Reappraisals (33 page)

The serial political upheavals of the nineteenth century left relatively little mark upon the daily experience of most Frenchmen once the disturbances had subsided. Even the postrevolutionary political divisions of the country—Right/Left, monarchist/republican, Communist/Gaullist— settled over time into the national cultural topography, sedimented layers of political habit whose very schisms formed part of the shared French experience. In Philippe Burrin’s words, “France has tended to conceive of its conflicts in historical terms, and to conceive of its history in terms of conflict.”
⁶

In the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, this whole edifice— variously and affectionately described and recalled as
la France profonde, la douce France, la bonne vieille France, la France éternelle
—seemed, to the French, to come crashing down around their heads. The agricultural modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, the migration of the sons and daughters of peasants to the cities, had been steadily depleting and depopulating the French countryside, even as it grew vastly more productive. The towns and cities themselves, long preserved in the dowdy urban aspic of decay and underinvestment, suddenly became crowded and energetic. The revitalized national economy effected a transformation in the jobs, travel patterns, and leisure time of a new class of city-dwellers. Roads and railways that had gathered weeds and grime for decades were rebuilt, relandscaped, or replaced by a virtually new network of national communications.

Much of this began almost unnoticed in the gloomy postwar era and accelerated through the years of high prosperity and optimism of the sixties. But its effect was only really appreciated a decade later—until then it was the changes and the gains, rather than the losses, that attracted commentary, if at all. And by the time the French did collectively begin to look back in anxiety and perplexity at a rapidly disappearing past that most adults could still recall from their own childhoods, this sense of loss coincided with the precipitous collapse of that other eternal fixture of French life, the political culture inherited from 1789. Thanks to the historian François Furet and his colleagues, the Revolution was displaced from its pedestal and ceased to determine, by projection forward across the centuries, the self-understanding of the French political community. In a related development, the Communist Party ceased during the course of the 1970s to be a fixed star in the ideological firmament, its prestige collapsing along with its vote; in the parallel political universe of the intelligentsia, Marxism, too, lost its appeal.

A Socialist president was elected by popular suffrage in 1981 and proceeded in less than two years to abandon all the tenets of traditional socialism, notably the promise of a
grand soir
of onetime revolutionary transformation that had marked the Left since 1792 and that had, in part, helped to propel him into power. The Right was no longer bound together by the person and aura of Charles de Gaulle, who had died in 1970, and the fundamental measure of political conservatism in France— the propensity of conservative voters to be practicing Catholics—was undermined by the collapse of public religious observance as the churches of village and small-town France lost their parishioners in the rush to the metropolitan centers. By the early eighties the ancient foundations of French public life appeared to be crumbling away.

Finally, and belatedly, the French—at least in Pierre Nora’s account— awoke to their country’s shriveled international status.
⁷
No longer a world player, France was not even the most significant regional power, thanks to the steady rise of West Germany. Fewer and fewer people in the world were speaking French, and between the economic and cultural dominance of the United States and the recent addition of the United Kingdom to the European Community, the universal hegemony of English was on the horizon. The colonies were almost gone, and one legacy of the sixties—the renewed interest in local and regional languages and culture— seemed to threaten the very integrity and unity of France itself. At the same time another legacy of the sixties—the demand that light be cast on murky corners of the national past—was arousing interest in the wartime Vichy regime that de Gaulle and his contemporaries had sought so assiduously to put behind them for the sake of national reconciliation.

In what seemed to fearful local observers to be a single and somehow related process, France was thus modernizing, downsizing, and splitting apart all at once. Whereas the France of, say, 1956 had been in most important respects fundamentally similar to the France of 1856—even down to a remarkable continuity of geographical patterns of political and religious allegiance—the France of 1980 did not even much resemble the country just ten years earlier. There seemed to be nothing left to hold on to—no myths, no glory, no peasants. As Pascal Ory expressed it, with plaintive irony, in his entry on “Gastronomy” in
Realms of Memory
: “Will French cuisine be all that remains when everything else has been forgotten?”
⁸

Pierre Nora’s ambitious project was born in this time of doubt and lost confidence. It even had a certain urgency about it—all fixed reference points were disappearing, the “ancestral stability” had gone. What had once been daily life was on its way to becoming a historical object. The centuries-old structures of French life, from field patterns to religious parades, from local memories passed on across the generations to official national history enshrined in word and stone, all were going or gone. They were not yet history, but were no longer part of a common national experience.

There was a pressing need to capture the moment, to depict a France passing uneasily from an experienced past to a historical one, to fix historically a set of national traditions that was slipping beyond the realm of lived memory.
Lieux de mémoire
, as Nora puts it in his introductory essay, “exist because there are no longer any
milieux de mémoire
, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.” And what are
lieux de mémoire
? “[They] are fundamentally vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society; fleeting incursions of the sacred into a disenchanted world: vestiges of parochial loyalties in a society that is busily effacing all parochialisms.”
⁹

Les Lieux de mémoire
is a splendid enterprise, and a very French one. Between 1984 and 1992 Pierre Nora brought together nearly 120 scholars, almost all of them French (all but a few professional historians), and set them the task of capturing, in 128 entries, what it is (or was) to be France. The criteria of inclusion changed over time. The first volume to be published dealt with
La République
and was concerned with the symbolic, monumental, commemorative, and pedagogic forms of republican life in modern France, the Pantheon in Paris being a notable example. The second volume—three times the size of its predecessor—took on
La Nation
and addressed everything from geography and historiography to symbols and embodiments of glory (Verdun, the Louvre), the importance of words (the Académie Française), and the image of the State (Versailles, the National Statistics, etc.). The third volume—
Les Frances
— is larger than the first two volumes combined and contains just about everything that one could conceivably associate with France and that was not already included in volumes one and two.

