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I

CONFLICTS AND DIVISIONS

REALMS OF MEMORY THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FRENCH PAST UNDER THE DIRECTION

OF

PIERRE NORA English Language edition edited

& with a foreword by Lawrence D. Krit\man



Translated by Arthur

Goldhammer

Realms of Memory

a

is

monumental

endeavor by France's leading

tive

collec-

intellectu-

exploring the cathedrals and palaces, the

als,

rituals, legends,

and episodes that form the

The first

landscape of French consciousness.

volume,

Conflicts

symbols of

and Divisions,

reflects

political, religious, regional,

generational

difference

that

on

and

structure

France's self-definition.

The book begins with the political that

have carved

a path

clashes

through French

his-

tory and memory, between Franks and Gauls, French and foreigners, Vichy and

all

other regimes. Contributors explore shifting

conceptions of political meaning over centuries,

from the often irreverent portrayals of

Gauls

in

such popular media as the Asterix

comics to nostalgic reimaginings of pre-revolutionary France by

modern

ultranational-

ists.

A second section analyzes sites and events of the religious conflicts that underlie

French

identity.

The authors

chronicle the

manufacture of remembrance, as seen in the Protestant festivals held each September to

commemorate Huguenots

persecution

the

in the sixteenth-century

of

Wars of

Religion; and of the processes of forgetting,

witnessed in the assimilative tradition

French Jews that has hindered,

if

among

not pre-

vented, rediscovery of a distinctively Jewish past and

acknowledgement of the French

legacy of anti-Semitism. Conflicts

section sis

on

and Divisions concludes with

issues of time

a

and place, an analy-

of the cleavages that separate Paris and

province, north and south, and erations as demarcated tive years as 1789

human gen-

by such transforma-

and 1968.

(continued on back flap)

I

REALMS OF MEMORY

European Perspectives

REALMS

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Rethinking the French Past

OF

MEMORY VOLUME

Under

i:

CONFLICTS AND DIVISIONS

the Direction of Pierre

Nora

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION EDITED AND WITH A FOREWORD BY LAWRENCE Translated by Arthur

Goldhammer

D.

KRITZMAN

To honor Clifford E. Rybolt,

Edwin

IV.

Rickert has

Jr.

and Mary Grace Rickert Rybolt, friends of France,

made a gift

Columbia University Press wishes

to the

Press toward the costs of publishing this book.

to express its appreciation for assistance

given by the

government of France through Le Ministere de la Culture in the preparation of the translation.

Columbia University Press Publishers since 1893

New York Copyright

Chichester, (c)

West Sussex

1996 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Les Lieux de Memoire

(c) Editions

Gallimard, 1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Les Lieux de memoire. English

Realms of memory: rethinking the French past / under the direction of Pierre

Nora English language ;

a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman p.

— (European

cm.

;

edition edited and with

translated

by Arthur Goldhammer

perspectives)

Revised and abridged translation of the original work in French. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:

v.

1

.

Conflicts and divisions.

ISBN 0-231-08404-8 I.France 4. I.



(alk.

Civilization



paper) Philosophy.

National characteristics, French.

Nora, Pierre.

11.

5.

2.

Memory.

NationaHsm

Kritzman, Lawrence D.

iii.



3.

Symbolism.

France.

Title.

IV. Series.

DC33.L6513 1996

—dc20

944

95-49349

CIP

Casebound

editions of

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and

durable acid-free paper.

Designed by Linda Secondari Printed in the United States of America

CIO

987654321

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism Lawrence D. Kritzman, Editor

European Perspectives presents English translations of books by leading European thinkers. With both

classic

and outstanding contemporary works, the

series

aims to shape the major intellectual

controversies of our day and to facilitate the tasks of historical understanding.

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

Theodor W. Adorno, Notes

to Literature, vols,

i

and 2

Richard Wolin, editor, The Heidegger Controversy

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks,

vol.

i

Jacques LeGoff, History and Memory Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering Julia Kristeva, Nations

in

Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against

Without Nationalism

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust

Hugo

Ball, Critique

Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, IVhat Is Philosophy!'

of

the

German

Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness:

Intelligentsia

On

the

Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Elisabeth Badinter,

Moment of Aesthetic Appearance

Mind

XY: On Masculine Identity

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, igyz-iggo

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory,

and the Present

Humanity

1

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Lawrence D. Kritiman

ix

xv

Preface to the English Language Edition

General Introduction: Between Introduction to

PART

I.

Volume

1:

Memory and History,

Conflicts

and Divisions,

Pierre

Pierre

Nora

i

Nora

21

POLITICAL DIVISIONS

I

Franks and Gauls, Kr^sitof Pomian

II

The Ancien Regime and

III

Catholics and Seculars, Claude Langlois

IV

French and Foreigners, Gerard Noiriel

145

V

Wichy, Phillipe Burrin

18

VI

Gaullists

VII

Right and Left, Marcel Gauchet

PART

II.

27

the Revolution, Francois Furet

and Communists, Pierre Nora

MINORITY RELIGIONS The

Jansenist Schism, Catherine Maire

Port-Royal:

IX

The Museum of

X

Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the

the Desert:

The

DIVISIONS OF TIME Time and

301

Protestant Minority, Phillipe Joutard

Rue Copernic: Jews

of French History, Pierre Birnbaum

III.

205 241

VIII

PART

79 109

at the

353

Heart yj^

AND SPACE

XI

Divisions of

XII

The Saint-Malo— Geneva

XIII

Generation, Pierre Nora

499

Index

613

Space, Alain Corbin Line, Roger Chartier

427 467

1 i

FOREWORD

In

Remembrance

of

Things French

Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory (1984— 1992)

is

one of the great French

intellectual

achievements of the Mitterrand era. Nora and his colleagues from a variety of aca-

demic disciplines



history, literary studies, political science, sociology

"memory

locate the

imaginary representations and historical social

should not be taken

seek to

places" of French national identity as they have been con-

structed since the middle ages. This history of

form French



and cultural

realities that

identity.

literally. It is to

memory

realized through the

occupy the symbolic

Memory, which

be understood in

is

its

sites that

also includes forgetting,

"sacred context" as the vari-

ety of forms through which cultural communities imagine themselves in diverse representational modes. In this sense, as a critical category itself

from

history,

which

in the evidence derived

French past

as

it

is

"memory"

distinguishes

regarded as an intellectual practice more deeply rooted

from the study of empirical

emerges from

places produced over time

this

work is the

result

reality.

The

recollection of the

of a cataloging of the

memory

which depict the "imaginary communities" binding

national memory.'

Nora's

magnum opus represents the symptomology of a certain form of cultural

melancholia as well as the sign of an attempt to construct a symbolic encyclopedia that attests to the values

and belief systems of the French nation. Conceived

history of France through

as a

memory, Nora's work not only demonstrates how

memory binds communities together and creates social identities but also dramatizes how one 's consciousness of the past is symptomatic of the disappearance of certain living traditions.

Nora's idea of the nation

is

drawn from

the concept of the

he gleans from Frances Yates's The Art of

memory place, a term

Memory and Maurice Halbwachs' The

— X

LAWRENCE Collective

KRITZMAN

D.

Memory? Drawing on

rhetorical tradition that dates

QuintiUan, Realms of memory functions as an inventory of

conception of

memory

is

broad: he uses

it

back to Cicero and

loci

memoriae. Nora's

to discuss geographical place or locus

(Reims, Paris, the prehistoric caves of Lascaux), historical figures (Joan of Arc),

monuments and

buildings (Versailles and the Eiffel Tower), literary and artistic

objects (Descartes' Discourse on

Method and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past),

emblems, commemorations, and symbols (the French

which are the ical

result

it is

of

of an imaginary process that codifies and represents the histor-

memory

consciousness of "quintessential France." If

nature

flag, the "Marseillaise") all

places are symbolic in

because they signify the context and totemic meaning from which col-

lective identity emerges.

Nora's "symbolic typology" presents both ideas and the material structure France's national identity. Yet constitute a monolithic entity.

Beyond

memory

as

Nora conceives of

the repertoire of

events and commemorative dates. Realms of

realities that

Memory

monuments,

it

does not

institutions,

also evokes the conflictual

spaces and symbolic divisions within France that reconfigure

its

relationship with

the past: the ancien regime and the Revolution, French and foreigners. Right and Left,

and Paris-Province. As the general

title

of the

last

three volumes of the French

edition indicates (the plural Les France), the idea of France has never been a totalized concept since

memory"

is

its

sense of identity

is

plural and unsettled. Indeed, a "realm of

a polyreferential entity that can

draw on a multiplicity of cultural myths

that are appropriated for different ideological or political purposes. his insightful essay

matizes this political

on Joan of Arc (which appears

phenomenon by demonstrating how

emblem simultaneously functioning

in

volume

3)

For example,

Michel

that historical figure

for the

in

Winock draemerged

mythology of both the

left

as a

and

the right alike. For xenophobic groups such as the paramilitary fascist leagues of the

1930s or the acerbic neo-nationalism of Jean Marie Le Pen, Joan of Arc represents

of symbolically forestalling foreign incursions into the

a totemic figure capable

homeland whereas

for the left she incarnates courage in

doing battle against the cor-

ruption of the Church.

The

idea of France as

it

emerges from these volumes

contradictory and that threatens the realization of

its

is

one that

is,

at times, self-

universalistic pretensions.

The

organic idea of the nation or the French "super-ego" that

Nora

first

volumes of the French-language edition seem

most potently

torical

moments when those Hegelian heroes

reify the



to operate

refers to in the at his-

Louis XIV, Napoleon, de Gaulle

very possibility of movement and change.

What

remains, those temporal

expanses situated between the privileged moments perceived as periods of historical greatness, is

but the peripatetic and destabilizing

In articulating the concept of certain

key ideas found

in

memory

movement of

time.

Nora's work represents a rethinking of

Maurice Halbwachs's theory of collective memory. To be

— Foreword

memory is diametrically opposite to that of the philosopher Henri Bergson who thought of memory as a purely subjective phenomenon. On the contrary, Halbwachs displaces memory from the sure,

Halbwachs's sociological conceptualization of

individual realm to

domain of the

"social frames" (what he terms the cadres sociaux)

of collective experience. In essence, the act of remembering

is

always related to the

repository of images and ideals that constitute the social relations of which take. Places

we par-

of memory are therefore determined by the mix of individuals that con-

stitute the social

group

to

which they

relate.

memory he does so in order to delineate the metamorphoses that French memory has undergone in recent times. By reflecting on the phenomenon of the nation as republic Nora demonstrates how If

Nora

speculates

on

the idea of collective

Republican France was constructed as a series of principles meant to defend a singular moral imperative functioning in the

memory

name of a social totality. For example,

of the "Declaration of the Rights of

Man" evoked

the very idea of the Republic could be created and

community

a narrative

However more enced during

through which

recently, in the

it

shadow of



this past half-century

a past

the

through which

commemorated; it gave the social

could continue to forge

its

identity.

the infelicitous historical events experi-

the Vichy collaboration, torture in Algeria

memory and the humanism assohad come undone. France had now left itself open to an agonistic

the universalistic principles underlying republican ciated with

it

encounter that would be played out in the postwar period between Gaullism and

Communism it

in

an attempt to take hold of the reptablican tradition and derive from

renewed national myths. Memory would now take shape

ing spheres of political influence;

it

in divided

and compet-

would make the republican values of cohesion

associated with the universal principles of Enlightenment thought ble of creating true consensus. In this context the

no longer capa-

memorial process activates a

renewed sense of national self-consciousness by dividing the "unitary framework" of collective cization of

memory into smaller configurations or identities resulting in the politi-

memory.

Nora's collection presents a series of highly innovative essays that signal a

approach to the writing of national history. This new historiography distances

from the chronological and teleological theoretical presuppositions of sors.

its

new itself

predeces-

History conceived either in terms of the definable causes and effects of

Comtean positivism or the no longer

To be

artificial

determinism of the Annales school

is

viewed

as

critically acceptable.

sure, the ostensible target of Nora's

century historian Ernest Lavisse,

who

new historiography

in his

is

the nineteenth

eighteen-volume history of France,

conjoined scientific and affective concerns in order to produce a positivist history. Lavisse

is

pretations

regarded as the historian most responsible for drawing historical inter-

from archival

data; the archive

was

the place

where memory was stored

xi

XII

LAWRENCE

KRITZMAN

D.

and from which history could be materiaUzed cursive manifestation of archival

espoused was

filtered

memory

in written

for

form. Ironically the dis-

the scientific pretensions

all

it

through a romantic consciousness whose modus operandi was

to sustain political myths. Furthermore, archival

the true memorialist enterprise since

memorabilia and the many

loci

it

memory limited

the parameters of

put constraints on what constituted cultural

—museums, monuments,

public spaces

— from

which representations could possibly emerge.

One might

argue that Nora's concept of historiography constitutes a history of

the present in as

much

as

many of

the essays in Realms

of Memory focus on the

continuous thread of the past remembered. Nora contends that even

memory

are ever present in the

contemporary world

are currently living in a historical society

it is

if

dis-

references to

paradoxically because

where memory functions

as a

mere

we

his-

can exist only as a simulation of the past. "Lieux de memoire exist

torical trace that

memory is a reenact memory

because there are no longer any milieux de memoire^ settings in which real part

of everyday experience"

through traditions and

rituals

(p. i). If

premodern

where present and past

societies

exist simultaneously in a

kind

of atemporal space in which act and meaning coalesce, then the historical world of the present

The

is

one

that represents historical consciousness as

creation of "realms of

memory"

is

the result of

disembodied memories.

modern

society's inability to

memory" takes place because real environments of memory have disappeared. The projection of a "realm of memory" is therefore the sign of memory's disappearance and society's live within real

memory;

the consecration of a "realm of

need to represent what ostensibly no longer

The most

striking aspect of this theoretical practice stems

which temporality torical" since

exists.

it is

is

conceived. In

modern

no longer authentically

societies the past

lived.

is

from the manner

in

experienced as "his-

The present mode of historical per-

derived from an imaginative form of consciousness based more on myths

ception

is

than on

facts.

the past than

Our knowledge of

the past

on our apprehension of

the present. Accordingly,

Nora and

is

less a

the past as

question of our empirical grip on

we

represent

his contributors

engage

it

through the lens of

in

an archaeological

quest through which they are able to retrospectively "uncover" traditions and delineate the

manner

To be

sure,

in

which they took shape.

many of

the contemporary notions concerning France in

its

pre-

revolutionary origins stem from nineteenth-century constructions of the French past where, for example, Michelet credits Joan of

The medieval

cathedral, as

Arc with

the birth of the nation.

we think of it today, can be seen as a monument belong-

ing less to Christian tradition than to the secularized domain of the national patri-

moine or cultural heritage; the imaginary representations of the past derive from a

hermeneutic practice that reinterprets them in terms of the social exigencies of the present in order to uncover other traditions. Accordingly, the cathedral

is

con-

Foreword

"memory

structed a posteriori as a

place" associated with the creative energy

achieved through the secularized collective activity of the masons; from this perspective the re-presentation of this cultural activity as a nonreligious endeavor

used as the narrative frame for the reinterpretation of the collective

is

memory of the

French Middle Ages and as a celebration of the newer traditions of Third Republic France. Secular values transformed the cathedral into the locus of contemporary

Or perhaps more recently, we are shown through the example of the Eiffel Tower in Henri Loyette 's essay (volume 3) how the corrosive force of time strips away the ideological roots of that monument (its function as a

conceptualizations of the past.

symbol of revolutionary modernism) and thereby transforms ory" into

its

contemporary incarnation

The "realms of memory" explored a multiplicity

as part

in the essays in these three

of interpretations that give

it

must have

a capacity for

mem-

of the "poetry of Paris."

new meaning

might be termed a form of genealogical revisionism. exist

that "realm of

If a

volumes produce

to history

"realm of

through what

memory"

is

to

metamorphosis: the recycling of knowledge

new symbolic representations. In becoming a synonym for "realm of memory" enables successive generations to mediate

through associations and national identity, a their cultural

myths by inculcating them with

Ironically, Nora's

new

their desires.

reading of history uncovers the symptomology of a cer-

tain French^z/z de siecle melancholia.

the traditions associated with

it

As Nora points out the French Revolution and

functioned as the determining element in the con-

struction of national identity through references to narratives of the past. social order

The

of the modern nation-state, rooted in the secularized traditions of the

Republic, could be legitimized in a collective identity whose consciousness was

based on a teleological view of the nation as pedagogical authority in the represen-

From

memory overdetermines history in its quest to be universal and create a patriotic synthesis. The consubstantiality between memory and history that coalesced in what Nora terms the "memory nation" has broken down in our own fin de siecle where the former "centralizing Jacobinism" of tation of

its

values.

national culture can his colleagues

now

this perspective,

no longer

unify.

conceive of

it,

Furthermore, national memory, as Nora and

can be found in the institutions of the ancien

regime and the collective heritage of the

now partake

monumental and physical landscape

of France 's memorial legacy.

But for now, what remains of the idea of nationhood gic reflection, articulated

more than an attempt

Nora

is

engendered by a nostal-

through the disjunctive remembrance of things

way, one might argue that the quest for ing

as they

past. In a

memory in the contemporary world is noth-

to master the perceived loss of one's history. It

is also,

as

so brilliantly teaches us, an attempt to read the signs of culture in places,

objects,

and images that are marked by vestiges of the

vicissitudes

of contemporary consciousness.

When

past,

all is

and remembered

said

in the

and done the idea of

xiii

XIV

LAWRENCE

D.

KRITZMAN

France that emerges from these volumes tions of

memory than on

is

based more on the imaginary construc-

the encyclopedic compilation of empirical data.

Nora's remembrance of things French ultimately suggests a

through which the history of about

memory and French

memory may be

national identity

sions that might at first not be obvious.

written.

becomes

What

new

critical

model

appears to be a book

a study with critical

dimen-

Although Nora consistently draws our

attention to the specificity of the French context, the reader will nevertheless find in these

pages the ways in which a nation can rediscover

identity

"realms of memory." Each nation has

the logic constituting

its

and myths;

French have fashioned

just as the

its

its

by rearranging

official

memories

their history according to the so-called

universal values of the French Revolution, Americans have anchored their the idealistic

dream of

"liberty

and

justice for all."

By

focusing on

how

own

in

the disap-

pearance of certain memorialist practices in France enabled historians to uncover the patterns of other traditions,

memory

Nora

suggests

how

the rewriting of the history of

new paradigms of cultural identity. The reader will find in the make up Realms of Memory an exhilarating intellectual project whose

can forge

essays that

exemplarity

lies in its

power

to translate the vicissitudes of national self-conscious-

ness and the disjunctions between the original meanings attached to

and the heuristic processes currently used to describe them. In

memory

this "era

sites

of com-

how the history of memory functions as a mirror of the changing role of cultural politics and how national commemoration in the age of global politics has given way to the heterogeneous and memoration," Nora and

his colleagues enable us to see

divided character of contemporary remembrance. Always insightful, always

nuanced, always sensitive to epistemological will

remain a landmark

Lawrence D. Kritzman

in cultural criticism

Dartmouth College

May

1996

shifts

over time, Realms of

and historiography for years

Memory

to

come.

PREFACE TO THE

E N G L I S H - L AN G UAG E

From Lieux de me moire to Realms of Memory Nora

Pierre

These three volumes of Realms of Memory translation of the seven

They

memoire.

offer

volumes published

what Rabelais would

are, in the strongest possible sense, a

in

French under the

title

Les Lieux de

call the substantifique moelle, the

very

marrow of

the work, and are the concentrated, condensed product of a lengthy

intellectual

and publishing venture that developed over a period of almost a decade,

from 1984

to 1992.

because

very

this



its

along the

The at the

whom I owe a

debt of gratitude, for without the effort and talent of each and every one

real

whole

involved nearly 120 contributors, most of them French, to

it

of them

This venture was collective as well as individual: collective,

work would be of

little

interest;

and personal, because the project

as a

overall conception and detailed structure, revised at various stages

—was

way

a solitary

work, which evolved as

point of departure, the original idea, which

I

it

progressed.

first tried

out on

my seminar

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, was to study national

feeling not in the traditional thematic or chronological

manner but

by ana-

instead

lyzing the places in which the collective heritage of France was crystallized, the

memory was rooted, in order to create a vast topology of French symbolism. Though not really a neologism, the term did not exist in French when I first used it. It met with remarkable

principal lieux^ in

all

senses of the word, in which collective

'

success, however, to the point

where it was included

Dictionnaire Robert de la langue frangaise. rhetoric as described

(1966), cal art

by Frances Yates

which recounts an important

of

memory was based on

in

I

took

in the 1993 edition it

of the Grand

from ancient and medieval

her admirable book. The Art of

tradition of

Memory

mnemonic techniques. The

a systematic inventory of loci memoriae, or

ory places." In French, the association of the words

lieu

and memoire proved

classi-

"memto

have

EDITION

XVI

PIERRE NORA profound connotations



was something

(the effect

tions arise in part

from the

like that

of the English word "roots"). These connota-

specific role that

the French idea of the nation and in part

French toward their national cific role

and to

and largely unconscious

historical, intellectual emotional,

past.

The

memory played

from recent changes

goal of this

changes in attitude

illustrate those

in the construction

book



is

of the

in the attitude

to shed light

on

in short, to elaborate

of

that spe-

and make

sense of the very term lieu de memoire.

From

Les France to

move from the

easily dated to

general,

La

La Nation, and (although the last remained rather vague in my mind). The intention was

the first

I

work

envisioned a

in three parts:

Republique,

simple to the complex, from content to form, from what was most

what was most

difficult to pin

from the most recent

to the

down, from the most

most ancient, from the most

political to the

most carnal, from the most unitary to the most diverse, from the most evident most problematic. But if the English-speaking reader is

most

local to the

to the

to understand the scope

and

ambition of a project of which these three volumes can be seen as both a culmina-

moment to explain the slow process by which that project came into being. For the work is in no sense linear; each of its three segments has, like the stages of a rocket, its own internal logic and dynamic. tion and a synopsis,

I

must take

a

La Republique (1984) required only one volume, but La Nation (1986) took For the study of the Republic, illustrative

it

proved

three.

sufficient to look at a selection of sites

and

examples mainly from the founding years of the Third Republic. But

"the nation,"

whose conceptual underpinnings were not

one might expect, called for

more

a

as

thoroughly explored as

systematic, sweeping, and carefully structured

investigation.

The

first

aspects of

volume of La Nation deals with what might be

memory:

the long-term "legacy" of the

such as the anointment

phy"

to

ritual

monarchy

called the immaterial

embodied

as

in lieux

of Rheims; the key works that enabled "historiogra-

revamp the very foundations of

historical

memory; and,

finally, the

way in

which scholars and painters organized the "landscape" of France. The second vol-

ume

deals with the material, namely, "the territory" of France,

symbolic representation as a hexagon; "the

state,"

with

its

its

borders, and

its

monumental or symbolic

instruments, like Versailles; and "the patrimony," or legacy of historical

monu-

men who did most to preserve it, such as Prosper Merimee and Eugene VioUet-le-Duc. The third volume is concerned with the ideal, ments and

sites,

together with the

namely, the two fundamental ideas upon which the nation was

built: "glory,"

both

military and civilian, and "words," France being a country in which the relation

between language and the national idea

finds

on

literature

the other

on the one hand and

hand has always been

political

close.

power, the

state,

and

Here, for instance, one

"Verdun" alongside "La Coupole" (the familiar term for the Academic

Preface to the English-Language Edition

"The Louvre,"

Fran§aise), and

that residence of kings that

a temple of the

alongside "Classic Textbooks."

arts,

La Nation

After the publication of the three- volume edition of ject

became

came

temporary

to a

halt.

in 1986, the pro-

Following a lengthy period in which the country's

leading historians seemed to have rejected the nation as a framework for doing history,

numerous

signs pointed to a return to a

more nation-centered

history.

A num-

ber of "Histories of France" suddenly appeared. Indeed, Fernand Braudel himself, the leading light of the Annates Identite de la France (1986).

movement, seemed

To be

sure,

to

move in this direction with his

Les Lieux de memoire began with a different

premise and reflected a radically different point of view. Yet

seemed possible ness

to define the idea of a lieu de

by bringing

felt that in

"monuments

La

Tour de

its

had

fruitful-

to the

dead"

France par deux enfants,

la

I

order to go on, to treat such often-studied yet inevitable subjects as Joan

of Arc, the court, or the Eiffel Tower as lieux de memoire, take a

initially, it

memoire and demonstrate

together, for example, such subjects as

and the widely read children's text entitled

if,

more

theoretical approach. It

instead those objects

would have

to

it

would be necessary

was no longer enough simply be

constructed: in

to

to select objects;

each case one would have to

look beyond the historical reality to discover the symbolic reality and recover the

memory

that

it

sustained.

In fact, planning Les France forced atively

broad concept of

lieu de

me

memoire.

move from a relatively narrow to a relThe narrow approach had consisted in takto

ing actual memorials such as the Pantheon and showing closely related to such seemingly different objects as

emblems, and mottoes;

as well as to

such as the Academie Francaise, the Vendee,

and men such

how

these

were actually

museums, commemorations,

even more remote objects, including institutions

realities

such as borders, regions such as Alsace and

as Frangois Guizot,

who was

responsible for creating so

many of the instruments by means of which memories are perpetuated; and, tion, to

more

serve the

abstract notions such as that of a dynasty,

memory

of the high and mighty. Now,

emerged only with the

this

in addi-

which did so much

to pre-

broader conception, which

third part of the series, entitled Les France, involved a sys-

tematic analysis and dismantling of the most typical forms of French national

sym-

bolism and mythology, of the most expressive and revealing elements of "Frenchness." If the expression lieu de memoire must have an official definition,

should be

this:

a lieu de memoire

material in nature,

is

any

significant entity,

which by dint of human

will or the

whether material or non-

work of time

symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community French community). The narrow concept had emphasized the

exhume

significant sites, to identify the

memory, and then

As

most obvious and

to reveal the existence of invisible

it

has

become

a

(in this case, the

site:

the goal

was

to

crucial centers of national

bonds tying them

revealing and sweeping as this approach was, however,

it

all

together.

tended to create the

xvii

a

XVIII

PIERRE NORA impression that lieux de memoire constituted a simple objective category.

The broader

conception required by the planning of Les France placed the accent instead on

mem-

ory,

on the discovery and exploration of latent or hidden aspects of national memory

and

its

whole spectrum of sources, regardless of

method,

this natural extension

rise to a far

more ambitious

of the original notion of a

project: a history

This was of course a far more

This simple change of

their nature.

de memoire, in fact gave

lieu

of France through memory.

difficult project,

but also a tempting one.

Whatever "France" may be, neither science nor conscience can today show

it

to

be

the culmination of a single, unitary pattern of development or even the product of a variety of clearly identifiable deterministic processes. to

show

that France

an entirely symbolic

is

instead,

If,

were possible

it

then those deterministic

reality,

processes could be seen for what they are: namely, inexhaustible, hence justifying the plural of the

title,

Les France. Such a symbolic unity would

justify the discon-

certing approach of studying the subject in terms of independent symbolic entities

What began

and would clearly reveal the unifying

logic.

mental, almost playful attempt to track

down lieux de memoire would

infinitely

more

moment would could be made

exciting

new

vistas: a

as an empirical, experi-

thus open up

notion improvised for the needs of the

then become a category in terms of which contemporary history or perhaps even more than a category, a "concept"

intelligible,



thing quite rare in history. This might help to institute a symbolic history better suited than traditional history to the civic as well as intellectual needs of our time.

The French

case,

which

serve to demonstrate a

is

particularly apt for an exercise of this kind,

new approach

other national contexts.

It

to national history that

was this prospect that impelled me

solicit sixty-six additional essays, constituting three thick

sand pages each. These tions of

memory

sions, its real or

itself,

new volumes were conceived to

might prove useful

to

its

new volumes of

most

overall architecture as the

American

vital

I

its

divi-

symbolic fixations. Les France

and expressive component. That

framework and foundation

is

its

most com-

why I

chose

its

for putting together this

edition.

The problem of reducing the seven volumes of umes for the English-language version imposed which

a thou-

follow the natural articula-

(1992) can thus be seen as the culmination of the whole enterprise, its

in

go back to work and

which the historian can only approach by way of

imaginary continuities, and

plete achievement,

would then

the French edition to three vola

number of

difficult choices,

discussed at length with the American publisher. Sacrifices were inevitable.

But we were determined to come up with a well-designed, well-balanced structure,

one that makes sense rhetorically and ception of the work, fully embodies

that, far its

from watering down the original con-

method, principal

reach. Since each stage of the French edition reconsidered,

ened the work of the preceding

stages,

it

seemed natural

results,

and theoretical

expanded on, and deep-

to use the final stage of the

— Preface to the English-Language Edition

French edition as the basis for a work that would be

and perhaps somewhat

The major

first

less

The

coherent

dense than the French version.

of these English volumes,

Conflicts

and Divisions,

is

concerned with the

and geo-historical divisions that give French

political, religious,

structure.

just as intellectually

second. Traditions,

is

entirely devoted to roots.

It

memory

its

begins by explor-

ing the oldest social models whose legacy remains active today: the peasant model

with "the land," the Christian model with "the cathedral," and the monarchical

model with "the court."

It

continues with an in-depth analysis of a series of key

And

books, which in themselves contain a portrait of French identity.

it

concludes

with several "very French" specialties, things that foreign and French observers alike agree are distinctively

French. Finally, the third volume. Symbols, begins by

bringing together the most official of France 's national emblems: the tricolor the Marseillaise, Bastille Day.

from Lascaux to the

Eiffel

flag,

proceeds to survey a number of important places

It

Tower where the heart of France can truly be said to beat.

And it concludes with some of the most typical incarnations of the image of France, such as the republican motto, emblematic figures like Joan of Arc and Rene Descartes, and the "genius" of the French language.

In strictly quantitative terms, these Realms of

Lieux de memoire? But these volumes are all

in

which

I

have jokingly compared

times to a labyrinth or cathedral: a lieu de memoire.

it is

itself a

The English-language but one that

fied, purified structure,

the original edifice.

It is

represent a third of the

no sense "selected

plan has been modified in significant ways.

struction,

Memory

at

The French

excerpts."

text

is

a

set, at

monument that has become, is

a

microcosm.

It

over-

complex con-

times to a giant Erector

version

The

other

way,

in its

offers a simpli-

quite representative of the spirit and style of

is

ordered differently, but

it

accomplishes the same mission.

own distinctive way, an attempt to subvert as well as to exemplify and magnify that traditional genre known as the "history of France." Realms of Memory is

The archetype of

thus, in

that genre,

its

its

canonical and to this day unsurpassed model,

is

twenty-seven volume Histoire de France by Ernest Lavisse, a powerful attempt the beginning of the twentieth century to reknit the less,

at its



at

height

garment of history rent by the French Revolution and create one seam-

synthetic nation: France and the Republic.

Memory cal

when the Third Republic was

the

consists in the effort to

decompose

The

originality of

that unity, to dismantle

its

Realms of

chronologi-

and teleological continuity, and to scrutinize under the historian's microscope the

very building blocks out of which traditional representations of France were constructed.

Of

course those building blocks came in

of possible topics

The

is

infinite,

and exhaustiveness

is

many varieties, by

so that the range

definition impossible.

success of the enterprise depends entirely on the eloquence of the ensemble

and on the

skill

with which the task

through a prism, to

relate the

is

executed.

The

symbolic whole to

its

goal

is

to pass

French identity

symbolic fragments.

It is

one

xix

XX

PIERRE NORA thing to describe the prehistoric paintings on the walls of Lascaux and quite another to analyze, using the speech delivered

by the President of

eth anniversary of the cave's discovery,

memory

how

the Republic

on the

fifti-

archaeology provided France with a

extending back in time well beyond "our ancestors the Gauls."

It is

one

thing to recount the history of the Tour de France bicycle race since 1903, to revisit its

great moments,

its

heroes,

its

quite another to use the race to

reporters,

show how

and

its

gradual commercialization, and

that "democratic horse," the bicycle,

by

retracing, intially, the route

once followed by apprentice craftsmen as they toured

France to acquire the

of their trades, enabled ordinary people to learn the

skills

country's geography, to discover

its

plains and coasts, in the very year that the

learned geographer and historian Paul Vidal de La Blache described France 's geographical diversity in his celebrated Tableau de la geographie de la France, which

served as an introduction to Lavisse's Histoire de France. the

work of Marcel

text,

man widely acknowledged to be "the greatest writer and even to enumerate the many lieux de memoire that

Proust, the

of the twentieth century,"

appear in his

from the petite madeleine

to the

uneven paving stones

yard of the Guermantes to the steeples of Martinville; is

done here

for the first time,

how a writer who

erary talents

so

stood at

a Jew,

a

Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre

And

it is

it is

with

all

first

outside the dominant

in a

a social butterfly

whose lit-

Breton, Andre

the literary firma-

the zenith

the subjects treated in these volumes.

Readers are of course free

group the cards

to

in the court-

quite another to study, as

— homosexual, and were underestimated by Andre Gide and Andre of —came occupy

currents of French literature

ment.

one thing to analyze

It is

to

group these subjects

as they will, as

hand of poker. One can proceed chronologically,

to reveal a strong, centralizing continuity in the creation of

one might

for example,

which the nineteenth

century played a preponderant role, but beyond which we can make out several sed-

imentary layers corresponding to the key stages of nation-building, none of which has dropped out of

memory or lost its

symbolic effectiveness:

we go from

a "royal

memory" of the feudal age to a "state memory" of the absolutist monarchy to a "national memory" of the immediate post-Revolutionary period, and from there to a "citizen memory" of the republican schools and finally to the "patrimonial memory" of our age. Or one can group the subjects thematically to reveal how this type of symbolic history, which points up the links between the material base of social existence and the most elaborate productions of culture and thought, allows specialists in

such diverse fields as

art history, literary history, political history, the his-

tory of law, historical demography, and economic history to case the goal

is

work

together. In each

the same: to restore the original strangeness of the subject, to

show

how each element reflects the whole and is involved in the entire national identity. It also allows us to explore radically new subjects, which no linear thematic or chronological history

of France would have any reason to take into account, such as the

sol-

Preface to the English-Language Edition

dier Chauvin. its

way

Everybody

many

into

is

familiar with the term "chauvinism,"

languages other than French.

comes from the name of Nicolas Chauvin,

who

which has found

Some may know

a veteran

that the

word

of the wars of the Revolution

home to his native La Rochelle covered with wounds and medals, "to live out his days among his people," to borrow a celebrated line of Du Bellay's. But in fact Chauvin never existed. He was a myth forged by the and Empire,

allegedly returned

and chansonniers, or songsters, of the Restoration and July Monarchy, a

caricaturists

"remake" of the peasant-soldier of

Roman

whose ghost has returned countless times soldier," the heroic peasant soldier

Antiquity and Rousseauist ideology

in such diverse

forms

"unknown

as the

of Petainist ideology, and various figments of

When juxtaposed with the inevitable article on Verdun,

rural Catholic nationalism.

however, a detailed analysis of this myth takes us deep into the heart of French identity

and reveals a

distinctive feature

Such juxtapositions and

of the French tradition.

short-circuits,

which distinguish

this

work from other

works of history, may trouble or even shock some readers. The approach taken here

may seem to deny that a national dynamic of any kind exists, be it spiritual or material, nationalistic, patriotic, or revolutionary. To set an ironic, almost caricatural symbol such Verdun, to

as the Gallic

treat the

cock alongside the palace of Versailles or the battle of

French

taste for

gastronomy

in the

same analytic terms

as

Joan

of Arc or General de Gaulle, to focus the same kind of attention on the Bicentennial

of the French Revolution as on the Revolution

itself, is to

blur the distinctions

between the greatest and most brilliant accomplishments of French history and dition and the humblest instruments for fabricating that history

and that

tra-

tradition,

and to do so runs the risk of appearing to diminish those accomplishments. Therein, however,

lies

the very principle of this project,

whose ambition

is

to think

about the nation without nationalism and about France without any universalistic a priori;

whose

sists in

inspiration

is

almost ethnographic; and whose method therefore con-

shedding light on the construction of representations, the formation of his-

torical objects

over time.

Americans but by

its

It

incorporates a dimension of analysis familiar to

very nature long foreign to the

spirit

of French history: the

historiographic dimension.

Adopting a historiographical approach ficulties



political, scientific,

tary narrative

discipline,

not intended to sidestep the

moral, and civic



that a synthetic

would present in the France of today;

by current tendencies Ever since

is

history,

in history

field

approach or uni-

an approach dictated,

I

feel,

and historiography.

and particularly national

advances in the

it is

many dif-

history, first

emerged

as a scientific

have depended on methodological revisions. Such

revisions require historians to distinguish clearly

between what contemporaries

believe they have experienced or are experiencing and

what

critical

evaluation can

xxi

XXII

PIERRE NORA reveal about this is

to

mark

common fund

of beliefs and traditions. To make such distinctions

Moreover, every important advance

a discontinuity in the discipline.

in

the field of history has been associated with a major historical upheaval, as a result

new

of which historians have been led to explore

sources, methods, and interests.

Thus France 's traumatic defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 and subsequent

Germany

rivalry with tive,

led

French historians to develop a

not to say a civic and national duty: to

test the

new

categorical impera-

whole received national

tion against the archival evidence. This led to a sharp, clear distinction rative sources, as

which were viewed

between nar-

and archival sources, which were seen

proof positive. For the "methodical" or "positivist" school of historians,

a cmzca/ discontinuity. in

as suspect,

Then World War I, followed by the Crash of

which the celebrated Annates were founded

nomic trends and

statistics, particularly



1929



this

was

the year

revealed the importance of eco-

demographic statistics, and this new empha-

led to the discovery of a structural discontinuity. Historians

sis

tradi-

between individual and collective consciousness of

saw an opposition and the

historical experience

undeniable consequences of long-term deterministic processes, of medium-to-long

range historical cycles that affect

how groups

of people

live, love,

and

A clear

die.

expression of this kind of structural discontinuity can be seen in Braudel's famous durees,

which taught us

illusory.

As

that the apparent

this historical

homogeneity of

we

the

as well as scientifically,

can be from ourselves in space as well as time, and

became even more

familiar as a result of the

same period. Call

is

largely

process continued, the impact of decolonization and eco-

nomic "takeoff" made us aware, intimately ated

historical time

of

how

alien-

"inner distance"

this

growing influence of psychoanalysis

this third discontinuity ethnological. It

gave

in

rise to the history

of "mentalities" and to a new interest in marginal social groups, to the "colonized" within our

own

societies:

workers,

women,

Jews, provincials, and so on.

also led

It

to historical study of apparently atemporal topics, such as the body, climate, myths,

and

festivals, as well as

smells.

of seemingly

Meanwhile, along with the

in public opinion, images, tried to

The

trivial subjects,

rise

of the media,

and "events"

such as cooking, hygiene, and it

provoked a surge of

—new themes

survey in a three-volume work entitled Faire de discontinuity that

we

that Jacques

interest

Le Goff and

I

I'histoire?

are experiencing today can be seen as yet another of

history's continual self-revisions, an expansion

and deepening of the mechanism of

discontinuity but with one important difference: this time the entire French historical tradition

entered the age of historiographical discontinuity. This latest discontinuity

more

diffuse

because

it

We have

has been set aside and subjected to a fundamental rethinking.

is

and more radical than those that have gone before. More

reflects the

at

once

diffuse,

convergence of a number of phenomena that are themselves

complex and far-reaching: the

political

and national impact of de Gaulle's disap-

pearance, the consequences of the demise of the revolutionary idea, and the after-

Preface to the English-Language Edition

effects

of economic

converged

in the

crisis.

But also more

because these three phenomena

radical,

middle seventies to form a

new constellation that profoundly alters

our relationship to the past and to traditional forms of French national sentiment/

The new importance of memory and

the search for the lieux that

return to our collective heritage and focus inscribed in this

new

sciousness to another, this shift from one it

on the country's shattered

the

it,

identities, are

This transition from one type of national con-

constellation.

underlies this project and gives

embody

model of

the nation to another,

is

what

meaning.

A nation that was long agricultural, providentialist, universalist, imperialist, and state-centered has passed away, and in its

its

place has emerged a nation conscious of

diminished power, reshaped by European integration and internal "regionaliza-

tion," redefined finally, tested

by

the fading of the national-revolutionary equation of 1789, and,

by an

influx of immigrants not easily adaptable to the traditional

norms of "Frenchness." At the same time, however, France has been its

attachment to

national roots has been transformed. That attachment

its

longer based solely on history:

ened countryside, has rediscovered

now

it

lost traditions,

includes a deep consciousness of

wrecked ways of



life

its

its

In

from

a type

of history that

and yet quite new. Highly traditional because

this

new

it

is at

once highly

tra-

does not assume any par-

methodology and concentrates on subjects with which everyone

some ways the work might seem

or beyond, because

threat-

heritage.

its

historical turning point. It derives

ticular

no

is

very "identity." France

This polyphonic study of lieux de memoire is intended to be a response to

ditional

and

revitalized

it

calls for

to

is

familiar.

be a throwback to the era of positivist history

an almost literary treatment. But

at the

same time

it is

memory is history that has become critical of its own tools: history has entered its episte-

quite new, because the history of

through and through, and not

just

mological age.

There

are, to

put

it

strongly, three types of national history.

the creation of Michelet: his goal in

was

to integrate

all

The

first

type was

the material and spiritual facts

an organic whole, a living entity, to present France "as a soul and a person." Here,

post-Revolutionary romanticism achieved national history

is

typified

culmination.

by the work of Lavisse:

national tradition against the

monument

its

documents

his goal

was

to the age of republican positivism.

and

levels

to use the results

was

in the archives. Lavisse

The

's

type of

to test the entire

work

stands as a

third type of national history

was created by Braudel, who unfortunately died before goal

The second

his

work was complete: His

of the social sciences to characterize the various stages

of duree; to integrate the geography of Vidal de La Blache into history;

to extrapolate

from economic

cycles;

and to make Marxist concepts

adapt them to the French climate. This

is

the fruit of the Annales.

less rigid

and

xxiii

XXIV

PIERRE NORA These three types of national history are now joined by the present attempt to write a history in mukiple voices. is

a fourth,

The

exemphfied by

central point, the goal

to reinterpret the history of France in symbolic terms, to define France as a real-

ity that is entirely

symbolic, and thus to reject any definition that would reduce

phenomena of another order. Adopting such

a

view opens the way

to a

it

to

new kind of

history: a history less interested in causes than in effects; less interested in actions

remembered or even commemorated than

in the traces left

by those

actions and in

the interaction of those commemorations; less interested in events themselves than in the construction

of events over time, in the disappearance and reemergence of

their significations; less interested in

reuse and misuse,

than in the that

is

its

"what actually happened" than

in its perpetual

influence on successive presents; less interested in traditions

way in which

traditions are constituted

and passed on. In short, a history

neither a resurrection nor a reconstitution nor a reconstruction nor even a

representation but, in the strongest possible sense, a "rememoration" that is interested in

memory not as remembrance but as



a history

the overall structure of the

past within the present: history of the second degree. I

am not unaware of how ambitious this project is.

only such a history,

at

But experience has shown that

once scholarly and accessible to the broader public,

ble of responding to the needs of the

moment, of reconciling,

in

is

capa-

France and perhaps

elsewhere as well, the requirements of science with the demands of conscience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This English-language edition could not have existed without the enthusiasm, competence, and devoted

work of those

to

whom

I

have the pleasure of expressing

my

profound gratitude. I

am indebted above

cuss the project

all

to

Lawrence D. Kritzman. Every meeting we had

was highly agreeable and deeply

fruitful.

help in the difficult task of selecting texts. His initiative

to dis-

His advice was of great

was indispensable

in

mak-

ing the project a reality: his persuasive ardor gained the support of John Moore, the President and Director of Columbia University Press, to

whom I

offer

my deepest

thanks for his wilingness to embark on such a complex venture. Jennifer Crewe, the Press's Publisher for the Humanities, guided the project from start to finish.

Without her vast professional experience and

standing, this difficult enterprise

And

would never have reached

patient, tolerant its

under-

happy conclusion.

nothing would have been possible without Arthur Goldhammer, his exem-

plary talent for translation, his intimate and instinctive understanding of the project,

backed by knowledge of every subject, his intelligent and sensitive suggestions,

and, above

and

all,

his unflagging energy,

my friendship.

which earned

my

admiration and gratitude,

(

REALMS OF MEMORY

General Introduction:

Between Memory and History Pierre

Nora

The End

of

Acceleration

Memory-History history: the

of

metaphor needs

increasing rapidity into an irretrievable past. erally believed.

What was

left

The equilibrium between

of experience,

still

to

be unpacked. Things tumble with

They vanish from sight,

or so

the present and the past

lived in the

warmth of

is

it is

gen-

disrupted.

tradition, in the silence

of

custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, has been swept away by a surge of deeply historical sensibility.

and done with, that

on our

stantly

lips

Our consciousness is shaped by a sense that everything is over something long since begun is now complete. Memory is con-

because

Our curiosity about refuge,

which rift

is

it

no longer

the places in

which memory

associated with this specific

a sense

moment

of rupture with the past

has occurred in memory. But that

question of

its

exists.

is

rift

embodiment: there are

in

is

crystallized, in

which

it

finds

French history, a turning point

inextricably

has stirred

sites, lieux

bound up with

in

a sense that a

memory sufficiently to raise the de memoire, in which a residual

sense of continuity remains. Lieux de memoire exist because there are no longer any

milieux de memoire, settings in which

memory is a real part of everyday experience.

Think, for example, of the irrevocable breach marked by the disappearance of peasant culture, that quintessential repository of collective

memory whose vogue as

an object of historical study coincided with the heyday of industrial expansion. This collapse of a central

component of our memory

is

only one example

among many,

however. Globalization, democratization, and the advent of mass culture and the

media have turned the world upside down.

Among the new nations,

independence

has swept into history societies only recently roused from their ethnological slum-

— 2

PIERRE NORA bers by the rape of colonization. At the same time a sort of internal decolonization

has had a similar effect on ethnic minorities, families, and subcultures that until recently had amassed abundant reserves of

on memory

Societies based

memory but little in the way of history.

no more: the

are

ues from generation to generation



have ceased to function as they once

institutions that

once transmitted val-

churches, schools, families, governments did.

And

on memory have

ideologies based

ceased to function as well, ideologies that once smoothed the transition from past to future or indicated

what the future should

retain

from the

of reaction, progress, or even revolution. More than history has, with

once the legacy

past,

that,

whether

in the

name

our very perception of

much help from the media, expanded enormously, so that memory, of what people knew intimately, has been supplanted by the thin

film of current events.

The

"acceleration of history" thus brings us face to face with the

tance that separates real tive

and archaic

tory,

which

is

memory

societies



the kind of inviolate social

enormous

memory that primi-

embodied, and whose secret died with them

how modern

societies organize a past they are

dis-

—from

condemned

his-

to forget

because they are driven by change; the distance between an integrated memory, powerful, sweeping,

ory without

un— self-conscious, and

inherently present-minded



a

all-

mem-

a past that eternally recycles a heritage, relegating ancestral yesterdays

to the undifferentiated time of heroes, inceptions,

memory, which

is

nothing but history, a matter of

has steadily increased since

and even the duty

sifting

now

This uprooting of memory,

its

if

of

the right, the capacity,

reached the breaking point.

eradication

has had the effect of a revelation, as

—and our form

and sorting. This distance

modern man accorded himself

to change. It has

calling into question

and myth

by

the conquering force of history,

an ancient bond of identity had been broken,

something once taken for granted: the close

fit

between history

and memory. French and English suffer from an often-remarked deficiency: there

is

only one word to denote both lived history and the intellectual operation that makes it

intelligible

Historic). in

our

If

we still

(German, on the other hand, distinguishes between Geschichte and

Here we

lives are

see the

profound truth of

this linguistic deficiency: the

of the same nature as the changes

dwelled

among our memories,

there

in the

exist,

have been swept away by history. Every one of our

would be experienced,

in

represent our lives.

would be no need

embodying them. Lieux de memoire would not

ian,

way we

because

acts,

changes

to consecrate sites

memory would

down to

the

not

most quotid-

an intimate identification of act and meaning, as a

reli-

gious repetition of sempiternal practice. With the appearance of "the trace," of distance and mediation, however, history.

ple of

Think of

we leave the realm of true memory and enter that of

the Jews faithfully observing their traditional ritual: as the "peo-

memory," history was no concern of

world obliged them to discover

a

theirs until

need for historians.

exposure to the modern

Between Memory and History

Memory and history, opposed. Memory is hfe,

from being synonymous, are thus

far

always embodied

in

many

and as such

in living societies

respects

in

perma-

nent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious

of the distortions to which

it is

subject, vulnerable in various

ways

to appropriation

and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long periods only to be suddenly reawakened. History, on the other hand,

what

lematic and incomplete, of the present, a past.

bond tying us

Memory, being

those facts that suit

a

it.

is

no

is

the reconstruction, always prob-

Memory

longer.

is

always a phenomenon of

to the eternal present; history

is

a representation of the

phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only

It

thrives

eral impressions or specific

on vague, telescoping reminiscences, on hazy gen-

symbolic

vulnerable to transferences, screen

details. It is

memories, censorings, and projections of

all

kinds. History, being an intellectual,

nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and critical discourse.

remembrance into prose.

in a sacred context. History ferrets

Memory wells up from groups

that

Maurice Halbwachs observed, that there are as that

memory is by nature

it

it

out;

it

Memory

turns whatever

welds together, which

is

it

situates

touches

to say, as

many memories as there are

groups,

multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual.

By

contrast, history belongs to

sal

vocation.

everyone and to no one and therefore has a univer-

Memory is rooted in the concrete:

in space, gesture, image,

and object.

History dwells exclusively on temporal continuities, on changes in things and in the relations

among

things.

Memory is

At the heart of history

Memory is it,

is

a criticism destructive

is

always

to repress

it.

History divests the lived past of

presumably a

final, definitive

of the historian,

is

sign of history

to

demolish

What looms on

the

of a completely historicized world,

disenchantment.

The thrust of history, the ambition it.

A gener-

would no doubt preserve some museums, medallions, and

as materials necessary for

makes them, for

legitimacy.

is

not to exalt what actually happened but to annihilate

alized critical history

monuments

at the limit

its

relative.

of spontaneous memory.

always suspect in the eyes of history, whose true mission

horizon of every historical society, is

an absolute, while history

its

own work but would

drain them of what

us, lieiix de memoire. Ultimately, a society living

would not need

to attach

its

memory to

wholly under the

specific sites

any more than

traditional societies do.

Perhaps the most tangible sign of the

emergence of

split

a history of history, the

between history and memory has been the

awakening (quite recent

in

France) of a his-

toriographical consciousness. History, especially the history of France 's develop-

ment

as a nation, has

been our most powerful collective

tradition,

our milieu de

memoire par excellence.

From

modern

histo-

rians of "total" history,

France 's entire historical tradition has developed as a

disci-

plined exercise of the

the chroniclers of the Middle

Ages

to

mnemonic faculty, an instinctive delving into memory in order

3

4

PIERRE NORA to reconstruct the past seamlessly

and

in its entirety. Surely

historians since Froissart has felt that he

memory. Commynes had no notion

none of the great French

was representing only a part of

that

the national

he was recording only dynastic memories,

or La Popeliniere only "French" memories, or Bossuet only memories of the "most Christian monarchy," or Voltaire only memories of the progress of the

human race,

or Michelet only memories of "the people," or Lavisse only memories of the nation.

On the contrary, his predecessors

each of these historians was convinced that his task was to correct

by making memory more

explanation of the past.

The

factual,

comprehensive, and useful as an

with which history has equipped

scientific arsenal

over the past century has done nothing but reinforce cal

method whose purpose

torical

to establish true

is

method has been intended

this

view of history

as a criti-

memory. Every major revision of

bare the subversion from within of memory-history by

by nature

critical,

and

all

critical history. All

when

history begins to write

its

own

damental change takes place. Historiography begins when history of uncovering that of

memory and

in itself

which

seeking to free

is

it

lays

history

denounce the supposedly fraudulent mytholo-

historians

gies of their predecessors. But

his-

broaden the base of collective memory.

to

In a country like France, the history of history cannot be innocent, because

is

itself

not history, of showing

from memory's

itself

history, a fun-

sets itself the task

itself to

be the victim

grip. In countries

where

his-

tory has not assumed the same didactic role in forming the national consciousness, the history of history need not burden itself with such polemical content. For

exam-

United States, a country of plural memories and diverse traditions, his-

ple, in the

toriographical reflection has long been part of the discipline. Different interpretations of the

American Revolution or the

Civil

War may

involve high stakes but do

not threaten to undermine the American tradition because, in a sense, there

such thing, trast,

or, if there

historiography

iconoclastic and irreverent.

defined objects in the tradition

book and

like the petit Lavisse

how



no

not primarily a historical construct. In France, by con-

is, it is

is

is



a

key

battle

in order to take

It

seizes

on the most

such as Bouvines or a standard text-

them

apart, to

show how they function

they came to be. In so doing, historiography sows doubt;

of a knife between the heartwood of

memory and

study the historiography of the French Revolution,

we no

and interpretations, we indicate that

clearly

it

runs the blade

the bark of history.

when we

When we

reconstruct

longer identify fully with

its

its

myths

heritage.

When we question a tradition, however venerable, we separate ourselves from it to a degree.

Nor

is

the history of history concerned solely with the

ments of the national

tradition. History in general has

conceptual and material resources, tribution,

its

summating of history.

origins and tradition;

its

divorce from

begun

most sacred

to question

its

ele-

own

production processes and social means of dis-

its

has thus entered the historiographic age, con-

it

memory

—which

in turn

has become a possible object

Between Memory and History

At one time, the Third Republic seemed

to

draw together and

crystallize,

through history and around the concept of "the nation," one tradition of French

memory,

a tradition that runs, if

we

set the

chronological limits broadly, from

Augustin Thierry's Lettres sur Vhistoire de France (1827) to Charles Seignobos's Histoire sincere de la nation frangaise (1933).

Throughout

and the nation enjoyed an unusually intimate communion,

ory,

plementarity at every level



scientific

mem-

this period, history,

a symbiotic

and pedagogical, theoretical and

com-

practical.

The nationalistic definition of the present cried out for justification through a highlighting of the past. Yet that present had been made tenuous by the trauma of the Revolution, which forced a wholesale reevaluation of the monarchical past; and

was made

still

more tenuous by

—which had German army—

for France to the

which made

it

even more urgent

German science and pedagogy even more than develop its own archival scholarship and scholarly insti-

lost

to

out to

tutions for the transmission of as priests,

the defeat of 1870,

memory.

Historians, speaking half as soldiers, half

bore the burden of responsibility on behalf of the nation. Their tone

remarkable: witness, for instance, Gabriel Monod's editorial in the

Revue

it

historique (1876), in

which he saw no reason not

to look

is

of the

first issue

forward "henceforth

to painstaking, methodical, collaborative scientific investigation" leading in a "discreet, confident

race." This text itivist

history

manner

to the

grandeur of the fatherland as well

and a hundred others

like

it

as the

human

make one wonder how the idea that pos-

was not cumulative ever gained

credibility.

Indeed, in the teleological

perspective of the nation, the political, the military, the biographical, and the diplo-

matic were

all pillars

Ravaillac, the

were

Day

of continuity.

The

defeat at Agincourt, the dagger of

of Dupes, and the secret clauses of the Treaty of Westphalia

included in a scrupulous accounting. Erudition of the most assiduous kind

all

defined the reserve of capital that constituted the nation by adding a detail here, taking

away another

from France's roots

there.

in

This "memorial space" possessed a powerful unity:

Greek and Roman antiquity to her colonial empire under the

Third Republic the distance was no greater than that between the high-level scholarship that annexed

new conquests

to the national heritage

and the textbooks that

imposed the new dogma. History was holy because the nation was holy. The nation

became

the vehicle that allowed French

memory

to

remain standing on

its

sancti-

fied foundation.

Why did mined

this synthesis

in the crisis

of the 1930s, when the

eventually the old couple

same time, and

break down.'' Because

for the

was supplanted by

same reasons,

ory,

was transformed

was

particularly remarkable.

kinds of

state

history,

a

its

sacred character was under-

was divorced from

new

the nation and

At

one: state and society.

which had become

a tradition of

the

mem-

into social self-understanding. In France, this transformation

memory and even

The new social

history

was

able to shed light

on many

to transform itself into a laboratory for investigating

5

6

PIERRE NORA past mentalities. But

when

jective force as well as

its

shed

it

its

identification with the nation,

it

lost its sub-

pedagogical mission, the transmission of values, as the

current educational crisis attests.

The

nation

The

that defines the collective consciousness.

no longer

is

the unifying

framework

definition of the nation ceased to be

an issue, and peace, prosperity, and France 's diminished status as a world power did

Once

the rest.

by

society had supplanted the nation, legitimation

the past, hence

by

gave way to legitimation by the future. The past was something one could

history,

only study and venerate, and the nation something one could only serve, but the future

terms

is



something for which the groundwork has

nation, history,

memory



be

laid.

Thus

the three

regained their autonomy: the nation ceased to

be a cause and became a given; history became a a purely private

to

social science;

phenomenon. The memory-nation was thus

and

memory became

the last incarnation of

memory-history.

The study of lieux de memoire define

thus

importance and significance.

its

French historians have begun to ical:

lies at

reflect

memory.

the end of a tradition of

the intersection of

One of

these

on history

The

Places, lieux de memoire,

we

used to

other

is

histor-

become important

live

on terms of

inti-

has been depleted, only to be replaced by a reconstructed history. Historical

work has achieved an unprecedented depth, while at the same time

the legacy of the

obeys an internal dynamic: the old

past has

been consolidated.

political

and

intellectual

ray. It is

still

too substantial to ignore entirely yet too flimsy to be of

its

that

purely historiographical:

as a practice.

even as the vast fund of memories among which

macy

is

two developments

Critical discourse

framework

that

most powerful symbols have any

once shaped

life left in

historical research is in disar-

much use; only

them. Taken together, these two

developments, one historical, the other historiographical, force us to reexamine

both the basic tools of historical research and the basic symbols that define our

memory:

the archives and the tricolor; libraries and festivals; dictionaries and the

Pantheon; museums and the Arc de Triomphe; the Dictionnaire Larousse and the

Wall of the Federes (where defenders of the Paris

French

Army in

Commune were massacred by the

1871).

Lieux de memoire are fundamentally vestiges, the ultimate embodiments of

commemorative consciousness

memory,

cries out for

ual. It is a

tained

it.

The

having renounced

notion has emerged because society has banished

rit-

notion produced, defined, established, constructed, decreed, and main-

by the

artifice

and desire of a society fundamentally absorbed by

transformation and renewal. old,

that survives in a history which,

a

By its very nature

youth over old age, the future over the

that society values the

past.

Museums,

collections, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions,

private associations



its

own

new over the

archives, cemeteries,

monuments,

sanctuaries,

these are relics of another era, illusions of eternity. That

is

Between Memory and History

what makes these pious undertakings seem less.

They

sad and

like exercises in nostalgia,

are the rituals of a ritual-less society; fleeting incursions of the sacred

into a disenchanted world; vestiges of parochial loyalties in a society that

effacing

all

parochialisms; de facto differentiations in a society that levels

of recognition and group

ple; signs

affiliation in a society that tends to

only individuals, assumed to be equal

Lieux de memoire

memory, hence tions,

life-

that

if

we must create

busily

on princirecognize

not identical.

of a sense that there

arise out

is

archives,

is

mark

no such thing

spontaneous

as

anniversaries, organize celebra-

pronounce eulogies, and authenticate documents because such things no

longer happen as a matter of course. enclaves as preserves of true of

all

memory

to

When

certain minorities create protected

be jealously safeguarded, they reveal what

lieux de memoire: that without

commemorative

soon sweep them away. These bastions buttress our

vigilance, history

but

identities,

defended were not threatened, there would be no need for them. brances they protect were truly living presences in our Conversely,

if

lives,

is

would

what they

if

If the

remem-

they would be useless.

upon memories in order to distort and transform

history did not seize

them, to mold them or turn them to stone, they would not turn into lieux de memoire,

which emerge

in

two

stages:

tory, then returned to left

moments of

—no

it

history are plucked out of the flow of his-

longer quite alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells

on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.

Take, for example, "La Marseillaise" (France's national anthem) or the

ments to the dead of World War

I

found

in

most French

villages. In 1790, the

Fourteenth of July (Bastille Day) both was and was not already a

When Bastille Day was made a national holiday in memoire, but the republican

then very

spirit,

1880,

much

alive,

than that: a genuine return to the source. But what does

our national

memory

we have no legacy,

The memory we

further use for the sacred. are, yet at the

in

We

assess.

to

be

feel a visceral

same time we

which we must now coolly

memory

it

mean

today.''

lieujc

something more

The

loss

of

with eyes that are it is

no longer

and for the time being

attachment to that which estranged from this

have washed up from a sea of

which we no longer dwell: they are partly

partly affective and sentimental.

so,

feel historically

These

it

memoire.

official lieu de

made

see tears at us, yet

what was once sacred rapidly ceased

made us what we

it

lieu de

became an

as a living presence forces us to look at

neither naive nor indifferent. entirely ours:

it

monu-

official

and

institutional,

We all recognize them without feeling any sense of

unanimity about them. The old symbols no longer arouse militant conviction or passionate participation, but the

swung over

rial

has

has

become

a

world

life

has not entirely gone out of them.

into the historical. in

A world

which our relation

Totemic history has become

to

that

longer celebrate the nation, but

we

once contained our ancestors

what made us

critical history: it is the

The memo-

is

merely contingent.

age of lieux de memoire.

study the nation's celebrations.

We no

7

8

PIERRE NORA

Memory Grasped what we

by History

memory today is therefore not memory but already history. The socalled rekindling of memory is actually its final flicker as it is consumed by history's flames. The need for memory is a need for history. Of course, it is impossible to do without the word, but when we use it, we should call

be aware of the difference between true memory, which today subsists only tures

and

habits,

unspoken

craft traditions, intimate physical

reminiscences, and spontaneous reflexes, and

through history, which

is

memory

knowledge, ingrained

transformed by

practically the opposite: willful

in ges-

its

passage

and deliberate, experi-

enced as a duty rather than as spontaneous; psychological, individual and subjective, rather

the

than social, collective, and all-embracing.

immediate form of

first,

memory

How did the transition from

to the second, indirect

form take

place.''

