Francophobia

Anti-French sentiment or Francophobia refers to a dislike or hatred toward France, the People of France, the Government of France, or the Francophonie (set of political entities that use French as an official language or whose French-speaking population is numerically or proportionally large). Its antonym is francophilia. This sentiment has existed in various forms and in different countries for centuries.

France as continental hegemon

Though French history in the broadest sense extends back more than a millennium, its political unity dates back from the reign of Louis XI, who set up the basis of nation-state (rather than a dynastic, transnational entity typical of the late Middle Ages). According to Eric Hobsbawm (1990), only aristocrats and scholars spoke French before the French Revolution; about two-thirds of the population of the French kingdom spoke a variety of local indigenous languages often referred to as dialects. Henceforth, Hobsbawm argues that the French nation-state was constituted during the 19th century through conscription, which accounted for interactions between French citizens coming from various regions, and the Third Republic's public instruction laws, enacted in the 1880s, probably in parallel with the birth of the European nationalisms.