Until now it was believed that the French word “chauvinism” was derived from the name of the brave soldier of the Napoleonic guard Nicolas Chauvin. Historian and political scientist Gerard de Puimèges proves that the soldier Chauvin did not exist in reality and that this character - a village boy who, being called up for military service, fights bravely, and then returns to his native village and takes up the plow again - was invented by French poets and vaudeville artists of the 1820s and 1830s. Going back to antiquity, the both heroic and comic myth of the “soldier-farmer”, embodied by Chauvin, helped the French to console themselves with illusions about the unity and cohesion of their nation. Puimege's book is a kind of political and ideological history of France in the 18th-20th centuries, which is based on a story about the French version of nationalism called chauvinism. CONTENTS: Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 9 Part I. THE SEARCH OF CHAUVIN1. In search of Mr. Chauvin 152. Recruits and veterans 413. Portraits of a hero 734. Military-agrarian vaudeville 86Part II. MYTH ABOUT THE SOLDIER - FARMER1. Ancient origins 1112. Evolution of myth: the Age of Enlightenment 125- Idyll in tights 1523. The soldier - tiller and the Revolution 1604. Eradication of pauperism: projects of colonization and agricultural commissions 1885. Pedagogy of chauvinism 228- Mutual teaching 232- Vaudeville in the gymnasium 242- School textbooks and books for public reading 254- The basis of the system is competition 2696. The spirit of '48 and the resurrection of the Empire 2787. From 1870 to Marshal Pétain 304Part III. IMAGES OF THE MYTH1. An avalanche of images 3252. Death in Arcadia 333CONCLUSION: The originality of chauvinism 362The specter of state nationalism 367The experience of psychoanalytic interpretation of chauvinism 374The main myth 381Index of names 389