Revolutionary France and the Origins of Nationalism: An Old Problem Revisited

Like many people, I first became interested in nationalism in the 1980s. It was a moment when we seemed to be on the brink of a new ‘springtime of nations’. Names that seemed to have vanished from the map forever as sovereign entities – Latvia, Serbia, Lombardy, Flanders – seemed to be clamoring for national rebirth. Journalists were finding it impossible to resist the seductive, if misleading, image that with the thawing of the Cold War, deeply-buried national passions were again germinating in long-frozen soil. By the late 1990s, with the map of Europe now changed, and nationalism apparently producing a bloody