The

way to find out is to look at the outcome of this recent metamorphosis. Modern memory is first of all archival. It relies entirely on the specificity of the

best

trace, the materiality

of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the

of the image. The process that began with writing has reached high-fidelity recording.

its

culmination in

The less memory is experienced from within,

the greater

need for external props and tangible reminders of that which no longer qua

memory

—hence

the obsession with the archive that

visibility

its

exists except

marks an age and

in

which

we attempt to preserve not only all of the past but all of the present as well. The fear that everything

is

cise significance

on the verge of disappearing, coupled with anxiety about the pre-

of the present and uncertainty about the future, invests even the

humblest testimony, the most modest vestige, with the dignity of being potentially

memorable. Have we not often enough deplored the

loss or destruction

of what

know those who came before us, and so wish to avoid a similar reproach from those who will come after.'' Remembering has become a matter of meticulously minute reconstruction. Memory has begun to keep records: delmight have enabled us to

egating the responsibility for remembering to the archive,

snake deposits

its

it

deposits

its

signs as the

shed skin. In the past, collectors, scholars, and monks devoted

their lives to

amassing documents on the fringes of a society that was oblivious of

them and of

a history that

seized fruits

on of

this treasure trove

its

Now that

was written without and used

it

their aid. Later,

as the basis of

its

memory-history

work, disseminating the

labors through a myriad of social institutions tailored to the purpose.

historians have

abandoned the

cult

of the document, society as a whole

What we call memory is in fact a gigantic and breathtaking effort to store the material vestiges of what we has acquired the religion of preservation and archivalization.

cannot possibly remember, thereby amassing an unfathomable collection of things

we might someday need to recall. Leibniz's "paper memory" has become an institution in its own right, comprising museums, libraries, depositories, documenthat

Between Memory and History

tation centers,

and databases. Specialists estimate that the number of documents

stored in public archives alone has multiplied a thousandfold in just a few decades.

No previous epoch ever stocked archives at such a prodigious rate: modern society we now possess unprecedented means for reproducing and preserving documents, but more than that, we feel a superstitious respect and veneration for the trace. As traditional memory has vanished, we have felt called upon to accumulate fragments, reports, documents, spews out greater volumes of paper than ever before, and

images, and speeches

—any

tangible sign of

might some day be subpoenaed tory.

The

trace negates the sacred but retains

everything in archives instead.

we

suffer



as if this

expanding dossier

who knows what tribunal of hisaura. We cannot know in advance

as evidence before

what should be remembered, hence we

reason:

what was

its

from destroying anything and put

refrain

The realm of

the

memorable has expanded without

from hypertrophy of memory, which

is

inextricably intertwined

with our sense of memory's loss and concomitant institutionalization. Old-fashioned professional archivists,

who

used to be accused of suffering from a mania to

preserve, have switched roles in a curious als that

now

fill

knew

days, there the state.

it

insist that

who produce

was the

memory embodied

trick

in material

of the trade.

form has expanded

has also been copied, decentralized, and democratized. In the old

were three main sources of

Nowadays who does not

archives: the great families, the church,

feel called

upon

was minor

at best,

lawyers and anyone else the testimony, the

The

more

and

to record his reminiscences or

write his memoirs.'' Everyone has gotten into the act: not just people history

the materi-

everything be preserved, whereas the

that controlled destruction

In just a few years, then, prodigiously;

those

our archives. Today's archivists are trained by private firms and

government bureaucracies, which older archivists

way with

whose

role in

but also the relatives of such people and their doctors and

who happened to be standing about. The less extraordinary aptly

imperative of the age

it is

is

taken to illustrate the average mentality.

not only to keep everything, to preserve every sign

when we are not quite sure what it is we are remembering), but also to fill archives. The French social security archives can serve as an object lesson: they con(even

tain all

a

an unimaginable mass of documents, some two hundred linear miles of paper

told. If

explored with the aid of a computer, these documents might well provide

compendium of French

society, a

summa of

matters ranging from diets to lifestyles, just to

preserve

let

choices. Archive as

all

the

normal and the pathological

classified

in

by region and occupation. But

alone exploit this massive material requires drastic, unfeasible

much

as

you

like:

something

will

always be

left out.

Or, to take

another revealing case, consider the recent proliferation of oral histories in France.

Across the country there are lecting

now more

what Philippe Joutard has

than three hundred teams employed in col-

called "the voices that

come

to us

from the

Well and good. But think for a moment: these are not ordinary archives.

It

past."

takes

9

lO

PIERRE NORA thirty-six

hours of work to produce

sense only ditions

just

if listened to in their entirety;

one hour of tape, and the recordings make

Under

they cannot be sampled.

these con-

one has to ask what possible purpose they might serve. Whose will to remem-

ber do they ultimately

reflect, that

of the interviewer or that of the interviewee.-^ The

sheer mass of material changes the significance and status of the archive.

memory but

longer a more or less intentional record of actual culated compilation of a vanished

ory

which

to actual experience,

is

memory.

It

criminate filling of archives

a

is

adds a secondary or prosthetic

often altered

news broadcasts on

(witness the effect of live

by

practice,

memory comes

the events being covered).

troublesome by-product of the

we internalize

to history requires

The

it

as

to us

from without. Because

new

historical imperative has reached well torians.

Those who used

to

be

left

its

identity

beyond the limited

out of the

memindis-

consciousness,

memory.

no longer

it is

a social

memory

by dredging up its past.

remember makes every man his own

resulting obligation to

The

an individual constraint. The transition from

every social group to redefine

cal-

the very fact of being recorded

the clearest expression yet of the "terroristic" effect of historicized

Historicized

and

a deliberate

no

It is

circle

historian.

Thus

the

of professional hisnot the only ones

official histories are

obsessed with recovering their buried pasts. Practically every organized social group, and not just the intellectual or educated, has followed the lead of the ethnic minorities in seeking their in

own

roots and identities. There

which some member has not sought

fully as possible.

nomenon:

The proliferation of

the

most

hardly a family today

hidden ancestral past as

genealogical research

is

a striking recent phe-

the annual report of the Archives Nationales for 1982 reports that 43 per-

cent of those engaged in archival 38 percent

to reconstruct the

is

work were doing genealogical

were doing academic work of some kind). Another

significant histories of biology, physics, medicine,

research (whereas

striking fact

is

that

and music have been

written not by professional historians but by biologists, physicists, physicians, and

musicians. Educators themselves have assumed responsibility for the history of

education from "phys ed" to the teaching of philosophy. lectual disciplines

ing into

its

have come under attack, each has sought to

origins. Sociology has

anthropology has explored administrators.

Even

its

past

gone

As

in search

of

its

the established inteljustify itself

to colonial

attempted to trace the origins of

for history, the positivist approach, long since

historians, has discovered a

by delv-

founding fathers, while

from sixteenth-century chroniclers

literary criticism has

gories and traditions.

by professional

As

new-found popularity

its

cate-

abandoned

as a result of this

The demise of memory-history has multiplied the number of private memories demanding their own individual histories. The commandment of the hour is thus "Thou shalt remember." It is the self that urgently

felt

need to resurrect the

remembers, and what

it

past.

remembers

is itself,

hence the

historical transformation

of

Between Memory and History

memory has

led to a preoccupation with individual psychology.

ena are closely related



The two phenom-

so closely that one can hardly refrain from pointing out

that they coincide exactly in time.

At

the end of the last century,

when

rural society

memory became

collapsed and age-old social equilibria were disrupted,

a central

issue in philosophical thinking with Bergson, in psychological thinking with Freud,

and

in autobiographical literature

French image of of

with Proust.

The disintegration of the traditional

memory as something rooted in the soil and the sudden emergence

memory as something central

to individual identity

were

like

two

sides of a sin-

gle coin, as well as the beginning of a process that has today reached an explosive

We owe

stage.

to

Freud and Proust those two intimate yet universal lieux de

memoire, the primal scene and the celebrated petite madeleine. This transformation

of

memory marks a

decisive shift

from the

from the concrete message

social to the individual,

from repetition to remembrance. Memory became psychologization, the self

Ultimately,

memory

now

stands in a

from the

historical to the psychological,

new

to

its

subjective representation,

a private affair.

relation to

As a result of this

memory and

the past.

constrains the behavior of individuals, and individuals

By defining the relation to the past, it shapes the future. The atomization of memory (as collective memory is transformed into private memory) imposes a duty alone.

to

remember on each

individual. This "law of

remembrance" has great coercive

force: for the individual, the discovery

of roots, of "belonging" to some group,

becomes the source of

and hidden meaning. Belonging,

becomes

a total

be present it.

The

identity, its true

commitment.

at all unless

some

less collective the

When memory ceases to be

isolated individual decides to

experience of

memory is,

uals to bear the burden, as if an inner voice

omnipresent,

it

felt a

is

perhaps most evident

among

the greater the need for individ-

were needed

to

each Corsican "You

tell

nonpracticing Jews,

need in recent years to explore memories of the Jewish

dition,

whose

history

is its

memory,

to

be Jewish

ceases to

assume responsibility for

must be Corsican" and each Breton "You must be Breton." The force of

nomenon

in turn,

is

to

this

phe-

many of whom have

past. In the

Jewish

tra-

remember being Jewish.

If

memory inexorably asserts its claim over a person's whole being. What kind of memory is this.'' In a sense, it is memory of memory itself. The psychologization of memory makes each individual feel that his or her salvation truly internalized, such a

ultimately depends

Thus

far

we have

on discharging

a debt that can never

be repaid.

explored two types of memory: archival

an individual duty.

To complete

memory we must add

this portrait

a third type: alienated

memory and memory as

of the modern metamorphosis of

memory.

When we

our relation to the past by studying significant historical works, historical

knowledge

relation with the past,

is it

not

at all like

memory:

try to puzzle out

we discover that our

instead of placing us in a continuous

creates a sense of discontinuity.

Of course for the memory-

12

PIERRE NORA history of an earlier time, the past

was not yet

of remembrance. In a sense, the present its

presentness conjured

itself

between yesterday and today, opening up

and

was seen

certainty of

From

this

era, progress

knowing

came

which gave

a

to

however;

and decadence, both

whom and

to

wedge had

and an

a "before"

as implying a radical difference,

modern

updated past,

as a retrieved,

exist, a thin

it

to inserted

This distance

"after."

was rather a gap,

The two

as such called for a restoration of continuity.

in the

could be revived by an effort

it

away by being grafted onto and rooted in what went before.

True, in order for a sense of "pastness" to

was not seen

over:

a hiatus,

great themes of history

reflect this cult

what we are indebted

of continuity,

this

what we

are.

for being

the important notion of "origins," that secularized version of

French society

in the process

of nationalist secularization

its

myth

idea of

and need for the sacred. The grander France 's origins were, the more they magnified the

grandeur of the French. Through the past we venerated ourselves.

This connection has been severed. Just as the future manipulable, well-marked extension of the present



—once

has

have we gone from the idea of a visible past to one of an rooted past to a past that tory that

we

we experience as

a visible, predictable,

come

to

seem

invisible, so

from

invisible past;

a radical break in continuity;

a firmly

from

a his-

we believed lay in the continuity of some sort of memory to a memory that

think of as projected onto the discontinuity of history.

We

no longer speak of

"origins" but rather of "inceptions." Given to us as radically other, the past

world from which we are fundamentally cut

memory when we It is

a mistake,

off.

We

how alienated from it we

discover

is

a

discover the truth about our

are.

however, to think that our sense of discontinuity is somehow vague

or ambiguous, a gap in the night. Paradoxically, distance requires rapprochement to counteract

its

for the feel of

effects

and give

it

emotional resonance. Never have

mud on our boots, for the terror that the devil inspired in the year looo,

or for the stench of an eighteenth-century

city.

But such hallucinatory re-creations of

the past are conceivable only in terms of discontinuity. relation to the past

is

it.

tion of light and

purposes.

Now

was

Resurrection,

shadow

that

to resurrect the past, the

new ideal is to create a

no matter how complete, implied

a careful manipula-

we no

longer have a single explanatory principle,

At

the

same time, nothing

is

whose children we were; now we

now

are the children of

we

find our-

too humble, improba-

or inaccessible to aspire to the dignity of historical mystery.

past can

rep-

to create an illusion of perspective with an eye to present

selves in a fragmented universe. ble,

The whole dynamic of our

shaped by the subtle interplay between the inaccessible and the

nonexistent. If the old ideal resentation of

we longed more

We

used to

know

no one and everyone. Since the

be constructed out of virtually anything, and no one knows what

tomorrow's past

will hold,

our anxious uncertainty turns everything into a "trace," a

potential piece of evidence, a taint of history with

cence of everything

which we contaminate the inno-

we touch. When we look at the past, we take violent possession

— Between Memory and History

of what

we know

no longer ours. Since we no longer know what

is

we

are looking

we have had to narrow our focus. Broad, panoramic views are no longer admissible; we eschew fragments as well as frescoes. Instead, we spotlight selected elements of the past, concentrating on "representative samples." Our memory is intensely for,

retinal,

powerfully televisual.

historical writing has to



The much-touted

"return of the narrative" in recent

be linked to the ubiquity of visual images and film in con-

new narrative is very different from traditional narrative, which was episodic and self-contained. Our scrupulous respect for archival documents (which we examine for ourselves, with our own eyes) and our new-found interest in oral history (in which we quote participants directly and listen to the sound of their own voices) are surely linked to the way in which live news broadcasts have temporary culture

even

if this

accustomed us to a certain immediacy.

we want to

more savory existence, and we read biographies

return to a slower-paced,

of ordinary people as

We study the everyday life of the past because

say that the "masses" can never be understood simply by,

if to

And from countless "microhistories" we take shards of the past and try to glue them together, in the hope that the history we reconstruct might seem more like the history we experience. One might try to sum all this up by as

it

were, measuring their mass.

coining a term like "mirror-memory," but the problem identical copies

we

of ourselves, whereas what

way

of figuring out what

Strangely, this

which the

dered otiose



in society clearly defined:

way to the

to

tion and

its

make

fate.

much by

and,

We seek not our ori-

the practice of history

history as

by

the historian.

Once upon a time his role was simple, his place

he was the spokesman for the past and the guide

future.

As such,

his individual personality

than the service he rendered: scholarship was to be all



the repository of the secrets of the present. Indeed, this magical

Consider the historian's strange

bridge, an

difference

toward the future might have been thought to have ren-

transformation has been accomplished not so

pointed the

identity.

is

we are from what we are no longer.

alchemy of essences has helped

relentless drive

that mirrors reflect only

seek in history

through difference, a sudden revelation of our elusive gins but a

is

worn

who

was less important

lightly, to serve

only as a

but imperceptible link between the physical mass of the documenta-

inscription in

obsession with objectivity.

memory With

—whose

absence, one might say, produced an

the disintegration of memory-history, however, a

new kind of historian has emerged, a historian prepared, unlike his predecessors, to avow his close, intimate, and personal ties to his subject. Indeed, he is ready to proclaim the closeness of his relationship to the past, to deepen obstacle to understanding but as a tool. His jectivity, creativity,

and capacity

work

to re-create.

is

entirely

He performs

taking something lifeless and meaningless and investing

Imagine

a society

it

it,

to treat

not as an

dependent on

his sub-

a metabolic function,

with

life

it

and meaning.

would be

inca-

would content

itself

wholly preoccupied with the here and now:

pable of producing historians. Living entirely for the future,

it

it

13

14

PIERRE NORA with mechanical devices for recording and cataloging the present while indefinitely

postponing the task of understanding ferent:

has changed so radically that

it

with understanding itself

historically.

Our society is quite difmemory and become obsessed

itself to a later day. it

has lost

its

This accounts for the increasingly central role

of the historian: he prevents history from being merely history.

Thus we compensate close-up and

by trying

for our alienated perspective

And

artificial hyper-reality.

to

view the past

our perception of the past changes,

as

in

we

discover reasons to look again at traditional subjects that once seemed to hold no further interest, the commonplaces, as

were, of our national memory.

it

we grew up

ourselves back on the doorstep of the house

uninhabited and

we

see

them

work

to

them

for.''

all

in a

be done

but unrecognizable.

new is

light.

different.

The

We

"memory man."

of

the old homestead

in:

workshop

is still

where

it

used to be, but the

recognize familiar rooms, but what are

memory. And so

Instead, he has

become,

in his

very being, a

to use is

a

memoire.

lieu de

Memory: Another History



senses: material, symbolic, a lieu de

and functional.

memoire only

if

textbook, will, or veterans' group de memoire only

when

minute of

it

becomes

silence,

time, thus concentrating material, the symbolic,

An

places, sites, causes

archive

which might seem

memory. These

to

strictly



symbolic

material in a demographic sense; functional tallized in generations

tion, since the

a

always coexist.

What

by hypothesis,

since

A

a lieu

commemo-

act, disrupts

embodied memory

three aspects of

and the functional

becomes

The observance of

be a

three

-in

with a symbolic aura.

it

a purely functional object that

part of a ritual.



a purely material site that

is

imagination invests is

simple and

artificial,

could be more abstract than the notion of a historical generation.-*

lieu de



the

memoire

A generation is

memories are crys-

and passed on from one to another; and symbolic by defini-

term "generation" implies that the experience of

people can be used to characterize a its

we

no longer be

the historian can

ambiguous, concrete and abstract, they are lieux

rative

is

The old family heirlooms are still there, but

Lieux de memoire are complex things. At once natural and

becomes

find

Historiography has entered the epistemological age; the era of identity

over. History has confiscated

Realms

old

We

much

larger

number who

a small

number of

did not participate in

central event or events.

Lieux de memoire are created by the interaction between interaction resulting in a mutual overdetermination.

present

initially.

Without

A

memory and history,

will to

this criterion, the definition

remember must be

would be so broad

encompass almost any object worthy of remembrance. Think back rules of historical criticism: historians at

"direct sources" (such as laws

an

to the

as to

good old

one time distinguished carefully between

and works of

art,

things intentionally produced

by

a

Between Memory and Histor/

society in full

knowledge

(testimony unwittingly intent to

Yet

would be reproduced) and

that they

left



history



time and change

did not intervene,

The

hybrid places, mutants in a sense, compounded of

life

individual, the prosaic it is

Without an

we would be

dealing not

d'histoire.

with lieux de memoire but with simple memorials.

and the eternal. They are

fit).

behind for historians to use as they see

remember, lieux de memoire would be lieux

if

like

Mobius

strips,

endless rounds of the collective and the

true that the fundamental purpose of a lieu de memoire

is

the

maximum possible meaning with

speak are

I

and death, of the temporal

and the sacred, the immutable and the

immaterial (just as gold, they say,

which

lieux of

is

forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death,

the

"indirect sources"

memory of money)

fleeting.

For although

to stop time, to inhibit

and to materialize the



all

in



the fewest possible signs

order to capture

it is

also clear that

lieux de memoire thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to res-

urrect old

meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable con-

nections (that

is

what makes them

exciting).

Consider two very different examples.

First, the

new calendar adopted

during the French Revolution: this revolutionary calendar ever there was one, since, being a calendar,

it

was intended

is

to

a lieu de

for a time

memoire

if

be a framework for

new system of names and symbols intended, as its principal author ambitiously claimed, "to open a new book to history" and, as another sponsor suggested, "to make the French feel at home again."

memory, and, being revolutionary,

at the

the Revolution: the future 's days, months, years, and centuries

would

forever call to

enough

offered a

supposed to stop the clock of history

In so doing, the calendar

moment of

was

it

mind images of

also

the revolutionary epic. Surely that alone

to qualify the revolutionary calendar as a lieu de

establishes

its

claim in our eyes

is its

failure to

authors. If the revolutionary calendar had truly familiar as the Gregorian calendar, hence

however,

is

its

memoire! But what further

the role foreseen for

become our calendar,

no longer

melted into the landscape of memory, and of other conceivable lieux de memoires.

fill

it

a lieu de memoire. It

only purpose would be to

it

by

would be

its

as

would have fix the dates

What makes the case even more interesting,

the fact that the failure of the revolutionary calendar

Certain events remain forever attached to the

Thermidor, Brumaire. Thus the

would be

lieu de

names of

memoire

is

its

was not complete.

months: Vendemiaire,

a distorting mirror, twisting

its

own themes in ways that define its significance. Such intricate convolution is part of the definition of the lieu de memoire.

For our second example, consider the well-known children's book entitled La Tour de la France par deux enfants, another incontrovertible lieu de memoire, for like the petit Lavisse

it

shaped the

memory of

millions of French boys and girls.

schoolchildren throughout France studied

it,

When

the minister of public instruction

could take out his pocket watch at 8:05 a.m. on a certain day of the year and confi-

15

i6

PIERRE NORA dently declare, "All our children are just

now

crossing the Alps." Moreover, the

Tour was a compendium of what every child should

about identity and a journey of first

But the story

initiation.

appears: a careful reading shows that

when

finally consolidated

is

was published

On May

its initial

success to

And later.'' Thirty-five years supreme among French children's

and their memories. it still

reigned

talgic appeal, as

evidenced by the fact that the

revised ones. Subsequently the

after the

memory and

is

it

its

so often the case

appeal to grown-ups

work's

but

texts,

As

its

it

16 of that year, the

first

publication,

was read

for

nos-

its

edition sold better than later,

first

book dropped out of favor and continued

only in remote rural areas. Slipping out of collective memory, torical

in 1877,

hold on power, but the book derived

its

seductive appeal from a subtle enchantment with the past.

with children's books, the Tour owed

about France, a story

more complicated than it

the Tour

already portrayed a France that no longer existed.

Third Republic

know

then pedagogical memory. In 1977,

it

when

to

entered

be used

first his-

the Breton writer

Pierre-Jakez Helias's provincial autobiography Le Cheval d'orgueil became a million-seller as Giscard d'Estaing's industrialized France, then in the throes

nomic

crisis,

rediscovered

its

oral tradition

new edition of the the collective memory albeit

and peasant

it

would not be forgotten yet

memoire. But does

because of

its

it

this time,

again.

and of course without any guarantee that

So here we have

a

prime candidate for a

/ieu de

qualify as such because of the book's original intention or

role in subsequent cycles of national memory.'' Clearly both:

de memoire are, to is

memory

roots, a



Tour was published and the book once again entered a different collective

of eco-

borrow from

all

the language of heraldry, objects en ahime,

to say, objects containing representations

lieux

which

of themselves (hence implying an

infi-

nite regress).

Indeed, this dual identity of lieu^ de memoire allows us to delimit,

classify,

and

cat-

egorize different types. Certain broad categories of the genre stand out: anything

having to do with the cult of the dead, the national heritage, or the presence of the past can be considered a lieu de memoire. But certain objects that definition have to be included, while others that

seem

to

fit

do not

fit

the strict

have to be ruled out. For

example, some important prehistoric, geographical, and archaeological

sites

must

be considered lieux de memoire despite the absence of any intent to remember, because that absence

is

compensated

for

by the work of time and science and by

man's dreams and memories, which constitute an overwhelming brief inclusion.

Not every border marker has

memoire as the Rhine, Brittany that treaty

is

is

the

same claim

say, or the "Finistere," that

celebrated in the pages of Michelet.

in favor

to be considered a lieu de

"Land's End"

Any constitution

at the tip

owing

to the

of

or diplomatic

a lieu de memoire, but the Constitution of 1793 has a different status

the Constitution of 179 1

of

from

fundamental importance of the Declaration

of the Rights of Man, and the treaty of Nijmegen has

a different status

from, say.

Between Memory and History

Empire

the division of the Carohngian

from early and

1944, to take examples

Memory

dictates

at

Verdun

late

European

the historical record.

Hence they

—even —

certain

memory uses to inscribe itself on

the genre of history itself

indeed the very notion of event

de memoire? These two questions

historical events

stake out the boundaries of our domain. Is not

every great work of history

And is not every great event

Conference of

history.

and history writes. Both history books and

deserve special attention: both are implements that

Only

in 843 or the Yalta

call for detailed

works of history are



a lieu de

—by

memoire?

definition a lieu

answers.

lieux de memoire, namely, those that reshape

memory in some fundamental way or that epitomize a revision of memory for pedagogical purposes. Relatively few works have managed to give new historical memories firm roots in

French

In the thirteenth century the Grandes Chroniques de

soil.

France condensed dynastic

memory and

established a

model

centuries thereafter. In the sixteenth century, during the

school of "perfect history," as

it

was

called, destroyed the

for historical

Wars of

myth of

title

serve as an

emblem of

this school, as

for

Religion, the

the monarchy's

Trojan origins and resurrected the Gauls: Etienne Pasquier's Recherches de

may

work

France

la

evidenced by the very modernity of

its

(which indicated a preference for "research" over chronicle and "France" over

dynasties).

The historiography of

the late Restoration introduced the

whose

cept of history: Augustin Thierry's Lettres sur I'histoire de France, lication

began

in 1820,

was

on the

first

were collected and published

as a

scene.

The

bound volume

in 1827, within a

Europe and in the

first lectures

and culminated

historique (1876)

few months of the

book by an

illustrious

on "the history of

in France." Finally, positivist national history

Revue

pub-

serial

various fragments of Thierry's

publication of the Precis d'histoire moderne, the first

comer, Jules Michelet, and Guizot's

modern con-

civilization in

began with

in Lavisse's

new-

a manifesto

monumental twenty-

seven volume Histoire de France.

Memoirs,

too,

can be lieux de memoire (as the word suggests). Chateaubriand's

Memoires d'outre-tombe, Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard, and Henri Amiel's Journal intime belong to the genre not because they are bigger oirs but because,

same can be

and better than other

beyond simply exercising memory, they

said of statesmen's

also interrogate

mem-

it.

The

memoirs. From Sully to de Gaulle, from Richelieu's

Testament to the Memorial de Sainte-Helene and the Journal of Poincare, the genre exhibits certain constant

individual texts.

man of

the

pen

and specific features despite variations

The memoir writer must be aware of as well as a

vidual story with a

man of

more general

As

compel us

to think of

story.

for "great events," only

account of their greatness.

its

other memoirs.

of

He must be

a

He must find a way to identify his indiAnd he must somehow make his personal

action.

rationale consonant with public rationality.

the genre

in the quality

Taken together, these

characteristics of

exemplars as lieux de memoire.

two types

To begin

are pertinent here and not in

with, there are events that

any sense on

may have seemed

17

i8

PIERRE NORA minor and gone almost unnoticed at the time but upon which posterity has

relatively

conferred the grandeur of a

with the past.

new beginning

or the solemnity of an inaugural break

And then there are events (which may not be events at all, in the sense

that nothing concrete needs to

happen) that are immediately invested with symbolic

were being com-

significance and treated, even as they are unfolding, as if they

memorated

media have treated us

in advance. In recent years the

As an example of

abortive attempts to create events of this second type. type,

one can

take, say, the election

of

Hugh

Capet, in

to countless

itself

the first

an unremarkable

inci-

dent but one that has taken on enormous weight owing to ten centuries of subse-

quent history ending on the scaffold. As examples of the second type, consider the

German

surrender in World

War

I

(which took place

Rethondes), the handshake between Hitler and Petain

German

collaboration in

World War

II),

of

"events." Indeed,

it is

Memory

There

is

first

down

is,

the

Champs-

type foundational and events of the

the event itself

what counts. The notion

memoire would cease to have any specific meaning

lieu de

memoire.

Montoire (sealing Franco-

or de Gaulle's march

Elysees at the Liberation. Call events of the

second type spectacular. In neither case

at

in a railway car near

if

we

included

the exclusion of the event qua event that defines the lieu de

fastens

upon

sites,

however, no reason

whereas history fastens upon events.

why we

cannot imagine a variety of possible

arrangements or classifications of objects within the category of lieux de memoire.

Some such

objects are part of everyday experience: cemeteries,

memorations. Others are products of generation, which

was mentioned

of memory, or certain "divisions"

reflection,

earlier,

in the

museums, com-

such as the concept of a historical

or the lineage, or the "region" as an object

way the French perceive

their national ter-

ritory (Paris-provinces, for example, or north-south), or of the notion that the

French landscape

is

a "painting" that

comes

to

mind

if

one thinks of Corot or of

Cezanne's paintings of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Emphasizing the physical aspect of the lieu portable,

and

would

their

Some

lieux de memoire are

importance cannot be overlooked, because the people of

ory, the Jews, offer a

graphical:

reveal another broad spectrum.

prime example of one

what matters is

in the

mem-

Torah. Other lieux are topo-

their specific location, their rootedness.

tourist sites generally, as well as the Bibliotheque Nationale (in

Examples include

what used

to

be the

residence of Cardinal Mazarin) and the Archives Nationales (in what used to be the residence of the Prince de Soubise).

Some sites are monumental,

not to be confused

with others that are architectural. Statues and monuments to the dead, for example, derive their significance from their very existence. Although location

is

by no

means unimportant with such monuments, they could be placed elsewhere without altering their meaning. Structures that develop over time are different: their

mean-

ing stems from the complex relationship of their component parts, so that they

become mirrors of of Versailles.

a society or a period, like the cathedral of Chartres or the palace

Between Memory and History

If,

instead of the physical aspect,

we were to emphasize the functional dimension,

a different picture

would emerge. Some

tions, are clearly

intended to preserve an incommunicable experience and are

doomed

who

to vanish with those

lieux de memoire, like veterans' organiza-

shared that experience. Others, equally

ephemeral, are designed to serve a pedagogical purpose: textbooks, dictionaries,

and the

last wills

and testaments and ledger-journals that heads of household once

used to convey their wishes and admonitions to their descendants.

And finally, if we were to emphasize the symbolic element, we might want to disDominant

tinguish between "dominant" lieux de memoire and "dominated" ones.

of triumph. They are imposing as well as generally

sites are spectacles, celebrations

imposed from above by the government or some

One

cold and solemn, like official ceremonies.

official organization,

and typically

doesn't visit such places; one

is

sum-

moned to them. Dominated sites are places of refuge, sanctuaries of instinctive devotion and hushed pilgrimages, where the living heart of memory still beats. Among

we may include the Sacre-Coeur Church in Paris (commemorating the end of the Commune), the official funeral of Paul Valery, and the funeral ceremony for de Gaulle at Notre Dame; among dominated sites, the popular pilgrimage dominant

sites

to Lourdes, the funeral of Jean-Paul Sartre,

These sites

be refined ad infinitum.

classifications could

with private ones; pure

funeral eulogies, the

and de Gaulle 's burial

sites,

whose only function

war memorial

at

is

Douaumont, and

and composite ones, whose commemorative dimension

meanings (such

One

is

site at

Colombey.

could contrast public

commemorative (such

as

the Wall of the Federes),

but one of

many symbolic

as the national flag, festival itineraries, pilgrimages,

and so on).

This preliminary typology should not be construed as being either rigorous or comprehensive or as limiting possibility in any way: It

shows

all

that matters

is

that

it

can be done.

that an invisible thread links ostensibly unrelated objects. It suggests that

bringing the Pere-Lachaise cemetery and the Statistique Generale de together within the covers of one

book

is

la

France

not quite as provocative a gesture

as, say,

the surrealist conjunction of an umbrella with a steam iron. All of these different identities

belong to a complex network, an unconscious organization of collective

memory that it is up to us to bring to consciousness. The lieux de memoire constitute our moment in the history of France. What

sets the

kind of history

history, ancient or

modern,

torical or scientific

approach

is

we

are attempting here apart

from

all

other kinds of

one simple but decisive element. Every previous

to

his-

memory (whether concerned with national memory

or social "mentalities") dealt with realia, with things in themselves, in their immediate reality. Unlike historical objects, lieux de rather, they are their

own referents



is

precisely that

in reality; or,

pure signs. This is not to say that they are with-

—on

out content, physical presence, or history lieux de memoire

memoire have no referents

the contrary. But

which allows them

to escape

what makes them

from

history.

The lieu

19

20

PIERRE NORA something singled out within the continuum of the profane (whether

a templum:

is

in space, time, or both), a circle within bolic, everything is

is

name but Hence

at the

upon

same time open

its

identity

it

and summed up by

to an infinite variety of possible other meanings.

the history of lieux de memoire could not be

and the methods could not be

able,

by

the world, defined

The topics are obvious, the material is standard,

dinary.

memoire has a dual nature:

significant. In this sense, the lieu de

a hermetic excrescence

its

which everything counts, everything is sym-

more banal or more

extraor-

the sources are readily avail-

Such

less sophisticated.

a history gives the

appearance of reverting to long-outdated models. But nothing could be further

from the truth. The only way to approach the subject is to delve into empirical detail, but what one seeks in

this

categories. Reflecting

on



history to

life,

giving

it

a

immersion

more than

in the art

own methods. It brings history back The new history is a purely transferen-

just its

second level of existence.

and as

in the historian's

expressed in terms of traditional historical

lieux de memoire transforms historical criticism into critical

history critical of

history,

tial

way cannot be

of war, everything

tenuous relation to his

in the subject. Ultimately,

is

new object and of

it is

a history that

finding the right depth of

depends on

its

ability to avail

of a tenuous, intangible, almost ineffable bond: what remains of our inex-

itself

pugnable, intimate attachment to those faded symbols of the past. history as

it

was practiced by Michelet, which

for lost love so well described

by Proust:

inevitably calls to

that

moment when

passion finally loosens, in which the real sadness

from

matter of tact

in the execution, a

that for

heart,

is

that

the revival of

It is

mind

the

mourning

the obsessive grip of

one can no longer suffer

which one has already suffered so much. The head takes over from the

and one

is left

with only reasons where once there was sublime unreason.

Of course to invoke the name of Proust is to make a very literary reference. cause for regret, or should

I

try to justify

it.''

The

answer, once again,

is

Is this

linked to our

Memory has known only two forms of legitimacy: historThese have run on parallel tracks but until now have always remained

current historical situation. ical

and

literary.

boundary between the two has blurred. Out of the virtually simul-

separate. Lately the

taneous demise of memory-history and memory-fiction has tory,

which owes

its

prestige and legitimacy to a

to a different past. History has

become our

have seen a revival of the

historical novel, a

tion of historical drama,

and the

things

if

not that they are

lieux de memoire in trated,

promoted

it,

vogue

for personal

of oral history.

What

for faltering

which our depleted fund of this

—and

new type of relation to the past

substitute for imagination. Recent years

somehow stand-ins

and expressed stems from

epoch devoid of

rise

come a new type of his-

collective

new sensibility.

memoirs, a

can account for

fiction.''

all

these

Our interest in the

memory is rooted,

concen-

History offers profundity to an

true stories to an epoch devoid of real novels.

to the center of history: thus

revitaliza-

do we mourn the

loss

of

Memory has been

literature.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME

and Divisions

Conflicts Pierre

Nora

From the standpoint of memory, France is not diversity but division. The insistence on

diversity, at

once problematic and providential, corresponded to an era of

state-

centered national synthesis, in which endless invocations of unity reflected an imperious need,

more

insistently felt in

France than in

come powerful heterogeneous and contradictory central organization. Republican France,

one and

many

other countries, to over-

forces through a vast effort of

indivisible



the France not only

of Michelet and Vidal de La Blache but also of Charles de Gaulle and Fernand Bruadel in

—had

which an

ible,

its

own

"memory-history,"

infinite diversity

full

of sound and fury, a colorful history

of locales, peoples, and languages was merely the vis-

perceptible face of a tenacious effort to achieve unity through the temporal

construction of politics and history. Unity and diversity: this antithetical yet

plementary pair has come apart before our eyes, and with ception of France has lost

When began

to

its

new

kind of

intelligibility

emerge, one whose overall organic unity depended not on historical unity

territorial

tity

sustained

out of which

harmony achieved through conquest but by an enduring sense of

it

was built:

its

own

Let us take political polarities

and vicissitudes of French

our idea of France

is

rather

on

a feeling of iden-

divisions, of the powerful polarities

these included not only political polarities but also religious

and geo-historical ones. The three parts of first.

this

volume

As numerous

reflect these three

themes.

as the conflicts, battles, divi-

political history are, the political

myths on which

based stem from a relatively limited number of fundamental

oppositions, each reflecting and reinforcing the others. to

a comprehensive per-

usefulness and relevance.

the Third Republican synthesis evaporated, a

and

sions,

it

com-

It

would have made no sense

choose some of these rather than others. All had to be taken into account not only

I

22

PIERRE NORA as they unfolded in time but also as sources of specific conceptual instruments in

terms of which they rationalized their

own

was the funda-

existence. First, there

mental division of the Revolution, which became the source of a series of religious, political, social,

connotations. sions,

and national oppositions with powerful, perpetually regenerated

On top of this, the twentieth century superimposed three further divi-

each associated with a specific historical moment; taken together, these

new

divisions altered the old national-revolutionary equation. France being a country in

which immigration was an

older,

more continuous phenomenon than

neighbors, there was

of

the basic

influx of large cal principles

first

numbers of

and

all

foreigners,

were

social realities,

a resurgence

at

once welcomed and rejected. Then there

partition of the

were

tory (which

it

name,

And finally national memory past.

between Gaullists and Communists.

Nevertheless, this series of archetypal divisions interest

implicit in the very

of the whole counterrevolutionary

reflected in the bipolar opposition

its

who, owing to the country's basic ideologi-

was the great moment of hegemonic

there

any of

antinomy resulting from the periodic

was Vichy, born of defeat and occupation: division was which suggested

in

would be of merely

descriptive

not for the fact that the intrinsically conflictual nature of French his-

made

it,

for Marx, the very

reflected in both the beginning

model of national history

and end of the saga:

in the country's

in general)

myth of

is

origin

(the prehistory of the French model, so to speak) and in the "democratic age," the

keystone of the model as well as the source of a retrospective interpretation of the

whole of French origin rested

history. In fact,

from the sixteenth century on, the French myth of

on the duality of Franks and Gauls; revivals of this myth



in the eigh-

teenth century with Boulainvilliers and again, in contradictory fashion, in the nine-

teenth century with Augustin Thierry and Fran9ois Guizot that the history of France

is

a story



established the idea

of eternal conflict between victors and van-

quished; this idea became firmly rooted in the subsoil of the national imagination.

Meanwhile, another duality, the opposition between right and tural itics is

underpinning of

with both

its

all

political

left,

became the struc-

"space" in contemporary France, providing pol-

driving dynamic and

its

interpretive framework.

What is striking

not merely the similarity between these two dualities but the fact that in both cases

the original polarization reflects both

most exemplary, most

specific

what

is

most

distinctive about France

and most universal, since the

and

class struggle origi-

nated in the struggle between the races, and the right-left division, which grew out

of the

first

revolutionary assembly, became a fundamental feature of democratic

political structures

everywhere. These two examples show

just

how

fruitful

sym-

bolic history can be.

The same mechanism is at work with religious minorities. Many countries have more substantial Jewish populations than France, yet no other country has linked its revolutionary identity to Jewish emancipation, and to an assimilationist version of

— Conflicts

that emancipation, in such a

way as to give such dramatic prominence to the national

debate about discrimination against Jews from the Dreyfus Affair to the anti-Jewish statute

of 1940 under Petain. All European countries were affected to one degree or

another by the Reformation, and several endured religious wars, but none other than France as a

made

permanent part of

this religious conflict a

symbol of tolerance and persecution

to the

its

identity or treated

it

same degree. And no other country

had to contend with the phenomenon of Jansenism, a dissident movement within Catholicism that perpetuated the doctrinal struggles of the sixteenth century.

The same

principle of division, coupled with the

same types of

sion, has also presided over the construction, perception,

conflict

and ten-

and representation of

space and time in France. But unlike the divisions underlying the political and

gious imagination, divisions of this third type

most significant ones are treated divisions decreed France.''

by nature,

And which

in this

volume.

especially that

divisions have

the French learned to perceive

come

in

many varieties. Some of

between the north and the south of

their

in

terms of which

vaunted diversity, beginning with

the persistent opposition between Paris and the provinces.'* Finally, logical division

which



is

more

in all countries

the

What could be more important than

been more crucial than those

and master

reli-

what chrono-

significant than the notion of a historical generation,

but especially in France, from the romantic era to

has had the power to infuse the natural replacement of the old by the

May '68

young with

mobilizing energy.'*

Many

people

crisis in a

feel that the resurrection

of these symbols of division

France that has begun to question

its

identity

and ceased

is

fueling a

to recognize

By studying the logic of the historical construction and development of such symbols we hope to arrive at a more adequate understanding. We shall see what no itself.

longer works and on what basis renewal partially obscured, yet

an identity even

we

now in

can

still

is

possible.

make out

The

signs and markers

the unbroken path, the

the throes of fundamental change.

may be

permanence of

23

I

PART

I

BETWEEN MEMORY AND HISTORY

FIGURE

1

.0

Vercingetorix, from Nodier, Taylor, and Cailleux,

lithograph by

Engelmann

after Lacroix, 1829.

Voyages pittoresques dans I'ancienne France;

CHAPTER

Franks and Gauls^ Kr:^sitof Pomian

Problems

of the time.

The bloc system beloved

by politicians (Clemenceau said, "The Revolution

is

a bloc")

have

The

heroic

Gauls

memory

of the ancient

a duty to

break down monoliths

or,

as the

paleontologists say, to "stratify" them.

by monuments

often recalled

is

and detested by historians; historians



such as the Vercingetorix in Clermont

Camille Jullian

or the Gaul on the Pont d'lena in Paris; by street names, Alesia, Gergovie, and

among the most common; and by signs. One Paris restaurant calls itself simply Nos Ancetres les Gaulois. With Asterix the Gauls have triumphed even in the world of comic books. And there is no shortage of paperback editions Vercingetorix being

of books dealing with them, from Caesar's Gallic JVars to Camille Jullian's Vercingetorix, Albert Grenier's

Gaule,

among many

ily find

enough to

others.

Les Gaulois, and Paul-Marie Duval's Dieux de

Anyone who wants

satisfy his or

her

initial

more about them can

to learn

curiosity in

la

eas-

any bookstore. More demand-

ing readers can turn to libraries, where they will find, counting journal articles, tens

of thousands of

titles

Nor are printed

on every conceivable aspect of

texts the

end of

and visited by large numbers of

it.

the subject.

Archaeological excavation

tourists, others

sites,

some famous

more modest and of purely

local

importance, offer a glimpse of vestiges of the Gauls and the Gallo-Romans: their oppida, their cities, their villae. Meanwhile, archaeological

upon row of

statues of their

gods and exhibits of their

coins, art works,

and everyday objects; and fine

ues, engravings,

and drawings that show

art

museums

tools, utensils,

museums

weapons,

in the nineteenth

off, there is a

it all

row

exhibit paintings, stat-

how they were imagined

and the early part of the twentieth century. To top

contain

whole appa-

ratus of special exhibitions, tourist information signs, guidebooks, catalogues, folders,

maps, plaster

with

its

casts,

photographs, and postcards



a

whole

literature in itself,

own iconography. All of this is supposed to help visitors know what to look

I

28

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN and teach them how to study the remains of the past with an objective eye while

for

instilhng a deep and lasting interest in the subject, but at the

same time

inculcates

it

certain beliefs, including a belief in the Gallic origins of the French, along with certain values, primarily patriotism.

All these facts are duly established. But taken together, as create the impression that French national

memory

we have just done, they

reserves an exceptionally large

place for the Gauls. Experience, though, does not bear this out.

centage of the total to them.

number of monuments,

The same can be

said of books,

and Gallic objects

Gallic sites

in

street

even

if

Only

names, and signs

in

a small per-

France allude

we include comics and paperbacks.

museums account

for only a small portion of the

archaeological remains and artifacts on display in France, a country in which countless

populations have

left

traces ranging

from prehistoric cave paintings

olithic sites to obsolete nineteenth-century factories.

to pale-

Yet the French attach more

importance to the Gauls than to the other peoples that formerly inhabited the tory of France, including even the Franks. This historical

memory,

just as the

a distinctive feature distinctive feature

of

of

a distinctive feature

Rome

the importance ascribed to

is

is

a

memory.

To judge by publications aimed

at the general ptiblic, the privileged status that the

Gauls enjoy today stems from a composite of three images. (The of each image by itself cannot be ascertained.) The

first

of these

relative

is

importance

an image of splen-

dor, of Celtic gold or of the treasures of Celtic princes, the general public distinction

of French

importance attached to the ancient Germanic tribes

German memory and

Italian

is

terri-

making no

between the prehistoric Celts and the Gauls.^ The second image

powerful esoteric knowledge supposedly possessed by the Druids,

who

is

one of

allegedly

transmitted that knowledge from generation to generation in secret nocturnal cere-

monies. Certain contemporary adepts of the occult claim to be the inheritors of this tradition.^

The

third

image

is

that of "nos ancetres les Gaulois."

Some years ago,

the

history and manifestations of this third image were discussed at a major gathering of

who emphasized its mythical character. Nevertheless, it still has its champions, who are quick to deplore what they see as an unjust discrediting of an imporscholars,

tant truth. ^

"Our

ancestors the Gauls" are generally depicted as valiant warriors,

usually either in triumph or

and sword



especially

on

the point of death but almost never without helmet

when they

enter an

enemy temple and

beautiful captives, naked and with fear in their eyes. In tions of the Gauls to its

we thus find, strangely enough,

find awaiting

them

contemporary representa-

the three functions that according

Georges Dumezil structure the ideology of the Indo-Europeans: sacred royalty

in

dual aspect, luminous and somber, Mithraic and Varunian; warriors, with their

victories

and miseries; and

down to

the present day and

fertility,

which

cock and gauloiserie (salacious

which has ensured the continuity of the race

cries

out to be associated with the symbol of the

storytelling).*'

Too

facile to

be taken altogether sen-

— Franks and Gauls

ously, such

an analysis does not, in

my view, yield a satisfactory account of the Gallic

presence in French national memory, but the possibility deserved to be mentioned.

Ideological Battle: Vichy

In

But for the use of the "Celtic cross" by a small sectarian group on the extreme right and rare mentions French less

in official speeches, the

fifty

into service.

Vichy that

On August

ological police

week before



TRANS.), celebrated

"la Terre in

period)

its

(militia,

by

Vichy's paramilitary ide-

second anniversary

in great

pomp beneath

de France" and national unity. Preparations had begun the

metropolitan France and even earlier in the colonies. Local Legion

commune had solemnly dug up shovelfuls of the local soil to be sent

bag to Gergovie, where on August 30

French earth

ples of

30, 1942, the Legion, a veterans' organization created

became Joseph Darnand's Milice

leaders in every in a sealed

but absent from the

years separates us, in fact, from the last major effort to dragoon them

later

symbols of

all

This has been true, however, only since the end of the war;

political scene.

than

Gauls are today

—were

les Terres

all

the bags containing their sam-

of France (the capital

letter

to be deposited in a marble cenotaph

Petain in person.^

And

that

is

exactly

being de rigueur

in this

and sealed up by Marshal

what happened.

Sealed up in the cenotaph along with the samples of French

soil

was

a

document

from the pen of Rene Giscard d'Estaing, transcribed onto illuminated parchment. It

drew

it

had been two years since the founding of the "Legion frangaise des combattants

et

several parallels

des volontaires de

la

between the most ancient past and the most recent present:

Revolution nationale" and twenty centuries since the awak-

ening of national sentiment in Gaul; succeeding Vercingetorix, the leader of the Arverni, was Marshal Philippe Petain, leader of I'Etat franfais; alongside the

ument

to Vercingetorix erected in 190 1 there

was

"collected in the metropolis and in the colonies, spirit

of France has breathed and

have created

up

its

greatness."^

in

which

At Gergovie,

is

the crypt built to hold French soil

from

the

all

the places

preserved the

in other

upon which

memory of

those

words, the Vichy regime

as both the guardian of national territorial integrity

past, including,

mon-

and the heir to

all

the

who

set itself

of France 's

though not without considerable hesitation, the Third Republic.^ At

same time, however,

France: as General

it

portrayed

Campet put

it,

itself as the

force responsible for the rebirth of

France "was born the day our forefathers came

together and agreed to submit to the discipline of a single leader."'" That founding

event had occurred

at

Gergovie, and Vichy was

now assuming

the leadership first

conferred there.

The ceremony at Gergovie, which Maurice Schumann rightly blasted as "comedy or sacrilege,"" appears to have marked the end of the Vichy regime's attempts to

mobilize the Gallic ancestors on behalf of the "national revolution." Those attempts

29



KRZYSZTOF POMIAN had begun

September 1940 with the adoption of the francisque

in

headed GalHc axe, der" and a

gallique, the

symbol of "French unity under the orders of

as the

mark of support

for the marshal.

its

The francisque, according to

two-

commancreator,

its

combined the star-studded baton of the marshal of France with the "two-headed

weapon

by the Gauls and

carried

ordeal from which our country as virtually a reincarnation

their leader Vercingetorix in the era of the first

was

to emerge."'^ This formulation portrays Petain

of Vercingetorix, and

Vichy propaganda co-opted the Gauls for the regime paid is

why Vichy

homage

was

chose the francisque as

purposes in two ways.

its

symbol and Gergovie

Roman

superiority.

of com-

as a place

led them,

Gaul "accepted

once the

are.

peace; vanquished and victors reached an understand-

After two millennia

fathers the Gauls, tors

made us

we find ourselves in the same position as our fore-

and we hope with

and vanquished, there

battle

defeat: Julius

its

ing and from this great clash was born the Gallo-Roman civilization that

what we

First,

of honor, however, the gov-

on the Gauls' realism, which

acknowledge Rome's

Caesar brought the

own

its

flattered the nation's sense

insisted forcefully

lost, to

was to be used again at Gergovie.

to the Gauls' heroic struggle against Caesar's legions: that

memoration. Having thus

ernment

it

all

will at last

our hearts

that,

from the accord between vic-

be born the European peace which alone can

save the world."

Later in this article

will

I

examine the roots of the idea that the Gauls had no

choice but to accept defeat and submit to

Rome

and, furthermore, that this defeat

gave birth to Gallo-Roman civilization and thus "made us what is

enough

to note that this idea

we are." For now it

had already been used, between 1870 and 19 14, to

suggest that irreducible differences would always divide Gallo-Roman France from

Germanic Germany, and between the a

war by

mask of

casting

it

Kultur}'^

rowed what was

as a clash

The

19 14

between

and 19 18 to bestow a civilization

attempt by Vichy to root

originally an

tion with the Nazis in the

a

dimension on

and a barbarism that hid behind

itself in the Gallic past

anti-German theme and used

name of

spiritual

new European

it

civilization

thus bor-

to justify collabora-

of the future.

All this appears to have occupied only a minor, even a marginal, place in Vichy

propaganda. Nevertheless, the reflex of turning to the Gauls to lend credibility to the claim that the regime

In so doing, Vichy to the fell:

was

was creating and representing French unity

in fact repeating a traditional pattern that can

Second Empire and

that

became

the invocation of an alleged

a part

of republican

community of

is

significant.

be traced back

ritual after that

ancestors, identified in this instance

with the Gauls, has the effect of presenting the French as people of a blood,

members of

a single family

empire

common

and thus different from peoples unable

to claim

such ancestry.

To be sure, the official discourse of the Third Republic imputed a sig-

nificance that

was more

Gallic past.

The

racial

cultural than biological,

theme was never

far

more

spiritual than racial, to the

from consciousness, however, and the

Franks and Gauls

politicians

and pamphleteers of the extreme right really acknowledged no other

basis of national unity.

Who is French? What is the nature of French national identity, and where does According to the laws and customs of the Republic,

it

reside?

it

suffices to be a

French right,

with

which

spirit,

by

French

one

contrast,

soil, is

is

citizen

imbued with French culture

or, rather,

is

French only

if

one has French blood, for blood, along

the substrate of the national identity. Republican ideology distin-

Germans but

The extreme

other nations.

also

from the English, the

who

by blood, and those who pass themselves off

to establish a visible

as

is

usually,

to manifest itself in external appearance: the shape of

the nose, the color of the skin, the curliness of the hair. In this and respects, the supposedly unifying discourse

directly

its

French without

French because they have in their veins something that

though not always, supposed

and

boundary between the "true French," those

is

are French

Italians,

right obviously accepts those distinctions, but

primary interest

really being

with the

the bearer of French identity. According to the extreme

guishes the French from the all

order to be French

in

from the ideas of the extreme

of Vichy actually drew

right,

and

its

many

its

other

inspiration

exclusionary policies were

accompanied by violent attacks on, and the murder or execution

of,

many

cate-

gories of French citizens.

Yet Vichy's exploitation of the Gallic theme, inspired by the extreme right, was only the most recent battle in a conflict that dates back to the beginning of the eighteenth century: a conflict over ancestry.

or the Gauls or both?

With in the

It

was

Were the ancestors of the French the Franks

also a conflict about France:

When

did France begin?

the arrival of the Franks or of the Gauls? If the former, did the Franks

wake of

a

bloody conquest

peaceful one followed

by

a conflict over the belief

to feast

a fusion of the

on the

spoils, or

two peoples? And

on the part of some Frenchmen

was

last

their settlement a

but not

that they

come

least, it

was

were more French

than others, a belief justified by the claim that their ancestors were the true founders

of the nation and supposedly the source of rights to which other French people could advance no legitimate claim. This

of orders: the nobility versus the third gle: the aristocracy

last conflict at first

estate.

Later

it

took the form of a clash

took the form of class strug-

versus the bourgeoisie. Like the idea of a nation, therefore, the

ideas of social class and class struggle also figure in the controversy surrounding

"nos ancetres

The

Gaulois."

Gallic reference thus stands at the intersection of the various polemics and

conflicts

was

les

through which French national integration was achieved. That integration

vertical, ultimately

nationality to culture).

It

all

was

according equal rights to

citizens

all

French nationals and French

of the Republic (provided that they assimilated French

also horizontal, establishing a clear

boundary between French and

non-French. In the long Franco-French and Franco-foreign war over national iden-

31

32

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN tity

and memory, the Gallic reference played

guess from the frequency of

Now

it

was

a

much

one might

larger role than

explicit invocations.

its

able to play this role only because there

were good reasons

for peo-

ple to believe that the Gauls (unlike their predecessors as the designated ancestral

people, the Trojans) were not a figment of the imagination; they had indeed

left

on

French soil traces that enabled one to assert with a probability approaching certainty that they

had lived

to their gods,

there, built there, cultivated the earth, buried their dead,

and fought with

their enemies. All of this

took place, moreover, not in

mythical time immemorial but in an era to which dates could be assigned. flict

over the Gauls

is

therefore intimately

prayed

bound up with the

results

The con-

of research into

provided the contending parties to the conflict with their

their past, research that

arguments, while in turn the conflict conferred on the findings and discoveries of the scholars a significance that

or even cultural. conflict that will

It is this

was not merely

interaction

between

intellectual but quite often political

historical research

and ideological

be the primary focus of our attention here.

Images and Relics The

total

mass of

Gauls can be thought of as comprising a number of a different era.

Comic books discovered

only with Asterix some ten years sent,

and

it

way

or another to the

distinct strata,

each deposited in

images, and relics that refer in one

texts,

later.

the Gauls in the late 1940s, but success

That success has continued

right

up

came

to the pre-

has brought the rest of French history into comic books along with

This most recent stratum

few paintings

that

in the late 1820s,

lies

atop earlier layers of Gallic imagery. Leaving aside a

were ahead of

when

their time, the

most ancient stratum began

by Lacroix appeared

a Vercingetorix

Auvergne in Nodier, Taylor, and

Cailleux's Voyages pittoresques}^

in the

illustrators

recueillant le

At

revoke des Gaulois contre

les

of painting the capture of

le

tribunal

Throughout the century these

among them La Fondation and La Bataille du RhoneP

of books on the Gauls,

de Marseille, Brenn qui met son sabre dans la balance, Painters soon followed.

form

volume on

gui sacre (Druids gathering the sacred mistletoe) and Vercingetorix devant de Cesar (Vercingetorix before Caesar's tribunal).'^

to

The first edition of

Henri Martin's Histoire de France included two engravings: Les Druides

themes were recycled by

it.'*"

the Salon of 1831

Romains au IIP

it

was

siecle,

possible to see an Episode de la

and in the 1830s Delacroix thought

Rome by the Gauls but never actually executed the work.^*^

Paintings depicting the Gauls, and especially Vercingetorix, proliferated in the

1850s (think of Chasseriau's

Luminais

all

inspiration

but

made

La Defense

des Gaules) and even

the subject his specialty, while

from France's ancient

past.^'

many

more

after 1870:

other painters sought

Sculpture developed along similar lines.^^

Overall, the period 1870— 19 14 seems to have produced

more works on

the Gauls

Franks and Gauls

than

other eras of French art combined.

all

What

is

more, curio dealers sold thou-

sands of engravings representing subjects identical to those treated in these illustrations,

along with plaster casts of Gallic

artifacts

book

unearthed by archaeological

excavations and postcards representing Gallic themes. Between 1906 and 19 14

more

than a hundred different postcards were available from vendors at Alesia alone.

Images of the Gauls thus appeared

first in

connection with

texts.

They

freed

themselves from the written word in the second half of the nineteenth century, as

though by then

it

was assumed

that

everyone knew the history of Gaul and

its

heroes. Today, images are once again found in conjunction with texts, but not as illustrations:

whereas

in

an illustration depends on a text that can do without

comic books the

text

its

support,

inseparable from and subordinate to the image,

is

without which the words are often meaningless. As representations of the Gauls evolved, these images, once considered a minor genre, were accepted into the pan-

theon of high culture, receiving state patronage and being celebrated in salons and fine art

museums. Then,

culture,

after

going into eclipse for a time, they reemerged in youth

which for a long time remained outside of

the aesthetic sanction of the

pop

art

official culture, until

movement in the United

States

it

and the

received political

backing of the left-wing intelligentsia in France.

Note minimal

when

that the period in texts (titles

at

most

of paintings, inscriptions on monuments) was also the period

those images were a part of the official high culture. Here

spectators

was

which images of the Gauls were accompanied by

is

evidence that

were so imbued with Gallic themes that a mere evocation of those themes

make

sufficient to

a painted scene or sculpted figure

This ceased to be the case after World

War

I.

immediately

Among official

intelligible.

institutions,

only the

educational system has continued right up to the present day to teach, through textbooks, that the Gauls

Comic books



became

first

its

Gallo-Romans and ultimately Frenchmen.^''

to the delight of their readers



accordingly allude primarily to

what is taught in school or rather to what students remember of what they have been taught in school.

Along with tent

and

these changes in the status of Gallic imagery

style. In the

images depicted

if

scenes of pathos,

came changes

in

con-

nineteenth century the most widespread and symptomatic

not historical characters then at least historical scenes, generally

whose content was

attested

by documents and rendered with con-

cern for archaeological exactitude, using the resources of an elevated

artistic style.

Today, images of the Gauls generally portray fictional characters taking part in comical adventures set against a background that not utterly fantastic, and the representation

is

is

in

many

cases anachronistic if

irreverent if not downright satirical.

Within the space of a century the character of Gallic imagery has gone from the epic to the burlesque.^^ Asterix adopts the as

La Belle Helene does toward

same

attitude

the classic tradition.

toward the Gallic tradition

33

34

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

now from the most recent stratum (itself divided into several layers), which involves representations of the Gauls by people who thought of themselves as their descendants or who played on such beliefs, to what appears to be the most Let US turn

ancient stratum, consisting of relics

left

by

the Gauls themselves: ruins and artifacts

museums. Note

in situ as well as objects displayed in archaeological

the stratum that appears to be the most ancient: that

come

objects themselves

to us

is

I

call this

because, while the material

from the time of the Gauls,

those objects have acquired the status of

that

only recently that

it is

For centuries before, the vestiges of

relics.

the Gauls, along with those of other ancient peoples, were treated as refuse, buried in the earth, forgotten,

and

be misinterpreted

likely to

Roman

Until quite recently, for instance, old

Queen

Brunhilde,

who had become

if

encountered by chance.

paths were thought to be the

work of

of legend.

a figure

A new interest in ancient monuments began to emerge in the sixteenth century. of course, that the antiquarians and history buffs of the time were pri-

It is true,

marily interested in Roman, Greek, and Egyptian not turn up their noses past or even at

mere

at objects

apt for illustrating the local or national

seemed

curiosities that

spectacular discoveries Childeric's

deemed

strikingly strange or enigmatic.

showed people where

tomb was located

Nevertheless, they did

artifacts.

Some

to look. In 1653, for example,

Now Childeric, of course, was not a Gaul,

in Tournai.

but the riches found in his tomb aroused the interest of antiquarians in sepulchers.^^ In 1685 the ossuary of Cocherel was uncovered, although

published until

much later, at which time it was interpreted as a

In 171 1, in the course of repairs to the Seine

Notre-Dame in

was discovered along with

three cranes.^'

its

The

its

Montfaucon, himself

Esus

of the boatmen of

tree,

went on display

and

was certainly not

more methodical excavation was attempted: Nicolas-

the only magistrate to order excavations at

Societe Litteraire of Clermont,^^ and on

The

Valogne

in

Gergovie

in 1755,

Mont Auxois in

on

his

own estates.^^ Also

begun at the behest of the

1784,

which may have been

by the Estates General of Burgundy.^''

year 1759 marks an important date in the constitution of a corpus of Gallic

and Gallo-Roman

artifacts, for

it

was then

along with Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Recueil. It

work on

is

that

Caylus included Gallic antiquities

Roman

ones in the third volume of his

not out of the question that the idea was suggested to him by Maffei's

the antiquities of Gaul.^5 In

any

case,

it

was

in the

volume

cussed certain of Maffei's opinions that Caylus published his ties.

at

century President de Robien (of the parlement of Rennes)

worth mentioning are the excavations

initiated

bull with

in his Antiquite

Joseph Foucault, the intendant of Normandy, ordered one such 1691.^' In the eighteenth

its

in antiquarian shops.

reproduced some of them

a collector,

expliquee?^ Occasionally a

its

was not

"Gallic sepulcher."^^

Paris, the altar

inscriptions,

(allegedly) Gallic objects

description

He ascribed no artistic value to

list

in

which he

dis-

of Gallic antiqui-

them: "I have commissioned engravings of the

FIGURE

1.1

Henri Motte, Cutting Mistletoe; Salon of 1901.

36

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN works of the Aborigenes, the

some ways be

veyed no notion of

can be

Etruscans, and the Sards,

inferior to that of the Gauls.

the ancient productions of

mind."^''

first

my

in

should therefore be entitled to record

I

country, even

if

they were in worse taste and con-

divinity, as evidence of a great precision

and breadth of

On this point Caylus never changed his mind: "What have I said, and what about the Gauls?" he asked in the conclusion of the

said,

published during his lifetime. "Fighting was a

whose merit may

few crude

all

final

volume

to

be

they knew. True, one does glimpse

acquired through trade with Greece. But after having fought

artifacts

bravely, they seem, so far as the arts are concerned, greatly inferior to those

who

defeated them by force of arms." Caylus's interest in the Gauls was thus motivated exclusively by patriotism: "I think that

I

can boast of having provided more details on the antiquity of the Gauls

than anyone

else.

I

have done

my country this

small service. "^^

Most of the monu-

Roman Gaul that he reproduced reflected his taste and that of his correspondents. He never passed up any opportunity, however, to present any monument that seemed "patently" Gallic. He called for the publication of Antique Gaul,^^ ments of

praised Pelloutier's History of the Celts, kept abreast of research uities,

and

Druids.""

