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 is a monumental collec-

tive endeavor by France's leading intellectu-

als, exploring the cathedrals and palaces, the

rituals, legends, and episodes that form the
landscape of French consciousness. The first
volume, Conflicts and Divisions, reflects on
symbols of political, religious, regional, and
generational difference that structure

France's self-definition.

The book begins with the political clashes

that have carved a path 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 cen-

turies, from the often irreverent portrayals of
Gauls in such popular media as the Asterix
comics to nostalgic reimaginings of pre-rev-
olutionary 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 the persecution of
Huguenots in the sixteenth-century Wars of
Religion; and of the processes of forgetting,

witnessed in the assimilative tradition among

French Jews that has hindered, if not pre-
vented, rediscovery of a distinctively Jewish

past and acknowledgement of the French

legacy of anti-Semitism.

Conflicts and Divisions concludes with a

section on issues of time and place, an analy-

sis of the cleavages that separate Paris and
province, north and south, and human gen-
erations as demarcated by such transforma-
tive years as 1789 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 i: CONFLICTS AND DIVISIONS

Under the Direction of Pierre Nora

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION EDITED AND WITH A FOREWORD BY LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

To honor Clifford E. Rybolt, Jr. and Mary Grace Rickert Rybolt, friends of France,
Edwin IV. Rickert has made a gift to the Press toward the costs of publishing this book.

Columbia University Press wishes 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 Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright (c) 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
;
edition edited and with

a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer

p. cm. — (European 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 (alk. paper)

I.France — Civilization — Philosophy. 2. Memory. 3. Symbolism.

4. National characteristics, French. 5. NationaHsm — France.

I. Nora, Pierre. 11. Kritzman, Lawrence D. iii. Title.

IV. Series.

DC33.L6513 1996
944 —dc20 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 in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity
Julia Kristeva, Nations 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 of the German Intelligentsia

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, IVhat Is Philosophy!'

Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance
Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind
Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Identity
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, igyz-iggo

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present

 1

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Lawrence D. Kritiman ix

Preface to the English Language Edition xv

General Introduction: Between Memory and History, Pierre Nora i

Introduction to Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, Pierre Nora 21

PART I. POLITICAL DIVISIONS

I Franks and Gauls, Kr^sitof Pomian 27
II The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, Francois Furet 79
III Catholics and Seculars, Claude Langlois 109
IV French and Foreigners, Gerard Noiriel 145
V Wichy, Phillipe Burrin 18

VI Gaullists and Communists, Pierre Nora 205

VII Right and Left, Marcel Gauchet 241

PART II. MINORITY RELIGIONS

VIII Port-Royal: The Jansenist Schism, Catherine Maire 301
IX The Museum of the Desert: The Protestant Minority, Phillipe Joutard 353
X Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the Rue Copernic: Jews at the Heart
of French History, Pierre Birnbaum yj^

PART III. DIVISIONS OF TIME AND SPACE

XI Divisions of Time and Space, Alain Corbin 427
XII The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line, Roger Chartier 467
XIII Generation, Pierre Nora 499

Index 613
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 — seek to
locate the "memory places" of French national identity as they have been con-
structed since the middle ages. This history of memory is realized through the

imaginary representations and historical realities that occupy the symbolic sites that

form French social and cultural identity. Memory, which also includes forgetting,

should not be taken literally. It is to be understood in its "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 "memory" distinguishes

itself from history, which is regarded as an intellectual practice more deeply rooted
in the evidence derived from the study of empirical reality. The recollection of the

French past as it emerges from this work is the result of a cataloging of the memory
places produced over time 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 as a

history of France through memory, Nora's work not only demonstrates how
memory binds communities together and creates social identities but also drama-
tizes 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 memory place, a term
he gleans from Frances Yates's The Art of Memory and Maurice Halbwachs' The
 —
X LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

Collective Memory? Drawing on rhetorical tradition that dates back to Cicero and
QuintiUan, Realms of memory functions as an inventory of loci memoriae. Nora's
conception of memory is broad: he uses it 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 flag, the "Marseillaise") all of
which are the result of an imaginary process that codifies and represents the histor-
ical consciousness of "quintessential France." If memory places are symbolic in
nature it is because they signify the context and totemic meaning from which col-
lective identity emerges.

Nora's "symbolic typology" presents both ideas and the material realities that

structure France's national identity. Yet memory as Nora conceives of it does not
constitute a monolithic entity. Beyond the repertoire of monuments, institutions,

events and commemorative dates. Realms of Memory 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 total-

ized concept since its sense of identity is plural and unsettled. Indeed, a "realm of

memory" is a polyreferential entity that can draw on a multiplicity of cultural myths

that are appropriated for different ideological or political purposes. For example, in

his insightful essay on Joan of Arc (which appears in volume 3) Michel Winock dra-
matizes this phenomenon by demonstrating how that historical figure emerged as a

political emblem simultaneously functioning for the mythology of both the left 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
a totemic figure capable of symbolically forestalling foreign incursions into the
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 is one that is, at times, self-

contradictory and that threatens the realization of its universalistic pretensions.

The organic idea of the nation or the French "super-ego" that Nora refers to in the

first volumes of the French-language edition seem to operate most potently at his-

torical moments when those Hegelian heroes — Louis XIV, Napoleon, de Gaulle
reify the very possibility of movement and change. What remains, those temporal
expanses situated between the privileged moments perceived as periods of histori-
cal greatness, is but the peripatetic and destabilizing movement of time.

In articulating the concept of memory Nora's work represents a rethinking of

certain key ideas found in Maurice Halbwachs's theory of collective memory. To be
 —
Foreword xi

sure, memory is diametrically oppo-

Halbwachs's sociological conceptualization of
site to that of the philosopher Henri Bergson who thought of memory as a purely

subjective phenomenon. On the contrary, Halbwachs displaces memory from the

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 we par-
take. Places of memory are therefore determined by the mix of individuals that con-
stitute the social group to which they relate.

If Nora speculates on memory he does so in order to delin-

the idea of collective

eate the metamorphoses that French memory has undergone in recent times. By

reflecting on the phenomenon of the nation as republic Nora demonstrates how

Republican France was constructed as a series of principles meant to defend a sin-

gular moral imperative functioning in the name of a social totality. For example, the

memory of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" evoked a past through which
the very idea of the Republic could be created and commemorated; it gave the social
community a narrative through which it could continue to forge its identity.

However more recently, in the shadow of the infelicitous historical events experi-

enced during this past half-century — the Vichy collaboration, torture in Algeria

the universalistic principles underlying republican memory and the humanism asso-
ciated with it had come undone. France had now left itself open to an agonistic
encounter that would be played out in the postwar period between Gaullism and
Communism in an attempt to take hold of the reptablican tradition and derive from
it renewed national myths. Memory would now take shape in divided and compet-
ing spheres of political influence; it would make the republican values of cohesion
associated with the universal principles of Enlightenment thought no longer capa-
ble of creating true consensus. In this context the memorial process activates a
renewed sense of national self-consciousness by dividing the "unitary framework"
of collective memory into smaller configurations or identities resulting in the politi-
cization of memory.
Nora's collection presents a series of highly innovative essays that signal a new
approach to the writing of national history. This new historiography distances itself

from the chronological and teleological theoretical presuppositions of its predeces-

sors. History conceived either in terms of the definable causes and effects of
Comtean positivism or the artificial determinism of the Annales school is viewed as

no longer critically acceptable.

To be sure, the ostensible target of Nora's new historiography is the nineteenth

century historian Ernest Lavisse, who in his eighteen-volume history of France,
conjoined scientific and affective concerns in order to produce a positivist history.
Lavisse is regarded as the historian most responsible for drawing historical inter-
pretations from archival data; the archive was the place where memory was stored
XII LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

and from which history could be materiaUzed in written form. Ironically the dis-
cursive manifestation of archival memory for all the scientific pretensions it

espoused was filtered through a romantic consciousness whose modus operandi was
to sustain political myths. Furthermore, archival memory limited the parameters of

the true memorialist enterprise since it put constraints on what constituted cultural
memorabilia and the many loci —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 dis-

continuous thread of the past remembered. Nora contends that even if references to
memory are ever present in the contemporary world it is paradoxically because we
are currently living in a historical society where memory functions as a mere his-

torical trace that can exist only as a simulation of the past. "Lieux de memoire exist
because there are no longer any milieux de memoire^ settings in which memory is a
real part of everyday experience" (p. i). If premodern societies reenact memory
through traditions and rituals where present and past exist simultaneously in a kind
of atemporal space in which act and meaning coalesce, then the historical world of
the present is one that represents historical consciousness as disembodied memories.
The creation of "realms of memory" is the result of modern society's inability to

live within real memory; memory" takes place

the consecration of a "realm of
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
need to represent what ostensibly no longer exists.

The most striking aspect of this theoretical practice stems from the manner in

which temporality is conceived. In modern societies the past is experienced as "his-

torical" since it is no longer authentically lived. The present mode of historical per-
ception is derived from an imaginative form of consciousness based more on myths
than on facts. Our knowledge of the past is less a question of our empirical grip on
the past than on our apprehension of the past as we represent it through the lens of
the present. Accordingly, Nora and his contributors engage in an archaeological
quest through which they are able to retrospectively "uncover" traditions and delin-
eate the manner in which they took shape.
To be sure, 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 Arc with the birth of the nation.

The medieval cathedral, as 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 xiii

structed a posteriori as a "memory place" associated with the creative energy

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

used as the narrative frame for the reinterpretation of the collective 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
conceptualizations of the past.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

symbol of revolutionary modernism) and thereby transforms that "realm of mem-

ory" into its contemporary incarnation as part of the "poetry of Paris."
The "realms of memory" explored in the essays in these three volumes produce
a multiplicity of interpretations that give new meaning to history through what
might be termed a form of genealogical revisionism. If a "realm of memory" is to

exist it must have a capacity for metamorphosis: the recycling of knowledge

through associations and new symbolic representations. In becoming a synonym for
national identity, a "realm of memory" enables successive generations to mediate
their cultural myths by inculcating them with their desires.

Ironically, Nora's new reading of history uncovers the symptomology of a cer-

tain French^z/z de siecle melancholia. As Nora points out the French Revolution and
the traditions associated with it functioned as the determining element in the con-
struction of national identity through references to narratives of the past. The
social order 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-
tation of its values. From memory overdetermines history in its
this perspective,

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
national culture can no longer unify. Furthermore, national memory, as Nora and
his colleagues now conceive of it, can be found in the institutions of the ancien
regime and the collective heritage of the monumental and physical landscape as they

now partake of France 's memorial legacy.

But for now, what remains of the idea of nationhood is engendered by a nostal-
gic reflection, articulated through the disjunctive remembrance of things past. In a

way, one might argue that the quest for memory in the contemporary world is noth-
ing more than an attempt to master the perceived loss of one's history. It is also, as

Nora so brilliantly teaches us, an attempt to read the signs of culture in places,
objects, and images that are marked by vestiges of the past, and remembered in the

vicissitudes of contemporary consciousness. When all is said and done the idea of
XIV LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

France that emerges from these volumes is based more on the imaginary construc-
tions of memory than on the encyclopedic compilation of empirical data.

Nora's remembrance of things French ultimately suggests a new critical model

through which the history of memory may be written. What appears to be a book
about memory and French national identity becomes a study with critical dimen-
sions that might at first not be obvious. 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 its identity by rearranging
the logic constituting its "realms of memory." Each nation has its official memories
and myths; just as the French have fashioned their history according to the so-called

universal values of the French Revolution, Americans have anchored their own in

the idealistic dream of "liberty and justice for all." By focusing on how the disap-

pearance of certain memorialist practices in France enabled historians to uncover

the patterns of other traditions, Nora suggests how the rewriting of the history of

memory can forge new paradigms of cultural identity. The reader will find in the
essays that make up Realms of Memory an exhilarating intellectual project whose
exemplarity lies in its power to translate the vicissitudes of national self-conscious-

ness and the disjunctions between the original meanings attached to memory sites

and the heuristic processes currently used to describe them. In this "era of com-
memoration," Nora and how the history of memory
his colleagues enable us to see

functions as a mirror of the changing role of cultural politics and how national com-
memoration in the age of global politics has given way to the heterogeneous and
divided character of contemporary remembrance. Always insightful, always
nuanced, always sensitive to epistemological shifts over time, Realms of Memory
will remain a landmark in cultural criticism and historiography for years to come.

