Reading your essay about riverlands, a question about real history rises : Why did france become a united country while germany and italy not?

Well, both Germany and Italy did, but they just did later…

A lot of it does come down to luck. There were a lot of states that are currently part of France – the Duchy of Burgundy, the Duchy of Brittany, the County of Flanders, the Duchy of Acquitaine, etc. – that had a long tradition of independence and didn’t think of themselves as belonging to the French nation-state, and had some wars and some dynastic marriages gone differently, they might have stayed out of the French nation-state. 

I also think the very persistence and bitterness of the Hundred Years War helped. By creating a singular evil Other who the nation could be defined against, the War helped to create a sense of national identity on both sides, creating a centripetal force that counter-acted the previously dominant trend of regional separatism. 

By contrast, if you look at Italy and Germany, you had a lot of states that managed to dodge absorption for a long long time, and the wars that wracked those countries tended to be far more complicated struggles that made developing a national identity more difficult. Take Italy for an example: maybe you could find a proto-nationalism within the Guelphs, but they had to contend with a kind of pan-European proto-nationalism among the Ghibellines, and even then the Guelphs were backed by the French to check the Holy Roman Empire. Then when you get down to the Renaissance, and Italy is being simultaneously claimed by the French and the Spanish and there’s nine feuding city-states that were all claiming to be the true rulers of Italy and then you have to deal with the fact that the Papal States which were probably the best positioned to be the nucleus of an Italian state were owned by the Church and the Pope wasn’t always Italian, and then chunks of Italy get given to the Austrians, and it’s really difficult to get your feet under you politically.