The French Revolution consolidated the idea of the nation as a political body, capable of identifying with both the community of citizens and the state. In January 1789, in his manifesto, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (applying the principles of Rousseau’s Du contrat social and of the American Revolution to the French assembly of the Etat Généraux) glorified the social utility of the Third Estate while denouncing its powerlessness in the political order. From then on, the nation, now defined in opposition to privileged classes, began to represent all citizens whose collective sovereignty was constituted by the legitimate foundations of the state, which in turn was consecrated as the political expression of this sovereignty. The equation “nation-state-people” achieved by the French Revolution embodied an essentially politically defined principle of nationality, as it presupposed that all those belonging to the same nation should enjoy the right to be governed by their own and independent government. The state, which had been at the centre of a long process of transformation since the Middle Ages, thus became a frame of reference for political nationalism.

Interestingly, from 1815 onwards, French nationalism almost always developed against the ruling regime and existing political institutions. The many 19th-century regime changes of France rocked Europe as a whole, starting with the epochal Revolution of 1789, the declaraton of the Republic in 1792, and the subsequent victorious campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte (crowned emperor in 1806), which redrew the political map of Europe and changed the ideological certainties of the ancien régime.

Napoleon’s two-stage downfall in 1813 and 1815 left an ambivalent heritage in the European lands affected by his rule. On the one hand Napoleon had been a foreign tyrant, provoking anti-French liberation movements in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere, and sharpening a nationalist political ethos in England; on the other hand, the institutional modernizations imposed by him were adopted in many countries and continued to affect cultural production and cultural institutions there. Thirdly, for a number of subaltern populations, from Dublin to Ljubljana and Warsaw, the memory of the French glory years remained an anti-absolutist inspiration; and in the next decades ideas of popular sovereignty or constitutional rule would feed into emerging national movements.

Within France, the tradition of instability continued after the restoration of the Bourbon kings in 1815. A Liberal revolution in 1830 replaced the reactionary Bourbons with a more liberal constitutional monarchy, headed by Louis-Philippe, from the Orléans branch of the French royal dynasty. Under his reign, a number of nation-building initiatives were undertaken to subsume the political divisions under a common notion of abstract, eternal Frenchness: the architecture of the Place de la Concorde, the establishment of a national-historical museum in the Versailles palace, the repatriation of the corpse of Napoleon from St Helena, and his reinterment in the Invalides. The revolutionary year 1848 saw Louis-Philippe ousted, and instated a left-wing Second Republic which soon came under the sway of Napoleon’s nephew Louis Bonaparte; he seized power in 1852 as Napoleon III, monarch of a Second Empire. As in Europe’s other post-1848 monarchies, a liberalization set in in the 1860s, and Napoleon III continued the cultural nation-building policies of Louis-Philippe – among other things, with the modernization of the city of Paris and with a cult of Vercingetorix and the nation’s Gaulish “ancestors”. Napoleon III, whose foreign policy was incautious, came to grief against Bismarck’s empire-building and was devastatingly defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. A violent revolution waged by the Paris Commune was equally violently repressed, and a Third Republic installed. It rode out the century, lasting until 1940, and proved successful in its foreign policy of gaining anti-German allies (Entente Cordiale, 1904; Triple Entente 1907), with Paris once again the European metropolis par excellence. The Third Republic also brought a long-standing policy of state centralism to its greatest heights, provoking, in the process, regionalist movements from the Provence to Bretagne.

Each regime left behind a legacy of aggrieved victims and regretful supporters. The deepest rift in the country was not, however, that between republicans and monarchists (who were divided among themselves, with different monarchs and ousted dynasties to look back to – Bourbon, Orléans, and Bonaparte), but between secularists and conservative Church supporters; their conflicts were played out mainly over control over education and repeatedly led to bitter clashes, e.g. in the early 1840s and in the Third Republic.The Romantic-historical cult of Joan of Arc proved one point of concord between the two parties.