Dom

Martin for attributing an Etruscan

He devoted three plates to

and reported the

tion,

He

criticized

results

on northern

antiq-

monument

to the

Gergovie, summarized the debate over

"because they cannot teach us about history and

different

from other Gallic

explain" and

still

it

and place of

artifacts, all

it is

impossible to

The

make any con-

of them being "in general very

difficult to

and other megalithic monuments.

may seem, megalithic monuments in general did not begin to attract It

was not

until a

moreover, that people began to approach them with archaeological

earliest

known

hidden beneath a

we saw

a

were no

their fabrication."''^ In this they

attention until the second half of the sixteenth century.''^ later,

curiosities,

more difficult to date.'*'' Last but not least, he took an interest in the

raised stone of Poitiers

Strange as

loca-

of the excavations that had been carried out there.

reproduced certain "Gallic medals" while dismissing them as mere

jecture concerning the time

its

interest.

excavation was at Cocherel, an attempt to discover what was

hill

moment

century

on which two stones had been implanted. For Montfaucon,

ago, this

was

a "Gallic sepulcher,"

and stones found

other locations were also identified as Gallic artifacts, namely, weapons.'"' raised stone at Poitiers, Caylus said that "it

is

probable that works of

as

in various

As for the

this

type and

nature are from the time of the Gauls and that their construction must have predated the wars with Caesar

by several

question must be a tomb of

He took him

some

a different position,

which were brought sent

centuries."

his father's

that the stone in

kind.'*''

however,

to his attention

maps and

He prudently assumed

in regard to the megaliths

of Brittany,

by La Sauvagere and President de Robien, who

drawings.''^

While disagreeing with Deslandes, who

Recuell d'antiquites(m2-m7).

FIGURE

1.2

Gallic coins; Caylus,

FIGURE

1.3

Evariste Luminais, Gallic Lookouts.

38

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN saw the rows of stones

at

Carnac

surface of the earth," and with

Roman camps,

as "a

consequence of revolutions occurring

La Sauvagere, who saw them

in the

as vestiges of old

Caylus refused to attribute them to the ancient Gauls. The Gauls, he

argued, would have raised such structures "at several places on the continent," but

"none has ever been found except in provinces located on the seacoast or in any case not far away." Furthermore, what was

Gauls did not

seemed

known of

the customs and religion of the

imputing to them the "kind of superstition" that the megaliths

justify

even tradition has main-

to indicate. After noting "the absolute silence that

tained concerning a custom so often repeated," Caylus concluded that "one can infer

from

Roman

this

an even more remote antiquity,

memory

of which had been

lost in

times."'*^

Caylus truly inaugurated Gallic archaeology. Various anthologies, some of

which claim

to

be continuations of Caylus's own,^^ extend his contribution by

adding information about new discoveries and the results of recent excavations. Not only did the Revolution not halt such research, but est

by promoting

more

it

actually stimulated

the nation's antiquities, especially those of the Gauls.

to say about this period later on, but for

now

it

which unwittingly provided archaeological

The purpose of

Celtomania.

this

to establish a

government

burial sites, a report

epoch-making report was

typology and (for the older

drawing whatever

historical lessons

have

shall

justification for the extravagances

of

scientifically irre-

down

to the Renaissance

sites) a relative

chronology, while

proachable: to classify burial places from the ancient past

and

I

inter-

will suffice to note the publi-

by Legrand d 'Aussy of an important report on French

cation

new

were available from the and

to organize excavations both in Paris

sites

and urging the

in the departements}^

Legrand therefore took an obvious interest in "Gallic tombs," which, contrary to Caylus, he identified as megalithic monuments. clearly all

among the various types of such monuments and

of which subsequently entered into

menhir, for example, in these terms: obelisks are called ar-men-ir.

addition to allowing to France

lecavene,

dolmine):

them names, nearly

accept the expression

to avoid circumlocution,

it

all

more

the

readily because, in

has the advantage of belonging in a

word whose pro-

From Deslandes he borrowed

the

word

which has not survived. And he launched the word dolmen (he spelled "M. Coret, at

Once again

vious ones,

is

I

in discussing tables

And

shall avail

necessary to

while

I

of a sort that

I

am

my

myself of

this expression,

which,

exposition. In a subject that

no terminology

have every right

exists,

to coin

I

it

about to describe and

Lockmariaker, says that in low Breton they are

as a consequence

myself.

to give

common parlance. He introduced the word "I am told that in low Breton these crude

not unduly disagreeable."^^

is

which can be seen

which

me

I

the first to distinguish

and of conveying to the mind a precise meaning

nunciation

dolmin.

He was

is

known

like the

totally

as

two pre-

new, and for

have been forced to create one for

new words,

I

prefer to adopt already

Franks and Gauls

when,

existing ones, especially

the

as with

words borrowed from low Breton, they

hope of representing the old Gaulish nomenclature.

word dolmine and use

it

to refer to the tables

Legrand devoted a section of

previously

He was

exist,

and

in so

fully conscious

interested only in

was Roman.

It

"Who would believe

open

view and massive enough

in plain

unknown

as if they did not all

exist.'^

left

to attract

and

During the

six-

but a few scholars in France were

Roman antiquities. They valued, and were receptive to, only what

was only

seemed

after

Montfaucon and Caylus, having undertaken

were obliged

to

to treat

concern themselves with those of the Gauls

which we ought

to recognize the extent to

to

everything related to the primitive history of our forefathers."^^ they

monument

work thus created an object that did not

the seventeenth centuries,

antiquities generally,

that people

the

France today what the pyra-

of the innovative nature of his work:

hold the eye are nevertheless as

much of

up

"^^

doing he changed the very perception of the landscape.

that objects standing in the

teenth and

about to describe.

said, "are to

at a time, his

shall therefore take

each type of megalithic

his report to

and another to burial mounds, which, he

mids are to Egypt."^'' One step

am

I

I

offer

be interested in

The monuments

behind consequently became both objects of science and subjects of gen-

eral curiosity: "In

order to make the various types of Gallic tombs interesting,

necessary to consider both their moral and scientific aspects. a very strange afterlife, they represent religious

was useful yet

nothing, about the itive history

As

entirely neglected.

monuments

The

fruit

a result,

of our nation, our country, and our

of a belief in

"we know nothing, absolutely our archaeology, of the prim-

arts."^^

Legrand 's appeal did not go unheeded. The Academie Celtique, founded

and to produce etymologies for

all its

To pursue

made of

Gauls."^^ Usually only the first of these goals called attention to the etymological

academy's founders. As a

research

on

in Paris

the Celtic language 2.

To

monuments of

the

derivative tongues, especially French.

describe, explain, and have engravings

is

mania evident

result, there is a

was

views and mores whose description

that lie at the core of

in 1804, set itself the following goals: "i.

it

the ancient

emphasized, and scholars have in the writings

tendency to forget that

of some of the this

flamboyant

Celtism did not enjoy unanimous support,^' and that differences over linguistic excesses and other "extravagances of the imagination" led the

emy

to

became

change a

model

after 1824.''°

of

its

name

in 1813 to the Societe des Antiquaires

for the antiquary societies that

began

de France, which

to proliferate in the provinces

The change affected not only the organization's name but the very focus

its activities. Initially

tics,

members of the acad-

monuments, and

the

academy had simultaneously pursued work on

ethnography.*^' After 18 13 archaeology

—became

and Gallo-Roman but also Gallic archaeology Gallic archaeology

was based on an axiom

its

set forth

beginning of his Histoire de France though accepted



linguis-

not only medieval

exclusive preoccupation.

by Henri Martin

much

earlier:

"The

at the

first

men

39

40

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN Europe,

to populate the west of

in a period well before

were the Gauls, who are our true ancestors because

their

any

historical tradition,

blood predominates

in the

successive mixture of diverse races that has shaped the modern French. "^^ Megalithic

monuments as well

were attributed

to the Celts,

as objects in stone

who were

and bone unearthed by excavation

identified with the Gauls/^

These vestiges

became the seeds around which crystallized patriotic-mythological dreams and ciful reconstructions

of religious

cults,

which took information gleaned from

Caesar, Strabo, Pliny, and others and ascribed

it

to the

world of menhirs and dol-

mens. The very extravagance of Cambry's book on Celtic monuments tive

of

fan-

is illustra-

this approach.''''

Other interpretations were admittedly more sober. ''^ Nevertheless, the Celtic and Gallic attributions, as well as the chronological representations

based, were completely erroneous. Yet

megalithic

monuments yielded only

trivial

major discovery, a discovery so great that in search

to

estimate of the length of time

the Iberians,

were the

fossils.

on

led in fact to a set

out

Gallic archaeol-

of Boucher de Perthes's pio-

bears the trace of the transition

went hand

man had inhabited

the idea that the Celts, either

human

title

et antediluviennes,

to the other. Since that transition

It

was foreseen by no one. Having

be prehistoric archaeology. The

neering book, Antiquites celdques

up

it

the case that research

or negative results.

of the Celts, archaeologists instead found

ogy turned out from one

by no means

it is

on which they were

hand with an increase in the

in

this earth,

it

was necessary

to give

by themselves or together with the Ligurians and

earliest inhabitants

of

Gaul.'''' It

was

also necessary to revise

the attribution of the dolmens and menhirs.

In

1

86 1 the Academic des Inscriptions offered a prize for the best essay on the

topic of Celtic

monuments. In the conclusion of the winning

entry,

Alexandre

Bertrand set forth a series of "hypotheses to be combated" on the subject: "General

hypotheses: erected

by

i.

that menhirs, dolmens, tumuli,

the Celts;

2.

that these

and cromlechs are monuments

monuments were once found throughout Gaul,

unevenly distributed to be sure but nearly everywhere. The reason longer found everywhere

is

that they

were destroyed. Specific hypotheses:

the menhirs are idols; 2. that the menhirs are 3.

that the

menhirs are

Druidic origin;

5.

that

dolmens were altars

altars; 4. that

for the sacrifice of

it is

that

at gravesites;

6.

that

human victims."''^ Naturally these assertions

resistance. But in 1867 the International officially

Congress on

introduced the term "mega-

monuments previously attributed to the Celts and Druids.''^ Traces

of the earlier attribution trade,"

i.

rocking stones {pierres branlantes) are of

Anthropology and Archaeology

lithic" to refer to

commemorative stones

hollowed-out stones were used for sacrificial purposes;

met with opposition and Prehistoric

why they are no

persist,

however:

because of Legrand d'Aussy.

if

Obelix

is

"a menhir deliveryman by

Franks and Gauls

Promoting

As

Museum

a

of National Antiquities

Gallic archaeology progressed over the course of the nineteenth century,

its

Museum

of

adepts urged the authorities, with growing insistence, to create a National Antiquities.

on

Once

again,

Legrand d'Aussy was

burial sites included a "Proposal for the French

His paper

in the forefront.

Museum of Monuments"

in

which, after remarking on the institution's value and importance, he lamented the

museum

fact that the

in his periodization

contained only

was

monuments of

called the "age of

the

most recent period, which

mausoleums." Indeed, the period prior

to

the arrival of the Franks seems to have been represented in Alexandre Lenoir's

museum only by the altar of the Parisian boatmen (nautes).^'^ The Gauls before the Roman conquest were missing, to Legrand 's dismay: "I want menhirs, lecavenes, dolmens, rows of dolmens, colonnades. Let us try to create in Paris a savage decor, the first of

type to be seen there. Let us heighten

its

impression by making

it

its

accurate in every detail, that

effects

and strengthen

its

by composing authentic

is,

among the finest examples that neighboring departements have to offer and transported to the museum grounds, where they will be arranged as scrupulously as they once were." As for monuments that might prove too costly to transport, "they may be duplicated here as accurately as possible," along with "tumulary hills" that unfortunately could not be moved. "Then [Lenoir's museum] tombs, to be selected from

will truly will

its

be entitled to

call itself

the

collection be complete back to

monument

will

be lacking.

What

unusual, stimulating, and novel

most remote periods of the

other

spectacle.''

Legrand 's proposal, along with

artifacts,

tion with others interested in the subject.

ever,

museum

in

Europe

for only then

past:

no type of such an

will offer

"^"^

his excavation plans,

and Gallo-Roman

collector of Gallic

museum of French monuments,

The

was taken up by another

Grivaud de

la Vincelle, in

conjunc-

goals of the project changed,

how-

even as the associated terminology became increasingly precise. Grivaud

called for "the establishment of a truly national

museum,

that

is,

a

museum com-

posed solely of ancient monuments found in France." This would differ from Lenoir's

museum

Middle Ages, remote

it

in that, rather than give pride

would make room

of place to works of

for every available vestige of France

and the 's

most

past:

If there

were

monument

a place in the capital especially

designed to receive every ancient

discovered in France, that collection would, with a

care and at very

little

expense,

grow

engaged

in research

modicum of

daily in extent and richness. Since each

object would be classified along with the date and place of ars

art

its

discovery, schol-

on ancient Gaul would find among the

exhibits evi-

dence to support their conjectures. They would find material for interesting

41

42

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN dissertations

and would certainly revive throughout the country the

which today

antiquity,

is

One

almost extinct.

taste for

could excavate, with the cer-

abundant harvest, the Chatelet plateau, two-thirds of

tainty of finding an

which has not been touched; the Mom

whose ancient

Seleucus,

soil

has barely

been scratched; and many other places where once stood establishments of considerable size, whose invaluable vestiges remain hidden in the earth from

which they would be wrested

to

become,

in the

French Museum, irrefutable

evidence of the ancient splendor of France.''' In the same year, 1807, Quatremere de Quincy, Palais des

Thermes

(baths) in Year

Gallo-Roman museum. Ten years government had issued

first

became

interested in the

of the Republic, called for the creation of a

II

later,

the political climate had changed and the

a decree closing the

wake of which Grivaud renewed

who

Museum

of French Monuments, in the

his earlier proposal;

Quatremere wrote

of his book on his collection and claimed to have initiated the

a review

call for a

Gallo-

Roman museum, whose first promoters were in fact Maffei and Caylus7^ Like them, Quatremere proposed a museum of ancient sculpture either produced in or imported into France. He cared as little for Celtic monuments as for those of the Middle Ages. In 1819

his plan

Due d'Angouleme's visit to

came

the Palais des

for the preservation of the edifice

Gallo-Roman museum. In

work on

The In

1

the project

was

however, and writers,

Sommerard then, that national

was

collection

among

monuments,

to link the

Thermes, he secured

a

promise of funds

and had himself appointed curator of the future

1820, however, after the

fall

of the Decazes government,

halted.

museum did

not resurface until after the July Revolution.

bought the Baths. The vogue was now for the Middle Ages, artists,

and people of fashion were flocking to the

on display

Hotel de Cluny.

in the

numerous proposals

the

Taking advantage of the

''^

idea of a national

83 1 the city of Paris

close to realization.

It will

come

floated at the time for a

the public favored that of Albert Lenoir,

two adjoining buildings

as

at the site,

whose

no

surprise,

museum

major epochs

that

in a series

one ancient, the other medieval,

be housed

mon-

of architectural spaces contemporary with the

bequeathed them to us."

Lenoir proposed that the exhibits of to

of

central idea

so as to offer the public a "complete chronology" and in order "to display the

uments of our history

Du

in the Baths,

is,

naturally

be preceded by an exhibit of "Druidic monuments," to be

collected in a "Gallic court" with entry

ner of dolmens, that

Roman monuments, which were

by way of bridges constructed "in the man-

with an enormous stone spanning the ditch." Furthermore,

"the Druidic fragments that Paris possesses, steles of local interest that were

unearthed

in the excavations at

Notre-Dame

in 171

1,

along with those found

Saint-Landry in 1829, should provide ample matter for the Gallic exhibit that

is

at

to

Franks and Gauls

lead

up

to the

Roman

one. These could be augmented with the Venus of Quinipily

and the statue of Vercingetorix, a celebrated general, discovered

Auvergne, which

hoped

it

The

may be

rest

is

century in

this past

probably stored in some obscure place from which

it is

to

be

retrieved."'''*

of the story

is

National Assembly and Senate

well known. In 1843

approved the allocation of funds

to purchase the

Du Sommerard

collection.

who sponsored the bill in the Assembly, did not fail to allude to his memories of the Museum of French Monuments or to invoke patriotism in his plea on behalf of the new museum: "Gentlemen, we find in various institutions around Paris Greek collections, Roman collections, Egyptian collections. Not even the savages of Oceania have been neglected. It is high time that we gave some thought to Francois Arago,

our ancestors. Let us see to

museum.

torical

on March exhibit

His

call

it

that the capital

of France also includes a French his-

was heeded. The Musee de Cluny, which was dedicated except that the Gallic

17, 1844, in general reflected Lenoir's proposal,

was omitted. The

lion's share

of the space went to the Middle Ages.^*"

Although the museum proved quite popular, had hoped to see the establishment of a

it

therefore failed to satisfy those

museum of French

antiquities



who

group

a

whose numbers were growing.

By by

the 1820s excavations

were being organized

local organizations, private individuals,

virtually

everywhere

in

and government bodies. The

France

artifacts

they unearthed went into private collections or were displayed in one of the archaeological

museums

into literature

that

many provincial

by Chateaubriand

at the

growing number of

gauge of the growing public editions through

works

interest in the nation's ancient past

increased attention paid to the Gauls

I

after 1830. is

in Franche-Comte.''

number of

after 1850.

Another

number of works devoted to the loca-

tion of Alesia (as well as the degree of passion invested in them).

Sainte-Reine in Burgundy or the

the

One

have already mentioned the

by painters and sculptors

this interest is the

num-

Norma and Gounod's cantata

historical

which some of these works went, and

measure of the intensity of

Gauls, introduced

turn of the century and featured in a

ber of operas devoted to Velleda as well as in Bellini's Gallia,^^ also figured in a

The

cities established.^^

new contender that entered

Was

it

Alise-

the race in 1855, Alaise

Besan9on versus Semur-en-Auxois. Quicherat alone con-

tributed nearly twenty times to this debate, challenging

most of the leading lights of

French archaeology. The polemic raged for several years with the participation of

some

fifty

authors

who

hurled political allusions and insults back and forth, draw-

ing the attention of the press and general In

1

public.''^

86 1, Henri Martin, one of the most stalwart champions of the Gallic cause,

summed up

his impressions

of a

visit to the Celtic gallery

of the British

Museum

in

terms that echo the sentiments of Arago's speech: "The sight of such a fine national collection in a country devoid of centralization inevitably turns the thoughts of a

43

44

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN French archaeologist to the Louvre, whose cosmopohtan galleries are open uities

from

all

over the world except those of our forefathers, while our institutions

of higher learning offer classes in

all

languages, even Javanese and Manchu, of

which we strongly approve, yet not one chair affairs

to antiq-

was imminent. Napoleon

III,

who

in Celtic."^"

in 1858, at the height

Commission on the Topography of

Alesia, created a

The end of

of

this state

of the battle over

the Gauls, decided in i860 to

pursue plans for a History of Julius Caesar. In 1861 he therefore requested that

Ludwig Lindenschmidt,

museum of Mainz (founded in 1852), proof Germanic and Roman arms.^' It was in these cir-

director of the

vide him with reproductions

cumstances, apparently, that Legrand d'Aussy's old idea, updated to meet the needs

move toward accomplishment.

of the moment, finally began to

On November

8,

Germain-en-Laye to the

Museum

Antiquities, the

1867,

as "a

museum of

of Antiques," that

Celtic is,

Gallo-Roman Museum,

called the

its

was issued

1862, a decree

establishing the chateau of Saint-

and Gallo-Roman antiquities subsidiary

the Louvre.

later

changed

The new

institution

Museum

to the

was

to be

of National

name that it still bears today. The museum was dedicated on May

12,

holdings enriched by the acquisition of the Boucher de Perthes collections

(which Cluny had rejected

name appears on Gallic and

in 1858)

the donors'

Gallo-Roman

and by donations from Napoleon

twenty-five times and whose

list

artifacts.^^ Initially traces

of the

gifts

III,

whose

included mainly

institution's association

much so that visitors were archaeology start off with monu-

with the history of Caesar project were quite apparent, so

museum of national ments located in Italy celebrating a Roman emperor's victories over the Dacians."^^ Under the Third Republic the Saint-Germain museum accentuated both its scienastonished to "see a French

tific

and

its

patriotic character,

symbolized by a change of name: the "temporary

Hall of Caesar and the Conquest" became the "Hall of Alesia."^'* In 1881, Gaston Boissier had this to say at the conclusion of one visit: "It can be said that the

of National Antiquities exists and that anyone it

contains will be

making

fifteen or

twenty

halls

a quick but comprehensive survey of our ancient history

from the most remote past

Over

who tours the

Museum

to the

beginning of the Middle Ages."^^

the past hundred years archaeological

museums

in

France have to one

degree or another undergone changes and reorganizations that have ultimately affected the

ways

the past they take are

in

which

visitors perceive the exhibits

away with them. Today,

no longer restored and displayed

in

such a

ate the illusion of a direct confrontation

brought back to

life

in

in contrast to a

and therefore the image of

hundred years ago, objects

way as to efface their history and cre-

between the spectator and

a past ostensibly

ways envisioned by Guizot, Michelet, and Viollet-le-Duc.

Nowadays the emphasis is rather on the historical distance that separates us from the past

whose

vestiges

we

admire: the restored portions of artifacts are clearly indi-

cated, objects are displayed as found in situ,

and

their laboratory treatment

is

Franks and Gauls

manner of display

described. Furthermore, the

tury ago.

is

different

from what

New interpretations determine the arrangement of

covery of a princely burial

site at

in 1953, as well as

(especially the use of carbon 14), pollen studies, ical,

and other analyses. Advances

and

work on

each object.

modern dating techniques

and metallurgical, chemical, phys-

celtica (1853)

Jubainville to Vendryes, Benveniste, and beyond; the

vative

to

and Indo-European linguistics have also

in Celtic

been important, from Zeuss's Grammadca

a cen-

of recent finds, such as the dis-

in part the result

Vix

was

artifacts as well as the

accompanying commentary and thus the significance attached These new interpretations are

it

and the work of Arbois de

same can be

said of the inno-

myths, and religions done primarily by Georges Dumezil

beliefs,

his followers. In short, the oldest representations

surviving artifacts once treated as worthless junk, in that their significance

and

in

some

of the Gauls, in the form of

embody

all later

representations,

cases even their physical appearance bear the

earmarks of countless discoveries, techniques, and theories from the time of

Montfaucon and Caylus

to the archaeologists

From Caesar

XIV

to Louis

The number of tury of the

by

ancient texts that instruct us about Gaul prior to the mid-fifth cen-

Common

established the

its

Era

is

impressive. According to Paul-Marie Duval,

anonymous

authors, or several hands yield

inhabitants and in

some

cases a

good

deal more.

are in Latin, the others in Greek; roughly 275 are in the

of Christian inspiration.

were exhumed only time. But it

first

who

has

most comprehensive bibliography, "by the year 460 some 350 works

single authors,

proper or

of today.

some mention of Gaul

More than 190 of

pagan

tradition, while 75 are

These texts did not all play the same historical

recently,

these

role.

Some

whereas others have been known and used for a long

one and only one has never been forgotten. Only one work

has, ever since

appeared, been read, quoted, copied, translated, printed and reprinted, para-

phrased, glossed, and discussed: Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars.

There are numerous manuscripts of the work: 33

in the Vatican Library, 25 in the

Bibliotheque Nationale, 17 in Florence.^'' Printed editions appeared in rapid succession: 10 in the fifteenth century, 39 in the sixteenth century, 20 in the seventeenth

century, 22 in the eighteenth century, and 214 in the nineteenth century

if

one

includes both separate publications and editions of the complete works and counts reprint editions.^^

There are

also

cially significant since scholars

sions demonstrates that the translated edition dates

numerous French

know Latin,

translations,

which are espe-

so that the existence of vernacular ver-

work was being read by

a

broad audience. The

from the beginning of the thirteenth century;

it

first

formed the

second part of the Fait des Romains, a compilation of several ancient works that enjoyed an enormous success.^^

Of

the next

two

translations,

both from the

final

45

'

46

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN decades of the fifteenth century, one, by Robert Gaguin, was also widely read.'"

Then came

the printed editions: lo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 19 in the

seventeenth century, 9 in the eighteenth century, and 61 in the nineteenth century.'

round out the

Finally, to

picture,

Caesar, commentaries on his work, and discussions of

some 70 of

these, 55 of

many

should also mention the

I

which had been published

its details.

biographies of

In 1880 there were

and

in the previous thirty years,

these figures are surely far from complete.'^

There

is little

mention of Gauls and Romans

in

French oral

and

traditions,

highly probable, moreover, that what mentions there are derive from books.'^

it is

The

name "Gaul" was preserved first of all by the Church. Throughout the Middle Ages it used the word Gallia to refer to the territory under the jurisdiction of the primate of Lyons, whereas the names Francia and regnum Francorum were applied to the profane entity.

took on

The word

Gallia,

which many writers used

political significance in the twelfth century,

as a geographic term, also

when it appeared

in expressions

such as regnum Galliae for the kingdom of France or when the kings of France were characterized as kings of the geographic territory in Latin as Galliae (e.g.,

known in French as les

Gaules and

Lodoycus rex Galliarum) or of the Gallic people

(e.g.,

Philippus rex Gallorurri)?''

More than of the

Roman

ancestors,

it

at issue,

however. For sixteen centuries, from the time

conquest to the French

was

among them,

name was

the

solely thanks to a

that

elite 's

discovery that the Gauls were their

few ancient authors, Caesar

memory was kept alive of

the people

first

and foremost

who had once inhabited

the

various parts of Gaul, of various episodes in their history, of their customs, institutions,

and

beliefs,

and of the deeds and actions of

their

most

illustrious figures.

Caesar conquered Gaul with implacable brutality and cruelty, but to

it

he also

monument aere perennius. It would have been disastrous if the works of the various ancient authors who had written of Gaul and the Gauls had disappeared in the fifth century, yet if Caesar's work had survived, the bulk of our knowledge erected a

would have remained place

—where

the

intact. If

memory of

one had

to single out

things Gallic

was and

one place is still

surely be that diaspora of individual places constituting

all

—one

formative

preserved,

it

would

the extant volumes of

The Gallic Wars.

As

readers of ancient writers and above

all

of Caesar, the chroniclers of the

Middle Ages included what they had learned about Gaul and

its

inhabitants in their

works. For example, Heri, a Benedictine from Auxerre, embellished his poem on the life

of Saint Germanus with a reference to Caesar, Gaul, and the siege of Alesia,

which he clearly identified with Alise in Auxois. His opinion on the subject was bor-

rowed by

the

monks of the nearby abbey at Flavigny, who had also read

inscribed in their martyrology.'^ This

is

a

good example of the use

sacred history of knowledge derived from the ancients.

An

Caesar, and in local

and

example of the use of

Franks and Gauls

such knowledge in national and profane history can be found in Almoin de Fleury 's preface to his Historia Francorum. Using the testimony of Pliny, Caesar, Sallust, and

Orosius, he compares Gaul to Germania and points out that the Gauls captured

Rome and sowed

fear in

This preface served as the inspiration for the

Italy.'*'

we mention the two provinces of Gaul, which now is called France, it is well that we pause here for a description of Gaul as given by Julius Caesar, who in ten years achieved its conquest, and with which Pliny and many other philosophers are in agreement."'^ Grandes Chroniques de France: "But since

Implicit in

Almoin and

been called Gaul

explicit in the

Grandes Chroniques, the idea that what had

now bore the name of France seems to have been quite widespread

from the twelfth century on: France aveit nun Galle a Si n'i aveit rei

eel jur.

ne seinnur.

Romain en demainne

I'aveient

[France in those days went by the It

had neither king nor

The Roman had

we

read in the

Roman

de Brut

it

elsewhere, and the same opinion

is

dominion]

(1155). Similar formulations

can be found

expressed in Li Fait des Romains, whose wide cir-

culation has already been mentioned.'^ In short,

men

Gaul.

lord.

in his

by Wace

name

from

at least the twelfth

century on,

of learning generally agreed that France was the successor to Gaul.

Nevertheless, this did not prevent chroniclers and historians from following Almoin

and the Grandes Chroniques

in suggesting that the

French were the descendants not

of the Gauls but of the Franks; they did so by beginning their histories of France with the earliest Frankish kings and relegating Gaul from the main body of the text to the introduction or preface.

This also made

under what circumstances Gaul had changed

its

it

possible to explain how, why, and

name, while

at the

same time assur-

ing the French of a privileged place in universal history.

France owed

its

place in universal history to the notion that the French, being

Franks, were in reality Trojans and therefore younger brothers of the Romans.

From

the seventh century

on

naturally enough, but also

Scandinavians. claims,

Only

a

this idea

was echoed not only by French

by Germans, Spaniards,

historians,

Italians, Belgians, Poles,

and

few Englishmen remained skeptical of these Frankish

and they ascribed Trojan roots to either the inhabitants of Britannia or

ruling dynasty.

This virtually unanimous European opinion began to break

in the fifteenth century,

when

Italian

its

down

humanists began to argue that peoples

descended from barbarian tribes could not possibly have Trojan origins, unlike the

Romans and

their legitimate heirs, the inhabitants

of

Italy. '"^

of the Trojans (did not Antenor die in Padua.'*) had

its

This "Italianization"

counterpart in other

47

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

48

European nations

form of

a search for

was purely

national, a

in the

a glorious past that

search that was facilitated by the revival and circulation of long forgotten or

little

known

example, was rediscovered in

texts: Livy, for

the fourteenth century, along with Tacitus'

Germania and various Latin and Greek geographers, especially Strabo. thirty-four manuscripts

Of

a total

of

by Strabo, twenty

date from the fifteenth century, which also

saw

five editions of the Latin translation of

his works.

An

edition of the original

Greek

text did not appear until 1516.'^'

What began

to

change was thus the very

framework of the secular universal history that

gave meaning to the various ethnic and

national histories. Henceforth, what distin-

guished the "historical peoples"

whose

feats

had

mankind

—was

not so

as ancientness, FIGURE

1.4

Julius Caesar, Commenfa/res; French translation (1482).

the allegedly

implications

the

from the

modern Germans drew glory from Iberians, the Poles

their

those

for

all

much Trojan ancestry especially when attested by

most ancient authors, and

tary exploits, especially against the

Thus



Germanic

mili-

Romans.

ancestors, the Spanish

from the Sarmatians, and the Swedes from the Goths

(despite their unenviable reputation elsewhere).

The promotion of Gaul and

the

Gauls, which, along with that of Brennus,'^^ played an increasing role in the history

of France from the fourteenth century on (as did the promotion of Arminius in

Germany and of various legendary conquerors of the Romans elsewhere), was part of this European movement and accelerated with it after 1450. "By 1480 a Frenchmen most sure, these

definitely

new ancestors were not yet in

the French felt attached

in 1400."'"^

To be

a position to replace the Trojans, to

whom

had Gallic ancestors he did not have

by long

habit and

who, throughout the sixteenth century,

coexisted with the Gauls, resisting repeated attempts to purge

of France. But in the end the Trojans it

was no more than

a

war

too:

by

the history

the seventeenth century

memory.

Universal history also had

more important than

lost this

them from

its

the profane

sacred component, however. This was vastly

component, because Genesis provided the

ulti-

mate answer to the question of national origins in the genealogy of Noah's descendants and the story of the diaspora following the failed attempt to build the tower

— Franks and Gauls

FIGURE

Remus presents

1.5

his

daughter to Francus with the

city of

Reims

the background; sixteenth-century tapestry, studio

in

of Beauvais.

of Babel.

The Trojans had

years: they

held a place in this genealogy for

were descendants of Japhet. The ancestors

chose for themselves in the fifteenth century therefore had to legitimate themselves all

the

more than

that the

— Germans,

by producing

their

a

thousand

European nations

Sarmatians, Gauls

own

genealogies going

way back to Japhet as originator of the line, the father of all Europeans. The

chain not only had to be traced back generation after generation, authenticated by authority adequate to ensure

its

it

had to be

also

acceptance. Annius of Viterbo

resolved both of these problems by a stroke of genius that ensured his

work an

He claimed to be publishing for the first time texts among them Manetho and Berosus, writers who had

audience throughout Europe.

of very ancient historians,

been widely quoted and highly respected peared.

On

its

face there

in antiquity but

whose works had disap-

was nothing impossible about

this claim.

The

texts

Annius published, especially those of Berosus, contained genealogies showing

how the various peoples of Europe had descended from Japhet. the Gauls, for example, the pseudo-Berosus gave a their first twenty-five kings.

It

nearly two centuries.

In connection with

containing the names of

did not take long for Annius to be labeled a

forger, but the controversy over the authenticity '^'^

list

49

of the texts he published lasted for



KRZYSZTOF POMIAN In French culture, the sixteenth century

was the great century of

the Gauls.

Books dealing with the subject clearly enjoyed the favor of the public. Between 1 509 and 1599 there were (not counting the works of Caesar) more than sixty editions of authentic or apocryphal ancient works pertaining to the history of Gaul, as well as a large

number of other

published

and

his

devoted to the subject. "^^ Berosus was

many times both with and without the comments of his self-styled

list

book, Les

texts at least partly

editor,

of Gallic kings was included by Jean Lemaire de Beiges in his influential

Illustrations de la

Gaule

et les singularitei

de Troye,

whose very

title is

evi-

dence of the coexistence of the two ethnogenetic legends. These kings became sufficiently well

known

for a

canon of Beauvais cathedral, about

1530, to

five tapestries depicting, respectively, Samothes, the first king of the

Gauls with the

and the founder of

Celtic Jupiter; Hercules of Libya, the tenth king of the Gauls Alesia; Galathes, the son of Hercules

commission

and eleventh king of the Gauls with Lugdus,

the founder of Lyons; Belgius, the fourteenth king of the Gauls, with Jasius and Paris, the

founder of Paris; and,

twenty-fifth kings of the Gauls.

The

finally,

Francus and Remus, the twenty-third and

'^^

Gauls' introduction into the history of France raised an immediate problem:

their relation to the Franks.

As long

the problem could be solved

as the

Franks were identified with the Trojans,

by invoking mythical genealogies.'^' But when

identification ceased to be taken for granted, things

that

became more complicated.

What had to be avoided at all cost was any suggestion that the French monarchy had originated with an invasion and conquest. For philosophical as much as political reasons there always had to be unity at the beginning.

worked

out. Frangois

always been

allies

as liberators: the

For Hotman, ical

Hotman

two united peoples formed

a nation

Claude Fauchet and others.

He

Rome and who came and elected their

a different solution,

first king.'"^

as

which was popularized by

who had migrated

one community subsequently divided, but

divided segments reunited to form a single nation. There

ing of Gauls and Franks

much

Gaul

from the same origins and shared similar cus-

toms."'" In other words, the Franks were Gauls

says as

to

held that "the Franks mixed easily and united with

the Gauls because they sprang

What began

Germans, who had

words, ethnic difference became blurred within a single polit-

community. Bodin proposed

Rhine.

types of solutions were

identified the Franks with the

of the Gauls in their struggle with

in other

Two

Hotman was also

is

across the

in the

no doubt

end the

that in speak-

thinking of Catholics and Protestants; he

himself in his preface. All indications are that Fauchet shared this

view, along with other historians close to the so-called politiques}^^

Between the end of the Wars of Religion and the French Revolution, the idea of

Noah continued

to hold a certain attrac-

A book by Father Pezron, who was by no means the

only person to cling to

tracing the ancestry of the Gauls back to tion.

such notions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe,

is

a

good example of

Franks and Gauls

how intellectual interests and methods, some of which dated

as far

Middle Ages, coexisted with more recent developments, such

back as the early

as occasional ethno-

graphic objectivity, an interest in the language spoken by ordinary people, and a desire to study

modern languages in a comparative light. " ^ These survivals of older

methods persisted much longer historical disciplines.

The

in the study

of European prehistory than in other

biblical-etymological speculations of Father Pezron are

not so far removed from the techniques employed in seemingly more tories

modern

of the Gauls and Celts, which include investigations of their beliefs, manners,

and customs. These

later efforts

took ancient texts as authorities rather than as

sources to be studied with a critical eye. Influenced, wittingly or unwittingly,

book of Genesis, they were hamstrung by historically

minded

Simon

later,

could thus tively

still

as can

be seen

be seen as Gauls

who had

in

work of

in the

Pelloutier."^ Despite criticism

by

the

chronology, as well as steeped in

biblical

Hence they were doomed

patriotism.

myths and create new ones, and,

his-

advance to revive old

Dom Jacques

by Leibniz and

Martin"''

Freret, the Franks

returned to their homeland."^ Even rela-

narrow and more scholarly works were often shaped by legend. The only

exceptions were the historical geographies of Adrien de Valois in the seventeenth

century and d'Anville in the eighteenth century,"^ along with Caylus's archaeology, which

was mentioned

previously.

Franks versus Gauls

To be completely comprehensive, we should ars,

also include research

by

local schol-

references in the Encyclopedic, and literary allusions: even so, the harvest

remains quite meager. Between the end of the Wars of Religion and the French Revolution, the Gauls elicited only moderate interest."^ in the history

Of

marginal importance

of France, which truly began only with the Franks, they did not

arouse great passions.

Toward

the end of Louis

XIV's

reign,

between the two groups began

to

of the history of France in

entirety and, in particular, to a

Gallic period. It

is

its

be redefined, and

this

however, relations

eventually led to a

new view

new approach

to the

impossible here to delve into the political, ideological, and social

whose

context of this turning point,

effects

were soon

felt in

the debate over the

French constitution."' Over the course of the next century there would be further

profound

effects

tory: rather than

harmony

on

historical research

and the overall presentation of French

view the history of France

interrupted only

by

in the traditional

accidents, people

began

his-

terms of unity and

to see the country as the site

of an age-old antagonism, a confrontation between the descendants of the Gauls

and the heirs of the Franks. In

this

connection

views of the Comte de Boulainvilliers, past in this

new way.

'^^

it

who was

will suffice to recall the principal

the first to envision the national

51

52

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN According to the Franks.

new

The

masters.

At

French history began with the conquest of Gaul by

Boulainvilliers,

territory

was divided

up, and the Gauls

were subjected

to rule

by

were not subjects

the time of the conquest, moreover, the Franks

of any king. All were noble, and they lived in an aristocratic regime under an elec-

with no obligation to the monarch other than military service.'^'

tive kingship,

Accordingly, the Gauls were subjugated not by a king but by landed nobles: "This truth

is

so certain that in the usage of the Monarchy, the Third Estate

tuted only after

it

was emancipated by

the Lords.

It

in contravention

undertaking

this

it

of the obvious rights of the Owners of land and of

Government. "'^^

the fundamental law of the

From

consti-

sought the protection of the

Kings and claimed to be immediately subject to the monarch. In

was supported

was

the time of Clovis on, kings had tried to strip the Franks of their liberties

and privileges by relying,

if

gle against their masters.

necessary,

Had

on the Gauls and helping them in their strug-

Clovis lived longer, he might have succeeded in

reducing the Franks to servitude. '^^ This finally did happen during the reign of

harmony between

Pepin, but Charlemagne restored great Prince

the king and the Franks: "This

saw that despotic and arbitrary government, of the kind

father Charles Martel

had hoped

of the Nation and

certain

its

to establish,

that his grand-

was absolutely contrary

and evident rights and therefore that

and he consequently decided to give the French the

justice

it

to the genius

could not

last,

due them by reestablish-

ing the ancient form of government."'^'* It

was Charlemagne who consecrated feudal

doing undue violence to the laws."'^^ blies as

rights

and introduced

and

supreme tribunals and authorities with the power to make

ecclesiastical lords.

nobility, I,

"without

He also revived the role of the national assem-

cerning taxation, war, armed forces, and alliances and to lay

fiefs

all

decisions con-

settle differences

between

These assemblies consisted exclusively of the clergy and

because "the French, after conquering the Gauls during the reign of Clovis

government

established their

remaining in a

state

entirely apart

from the subject Nation, which,

between Roman servitude and a kind of

liberty,

was always

regarded by the Conquerors as destined to labor and to the cultivation of the land

and not

to share the

honors of sovereign administration."'^''

For Boulainvilliers, the central

own day was rights

of peerage, that

is,

a degradation

the Franks lost and the Gauls

of the Gauls in

this

nobility,

one of the causes of which

serfs abetted

won. Against

by the same

this

it

Capetians.'^'' In the

end

might be objected that nothing

formulation other than the name, which

to refer not to the inhabitants

synonym

of the

the Capetian family," together with a rise of the third estate,

which consisted of emancipated

as a

of French history from Charlemagne to his

the erosion of feudal rights and, as a necessary consequence, of the

was "the policy of

left

axis

is

is

used, moreover,

of independent Gaul but to the Gallo-Romans, indeed

for their enslavement.

True enough, but

this truth

only scratches the

Franks and Gauls

surface. In the first place,

ple that for

"Gaul" was not

just

any name:

two centuries had enjoyed the reputation

it

name of a peodirectly or by way of

was

(either

the

the Franks) of being the ancestor of the French nation. For Boulainvilliers, ever, only a part of the

French nation descended from the Gauls, namely, the com-

moners. The nobility, therefore, was in his view

acknowledged

that

how-

To be

body.

like a foreign

mixed marriages and other factors had resulted

where, "by the accession of

Hugh

sure,

he

in a situation

Capet, the two peoples had become fused in

shared rights and a single national body."'^^ Nevertheless, he saw the rights of conquest as the cornerstone of noble privileges, which he presented as a perpetuation

of the original antagonism between Franks and Gauls. Thus a direct link was estab-

between the history of the Gauls, ancestors of the third

lished

and the

estate,

his-

tory of the government of France: the monarchy, legislative assemblies, municipal

and feudal

rights

rights.

This became flagrant from the

moment Abbe Dubos

published his methodical

refutation of Boulainvilliers's idea of French history. Boulainvilliers

because in the

fifth

century there were no Gauls in Gaul; they had

all

was wrong "metamor-

phosed" into Romans. '^^ The Franks, moreover, were by no means savages encountering civilization for the first time: they

ing alliances with

had for centuries been trading and form-

Rome, and many of them had served Rome. Indeed, they were

"the most civilized of the barbarian nations."'^" quest," except of the territory held

of

Romans

to Frankish kings.

Thus

there

was no "Frankish con-

by Syagrius, but rather voluntary submission'^'

Furthermore,

submission was ratified by the

this

Empire, which conferred power and legitimacy upon those kings and, pursuant to valid legal forms, ceded to

ment

initially

them

had such negligible

rights over Gaul.'^^ effects:

That

"The general

is

why

Frankish

settle-

idea that one should have of

the state of the Gauls under Clovis and throughout the reign of his sons and grand-

sons

is

that

it

was,

Valentinian III."

at first glance,

Of

much

course barbarians

closed to them, and a foreign prince

the

same

now

as

it

had been under Honorius and

filled offices that

was pretorian

prefect.

had previously been

"As for the

rest,

the face

of the country was the same. Bishops governed their dioceses with the same authority

Romans continued to same as before. The same

they had before the Franks became rulers of the Gauls. All

live

Roman law. In every city the officers were the were levied. The same shows were staged. In short, manners and customs

under

taxes

were the same

Dubos

as

when people were obedient

to the sovereigns

of Rome."'^^

did not stop at contrasting the image of a violent and bloody conquest

with that of a peaceful settlement, however.

He

challenged the whole range of

Boulainvilliers's contentions concerning the Franks'

regime before and

after their

He insisted that the Frankish monarchy had always been hereditary, the notion that the nobles had elected the king.'^"* He showed that the

arrival in Gaul.

and rejected

Franks paid taxes under the sons of Clovis'^^ and that the Merovingian kings

53

54

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN wielded absolute authority over their

had been slaves while others were order,

were

free

He

maintained that some Franks

and that the free men formed

Gaul

in

after the arrival

also soldiers.

'^^

of the Franks only the Franks bore arms:

Romans

All this evidence provided further support for Dubos's central

argument: that the Franks did not subjugate the Romans, jects

a single

and he denied both that the only profession of free men was that of arms

'^^

and that

subjects.'^''

of the French monarchy. In so doing, the

who

rather

became sub-

Romans retained the right to hold any

employment; entered into marriages with the Franks, who quickly and adeptly mastered Latin; maintained the division of the population into three orders; and retained ownership of their land.'^^

Dubos

thus refuted Boulainvilliers's identification of the nobility with the Franks

and of the third estate with the Gauls. According to him,

free

Franks joined an

already existing nobility without overturning the social structure that predated their arrival in

Roman

Gaul. Along with

Roman

law (and municipal law in particular),

that social structure survived the arrival of the Franks. Furthermore, feudal rights

did not originate in this period and could not therefore have been consecrated under

A much

Charlemagne.

later

development, these so-called rights were in

usurpation: the lords entrusted

by the prince with

fact a vast

the administration of territories

within his power seized the opportunity afforded by a weakening of the monarchy to claim rights that legally

belonged to the king alone. In so doing, they arbitrarily

rewrote the laws for their own benefit and stripped the people of their freedom. "The old tribunals suffered the same fate as the old laws.

Our usurpers arrogated

selves the right to administer justice or else entrusted

removed

inated and

as they

sonal and real taxes at will.

saw

It

fit.

it

to officers

that

them-

whom they nom-

Finally, they asserted the right to levy

was then

to

both per-

Gaul truly became a conquered

land."'""^

Conflict therefore did not figure in Dubos's account as an effect of conquest.

emerged, rather, as a trary nobility

result

working

of the institution of feudalism by a tyrannical and arbi-

to the detriment

eyes, moreover, this conflict

was

of both monarchy and people. In Dubos's

a social conflict

devoid of ethnic coloration,

because the two nations had merged and become one.

common law.''*'

It

derivative of Latin, to dress in the

They had begun

same fashion, and

to speak a

under one

to live

Nevertheless, the conflict between them had dangerous implications for

France. "Not even experience could teach the inhabitants of Gaul to overcome those

of their vices most inimical to the perpetuation of flightiness

them to Gaul will

and

fight

to the

their haste to resort to

society, especially their natural

arms and violence, which has so often caused

when no real issue was at stake. These vices, which opened the gates of

Romans and later delivered the country into the hands of the

Barbarians,

always cause grave harm so long as the peoples of Gaul do not live under a sov-

ereign with authority sufficient both to prevent them from destroying one another

and to force them to

live happily in the

most beautiful country

in Europe."'''^

Franks and Gauls

The

French history by BoulainvilHers, of an enduring

idea, introduced into

antagonism between the heirs of the Franks and the descendants of the Gauls was not laid to rest by Dubos's arguments. Dubos's reputation suffered from

Montesquieu's unity

when

the climate

Boulainvilliers's flict

in

suffered further from his insistence

criticism.''*^ It

way of

was one of looking

between nobility and third

conflict

made

at things

on the need

it

for

estate.

possible to think about this con-

both historical-legal and political-polemical terms, the two modes being

at

times distinguished but frequently combined. In the historical-legal mode, writers

from Boulainvilliers himself

to

Montesquieu, Mably, and Montlosier constructed

"systems" that proposed solutions, presumably compatible with the alleged underlying factors, of such problems as the relation between the tative institutions, the role

noble

privileges.''*'*

monarchy and represen-

of the parlements, and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of

mode, the Gauls became symbols of

In the political-polemical

the third estate and the Franks of the nobility. Writers speaking in the third estate could thus identify that

Sieyes did,

group with the nation

as a

name of

whole and

the

ask, as

why it did not dispatch "to the forests of Franconia all those families that

cling to the absurd pretension of having sprung

having inherited the rights of

conquest.''

The

from

Boulainvilliers

turned back against the

nobility.''*^

it

consists solely of descendants

The exclusionary

employed against the

conquerors and of

Nation, thus purged, will be able to

take consolation in being reduced to the belief that

of the Gauls and the Romans."

a race of

noblesse de robe

which

principle in politics,

and the third

estate,

was thus

The idea of an enduring antagonism born of the

Frankish conquest would thus serve throughout the Revolution to justify the exclusion of the nobility. tors

were Gauls.

Amedee

From now on, a person could be French only if his or her ances-

'^'^

Thierry and His Contemporaries

Writers primarily interested in the Gauls or the Celts generally stayed out of the

controversy begun by Boulainvilliers. Prior to the Revolution, Pelloutier had nothing to say about

it.

Nor

did

La Tour d'Auvergne Corret

later on,

although he was

careful to include the bards, the Druids, Ossian, the Breton peasants

whose

dress

had remained unchanged for twenty centuries, and etymologies tracing words from

As

various languages back to their roots in the "Celto-Breton of Armorica." relations

between the Gauls and the Franks, the most plausible hypothesis,

view, was that the Franks were the progeny of "one of the

Sigovese established in Germany." If

so,

teenth century.

in his

colonies that

he argued, "the Franks, in driving the

Romans out of Gaul, were merely reclaiming returning to their country of origin."'''^

many

for

We

their ancestors' ancient heritage,

thus

come

full circle

back

to the six-

55

56

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

who prided himself on not giving in to the "credulity of ancient historians" and who took Gibbon as his model of critical scholarship, tried to eliminate traditional "fables" from his work.'"*^ He Jean Picot's book took a very different

line. Picot,

was

interested not just in historical events but also in the climate and soil of

and

in

tics

of the Gauls along with their

what the country produced

as well as in the physical

Gaul

and moral characteris-

diet, clothing, education,

marriage and funeral

customs, techniques of hunting and making war, government, religion, population,

and wealth. As the If

titles

of his

treatises indicate,

La Tour d'Auvergne's book corresponds

was

close to that of the ideologues}'''^

the Franks in an imperial

He

he did

to the

well as history.

statistics as

pre-romantic

sensibility, Picot's

presents relations between the Gauls and

emphasizing the reconciliation of two formerly

spirit,

warring peoples. To be sure, the Gauls "were obliged to adopt some of the laws of the Franks, but their

own

influence

was

far greater than

one might think. The

advantages of number and enlightenment made themselves

felt.

These gave

the

conquered people a glorious ascendancy. The Franks unwittingly adopted most of their

manners and customs. Before long, having truly become Gauls, they preserved

virtually

none of the

other than the

qualities

name and

of the Franks

the conquests.

who had once

inhabited Germania,

"'^^

Perceptible in the Charter of 1814, this spirit of reconciliation ultras at the

beginning of the Restoration

Montlosier's book'^'

not long in coming.

—and

It



was attacked by the

as evidenced, in

subsided rapidly after 1820.

The

our domain, by

liberal

response was

consisted in a reaffirmation of the centrality, in the France of

the present as well as of the past, of the conflict

between the heirs of the Franks and

the descendants of the Gauls. After invoking Boulainvilliers, Montlosier, and other

"noble writers," Augustin Thierry affirmed "this somber and terrible truth: there are

two enemy camps on the

soil

"Chlodowig's Sicambrians," he

of France." Against the nobility, associated with

insisted

on

his

own

ancestry:

"We

are the sons of

men of the third estate; the third estate emerged from the communes, and the communes were the asylum of the serfs; the serfs were the people vanquished in the the

conquest."'^^ Meanwhile, Guizot proudly asserted "that since the beginning of our

monarchy France has been troubled by a struggle between two peoples, and olution

the rev-

was simply the triumph of the new victors over the former masters of power

and of the land." The two peoples

in question

were "Franks and Gauls, lords and

peasants, nobles and commoners."''^ It

if

took just a few years for Guizot and Augustin Thierry to discover that this idea,

generalized, could render historical progress intelligible, both in France since the

arrival

of the Franks and in England since the

Thierry assumed that history has a direction:

Norman Conquest. Both Guizot and it

moves from barbarism toward an

ever more perfect civilization. In the political realm

it

tends to replace chaos with

order, force with justice, arbitrariness with law, servitude with liberty, private will

Franks and Gauls

men saw the driving force behind this ascendant movement in the conflict between "social conditions" or "classes," each embodying its own way of exercising power and its own principle of legitimacy. There were in their with public power. Both

view

five such conditions or classes: royalty, clergy, nobility, bourgeoisie,

antry.

Thus Guizot and Thierry introduced

political life

major innovation

in the study

of the

of the past: the idea that a nation, as subject and object of history,

homogeneous

a unified,

a

and peas-

entity personified

various groups in conflict,

whose

by

king and court but a composite of

its

antagonistic coexistence

Guizot and Thierry did not agree on every point. The social conflict in the light

is

a source of progress.'^"*

inclined to

latter,

in

view

all

of the Greek struggle for independence, emphasized the

ethnic dimension, whereas Guizot stressed the "class struggle." '^^

were interested

not

is

how nations, which by nature incorporated

Still,

conflict,

both writers

were formed

out of groups differentiated primarily by ethnic characteristics. Conquest easily

found

its

place in such a conceptual framework.

It

resulted in domination based

force alone, arbitrary domination for the benefit of private interests: such original

form of

aristocratic rule.

Revolution also found

its

place:

through

on

was the

it,

a

once

subordinate class came to occupy a dominant position, with a concomitant change in the

form of government and principle of legitimacy.

It

thus

became

possible, as

Guizot showed in his lectures, to propose a synthetic overview of French and

European history from the fall of the Roman Empire

to the

French Revolution.

One

could identify the true actors in this historical drama as well as grasp, beyond events themselves, the hidden In 1828,

Amedee

mechanism

that caused

them

to occur.

Thierry, Augustin's brother, published the Histoire des Gaulois,

which between then and 1 877 went through ten editions (one of which, the reprinted four times), despite criticism description of Gallic

life

by every writer on the

found

subject,

its

by archaeologists

way

a

was

in the i86os.'^'' Thierry's

into the school curriculum. It

and there were

1857,

was repeated

good many of them, most notably

Henri Martin and Theophile Lavallee, whose books were widely disseminated.'^^

Most of our graphical images of the Gauls, whether their

horned or winged helmets crowned by

multicolored shields, seem to have breastplate in the

Greek or Roman

tall,

in painting or sculpture, with

bushy plumes and

come from Thierry style,

as well:

their four-sided,

"A wrought metal

or a coat of mail of Gallic invention; an

enormous saber hanging by iron or copper chains beside the

right thigh;

sometimes

a shoulder-harness gleaming with gold, silver, and coral, along with a gold necklace, bracelets,

bright

and rings encircling the arm and middle finger; breeches and cape

diamond patterns or magnificently embroidered; and,

long reddish mustache: so

we may imagine

last

but not

in

least, a

the military accoutrement of the

Arvernian, Aeduan, or Biturigan noble of the second century b.c."'^^

For the nineteenth century,

book on

Amedee

Thierry's

the earliest periods of French history,

book thus served

and

it

as a reference

so happens that the historical

57

58

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN account

it

gives

was based on the ideas of Augustin Thierry and Guizot. In

transalpine and cisalpine Gaul, in Thrace, in Asia Minor, the Gauls

abandoned the

nomadic life in favor of a sedentary one. Thereupon they found themselves exposed to the influence

of their

toms

of Greek civilization, which softened them and corrupted the purity

way of

life'^°

as drinking

but

same time

at the

from human

skulls at

victory of the nation." Thierry

away with them. By

By

where

in Gaul."'^'

renounce such savage cus-

us that "such brutal and ferocious customs long

tells

gradual advance slowly but surely

its

the beginning of the second century, they

the middle of the first century

were confined

to

where Posidonius found them flourishing

the fiercest tribes of the north and west, still....

to

banquets "honoring the conqueror and the

held sway throughout Gaul. Civilization in did

them

led

no

trace of such barbarism remained any-

In transalpine Gaul, to which the influence of Greek civilization was transmitted via Marseilles, the Gauls experienced lived tains,

But

under the rule of

who

priests.

two major

political revolutions. Initially they

This theocracy'*'^ was abolished by the

tribal chief-

arrogated to themselves the political power they took from the Druids.

"if the aristocratic revolution benefitted Gaul,

of another, more salutary revolution. As

it

was because

grew

cities

in

it

sowed

number and

size,

the seeds

they cre-

ated a unique people in an excellent position to understand and covet independence.

And

among

the leaders of the aristocracy, succeeded gradually in conquering

principle and

new forms of government were born '""^

tion replaced the ancient privilege of heredity."

region, although "the constitutions that ied according "to particular east

"By

Gaul."'*'''

Amedee munes

inside city walls: popular elec-

This was so in

the cities of the

all

The movement began

local circumstances."

it

had already made

This account of the social history of the Gauls to the history of the

Thierry, with the

in the

War of

Middle Ages

Investitures

as

it

is

itself felt

in the

many

time of

and the emancipation of the com-

this

account, then, the

Romans came

to

Gaul

at a

to develop their

own distinctive

civilization.'^^

Gaul the ancestors of the

bond between

two peoples was

word

"moral type." To be sure,

that for it

the cen-

beginning

the inhabitants

French.'' In genealogical terms, "nineteen- twenti-

were descended from the former.

to a single "race," a

cities

To what extent were

eths" of the latter the

when

time

of gravity was in the process of shifting from rural villages to

this

through-

obviously in

was presented

civi-

as central episodes.

Following

of

A new

emerged from the popular revolution" var-

the middle of the first century,

ways analogous

ter

and

it.

and south, where people were most susceptible to the influence of Greek

lization.

out

by dissension

the people did in fact covet independence, and, encouraged

was but

a

But for Amedee Thierry, the

He defined it in terms of belonging

far stronger.

him meant

'"^"^

temperament, a psychic character, a

a short step

from the moral

to the somatic, as

evident from a pamphlet on the "physiological characteristics of the

human

is

races"

Franks and Gauls

that

was

inspired

the "moral type,"

family," he

whose

summarized

ancient peoples. ligent;

by Thierry's book.'^^ But Thierry himself was

interested only in

"salient traits," the defining characteristics of the "Gallic

as follows:

"A personal

gallantry without equal

the

A frank, impetuous spirit open to all impressions, eminently intel-

but also an extreme fickleness, a lack of constancy, a marked repugnance for

the ideas of discipline and order that are so powerful

among

Germanic

the

great deal of ostentation, and, last but not least, a perpetual disunity sive vanity."'*'^

FIGURE

among

For Amedee Thierry

Gaul Invaded: The Franks;

1.6

it

illustrations

races, a

born of exces-

was the apparent permanence of these

traits

by Raffin for Devinat and Toursel, Histoire de France.

\

Un



chef, ClOVis. Oa eat le chef? Sur Qui le porte? Qualre gnrj' paven-

2.

Les Francs



pillards.



oa

sont entrfs

— —

Que

fontMeurtrr, pillage. Qu'eniportent-ils? Coffrttn. belUg Hoffrt, vases pricifur. I.a Gaule n'cta t done pas Que vont-ils en f»ire? Partage.

Francs? Richr

li'S

villa.



d^fentlue? facile

4.

Mai

df/endue, tongue poijr. peu de totdals. proit pillitt ruinff, mft thru reuse.

La QaiUe,



roi Dagobert.



Cent ant apr^a Clo ivi^uf. Les habits du roi? Commf nnrietu ehefg rovxaxm: en outrr, rouronne. Saint Eloi nrait rrfu Geate? Pourqun.? (In trdne d'or. de Vor pour faite un tr^mf. trit fuibUf rf tris honnfte, xl en arait fait deux; dttint miniUTt dt Dagobert. ris.



Dngobfrt dan$ ion

palriis;

d

ttft c/itfig,





59

6o

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN that established a sort of psychological continuity

between the Gauls and the

French: the former were the ancestors of the latter in the sense that the Gauls

bequeathed to the French their inner constitution, which to feel a natural sense of solidarity with

French

in turn caused the

and sympathy for the Gauls.

Amedee Thierry recounted the Roman conquest from the point of Gauls. He emphasized the unfortunate effects of Massalian policy,

Furthermore,

view of the

which culminated

in

an alliance between

henceforth treated as friends and history of the Gallic nations the

words of discord and

sow

ruin, fatal

out exception, in a

common

terized as the "national party"

that

whom

'^^

the

Romans

uttered for the first time in the

of the

Roman people,

would, for an entire century,

nations, ultimately to reunite

servitude."

ticularly noticeable in the passages

the Aedui,

allies, friends, brothers

powers

among, and weaken those

conflict

"Thus were

allies.

words

Rome and

them

all,

This indignant and patriotic tone

devoted to Vercingetorix, whose party

is

with-

is

par-

charac-

and whose army was a "national army" serving the

"national cause," the "cause of liberty." ''''^ As for Vercingetorix himself, this first

isolate,

was the

time that he was portrayed in so clear and unambiguous a fashion as the

defender of "Gaul's independence," the incontrovertible hero of the struggle

Roman

against the

invaders,

whose words

in

sending the cavalry to bring help to

Alesia resounded "as the distress cry of the fatherland

alone in his struggle, he would have won. "If

had been attacked as boldly

would have been saved, and peace and freedom of

all

names Crassus and Varus

the

not been

efforts; if the

outer line toward the

as Vercingetorix attacked the inner line,

name

nations,

Had he

Comm the Atrebate, Virdumar, and

Eporedorix had backed Vergesilaun's stubborn plain

itself."'""

Caesar, which

came

to stand for

would have gone down

for the comfort of peoples

Gaul

danger to the

in history alongside the

and the everlasting terror of

[would-be] conquerors."''^

Thus

there can be

no doubt about Amedee Thierry's judgment of the Roman

One problem remains, however, because Caesar, in conquering Gaul, brought not only Roman domination but also Roman civilization, which Thierry acknowledges to have been superior to that of the Gauls. The patriotic point of view thus conflicted with the philosophical. Which are we to choose, or, if no choice is to be made, how are we to reconcile the two.'' Guizot did not hesitate for a conquest.

moment. In

a

remark worthy of Hegel, he indicated

his preference for civilization:

"When the imperial administration prevailed in Gaul, however bitter and legitimate the resentments and regrets of patriots may have been, it was surely more enlightened,

more

impartial,

ests than the

more preoccupied with general views and

former national governments had been.""^ As

truly public inter-

we have

seen,

Amedee

Thierry preferred the patriotic point of view. But once the Gauls are defeated, he emphasizes the efforts by Caesar and his successors to win them over, along with "the taste for study in the upper classes and for agriculture in the people," which.

Franks and Gauls

"encouraged by the government, absorbed the anxious energy of the GalUc character

and miraculously eased the transition to the institutions of the conquest."'^''

While he sympathetically described every manifestation of Gallic nevertheless did not cal life

condemn

of Rome. For him,

the Gauls for participating in the cultural and politi-

Roman civilization, while not a value superior to national

independence, apparently compensated for

Romans and

he

resistance,

the Germans,'^^

it

was

For Gaul, caught between the

its loss.

certainly better then a relapse into barbarism.

The Gauls Between the Romans and the Germans The

Amedee

eighty years that elapsed between

Camille Jullian's Histoire de

la

Thierry's Histoire des Gaulois and

Gaule witnessed an explosion of interest in the Gallic

and Gallo-Roman periods, several symptoms of which

There was,

in particular, a rapid increase in

made by comparing

increase can be

we have already mentioned.

knowledge.

A

rough estimate of

work with

the three volumes of Thierry's

that

the

four of Jullian's, paying attention not only to the relative lengths (Jullian's

is

approximately three times as long) but also to the number of references to source

documents, maps, inscriptions, coins, and sculpted monuments

many in Jullian was

as in Thierry).