Lawrence D. Kritzman
Dartmouth College
May 1996
 PREFACE TO THE E N G L I S H - L AN G UAG E EDITION

From Lieux de me moire to

Realms of Memory
Pierre Nora

These three volumes of Realms of Memory are, in the strongest possible sense, a

translation of the seven volumes published in French under the title Les Lieux de
memoire. They offer what Rabelais would 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. This venture was collective as well as individual: collective,
because it involved nearly 120 contributors, most of them French, to whom I owe a
very real debt of gratitude, for without the effort and talent of each and every one
of them this work would be of little interest; and personal, because the project as a

whole — its overall conception and detailed structure, revised at various stages

along the way —was a solitary work, which evolved as it progressed.

The point of departure, the original idea, which I first tried out on my seminar
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, was to study national
feeling not in the traditional thematic or chronological manner but instead by ana-
lyzing the places in which the collective heritage of France was crystallized, the
principal lieux^ in all memory was rooted, in
senses of the word, in which collective
order to create a vast topology of French symbolism. Though not really a neolo-
gism, the term did not exist in French when I first used it. It met with remarkable '

success, however, to the point where it was included in the 1993 edition of the Grand
Dictionnaire Robert de la langue frangaise. I took it from ancient and medieval
rhetoric as described by Frances Yates in her admirable book. The Art of Memory
(1966), which recounts an important tradition of mnemonic techniques. The classi-

cal art of memory was based on a systematic inventory of loci memoriae, or "mem-
ory places." In French, the association of the words lieu and memoire proved to have
XVI PIERRE NORA

profound connotations — historical, intellectual emotional, and largely unconscious

(the effect was something like that of the English word "roots"). These connota-
tions arise in part from the specific role that memory played in the construction of
the French idea of the nation and in part from recent changes in the attitude of the
French toward their national past. The goal of this book is to shed light on that spe-

cific role and to illustrate those changes in attitude — in short, to elaborate and make
sense of the very term lieu de memoire.
From the first I envisioned a work in three parts: La
La Nation, and
Republique,
Les France (although the last remained rather vague in my mind). The intention was
to move from the simple to the complex, from content to form, from what was most
easily dated to what was most difficult to pin down, from the most local to the most
general, from the most recent to the most ancient, from the most political to the

most carnal, from the most unitary to the most diverse, from the most evident to the

most problematic. But if the English-speaking reader is to understand the scope and
ambition of a project of which these three volumes can be seen as both a culmina-
tion and a synopsis, I moment to explain the slow process by which that
must take a

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.

La Republique (1984) required only one volume, but La Nation (1986) took three.

For the study of the Republic, it proved sufficient to look at a selection of sites and
illustrative examples mainly from the founding years of the Third Republic. But
"the nation," whose conceptual underpinnings were not as thoroughly explored as
one might expect, called for a more systematic, sweeping, and carefully structured

investigation.

The first volume of La Nation deals with what might be called the immaterial

aspects of memory: the long-term "legacy" of the monarchy as embodied in lieux

such as the anointment ritual of Rheims; the key works that enabled "historiogra-
phy" to 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, its borders, and its

symbolic representation as a hexagon; "the state," with its monumental or symbolic

instruments, like Versailles; and "the patrimony," or legacy of historical monu-
ments and sites, men who did most to preserve it, such as Prosper
together with the
Merimee and Eugene VioUet-le-Duc. The third volume is concerned with the ideal,
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 literature on the one hand and political power, the state, and
the national idea on the other hand has always been close. Here, for instance, one
finds "Verdun" alongside "La Coupole" (the familiar term for the Academic
 Preface to the English-Language Edition xvii

Fran§aise), and "The Louvre," that residence of kings that became a temple of the

arts, alongside "Classic Textbooks."

After the publication of the three- volume edition of La Nation in 1986, the pro-

ject came to a temporary halt. Following a lengthy period in which the country's
leading historians seemed to have rejected the nation as a framework for doing his-
tory, 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 movement, seemed to move in this direction with his
Identite de la France (1986). To be sure, Les Lieux de memoire began with a different
premise and reflected a radically different point of view. Yet if, initially, it had
seemed possible to define the idea of a lieu de memoire and demonstrate its fruitful-

ness by bringing together, for example, such subjects as "monuments to the dead"
and the widely read children's text entitled La Tour de la France par deux enfants, I

felt that in 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, it would be necessary to

take a more theoretical approach. It was no longer enough simply to select objects;

instead those objects would have to be constructed: in 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 me tomove from a relatively narrow to a rel-
atively broad concept of lieu de memoire. The narrow approach had consisted in tak-
ing actual memorials such as the Pantheon and showing how these were actually
closely related to such seemingly different objects as museums, commemorations,
emblems, and mottoes; as well as to even more remote objects, including institutions
such as the Academie Francaise, realities such as borders, regions such as Alsace and
the Vendee, and men such as Frangois Guizot, who was responsible for creating so
many of the instruments by means of which memories are perpetuated; and, in addi-

tion, to more abstract notions such as that of a dynasty, which did so much to pre-

serve the memory of the high and mighty. Now, this broader conception, which
emerged only with the 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, it

should be this: a lieu de memoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-
material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a

symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community (in this case, the

French community). The narrow concept had emphasized the site: the goal was to

exhume significant sites, to identify the most obvious and crucial centers of national

memory, and then to reveal the existence of invisible bonds tying them all together.

As revealing and sweeping as this approach was, however, it tended to create the
 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 their nature. This simple change of
method, this natural extension of the original notion of a lieu de memoire, in fact gave
rise to a far more ambitious project: a history of France through memory.
This was of course a far more 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. If, instead, it were possible

to show that France is an entirely symbolic reality, then those deterministic
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

and would clearly reveal the unifying logic. What began as an empirical, experi-

mental, almost playful attempt to track down lieux de memoire would thus open up
infinitely more exciting new vistas: a notion improvised for the needs of the
moment would then become a category in terms of which contemporary history
could be made intelligible, or perhaps even more than a category, a "concept" —
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 is particularly apt for an exercise of this kind, would then
serve to demonstrate a new approach to national history that might prove useful in

other national contexts. It was this prospect that impelled me to go back to work and
solicit sixty-six additional essays, constituting three thick new volumes of a thou-

sand pages each. These new volumes were conceived to follow the natural articula-
tions of memory itself, which the historian can only approach by way of its divi-

sions, its real or imaginary continuities, and its symbolic fixations. Les France
(1992) can thus be seen as the culmination of the whole enterprise, its most com-
plete achievement, its most vital and expressive component. That is why I chose its

overall architecture as the framework and foundation for putting together this

American edition.

The problem of reducing the seven volumes of the French edition to three vol-

umes for the English-language version imposed a number of difficult choices,

which I 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 that, far from watering down the original con-
ception of the work, fully embodies its method, principal results, and theoretical
reach. Since each stage of the French edition reconsidered, expanded on, and deep-
ened the work of the preceding stages, it seemed natural to use the final stage of the
 —

Preface to the English-Language Edition xix

French edition as the basis for a work that would be just as intellectually coherent
and perhaps somewhat less dense than the French version.
The first of these English volumes, Conflicts and Divisions, is concerned with the
major political, religious, and geo-historical divisions that give French memory its

structure. The second. Traditions, is entirely devoted to roots. It 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
books, which in themselves contain a portrait of French identity. And 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 flag,

the Marseillaise, Bastille Day. It proceeds to survey a number of important places

from Lascaux to the Eiffel 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 Memory represent a third of the
Lieux de memoire? But these volumes are in no sense "selected excerpts." The over-
all plan has been modified in significant ways. The French text is a complex con-
struction, which I have jokingly compared at times to a giant Erector set, at other
times to a labyrinth or cathedral: it is itself a monument that has become, in its way,
a lieu de memoire. The English-language version is a microcosm. It offers a simpli-

fied, purified structure, but one that is quite representative of the spirit and style of

the original edifice. It is ordered differently, but it accomplishes the same mission.
Realms of Memory is own distinctive way, an attempt to subvert as well
thus, in its

as to exemplify and magnify that traditional genre known as the "history of France."

The archetype of that genre, its canonical and to this day unsurpassed model, is the

twenty-seven volume Histoire de France by Ernest Lavisse, a powerful attempt — at

the beginning of the twentieth century when the Third Republic was at its height
to reknit the garment of history rent by the French Revolution and create one seam-
less, synthetic nation: France and the Republic. The originality of Realms of
Memory consists in the effort to decompose that unity, to dismantle its chronologi-
cal and teleological continuity, and to scrutinize under the historian's microscope the
very building blocks out of which traditional representations of France were con-
structed. Of course those building blocks came in many varieties, so that the range
of possible topics is infinite, and exhaustiveness is by definition impossible.

The success of the enterprise depends entirely on the eloquence of the ensemble
and on the skill with which the task is executed. The goal is to pass French identity
through a prism, to relate the symbolic whole to its symbolic fragments. It is one
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 the Republic on the fifti-

eth anniversary of the cave's discovery, how archaeology provided France with a
memory 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 reporters, and its gradual commercialization, and
quite another to use the race to show how that "democratic horse," the bicycle, by
retracing, intially, the route once followed by apprentice craftsmen as they toured
France to acquire the skills of their trades, enabled ordinary people to learn the
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 geo-
graphical diversity in his celebrated Tableau de la geographie de la France, which
served as an introduction to Lavisse's Histoire de France. It is one thing to analyze
the work of Marcel Proust, the man widely acknowledged to be "the greatest writer
of the twentieth century," and even to enumerate the many lieux de memoire that
appear in his text, from the petite madeleine to the uneven paving stones in the court-

yard of the Guermantes to the steeples of Martinville; it is quite another to study, as

is done here for the first time, how a writer who stood at first outside the dominant
currents of French literature — homosexual, a and a Jew, a social butterfly whose lit-
erary talents were underestimated by Andre Gide and Andre Breton, Andre
Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre —came occupy ofto the zenith the literary firma-

ment. And so it is with all the subjects treated in these volumes.

Readers are of course free to group these subjects as they will, as one might
group the cards in a hand of poker. One can proceed chronologically, for example,

to reveal a strong, centralizing continuity in the creation of 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 mem-

ory" 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 spe-
cialists in such diverse fields as art history, literary history, political history, the his-

tory of law, historical demography, and economic history to work together. In each

case the goal is 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 chrono-

logical history of France would have any reason to take into account, such as the sol-
 Preface to the English-Language Edition xxi

dier Chauvin. Everybody is familiar with the term "chauvinism," which has found
its way into many languages other than French. Some may know that the word
comes from the name of Nicolas Chauvin, a veteran of the wars of the Revolution
and Empire, who home to his native La Rochelle covered with
allegedly returned

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

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

"remake" of the peasant-soldier of Roman Antiquity and Rousseauist ideology
whose ghost has returned countless times in such diverse forms as the "unknown
soldier," the heroic peasant soldier of Petainist ideology, and various figments of
rural Catholic nationalism. When juxtaposed with the inevitable article on Verdun,
however, a detailed analysis of this myth takes us deep into the heart of French iden-
tity and reveals a distinctive feature of the French tradition.
Such juxtapositions and 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 mate-
rial, nationalistic, patriotic, or revolutionary. To set an ironic, almost caricatural

symbol such as the Gallic cock alongside the palace of Versailles or the battle of
Verdun, to treat the 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 tra-

dition and the humblest instruments for fabricating that history and that 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 inspiration is almost ethnographic; and whose method therefore con-
sists in shedding light on the construction of representations, the formation of his-
torical objects over time. It incorporates a dimension of analysis familiar to
Americans but by its very nature long foreign to the spirit of French history: the
historiographic dimension.

Adopting a historiographical approach is not intended to sidestep the many dif-

ficulties
— political, scientific, moral, and civic — that a synthetic approach or uni-
tary narrative would present in the France of today; it is an approach dictated, I feel,

by current tendencies in history and historiography.

