of “our ancestors the Gauls.” In any case, in a country with a large immigrant population, it was thought absurd to wish to show all the nation’s children that their ancestors were Gauls.

Why Has France Never Felt a Lasting Need to Investigate Its Origins?

France is the source of the modern concept of the nation-state, based on the ideals of the French Revolution. It is also the most complete example of a nation-state in that, for longer and more strongly than elsewhere, the central government in France has asserted its supremacy over all other democratic institutions. The continuity of the structures of the state is indeed usually taken—now, as for several centuries past—to be identical with the unity of the country.

Nevertheless, the Revolution and the upheavals of the eighteenth century that affected Europe’s sense of space, identity, time, and history led in France to the profound questioning of the concepts of society and nation. During that period the medieval myth of the Germanic and Trojan origins of the aristocracy was replaced by a different social and national model, in which the history of the nation was driven by historical, ethnic, and social forces that pitted the winners—the Franks—against the losers—the Gauls (Olivier 1999). Given the attitude toward social emancipation propounded by the Revolution and following in the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, the Frankish racial ancestry claimed by the aristocracy became socially indefensible. The nation henceforth was to be made up of the whole of society, meaning all those—whatever their origins—who had chosen to live together, and anyone who supported the values of the Republic was deemed to be a citizen.

However, conjuring away the racial ancestry allegedly bequeathed by the Franks to the minority of their noble descendants in favor of the cultural inheritance from the Gauls and Romans (supposedly the prerogative of the majority) gave rise to a pernicious notion of the French nation and its citizenship. As French archaeologist Laurent Olivier argues, these notions are both political (all those who support the values of the Republic are citizens) and ethnic (all those who live within the national frontiers are French). This ambiguity was to reemerge every time that the structural legitimacy of the state or the country’s frontiers were challenged: in the reign of Napoleon III, after the defeat of 1870, and during the Second World War under the Vichy régime. Appeals were made to archaeology on each occasion because, on each occasion, the myth of “our ancestors the Gauls” was revived. This myth, by supporting the idea of the continuous existence of the nation ever since the very beginning (and France or the Republic being taken as its expression), made it possible—very briefly—to give legitimacy to the coincidence of the state, the frontiers, and the nation.

It is therefore logical that in 1996, at a time of increasing Americanization and when socially productive relationships were being affected by globalization, France did not hesitate to sign the Malta Convention, which advocated the protection of archaeological heritage as a source of European collective consciousness. It is also easy to understand why the French archaeological community shifted in a couple of decades from “universal” interests to curiosity about questions of identity, unconsciously based on a return to the values of a “national” past.

Low Priorities: Theoretical Models and Epistemological Curiosity

For many years the second feature peculiar to French archaeology was its rejection of theoretical models and its lack of epistemological curiosity. During the 1970s and 1980s, this trend was contradictory to those in the rest of society because French philosophy was emerging from one of its most productive periods, with figures like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Ricæur, Lacan, Goldmann, Lefèvre, Braudel, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, Piaget, and later Vernant, Godelier, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Derrida, and others making contributions. The paradox was even odder in that Anglo-American postmodern (or “postprocessual”) archaeology borrowed most of the terms for its concepts from French.

It must be borne in mind, however, that French archaeologists were still few in number,