What also formed a political continuity since the days of Talleyrand was the urge, felt in all political quarters, to restore defeated France to the first rank among the European states. Claims to the Rhine as an eastern frontier were raised repeatedly, leading to a crisis in 1840. The claims raised (or inferred to have been raised) by Prime Minister Thiers provoked intense anti-French patriotic fervour in the German territories, as was expressed by countless Rheinlieder (Rhine songs) expressing a growing sense of national consciousness in Germany. Max Schneckenburger composed Die Wacht am Rhein, and Nikolaus Becker his famous Rheinlied, against which Alfred de Musset replied with a scathing Le Rhin allemand (1841) and Alphonse de Lamartine with a conciliatory Marseillaise de la Paix (1841). In his response to Becker, Lamartine dared to present his vision of the Rhine as a link and not a border, thereby going beyond the stereotypical conceptions of the Rhine under French and German nationalism. Lamartine’s poem was soon criticized by Quinet, who, in his poem Le Rhin, judged it too conciliatory in the face of German chauvinism.

France also took a pro-active role in international politics, and from the Crimean War on claimed a geopolitical sphere of influence in the Levant (first established by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign), as well as developing colonial ambitions in Africa. These ambitions fed a long-standing rivalry with the old enemy Britain, played out again over the French-constructed Suez Canal.

But it was the “German question” and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine that dominated the period between 1870 and 1914. The yearning for revenge was one of the main causes of the Boulangist crisis, which upset French political life for three years, from 1887 to 1889. As leader of the nationalist faction in the National Assembly, the ex-general Georges Boulanger indulged in provocative anti-German political gestures (such as fomenting nationalist protests at the Parisian production of Wagner’s Lohengrin in 1887), and conducted a wayward populist campaign both in and outside of government, at successive stages garnering more electoral support. The government reacted by denouncing the “Boulangist conspiracy”, and issued a warrant for his arrest in 1889; Boulanger took exile in Belgium, where he committed suicide in 1891. The Boulanger scandal would be recalled in several novels of the period, including Paul Adam’s Le mystère des foules (1895), and, notably, Marice Barrès’s Appel au soldat (1900).

By the end of the century, the word “nationalism” had taken on a fresh meaning, thanks notably to the mediocre politician and very successful author Maurice Barrès (1862–1923). Indeed, in an article published in Le figaro in 1892, “La querelle des nationalistes et des cosmopolites”, Barrès introduced the term “nationalist” into the French political vocabulary. From then on, the term was used to define a system of thought centred on the exaltation of the national idea. His Appel au soldat was the second volume of a trilogy of novels which between them defined a combination of xenophobia, chauvinism, and conservatism that would characterize a new, right-wing type of French nationalism in the new century: Les déracinés (1897), L’appel au soldat (1900), and Leurs figures (1902). His impact on public opinion was acknowledged by his election to the Académie française in 1906, and his vehement chauvinism harmonized with the public climate of the war efforts of 1914-18.

Barrès’s public resonance can be dated back to the affaire Dreyfus, which shook French public opinion a few years after the Boulangist crisis. Alfred Dreyfus, the one Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was accused in 1894 of spying for Germany and sentenced to deportation. Two years later, another officer was indicted as the felon responsible. The affair aroused contrasting reactions in French pubic opinion. Whilst a minority of people protested his innocence (including Emile Zola in 1898), the majority of the population believed the perjured army accusers and considered Dreyfus guilty. At that time, anti-Semitic sentiment went rampant, bolstered by the financial scandal of the Panama Canal, which had duped or ruined hundreds of thousands of investors. Socialist support for Dreyfus swayed public opinion, and the conspiracy and forged evidence against Dreyfus was exposed in 1898, although Dreyfus himself was not fully rehabilitated until 1906.

It was in the chaotic years of the affaire Dreyfus that a right-wing, anti-republican group was founded, the Action française (1899). Among its founders was Charles Maurras (1868–1952), a former associate of the Félibrige who since 1894 had moved into the ambit of Barrès. Maurras steered the Action française towards “integral nationalism”, advocating the establishment of a hereditary, antiparliamentary, and decentralized monarchy. L’Action française also became the name of the daily newspaper published by the group from 1908 until 1944. Elected to the Académie française in 1938, Maurras became a strong supporter of Pétain’s Vichy regime. On his condemnation for high treason in 1944, he is reported to have exclaimed “C’est la revanche de Dreyfus!”