The evidence of more than three hundred concerts of early music given by the Parisian Schola Cantorum and its sister association, the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, as well as more than four hundred performances of this repertoire outside the Schola shows that the most consistently performed composer in Paris at the French fin de siècle was the German Johann Sebastian Bach. This is coupled with a shift at the Schola, from a preponderance of works by Palestrina in the 1890s to a new emphasis on Rameau operas in the early 1900s. This article is an attempt to understand these repertorial preferences as manifestations of at least two types of nationalism: first as a mass movement to attain ethnic-linguistic homogenization and second as a movement by the social elite as a means of establishing its difference. All three composers examined in the case studies emerge as vehicles for both types of nationalism, though there is more evidence of the second type than there is of the first. This article also shows that there is a distinction between the ways in which these repertoires were either co-opted or received by the social elite and the intelligentsia, the latter using early music as a metaphor for the ‘serious’.