by Tony Judt
Inevitably, there is some loss. Nora has wisely reduced the overall number of articles from 128 to 44, though he mostly kept the longer ones. Missing, unfortunately, are some of those essays that captured the original spirit of the enterprise at its best: Jean-Paul Poisson, for example, on “the office of the notary,” a fixture in every small French town and part of the life cycle of anyone with any property to inherit, bequeath, or contest—which meant a large part of the population; or Jacques Revel on “the region,” a crucial constituent element in the mental and moral geography of every inhabitant of France. But these, like many of the other contributions not included in the English-language edition, are of more interest to the French reader—for whom they are, precisely, a realm of memory. Perhaps for that reason the majority of the cuts are from the middle volumes on “the Nation,” whose innermost memories and concerns are least accessible to outsiders.
What the English reader gets, as a result, is something far closer to the spirit of Volume III, Les Frances—whose structure is used to regroup the translated essays. A few of the essays on French land and topography have been retained but hardly any of the descriptions of social or educational rites de passage—such as receiving one’s bachot from a lycée or being accepted into a grande école—or the illuminating monographic contributions on the origins of the French fascination with their own heritage. Nora’s original interest in lieux de mémoire like the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre or the Fourteenth of July national holiday as commemorative objects for dissection is thus diluted, and the result is a collection of very high-quality essays on mostly conventional historical subjects: political and religious divisions and traditions; significant institutions, dates, buildings, and books.
Within these limits, this new translation makes available to English-language readers some of the best French scholarship today: Jacques Revel on the Royal Court; Mona Ozouf on “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; Jean-Pierre Babelon on the Louvre; Alain Corbin on “Divisions of Time and Space”; Marc Fumaroli on “The Genius of the French Language”; and others besides.
Revel and Corbin, especially, bring to their subjects great scholarly authority: Respectively, the president of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (and longtime editor of the journal Annales) and the holder of the premier chair of history in France, they wear their standing and their learning lightly. Alain Corbin, who has written on everything from economic backwardness in the Limousin to the history of prostitution, illustrates divisions of time and space with a remarkable superabundance of examples. Jacques Revel recites once again the national Ur-narrative of courtly life in early modern France, but he infuses it with so much allusion, subtlety, and significance that the whole familiar story reads as though told and understood for the first time.
Even those essays that don’t quite come off—like that by Antoine Compagnon on À la recherche du temps perdu, where the author is confronted with the precociously self-referential, realm-of-memory character of Proust’s own masterpiece—are still a pleasure to read and full of wit and perception. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is the way in which all the contributions manage to cast light on a compact range of themes at the core of any attempt to grasp the French past, and France itself.
The first of these is the sheer ancientness and unbroken continuity of France and the French state (eight hundred years at the most modest estimate), and the corresponding longevity of the habit of exercising authority and control from the center. This is not merely a matter of political power, the well-known propensity of French rulers of all ideological persuasions to aggregate to themselves the maximum of sovereigntyand dominion. In his essay on Reims Jacques Le Goff notes that the cathedral there—the traditional site for the coronation of French kings—is a masterpiece of “classical” Gothic, before going on to comment that “in French history ‘classical’ often refers to the imposition of ideological and political controls.”20
The urge to classify, to regulate everything, from trade and language to theater or food, is what links the public sphere in France with cultural and pedagogical practices. It is not by chance that the Guide Michelin (green) authoritatively divides all possible sites of interest into three: interesting, worth a detour, worth a journey. Nor is it an accident that the Guide Michelin (red) follows the same tripartite division for restaurants—both inherited the practice from “classical” French rhetoric and philosophy, which also bequeathed it to dramatic theory and political argument. As Pascal Ory notes, “codification” in France is a lieu de mémoire in itself.
So is religion. Christianity—Catholic Christianity—is so long-established in France that Nora himself has no qualms about treating it, along with monarchy and peasantry, as the essence of true Frenchness. All the essays on religion in Realms of Memory have a robust, engaged quality: Claude Langlois even outdoes Nora, claiming that “in terms of monuments, the lesson is clear: France is either Catholic or secular. There is no middle term.” André Vauchez, who has a fine essay on cathedrals, would probably agree with him—he is trenchantly committed to his subject, defending against the philistinism of the times the appropriately symbolic and otherworldly character of a great cathedral. But in the context of this collection, Vauchez has it easy—as Proust pointed out: “The cathedrals are not only the finest ornaments of our art but the only ones that are still connected with the purpose for which they were constructed”—an assertion even truer today than it was when Proust made it in 1907.21
But France is not just Catholic or secular—it is, and has long been, Protestant and Jewish as well, just as it is now also Islamic. Jews and Protestants are well served in the essays by Pierre Birnbaum and Philippe Joutard included here, both of which are more thoughtful and less conventional than the contributions on Catholics, perhaps because they must perforce work against the historiographical and national grain. Joutard shows the importance of memory in French Protestant life, so marked that Protestants in rural communities typically have a stronger collective memory of ancient events than do their Catholic neighbors, even when the Catholics were more active in, and were more directly affected by, the events in question. And his essay on the longevity of victim memory is an implicit reminder to the editor that too much emphasis upon the normatively Catholic character of Frenchness can result in new forms of neglect. There is no entry in these pages for the massacre of Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572—a French “memory date” if ever there was one.
