The Jacobins created the modern French nation by winning rural hegemony.

Evidence

Without the agrarian policy of the Jacobins, Paris would have had the Vendee at its very doors. The resistance of the Vendee properly speaking is linked to the national question, which had become envenomed among the peoples of Brittany and in general among those alien to the slogan of the “single and indivisible republic” and to the policy of bureaucratic-military centralisation—a slogan and a policy which the Jacobins could not renounce without committing suicide. … Rural France accepted the hegemony of Paris; in other words, it understood that in order definitively to destroy the old regime it had to make a bloc with the most advanced elements of the Third Estate, and not with the Girondin moderates. If it is true that the Jacobins “forced” its hand, it is also true that this always occurred in the direction of real historical development. For not only did they organise a bourgeois government, i.e. make the bourgeoisie the dominant class—they did more. They created the bourgeois State, made the bourgeoisie into the leading, hegemonic class of the nation, in other words gave the new State a permanent basis and created the compact modern French nation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 475

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is an early concrete-working definition of hegemony as distinct from mere domination: the Jacobins made the bourgeoisie the dominant class but went further to make it the leading class of the nation.
• XREF: Connects forward into the Islamophobia toolkit: the nation as a hegemonic achievement (‘compact modern French nation’) prefigures later readings on imagined community and how the nation-state incorporates or excludes populations.