Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture ed. by Susan Harrow and Andrew Watts (review)

This volume of sixteen scholarly essays seeks to bring the hitherto almost exclusively twentieth-century-focused discipline of ‘memory studies’ to bear on the long nineteenth century (1789–1914). By combining research by leading academics and emerging scholars, this project, which began at a meeting of the UK Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, testifies to the vibrant multidisciplinarity and international reach of current work in nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and historical French studies. In their Introduction, Susan Harrow and Andrew Watts are perhaps overly defensive about the absence of ‘theory’ from the book. According to them, the volume rejects a resolutely theoretical approach and prefers instead to emulate Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project ‘through its embrace of the popular and the official, the literary and the political, the visual and the ethnographic, the cultural and the social, the national and the international, the religious and the secular’ (p. 17). But it is precisely this eclectic approach to nineteenth-century France that constitutes the volume’s interest. Several essays engage with previously neglected manifestations of cultural memory such as street names and signage (Colette Wilson), student festivals (Elizabeth Emery), national festivals (Rémi Dalisson), military memoirs (Brian Martin), history painting (Melanie Vandenbrouck-Przybylski), zutiste poetry (Denis Saint-Amand), and government reports (Ben Fisher^†) in order to show not only how the nineteenth century remembered and rewrote itself and its relationship with previous centuries, but also how France remembers (or chooses to forget) aspects of nineteenth-century history. Other contributions, such as Luc Nemeth’s discussion of twentieth-century French accounts of the Dreyfus Affair, show how and why the nineteenth century was remembered differently at various times. It is precisely the volume’s dual focus not only on the nineteenth-century’s own acts of remembrance, but also on the ways in which that century has been rewritten and re-remembered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that makes this volume an important contribution to French cultural history. This investigation of actual acts of remembering, which takes up the first half of the volume, is complemented by analyses of how the themes of memory and remembering function within a range of literary texts, both canonical and lesser known. Here again, the dual focus of the volume is apparent: on the one hand in the discussion of the function and themes of memory and history in realists such as Zola (Émilie Piton-Foucault), Flaubert (Carmen Mayer-Robin, Mary Orr), Balzac (Owen Heathcote), Barbey d’Aurevilly (Francesco Manzini), and Stendhal (Lucy Garnier and Cécile Meynard), and on the other hand in Tim Farrant’s and Richard Saint-Gelais’s respective explorations of the way in which remembering can become an act of transformative homage from one age to another.