| Abstract | For more than forty years now, the French state has produced, legitimized, and supported local identities through national policies of historic preservation and public discourses about heritage. Rather than simply replaying the old, anxious, and nostalgic tune of national identity, the advent of heritage in France marked a singular moment of cultural transformation and rupture. The national past became articulated, in public speech and political practice, with the cultures and identities of local and regional territories. Given France's centralist tradition, and its political culture that is often cast as the archetype of “an ideology concerned with boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity” (Handler 1988: 6), this historical transformation presents a puzzle, to which this paper provides answers through historical and theoretical inquiry.
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