Why do France and the United States – two nations that claim to be founded on universal principles rather than common ancestry – place such extraordinary importance on their national holidays? And what do today’s battles over these celebrations reveal about the crisis of democratic national narratives?
France and the United States are two exceptional cases of nation-building: both claim to derive their legitimacy from universal political principles rather than ethnic origin. Their holidays therefore do more than commemorate a historical event – they periodically recreate the nation itself. Yet the contemporary politicisation of these rituals points to a deeper transformation: the debate is no longer simply about what the nation is, but about who can legitimately claim to embody it – and the answer, in both countries, is now fiercely contested.
Two revolutions, two universalisms
Unlike most nations, France and the United States define themselves through political ideals rather than shared ethnicity, language or religion. Both emerged from revolutionary ruptures; both claim universal significance; both present citizenship as a political rather than ethnic identity, built on abstract principles rather than ancestry. As Benedict Anderson showed in
Imagined Communities, such nations are not given by blood but constructed through shared narrative – and the most rigorous theorisation of this idea is French: Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture What Is a Nation? defined the nation as a “daily plebiscite”, founded as much on what a people chooses to forget as on what it remembers.
The two universalisms nonetheless diverge. The American Revolution is narrated as a story of independence – a federal republic built on liberty, providence and a genuinely new social order, from the Declaration of Independence to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The French Revolution is told as a story of internal rupture – a centralised, indivisible republic built on equality and reason, enacted through revolutionary festivals designed to forge a new citizenry almost from scratch.
Two civil religions
Sociologically, both holidays function as civil religion: sacred dates, founding heroes, sacred texts, collective rituals that bind a community without reference to any church. Bellah’s 1967 essay Civil Religion in America remains the foundational account: the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington, and the providential language of presidential inaugural speeches all function as the liturgy of an American civic faith.
France built an equivalent structure through ostensibly secular means. Historian Pierre Nora described French republican memory as a genuine “civil and civic religion” complete with its own emblems, hymns and temples – the Marseillaise, Bastille Day, the Pantheon. The official symbols of the French Republic – flag, anthem, motto, Marianne – are themselves the liturgy of this civic faith.
A French survey carried out in 2015 found 93 percent of French respondents attached to the tricolor flag, associating it above all with the Republic, the Revolution and liberty – a civic creed not unlike Bellah’s account of American ritual, even if the circumstances were exceptional.
Neither country eliminated political religion. Both reinvented it.
Invented, not inherited
National holidays are not expressions of historical continuity; they are periodic reinventions, reshaped by each generation to answer the crises of its present. Historian Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of “invented tradition” captures this: traditions survive precisely because they are continually remade, not because they are frozen in time.
The American Bicentennial of 1976 is the clearest case. As historian Jill Lepore recently recounted, the celebration was meant to bind a country bruised by Vietnam and Watergate – instead it became a battleground, denounced by the Congressional Black Caucus as “a fraud on the American people” and boycotted by civil-rights leaders, before settling into the comfortable patriotic memory we associate with it today.
France offers its own version. When François Mitterrand walked alone into the Panthéon in 1981, laying roses on the tombs of Jean Jaurès (the socialist martyr), Jean Moulin (the Resistance hero) and Victor Schoelcher (the abolitionist), he was not simply paying his respects – he was staging a vision of the Republic, choreographed to present a new political era as the natural heir to France’s deepest traditions.
Tradition, in both countries, turns out to be something each generation has to re-argue, not something it simply inherits.
From shared ritual to contested memory
The defining political struggle today is about who has the legitimate authority to speak in the nation’s name.
In both countries, nationalist movements now seek to reactivate a more homogeneous, more heroic and more exclusive memory of the nation: nostalgia for lost unity, suspicion of professional historians, open warfare over collective memory. Yet the myths on which these movements draw long predate contemporary populism. The roman national (national romance) built around peasants, terroirs and rural roots runs far deeper than any single presidency.
Historian Suzanne Citron traced it – an image of France as an ancient, continuous community stretching from Vercingetorix (a Gallic chieftain who united the Gauls c.82 BP to 46 BP) to the present – back to the school textbooks of the French Third Republic, and French presidents across the political spectrum have mobilised it ever since: Jacques Chirac asserted that France “plunges its roots” into its agriculture and rurality; Macron has spoken in identical terms, defending “a ruralité that exists nowhere else” and “an art of living that has always been at the heart of our identity”.Yet agriculture today employs barely 2.7% of the French workforce. When practically no one farms any more, the peasant becomes everyone’s ancestor.
The same dynamic is visible in how France’s highest civic institution is being used and contested. Since 2017, President Emmanuel Macron has used a series of pantheonisation ceremonies to construct a particular vision of republican memory, honouring figures from Simone Veil and Josephine Baker to, most recently, historian Marc Bloch.
In pantheonising Bloch, Macron framed the ceremony as a response to historical revisionism and “identitarian withdrawal” – and Bloch’s own family demanded that the Rassemblement national be excluded.
The Pantheon has become a battlefield: less a site of shared national memory than a space where competing versions of the Republic’s inheritance are actively contested.
Yet the comparison with the United States reveals how differently this contestation operates. Donald Trump’s relationship to the Fourth of July is intensely personalised: an “enemy within”, a narrative of national salvation built around his own figure as a divinely chosen leader and culminating in the America250/Freedom250 commemorations. The French case works differently. Rather than a single charismatic saviour, French nationalist rhetoric leans on the older vocabulary of the Republic itself – sovereignty reclaimed, a people “given back” its country – drawing on a long-standing republican vocabulary rather than building a new cult of personality around a single leader. Linguist Cécile Alduy’s statistical analysis of French political discourse identifies exactly this operation: a persistent national romance – one that conjures an older, more homogeneous vision of who truly belongs.
In this sense, Trump personalises a civil religion built around providence, while French nationalism nationalises a republican memory it claims to inherit rather than invent. One channels restoration through an explicit culture-war enemy; the other channels it through a vocabulary of continuity that predates any single leader by generations.
Who gets to embody the nation?
National holidays have never been politically neutral.
The question that distinguishes our moment is different: who has the legitimate authority to define the nation, speak in its name, and embody its values? Renan’s “daily plebiscite” was meant to describe how a people collectively renews its consent to belong together – but a plebiscite can always return a different answer, which is exactly what is now being contested on both sides of the Atlantic.
Formerly, these rituals were designed to produce a common “we”. Increasingly, they have become arenas in which competing groups contest who truly belongs at all.
The contemporary crisis of national celebrations may ultimately reveal a deeper transformation: the debate no longer concerns what the nation is, but who can legitimately claim to embody it.
A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!
