What Is a Nation? and continues to be invoked. Political historian Karl Deutsch, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Renan, said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours". Benedict Anderson's 1983 work Imagined Communities, which states that a nation is an "imagined political community", argues that Renan contradicts himself when he says French people must have forgotten the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, yet does not explain what it is. In other words, Renan assumes that all his readers will remember the very massacre he says they have forgotten.
What Is a Nation? to the reasons based on race, geography, history and so on. They argue that Renan maintains his intellectual background but subtly, i.e. the arguments he explicitly used in "What is a Nation?" are not consistent with his thinking. The concept of "daily plebiscite" would be ambiguous. They argue that the definition is an opportunist idealization and it should be interpreted within the Franco-Prussian War and in the midst of the dispute concerning the Alsace-Lorraine region. What Is a Nation? "What is a Nation?" ("Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?") is an 1882 lecture by French historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892), known for the statements