Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2, Traditions - Review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1999 by Joseph Amato

Edited by Pierre Nora, Lawrence D. Kritzman. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, xii plus 591 pp.).

By Joseph Amato Southwest State University

Traditions is the second volume of what is to be the three-volume English edition of Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Traditions, like the other two volumes, is a selection from Pierre Nora's original seven-volume French Lieux de Memoire. The pieces for the English edition were chosen, according to editor Lawrence Kritzman, because of their potential appeal to an American audience, while more complex historiographical pieces were left for subsequent gleaning. The authors of this work, who include a range of historians, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and other representatives of French cultural and intellectual academic life, are unfortunately not identified with short biographies and bibliographies.

Traditions is a collection of fourteen beautifully translated and high-quality essays, although in a few instances, in the French intellectual tradition they are over-argued and too-bright-for-their-own-good. Analyzing distinct traditions around which the French experience, remember, and make history out of their memories, the essays are divided into three major sections.

In Part One, 'Models," there is Armand Fremont's instructive geographic overview, "The Land"; Andre Vauchez's "The Cathedral," an institution which after mediating a thousand-year discourse between town and countryside, bishop and people, man and God, has become an imposing, costly, and even embarrassing heap of mute stones. There is also Jacques Revel's study of "The Court," which as an inherited way of conceiving and practicing power, continues to stamp the political society of the Fifth Republic, defining both the poles of majesty and Machiavellianism typfied by a Mitterand.

"Books," Part Two, is an astute collection of essays. Jacques and Mona Ozouf lead off describing how Le Tour de La France par deux enfants served as "The Little Red Book" of the nascent Third Republic. Jean-Yves Guiomar, explains how the geography of Paul Vidal de La Blache defined the "plenitude and density of France," while meeting the scientific task for the new Republic of laying the foundations of patriotism. In "The Nation's Teacher," Pierre Lavisse explains how this professor, whom republican Charles Peguy despised so singularly, provided as no one else a kind of intellectual orthodoxy for the emerging Third Republic, which threaded its way between crisis and ideology on its path from one century to the next. In Antoine Compagnon's "Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past," the reader encounters the artist whose work, although it be fiction, defines The Realms of Memory more than any other. Proust's dawning and towering importance converges with an entire age's need - not just that of its compulsive historians - to clarify what it remembers and the terms of its remembrance. While progress is hoped for in twentieth century France, nostalgia, it has been argued, rules.

"Singularities," Part Three of Traditions, features distinct French ways of experiencing, representing, and commemorating the past. In "La Coupole," Marc Fumaroli explains how the Academie Francaise, the spiritual rudder of French eloquence, charted across centuries the just measure between art and truth. In "The Pulpit, the Rostrum, and the Bar," Jean Starobinski shows how France's orators, up to the last century, defined meaning by exhortation - first the church's, then the revolution's, and finally the law's - until mass media books, newspapers, photographs, and films, muted its eloquence. Just perhaps, contemporary France has less to say, with fewer places to say it, and with proportionately far fewer people listening.

Antoine Prost methodically demonstrates that France's "Monuments to the Dead" don't speak with the same voice. Standard historical prejudices aside, these monuments do anything but express a consistent jingoistic nationalism. Gerard de Puymege cleverly concludes in his inquiry "The Good Soldier Chauvin," that Chauvin was an invented myth of the soldier-peasant which had the function of unifying France beyond class and party against national enemies until Vichy's final embrace proved mortal. In "Street Names," Daniel Milo demonstrates how French city names illustrate how they went from belonging to "a spontaneous organic system of the Middle Ages to a semi-state-oriented system emphasizing the history and the nation." Accenting a major theme of the entire work, street names reveal the overall three-step national transition from natural memory to official historical memory to the advent of a post-history and anti-memory in whose kingdom new towns receive only neutral names.

Two additional pieces - Pascal Ory's "Gastronomy" and Georges Vigarello's "The Tour de France" - also capture modern and contemporary France as self-defining. The first demonstrates the recent and contrived character of French eating and cooking, while the second, shows just how recent, commercial, staged, and all-consuming the Tour is.