Ever since history, and particularly national history, first emerged as a scientific

discipline, advances in the field 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
XXII PIERRE NORA

reveal about this common fund of beliefs and traditions. To make such distinctions
is to mark a discontinuity in the discipline. Moreover, every important advance in

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

of which historians have been led to explore new sources, methods, and interests.

Thus France 's traumatic defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 and subsequent
rivalry with Germany led French historians to develop a new categorical impera-

tive, not to say a civic and national duty: to test the whole received national tradi-

tion against the archival evidence. This led to a sharp, clear distinction between nar-
rative sources, which were viewed as suspect, and archival sources, which were seen
as proof positive. For the "methodical" or "positivist" school of historians, this was
a cmzca/ discontinuity. Then World War I, followed by the Crash of 1929 — the year

in which the celebrated Annates were founded — revealed the importance of eco-
nomic trends and statistics, particularly demographic statistics, and this new empha-
sis led to the discovery of a structural discontinuity. Historians saw an opposition
between individual and collective consciousness of historical experience and the
undeniable consequences of long-term deterministic processes, of medium-to-long
range historical cycles that affect how groups of people live, love, and die. A clear
expression of this kind of structural discontinuity can be seen in Braudel's famous
durees, which taught us that the apparent homogeneity of historical time is largely

illusory. As this historical process continued, the impact of decolonization and eco-
nomic "takeoff" made us aware, intimately as well as scientifically, of how alien-

ated we can be from ourselves in space as well as time, and this "inner distance"
became even more familiar as a result of the growing influence of psychoanalysis in

the same period. Call this third discontinuity ethnological. It gave 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. It also led

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

and festivals, as well as of seemingly trivial subjects, such as cooking, hygiene, and
smells. Meanwhile, along with the rise of the media, it provoked a surge of interest

in public opinion, images, and "events" —new themes that Jacques Le Goff and I

tried to survey in a three-volume work entitled Faire de I'histoire?

The discontinuity that we 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 histori-
cal tradition has been set aside and subjected to a fundamental rethinking. We have
entered the age of historiographical discontinuity. This latest discontinuity is at once
more diffuse and more radical than those that have gone before. More diffuse,

because it reflects the 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 xxiii

effects of economic crisis. But also more radical, because these three phenomena
converged in the 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 embody it, the

return to our collective heritage and focus on the country's shattered identities, are

inscribed in this new constellation. This transition from one type of national con-
sciousness to another, this shift from one model of the nation to another, is what
underlies this project and gives it meaning.
A nation that was long agricultural, providentialist, universalist, imperialist, and
state-centered has passed away, and in its place has emerged a nation conscious of

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

tion," redefined by the fading of the national-revolutionary equation of 1789, and,

finally, tested by an influx of immigrants not easily adaptable to the traditional

norms of "Frenchness." At the same time, however, France has been revitalized and
its attachment to its national roots has been transformed. That attachment is no
longer based solely on history: it now includes a deep consciousness of its threat-

ened countryside, lost traditions, wrecked ways of life — its very "identity." France
has rediscovered its heritage.

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

historical turning point. It derives from a type of history that is at once highly tra-

ditional and yet quite new. Highly traditional because it does not assume any par-
ticular methodology and concentrates on subjects with which everyone is familiar.

In some ways the work might seem to be a throwback to the era of positivist history
or beyond, because it calls for an almost literary treatment. But at the same time it is

quite new, because the history of memory is history that has become critical
through and through, and not just of its own tools: history has entered its episte-
mological age.
There are, to put it strongly, three types of national history. The first type was
the creation of Michelet: his goal was to integrate all the material and spiritual facts

in an organic whole, a living entity, to present France "as a soul and a person." Here,
post-Revolutionary romanticism achieved its culmination. The second type of
national history is typified by the work of Lavisse: his goal was to test the entire

national tradition against the documents in the archives. Lavisse 's work stands as a
monument to the age of republican positivism. The third type of national history

was created by Braudel, who unfortunately died before his work was complete: His
goal was to use the results of the social sciences to characterize the various stages
and levels of duree; to integrate the geography of Vidal de La Blache into history;
to extrapolate from economic cycles; and to make Marxist concepts less rigid and
adapt them to the French climate. This is the fruit of the Annales.
XXIV PIERRE NORA

These three types of national history are now joined by a fourth, exemphfied by
the present attempt to write a history in mukiple voices. The central point, the goal

is 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 it to

phenomena of another order. Adopting such a view opens the way to a 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 "what actually happened" than in its perpetual

reuse and misuse, its influence on successive presents; less interested in traditions

than in the way in which traditions are constituted and passed on. In short, a history
that is neither a resurrection nor a reconstitution nor a reconstruction nor even a

representation but, in the strongest possible sense, a "rememoration" — a history

that is interested in memory not as remembrance but as the overall structure of the

past within the present: history of the second degree.

I am not unaware of how ambitious this project is. But experience has shown that
only such a history, at once scholarly and accessible to the broader public, is capa-
ble of responding to the needs of the moment, of reconciling, in 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, com-
petence, and devoted work of those to whom I have the pleasure of expressing my
profound gratitude.
I am indebted above all to Lawrence D. Kritzman. Every meeting we had to dis-

cuss the project was highly agreeable and deeply fruitful. His advice was of great
help in the difficult task of selecting texts. His initiative 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 patient, tolerant under-
standing, this difficult enterprise would never have reached its happy conclusion.
And nothing would have been possible without Arthur Goldhammer, his exem-
plary talent for translation, his intimate and instinctive understanding of the pro-
ject, backed by knowledge of every subject, his intelligent and sensitive suggestions,
and, above all, his unflagging energy, which earned my admiration and gratitude,
and my friendship.
(
REALMS OF MEMORY
General Introduction:
Between Memory and History
Pierre Nora

The End of Memory-History

Acceleration of history: the metaphor needs to be unpacked. Things tumble with

increasing rapidity into an irretrievable past. They vanish from sight, or so it is gen-
erally believed. The equilibrium between the present and the past is disrupted.
What was left of experience, still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of
custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, has been swept away by a surge of deeply
historical sensibility. Our consciousness is shaped by a sense that everything is over
and done with, that something long since begun is now complete. Memory is con-
stantly on our lips because it no longer exists.

Our curiosity about the places in which memory is crystallized, in which it finds

refuge, is associated with this specific moment in French history, a turning point in

which a sense of rupture with the past is inextricably bound up with a sense that a

rift has occurred in memory. But that rift has stirred memory sufficiently to raise the
question of its embodiment: there are sites, lieux 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 memory but little in the way of history.
Societies based on memory are no more: the institutions that once transmitted val-
ues from generation to generation — churches, schools, families, governments
have ceased to function as they once did. And ideologies based on memory have
ceased to function as well, ideologies that once smoothed the transition from past to
future or indicated what the future should retain from the past, whether in the name
of reaction, progress, or even revolution. More than that, our very perception of
history has, with much help from the media, expanded enormously, so that memory,
once the legacy 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 enormous dis-

tance that separates real memory — the kind of inviolate social memory that primi-
tive and archaic societies embodied, and whose secret died with them —from his-

tory, which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget

because they are driven by change; the distance between an integrated memory, all-

powerful, sweeping, un— self-conscious, and inherently present-minded — a mem-

ory without a past that eternally recycles a heritage, relegating ancestral yesterdays

to the undifferentiated time of heroes, inceptions, and myth —and our form of
memory, which is nothing but history, a matter of sifting and sorting. This distance
has steadily increased since modern man accorded himself the right, the capacity,

and even the duty to change. It has now reached the breaking point.
This uprooting of memory, its eradication by the conquering force of history,

has had the effect of a revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity had been broken,
calling into question 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 (German, on the other hand, distinguishes between Geschichte and
Historic). Here we see the profound truth of this linguistic deficiency: the changes
in our lives are of the same nature as the changes in the way we represent our lives.
If we still dwelled among our memories, there would be no need to consecrate sites

embodying them. Lieux de memoire would not exist, because memory would not
have been swept away by history. Every one of our acts, down to the most quotid-
ian, would be experienced, in an intimate identification of act and meaning, as a reli-

gious repetition of sempiternal practice. With the appearance of "the trace," of dis-
tance and mediation, however, we leave the realm of true memory and enter that of
history. Think of the Jews faithfully observing their traditional ritual: as the "peo-

ple of memory," history was no concern of theirs until exposure to the modern
world obliged them to discover a need for historians.
 Between Memory and History 3

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects

opposed. Memory is hfe, always embodied in living societies and as such 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 sud-
denly reawakened. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always prob-

lematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always a phenomenon of

the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the

past. Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only

those facts that suit it. It thrives on vague, telescoping reminiscences, on hazy gen-
eral impressions or specific symbolic details. It is vulnerable to transferences, screen
memories, censorings, and projections of all kinds. History, being an intellectual,

nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and critical discourse. Memory situates

remembrance in a sacred context. History ferrets it out; it turns whatever it touches

into prose. Memory wells up from groups that it welds together, which is to say, as

Maurice Halbwachs observed, that there are as many memories as there are groups,
that memory is by nature multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual.
By contrast, history belongs to everyone and to no one and therefore has a univer-
sal vocation. 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 an absolute, while history is always relative.

At the heart of history is a criticism destructive of spontaneous memory.

Memory is always suspect in the eyes of history, whose true mission is to demolish
it, to repress it. History divests the lived past of its legitimacy. What looms on the
horizon of every historical society, at the limit of a completely historicized world,
is presumably a final, definitive disenchantment. The thrust of history, the ambition
of the historian, is not to exalt what actually happened but to annihilate it. A gener-
alized critical history would no doubt preserve some museums, medallions, and
monuments as materials necessary for its own work but would drain them of what
makes them, for us, lieiix de memoire. Ultimately, a society living wholly under the
sign of history would not need to attach its memory to specific sites any more than
traditional societies do.

Perhaps the most tangible sign of the split between history and memory has been the
emergence of a history of history, 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 the chroniclers of the Middle Ages to modern histo-

rians of "total" history, France 's entire historical tradition has developed as a disci-

plined exercise of the mnemonic faculty, an instinctive delving into memory in order
4 PIERRE NORA

to reconstruct the past seamlessly and in its entirety. Surely none of the great French
historians since Froissart has felt that he was representing only a part of the national
memory. Commynes had no notion that 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, each of these historians was convinced that his task was to correct
his predecessors by making memory more factual, comprehensive, and useful as an
explanation of the past. The scientific arsenal with which history has equipped itself

over the past century has done nothing but reinforce this view of history as a criti-

cal method whose purpose is to establish true memory. Every major revision of his-

torical method has been intended to broaden the base of collective memory.
In a country like France, the history of history cannot be innocent, because it lays

bare the subversion from within of memory-history by critical history. All history
is by nature critical, and all historians denounce the supposedly fraudulent mytholo-
gies of their predecessors. But when history begins to write its own history, a fun-

damental change takes place. Historiography begins when history sets itself the task

of uncovering that in itself which is not history, of showing itself to be the victim
of memory and seeking to free itself from memory's 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-
ple, in the United States, a country of plural memories and diverse traditions, his-
toriographical reflection has long been part of the discipline. Different interpreta-
tions 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 is no
such thing, or, if there is, it is not primarily a historical construct. In France, by con-
trast, historiography is iconoclastic and irreverent. It seizes on the most clearly

defined objects in the tradition — a key battle such as Bouvines or a standard text-
book like the petit Lavisse — in order to take them apart, to show how they function
and how they came to be. In so doing, historiography sows doubt; it runs the blade
of a knife between the heartwood of memory and the bark of history. When we
study the historiography of the French Revolution, when we reconstruct its myths
and interpretations, we indicate that we no longer identify fully with its 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 most sacred ele-

ments of the national tradition. History in general has begun to question its own
conceptual and material resources, its production processes and social means of dis-
tribution, its origins and tradition; it has thus entered the historiographic age, con-
summating its divorce from memory —which in turn has become a possible object
of history.
 Between Memory and History 5

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 this period, history, mem-
ory, and the nation enjoyed an unusually intimate communion, a symbiotic com-
plementarity at every level — scientific and pedagogical, theoretical and practical.

