Abstract
According to Ernest Renan, in Qu'est ce qu'une nation, "Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning and they will have an end". While the opposite assumption is widespread, nations are in fact recent in the human history. They are younger than their official histories that the nationalists would have us believe. Nations are barely two centuries old. In the modern or rather, political sense of the word, they did not exist before the ideological revolution that began in the 18th century and conferred political power on the people. From that time on, the nation referred to a community united by different links, like the allegiance to the same monarch, a common religion, culture or language. So nations belong to the modernity and are not, like in the eyes of the nationalists, a natural and eternal way of classifying men.
