I think your point about patriotic songs, poetry, etc. is quite good–throughout the West I don’t think the great majority of any nation fully embraces the consequences of secularized, contract-based politics, but merely espouses the principles while relying on older, increasingly vague sentiments to sand away the rougher edges. Thus the typical American will describe the origin and role of states and government as a secular Lockean, while singing old anthems and songs that explicitly or implicitly invoke a far different conception, and all the while leaning on a pared-down, Protestant Christianity to fill in the stark lines of his professed philosophy. Even now, this representative person may recoil from his own professed secular contractualism if he could see it shorn of the inconsistencies left in popular imagination from a past era which disguise its sharper features; as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries go on, however, it seems the principles increasingly displace or colonize the tradition that humanize them.

No attention is paid, for one, to the legal continuity between the medieval and modern West. In 1250 and in 1550 there was a Kingdom of France, legally distinct from the King of France, using in either case a common legal framework. The key change is not the new development of an abstract concept of “France,” but a rearrangement of agency as to public functions within it. And that project, which eventually saw the French Crown (and its Republican successors) as the unique original agent of public functions within defined territorial limits is the end result of centuries of Capetian efforts towards it. The France of 1550 differs from the France of 1250, politically, chiefly in that the Crown had made great strides in its perennial projects of territorial expansion and location of public initiative with the Crown within that territory. Or, one might see the great oak tree overpowering all around it, and wish for the sapling of before; the trouble is that the problems of the ancient oak exist in some form in the sapling, and a great deal of ingenuity must be spent in identifying exactly where and in what ways to arrest its growth, assuming that possible.

More broadly, I wonder if the Virgilian empire–peaceful, universal in scale, perfectly ordered–is useful more as a model than a reality. Such a conception can serve as a focus to direct our efforts in re-ordering existing political arrangements (I have a bust of Charles V in my office, for more or less this reason), without expectation that the inevitable decay of this world will ever allow it to actually exist, or at best exist briefly before becoming corrupt and killing much good in its corruption.