REALMS OF MEMORY: The Construction of the French Past / Volume II: Traditions.<i> Directed by Pierre Nora</i> .<i> English-language editor: Lawrence D. Kritzman</i> .<i> Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer</i> .<i> Columbia University Press: 592 pp., $37.50</i>

France, in the 200 years since the Revolution, has been a model of conflict and adversarial relations in society, economics and politics. Beneath the surface, the country enjoys a profound unity of common references to which the realms of its memory are crucial. If the French are united in anything, it is in their admiration of the reconstructed past that they call their history. These are the feelings that Charles de Gaulle learned in school and at his parents’ knees. In his “Memoirs,” De Gaulle explains that his three brothers, his sister and he “had as a second nature, a certain anxious pride in our country.” And he goes on to tell how, living in Paris, “nothing struck me more than the symbols of our glories: night falling over Notre Dame, the majesty of evening at Versailles, the Arch of Triumph in the sun, the flags we conquered quivering, floating under the vaulted roof of the Invalides.”

Almost exactly the same images had appeared in a book published 100 years earlier by the best-remembered of French historians, Jules Michelet. A father’s first duty to his son, explains Michelet, is to teach him about the fatherland. He takes him to Notre Dame, to the Louvre, to the Tuileries (that have since burned down), to the Arc de Triomphe. From a balcony or a rooftop, he shows him the people, the army marching past, the shimmering bayonets, the tricolor flag: “There my child, look, there is France, there is the fatherland.”

A quarter of a century ago, the anxious pride that Michelet shared with De Gaulle moved a much younger man, Pierre Nora, to undertake what he called an inventory of the entities--symbols, sites, dates, monuments, institutions, activities--associated with national memory. Nora too was inspired by pride in national achievement, by the belief that common memories, however artificial, cement national unity and by anxiety that both memory and unity were fading.

Started in a university seminar in 1979 and continued with the publication of a first collection of essays in 1984, the project snowballed: three further volumes appeared in 1986, three more in 1992: 135 essays in all, give or take a couple. By that time, Nora’s “Lieux de Memoire,” selections from which are offered here as “Realms of Memory,” had themselves become a lieu de memoire: a classic of French historical and literary recollection, containing pieces by some 150 authors of whom 15, not to mention Nora himself, are featured in these pages.

The present volume, second to be published in English by Columbia University Press in a sensitive translation by Arthur Goldhammer, features several of the sites to which Michelet and De Gaulle referred. It is also supplemented by others: a disparate but alluring collection of 15 essays that runs from the distant past (cathedrals, the court) to the present (the Tour de France), with detours for gastronomy, war memorials, street names and for several books that, appropriately, include Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” Readers will pick and choose.

I, for one, am more interested in cycling than in public eloquence from the pulpit or the bar. But in “Realms of Memory,” the general level is uniformly high, the scholarship accessible, lashings of information are invitingly presented and the approach is superficial but never shallow; just as it should be in accounts of dead folk and events from a past that is even less penetrable than the present.

Most specialists will prefer to read the essays in the original French. For the average reader, what “Realms of Memory” offers is an unusual look at the French looking at themselves, at France and at their historical memory being simultaneously made and unmade.

One sees this from the book’s first contribution by Armand Fremont, “The Land,” a term deeply evocative to the French, for whom la terre et les morts (“the soil and the dead”) represent the fatherland more poignantly than more mobile societies may conceive. What no outsider can miss, however, is the sensual, passional relationship between the French and their material environment. French geography and topography are emotional, sentimental, almost anthropomorphic, because the country is a person of the same family.

Witness the treatment of Vidal de La Blache’s “Geography of France” which, published in 1903, continues to be cited and read less for its facts than for its poesy. Vidal tells us something about national character. He follows Michelet in tracing the creation of a national personality that transcends its ethnic components (Celtic, Latin, Germanic) because ethnic and geographic fatality can be vanquished by will and effort. France is a person: female (of course), generous, brave, resilient. She is portrayed by Vidal in this fundamental text, whose full title is “Picture [Tableau] of French Geography,” and constantly interacts with her rivers, mountains and valleys, which are personified (hence captivating to read), but in a context in which the chief human enterprise is agricultural.

The book looks backward. Industry is secondary, trade receives scant notice; the ports, the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea and their far horizons are less relevant than continental relations. Vidal probably got all that right, a perception which only makes more damning his portrait of an unenterprising national personality indifferent to wider challenges.

