Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Volume II: Traditions (review)

Book Reviews Pierre Nora et al., Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Volume II: Traditions, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. xi + 591. $37.50. In this second volume of translated selections from the seven-volume collection, Les Lieux de mémoire, originally published in France from 1984 to 1992, Pierre Nora and his collaborators continue their examination of the complexities of collective memory over the centuries. Like the first volume in this Columbia University Press abridgement (reviewed in L'Esprit Créateur, 37, 2 [1997]: 93-94), this one ignores the internal structure of the French work, which differentiated between "memory sites" related to the republican political regime, those connected to the nation-state, and those tied to a presumably more primordial level, "Les France." Editor Lawrence Kritzman has mixed together 14 essays from all three parts of the Nora collection, without indicating their origins—a procedure which would be more objectionable if the distinctions between these categories had not already become blurred in the course of the work's luxuriant expansion over the course of its original publication. Volume I of Realms of Memory dealt with fractures in the unity of the French past; volume II deals with "Traditions," which Nora defines as "fundamental references that the collective 'France' has elaborated for itself...." Some, such as the rural farming landscape and the royal court, "derive their energy precisely from the fact that they no longer exist as social and historical realities." Others, like war memorials and the annual Tour de France, are contemporary examples of what Nora calls "the French form of civil religion" with its multiple forms of "secular liturgy" (ix-x). With its mixture of topics from high and low culture, the book itself exemplifies what contributor Pascal Ory refers to as "a typically French tendency to take seriously activities elsewhere deemed trivial. . ." (467): articles on the Académie française and medieval cathedrals are juxtaposed with essays on bicycleracing and restaurant guides. Although historians predominate among the contributors, the project is multidisciplinary, with essays by literature scholars, art historians and geographers . (It would have been helpful to have identifications of the authors, not all of whom are likely to be familiar to American readers.) In a book devoted to demonstrating the diversity of French traditions, it is not surprising to find articles with varying emphases, although the contradictions are rarely as glaring as those between the two consecutive contributions of Antoine Prost on "Monuments to the Dead," which sees the commemoration of fallen soldiers from World War I as a reflection of republican values marked by a surprising absence of nationalism, and Gérard de Puymège on "The Good Soldier Chauvin," in which the military tradition is condemned as "a vehicle of cultural and moral regression, of latent sexist, racist and xenophobic violence . . ." (360). Given that the original articles discussed traditions linked to three different entities—the republican institutions of the Third Republic, the nation-state, and "les France"—it is not surprising that they evoke many different historic periods. The overall pattern nevertheless suggests a rather conventional periodization for the origins of France's major traditions. Only "the land" (Armand Fremont) harks back to time immemorial. André Vauchez's "The Cathedral" moves forward to the high middle ages, from which these selections jump to the grand siècle, seen as the critical moment for the shaping of traditions of eloquence (Jean Starobinski), the royal court (Jacques Revel), the Académie française (Fumaroli) and gastronomy (Ory). The eighteenth century and the French Revolution play little role in these essays, aside from Daniel MiIo's discussion of "Street Names," and even the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century gets little attention, VOL. XXXVIII, NO. 1 117 L'Esprit Créateur credited only with the appearance of chauvinism (de Puymège). By contrast, in the years from 1870 to 1914, the invention of tradition appears to have been a major industry, fueled by textbooks (Nora on "Lavisse, the Nation's Teacher," Jacques and Mona Ozouf on Le Tour de France par deux enfants, and Jean-Yves GuÃ-omar, "Vidal de la Blache's...