Chapter 3 - Debating the Nation’s History

Summary

Starting with a brief examination of Nicolas Fréret’s essay L’origine des Français et de leur établissement dans les Gaules, the third chapter looks at the onset of the eighteenth-century debate on the nation’s origins. The classic opposition between the Gallic and the Frankish theses is reassessed. In particular, the latter is considered in relation to the shift from the dominant legalist and royalist paradigm to the cultural and ethnic one. It will be argued that both Germanists and Romanists, by discussing the origins of France in ethnic terms, fuelled, independently of their immediate aims, a discourse that was subversive for it inevitably undermined the royalist national narrative and, therefore, monarchical authority as such. The chapter examines the writings of authors such as Fréret, the Père Daniel, René-Joseph de Tournemine, Joseph Vaissètte, the abbé de Trianon, Étienne Lauréault de Foncemagne, and Jean Baptiste Dubos.