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Book Reviews much about the historical antecedents of the political tensions and struggles surrounding France's current wars of national and cultural identity. It is a highly instructive, thoroughly researched work of historical and literary scholarship that merits a wide readership in a variety of disciplines. Rosemarie Scullion 77ie University of Iowa Pierre Nora et al. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Pp. xxv + 651. $37.50. This first volume of a planned three under the title of Realms of Memory contains selections in English from Les Lieux de mémoire, the most ambitious French historiographical project of the past two decades. Les Lieux de mémoire, conceived and organized by Pierre Nora and published between 1984 and 1992, consists of seven large volumes with essays by 120 collaborators. Nora's purpose, as he explains in a preface written for this American version, was to "subvert as well as to exemplify and magnify that traditional genre known as the 'history of France.' ... to decompose that unity, to dismantle its chronological and teleological continuity, and to scrutinize under the historian's microscope the very building blocks out of which traditional representations of France were constructed" (xix). To this end, he assigned his collaborators to examine the changing content of France's "sites of memory," the multitudinous events and symbols, ranging from the Frankish invasions to the "Marseillaise," that collectively constitute the national image of its past. For all the diversity of the collaborators and the "memory sites" examined, Nora's project has a single aim: to deconstruct the French past by showing that none of these familiar historical objects has ever had a fixed meaning. Nora claims that the result is a national history "in multiple voices" that is "less interested in 'what actually happened' than in its perpetual reuse and misuse.. ." (xxiv). In this respect, the project now seems an uncannily appropriate memorial to the Mitterrand era in which it was originally conceived: the late president's own tangled past could well have served as a paradigm case of historical undecidability. In intellectual terms, Les Lieux de mémoire was both an attempt to assimilate postmodernist insights into French historical practice and an effort to maintain history's central position in French life at a time when the immensely successful Annalesschool tradition was coming under attack. Nora also aimed to refute the "essentialist" versions of French history put forward by right-wing movements such as Le Pen's Front national and by historians like Fernand Braudel, whose posthumously published L'Identité de la France, with its argument for a national tradition dating back to prehistoric times, was a bestseller in the mid-1980s. The first volume of Realms of Memory is both more and less than a translation of Les Lieux de mémoire. With Nora's approval, Lawrence Kritzman has selected (and Arthur Goldhammer has admirably translated) thirteen articles from the seven volumes of the French work and rearranged them in a new pattern. (Annoyingly, readers are not told where the chosen essays appeared in the original French publication.) Columbia University Press plans two more volumes of selected essays, which will constitute what Nora modestly dubs a "microcosm" of the original; the University of Chicago Press plans an additional series of selections, but it is unclear whether the two projects combined will add up to a complete translation. In keeping with this volume's subtitle, "Conflicts and Divisions," the translated essays deal with "political divisions," "minority religions," and "divisions of time and space." Readers looking for a survey of modern France's political groupings may VOL. XXXVII, NO. 2 93 Book Reviews be thrown for a loss by a line-up that runs from Krzysztof Pomian's "Franks and Gauls" to Nora's own combination of "Gaullists and Communists," while omitting such standard themes as class divisions (there are no index entries for "bourgeoisie" or "proletariat"). Similarly, "Divisions of Space and Time" ignores familiar oppositions such as pays d'oc/ pays d'oéilm favor of geographers' conventions like "the Saint-Malo-Geneva line," discussed by Roger Chartier. As might...

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