For two decades, the dispute over national identity has dominated public discourse in France, polarising political parties, dividing academics and intellectuals, and fuelling one of the main controversies of the post-Cold War era. Yet for all the attention France's identity crisis has received, the origins of this obsession remain widely misunderstood. Key to unlocking this puzzle lies in the overlooked history of the 1980s–a crucial decade in which French national identity became bound up with a renewed political focus on culture. In this period, it was not the far right, but the Left, that reinvigorated debates around French identity. This book recovers a buried chapter. It explains when and how the politics of national identity emerged in France, and how it transformed public life, offering a fresh perspective on the relationship between culture and nation in contemporary democracies. As identity politics fractures democracies across the Western world–fuelling culture wars, inflaming debates over immigration, and redrawing the boundaries of belonging–Cultural Nationalism in France could not be more timely. Charting the wider arc from May 1968 to the end of Mitterrand's presidency in 1995, this book reveals how questions of citizenship, multiculturalism and competing cultural identities moved from the margins to the very heart of political life, a transformation whose consequences are still unfolding today.

Vincent Martigny is Professor of Political Science at the University of Nice Côte d'Azur and the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, as well as a research associate at Sciences Po-CEVIPOF, , France.