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Drawing on sociological conceptualisations of the formation of group identities, this study investigates the formation of a ‘French’ identity in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Whilst championing a symbiotic relationship between theoretical frameworks and the historical case study, I consider how a twin discourse of barbarity, both forged and recorded in the first French monolingual dictionaries, was invested in a social practice in order to form an elite and restricted intra-European ‘social identity’, which would later be rearticulated as a national identity at the end of the eighteenth century. My main thesis is that the methodisation of – what I typologise as – Gallocentric travel to distant extra-European lands and the accounts resulting from such travel was mirrored in the culture of travel to England and travel writing, itself a practice employed as a further vehicle in the assertion and consolidation of the language of ‘Frenchness’. To evidence this, I examine how the language of barbarism, first employed in the sixteenth century in relation to Eastern and Amerindian peoples, was reattributed to the lower English classes in the seventeenth century to construct a sense of superior ‘Frenchness’ within Europe and with it, a French ‘social identity’. In turn, I study how in the wake of the Glorious Revolution exponents of a counter-culture of anti-Gallocentric travel challenged this particularised narrative on ‘Englishness’ and looked to upturn the language of barbarity. Overall, my study drives towards putting forward a fresh analysis of Voltaire’s 1734 Lettres philosophiques. I argue for a new reading of this canonical text in light of my study of the language of ‘social identity’ and cultures of (anti-)Gallocentric travel and travel writing. In this, I suggest Voltaire’s ambivalence in the face of increasingly ‘enlightened’ thought.

At the end of the twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu and Umberto Eco were two of the most prominent intellectuals in France and Italy. Yet, in spite of the fact that France and Italy are neighbouring countries and have been, historically, exercising an on-going cultural influence upon each other, there is no systematic comparative study of these two intellectuals. This study responds to this absence by offering, within the framework of an interdisciplinary project, a thorough analysis of some of the key themes of the thought of Bourdieu and Eco. By addressing how Bourdieu’s and Eco’s work contributes to a better understanding of the creative and the interdisciplinary nature of intellectuality, this study explores the following hypothesis: those scholars who become known to the general public as public intellectuals are often interested in exploring and in testing the limits of disciplinary fields. In so doing, they challenge the norms that define academic professionalism and the growing specialisation of knowledge in academia. By highlighting the differences, as well as the similarities in the approaches of Bourdieu and Eco, this study shows that critical engagement is defined by the very disciplinary boundaries and structures it attempts to challenge and question. This study demonstrates that interdisciplinarity does neither exclude nor render obsolete existing disciplines. On the contrary, solid grounding in one discipline facilitates the production of interdisciplinary knowledge. As the examples of Bourdieu and Eco show, disciplines can be transcended only once they are fully mastered. Once fully mastered they appear in their contingency, not as absolute statements but rather as vehicles towards knowledge.