The classic voluntaristic and anti-deterministic definition of what a constitutes a sense of nationality: a shared recollection of past achievements and traumas, a willingness to forget let ancient divisions, and the habitually-renewed willingness to identify as a collective. Conceived in the context of ongoing post-1871 altercations between French and German intellectuals over their countries’ respective claims on Alsace-Lorraine, it is not only a classic refutation of ethnic essentialism and determinism, but also the historical point of crystallization of a fundamental heuristic and rhetorical distinction between “our” civic nationalism (good) and “their” ethnic nationalism (bad).