There

flourishing: the discipline

Quicherat had been teaching tions

it

is

nothing surprising about

had had

at the

(at least ten

its

own

this.

times as

Archaeology

journal since 1844, and Jules

Ecole des Chartes since

1847.'^''

Many excava-

were under way, most notably on Mount Beuvray (Bibracte) under the direc-

tion of BulHot

and de Dechelette'^^ and

the patronage of

Napoleon

III

at Alesia, initially

from 1861

to 1865

under

and, after 1906, at the behest of the Societe des

Sciences Historiques et Naturelles of Semur.'''^ Important works appeared in rapid succession, including the Dictionnaire archeologique de la Gaule (1875— 1878), pro-

duced by a committee appointed by Napoleon textbook, which

is still

in use today.

Other "sciences ancillary

to history"

geography produced the summa of

umes devoted

to

Gaul

matics offered the

III in 1858,

were by no means

Desjardins,'^''

left

behind: historical

epigraphy contributed the vol(after 1888),

numis-

Blanchet,'^' Esperandieu catalogued sculpted

monu-

in the Corpus Inscriptionum

work of

and Joseph Dechelette's

'^^

Latinarum

ments,'^^ and Henri Gaidoz's founding, in 1870, of the Revue celtique provided a

forum

for reporting

material thus

was

also

Even

on the

latest

work

in philology

and

linguistics.'^^

Most of the

made accessible referred to the period of Roman domination, but there

much more work

than before that shed a

the situation in higher education

superfluous Henri Martin's bitter

new light on independent

was changing,

comments (quoted

earlier)

at

long

last

Gaul.

rendering

on France's neglect of

her ancient past. In a single year, 1882, Alexandre Bertrand began teaching courses

on French archaeology

at the

Ecole du Louvre, and Heron de Villefosse did the

61

62

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN same

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he devoted most of his teach-

at the

Roman

ing on

epigraphy and antiquities to Gaul, while Arbois de Jubainville was

December

elected to the chair of Celtic literature at the College de France. '^"^ In

1905, Camille Jullian delivered an inaugural lecture for the chair in history and national antiquities at the College de France, in which he

made

a fervent appeal for

cooperation between historians and archaeologists, for parallel study of texts and

documents and monuments: "A true national history must be constantly

stones,

touch with the

nourished

soil that

of the past without studying that

our history from

During

its

roots."

men and the soil

stones they erected

and those stones

is

nothing

upon less

it.

To speak

than to sever

'^^

the eight decades in question, the Gallic and

Gallo-Roman periods occu-

pied an increasing portion of works treating the history of France in

its

from fifty-odd pages

first

in

Michelet (1834) to a hundred in Henri Martin's

(1833) to

more than

to a thick

volume by Gustave Bloch

agreed that eral issues

and

it

the

Germanic

essential to include

what was

Roman

its nature.'*

edition

And

a

's

Gaul

Histoire.

in

Yet while everyone

any history of France, sev-

genuine connection between Gaul

finally,

what was the

of Gaul on

state

conquest, and what were the effects of that conquest and of

invasions.-*

The

old problem of the Franks' relation to the Gauls and

Gallo-Romans had survived, even had been

(191 1) in Lavisse

remained controversial. Was there

the eve of the

entirety:

three hundred in the third edition (1844) and the fourth (1855),

was absolutely

France.'^ If so,

in

a century before,

if it

was

stated differently

and along with

it

now from

the

way

it

subsisted the old division between

"Germanists" and "Romanists."

Sismondi appears to have been the person there

was any

nations

link

farthest in

are dissimilar and

whose

institutions are absolutely differ-

and the French, successively occupied the beautiful country that

extends from the Alps and the Rhine to the Pyrenees and the two seas.

of one

is

denying that

between the history of France and the history of Gaul. "Two

whose characters

ent, the Gallic

who went the

independent of that of the other; each

is

complete unto

The

itself."

history

To be

sure,

many French people were descendants of Gauls, and the "race" had not been completely made over. But the history of the Gauls did not merge seamlessly into the history of the French. The two were separated by "an interval of four centuries... during which the Gauls were merely a province of the Roman Empire, without a national spirit or government of their own, without a will or a

life."

Accordingly, the "true origin of the French people" was the final invasion of the barbarians on

December

31, 406.

This was the view against which, without saying ing. It represented an

so,

Amedee Thierry was

react-

extreme position in a debate whose other extreme was

defended by Henri Martin.

I

have already quoted the sentence with which Martin

began the history he published

in 1833.

Eleven years

later the

opinion expressed

Franks and Gauls

"The people who

there had evolved to this:

first

populated the center and west of

for their blood

Europe were the Gauls, our true ancestors;

is

by

far the

predominant

element in the successive mixture of various peoples that formed our nation, and their spirit is

still

in us.

Their virtues and their vices, preserved in the heart of the

French people, along with the essential

of their physical type, recognizable

traits

beneath the degeneration induced by a change of mores and a mingling of populations,

were

attest to that ancient origin.

still still

"'^^

For Martin,

in other

words, the French

effectively Gauls, physically as well as morally. Politically,

were not Gauls, because the French were a nation once,

became captives of

the

a nation,

however, they

whereas the Gauls, having been

Roman Empire.

It

was therefore necessary

for

German barbarians to come and liberate them, thereby reviving the martial character and virtues of a people gone soft: the Germans were needed in order to "prothe

vide at last the mortar that would bind together the building blocks of French nationality."'^^ It

remains to be seen

how

Martin reconciled his view that the mingling of

populations (associated with Thierry's idea of racial continuity) had been a source

of degeneration with his belief in the progressive character of the French nation.

He

surely took that belief from Michelet,'^^

historians

and archaeologists

who studied

whose work

also influenced other

Gaul, including Jules Quicherat, perhaps

Fustel de Coulanges, and certainly Camille Jullian.'^" Michelet, though an adver-

saw

sary of the "tyrant" he

ity-of-race viewpoint,"'^' a radical discontinuity

in the

Thierry brothers' "exclusive, systematic perpetu-

was unwilling

to

go

to the other

extreme of assuming

between Gaul and France. The French, he argued, were

"mixed Celts," '^^ descendants not only of the Gauls but also of the Greeks,

Romans, and Germans. All of these ritory of Gaul, multiplying there

races,

which had successively occupied the

and superimposing

ter-

their distinctive contributions,

were simply "elements," "living components," without which the French nation could not have become what stituting France.

it

was yet which by themselves were incapable of con-

Before the nation could

come

into being, these elements

subjected to "internal processing," or self-transformation.

to

first,

in the history

and changed

its

yet remains the sentially Gallic

Celts,

itself

doing France revealed

its

it

took

in.

it

—metaphor —

with their clannish

unity and self-regard

becomes an oak,

latent potential,

to

borrow

used by Michelet himself.

spirit, their

that

is

''''

what came

But there was also transformed

identity yet remained the same, just as an acorn changes

same when



of France, for the French

internalizing and assimilating

it from outside and building its own body from what

discontinuity, for in so

be

'^^

For Michelet, then, there was continuity nation was present virtually from the

to

"The process or series of

changes that our fatherland underwent in the course of transforming the subject of the history of France."

had

a Hegelian

its

—and

itself,

identity

quintes-

In the beginning were the

"warrior's resistance to discipline," their dis-

in short, their "barbarian

and bellicose chaos," which the

63

64

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN Druids and "men of the oaks" never managed to master.

In order to rescue Gaul

from "the ebb and flow of barbarism," some outside element was needed, and

came first from Greece,

later

administration, and urban

from Rome.'^^ It was

life

to Gallic soil. If,

this

Rome that brought organization,

moreover, the Celtic element sur-

vived in the French language and therefore also "in customs as well as language, in action as well as thought,"''^ nization,

it

did so only within the framework of

Roman

orga-

whose power proved such that even as "the barbarians seemed on the verge

of destroying

they would be subjected to

it,

its

force in spite of themselves. Like

it

or not, they would have to dwell beneath invincible vaults that they could not shake.

bow their heads and accept the law of defeated Rome." Among the fundamental tenets of that law, which Rome Vanquishers though they were, they would nevertheless

had implanted

in

French

soil,

was the "idea of equality under one monarch, so con-

trary to the aristocratic principle of Germania." in

Taken up by the Church, preserved

popular traditions, revived by Charlemagne and Saint Louis,

this idea

would

slowly but surely lead to the "abolition of the aristocracy, to equality, to the equity

of Modern Times."

'^^

The Roman conquest

established order and unity in Gaul. This order and this

unity were "external," to be sure, "and material," capable of subduing "the obstinate discord of heterogeneous elements" only

by force,

yet their effects

ing stamp on French institutions, just as Celtic traditions

left a

lasting

left a last-

stamp on

French individuals. In other words, Michelet disputed Amedee Thierry's con-

were

tention that the Gauls

a nation before the

Roman

conquest.

Fustel de Coulanges sided with Michelet:

"The Gauls were not

no more unified

racially.

politically than they

were

a clear idea

ble of

sixty tribes not united

of a

common

them

a nation; they

were

into a single body.

They

federal bond, higher authority, or even

The only kind of

fatherland.

knowing was love of

The

by any

this point

They did not possess a system of

public institutions and practices capable of forging

were roughly

On

patriotism they were capa-

the tiny state of which each of

them formed

a

part."^'^'^

Gallic heritage, Fustel argued, remained visible in the pattern of land use in

France, in territorial divisions, in the location of urban centers, and in the persistence of local allegiances: "Three-quarters of our French cities are former Gallic cities.

aries.

Until fairly recently, moreover, these civitates retained their ancient bound-

The pagi or pays

[rural regions]

still

exist,

and the memories and affections of

rural people remain firmly attached to them. Neither the

nor feudalism destroyed these living us through the

ages."^*^'

units,

Romans nor the Germans

whose very names have come down

to

In the age of the Gauls, however, these local loyalties cre-

ated divisions and conflicts between and within tribes, and these were the primary

source of the disorder responsible for the weakness of Gaul and first

the Cimbri and, later, Ariovistus.

ual courage

is

To

resist

its

inability to resist

an invasion, Fustel

insists, individ-

not enough. Nations are defended only by the strength of their pub-

Franks and Gauls

lie

institutions

Roman

and

social discipline. ^"^^

Although he was speaking of Gaul before the

conquest, he was thinking of post- 1 871 France, where he believed dissen-

sion and conflict

were present dangers.

Clearly these patriotic and philosophical views were very different from, not to say

incompatible with, those of

Amedee Thierry

discussed above. In this area, Michelet

more strongly

followed Guizot, although Michelet believed even civilization coincided

tion that the

Roman

that the progress

of

with the formation of the French nation, which led to the posi-

conquest was both an ordeal and a blessing: violent and cruel,

was nevertheless necessary

it

for civilization to progress to the next higher phase,

resuming its steady march toward history's ultimate goal, France, the embodiment of the universal. In contrast to

almost an end in France.

He

though

his heart

itself,

Amedee

Michelet saw

whom

Thierry, for it

an independent Gaul was

exclusively as a stage in the development of

Roman conquest in the name of reason, even And he treated Roman Gaul the same way: once

accordingly absolved the

remained

Celtic.

Gaul, along with the rest of the Empire,

fell

into decadence, the invasions

necessary so that the barbarians might regenerate the country with at great cost in devastation, brutality,

son, concerning

and

historians

albeit

civilization.

born around 1830 had good rea-

Gaul and other matters, to trust more in archaeology than in poetry

to repudiate their elders' fascination

with the barbarians.^^^

The

defeat of 1871

Roman conquest as qualitatively dif-

further accentuated this tendency to regard the

ferent

new blood,

and a temporary regression of

Wary of romantic myths and visions,

became

from the German invasions. Thus, according

to Fustel, the

Romans, by

bringing order and discipline, literally saved Gaul from a relapse into barbarism,

which would have been the consequence of rule by Ariovistus and

his allies.

Romans made Gaul

its

into a "substantial

and

to gain access to civilization

quishing their Gallic identity.

and

in that sense to

The

inhabitants of

take advantage of this opportunity. Therefore civilized Gaul, cultivated

roads,

become Romans without Gaul were

intelligent

to the

by the Roman

enough

and

to

"one should not say that the Romans

peace and security toil,

it

secured, the Gauls

came

to

Roman

became farmers, built

know wealth and

and by laudable imitation of what was

spirit

relin-

turned forest into farmland, drained the swamps, built

roads, toiled, and, as a result of that

ples

inhabitants

and erected temples and schools. Rather, one should say that under

and thanks

rule,

it,

body" and enabled

solid

The

luxury.

Guided

best, they erected

tem-

schools."^"''

Unlike the

Roman

conquest, the Germanic invasions, as Fustel saw them, were

spread out over several centuries and took various forms involving "slow infiltration,

one

at a time,

by individuals and small groups." They did not immediately

transform the country or establish anything

was close were

to

Dubos and

still

new.^*^^ In

closer to Guizot,

advancing

who argued

essentially limited, local, sporadic events."

this

view Fustel

that "the invasions

But Guizot took up one of

65

66

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN Montesquieu's themes with his assertion that "the Germans brought us the liberty,"^^'^

of

an idea that Fustel rejected. In his view, the Germans as such brought

new blood or a new language or a new religion or private law or institutions. The Germanic invasion had the effects that an invasion by any

nothing novel

at aU:

not

people would have had.

enced

FIGURE

spirit

its

1.7

It

disrupted the normal functioning of society and influ-

evolution, but "it did not result in the supplanting,

The statue

Journal {December

of Vercingetorix rides in

22, 1901).

an automobile; cover

on Gallic

of the illustrated

soil,

supplement

to

of the

Le Petit

Franks and Gauls

Gallo-Roman character and

spirit. "^"^

Germanic character and

saw the Germanic invasions

Fustel

by

spirit

67

a

Thus

as a side

episode, an important one, to be sure, but

comparable

Roman

whereas the

to others,

conquest, which brought about a synthesis of

Roman

the

unique

act,

spirit

with the Gahic

nothing

spirit,

was

a

than the founding act

less

of the history of France, the effects of which

would continue

to be felt in the

modern

era.

This view of the matter never enjoyed

unanimous support. Opposition came not only from "Germanists" but

also

from the

fact that

independent Gaul could always claim some champions,

who

the

felt that

Roman

had violently imposed foreign 1

conquest

Between

rule.^°^

871 and 1 9 14, however, this position appears to

have been

in the minority. It

was expressed

in

writings intended for the general public and

during

especially

honoring

festivities

Vercingetorix where subtleties would have

been out of place, but

from

missing

it

appears to have been

academic

historiography.

Academic writers were rather inclined that the

Roman

victory over the champions of

was not only

Gallic independence as

Amedee Thierry

that there

was no

rea-

"When

I

see everything

to Rome,... when

I

realize that the

son to grieve over

we owe

a lesser evil,

implied, but actually a

boon for Gaul and hence

that

to argue

it:

language I speak is virtually its language... [and] that

I

have taken from

Rome

so

many

feelings

and ideas along with a particular cast of mind and way of judging things,

am proud

as well as defects to

attached as

I

am

to

my

short,

I

am

Gaul,

I

confess... that

feel

qualities

almost as

it is

a

and

Roman

I

am

I

as

that, in

as

impossible for

annoyed with Caesar and

our forefathers seems to

which

qualities,

much

of which

am a me to

I

that the defeat

FIGURE

1.8

Gallic warrior's

of

me not something to be

;ready deplored."^"'

costume; Paris, Musee de I'Armee.

68

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN These words of Gaston

Boissier's

were echoed

by

five years later

the

judgment of

Camille JuUian: "Gaul had no alternative but to choose between two dominations. ridding

and as

of Germans, even at the price of

it

may have

no surprise

saved

its

race and

its

its liberty,

neutrality,

Rome rescued it from barbarism

historical existence.

It

should therefore come

that in 191 5, Pro Alesia, the "journal of the Alise excavations

questions concerning Alesia," which, though

was

it

called the "holy shrine of Gaul,"^"

became a "Gallo-Roman

journal."

Here

is

and of

strove to maintain a tone of scientific

also the journal of the cult of Vercingetorix,

Salomon Reinach

By

which flourished

changed

in

what

orientation and

its

the crucial passage in the editorial justify-

ing this decision: "At stake in the struggle between Vercingetorix and Caesar was the

Had

very future of Gaul.

victory bestowed

its

favors

on

the Gauls, Gaul might have

remained, as Germania did after the Varus disaster, outside the several

more

centuries.

Amedee

for

The defeat of Vercingetorix was poignant and painful, but its

consequences were incalculable. Out of tury earlier,

Roman Empire

it

Roman Gaul was born."^'^ Less than a cen-

Thierry, steeped in patriotic principles, had also pondered the

consequences that might have ensued had the Gauls won: the tribes of Gaul, he believed,

would have

hatred of victory

lived in freedom. Patriotic principles

Germany had

were

still

at

work now, but

intervened to produce the belief that the effects of a Gallic

would have been uniformly negative, so

that

one

now rejoiced in the fact that

such a victory had not taken place and bestowed equal admiration on Vercingetorix, the soul and conscience of Gaul, and Caesar,

who had forged its body and its strength.

Camille Jullian and His History of Gaul Published between 1907 and 1926, Camille Jullian 's Histoire de la Gaule was the realization

of an ambition that

its

author had conceived in 1873,

next-to-last year of high school, he received as a prize, read

made

fore

his

it,

and resolved

book

a

book but

Thierry's Histoire des Gaulois

to rewrite that history in his

compendium of

controversies concerning Gaul and

Thierry's

Amedee

when as a student in his

its

all

the research,

all

own

way.^'^

He

there-

the thinking, and

all

the

inhabitants not just since the publication of

since they first entered the historical arena. Jullian's prodigious

erudition, reflected in his notes, gives the impression that he had read, scrutinized,

and carefully weighed every Ages, and modern times. to a

summa which,

certain points

recent work.^'"* tions

It

line written

in the space available to

Middle

do

justice

taken as a whole, remains unsurpassed even today, even though

shall therefore

rejected, corrected, or revised in light of

confine

on some of the controversial

more

my remarks to a discussion of Jullian's posi-

issues discussed above.

Before turning to that task, however, Histoire de la Gaule

his subject in antiquity, the

would be impossible

must of course be I

on

I

must mention how

was compared with the historical

strikingly original the

literature

of

its

day. Jullian

was

Franks and Gauls

in fact the first

French historian to challenge, both

in his practice, the

dogma

that history

is

in his statements

69

of intention and

based on the interpretation of texts (which

he took to mean texts alone). Jullian wrote history based on the evidence of earth

and stone as well. Immediately impressed by Vidal de La Blache's Tableau de France, to his great

which he devoted courses

book with

a sort

in

1905— 1906 and 1906—1907,^'^ Jullian began

of tableau of Gaul: a description of

uation in the ancient world, and of the nature and aspect of

imbued with the Vidalian

ters,

Jullian's history

spirit,

all

its

its

structure, of

its sit-

terrain. Similar

chap-

can also be found in other volumes.^'^

was thus associated with geography.

archaeology and above

la

It

was

also connected with

with prehistory, within limits defined by the available

documentation. Priority was given to written sources:

texts, inscriptions,

and leg-

ends on coins. But Jullian also derived whatever information he could from figurative

monuments and everyday

but not

objects such as tools, artifacts, and weapons.^'^ Last

least, Jullian raised sociological

questions (and here one senses the influence

of Fustel): he was interested in tribes and clans, in political institutions and social organization, in the family and the nation. In short, his history aimed at reconstructing the past in

all

areas to

which the sources granted

wrote, "is a portrait or narrative of what

emanates from man, from his

FIGURE

1.9

human

Loire.

"For history," he

actions produce. Everything that

will, his intelligence,

Monument to the dead; Boen,

access.

and

FIGURE

his sentiments, is within the

1.10

Monumenttothe dead;

Barbizon, Seine-et-Marne.

70

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN historian's domain....

Hence any monument, whatever its nature and no matter how

small, everything that

man planned

in his

mind and shaped with

his

hand, every-

down on the soil of France, ought to find a place in a chapter of our national history. And from the moment the mark of man's thought and man's hand thing that he set

first

appears on a piece of

mens, and painted caves are Paris, or the

the historian has the duty to intervene. Arrows, dol-

flint,

as

much

Notre-Dame of

his business as the Acropolis,

Maison Carree."^'^

The Histoire de in this respect

la

Gaule was the realization of

by no means exceptional)

this

work of

the

program. But

it

was

also (and

a patriot and, indirectly,

of an

ideological and political conjuncture. Such factors cannot be neglected, especially

when the

it

comes

Roman

to subjects as delicate

and controversial as the

conquest and the effects of that conquest.

Jullian staked out

new ground. The

On

state

of Gaul before

both of these matters

Gaul during the

central axis of the history of

half-millennium between the arrival of the Celts and that of Caesar was, he argued, the formation of the Gallic nation,

The

which led

Gauls, he argued, had the idea of a

selves

by

a single

name.

If they

to adopt a political organization.

common

were divided

by language and commercial exchanges, by and by "a community of

it

fatherland and referred to them-

into tribes, those tribes

alliances

and relations of domination,

traditions, institutions, teachings,

and hopes" that were

kept alive in "periodic gatherings around gods, priests, and ies."^'' All the

tiny

was

to

form "a

worked against

geographic and

its

terrain

of

the oriental world. "^^^ Jullian

this

unifying tendency.

political terms.^^' Nevertheless,

He

sanctuar-

The

des-

and the dreams of

single empire, similar to those that

in the vast natural regions

forces that

common

elements of a "national fraternity" were therefore present.

imposed on Gaul by the configuration of

inhabitants

were linked

its

had come into being did not neglect the

analyzed them

at

length in

he claimed to have shown that the

Arverni were ideally placed to undertake the unification of Gaul. His analysis thus

provided an explanation for the emergence of the "Arverni Empire" during Hannibal's wars in the late third century B.C. During the next century "the Arverni

acquired most of Celtic and Belgian Gaul."

Of course this was not a "compact state The bonds

with homogeneous parts obedient to a very powerful sovereign." tied the various Gallic tribes to

it

that

"were necessarily diverse and variable."^^^ The

"Arverni Empire" nevertheless represented the

first historical

incarnation of

Gallic unity, as well as incorporating "the seeds of a fruitful entente and progressive fusion.

All this

"^^^

was destroyed by

in the first place

the

by arms, when

Romans sixty years before the legions that

came

to

Caesar.

It

was destroyed

defend Marseilles defeated

the Arverni king Bituit, thereby reducing part of Gaul to a colony and eventually a

And it was destroyed thereafter by Roman policy, which favored nobility by abolishing kingship among the Arverni, thus undermin-

province of Rome. the municipal

Franks and Gauls

Rome

ing their domination of Gaul.

also served

own

its

by awarding

interests

favorable treatment to certain tribes, allowing anarchy to smolder: "In this way,

through favors of Gaul's

still

more pernicious than violence, Rome completed the destruction

The

unity."^^'*

decline of Gallic civilization and the "moral poverty" of

Gaul by the time of Caesar's as

was the Gauls'

Teutons and

inability to

own efforts,

were thus the

fruit

of the Romans'

defend themselves

first

against the Cimbri and the

arrival

later against Ariovistus'

Germans

—an

inability that the

Romans

invoked to justify their conquest.^^^ Unlike

Amedee

Thierry, Jullian denied that a Gallic nation existed on the eve of

Caesar's arrival, and what Thierry characterized as a "popular revolution" Jullian

saw

as nothing

ever, he

more than

a

Roman

machination. Unlike Michelet and Fustel, how-

argued that the anarchy that Gaul exhibited

at the

time was not a result of

the Gallic character but a recent development due to deleterious influence

Roman

outside. His

view of the

effects point

up what he regarded

namely,

its

conquest and his judgment of as essential in the history

incomplete development as a nation.

It

its

from the

evolution and

of independent Gaul,

was the Romans' violent

inter-

ruption of Gaul's national development that marked the beginning of the conquest. In fact, a

it

was more than

Roman province,

carry

it

through to

what was

left

memories of

the beginning: after the defeat of Bituit and the creation of

the conquest

among

future,

memories

Gaul reverted it

was

To Jullian the

memory and

facts

the

makes

forms of

the king of the Arverni

dream of

this point

it.

its

who

"In this

national

life,

which would and, as in the

put himself forward as

clear: Vercingetorix represented

a "free, united,

its

both

and powerful" Gallic fatherland,^^^

with Caesar he alone deserves sympathy and admiration.

unambiguously: "Between Caesar and [Vercingetorix]

have no hesitation: [Vercingetorix] was the true hero."^^^ iety at the

crisis,

"^^''

of the matter were thus

in the confrontation

Jullian

that sustained

to the old

champion before the Roman people.

and

by

The cooperation of the Gallic tribes and the choice of supreme commander were possible only thanks to that residual

previous century,

the

the Gauls, a national sentiment fed

lost unity.

national sentiment and the its

Caesar had only to

half completed.

conclusion. In order to do so, however, he had to contend with

its

of national sentiment

Vercingetorix as

decide

was already

He

I

says this without anx-

thought that his hero might actually have won, for he

now

repudiated, as

we have just seen, his old argument that the Romans had saved Gaul from Germanic barbarism. Jullian avoids hypotheticals, but he probably believed that

if

Vercingetorix had won, a "free, united, and powerful" Gaul would have been in a position to defend itself against

all its

the history of Gaul, Jullian plainly

In his view

enemies. In short, in narrating this episode in

and unequivocally championed the Gallic cause.

no mitigating circumstance lessened the crime of the Romans, not even

the superiority of their civilization,

and Caesar embodied two kinds of oppression.

71

72

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN of the

Romans themselves and of

the peoples he conquered in their name, as

symbolized by the deaths, three months apart, of Cato and Vercingetorix.^^" In

volumes on Gallo-Roman

Rome's

effort in Gaul,

civilization Jullian

but he became more

In the general conclusion, he insisted Gaul:^^' "If

pleted

from

its

the

formation on the ground, where

Rome and

a fascination with

as the only valid criterion. It

harm

its

a great nation

political climate in

From

take a

more

would have com-

detailed analysis to

Rome

this

change of

differently

gauge the

marked the end of an

fixture of the

attitude: objec-

from the empire

in

Memory From

era.

the 1920s the Gauls

Even archaeology gave up on them:

Bibracte excavations, halted after Dechelette's departure in 1907, until 1984,

were

common culture, widely represented in art, literature, and

publications aimed at the general public.

bucked the

rela-

which he wrote, owing first and foremost to the First World War.

Histoire de la Gaule

resumed

Starting

own opinions, and changes in the ideological and

a Genealogical Issue to an Object of

no longer a

to

regard the national interest of the Gauls

(one generally speaks of Augustan

decline), the evolution of Jullian's

Roman Conquest did

civilization, so evident in Gallia, Jullian ulti-

la Gaule, to

would

of

dealing with the Late Empire.

would have cut a noble figure."

it

later

stress the positive aspects

that the

importance of the various factors contributing to

tive data

The

critical in

Domitian and Caesar had not come,

mately came, in the Histoire de

tive

on

would

was

and Pro Alesia ceased publication

tide to continue exploration

of the

site.

in 1932,

the

would not be

although Toutain

Politicians also turned their

backs on the Gauls, except for an occasional mention, usually by orators of the far right,

and of course Vichy's abortive attempt to bring them back into the limelight.

Only

the schools kept the faith.

The Gauls

thus apparently went into eclipse until

Asterix and his friends revived interest in them. But the kind of interest they attract

seems profoundly different from the kind of

the great issues of national identity,

interest they

which were central

now

aroused in the past:

to almost

every work on the

subject from the sixteenth century up to and including the writings of Camille Jullian, are

no longer framed

irrelevant. It

ways

is

in

terms of France's relation to Gaul.

are

the very notion of national identity that has changed in essential

since the beginning of the twentieth century.

At

that time people believed that national identity

national character that

was assumed

to

was based on

a hereditary

be connected with certain equally hereditary

physical peculiarities. In other words, national identity its

The Gauls

was based on

"race," in both

psychological and physical senses. Questions of national identity were therefore

posed

in

terms of kinship relations between nations and hence also of heredity.

They concerned land

it

now

the length of time that a particular people had been settled

occupied



a land that

collective consciousness

was supposed

to

on the

have contributed to shaping

its

and behavior. They also concerned the place that each peo-

Franks and Gauls

pie's ancestors

had occupied

rights that that place

in the history

was supposed

to justify.

invokes (sometimes implicitly) blood and

To be sure,

ginal. National identity

is

It

which

head from time to time

has nevertheless become mar-

today held to be based on cultural continuity, where cul-

understood as both a semiotic and a material

is

nationalist ideology,

soil, still rears its

form of outbursts of racism and xenophobia.

in the

ture

of Europe and of the world and the

by the transmission of works of

fact,

whose continuity is ensured

the past understood in the broadest possible sense,

together with the models and examples they contain, and combined with the knowl-

edge necessary to understand, preserve, and reproduce them and add to their reper-

Hence the problems

toire.

that national identity raises are

nowadays

stated in terms

not of genealogy but of memory.

One

result of this

become

is

that our attitude

Another

rather ironical.

is

toward "our ancestors the Gauls" has

while

that,

we

are

no longer interested

in a sup-

posed kinship between the inhabitants of pre-Roman Gaul and the French population today,

we

are interested in

national traditions.

how these

What effects

This has led to looking

at the

alleged Gallic origins are reflected in our

did the Gallic past have, and what role did

Gauls themselves in

ological investigations are focused

on

new ways. Some

their sanctuaries

and

it play.'^

current archae-

rituals,

while others

attempt to assess the importance in their lives of hunting and husbandry, of war and

weaponry, of trade, of metalworking, and of agriculture.

working

work

is

to understand the Gauls' sense of space

aimed

in the history

nomic

at

The

some time now^^^

social organization. All this

is

which

is

in the

pages that remain

France 's Gallic

a religious

and cultural as well as

a social

thus very different from earlier returns. This time

the Gauls themselves

becoming

is

and eco-

"return of the Gauls" that has apparently been going on for

much

a subject is

who

are

coming back

as

it is

to understand the nature

memory is

a

France 's historical memories.

sufficient to enable us to pierce their

Wars and a few works of

lesser

not so

My purpose

and function of that memory.

memory of long duration. Having been

None of

it is

France 's Gallic memory,

of historical and intellectual investigation.

ous existence since Caesar's publication of the Gallic

Gallic

other scholars are

demystifying the Gauls and restoring them to their rightful place

of France, which

history.

and

Still

IVars,

it is

in continu-

the longest-lived of

the predecessors of the Gauls

left

evidence

anonymity. For some fifteen centuries, the

importance were

all

there

memory of the Gauls and assure them of a place in history.

was

to preserve the

In the sixteenth century,

narratives concerning the Gauls proliferated, incorporating various ancient testi-

mony

along with modern fables. Research on Gallic

seventeenth century and was carried on

more

relics

began tentatively

in the

systematically in the eighteenth cen-

The nineteenth century began to portray them in images, to set them to music and on the stage, to write about them in poems and novels. These constitute the principal stages in the evolution of France 's memory of the Gauls. Each later stage tury.

superimposed

itself

on

its

predecessors and exerted a retroactive influence: owing

73

74

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN to historical criticism it

would have been

and archaeology, our reading of Caesar is different from what

a century ago, just as the visual

images of the Gauls that

we

are

images of that time

nowadays prepared

differ

from

to accept as accurate.^^''

memory is first of all the history of the growth in the number of texts and objects supposed to embody Envisioned over five centuries, the history of France 's Gallic

memory. This

that

is

so despite the elimination of texts and objects that failed to

withstand ever more rigorous standards of a qualitative diversification of the

critical scrutiny. It is also the history

whole body of

texts

of

and objects dealing with the

Gauls, a history of successive classifications and distinct hierarchizations. This,

meanwhile, went hand in hand with an increasing specialization of those of preserving and studying those texts and objects.

It is,

in

charge

furthermore, the history of

an ever wider diffusion of historical knowledge and legends concerning the Gauls, all

of

brought within reach of the entire population through compulsory school-

it

ing and inexpensive books. Last but not

and

tion

status

least,

it is

the history of the changing func-

of the Gallic theme within French national memory.

come about

Careful scrutiny shows that these changes did not

One

in a

uniform way.

can identify four periods during which interest in the Gauls was particularly

intense,

and these periods stand out from stretches of

relative indifference: they are

the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century; the second half of

the sixteenth century; the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth

century; and the eight decades from the late 1820s to 1914, with two brief periods of particular intensity

whose effects were cumulative, the first around mid-century, the

second after 1870. Now, each of these periods corresponds to a particularly grave

moment

in

French history: the end of the struggle between the Armagnacs and the

Burgundians, which coincided with and helped to fuel the Anglo-French war; the

Wars of

Religion, which were coupled with

war with Spain;

the final years of the

Revolution and the Empire, during which conflict between proponents of the Old

and the

New Regimes continued unabated, while France was at war with all of Europe; social struggles of 1848 and the Commune and the two wars with Germany.

Only the last thirty years, symbolized by Asterix, appear not to is

probably related to the

fact that the Gallic

in either a burlesque or a reflective It is

theme

is

fit

which

now dealt with at one remove,

mode.

by examining these periods one

after

another that

we have been

ceive the changes in the function and status of the Gallic theme.

ured in a myth of ethnic origin that was the Trojan myth; in this

the pattern,

at first associated

At

with and

able to per-

the outset later

it

fig-

supplanted

form it played a unifying role. The Franks and the Gauls were

considered to be two branches of a single family, and the Franks' entry into Gaul was

portrayed as a homecoming. Within

this

broad family the king of France occupied the

whose

superi-

As French

society

place of the father and the nobles occupied the place of elder brothers, ority,

immediately perceived as natural, needed no

justification.

Franks and Gauls

transformed class first

itself

from

a society of orders into a society of classes (the very

came into use at the end of the seventeenth century),

privileges

became a

subject of controversy.

word

the legitimacy of noble

There were only two ways

to legitimate

such privileges: as recompense for services rendered to the monarchy or as prizes in

down through

open combat

in the

The attempt

to justify noble privileges as the spoils of conquest

remote past and passed

commoners with Gauls

nobles with Franks and

the generations.

and

by identifying

altered the function of the Gallic

theme: a unifying myth based on ethnic origins gradually gave that articulated

won

way to an

ideology

Despite efforts to restore the original

justified social conflict.

function of the Gallic theme, the pitting of Gauls against Franks, of the vanquished against their vanquishers, served,

the end of the

from the beginning of the eighteenth century

Second Empire and beyond,

frontation within French society

as a

way of

to

thinking about the con-

between the nobility and the Third

Estate, the aris-

tocracy and the bourgeoisie. "It was born with class antagonism and

grew

as class

antagonism grew."^^^

The Gauls were not

pitted solely against the Franks,

involved in struggle with the

Romans on

was how they were seen

other. This

first

and collectors of ancient objects, and

the one

by

hand and the Germans on the

antiquarians, readers of ancient texts,

later

by archaeologists, who turned the

national past into an object of science, and historians, results

however. They were also

who increasingly relied on the

of archaeological research. Unlike the "class" conflict between the Gauls

and the Franks, the triangular struggle among Gauls, Romans, and Germans nation against nation. In the eighteenth century, however, no clear distinction

made between

the two.

It

was only

after the

set

was

Revolution that a definitive line would

be drawn: the Franks and the Gauls were two groups within a single nation, whereas the Gauls confronted the

Romans (or the Germans)

as

two

distinct,

enemy societies.

After the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially after 1870, the antagonism

between Gauls and Germans became the dominant theme, a change accompanied

by yet another change

The

in its status

each other.

Its

that

national

its

Gallo-German

hostility served to unify

function was to unify not a

bond was reduced by some

ous term at

was supposed

to

be the

prove that these two nations had always been hostile to

from outside. Thus the Gallic theme was restored

now

it

function changed because from the mid-nineteenth century until 19 14

the idea of everlasting a threat

theme changed because now

status of the Gallic

role of historical science to

and function.

first that later

opened the door

to all kinds

became

monarchy but

to a matter of "race"

sinisterly

to

its

France in the face of original role, except

a nation.



To be

a dangerously

unambiguous



sure, the

ambigu-

or "blood," which

of abuses. In particular, some French

men and women

were excluded from the nation on the pretext that they were French only

in appear-

ance and not in essence, that essence being defined of course by "race" or "blood."

75

76

KRZYSZTOF POMIAN More

recently,

however, a broad consensus has held that nationality and culture are

inseparable. Indeed,

munity

that

it

was the

identification of national

would emerge victorious from World War

bonds with

cultural

com-

II.

Enlisted initially in the class struggle and later in the struggle between nations, the Gauls served in every

foreign enemies.

war

in

which Frenchmen confronted other Frenchmen or

Now, however, they

are free to

become what they

are:

mythological self-mockery to object of research, a unique and central

memoire of the nation France.

FIGURE

1.11

Late nineteenth century advertisement for "Gallic

Elixir."

from

lieu de

FIGURE

2.0

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen; poster by Charles Fournigault, 1905.

CHAPTER

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution Francois Furet

If the

French Revolution hes

live today, ily

at the

two hundred years

root of the political civilization in which

because the Revolution wanted

actors

and the actions of

it

appeared on the historical scene,

it

that way.

after

a people,

Through

thought of

it

the voices of

itself as a

it is

its

we still

primar-

principal

foundational event, a

memorable occurrence if ever there was one: the regeneration of humanity through individual liberty at long last that

preceded

it

alike.

memory

The Revolution

necessary instrument of

Revolution

itself to

the return of

the hoary powers of oppression.

was nothing but an "Ancien Regime,"

erased from the national

monarchy

won from

what

its

past

a lapidary definition that

everything that came before, feudalism and

thus occupied the whole space of history as the

redemption. Henceforth there would be nothing but the

commemorate, honor, or celebrate,

it

The

as if continually to

ward off

abolished.



how much this ambition upon which Burke offers the most profound commentary shook things up, we must restore its strangeness, which In order to measure



was

to unite history with reason: the Revolution sought to reinstitute society in the

manner of Rousseau,

that

is,

to regenerate

This universal ambition was akin in ent in

its

its

content, since regeneration

man through

a veritable social contract.

abstraction to a religious message but differ-

was now without

a

transcendent foundation of

any kind, and indeed claimed to take the place of transcendence. In the French Revolution not only was the religious distinct from the transfer of function

monarchy, and its

effects

on

it

from one

to the other.

paid the price.

authority of any kind, granting

man

human full

but there was a

The Church had given

More profoundly,

institutions, delivered

political,

its

hand

to the

the Revolution, quite apart

action from

its

from

subjection to higher

sovereignty over the ultimate ends of his-

2

8o

FRANgOIS FURET tory: the revolutionary investment in the poHtical thereby invaded the realm of the

reward with

religious, replacing divine

its

own

earthly promise. Conversely,

Catholic tradition became the bulwark of the Counterrevolution.

sophical radicality that

was the most profound

Revolution, the feature that distinguished

It

was

this philo-

characteristic of the French

from both the English and the

it

American Revolution.

The

English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century saved the nation from

the corruption of the

Saxon

monarchy but did so in the name of the Holy

liberties. Finally, in 1688, the

regime based on a return to religion and tradition.

a durable

later, just

prior to the French earthquake, the

new

nation, but independence

new one

replacement of the old dynasty by a

founded

a

Bible and Anglo-

A

century

American Revolution did indeed begin

was acquired

in the

name of

the inextricably reli-

gious and political values of the original immigrants, indeed as the faithful

ment of

fulfill-

their wishes.

In order to understand, by contrast, the unique historical character of the French

tabula rasa, one can

still

follow Tocqueville 's inspiration and begin with the

American event. Consider, Colonies conceived of their texts in the history

for instance,

how

own past. To do

the insurgents of the Thirteen

this, let

us look

at

two

relatively early

of the American Revolution, John Adams's Dissertation on

the

Canon and the Feudal Law (1765) and Thomas Paine 's Common Sense (1776). Adams and Paine time,



on the

Adams

the

two names more or

right

and on the

less

mark

left.'

based his thinking on an idea of

losophy: as

the limits of the political scene of the

human

history taken from Scottish phi-

man gains enlightenment, he moves from a barbarous social state to sub-

servience to arbitrary rule before arriving at a form of government in which his free-

dom can flourish. formity with

This sequence, perfectly exemplified by English history,

human

nature and reason as

God

constituted them.

is

in

con-

Adams's thought

thus combined the theme of English liberties with a providential model of histor\; a reconciliation

the

through

God

of the particular and the universal.

American version of English history was more

In fact, there

but the thing is:

was an "old regime" it

in

England.

the outset,

universalist than the original.

The words are not found in Adams

was inherent in the combination of canon and feudal law that was

characteristic of medieval England.

epoch separating barbarism from

Although many forms of tyrarmy existed

libertv',

of spiritual and temporal oppression, oppression availed clergy,

From

itself

which sustained

none was so miserable

at

once

clerical

and

as the

combination

aristocratic. Spiritual

of God's name to bestow absolute power on the its

rule

through

a carefully

in the

Roman

perpetuated obscurantism.

Temporal oppression grew out of the domination of the barbarian populations by warriors and their chieftains.

From

this

came vassalage among

lords and servitude

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

among the people. This and virtue

all

period of darkness, during which freedom, enlightenment,

were trodden under

Reformation to the

first

foot, lasted until the

American settlement, Enlightenment gradually spread

through Europe, especially in England. tyranny, that

is

And with this progress, ecclesiastic and civil

canon law and feudal law, seem

ence."^ Eventually there

Reformation: "From the

to

have

and

lost their strength

influ-

was rebellion against both forms of tyranny under the

reign of the "execrable" Stuarts. It

who

was

this rebellion, this

combat, that brought people to America. The Puritans

crossed the Atlantic, fleeing persecution for their love of enlightenment and

their spirit

of free inquiry, came to the

society that

behind:

it

was the exact opposite of

was

a society led

New World to establish a civil and the clerical

by men of learning,

and

aristocratic

faithful to

religious

tyranny they

left

both the great lawgivers

of antiquity and the teachings of Christ and in conformity with both reason and revolution. In the ecclesiastical sphere the Puritans destroyed the episcopal hierar-

chy, dispelled the ridiculous superstitions in

which

that hierarchy

shrouded

its

power, and thus established an enlightened, virtuous clergy independent of the temporal power. In the civil realm they tery,

knew that "government

is

a thing without

mys-

simple and comprehensible, founded in nature and reason and within reach of

common sense."^ They wanted ual

upon another, such

all

in the feudal regime.

as

nothing to do with the dependency of one individ-

had existed even

They

in the

established a

democracies of antiquity but above

government of

free

men, which

for

Adams was

not the same thing as a republic, for a king was necessary, as were

priests, as a

brake upon the power of the people.

American colonies was

a

And

just as the

consequence of the Enlightenment,

Enlightenment responsible for an extraordinary improvement

founding of the so, too,

in the

was the

education of

the people, a necessary prerequisite for the preservation of public as well as indi-

vidual liberties.

As

for the conflict with England,

phlet, the reason for

the

it

which formed the context of Adams's pam-

was none other than

the political and cultural gap separating

mother country from her American colonies. Seventeenth-century England had

indeed been the theater of the great historical struggle between the "old regime"

and

liberty,

to the end.

but the country had been unable or unwilling to continue that struggle

Upon the ruins of

by an archbishop with

Catholicism

ties to the state. It

another ruling family, faithful

had revealed their intention their

former

state

at first to the

a hierarchical

church led

had replaced the Stuart dynasty with contract of 1688. But the Hanoverians

to return their subjects, the

in

Americans

first

of

all,

to

England, are not yet destroyed." Traces of the old

laws remained, and with them, the this

had reinstated

of slavery. Why.'' Because the systems of canon and feudal law,

"though largely undermined

of

it

was George

Ill's

spirit

of domination they embodied.

determination to rule America in that

spirit.

The proof

81

82

FRAN90IS FURET Not only was

there

no "old regime"

keep from being contaminated by one, for that absence was

to

very essence of their

tion, the

must

in the colonies, but the colonies

identity. In fact, the

fight

their chief distinc-

English Revolution of the sev-

enteenth century had nothing like an "old regime" in the French sense either, since it

was shaped

in part

Carta. But John

by

Adams

constructed an old regime for

America the revolutionary privilege of the tabula go

desire to all

a step

beyond English

rasa.

it

Louis Hartz recognized, of any of the old the

new country was

and human nature.

rights

to have

no

could flourish unopposed.

it

that very reason

was not

It

in

its

European

ically

to

new.

He was simply

idea.

new

society,

Born

in

which for

by circum-

sense, slowly shaped

community born subsequent

the discovery of liberty, which shaped itself and recruited

Adams was

as

passion for religious and

itself in a

stances and the vagaries of princely ambition, but a

of that principle. In 1765 John

the

order to find the tabula rasa upon

embodied

a nation in the

was

It

contamination by the journey

spirit's

past other than

Europe, that idea had to cross the Atlantic

devoid of

new land, and purified,

America has no history but the history of an

political freedom.'*

which

order to bestow upon

For America was born of a

best of English society transplanted to another clime, to a

itself:

in

liberty, to establish, in virgin territory

homeland based on human

prior tradition, a

by memories of the Magna

the biblical spirit and in part

its

to

population in the light

not telling his compatriots anything rad-

repeating the original choice of the American colonists

oppose English tyranny.

As Adams saw it, the English "old regime" consisted of feudalism plus the Catholic Church. To that duo Thomas Paine added the monarchy, making a trio. He condemned

the

whole English constitution: not because

always been harmful (Paine agreed with Sieyes that

dark age

in

which

it

came

into being), but because

it

it

that constitution

had

marked an advance over the

included oppressive elements

such as a hereditary crown and an aristocratic House of Lords, both in contradiction to the principle of equality (as

was

the sacerdotal hierarchy).

component, the House of Commons, was not strong enough

The

republican

compensate for the

to

flaws in an overly complex system.

Thus Paine

did not attack the English regime

on

the grounds that

it

was

liable to

be corrupted by forces that it had vanquished but not entirely destroyed between the

Reformation and the "Glorious Revolution." He condemned grounds

that

it

was incompatible with

it

in toto

on the

the rights of humanity. In this respect he

closer to the French Revolution than to John

Adams,

since he

wanted

was

to radically

sever the American Revolution from the tradition of "English liberties" and turn the rebellion of the

American

colonists into a revolution, that

is,

a

new epoch

in the

history of the world. Paine carried the idea of a radical break so far as to deny the filial

relationship

England,

is

between England and her colonies, writing

that

"Europe, not

America's motherland." By that he meant that England was no better

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

than the rest of Europe, since she, Hke other countries, had exported to America those

whom

But

if

cle that

she persecuted on civil and rehgious grounds.

America's revolutionary novelty had no precedent, no ancestor, the obsta-

it

had to overcome was not,

most sanctuary

to thwart

its

inner-

its

purpose. England was a foreign power in the strongest

sense of the word: foreign because a different

as in France, within itself, lurking in

it

was remote, and foreign too because

it

was of

and hostile nature. All that was necessary to give the American plan a

chance was to sever the

ties

between the colonies and the mother country. Paine 's

pamphlet therefore came to the same conclusion

was merely a

repetition of the act

Adams's treatise: the war of 1776

as

by which the colonies had been founded,

a natural

consequence of the emigration from Europe, a solemn reaffirmation of the break.

The

physical journey of the seventeenth century and the declaration of indepen-

dence of the

eighteenth century were twin events, and the second therefore had

late

no "old regime"

to liquidate but only a foreign

Compared with being able, without circumstances of

Old World,

power

to defeat.

America had the good fortune of

the France of 1789, therefore,

difficulty, to associate the radicalism

its

history.

From

the beginning,

to England, the ghost of the "old

it

left

behind,

The United

any scores with

its

ing of the anguish and conflict of a history severed in two, yet lutionary advantages inherent in the In the

relegated to the

it

regime" that has haunted French rev-

olutionary culture and politics for two hundred years. the future squarely without having to settle

of the tabula rasa with the

manner of

its

States could face

past. It it

enjoyed the revo-

birth.

American case there was no contradiction between the existence of

and the wish to rebuild society on an absolutely tion" of 1776 repeated that of the Mayflower.

new

So

far

foundation.

The

whose beginnings were

still,

a past

"revolu-

from being incompatible,

American history and the tabula rasa were one and the same thing, tory,

knew noth-

for that his-

in the late eighteenth century, fresh in every-

one's mind, originated with a spatial separation from the mother country and the

founding of a

new society on (supposedly)

virgin territory.

Thus the concrete his-

tory of the Americans, and of the Americans alone, satisfied the abstract criterion

of democratic philosophy: the institution of society through the free will of the parties to a social contract.

Hence

was not an abstraction. Indeed, States, the heart

of

its

it

the

American tabula

was the very

identity, that distinguished

rasa, unlike the French,

historical origin of the it

from Europe

United

as a society

and

a nation.

European States as a

intellectuals

sometimes see

consequence of the brevity of

this paradoxical character its

history: Americans,

it is

of the United alleged, lack a

sense of history because their history has been so short. In fact, this kind of think-

ing misses the point. "Recent" histories can be very difficult to live with, and thus foster a

tendency for individuals and nations to ruminate upon the

past: think, for

83

84

FRANCOIS FURET example, of the French obsession in the nineteenth century with the Revolution.

What

unique about the American experience

is

to speak, a true tabula rasa, a true

is

that

recommencement of

it

society

experiment, an almost miraculous success of negativity.

not with the past but with the "frontier"

As

a result,



that

is,

had as

genetic code, so

its



a

unique historical

The American obsession is

the future.

moreover, America was particularly well suited to found a society

based on a contract freely accepted by the parties and guaranteed by law. In France, the

men of

1789 wanted such a foundation as ardently as their American predeces-

sors of 1776 past.

By

and 1787 but had

contrast, the

voluntary contract

contend with the formidable weight of the national

to

American

colonists

had no history but

among themselves and by

English monarchy until the king violated

from

a king

who betrayed was

From

them

at the

Revolution.

The most

found most

striking,

there

it

American

center of what

was but

a short step to formalizing

was indeed

colonies, the idea of instituting society de

would soon, by autumn, be

The

in the history

structed,

The men of

was

nalism that

it

well before

in

was

to

all

1789 wanted to emancipate not the French

was something akin

to Descartes's rejec-

of which was branded irrational and particular.

be made over from top to bottom,

literally

recon-

any case so intimately intertwined with French philosophical

predated the Revolution.

it

how the moment in

been thought before him: a negation of what preceded

of France,

idea that society

called the

the ambition to rise above the details of

in general. In their attempt there

tion of everything that had

them

its

spectacular aspect of the event, that which contemporaries

order to attain the universal.

man

to the

terms. In emancipating themselves

Revolution had come to pass, to abstract from the particularities of the

but

a

the purpose of the Constitution.

In the France of 1789, as in the

novo was also

the contract that tied

by

their confidence, the colonists restored the original con-

ditions of their partnership.

terms. That

its

that sanctioned

became

the

weapon of

It

ratio-

could be found in the royal administration

among the be known as

the monarchy's enemies in 1789:

Physiocrats, for example, and in the experiment that has

come

to

Turgot's ministry (1774—1776).^

The French

idea of tabula rasa thus differs

philosophical view rather than an experience.

from the American

a long history that

had shaped

wanted

to create a

their territory into

new

an old nation and their

particular in their past and presupposed the birth of a

ety, the

new

The French rev-

world, but on the ruins of

nity into a monarchy. Their project implied a negation of

actions of a

having been a

The American colonists had invented

out of whole cloth a society that did not exist prior to their arrival. olutionaries of 1789 passionately

in

what was

new man,

commu-

irrational

and

regenerated by the

public authority. Instead of repeating the origins of French soci-

Revolution was to rescue that society from the curse of

its

past. Instead

of

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

an event to be relived in

new

order to create a

original spirit, a

its

spirit. If

the

whole history was

two revolutions share

a

to

be jettisoned

common

cult

in

of will in

the service of a universalist ambition, if both sought to invent a novel society based

of the contracting parties, the French project was beset from the

on the

free consent

outset

by formidable tensions between

to pass

and the abstraction inherent

The idea of a example

first,

name of

pamphlets that date from the period 1787— 1788.

rules

le tiers

etat?oi January 1789.

The

coincided with the rapid disappearance of references to an

this idea

new

a rational reconstruction

even before the outbreak of the Revolution,

ancient customary "constitution" of the kingdom,

completely

which it came

very nature.

its

famous pamphlet Qu 'est-ce

in Sieyes's

emergence of

in

radical break with the past in the

of the social was present from the for

the historical circumstances in

written constitution, which

which were still quite

It

would

common in

was accompanied by set

down

in black

calls for a

and white the

governing the organization and powers of the government. Furthermore, the

idea of the tabula rasa

was not limited

of the Enlightenment.

It

sign of this

is

the

letters "the first

was

to

men of learning steeped in the

rationalism

also widely diffused in the sensibility of the time.

number of people who,

year of liberty." Nothing

in the spring at the

One

of 1789, began dating their

time compelled them to do so other

than their perception of unfolding events and the mounting collective enthusiasm that

drove those events forward. Four years before the Convention decided on a

revolutionary calendar, in other words, people had spontaneously hit on the same idea.

much more vivid sense of a rupAmericans who had preceded them twenty

There can be no doubt that these people had

ture in the chain of time than did the

years earlier, for separate from olis that

had

it

was

their

them and

little

by

own history that they suddenly perceived as something

not, as

little

a

had the Americans of 1776, the history of

grown

as

remote as the maps said

it

a

metrop-

was.

This powerful sense of a break in the continuity of time, which would give the idea of the

from the

Ancien Regime the peculiar force that

rationalist, voluntarist radicalism

of the

it

had

men

in France, is inseparable

of 1789.

What

they under-

took to do was to reestablish society, through their action, on a basis of reason. In this respect, as

has often been noted, their project was less "prudent" (in the ancient

sense of the term) than that of the

any reference to

Not only

that,

the English

God and

American Founding Fathers,

but they were also without the legal and constitutional moorings that

common

law and

Coke nor Bolingbroke nor

What

it

eschewed

ignored Christian pessimism about the nature of man.

political

legacy of Whiggery (including opposition)

afforded the Americans. In what preceded

of power;

since they

a taste for,

it

the French Revolution found neither

much less practical

experience of, the balance

found absolutism.

did absolutism

tional" tradition

mean

in this context.-^

A

of the monarchy. Tocqueville

first

is

subversion of the "constitu-

unforgettable as the historian of

85

86

FRANCOIS FURET the pathological relationship between the French Revolution and absolutism.

showed, the

two centuries of what the Revolution

final

called the

As he

Ancien Regime

witnessed the destruction of traditional society from within. For one thing, the

growth of the

and the concentration of administrative

state

power in one place drained ities

the feudal hierarchy of

of power. For another,

this dispossession

as well as political

meaning and stripped

of society by the

state

its

author-

was accompa-

nied by a continual readjustment of the statuses and ranks inherited from feudalism: the monarchical government, for instance, sold access to the nobility to the highest

bidder, and nobility

growth of the society,

fiscal

was henceforth defined

and administrative machine resulted

monarchy

In order for the absolute

however,

it

had to reduce

of uniformity of

when,

in

something like a "caste"

composed of corps kept meticulously separate from one another and by their

very nature unconcerned with the public

ity,

The

solely in terms of privileges.

its

its

to

interest.

occupy the whole space of public author-

subjects to equal obedience: this

was

the condition

laws. Its actions therefore tended to have a leveling effect, even

for financial reasons,

sought ever more ingenious ways to milk cash from

it

an endless proliferation of minor differences of status (which, because they were

devoid of any

real content in

terms of power, had

all

the

more symbolic value

in

terms of self-regard). The monarchy continually re-created both equality and inequality and fortified each passion

by what

it

gave to the other. According to

Tocqueville, the absolutist state dishonored aristocracy without opening up a space for democracy. This observation explains

ancient

monarchy had nothing

negation of what

it

was.

The

to

what Burke

failed to grasp: that the

bequeath to the Revolution other than the pure

tabula rasa of 1789

was born of

French revolutionaries' passionate repudiation of history was

this

paradox: the

itself a

product of

their history.*^

One can imagine from

somewhat

a

extending Tocqueville 's analysis by approaching the subject

different angle, closer to the symbolic than to the sociological.

The monarchy developed politic" conceived of as

tence,

as a

power embodying

meaning identically reproduced).

stituted the essence of

Regime" and,

in the

and for

first

all.'' It

It

(in the old sense

nation, but

few months from May

to

September of 1789, demolish once

abolished the organic society of orders, which in one night was

who would be

on

of the word repre-

what the Revolution would soon baptize the "Ancien

making him simply

representants,

exis-

was this constellation of things that con-

transformed into a society of free individuals, and nation,

"body

something very ancient, fundamental to communal

and represented by the king of France

sented,

the nation, the head of a

its

then severed the king from the

delegate. Henceforth

charged, as the

word

the basis of a society henceforth

Such an exercise would be

it

difficult in

any

case,

it

would be the

deputies, the

suggests, with "incarnating" the

composed of autonomous atoms. and

all

the

more

so because

it

was

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

FIGURE

2.1

The Frenchman of the Past; anonymous

FIGURE

quite

new at the

2.2

The Frenchman of Today; anonymous

engraving, 1790.

engraving, 1790.

time, but under the circumstances

it

was almost impossible,

since

it

required combining the radical individualism of 1789 with a no less radical concept

of the nation as

a unitary

This difficulty

body.

illustrates the ambiguities

and impasses into which the men of

1789 were led by their negation of the entire national past, aristocracy and monar-

chy

alike.

Consider, for example, the

August—early September 1789, even to the people

first

great constitutional debate in late

as the deputies

were planning the devolution

of the absolute sovereignty of the king

in the cards since

June

17,

when



a devolution that

the assembly of the Third Estate

simply the National Assembly, thereby accomplishing the

mental act of the Revolution. In

wing of

this

first

renamed

itself

and most funda-

tremendously important debate, the right

the revolutionary camp, the first moderates of the Revolution, argued in

favor of English-style co-sovereignty, with supreme

king and a bicameral parliament. But

this idea

power divided between

representatives ran afoul of

two

begun

to exist in France's past,

attempt to "restore"

it,

new

national

impossibilities. First, the Monarchiens

appealing to a tradition, a monarchy, that either did not exist or, as

the

of joining the national past to the

Revolution by dividing power between the old monarchy and the

much

had been

no longer had any

if

it

were

had even so

reality.

And

the

along with a second chamber that would have revived the

old specter of an aristocratic

power base

after

two centuries of absolutism, was

87

88

FRANCOIS FURET

FIGURE

made

2.3

to

The Oath of June

seem even more

the "feudal" principle, lived

17,

1789;

anonymous engraving.

unrealistic

by the Revolution's

radical

condemnation of

which having existed before absolute monarchy, now out-

it.

In this sense, the radical part of the revolutionary traditionalist than the

moderate

part:

it

camp was unwittingly more

took over the sovereignty that the efforts of

absolutism had produced, whereas the Monarchiens sought to reinvent sovereignty in a novel form.

The

radicals gave the Constituent

Assembly sovereign power

to

remake the body politic. But the peremptory affirmation of chronological discontinuity that gave the

word "revolution"

its

new meaning was

inextricably associated

with the patriotic party's adoption of a concept of political sovereignty shaped by absolutism: the people took the place of the king, but

it

was the same

democracy supplanted absolute monarchy. Since there was no place ception of sovereign

new conception in the idea

power

for anything but the

for anything but the people or

in the old

monarch, there was no place

its

Pure

place.

con-

in the

supposed representatives. Thus,

of Ancien Regime that took shape precisely in August and September of

1789, there

was

a

symbolic and practical overthrow of the throne masked by the

i

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

reuse of the king as

first

functionary of the people, proclaimed as such by the vast

majority of constituents.

The

radical negation of the

Ancien Regime quickly demonstrated

nary power over people 's minds as well as

its

power to mask

its

extraordi-

the legacies of the past.

In rejecting the tyranny of the Hanoverian kings and even in denouncing the prin-

of monarchy

ciple ful to

English

itself,

liberties:

American

the

knowledge

had no

difficulty

remaining

even Thomas Paine drew the essence of his

ing from the English tradition. their

colonists

that the

By

contrast,

it

was against

political think-

their will

and without

French of 1789, bent on forgetting or wiping out

ory of previous centuries, were constantly digging up old constraints in

They wished

to

make

a clean slate of the past even

people on earth were in

convention, neglecting the substance of their history. cratic society

on the Night of August Fourth, but

reaffirm the unity of the specter of the

forward.

The

new

sovereignty

all

Ancien Regime would continue

the

finally exorcised

on August

10, 1792,

first

new forms.

that very abolition led

own

this, take,

same month whose

among

would be

gist

seizure of the Tuileries

and the

was

even before the execution of the king.

It

was

anew with Year I,

rel-

a

like its

1789. will

less

To be

than a sure,

new

the

recommencement.

memorandum

circulated

by Roland,

a little

more than

a

August

week

19,

after the

of the monarchy on the tenth, was to allow the

minister to explain to local authorities the

nothing

if

thousand other possible examples from the

identical, a

fall

it

it

document, issued

this

the

and drive

minister of the interior, to the municipal governments of France, dated

The purpose of

to

ghost until

it

national past had never stopped contaminating the great national

1792.^

them

four years of the Revolution to the Ancien Regime, as

To understand

No

more vigorously. Indeed,

then and then only that the Convention decided to begin time

egating the

mem-

new society based purely on The French abolished aristo-

to haunt the Revolution

surviving monarchy would haunt

all

though that was impossible.

of a position to found a

less

faith-

meaning of what had happened

in Paris:

revolution, relegating to the corrupt past the years since

Roland conceded, "despotism was destroyed

be the epoch of the reign of equality."

The popular

in 1789."

But "1792

insurrection of August 10

was necessary because "we were generally very corrupt, and the revolution,

a con-

sequence of Enlightenment, had to combat ingrained habits \moeurs\." In other words, the destructive habits inherited from the Ancien Regime had compromised the very establishment of the

however,

this

theme of the

influence later on, in

new regime and of equality among citizens.

inertia

of custom, which was destined to achieve vast

no way limited the revolutionary reaffirmation of the Tenth of

August: "The Revolution having just been completed, beneficent effects.

Never again

Strangely,

Our

shall the

representatives have

sworn

to

let

us hasten to assure

uphold liberty and

its

equality.

two be put asunder." For the next few weeks Le Moniteur and

administrative documents

would continue

to be dated "the fourth year of liberty."

89



FRANfOIS FURET There followed a brief

transitional phase, in

"the fourth year of liberty and

Convention reconvened, first

as

first

which documents bore the inscription

year of equality." But in the end, after the

of September

were

25, all official texts

to

be dated "the

year of the French Republic."

