DOMNA STANTON
Distinguished Professor of French, Graduate Center, CUNY; author of The Monarchy, the Nation and its Others: France in the Age of Louis XIV (forthcoming); The Aristocrat as Art

‘There Are No Jews in France’: Alterity in Louis XIV’s Nation-State

In a nation constructed on a set of exclusions, as nations usually are, Jews in l7th-century France held a position at once similar and different from other others. Although formally thrown out of France in 1614, by the edict of a monarchy that upheld the ideal of “one king, one law, one faith,” Jews had a continued presence because they served political economic, military, medical and religious functions. A nascent anthropological and scholarly curiosity about Jewish customs, life and beliefs seems to herald the dawning of an age of tolerance after 1685, but this trend does not resolve the contradictions of an absolutistic nation-state whose proclaimed exclusions were belied by presences that were fundamental to its identity -- contradictions that may well be endemic to the nation-state.