:;"" ... '

Rethinking the French Past

REALMS OF MEMORY

VOLUME I: CONFLICTS A.ND DIVISIONS -

:~/~

:' :,.,!\.

9 '::,~;<.-:.,"", ,~

. A:

Under the Direction of Pierre Nora

ENGLISH-LASGl'AGE EDITION' EDITED AND WITH A fOREWORD BY l.>\WRENCE D. KRITnfAN

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NE \'1 '(OR I(

Translaced hy Anh"r Goldhammer

To honor Cliffo,d E. Rybolt, J'. a",J .if~,::' Cr;l.c,: Ricl"C11 !tvblJll, [tii",J; of F,ance,

EJlI·ill W R;cxm has mQJi Q gift 10 Chi Puss cOIl'QrJ lh~ cosU ofruM';;"i",: rhis book.

Colllnlbia. Unirirsif)' Ptess wiIJr.u co expriSS iu appr,ciario",[at assisranCi givin lJ.v flu

gOI'wlmel''lf of Fral'lcc 'hrougJr. Le Afj",isllre d, loJ Clliture i" tlu pri?rl,~tir)'f1 of III, lr,;!tJI.:::'ofi.

~ Coll,lmbi;;(l Uni ...enity Press

PlIblj}!\u}}ince I!~))

t;e\\' rork Chichcuer, WenSus!ex

Cop~·~h! (e) 1996 Coillmbi.. Uni ...eniry Press

All n~h[SrC"Sel'·ed

LlS Licll.\'Jl Mimoifl (c) Edi,ions G:lllim;/,rd. '9"~

Libr:uy of Congress C;/'I..login~·in-PubliQdon 0;;(11;;(1

les Ucux d, memoire. English

Rcslms or memory: redlinbng die flench pUt / under the

dirterion or Piene Nor;/, i EI1g1ish language edirion ediled ;/,nd with

I fO(t~Ofd by LnifulCe D. Krium;Jn; U'~n5bu~d by Arthur Go\dh~mmeI

p. em, -(Ellrope;;(ln perspecli ...C"S)

R<!~ised snd abridsed Irll15l.:uion of the original work in french•

Includ<!~ bibliographicl rdetentes ilnd inde:t.

COmCnl5; .... I. Connicrs and dh·isions.

158:\ o·:ll-oS4~04·S (;;(Ilk. paper)

I, Fr3nee-Ci,·m:ulion-Philoluphy. 1. Memory. }. Symboli$m.

~. }:.1lion~1 d\;/,ucteri\tics. french. ,. N;l,\ion;/,Iisffi_Fnnce.

1,1'0:;;(1. Pierre. II. Kria.m;/,n. L;;(I":rence 0, Ill, Tide.

"., Series,

DCjj.L~I} 1996

90404-de:'3 • 9S-04'JH)

C!P

CSjebound ediliofl$ 01 Col"mbb Cnh'cuity Pu:u boo~ uc pdnled on perm;;(lne:!1 and

dlln-blt .1.:id·free paper.

Dwgll''''''', 1.;""11 SUQ"J~ri

Priflled in Ihe United 51:11($ of ."-merk1

c I09S;GI 04pl

____c,

1

J

. I

FOREWORD

In Remembrance of Things French

\

j

I Pierre Nora's Realms of lV/emory (1984-1992) is one of the great French intellectual

J achievements of the Mitterrand era. Nora and his colleagues from a variety of aca­

demic disciplines-history, literary studies, political science, sociology-seek to

locate the "memory places" of French national identity as they have been con­

structed since the middle ages. This history of memory is realized through the

imaginary representations and historical realities that occupy the symbolic sites that

form French social and cultural identity. Memory, which also includes forgetting,

should not be tak~n literally. It is to be understood in its "sacred context" as the vari­

ety of forms through which cultural communities imagine themselves in diverse

representational modes. In this sense, as a ~ritical category "memory" distinguishes

itself from history, which is regarded as an intellectual practice more deeply rooted

in the evidence derived from the study of empirical reality. The recollection of the

French past as it emerges from this work is the result of a cataloging of the memory

places produced over time which depict the "imaginary communities" binding

national memory.l

Nora's magnum opus represents the symptomoiogy of a certain form of cultural

melancholia as well as the sign of an attempt to construct a symbolic encyclopedia

that attests to the values and belief systems of the French nation. Conceived as a

history of France through memory, Nora's work not only demonstrates how

memory binds communities together and creates social identities but also drama­

tizes how one's consciousness of the past is symptomatic of the disappearance of

certain living traditions.

