The formation of the French national state is often characterized as a march toward centralization. Political histories recount the consolidation of a central authority and administration from the time of the Revolution and Napoleon (Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1992; Tocqueville 1955). Cultural histories focus on Parisian life and institutions or the gradual integration of provincial norms, languages, and customs into a broader French culture through school and the military during the Third Republic (E. Weber 1976). Analyses of citizenship follow an assimilationist ethos emanating from the Revolution (Brubaker 1992). Well established by now, this image of France as the central state par excellence sends us searching deep into the past for early clues — if need be, one can find central state institutions as far back as 1032 in Henri Ier's Prevot de Paris — and trains our eye to home in on the tendency for much of modern French life, including education, social welfare, even architectural innovation, gastronomy, and patterns of protest and revolution, to orient toward Paris. When it comes to the steady march of the French state, we conclude that all roads do, indeed, lead to Paris.

What is a central state par excellence? Max Weber defined the state as a human community that successfully claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory (Weber 1946: 78).