This paper will examine the problems of nation-building in Italy in later nineteenth century Italy, focusing principally on the ideas and policies of the man who dominated the country in the 1880s and 1890s, Francesco Crispi. It will be my contention that Crispi and many of his political contemporaries on both the left and the right were strongly conscious of the mobilising and nationalising potential of "the other", and to an extent manipulated and deliberately exaggerated threats posed both by internal enemies--principally the Catholics and the socialists--and external enemies--above all France. Crispi's attitude to France and the French was complex and highly ambivalent, and I will ...