Communications and National Identity
in Early Modern France
This website represents an ongoing report on the outcomes of a continuing research project that addresses a fundamental question in current debates over nationhood and national identity - the ideological and discursive bases on which nations are built - by studying, through an innovative set of methodologies, the roots in Early Modern France of contemporary national consciousness.
The project seeks understanding of the survival of particularist ideas about the "French people" and France within the universalist context of Enlightenment thought.
Through a range of methodologies of discours analysis, it attempts to demonstrate how representations of national character were already being disseminated, as today, in a broad range of literary philiosophical and political texts.
The project places the growth of national identity in the context of the communications structures of the time and of the range of available media, investigating the ways in which an ever broader spectrum of information channels affected the evolution of French national life.