In contrast to the United States, which has an enduring fundamental text, the

covenant of the

new

nation, the French Revolution had several "Year

A

several constitutions.

of commencements and recommencements, a work

series

endlessly completed and rebegun, dition created ex nihilo

it

offered those

and of an endless

have to overcome

now and

wished to invent,

a curse

forever.

order to

fulfill its

promises, would the

men

of 1789

who wished to abolish it, the annunciations of a new age. What is para-

hidden even from those

solemn rejection of the past was intimately

that a

is

in

Always lurking within what

Ancien Regime withstood the repeated doxical about France

who came after it the idea of a tra-

battle against a constantly renascent past:

Ancien Regime was what the Revolution,

the

Ones" and

inter-

The rejection of the past signified more than tendency of modern democracy to build the future upon human will. It also

twined with an obsession with history. the

reflected the Revolution's inability ever to achieve

Within the Revolution,

as a result, the

its

ends.

ghost of the past was always present, and

the revolutionaries were obsessed with arriving at a destination they never reached. It

would be impossible

principal theme,

was

to

list

the

men whose

principal goal, or the

to bring the Revolution to

moments whose

an end. First there was Mounier in

July 1789, followed by Mirabeau, Lafayette, Barnave, the Girondins, Danton, and

Robespierre Bonaparte,



each, moreover, to his or their

who

own

advantage

—and

ultimately

succeeded for a time, but only for a time (and only by allowing the

Revolution, gone amok, to wreak havoc on

Revolution demonstrate any

real capacity to

number of attempts

in

to

do so

all

of Europe). In no case did the

found a new

The very

social order.

such an extraordinarily short period of time bring

out the narrowly instrumental character and philosophical vanity from which

them

suffered.

Even

the Festival of the

Supreme Being (June

1794),

all

of

which was

probably the Revolution's most pathetic effort to transcend the ephemeral and the

immanent, never for one moment succeeded

in passing itself off as

than an attempt at manipulation by a provisional government. ent in the Revolution, which rain of

maneuver and

was of

suspicion.

It

a

which was

to

be

at

once

power

political

and

a

overcome

its

foundation of the

was never anything but

struggles:

own

power was

political.

men and groups

of

men who, one

and

a series of events

to rest with the people



in

ter-

internal contra-

remained the unique and unchallenged principle of the whole business

embodied

inher-

never achieved any independent or higher exis-

In effect, the French Revolution

regimes, a sequence of

The ambition

fundamental order, never ceased to be a

tence, as if the Revolution as history could not diction,

anything other



but

after another, arrogated to

it

this

was

them-

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

selves a legitimacy that,

though

elusive,

repeatedly reconstructed each time

was destroyed. Instead of

it

Revolution accelerated and fragmented

was

tutions. It

a principle

and a

ulated conflicts developed:

—an

nothing

politics,

between

remained indestructible, or

it

it

was never

that idea

No

drift.

forward.

It

by circumstances.

It

was

October of 1789.

It

was the

arresting time, the

able to create insti-

always postponed. The

and

legislated for eternity,

it

was

the Declaration of the Rights of

it

tightly constrained

Man

but also July and

monarchy of 1790— 1791 but

constitutional

1792, Year

and that

in place

schism in the Church, the king's resistance, the flight to Varennes.

RepubHc of September

was

reference point in the past, no

French Revolution wavered endlessly between that which held it

rate

and the struggles for power there was

institutions in the present, just a future forever possible but

which propelled

any

an idea of sovereignty around which unreg-

formula for historical

ideal

because

at

also the

was

It

the

the Constitution of 1793, but also the de facto

I,

was

dictatorship and the Terror. Its true essence

finally captured in 1793, in the for-

mula describing the government of the Revolution simply

as "revolutionary."

This

tautology aptly expressed the incompatibility between the French revolutionary idea and any fixed or durable institutions.

Revolution was

principle, together with the set

its

associated with that principle: the politics that

it

What was

whence

fixed or durable in the

of collective beliefs and passions

the infinite elasticity of the bids for

inaugurated, and the attempts to put an end to

power

in

in vain yet

it, all

forever tried anew.

was

It

in the character

of the Revolution, therefore, to snatch France from

which was condemned

past,

in toto,

and to identify

it

with a

new

its

principle without

ever being able to root that principle in institutions. This gave rise to two sets of

antagonisms whose these

centered

memory

would meticulously keep

the French

alive.

One of

on the fundamental opposition between Revolution and

Counterrevolution, which would eventually take on the aspect of a religious debate

over two conceptions of history and of the world. century were a people those

who

who

The French of

the nineteenth

could not cherish as one what 1789 had put asunder:

loved the Revolution detested the Ancien Regime, and those

who

Ancien Regime detested the Revolution. But alongside that fundamental

the

in relation to

which the

right

and the

left

took place between 1789 and the Empire the

men and

of unified

ideas of the Revolution

homage

to a

common

would define themselves, the

left

itself.

loved split,

clashes that

behind a second series of conflicts over

The

revolutionary tradition consists not

beginning but of a range of loyalties to legacies

that are not just diverse but contradictory: the left is united against the right, but

has nothing else in

embarked upon

common. The men of

parallel careers in

1789, 1793, and 18 Brumaire

le

salut public,

may have

combat against the same adversary, but they

bequeathed to their successors memories and ideas of

it

proved to be incompatible.

that,

once deprived of the excuse

91

92

FRANfOIS FURET

FIGURE

Allegory of the Rights of /Wan; "Aristocracy and

2.4

Bastille.

From these

ruins rises Liberty,

armed with

a

the victims of arbitrary power, prostrate themselves

its

agents are buried beneath the ruins of the

sword and trampling the hydra underfoot. Prisoners, in

thanksgiving before the Altar of the Nation;" engrav-

ing, 1791.

FIGURE

Allegory of Liberty: "The King takes up residence

2.5

in

Paris. In the

procession behind his family

are the Deputies of the National Assembly. The Parisian Militia keeps the people its

mission

FIGURE

2.6

is

to maintain order

attests to this reality.

No

attempted to explain his time without Revolution

itself

stemmed from

nineteenth-century historian or politician

first

casting an eye not just

but even more on the fact that

tinually being reenacted

owing

the Revolution.

its

The

whose causes ultimately

history of this period can therefore be orga-

The

first

runs from 1789 to 1799 (or

one wants to include the creation of the Empire), the period

ation of a repertory of political forms invented

new

on the French

unpredictable events were con-

to divisions within France

nized in terms of two chronological cycles.^

ize the

show that

history of the century that runs from the French Revolution to the

Third Republic

if

order to

1789.

Allegory of the Festival of the Supreme Being; engraving, 1794.

The whole

1804

in line in

and ensure that the Laws are executed;" engraving,

by

that

saw the

the Revolution to institutional-

public sovereignty. Indeed, this prodigious inventiveness

Revolution's quintessential trademark.

cre-

was

the

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

In the second, repetitive, cycle the French recast and in so doing crystalUzed for

longer periods the same political forms, reborn from the same revolutions: two constitutional

monarchies

after that

(July 1830, February 1848) and a second republic

the first titions

of 1789— 1792, two victorious Parisian insurrections

two insurrections smashed (June 1848, March

modeled on the

had been taken to be

was unprecedented:

it

a

first,

1871),

and even a second Bonaparte, even though

unique historical phenomenon. This

series

of repe-

reveals the extraordinary constraining influence of the

Revolution on nineteenth-century French

In the middle of the century,

politics.

moreover, the Second Republic, the most mimetic of

all

the nineteenth-century

regimes, itself reproduced the whole cycle of the last ten years of the eighteenth century, except that (the June Days). tors: farce

But

it

began with the republic and

all

the actors were present, lined

followed tragedy, as Marx said.

ond Bonaparte demonstrated politics

was owned by

in

The

Jacobin phase was stillborn

its

up with their illustrious ances-

fact that the play

almost insulting fashion

the revolutionary tradition.

how

ended with

a sec-

completely French

What had seemed,

in the

second

year of the nineteenth century, the product of a fortuitous encounter between exceptional circumstances and a peerless leader could later, as

now

be seen, a halfcentury

The mediocrity of

the fatal consequence of revolutionary republicanism.

the beneficiary revealed the influence of a deterministic

human will:

this

mechanism independent of

mysterious but obvious fact became the focal point of the

work of

both Tocqueville and Quinet.

There was, however, one

essential difference

between the two great cycles of the

French Revolution, that of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth. The first

took place in the absence of

stable,

powerful administrative structures, since

these had disappeared in 1787 with the last great administrative reform of the

monarchy. This,

in large part, accounts for the extraordinary fluidity

ary politics, which never relied on powerful state structures. 1789, settled into a space

abandoned by the monarchy, and

of revolution-

The Revolution,

until the

Consulate

never succeeded in reorganizing that space in a durable and systematic way. trast,

in it

By con-

the second cycle of the French Revolution, that of the nineteenth century,

took place entirely within a strong and stable administrative framework: that created

by Napoleonic

centralization,

which did not change throughout the century and

which no revolution even attempted teenth century

was characterized by

to transform. a

French

political life in the nine-

profound consensus around

state structures

coupled with permanent conflict over the form to be taken by that very same

Why this consensus.'' dition

state structures

and a legacy of the Revolution. This

gettable fashion: there its

Because these

ambitions,

is

was an Ancien Regime

was never

were both

a monarchical tra-

what Tocqueville showed in

state.

in unfor-

France that the Revolution, for

able to extirpate and ultimately identified itself with.

contrast, the Revolution's only legacy to the living

memory

all

By

of the French con-

93

94

FRANCOIS FURET

FIGURE

sisted

2.7

David, The Triumph of the French People; drawing, 1794.

of doubts about legitimacy and conflicting allegiances.

because the

France was more a

crisis in

moreover, that

was precisely

of legitimacy than of substance,

solution proved so difficult: the consensus around the adminis-

its

trative apparatus

crisis

It

of the

over the form of the

made revolutions technically easy, and the conflict made them inevitable. What is more, no one was aware

state

state

of the consensus, including the political actors, while everyone, including those

most indifferent conflict

to politics, endlessly

—namely,

bequeathed to the French

that political

power

is



This was because

revolutionary people. tradition,

more

which

Through

that of the

is

also

the key to social change. at

the belief

and right

These two

facts

once a conservative and a

the Revolution the French love a far

monarchy; into

by

to all the French, left

account for the oft-noted paradox that the French are

the

conflicts.

was fueled not only by the memory of the Revolution but

that the Revolution alike

dredged up old

more

ancient

that tradition they infuse equality

all

easily because the monarchical administration spent centuries laying the

groundwork

for

it.

love both parts of

But the Revolution also made the French a people that cannot its

history at once, as well as a nation that since 1789 has been

obsessed with the reinstitution of the social.

macy out of fragments of blocks that do not

fit

And

their recent history,

together properly.

they cannot build a

which has

left

new

legiti-

them with building

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

For two hundred years the classical

example of the replica-

tion of political confrontation

within the revolutionary tradition

has been the pitting of

1789

against 1793, of quatre-vingt-neu-

(ninety-

quatre-vingt-treiiistes

For one side the prob-

threeists).

lem the

against

(eighty-nineists)

vistes

is

down

to pin

new

1789, to root

principles in stable insti-

tutions: in a

word,

as always, to

end the Revolution. This was already Benjamin Constant's goal in 1797. It

would be the goal of

Guizot and Thiers a generation later,

Ferry

and of Gambetta and Jules at the

end of the century.

For the other side, by contrast, the

problem scend reject 1789 as a

it

is

to

deny

in the

1789, to tran-

name of

1793, to

foundation and celebrate 1793 as an anticipation whose promise has

Here we have two exemplary instances of the

yet to be realized.

Revolution continues to provide to those

alternative that the

who invoke it as a reference.

Either

it

must

be ended or it must be carried on, evidence that in either case it is always open-ended.

To end

it,

the only available stopping place

citizenship

remains

is

and

civil equality,

to find a definitive

wish to continue vided that one

of need but as stitute a true

it,

because that

which saw the advent of political

is

1789,

is

the point of national consensus.

form of government

for this

new society.

What To those who

however, the Revolution also offers a point of departure, pro-

upon 1793 not as a temporary dictatorship in an hour an abortive attempt to go beyond bourgeois individualism and reconis

willing to look

community by transcending

the principles of 1789.

Indeed, to the observer the French Revolution has the extraordinary property of being, in the sequence of oretical critique

down

events and periods, the concrete

embodiment of

of liberalism that Rousseau conceived thirty years

to the level

the the-

earlier. It

brings

of actual history the quintessential philosophical problem of the

eighteenth century: liberal

its

What is a society, if we are individuals.''

philosophy escaped from

this

impasse by begging the question of the social

character of the natural individual: that interplay of the passions

and the

Classical "English-style"

is

the secret of the final order to

interests gives rise.

which the

But nearly a century before Marx,

95

96

FRANCOIS FURET all

of Rousseau's

political

work was

a critique of such question begging: in order to

move from natural man to social man,

society

must be

by denaturing the

"instituted"

natural individual, erasing the individual of selfish passions and interests in favor of the abstract citizen, the only admissible party to the social contract.

stand

It is

easy to under-

how this conceptual scheme can serve as a frame of reference for 1793 as against

1789, provided that one ceases to see 1793 exclusively in terms of a response to an

exceptional situation. Furthermore, the Jacobins themselves set the example, lating

Rousseau from the century's other philosophers

by

iso-

as the only thinker to deal with

equality and citizenship. In order to establish 1793 as the central reference point of the

Revolution, the negation-transcendence of the liberal individualism of 1789, the

men

of the nineteenth century did not have to go very

first

far:

they simply had to reread

Robespierre and then Rousseau. In tracing the Revolution back to philosophy, they could interpret the whole Revolution in terms of a clash between two contradictory principles that arose

To end

one

after the other.

the Revolution or continue

very soon gave

rise to

it.

These two objectives or representations

two admirably opposed yet complementary

histories of the

Revolution, which crystallized in the 1830s around the July Revolution.

The

liberal

generation of the 1820s was exemplary because

meditated on and

it

even wrote the history of the French Revolution before moving on to practical

work

in July 1830. Thiers, Mignet,

class struggle as the

motor of

and Guizot invented

that determinism,

they called the middle class as the crowning events of 1793 were but a passing

—and

historical determinism, the

and 1789 and the victory of what

moment of

deplorable



this historical dialectic.

^episode in this history of the

bourgeoisie, an episode attributable to exceptional circumstances

was

to

The

whose

repetition

be avoided: the "government of the multitude," to use Mignet 's terms, was not part of the inevitable. effect, the sense

of history, was

from aristocracy

tion

absolute

The

monarchy

to

essential, in

still

the transi-

democracy, from

to free institutions. In this

respect the history of France was, along with

that of England,

one of two fundamental

components of European say,

identity,

which

is

to

of civilization itself. The advantage of the

French over the English case was that

in

France the victory of democracy was more

FIGURE by

2.8

Allegory of the Constitution of 1793, engraved

Allais.

FIGURE

2.9

Between Two

Stools,

Ass on

tfie

Ground;

caricature of the coup d'etat of 18 Fructidor, Year

(September

4, 1797).

V

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

decisive, but France also

had the disadvantage that

free institutions

took longer to

develop there.

The larly

reference to England expressed a deep kinship of values and ideas, particu-

apparent in Guizot: the English conception of liberal individualism based on

self-interest

and property

as well as the English wariness

of

political

democracy, the

97

98

FRANfOIS FURET wish to borrow the British example of a



ported by the propertied ehte

free

government rooted

strongly to this generation of French liberals, cal principles

Enghsh

these aspects of the

who drew many

in history

and sup-

tradition appealed

of their philosophi-

and convictions from the other side of the Channel."^ But seven-

teenth-century England also presented them with a model of disciplined revolution:

1688 after 1648. their

It

was the example of

a people

who,

like the

French, had executed

king and experienced spiraling promises of egalitarianism as well as one-man

rule only to return to the old regime, but

who then,

forty years later,

had

on the

hit

way of a conservative revolution out of which came a moderate parliamentary regime. To end the Revolution was thus also to adopt an "English" strategy. middle

In this respect 1830

were quick

to

go

to

marked

a turning point,

work. The Trois

and Guizot, Thiers, and

Gloriexises

were supposed

to

mark

their friends

new The

a

but the accession of an Orleans to the throne was to avoid another 1793.

of the

lectual "eighty-nineism"

because

it

liberal historians

of the Restoration was not

allowed a place for the dictatorship of Year

and deplorable,

necessity.

was

all

to avoid at

II,

which it saw as

But their political "eighty-nineism" was

cost a repetition of 1793

1789, intel-

radical,

a secondary,

The

radical.

by halting the Revolution

goal

in its initial

phase through recourse to Louis-Philippe. In short, the aim was an improved 1789

men of

based on the 1688 English model, to be achieved by daring what the

been unwilling to thus founding a

change of dynasty, putting an Orleans on the throne and

try: a

monarchy of

apparent success, since

1789 had

it

the Revolution. This political strategy

resulted in the July

Monarchy, but

at a

met with

deeper level

this

success only concealed the inconsistency of the 1830 liberal interpretation of 1789.

That interpretation needed to avoid a

fell

short first of

terrorist dictatorship

all

was

intellectually, for if all that

a

change of dynasty, the Revolution's

ever-mounting promises must have been rooted not conflict with

Louis XVI.

It

had been

in

"circumstances" but in the

also failed as a matter of practical politics, because sub-

sequent events showed that the accession of Louis-Philippe was not enough to stem the Revolution's predilection for outbidding

four years of brutal combat between the

of the

street,

who felt cheated of

itself.

The July Days were

new government and

"their" revolution.

followed by

the republican people

These battles, which the men of

July finally won, can in one sense be taken as testimony to their political realism; their successful "1789" led only to analysis,

it

remains the case that

revival of street Jacobinism.

an abortive "1793." But on the level of

this

word, without "circumstances"

emerges from

its

1789 did nothing to prevent the

On the contrary, the experience proved that without an

Ancien Regime monarch, without

a river

new "canonical"

intellectual

aristocrats,

without foreign or

civil



war

in a



Jacobinism emerged from the July Revolution as

source. If a radical eighty-nineism could exist in politics,

could also exist in history: there

is

able truth that the crushing of the

it

some of 1793 in every 1789. It was this unavoidbarricades on the Rue Transnonain was meant to

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

FIGURE

Ah! Ah! This

2.10

Is the

History of France from January 21, 1793, to

November 20,

1815.

Look at It! anonymous engrav-

ing, 1815.

exorcise, but

ory

how could

in the street,

ness,

The

July bourgeoisie had replayed the process of

proving that the dynamics of revolution

time, uncontrollable.

men of

it?

Compared with

their ancestors of la

are, at least part

memof the

Grande Revolution, the

1830 had the advantage of their memories, as well as greater class conscious-

more

political experience,

and fewer humanitarian scruples, yet with the same

uncertainties they rediscovered and dealt with exactly the

Mirabeau, Brissot, Danton, and Robespierre, namely,

Now

at the

same time, but

how to

same problem

as

stop a revolution.

for symmetrically opposite reasons, this radical

eighty-nineism led to the crystallization of the contrary belief, that the Revolution

can succeed only

if it

that of being betrayed in Glorieuses

gave

rise to a

olutionary tradition.

analogy with the

fall

own dynamic and runs no greater risk than mid-course. The Orleanist confiscation of les Trois

remains true to

its

dramatic and decisive confrontation within the national rev-

It

seemed almost natural

to interpret that confrontation

by

of Robespierre and the meaning of the Ninth of Thermidor.

Indeed, no other date was available to symbolize a premature end to the Revolution. Its

significance had been explored, moreover, well before 1830

the Babouvist tradition,

which held

that

by Buonarroti and

what happened on the Ninth was

that a

clique of wealthy bourgeois overthrew the hero of an egalitarian republic

looked favorably on the people's cause.

The juste-milieu regime of

99

who

1830 that had

lOO

FRANCOIS FURET installed itself

on the heels of

a Paris insurrection stood as the

second episode

in this

saga of recurrent betrayal. With hindsight the Ninth of Thermidor was thus

wrapped in the historical ressendment of 1830 and the

interpretation that surrounded

the later event: an interpretation couched in terms of class struggle,

now situated between the bourgeoisie and

the liberal historians but

Thus gave

a Jacobinism completely divorced

rise to

it

became

image survived the it

was

a constellation of intellectual as doctrine.

resulted first of

all

in

and

The

something

far

that supposedly

more than a memory:

political convictions,

an interpretation,

a

But what memory.'*

an important chronological displacement within and

through the history of the Revolution. The 1789.

the people.

fixed in revolutionary historiography and tradition. This

entire nineteenth century as

memory crystallized It

from the circumstances

borrowed from

liberals

had put down

their

anchor

in

Jacobins had their source in 1793. For them the crucial period of the

Revolution was precisely the one that Mignet had dismissed as the provisional reign

of the multitude, which he attributed to exceptional circumstances. excused, they celebrated:

among the necessities of the Revolution,

their eyes not a secondary, derivative place but a central

the period during which the Revolution escaped from its

What he had

1793 occupied in

and decisive one. This was

its

own

clutches

by crushing

enemies, internal and external, while at the same time adumbrating the

egalitarian

FIGURE

2.11

image of the

social contract.

Lordereau, The Throne Burned; lithograph, 1848.

first truly

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

Behind the celebration of in

le

salut public there

was not only

patriotic investment

and retrospective love for a France threatened and saved but

the cult of the state in

even religious. In

all its

this respect

also,

more

simply,

forms: military, economic, political, educational, and it is

significant that the great Jacobin historians of the

Revolution were even more systematic proponents of absolute monarchy (up to

101

I02

FRANCOIS FURET and including Louis XIV) than freely.

Like the

their liberal predecessors,

whose work they drew on

Jacobin historians admired the monarchy as the instru-

liberals, the

ment of nation building and

the

embodiment, representation, and defense of the

public interest above the various classes, but they also

mon masses from bourgeois individualism,

saw

it

selfish private interests,

of the market. They reworked the whole Ancien Regime to bring 1793. In their eyes the Jacobin state carried

com-

as protecting the

on and magnified

and the cruelty it

into line with

a tradition that Louis

Blanc, for one, celebrated as well in Sully, Colbert, and Necker. Guizot, Mignet, and

Thierry liked that aspect of the monarchy which paved the alliance of the

Third Estate with the kings of France

Buchez and Louis Blanc admired only le

salut public, the

government of

that

way

for 1789: the

modern

to create a

nation.

which prefigured 1793: the incarnation,

souls, the protection

of the weak.

Among

the

Jacobin historians " ninety- threeism" was absolute. Starting from a negation of 1789 (repeated and radicalized in the negation of 1830), they rejected

Constituent Assembly on the grounds that

it

the

all

work of

the

bore the hallmark of bourgeois indi-

vidualism and threatened to destroy the national community.

For

liberal

memory

the Declaration of the Rights of

Man was

the most impor-

moment of the Revolution, the charter of the modern citizen, the founding act of the new political civilization. Even Michelet the Michelet of the Histoire de la Revolution frangaise who was not a liberal, much less an Orleanist, saw in the tant





Declaration the quintessential meaning of the Revolution:

it

was

the text that inau-

gurated a society based on law as opposed to favor. In Buchez's eyes, by contrast, the Declaration

was

principle capable of reconstituting a like a latter-day

man were

the Revolution's great error, for the rights of

community.

It

was Jacobinism,

Annunciation, heralding the advent of a

not a

rather, that

was

new eschatology in which

socialism and Catholicism were inextricably intertwined. For Louis Blanc, the

Constituent Assembly was the fulfillment of the program of Voltaire, which was that of the propertied classes; the

Convention was the daughter of Rousseau, work-

ing on behalf of the toiling masses to pave the

way for mankind's third age, after the

ages of authority and individualism: the age of fraternity. Instead of a battle

between the

third estate

and the privileged, the Revolution was transformed into a

confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the people, which ran right through 1793.

For Esquiros the Montagnards were the party of the proletariat as opposed to

the Girondins, the prisoners or interpreters of bourgeois interests. Jacobinism

was

transformed into a precursor of socialism. In this historiography, therefore, "circumstances" were not invoked, as in the

work of Thiers or Mignet,

to excuse the dictatorship of 1793

was temporarily indispensable, because as fundamentally liberating. to

that dictatorship

They were used only to

on the grounds

was now

that

it

to be celebrated

distinguish the Terror, alleged

be a pure product of the exceptional situation, from Jacobinism or Robespierrism

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

might be, these being

as the case

embodiment of

the very tion's

the Revolu-

meaning. Thus the distinguish-

ing criterion of nineteenth-century

Jacobin historiography was not the theory of circumstances, a by-product of the theory of necessity,

which

the Jacobins in fact shared with the

What

Uberals.

characterized

the

Jacobins was the centraUty accorded to 1793 as the

most important period

of the Revolution, or in any case the

period most crucial for the future.

The of

goal

was

title

its

to strip the bourgeoisie

which

legacy,

renounced

revolutionary

the

to

it

had irrevocably

in the deceptive

game

it

played in July—August 1830. Jacobin

saw 1789

history the

as

merely marking

end of the Ancien Regime,

whereas 1793 invented the future. (Quinet would argue precisely the opposite.)

The Jacobin

phy

was born

that

Monarchy was chronological linked

two

historiogra-

the

in

July

the product of a

displacement

powerful

ideas:

that

the

Revolution as the power of the people,

culminating under Robespierre

and

smashed

on

the

Ninth

of

Thermidor; and the Revolution as a rupture in the fabric of time, as advent, future.

FIGURE

2.14

as

prefiguration

of

The eighty-nineism of

Patrioty,

the the

The Republic That Decent

People Do Not Want; lithograph, 1848. FIGURE 1871.

2.15

Alfred Le Petit, The

Two Republics;

103

I04

FRANgOIS FURET

men of July was ment

the acceptance of one kind of society and the quest for a govern-

The ninety-threeism of

suited to that society.

those defeated in the July

Revolution was the inventory of an aborted promise and of a society to be remade.

The

when

July regime can thus be seen as the period

French Revolution crystallized

—remembrances,

together and quite difficult to unravel.

national

memories of the

passions, and ideas

The July Days

vanquished party, giving the Counterrevolution an appellation

would

retain

rights until the death of the

ment

same

likely to

controlee that

due de Bordeaux. In the victorious parry

the July Revolution created Orleanism, but the heirs of 1789 selves in the

mixed up

created legitimism, embodied

in the

its

all

would soon

find them-

situation as their predecessors: divided over the type of govern-

guarantee the famous principles the greatest

by republican outbidding. Not only did

stability,

and threatened

the substitution of Louis-Philippe for the

republican dynamic of the Trois Glorieuses leave years of civil disturbance in

wake, but

after a brief period

tation returned

The

of

stability

between

its

and 1840 revolutionary agi-

1835

more vigorous than ever in the last eight years of the Orleanist reign.

republican and socialist ideals found their most brilliant interpreters in this

period: Michelet and Quinet, Louis Blanc,

Proudhon and Buchez. As is customary in

France, works of history and literature preceded and heralded the

fall

of the regime.

February 1848 sounded the death knell of the monarchy of July 1830 and thus ended

what amounted in 1789

to the first systematic effort to bridge the gulf that

had opened up

between the Ancien Regime and the Revolution. Before becoming its

leader,

Guizot had been the theoretician of the regime whose doctrine he had more or set

down

in writing.

As

a result, the revolution

but the ideas that had surrounded those ideas had sought to dispel.

its

inception.

With

of 1848

It

killed not

only a monarchy

thus gave renewed vigor to

the action in Paris in February, the

olution reclaimed the fundamental heritage of French politics, even cate,

late

its

may never have

enjoyed a finer

moment

winter of 1848 in Paris: with socialist utopianism adding

its

all

new

that

rev-

birth certifi-

namely, the ambition to begin society anew on the ruins of the past.

democratic make-believe

less

than

As a result, it

did in the

of

effects to those

the revolutionary tradition, practically anyone with a thought in his head set up

shop selling the best of

all

possible societies.

others touching, depending

without

rival,

on

their cast

but one could be just as

Some found

of mind.

moved by

the spectacle laughable,

Among

the former, Flaubert

the social imagination set free

is

by

the fancied abolition of the past and abstract ideas about the future. In this respect

February 1848 not only repeated 1789 but diversified

it

to the utmost, endlessly

tiplying providential advents and felicitous combinations.

mul-

There was, however, one

big difference between 1848 and 1789: in 1848, proposals for a happier future greatly

outweighed condemnations of the

past.

This was because the Ancien Regime of

1789, already defeated a second time in 1830, could not be recycled indefinitely:

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

rather than a presence or a threat,

more than ever

it

was now a memory. The

future,

by contrast, was

to be reinvented, since a solution to the "social question"

was an

even more pressing need than a solution to the question of government. In fact, the particular importance of the revolution of 1848 in French history

stems not from the novelty of brilliance

of

its

course or the talent of

its

achievements but from the fact that

it

its

political leaders or the

restaged the great founding

scene of French politics, the revolutionary rupture, with renewed vigor. In retrospect July 1830

by

politicians.

The proof of

had come

to

seem

little

more than

February 1848 aimed to be this

a matter of

a reincarnation

some

fiddling about

of illustrious ancestors.

can be seen in a comparison of the triumphant historians of 1830

with those of 1848.

The

former, Guizot above

all

but also Thierry, Mignet, and

Barante, wanted to re-create a 1789 that could cap both the Ancien

Revolution, whereas the

even Lamartine, had

it

latter,

in

mind

The French obsession with

Regime and

the

Michelet primarily but also Quinet, Louis Blanc, and to begin the Revolution anew.

the tabula rasa

by no means ended with

the

new revo-

lutionary cycle of 1848— 1851, which, like the first one, culminated with a Bonaparte.

True, the positivist republicans

who grew up under

the Second

Empire learned

something from their fathers' Utopian hopes. They would found a republic alliance with the Orleanists, in part

by reinterpreting the

whole history of France, monarchy and democracy combined,

as hitched first to the

1870s in part

FIGURE

2.16

by forging an

in the

Rougeron Vignerot, The Promised Land; engrawnq, circa

1891.

105

io6

FRANCOIS FURET of the Third Estate and then to the education of the people. The dream of an

rise

absolute

new beginning migrated

prospered: du passe faisons table

Not

that this

one has only

dream

is

rase,

work

from the

dogged

made necessary by what goes before, above characteristic of bourgeois society.

socialist idea: to see this

efforts to distinguish himself

the collective appropriation of the all

by

emphasized the role of human

ence and will

may lack intellectual

the formidable

economic growth

coherence, yet

gave immense power to

this fragile synthesis

regenerating

that, to the

initiative in history: this reconciliation

When

it

this

con-

of

sci-

had an extraordinary power

the Bolsheviks seized

and by reviving, dressed up

is

But Marx combined his concept of objective

seduce the intelligence.

tion

from the

means of production

laws of historical development with a revolutionary messianism trary,

it

VInternationale.

goes the famous line of

necessarily inseparable

to consider Marx's

Utopians. In his

time to the socialist movement, where

at this

power

in

to

October 1917, they

by associating Marxism with revolu-

time in scientific finery, the French idea of

men through their own free will. No one can grasp the influence of the

Communist idea in France from 1920 on without taking into account what that idea owed to its Jacobin precedent. Through the Communists, therefore, the left rediscovered the idea of the tabula rasa in the form of a recommencement of a abortive attempt

remembered

Communist Party sought tory that fiction

it

to portray itself as the faithful heir

it

of revolutionary

of a purely conventional refoundation of

idea of Ancien

is

conservative in

its

Regime even survived

society.

The French left is

left

his-

only

at the price

revolu-

makeup. the decline of

communism

because in the 1970s Frangois Mitterrand's Socialist Party regained the

was when the

revived what was by definition ahistorical in the Revolution's legacy: the

tionary because of what

The

as a promise. Paradoxically,

first,

its

for a time,

dominance of

of shouldering the revolutionary heritage. Not only was the

idea of a break with capitalism and bourgeois society the key to the

Commun, but anyone who was

in

France

at the

Programme

time can remember hearing the vic-

tors in the 1981 presidential elections refer to the presidency of Valery Giscard

d'Estaing as the Ancien Regime. Farce after tragedy, to borrow a phrase from Marx: this final farce

pointed up the exhaustion of the formula, which had become an

almost magical incantation for solving the problems that the

left

would have

to face.

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution died in an indifferent and prosperous nation.

FIGURE

3.0

The

city hall

and the church

in Biot,

Alpes-Maritimes.

CHAPTER

Catholics and Seculars^ Claude Langlois

On

July

5,

1904, the National

Assembly approved

law prohibiting members of

a

Catholic "teaching congregations" from teaching in the public schools.

camp had

at last

emerged victorious from

a long struggle, the stakes

The

secular

of which were

portrayed in the March 19 issue of L'Assiette au beurre, with that satirical publication's usual ferocity.

That

Grandjouan and Roubille the other, its

issue bore the title

set

Two

for slogan.^

"Take off your hat

Man

catechism or the Rights of

— —egg

The women

a desiccated

the Republic)

and

hell,

ist hell,



to a different idol:

to the Fatherland!"

the alternative

nun and an

the child on:

As in a mirror, every image had

is

The

"Kneel before

crucifix or the flag, the

hardly one to gladden the heart.

overstuffed, pop-eyed Marianne (symbol of

"Go ahead, choose. You're free." Gone are heaven

gone are the broad highway leading to perdition and the narrow path

vation: ahead

lie

two

it

old crones tower menacingly over a small child.

Both order him to show respect, though in each case the Savior!" or

in

up two opposing educational models, each countering

symbol for symbol and slogan

symmetrical counterpart.

"Freedom of Education," and

identical roads.^

represented in one case

by

Both

rise steeply

to sal-

but toward the same capital-

a church, in the other

by

military barracks.

A battle between proponents and opponents of religious education.'' Don't be misled

by appearances!

the

magazine warned. In

together. Teachers

are in

it

revoir,

mon cher collegue,

ter

of a perfect

circle

drawings insinuated, both sides

from both camps understand each other

let's

perfectly:

"Au

hope the children won't notice the change." At the cen-

two men shake hands,

like

dren remain prisoners. "The grand seminaire

riculum hasn't changed."

fact, the

A pointless

is

horse traders

at a fair,

while the chil-

dead, Vive I'Ecole Normale!

revolution.

The

replace that of the Church; the government's truth

The

cur-

morality of the state would

would replace the

Vatican's.

3

no

CLAUDE LANGLOIS Rather than smash old

idols, the

Republic

merely substituted new ones. In two adjacent sketches, fiercely didactic in their caricature,

Grandjouan

confidently

unmasked

Republic's strategy for shoring up

memory:

its

the

nascent

the cult of the great leader from

Joan of Arc to Carnot; the continuity of the

from monarchy

nation's history

as contrasted with the

nation's

inflicted

on

the

geography through the loss of Alsace

and Lorraine; and trinity

wound

to republic,

last

but not

least, the

new

of secular values, comprising Kant's

morality, the immortal principles of 1789, and

the fatherland.

And

all

of

this against a



ground of generalized Hugolatry ration of the national poet, Victor

back-

the ado-

Hugo.

In a country that could stoop to a sordid battle

over the future of

was dead. As

if

recaptured the

by

spirit

its

children, liberty

instinct,

Grandjouan

of the caricatures of

1789, and instead of the lamentable political

which complicitous so-called ene-

theater in

mies basked in each other's limelight, he offered France a

new version of the Reveil du

peuple from the early days of the Revolution.'' Liberty,

still

female and eternally young but

reinterpreted in the light of Swift and the

Book of Judges, had turned into a giant chasing Lilliputians, laymen as well as priests.

female Samson, she brought

down

A

temples

and smashed idols yet emerged unscathed.

Freedom would come from the artist

FIGURE

tion

tion

in

19, 1904).

Grandjouan, Always

3.2

L'Assiette

drawing

au beurre, special issue on freedom of educa-

(March

FIGURE

would have us believe.

Roubille, Choose, You're Free;

3.1

L'Assiette

socialism, or so

Idols;

drawing

au beurre, special issue on freedom

(March

19, 1904).

in

of

educa-

— Catholics and Seculars

¥ox L'Assiette au beune, with to

anarcho-syndicalist leanings,

its

it

was long past time

be done with the incessant quarrels of that decrepit couple, the Catholic and the

secular {le laic)^

who

refused to admit that

it

was time

done with these "sacristy quarrels" that simply made had done

earlier, to

mask what was

essential,

to step aside. It

was time

possible, as the

Dreyfus Affair

it

The

namely, the class struggle.

to

be

appar-

ent complicity of old enemies, stuck in roles they had already played a thousand times,

is

not, however, entirely convincing

Quite apart from the

ater.

ritual

proof that

this

was simply

designation of enemies

Restoration, Freemasons under the Third Republic^





shadow

a

the-

Jesuits during the

the very excessiveness of the

nineteenth-century polemic, the very extremity of the insults, the fantastic nature of the obsession, filled

all

point toward very real issues and distinct camps.

The history is also

with "affairs," whose character remained constant from one century to the next:

from the Mortora children (1858) to the Finalys (1953), from Father Mingrat (1823) to the priest

from Uruffe

sexual crimes

(1956),*^

by members of the

along with forced baptisms of Jewish children and clergy.

These

met with equal vehemence from the Catholic sity,

attacks

from the secular camp were

side: there

were

the univer-

culminating under the July Monarchy, and on the Republic after 1880.

"mainstream" history was not immune from the consequences of nism: the alliance of

Throne and Altar during

lence in 1830, and the to the Catholic

the

on

attacks

long antago-

this

the Restoration led to anticlerical vio-

compromising favors that the authoritarian Empire handed out

Church met with dramatic sanction

Commune. The

And

list

in the execution

of hostages by

goes on and on: the laws instituting secular education, the

Dreyfus Affair, the laws forbidding members of religious orders or congregations to teach in public schools (a real confrontation), the Separation, etc.

wake of many

that Father Besse, in the

indeed

exist:

others,

saw

The "Two Frances"

in 1907 as naturally

opposed do

"Royalist and Catholic France, and revolutionary and atheist France."''

Notwithstanding its self-imposed blindness, L'Assiette au beurre forces us to focus

on essentials, for the magazine in its own way raised several troubling questions can help us get a better grasp of this major conflict in French history.

deground was the for

minds or

conflict really fought: ideological or practical.''

a struggle for power.'*

What bound

are indeed laics, people of secular disposition,

palpable

reality.''

accorded these

"What does

The Age

And

finally,

debates.''

Even

all this hide.''"

how

if

are

posed

—remains

we

that

On what bat-

Was

it

a struggle

the contestants together.-* If there

is laicite,

or secularism, an equally

to interpret the excessive

differently, the

prominence

magazine 's blunt question

pertinent.

of Historians

After World

War

I,

as the conflict

incessant confrontation, a

was beginning

number of

to subside after a half century

historians attempted to

of

answer these ques-

1

1 1

112

CLAUDE LANGLOIS

FIGURE

3.3

Catholic

FIGURE

3.4

Islamic

tions.

ceremony

ceremony

in

in

the Italian community of Marseilles.

front of the city hall of

Three works appeared within the space of ten

quite different, even though

came out failure

Charvieu-Chavagneux

all

dealt with the

in 1925, as the Catholics

of Edouard Herriot,

Cartel des

same

years. Their outlooks

subject: secularism.

were mounting a "second

who had

believed that

Gauches together with the mortar of

(Isere), 1989.

it

was

rally"

still

and

The

were first

just after the

possible to hold the

anticlericalism that

had worked so

Catholics and Seculars

well before the war. Georges Weill produced a dition

and careful

objectivity,

which extended

work of impeccably his Histoire

intelligent eru-

du catholicisme

liberal en

France (1909) and anticipated his Histoire du parti republicain en France (1928): the Histoire de I'idee laique en France

au XIX^

siecle chronicled a battle that

had truly

ended with the armistice of 1905 and the peace of the Union Sacree.^ Ten years later,

L'Invasion laique,

by

the less irenical

Canon Caperan,

seminaire of Toulouse, inaugurated a series of

of secularism in France."' lished the first

volume of

Moyen Age)^ The ity

One his

year

professor at the grand

books on "the contemporary history

earlier, in 1934,

Georges de Lagarde had pub-

monumental Naissance de

Vesprit laique au declin

du

three authors not only had different attitudes about the desirabil-

of objectivity but also chose to treat different subjects over different time peri-

ods: the secularization of thought,

which began with the challenge of nominalist

philosophy to scholasticism; the secularization of the

state,

which began with the

Revolution; and the secularization of schools, which took place over the

first

few

decades of the Third Republic.

The nature of the

subject required

a genealogical approach. laique follows

it

like a

shadow.

free. It inevitably recalls

the chain

"Born of

what

wants to break

it

It it

all

three authors to

Christianity,"

adheres to

it

combine a

structural with

Lagarde pointed out, "the word

even

claims to suppress.

as Its

it

thinks to be

working

itself

very rallying cry rivets

as firmly as the prisoner's leg iron

is

it

riveted to

to its

chain."" Yet a pair of terms that exist only in opposition and mutual dependence nevertheless have a history, and therefore an origin: in the fourteenth or the eighteenth century, but not in the sixteenth. 1957, invoking the

as to preserve itself intact for the

Ferdinand Buisson ("France

it,

instructive to find

Canon Caperan,

names of both Jean Jaures ("Our French genius withheld

from the Reformation so

that the

It is

is

in

itself

Revolution") and

not Protestant but secular") to bolster his argument

Reformation, despite the reproaches that Catholics traditionally heap upon

should be

the classic

left

out of the inevitable investigation of paternity; indeed, he shares

view of

his adversaries that the origins

of the Revolution, and therefore

of the secular idea, were necessarily philosophical.'^ Historians thus

surrounding

it

first

tackled the issue between the two world wars, as the conflicts

were subsiding. The new political

egate the whole matter to the past once and for

situation after 1945

all:

seemed

to rel-

the emergence of the (centrist

Christian-Democratic) mrp was thought to symbolize the reintegration of Catholics into French political

life.

But Vichy had revived the educational

issue,

by

then dormant for forty years. This allowed the right, which resurfaced in 1951, to establish a

permanent toehold

as the opposition to the socialist— mrp (or lay-

known as the Third Force (between the Communists and the 1984 the Savary Law was intended to restore peace to the educational sys-

Catholic) alliance right). In

tem. Instead,

it

revived old divisions: a huge demonstration on June 24, 1984, forced

113

114

CLAUDE LANGLOIS President Fran5ois Mitterrand to withdraw the

bill

and force the resignation of

Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. But what was the significance of dismiss

it

this

most recent confrontation?

It is

tempting to

throwback, since the debate had moved onto new ground

as a

in the

new issues were democratization of education and post- 1968 cultural change.'^ Was it a throwback, though, or a return of the repressed? It appeared that thirty years of calm had come to an end: old batdes picked up where they had left off. One last time, in any case, left and right acted "thirty glorious years" of postwar growth: the

out the secular versus Catholic conflict on the familiar ground of education,

although

this

was an area

that

had been extensively transformed since the advent of

social

democracy. The issue was no longer one of establishing secular public schools

as in

88 1, or of deciding whether specific groups of people had the right to teach

1

as in 1904, but

one of

effective

them Catholic, which received

Of course

autonomy

for recognized private schools,

substantial state subsidies.

anything can be explained. Consider, to begin with, the changes that

had taken place within Catholicism. The situation ferent

from

sisters, the

of

that

of the 1950s.

Owing

in the 1980s

to a shortage

was

substantially dif-

of priests and lay brothers and

Catholic hierarchy no longer exercised effective control over

ecoles libres (parochial schools),

users, that

is,

which were increasingly

the parents of their pupils.

Catholics were ever

more firmly attached

"militant" Catholics political issue.

most of

were on the

The

system

hands of

The dwindling number of

to the right,

decline.''*

in the

its

their

practicing

whereas the more left-wing

educational issue was thus

still

a

Only one thing had changed over the course of the century, but it was

an important thing: a hundred years ago the battle for secularism helped to consolidate the fragile unity of the republican side,

whereas the battle over parochial

schools under the Fourth and Fifth republics has served mainly to revitalize struggling right-wing parties. Nevertheless, this itself

all

too visible confrontation cannot by

account for the enduring antagonism or for the reemergence of combative

identities

long buried

in

memory but never truly eliminated. Taking for granted that

the secular camp's vitality and organization depend

and intransigent Catholic opponent,

it

on

the existence of a substantial

follows that the decrease in the social influ-

ence of religion and the triumph, for the time being

at

any

rate,

of conciliar

Catholicism have helped to reduce traditional antagonisms.'^

We are indeed living in a period of change, but the source of that change is most likely elsewhere.

The enduring

reflects the exclusive

Catholic-secular split that

domination of Catholicism

of the Edict of Nantes.

in the

is

so peculiar to France

country after the revocation

The Revolution's proclamation of religious freedom and the

organization of non-Catholic faiths under the Consulate and Empire did not alter the balance of power.

Throughout

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Catholicism enjoyed a near monopoly simply because

it

was the

religion of the vast

Catholics and Seculars

majority (more than 95 percent) of French people and because steady institutional as well as

monumental

maintained a

it

Neither Protestantism nor

visibility.

Judaism wished to or could take advantage of the system of religious organization to reinforce their stature vis-a-vis Catholicism. Indeed,

affected

by

a result

many

both religions were far more

century than Catholicism was, and as

liberal influences in the nineteenth

Protestants and Jews poured their energies into civil society and

became the staunchest supporters of the new Republic.

Some would

suggest that French Catholicism

combined influence of Vatican course plotted by any number of site direction,

May

and

II

itself

began

to secularize

1968 and that in so doing

new theologies.

it

under the

followed a

Several factors worked in the oppo-

however. To begin with, there has been a revival of self-conscious

Catholic identity, partly in reaction to the unchallenged domination of academic his-

While Protestants have

tory and the resulting "secularization" of religious history.

found

at least four opportunities since

Catholics have taken

on

the

more

1980 to repeat the celebration of their origins.

difficult task

new "church

of writing

histories"

dealing with the complex burden of a two-thousand-year history.'^

But other factors were more important.

When

Archbishop

(later Cardinal)

Lustiger of Paris spoke at a rally organized by the Parent- Teacher Associations of parochial schools in the Paris area

on April

tory of religious education in France:

24, 1982,

he had

this to

say about the his-

"The system has not always been

clearly

defined. This ambiguity was essential to the delicate and difficult equilibrium of the

French educational system. All things considered, however,

on the

fact that

can pride ourselves

our culture has been able to accommodate the three religions that

Emperor Napoleon I recognized: Catholicism, But what

we

a difficult

the Protestant Church, and Judaism.

problem we face now with the unforeseen

arrival

of large num-

bers of French-speaking children of Islamic background!"" In fact, the change had

begun much

earlier: first the

decolonization of North Africa and then the end of

prosperity in Western economies together led to unprecedented changes in the

French religious landscape. First, decolonization,

led

and above

some 250,000 to 300,000 Jews

1950 and 1970.^''

The

to

all

the dramatic

outcome of

the Algerian

War,

emigrate from North Africa to France between

short-term effect of this was to double the Jewish population

of metropolitan France.

More profoundly,

the long-term effect

was

to

change the

nature of French Judaism, as large numbers of traditionally minded Sephardic Jews

from North Africa joined the existing Jewish population. This phenomenon went largely unnoticed, however, by a public keenly aware of the birth of a

new presence of Islam on French

new religion in France

the capitalist economies, leaving idents of France.^'

as a

soil.

much more

Gilles Kepel sees the

consequence of the economic

crisis that

shook

many North African immigrants as permanent res-

Although other causes must surely be taken

into account as well,

115

ii6

CLAUDE LANGLOIS it is

number of Muslim places of worship

clear that the

after 1975,

proof that

a minority of

in

France increased sharply

Muslims had become determined

to satisfy the

requirements of their religion wherever they happened to be living and raising children. Statistically, Islam has

become France's second most important

measured by the number of people living on French descent (some

3

been involved

in dealings

to 4 million). This

before. Indeed, the point

Islam, treating

it

is

a recent

with Islam since

is

that France can

as an alien,

and

soil

religion, as

who claim to be of Muslim

development, even though France has conquest of Algeria,

at least the

no longer take

inferior, religion.

a colonial attitude

French Muslims

will

if

not

toward

no longer

tolerate being treated as second-class citizens.

The

greater visibility of Judaism and the presence in France of an Islamic

munity

that has yet to exercise

in the situation.^^

potential

Now, if it is true that the

power

new

ingredients

became

established

are entirely

Catholic-secular split

France as a result of the failure of Protestantism and thus of the absence of true

in

religious pluralism,

may

it

formed before our very posed a

its full

com-

dead

well be swept aside as the religious landscape

eyes.

Does not

"new secularism"

the

that

Christians and

it is

way of

becoming

resolving an old conflict between

seculars.''

The "Islam of less deliberate

envisaged solely as a

trans-

some have pro-

as a solution to the parochial school issue that erupted in 1984 risk letter if

is

a

thousand mosques"

is

more or

surely a fantasy, the result of a

confusion between a simple place of worship and the full-scale

mosques complete with minarets out France. Yet the fantasy struction of minarets

is

that

some

see replacing village churches through-

revealing of a

new

sense of vulnerability, for the con-

would end Catholicism's long-standing monopoly of French

religious architecture. In effect,

modern Catholicism has portrayed itself as the

sole

legitimate heir of medieval Christianity. In the nineteenth century Catholics built

many neo-Romanesque and above that point,

and

clear:

France

neo-Gothic churches precisely to underscore

in the twentieth century the

tectural technology to is

all

is

promote

a

Church has

new sacred art.

either Catholic or secular.

called

upon modern

archi-

In terms of monuments, the lesson

There

is

no middle term.

Choosing Sides It

was when

statues of

Marianne were erected

erate opposition to statues of the the Virgin

towns that the secular camp

really

That moment is remembered

in

is

from Sainte-Beuve, an

by

calling for an

town squares

in delib-

on the heights overlooking those same

its

existence

known

for the first time.^'

two symbols, one a text, the other a motto. The

influential orator in the Bonapartist Senate,

spoke out against Catholics faculties

made

in republican

who

end to

who

text

in 1868

dared to challenge the materialism of the medical state control

of higher education. In response to

Catholics and Seculars

drew

the threats of the clerical party Sainte-Beuve

this portrait

of the nascent sec-

ular world:

There

is

another great diocese, Gentlemen, a diocese with no fixed borders,

which covers

all

of France, indeed

all

the world, and

which extends

its

branches and enclaves even into the dioceses of the honorable prelates... which comprises.. .minds emancipated to varying degrees but

one point: that the greatest need of ity

all is

to be liberated

and blind submission; an immense diocese

which counts among

nate, boundless province);

and

deists, spiritualists,

(or, if

and seekers of

champions of pure science;

all

when

it is

true,

that he

Sainte-Beuve rejects Catholicism in toto in the

la

at the

The terms

clerical

their technical

less

same time he projects onto borrowed from

ism," only a "clerical" is

the

and

meaning

laicite.

laic

As

enemy"

the

late as

new

election,

now

this

and

as opposites

"Clericalism to take



that

is

the

on connotations

Second Empire. The

and were soon joined by the

1876 there was no such thing as "clerical-

republican

what remains,

was indeed the

the concise motto that

lay) during the

or policy; but

was indeed the denunciation of and that

later:

had already begun

(clerical

spirit, party,

orator's speech to understand

together,

traditional

the other an image of

we have

than ten years

two adjectives always appeared together and

name

Bossuet as a source of continual sectarian proliferation.

Gambetta borrowed from Peyrat

"clericalism

in

forget or neglect them.^'*

In contrast to this convoluted self-definition

clericalisme

and rational

one an image of Catholicism as wholly identified with the

Protestantism, defined a

enemy."^^

common sense and

name, yet each member

body with many "branches and enclaves,"

Jesuits, a

it

its

trying to define two caricatures

is

religious controversies:

that

members thousands of

and no consistory president or

of individual autonomy and unfettered reason, yet

nouns

its

of truth, science, and free inquiry to the attention of anyone

An astonishing definition:

beyond

you prefer, an indetermi-

the occasion arises and conscience compels him, to

who might be tempted to

camp

from absolute author-

kinds, adepts of

other designated leader authorized to speak in

the lay

agreement on

this diocese. ..this great intellectual

province, has no pastor or bishops,

recall the rights

in

disciples of so-called natural religion, pantheists, pos-

itivists, realists... skeptics

turn has the duty,

all

on May

war

after

cry.

4, 1877,

One

Gambetta made

has to read the great

one hundred years, astonishing:

clericalism that held the republican

terrain

camp

on which Gambetta, having won an

sought to obtain the indispensable mandate of the people. For him,

moreover, clericalism was not merely a periodic resurgence of a remote peril but a

new and dangerous

evil that threatened to

weaken the

state,

undermine

society,

and

destroy national unity. If the clerical parry were to win, France would immediately face a military adventure, social peril,

and counterrevolution.

117

ii8

CLAUDE LANGLOIS This was in part pure

way

The denunciation of

fiction.

clericalism

for the republicans to invoke history, not only the

but also the unavowable history of 1870 and 1871 raising

two specters

nation.

Even more,

Eckmann-Chatrian

it

was

a

states to the

war," in some ways

Holy

See.

war

like the

Years' War. Apocalypse

avowable history of 1789 words,

in other

would

it

was

way of evoking an image of

typifies these bellicose fantasies.^^

he says, would lead to conflict with Italy

mer papal

a convenient

a

way of

of a return to the Ancien Regime and that of a

at once, that

revival of socialism.



was

in the

Chambord's

return,

France should attempt to restore the for-

if

"The

the battered

Jesuits

would saddle us with

Cevennes, in some ways

follow: France

a religious

like the

Thirty

would be devastated, depopulated,

and bled white. She would be delivered into the hands of the Prussians, who time would exact an even higher

ten billion francs and

toll:

all

this

of Champagne.

would mean the breakup of France, with the south seceding from the north and

It

the

country dividing into four or five parts, in which the comte de Chambord would play the role of the king of Bourges, reigning over his capital and a country "the

of a garden." This nightmare

size



as in Lavisse's history textbook, but back-

wards, with history destroying France rather than building

one that Gambetta continued

to evoke,

though

in

more

it

piece

by piece

—was

restrained terms, as he

availed himself of every opportunity to attack his enemies' aggressiveness and antinational outlook.

Fiction in part, but also reality, given the

come

to

which the Republic did indeed

in

power, in the wake of efforts to establish a

the Paris skill at

way

Commune.

new dynasty and of

war and

In order to gain support, the republicans emulated Thiers's

embodying pacifism and conservatism, but they

parliamentary tradition:

it

was

difficult for

them

also

when

themselves. In any case, there

was no immediate dynastic

at least

that

was

backed the Orleanist

to accuse their adversaries of res-

urrecting the "party of order"

and imperials were

a

precisely the role they wished to play threat, as

both royalists

temporarily out of action. Only one thing united groups

otherwise deeply divided over the proposed solutions, and that one thing was

reli-

gious policy: the authoritarian Empire had manifesdy supported Catholicism, and the

Ordre Moral government,

did

its

if

it

had

failed to give

France a king, nevertheless out-

predecessor in supporting the Church. So the

But clericalism was more than opposition.

The term

just a

enemy was indeed

clericalism.

convenient substitute for a missing

also designated a Catholicism that

political

had undergone a thorough

overhaul during the July Monarchy and another transformation in the 1860s: facing

changes of its

many

kinds that threatened both

doctrinal foundations,

it

of the

spirit

place in society and the credibility of

responded by making the ultramontane, counterrevolu-

tionary spirit of the Syllabus left

its

its

own.^^ Gallicanism died, and with

it

went what was

and practice of the Concordat. French Catholicism, which had

proved incapable of establishing

a party

of

its

own on

the

in fact

model of the German

Catholics and Seculars

FIGURE

Dumont, Law on Public

3.5

Ignorance; engraving after Bertall, circa 1850.

FIGURE

Valery Muller, The Last

3.6

Idol,

for the Freethinkers Convention, 1905.

Zentrum, did manage to create

numerous organizations of both clergy and laity with the ability to exert increasing influence

ety and, as a result,

on soci-

on the

state.^^

The Republic, in effect,

estab-

lished itself just as old local soli-

were disappearing

darities

ever:

the

des

fin

for-

notables^'^

coincided with the fin des roirs^'^



that

fication of

is,

ter-

the effective uni-

once self-sufficient

regions coincided with the collapse of local dynasties and the

waning of memories of what those dynasties had represented.

Meanwhile, experiments with

monarchy and empire

also failed,

along with the history, old or new, that these attempted to emulate and the political and social patterns they embodied.

At the same time, workers' organizations the final years of the

legitimate

memory

that

had formed

in

Empire were repressed, along with the

of the nascent proletariat. In

effect, the

triumphant republicans had returned to the ideology of 1789:^' the individual alone, isolated,

tabula rasa



without a past

but facing a Catholic Church riveted to

tory and strengthened

by

state

and by the energy of

its

congregations of

cially

of

women

as well as

backing for

by the

nized lay groups, most of which

secular clergy,

cumstances

who became

it is

its

the

his-

parish clergy

men and

espe-

active support of orga-

came

from legitimism. Meanwhile, the

its



to the Catholic

state lost control

camp

of the

ultramontane. Under the

cir-

hardly surprising that there was a resur-

gence of the familiar figure of the "congregation," fraught with memories of the monks of the Leagues and of Jesuits

119

I20

CLAUDE LANGLOIS imposing

their discipline

on

the nation's elites.

There

also appeared a

new

figure, a

lay Janus, the convinced legitimist and assiduous benefactor, thejesuite en robe courte likely to lead a

new

"cabal of the devout. "^^

ture and unique conjunction If the Republic

was

ical

model and

was thus by no means

to achieve stability,

turned their attention to

What emerged from this unusual junc-

this task,

as a social force.

it

needed

chimerical. solid local roots.

As

republicans

they encountered Catholicism, both as an ideolog-

What they called

clericalism

was

in fact the mobiliza-

tion of an impressive apparatus of social control, together with a simultaneous denunciation of the paths that the

circumstances

it is

new

society

not difficult to see

hoped

to take

toward modernity. Under the

how the schools became the prime battleground.

The conflict eventually engulfed the whole society, because republican attacks on the Jesuit colleges and efforts to establish secondary education for

threatened to realign control of the lic

elite

and because the

institution

young women of secular pub-

primary schools threatened to realign control of the masses. The struggle was

nevertheless primarily ideological: revolution versus counterrevolution. Both

camps were fond of these kinds of

identifications. If the Syllabus reinforced the

counterrevolutionary aspect of French Catholicism, the repression of the

Commune led republicans to exalt the revolutionary heritage by way of compensation.

As Claude

Nicolet rightly noted, the battle over secularism

aware of "the fundamental and ineluctable link between the tual."

was

For them, the

"literally the

anticlerical battle

was the

political

prerequisite of

all

curriculum, was so important.

and the

Party.^"*

The

secularization, affecting both teachers

first

schools.

Thursdays

for religious instruction,

Saturday classes. In recent years

ents upset about losing

and

impact was on the curriculum: the catechism disap-

Wednesday afternoons) were reserved in

it

The reform process was begun by Jules Ferry and the

was eliminated from the public

was made up

spiri-

political action;

peared from the program, and under pressure from the Radical Party instruction

republicans

motor of history."^^

That is why the process of educational

Opportunist

made

weekend time with

this

(later

all

religious

changed

and the time

to

lost

has led to protests from par-

their children, but as recently as 1991 the

courts sided with the bishops, ruling that unless the whole arrangement were to be renegotiated, the existing

compromise must be maintained.

In the short run the secularization of the curriculum had

ambiguous conse-

quences. For teachers, neutrality became the cardinal rule of behavior, not only

because

it

made

sense but because the authorities did not want to

stir

up trouble or

put weapons into the hands of the enemies of secular education. In a famous state-

ment Ferry warned teachers

that nothing in their instruction should

shock fathers

who entrusted their children to the public schools.^^ Still, nothing in this admonition prevented the schools from inculcating the new republican values of nation, work, and science, as a

result

of which battles over textbooks flared up periodically.

Catholics and Seculars

Just as

compulsory education

of virtually eradicating

in

France marked the

illiteracy,^"^

final stage in the

long process

the secularization law completed a similar, and

equally irreversible, evolution in primary education: traditional religious texts such

Royaumont

as the

were replaced by new and more

Bible and Les Devoirs du chretien

"functional" texts such as Francinet and Simon de Nantua; sacred history ("In the

beginning

God

created the heaven and the earth")

("Our ancestors the Gauls"); and new which curiosity about the things of substance of children's lessons.'^

writer with a

flair

for teaching,

ers trained in the stituted

this

world took the place of the

the provocative

whose work that

illustrates

was

afterlife as the

Tour a

how the new curriculum sup-

clearly outdated. later, as

schools replaced Christian Brothers,

only a minority of the teaching

in

pseudonym chosen by

teaching staff came about somewhat

new normal

ing sisters of various orders,

geography appeared,

A good example of the change is the famous

program

planted a traditional religious

The secularization of the

disciplines such as

by G. Bruno,

de la France par deux enfants

was replaced by profane history

lay teach-

who by now conand teach-

staff in public schools for boys,

who still accounted for the majority of teachers in girls'

schools. In boys' schools the replacement process

began

as early as i860

and contin-

ued throughout the decade that preceded the new law (1886), so that compliance was almost immediate. In

girls'

schools,

by

contrast, the shortage of lay female teachers

made it necessary to adopt a policy of gradual changeover, off or quit their posts. In

any

case, the

new law heightened antagonism

where the public school and the church school often vied

regions,

Reality

is

in religious

for pupils.

of course never neat. At the village level one wonders

how many fam-

the Sandres continued to produce generation after generation of school-

ilies like

masters and -mistresses almost as

if

the law had never been passed.

regions was there no battle of the schools at tion

as Catholic teachers died

and no enthusiasm for

for example,

where

a

conflict.''

all,

In

how many

because there was no real opposi-

How much real change was there in the Doubs, laywomen

majority of schoolmistresses were

(that

is,

not

sis-

before 1880 but were nevertheless practicing Catholics (hence not "secu-

ters)

lars")



sards"

as indeed they

were quite

would remain

afterward.''

real: if the typical village

the Republic's "black hus-

Still,

schoolmaster of the early nineteenth

century also served as choirmaster, usher, and sacristan, he was likely to be replaced at the

ian,

end of the century by a

and

from

local bandleader.

a glance at the

An

man who doubled

as

mayor's secretary, town librar-

idea of the magnitude of the change can be gleaned

government's budget. In the period 1875— 1879 more money was

allocated to religious functions {cukes) than to public education (55 million francs

versus 46 million), whereas

by 1885— 1889 spending on

48 million versus 130 million on the 1883 especially,

latter.

the former had declined to

Minutes of parliamentary debates, for

show how republicans saw every decrease in

the budget for religious

functions as a direct contribution to the progress of public education.""^

121

122

CLAUDE LANGLOIS Secularization affected

all

levels of the educational system. Religious officials

soon disappeared from the Conseil Superieur de I'Enseignement

ogy

moribund

faculties, already

to

be sure, soon discovered that they were no

longer welcome in the state university system/'

The

secularization process also

involved other areas of public service: nuns, for example, to

which they had been systematically assigned

they remained

and theol-

Piiblic,

left

the

women's prisons

after the 1839 reform.'*^

at their posts in provincial hospitals,

though not

By contrast,

in institutions

run by

the Assistance Publique in Paris, where lay nurses replaced Sisters of Charity. secularizing wave also swept through cemeteries and courts. In 1880,

The

Sunday ceased

Was this political progress or social regression.'' In 1884 it ceased to be obligatory for assemblies embarking on new terms to solicit the "assistance" of God "in the churches and temples": God was discreetly outlawed at to

be an

official

day of

rest:

was

reinstated that

that the Catholic conception of marriage ceased to

be a universal

the cost of a slight modification to the Constitution.''^ Divorce

same year, so

requirement. But certain symbols had a more direct impact. tionists

inaugurated a

new

daily

newspaper

When

in 1883, they called

it

the

La

Assump-

Croix (The

Cross), because, to the outrage of Catholics, the crucifix had just been banned from

schools and

hospitals.''''

