ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of French political history, with particular emphasis on the role of the state in building a French polity and upon the legacy of the French Revolution and its aftermath. The statist tradition in France certainly preceded the Revolution, but the case must not be overstated. The French Revolution, with its civil wars and its crushing of the power of the aristocracy and the clergy, created the conditions for the emergence of France as a genuinely unified post-feudal nation. The emergence of a strong central state during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods was accompanied by a gradual but ruthless suppression of all linguistic and regional identities; the progress of the idea of nation thus became largely synonymous with that of the state itself. It is in this sense that modern France might be considered a state-led creation. This divisive heritage can be illustrated in relation to three spheres: the conflict between the Church and anticlerical movements.