Nora's idea of the nation is drawn from the concept of the memory place, a term

he gleans from Frances Yates's The Art of lV/emory and Maurice Halbwachs' The

II

rI

I

I!,

I

\\.

.

II

x LAWRE~CE D. KRITZ~AN

Collective ivfemory.2 Drawing on rhetorical tradition that dates back to Cicero and

Quintilian~ Realms of memory functions as an inventory of loci memoriae. Nora's

conception of memory is broad: he uses it to discuss geographical place or locus

(Reims~ Paris, the prehistOric caves of Lascaux), histOrical figures (Joan of Arc),

monuments and buildings (Versailles and the Eiffel Tower), literary and artistic

objects (Descartes' Discourse on Afe:hod and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past),

emblems: commemorations: and symbols (the French flag, the "l'ifarseillaise") all of

which are the result of an imaginary process that codifies and represents the histor­

ical consciousness of "quintessential France." If memory places are symbolic in

nature it is because they signify the context and tOtemic meaning from which col­

lective identity emerges.

Nora's "symbolic typology" presents both ideas and the material realities that

structure France's national identity. Yet memory as Nora conceives of it does not

constitute a monolithic entity. Beyond the repertoire of monuments, instirutions,

events and commemorative dates, Realms of Memory also evokes the conflicrual

spaces and symbolic divisions within France that reconfigure its relationship with

the past: the ancien regime and the Revolution, French and foreigners, Right and

Left, and Paris-Province. As the general title of the last three volumes of the French

edition indic3(es (the plural Les France), the idea of France has never been a total­

ized concep( since its sense of ide'1tiry is plural and unsettled. Indeed, a "realm of ..

memory" is a polyreferential entity that can draw on a multiplicity of cultural myths

that are appropriated for different ideological or political purposes. For example~ in

his insightful essay on Joan of Arc (which appears in volume 3) Michel Winock dra­

matizes this phenomenon by demonstrating how that historical figure emerged as a

political emblem simultaneously functioning for the mythology of bot~ the left and

the right alike. For xenophobic groups such as the paramilitary fascist leagues of the

1930S or the acerbic neo-nationalism of Jean Marie Le Pen, Joan of Arc represents

a tOtemic figure capable of symbolically forestalling foreign incursions into the

homeland whereas for the left she incarnates courage in doing battle against the cor­

ruption of the Church.

The idea of France as it emerges from (hese volumes is one that is, at times, sel±"­

contradictOry and that threatens the realization of its universalistic pretensions.

The organic idea of the nation or the French "super-ego" that Nora refers to in the

first volumes of the French-language edition seem to operate most potently at his­

torical moments when those Hegelian heroes-Louis XIV, Napoleon, de Gaulle­

reify the very possibility of movement and change. What remains, those temporal

expanses situated between the privileged moments perceived as periods of histori­

cal greatness, is but the peripatetic and destabilizing movement of time.

In articulating the concept of memory Nora's work represents a rethinking of

certain key ideas found in Maurice Halbwachs's theory of collective memory~ To be

i· I I

7· !

I·

)

I I Foreword xi

. )

I

i \ }" i

sure, Halbwachs's sociological conceptualization of memory is diametrically oppo­

site to that of the philosopher Henri Bergson who thought of memory as a purely

subjective phenomenon. On the contrary, Halbwachs displaces memory from the

individual realm to domain of the "social frames" (what he terms the cadres sociaux)

of collective experience. In essence, the act of remembering is always related to the

repository of images and ideals that constitute the social relations of which we par­

take. Places of memory are therefore determined by the mix of individuals that con­

stitute the social group to which they relate.

If Nora speculates on the idea of collective memory he does so in order to delin­

eate the metamorphoses that French memory has undergone in recent times. By

reflecting on the phenomenon of the nation as republic Nora demonstrates how

Republican France was constructed as a series of principles meant to defend a sin­

gular moral imperative functioning in the name of a social totality. For example, the

memory of the "Declaration of the Rights of 1fan" evoked a past through which

the very idea of the Republic could be created and commemorated; it gave the social

community a narrative through which it could continue to forge its identity.

