In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13 1 Constructing Memory: The History of Heritage in France Heritage permeates contemporary French culture, from advertising to the film industry, from cinema to politics. Heritage is understood as a way of defining the national present through a particular vision of the past. It is seen as relying on glorious narratives about the past that justify seemingly nationalistic conceptions of the nation, and it also references particular cultural monuments, artifacts, historical figures, and historical events from the past to produce a conception of the nation as possessed of a superior culture and a superior history. In general, heritage privileges ancestry over citizenship, the rural over the urban, past over present. It is a way of conceiving of the nation as a cultural community, formed by common historical experiences. Heritage privileges collective memory, which it presents as the guarantor of national stability and integrity. French heritage assumes that modern France was created progressively over time through key transformational events, including the Roman conquest, the Hundred Years War, the Wars of Religion , and the French Revolution. It imagines that the memory of these events has been transmitted in an unbroken line across generations, starting from ancient Gaul. It embodies Ernest Renan’s belief that the nation exists in the memory of the great things it has done. Heritage, History, and the Colonial Past Heritage is often read as a (post-)colonial or postmodern phenomenon. It has been understood as an attempt to detach nationality from citizenship and to 2VFKHUZLW]&KLQGG $0 14 / CONSTRUCTING MEMORY privilege ancestry over citizenship in order to marginalize the post-colonial minorities who now reside in the nations that once colonized them (Hall 2005; Higson 2003; Lebovics 1992, 2004). In France, in particular, heritage has been understood as a return to certain nineteenth-century ideas concerning the nation and national identity. Herman Lebovics has grouped such ideas under the term “the True France,” which holds that the French are a people in the cultural, if not the ethnic sense, of the term and which considers culture to be the foundation of national cohesion. Colonial subjects and their descendants are, according to this principle, permanently excluded from the space of the nation because they lack the appropriate heritage. The concept of “the True France” was central to thinking about the nation during the nineteenth century in general and during the Third Republic in particular. It was closely linked to the idea of “the Greater France” or to empire and to the colonial mission civilisatrice (Lebovics 1992; Conklin 1997; Sherman 2004), according to which France, as a result of its unique history, was obliged to spread its culture to “uncivilized” parts of the world. Colonialism, in this view, was not the domination or exploitation of the colonized. It was their salvation.1 Benedict Anderson argues that nineteenth-century conceptions of nation relied upon the belief that there existed fundamental similarities among the diverse members of a national group. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger similarly argue that from the nineteenth century forward, nations have depended for their legitimacy upon mythic narratives about the national past that propose deep, historical ties linking modern citizens to the ancient inhabitants of the same geographic space (1990). It was Renan who perhaps first articulated this particular understanding of the nation. His lecture “Qu’estqu ’une nation? (What is a nation?)” argues that the nation is a “spiritual” or intellectual principle, something that exists predominantly in the minds of its members (1996/1882, 52). The sense of common identity and common purpose that national identity implies derives, according to Renan, not from race but from history. The nation, in Renan’s reading, is “a historical result” (1996/1882, 45), and what binds citizen to citizen is not ancestry but collective memory, “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” (1996/1882, 52). On the surface, Renan’s insistence that the nation is a historical rather than ethnic community seems to reject ancestral conceptions of national identity. By arguing, however, that the French nation is a historical result and by locating the origins of that nation in the ancient past, Renan imagines the nation in terms that remain essentially biological or ancestral. On the one hand, he conceives of the nation as something like a biological organism, which is born at a certain moment and then undergoes a process of development similar to maturation. On the other, he conceives of collective memory 2VFKHUZLW]&KLQGG $0 [18.117.183.172] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 12...

Share