Catholic Science and Secular Morality

The

schools were central to republican thinking not only because they were a

strategic prize to

be wrested from the clergy but also because education was directly

implicated in two areas in which the

war between Catholics and

ending, namely, science and ethics.

As

it

seculars

was never-

happens, the vocabulary of the time

revealing: contemporaries spoke of "Catholic science"

and "secular morality,"

both contenders were required to prove their mettle on the enemy's

is

as if

terrain.

"Catholic science" originated with the followers of Lamennais.''^

It

was

in

no

sense a precursor of Stalin's concept of "proletarian science" but rather the expression of a wish to reestablish a unifying theological discourse capable of incorporat-

ing the practice of science, which had achieved

autonomy from theology in

the sev-

enteenth century and turned secular in the second half of the eighteenth century

and during the Revolution.

When

it

came

to particulars. Catholic science also

tended to favor those "scientific" concepts most closely aligned with traditional

philosophy (advocating, for example, vitalism over materialism in medicine) or revealed truth (preferring monogenist to polygenist theories in anthropology). After i860, and even

more

from German philology

more

directly.

to

Meanwhile,

after 1870, discoveries in scientific disciplines

Darwinian biology challenged

scientists

biblical truth

ranging

more and

such as the illustrious Marcellin Berthelot were

quick to throw their support to the Republic. Catholics found themselves in a defen-

!

Catholics and Seculars

BRANLY

CROIT..!

FOCH

CROIT...

PASTEUR

123

CROfT..

^5 Vertu3 pique5^

^5 VertSp'iques

...

FIGURE

3.7

3.8

lui,

ne croit poM

Catholic scholars and secular virtues. Gignoux, draw-

ing for Le Pelerin

FIGURES

mait M. Homait,

AND

(May

3.9

1929).

Grandjouan, The Secular Virtues; for La

Raison (August, 1907).

sive situation,

defended only by the

the Instituts Catholiques

who were also believers

still

and reduced

in order to

atheistic: fortunately there

was

young

science faculties of

to issuing lists

of

scientists

prove that science need not be

Pasteur.

They were

also obliged to

refight old battles, as their enemies purposely raised again

again the

trial

of Galileo. Fortunately, anniversaries raised

and

less predictable issues

of

contention. In 1892, for example,

Europe celebrated the four-hundredth anniver-

sary of the discovery of America

by Christopher Columbus. But what exactly was

being

Was it "the triumph of positive science over the chimerical scitheology.-^" Or was it the advent of a new missionary fired by an "almost

celebrated.''

ence of

124

CLAUDE LANGLOIS supernatural desire to bring Christ... to the

Him in the shadow of

unknown peoples who waited so long for

death.-^'"''^

The battle raged on at a more down-to-earth

level as well, at times in rather pic-

turesque fashion. In 1910, for instance, a teacher in Blajan (Haute- Garonne) offered this rather curious exercise in dictation in a

Those submissive them

course in hygiene:

to the clergy rarely bathe because their religion teaches

may

modesty: one

to prefer filthy

not look

A

the body, the sexual parts for example....

at

or touch certain parts of

great doctor set out to discover

which religion has the greatest number of victims and the greatest variety of diseases of this kind [sexual disorders].

gion, which

is

He found

that

it

was

the Catholic reli-

understandable since this religion teaches no, or virtually no,

principles of hygiene....!

decently but above

am

speaking to you

scientifically,

honestly and

all practically.

In fact, at this late date, the patronages catholiques, or church youth organizations,

then at their peak, paid particular attention to the physical development of the boys

who

joined them:

to France,

it

these clubs that soccer, and later basketball,

and they also popularized

If the Catholics

ulars

was through

were obliged

in the habit

were to

called

upon

do the same

to

of gymnastic

sorts

all

in the

of responding to attacks in

were only too glad

Religieuse, they also

where the "good

moral realm. Anticlericals were of course this area

by pointing accusatory

that such tactics

were generally held

schoolmistresses, often isolated single

on moral grounds, or terparts, as

at

by

the courts.

And

fingers at

while repub-

to reprint Diderot's salacious novel of the religious life

knew

sisters"

activities.

demonstrate their mettle in science, the sec-

Christian Brothers found guilty of various crimes licans

came

any

rate

were useless to

grassroots level,

be above suspicion. By contrast, lay

women, were

more open

at the

La

relatively vulnerable to attack

to suspicion than their religious coun-

can be seen in Leon Frappie's novel L'Institutrice de province and the

responses to

it

compiled by Francisque

Sarcey.''^

That

is

why

the officials of the

Upper Normal Schools of Sevres and Fontenay, which trained future female schoolteachers and principals, insisted that their young charges be morally beyond reproach, as Frangoise Mayeur has pointed out. In the "gentle lay convent" of

Fontenay, for example, particular attention was paid to "education of the conscience." tor

At Sevres,

the first headmistress,

Mme Favre, daughter of an Alsatian pas-

and wife of the republican Jules Favre, inculcated a

strict

sense of duty in her

female students, using the ethical writings of Epictetus, Kant, and Emerson.'*^

At

its

peak

in the period

Catholics found visible

i860— 1910, the antagonism between seculars and

embodiment in every

village in France,

combined town hall— school buildings went up opposite

clerical

where from 1880 on

compounds (church

plus rectory) renovated during the Second Empire; and in every

city,

where gov-

— Catholics and Seculars

ernment buildings and statues of great men

downtown church

steeples

main squares counterbalanced the

in the

and crowned Virgins looking down from the surround-

ing heights, or where Renaissance-style city halls competed with huge neo-Gothic

churches built a few years

Not even

Paris

earlier.

was exempt from

this battle

of symbolic architectures. For more

Was it a of Victor Hugo

than a century the two sides fought over Soufflot's neoclassical edifice:

The

church or a pantheon.'' (1885),

which came

issue

was

finally decided

moment

at the right

to

weigh

by the death

definitively in favor of the latter

choice, today's Pantheon. But soon each side in the dispute a

more modern emblem: Sacre-Coeur for the

still

seculars.

Both drew

from within

criticism

their

would be

Catholics, the Eiffel

able to claim

Tower for the

own camps. Everyone knows of the

hullabaloo unleashed by the construction of Eiffel's tower. But Sacre-Coeur had

Catholic detractors. olation of the

Its

Romano-Byzantine architecture

Romanesque of southwestern France) was hard

Coeur of Montmartre be built in our national a

(actually

vexing question, and those

their answer: the

who

it

was an extrap-

to take. "Will Sacre-

some foreign

style or in

its

style.-^" It

was

signed one protest petition were unanimous in

church should be French and Gothic and not a "mosque.

Before long, however, these

between seculars and

vow" approved by

initial

clericals.

The

quarrels gave

out-and-out antagonism

construction of Sacre-Coeur was a "national

Assembly on July

the

way to

24, 1873, t^^t

at the

is,

Those who made the vow had of course denounced the imperial

height of reaction.

feast

and were react-

ing to the shock of France 's defeat, both sentiments that republicans could share, but that

made no

difference: the

shadow of

clericalism that the

new church would

cast

over Paris was intolerable. In 1881 the Radicals sounded the alarm in the Assembly:

We ask only one thing, and that is to repudiate the work of the cler-

CLEMENCEAU:

the National Assembly, to disavow

ical reactionaries in

it

publicly.

ADMIRAL DE LA RONCiERE DE NOURY: No to the revolutionary THE MARQUIS DE BELCASTEL: Catholicism is for all times CORDON:

M.

I

beg your pardon. Catholicism did not

will not exist after

it

has ceased to

THE MARQUIS DE BELCASTEL:

It

spirit!

exist before

it

existed

and

exist.

has existed since the

first

day of the world and

will exist forever.^'

And

that

had been

was not the end of

it.

Before long

built in expiation for the crimes

it

was being

of the

alleged that Sacre-Coeur

Commune. This was

intention, but the choice of site lent itself to this interpretation,

not the

initial

which many

Catholics did not shrink from proposing as a justification.

As the

for the Eiffel

Tower was

built

Revolution's only

Tower, aesthetic debate should have been enough. But

on the Champ-de-Mars, which Michelet had

monument, on

called the

the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of

125

CLAUDE LANGLOIS

126

FIGURE

3.10

The Christ of the Criminal Courts; postcard, 1904.

FIGURE

3.1

Christ Will Stay, despite the Sectarians; engraving. La Croix illustree

1

1789.

(November

11, 1905).

That was too much. To many outraged CathoHcs, the new monument was

modern Tower of Babel

that

a

would sow confusion among those who had haughtily

dared to erect such a "hideous skeleton," such a "horrid piling," as opposed to Sacre-Coeur, that "bastion of

Semaines

religietises,

pastiche of Victor

God" and "white

citadel."

The Breton

publication

from which these compliments were taken, even offered

Hugo

in

mockery of the

this

project:

Nains de quatre-vingt-neuf, singez

les

grandes choses,

Multipliez I'enorme, artisans, apprentis:

Creez des tours de

fer

Mais vos reves sont

pour vos apotheoses,

laids et

vous

etes petits.

[Midgets of '89, emulate great things; artisans, apprentices,

copy what

is

immense:

Create iron towers for your apotheoses,

but your dreams are ugly and you are small.]^^

There

is

no need

to multiply examples.

fierce at the time the republicans

were forced

came

No

one denies that the antagonism was

to power. Like

it

or not, Protestants and Jews

to adapt to this Procrustean bed. Events also played a part.

There were

Catholics and Seculars

many

among

Protestants

And what

miracles.

is

the republicans, and their educational militancy

Bank of

there to say about the unfortunate Catholic

Union Generale, whose collapse was blamed on

a

worked

conspiracy of

its

the

alleged

Protestant and Jewish enemies? In any case, the real antagonism that developed in the larization legislation

of the i88os dictated certain

wake of

the major secu-

but failed to

political positions

impose a permanent structure on either the right (both Orleanists and Bonapartists being only sporadically pro-clerical) or the

(where anticlericalism was an issue

left

of only moderate importance to the chastened Opportunists and even to certain socialists).

That persistent antagonism did not prevent temporary realignments,

however, as when Legitimists and Radicals found themselves on the same side in the Boulangist controversy, nor did

manent support

prevent

it

many

Catholics from offering their per-

to the Republic. Nevertheless, the presence of vociferous activists

and eager followers

in



both camps

the Assumptionists of

example or the editors of La Libre Pensee on the

right, for

La Bonne

left



Presse

on the

precluded any real

effort to restore peace.

we

If

focus for a

about the

Founded

new

state

in 1883

by Father Vincent de Paul

which was aimed

Croix,

order to extend for polemic: all,

moment on the Catholic side. La of mind among Catholics in the

its

at a

choicest

tell

Bailly in the spirit of

was

words were reserved

for

us a great deal

early years of the Republic.

broad audience and spawned many

roots into the provinces,

its

Croix can

Le

Pelerin,

La

local affiliates in

a daily paper with an obvious zest

Freemasons obviously, Jews above

and schoolteachers, "the teaching Republic's chain gang." La Croix attacked the

secular state ("the state-god that expelled the real suffrage"), parliament ("a

God and

lives solely

chamber of disorder"), and above

all

on universal

the university, that

"mortal illness," which "discovered a secret that had previously eluded humanity:

how

to increase the

however, the

number of

political battle

suicides

by young people." Apart from polemic,

never really amounted to anything: one can understand

why the time was not ripe for "proper"

combat, yet despite Pope Leo XIII's

royalist

injunction, rightists remained steadfastly

opposed

to accepting the Republic or

forming a true conservative party. Catholics pursued the illusory goal of trying to unite people around Catholic interests alone, after election.

weak

La

and they

failed regularly in election

Croix revealed a powerful capacity for invective coupled with a

capacity for organization: up to the time of the Dreyfus Affair, this

was the

disconcerting public face of the Assumptionists' private newspaper.^"*

Thus wage

the "separation of church and school" induced combative Catholics to

new political realities.^^ On own. By the end of the nineteenth

ideological warfare without real contact with the

the educational battlefield, at

any

rate,

it

held

its

century both sides had reason to be satisfied. Seculars were pleased that secular education

was

a reality: nearly three quarters of

all

elementary school pupils attended

127

128

CLAUDE LANGLOIS secular public schools, and lycees and colleges for lar.

The

revitalized university system

from the

petition

its

enjoyed a near monopoly, with

five Instituts Catholiques thus far established.

educational system (which

had

still

young women had become popu-

its

com-

But the Catholic

now included most of the private schools in France)

strong points. In certain regions such as the west of France

against

little

it

held

its

still

ground

competitors. Girls remained loyal to the Church: forty percent of female

students were taught

by

religious sisters,

and that figure understates the Catholic

influence in both the lower and middle classes. Finally, a network of Catholic col-

with priests and monks as teachers attracted more and more students every

leges

year from 1887 to 1898, increasing tion

from thirty-two

its

share of the male secondary school popula-

to forty-two percent

of the

In education, the battle

total.

strengthened both sides without designating a victor.

Hence something had series

to

be done, and to the detriment of

of anti-congreganist measures were passed in the wake of the

France

now

enjoyed freedom of association for

which previously were the only

became grounds

ment of

all

legal associations.

the Concordat as well:

What had been

of 1901:

a privilege

To

the detri-

from 1905 the Republic no longer recognized or religion.

The

battle

delicate terrain: not the school but religion itself.

Republic prepared to

Law

except the "congregations,"

for discrimination; the exceptional status remained.

assumed the cost of supporting any

more

liberal principles a

revisit the Revolution.'' Catholics

now shifted to new and Was the Radical Party's

saw

a repetition of 1790 in

the anti-congreganist laws and of 1795 in the separation of church and state. Despite the vociferous exhortations of extremists

not revisit either 1791 or 1793.

It

on both

however, the Republic did

sought neither schism nor dechristianization. Let

inventaires turn to confrontation resulting in death,

troublemakers arrested.

sides,

and Clemenceau would have the

No new persecutions for a few candlesticks!

Let the pope

prohibit cultuels, and other procedures for the devolution of church property

be negotiated.

because

it

was

The

would

separation of church and state presented a paradoxical situation:

carried out under the searchlight of history, there

was an obsession

with the revolutionary precedent, but the end result was an amicable parting of the

ways without dramatic incident. The "lesson of

the Terror," recited throughout the

nineteenth century, was not forgotten, even though the protagonists delighted in the heroic combats of their illustrious ancestors.

Then came

the war, which changed nothing but confirmed everything:

Catholics, like socialists, died to defend France and in so doing also defended the

Republic. There was nothing like the uprising of the Vendee against the Revolution; indeed, "emigres," actually banished clergymen, returned to France in order to take part in the war. Catholics

marched

to the front

under the blue, white, and red of the

Republic, although they might have preferred a flag embellished with an image of

Sacre-Coeur.

The dead had

their caskets

draped

in blue, white,

and red. In

fact.

Catholics and Seculars

most Catholics were outspoken in their outrage when the pope proposed in 19 17 that peace be concluded without a winner or loser. There were a few false notes, however, as at the

end of 191 5, when a

some "15,580

shirker priests." Verbal excess

"vile

rumor"

circulated that the country harbored

was always

tionary violence sprang readily to mind, even

if

it

was only

Bonnet rouge, for example, began one polemic with insisted that conscript priests should

have to

die.

possible; images of revoluto

deny

this blast:

their reality.

"We

Le

have never

We have no intention of refloating

Carrier's scuttlable boats."^^'^^

Tactical errors of this sort did not stand in the trenches. After the

war

way of

the religious conflict seems to have

reconciliation in the

come

to a standstill, as

new themes. The Cartel des Gauches would learn this lesson the hard way when it attempted to rekindle the battle in 1924. Catholics plastered the walls with their answer: "We will not go."'^" Men who had was

the neither side

worn

able to develop

the uniform and shed blood for France could

no longer be

exiled. All that

could be said on the subject had been said, yet the battle was not yet over. ular

The

sec-

camp was probably never more highly organized than in the interwar years, and

verbal clashes were not

1920

Rome

uncommon. Take

the case of Joan of Arc, for example. In

canonized her, and a legislature

filled

with war veterans honored her as

the "national saint." In 1929 the five-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of her

adventures again put her in the public eye.

came

in 1930 in a series

of ten

articles

counterattack was inevitable, and

published in VEcole

the Syndicat National des Instituteurs, in

liberatrice,

which Gaston Clemendot

it

the organ of

set out to top-

Domremy."^'

ple "the idol of

When

A

Vichy

legislation favorable to Catholic schools

was overturned

in 1945,

proponents of the parochial school system began to organize. Their opponents revived such publications as

La

Calotte,

La

Raison, and Les Cahiers rationalistes.

Breton priests gleefully denounced "the devil's schools," while seculars responded with the incontrovertible slogan, "Public schools, public funds."

between "those Resistance.'^ In

who

any

Had

the entente

who do not" failed to survive the lay down their arms enjoyed a mar-

believe in heaven and those

case, those

who

refused to

velous second season.

The Revolution as Matrix

where

did this terrible family battle

away with genealogies but not

begin.'' If

we

ask those involved,

explanations. Perhaps there

is

we will come

a sign in the fact that

whenZa

Calotte

calendar.

Other secular voices invoked precursors from before 1789: the

resumed publication

in 1945,

it

remained

faithful to the republican legists

of

Philip the Fair, the "freethinkers" of the Renaissance, the philosophes of the eigh-

teenth century. Their adversaries followed a

somewhat

different route to the

same

129

CLAUDE LANGLOIS

130

FIGURE

3.12

Peree, The Rights of Man; engravmg. 1793.

end, but their heroes and martyrs had different names.

books used

in Catholic

A glance at the history text-

and secular schools under the Third Republic

is all

the con-

firmation one needs.^^

Everyone pointed secular antagonism?

I

to the Revolution, but

prefer to call

it

was

the matrix

this really the origin



but in what sense?

of Catholic-

The two camps

Catholics and Seculars

did not exist as such at the time, and the vocabulary the noble vocabulary

was not yet fixed. Or at any rate,

was not yet fixed; common parlance was something else

again.

clergy were ferociously mocked. Indeed, political caricature was invented for

The

the purpose of attacking the clergy: the

debauched monk, the

big, fat bishop.^^

The

clergy were an early target of insults as well: the streets rang with shouts of "priests

lampposts" as patriots emerged from the theater where the actor Talma

to the

thrilled

crowds with

his portrayal of the Saint

Bartholomew's

November

Marie Joseph Chenier's Charles IX. In

1789, Camille

gurated his soon-to-be-famous newspaper Revolutions de France

summary of

this lapidary

Assembly [literally,

legs."

gan

"The king

the situation:

is

in the

Day

massacres in

Desmoulins inauet

de Brabant with

Louvre, the National

in the Tuileries...the mills are turning, the traitors are fleeing, la calotte

is

the skullcap, that

is,

the clerical party]

is

prostrate, aristocracy

is

on

its last

He happily adapted Voltaire 's anticlerical polemics, including the famous slo-

ecrasei I'infdme (crush the vile thing!), to the

the "swindling

and stupid bonzes."

he came up with this formula, the gle to the death going

The

on between

needs of a daily struggle against

When the first religious tensions

first

of

a

long

line:

"There appears

the skullcap and the tricolor

arose in 1790, to

be a strug-

sash."'''*

ferocity of such images and the impertinence of such

words cannot be

ignored, nor can the fundamental antagonism between patriots and aristocrats.*^^ Still,

historians seeking to understand

own way of

putting things:

it

is

what happened

in 1789

and 1790 have their

possible, for example, to suggest that the

Revolution initiated a twofold process of secularization, half of which succeeded while the other half failed.

On

secularization of political

the one

space,

hand there was the immediate,

which took place almost by consensus.

Catholicism disappeared not only as the

tem but also

as the

first

order of the

tripartite

eignty. In the

new

medieval sys-

kingdom's leading landowner and primary source of legitima-

government power. The divine-right monarchy gave way

tion of

irreversible

political

landscape the religious dimension had no relevance. In

the new, regenerated France there

and Jews but only free

citizens

fundamental reference.

to popular sover-

On

were

in

theory no longer Catholics, Protestants,

enjoying equal rights.

the contrary,

it

No longer was

was reduced

Catholicism a

to just another of those

opinions open to public discussion, in the light of which individuals were free to

choose

how they

stood.

This unprecedented secularization of the political sphere ula rasa of obstacles

which the revolutionaries were so fond

—one form

of the tab-

—encountered no immediate

among the deputies of the clergy, but the progress of the Revolution soon

aroused an opposition whose goal was to defend the rights of both Catholicism and the

monarchy, pitted against a

clerical

avant garde

more

inclined to explore gen-

uine social equality than to draw the consequences of the erty. ical

In any case, the clergy

saw concretely

new

definition of lib-

that the installation of the

new

polit-

order was in fact working out to their disadvantage: the Church's property was

131

132

CLAUDE LANGLOIS

Figure 3.13

The Jehovah of the French; enqrav'mg after Sauvage, 1792.

Figure 3.14

God and the Head of the Church Protect Napoleon; anonymous

matical legend (protege should be protegentl.

engraving. Note the ungram-

Catholics and Seculars

nationalized to finance the Revolution, their religious

name of

individual freedom and public

nition as the national religion in the

utility,

name of

vows were

nullified in the

and Catholicism was denied recog-

the

brand-new

freedom

principle of

of religion.

But the Revolution,

after creating

an autonomous political space by excluding

Catholicism as an integral component of the Ancien Regime, also attempted to secularize that very

same Catholicism by incorporating

it

new

into the

administrative

order that was beginning to be established by late 1789. "Secularize the Church": paradoxical formulation

this

is

borrowed from

Jaures.''^

In the present context

may take this to mean the imposition on the Catholic Church of new "norms" lished for the nation as a whole: the redistricting

departements, with

administrative officials.

same multistage

What

is

to coincide,

and through

which took more account of the popula-

and new procedures for choosing religious

parish priests, involving the

estab-

of space through the creation of

which the Church's new dioceses were

the realignment of mainly urban parishes, tion;

we

officials,

primarily bishops and

electoral system used for selecting

more, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy also

regulated the finances of the Catholic Church, offering

more

more

equitable and

generous compensation to the parish clergy generally and introducing reforms in church procedures desired by a majority, along with a pinch of Presbyterianism and

of Gallicanism.

a dash

This

is

where the rupture originated. Those who rejected the Civil Consti-

tution of the Clergy also dismissed a reorganization of the

Church along

lines

they considered too "secular," even though this would have replaced a system

which, with its nonclerical

The repudiation in particular

also

collateurs,

or patrons, also

left a

great deal to be desired.

concerned the manner of the reform: the Catholic hierarchy

could not accept a reform without either agreeing to

it

itself, in

Rome

accordance with Gallican tradition, or submitting the proposed changes to for the

new the

customary negotiations. But the Constituent Assembly,

sovereignty, could not agree to a national council, which

Church of France, and did not wish

in the flush

of

its

would have revived

to await the favors of Pius VI,

who had

been antagonized by the revolt in Avignon, was hostile to the Revolution anyway, yet

who

for the

moment had chosen

to refrain

from action pending further devel-

opments. Faced with mounting troubles, particularly in the provinces, the

Assembly took the

initiative

and forced

to vicar, to take the

oath (in

Constitution that by

now

all

common

included the

concerned

after

priests,

from bishop down

February 1790) and assent to a

new law

against which

many

clerics

had protested.

What unity,

followed was the paradoxical spectacle of an oath, a sacred act of national

becoming instead

a sign of national division, accepted

by some and

rejected

by others among the 160 bishops and coadjutors and 50,000 cures and vicars of

133

134

CLAUDE LANGLOIS

France.''*'

The

Civil Constitution,

which had

Catholicism coincided with France



down

laid

the implicit principle that

a state religion but not a national

one



thus

perceptible sign of division at the national

led, as a result

of the oath, to the

level, since the

people were to one degree or another involved in the choices made

by

their clerics.

The

first

secularization defined a political space outside

first

Catholicism, whereas the second placed religion back at the heart of political debate. Until then the opposition to the Revolution existed only in the relatively

vague form of the "aristocracy," but now Catholicism.

The Third

Estate had of course initiated the Revolution

to maintain three distinct orders.

the abstractions

it

took on the precise outlines of

it

But the Revolution was able

by refusing

to attach "figures" to

excluded only by transforming the noble into the "aristocrat"

The would merge

and the

priest into the calotin.

pejorative term calotin in fact

distinct

images that

into a single

combined three

image for posterity: the fanatic

preacher of an intolerant and superstitious religion, the representative of the

Ancien Regime who had refractory who, order.^'

There

lost his

by refusing

is

property and privileges, and,

last

to take the oath, excluded himself

a direct line

but not

least, the

from the new

of descent from the Revolutionary

civic

calotte to the cUri-

calisme of the Republic.

Of

course the Revolution never learned to deal with the religious conflict that

introduced a crucial division into renewal of secularization,

this

The

history.

its

time directed

rest

at society as

of the story

is

familiar: a

well as the clergy, coupled

with dechristianization: by the end of the Terror, the Revolution of Year

become vehemently more

antireligious.

religion but rather of different treatment for the

Constitution:

is

not one of uniform hostility to

two

rival churches, the

grew out of acceptance or

on the one hand the martyred

discarded his surplice and took a wife.

priest,

The

organized an armed opposition to defend

and

crisis

its

faith

in

its

which a

Assembly, but that Catholicism found

itself at

at

And of

who

course

rural population

king.

around the oath soon raised another related but

not only that nonjuring priests found themselves

refrac-

the clergyman

aureole and the stigma.

way

one

rejection of the Civil

on the other

people would also remember the Vendee and the

The

had

For collective memory, whether spontaneous or

often than not revived, the dominant image

tory, the other constitutional, that

II

distinct issue. It

was

odds with the Constituent

odds with the Revolution. The revo-

lutionaries therefore sought to establish their

own

sacred ritual distinct from the

Catholic liturgy, as evidenced by three highly symbolic acts that took place in 179 1: the transformation of the

Church of Sainte-Genevieve

into the Pantheon, the

purely "secular" celebration honoring Voltaire, and the exhibition of David's sketch exalting the Tennis Court Oath as the taint, the

Revolution inaugurated

itself in a

moment

in which,

pure of

all clerical

unanimous outpouring. The great rev-

olutionary scholar Albert Mathiez gave an excellent

summary of

the novelty of the

Catholics and Seculars

situation in the conclusion to his thesis, written in 1903:

when he was

young man

just a

still

nowadays, he explained, republicans

no longer give any thought to dreaming up new religions. They do not care establish a

new church, but they have not given up hope of resolving the prob-

lem of democracy. Today, ations to

to

come, we have

stamp on gener-

in order to impress the republican

free,

compulsory, secular education.. ..Our ancestors

of the Revolution hoped to achieve the same goal of imparting a republican education by establishing a

Why do

I

define the

religion.''^

bring up the subject of revolutionary

new

brought out another type of tension between Catholicism and

cult

the Revolution: along with secularization later Jules

Because the effort to

religion.''

Ferry would

went

much more Utopian dreams

What kinds of teachschools.'' The Revolution had

What

curriculum for

for education,

its

and these reveal the central issue

heart of the debate over secularization in terms similar to those used

were

How were

Those who took

wedded

part in this thinking

The

were, however, two primary models.

dation as the basis of stressed in is

first,

that substitute

more or

ought

less inspired

morality. "Religion

its

is

therefore the

first

first

and basis of

all faiths

There

by Rousseau,

point

primary education.. ..What the primary schools must instill

grand as nature.

to be.

of the

common religious foun-

that every society requires a

a religious principle, the essence

This

what

in seeking a substitute for

to a degree in Robespierre's project to establish a cult

Supreme Being. The idea was

young

the

to the

were unanimous

discredited Catholicism but disagreed about

was implemented

by

at the

new course of politics.'' How embrace the new system, founded on reason.''

the people to be

be persuaded to

free citizens to

century

out to resolve practical questions:

set

ers did the Republic need.''

Mathiez:

A

a transfer of sacrality.



I

want

to be

in their pupils

a religion as simple

and

"^^

model remained mainly

becoming operational.

It

theoretical; the second

began with the observation of the immense

Catholicism to "mobilize" the faithful; the Church, with a theology that offered

aimed above

comfort even as

it

its

resources to indoctrinate large numbers of today's patriots or tomorrow's republicans,

people.'''* it

guilt, clearly

When

therefore

ability

of

impressive liturgy and

of

stirred feelings

all at

it

made

came

had the

to training

sense to tap into

Catholicism's sources of energy in order to generate genuine revolutionary enthusiasm.

According

to a

well-known

text

by the pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne,

"National education consists in seizing the child for the

unborn

still

child already belongs to the nation.

whole person and never

lets go,

the child but for a lifetime."^^

future republican,

is

in the cradle,

The

to be inculcated

earlier,

nation takes hold of the

so that national education

The new

and even

is

not an institution for

catechism, essential to the salvation of the

from

birth.

135

136

CLAUDE LANGLOIS These dominant positions



religion as the foundation of society and the adap-

tation of Catholic forms for the benefit of the republican regime critic in

a radical

Condorcet. "Fanaticism," Bouquier pronounced, following Rabaut's lead,

"once had of

—found

liberty,

a

temple in every commune. Let those temples

now become

of education."^'' But Condorcet replied that "if you

national temple,"

you would introduce the

the temples

school a

call a

principle of authority, the very basis of

fanaticism, into education.''^

Neither the French constitution nor the declaration of rights should be presented to any class of citizens as tablets from heaven that must be worshipped

and

believed.... As

men who do

long as there are

receive their opinions from an alien opinion, in vain.

Even

who believe,

Between the

light

masters and

two

into

classes, those

critical

Were some people advocating

mean

that

it

that students

pose

is

is

possible.

as a doctrine

its

in

be taught the text of the

conforming

one should whip up blind enthusiasm

favor so that citizens will be incapable of assessing

people that this

is

of "revolutionary enthusiasm"

must be taught

principles of universal reason or that

tell

human race who reason and

of reason and the darkness of belief no compromise

Constitution.-^ "If they

ing to

chains will have been broken

slaves.''^

Condorcet was even more vehemently his Memoires.

who

those guiding opinions are useful truths, the

if

would nevertheless remain divided those

all

not obey reason alone,

to the in its

true worth; if they are propos-

what you must worship and believe; then what they pro-

the creation of a kind of political religion." Responding directly to Rabaut

Saint-Etienne and others

who hoped

to

form future

cation of the young, Condorcet strongly the child in

its

very

first

citizens

by controlling

denounced those who "propose

moments in order to

fill its

mind with images

the eduto seize

that time can-

not destroy, to bind individuals to the laws and constitution of their country by blind emotion and introduce

them

to reason

ination and the confusion of the passions." political truths

than fanatics of

delusions.-^.-.To declare

seduce them in the

it

all

only through the miracles of the imag-

Were such people "more certain of their

sects feel they are certain

permissible to dazzle

name of

men

of

all

their religious

rather than enlighten them, to

truth.. .is to consecrate all the follies

of enthusiasm,

all

the ruses of proselytism."^^

Why dwell on the texts of an isolated

thinker.''

The answer

is

that they set forth

the ideological underpinnings of the Catholic-secular relationship in the forceful of terms. If Religion and

Reason are antinomical,

religion cannot permit a religious administration of

contradicting

itself.

also because of

a reasoned critique of

knowledge and power without

Condorcet 's remarks are valuable not only

Condorcet 's

most

strategic position as a link

in themselves but

between the philosophes and

the ideologues. Both directly, through his writings on education, and indirectly.

Catholics and Seculars

through his influence scientism,

in transmitting the legacy

Condorcet transmitted

to the

of the Enhghtenment in the form of

Third Repubhc a message that would by

and large be heeded,^^ despite recurring temptations to combat Catholicism with

its

own weapons, such as civic baptisms and weddings.^' Condorcet made explicit what the Revolution in nality alone

early stages demonstrated:

its

and independent of

all

if politics is to

authority, then

it

be based on ratio-

cannot assume direct control

of religion in any form. Condorcet 's critique thus explained the imbalance that

would emerge to

later in the relation

between secularism and

religion: the state

renounce religion (secularization) rather than appropriate

it

tended

(secular religion).

Mediations

of

course the passage from the fundamental experiences of the Revolution to the

involved a

later Catholic-secular split

Napoleon brought

discuss here. First,

A

number of mediations, stability to

three of

French society and

which

its

I

shall

institutions.

postrevolutionary order emerged that included effective secularization of state

and society through the Civil Code; the existence of multiple while the Concordat consecrated a special place for

faiths

Roman

was recognized,

Catholicism as the

majority religion; and the university was given responsibility for managing public

education under the control of the forth constrained

by

a

state.

system of institutions

olutionary secularization and France

high degree of sity

or to rival

stability. it,

Catholic-secular antagonism

's

was hence-

both the effects of rev-

that, reflecting

distinctive religious history, resulted in a

No matter whether Catholics sought to control the univer-

the state's role in education had

become

irreversible. Seculars

could try to overturn the Concordat, but Catholicism would nevertheless remain the majority religion sociologically to achieve a stable

and retain

its

Roman roots. Napoleon's aim was

empire through a Utopian fusion of antagonistic traditions, as

epitomized in Portalis's pithy phrase: "Philosophical without impiety and religious

without fanaticism."

The

reality

would eventually

fall

short of this unrealizable

ecumenical ideal, yet the effort would help to make possible

mate



the

—and

emergence of two traditions rooted in two antagonistic memories, which

Michelet, for example,

would transfigure

in the Introduction to his Histoire de la

Revolution frangaise in the following terms: "Therefore, despite elaborations and ciples,

two

new forms and new words,

actors,

two persons on the

The second mediation

is

implantation of a tradition.

Vendee

in a sense legiti-

as a region based

I still

see only

stage: Christianity

all

two great

the theoretical facts,

two prin-

and the Revolution. "^^

not institutional in nature but has to do, rather, with the It

on

has been said, rightly, that the Revolution created the the

memory of

a

murderous

history.^^ Indeed, all

France continues to bear the stigma of revolutionary division.

and visible and therefore most profound of those divisions

is

of

The most enduring

religious in nature.

A

137

138

CLAUDE LANGLOIS

map showing

the proportion of priests

Constitution of the Clergy in 1791

is

who took

the oath to support the Civil

strikingly similar to a

quency of

War

II.

map showing

religious practice just after

Areas where

a

World

high proportion of

priests refused to take the oath

where

the fre-

a high proportion

became

areas

of the population

continued to go to church, whereas "constitutional" areas

became "dechristianized."

The problem

how

is

and two errors avoided. reflects a

to interpret these facts,

in

particular are to be

The map of

the oath already

long religious history, as Timothy

Tackett has shown.^'* Furthermore, the contrasts in religious practice are already notice-

able in the nineteenth century thanks to epis-

copal surveys conducted under the July

Monarchy and

The crucial

afterward. factor,

however,

is

what took

place in each locality in the three decisive FIGURE

3.15

For or against Catholicism after Thermidor:

propaganda by engraving

and fa/7s; engraving, FIGURE

3.16

in

1797. Strack,

Atheism

1797.

Strack, The

Magic Lantern,

1797.

Tries

Catholics and Seculars

decades following the oath of 1791. reveal the existence of

two

refractory regions and a

new one in

The

crisis

surrounding the oath seems to

distinct religious models, a traditional

one

the constitutional regions. In areas

clergy, in accord with their flock, accepted the

autonomy of

in the

where the

the political and a

degree of secularization of the church, they would have difficulty in the future maintaining

who had

its

spiritual

committed themselves

largely

from

benefitted

hegemony through preaching and confession among men

There was

it.

simply

to the revolutionary process or

more immediate,

also another,

difficulty: the sys-

tematic destruction of the Constitutional Church, which got off to an effective start

with the forced abdication of Year

II,

continued with loss of clergy to

its

rival

during the Directory and with marginalization under the reconstruction that

lowed the Concordat, and ended with the elimination of the

Of

tutional clergy during the Restoration.

the

last

fol-

surviving consti-

many consequences of

this sys-

tematic elimination of the constitutional clergy, two deserve explicit mention.

Areas

any

in

which the constitutional clergy had dominated found themselves without

priests at all or, at best,

hard-hit dioceses,

up

with no priests of their "own." In some particularly

to forty percent

These "devastated" regions were

of the parishes were therefore eliminated.

also, for

view of the

dechristianized, especially in

obvious reasons, quick to become fact that, at the national level, the

destruction of the constitutional church resulted in the total triumph of the refractory,

of which revived nineteenth-century Catholicism was the direct heir.

not difficult to understand

how

It is

such a monopoly helped to perpetuate rather than

attenuate hostility.^^

One result of this forgotten "schism," tion of the constitutional

differences

lost in the silence

church in which so

were preserved

in the

surrounding the destruc-

many parties had

forms of religious practice

a hand,

itself.

was

Was

that old

the cleav-

age really between "practicing" and "nonpracticing" Catholics.'' No, because each

group had the

its

own "version"

one hand, a Catholicism

tor beliefs

above

all

The real

of religion. in

difference

which, as in the past, the clergy continued to moni-

and control practice through the catechism,

confession, a

Roman

was rather between, on

liturgy, sacraments,

and

or ultramontane form of Catholicism that was also

more intransigent and fundamentalist; and on the other hand,

a traditional

Catholicism sustained largely by the desire of the faithful to seek the sanction of the clergy for important

moments

in life

such as birth and death, as well as to seek the

direct aid of healing saints in facing life els is linked to the clergy, the

's

misfortunes.

The

first

second more directly to the

of these two mod-

laity.

Thus

the old

medieval distinction between lay and ecclesiastic was revived within Catholicism as a result

of the Revolution. Furthermore,

as the matrix within

ulars

and

clericals

this difference in religious practice

which a quasi-religious,

could develop.

quasi-political opposition

served

between sec-

139

CLAUDE LANGLOIS

140

FIGURE

3,17

The Revolution Today. Above the entry

to this

read; "The French people recognize the existence of the

The

church

third type of mediation

occurred in two stages: the

debate within

first

a constitutional

marked the beginning of an

in

Houdan

(Yvelines), the text of 18 Floreal,

Supreme Being and the

was the began

Year

II,

can

still

be

immortality of the soul."

restoration of

normal poHtical

life,

which

in 18 14— 181 5, with the institution of public

framework, and the second

in 1848, a year that

irreversible process of democratization.

The Restoration brought with frontation, although within a

it

the possibility of nonviolent political con-

narrow framework. In

fact the postrevolutionary

Catholics and Seculars

equilibrium had to be

imposed by the

left

untouched

allies in the

in

most

essential respects; external constraints

wake of Napoleon's

defeat had to be taken into account;

new regime had to be maintained. room to maneuver. It was legitimate,

and, last but not least, the fragile legitimacy of the

Under these conditions both

sides

had

little

however, to debate the Revolution in historical or philosophical terms, also legitimate to debate religion

by arguing about

new regime and

it

was

the role of the Jesuits or the

Congregation or, better yet, grappling over educational played by influential Catholics in the

just as

issues.

the

The very visible role

open goal of missionaries

of working toward both a political restoration and a religious reconquest provided pretexts for adversaries to seize on.

Thus

the

narrow scope of permissible debate

combined with ideological and symbolic overinvestment

in questions

of the sacred

and the laws concerning sacrilege and with the desire to return to the Ancien

Regime

to bring religion

choices. It

was

cursor of what

One tion,

back

in as a discriminating factor in contrasting political

the liberals versus the ultras, a situation that

would come

was in many ways

to pass in the early years of the

clear sign of this situation

was

the

a pre-

Third Republic.

new importance of

debates over educa-

over the role of the Jesuits and the teaching congregations, a pedagogical bat-

tle

over mutual instruction (the monitorial system) that turned into a doctrinal bat-

tle

in the context

FIGURE

3.18

of

new

legislation

concerning primary education.^^ Every occa-

Demonstration protesting the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses; Paris, 1989.

141

142

CLAUDE LANGLOIS was an opportunity

sion

ahead of

it:

for conflict.

A new

the division of society resulting

But whereas Destutt de Tracy,

in

theme appeared with

from two

a long future

different educational systems.

Year X, as the Revolution was ending,

still

saw the

dual system of education as a reflection of class division (working class and educated class),

in

1

8 16, at the

beginning of the Restoration, the rector of the acad-

emy of Rennes insisted instead on the ideological division within the elite: "Today," he wrote to a friend, "studies pursued separately and in institutions whose not entirely the same are a source of division in society. their preparatory or

feel

They

filled

with serious preju-

accuse each other of ignorance and impiety.

contempt and hatred without knowing one another. "^^ Such

during the Third Republic, were

more years before

still

new in the

the liberal deputy General

it

They

common

ideas,

Restoration, where

Foy would

is

When young people leave

church schools, they enter the world

dices against one another.

spirit

would be

initiate public

six

debate over

As it happens, the quoted passage is from a priest with Jansenist lean-

the question.^^

ings

who began

lege

of Vannes after the expulsion of the Jesuits. Another case in which

his career

on

the eve of the Revolution as the principal of the colcritical

thinking simply leapt over the Revolution was the denunciation of the "priestly

who had somehow wan-

party" by Montlosier in 1826.'" Montlosier was a Gallican

dered off into the past of the Ancien Regime; he drew on the anti-Jesuit literature

of the eighteenth century to compose pamphlets giving one of the descriptions of clericalism.

It

was an odd

trick

earliest clinical

of memory: the Revolution remained

present but chiefly in a historical mode, whereas everyday politics drew on the debates of the previous century. Never before had there been so editions of Voltaire and Rousseau. icals,

There were no seculars

yet,

many

published

nor were there

cler-

but there were two camps that bore an uncanny resemblance to them.

Debate, however, remained narrowly circumscribed. ever, after 1830

It

began

to spread,

and especially 1848, affecting minor provincial notables

pharmacist Homais (in Flaubert's Madame Bovary) and the

elite

how-

like the

of the urban work-

ing class like Pierre Proudhon, as well as rural people. In the end, with the establishment of universal suffrage, the people decided, once the issue was openly raised, as in 1877.

but a

new

but the

But

this

outcome required not only the introduction of universal

politicization of Catholicism.

latter

process

is

less well

The

history of the former

is

suffrage

well known,

understood. In one departement of east-central

France (the Ain), Philippe Boutry has found that the clergy began to play a greater role in public debate after i860.

They spoke out on

ing congregations, schools, and even

relations with

Rome,

the teach-

monarchy versus republicanism. By

1880, "a

process of politicization had created a unified segment of public opinion in support

of the Catholic

faith, the

Holy

See,

and the conservative parties."'' Clerical and

ular parties squared off in village elections.

the boundaries of the reservation to

The

sec-

cure of the 1870s ventured beyond

which the Concordat system had confined him,

Catholics and Seculars

at the

—prominent

same time replacing the

was on the

decline. In

any

notables

equipped to deal with the issues facing

inevitably

customary

It is

civil society."^^

modes of knowledge

meant invoking

a different set

to portray the clash

and theological.

to bear

—whose power

of knowledge that

case, "the cures possessed the kinds

politics required: historical, philosophical,

a desire to bring older

local citizens

No

one was better

Indeed, clericalism reflected

on the political process, and

this

of memories to justify one 's actions.

between seculars and Catholics

as a uniquely

French phenomenon, along with the variety of French cheeses and the insatiable French

There have of course been clashes

thirst for history.

outbursts of anticlerical sentiment even

more

just as

violent in southern

pronounced and

Europe and Latin

America, but the enduring mix of radical secularism and Catholic dominance

doubt unique to France. There

is

embrace worldwide models

alliances.

Have we ultimately plumbed tempting to see

it

as the

the deeper

symptom of

coexisting with the archaic.

meaning of

and the privatization of

this

novel

a structural imbalance, a sign

couple.'^ It is

of the modern

What is undeniably modern in France is the affirmation

of individual autonomy and the secular character of the

civil

no

nevertheless reason to ask whether this unique

heritage can survive the expansion of our horizons to

and regional

is

religion.

What

is

state, the plurality

probably archaic

is

of faiths

the internalization of

war, the incessant "theologization" of political debate, and the persistent

implication that the adversary

is

somehow

illegitimate.

This recurrent conflict has

been internalized, but fortunately in some ways

it

differences over the oath of 1791, exacerbated

by revolutionary violence,

has also been exorcised. Based on

pute was quickly institutionalized and soon civilized.

unique partition of

dom of

religion

liberties: seculars

and education.

From

it

the dis-

derives France's

enjoy those of 1789, while clericals enjoy free-

On the minus side of the ledger,

one can blame the

all-pervasive secular-Catholic split for the "absolute" Republic's inability to accept a legitimate opposition.^^

On the plus side

one can put France 's

later allergy to the

fascist virus. Is the

laique-Catholique split beginning to

charms of

a

France that no longer exists.'' Surely

clusion. Events always send people will

fade.'' Is it

always be someone

it is

back to the past

—and perhaps

one of the old-fashioned

too soon to draw any such conin search

of precedents. There

not the someone one expects

ghost of that champion of anticlericalism, Emile

Combes



to

(1835-1921).'''

invoke the

143

FIGURE

4.0

Antiracist demonstration by the group S.O.S.-Racisme,

November

1987.

CHAPTER

French and Foreigners Gerard Noiriel

In recent years the French political scene has

been disturbed by demonstrations con-

cerning the presence of "foreigners" in France, and in a figurative sense the sound

of those demonstrations can

still

be heard resounding

in the streets

of the country's

La France aux Franfais/ This old nationalist slogan, which the extreme right has made its war cry, has been countered by antiracist organizations with a slogan never before heard in France: "We are all immigrants of the first, second, third, or fourth generation."' A new front has thus been opened in the battle over immimajor

cities.

gration: the front of

Reasons

memory.

for the Repression

"Peoples always reveal their origins.

The circumstances surrounding their birth and

development influence them throughout tells

This idea of Tocqueville 's

us a great deal about the contrary roles that immigration has played in the his-

tories

of France and the United States from the beginning. As Jeanine Brun points

out, the

very fact that the American nation was created by the migration of

European colonists meant

that "the

immigration from the inception of immigration even today territory. It

was

originated the a

their history."^

myth

America

American is still

it

national history."^

was

citizen.

its initial

realities

of

The American model of function of populating a

during which the nation was born that Crevecoeur

America a fusion of

that in this

its

preserves aspects of

in the period

"new man." From

potential

still

United States was aware of the

for a long time

This has given

different peoples

was giving

rise to

immigrant was a

assumed

that every

rise to a

widely shared feeling that

an "unfinished country," to borrow a phrase from Nathan Glazer,

4

^

146

GERARD NOIRIEL who sees this enduring set of ideas as one of the main reasons why the United States is

finding

it

so hard to stop illegal immigration.

Immigration

is

American myth of

also a part of the

origins,

and so

it

has always

been an important topic in history books. For many people the American example the principal if not the only historical at the statistics,

however,

is

enough

model of immigration

in the world.

to see that since the beginning

is

A glance

of the twentieth

century immigration has had a proportionately greater impact in France than in the

United

massive influx in the

States. After a

America established

a strict

first

decade of the twentieth century,

system of ethnic quotas. Thereafter France became the

world 's leading immigrant host country, with

of increase in

a rate

its

foreign-born

population of 515 per 100,000, compared with 492 for the United States (in 1930).

Forty years

time

later, at a

when Western economies were once

again calling for

massive influxes of immigrants, the percentage of foreign-born residents in France reached eleven percent; while If,

it

was

less

than six percent in the United States.

was not seen

despite these figures, France until recently

country,

it

as a historic host

was because immigration did not coincide with the building of

French nation.

On

the contrary, the distinctive feature of the French

compared with the American

is

that the

purpose of immigration

in

the.

model

modern

as

times

has never been to populate open territory. At the time of the Revolution, France

was the most populous country

in

Europe, and

its

leaders

were

chiefly concerned

with the emigration of French subjects to other countries. Furthermore, centuries

of centralized rule had helped to bring about ethnic and linguistic unification,

which

in turn facilitated the

was not began

trialization,

and

strict

At

the time this immigration

this

perception

is

was seen

It

as closely linked to indus-

corroborated by a comparison of curves of

industrial activity with foreign population as well as in

revolutionary government.

second half of the nineteenth century that mass immigration

until the

in France.

implementation of

by an examination of

which the immigrant population was concentrated. At

first,

the areas

therefore,

immi-

grants were seen not as future citizens but as a temporary addition to the labor force.

Because immigrants were seen as part of a workforce, their

traditionally subject to close

the

government regulation and police

activities

scrutiny, whereas

American authorities, obedient to the law of supply and demand, were

liberal. In

were

far

more

France, a whole system of identity cards and labor contracts was set up

by the government

to funnel immigrants into industrial areas

in seriously short supply

authorities also

saw

to

it

where workers were

(most notably in heavy industry and agriculture). The

that

workers would be

flexible

by organizing

a dual labor

market: one for French workers (skilled and settled), another for immigrant workers (unskilled

and mobile). As Gary Cross has shown, France thus invented the

"modern" model of immigration, which other adopt after World

War

II.

industrialized countries

would

French and Foreigners

Controlled by the necessities of big industry, the French model of immigration

was also the product of an early democratization of the political system. The French

economy was unable

to find the proletariat

was the most populous country

in

it

Europe

needed to expand (even though France because most French peasants

in 1800)

were not only immune to the charms of big industry but resourceful enough to elude

grasp. In

its

my view this state

of

affairs

Revolution that rarely receives the attention for equality"

it

was one consequence of the French deserves.

By spreading the

and the urge for ownership into even the most remote rural

"passion

areas, the

Revolution not only encouraged the Malthusian behavior that manifested

on

itself

developed elsewhere in Europe, but

at the

same time discouraged peasants from fleeing the countryside for the

city.

a

broad scale in France a century before

it

Parliamentary democracy, which culminated in the adoption of universal (male) suffrage in 1848, gave

working people the

political tool

they need to oppose prole-

tarianization, a tool that their English counterparts as described lacked.

Hence big industry had no choice but to seek the workers

immigration. Surely ers

it is

no accident

between

dent in status

many

after

World War

industrialization, Malthusianism,

The importance of

and

the Revolution for the French

other areas as well.

needed through

that the massive importation of foreign

by other major European countries

relation

it

by Marx sorely

Two

II illustrates

political

the

work-

same cor-

democracy.^

model of immigration

evi-

is

events were crucial in establishing the legal

of foreigners in France. As Jean Portemer has noted, the Night of August

Fourth,

when

the Constituent

Assembly abolished

all

privileges, simultaneously

founded a national community with one constitution and one code of law for

"From then on

nationality

was

the criterion that defined the foreigner."^

The

all.

other

key event, which also took place in the summer of 1789, was the Declaration of the Rights of

Man and

the Citizen. This

document

the source of the radical differ-

is

ences between the French and American conceptions of immigration.

From

the

very beginning of the Revolution, in debates over Protestants, Jews, and "people of color" (to use the language of the time), the universality of the "rights of

repeatedly stressed tus

by spokesmen

under the Ancien Regime.

case for the Protestants lay yourselves a

open

few days ago that

on

for

all

groups that had been relegated to inferior

On August 23,

1789,

men

that

islands

them

harms no one."'

are equal in rights

and colonies"

this reply

A

filed a

to

of having contradicted yourselves by declaring

and today that two million of your fellow

way

his

you would not wish

and today that they are unequal; of

having declared previously that they are free to do whatever ers

sta-

Rabaut Saint-Etienne based

the following logic: "Gentlemen,

to the reproach

man" was

few weeks

is

not harmful to oth-

citizens are not free to

later the

worship

in a

"people of color of the French

motion based on a similar argument, which earned

from President Freteau: "No part of the nation

Assembly of its representatives for its

rights in vain.

will ask the

Those who, by dint of the

seas'

147

148

GERARD NOIRIEL expanse or prejudices concerning differences of origin, seem to be placed farther

from

its

acterize

regard, will be all its

drawn

closer

by these sentiments of humanity, which char-

deliberations and inspire

recognized as having equal rights,

it

all its

were

efforts.""' Still, if all individuals

was on condition that the realm of

and

religious

ethnic practice (which belonged to the "private" sphere, in which every individual

was his own master) be came divested of

izen

strictly

all

separated from the political arena, to which each

As Clermont-Tonnerre put

traces of his origins.

it

in his

brief in favor of allowing Jews to occupy municipal and provincial offices,

must deny the Jews everything als.

They must not

as a nation

constitute a political

individually be citizens.... If they

may be banished

"we

and grant them everything as individu-

body or order within

do not wish

to

be

so, let

the state.

them say

so,

They must so that they

forthwith.""

These few excerpts from the parliamentary debates of 1789 bring out an and permanent ingredient

in the

States the immigration issue

is

essential

French conception of immigration. In the United

invariably associated in theory, practice, and attitude

with race and ethnicity, whereas in France the Declaration of the Rights of

marks the triumph (or at any

rate the legal triumph) of a repudiation

and religious practices were to be confined to the private sphere.

grouping based on cultural or religious

was prohibited. This

criteria

feature of French immigration policy today.

Even when

Man

of any form of

segregation based on race, religion, or ethnic origin. In exchange, however, tural

cit-

all

cul-

Any political is

an essential

the authorities were

obsessed (as they were in the interwar period) by the idea of selecting immigrants so as to

weed out those who appeared to be most alien to French cultural norms, they

invariably

came up

against the "republican tradition,"

of ethnic quotas as in the United

States.'^

which precluded the adoption

For two centuries,

officials

have worried

about the possibility that people of similar ethnic background would band together in pursuit

of political ends. Even under the July Monarchy, France accepted

refugees and even paid them subsidies, yet only on condition that they remain dis-

persed throughout France.

A century and a half later, the government is still using

a similar "policy of atomization" with regard to refugees

An exciting problem by which

for social history

these traditions

Philosophers

all

would be

from Southeast

Asia.'^

to study the concrete modalities

stemming from the French Revolution were

too often confine themselves to the analysis of texts, as

transmitted. if

words by

themselves were enough to fashion traditions capable of enduring for centuries. As recent polemics abundantly illustrate, one can, sively to discourse, bring out

using different

texts,

socialist ideology.

understand

by confining one 's

attention exclu-

an image of France as the "homeland of liberty"

or,

by

develop a picture of France as a testing laboratory for national

Yet a century ago Emile Durkheim showed that one could not

political traditions

by studying discourse

the height of the Dreyfus Affair, "everyone

was

alone. "Yesterday," he wrote at

all

for cosmopolitanism. Today,

French and Foreigners

patriotism has the upper hand. this turmoil, all this

And

149

all

ebb and flow, takes

place without the slightest change in

law and moral-

the cardinal precepts of ity,

which are immobiliied by their hier-

Thus

atic form."

for

Durkheim

course becomes tradition only

if it

embodying itself in legal

ceeds in

codes, or institutions.

suc-

rules,

The numerous

Declarations of the Rights of since 1789

dis-

Man

and the great constitutional

principles of the Republic are the true

underpinnings of the French tradition.

how

In order to understand

those

great principles affect the collective

we cannot

consciousness, however, rely

on

We

legal texts alone.

must

explore the thousand and one material

channels

that,

therefore

all

tively, orient

unconsciously

much more

that

An excellent exam-

ple to illustrate this point

ment.

It

effec-

our everyday perception

of the social world.

statistical

and

is

the official

apparatus of the governhas often been said, and

rightly so, that statistics are the lenses

through which modern the society in

which he

parison of U.

S.

tion statistics strate,

man

observes

lives.

A

com-

and French immigra-

is

enough

to

demon-

once again, the importance of

the French Revolution as a foundational

moment.

Until

American immigration

the

1960s,

statistics

were

based on racial and ethnic categories (race,

language, parents'

religion,

place of birth).

By

contrast, French

FIGURE

the

statistics since the

nineteenth century

4.1

Game

reads: "Foreigners

Law

of the goose, circa 1790.

who

The caption on the top card

acquire National Properties

in

under the Safeguard of the Law."

have incorporated the principles of 1789: hence there are

no questions about

accordance with

are regarded as French." The bottom card says: "Non-Catholics

religion or parents' place of birth,

and the

I50

GERARD NOIRIEL most important

criterion

is

the legal

ough comparative study would in

nomenclature

in

one of citizenship (French or foreign).

A thor-

reveal the crucial effects of these initial differences

determining

how the Americans and

immigration over the past century and

perceive

still

it

the French have perceived

today: on the one hand as an

"ethnic" problem, on the other as a problem of "foreigners."

Important as the Declaration of the Rights of see

its limits.

is, it is

equally important to

In the debate that followed Clermont- Tonnerre 's declaration in favor

of the emancipation of the Jews, quoted tal

Man

contradiction in the ideology of

tion to Clermont- Tonnerre

earlier,

human

one speaker pointed to a fundamen-

rights.

Abbe Maury

by an argument based not on

on the same "national" ground on which

justified his opposi-

a racist or ethnic logic but

The

the revolutionaries themselves stood.

Jews, he argued, were a nation and therefore foreigners on French

could not become full-fledged citizens of France: "To

call

Jews

soil,

hence they

citizens

would be

tantamount to saying that without letters of naturalization and without ceasing

to

be

English or Danish, Englishmen and Danes could become French." This argument revealed a fundamental inconsistency in the Declaration of 1789, an inconsistency that has continued, as

immigrants

we

France to

in

shall see, to

this day. In fact, as

Declaration of the Rights of

Although the religious

have an important impact on the treatment of

Man

and of the Cidien

universalist logic of the

and ethnic origins through

Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out, the is

a contradiction in terms.

French revolutionaries was able

nationality,

tion of the foreigner, since the foreigner

it

inevitably ran

men of

belong to the nation. The blindness of the

up against the ques-

defined precisely as one

is

to reconcile

1789 to this issue

who

does not the

is all

more

surprising in that the contradiction had not escaped Rousseau several decades ear-

"One must choose between making a man and making a citizen, because one cannot simultaneously make both." Later he added: "Every patriot is hard on foreigners. They are merely men, they are nothing in his eyes."'^ lier.

In Emile he wrote:

Revolutionary events would reveal the pertinence of matic fashion.

over

all

As Albert Mathiez pointed

other considerations during the

this

observation in dra-

out, universalist enthusiasm prevailed

first

years of the Revolution.'*"

By virtue of

the logic described above with respect to religious minorities, the foreigner living in

France was seen primarily as a

man and

therefore as directly concerned

by

the

Declaration of Rights. In August 1790 the right of escheat (reversion to the state of a nonnaturalized alien's estate) felt that it

was "contrary

no matter what

their

was unanimously abolished, because the deputies

to the principles of fraternity that

country and their government; that

ought to bind

of man and the

citizen

and that

free France should

men,

this right, established in

barbarous times, should be proscribed in a nation that has based the rights

all

open

its

its

constitution

bosom

on

to all the

peoples of the earth by inviting them to enjoy, under a free government, the sacred

and inalienable

rights of humanity."'^ In subsequent years the revolutionaries con-

French and Foreigners

tinued to display generosity toward foreigners. In 1792, even though France

war and

its

was

at

enemies were taking steps against French citizens within their borders,

foreigners held (as they had under the Ancien

Regime) important posts

in the

gov-

ernment and bureaucracy and even commanded troops. In August of that same year the deputies voted to approve the

well-known decree declaring that all philosophers

Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, George Washington, and others) were French. In November France offered "fraternity and aid to all peoples who wish to regain their liberty." and freedom fighters throughout the world (such as

According to Mathiez, itary defeats,

it

was not until the middle of

domestic troubles, and an economic

eigners underwent a total reversal. Within a

would do, one logic replaced another.

It

1793, following a series of mil-

crisis, that

few months,

was then

that

the attitude toward for-

as if

no halfway measures

most of the ingredients

that

would recur in subsequent outbreaks of xenophobia were first seized upon: the issue of foreigners became a key element in Franco-French

political struggle,

each party

accusing the other of being in the pay of the enemy. All the troubles of the

were "explained"

was

as the effects

political: foreigners

were

moment

of a conspiracy hatched abroad. That conspiracy

spies

who

destabilized the country.

It

was

also eco-

nomic: foreign gold was ruining the national economy. These arguments were used to justify increasingly authoritarian measures: revolutionary clubs

members were banned, and noncitizens were removed from army. Foreigners were also

were stepped up.

Lists

among

public offices and the

the first victims of the Terror. Police checks

of suspects circulated, and

ultimately guillotined despite their roles in the

greatest

with foreign

many whose names appeared were first years of the Revolution. The

champion of universal values, Anacharsis Cloots, was executed

Prussian agent.

Thomas Paine was thrown

measures were abandoned

in prison.

after the Terror, they

Even though most of

as a

these

demonstrated the implacable logic

of the forms of exclusion inherent in societies built upon national foundations.

The

last essential

aspect of the French

model of immigration

explained by the Revolution has to do with historical amnesia.

that can be

The very

fact that

republican rights and their concomitant statistical categories erased every last vestige

of origin in the definition of the individual

is

important for understanding why

the history of immigration remained invisible in France for so long. the

myth of

origin that

was

sible for "foreigners" to

many American

built

upon

have a place

the events of the Revolution

in the collective

memory of

More generally,

made

it

the nation.

impos-

While

textbooks celebrate the contributions to the American republic of

the various communities that settled in the United States over the years, in France

immigration is

is

always approached as

seen as a temporary

a question extrinsic to the country's history. It

phenomenon, something

fleeting

and marginal. Similarly,

while Ellis Island, through which millions of European immigrants passed in order to enter the

United

States, has

became

a

museum, comparable

sites in

France, such

152

GERARD NOIRIEL Toul selection center, which processed most Central European immigrants

as the

the interwar period, have been torn starkly at

down,

odds with the myth of the

soil

as if

had

in

something dictated that a history so

to be magically erased.'^ It

is

hardly

surprising that this repressed history has resurfaced in recent controversies.

The Great Battles Albert Mathiez introduced his book on the Revolution and foreigners by saying that "if the present

surely

it is

work has any

to discover

beneath changing appearances what

remains, so as to distinguish

— wartime—

in this in

work

usefulness other than the satisfaction of curiosity,

to highlight

it

from what passes, what

common

is

permanent, what

is

His purpose

accidental."

features in French attitudes toward foreigners

could be expanded to include xenophobic attitudes in times of eco-

nomic

crisis.