If Catholicism is at the “center” of French memory and heretics and minorities have often sat neglected at the cultural “periphery,” the same Manichaean contrast has been reproduced in a rich variety of social and geographical keys. For as long as anyone can remember, France has been divided: between north and south, along the line running from Saint-Malo to Geneva that was favored in nineteenth-century economic geography as the point of separation between modern and backward France; between speakers of French and speakers of a disfavored regional patois; between Court and country, Right and Left, young and old (it is not without significance that the average age of the members of the Legislative Assembly of the French Revolution in 1792 was just twenty-six years), but above all between Paris and the provinces.
The “provinces” are not the same thing as the countryside—campagne in France has had positive connotations for centuries, whereas ever since the emergence of a court, “provincial” has been a term of round abuse. In the subliminal iconography of France, the countryside is peopled by solid peasants, rooted in the soil for generation upon generation. Even today, Armand Frémont, the author of an essay, “The Land,” in Realms of Memory, cannot resist a distinctively French response to his theme: “The land was domesticated without violence to nature’s rhythms, without the large-scale transformation of the landscape sometimes seen in other countries”; the French landscape shows “unparalleled harmony,” etc. The sense of loss today, as rural France vanishes from sight, is palpable.22
No one, however, regrets “the provinces.�
� The typical “provincial” came from a small town and was conventionally depicted harboring the forlorn hope of “making it” in Paris—unless he stayed at home under the bovine illusion that life in his constricted little world was somehow real and sufficient. From Molière to Barrès, this is the staple tragicomic premise of French letters. It reflects, of course, a widespread prejudice shared by provincials and Parisians alike: that everything of consequence happens in Paris (which is why 92 percent of Parisian students under the “bourgeois” monarchy from 1830 to 1848 were drawn from the provinces). The capital thus was able to drain from the rest of the (provincial) nation virtually all life and energy. Much of French history, from the political economy of Louis XIV’s Versailles through the atavistic ideological appeal of Marshal Pétain’s anti-Parisian rural idyll to the residential preferences of French professors can more readily be understood once this fundamental polarity is grasped.
The pejorative connotation of “provincial” stands in marked contrast to the traditional French affection not just for peasants and the land, but also for the idea of France, as mapped on the territory itself. Here, of course, “traditional” should be understood as something quite recent—it was in the nineteenth century, specifically in the early years of the Third Republic, from 1880 to 1900, that the map of France was imprinted so successfully upon the collective soul of the nation. Great pedagogic works of history and geography (Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France and Paul Vidal de La Blache’s Tableau de la géographie de France, both discussed in Realms of Memory) provided generations of French teachers with the tools with which to hone the civic sensibility of the nation’s children.23
The Tour de la France par deux enfants (first published in 1877 and required reading for every schoolchild for decades to come) and the bicycle Tour de France (inaugurated in 1903, the year Vidal de La Blache’s Tableau first appeared) followed fairly closely the route traditionally taken around France by the artisan journeymen (compagnons) on their own tour de France in times past. Thanks to this contiguity of time and place—real and constructed—the French by 1914 had a unique, unmatched feel for the memory of their country, its frontiers, its variety, and its topography, as prescribed in the official cartography of the national past and present. It is the passing of this “feel,” and the reality it reflected, however tendentiously, that Nora is recording and mourning in these pages.
The pedagogical efforts of the early Third Republic—proclaimed in 1870 after Napoléon III was captured by the Prussians—were understandably more appreciated in the disfavored provinces than in the nation’s capital. In a 1978 survey the five most popular street names in France were République, Victor Hugo, Léon Gambetta, Jean Jaurès, and Louis Pasteur: two Third Republican politicians, the pre-eminent “republican” scientist, the French poet whose funeral in 1885 was a high point of Republican public commemoration, and the Republic itself. But these street names show up much more frequently in provincial communities than in Paris, where on the contrary there is a marked bias toward names that are nonpolitical or from the ancien régime. The civic conformity of the moderate late-nineteenth-century Republic echoed and comforted the mood of small-town life.
After 1918, when the time came to commemorate the enormous French losses in World War I, the republican cult of the war dead, what Antoine Prost calls the civil religion of interwar France, was again more marked in the provinces, and not just because it was in the villages and hamlets that the human losses had been greatest. The Third Republic, and everything it stood for, mattered more in the towns and villages of France’s regions and departments than it did in urbane, cosmopolitan Paris: The loss of that heritage is thus felt more deeply there.24
The experience and the memory of war in our century is an important clue to France’s fractured heritage, and perhaps deserves more attention than it receives in Realms of Memory. In the words of René Rémond: “From 1914 to 1962, for nearly half a century, war was never absent from French memory, from national consciousness and identity.”25 The First World War I may have been morally untroubling, but it left scars too deep to touch for a long time: In addition to the five million men killed or wounded, there were hundreds of thousands of war widows and their children, not to speak of the shattered landscape of northeastern France. For many decades World War I lay, as it were, in purgatory—remembered but hardly celebrated. Only very recently have the battlefields of the Western Front become sites of more confident commemoration—as you enter the Department of the Somme, official roadside signs welcome you to the region, reminding you that its tragic history (and its cemeteries) are a part of the local heritage and merit a visit: something that would have been unthinkable not long ago.26
But World War II, not to speak of France’s “dirty wars” in Indochina and Algeria, carries more mixed and ambivalent messages and memories. If Vichy is now a lieu de mémoire for scholars and polemicists, for most French men and women it has yet to emerge fully from the coffin of oblivion into which it was cast in 1945: “four years to be stricken from our history,” in the words of Daniel Mornet, the prosecutor at the trial of Marshal Pétain. The twentieth-century past, in short, cannot easily substitute for the older, longer history whose passing is recorded and celebrated in Nora’s collection.
