Reappraisals (34 page)

Only France, we are encouraged to believe, has history and memory on a scale sufficient to justify and fulfill the ambitions of
Les Lieux de mémoire
. Furthermore, for Nora, “France is . . . a ‘nation of memory’ in the same sense in which the Jews, long landless and stateless, have survived throughout history as a people of memory.” And—just to nail the point down—only in French, apparently, can one even speak of
lieux de mémoire
: “Neither in English, nor German, nor Spanish can one find a satisfactory equivalent. Doesn’t this difficulty in moving into other languages already suggest a sort of singularity?”
¹⁹
According to Marc Fumaroli in “The Genius of the French Language,” this linguistic distinction has something to do with the French tradition of rhetoric, inherited directly from the Latin. The Italians presumably have it too, then; but perhaps they lack the necessary historical burdens? As the Italians say (there is no satisfactory French equivalent):
magari
.

Are these distinctively French characteristics of
Les Lieux de mémoire
—the book and the things themselves—not an insuperable impediment to translation? No: The English-language version, whose third volume was published in June (the previous two volumes appeared in 1996 and 1997), is a major publishing event in its own right. It is as copiously and beautifully illustrated as the original, and the translation, by Arthur Goldhammer, is wonderful—sensitive to the different styles of the various contributors and superbly confident and learned in its grasp of a grand variety of technical and historical terms. The books are a pleasure to read, in English as in French.
¹³

Even the title is an imaginative leap across cultures. A
lieu
, in French, commonly translates into English as a place, or site. Thus for
lieux de mémoire
one might write “memory-sites,” or “places of memory” (as in “places in the heart,” perhaps). But Nora clearly intended his
lieux
to indicate concepts, words, and events as well as real places, and the concreteness of English means that “place” won’t do. “Site” might have served, but there are so many actual sites studied in Nora’s collection that the term could seem misleadingly spatial. “Realms of memory” has the opposite problems, of course—“realm” in modern English has retained only the loftiest of the uses of its French cousin,
royaume
, and is quite abstract, thereby diluting some of the emphasis on soil and territory that is so important in French memory. But as intercultural compromises go it is elegant and suggestive.

Inevitably, there is some loss. Nora has wisely reduced the overall number of articles from 128 to 44, though he mostly kept the longer ones. Missing, unfortunately, are some of those essays that captured the original spirit of the enterprise at its best: Jean-Paul Poisson, for example, on “the office of the notary,” a fixture in every small French town and part of the life cycle of anyone with any property to inherit, bequeath, or contest—which meant a large part of the population; or Jacques Revel on “the region,” a crucial constituent element in the mental and moral geography of every inhabitant of France. But these, like many of the other contributions not included in the English-language edition, are of more interest to the French reader—for whom they are, precisely, a realm of memory. Perhaps for that reason the majority of the cuts are from the middle volumes on “the Nation,” whose innermost memories and concerns are least accessible to outsiders.

What the English reader gets, as a result, is something far closer to the spirit of Volume III,
Les Frances
—whose structure is used to regroup the translated essays. A few of the essays on French land and topography have been retained but hardly any of the descriptions of social or educational
rites de passage
—such as receiving one’s
bachot
from a lycée or being accepted into a
grande école
—or the illuminating monographic contributions on the origins of the French fascination with their own heritage. Nora’s original interest in
lieux de mémoire
like the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre or the Fourteenth of July national holiday as commemorative objects for dissection is thus diluted, and the result is a collection of very high-quality essays on mostly conventional historical subjects: political and religious divisions and traditions; significant institutions, dates, buildings, and books.

Within these limits, this new translation makes available to English-language readers some of the best French scholarship today: Jacques Revel on the Royal Court; Mona Ozouf on “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; Jean-Pierre Babelon on the Louvre; Alain Corbin on “Divisions of Time and Space”; Marc Fumaroli on “The Genius of the French Language”; and others besides.