The nationalistic definition of the present cried out for justification through a high-
lighting 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 it

was made still more tenuous by the defeat of 1870, which made it even more urgent
for France —which had lost out toGerman science and pedagogy even more than
to the German army— to develop its own archival scholarship and scholarly insti-
tutions for the transmission of memory. Historians, speaking half as soldiers, half

as priests, bore the burden of responsibility on behalf of the nation. Their tone is

remarkable: witness, for instance, Gabriel Monod's editorial in the first issue of the
Revue historique (1876), in which he saw no reason not to look forward "henceforth
to painstaking, methodical, collaborative scientific investigation" leading in a "dis-

creet, confident manner to the grandeur of the fatherland as well as the human
race." This text and a hundred others like it make one wonder how the idea that pos-
itivist history 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 of continuity. The defeat at Agincourt, the dagger of
Ravaillac, the Day of Dupes, and the secret clauses of the Treaty of Westphalia
were all included in a scrupulous accounting. Erudition of the most assiduous kind
defined the reserve of capital that constituted the nation by adding a detail here,
taking away another there. This "memorial space" possessed a powerful unity:
from France's roots in Greek and Roman antiquity to her colonial empire under the
Third Republic the distance was no greater than that between the high-level schol-
arship 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 this synthesis break down.'' Because its sacred character was under-
mined in the crisis of the 1930s, when the state was divorced from the nation and
eventually the old couple was supplanted by a new one: state and society. At the
same time, and for the same reasons, history, which had become a tradition of mem-
ory, was transformed into social self-understanding. In France, this transformation

was particularly remarkable. The new social history was able to shed light on many
kinds of memory and even to transform itself into a laboratory for investigating
6 PIERRE NORA

past mentalities. But when it shed its identification with the nation, it lost its sub-

jective force as well as its pedagogical mission, the transmission of values, as the
current educational crisis attests. The nation is no longer the unifying framework
that defines the collective consciousness. The definition of the nation ceased to be

an issue, and peace, prosperity, and France 's diminished status as a world power did
the rest. Once society had supplanted the nation, legitimation by the past, hence by
history, gave way to legitimation by the future. The past was something one could
only study and venerate, and the nation something one could only serve, but the
future is something for which the groundwork has to be laid. Thus the three
terms — nation, history, memory — regained their autonomy: the nation ceased to
be a cause and became a given; history became a social science; and memory became
a purely private phenomenon. The memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of

memory-history.

The study of lieux de memoire thus lies at the intersection of two developments that

define its importance and significance. One of these is purely historiographical:

French historians have begun to reflect on history as a practice. The other is histor-

ical: the end of a tradition of memory. Places, lieux de memoire, become important
even as the vast fund of memories among which we used to live on terms of inti-

macy 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

past has been consolidated. Critical discourse obeys an internal dynamic: the old
political and intellectual framework that once shaped historical research is in disar-

ray. It is still too substantial to ignore entirely yet too flimsy to be of much use; only
its most powerful symbols have any life left in 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 Commune were massacred by the
French Army in 1871).

Lieux de memoire are fundamentally vestiges, the ultimate embodiments of a

commemorative consciousness that survives in a history which, having renounced

memory, cries out for it. The notion has emerged because society has banished rit-

ual. It is a notion produced, defined, established, constructed, decreed, and main-

tained by the artifice and desire of a society fundamentally absorbed by its own
transformation and renewal. By its very nature that society values the new over the
old, youth over old age, the future over the past. Museums, archives, cemeteries,

collections, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries,

private associations — these are relics of another era, illusions of eternity. That is
 Between Memory and History 7

what makes these pious undertakings seem like exercises in nostalgia, sad and life-

less. They 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 is busily

effacing all parochialisms; de facto differentiations in a society that levels on princi-

ple; signs of recognition and group affiliation in a society that tends to recognize
only individuals, assumed to be equal if not identical.
Lieux de memoire arise out of a sense that there is no such thing as spontaneous
memory, hence that we must create archives, mark anniversaries, organize celebra-

tions, pronounce eulogies, and authenticate documents because such things no

longer happen as a matter of course. When certain minorities create protected

enclaves as preserves of memory to be jealously safeguarded, they reveal what is

true of all lieux de memoire: that without commemorative vigilance, history would
soon sweep them away. These bastions buttress our identities, but if what they
defended were not threatened, there would be no need for them. If the remem-
brances they protect were truly living presences in our lives, they would be useless.
Conversely, if history did not seize upon memories in order to distort and transform
them, to mold them or turn them to stone, they would not turn into lieux de memoire,
which emerge in two stages: moments of history are plucked out of the flow of his-

tory, then returned to it —no longer quite alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells
left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.
Take, for example, "La Marseillaise" (France's national anthem) or the monu-
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 lieu de memoire.
When Bastille Day was made a national holiday in 1880, it became an official lieu de

memoire, but the republican spirit, then very much alive, made it something more
than that: a genuine return to the source. But what does it mean today.'' The loss of
our national memory as a living presence forces us to look at it with eyes that are
neither naive nor indifferent. The memory we see tears at us, yet it is no longer
entirely ours: what was once sacred rapidly ceased to be so, and for the time being
we have no further use for the sacred. We feel a visceral attachment to that which
made us what we are, yet at the same time we feel historically estranged from this
legacy, which we must now coolly assess. These lieujc have washed up from a sea of
memory in which we no longer dwell: they are partly official and institutional,

partly affective and sentimental. 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 life has not entirely gone out of them. The memo-
rial has swung over into the historical. A world that once contained our ancestors
has become a world in which our relation to what made us is merely contingent.
Totemic history has become critical history: it is the age of lieux de memoire. We no
longer celebrate the nation, but we study the nation's celebrations.
8 PIERRE NORA

Memory Grasped by History

what we memory today is therefore not memory but already history. The so-
call

called 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
be aware of the difference between true memory, which today subsists only in ges-

tures and habits, unspoken craft traditions, intimate physical knowledge, ingrained
reminiscences, and spontaneous reflexes, and memory transformed by its passage
through history, which is practically the opposite: willful and deliberate, experi-
enced as a duty rather than as spontaneous; psychological, individual and subjec-
tive, rather than social, collective, and all-embracing. How did the transition from
the first, immediate form of memory to the second, indirect form take place.'' The
bestway 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
trace, the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility

of the image. The process that began with writing has reached its culmination in
high-fidelity recording. The less memory is experienced from within, the greater its

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

qua memory —hence the obsession with the archive that 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 on the verge of disappearing, coupled with anxiety about the pre-
cise significance 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
might have enabled us to know those who came before us, and so wish to avoid a
similar reproach from those who will come after.'' Remembering has become a mat-

ter of meticulously minute reconstruction. Memory has begun to keep records: del-

egating the responsibility for remembering to the archive, it deposits its signs as the

snake deposits its 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 was written without their aid. Later, memory-history
seized on this treasure trove and used it as the basis of its work, disseminating the
fruits of its labors through a myriad of social institutions tailored to the purpose.
Now that historians have abandoned the cult of the document, society as a whole
has acquired the religion of preservation and archivalization. What we call memory
is in fact a gigantic and breathtaking effort to store the material vestiges of what we

cannot possibly remember, thereby amassing an unfathomable collection of things

that we might someday need to recall. Leibniz's "paper memory" has become an
institution in its own right, comprising museums, libraries, depositories, documen-
 Between Memory and History 9

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
spews out greater volumes of paper than ever before, and we now possess unprece-
dented 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,

images, and speeches —any tangible sign of what was — as if this expanding dossier
might some day be subpoenaed as evidence before who knows what tribunal of his-
tory. The trace negates the sacred but retains its aura. We cannot know in advance

what should be remembered, hence we refrain from destroying anything and put
everything in archives instead. The realm of the memorable has expanded without
reason: we suffer from hypertrophy of memory, which is inextricably intertwined

with our sense of memory's loss and concomitant institutionalization. Old-fash-

ioned professional archivists, who used to be accused of suffering from a mania to
preserve, have switched roles in a curious way with those who produce the materi-

als that now fill our archives. Today's archivists are trained by private firms and
government bureaucracies, which insist that everything be preserved, whereas the
older archivists knew that controlled destruction was the trick of the trade.
In just a few years, then, memory embodied in material form has expanded
prodigiously; it has also been copied, decentralized, and democratized. In the old
days, there were three main sources of archives: the great families, the church, and
the state. Nowadays who does not feel called upon to record his reminiscences or

write his memoirs.'' Everyone has gotten into the act: not just people whose role in

history was minor at best, but also the relatives of such people and their doctors and
lawyers and anyone else who happened to be standing about. The less extraordinary
the testimony, the more aptly it is taken to illustrate the average mentality.
The imperative of the age is not only to keep everything, to preserve every sign
(even 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-

tain an unimaginable mass of documents, some two hundred linear miles of paper
all told. If explored with the aid of a computer, these documents might well provide
a compendium of French society, a summa of the normal and the pathological in

matters ranging from diets to lifestyles, all classified by region and occupation. But
just to preserve let alone exploit this massive material requires drastic, unfeasible
choices. Archive as 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 now more than three hundred teams employed in col-
lecting what Philippe Joutard has called "the voices that come to us from the past."

Well and good. But think for a moment: these are not ordinary archives. It takes
lO PIERRE NORA

thirty-six hours of work to produce just one hour of tape, and the recordings make
sense only if listened to in their entirety; they cannot be sampled. Under these con-
ditions 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. It is no
longer a more or less intentional record of actual memory but a deliberate and cal-

culated compilation of a vanished memory. It adds a secondary or prosthetic mem-

ory to actual experience, which is often altered by the very fact of being recorded

(witness the effect of live news broadcasts on the events being covered). The indis-

criminate filling of archives is a troublesome by-product of the new consciousness,

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

Historicized memory comes to us from without. Because it is no longer a social

practice, we internalize it as an individual constraint. The transition from memory

to history requires every social group to redefine its identity by dredging up its past.
The resulting obligation to remember makes every man his own historian. Thus the

historical imperative has reached well beyond the limited circle of professional his-
torians. Those who used to be left out of the official histories are not the only ones
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 own roots and identities. There is hardly a family today
in which some member has not sought to reconstruct the hidden ancestral past as
fully as possible. The proliferation of genealogical research is a striking recent phe-

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

cent of those engaged in archival work were doing genealogical research (whereas

38 percent were doing academic work of some kind). Another striking fact is that

the most significant histories of biology, physics, medicine, 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. As the established intel-

lectual disciplines have come under attack, each has sought to justify itself by delv-
ing into its origins. Sociology has gone in search of its founding fathers, while
anthropology has explored its past from sixteenth-century chroniclers to colonial

administrators. Even literary criticism has attempted to trace the origins of its cate-

gories and traditions. As for history, the positivist approach, long since abandoned
by professional historians, has discovered a new-found popularity as a result of this

urgently felt The demise of memory-history has multi-

need to resurrect the past.

plied 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
remembers, and what it remembers is itself, hence the historical transformation of
 Between Memory and History

memory has led to a preoccupation with individual psychology. The two phenom-
ena are closely related — 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

collapsed and age-old social equilibria were disrupted, memory became a central

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

and in autobiographical literature with Proust. The disintegration of the traditional

French image of memory as something rooted in the soil and the sudden emergence
of 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

stage. We owe 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 historical to the psychological, from the
social to the individual, from the concrete message to its subjective representation,

from repetition to remembrance. Memory became a private affair. As a result of this

psychologization, the self now stands in a new relation to memory and the past.

Ultimately, memory constrains the behavior of individuals, and individuals

By defining the relation to the past, it shapes the future. The atomization of
alone.

memory (as collective memory is transformed into private memory) imposes a duty
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 identity, its true and hidden meaning. Belonging, in turn,

becomes a total commitment. When memory ceases to be omnipresent, it ceases to

be present at all unless some isolated individual decides to assume responsibility for
it. The less collective the experience of memory is, the greater the need for individ-

uals to bear the burden, as if an inner voice were needed to tell each Corsican "You
must be Corsican" and each Breton "You must be Breton." The force of this phe-
nomenon is perhaps most evident among nonpracticing Jews, many of whom have
felt a need in recent years to explore memories of the Jewish past. In the Jewish tra-

dition, whose history is its memory, to be Jewish is to remember being Jewish. If

memory inexorably asserts its claim over a person's whole

truly internalized, such a

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
ultimately depends on discharging a debt that can never be repaid.

