Matthew D’Auria. The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830.

Abstract

What is a nation? All French historians know how Ernest Renan answered that question in 1882, though it’s actually a little more complicated than most typically remember. But what was the French nation before being a soul, a spiritual principle, an act of will? And where did it come from? As it turns out, there were many competing origins and essences of French national identity before the Third Republic ironed out the wrinkles in its roman national. Was it a tale of Frankish conquest, or of a small village of Gauls resisting you-know-who? Should it be about aristocratic notions of honor and sacrifice, or bourgeois ideals of individual enterprise and common good? Did it come from one ethnic group or another, or maybe a synthesis of three? Or was it in fact all down to climate, or character—no, wait, class!? As Matthew D’Auria explains in his engaging book, The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830, France was all of these for different people and at various moments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And it was out of this heteroglot discourse of origins that one voice rose above the others to establish that “our ancestors [were] the Gauls.”