ABSTRACT
Several months ago, the headline of a New York Times article announced in large type: “Lacking Barricades, France Is in a Funk.” The article went on to discuss a widely reported malaise generated by contemporary challenges to France’s sense of itself-challenges posed by the conditions of a global market and the ambiguities of its position in the emerging European Community. France is, according to these reports, “disoriented,” “a society unmoored,” and, in the words of philosopher Andre Glucksmann, “in a crisis with respect to its own history and . . . its place in the world.” 1 While it is not surprising to find that the French perceive no clear models by which to address current economic
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and geopolitical shifts, I want to draw attention to the allusive historical quotation of the headline-the reference to barricades that invokes an assumed relation between the French nation of the present and the history of France.
