This question is at the heart of the ACLS CRN project—or at least, it is for me.

Nearly twenty years ago, I sought to answer a similar question in work that became Boundaries, published in 1989. My research was grounded firmly—perhaps too much so—in a particular geographic and historical site: the Catalan borderland between France and Spain. I studied a valley divided between the two kingdoms, then nation-states, from 1659 to the present. My question, at the time, was: what difference does a state make in the formative period of national identities? The answer was: a great deal more than expected, especially in largely rural and agricultural—peasant—communities in the borderland. Peasants took on the identities of Frenchmen and women, on the one hand, and Spaniards, on the other, despite their common ethnic identity as Catalans (including their language, religion, cuisine, and inheritance practices). In other words, they came to identify themselves, rhetorically and through their interests in opposition to each other, as French and Spanish, while they remained ethnically Catalan.

I was particularly concerned with both the multiplicity of identities (their "contextual and oppositional" qualities, derived from a segmentary model). As early as the eighteenth century, vernacular expressions of belonging to the nation appeared in the pleas of municipalities and communes fighting with their neighbors, across the boundary, over access to forests and grazing rights on distant mountains, over young rivers that washed away their banks . . . and over the location of the boundary itself. The local communities and elites took up their particular interests in the language of the nation, affirming their identities as French and Spanish. And they did so without loosing their local interests, identities, and sense of purpose. But I was also interested in the deeper historical process and mechanism of identification, an explanation of how peasants moved from initial resistance in the borderland (banditry, contraband trade, and occasional rebellion that united the Catalans on both sides of the border in the late seventeenth century) toward a self-interested and oppositional affirmation of national identities less than two generations after their annexation. In other words—how identities "stuck" in the century before the French Revolution.

The paradox would be that under the Old Regime, and even until the late nineteenth century, states were singularly uninterested in identifications. This is an important general point about pre-modern states. France, and Western Europe, were culturally heterogeneous places in the early modern period (16-18th centuries), as were Russia and China. But if France, Spain, or England were not yet "nation-states" (the French, preferably, say "state-nations"), they were not organized as multi-ethnic empires. The legal frameworks of institutional unity structured (and undercut the uses of) cultural diversity, as we shall see, and provided the framework of local identifications with the state.

In the eighteenth century, France was highly diverse and fragmented in language, custom, and culture. Rural France, at least 80% of the population, did not speak French, but nor did it speak any single language or dialect: Breton, Basque, Occitain, Piedmontese, German, Flemish, Walloon—these were the principal languages of France, albeit ones found largely on the peripheries of the kingdom. Differentiation and diversification was perhaps more extreme than elsewhere in western Europe: each district or pays had its own dialect, customs, costumes, cuisine, and other markers of identity. The monarchy made no efforts to homogenize cultural practices; the only concern was with the religious unity of Roman Catholicism, imposed as an "official" religion in 1685. And even here, the threat was not from Islam or Protestantism, but the minor sect (that became a major political battleground) of Jansenism. By contrast, in France's North American colonies, the imposition of Catholicism on indigenous peoples (and in relation to the English protestants), was a much stronger marker of cultural identity. Its importance, in the Carribean colonies, was still visible in the Code Noir of 1685, but by the early eighteenth century, with the reglementation of slave societies in the Carribean and Louisiana, exclusive racial categorizations had displaced religion as markers of belonging.

In the metropole, there was no attempt to impose a uniform identity on either French subjects or, more revealingly, on the thousands of foreigners who sought to become French, the subject of my current research. Despite contemporary claims of universalism, France made no conscientious attempt to impose an "official" identity, much less a distinctive cultural identity, on its diverse populations (although the state was increasingly preoccupied with policing the movement of people, goods, and ideas in the kingdom). For those foreigners who became citizens, the monarchy instituted no a priori requirement of knowing the French language, of practicing French customs, or of adopting French culture. Instead, the state and its lawyers insisted only on residence as an index of devotion and loyalty, and even residence proved to be a legal and administrative fiction that was frequently exposed. Just as the French state never proclaimed the necessity that its subjects "be French" (in a cultural sense) until long after the Revolution, neither did the French monarchy seek to impose a requirement of culture or even religion on those foreigners who sought to become citizens.

But "national identity" defined in cultural terms—a set of qualities or values of "Frenchness"—was quite independent of the vernacular process of identification.¹ The linguistic and behavioral identification of local actors with an abstract entity, France, could and did occur without the adoption of any specific cultural traits or characteristics, including the French language. The lesson I drew from the borderland of France and Spain, and in my more recent work on naturalization, was that distinctive, "national" expressions of belonging and identification took shape long before the adoption of specific cultural traits and practices.

