Symbols, Vol. 3. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (review)

The history of what makes France, France, is again the subject of this third and final volume of Realms of Memory. Forming another long and exceptionally high quality collection of essays (see my earlier review here of volume two), emblems, major sites, and identifications are the matters at hand in this work.

In the first of three sections, French emblems are looked at. A succession of solid essays ask why did the tri-color triumph, over white or red banners? Who composed and first sang La Marseillaise—France’s least impeached popular voice—and how did this “Chant de guerre pour l’armeé du Rhin, written in Strasbourg in April, 1792,” endure good and bad political times to become France’s national anthem. Equally curious, how did such an irreconcilable trio as Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity establish themselves as the nation’s ruling triangle despite the decomposing forces of polygonal France? How did Bastille Day, the Dies Irae of the French Revolution, reach its high point as a celebration in 1880 and become a rather friendly and toothless national holiday, un jour de boire rather than le jour de gloire ?

In the second section the contrasting histories and peculiar fates of seven memorial sites (literally lieux de mémoire ) are examined. In a first essay, the pre-historic paintings of the caves of Lascaux (declared a national monument only in 1909) shows how they became a matter of fantasy, commerce, religious apology, and science in this century. The Louvre demonstrates the evolution of a set of buildings. They originated from a monarch’s wants and whims. They followed the spreading aesthetic wishes of academies and salons. They ended in the service of national and world tastes. Conversely, Versailles, as different type of lieu de mémoire, encapsulated and congealed in time Louis XIV’s wish to command meaning. It still stands as the memorial he built to himself and evidence that France itself is a historical site.

Reims, the place which once linked throne and altar, now is forlorn reminder that the sacred and symbolic languish in the modern world. The contemporary Republic, try as it will, has neither throne nor crown. The Pantheon, created out of the church Sainte-Geneviève in order to satisfy the nation’s enlightened impulses to join France and history around the church of its most renowned benefactors to humanity, created a contested and empty memorial. A failed act of remembrance and commemoration—this “Ecolé Normale of the Dead”—shows, according to Mona Ozouf, “endless division is a specialty of French history, which has never managed to end its revolutions, pin down its chronologies, or reconcile its children.”

Where steeple and pillar failed, Eiffel Tower succeeded. It collected eyes, symbols, metaphors like a magnet, while at the same evading any singular crippling and fatal meaning. Today, more than anything else it has come to stand for Paris and France.

Conversely, Verdun cast the pale of the First World War on France. It shows technology can generalize the bad into an immense evil. Although initially its interpretation ran on several tracks, it finally became what soldiers who survived it knew it to be from their very first march into its crater filled fields—a terrible place of death. Designated as an ossuary—a bone yard—not a mausoleum, Verdun testifies to an unimaginable sacrifice of life which subsequent holocausts have not yet silenced in the French mind.

The third section forms a pot-pourri of identifications. Here the Gallic Cock is plucked. No German eagle or British Lion, this vain and fertile domestic barnyard pro-creator was born in the Middle Ages more as a symbol conveying the disdain of contesting monarchies rather than a spontaneous symbol of indigenous French alacrity and pride. Joan of Arc truly has been loved and used by all the French. She is the saint of the religious...