The Crisis of French National Identity
7:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

The keynote speaker for the “From Paris to the World” conference, Dr. David Bell focused on the present-day debates on national identity in France, and the tone of despair which has come to characterize them. These debates, he suggested, have centered on a series of related problems: the difficulties France has had in assimilating recent immigrant communities; the threat to its culture posed by globalization; its weakening geopolitical position, particularly vis-à-vis the United States; and its economic rigidity. Dr. Bell argued that while these factors have been important, we also need to situate this perceived “crisis” against an older story: the crisis of the “republican” form of French nationalism which was born at the time of the French Revolution, but lost most of its effectiveness in the 1960s. He concluded with some speculation about what the future may hold for France.

Dr. David Bell holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 2005, he was a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has published two principal books: Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford University Press, 1994), which won the Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which won the Gershoy Prize of the American Historical Association. In early 2007, Houghton Mifflin will publish his new book The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It.