In fact, given the close relationship between immigration and indus-

trialization in the

"French model," every period of economic expansion (Phase

A

of the Simiand Cycle) leads to a massive influx of foreigners, and every economic

downturn (Phase B) leads not only to unemployment and

a halt to hiring but also to

integration of recently arrived foreign workers. Labor-market competition intensifies

French

hostility

political level. It

was

at the

The

toward foreigners, and

this

issue of immigration then

end of the nineteenth century

industrial expansion of the

xenophobia makes

becomes

of the number of foreigners

in France, to

a national problem.

that this pattern

Second Empire led over

itself felt at the

was

first

noticed.

The

a ten-year period to a doubling

approximately one million in 1880. The

majority came from neighboring countries, primarily Belgium (40 percent) and Italy,

and they lived mainly

Rhone).^*^

in

departements near the borders (Nord, Bouches-du-

The importance of immigration for the French economy was already rec-

ognized by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu: "France," he wrote in 1886, gration, just as the republics of Argentina and Australia are. fifty

thousand foreigners

a

year

come here

to settle

"is a

land of immi-

An average of forty to

and put down roots.

The

Great Depression, whose impact on France was particularly severe, saw a leveling off of the foreign population at about one million. Competition fierce in the

mining and construction

industries,

was

particularly

which had recruited large numbers

of foreign workers during the Second Empire only to see them vie for jobs during the crisis with

unemployed French workers. For the period 1867— 1893, Michelle

Perrot has found evidence of eighty-nine incidents in which French and foreign

workers clashed; she also notes that xenophobic arguments were effective

means of mobilizing French workers

tions.^^ In these clashes

for strikes, petitions,

Flemish Belgians were the

first victims.

a particularly

and demonstra-

In the

Nord every

economic crisis since the July Monarchy triggered demonstrations against them. By the end of the century there were veritable anti-Belgian uprisings

by

the

working

FIGURE

4.2

Italian

Emigrants

in

the Gare Saint-Lazare; engraving, Petit Journal illustre (March 29, 1893).

154

GERARD NOIRIEL class.

who consticommune in

In 1892 at the Drocourt Mines in Pas-de-Calais, Belgian workers,

tutedthree quarters of the local workforce, were obliged to flee the

haste under threat from the French population. "Their return, which

complete by

1

3

August, was accomplished under

was nearly

Trains from

difficult conditions.

France arrived crowded with large families of poor people carrying cheap bags.

There were housing problems

what the French miners had destroyed."

to replace

due to vandalism

the losses of each family

At

They

at their destination.

An

also

had

official

to find furniture

Belgian inquiry set

at forty to fifty francs.^^

the end of the century the target of xenophobia shifted to the

most recently

arrived immigrants, the Italians. In Marseilles in 1881 there were veritable riots for several days in the streets of the city. "At four in the morning," wrote a journalist

between French and

for the Petit Marseillais, "brawls broke out

parts of the

city....

At

five-thirty, as

of youths began chasing

workers gathered

shouting

Italians,

Belsunce for hiring, a gang

at

them and

at

Italians in various

striking

some

rather hard

blows. Faced with such a welcome, the Piedmontese fled in panic as their pursuers

chased them into the

Rue de

to shout Vive la Republiquel"

la

Couronne and

armed with

Rue de

Within days hundreds of

of Italians reached a fever pitch

between French and

the

Aigues-Mortes

at

I'Echelle, ordering

Italians left the

in 1893.

and branches

set

Hatred

Following brawls

Italian laborers in the salt marshes, three

clubs, shovels,

city.^''

them

hundred people

out after foreign workers.

A convoy of

eighty Italians being escorted out of town by gendarmes was attacked by rioters,

and several people were

The

official toll

actual toll

was

left

dead.

Some of

was eight dead and

fifty

dead and

a

the injured

fifty injured,

hundred and

were bludgeoned

to death.

but according to the Times the

fifty injured.

What was new at the end of the nineteenth century was that acts of popular violence against foreigners were increasingly related to the political climate of the time.

Whereas popular brawls under

the July

Monarchy had been mainly of

the

"ethnic" variety (triggered by hostility toward Piedmontese, Auvergnat, or Flemish

workers), hatred of foreigners was

now most

often justified in terms of the inter-

national situation. For example, the immediate cause of the attacks streets

on

Italians in the

of Marseilles in 1881 was colonial rivalry between France and Italy over

Tunisia.^''

Conversely, violent clashes between French and foreign workers found

an immediate echo in parliament. Here, then,

is

another illustration of the link

between mass immigration and democratic politics. Indeed,

it

was not until the par-

liamentary and party system began to flourish in the early years of the Third Republic that immigration really became a political "problem." Following a pattern first laid

down during

the Revolution

and

fully

developed in the 1880s, the immi-

grant with no voice in policy making became a political football to be kicked about in

polemics between the right and the

movement

to

make

left.

Boulangism was the

first

major

political

systematic use of popular hostility toward foreigners for elec-

.

155

French and Foreigners

^cl etjpui[ m/me y

^

lil

I

Indications (• service.

A.

.

PAi,

NIMtS EN 1RANSP0HT

Ttf

CAUMSE PAR

SERA TRfS DiFFSi

AVIS, Dunk

Ic* clrpArhc^ iiDprinuVs est

toral purposes. for

its initial

,

in f3^arl^^es i-omains

nn nnmifro d'ordre,

le

PResfNCe DE LA UOUPf tT AUVFB QU'/i SRAND PEIME

wconil

[tar

»[i|iai>

inilitine le;

il

l.-lr^cfai'l'iq'"'. 1"

nomUiT

.Ici

molt

loids

.

|»">ii" nr.rnt,, let

aulro 'IWgnent

fipiire

aprfj

le noiii .In lieu

'

''"p'^\)t

/^

i'licurc ilo a^pfll.

That was one reason

success in socialist ranks,

responded

which

U

AI6UES MOKTfS

A

to

Boulanger's

defense of national employment and

denunciation of large employers

who

used foreign workers and opposed any

measures to expel them or reduce their number.^^ the left

The

respective positions of

and right with respect to immi-

gration did not really stabilize until

Marxism gained

influence

in

the

workers' movement, French workers

strengthened their

ties to the

Second

International, the Ligue des Droits de

I'Homme was

created,

and the conclu-

sion of the Dreyfus Affair clarified the political situation: the parties right,

of the

harping mainly on the issue of

security (which particularly appealed to the

groups most affected by the

cri-

sis),

emphasized the "national

est"

and proposed vigorous measures

inter-

against immigrants, whereas the left

was more apt

to invoke the "rights

of

FIGURE

4.3

Telegram concerning the

Algues-Mortes FIGURE

4.4

in

anti-Italian

demonstrations

in

1893.

Disturbances atAigues-Mortes: The Departure of the

Workers, engraving from Le Petit Parisien (September

3,

1893).

Italian

156

GERARD NOIRIEL man"

in calling for equal treatment

same time advocating

The

strict

measures

of French and foreign workers, while to stanch the influx

of

new

at the

immigrants.^^

impressive growth of French industry in the 1920s, which was associated

with postwar reconstruction, together with the wholesale slaughter of wartime,

gave

rise to

an unprecedented need for immigrant labor. By 1930 there were three

million immigrants in France, three times as recruited over a

tingent ities,

Once

much wider area than before.

among many, and

if Italians

many

as in 1920.

Workers were

Belgian workers formed just one con-

were the most numerous,

was other

it

national-

such as the Poles, that experienced the most rapid growth in their numbers.^^ again, the

economic

new workers and

France

crisis that hit

in the 1930s halted the recruitment

What made matters worse now, compared to the prewar period, was that many of the new immigrants were actually refugees: Armenians, Russians, and German Jews. Many were people of professional background who sought positions in France comparable to those that they or their parents had known before their exile. Hence foreign of

led to a renewal of xenophobic speech

and

competition on the labor market was not limited to the working

acts.

class.

This was one

reason for the intensity of nationalist rhetoric in the 1930s, at which time national-

ism enjoyed the support of a substantial segment of public opinion. Although the right in the early 1930s

was once again

work

issue of protecting the national

Bonnet has shown,'^ ity

even on the

left,

"far

inclined than the left to

make

the

force an electoral warhorse," as Jean-Charles

nationalist pressure

except for the

more

was such

that the issue gained in popular-

Communist Party, which on the whole

stuck to

its

internationalist positions until the Popular Front.

Many legal and bureaucratic measures were adopted against foreigners, a taste of what was revise the

to

come under

Code of

Vichy.

doctors, a

bill to

Nationality of 1927 was filed on June 22, 1934. Rushed to the

floor within weeks, the Socialists,

Under pressure from lawyers and

and went into

new law was passed by effect

on July

19, 1934, less

the

Chamber, including the

than a

month

after

it

was

first

proposed! Keen to ban naturalized foreigners from the professions, the deputies established the requirement that

newly naturalized

citizens

must complete ten years

of training before being admitted to any position considered to of fonction publique. tion, the

And

that

was not

all.

fall

under the rubric

Contradicting the entire republican tradi-

memthe new

Council of the Order of Attorneys decided to reject applications for

bership submitted by any individual naturalized before 1934, thus giving

law a retroactive interpretation that was upheld by the Paris Court of Appeals.^'

The

third high point

major economic

of French xenophobia coincided with the country's third

crisis in a century.

a massive recruitment of foreign

The

industrial expansion

of the 1960s relied on

workers made possible by yet another enlargement

of the zone of recruitment. For the

first

time the majority of

new immigrants were

non-Europeans from what was once the French colonial empire, primarily the coun-

French and Foreigners

tries

of North Africa.

A growing worldwide recession in the 1970s produced effects

similar to those of earlier crises: a halt to the recruitment of

new workers,

settlement

of immigrants already in the country, and hostility from some French workers, called for

who

immigrants to be sent back where they came from. Racist attacks prolif-

erated, particularly against

North Africans, reaching

bloody summer of 1977, which

left fifteen

a

peak of violence

in the

people dead in Marseilles. Various legal

and administrative measures were taken to deal with the situation, from the

memo"

"Fontanet

suspending immigration

in 1974 to the

Loi Bonnet of 1980

(allowing immediate deportation of foreigners without proper papers) to the

Chalandon plan

to revise the

Code of

Nationality in 1986—87. These measures

themselves became the subject of endless polemics between the right and the

along

much

the

same

lines as in

previous periods.

consequence of these polemics was to have

And

left

surely the most important

of the extreme

facilitated the rebirth

right in France in the 1980s.

To some it may be worrisome or incomprehensible that,

in the

very year in which

Man and

France celebrated the bicentennial of the Declaration of the Rights of the Citizen,

timeworn demagogic themes, such

as "national preference" in

employ-

ment, housing, and health or that miracle cure for unemployment, sending eigners

home, could

still

when Jean-Marie Le Pen justified

this

program of exclusion by

zens have equal rights, not men," he put his finger

deepest wounds.

segment of the

attract a not inconsiderable

between the rights of

man and

for-

electorate.

But

asserting that "citi-

initial

oldest,

contradiction

the rights of the citizen.^^

Beyond "changing appearances," the history of immigration invariant, namely, an intrinsically gration."^'*

all

on one of the Republic's

Clearly France has yet to overcome the

of

French

illustrates

way of approaching the

another

matter of "inte-

Recent arguments concerning North African immigrants begin from the

premise that today's problems are new.^^ For some observers, what the present situation has to

gration since the 1960s. revision to the

Code of

is

novel about

do with the unprecedented pace and magnitude of immi-

The

minister of justice explicitly introduced the proposed

Nationality as a

way of preserving "French identity"

presence of such a destructive influx. "France, as

is

well known,

is

a

country com-

posed of foreigners, but the process took shape over centuries. Today contend with accelerating change.

"^"^

in the

we have

to

A more common argument for the novelty of

today's problems has to do with the alleged "cultural distance" between the French

and North African communities. There was no problem before, proponents of

view

allege,

background in

this

because most immigrants were Europeans, hence similar in cultural to the French: "France

is

a

European nation,

that

is,

a territory located

Europe and populated by Europeans, which has always remained open

European neighbors.... Today's immigration, unlike or the 1930s,

is

extra-European.

to its

that of the nineteenth century

The majority of immigrants

are

now North

157

158

GERARD NOIRIEL Africans, Black Africans, Turks, and Indo-Pakistanis. In terms of background and

no connection with the major periods of

cultural references, these foreigners have

European

history: Antiquity, the Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the

Enlightenment."^^

now

Let us

cast

our eyes backward one century. Commentators were already

referring to the "novelty" of the migratory situation and already proposing the argu-

ment

sudden influx of foreigners posed a threat to the "national identity"

that the

and that the "cultural distance" between the newcomers and "native" Frenchmen

was unprecedented. To be

sure, Jean

Laumonier

asserted, using fashionable organic

metaphors, France had experienced any number of invasions since prehistoric times, "but then our nationality was

still

in formation.

Those invasions were necessary

to

the development and definitive constitution of a social organism. Indeed, they

played the role that abundant and substantial nourishment plays in the growth of a

young

individual." Today, however, the French nation

grown

is

up, and

all

those

immigrants can no longer be "digested." If the influx continued, there was likelihood of "a social disorder analogous to the physiological disorder of poisoning."^^

more explicitly. In

Fears for the future were often spelled out

our population

that "if

the reason

and

this

holding steady or even increasing to a very slight degree,

foreign immigration.

is

It is

the foreigner who

introduction of generally hostile elements

for the future.

merce,

is

its

its

customs, and

most precious possession,

its

its

filling

Twenty years

nationality."^' I

have

our empty spaces,

an invasion in disguise, a threat

is

as a result of this

intrinsic strengths.

confirmed that "the French population as

Over time

it

com-

loses

its

Vacher de Lapouge

later

just described

it

will not last for-

Over the past half-century immigration has introduced more foreign elements

ever.

than

is

A people that recruits abroad quickly loses,

character,

1883 a doctor stated

all

the barbarian invasions put together....

off and the French population

omen

At

would

truly

Add a little yellow blood to top it all

become

a nation of Mongols.

Quod Dii

/"40

avertantl

the time, of course, discussions of "cultural distance," that

is,

of

criteria for

measuring the foreignness of foreigners, did not rely on "European culture" standard of proximity. that the

problem was

ily, if it is

to

On the contrary, it was because the "enemy" was at our gates

said to

be so serious. Some authors were

German immigrants

ralization of

in eastern France:

be complete and definitive, requires not

sage of two or three generations. citizens,

still

as a

The

"The

critical

of the natu-

naturalization of a fam-

just interbreeding

but the pas-

presence in the east of recently naturalized

attached to their former homeland by a thousand unconscious

ties,

therefore constitutes a danger the gravity of which must be obvious to any child.

Maurice Barres played an essential role

in the process

of constructing difference by

elaborating on Jules Soury's discussion of parents of substantial continuity, the

still

living thought

whom "we

and word with

are

all

only the

their train of gestures,

French and Foreigners

habits,

and hereditary reactions

the intrinsic ethnic entiate the

nomena

in virtue

of which the dead contain the living; and

and national characters, born of secular variations, that

Frenchman of France from

the foreigner, are not metaphors but phe-

components of our nerve

as real as the anatomical

differ-

centers....

That

the

is

foundation of our cult of the dead and of the earth on which they lived and suffered, the basis of the national religion.'"*^

Under

these conditions the very concept of

"European civilization" makes no sense. "Any foreigner living on our soil, even one

who

thinks he cherishes us, naturally hates eternal France, our tradition, which he

does not possess, which he cannot understand, and which, precisely, constitutes

For Barres,

nationality.'"*^

this irremediable "cultural distance"

was "predestined for Dreyfusism": "Because

explained

why

Zola

and ancestors were

his father

Venetians, Emile Zola quite naturally thinks like a rootless Venetian."

The

a contrast

was drawn between

the troubling present

the immigrants of the late nineteenth century

and an idealized

were seen as

a positive

who came

Seignobos, for example, argued that the foreigners

to

past, in

neighbors."

By contrast, he insisted

diers killed at the front

had given

Georges Mauco observed

in

that the influx of Polish rise to a

"new"

France before 19 14

of individual decisions, and

Since the war, the arrival of

this

was

sol-

"Before the war,"

terms repeated virtually word for word It

were "our

workers to replace

problem.'*'*

by Albin Chalandon, "immigration was unregulated.

which

model. Charles

did not alter the anthropological character of the population because they

result

now

discourse of the interwar years was cast in the same mold, except that

fifty

years later

a slow process, the

allowed for rapid fusion with the population.

homogeneous masses of people

in a short period

of

time in relatively circumscribed regions has greatly encouraged the tendency of

immigrants to band together in their land of exile and to reconstitute their social structures

and communal

life."'*^

A few years later, another specialist went even fur-

ther:

"Our powers of absorption were

same

in 1940.

Our

still

quite high in 1910....

absorptive capacity has been

all

It is

no longer

the

we

no

but abolished because

are

longer faced with immigration by recruitment but rather with a sudden flood, which threatens to

drown

all

that remains of the

French

Anxiety about the future can even be found in the interwar period.

race."'**'

in theses in political science written

"From the standpoint of maintaining political liberties," Jean

Pluyette asked, "what effect has the immigration of

1.5

million Mediterraneans

had.-^

Doesn't such a massive invasion risk disrupting the national ethnic equilibrium in favor of one of that

component

its

in

components.''

such a

way

erable anxiety about France

Armenians, or

Poles.'*^

similable groups,

's

And won't

as to alter

then promote the characteristics of

our public

ability to assimilate

The most

customs.''"'*^

cast

of mind,

There was consid-

newcomers, be they Russians,

respected authorities even

whose "customs,

are in contradiction with the

it

drew up

tastes, passions,

profound orientation of our

a

list

of inas-

and age-old habits

civilization."'*^

159

i6o

GERARD NOIRIEL The Memory

The

of Origins:

A

Controversial Battle

secretary of the Conseil General of Meurthe-et-Moselle, Maria

who grew up in Pont-a-Mousson, has just pubhshed a history of her family at her own expense. Entitled Le Passe simple, her book is Liberatore-Lefebvre,

a touchingly naive account of her parents' arrival in

Dieulouard from their

native Italy in 1958 and of the birth and upbringing of their five daughters.

She

tells

of the children's relations to one another and to their surroundings.

The pace of

The

the

book

agreeable, and

is

the situations are delicious.

author, aged twenty-nine, embarked on this literary adventure as a

unique

her mother and father,

gift for

who

will celebrate their thirtieth

wed-

22.^*^

ding anniversary on January

Because immigration has not until ory, a

many of

whole segment of France's

now been

mem-

a legitimate object of national

collective history has

been relegated to the realm

of private memoirs. Over the past few years, however, there have been growing

who came

signs that people

to

France from other countries want to make

The above example of an

cially neglected history public.

published by the author at her

own

expense

is

this offi-

autobiographical

work

by no means exceptional. All across

France one finds people from every immigrant group that arrived before World

War

II

involved in similar efforts to rescue the past from oblivion and

ously untold stories. take

many

forms.

It

The

struggle to preserve the

would be useful

memory of

to have an exhaustive

tell

previ-

one's forebears can

summary. Many theses

on the history of immigration are the work of descendants of immigrants,

for

example, and they are often explicitly described as a token of fidelity to the author's roots.^' tions

whose

ple of

There has

stated

also

purpose

is

Armenian descent,

Armenian populations, one

been

to keep

a sharp increase in the

immigrant culture

for instance, especially in finds

earlier village-based groups.

new newspapers and

At Issy-les-Moulineaux,

finds the Centre de Recherche et de

number of organiza-

alive.

Among French peo-

communities with large organizations supplanting to take

one example, one

Documentation Armenienne and the

A

on

to

memories of one 's roots can be found among descendants of Spanish refugees

in

Association Audio-Visuelle Armenienne.

the south of France.

At Bedarieux,

similar determination to hold

for example, high school students

have published an account of their history with mayor, Antoine Martinez, "Spain

at

who

a preface

and teachers

by the Communist

did not hesitate to give his introduction the

title

Heart" or to assert that his town bears "the indelible imprint" of Spanish

immigration.^'*

The

Italians,

who formed

appear to have been in the forefront of

the first foreign

this effort to

community

in France,

reappropriate the past. Thanks

to the energetic efforts of its president, Pierre Milza, the

Centre d 'Etude

Documentation de I'Emigration Italienne (cedei), founded

in 1983, has

et

de

funded

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W,n,lul,dc{-1W//rovmce there, too, that the provinciality

Around

fertile

numerous salons, academies, and people of talent, had always set

Fumaroli points out, Parisian cliques determined

and

of prestige that

loss

Helene Himmelfarb has shown that the king's sojourns followed a complex

fashion blessed with itself

any case have probably overestimated the

that the system of representations and

split

was defined

was

it

in high-society

as well as experienced

of the individual was most easily gauged.

the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, a centrifugal process

was set in motion,

a process that

would continue until

the

of the monarchy.

fall

Little

by little the capital began to criticize itself. Hints of denigration of the city are already perceptible in Lesage and Montesquieu, and these tions of

would be reinforced by denuncia-

urban pathology launched by neo-Hippocratic physicians well before Louis-

Sebastien Mercier contributed his hallucinatory stimulated idyllic discourse. Indeed, tryside,^' that

it

was not

la province

most obviously profited from the hunger

The degree

to

Denunciations of the City

diatribe.^''

but

la

campagne, the coun-

to escape.

which the academic movement spread outside Paris

Age

in the

of

Enlightenment might seem to point toward a successful effort of emancipation or

even a cultural primacy of

ments that

in

some

la province.

Without denying the novelty of develop-

cases demonstrate real initiative

on the part of provincial

Daniel Roche's important study suggests a need to modify tion.^^

ited

of

Indeed, the academic

this positive interpreta-

movement spread by perpetuating a social model inher-

from the Great Century. Furthermore, "a person who frequented the academies

his

province and the salons of Paris was, however devoted he

his city,

governed more by Paris than by

tion the

example of Montesquieu

for

actors,

is

While

rise.

The

it is

in this milieu

desire subsided in the second half of the century,

on the

to

his provincial academy."'" In this connec-

revealing.

independence from Paris developed

may have been

true that a genuine desire

between

171

5

and 1750,

that

when the thirst for local power was

resulting accentuation of regional consciousness sharpened the

contours of the provincial image. Anything that fostered local pride reinforced Parisian difference and heightened the uniqueness of the City that transcended

regionalism.

By

the

same token, anything

provinces tended to devalue

Retouching the portrait of ers, the

that helped to

promote the

all

several

la province.

la province in countless

ways, some more subtle than oth-

Revolution reshaped the conception of the Paris-/?rovmce relationship. The

Divisions of Time and

first

thing to look at in this regard

is

Space

the effect of the Revolution's creation of the

On

departements and the resulting spatial rearrangements.^'

the eve of the convo-

cation of the Estates General, the concept of la province as a territorial and admin-

remained on the whole rather vague. The

istrative entity

ried out cial

territorial redistricting car-

by the Constituent Assembly had the paradoxical

effect

of spurring provin-

consciousness. People began to delve deeper into provincial identity in their

of the provinces.

efforts to resist the abolition

about

this process,

I

have more to say presently

shall

which began under the Constituent Assembly.

At the same time, the emergence of

a departemental identity, followed

by

its

gradual refinement and promotion by a prolix literature, ultimately led to a pro-

found upheaval

in the

system of

sive episode in the history

To be ically

territorial representation.

of the

spatial

sure, the elaboration of a

new

imagination and

This proved to be a deci-

its

relation to nature.

departemental identity did not in

transform the image of either Paris or

rad-

Immediately following the

la province.

reform, the adjective departemental naturally inherited

itself

the stereotypes associated

all

with provincial, and no doubt those stereotypes became even more deeply ingrained. In fact, departemental identity established itself so forcefully that

it

accentuated the consciousness of belonging to this or that locality. Contrary to the intentions of those behind the

new

administrative map,

grip of territorial imagery, individuals over time

who hoped

became more

to

weaken the

intensely identified

with their departements.

The creation of the new entity and the reflection it encouraged marked an important page in the history of "the relationship of territory to power."^^ The debates that

accompanied the new division of

territory,

which was carried out on the basis

of data concerning political economy, geography, and biology, revealed the existence of hostility toward Paris.

They provided an opportunity for la province to vent

long-suppressed bitterness.

The scope of

this diatribe

remains to be ascertained, however. Marie- Vic Ozouf

and Ted Margadant have analyzed the provincial discourse clearly that the initial hostility eral import. It

was one

was associated with an anti-urban

bias

They show of more gen-

aspect of an ongoing polemic that pitted small towns against

"capital cities," countryside against

up of a new administrative roots have been unearthed It is

in depth.

map

by

devouring metropolis. In addition, the drawing

rekindled old interurban conflicts, whose remote

historians studying urban networks

and hierarchies.

not enough, however, merely to note the revival of such conflicts.

The

administrative reform led to a rapid expansion of the Vans-province relationship,

which had previously been confined tightened

its

grip

mony between tal

on the

rest

to the sociocultural realm.

of the country by turning

the parts and the whole.

clearer authority over the totality of

The new French

As

the capital, Paris

itself into a

symbol of har-

territorial division

territory.

The

gave the capi-

city benefitted

from

435

436

ALAIN CORBIN the psychological importance of the notion of centrality, from the

new

desire to

turn France into a single ontological entity, a nation whose greatness would be mea-

sured by the prestige of

out

first

its

capital.

by the Montagnards and

ified a centralizing

The

later

revisions of the administrative

carried

under the Consulate and Empire merely

clar-

work of the Constituent quarter of 1789. Of course the members of that body risks that the capital's new preeminence entailed, as is

tendency already apparent

Assembly during the

map

final

were already aware of the

in the

apparent in the lucid report prepared by Target as secretary for the Constitutional

Committee

of 1789.

in the fall

was not between

The

balance that would have to be struck, he noted,

Paris and each of the provinces taken singly but

between Paris and

la province in its entirety.^'*

The

new images of

creation of the departements and the

the reforms

were by no means the Revolution's only contribution

tionship between Paris and la province.

imposed by

centrality

to the

new

rela-

We have yet to identify the consequences of

To that end, we must keep our eyes fixed firmly on the chronology of events. The summer of 1789 made Paris the capital of the Revolution.'^ The center of the Enlightenment became the city of Liberty. The Fourteenth of July bestowed upon Paris an "immediately central role." By taking the Bastille, Parisians won the right to set themselves up as guides for all of France. a

complex

political history.

As Le Moniteur noted

at the time,

much

as an individual city so

"everyone

felt that

Paris ought to be regarded not

meeting place and

as the general

common

city

of

all

the French."''^

The

lapse of time

between events

in Paris

and provincial reactions

events attests to the capital's preeminence. In any case,

it

was Paris

to those

that

would

henceforth confer meaning on episodes of municipal revolution dispersed through-

out the territory.

The

capital,

perceived as the source of public opinion, tended to

restrict la province to a receiver's role.

with their associated procedures of figure of an initiating

image of

city.

The

la province.

They saw themselves

The

The network of

affiliation

political societies, together

and correspondence, established the

press in the capital established a highly Parisian

journalists of the big city set themselves

as the educators

of the

rest

up

as sentinels.

of France, whose inferiority they

implicitly proclaimed.

The

Festival of the Federation

on July

14,

1790, gives us a clear view of the

modalities of the relationship just then being established between Paris and province. This occasion status

on

the capital.

was a sort of "national

The travels of

the federes,

investiture," conferring a

la

new sacred

Mona Ozouf observes, were experi-

enced as a form of "national education," a glorious "federative pilgrimage" to the "sacred birthplace of the Revolution."'^ In fact, the occasion quite complex.

showed

There was

that representations of Paris

a kind

and

la province

were

of tension between two conceptions of space:

in

Divisions of Time

the course of their travels to

and from

Paris, the federes,

and Space

Ozouf notes, hoped that by

experiencing "topographical egalitarianism" for themselves they could establish

both the "sacredness of the center" and the concomitant sacredness of French

ter-

ritory as a whole.

A new balance was struck in

1792. Unlike July 14, 1789,

August

was

10, 1792,

not strictly speaking a Parisian event. Provincials, most notably from Brittany

and Marseilles, took part in the capture of the Tuileries. The imagery became

more complex than

ever. In this instance the crucial point

stated, the increased centralization

seen, the

work of

the

Constituent Assembly. tion that

is

of Jacobin France. In

surely not, as this area, as

Montagnards merely continued

a process

What was

was the near

by

decisive,

contrast,

was established between the democratic populace of

often

is

we have

begun by the identifica-

Paris and the

national image.

In the eyes of provincial patriots called to take initiative,

who

recognized that the people of Paris

felt

upon themselves a mission of revolutionary surveillance, incitation, and

the capital long remained the center and sentinel of the Revolution.

Thermidorians themselves would attempt,

at least initially, to legitimate their actions

by invoking the image of a populace blessed with a

To my mind,

the crucial development

representations.

The

gift for

thwarting conspiracy.

was the introduction of

The Girondins had developed

a type

a

new system of

of discourse which the

Thermidorians, once victory was assured, were content to recycle as often as the

What the provincial felt toward Paris was no longer simply deep and specific hatred. From the summer of 1792 to mid-

circumstances required. a

vague

hostility

but a

June of 1793 the diatribe was

at its

most

intense. Federalism,

which

on

built

a

departemental base, developed a range of stereotypes whose influence on political representation

would endure

Raymonde Monnier Paris of

its

for

some

time.

Alan Forrest, Mona Ozouf, and

see this system of images as a caricature intended to deprive

sacred status^'

The dialectical relation between the capital and la province

was thus based on an evolving

dialectic

of good and

nothing but a blind, rebellious, faction-riven

city. It

conspiracy, anarchic, turbulent, even tumultuous, final years

accordingly,

was

a center of intrigue

and

evil. Paris,

was

much

as

Rome had been

of the Republic, or better yet, under the Empire,

when

it

in the

was obsessed

with the demands of the plebs. Paris also

showed

itself to

The Girondins denounced their criticism at the Paris

be an arrogant

city, at

once slavish and domineering.

the dictatorship of the despotic city, obviously aiming

of the

Commune.

Marat, the quintessential Parisian, was

seen as both symbol and scapegoat.

Against such a monster the only possible form of federation was one of

La province was not itself

to

blame

for the federalist crisis.

had long been trying to secede from the

rest

As

the Girondins

hostility.

saw

it,

Paris

of France. Parisians had no sense

437

438

ALAIN CORBIN of

"Destroy the imperious federalism of the Paris sections,"

political legitimacy.

read a petition from the Republican Society of Champlitte that arrived on June 20,

immense

1793. "Nationalize this

that this role

Yet the

so that

it

may

obey the sover-

at last learn to

down to the level of the departements.'"*" Some the designation of a new center: the sections of Bordeaux proposed

eign will of the people, to cut

even called for

city,

itself

be assigned to Bourges/'

summer of

'93

was of course the point

arms was

the Parisian people in

led to the collapse of the

at its height. It

power of

at

which the

political influence



was Thermidor

the capital, which

July 1794



of

that

was soon deprived of

its

municipal government.''^

However important

made

at this

this

process

may have been,

the essential changes that were

time to the system of representations that concerns us here cannot be

summed up under the heading of

increased administrative centralization.

The

rev-

olutionary period established the sacred character of the capital as the cradle of Liberty and gave a firm foundation to memories of the struggle between the people

of Paris, invested with that sacredness, and the

all

too often helpless representatives

of the nation. For years to come, conflicts of legitimacy based on

this duality

would

continue to govern the political imagination, the consciousness of identity, and the pattern of revolutionary violence.

Over

the course of the nineteenth century the real and imaginary relationship that

wedded

Paris to la province while sharply differentiating one

from the other under-

went numerous changes. Nevertheless, the range of stereotypes elaborated

in the

aftermath of the Fronde continued to define the deep structure of the relationship.



All the dictionaries of the period



their definitions with quotations

from Moliere, La Bruyere, and

Bescherelle's, Littre's, Larousse's

illustrated

Mme

de Sevigne.

Deprivation, denigration, and ridicule remained the crucial semantic components,

although a

new

sense of propriety

and mollified the

At

may have somewhat moderated

the denigration

diatribe.

the beginning of the century derision

was

still

paramount. Vaudeville gave

wide currency to the motifs of classical comedy and the bourgeois novel. The

inten-

make

the provincial the butt of laughter for a broad audience of

com-

mon people. The

extension of Parisian complicity to a wider class of people

is

tion

was

to

chief feature of comic characterization in this period. the capital and

the

making

comedy of pure

ProvinciaiLx a Paris, a

group of "nice

tacitly

a fool

The

the

provincial lout visiting

of himself became the paramount theme, supplanting

geography."*^ In 1802, Paris

made

a triumph of Picard's Les

which depicted the members of the Gaulard family from Ligny,

folks

who repeatedly allow themselves to be swindled." Vaudeville

consented to the disappearance of M. de Pourceaugnac; there was no longer

any need to poke fun

at

country

squires.'*''

Divisions of Time and

Under the July Monarchy the fooUsh provincial

visiting Paris

Space

remained popular,

but over the years the characterization of the ethnotype acquired

new

Perpetually harassed, swindled, and robbed, forever deceived, quick to

depth.

fall

into

every trap, the provincial suffered an endless series of "tribulations." In 1842,

Eugene Guinot, writing under the pseudonym Pierre Durand, enumerated them a

humorous vein

Delphine Gay,

in a

Mme

work

in

entitled Physiologic du provincial a Paris.^'^ In 1844,

de Girardin, attempted a further refinement of the portrait,

meticulously describing "the inhabitants of la province prey to Parisian emotions." "Scarlet-faced" and with "a busy if

the provincial scurried about his business

air,""**"

he did not actually run through the

His gestures, manners, and gait

streets.

pointed up his clumsiness. Provinciality was a somatic

by petty life

criminals.'*^ In 1837,

reality, a fact

"The most obvious

Balzac noted:

well understood

signs of provincial

and movement, which suffer a

are to be found in gesture, behavior,

all

loss

of the

agility that Paris continually communicates."''^

The

provincial belonged to a strange "species" that

and

City,

ing

its

high

were inevitably

his efforts to satisfy his curiosity

grasp of provincials, who, reality

Mme

de Girardin

because they saw only

society."'*' Situated at the

places frequented

by the 2,000

"its

was

tells us,

utterly ignorant of the

in vain. Paris

eluded the

stood no chance of discover-

public pleasures" and

"knew nothing of

its

confluence of public and private, the inaccessible

who made up

individuals

"society" constituted the

only theater in which a metamorphosis was possible; the rest was mere illusion, a counterfeit integration into the provincials

ways of the

committed errors that were not

City. Ignorant of the city's codes,

just foolish

but "frightful." Having no

contact with genuine Parisians, they copied one another:

admires the stole of a lady from Beauvais, Parisian society.... Abbeville.... It latest

whom

let

she mistakes for a lioness of

An elegant fellow from Cahors covets the jacket of a dandy from

would be too

cruel if they

were

to return

fashions from Alsace or Berry!... After this

doubt, but

"A lady from Grenoble

them be under no

illusion:

trip,

from the

capital with the

they will have seen Paris, no

they will not have seen Parisians." Like M.

de Pourceaugnac and the Gaulards of Ligny before them, these bewildered provincials

have no choice but to go home.

Ridiculous though such kind of initiation.

The

visits to Paris

provincial

his pilgrimage, the indelible

According to the Parisian,

were, they could nevertheless serve as a

who visited

mark of

a

Paris

somewhere retained "a

more or

in fact, the provincial,

less

trace of

complete experience."

"having once touched the

of the capital, loses his primitive character, his departemental naivete.

streets

"^°

Meanwhile, of course, a new consciousness of the primacy of the center was developing; Paris's relation to the provinces (plural, as opposed to la province) was

The process been analyzed by Marcel Roncayolo and Jean- Yves Guiomar.^' The new con-

being reshaped. Michelet has

made

this explicit in his

Tableau de la France.

439

44°

ALAIN CORBIN ception of a foundational center would henceforth determine the picture of the

The search for the local genius of each province suggests that consciousness

nation.

of being French lay not in a mere summation of local qualities but

in the "tran-

scending of the constituent elements in [the nation's] center, Paris." In Michelet's

words, "the center knows

itself

and knows

hand, "see themselves in [the center]. In

all

it

the rest."

The provinces, on the other

they love and admire one another in a

superior form."^^ This semantic imperialism brings us to a fundamental paradox of

anything that heightened provincial individuality, anything that

this analysis:

smacked of regionalism or localism

(in this period a favorite

pastime of local poly-

maths), increased difference and, owing to ignorance of the national, implicitly exalted Paris.

nents even as

The it

capital,

marveled

which rose above the

local genius

of each of

transcended the provinces.

at their diversity,

its

compo-

emerged

It

as

the cornerstone of French unity, as the exclusive space of national expression and

consecration.

The mapping of at this

the territory and fabrication of regional images that took place

time were carried out in accordance with this transcendence. Initially these

projects were shaped

astonished Parisian

by the discovery of the strangeness of the provinces. An

elite

was eager

to understand the resistance to reason

strated during the Revolution: the surprising, vexing, or just simply

ment

to old beliefs, superstitions,

and prejudices,

dated weights and measures, and to local patois.

ordered prefects to undertake, the venture organized

amazing attach-

to the antique calendar, to out-

The

investigation that Chaptal

the research conducted

by

the Celtic Academy,^'*

by Charles Nodier and Baron Taylor, and

the proliferating

geographical narratives exemplified by L'Ermite en province were implicitly with reference to the center. Regional images

Between 1820 and

1835 the Parisian elite

imposed

its

Brittany.^^ In 1829, Jules Janin popularized a plutonic enne.^**

Under

the July

Monarchy

the Pyrenean savage, studied

tourists

from the

by Jean-Fran9ois

demon-

emerged

tragic

organized

all

in the capital.

view of Armorican

image of the

city

of Saint-Eti-

capital sketched the portrait of

Soulet.^^

painted of the peasants of the Limousin mountains

And

owed

the portrait that was

a great deal to Parisian

readers of Walter Scott's Waverley novels. In 1842 three of the nine volumes of the

important series Les Frangais peints par eux-memes offered a provisional all

that

summary of

had been learned about provincial ethnotypes. Their images could be com-

pared with those of the Parisians depicted in five other volumes of the

series.

importance of the division that interests us here emerges strikingly from

this

The

ambi-

tious work.

Local

more

elites

soon developed

to say presently. Brittany

their

was

own

counterimages, about which

particularly quick in

its

shall

have

response. Backed by a

talented bourgeoisie, native nobles attempted at the height of the July establish the figure

I

of the Arcadian Arcoat, exalted by Brizeux. This

is

Monarchy

to

not the place.

Divisions of Time and

Space

however, to delve into a broad process that interests us only to the extent that influenced

by the complex

relationship

among

Paris, la province,

and

it

les provinces.

More important in the present context was the ambiguous emergence of a fictional figure in the 1820s

followed by a sudden explosion of interest in the sub-

erary interest. Nicole Mozet has provided an excellent analysis of

primacy of the

reflected the

its rise,

lit-

which

petite bourgeoisie in provincial imagery.^^

The new precision in the topographical

description of small towns paralleled the

of archaeology.^^ As the fascination with the exotic temporarily waned,

province

new

new

Revolution of 1830. The small provincial town became an object of

ject after the

rise

was

became

a

museum,

la

one of the creators of the

a vast antique gallery. Balzac,

imagery, even planned a moral and social archaeology based on the study of a

The

small provincial town.^''

Parisian reader

was

invited to

embark on

a journey in

both space and time. The national past would emerge from the remains discovered

through excavation

open

in the

air.

a present perpetually in the process

entity distinct

town was

far

from

more

Paris

was

a surface



was easy

to read still

an

either of these, the small provincial

successful at preserving the vestiges of the past.

offered the key to reconstructing vanished centuries.

ary

it

of creation, whereas the countryside was

Compared with

la province.

on which

A

Each of them

fictional provincial itiner-

the imagination's counter to the erudite travels of Prosper

Merimee

—was

a

way of recovering the national past, of grasping the stages in the creation of France. This ambitious archaeological project transformed the image of latter

was no longer

a

comic space peopled by fools so much

The vacuum "of

la province.

as a static

emptiness, boredom, negativity"''' and "mediocrity of ideas,"''^ where

withered in "eternal virginity" and "non-life."''^

onment

Mme

in the infinite triviality

It

was

women

a trap, suggesting impris-

of the everyday. Bussy-Rabutin's image of rust and

de Sevigne's of mildew were reinterpreted in the light of an archaeological

project that contributed

new

figures to the social imagination and reflected the

redistribution of power.

At the same time

the small

town of

fiction

became the

tragedy. Here, close to nature, artifice had yet to as in Paris.

Here the violence of

draw the

theater of a

new

kind of

sting of vigorous passions

desire, further exacerbated

by the

scarcity of

opportunities, the mediocrity of available partners, and the length of the wait for

vehemence of the

love 's impact, accounted for the the torment of dishonor that Calyste

embraced.*'^

du Guenic attempts

A fatherless world regicide, the

is

at a

time

love*'''

when



because he

and the is

the king's exile

— an empty

stage

alacrity

a Breton

to hurl pretentious Beatrix

imaginary province

boredom and "buried"

It is

act*'''

with which

from Guerande

from the top of

a

cliff.

had reawakened memories of

on which the only actors were

tended to be seen as a feminine place.

A gulf of sex

thus separated Paris from the small town. For the rest of the century la province, jealous in

any case of a

city that

sought only to exploit

it,

fell

for the seductiveness

441

ALAIN CORBIN

442

of

Paris.'^''

The capital resorted to a variety of tactics to

flames of desire that

it

fan the

kindled. Like the Illustrious Gaudissart,

clever image makers set out to seduce la province the better to

swindle or even conquer ists,

Many people

— —

salesmen, journal-

fashion designers, novelists, politicians

we shall see in a moment.

goal, as cial

it.

woman, ardent but

shared the same

In novels, the simple provin-

neglected, could be portrayed, at least

until she acquired a "stock

of foolishness"''^ and renounced

coquettishness for confitures, as the ideal prey for the dandy

or tired genius fare

of Paris

worn down by

the harsh and unremitting war-

society.

This enrichment of the imagery, which reshaped the Parisprovince relation in contemporary minds, the point

is

important

ures of exile.

J

J.



in a

La province no

was

also reflected—

fundamental reversal of the

fig-

longer connoted only disgrace,

fiUNDmU.

111 l-.>

FIGURE

11.2

Gaudissart, a fast-talking Parisian flinnflam

something of the complexity FIGURE

11.3

artist,

sets out to

conquerthe provinces. Gaudissart's renown suggests Scenes de la vie de province.

of the ?ar\%- province psychology. Illustration by Piau for Balzac's

Illustrations for the

cover of

L

Reybaud's Jerome Paturotala recherche d'une position sociale

(1845).

Representations of social ascent were inseparable at the time from the idea of a circulation between Paris and the provinces.

— Divisions of Time and

estrangement from the center, and the staleness of existence. allowed

it

to

become

a "spatial

metaphor

youthful sojourn in Paris turned

for the

mother

Its

figure."^'

Space

feminization

The

obligatory

Back to one 's "roots": the

la province into a refuge.

romantic sensibility fostered such regressive tendencies, and the anxious expectancy of mothers and

sisters

made young men

all

the

more impatient

to return,

however

Private diaries and letters reveal the intensity of the exchanges that traveled

briefly.

back and forth between the young scholar's Paris and the sweetly feminine provtnceJ^ In those exchanges the capital found yet another occasion to

mold

the

woman who waited frozen in anticipation; the epistolary relationship that developed between brother and sister allowed the young man to play Pygmalion.^' In contrast to the youthful,

mount

which became

the barricades, /a province,

become In

masculine Paris, boiling over with revolutionary ideas and eager to

of

a place

initiation,

was apt

to

a focal point of reactionary interpretation.

all

of

this the real

and the imaginary were inextricably intertwined. Novels

new mirror to provincial female readers eager to discover their identity and we know that their numbers were large. Literature fostered a new consciousoffered a

was no longer

a matter of

ness of provinciality and instilled a desire to conform.

It

embodying an ethnotype,

merely of conforming

image of oneself produced by the the private sphere it

Gascons of

like the

when evoking

old, but

to

an

The care with which novelists described atmosphere of a provincial town surely made

capital.

the

easier for female readers to identify with the text.

Meanwhile, Paris was also developing new attractions. The collapse of the educational system and

Revolution made

it

its

necessary for ambitious young

would have remained Mozet rightly

subsequent reorganization and centralization under the

in their native

provinces to

men who in the past probably come to Paris to study. Nicole

of the experience of deracination for

calls attention to the intensity

young men who came of age between 1795 and 1810.^^ The prestige of the slowly reestablished academies as well as of the Sorbonne and the lycees of the Latin Quarter, the founding of the grandes ecoles



in short, the entire state policy for

training elites (and, later, the establishment of conferences for in

going into

politics^'*)

itinerary for years to

—made

Paris an obligatory stop

selves.

la province

to individuals eager to

did not provide a grand

New forms of social mobility coupled with the

refashion the relationship between Paris and province. if

interested

on the ambitious youth's

come.

Such deracination was pleasing and convinced that

young men

jump

enough rise

into the social

swim

stage for their inner

of individualism helped

The effect was a new division,

not a fracture, within the heart of each individual, at once keen to get to Paris and

nostalgic for the provincial refuge.

The social

capital

more than ever became

the focal point of

and emotional success were centered

in

it,

all

ambition. All images of

the culmination of every career. La

443

444

ALAIN CORBIN province, formerly the hell of exile, stood out

of

failure: the provincial

more and more

overcame hurdles and waited anxiously and achingly

Parisian promotion only to return in failure to a static

resignation.

What was

clearly as the theater

life

for

of disappointment and

lacking was no longer the king's presence but a sense of

progress; the provincial

was

a

man

of thwarted ambitions

who had

the sense of

being trapped in a net.

For the young provincial-born student

still

innocent of failure 's torments and

disappointments, Paris was the favorite place to acquire a sentimental education.

The plentiful

opportunities for affairs, the liberated

ways of a

society of

young peo-

ple delighted to be free of familial and provincial restraints, a certain nonchalance characteristic of Paris society, the possibility of leading a

bohemian

life

and of tem-

porarily setting up housekeeping with a grisette (working girl) capable of calming

senses inflamed

by deferred

of male camaraderie cult arts



desire for a prestigious mistress, the abundant varieties

these things

all

made

Paris the ideal place to learn the diffi-

of making love with finesse and boasting of

of freedom, moreover, one could, without great times the capital also offered, in

inducements of

risk,

afterward. Within this space

provoke the bourgeoisie. At

theaters and even in

its

its streets,

the intoxicating

political turmoil.

In this Paris of juvenile tribulations, even as

and the "younger generation" emerged as a covered

it

new forms of

young

distinct reality, provincial

The youth who

suffering.

scholars flocked to the city

Grenoble or La Cote-Saint-Andre found that

it

martyrs

dis-

arrived in the capital from

was not easy

to gain acceptance.

Poverty beckoned; the pleasures of the capital were subtly undermined by the bitter certainty of

ocrity that

some day being forced to swallow one 's ambitions and return to a medi-

was both bourgeois and

meanwhile reveled

in the pleasures

provincial.''^

drew

fate

of the hero,

le

Trovers du siecle enjoyed a

who had come

attention to the misfortunes of

The problem was

to Paris

that a stay in Paris

knowing how

huge success. The

from La Rochelle

young people uprooted from by

provincial's initiation or metamorphosis. Parisian included

life

and torments of the Parisian apprenticeship. In

1829, Gustave Drouineau's Ernest ou

wretched

Novels depicting small-town

to study law,

their native soil.

itself

was not enough

The

indispensable skills of the true

to

complete the

to present oneself, mastering the capital's codes, a

certain nonchalance in demonstrating that mastery, familiarity with fashionable places, habituation to the

sions quickly

enough

to

rhythm of Parisian

make easy

life,

and a capacity to decipher

conversation. Such

skills

allu-

could be acquired only

through contact with "society," proximity to which was the only way to learn what true superiority looked like, discover the real social hierarchy, and devise plans and tactics

based on that knowledge. In other words, an assiduous immersion in society

was the only way

to gain a clear

image of what success was and how

A narrow but active circle of people

determined

who would be

to achieve

it.

blessed with favor

Divisions of Time and

Success depended on meeting the right people, even for the

and recommendations.

young man of

talent or the genius awaiting anointment.

ners, progress in

there

ships in

all

make hard and

fast distinctions, for apprentice-

were closely intertwined.

these areas

In this connection ciality.

Refinement of one 's man-

one 's sentimental education, and realization of one 's ambitions:

point in attempting to

is little

Space

it is

important to distinguish between two levels of provin-

The provinciality of the vaudeville character lost in the Parisian tempest, the

heir to a

comic ethnotype with an already lengthy tradition behind

it,

should not be

confused with the subtler, more discreet provinciality that only the hidden

of high-society conversation could flush out. Once again, however, distinguish the imaginary

from the

real in

it is

pitfalls

difficult to

view of the tremendous influence of

lit-

erary models and the acuity of contemporary social observers. Characters such as

Rastignac, Jerome Paturot, and Prosper Chavigni^^ exerted a direct influence on readers

who

studied and interpreted their behavior and perhaps even on those

who

served as models for these characters.

What happened, were

as they

in

nullified

sum, was that provincial

by

Paris.

No

elites

were not so much supplanted

longer was there such a thing as a provincial

because the talented provincial metamorphosed into something other than a

elite,

provincial, whereas the elite Parisian

privileged exemption

from

welcome, the aristocrat

who

ventured outside the capital enjoyed a

provinciality.^^

in his chateau

So long

as they did not overstay their

and the wealthy bourgeois in

his

country

house remained Parisians. The high-ranking functionary serving in the provinces

pawn manipulated by Paris and in no danger of contamination by his surroundings. Nor was his wife, the femme administrative whom Balzac so carefully

was

a

distinguished from the femme de province?^ Genius,

by

dint of a sort of immaculate

conception, could not be reduced to the status of provincial. Eugene Guinot refused

even to recognize as provincial the individual coach. ^'

A

few decades

later,

who

arrived in Paris by postal

Pierre Larousse's Grand Dictionnaire stretched the

privilege of Parisian citizenship to include

anyone arriving

in central Paris

by

express tram.

The point is that the Paris-/>rovmce distinction had become less geographical than ever. Provinciality, defined as

backwardness, immobility, unavowed boredom,^^

archaic customs, petty intrigue, or sensual timidity

—had

ties"^''

own

according to the old timetable.

iar

The

who

the "horticulture of vulgari-

Each quarter of the

established itself in the center of Paris.

subculture, and there were bourgeois

that has



its

had

was "a separate province

inhabitants are in general less famil-

with things Parisian than are the citizens of Quimperle or Castelnaudary."^^

judgment would be repeated

"The

a quarter

its

continued to take their meals

Marais, for instance,

nothing to do with Paris proper, and

city

of a century

later in

The

Larousse's dictionary:

resident of the Chaussee d'Antin hardly distinguishes

any more between a

445

446

ALAIN CORBIN render of the Marais and an impeccable notary from Carpentras. la province in the

very heart of

The Marais is now

Paris."^''

For the true Parisian the danger of provincial contagion was quite dire

was the

risk?

can be traced

all

real. Just

how

To answer the question we must hark back to a social practice that the way back to seventeenth-century preciosite. "Society" implies

the absence of any belatedness or backwardness, a permanent

harmony between the

individual and the emerging present, a perception of fashion even as

it

evolves, a

firm grasp on ceaseless but ever-shifting currents. Social commerce flourishes conversation, which feeds on the effects produced by reporting and fresh news. But

commentary on

close to the source.

the

news

is

to awaiting eagerly the

news from

and "retarded humor."^^

Paris,

It is difficult if

Delphine Gay had some

commenting on

a senseless activity unless

La province, being remote from

that source,

is

in

one

is

situated

perforce reduced

only to greet that news with commonplaces not impossible to be witty in Sancerre.

intelligent things to say

on

this subject in the "Paris

Mailbag" column she published in La Presse. The purpose of the column was pre-

on Parisian

cisely to provide the frustrated provincial with brief reports

According gap.

Gay, a brief stay in the provinces was enough to create a dangerous

to

"We no

harmony with

longer feel in

wildly strange

when one

we

soon asking what

we

returns to

it

moment. Society seems

the ideas of the

"We

after a lengthy absence."

should do, what

we

should see, what

we

arrive. ..and are

should say, because

are as ignorant as can be about the interests of Parisians." "This

Parisian

fashion.

life is

a study that takes years"

rock did you crawl out from

from the capital too long. days to regain that

under.'' "

"It's

is

because

and implies "the habit of society." "What

people ask the Parisian

impossible to talk to you

tireless activity, that elasticity

who

any more."^^

has stayed away

It will

take

"many

of character, that agility of judg-

ment, that constant presence of mind, that perpetual courage in every detail that constitutes the Parisian intelligence."

Here

must digress

I

Monarchy,

a time

when

a

moment. These words were written during

the necessities of parliamentary politics actually tightened

the links between Paris and the provinces. that through representative

government

duce new

elites at

depths of

la province}'^ In fact, this

cial

The doctrinaires,

the nation

following Guizot, hoped

would transform

itself

and pro-

an accelerated pace, drawing even upon the masses buried in the decanting of the superior portion of the provin-

population more than ever required a metamorphosis of the provincial.

Political convictions aside, the

The

the July

first

was

toral district.

the Parisian

who

Chamber

consisted of three types of deputies.

seduced a small provincial town, the seat of an elec-

An immeasurable distance separated this deputy from his constituents.

For the time being the elected representative provincial mold.

The

felt

no need

to tailor himself to

fit

the

voters of less fortunate districts did not need to be seduced.

They deliberately chose representatives already belonging to the national elite, men

Divisions of Time and

close to the center of

never

power and ready to serve

lifted a finger to please the loyal

bitterly

about

Limousin^'

—seems



to

as mediators.'" Saint-Marc-Girardin

voters of Saint-Yrieix; prefects complained

Emile de Girardin

this.

Space

to confine ourselves to examples

from the

have been a perfect stranger to Bourganeuf, which he served

as deputy.'^

The restoration of universal suffrage in March be deputies to appeal to the voters.

Many

made it necessary for would-

1848

aristocrats

who

lived in the

Faubourg

who in the past had simply gone through the motions of enduring from time to time a brief provincial exile now found it opportune to emulate the example of Alexis de Tocqueville, who cultivated the sympathies of voters residing Saint-Germain and

where he had

in the district

Clubs and

later the

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Club des

his estates.'^

Montagnards again sent eloquent speakers on missions into the

vast heathen territory of la province. This soon provided the capital's vaudeville

with

new comic

material, as

it

treated, in

what could only be

a derisory

spread of Parisian political fashions and debates to provincial

The second cial native,

type of deputy in the

Chamber was

was nevertheless possessed of

the

manner, the

territory.^''

man who, though

a provin-

After undergoing a virtually

talent.

instantaneous metamorphosis, he joined cabinets, participated in central political debates, infiltrated the networks of power, patronage, and intrigue, and if need be

manipulated elections. For such a figure the crucial talent was oratorical eloquence,

which made

it

possible to stand out in a

but dominated by powerful speakers.

turned the

Chamber

Chamber packed with ridiculous provincials

Men

such as Berryer, Guizot, and Lamartine

into an important place

on the

social circuit,

one of the most

fertile

sources of conversational material. In the evening, assiduous frequentation

of

or that salon allowed these renowned speakers to consolidate their successes

this

on the podium.

The

third type of

deputy was the notable de

clocher, the local

worthy who man-

aged to win an election and thus became the oafish bourgeois deputy in the

Chamber beneath Daumier's

ferocious gaze and

the mirth-provoking "bust-ups" {cohues) that ville

the

made

who was

who fell asleep

a regular fixture at

the Tuileries and the hotel de

under the July Monarchy places that society ladies were loath to

visit.'^

Under

Second Republic the ranks of these anonymous provincials would be swelled by

the kinds of candidats ambulants ("carpetbaggers" in teurs de treteaux (tinpot

gasbags)

ever, the Prince-President

number of in the

and

at

whom

Tocqueville poked

fun.'*'

In 1852,

his friends introduced reform: they

deputies, eliminated the speaker's

Corps

American parlance) and

ora-

how-

reduced the

podium, and prohibited public debate

Legislatif.

During the

first

between Paris and

half of the nineteenth century, the established relationship

la province,

through

and subtle portrayal and analysis

its

profound impact on countless individuals

in fiction, gained in

both refinement and depth. For

447

ALAIN CORBIN example of the richness of

a particularly illuminating

we may turn

action between reality and fiction,

this

experience and the inter-

Memoires of Marie Cappelle.

to the

Marie, having been born into the aristocracy of Picardy, spent

many

years in

Parisian society before being exiled to the depths of the Limousin at the age of

A

twenty-three.

cultivated

though not very wealthy orphan, she

contempt, occasionally tempered by

marry, a

man by

the

name of

arsenic and sentenced to

pity, for the

felt

nothing but

boorish fellow she was obliged to

Lafarge. Accused of poisoning her husband with prison, she recounted her sad experience of provin-

life in

cial life.

Her any

case

was unusual, and her knowledge of

tourist.

Through marriage Marie Lafarge

la province

went

far

beyond

that of

joined a provincial clan. She was

obliged to endure the horrifying experience that Dorine had promised Marianne: social intercourse with the petty bourgeoisie of Tulle

exonerate herself, Marie hoped to stereotypes of the fictional small this

"poor flower

lost

among

and Uzerche. Anxious

to

move her Parisian readers to pity by feeding them town. The tactic was evidently effective, because

the brutes of the

won

Limousin"

the

sympathy of

Parisian society.

La province

as she described

it

was by no means

campagne. In portraying the

la

peasants and blacksmiths of the village adjacent to her manor, the sinister Glandier,

Marie adopts an

idyllic tone.

She

is

careful not to disparage the

few

aristocratic

chateaux in the vicinity: these she described as oases of Parisianness, places where

good manners flourished and where she was ing

to the civilized world. "'^

ney Lachaud, who so

A few talented bourgeois, such as the attractive attor-

brilliantly

managed Marie 's

commentary. By contrast, the lengthy riage are recounted as

able to sample the pleasures of "return-

visits to

defense, also escape her scathing

Uzerche immediately

though they were tantamount

after her

mar-

to a Sadeian torture. Marie

Lafarge experienced a sense of extreme strangeness upon discovering the bourgeoisie of that small

To begin with, was shocked by rudimentary is

served, the

this

town and

the things

I

was obliged

at best: guests are tete

de veau

is

new

to see

things" surrounding

it.^^

and hear." The local manners are

received in the kitchen, hugs are exchanged, no tea

served au naturel, wine

civility is less appalling

or "Correzian chatter," as she silver

the "incredible

she was flabbergasted by the uncivilized and archaic customs: "I

"degree zero" of

of the

all

calls

it.

is

offered as a refreshment. But

than the content of the conversation,

The women unabashedly

discuss the quality

and question her about her servant's wages and the price of her clothes;

they shamelessly question her husband about the size of her dowry. At night,

what passes for a ball, these

scarlet

at

women "could neither appreciate nor understand

my simple gown of India muslin trimmed with twine." Tulle, like Uzerche, utterly lacked a social stays

home and

entertains

no one

else."

The

life:

"There

tragic setting

is

is

no

society; everyone

thus subtly portrayed.

LcBinsien passe ave.c dedam devaniles raonis dAuvergne.TOagmfiijues rnais entierementpeupkis de portem d

eau au dire des voyageurs ,

lEWOSmoN

Expo'iitioii

FIGURE n.4

IINIVCRSELLE

tn plein vcnl des provinciaiis venus a Paris.pour voir le Palais

Veyron, The Parisian

disdainfully drives past the

in

31,

.

(it

1

11.5

,

,

the Provinces; lithograph, circa 1860. The caption reads: "The Parisian

mountains

of

Auvergne, which are magnificent

populated exclusively by water carriers." FIGURE

iiiduslne.

Daumier, The Exposition L/n/Verse/Ze; lithograph, 1855.

but, to

hearthe travelers

tell

it,

45°

ALAIN CORBIN The sense of stifling imprisonment transmitted to the reader is more persuasive than a lengthy plea.

that

is

The

text successfully

the subject of this essay;

it

conveys a sense of the Paris-province cleavage

shows

just

how disorienting the distance between

Parisian society and small-town provincial society could be.

The gap was again reshaped

in the

second half of the century. The restoration of

new politi-

universal male suffrage and the slow process of familiarization with the cal

system altered the Paris-province relationship yet again by raising a challenge

domination over what

Paris's imperial

France.

la province

now

to

implied, namely, the rest of

The problem was keenly felt as early as February

when the provisional

1848,

government was being formed. Lamartine, Garnier-Pages, Marrast, Marie, and

Dupont de

I'Eure

felt that

the establishment of the Republic ought to be ratified by

the provinces. Lamartine prepared a proclamation to that effect. Louis Blanc, LedruRollin, Albert,

and Flocon, on the other hand,

felt that

Paris

was sovereign

instance and that the rest of the country, less politically aware, had

what the people of the

capital

had decided.

If

Louis Blanc

is

he carried the day because he enjoyed the backing of armed

The subsequent cal

predominance

June

to

no

in this

undo

right to

be taken

at his

word,

revolutionaries.'*"'

introduction of universal suffrage, however, transferred politi-

to the provinces as early as April 1848.

riots in Paris reflected the rest

The

suppression of the

of the country's desire for order and for the

defense of republican legitimacy; by this point "the rest of the country" included the suburbs of Paris as president

Karl

Marx

On December 10, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's election

itself.

of the Republic was rightly interpreted, by no

himself, as proof of the peasantry's

1851, while the

"yellow gloves" hissed

at

new

less a

commentator than

role in politics."" In

December

Louis Napoleon on the boulevards,

thir-

teen departements constituting what might be called la province rouge rose in rebellion at the

news of

was about

to

in

contemporary

Through

domination of the provinces by Paris

of France

the ballot

fiction: Beziers,

September

political regimes.

as the rest

d'etat, as if the

same small towns, many of them subprefectures,

Forcalquier.'"^ After

unmake

coup

be overturned. Ted Margadant has shown that the insurgency

ished in the very

prominently

the

4, 1870, Paris

Thanks

— slowly

box on February

its

8, 1871,

that figured so

Bedarieux, Clamecy, Marmande,

would no longer be

able to

to universal suffrage, la province

asserted

flour-

power over and then,



make and

here defined

the nation as a whole.

in late

May, through

its

sup-

port of the army, la province, the guardian of legitimacy, overcame the revolution-

ary desires of a considerable segment of Parisian society.'"^

It

would of course be

a

mistake to analyze these episodes in terms of the perception of the Paris-province

gap

as

it

existed in an earlier period. In such tumultuous times, the vast majority of

Parisian "society" (especially

is

apt to discover that, despite internal divisions

among youths),

previously reviled province.

on both

sides

class-consciousness militates in favor of unity with the

Divisions of Time and

Space

Meanwhile, however, new developments helped to reinforce provincial fascination with "Parisian life"

and thus increase the intervening

railway system was designed expressly to serve the needs of the capital.

meant more rapid dissemination of the news. This, together

tion of the telegraph

new modes of

with

The new The inven-

social distance.

social control

and a powerful national police

(first

organized

during the Second Republic and completed under the Second Empire'"''), reinforced centralization.

