Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank remind us that empires constitute a far older form of rule than the nation-state. As they note, the historical “endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary and inevitable.” In settings including the French Caribbean, Spanish South America, and British North America, they stress that the fight for rights began as struggles for reform within an imperial framework, before they reached a revolutionary tipping point.1 This complicates standard ways of thinking in which nations, born of the eighteenth century, simply replaced empires. This chapter examines the entangled relationship between different kinds of nationalism, on the one hand, and a nebulous and multitiered French Empire, on the other hand. It suggests both the endurance and unexpected influences of imperial structures and ideas, as well as the significance of paths not taken, such as federalist alternatives to nationalist frameworks.