Foreword

1

JULES MICHELET’S CONCEPT OF PEUPLE

1. COMMENTARY ON ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS

I will begin by defining the concept of peuple, as it is central to various new theories of identity, in the sense that it reveals the foundations of France’s quest for social harmony. My aim is to analyse this ideology and its impact on contemporary and modern political thought. Arguably, this concept has often been misunderstood and inappropriately applied to other societies whose cultures and political systems are different from those of France. For example, the Romanian popor, the Slavic narod and the Hungarian nép are all words that have been mistakenly equated with peuple. The aforementioned cultures adopted the French term as a way of consolidating their own myths of national identity, but in doing so they diluted its original meaning. The most important goal for those nations was the formulation of autonomous political and linguistic communities distinct from others around them. As a result of this loose application of the concept of peuple to a wide variety of contexts, a range of theories have emerged about the nature of Eastern and Western national