It is not just that the recent past is too close to us. The problem is that although the land, the peasants, even the Church (though not the monarchy) survived well beyond 1918 and even 1940, something else did not. In the first half of the Third Republic, from 1871 until World War I, there was no difficulty in absorbing the trophies of an ancient royal past into the confident republican present. But there is nothing very glorious or confident about French history since 1918, despite de Gaulle’s heroic efforts; just stoic suffering, decline, uncertainty, defeat, shame, and doubt, followed in very short order, as we have seen, by unprecedented changes. These changes could not undo the recent memories; but they did—and here Nora is surely right—appear to erase the older heritage, leaving only troubling recollections and present confusion.
This is not the first time France has had occasion to look back on a hectic sequence of turbulence and doubt—the men who constructed the Third Republic after 1871 had to forge a civic consensus and a national community in the aftermath of three revolutions, two monarchies, an empire, a short-lived republic, a civil war, and a major military defeat all in the span of one short lifetime. They succeeded because they had a story to tell about France that could bind the past and future into a single narrative, and they taught that story with firm conviction to three generations of future citizens.
Their successors cannot do this—witness the sorry case of François Mitterrand, president of France throughout the 1980s and for half of the 1990s. No French ruler since Louis XIV has ever taken such care and trouble to commemorate his country’s glory and make it his own; his reign was marked by a steady accumulation of monuments, new museums, memorials, solemn inaugurations, burials and reburials, not to speak of gargantuan lapidary efforts to secure his own place in future national memory, from the Arch at La Défense in western Paris to the Very Large Library on the south bank of the Seine. But what, aside from his Florentine ability to survive in power for so long, was Mitterrand best known for, on the eve of his death? His inability fully and accurately to recall and acknowledge his own role as a minor player at Vichy—an uncannily precise individual reflection of the nation’s own memory hole.
The French, like their late president, don’t know what to make of their recent history. In this, to repeat, they are not so very different from their neighbors to the east and elsewhere. But in France these things used to seem so simple, and it is the contrast that causes the level of unease audible in Nora’s great work. It also, I think, explains his juxtaposition of history and memory that I noted earlier. Memory and history used to move in unison—historical interpretations of the French past, however critical, dealt in the same currency as public memory. That, of course, was because public memory in its turn was s
haped by official accounts of the national experience that derived their meaning from a remarkably consensual historiography. And by official I mean above all pedagogical—the French were taught their memory—a theme brought out in Nora’s collection by the essays on French history as taught in nineteenth-century schoolbooks.
Now, in Nora’s view, history and memory have lost touch, with the nation and with each other. Is he right? When we travel the French autoroutes and read those didactic placards, what is actually happening? There would not be much point in telling us that we are looking at Reims Cathedral, approaching the battlefield of Verdun, or driving near the village of Domrémy, for example, unless we already knew why these places were of interest; for this, after all, the panels do not say. Their transparency depends on knowledge that the passerby has already acquired—in school. We don’t need to be told what these places “mean”; they take their meaning from a familiar narrative which they confirm by their presence. And therefore the narrative has to come first, or else they have no meaning.
Lieux de mémoire—“realms of memory”—cannot, in short, be separated from history. There is no autoroute information panel telling you when you are passing “Vichy” (as distinct from a signpost indicating the exit for the town). This is not because “Vichy” is divisive (Jeanne d’Arc, born at Domrémy, is, after all, a highly contentious symbol, currently the darling of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front), but because the French have no narrative to which they can attach “Vichy” that would give to it an agreed, communicable meaning. Without such a narrative, without a history, “Vichy” has no place in French memory.
In the end, then, it doesn’t really matter that “old” France has gone forever, or that, in Armand Frémont’s phrase, the state is “reprinting the poem of French rural society” in “eco-museums” and rural theme parks, though much is thereby lost. This isn’t even new—there has always been forgetting and remembering, the inventing and abandoning of traditions, at least since the Romantic years of the early nineteenth century.27 The problem with living in an era of commemoration is not that the forms of public memory thus proposed are fake, or kitsch, or selective and even parodic. As a deliberate attempt to both recall and outdo the Valois monarchs, Louis XIV’s Versailles was all of these things and an anticipatory pastiche of every lieu de mémoire that has succeeded it to this day. That is just how heritage and commemoration are.