Thus far we have explored two types of memory: archival memory and memory as
an individual duty. To complete this portrait of the modern metamorphosis of
memory we must add a third type: alienated memory. When we try to puzzle out

our relation to the past by studying significant historical works, we discover that our
historical knowledge is not at all like memory: instead of placing us in a continuous
relation with the past, it creates a sense of discontinuity. Of course for the memory-
12 PIERRE NORA

history of an earlier time, the past was not yet over: it could be revived by an effort
of remembrance. In a sense, the present itself was seen as a retrieved, updated past,
its presentness conjured away by being grafted onto and rooted in what went before.
True, in order for a sense of "pastness" to exist, a thin wedge had to inserted

between yesterday and today, opening up a "before" and an "after." This distance
was not seen as implying a radical difference, however; it was rather a gap, a hiatus,

and as such called for a restoration of continuity. The two great themes of history

in the modern era, progress and decadence, both reflect this cult of continuity, this

certainty of knowing to whom and to what we are indebted for being what we are.

From this came the important notion of "origins," that secularized version of myth
which gave a French society in the process of nationalist secularization its idea of
and need for the sacred. The grander France 's origins were, the more they magni-
fied the grandeur of the French. Through the past we venerated ourselves.
This connection has been severed. Just as the future —once a visible, predictable,

manipulable, well-marked extension of the present — has come to seem invisible, so

have we gone from the idea of a visible past to one of an invisible past; from a firmly

rooted past to a past that we experience as a radical break in continuity; from a his-

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

world from which we are fundamentally cut off. We discover the truth about our
memory when we discover how alienated from it we are.

It is a mistake, 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 effects and give it emotional resonance. Never have we longed more
for the feel of 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. The whole dynamic of our
relation to the past is shaped by the subtle interplay between the inaccessible and the
nonexistent. If the old ideal was to resurrect the past, the new ideal is to create a rep-

resentation of it. Resurrection, no matter how complete, implied a careful manipula-

tion of light and shadow to create an illusion of perspective with an eye to present

purposes. Now that we no longer have a single explanatory principle, we find our-

selves in a fragmented universe. At the same time, nothing is too humble, improba-
ble, or inaccessible to aspire to the dignity of historical mystery. We used to know
whose children we were; now we are the children of no one and everyone. Since the
past can now 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 which we contaminate the inno-
cence of everything we touch. When we look at the past, we take violent possession
 —

Between Memory and History 13

of what we know is no longer ours. Since we no longer know what we are looking

for, we have had to narrow our focus. Broad, panoramic views are no longer admis-
sible; we eschew fragments as well as frescoes. Instead, we spotlight selected elements

of the past, concentrating on "representative samples." Our memory is intensely

retinal, powerfully televisual. The much-touted "return of the narrative" in recent
historical writing has to be linked to the ubiquity of visual images and film in con-
temporary culture — new narrative is very different from traditional nar-
even if this

rative, 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
accustomed us to a certain immediacy. We study the everyday life of the past because
we want to return to a slower-paced, more savory existence, and we read biographies
of ordinary people as if to say that the "masses" can never be understood simply by,
as it And from countless "microhistories" we take shards
were, measuring their mass.
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
coining a term like "mirror-memory," but the problem is that mirrors reflect only

identical copies of ourselves, whereas what we seek in history is difference — and,

through difference, a sudden revelation of our elusive identity. We seek not our ori-
gins but a way of figuring out what we are from what we are no longer.
Strangely, this alchemy of essences has helped to make the practice of history

which the relentless drive toward the future might have been thought to have ren-
dered otiose — the repository of the secrets of the present. Indeed, this magical
transformation has been accomplished not so much by history as by the historian.

Consider the historian's strange fate. Once upon a time his role was simple, his place
in society clearly defined: he was the spokesman for the past and the guide who
pointed the way to the future. As such, his individual personality was less important
than the service he rendered: scholarship was to be worn lightly, to serve only as a
bridge, an all but imperceptible link between the physical mass of the documenta-
tion and its inscription in memory —whose absence, one might say, produced an
obsession with objectivity. With 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 pro-
claim the closeness of his relationship to the past, to deepen it, to treat it not as an
obstacle to understanding but as a tool. His work is entirely dependent on his sub-

jectivity, creativity, and capacity to re-create. He performs a metabolic function,

taking something lifeless and meaningless and investing it with life and meaning.
Imagine a society wholly preoccupied with the here and now: it would be inca-

pable of producing historians. Living entirely for the future, it would content itself
14 PIERRE NORA

with mechanical devices for recording and cataloging the present while indefinitely
postponing the task of understanding itself to a later day. Our society is quite dif-
ferent: it has changed so radically that it has lost its memory and become obsessed
with understanding itself historically. This accounts for the increasingly central role
of the historian: he prevents history from being merely history.
Thus we compensate for our alienated perspective by trying to view the past in

close-up and artificial hyper-reality. And as our perception of the past changes, we
discover reasons to look again at traditional subjects that once seemed to hold no
further interest, the commonplaces, as it were, of our national memory. We find

ourselves back on the doorstep of the house we grew up in: the old homestead is

uninhabited and all but unrecognizable. The old family heirlooms are still there, but
we see them in a new light. The old workshop is still where it used to be, but the
work to be done is different. We recognize familiar rooms, but what are we to use

them for.'' Historiography has entered the epistemological age; the era of identity is

over. History has confiscated memory. And so the historian can no longer be a

"memory man." Instead, he has become, in his very being, a lieu de memoire.

Realms of Memory: Another History

Lieux de memoire are complex things. At once natural and artificial, simple and
ambiguous, concrete and abstract, they are lieux — places, sites, causes — -in three

senses: material, symbolic, and functional. An archive is a purely material site that

becomes a lieu de memoire only if imagination invests it with a symbolic aura. A

textbook, will, or veterans' group is a purely functional object that becomes a lieu

de memoire only when it becomes part of a ritual. The observance of a commemo-

rative minute of silence, which might seem to be a strictly symbolic act, disrupts

time, thus concentrating memory. These three aspects of embodied memory — the

material, the symbolic, and the functional — always coexist. What lieu de memoire
could be more abstract than the notion of a historical generation.-* A generation is
material in a demographic sense; functional by hypothesis, since memories are crys-
tallized in generations and passed on from one to another; and symbolic by defini-
tion, since the term "generation" implies that the experience of a small number of
people can be used to characterize a much larger number who did not participate in

its central event or events.

Lieux de memoire are created by the interaction between memory and history, an
interaction resulting in a mutual overdetermination. A will to remember must be
present initially. Without this criterion, the definition would be so broad as to

encompass almost any object worthy of remembrance. Think back to the good old
rules of historical criticism: historians at one time distinguished carefully between
"direct sources" (such as laws and works of art, things intentionally produced by a
 Between Memory and Histor/ 15

society in full knowledge that they would be reproduced) and "indirect sources"

(testimony unwittingly left behind for historians to use as they see fit). Without an
intent to remember, lieux de memoire would be lieux d'histoire.

Yet if history — time and change — did not intervene, we would be dealing not

with lieux de memoire but with simple memorials. The lieux of which I speak are
hybrid places, mutants in a sense, compounded of life and death, of the temporal
and the eternal. They are like Mobius strips, endless rounds of the collective and the
individual, the prosaic and the sacred, the immutable and the fleeting. For although
it is true that the fundamental purpose of a lieu de memoire is to stop time, to inhibit

forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the

immaterial (just as gold, they say, is the memory of money) — all in order to capture
the maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs — 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 for a time

during the French Revolution: this revolutionary calendar is a lieu de memoire if

ever there was one, since, being a calendar, it was intended to be a framework for
memory, and, being revolutionary, new system of names and symbols
it offered a
intended, as its principal author ambitiously claimed, "to open a new book to his-

tory" and, as another sponsor suggested, "to make the French feel at home again."
In so doing, the calendar was also supposed to stop the clock of history at the

moment of the Revolution: the future 's days, months, years, and centuries would
forever call to mind images of the revolutionary epic. Surely that alone would be
enough to qualify the revolutionary calendar as a lieu de memoire! But what further
establishes its claim in our eyes is its failure to fill the role foreseen for it by its

authors. If the revolutionary calendar had truly become our calendar, it would be as

familiar as the Gregorian calendar, hence no longer a lieu de memoire. It would have
melted into the landscape of memory, and its only purpose would be to fix the dates

of other conceivable lieux de memoires. What makes the case even more interesting,
however, is the fact that the failure of the revolutionary calendar was not complete.
Certain events remain forever attached to the names of its months: Vendemiaire,
Thermidor, Brumaire. Thus the lieu de memoire is 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. When
schoolchildren throughout France studied it, 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-
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 know about France, a story
about identity and a journey of initiation. But the story is more complicated than it
first appears: a careful reading shows that when the Tour was published in 1877, it

already portrayed a France that no longer existed. On May 16 of that year, the

Third Republic finally consolidated its hold on power, but the book derived its

seductive appeal from a subtle enchantment with the past. As is so often the case
with children's books, the Tour owed its initial success to its appeal to grown-ups
and their memories. And later.'' Thirty-five years after the work's first publication,

it still reigned supreme among French children's texts, but it was read for its nos-
talgic appeal, as evidenced by the fact that the first edition sold better than later,
revised ones. Subsequently the book dropped out of favor and continued to be used
only in remote rural areas. Slipping out of collective memory, it entered first his-

torical memory and then pedagogical memory. In 1977, when the Breton writer

Pierre-Jakez Helias's provincial autobiography Le Cheval d'orgueil became a mil-

lion-seller as Giscard d'Estaing's industrialized France, then in the throes of eco-
nomic crisis, rediscovered its oral tradition and peasant roots, anew edition of the
Tour was published and the book once again entered the collective memory albeit —
a different collective memory this time, and of course without any guarantee that
it would not be forgotten yet again. So here we have a prime candidate for a /ieu de

memoire. But does it qualify as such because of the book's original intention or
because of its role in subsequent cycles of national memory.'' Clearly both: all lieux

de memoire are, to borrow from the language of heraldry, objects en ahime, which
is to say, objects containing representations 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 do not fit the strict

definition have to be included, while others that seem to fit 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 in favor of
inclusion. Not every border marker has the same claim to be considered a lieu de

memoire as the Rhine, say, or the "Finistere," that "Land's End" at the tip of
Brittany that is celebrated in the pages of Michelet. Any constitution or diplomatic
treaty is a lieu de memoire, but the Constitution of 1793 has a different status from
the Constitution of 179 1 owing to the 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 17

the division of the Carohngian Empire at Verdun in 843 or the Yalta Conference of
1944, to take examples from early and late European history.

Memory dictates and history writes. Both history books and historical events

deserve special attention: both are implements that memory uses to inscribe itself on
the historical record. Hence they stake out the boundaries of our domain. Is not

every great work of history —even the genre of history itself — a lieu de memoire?
And is not every great event — indeed the very notion of event —by definition a lieu

de memoire? These two questions call for detailed answers.