By 1992, therefore, the project had broken from its moorings and acquired encyclopedic aspirations. The methodological focus of the earlier volumes was gone, too. In Nora’s preface to the English-language edition, the contrast with his introduction to the first French volume, published twelve years earlier, is revealing: “A
lieu de mémoire
is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community (in this case, the French community).” It is hard to think of anything—any word, place, name, event, or idea—that could not qualify. As one foreign commentator observed, “By the end, the foreign reader loses the thread. Is there anything that isn’t a ‘
lieu de mémoire
’?”
¹⁰

PIERRE NORA HAS always insisted that he intended his project to be a sort of counter-commemorative history, deconstructing, as it were, the myths and memories it records. But as he ruefully concedes in his concluding essay in the final volume, the work has had a strange destiny: Commemoration has overtaken it, and it is now a sort of scholarly
lieu de mémoire
in its own right. There are three reasons for this. First, Nora is a very powerful figure in French intellectual life and for his magnum opus he secured the services of some of France’s best scholars; their essays are small masterpieces, classic contributions to their subject. Predictably, these volumes have acquired some of the status—and disadvantages—of a work of reference.
¹¹

Second, the long-standing national “canon” of historical memory— what counted as part of France’s heritage or
patrimoine
and why—has fallen apart. That is Nora’s theme. In his words: “The dissolution of the unifying framework of the nation-state has exploded the traditional system that was its concentrated symbolic expression. There is no commemorative superego: the canon has vanished.” Accordingly, where the national heritage was once carefully controlled for pedagogic and aesthetic value, today anything and everything is material for memory and commemoration.
¹²

This process was noticeably accelerated in 1988 by Mitterrand’s Culture Minister Jack Lang, whose politically calculated additions to the list of protected items in the
patrimoine culturel
of France (previously limited to heirlooms like the Pont du Gard or Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes) included a nineteenth-century Provençal crèche and the marble countertop of the Café du Croissant at which the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès drank his last cup of coffee before his assassination in July 1914. In a nice postmodern touch the crumbling façade of the Hôtel du Nord on Paris’s Quai de Jemappes was added to the national
patrimoine
in nostalgic homage to Marcel Carné’s popular film of that name—even though the film itself was entirely shot in a studio.

This recovery of randomly assorted items-for-commemoration is indeed testimony to the collapse of continuity of time and memory in a hitherto centralized culture, and Nora was surely right to invoke it in explaining the origin of his
Lieux de mémoire
. But what was new in the eighties is now commonplace, and a standard trope in studies of memory and tradition in changing societies. As a paradoxical result, Nora’s own heroic recovery and recording of memories and commemorations is not so much a starting point for new thinking on this subject as itself a reverentially acknowledged object for admiration: “worth a journey.”

The third reason for the odd career of these volumes is that despite the many brilliant insights in Nora’s own essays, the work as a whole is uncertain about itself: What began as a melancholy exercise in national self-analysis ends on a curiously conventional, almost celebratory note—“In these symbols we truly discover ‘realms of memory’ at their most glorious.”
¹³
That is probably a faithful reflection of the change of mood in France in the years since Nora first conceived his work—from a sense of loss to a sensation of nostalgic pride—but it seems odd that a work of history should become quite so emotionally engaged in its subject matter. Nora has firmly insisted that he did not want these volumes to be just a “promenade touristique dans le jardin du passé”
¹⁴
but that is what they risk becoming.

Inevitably, too, there are parts of the garden that suffer unexplained neglect, even under the editor’s panoptic gaze. There is no entry in any of the volumes of
Les Lieux de mémoire
on either Napoléon Bonaparte or his nephew Louis-Napoléon, or even on the political tradition of
bonapartisme
that they bequeathed to the nation. This is bizarre. As Chateaubriand remarked in
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
, apropos the anachronistic coronation of Charles X in 1824: “Henceforth the figure of the Emperor overshadows everything else. It is behind every event and every idea: the pages of this low age shrivel at the sight of his eagles.”
¹⁵
Chateaubriand was no neutral observer, and we are no longer in 1824, but his point still holds— for good and ill, France is suffused with the legacy of Bonaparte. From the Invalides to the Arc de Triomphe, from the
Code civil
to France’s periodic dalliances with political generals, from the disabling republican suspicion of strong executive power to the organization of departmental archival collections, the spirit of Napoléon is with us still.

Similarly, every visitor to modern Paris is a beneficiary (or victim) of the ambitions of Louis-Napoléon and his Second Empire. The Louvre today is Louis-Napoléon’s Louvre, for all Mitterrand’s efforts. The Parisian road and transport network grew out of imperial ambitions, thwarted or otherwise. In Louis-Napoléon’s case the lack of direct interest in him and his regime shown by Nora’s collection may also reflect a broader lack of concern with towns, town planning, and urbanism in general: a perhaps excessive care to record France’s love affair with its peasants and its land may account for this.
¹⁶

No study of
lieux de mémoire
for Europe as a whole could possibly neglect Napoléon Bonaparte—his battles, his laws, his depredations, his unintended impact on resentful national sensibilities in the Low Countries, Italy, and Germany. “Boney will get you if you don’t eat your food/go to sleep” was a popular threat directed to recalcitrant children in many parts of England and Spain within living memory. And his absence from Nora’s collection is thus an important reminder of just how very French-centered the work is, even down to its silences.
¹⁷
More than once Nora emphasizes that France is not just utterly unique, but indescribably special. “France,” we learn, has “a history more burdensome than that of any other European country.”
¹⁸
Really? Germans and Russians, at least, might wish to demur; Poles too.