This "pre-history" of the nation was very much on my mind when I was invited to participate in the initial New York meetings many years ago, where, among others, Jim Scott, arguing from a different continent, timeframe, and discipline, called for a different approach emphasis on what we came to call "identification." Jim's work rested on a different presumption: in his ethnography of everyday forms of resistance among Malaysian peasants; his treatment of the universal, hidden transcripts of resistance; and now his deconstruction of ethnic identifications in highland Southeast Asia, he presumes that states are rarely, if ever, "successful" in their projects of modern identification, and more often than not, the effects of their efforts are downright sinister (State Simplifications).

My work in Catalonia and Jim's in Southeast Asia thus pointed to extreme poles along a continuum of vernacular responses to official identifications: from individual and group resistance, silent and open, to the uncontested affirmation of official identifications. The tension, for a close reader of texts, is to be found within our jointly-authored paper, written in 1998 and "published" (on the web) in July 2001. Jim's contributions to the CRN lie in the topoi of subversion and challenge of official ideals and paradigms, of popular transnationationalism and alternatives to the nation-state; mine draw on the experiences of older, more established state frameworks in Europe, where peasants and other local actors did indeed "become" French or Spanish, and where forms of resistance continued within an accepted framework of national identity and national citizenship.

Still: there has always been an important point of convergence in our work, and in that of the network as a whole. It is indeed a truism to claim, among ourselves, that identity is contextual and contingent, that it is the vehicle of strategic and instrumental acts. Where we finally disagree—across the network as a whole—is over the question of history, the long-term impact of such instrumentalism.

In Old Regime France, contingent, relational, and strategic expressions of national identity could result in an increasingly affective, positive sense of belonging: a vernacular affirmation, among other identities in other contexts, of nationality and citizenship in a pre-modern world. The thousands of foreign migrants to the kingdom who sought and received grants of naturalization in the pre-modern period again provide an illustrative example. Their principal reason for seeking to be naturalized was an instrumental one: to be exempted from the onerous burden of their civil incapacity. As aliens, they were were unable to inherit or devolve property, except to native born heirs, and fell victim to an amplified feudal right called the droit d'aubaine, the right of escheat, by which the king seized their property at death. Thousands of individual foreigners, of all kinds and from all places, took letters. Incorporated into their royal grants are narratives that, however obscurely, reveal a more "vernacular" version of what it meant to become French.

This vernacular citizenship is marked by two qualities: first, its transparency, at least with respect to the tactical uses to which letters of naturalization might be put. Foreigners were explicit in their motives: to hold ecclesiastical benefice or acceed to a political office, to empower themselves in lawsuits with collateral heirs, foreigners sought to be identified as a "natural Frenchman." In this way, their uses of citizenship ran counter to the normative and "official" notion of the citizen in the West.² Secondly, this vernacular citizenship was more affective (and affected) in its textual expressions than anything offered up by royal officials or lawyers. It was often linked to the practice of French culture, the expression of French identity, the insistence on a French "nature."

Is this a case of a "successful" identification, then? It is important to identify the character of such a "success" more carefully. If identification "works," either in the short-term or over time, it does not necessarily do so on the basis of creating cultural uniformity or even political complicity. In the first instance, identity is not culture. In official terms, following the royal apologist and philosopher Jean Bodin in the late sixteenth century, a sovereign state exists independent of the diversity of customs, language, and mores of its citizens. In the vernacular version, identification is a process constituted by the self and collective affirmation of national identity—identifying oneself as part of the state, whatever one's cultural identity or practices. Politically, the "success" of identification does not imply the absence of contention and resistance. The French, in particular, have a remarkably contentious history, the subject of much scholarly attention that has often tried to quantify the kind and degree of resistance, revolt, and uprising in France since the seventeenth century (Tilly et al). But even these obvious indices of challenge and resistence belie the existence of more stable structures that frame contention, and do not allow basic challenges to the authority of the state, especially in territorial terms. It is significant that France has not had regionalist or nationalist rebellions, that is, territorially organized groups seeking autonomy or independence from the French state, before the mid-twentieth century. The French are, indeed, contentious, but they rarely contested the framework of the polity itself.