Haussmann's urban planning forced provincial

embark on projects of urban renewal "city of grocery displays"

to accept the Parisian model.'"' Paris,

—one immense,

the site of world's fairs in 1878, 1889,

modity.'"^

The

Nowhere

else

were the

city fathers eager to

rites

exalted spectacle of the capital

illuminated



and 1900

shopwindow

now the

as well as

adapted to the reign of the com-

of modernity so handsomely celebrated.

was

further heightened

by new ways of dra-

matizing power. During the Second Empire a cosmopolitan court was assembled.

(The novelty of became

the focal point of fashionable society.

new symbols of

consecrated guests,

The sovereign once more

court deserves further analysis.)

this

Shows, parades, receptions for foreign

superiority.

and birthday celebrations kept the

The process of senatorial nomination

streets noisy.

This extroversion, spurred

who anticipated the image of the modern city'"^ while decried by republicans who viewed the "imperial feast" with austere contempt, altered both the

on by

artists

trope of provinciality and the image of "Parisian

The primacy of rites

life,"

the private sphere gradually gave

whose animation it revealed.

way

to

immodestly ostentatious

and pleasures.

Hundreds of thousands of provincials flocked cone' {or cafe-concert,

which provided music

hall

to Paris for the "Expo," the

entertainment along with drinks),

and the funeral of Victor Hugo. First Carnot and then Loubet invited ors of France to vast federational banquets. In an era fascinated trip to Paris

was

like a

tour of the world.

The

fields in the 1880s, to

all

the

may-

by exploration,

a

i86os clearly marked a major turning

The

point in the history of the desire inspired by the capital. all

caf

tendency, prevalent in

adopt a pedagogical attitude only temporarily slowed the

convergence of the city with the idea of hedonism, preparing the way for the excesses of the Belle Epoque, tially

Parisian

New

which

in symbolic terms

was perceived

an essen-

phenomenon.

techniques of fascination perpetuated the contrast.

hedonism of

as

Paris, la province

more than ever evoked images of

were now ranked according to how "Parisian" they were, Hippolyte Taine,

Compared with

who traveled throughout

in provincial mustiness. Listen to

that

is,

the

hibernation. Cities

how alive or dead.

"greater France," took morose pleasure

him describe

Poitiers,

which he knew well from

having spent considerable time there: "Narrow, twisting

streets, steeply sloped,

with old cobblestones and grass growing in the gaps between, punctuated every so often

by a

street

lamp whose

light trails off into the night, lugubrious blackness, a

451

ALAIN CORBIN dismal solitude after eight o'clock and more often than not gates

on hinges

that

seem frozen

impression of coundess

moss between stones,

in place,

"One would

stale, cloistered lives."

day

all

long.. .carriage

silence,

and a vague

not feel more alone

in

a city that had died at a single stroke, that had been caught unawares and emptied of

inhabitants

by some sudden epidemic." "The temperament of

and

and

inert,"

"this species of

moral

inertia is painted

on people's

ing the "stupid and ignorant" faces of the young. '"^ For Taine, "attenuation of the individual,"

The theme of

who was condemned would remain

social fragmentation

twentieth century. Fran9ois Mauriac was

still

the region

is

flabby

faces," includ-

la province

meant the

to "kill time.""*'

a stereotype until well into the

harping on

as recently as 1964: the

it

provinces, according to him, were ignorant of the pleasures of conversation and of

"enrichment through closeness to others."'" For the owner of the country Malagar, provincial

life

meant first of

fore an obligatory retreat into

all

"bitter separation

home and

from society" and

Arland, but

it

work not only of Mauriac but

was Herve Bazin who

was

province

a place

also of

fictional province

where people "knew how

there

is

in Mauriac's

"more apt

work

All of these feelings

was not only

a

to hear the

The theme forms

of

to hate," the

intensified

the peasantry that

was

tones: la

moved slowly enough flesh." "^ Accordingly,

groaning of his

by an objective

new

stamping ground of

moral frontier separating Paris from

were

a

its possibilities.

took on dark

long-nursed vengeance as well as violent desire. Here things for an individual to be

pri-

Andre Maurois and Marcel

finally exhausted the last

Meanwhile, the tragic figure of the

there-

Here the hypertrophy of the

family.

vate, the secret, contrasts with the extroversion of the capital.

leitmotif in the

estate

la province.

reality: the rural

exodus.

It

affected but also the aristocracy, which, as

Michel Denis has shown in the case of Mayenne, suffered from declining rents."'

Toward

the end of the nineteenth century

for good, in

nearby

some

many

nobles abandoned their chateaux

to try their luck in the colonies or other exotic places, others to live

cities,

and

still

others to

embark on

a career in the

army or diplomacy

simply to squander what remained of their fortune in the whirl of Parisian

life.

respectable rural and small-town bourgeoisie, a favorite target of parody in the tion of an earlier period, light

on

was

also affected. Further study

the mobility of this group,

on its inherited

capital.

which found

it

is

needed

in

increasingly difficult to survive

more animated

irrevocably than before, consigned the cultivated

social life in the bud,

elite to the

reproducing what was created elsewhere. Rene Bazin,

By

more

secondary task of

who traveled in the provinces

of the Journal des debats, stressed the "decadence" of local soci-

decline of "social

of audiences."''

fic-

order to shed

led to the closing of theaters, hindered the spread of learned societies, and,

eties, the

The

Taken together, the many varieties of exodus further impov-

erished la province, nipped early stirrings of a

in 1893 at the behest

or

life in

the evenings," and,

more

generally, the thinning

the end of the century, while rural villages, disencumbered of

Divisions of Time and

the

heavy burden of poor laborers, were enjoying a revival of

wealth of organizations,

festivals,

and recreational

them of

and a new

many small provincial day when Poincare would

activities,

towns languished and withered, looking forward to the threaten to deprive

solidarity

Space

their subprefectures.

Meanwhile, the lengthening of vacations did nothing to lower the barriers between Capital and province but actually increased the intervening

The

social distance.

ostentatious presence in isolated places of a Parisian society eager to witness

the spectacle of nature but

still

envy and heightened

stirred

ments of

toward

if

not contemptuous of la province

As the habit of vacationing spread

irritation.

society, the 'PdiVis-province split

The

scious.

indifferent

became firmly rooted

to all seg-

in the social

subcon-

Parisian cousin instilled a sense of social distance even in the peasantry.

La campagne,

the countryside,

to their native villages

was

provincialized. Maids and nannies

brought with them a longing for the

furnished their dreams.

The wife of

capital,

who returned

images of which

town grocer emulated

the rural

the doctor's

wife by employing the services of one of the seamstresses whose numbers proliferated as ions.

women's magazines popularized "patterns" based on

Once

a campagnarde, she

became

the latest Paris fash-

a provinciate.

On the Parisian scene the ethnotype changed as well. "The old-fashioned, suspicious provincial

who

one hand on

arrives in Paris with

his watch, the other

on

his

double pockets, and who, whether riding in a carriage or sitting in a theater, eyes his

neighbors anxiously in the belief that since leaving Faucigny-les-Oies his every

movement has been followed by

a

gang of

thieves;

who

resolves never to sleep in

who comes down with a fever and colic the day after arriving by the Messageries Laffitte et Caillard; who dares not mingle with the crowd or stop in front of a shop or enter a restaurant and who is swallowed up in the Parisian temhis

bed

at the

pest without istent

inn and



comprehending what it is all about

nowadays except

in the

memory

that provincial

is

virtually

nonex-

of habitues of the Palais-Royal or the

Varietes.""^ Provincials no longer experienced the fear of visiting the capital that

once drove them to draw up their wills before departing.

Many

provincials keen to discover Paris were

now

selves with a brief visit, a sort of pilgrimage. All they nal glimpse of the city in

no longer hoped

all its brilliance.

willing to content them-

hoped was

to catch

an exter-

Unlike the ambitious youth of old, most

to penetrate to the city's secret core, access to

which remained

They did not aspire to visit the laboratory from which Parisianness radiated. Often they came in groups, traveling on pleasure trains. In Paris "they talked of home even as they trod the asphalt pavement; they brought Carpentras

difficult.

with them.'""^

This ridiculous touristification, which Labiche mocked in La Cagnotte, produced a

new comic

figure to light

Laroiisse. Paris in fact

up the pages of the ordinarily serious Dictionnaire

continued to rely on the same tactics to keep

its

distance and

453

FIGURE11.6

The 1900 Banquet of Mayors

September 22. The Fallieres, ity

inset

— View

Inside the

shows President Loubet reading

Huge Tent Set Up in

his

and Deschanel. The Third Republic took root because

and weave together distinct regional

nity linking the

mayors

of

all

identities. Here, the

the country's

communes.

the Tuilerieson

speech, flanked by Waldeck-Rousseau, it

managed to capture the sense of localcame to Paris in a spirit of frater-

provinces

Divisions of Time and

Space

even widen the gap. Listen to the prestigious dictionary's description of the

new

influx

of tourists. Provincials

poured tal's

in

through the capi-

railway stations.

new

strange

now

It

was

a

that

species

stepped onto the station plat-

forms, a species admirably

symbolized by "the rubi-

cund gentleman arriving on

from Bordeaux."

the train

Drunk with by

the

desires inspired

of

tales

"cousin

Michel" and keen to have stories

of his

his return,

own

to tell

upon

he scurried about

with his heart aflutter and "bulging eyes" firmly fixed

on the

ladies' ankle-boots.

For him, Paris, the Great Babylon, meant above

all

Fddmes (women). The

eroti-

cization of the capital's

image

increased between i860 and 1900, as manners loosened

and clandestine prostitution spread. For the provincial a binge, Paris

go

to escape

was from

on

the place to

social

and

marital constraints, the ever-

fascinating theater of moral

decompression. The rentier

dreamed of

the

house of

assignation."^ Montmartre, the

capital

of

pleasure,

shaped the provincial's very idea of hedonism. Less well-known singers from the Parisian cafes-concerts brought fashionable tunes to the music halls of Carcassonne

and thus revived the traditional folksongs of Aude valley workers."^

455

ALAIN CORBIN

45^

FIGURE

11.7

Felix Vallotton,

devoured. He

is

The

The Cafe, or the Provincial

about to become the victim of

a

woman

timid provincial has

of Paris, symbolically

more

come to be

a sphinx than a

creature of dreams.

Parisian tourism took

but

on a

certain ritual quality. This

made each visit less of an individual

adventure.

calmed

visitors' anxieties

The provincial tourist tended to

follow a fixed schedule and itinerary: a dinner for forty-five sous Royal; a

visit to the Invalides, the

some purchases from

the stalls of

Vendome column, and

La

Belle Jardiniere;

the orphan girl willing to let a stranger hesitant hayseed a thing or

buy her

at the Palais-

the Jardin des Plantes;

and the "odd encounter with

a ticket to L'Amiigu"^^^ taught the

two about the ways of the big

city.

A brief stay in Paris

taught the provincial visitor a whole

new

rienced Paris, our dictionary

as a "vast diminution of himself."

a "kind

He expeHe suffered

and ranks.

of annihilation." Discovering the national sphere tended to relativize

provincial hierarchies. tle

tells us,

scale of sizes, values,

of the

mud

It

was

a

changed individual

who

returned

home

"with a

lit-

of our advanced civilization sticking to the soles of his shoes." In

Divisions of Time and

short, according to Larousse, the chief result

of the

trip to Paris

was

Space

a heightened

awareness of an infinite distance.

Meanwhile, however, a provincial riposte was being elaborated, the nature and effectiveness of

which we would do well

growing reluctance

to

measure.

to disparage la province.

The

One positive new factor was a

authors of the articles in Larousse,

though subtle analysts of the cleavage that concerns us here, worked hard to deny its

very existence. To take them

at their

word, the Revolution established national

unity and thus abolished the provinces; la province simultaneously ceased to exist.

The word remained whose most into the

had

that

an archaic

was

solid bastion

summer of first

artifact

prominence,

for a long time Paris,

embarrassment

after all,

until well

at

They never-

accepting the old cleavage, which

first

came

under the monarchy, as anything other than an outdated,

This new sensibility emerged

relic

just as

of the past.

counter-images, developed by regional

determined to do battle against the imperialism of the Parisian gaze, were

coming late

had plenty of reasons

1871 to display bitterness toward a rural and provincial France

amusing, and on the whole nonsensical

elites

of language. Obviously the republicans,

sustained the Empire and then elected conservatives.'^^

theless felt a certain to

as

into their own.'^' Let us pause for a

example of

this effort

moment to examine

of rehabilitation. In 1874,

J-

Landerneau, protested against the connotation that his

common parlance. He attempted to prove that

F-

a minor, relatively

Daniel, a historian from

city's

name had

taken on in

"over the past few centuries" the city

had been the oldest in the province and the place where the prominent

men

of the

region gathered. Already "mired in luxury and pleasure" in the seventeenth century,

it

was seen

as the "Sybaris of Brittany

nothing could be famous unless

it

on the eve of the Revolution. "'^^ Thus

was known in Landerneau. "In speaking of some-

thing memorable, people said, then as now, that

it

will cause a stir in

Landerneau, a

common expression that has no intrinsic meaning.

"'^^

cation, this mistaken fabrication of a prestigious

etymology intended

sting of mockery, to stand the cial tactic.

contemptuous

jibe

This use of history as

justifi-

draw the

to

on its head, was a common provin-

Was it not said in Limousin that M. de Pourceaugnac,

forced to emigrate

during the Revolution, had never returned, and that people were glad of it.-^ erence to luxury and pleasure in the implicit argument

is

also significant:

borrows these elements of superiority from the description of the

J.

The ref-

F.

Daniel

capital in order to

protect Landerneau from mockery.

Somewhat als

later,

when

scholars began meticulously recording the tales and ritu-

of folklore, other historians would attribute the popular expression to the fact

that

Landerneau was regularly the scene of the raucous popular demonstrations

known

as charivaris.'^'*

On "Low Sunday after vespers, blindfolded men with clubs

would smash various kinds of earthenware pottery hung from ropes squares.

"'^^

Until 1920 or so, the

mayor and other prominent

citizens

in the town's

used to march

457

ALAIN CORBIN through the

shouting en gain an

was simply

sound of drums collecting money for the poor while

streets to the ed. It

was argued,

in other

words, that "the

Landerneau"

stir in

a matter of fidelity to ancient customs.

among them

Certain malevolent Parisians,

the author of the article in Larousse,

suggested that the raucousness of Landerneau's charivaris was a consequence of the large

number of cuckolds in the city. Mockery was thus reinstated.

Landerneau became

from Paris

a tourist attraction. Charles

the opinion that Landerneau's comic reputation

have been

its

Monselet admits to having

stemmed from

the

set out

He was

Breton city on account of the popular expression.

to visit the

the bell tower of

In any case, noisy

moon

of

affixed to

old church. '^"^ In short, the counterimage does not appear to

totally effective in this case.

There were other kinds of rehabilitation as well. Following the vogue for the rusnovel (which enjoyed great popularity between 1836 and 1856), the

tic

ian ideology

'^^

tional portrait final

rise

of agrar-

stimulated research into provincial identity and sharpened the

of village

life.'^^

The

agrarian movement, which flourished in the

decade of the nineteenth century under the progressives, and

Vichy, relates to the subject of this essay only indirectly. Writers praises of the soil, including that

well as Gustave

champion of the extended

Thibon and Pierre L'Ermite, hoped

structures and to tar Paris, the

fic-

family,

later

under

who

sang the

Rene

Bazin, as

to restore traditional values and

modern Babylon, with

But

a black brush.

this ide-

ology, which extolled closeness to the forces of nature and called for closer bonds

among

the cosmic, the animal, the vegetal, and the

human, was rooted more

in

ancient pastoral than in the themes of provinciality.

Nevertheless, the very scope and vigor of the agrarian cally increased yet again the distance

between Paris and

ology posed no threat to Parisian transcendence. leading talents

among the

few lucky enough

ment reinforced vatism.

It

It

movement paradoxi-

la province.

was the

capital that chose the

regionalist writers, bestowing a national

to enjoy its favor.

'^^

Agrarian ide-

renown on

Essentially nostalgic, the agrarian

the

move-

the identification of la province with the past and with conser-

gave an even firmer footing to old-fashioned values, customs, and

atti-

tudes and elicited a counterimage promoted most notably by Zola, Maupassant,

and Huysmans. Once again the old disparaging stereotypes were reinterpreted. Far from the capital, the idle Parisian succumbed to boredom and slowly destroyed himself.'^'

At the end of the century, even provinces, the capital

was

feasting

fireman,''^ the piou-piou Becassine.'^^

man of

on mockery of the

was triumphing

village

mayor,

'^^

in the

the village

("doughboy"),'^'* and, before long, the servant

These figures were attacked because for Parisians they embodied

oafishness as well as rusticity. the

as agrarian literature

the

soil.'^*^

By 1880 new

hygienic norms also tended to devalue

In other words, as la campagne turned increasingly into la

Divisions of Time and

459

Space

aONNE

FIGURES

11.8

venomous

AND

Illustrations by

—by which

province

I

mean

dream of Parisianness



A

11.9

naive provincial

girl

goes

to her

pleasures, while rejection of the capital

it

is

death

in

the

rewarded by

modern Babylon, the

lucid

became

the butt of ever

opened

itself

up

to the

more aggressive mockery.

Historians specializing in the Third Republic have long emphasized the growing

influence of la province

choosing tion

by

on

political life.

The gradual

official candidates, often selected in Paris,

citizens

of great prominence

led,

we

and of the efficacy of media-

are told, to a transfer of

provincial elites and the nouvelles couches, or

they represented.'^^ Indeed, Jean Estebe has

decline of the process of

new segments of

power

to

new

the population, that

shown that the number of government

ministers born in the provinces rose sharply between 1870 and 19 14, while the relative

number of

politicians

born

Third Republic. the

Parisian ministers in the south '^^

fell.

Estebe also showed what an important role

and east of France played

in

shaping the future of the

On the eve of World War I, Jules Lemaitre, Jules Delafosse, and

Quercy native Maurice Colrat attacked

Midi.'^' In Parisian circles passions

part of traditional elites that they

the outsized political influence of the

were further heightened by the feeling on the

had somehow been shoved

aside.

These displaced

wheeler-dealers were strongly critical of provincial deputies who, unlike the provincials

who had

served as intermediaries in an earlier period, had ceased, so

they believed, to partake of Parisianness.

-

PAKIS

victim of

happiness and a healthy

Damblans.

that the countryside increasingly

PRI'-SSt

its

life.

460

ALAIN CORBIN

how the "political-administrative sys-

Christophe Charle, meanwhile, has shown

tem" composed of ministers,

—was

by republican purges

affected

obliged to take

more

and high magistrates

prefects,

There

to the absence tacts to

all elite

also provincialized.''**' Candidates

groups

were thus

care than before in demonstrating their compliance with local

customs; they had to assume the characteristic provinciality.



is

of an ethnotype, to prove their

traits

no denying that these things were true

at a

time when, owing

of party organizations, deputies were forced to rely on personal con-

"hold" their

districts.''"

But was the fundamental configuration of the Paris-province relationship altered as a

result.'^

success

still

No simple answer can suffice. New procedures ensured that the roads to passed through Paris.

The Ecole

des Sciences Politiques, the Inspection

des Finances, the Conference du Stage, and the ministerial staff appointment

became tacts

the approved stepping-stones to political careers. In addition, Parisian con-

became increasingly

as important as ever.

Sons born into

henceforth obliged, Gilles

was more important than tion

and Parisian salons and high society remained

essential,

le

politically

Beguec points

prominent provincial families were

out, to take a detour

by way of

Paris. It

in the past for the future politician to legitimate his posi-

by acquiring the proper

The

credentials.

result

was

the establishment of subtle

interlocking networks "based on a complex system of provincial support and

What

Parisian contacts."'''^

is

more, the provincialization of the

political elite

was

countered by the Parisianization of the upper civil service (the Conseil d'Etat, Cour des Comptes, ministerial chiefs of dramatically, of the

economic

and Ponts

staff,

elites,

et

Chaussees) and, even more

which now contributed much more than

in the

past to the animation of Paris society.''*^ Paris reaped the benefits of the centraliza-

common practice of private companies'

tion of large businesses

and the

mer top

Meanwhile, the

civil servants.

intellectual elite

avoided provincialization

altogether. Paris remained the culmination of every career.

many this

engineers

who

was because,

hiring for-

While

it is

true that

graduated from the grandes ecoles married provincial women,

as recent graduates, they

were assigned

to the least attractive posts,

those located far from the capital.

At the beginning of

the twentieth century as in the past,

no debate of national

importance could begin anywhere but in Paris. La province merely reinterpreted

what the seemed

capital invented.

to lose

some of

As seen from

Paris, national issues recast in local

terms

their dignity.

Central to our topic in this connection were organizations of provincials living in the capital. It takes

some time

to appreciate the

importance of these mediating

bodies, which have often been interpreted as representing a form of provincial

revenge. At the end of the nineteenth century entire districts of the capital were

given over to Auvergnats, Limousins, Bretons, and Rouergats. People from these

groups saw each other

socially; they published their

own newspapers and

ran their

Divisions of Time and

A LA BODINIERE,

FIGURE

11.10

Groups

Space

I

8,

Rue Saint-Lezare

of provincials living in the capital

popularized folkloric images of their native regions, while, conversely, anything that sharpened the contrast with the

provinces Le

Mouel

made

Paris that

much more

for the Exposition of

distinctive. Poster

they organized celebrations of holidays and banquets and

helped families realize their matrimonial provincial

from

who came

by

Bretons of Paris, 1895.

own employment offices;

strategies.''*'*

to settle in the capital could

his native land.

People

now

Gone were the days when the

be seen as a lonely victim, an exile

looked to their provincial roots with a kind of

vague nostalgia fostered by extended vacations, but such feelings were intense than the homesickness of a previous generation of immigrants.

461

far less

462

ALAIN CORBIN

To be sure, the president of a group of "Limousins de Paris" could help to mediate between Paris and the home province. Such groups turned mockery into a force and helped change the provincial image. But

for mobilization

at the

same time they

insidiously reinforced the ascendancy of the capital and ensured the continued disqualification of provincial elites. ciality

They allowed

on ancestral grounds; they sometimes chose

"carpetbaggers" win elections back home. Gilles

how

certain Parisians to claim provin-

le

local candidates

Beguec has shown,

Correzians living in Paris influenced political

life in their

and helped

for example,

native region.'''^

Associations of provincials living in Paris sometimes allowed candidates to claim counterfeit provincial roots, enabling outsiders to defeat entrenched local

1964, Frangois Mauriac

went so

far as to assert that the provinces

had no way of

ing stock of themselves other than from the vantage point of Paris.

Le Beguec's

elites.

In

tak-

'^^

extensive research has also established the growing political influ-

ence of Parisian lawyers during the period between the two world wars, along with the declining influence of their colleagues in the provinces. Broadly speaking,

Beguec's work points up the gradual decline of local

model of

political

competence,

a

elites in the face

Le

of a new

model exemplified by the remarkable success

enjoyed by veterans of the Paris bar's Conference du Stage. In the meantime, however,

growing

role.

many

journalists remained blind to the capital's

Jacques Fourcade, for one, helped to perpetuate the hoary stereotype

of the "provincial Republic" by publishing a series of essays under that Temps. In these articles he portrayed strong views. ions

Once

much as sheep

therefore, they

elected,

la province as a place

of political

leave their

wool on

to shore

of pure opinions and

the brambles along their path." Periodically,

must "plunge back into

life

Le

however, the "party men.. .shed their doctrinaire opin-

their districts,"

caught in "the vise-like grip of their electoral clientele." trait

title in

as perceived

where they are once more '''^

Fourcade 's derisory por-

from a small-town Cafe du Commerce only helped

up Parisian predominance. His work perpetuated the

satirical portrait

of

the hapless provincial deputy proud of his southern accent, such as Claudius

Pegomas

in

Edouard Pailleron's Les Cabotins or Arnaud Tripier

Mirbeau's Foyer, both published before World

Over

the past thirty years, la province has

learned to moderate as tolerated as they

The very term

is

its

sensitive

and Paris has

this

new

obsolete. Mail slots in Parisian post offices

distinguish between Paris and province;

Nevertheless,

become more

tone. Disparaging references to the provinces are

becoming

now

Octave

War I.

once were. La province has benefitted from

marked, respectively,

in

no longer

sensitivity.

no longer

there are three slots rather than two,

Paris, banlieue (suburbs),

and autres departements.

many traces of the old stereotypes remain. They are faithfully pre-

served in the standard dictionaries. For example, the Grand Larousse de la langue franfaise (1976 edition)

borrows

this definition

from

a 1935 edition

of the dictionary

Divisions of Time and

Space

published by the Academie: "'Province. Invar, adj. Fam. and pej. Said of a person or

whose

thing ical

of the

Noun

characteristics contrast with the refinement, elegance, or vivacity typ-

capital.

(1640.

provinciaux

'Il

a

Guez de

un

air

province;

il

est tres province.' "

this: "Provincial.

Balzac), sometimes pejorative.... Elsa Triolet: 'fatigues des

meme quand

ce sont des intellectuels [tired of provincials even

they are intellectuals].' " In other words, the provincial laughter, at least not openly, but he can

is

when

no longer an object of

who thinks, acts, person who bores or

be portrayed as a person

and expresses himself without grace or genuine distinction, a tires

Or

the Parisian and elicits her pity.

Indeed, behind the emergence of

new

sensitivities associated

with

a restructur-

ing of the realm of decency, there has been a profound transformation that, once again, has reshaped the old cleavage without abolishing

it.

Leaving aside the counterfeit provinciality associated with certain vacation spots (Deauville, Avignon, Aix, Cannes), cities eager for cultural decentralization (such as

Grenoble, Lyons, Toulouse, and Tours) have

for themselves

tried,

not without success, to create

an image capable of rivaling that of the

in the transmission

of information

is

capital.

The

delay involved

dwindling, and this was once a fundamental

factor in establishing the Paris-/>rovmce split.

The media

carry the

news simultane-

ously to everyone, thereby tending to Parisianize the totality of the national territory.

Provinces once obliged to await anxiously the arrival of the news can

revel in the delights of

now

immediate commentary. There has been no concomitant

abolition of the delay in the transmission of fashions, however.

This Parisianization of the provinces availability

is

counterfeit, however, insofar as the ready

of information confers no corresponding power to

pate in the circles from

initiate, to partici-

which innovations emanate. Accordingly, Jean Planchais

sees not an identification of la province with Paris but a gradual dissolution of the

notion of province in the featureless expanse of "Greater Paris. "'"'^ This

just

is

way of noting the continued concentration of the nation's elites in a capital now readily accessible from a good half of the territory. This new mode of domianother

nation job as

is

exemplified by the "turbo-prof"

by high-speed

rail)

and the

(who commutes

to a provincial teaching

difficulties that universities in provincial cities

Amiens, Reims, and Orleans face owing

to the attraction of

nearby Paris.

Consciousness of the uniqueness of Paris remains acute. The tempo of capital continues to

suburbs) are

still

be more rapid than elsewhere. La province and

such

life in

the

la banlieue (the

defined by a different relation to time, by the need that people

residing there feel to justify their choice of residence, often, nowadays,

by some

form of ecological argument. All in

so

all,

much of

the capital.

the

the

most

significant

promotion of

change

in the relationship has

la province as

been the

result not

of challenges to the role and position of

The decline in Parisian imperialism has gone hand

in

hand with

a reduc-

463

464

ALAIN CORBIN tion of France's importance in the world, an internationalization of channels of

information, and a broadening of debate to encompass the entire planet. edition of Le

The

Grand Larousse records the manifestation of these developments

cultural sphere:

"The Landerneau of something,

said of a constricted

1984;

in the

environment

closed in on itself and perpetually agitated by trivial squabbles: for example,

Landerneau de

la litterature parisienne.'

"

'le

FIGURE

12.0

In 1826,

Baron Dupin drew

map, "enlightened France" French Populace

{:82e).

is all

a line

from Geneva to Saint-Malo "separating northern and southern France." On the

white, and "dark France"

is

gray and black.

Map

Representing the Level of Education of the

CHAPTER

The Saint-Malo-Geneva

Line^

Roger Chartier

Over the

past thirty years,

rians than that

become

few itineraries have been more traveled by French

which leads from Saint-Malo

a convenient

way of

Geneva. Taking

to

map

journey has

pointing out the major contrasts between the two

Frances that join along a line drawn between these two diagonal, which cuts the

this

histo-

cities.

On either side of this

of France in two, things appear to be different wher-

ever one looks: whether at agrarian landscapes or at technology, at the distribution

of communication or of manufacturing,

mastery of the written word. The litany of such the years, has revealed the contrast

heights and weights or their

at individuals'

between northern and southern France

enduring phenomenon, and one whose effects are often

and comparing

new

or refined indices

requirement for anyone

who would

doggedly extended over

disparities,



an

Compiling

is

thus a permanently essential

more

recently, challenge this basic

or both

bolster or,



perceptible.^

still

as

division of French national territory.^

Here, however,

I

shall take a different tack:

my purpose will be

to survey past

perceptions of France in order to understand how, at various points in time, people

conceived of the country's differential geography. In examining the (no doubt incomplete) evidence,

I

was guided by two fundamental concerns.

shed light on our national heritage: the "two-France" motif invention, nor

is it

the

work of

historians.

clarify the ideological factors that

allowed

it

Tracing to

is

I

hoped

by no means

to

a recent

genealogy can thus help to

emerge and

Second, the study of geographical representations strate

its

is

First,

that

it

in turn reinforced.

an excellent

way

to

demon-

how the development of the social sciences was linked to the political and eco-

nomic debates

that absorbed the

Understanding

how and why a divided

French

elite

from Louis

XV

to Louis-Philippe.

France was constructed can give us a better

12

468

ROGER CHARTIER grasp of what progress meant and what stakes

work backward

in time,

emphasizing

first

which the "two-France" theme triumphed

it

involved.

Hence

I

have chosen

to

the period of the July Monarchy, during in a variety

of forms, then moving on to

the second half of the eighteenth century in order to pinpoint the various groups that first

became conscious of meaningful

boundaries, while at the same time examining the question of

theme

at that

The le

why

interest in the

time remained limited.

history of a divided France began in 1822, buried in the pages of a

the prolific Italian geographer Adrien Balbi. In sur

kingdom's

spatial divisions within the

volume two of

book by

his Essai statistique

royaume de Portugal et d'Algarve compare aux autres etats de VEurope he included

an excursus on the French monarchy's efforts to establish public schools, which was accompanied, without comment, by a table indicating the number of pupils and ulty in royal and

emic in

1

district.

821.''

communal secondary, primary, and boarding

tical indicator, for

Guerry

schools in each acad-

These figures were then compared with the population of each

Twenty years before

in 1832:

Villemain,^ this compilation thus offered a

which Balbi received due

fac-

district

new statis-

credit, as in this appreciation offered

"This work by the learned Venetian geographer contains the

by

first

published documents concerning the state of public instruction."*" Published but not exploited: indeed,

was Konrad Malte-Brun,

it

France during the Empire,

a

Danish geographer who

settled in

who was the first, in a review published in the Journal des

debats, to use Balbi's figures to think about geographical contrasts in France.^

What made tistics fell

of boys

Malte-Brun's innovation possible was the fact that the academic

neatly into

two broadly homogeneous groups. By comparing

in school at various levels to the size

we

discovered that "if

the

sta-

number

of the male population, Malte-Brun

divide France into two parts, one to the north and east, the

other to the south and west (and excluding, ferent results." In the first area,

if

you will,

Paris),

we have two very dif-

which contained twelve academies per thousand

males, 123 boys for every thousand males attended school; in the second, with thir-

teen academies per thousand males, only 49 boys per thousand males were in school.

From these data emerged and western France cle did not indicate

is

this

fundamental diagnosis: "Public education in southern

to that in the

North and East

as

i

is

to 2'." Malte-Brun's arti-

any clear boundary between the two Frances whose educational

systems were so disparate; indeed, he included

in the totals for

northern and eastern

France the academies of Orleans, Lyons, and Grenoble, veritable outposts

in south-

ern territory. But he had taken the crucial step: that of construing provincial or regional inequalities as a dichotomy. Rather than subdivide the perception of differences into a myriad of small contrasts, a clearly decipherable and rationally treatable order had been constructed.

Malte-Brun not only originated the basic division of the country into two parts but also touched on a number of themes that would figure in the work of later

The Saint-Malo — Geneva

thinkers.

Line

To begin with, he situated France in a European context: "We would never

have imagined that several parts of southern and western France stood

at the level

of some of the least-schooled countries in Europe, while the north of France

is

pro-

gressing shoulder-to-shoulder with the most civilized countries in the world."

Because the line that divided Europe thus passed through France, the kingdom could be taken as a microcosm, in which contrasts that existed throughout the continent could be studied

on

a smaller scale. In his discussion of Austria,

moreover,

Malte-Brun reiterated the conviction of certain Enlightenment writers that improvements

in education

were linked to a decline

administrative reports note with pleasure that the

in criminality: "Certain recent

number of crimes decreases

in

proportion to the increase in the number of primary schools." So far as Malte-Brun

was concerned, however, was not of education social

this observation,

which would later become controversial,

What mattered most to him was the relation between and "administration." The effective use of power depended on a certain crucial importance.

homogeneity, but the figures showed that France was by no means uniform

and that vast cultural disparities existed between provinces. tioned, should

pay heed

to these differences,

he cau-

Politicians,

which careful study showed

to

be sys-

tematic rather than random.

In 1826, Baron Charles identified

Dupin

traced the frontier that divided the two Frances

by Malte-Brun. Having marked on

the population to the

a

map for each departement the ratio of

number of male primary school pupils, he made the following

point at a lecture delivered at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers:

Note the dark

line that runs

from Geneva

northern from southern France. North of

to Saint-Malo,

this line

which separates

one finds only thirty-two

departements and thirteen million inhabitants; south of

it,

fifty-four departe-

ments and eighteen million inhabitants. The thirteen million inhabitants of the north send 740,846 tants

young people

to school; the eighteen million inhabi-

of the south send 375,931 pupils to school.

It

follows that, for every mil-

lion inhabitants, the north of France sends 56,988 children to school,

south, 20,885.

and the

Thus primary instruction is three times as extensive in the north

as in the south.^

Charles Dupin was thus the inventor of a line that was to receive a great deal of attention in subsequent years, but for

He was

which another man would receive the

credit.

also the first to designate the northern part of the country as "enlightened

France"^ and, somewhat

later, the

south as "dark France." His

perhaps than has sometimes been claimed,

calls for

text, less

two remarks.

ground of the debate over popular education from the political

First,

it

innovative shifted the

to the economic.

Malte-Brun, the value of elementary education as a "means of civilization"

mately depended on the authority of the government: "Knowing

how

For

ulti-

to read,

469

47°

ROGER CHARTIER march

in a straight Une,

democracy or

in a

and shoot

whether

a rifle accurately are skills that,

in a

monarchy, can be either useful or dangerous, depending on

whether the government does or does not know

how

to control the public mind."

For Dupin, the significance of popular education was very requisite for progress in general, both

economic and

different:

intellectual.

it

was

the pre-

"Enlightened

France" was in fact the richer of the country's two parts, as evidenced by taxes on

both

real estate

and professional

activities, as

well as the

more

fertile in talent, as evi-

denced by the issuance of patents, the granting of degrees by Parisian

colleges,

admissions to the Ecole Polytechnique, and the membership of the Academie des Sciences.

The

fact that the various indicators that

Dupin examined yielded concor-

dant results north and south of the decisive dividing line was sufficient to demonstrate the benefits of public education,

which he proposed

as a crucial factor in

explaining the uneven economic development of the kingdom.

Although Dupin systematized the opposition of north and south, proposed another

spatial interpretation,

his lecture also

one that would be somewhat neglected

Forces productives et commerciales. Southern and western France,

it

in

turns out, did not

constitute a unified region: thirteen of his departements, in the regions of the

Rhone, Languedoc, and the Pyrenees, constituted section of the south because public education

a

was

"more industrious and opulent" "least

backward"

there."'

This

interpretation implicitly designated parts of Brittany, the Loire region, and central

France as a

less culturally

and economically advanced zone, a dark wedge driven

into a relatively enlightened region. This division,

which contrasted an eastern

France that penetrated southward proceeding from the English Channel toward the Mediterranean, with an Atlantic France that pushed far into the interior, would

prove

less successful

than the contrast between north and south. Yet

unnoticed, not only by

Edward Fox," but even

earlier

did not go

by Stendhal: "A minister of

the interior interested in doing his job rather than engaging, as intrigues with the king and in the

it

Chambers would do well

M. Guizot does,

in

to ask for an allocation

of two million a year for the purpose of raising the educational level of the population living in the fatal triangle

bounded by Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Valence

to

equality with that of the rest of France."'^ But Dupin's success in quickly focusing attention

on economic

inequalities ultimately blurred this

and established the dualist interpretation

Dupin devoted

the sixth

book of

ciales de la France, to a "Parallel

more

subtle

geography

in its place.

his great

work. Forces productives

et

commer-

of Northern France and Southern France with All

of France," in which he treated the country's internal differentiation in terms of

developmental models.'^

He

correlated statistics published

by Chaptal

in 1819, as

well as ones gleaned from various government agencies (such as the Contributions Indirectes, the Direction Generale des Forets,

and the Direction Generale des

Mines), with the educational data and interpreted the results in

much the same dual-

The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line

terms as in his lecture of the year before. In so doing, he raised a

istic

How,

in spatial terms,

who

administrators

was the

relied

economy organized?

nation's

on prefectural

ception of geography, which

drew on two

one sensitive to the

infinite diversity

of national

In the summaries of

unity.''*

of

reality, J.

modes of

distinct

Previously, imperial

had formulated

statistics

new question:

their

own

con-

spatial representation,

the other firmly

Peuchet, prefectural

wedded

to the idea

statistics

were pre-

sented in a series of juxtaposed descriptions of departements and regions; the data

were never arranged so as to bring out broader internal contrasts whole.

even

By

if his

categories

in the

contrast, for Jean-Antoine Chaptal, the unitary vision

figures

were arranged

in tables

by departement,

empire as a

was paramount:

his favorite descriptive

were "everywhere" and "nowhere," indicative of a homogeneous con-

Between these two extremes there was no room

ception of French territory.

for

thinking on an intermediate scale: differences were either dispersed in a host of local

and departemental findings or aggregated into a portrait of national unity (now in

economic rather than the

the

clear

what was new

Reasoning

in

political sphere).'^

This observation helps to make

of the Restoration "arithmeticians."

in the contribution

terms of the value of agricultural and industrial products, average

income per inhabitant, and public revenues, Dupin concluded an undoubted

enjoyed

lead

over

southern

Cherbourg)— Geneva Line clearly divided two Underlying

this

conclusion one can

make out

France:

that northern

the

distinct

Saint-Malo

transport,

Dupin

book

7, for

the broad outlines of an explanation

example, which

consequently in canals. But

this factor

natural

devoted to internal

could not have been decisive, because the

own, including

south enjoyed natural advantages of

its

growing crops unsuited

Hence other

history.

is

its

northern France's advantages in natural waterways and

stresses

for the inequality in

(or

economic universes.

based on three factors. First, northern France reaped the benefits of advantages: at the beginning of

France

to the north.

a climate that

permitted

were needed

to account

factors

economic development. Dupin was

discreet about

one of them:

On the problem of peasant income, he wrote: "The earnings of farmers in

southern France are barely enough to keep them alive so long as they retain their strength and health, but tress

if

they

fall

ill

or are injured or

and can no longer support themselves or

the refuge of the hospital, or

argument

is

their families

what have you. Such was

peasants everywhere in the kingdom prior the

grow old, they sink into

to the

is

the deplorable situation

of

based on history, moving from the determination of a disparity to a

line,

cultural: not

it

were, along the Saint-

and the nondevelopment of the south has become, owing to the

progress of the north, a question of underdevelopment. tion

without private charity,

Revolution" (emphasis added)." Here

process of differentiation. History has stopped, as

Malo— Geneva

dis-

only

scholastic competition

is

is

The key

to such an evolu-

elementary education more widely available

also harsher there.

in the north,

For every hundred pupils admitted to

471

472

ROGER CHARTIER the royal colleges there 6,931 in the south:

were 1 5,980 children

"Thus

subjects taken

in

primary schools

from the

superior schools are chosen from

among a much

north than in the south. This, in

my

northern French in

letters, science,

out being false to the

spirit

view,

and the

is

common class to be elevated to the larger

its

group of competitors

in the

the reason for the superiority of the

arts."^*'

One might add, moreover, with-

of Dupin's argument, that

those activities and businesses dependent "not on the

knowledge of

in the north but only

this superiority fertility

was limited to

of the land but on the

inhabitants."

This pre-Darwinian version of "educational Darwinism" was Dupin's basic explanation for northern France 's lead, and

example for

his "compatriots

Dupin

therefore held the north

up

as an

of the south" to follow. The purpose of his two-vol-

ume work, Forces productives et commercialese was thus to develop a model for those who ignored economic growth or had seen it pass them by. The work began on a solemn note: "Compatriots of the south,

it is

to

you

that

I

dedicate this description

of northern France. For your generous emulation and reflective imitation

He

model of one part of the realm.

is

offer a

then takes his readers on an imaginary jour-

ney through the thirty-two departements on the more prosperous internal frontier. Their advantage

I

most evident

in the area

side of France's

of industrial develop-

ment, one result of which is inequality in the terms of trade between the two Frances:

Considerable trade flows between northern and southern France. The south sends huge quantities of wine, so on. In return

it

receives

spirits, oil, livestock,

wrought iron

in a

wool,

and

many

products of the

arts.

Thus

and

silk

products, and

thousand forms, objects of the gold-

smith's art, jewels, fine furniture, woolens, spun and ings,

silk

woven

cotton, books, engrav-

the south ships primarily agricultural

products, while the north ships mainly manufactured products to the south,

some of

which, such as woolens, are made in part of raw materials from the south.^^

Dupin thus

outlines

one possible analysis of French

inequalities in terms of the

geography of underdevelopment. He cannot deduce all the corollaries of his however, because he sees the imbalance

in the structure

thesis,

of trade between north and

south not as the cause of the disparity between the two regions but merely as the

symptom. For him, what matters most is not how the south is exploited by

the north

but rather

how the north can set an example for the south to follow; the north's lead,

as he sees

it,

can be imputed to the proximity of other advanced industrial nations.

Northern France

is

"favored above

all

by

the proximity of peoples advanced in

industry and very happy in their institutions, such as the British, the Swiss, and the

Batavians."

By

contrast, southern France's only neighbors are "the peoples of

Spain and Portugal, Sardinia and Africa, long backward and degraded by bad laws

and bad governments."^^ For Dupin, the two-France motif served to bolster a

stir-

ring plea in praise of manufacturing and celebration of parliamentary institutions.

The model of development lay to

the north, in England and Scotland,

where

a

new

The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line and optimal equilibrium had been established between agricultural and industrial populations.

By heeding

the lessons of this example, northern France

would begin once more

further progress and southern France

still

to

would enjoy

move forward

and close the gap. Once the surplus agricultural population was shifted into indus-

and public education became available to

try

disappear, and efits

all

all,

the Saint-Malo— Geneva line

would

of France, unriven by internal boundaries, would enjoy the ben-

of England's good fortune.

The two opposed

pairs, enlightened

now joined by

France and poor France, were

raphy of values. The publication tion de la justice criminelle

France and obscure France, prosperous

in 1827

introduced a

a third,

of the

Compte general de Vadministra-

first

new set of

which transformed the geog-

statistics into the picture,

height-

ening the debate over the various "influences" likely to account for criminal behavior.^'*

These new

statistics

were soon widely publicized,

inclusion in a pamphlet published in 1828

Monarchie francaise comparee aux principaux

as

evidenced by their

by Adrien Balbi under the

etats

title

La

du monde}'^ Even more important,

new science of "moral statistics," which the Academie would "rank first among the branches of general statistics." It the lawyer Guerry set out to do research that made him one of

they became the basis of the des Sciences in 1833

was

in this area that

the first to explore the field of criminal geography.^""

Guerry proceeded

to aggre-

gate the data contained in the Compte generalhy using what he considered to be neutral

geographic

criteria:

"We shall therefore divide France into five natural regions:

the north, the south, the east, the west, and the center, each

contiguous departements. There

is

does not favor any system, because district is

First of

geometry and

at justifying a

draws

its

it is

lines in perfect

entirely geometric, others."^''

his explanations are

all,

feature, in this case, the

a

nothing arbitrary about

determined by that of the four

two reasons.

composed of seventeen this

grouping, which

and the extent of each

Guerry 's plan

aimed

is

interesting for

at reconciling

nature with

purely theoretical division of French territory, one that

freedom on a neutral surface with reference obvious existence of "natural regions." In

to a

this

permanent

we perceive

concern not unlike that of Dupin to identify his two Frances with what "our ances-

tors called the regions

of langue

d'oil

and langue

d'oc,

"^^

and perhaps also an echo of

the tensions that had influenced the division of the country into departements in 1790.^'

The will to reshape

space, whether

defining territories on a map, historical guarantees.

By

is

by drawing boundaries on the ground or

hard put to

it

to deal with an absence of natural or

dividing France into five parts, moreover, Guerry dis-

turbed the simple symmetry of the Saint-Malo— Geneva line and the whole system

of values that went along with

it.

Indeed, the geography of criminal behavior, based on data taken from the Compte general for the years 1825 to 1830, turned out to be governed not by a single law but

by

different laws for each type of crime. In crimes against persons the south ranked

473

9

DE

L'ETAT T)R L IXSTUrCTIOX ET dans

les «livers

DU XOMB

Arron^^ semens its Academies

et des

Gm

(^AR A.BALBI &_A.M.GUEHinr, imrovmce

power, 259; status

242

salization,

Revolutionary calendar, 89—90; as memoire,

bolism, 290; tripartite

15;

lieu

de

spontaneous origin, 85

Revolutionary identity: linked to Jewish

ing, 243;

splits,

277; univer-

286—290; used as form of vot-

used

in

Revolutionary assem-

blies, 242; see also Political parties

Right-left division: adoption attitudes toward, z6')—z66;

emancipation, 22

sym-

by

voters, 258;

cemented

in

World

Revolutionary Judiasm, 384

1930s, 274; developments after

Revolutionary religion, 135—136

War I,

Revolutionary tradition, 331

296; Restoration parliament, 24oi; role

Revolutionary utopianism, 420

in

Revolution of 1848, 104—105

viewed by Dumont, 293—294;

Revolutions de France et de Brabant (news-

Right and Left

paper): began publication (1789), 131

celtique:

founded (1870), 61

Revue encyclopedique, 474i—4751

Revue

historique, 357; editorial

(1876),

5

Rhine: as lieu de memoire, 16

Ridgway-the-Plague, 237

contemporary

Rights of

Man

societies, 283; as

see also

(Peree), 130!

Role politique des protestants frangaise de

Revolution Today, i^oi

Revue

267; properties of expression,

by Monod

i685 a ijiS (Dedieu), 373

Roman

bourgeois (Furetiere), 432

Roman conquest (of Gaul), 64—67, 68, 70 Roman Constitution (1713), 312, 316, 321 Roman de Brut (Wace), 47 Roman law, 54

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Romans,

Romantic

122—129;

Gaul, 53

53, 54; living in

generation, 511— 516; see also

^^-^^

Catholic-secular

antagonism Secular Virtues (Grandjouan), i23i

Generation

memory,

Royalism, 253

Self (gen.): relationship to

Royaumont

Self-reference: in lieujc de memoire, 16

Bible, 121

Rue Copernic: explosion

at

synagogue,

420, 422i; see also Anti-Semitism

Semaines religieuses (Breton publication), 126

Rue Transnonain, 98

Semur: excavations, 61

Ruines de Port-Royal, Le (Gregoire), 331,

Sentimental education, 444

Sephardic Jews,

334

Rural

exodus, 452—453; see also Paris-

from provincial, 430

115, 421; see also

Jews

Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO), 186 Seule France,

province relationship, 452 Rustic: difference

11

Sevres:

La

(Maurras), 184

Upper Normal School,

124

Sharecroppers, 479—480

Sacre-Coeur: as

lieu

de memoire, 18; sym-

Simon de Nantua

Saint-Magloire, 316

Saint-Malo— Geneva

Shook (Lanzmann), 417 Sicambrians, 56

bolic architecture, 125

467—496; divided

line,

economic universes, 470;

first identified,

Sisters

(religious text), 121

of Charity, 122

Six-Day War, 419

469; map, 466i; recent rediscovery, 496;

Social contract, 100

significance, 476; during twentieth cen-

Social history, 69—70, 148—149

tury,

Socialism, 212, 294

488

Salon of 1824, 251

Socialist Party:

during 1970s, 106; in 1981,

power

Salon of 1831, 32

199; increased

Salon of 1901,

joined with Radicals, 267; as part of

35i

Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 141!

Savary

Law

Section Frangaise de I'lnternational

Scenes de la vie de province (Balzac), 4421

Schools: Ecole de Port-Royal, 331; Ecole

du Louvre,

61;

Ouvriere (S.F.LO.), 261, 262 Socialists: in 1890s,

260

Social mobility, 443

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 62;

Social morphology, 491, 495, 496

private schools, 114

Social organizations, 488

Scientific

communities, 527

Second Empire (1852— 1870),

Social sciences, 451; industrial

expansion, 152; purpose, 182

Second Republic (1848— 1852),

93,

447

Section Fran9aise de I'lnternational

Ouvriere (S.F.LO.), 261, 262

467

Social security archives, 9

Social statistics,

Second Vatican Council, 212

487—488

Social status, 428

Societe de I'Histoire

du Protestantisme

Fran^aise (S.H.P.F.), 357, 366 Societe de Philosophic Chretienne, 334

Secular clergy, 119

Societe de Port-Royal, 302

Secular education, 109— 115, 120—129

Societe des

Secularism, 121; defined by Sainte-Beuve,

Societe des Antiquaires de Franc, 39

117; histories,

in— 116;

tri-

partite pattern, 280; revival (1970s), 284;

(1984), 113

des Chartes, 61; Ecole

(late 1890s), 258;

morality.

Amis de Port-Royal, 302

Societe des Etudes Juives, 392

647

648

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Societe des Sciences Historiques et

Suicide: geographical differences in fre-

quency, 486

Naturelles, 61

Societe Litteraire of Clermont, 34

Supplement au Necrologe (Cerveau),

Societe Royale de Medecine, 486—487

324—326 "Sur

Societe Saint-Augustin, 302, 341 Societies:

modern,

structure,

la necessite

d'une nouvelle edition des

Pensees" (Cousin), 339

297

Society: center of gravity, 432; class structure, 76, 174; described, 446; divided

by

educational systems, 142; foundation for

Syllabus, 120

Symbolic history (gen.), ix-x; described, xvi; linked diverse disciplines, xii

morality, 135; in la province, 448; rela-

Synagogues, 380

tionship to power, 487; social contract,

Syndicat National des Instituteurs, 129

95-96 Society (gen.): break in symbolic order, 289; changing nature of, 6, 291; contradiction in defining axioms, 292—293;

England

Middle Ages, 80; as frame of

in

reference, 290; Puritans in

New World,

Tableau de la France (Michelet), 439—440 Tableau de la geographie de la France (Vidal

de La Blache),

xii;

seen by Jullian, 69

Tableau du Grand Siecle (Villemain), 337 Table ronde,

La

(Braspart), 524

81; role vis-a-vis individuals, 293; split

Tabula rasa (American), 82—84

between conservation and change, 287;

Tabula rasa (French),

unity, 289

Tapestries: Gallic kings (1530), 50;

Sociologists: methodology, 495

84, 85, 86, 106

Remus

and Francus (sixteenth century), 49i

Sociology, 490, 492, 495

Tartuffe (Moliere), 431

Solitaires (religious recluses), 305, 315; at

Temoignage de

Temple de

Port-Royal des Champs, 305

Sorrow and the Pity, The (film), 198, 219

S.O.S.-Racisme (political action group),

(Horde), 317

la Verite

I'Oratoire:

commemoration of

Revocation of Edict of Nantes, 367 Temps, Le: political commentators, 255

Temps modernes, Les: published attack on

1441

Southern France, 471, 476, 479; Saint-Malo— Geneva

see also

hussards, 524

Tennis Court Oath,

line

"Souvenirs" (Gazier), 341

134, 501

Testement (Richelieu): as lieu de memoire, 17

Souvenirs (Moreau), 331

Texts (French): comic books, 33

Souvenirs (Tocqueville), 393—394

Texts (gen.),

Sovereignty, 88-89

Theater: anti-Semitic, 384—385; provincial

Space, 4^6-4^7

stereotypes, 430

Theater of memory, 210

Stalinism, 206 State:

51

divorced from nation (1930s),

5

Theatre-Fran9ais, 343, 427

State Jews, 404, 410, 413, 4i8i

Themericourt Collection, 330

Statesmen's memoirs: as lieux de memoire, 17

Theocracy: transalpine Gaul, 58

Street in

Landerneau,

A (Ciceri), 426i

Stuarts (English rulers), 81

Student

movement

Student riots

(May

de memoire, 500

Thermidorians, 437

Third Estate,

52; alliance

with kings of

(1986), 500

France, 102; confrontation with nobility,

1968), 499, 503; as lieu

75;

Gauls as symbols

use of

left

of, 55; origins, 56;

side of hall, 243

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Third Force,

Bibles, 308; launched

113

Third RepubHc

definition of

(i 870-1 940):

French national

identity, 31; educational

new wave of

Jansenism, 315

Union de

la

Gauche

(late 1970s), 211

battles, 341; Gallic past, 30; history text-

Union des Etudiants Communistes, 229

books, 130; immigration, 154; influence

Union des Jeunesses Revolutionnaires de

of

la province, 459;

Paris-province rela-

tionship, 454i— 455i; political categories,

257; studied

by Goguel,

French memory,

5;

287; tradition of

transferred

power

to

Petain (1940), 186—187

France: song, 226

Union General, 403, 404 Union Nationale, 267

Union of Rights,

255; ^ee also Political

parties

Throne Burned, TAe (Lordereau), looi

Union of

Time: abolished by memory,

Union pour I'Action Morale, 342 "Union Sacree," 516

tion as symbolic

526; genera-

unit, 527; see also

United

Generation

the Left, 284

States: distinguished

from Europe, immigration

Totalitarianism, 276, 289, 295

83; historical continuity, 83;

Toul selection center,

policies, 148; origins, 145, 1466; see

1

52; see also

Revolution (American)

Immigration

Tour de France memoire,

Universal history (gen.), 48—49

(bicycle race): as lieu de

Universalism, 392

xii

Tour de la France par deux enfants. (Bruno), 121, 223; as

lieu

La

de memoire,

Universal suffrage: approved (1848), 253; ix,

15—16 Tourist

abo

sites: as

lieux de memoire, 18

Tournai, 34

created need for political identification, 254; effect

on Catholic-secular debate,

142; effect

on Paris-province

ship,

Trade: between northern and southern

relation-

450

Utrecht: Jansenists

in,

318

France, 472

Transalpine Gaul, 58

Vacations: effect

Treaty of Frankfurt, 231

Treaty of Nijmegen: as

lieu de

Triomphe de

la

Triumph of

the French People,

memoire, 16

Republique (Dalou), 258

The

(David), 94i Trois Glorieuses, 98,

99

True Portrait of the Wandering Jew, The, 388

Two

Paris-province relation-

Valogne, 34 Vatican Council of 1870, 335 Vaudeville, 427, 438; representation of la province,

Trojans, 47, 49

Tuileries,

on

ship, 453

427

Veil

Law

Vel'

d'Hiv (Velodrome d'Hiver), 222,

(1975), 519

379, 4i6i Vercingetorix (Lacroix), 26i, 32

437

Vercingetorix devant

Republics, \oyi

le

tribunal de Cesar

(engraving), 32 Ultra-right,

Verdun: as

272—273

de memoire, 16

Versailles: as lieu de memoire, 18

Ultras, 248, 250, 251

Unigenitus (papal bull, 1713), 302; battle against, 313, 316, 324;

lieu

condemned

Quesnel, 311; condemned vulgate

Vers I'armee de metier (de Gaulle), 231

Veterans' organizations: as lieux de

memoire, 19

649

1

650

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Vichy France (Paxton), 219

Vichy regime (1940— 1944), 181-202; as ambiguous past, 183— 191; anti-Semitism, 409—415; changing memories

of, 181,

War of War of

1776, 83 Investitures, 58

Wars of

Religion, 355

Welfare

state,

196—202; compared with previous

Whiggery,

regimes, 182-183; exploitation of GaUic

Whites

past, 30, 31;

guardian of

integrity, 29;

Jewish statute (1940), 191;

187—188; policy of collabora-

officials,

tion, 185—186; policy

184; revived debate 113; role in

liberation

on secular education,

deportation of Jews, 199;

source of later divisions, 22; strategy for

movement,

Words: fundamental French

519

idea, viii

Workers' movement, 60, 176

Working

of exclusion,

192—193; renewal of French institutions,

85

(reactionaries), 253-254

Women's

territorial

290

class,

Works of

237

history: as lieu de memoire, 17

World War

effect

I:

on

religious conflict,

129; generational idea, 524;

German

render, 18

national revitalization, 191— 196; use of

World War

Gallic references, 29—32; use of rightist

Hands

ideology,

League of French Volunteers,

3

Vidalian geographers, 488—490; see also

Vidal de La Blache in

Name

sur-

in

II:

Hitler

and Retain Shaking

a Field of Ruins (fresco), 20oi; 20oi; as

operation of memory, 218; see also Vichy

regime

Index

Vie de Henry Brulard (Stendhal): as lieu de

Xenophobia,

memoire, 17

View of

the

Abbey of Port-Royal des

156, 166, 174; ^ec also

Foreigners; Immigration

Champs (Boulogne), 3o6i— 3071 Yalta Conference (1944): as lieu de

Villele ministry, 337

Vineam Domini (papal

memoire, 17

bull), 314

Year 1789, 95—104; interpreted

Vingt ans en igSi (Kanters), 524 Visit

of Napoleon

III to the Rothschild Estate

at Ferrieres (engraving), 3951

place in Jacobin history, 103; reflected by Trois Glorieuses, 98

Year 1793, 95—104; centrality to Jacobins,

Visual images (gen.), 13 Vivarais: Protestant

in 1830, 98;

museum, 362

103; dictatorship celebrated, 102; latent

Vix: princely burial site discovered (1953),

45

in 1

Year 1789, 98; revised view

of,

by

830s Jacobins, 100—102; viewed in

Voting, 256-257, 264, 284

nineteenth century, 96; see also Reign

Voyages pittoresques (Nodier, Taylor, and

of Terror

Year 1830, 98; historians

Cailleux), 32

Voyages romantiques dans I'ancienne France:

La

Bretagne (Nodier,

et. al.),

War:

effect

388i, see also

Jews

on GauUist and Communist

memories, 229

of, 105; interpreta-

Monarchy

Year 1848, 105

462i

Wall of the Federes, 222

Wandering Jew, 381—382,

tion, 100; see also July

Year

II,

Year

III: crisis

98

of Germinal and

Prairial,

246

"Young People of Today, The" (Massis and Tarde), 518

Youth: growing autonomy, 510— 511; internation rebellion, 499; as

gory (since 1960s),

new

174; transformed

adult society, 518

Youth movements,

social cate-

501, 504

Zionism: in France, 417, 421

by

Text: Fournier

Compositor: Columbia University Press Printer:

Edward Brothers

Binder:

Edward Brothers

(continuedfrom frontflap)

More than moments

a linear chronicle of critical

in the nation's history,

Memory is

Realms of

on

a richly evocative meditation

how the French construct their past through symbols, allusions, and associations. Hailed as the publishing event of the decade,

it is

an

invaluable source for understanding the sin-

gular shape of French culture and the

com-

plex relationship between history and

mem-

ory in all

societies.

PIERRE NORA

is

Editorial Director at Edi-

tions Gallimard.

He

Le Debat^ and

Directeur d'Etudes

Ecole

des

is

is

Hautes

editor of the journal

Etudes

en

at the

Sciences

Sociales, Paris.

LAWRENCE

D.

Geisel Third

KRITZMAN

is

Ted and Helen

Century Professor

in

the

Humanities and Professor of French and

Comparative Literature

at

Dartmouth Col-

lege.

ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER

has

translated

more than seventy books from French, and was recently named Chevalier de I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

COVER DESIGN: LINDA SECONDARI COVER ILLUSTRATION Liberty Leading the People :

by Eugene Delacroix Courtesy of the Louvre, Paris

PRINTED IN

U.S.A.

"This book of essays by a most distinguished galaxy of French intellecmals will provide

with a remarkably coherent view of the

many

lines

its

readers

of cleavage that run across the history of

France, whose perpetuation and coexistence constitute the conflictual unity of the French nation." —Stanley Hoffmann, author of Decline or Renewal: France Since the igjos

In

its

seven- volume French edition, Les Lieux de memoire was lauded by John Weightman of the Times Liter-

ary Supplement as "a magisterial attempt to define what

it is

to

be French." Francis Haskell of The

New

Review of Books noted "how very valuable the concept behind the book will be for historians of many

York

differ-

ent kinds."

Realms of Memory, the three-volume English-language edition of

what Pierre Nora

calls "the

this critically

acclaimed work,

very marrow of the work." France's leading intellectuals survey

have reinvented their past across the centuries and

reflect

how

distills

the French

on how myths become fused with history

in the cre-

ation of a collective national heritage.

This

first

volume,

Conflicts

and Divisions, explores the

clashes that structure France's self-definition.

political, religious,

Volume Two,

geographical, and generational

Traditions, discusses the roots of

French identi-

ty—landscape, cathedral, and court; literary works; and singular reference points from the Tour de France to the legacy of sophisticated gastronomy.

The

third

volume, Symbols, considers the emblems that signify

Frenchness to peoples around the world: Bastille Day, the Eiffel Tower, Joan of Arc, and Rene Descartes. Juxtaposing the accomplishments of France's history with the popular embodiments of ty.

Realms of Memory is a bold, innovative form of

by anyone interested

critical practice, a

I:

Kr^s^tof Pomian, Francois Furet, Claude Langlois, Gerard Noiriel, Phillipe Burrin, Pierre Nora,

Marcel Gauchet, Catherine Maire, Phillipe Joutard, Pierre Birnbaum, Alain Corbin, Roger Chartier

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES:

A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism Lawrence D. Krit^man, Editor

Columbia University Press

'New

ISBN 0-a31-0aM04-fl

9

780231"08A0A8

national identi-

stunning achievement to be appreciated

in the rich culture of the French.

CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME

its

York