However more recently, in the shadow of the infelicitous historical events experi­

enced during this past half-century-the Vichy collaboration, torture in Algeria­

the universalistic principles underlying republican memory and the humanism asso­

ciated with it had come undone. France had now left itself open to an agonistic

encounter that would be played out in the postwar period between Gaullism and

Communism in an attempt to take hold of the republican tradition and derive from

it renewed national myths. Memory would no·w take shape in divided and compet­

ing spheres of p01itical influence; it would make the republican values of cohesion

associated with the universal principles of Enlightenment thought no longer capa­

ble of creating true consensus. In this context the memorial process activates a

renewed sense of national self-consciousness by dividing me "unitary framework"

of collective memory intO smaller configurations or identities resulting in the politi­

cization of memory.

Nora's collection presents a series of highly innovative essays that signal a new

approach to the writing of national history. This new historiography distances itself

from the chronological and teleological theoretical presuppositions of its predeces­

sors. History conceived either in terms of the definable causes and effects of

Comtean positivism or the artificial determinism of the Annales school is viewed as

no longer critically acceptable.

To be sure, the ostensible target of Nora's new historiography is the nineteenth

century historian Ernest Lavisse, who in his eighteen-volume history of France,

conjoined scientific and affective concerns in order to produce a positivist history.

Lavisse is regarded as the historian most responsible for drawing historical inter­

pretations from archival data; the archive was the place where memory was stored

~,- 1

i I,

LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

and from which history could be materialized in written form. Ironically the dis­

cursive manifestation of archival memory for all the scientific pretensions it

espoused was filtered through a romantic consciousness whose modus operandi was

to sustain political myths. Furthermore, archival memory limited the parameters of

the true memorialist enterprise since it put constraints on what constituted cultural

memorabilia and the many loci-museums, mon·uments, public spaces-from .

which representations could possibly emerge.

One might argue that Nora's concept of historiography constitutes a historyof

th~ present in as much as many of the essays in Realms of lv/emory focus on th~ dis­

continuous thread of the past remembered. Nora contends that even if references to

memory are ever present inthe contemporary world it is paradoxically because we

are currently living in a historical society where memory functions as a mere his­

torical trace that can exist only as a simulation of the past. "Lieux de memoire exist

because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which· memory is a

real part of everyday experience" (p. I). If premodern societies reenact memory

through traditions and rituals where present and past exist simultaneously in a kind

of atemporal space in which act and meaning coalesce, then the historical world of

the present is one that represents historical consciousness as disembodied memories.

The creation of "realms of memory" is the result of modern society's inability to

live within real memory; the consecration of a "realm of memory" takes place

because real environments of memory have disappeared. The projection of a

,"realm of memory" is therefore the sign of memory's disappearance and society's

need to represent what ostensibly no longer exists.

The most striking aspect of this theoretical practice stems from the manner in

which temporality is conceived. In modern societies the past is experienced as "his­

torical" since it is no longer authentically lived. The present mode of historical per­

ception is derived from an imaginative form of consciousness based more on myths

than on facts. Our knowledge of the past is less a question of our empirical grip on

the past than on our apprehension of the past as w~ represent it through the lens of

the present. Accordingly, Nora and his contributors engage in an archaeological

quest through which they are able to retrospectively "uncover" traditions and delin­

eate the manner in which they took shape.

To be sure, many of the contemporary notions concerning France in its pre­

revolutionary origins stem from nineteenth-century constructions of the French

past where, for example, 1--1ichelet credits Joan of Arc with the birth of the nation. ,(

The medieval cathedral, as we think of it today, can be seen as a monument belong­)

ing less to Christian tradition than to the secularized domain of the national pam·­

moine Or cultural heritage; the imaginary representations of the past derive from a

hermeneutic practice that reinterprets them in terms of the social exigencies of the

present in order to uncover other traditions. Accordingly, the cathedral is con­

I

, i ,! I'

I "

! ( I

II I :

( i \

I I I, I

Forevvord xiii

structed a posteriori as a "memory place" associated with the creative energy

achieved through the secularized collective activity of the masons; from this per­

spective the re-presentation of this cultural activity as a nonreligious endeavor is

used as the narrative frame for the reinterpretation of the collective memory of the

French ~1iddle Ages and as a celebration of the newer traditions of Third Republic

France. Secular values transformed the cathedral into the locus of contemporary

conceptualizations of the past. Or perhaps more recently, we are shown through the

example of the Eiffel Tower in Henri Layette's essay (volume 3) how the corrosive

force of time strips away the ideological roots of that monument (its function as a

symbol of revolutionary modernism) and thereby transforms that "realm of mem­

ory" into its contemporary incarnation as part of the "poetry of Paris."

