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

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