Triumph of the clerks

To the outside world, France has always seemed monolithic. The richest and most powerful of Europe’s nation-states until the 19th century, intellectually and artistically insular at most times, intensely nationalist throughout, the French have been fascinating neighbours but never easy ones. Yet until the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, few of its inhabitants felt truly French as opposed to, say, Auvergnat or Périgourdin. They lived in a geographically isolated and highly diverse provincial communities. They spoke many languages and dialects, venerated different saints and observed a variety of possessive local customs. Until well into the 18th century, most Frenchmen used the word ‘France’ to refer to the region around Paris. It was a bad place, where tax collectors and recruiting sergeants got their orders from.

The French nation is the creation of the state to a degree which is unique among European nations. It owes its existence to imperial notions of central authority preached to an indifferent population by the servants of the medieval monarchy and transmitted intact through generations of public servants. The revolutionaries, bent on eliminating older and more intimate loyalties and on mobilising the full resources of the country for war, imposed a rapid and forcible programme of integration and bureaucratic centralisation to which the population did not take easily. Nineteenth-century historians, like Michelet and Lavisse, added the great national myths and that sense of historical destiny which is peculiarly French. Roads, railways and broadcasters have done the rest. In spite of a growing interest in local history, dialects and folklore, modern France has become a remarkably homogeneous society.