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For those of us involved in French studies, one of the most useful teaching tools to have appeared in recent years is Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de Mémoire. Filled with meticulously researched articles on an first glance every component deemed an integral part of French national identity, Les Lieux de Mémoire allows American students to comprehend how France constructs its sense of self, especially with respect to its historical patrimoine. I often turn to this monumental scholarly initiative in which the seventeenthcentury occupies an impressive amount of space, attesting to what is arguably the unique place this one century plays in France’s conception of its cultural identity. Articles on Versailles, conversation, gallantry, and the French Academy all illustrate that the memory of this particular historical moment in ingrained in the French national psyche. In some sense, the strong presence of seventeenth-century France endows our courses with legitimacy. It allows us to state to our American students that one doesn’t really know France or the French mentalité if one is ignorant of this essential building block of national identity.

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