Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789-1996 (review)

Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789-1996. By Avner Ben-Amos (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000) 425 pp. $95.00

This book follows in the paths laid out by Agulhon, Hunt, and Ozouf, approaching the study of politics through rituals and public ceremonies.¹ Ben-Amos examines the state funerals of the Third Republic, through which the republicans attempted to consolidate their regime over the bodies of deceased politicians, authors, scientists, and artists. In a methodological introduction, Ben-Amos tries to reject the Durkheimian tradition that views ceremonies as integrating events creating solidarities in communities.² Instead, he argues that the state funerals created solidarity in one social group while undercutting the solidarity of society as a whole. The book itself examines, in turn, the public discussions about state funerals from the Old Regime to the Third Republic, the evolution of the politics of the funerals, and the typical aspects of a "model" state funeral. He concludes by briefly bringing the account through the Vichy regime and the Fourth and Fifth Republics, and placing French state funerals in a comparative perspective.

The first section of the book, "Genealogy," begins with an account of the uses made of these events by the different regimes from the revolutionary governments of the 1790s through the Second Empire. Ben-Amos also discusses what he terms "subversive funerals," employed by republicans to express their opposition to these nonrepublican regimes, before turning to the funerals of the Third Republic, celebrations of the republican regime in power. The second section, "Politics," surveys many of the state funerals of the Third Republic. Ben-Amos' descriptions of individual funerals show that although the regime attempted to portray these ceremonies as above politics, counter-demonstrators frequently criticized the regime's policies. The third section of the book, entitled "Culture," considers the state funerals as rites of passage through which the Republic adapted the traditions of the civil funerals of the pre-1870 era, as well as the sumptuous bourgeois funerals of the late nineteenth-century, to its own ends, expressing and consolidating its power. In this section, Ben-Amos describes the ideal state funeral in each of its stages, from separation (the moment of death and the lying-in-state) to transition (the procession) to incorporation (the burial and memory of the funeral).

This is an ambitious book, both in its broad chronological range and in the issues that it addresses. In newspaper, police, and observer accounts Ben-Amos has found numerous details of these funerals that provide a richly textured account of public life during the Third Republic. He notes that "when a festival is considered in its totality, that is from the different viewpoints of the organizers, the participants, the spectators, and the commentators, it is proved to be both integrative and exclusive, albeit in different ways" (29). But because he consistently approaches state funerals from the perspective of those who organized them, most of them appear to be integrative. In the end, he shows not that these ceremonies were integrative but that they were meant to be so. As he puts it, they were "events that attempted to efface all traces of ideological conflict, and create a sphere from which politics would be excluded" (47). Hence, in his account, the Third Republic becomes a regime with relatively little dissent. Although he admits that virtually every funeral had some conflict, his analysis tends to marginalize it.

Despite its considerable achievement in examining the dominant republican political culture, this book fails to wrestle with the interpretive consequences of those who dissented from that culture. Hence, it does not exhaust the possibilities of understanding republican political culture through these events.