I recently fell down a Wiki-hole onto the article on the Gauls. At the end of the article, there were two things that struck me.
First, Charles de Gaulle (ironically, given his name) identified France as a Christian country that began when Clovis was elected king of the Franks, thus signifying a Frankish origin for France.
Second, the textbooks of Ernest Lavisse, in which the Gauls were referred to as "nos ancêtres lea Gaulois" ("our ancestors the Gauls"), were mentioned.
My question is, are there political reasons that either a Frankish or Gaulish origin for France was adopted? Would the Gauls, for example, be seen as an "anticlerical" choice in contrast to the Christian Franks?
By the time the Franks invaded the modern France area the Gauls were already Catholics and they were in fact Roman citizens, they had very little in common with the Gauls of Caesar time. The Franks converted to Catholicism right after their invasion, and the Roman version of it, not arianism, considered heretic by Rome and already spread between other barbaric population. So they got the church approval and began to mingle with the roman-gaul aristocracy but the leadership remained in the hands of the Franks, who built their reign based on their culture, although they took some ideas from the roman heritage. So the medieval French state was built primarily on the Franks culture, not on the roman-gauls one, and that's why Frenchmen can be considered to have Frankish origin.