Let us now turn from the grassroots to the high peaks from which those who governed states and societies after the French Revolution surveyed the problems of nation and nationality.

The characteristic modern state, receiving its systematic shape in the era of the French revolutions, though in many ways anticipated by the evolving European principalities of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, was novel in a number of respects. It was defined as a (preferably continuous and unbroken) territory over all of whose inhabitants it ruled, and separated by clearly distinct frontiers or borders from other such territories. Politically it ruled over and administered these inhabitants directly, and not through intermediate systems of rulers and autonomous corporations. It sought, if at all possible, to impose the same institutional and administrative arrangements and laws all over its territory, though after the Age of Revolution, no longer the same religious or secular-ideological ones. And increasingly it found itself having to take notice of the opinions of its subjects or citizens, because its political arrangements gave them a voice – generally through various kinds of elected representatives – and/or because the state needed their practical consent or activity in other ways, e.g. as tax-payers or as potential conscript soldiers. In short, the state ruled over a territorially defined ‘people’ and did so as the supreme ‘national’ agency of rule over its territory, its agents increasingly reaching down to the humblest inhabitant of the least of its villages.