The French Revolution transformed the notion of ‘Basqueness’ from an economic to a cultural feature. Under the ancien régime, local Basque elites defined the exceptionalism of their respective pays on the basis of such distinctive attributes as their ancient history, their peculiar language and their mœurs, which came to form the basis of Basque cultural identity after 1789. Nevertheless, when facing the French state before the Revolution, they employed such tropes of identity almost exclusively to defend local privileges, in particular fiscal exemption, from the increasing centralisation of the French state. The reforms of the early phase of the Revolution, especially the abolition of privileges and the reconfiguration of administrative France into départements, prompted Basque elites to reimagine the position of the old Basque pays within the new model of nation-state. The result was a transformation of the meaning of Basque exceptionalism from an economic feature within the ancien-régime French state to a separate linguistic and cultural entity within the emerging order founded upon notions of citizenship and nationhood.