Only certain works of history are lieux de memoire, namely, those that reshape

memory in some fundamental way or that epitomize a revision of memory for ped-
agogical purposes. Relatively few works have managed to give new historical mem-

ories firm roots in French soil. In the thirteenth century the Grandes Chroniques de

France condensed dynastic memory and established a model for historical work for

centuries thereafter. In the sixteenth century, during the Wars of Religion, the
school of "perfect history," as it was called, destroyed the myth of the monarchy's

Trojan origins and resurrected the Gauls: Etienne Pasquier's Recherches de la France
may serve as an emblem of this school, as evidenced by the very modernity of its

title (which indicated a preference for "research" over chronicle and "France" over
dynasties). The historiography of the late Restoration introduced the modern con-
cept of history: Augustin Thierry's Lettres sur I'histoire de France, whose serial pub-
lication began in 1820, was first on the scene. The various fragments of Thierry's
were collected and published as a bound volume in 1827, within a few months of the
publication of the Precis d'histoire moderne, the first book by an illustrious new-
comer, Jules Michelet, and Guizot's first lectures on "the history of civilization in

Europe and in France." Finally, positivist national history began with a manifesto

in the Revue historique (1876) and culminated in Lavisse's 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 and better than other mem-
oirs but because, beyond simply exercising memory, they also interrogate it. The
same can be said of statesmen's 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 and specific features despite variations in the quality of
individual texts. The memoir writer must be aware of other memoirs. He must be a

man of the pen as well as a man of action.He must find a way to identify his indi-
vidual story with a more general story. And he must somehow make his personal
rationale consonant with public rationality. Taken together, these characteristics of

the genre compel us to think of its exemplars as lieux de memoire.

As for "great events," only two types are pertinent here and not in any sense on
account of their greatness. To begin with, there are events that may have seemed
i8 PIERRE NORA

relatively minor and gone almost unnoticed at the time but upon which posterity has
conferred the grandeur of a new beginning or the solemnity of an inaugural break
with the past. 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
significance and treated, even as they are unfolding, as if they were being com-
memorated in advance. In recent years the media have treated us to countless

abortive attempts to create events of this second type. As an example of the first

type, one can take, say, the election of Hugh Capet, in itself 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 in a railway car near

Rethondes), the handshake between Hitler and Petain at Montoire (sealing Franco-
German collaboration in World War II), or de Gaulle's march down the Champs-
Elysees at the Liberation. Call events of the first type foundational and events of the
second type spectacular. In neither case is the event itself what counts. The notion
of lieu de memoire would cease to have any specific meaning if we included
"events." Indeed, it is the exclusion of the event qua event that defines the lieu de

memoire. Memory fastens upon sites, whereas history fastens upon events.
There is, however, no reason 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, museums, com-
memorations. Others are products of reflection, such as the concept of a historical
generation, which was mentioned earlier, or the lineage, or the "region" as an object
of memory, or certain "divisions" in the 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 would reveal another broad spectrum. Some lieux de memoire are

portable, and their importance cannot be overlooked, because the people of mem-
ory, the Jews, offer a prime example of one in the Torah. Other lieux are topo-
graphical: what matters is their specific location, their rootedness. Examples include
tourist sites generally, as well as the Bibliotheque Nationale (in 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 a society or a period, like the cathedral of Chartres or the palace

of Versailles.
 Between Memory and History 19

If, instead of the physical aspect, we were to emphasize the functional dimension,
a different picture would emerge. Some lieux de memoire, like veterans' organiza-

tions, are clearly intended to preserve an incommunicable experience and are

doomed to vanish with those who 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 dis-
tinguish between "dominant" lieux de memoire and "dominated" ones. Dominant
sites are spectacles, celebrations of triumph. They are imposing as well as generally
imposed from above by the government or some official organization, and typically
cold and solemn, like official ceremonies. One doesn't visit such places; one is sum-
moned to them. Dominated sites are places of refuge, sanctuaries of instinctive devo-
tion and hushed pilgrimages, where the living heart of memory still beats. Among

dominant we may include the Sacre-Coeur Church in Paris (commemorating

sites

the end of the Commune), the official funeral of Paul Valery, and the funeral cere-

mony for de Gaulle at Notre Dame; among dominated sites, the popular pilgrimage
to Lourdes, the funeral of Jean-Paul Sartre, and de Gaulle 's burial site at Colombey.
These classifications could be refined ad infinitum. One could contrast public
sites with private ones; pure sites, whose only function is commemorative (such as

funeral eulogies, the war memorial at Douaumont, and the Wall of the Federes),

and composite ones, whose commemorative dimension is but one of many symbolic
meanings (such as the national flag, festival itineraries, pilgrimages, and so on).
This preliminary typology should not be construed as being either rigorous or com-
prehensive or as limiting possibility in any way: all that matters is that it can be done.
It shows that an invisible thread links ostensibly unrelated objects. It suggests that

bringing the Pere-Lachaise cemetery and the Statistique Generale de la France

together within the covers of one book is 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 we are attempting here apart from all other kinds of
history, ancient or modern, is one simple but decisive element. Every previous his-

torical or scientific approach to memory (whether concerned with national memory

or social "mentalities") dealt with realia, with things in themselves, in their immedi-
ate reality. Unlike historical objects, lieux de memoire have no referents in reality; or,

rather, they are their own referents — pure signs. This is not to say that they are with-
out content, physical presence, or history —on the contrary. But what makes them
lieux de memoire is precisely that which allows them to escape from history. The lieu
20 PIERRE NORA

is a templum: something singled out within the continuum of the profane (whether
in space, time, or both), a circle within which everything counts, everything is sym-
bolic, everything is significant. In this sense, the lieu de memoire has a dual nature: it

is a hermetic excrescence upon the world, defined by its identity and summed up by
its name but at the same time open to an infinite variety of possible other meanings.

Hence the history of lieux de memoire could not be more banal or more extraor-
dinary. The topics are obvious, the material is standard, the sources are readily avail-

able, and the methods could not be less sophisticated. Such 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 way cannot be expressed in terms of traditional historical
categories. Reflecting on lieux de memoire transforms historical criticism into critical

history — history critical of more than just its own methods. It brings history back
to life, giving it a second level of existence. The new history is a purely transferen-
tial history, and as in the art of war, everything is in the execution, a matter of tact
in the historian's tenuous relation to his new object and of finding the right depth of
immersion in the subject. Ultimately, it is a history that depends on its ability to avail

itself of a tenuous, intangible, almost ineffable bond: what remains of our inex-
pugnable, intimate attachment to those faded symbols of the past. It is the revival of

history as it was practiced by Michelet, which inevitably calls to mind the mourning
for lost love so well described by Proust: that moment when the obsessive grip of

passion finally loosens, in which the real sadness is that one can no longer suffer
from that for which one has already suffered so much. The head takes over from the
heart, 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. Is this

cause for regret, or should I try to justify it.'' The answer, once again, is linked to our

current historical situation. Memory has known only two forms of legitimacy: histor-
ical and literary. These have run on parallel tracks but until now have always remained
separate. Lately the boundary between the two has blurred. Out of the virtually simul-
taneous demise of memory-history and memory-fiction has come a new type of his-
tory, which owes its prestige and legitimacy to a new type of relation to the past —and
to a different past. History has become our substitute for imagination. Recent years

have seen a revival of the historical novel, a vogue for personal memoirs, a revitaliza-

tion of historical drama, and the rise of oral history. What can account for all these

things if not that they are somehow stand-ins for faltering fiction.'' Our interest in the
lieux de memoire in which our depleted fund of collective memory is rooted, concen-
trated, and expressed stems from this new sensibility. History offers profundity to an
epoch devoid of it, true stories to an epoch devoid of real novels. Memory has been
promoted to the center of history: thus do we mourn the loss of literature.
 INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I

Conflicts and Divisions

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 impe-

rious need, more insistently felt in France than in many other countries, to over-
come powerful heterogeneous and contradictory forces through a vast effort of

central organization. Republican France, one and indivisible — the France not only

of Michelet and Vidal de La Blache but also of Charles de Gaulle and Fernand
Bruadel —had its own "memory-history," full of sound and fury, a colorful history
in which an infinite diversity of locales, peoples, and languages was merely the vis-
ible, perceptible face of a tenacious effort to achieve unity through the temporal
construction of politics and history. Unity and diversity: this antithetical yet com-
plementary pair has come apart before our eyes, and with it a comprehensive per-

ception of France has lost its usefulness and relevance.

When the Third Republican synthesis evaporated, a new kind of intelligibility

began to emerge, one whose overall organic unity depended not on historical unity
and territorial harmony achieved through conquest but rather on a feeling of iden-

tity sustained by an enduring sense of its own divisions, of the powerful polarities

out of which it was built: these included not only political polarities but also religious

and geo-historical ones. The three parts of this volume reflect these three themes.
Let us take political polarities first. As numerous as the conflicts, battles, divi-

sions, and vicissitudes of French political history are, the political myths on which
our idea of France is based stem from a relatively limited number of fundamental
oppositions, each reflecting and reinforcing the others. It would have made no sense
to choose some of these rather than others. All had to be taken into account not only
22 PIERRE NORA

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

terms of which they rationalized their own existence. First, there was the funda-
mental division of the Revolution, which became the source of a series of religious,
political, social, and national oppositions with powerful, perpetually regenerated
connotations. On top of this, the twentieth century superimposed three further divi-
sions, 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 in any of its

neighbors, there was first of all the basic antinomy resulting from the periodic
influx of large numbers of foreigners, who, owing to the country's basic ideologi-
cal principles and social realities, were at once welcomed and rejected. Then there
was Vichy, born of defeat and occupation: division was implicit in the very name,
which suggested a resurgence of the whole counterrevolutionary And finally
past.

there was the great moment of hegemonic partition of the national memory
reflected in the bipolar opposition between Gaullists and Communists.
Nevertheless, this series of archetypal divisions would be of merely descriptive

interest were it not for the fact that the intrinsically conflictual nature of French his-
tory (which made it, for Marx, the very model of national history in general) is

reflected in both the beginning and end of the saga: in the country's myth of 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 history. In fact, from the sixteenth century on, the French myth of
origin rested 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 — established the idea

that the history of France is a story 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 left, became the struc-
tural underpinning of all political "space" in contemporary France, providing pol-
itics with both its driving dynamic and its interpretive framework. What is striking
is not merely the similarity between these two dualities but the fact that in both cases
the original polarization reflects both what is most distinctive about France and
most exemplary, most specific and most universal, since the 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 23

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 made this religious conflict a permanent part of its identity or treated it

as a symbol of tolerance and persecution to the 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 conflict and ten-
sion, has also presided over the construction, perception, and representation of
space and time in France. But unlike the divisions underlying the political and reli-

gious imagination, divisions of this third type come in many varieties. Some of the

most significant ones are treated in this volume. What could be more important than
divisions decreed by nature, especially that between the north and the south of
France.'' And which divisions have been more crucial than those in terms of which
the French learned to perceive and master their vaunted diversity, beginning with
the persistent opposition between Paris and the provinces.'* Finally, what chrono-
logical division is more significant than the notion of a historical generation,

which — in all countries but especially in France, from the romantic era to May '68
has had the power to infuse the natural replacement of the old by the young with
mobilizing energy.'*
Many people feel that the resurrection of these symbols of division is fueling a
crisis in a France that has begun to question its identity and ceased to recognize

By studying the logic of the historical construction and development of such

itself.

symbols we hope to arrive at a more adequate understanding. We shall see what no

longer works and on what basis renewal is possible. The signs and markers may be
partially obscured, yet we can still make out the unbroken path, the permanence of
an identity even now in the throes of fundamental change.
I
 PART I

BETWEEN MEMORY AND HISTORY

FIGURE 1 .0 Vercingetorix, from Nodier, Taylor, and Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques dans I'ancienne France;
lithograph by Engelmann after Lacroix, 1829.
 CHAPTER I

Franks and Gauls^

Kr:^sitof Pomian

Problems of the time. The bloc system beloved

by politicians (Clemenceau said, "The Revolution

is a bloc") and detested by historians; historians

have a duty to break down monoliths or, as the

The heroic memory of the ancient paleontologists say, to "stratify" them.

by monuments
Gauls is often recalled
such as the Vercingetorix in Clermont
— Camille Jullian

or the Gaul on the Pont d'lena in Paris; by street names, Alesia, Gergovie, and
Vercingetorix being 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
of books dealing with them, from Caesar's Gallic JVars to Camille Jullian's
Vercingetorix, Albert Grenier's Les Gaulois, and Paul-Marie Duval's Dieux de la

Gaule, among many others. Anyone who wants to learn more about them can eas-

ily find enough to satisfy his or her initial curiosity in any bookstore. More demand-
ing readers can turn to libraries, where they will find, counting journal articles, tens
of thousands of titles on every conceivable aspect of the subject.

