The subject of the essay is the main stages of the historical past of French civilization, in the depths of which the political mentality of the ruling elites was formed. In the beginning, the authors consider the mental and civilizational results of the five hundred years of Romanization of Gaul as a province of the Roman Empire. The role of Christian proselytism in the formation of the monotheistic mentality and the political role of the Church of Gaul are revealed. The thesis about the mental heritage of the Roman Empire in the conditions of its collapse and the formation of the foundations of an original Christian nation is revealed. Then there is the convergence of the Roman and barbarian social structures of the Frankish Empire, as a result of which a monotheistic mental space was formed and Catholicism became the state religion. The conclusion is made about the historical and mental-political significance of chivalry. In the next section, the authors turned to the philosophical, theological and scientific heritage of the enlighteners of the Middle Ages and the New Age, who influenced the development of the political mentality of the French elites. The separate part of the essay examines the influence of the French Renaissance on the ruling elites, who, having mastered the mental models of the Italian Renaissance, began to build their national identity on their basis. The centuries-old theological and political nature of French political power in the Renaissance was transformed into a subject-pragmatic one. For the first time in the political history of Europe, politics was separated from religion. Christian dogmas as the basic mental attitudes of the elites gave way to the semantic primacy of secular principles of existence. During the period of absolutism, on the soil cultivated by the Renaissance, anti-absolutist and anti-clerical mental and political attitudes were formed in the elite environment, which determined the nature of the revolutionary events of the 18th-19th centuries. During the period of the Consulate and the First Empire, Napoleon I, seeking to ensure the economic dominance of the Empire and its military superiority over the countries of the continent, pursued a policy of mental reconstruction of the elite in order to create a new nobility. In the course of the analysis, the authors reveal the dialectical nature of the mental dynamics of the French elites.