This roundtable brings together contributors to a forthcoming edited volume, Histories of French Sexuality: Enlightenment to the Present (University of Nebraska Press). The volume, and hence this session, participate in advancing the importance of the history of sexuality in understanding wider narratives about the past. The papers, individually and collectively, will show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. We argue, quite simply, that it is impossible to get a full picture of the French past without it. The papers engage with topics important in France history: early empire building, formation of the modern self, medicine, colonization, and the social world of post-war France. At the same time, contributors reassert the importance of French history to the wider historical discipline. The study of sexuality in France essential to our understanding of the key categories that define social relationships, political formations, and cultural production both in the past and today. France, we argue, remains important not simply for its own sake, but for what it tells us about the modern world more broadly. This roundtable will thus highlight cutting-edge work within the history of sexuality in modern France, advancing the dual claim that we cannot understand France without sexuality and cannot understand modern sexuality without France.