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This article focuses on the three French national parks of C?vennes, Pyr?n?es and Vanoise. The case study deals with the way those parks maintain and promote a landscape symbolizing the perpetuation of a traditional French nationhood. First trying to link representative elements of a timeless national culture to the natural environment, park managers then treat it as a given as natural as this environment. Once the space has been shaped in its materiality, practices and representations, the space itself extends a discourse whose purpose is to generate a feeling of propriety of and belonging to the national territory. From the 1960s to present times, this heritage policy concerning nature participates in French nation-memory building, as much as it reveals its current crisis.