The "realms of memory" explored in the essays in these three volumes produce

a multiplicity of interpretations that give new meaning to history through what

might be termed a form of genealogical revisionism. If a "realm of memory" is to

exist it must have a capaciry for metamorphosis: the recycling of knowledge

through associations and new symbolic representations. In becoming a synonym for

national identiry, a "realm of memory" enables successive generations to mediate

their cultural myths by inculcating them with their desires.

Ironically, Nora's new reading of history uncovers the symptomology of a cer­

tain Frenchfin de siec!e melancholia. As Nora points out the French Revolution and

the traditions associated with it functioned as the determining element in the can...;

struction of national identity through 'references to narratives of the past. The

social order of the modern nation-state, rooted in the secularized traditions of the

Republic, could be legitimized in a collective identity whose consciousness was

based on a teleological view of the nation as pedagogical authority in the represen­

tation of its values. From this perspective, memory overdetermines history in its

quest to be universal and create a patriotic synthesis. The consubstantiality benveen

memory and hisrory that coalesced in what Nora terms the "memory nation" has

broken down in our ownfin de siec!e where the former "centralizing Jacobinism" of

national culture can no longer unify. Furthermore, national meIl1ory, as Nora and

his colleagues now conceive of it, can be found in the institutions of the ancien

regime and the collectiye heritage of the monumental and physical landscape as they

now partake of France's memorial legacy.

But for now, what remains of the idea of nationhood is engendered by a nostal­

gic reflection, articulated through the disjunctive remembrance of things past. In a

way, one might argue that the quest for memory in the contemporary world is noth­

ing more than an attempt to master the perceived loss of one's history. It is also, as

Nora so brilliantly teaches us, an attempt to read the signs of culture in places,

objects, and images that are marked by vestiges of the past, and remembered in the

vicissitudes of contemporary consciousness. When all is said and done the idea of

XIV LAWRENCE D. KRITz:..1AN

France that emerges from these volumes is based more on the imaginary construc­

tions of memory than on the encyclopedic compilation of empirical data.

Nora's remembrance of things French ultimately suggests a new critical model

through which the history of memory may be written. What appears to be a book

about memory and French national identity becomes a study wirh critical dimen­

sions that might at first not be obvious. Although Nora consistently draws our

attention to the specificity of the French context, the reader will nevertheless find

in these pages the ways in which a narion can rediscover its identity by rearranging

the logic constituting its "realms of memory." Each narion has its official memories

and myths; just as the French have fashioned their history according to the so-called

universal values of the French Revolution, Americans have anchored rheir own in

the idealistic dream of "liberty and justice for alL" By focusing on how the disap­

pearance of certain memorialist practices in France enabled historians to uncover

the patterns of other traditions, Nora suggests how the rewriting of the history of

memory can forge new paradigms of cultural identity: The reader will find in the

essays that make up Realms of lv/emory an exhilarating intellectual project whose

exemplarity lies in itS power to translate the vicissitudes of national self-conscious­

ness and the disjunctions between the original meanings artached to memory sites

and the heuristic processes currently used to describe them. In this "era of com­

memoration," Nora and his colleagues enable us to see how the history of memory . ~ 1

functions as a mirror of the changing role of cultural politics and how national com­

memoration in the age of global politics has given way to the heterogeneous and

di:vided character of contemporary remembrance. Always insightful, always

nuanced, always sensitive to epiStemological shifts over time, Realms of iHemory

,vill remain a landmark in cultural criticism and historiography for years to come.

Lawrence D. Krirzman Dartmouth College

11ay 1996 , J

I !

r- \ I

I

(I \ ! ) )

r-

i I