look at the questioning, remaking, and perceived (and real) threats to ideas of a singular French identity, and the loss of a sense of meaning and purpose in being tied to the French nation-state since WW2 until now

-Identity should be taken to mean the ways in which people assert and imagine their sense of self, but also how identities are assigned to people from outside. You might think about group identity versus individual identity, and the ways in which they connect to or complicate ideas of national identity.

-You may want to consider such events and processes: war and Nazi occupation, decolonization, immigration, Americanization, Cold War, regionalism, philosophical movements like existentialism and structuralism, the students revolt of 1968, and so forth. You should consider how these events and processes caused, or reflected, a certain questioning around French identity and France’s place in the world.

-You should also look at how new arrivals in France, such as immigrants, struggled to find their place in France, and how their own identities have become fraught and complicated. You may also think more generally about how has France’s colonial and post-colonial history has complicated and enriched notions of this “French” identity.

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