ABSTRACT
Paraphrasing Marx, one could say that nationalist ideology becomes a social force when it seizes the masses of a country. Prior to 1750 the term nation was mostly used in a neutral sense to designate, as the Dictionnaire de l'Academie suggested, a group of people who lived under the same laws and used the same language; the territory could be the state, but also the pays. Voltaire frequently used the word nation but in a vague way; it was for him more often than not a geographical expression. At times, however, the expression nation also took its medieval meaning. The idea of spirit of the nation took a long time to mature in the work of Montesquieu. A number of thematic ideas emerged during the last quarter of the eighteenth century which constituted the core of romanticism and which directly or indirectly contributed to the spread of the nationalist world vision.
