ABSTRACT
What is a nation? According to Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, nationalism is an “invented tradition” that has little relation to the premodern past. 1 Other historians such as Adrian Hastings maintain that nationalism is not a purely modern phenomenon at all but has deep and ancient roots in the medieval nation-state. 2 Hastings focuses on the example of England as an early unified kingdom; but France could serve as an equally good example of what he has in mind, since, in spite of its political transformation from feudalism to republicanism in the late eighteenth century, it has remained a united nation with a strong sense of its own unique identity rooted in a separate language and distinct customs. 3