Why then did "national" identities stick so "successfully," in certain instances, in pre-modern France? Instead of purported universality, the answer may lie in the distinctive institutional arrangements made when territory was acquired. Consider the reign of Louis XIV, whose personal rule extended from 1661 to 1715, and under whose authority France expanded its borders significantly. Alsace, Artois, the Franche-Comté, much of Lorraine, and the Roussillon all were incorporated into the French realm. But the mechanism of this incorporation was significant, and it was unique in a European context. Most European states represented what John Elliott has called "composite monarchies," and they resembled more closely empires in which subject populations of different ethnic origins maintained a de facto cultural diversity, but also distinct administrative and political institutions, and thus a distinct legal status within the realm. Such was reflected in their titles: the Habsburg king was simultaneously king, count, prince, marquis, duke, and count of several score distinct territories, and his full title ran on for pages in diplomatic documents. In France, the monarch was king of France and of Navarre. This titular singularity itself reflects the secret of French state-building, a secret revealed by the eighteenth-century English philosopher David Hume.

When a monarch extends his dominion by conquest, he soon learns to consider his old and new subjects on the same footing; because, in reality, all his subjects are the same . . . The provinces of absolute monarchies are always treated better than those of free states. Compare the "annexed territories" of France with Ireland, and you will be convinced of this.

In the wars and conquests of Louis XIV, the subjects of the annexed territories became legally equal: they gained the same juridical status as other French subjects. Despite the institutional, jurisdictional, and cultural diversity of the kingdom, all were considered regnicoles, native subjects, in contrast and oppositions to foreigners (aubains or étrangers). Officially, despite the persistence of multitudinous privileges and local institutional arrangements, the cross-cutting distinction of "citizen" and "foreigner" became a bounded distinction, an "action context" as Jim Scott might say. And this allowed naturalized foreigners to empower themselves, fiscally, materially, and symbolically, in relation to the French monarchy.

The cases invoked here—the Catalan borderland of France and Spain, and the naturalization of foreigners—offer peripheral perspectives. That is, I have found that it is precisely at the margins—both territorial and sovereign—of the state that the conceptions and practices of identity and identification are revealed. This is not only a question of frontiers and marginal spaces. The perspective from the margins can best reveal the historical process of becoming French territorially and juridically, of coming to identify with a pre-national state (even if the state had no interest in identifying, culturally, its subjects and citizens). Those caught on the margins, at a moment of incorporation, empowered themselves with a rhetoric of belonging in order to acquire benefits—material and symbolic—from the state. Did this mean that their identities changed? Not in a conventional or an essentialist sense. Theirs was a strategic and instrumental deployment, one expression of identification among others. But as benefits flowed, these "national" identities became stronger frameworks of identification, even if other, sometimes competing kinds of identification were hardly effaced. Identities "stuck," they acquired a privileged structural position in a configuration of possible identities that reframed the interests of local actors themselves. The "stickiness" of these new identities thus depended on the frameworks and processes—and possibilities, for local actors—of state-building projects.

My response, then, points to the distinctive structures and processes of state-building as conditions of identification. The legal equality of French citizens before the Revolution, in contrast and opposition to foreigners, gave subjects the possibility of seeking recourse to different arenas of the state—the law courts, the intendancy, the royal council. Engaging in the rhetoric of national identification, citizens, new and old, made use of the state for their own ends and needs, and often in their own terms. One does not have to await the appearance of the welfare state in the 20th century to understand how subjects and citizens strategically and tactically sought to instrumentalize their "national" identities in order to valorize, with material or symbolic capital, their claims. If the state provided these resources, including recourse to its own judicial and administrative insitutions, than it made sense to "belong" to a state in order to make use of these. In France, although the state never made efforts to identify such notions of "belonging" in cultural terms, but citizens and foreigners themselves often did as they discovered for themselves what a difference a state makes.

1. Searching for a "true" France, historians of all stripes have either identified a foundational historical moment, or denied the possibility of a single cultural identity faced with the fragmentation and contestation over what it meant to be French. The former—romantics and scientifics alike—look back to Philip the Fair, or the 100 Years War against the English; to the literary and artistic products of the French Renaissance, to the absolutist construction of French unity under the aegis of a divine monarch; to the efforts, in eighteenth-century civil society, to build a national identity (especially against the English); to the French Revolution; to the Third Republic's construction of an infrastructure—schools, roads, military conscription—that literally built the nation. Eugen Weber, writing in the mid-1970s, believed that such diversity in rural France continued to persist until at least the late nineteenth century. It was only under the Third Republic, in the 1880s, that the state sought formally to impose a national culture on its subject populations through universal primary education, mass conscription, and the construction of a coherent economic infrastructure (roads, railway networks, etc). Until then, peasants were not French. Weber's thesis has been highly criticized by those who point to other historical moments when people—and especially those in rural French—adopted the values and ideals of official discourse. Historians have sought to privilege previous events in this context, and especially revolutionary ones: 1848 and 1789 were so many "moments" when rural France was drawn in, and became an active participant in, the construction of French unity, and this despite the radical disagreements in France over the meaning of these revolutionary events in the rural world. [Back to text.]