Revel and Corbin, especially, bring to their subjects great scholarly authority: Respectively, the president of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (and longtime editor of the journal
Annales
) and the holder of the premier chair of history in France, they wear their standing and their learning lightly. Alain Corbin, who has written on everything from economic backwardness in the Limousin to the history of prostitution, illustrates divisions of time and space with a remarkable superabundance of examples. Jacques Revel recites once again the national Ur-narrative of courtly life in early modern France, but he infuses it with so much allusion, subtlety, and significance that the whole familiar story reads as though told and understood for the first time.

Even those essays that don’t quite come off—like that by Antoine Compagnon on
À la recherche du temps perdu
, where the author is confronted with the precociously self-referential, realm-of-memory character of Proust’s own masterpiece—are still a pleasure to read and full of wit and perception. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is the way in which all the contributions manage to cast light on a compact range of themes at the core of any attempt to grasp the French past, and France itself.

The first of these is the sheer ancientness and unbroken continuity of France and the French state (eight hundred years at the most modest estimate), and the corresponding longevity of the habit of exercising authority and control from the center. This is not merely a matter of political power, the well-known propensity of French rulers of all ideological persuasions to aggregate to themselves the maximum of sovereigntyand dominion. In his essay on Reims Jacques Le Goff notes that the cathedral there—the traditional site for the coronation of French kings—is a masterpiece of “classical” Gothic, before going on to comment that “in French history ‘classical’ often refers to the imposition of ideological and political controls.”
²⁰

The urge to classify, to regulate everything, from trade and language to theater or food, is what links the public sphere in France with cultural and pedagogical practices. It is not by chance that the
Guide Michelin
(green) authoritatively divides all possible sites of interest into three: interesting, worth a detour, worth a journey. Nor is it an accident that the
Guide Michelin
(red) follows the same tripartite division for restaurants—both inherited the practice from “classical” French rhetoric and philosophy, which also bequeathed it to dramatic theory and political argument. As Pascal Ory notes, “codification” in France is a
lieu de mémoire
in itself.

So is religion. Christianity—Catholic Christianity—is so long-established in France that Nora himself has no qualms about treating it, along with monarchy and peasantry, as the essence of true Frenchness. All the essays on religion in
Realms of Memory
have a robust, engaged quality: Claude Langlois even outdoes Nora, claiming that “in terms of monuments, the lesson is clear: France is either Catholic or secular. There is no middle term.” André Vauchez, who has a fine essay on cathedrals, would probably agree with him—he is trenchantly committed to his subject, defending against the philistinism of the times the appropriately symbolic and otherworldly character of a great cathedral. But in the context of this collection, Vauchez has it easy—as Proust pointed out: “The cathedrals are not only the finest ornaments of our art but the only ones that are still connected with the purpose for which they were constructed”—an assertion even truer today than it was when Proust made it in 1907.
²¹

But France is not just Catholic or secular—it is, and has long been, Protestant and Jewish as well, just as it is now also Islamic. Jews and Protestants are well served in the essays by Pierre Birnbaum and Philippe Joutard included here, both of which are more thoughtful and less conventional than the contributions on Catholics, perhaps because they must perforce work against the historiographical and national grain. Joutard shows the importance of memory in French Protestant life, so marked that Protestants in rural communities typically have a stronger collective memory of ancient events than do their Catholic neighbors, even when the Catholics were more active in, and were more directly affected by, the events in question. And his essay on the longevity of victim memory is an implicit reminder to the editor that too much emphasis upon the normatively Catholic character of Frenchness can result in new forms of neglect. There is no entry in these pages for the massacre of Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572—a French “memory date” if ever there was one.

