'The Germans are Hydrophobes': Germany and the Germans in the Shaping of French Identity

Citation

Rapport M (2008) 'The Germans are Hydrophobes': Germany and the Germans in the Shaping of French Identity. In: Forrest A & Wilson PH (eds.) The Bee and the Eagle: Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire, 1806. War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 234-255. http://www.palgrave.com/Products/title.aspx?pid=276487

Abstract
This article addresses issues of national identity and nationalism in the age of the French Revolution by looking at French attitudes towards the Germans. It engages with theories of nationalism while presenting empirical evidence gleaned from archival research. This material, sometimes grimly, sometimes rather amusingly, reveals much about French ideas and prejudices about the Germans and how it reflected back on the revolutionary and Napoleonic sense of what it meant to be French.

Keywords
France and Germany; National Identity; France History 1789-1793; Nation-state; Germans France