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

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1999 by Joseph Amato

The entire volume of Tradition is only put in focus by Vol. 1 of Realms of Memory, Conflicts and Divisions. Conflicts, another collection of analytic essays about French historical self-definition, addresses principal territories of French experience. These essays focus around such abiding political divisions as Franks and Gauls, political right and left, Catholics and seculars. They trace the place in France of minority religions - Protestants, Jansenists, and Jews. They sketch elemental French divisions of time (generations) and space (in Paris and the provinces).

More importantly, for our purposes, this volume contains Pierre Nora's introductory essay, "Between Memory and History," which provides the raison d'etre for the vast undertaking of Lieux de Memoire. Nora's intention is universal and dramatic. He seeks to offer more than just another survey of French history. He does not intend this work to be merely a Gallic response to English historian Theodore Zeldin's monumental two-volume, cross-sectional sociological approach to the Republic. Nor does he content himself with offering an Annales-like multi-dimensional survey of France's past. Instead, Nora conceives the work as rethinking the French experience and self-conception which stand in his opinion at a singular historical crossroad.

Nora - intensely conscious French historian that he is - argues that France has arrived at a historiographical kairos. Consciousness itself has now come fully upon itself - and with it, as Hegelian as the formulation is, has come no synthesis. Memory, according to him, has been ground up by critical self-awareness. Self-doubt and critical self-reflection have destroyed all eternal verities and French assumptions and presumptions. History, the disciplined practice of the mnemonic faculty, which swallowed memory, is presently being consumed by historiography, which has turned on itself, becoming a victim of its own epistemological consciousness. In other words, as Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and others declared a half century ago, the era of substantiality is over. The age of pure intellectual manipulation of experience is past, and that of historical forms of representation has begun.

If Nora's diagnosis is correct, Nietzsche's prognosis was right. The acid of critical history has digested monumental and commemorative history. The past is no longer out there for mere identification and facile reordering. French historians have reached the end of history.

Historians, Nora contends, have exhausted the past from which memory itself has largely vanished. That is, natural memory - spontaneous, concrete, singular, and filled with gesture and emotion - has been exhausted. As peasant culture, a primary repository of tradition, has been done in by globalization, democratization, and the advent of mass culture, so French society at large has lost its anchoring in past and memory. The very institutions that transmitted values from generation to generation - churches, school, families, government - have ceased to function as they once did.