Since his election in 2012 French president François Hollande has indulged in a predilection for a discursive politics of memory, structuring an ever-increasing proportion of his public addresses around physical sites of historical and cultural memory, thus intensifying a trend set by his presidential predecessors in the later decades of the twentieth century. This thesis explores this pattern of political instrumentalisation of monumental sites, identifying and analysing the particular physical and representative power of monumental sites as employed in political discursive strategies of identity. In my examination of these political discursive strategies of identity (re)production, in which I draw extensively on techniques offered by literary and narrative theory, especially M.M Bakhtin’s chronotope and Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism, I show the discursive tactics of President Hollande’s memorial excess to be in a tradition that is both timeless and, as a result of accelerating social and communication realities, in crisis: that is, the Western tradition of experiencing collective identity not only as narrative but also, more specifically, as myth. Myth as understood in this analysis is the myth of Greek epics, of Celtic traditions, of Christian dominance. A myth that forms both individual and collective identity by offering to its adherents stabilising explanations and meaningful experiences of time and space. Such myth is understood as always and inevitably operating as a triad: myth as narrative, ritual and hero. Should one of these interdependent components prove wanting, the myth will fail. My thesis begins by establishing the collective identity of the modern nation-state in this mythical tradition, identifying, as it does so, the manner in which the political myth of nation-state has adapted the balance of its narrative-ritual-hero triad to changing conceptions and experiences of space and time as provoked by developments in technologies of communication and social interaction. The subsequent narrative analysis of contemporary French political identity discourses allows me to identify the manner in which cultural and monumental sites are being employed in political efforts to mobilise the powers of ritual and hero without which the national narrative cannot aspire to mythical dominance. By analysing a tradition of museum politics, from the Louvre of the French Revolution to the recently-inaugurated National Museum of Immigration History, I isolate the strategies employed by political leaders in their (re)definition of national identity. Furthermore, in exploring contemporary attempts to evoke the mythical triad in cultural sites, I can identify the failings of the national model of collective identity in the twenty-first century context by contrasting the notions of ritual and heroism called upon by French leaders today through sites such as such as the Pantheon and the figure of Jeanne d’Arc with emerging experiences of lived identity provoked by the new temporal and spatial realities of cyberspace and the contestations around tradition social identity and leadership provided by increasing female political and social leadership and by the presence of previously marginalised social groups in contemporary collective narratives.