Nor are printed texts the end of it. Archaeological excavation sites, some famous
and visited by large numbers of tourists, others 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 museums contain row
upon row of statues of their gods and exhibits of their tools, utensils, weapons,
coins, art works, and everyday objects; and fine art museums exhibit paintings, stat-

ues, engravings, and drawings that show how they were imagined in the nineteenth

and the early part of the twentieth century. To top it all off, there is a whole appa-
ratus of special exhibitions, tourist information signs, guidebooks, catalogues, fold-

ers, maps, plaster casts, photographs, and postcards — a whole literature in itself,

with its own iconography. All of this is supposed to help visitors know what to look
28 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

for and teach them how to study the remains of the past with an objective eye while
instilhng a deep and lasting interest in the subject, but at the same time it inculcates

certain beliefs, including a belief in the Gallic origins of the French, along with cer-

tain values, primarily patriotism.

All these facts are duly established. But taken together, as we have just done, they
create the impression that French national memory reserves an exceptionally large
place for the Gauls. Experience, though, does not bear this out. Only a small per-

centage of the total number of monuments, street names, and signs in France allude
to them. The same can be said of books, even if we include comics and paperbacks.
Gallic sites and Gallic objects in museums account for only a small portion of the

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

less populations have left traces ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to pale-

olithic sites to obsolete nineteenth-century factories. Yet the French attach more
importance to the Gauls than to the other peoples that formerly inhabited the terri-

tory of France, including even the Franks. This is a distinctive feature of French
historical memory, just as the importance attached to the ancient Germanic tribes is

a distinctive feature of German memory and the importance ascribed to Rome is a

distinctive feature of Italian 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 relative importance
of each image by itself cannot be ascertained.) The first of these is an image of splen-
dor, of Celtic gold or of the treasures of Celtic princes, the general public making no
distinction between the prehistoric Celts and the Gauls.^ The second image is one of
powerful esoteric knowledge supposedly possessed by the Druids, who 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

scholars,who emphasized its mythical character. Nevertheless, it still has its cham-
pions, who are quick to deplore what they see as an unjust discrediting of an impor-

tant truth. ^ "Our ancestors the Gauls" are generally depicted as valiant warriors,
usually either in triumph or on the point of death but almost never without helmet

and sword — especially when they enter an enemy temple and find awaiting them
beautiful captives, naked and with fear in their eyes. In contemporary representa-
tions of the Gauls we thus find, strangely enough, the three functions that according

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

its dual aspect, luminous and somber, Mithraic and Varunian; warriors, with their
victories and miseries; and fertility, which has ensured the continuity of the race
down to the present day and which cries out to be associated with the symbol of the
cock and gauloiserie (salacious storytelling).*' Too facile to be taken altogether sen-
 —

Franks and Gauls 29

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.

In Ideological Battle: Vichy

But for the use of the "Celtic cross" by a small sectarian group on the extreme right
and rare mentions in official speeches, the Gauls are today all but absent from the
French political scene. This has been true, however, only since the end of the war;
less than fifty years separates us, in fact, from the last major effort to dragoon them
into service. On August 30, 1942, the Legion, a veterans' organization created by
Vichy that later became Joseph Darnand's Milice (militia, Vichy's paramilitary ide-
ological police — TRANS.), celebrated its second anniversary in great pomp beneath
symbols of "la Terre de France" and national unity. Preparations had begun the
week before in metropolitan France and even earlier in the colonies. Local Legion
leaders in every commune had solemnly dug up shovelfuls of the local soil to be sent
in a sealed bag to Gergovie, where on August 30 all the bags containing their sam-

ples of French earth les Terres of France (the capital letter being de rigueur in this

period) —were to be deposited in a marble cenotaph and sealed up by Marshal

Petain in person.^ And that is exactly 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 several parallels between the most ancient past and the most recent present:
it had been two years since the founding of the "Legion frangaise des combattants
et des volontaires de la 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 mon-
ument to Vercingetorix erected in 190 1 there was the crypt built to hold French soil

"collected in the metropolis and in the colonies, from all the places upon which the

spirit of France has breathed and in which is preserved the memory of those who
have created its greatness."^ At Gergovie, in other words, the Vichy regime set itself

up as both the guardian of national territorial integrity and the heir to all of France 's
past, including, though not without considerable hesitation, the Third Republic.^ At
the same time, however, it portrayed itself as the force responsible for the rebirth of

France: as General Campet put it, 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
3° KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

had begun in September 1940 with the adoption of the francisque gallique, the two-
headed GalHc axe, as the symbol of "French unity under the orders of its comman-
der" and a mark of support for the marshal. The francisque, according to its creator,

combined the star-studded baton of the marshal of France with the "two-headed
weapon carried by the Gauls and their leader Vercingetorix in the era of the first

ordeal from which our country was to emerge."'^ This formulation portrays Petain

as virtually a reincarnation of Vercingetorix, and it was to be used again at Gergovie.

Vichy propaganda co-opted the Gauls for its own purposes in two ways. First,

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

is why Vichy chose the francisque as its symbol and Gergovie as a place of com-
memoration. Having thus flattered the nation's sense of honor, however, the gov-
ernment insisted forcefully on the Gauls' realism, which led them, once the battle

was lost, to acknowledge Rome's superiority. Gaul "accepted its defeat: Julius

Caesar brought the Roman peace; vanquished and victors reached an understand-

ing and from this great clash was born the Gallo-Roman civilization that made us
what we are. After two millennia we find ourselves in the same position as our fore-
fathers the Gauls, and we hope with all our hearts that, from the accord between vic-
tors and vanquished, there will at last be born the European peace which alone can
save the world."
Later in this article I will 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 we are." For now it
is enough to note that this idea 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 19 14 and 19 18 to bestow a spiritual dimension on
the war by casting it as a clash between civilization and a barbarism that hid behind
a mask of Kultur}'^ The attempt by Vichy to root itself in the Gallic past thus bor-
rowed what was originally an anti-German theme and used it to justify collabora-

tion with the Nazis in the name of a new European civilization 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 was creating and representing French unity is significant.

In so doing, Vichy was in fact repeating a traditional pattern that can be traced back
to the Second Empire and that became a part of republican ritual after that empire
fell: the invocation of an alleged community of ancestors, identified in this instance

with the Gauls, has the effect of presenting the French as people of a common
blood, members of a single family 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 cultural than biological, more spiritual than racial, to the

Gallic past. The racial theme was never far from consciousness, however, and the
 Franks and Gauls 31

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
it reside? According to the laws and customs of the Republic, in order to be French
it suffices to be a French citizen imbued with French culture or, rather, with the
French spirit, which is the bearer of French identity. According to the extreme

right, by contrast, one is French only if one has French blood, for blood, along
with soil, is the substrate of the national identity. Republican ideology distin-
guishes the French from the Germans but also from the English, the Italians, and
all other nations. The extreme right obviously accepts those distinctions, but its

primary interest is to establish a visible boundary between the "true French," those
who are French by blood, and those who pass themselves off as French without
really being French because they have in their veins something that is usually,

though not always, supposed to manifest itself in external appearance: the shape of

the nose, the color of the skin, the curliness of the hair. In this and many other
respects, the supposedly unifying discourse of Vichy actually drew its inspiration

directly from the ideas of the extreme right, and its 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 eigh-
teenth century: a conflict over ancestry. Were the ancestors of the French the Franks
or the Gauls or both? It was also a conflict about France: When did France begin?
With the arrival of the Franks or of the Gauls? If the former, did the Franks come
in the wake of a bloody conquest to feast on the spoils, or was their settlement a

peaceful one followed by a fusion of the two peoples? And last but not least, it was
a conflict over the belief on the part of some Frenchmen that they 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 last conflict at first took the form of a clash
of orders: the nobility versus the third estate. Later it took the form of class strug-
gle: the aristocracy 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 les Gaulois."

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

conflicts through which French national integration was achieved. That integration
was vertical, ultimately according equal rights to all French nationals and French
nationality to all citizens of the Republic (provided that they assimilated French
culture). It was also horizontal, establishing a clear boundary between French and
non-French. In the long Franco-French and Franco-foreign war over national iden-
32 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

tity and memory, the Gallic reference played a much larger role than one might
guess from the frequency of its explicit invocations.

Now it was 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 there, built there, cultivated the earth, buried their dead, prayed
to their gods, 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. The con-
flict over the Gauls is therefore intimately bound up with the results of research into
their past, research that provided the contending parties to the conflict with their
arguments, while in turn the conflict conferred on the findings and discoveries of
the scholars a significance that was not merely intellectual but quite often political

or even cultural. It is this interaction between historical research and ideological

conflict that will be the primary focus of our attention here.

Images and Relics

The total mass of texts, images, and relics that refer in one way or another to the
Gauls can be thought of as comprising a number of distinct strata, each deposited in
a different era. Comic books discovered the Gauls in the late 1940s, but success came
only with Asterix some ten years later. That success has continued right up to the pre-

sent, and it has brought the rest of French history into comic books along with it.'*"

This most recent stratum lies atop earlier layers of Gallic imagery. Leaving aside a
few paintings that were ahead of their time, the most ancient stratum began to form
in the late 1820s, when a Vercingetorix by Lacroix appeared in the volume on
Auvergne in Nodier, Taylor, and Cailleux's Voyages pittoresques}^ The first edition of
Henri Martin's Histoire de France included two engravings: Les Druides recueillant le

gui sacre (Druids gathering the sacred mistletoe) and Vercingetorix devant le tribunal

de Cesar (Vercingetorix before Caesar's tribunal).'^ Throughout the century these

themes were recycled by illustrators of books on the Gauls, among them La Fondation
de Marseille, Brenn qui met son sabre dans la balance, and La Bataille du RhoneP
Painters soon followed. At the Salon of 1831 it was possible to see an Episode de la

revoke des Gaulois contre les Romains au IIP siecle, and in the 1830s Delacroix thought
of painting the capture of 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 La Defense des Gaules) and even more after 1870:

Luminais all but made the subject his specialty, while many other painters sought
inspiration from France's ancient past.^' Sculpture developed along similar lines.^^
Overall, the period 1870— 19 14 seems to have produced more works on the Gauls
 Franks and Gauls 33

than all other eras of French art combined. What is more, curio dealers sold thou-
sands of engravings representing subjects identical to those treated in these book
illustrations, along with plaster casts of Gallic artifacts 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: an illustration depends on a text that can do without its support,
whereas in comic books the text is inseparable from and subordinate to the image,

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, after going into eclipse for a time, they reemerged in youth
culture, which for a long time remained outside of official culture, until it received
the aesthetic sanction of the pop art movement in the United States and the political

backing of the left-wing intelligentsia in France.

Note that the period in which images of the Gauls were accompanied by at most
minimal texts (titles of paintings, inscriptions on monuments) was also the period
when those images were a part of the official high culture. Here is evidence that
spectators were so imbued with Gallic themes that a mere evocation of those themes
was sufficient to make a painted scene or sculpted figure immediately intelligible.

This ceased to be the case after World War I. Among official institutions, only the
educational system has continued right up to the present day to teach, through its

textbooks, that the Gauls became first Gallo-Romans and ultimately Frenchmen.^''
Comic books — 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 these changes in the status of Gallic imagery came changes in con-
tent and style. In the nineteenth century the most widespread and symptomatic
images depicted if not historical characters then at least historical scenes, generally
scenes of pathos, 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 is in many cases anachronistic if

not utterly fantastic, and the representation is 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 same attitude toward the Gallic tradition
as La Belle Helene does toward the classic tradition.
34 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

Let US turn 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

ancient stratum, consisting of relics left by the Gauls themselves: ruins and artifacts

in situ as well as objects displayed in archaeological museums. Note that I call this

the stratum that appears to be the most ancient: that is because, while the material
objects themselves come to us from the time of the Gauls, it is only recently that
those objects have acquired the status of relics. For centuries before, the vestiges of
the Gauls, along with those of other ancient peoples, were treated as refuse, buried

in the earth, forgotten, and likely to be misinterpreted if encountered by chance.

