The center-periphery dynamic has been essential in understanding the creation of the modern French nation. In the past forty years, historians have increasingly examined the integration of the regions of France into the nation as a function of the center-periphery relationship. Groundbreaking studies, in France by Maurice Agulhon, and the U.S. by Eugen Weber examined how the political culture of the nation spread from Paris and other urban centers towards the peripheries of France. In recent years, a revisionist approach has called into question the imposition of the center on the periphery by understanding the creation of the nation as a dialogue between the two. In this context, it has been suggested that the periphery was not completely dominated by the senter, but that, in many cases, local institutions mediated the cultural conflicts between a progressive center and a traditional periphery. While these studies have been helpful in reconceptualizing the relationship between center and periphery, they remain within this paradigm; and while giving agency to the periphery, they tend to reify the center.

Whether understood from a domination or dialogue model, in each case the making of the French nation appears the product of a history between the center and its peripheries. Thus there is within this approach an implied temporality in which the center exists before the periphery and the making of the nation is the spread of the ideals of this original center towards its peripheries. While such an approach propses to understand the creation of periphery, it does not allow us to understand the creation of the center which, within this paradigm, appreas to exist somehow outside of time.

In light of recent post-colonial studies, this paper attempts to understand the integration of Paris into the French nation as a center and, in so doing, historicize the center-periphery schema. In a France which has been observed through the optic of the center-[eriphery relationship, regions were integrated into the nation through their relationship to the center. I will suggest that, conversely, the center, could only understand itself as French through its relationship to the periphery. In this way, the center and the periphery were created simultaneously. It remains then to understand the process by which the center-periphery pattern was applied to the Hexagon.

The debates surrounding the fortifications of 1841 provide an opportunity to see the application of the center-periphery schema. The proposed paper will suggest that the fortifications of the 1840s helped integrate Paris into the French nation by transforming the willfull capital into the stable center of the modern French nation-state. While city walls had traditionally served to reinforce the power of a given city, in the context of the political instability which characterized the 19th century, these fortifications were built to limit the threat of Parisian revolution which risked to destabilized the nation as a whole. Using pamphlets and parliamentary records, I will show that in the debates over the construction of the wall there emerged two visions of Paris: either as the center dependent on its peripheries proposed by Adolph Thiers or as a privileged site with the potential to incarnate the nation and overthrow its government proposed by François Arago. Ultimately, this paper suggest that confining Paris within these walls was a means of defining it as the center of peripheries and in doing so helped secure a vision of France as the product of the center-periphery dynamic.