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In 1920, the new Baltic states were unknown to French public opinion and seen as unstable areas whose right to belong to Europe in terms of civilisation was contested. However, during the 1920s, little by little the Baltic nations were integrated into the French « mental map » of Europe. This integration came through the objective discovery of these countries, the restructuring of French imagination in relation to preoccupations of that time, and the efforts made by the new elites for Baltic realities to correspond to French systems of representation. Little by little, the feeling of a certain cultural proximity was therefore created. The « invention » of the Baltic nations thus operated in close interaction with the desire to obtain this second acknowledgement (following the de jure one) from French and Western public opinion.