If Catholicism is at the “center” of French memory and heretics and minorities have often sat neglected at the cultural “periphery,” the same Manichaean contrast has been reproduced in a rich variety of social and geographical keys. For as long as anyone can remember, France has been divided: between north and south, along the line running from Saint-Malo to Geneva that was favored in nineteenth-century economic geography as the point of separation between modern and backward France; between speakers of French and speakers of a disfavored regional patois; between Court and country, Right and Left, young and old (it is not without significance that the average age of the members of the Legislative Assembly of the French Revolution in 1792 was just twenty-six years), but above all between Paris and the provinces.

The “provinces” are not the same thing as the countryside—
campagne
in France has had positive connotations for centuries, whereas ever since the emergence of a court, “provincial” has been a term of round abuse. In the subliminal iconography of France, the countryside is peopled by solid peasants, rooted in the soil for generation upon generation. Even today, Armand Frémont, the author of an essay, “The Land,” in
Realms of Memory
, cannot resist a distinctively French response to his theme: “The land was domesticated without violence to nature’s rhythms, without the large-scale transformation of the landscape sometimes seen in other countries”; the French landscape shows “unparalleled harmony,” etc. The sense of loss today, as rural France vanishes from sight, is palpable.
²²

No one, however, regrets “the provinces.” The typical “provincial” came from a small town and was conventionally depicted harboring the forlorn hope of “making it” in Paris—unless he stayed at home under the bovine illusion that life in his constricted little world was somehow real and sufficient. From Molière to Barrès, this is the staple tragicomic premise of French letters. It reflects, of course, a widespread prejudice shared by provincials and Parisians alike: that everything of consequence happens in Paris (which is why 92 percent of Parisian students under the “bourgeois” monarchy from 1830 to 1848 were drawn from the provinces). The capital thus was able to drain from the rest of the (provincial) nation virtually all life and energy. Much of French history, from the political economy of Louis XIV’s Versailles through the atavistic ideological appeal of Marshal Pétain’s anti-Parisian rural idyll to the residential preferences of French professors can more readily be understood once this fundamental polarity is grasped.

The pejorative connotation of “provincial” stands in marked contrast to the traditional French affection not just for peasants and the land, but also for the idea of France, as mapped on the territory itself. Here, of course, “traditional” should be understood as something quite recent—it was in the nineteenth century, specifically in the early years of the Third Republic, from 1880 to 1900, that the map of France was imprinted so successfully upon the collective soul of the nation. Great pedagogic works of history and geography (Ernest Lavisse’s
Histoire de France
and Paul Vidal de La Blache’s
Tableau de la géographie de France
, both discussed in
Realms of Memory
) provided generations of French teachers with the tools with which to hone the civic sensibility of the nation’s children.
²³

The
Tour de la France par deux enfants
(first published in 1877 and required reading for every schoolchild for decades to come) and the bicycle
Tour de France
(inaugurated in 1903, the year Vidal de La Blache’s
Tableau
first appeared) followed fairly closely the route traditionally taken around France by the artisan journeymen (
compagnons
) on their own
tour de France
in times past. Thanks to this contiguity of time and place—real and constructed—the French by 1914 had a unique, unmatched feel for the memory of their country, its frontiers, its variety, and its topography, as prescribed in the official cartography of the national past and present. It is the passing of this “feel,” and the reality it reflected, however tendentiously, that Nora is recording and mourning in these pages.

The pedagogical efforts of the early Third Republic—proclaimed in 1870 after Napoléon III was captured by the Prussians—were understandably more appreciated in the disfavored provinces than in the nation’s capital. In a 1978 survey the five most popular street names in France were République, Victor Hugo, Léon Gambetta, Jean Jaurès, and Louis Pasteur: two Third Republican politicians, the pre-eminent “republican” scientist, the French poet whose funeral in 1885 was a high point of Republican public commemoration, and the Republic itself. But these street names show up much more frequently in provincial communities than in Paris, where on the contrary there is a marked bias toward names that are nonpolitical or from the
ancien régime
. The civic conformity of the moderate late-nineteenth-century Republic echoed and comforted the mood of small-town life.