La France et l'éveil des nationalismes (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles)

In post-revolutionary Europe, the rise of nationalisms constitutes a movement both political and cultural that has been defined everywhere as resolutely anti-French: with the conquests of Napoléon, a political supremacy had indeed added, at the beginning of the 19th century, to the intellectual and cultural reign of Enlightenment France. This article recalls, first, how European nationalisms appeared, then points out that this phenomenon is linked to the birth of Romanticism and evokes the reluctance manifested by France in the constitution of its own nationalism, because it seemed to fly in the face of French habits, from Louis XIV to Napoléon. Second, the article examines how Chateaubriand, once an opponent of Napoléon, integrated into his political thought the new data of nationalism and how he helped to define its contours, in a country which, by vocation “universalist”, appeared the European nation least susceptible to this temptation. We will thus see the specificities, even the contradictions, of French nationalism.