First delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882, Ernest Renan's What Is a Nation? is a seminal text in the study of nation, nationalism, and nineteenth-century European history. In it, Renan critically reviews the prevailing theories of nationhood of his time. Finding all inadequate to the task, he then develops his own, historically-informed theory wedding considerations of historical continuity to the imperative of present consent.

In an afterword, the political theorist Nathalie Krikorian-Duronsoy distinguishes Renan's idea of the nation from the social contract tradition, particularly in its Rousseauist variant. In Renan's view, the nation is not a mere sum of individuals but an autonomous entity in its own right. Only by grasping this may one move beyond the extremely partial reading to which What Is a Nation? has long been reduced and recognize the various ways in which Renan's thought intersects with contemporary debates regarding immigration, identity, and the future of the nation state.

Ernest Renan (1823-92) was a French writer, philologist, philosopher, and historian. Widely considered to be one of the most distinguished scholars of his era, Renan is today principally remembered for two works: his Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus, 1863), which was immensely controversial in its time for its depiction of the historical Jesus, and What Is a Nation? (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, 1882), a lecture on the idea of nationhood delivered at the Sorbonne in 1882 in which Renan responds to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71).