The aftermath of war provided the French political and intellectual elites with a new beginning. The country's cultural and intellectual heritage was badly damaged by the conflict. In that respect it resembled the material infrastructure of buildings, bridges, roads and railways, which suffered destruction on a massive scale, and the political institutions, which had collapsed for the first time in the spring of 1940 and for a second time in the spring of 1944. Emerging from a succession of foreign military interventions, the elites took ownership of regime change and launched an urgent programme of nation building, in which the cultural and intellectual rebuilding of French national identity played a key role. The way in which they rebuilt their nation was particular to the circumstances of France in 1944–47, but the success with which they achieved it might hold lessons for other countries in the present day, where embattled national elites confront the strategic task of building or rebuilding a nation after conflict and regime change.