The Creation of Identity and the Invention of Tradition

Memory is a weapon, but it can also be disarming. British historian Lewis Namier, in a brilliant essay on how the French remained obsessed with their past, noted how, after the collapse of military resistance in France in 1940, many Frenchmen assumed that a base for resistance outside the country could not be established because it had never been done before. As the newspaper France Libre explained: “The idea that France can be defended from the outside remains an abstraction, since no memory, no tradition, sustains it.”

For a nation that once so spectacularly decreed the abolition of its past--in 1793 the Christian calendar was abolished, and Year 1 of the New Revolutionary Era was proclaimed--the French have long been enthralled by their history. Unlike the English, for whom memory has decayed into an enervating nostalgia, the French have vigorously and sometimes breathtakingly manipulated the memory of their past in order to bestow authority on the present.

With the publication of the third and final volume of “Realms of Memory,” we now have an English version of the grandest, most ambitious effort to dissect, interpret and celebrate the French fascination with their own past. The project, orchestrated by the historian and editor Pierre Nora, stretched across seven volumes, bringing together a huge ensemble of historians and scholars; the English version, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman and excellently translated by Arthur Goldhammer, reconstitutes the elements of that sprawl into a tauter and in some ways more striking form. The two earlier English volumes dealt with such perennial conflicts and divisions of French public life as “left” and “right” and with such national traditions as the veneration of the land.

The essays in the third volume, “Symbols,” cover an array of subjects chosen for reasons at once playful and canny. They divide into three groups: national emblems (the tricolor, “La Marseillaise,” Bastille Day, the motto Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite), physical sites (Lascaux, Rheims, the Louvre, the Pantheon, the Eiffel Tower and Verdun) and, finally and somewhat more allusively, “Identifications” (such symbolic entities as the Gallic cock, Joan of Arc, Descartes, Paris and the French language, each of which has crystallized into a durable symbol of Frenchness).

Though there are evident resonances with the kind of work pioneered by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger on the invention of tradition, “Realms of Memory” has its roots in specifically French preoccupations. The spur to Nora’s project, begun in the early 1980s, was the buildup to 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution. With a Socialist government under Francois Mitterrand in office, debates revolved around if (and how) this founding moment of the modern French nation, one that had decisively divided the society, could be commemorated in an inclusive, conciliatory way. These debates were symptomatic of--and fed--a larger doubt about what kind of France was being celebrated. Many of the defining traits of the nation were blurring. The illusion of economic sovereignty was shattered by the abandonment of Socialist economic policy in 1983 in the face of international market pressures. A sense of cultural superiority was weakening, as the French language lost ground and a generation of mai^tres a penser self-destructed.

Above all, conviction in the continuing vitality and relevance of the revolutionary tradition, so defining of modern France, had collapsed. This tradition of revering past French revolutions for the promise they bestowed upon the future was extinguished within the span of a generation. Revolution--which in 1968 had seemed inevitable--20 years later looked not just impossible but not particularly desirable. In its place, a more liberal, plural political culture began for the first time to look attractive to the French. But to sustain this, France would need to tell itself new stories about its past. In this task of intellectual and political reinterpretation, historians like the late Francois Furet and Nora have played cardinal roles.

The more directly intellectual purpose of Nora’s enterprise stems from his interest in official time--occasions through which the state commemorates itself (1989 being one example)--and subjective time, time that is specific to generations, such as the “1968 generation.” It is this entanglement that ensures the steadily changing character of memory, because the meanings of official commemoration are continuously redefined by successive generations, who draw on their own experiences to infuse new meanings into old symbols. It also ensures a stream of symbolic trinkets, “commemorabilia” that give a nation--or a group within a nation--a sense of itself. In the case of France, Nora sees these adornments as compensation for a country that “has been condemned by the feeling that it is no longer a place where history on the grand scale is made.” (It is surely also driven by simple entrepreneurial opportunism, though Nora has nothing to say about this.)

Nora understands this commemorative luxuriance as a condition specific to contemporary societies. In France, it is symptomatically linked to the changed purpose of commemoration since the end of World War II. Earlier, Nora asserts, it was possible to assimilate events into a “unified national memory,” but now memory is used to affirm difference and distinctiveness. The collapse of a single national narrative and the dismantling of a regulated collective memory have encouraged the emergence of little narratives, attached to shared collective sites and speaking diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings. National history has ceded to national memory, which establishes more intimate but also more capricious relations between individuals and symbols of collective memory.

