For the last ten years, the studies of state-building processes and nationalizations of France and Chile have increased. The first objective of this program is to review these researches, to highlight the similarities but also the divergences about the processes, which are analysed sometimes within the framework of a consolidated democracy, sometimes within the framework of a democracy under construction.

Among the main lines that are selected, the often conflicting development of models of politicisation and the weight of the colonial constraint appear and, in both cases, can become useful. Furthermore, it will also be interesting to instigate the prospect of a comparative research: about the political imitation that is happening between France and Chile (concerning administrative and electoral matters); about the contemporary transformations of these processes, especially with the advent of an unprecedented change of the practices of citizenship (migratory flows and new structures of regional integration, electronic vote, “globalisation”). Finally, the last aspect is the appearance of a national state bureaucracy in these two countries: to which social processes does it correspond? What are its main characteristics? What are the chronology and the strategic, cultural and political necessities under which its spread in the guise that we currently know has happened?