French business enterprise is as prudent today, and as lightly dismissed, as it was in Vidal’s day. On the other hand, Jacques Revel’s article on the court discloses both continuities and changes. Magnificence, lavish splendor and spending befits a prince, and nothing is as magnificent as public works. The more arbitrary and gratuitous the project, the better it expresses the power of the sovereign. But Louis XIV, when he built Versailles, ruled over the greatest power in the Western world; and the Western world hastened to imitate him, from St. Petersburg to Lisbon. When the late President Francois Mitterrand spattered Paris with monuments, the resources he wasted were in inverse proportion to his fame and to the power of the nation he ruled.

It was Cardinal Richelieu who, a few years before Louis XIV was born, founded the academy, whose fate Marc Fumaroli chronicles in another brilliant essay. An institution that consecrates the consecrated (members are known as “Immortals”) is best delineated by its own, and Fumaroli makes clear that the squabbles and polemics that stir up storms in the champagne flutes of Paris are less significant than the conception of public utility that inspired Richelieu. Intellectuals have always been expected to make themselves useful; it’s only the “how” and the “to whom” that change from time to time. In France, they were given official recognition until they became too numerous either to heed or to censor. Their numbers have meant that many more intellectuals can operate incestuously by taking in each other’s washing; but it has also meant (to misquote Proust) that libraries and museums have become great cemeteries in which the names on most of the tombstones can no longer be read.

One of the academy’s functions was to discipline and order the French language, a crucial factor of national unity, in a great dictionary and in the general usage over which it presides. The French are as much gourmands of words as they are of wines; they savor conversation as they do a dish which, like a book, is meant not just to be consumed but also talked about. The gastronomy that Pascal Ory presents so appetizingly is part of national identity not because the French cook so much better but because they reflect on what they eat and discuss it endlessly. Informed, imaginative and often stylish, gastrolatry feeds gastro-patriotism, national and regional, whose development Ory traces from the late 18th century to the present, when new fads are being served with old sauces.

No chart of French mental geography would be complete without books no tourist map of national monuments would omit Proust’s towering creation. “A great writer,” warns the essay on Proust, “is not necessarily a writer whom people have read.” But they have heard of him. Collective memory entails no homework, only notoriety. Proust’s nachlass cannot compete with Graceland. But today, Illiers and Balbec, models for places in “Remembrance of Things Past,” welcome thousands of visitors every year; and the madeleine (the little cake that sets Marcel’s memory flowing when it is dipped in tea) has become the most famous reference in French literature.

Two of the most elegant essays in “Realms of Memory,” however, are about writers who were read widely because they wrote to inculcate patriotism, civic sense and historical memory in generations of children. Nora writes about Ernest Lavisse, a dedicated educator whose history primer excited or bored for decades. Mona and Jacques Ozouf write about a woman who hid behind a pen name (Bruno) and her husband (the philosopher Alfred Fouillee), who wrote the most successful and engaging fiction for children that France has known. First published in 1877 and still in print today, the “Tour of France by Two Little Boys” can still be read with pleasure. If you can’t get the book, the Ozoufs’ account provides a substitute that is informed and wise.

Another case of acute continuity may be found in the fact that the title of Bruno’s book, inspired by the traditional training tours of journeymen artisans learning their trade, would in turn inspire the name of the Tour de France, first run in 1903, the same year that Vidal de La Blache published his “Geography” as the first in Lavisse’s 27-volume history of France.

George Vigarello’s essay on the tour brings together many of the themes in “Realms of Memory”: glorification of the land and of its patrimony, an itinerary constructed to idealize the geography of national territory, a name recalling artisan journeyings and schoolbook lessons in citizenship, a wink at the embryonic tourist trade, an enterprise designed to sell products, pleasure, progress and, not least, bikes. Less than a century old and already a hardy annual event in major American newspapers, the tour has become as legendary as the other realms in Nora’s great inventory and as threatened by accelerated waning to memorial identity. The realms of memory have been revealed to be as mortal as memory itself. They wane and, soon, the names on most of their tombstones will fade away as well.

Were a work similar to “Realms of Memory” to be attempted in this country, one wonders how many common national references an American editor would find to orchestrate. Gettysburg, the Declaration of Independence, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the Mississippi River valley come to mind at once. So do bison, beef on the hoof and in its culinary manifestation, jazz, the World Series, Niagara Falls, Louis Armstrong, John Wayne, Mickey Mouse, McDonald’s, Monticello, the INS and the IRS, Manhattan and the Empire State Building, Washington (the man, the memorial, the stuff inside the beltway): 135 images should not be hard to find, some waiting to wane, others beginning to fade already. If new notions were being manufactured today to replace them, they would most likely be about diversity and dissension. But why bother? Who needs memorial patrimony when even matrimony is going out of style? And anyway, as everyone remembers, good Americans, when they die, go not to Arlington National Cemetery but to Paris.