Nora’s inquiry is conducted through a concept of his invention: the lieu de memoire. By this coinage (which has gained entry into the Dictionnaire Robert, the French OED), Nora means a resting point--a moment, a physical site or an idea--where memories settle. The creation of such lieux externalizes and locates in specific, public sites that which is most internal and intimate: memory. In the present volume, Nora identifies two broad types of lieux de memoire. The first are already constituted symbols, usually imposed by the state, and these are susceptible to standard styles of historical study. In this vein, there is a fine essay by Mona Ozouf on the French national motto, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, which since 1880 has been emblazoned upon every public building in France. Ozouf shows how that “illogical motto, a series of partial truths at war with one another,” came by a process of complex jostling to settle together in a way that has made them appear to be natural companions. Ozouf also has a superb essay on the Pantheon, “the Ecole Normale of the Dead.” Intended to be a monument to les grands hommes, at once a statuary to commemorate citizens of the universal Republic of Letters and a symbol of patriotic unity, it is in fact the partisan property of the political left.

The second type of symbolic lieu de memoire requires the historian creatively to bring the object of study into existence--something that requires much greater imaginative elan. These qualities are on full display in an essay on Joan of Arc, which reveals the malleability of her memory, invoked at different moments by the Republican left, Catholics and the extreme right, and another on Descartes, which shows how the Cartesian spirit came to stand for the French spirit in general. Maurice Agulhon’s essay on that most fabulous physical lieu, Paris, sketches a deft topography of the city, showing how the main axis of division is not the river but the line between eastern and western parts of the city, reflecting a left-right division. To the west are the military state monuments (Les Invalides, Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe), while the eastern parts of the city house memorials to popular radicalism (the July Column, Place de la Bastille, the Mur des Federes). As Agulhon notes, this cultural and symbolic division reflects a social geography: Eastern Paris has tended to be home to the popular classes, western Paris to the bourgeoisie.

These long, exploratory, meditative essays delight in unexpected twists, and they yield their insights with slow pleasure. Bringing together historians with often quite differing approaches, “Realms of Memory” does not embody an explicit common theoretical orientation. However, the contributions do share significant emphasis, and Nora’s directing talent is apparent. Unlike Fernand Braudel in that other great work on French identity, “The Identity of France,” Nora’s writers steer away from the rigidly impersonal structures and mentalites of the Annales school and take a directly political approach: They are interested in how meanings are created, manipulated, circulated and disputed. They focus on the products and activities of educated elites--the victors of French history. Indeed, amid the parade of symbols, there is a striking silence about that other realm thathas and continues to shape French identity: France’s colonial empire. There are few references in “Realms of Memory” to the wider world and how it has influenced the relations of the French to their past.

By taking a political approach, these essays reveal a society and culture whose elements have long been in conflict but also one in which that very conflict testifies to the presence of a shared, common terrain. As Nora puts it, the paradox of French national history is that it has placed its identity in that most unstable and changeable terrain--politics.

All the contributors in “Realms of Memory” display a kind of affectionate skepticism toward their subjects. Their style is not to strip away ideological illusion or to de-mythologize but to provide fond, if critical, remembrance. They can be read as a long billet-doux to the Republican tradition--one vigorously attacked for much of this century from both the left and the right of the political spectrum but also one which in the last few decades has achieved a consensual acceptance. Perhaps the most valuable political conclusion of Nora’s project is to show how division can be transformed into diversity. This generous, accommodative product of the late republican French intellect displays--and values--a France that is one and divisible, that is becoming more liberal and plural and that needs to give itself a history suited to this new self-conception.

Nora and many of his colleagues write in the tradition of the great 19th century French historians. They share, with Francois Guizot, Augustin Thierry and Ernest Lavisse the belief that History is the school of France, the means whereby a civic French identity may be inculcated. Jules Michelet’s legacy of a historical imagination at once scholarly and fanciful is recurrent here. But there is also a more political spirit moving invisibly through these volumes: that of Charles de Gaulle, a man able to reconcile in his own person the contradictory legacies--revolutionary and conservative--that constitute modern France. He has himself become a lieu de memoire; once a source of division and hated by the left during his reign, he is today venerated by many of the graying 1968 generation. De Gaulle was of course steeped in a sense of the French past: He was, in Regis Debray’s phrase, a “contemporary of the permanent.” He was also a supreme juggler of history and collective memory, daring to invent and knowing that, to do this, he and his nation had also to be able to forget.

De Gaulle’s appeal to the French to keep resistance alive in June 1940 was not made from French territory or even from a French colony: It was broadcast by the BBC from London. But the appeal was the origin of the myth of De Gaulle as the patriotic savior of the French. Mitterrand unveiled the text of that speech, engraved in bronze, at the Arc de Triomphe 50 years later. The fact that few in France had actually heard the original speech had become irrelevant. Memory and commemoration had triumphed--a triumph that, as De Gaulle well knew, required the capacity to forget.