The Birth of an Ideology

The "nation" of France, like the idea of nationhood itself, exists in the mind. And it is toward the products of the mind that Beaune directs her exciting new investigation of the origins of national feeling in late-medieval France. While most historians have concentrated on the same elements that formed the French state—historical events, personalities, or geography—Beaune looks at the myths, religious and secular symbols, and shared beliefs that set the people of late-medieval France to thinking of themselves as a nation.