The New Brunswick Acadians are the descendants of French colonists that settled from the start of the 17th Century along the shores of the present Bay of Fundy. They have been profoundly marked in their collective consciousness by both the need to survive in a hostile anglophone environment and a collective ideology that define identity in terms of ancestry and in a divine mission to defend the Catholic faith and French language. Because of these preoccupations there was an attempt to formulate a clearly defined territorial consciousness. In this minority group, few in numbers, dispersed, and having continually to come to terms with the anglophone majority, belonging is history, filiation. The Acadian « homeland » is the virtues of the ancestors and not a clearly defined territory. Between the rootedness of proximal space, characterized by the parish and the village, and identity with an abs-tract « nation » that is perceived in stricly temporal terms, there exists a profound hiatus with respect to belonging, a hiatus generating an ambiguity that is reinforced by the exposure of the rural « cells » to the vaster and more transparent space of urban, industrial society. After reviewing the traditional bases of Acadian identity, the successive changes leading to the emergence of a new society, and the résistance characterized by the persistance of a certain Acadian « sensibility », the author furnishes a brief description of Acadian territoriality based on the analysis of a survey administered to young francophones in New Brunswick. In so doing he insista on the complexity of the minority group's ethnic identity, the role of the national ideology that is diffused by the power élite in creative ambiguities, as well as the necessity for the population of reforrnulating, in terms of power and of territory, a new "Acadian project."