The view of France as a "culturally homogeneous space" to which the Conference's flier refers was developed in the late 19th-early 20th centuries by the historians of the so-called "positivist" school. Such a view frames several works written during this period, for instance, the monumental Histoire de France edited by Ernest Lavisse between 1900 and 1922. According to Lavisse and his team, "unity" figures among the essential, "indestructible" characteristics of France (Histoire de France contemporaine depuis la Révolution, vol. 9, 506). First grounded in "nature" (physical obstacles in France can easily be overcome or rounded), it also results from a political will; initially imposed by the monarchy, it has been "wanted by the nation" since the years 1789-1790 (510).

The idea that France is (and has always been) "one" is now challenged by theorists and cultural critics. Yet it is worth noticing that professional historians, especially members of the Annales School, have long rejected a view that they regard as mythological rather than grounded in historical evidence. Braudel, looking at the issue from the perspective of the "longue durée," has thus attacked the thesis of an early political unification of France; according to him, even the supposedly "absolute" monarchs of the 17th and 18th century never succeeded in imposing any kind of uniformity over their kingdom (L'Identité de la France, vol. 1, 60). Similarly, Le Roy Ladurie has devoted several studies to explaining that Southern France constituted (and to some extent still constitutes) a separate entity, endowed with its own economy (Paysans de Languedoc) and cultural trademarks (Montaillou, La Sorcière de Jasmin). As for Burguière and Revel, they have claimed in their recent Histoire de France that the country's administrative centralization is not founded in a social consensus; from the religious wars to the Commune to the Dreyfus affair to May 1968, France has always been characterized by strife and disagreement (Histoire de France, vol.5: Les Conflits).

The Annalistes' view of France as plural and heterogeneous has been radicalized by younger historians. In L'Invention de la France, Le Bras and Todd have thus argued that the industrial society has not suppressed the differences that defined the France of Ancien Régime. Basing their analysis on a large number of statistical maps, they have shown that France is still highly diverse in such areas as "family structure, suicide rate, birth rate of natural children, divorce rate, average marriage age, and effects of alcoholism" (7). More recently, Todd has extended this diagnostic to the domain that now concerns us most in French Studies: ethnicity. In this area, according to him, contemporary France is characterized by the contradiction between a "fantasy of homogeneity" ("homogénéité fantasméee") and the "objective diversity" of the country (Le Destin des immigrés, 246); that is, the "assimilation" model is still promoted in legal and administrative discourses, whereas the French in fact have adjusted to ethnic differences and live with them comfortably. Todd, for that matter, holds that the same discrepancy between ideology and actual practice can be found in the United States; indeed, the "loud multiculturalism" that is officially professed there contrasts with the way of life, which remains "appallingly homogeneous" (247).

The debates about French "diversity" have epistemological implications. For one thing, they show once again that "history" and "theory" cannot (and should not) be separated. Indeed, it is futile to ask what France "really is" (diverse or homogeneous), and expect history to provide an answer that is free of "theory," in the sense of "assumptions that frame the selection and arrangement of the data" (Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, 100). The positivist historians' "unity of France" thesis was made possible by a reliance on administrative documents and a desire for restoring the position of France in Europe after the defeat of 1870; the Annalistes' claim that France is in fact multiple (and happy to be so), by a turn to cultural archives and the intent to challenge the positivists' beliefs. Both views, therefore, demonstrate the same thing: namely, that there "is" no France, or, more exactly, that France (like any other object), can only "be" if it is placed, as some philosophers put it, "under the description" that a conceptual framework provides.