“Cacophony” was the term appropriately chosen by David Bell more than twenty years ago to sum up recent research on early modern nationalism (in France).1 His diagnosis still stands. The sources of this dissonance can clearly be traced to the “political language” (as Pocock and Skinner call it) of nationhood itself. Its longue durée encourages the assumption that the nation was “always already” there; moreover, it is many sided, and its key concepts – nation, Volk, (father)land, kingdom, the French, the Germans, etc. – are each distinct rather than interchangeable.2 Because this political language displays a high degree of congruency across the individual language areas of early modern Latin Christendom, this congruence of signifiers in the vernacular is frequently taken at face value to equal a congruence of the things signified.

In the Early Modern Period the idea of a unified Christian community in Western Europe shattered due to Protestantism and the religious wars that ensued. The idea of self-governed, sovereign, states emerged, as did the idea that ruler were put in place to serve and protect the people under his reign. In this time of discovery and early Enlightenment novel notions like that of a conditional social contract between a ruler and his subjects, the role of the state, individuality and individual freedom came up.