Panth�on de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War (review)

It is difficult to imagine an artifact of the Great War of 1914–18 with a more curious provenance than the Panthéon, whose fascinating history Mark Levitch recounts with considerable skill. A cyclorama (a 360-degree painting whose total area would nearly have covered an American football field), the Panthéon was originally the brainchild of two French academic artists too old to serve at the front. Work on the project began shortly after the Battle of the Marne in 1914, and the completed Panthéon was inaugurated in its own building near the Invalides in Paris just before the Armistice. Against the backdrop of various icons of the Allied victory, the Panthéon included the portraits of some 5,000 individuals, ranging from the St. Cyr cadets of 1914, to the King of the Belgians, to martyred nurse Edith Cavell, to Prince Alexander of Serbia, to Woodrow Wilson. In addition, the Panthéon contained a topographic map of the entire Western Front. The apparent victory in this "total" war, it seemed, required a representational monument that would humble even David's paintings of Napoleon.

The history of the Panthéon involved a dance between ambition and financial disappointment. The work was always supposed to pay its own way, through paid admissions. Immensely popular at its opening, the Panthéon saw a marked decline in attendance within a few years after the Armistice. For a time, interest abroad appeared promising. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation sponsored a tour of the Panthéon, in the vain hope that the profits would be able to contribute to the purchase of Jefferson's home at Monticello. The work made five stops between 1927 and 1940, in New York, Chicago, Washington, Cleveland, and San Francisco. Box-office receipts disappointed at every turn. Thereafter, the Panthéon sat, rolled up and crated, in a Baltimore warehouse until 1953, when Great War veteran Daniel MacMorris of Kansas City formed a plan to purchase it for the Liberty Memorial. Not surprisingly, the American section now became the centerpiece of the cut-and-pasted Panthéon, with "surplus" bits cast off to art markets in the United States and abroad. But memory of the Great War, still very much under construction in the 1950s, had changing requirements. Previously overlooked figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt (an undersecretary of the Navy under Wilson), Bernard Baruch (director of the War Industries Board), and Harry S. Truman (an artillery captain) were painted in. In 2002, the Panthéon was restored and rededicated, and is now displayed prominently as part of the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial.

Levitch's fine archaeology of the Panthéon provides a great service to historians of the memory of the Great War. No less important, he tells his story in such an engaging manner that most anyone with an interest in that conflict will want to go to Kansas City as soon as possible to see what remains of it. Some may maintain a degree of skepticism as to Levitch's broad claim that "the Panthéon's decomposition mirrors—however accidentally—the modernist impact of the war itself on Western culture and consciousness" (p. 5). Yet he certainly shows how memory of the war became a commodity as well as a duty, and how memory shaped and was shaped by present politics.