Until quite recently, for instance, old Roman paths were thought to be the work of
Queen Brunhilde, who had become a figure of legend.
A new interest in ancient monuments began to emerge in the sixteenth century.
It is true, of course, that the antiquarians and history buffs of the time were pri-
marily interested in Roman, Greek, and Egyptian artifacts. Nevertheless, they did
not turn up their noses at objects deemed apt for illustrating the local or national

past or even at mere curiosities that seemed strikingly strange or enigmatic. Some
spectacular discoveries showed people where to look. In 1653, for example,

Childeric's tomb was located in Tournai. Now Childeric, of course, was not a Gaul,
but the riches found in his tomb aroused the interest of antiquarians in sepulchers.^^
In 1685 the ossuary of Cocherel was uncovered, although its description was not
published until much later, at which time it was interpreted as a "Gallic sepulcher."^^
In 171 1, in the course of repairs to Notre-Dame in Paris, the altar of the boatmen of
the Seine was discovered along with its inscriptions, its Esus tree, and its bull with

three cranes.^' The (allegedly) Gallic objects went on display in antiquarian shops.

Montfaucon, himself a collector, reproduced some of them in his Antiquite

expliquee?^ Occasionally a more methodical excavation was attempted: Nicolas-

Joseph Foucault, the intendant of Normandy, ordered one such at Valogne in

1691.^' In the eighteenth century President de Robien (of the parlement of Rennes)
was certainly not the only magistrate to order excavations on his own estates.^^ Also
worth mentioning are the excavations at Gergovie in 1755, begun at the behest of the
Societe Litteraire of Clermont,^^ and on Mont Auxois in 1784, which may have been
initiated by the Estates General of Burgundy.^''
The year 1759 marks an important date in the constitution of a corpus of Gallic
and Gallo-Roman artifacts, for it was then that Caylus included Gallic antiquities
along with Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman ones in the third volume of his
Recueil. It is not out of the question that the idea was suggested to him by Maffei's
work on the antiquities of Gaul.^5 In any case, it was in the volume in which he dis-

cussed certain of Maffei's opinions that Caylus published his list of Gallic antiqui-
ties. He ascribed no artistic value to 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 first Etruscans, and the Sards, whose merit may in

some ways be inferior to that of the Gauls. I should therefore be entitled to record
the ancient productions of my country, even if they were in worse taste and con-
veyed no notion of divinity, as evidence of a great precision and breadth of
mind."^'' On this point Caylus never changed his mind: "What have I said, and what
can be said, about the Gauls?" he asked in the conclusion of the final volume to be
published during his lifetime. "Fighting was all they knew. True, one does glimpse
a few crude artifacts acquired through trade with Greece. But after having fought
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-
ments of Roman Gaul that he reproduced reflected his taste and that of his corre-
spondents. He never passed up any opportunity, however, to present any monument
that seemed "patently" Gallic. He called for the publication of Antique Gaul,^^
praised Pelloutier's History of the Celts, kept abreast of research on northern antiq-

uities, and criticized Dom Martin for attributing an Etruscan monument to the

Druids."" He devoted three plates to Gergovie, summarized the debate over its loca-

tion, and reported the results of the excavations that had been carried out there.
He reproduced certain "Gallic medals" while dismissing them as mere curiosities,

"because they cannot teach us about history and it is impossible to make any con-
jecture concerning the time and place of their fabrication."''^ In this they were no
different from other Gallic artifacts, all of them being "in general very difficult to

explain" and still more difficult to date.'*'' Last but not least, he took an interest in the
raised stone of Poitiers and other megalithic monuments.
Strange as it may seem, megalithic monuments in general did not begin to attract
attention until the second half of the sixteenth century.''^ It was not until a century
later, moreover, that people began to approach them with archaeological interest.

The earliest known excavation was at Cocherel, an attempt to discover what was
hidden beneath a hill on which two stones had been implanted. For Montfaucon, as

we saw a moment ago, this was a "Gallic sepulcher," and stones found in various

other locations were also identified as Gallic artifacts, namely, weapons.'"' As for the
raised stone at Poitiers, Caylus said that "it is probable that works of this type and
nature are from the time of the Gauls and that their construction must have predated
the wars with Caesar by several centuries." He prudently assumed that the stone in

question must be a tomb of some kind.'*''

He took a different position, however, in regard to the megaliths of Brittany,

which were brought to his attention by La Sauvagere and President de Robien, who
sent him his father's maps and drawings.''^ While disagreeing with Deslandes, who
FIGURE 1.2 Gallic coins; Caylus, Recuell d'antiquites(m2-m7).

FIGURE 1.3 Evariste Luminais, Gallic Lookouts.

38 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

saw the rows of stones at Carnac as "a consequence of revolutions occurring in the

surface of the earth," and with La Sauvagere, who saw them as vestiges of old

Roman camps, 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 known of the customs and religion of the
Gauls did not justify imputing to them the "kind of superstition" that the megaliths
seemed to indicate. After noting "the absolute silence that even tradition has main-
tained concerning a custom so often repeated," Caylus concluded that "one can
infer from this an even more remote antiquity, memory of which had been lost in

Roman 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 it actually stimulated new inter-

est by promoting the nation's antiquities, especially those of the Gauls. I shall have
more to say about this period later on, but for now it will suffice to note the publi-

cation by Legrand d 'Aussy of an important report on French burial sites, a report

which unwittingly provided archaeological justification for the extravagances of

Celtomania. The purpose of this epoch-making report was scientifically irre-

proachable: to classify burial places from the ancient past down to the Renaissance

and to establish a typology and (for the older sites) a relative chronology, while
drawing whatever historical lessons were available from the sites and urging the
government to organize excavations both in Paris and in the departements}^

Legrand therefore took an obvious interest in "Gallic tombs," which, contrary to

Caylus, he identified as megalithic monuments. He was the first to distinguish
clearly among the various types of such monuments and to give them names, nearly
all of which subsequently entered into common parlance. He introduced the word
menhir, for example, in these terms: "I am told that in low Breton these crude

obelisks are called ar-men-ir. I accept the expression all the more readily because, in

addition to allowing me to avoid circumlocution, it has the advantage of belonging

to France and of conveying to the mind a precise meaning in a word whose pro-
nunciation is not unduly disagreeable."^^ From Deslandes he borrowed the word
lecavene, which has not survived. And he launched the word dolmen (he spelled it

dolmine): "M. Coret, in discussing tables of a sort that I am about to describe and
which can be seen at Lockmariaker, says that in low Breton they are known as

dolmin. Once again I shall avail myself of this expression, which, like the two pre-
vious ones, is necessary to my exposition. In a subject that is totally new, and for
which as a consequence no terminology exists, I have been forced to create one for
myself. And while I have every right to coin new words, I prefer to adopt already
 Franks and Gauls 39

existing ones, especially when, as with words borrowed from low Breton, they offer

the hope of representing the old Gaulish nomenclature. I shall therefore take up the
"^^
word dolmine and use it to refer to the tables I am about to describe.
Legrand devoted a section of his report to each type of megalithic monument
and another to burial mounds, which, he said, "are to France today what the pyra-
mids are to Egypt."^'' One step at a time, his work thus created an object that did not
previously exist, and in so doing he changed the very perception of the landscape.
He was fully conscious of the innovative nature of his work: "Who would believe
that objects standing in the open in plain view and massive enough to attract and
hold the eye are nevertheless as unknown as if they did not exist.'^ During the six-

teenth and much of the seventeenth centuries, all but a few scholars in France were
interested only in Roman antiquities. They valued, and were receptive to, only what
was Roman. It was only after Montfaucon and Caylus, having undertaken to treat

antiquities generally, were obliged to concern themselves with those of the Gauls
that people seemed to recognize the extent to which we ought to be interested in
everything related to the primitive history of our forefathers."^^ The monuments
they left behind consequently became both objects of science and subjects of gen-
eral curiosity: "In order to make the various types of Gallic tombs interesting, it was
necessary to consider both their moral and scientific aspects. The fruit of a belief in
a very strange afterlife, they represent religious views and mores whose description
was useful yet entirely neglected. As a result, "we know nothing, absolutely
nothing, about the monuments that lie at the core of our archaeology, of the prim-
itive history of our nation, our country, and our arts."^^

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

in 1804, set itself the following goals: "i. To pursue research on the Celtic language

and to produce etymologies for all its derivative tongues, especially French. 2. To
describe, explain, and have engravings made of the ancient monuments of the
Gauls."^^ Usually only the first of these goals is emphasized, and scholars have
called attention to the etymological mania evident in the writings of some of the
academy's founders. As a result, there is a tendency to forget that this flamboyant
Celtism did not enjoy unanimous support,^' and that differences over linguistic
excesses and other "extravagances of the imagination" led the members of the acad-
emy to change its name in 1813 to the Societe des Antiquaires de France, which
became a model for the antiquary societies that began to proliferate in the provinces

after 1824.''° The change affected not only the organization's name but the very focus
of its activities. Initially the academy had simultaneously pursued work on linguis-

tics, monuments, and ethnography.*^' After 18 13 archaeology — not only medieval

and Gallo-Roman but also Gallic archaeology —became its exclusive preoccupation.
Gallic archaeology was based on an axiom set forth by Henri Martin at the

beginning of his Histoire de France though accepted much earlier: "The first men
40 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

to populate the west of Europe, in a period well before any historical tradition,

were the Gauls, who are our true ancestors because their blood predominates in the

successive mixture of diverse races that has shaped the modern French. "^^
Megalithic monuments as well as objects in stone and bone unearthed by excavation
were attributed to the Celts, who were identified with the Gauls/^ These vestiges
became the seeds around which crystallized patriotic-mythological dreams and fan-

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 is illustra-

tive of this approach.''''

Other interpretations were admittedly more sober. ''^ Nevertheless, the Celtic and
Gallic attributions, as well as the chronological representations on which they were
based, were completely erroneous. Yet it is by no means the case that research on
megalithic monuments yielded only trivial or negative results. It led in fact to a

major discovery, a discovery so great that it was foreseen by no one. Having set out
in search of the Celts, archaeologists instead found human fossils. Gallic archaeol-

ogy turned out to be prehistoric archaeology. The title of Boucher de Perthes's pio-
neering book, Antiquites celdques et antediluviennes, bears the trace of the transition
from one to the other. Since that transition went hand in hand with an increase in the
estimate of the length of time man had inhabited this earth, it was necessary to give

up the idea that the Celts, either by themselves or together with the Ligurians and
the Iberians, were the 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: i. that menhirs, dolmens, tumuli, and cromlechs are monuments
erected by the Celts; 2. that these monuments were once found throughout Gaul,
unevenly distributed to be sure but nearly everywhere. The reason why they are no
longer found everywhere is that they were destroyed. Specific hypotheses: i. that

the menhirs are idols; 2. that the menhirs are commemorative stones at gravesites;

3. that the menhirs are altars; 4. that rocking stones {pierres branlantes) are of
Druidic origin; 5. that hollowed-out stones were used for sacrificial purposes; 6. that

dolmens were altars for the sacrifice of human victims."''^ Naturally these assertions
met with opposition and resistance. But in 1867 the International Congress on
Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology officially introduced the term "mega-
lithic" to refer to monuments previously attributed to the Celts and Druids.''^ Traces
of the earlier attribution persist, however: if Obelix is "a menhir deliveryman by
trade," it is because of Legrand d'Aussy.
 Franks and Gauls 41

Promoting a Museum of National Antiquities

As Gallic archaeology progressed over the course of the nineteenth century, its

adepts urged the authorities, with growing insistence, to create a Museum of

National Antiquities. Once again, Legrand d'Aussy was in the forefront. His paper
on burial sites included a "Proposal for the French Museum of Monuments" in

which, after remarking on the institution's value and importance, he lamented the
fact that the museum contained only monuments of the most recent period, which
in his periodization was called the "age of 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 its type to be seen there. Let us heighten its effects and strengthen its

impression by making it accurate in every detail, that is, by composing authentic

tombs, to be selected from 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]
will truly be entitled to call itself the museum of French monuments, for only then

will its collection be complete back to most remote periods of the past: no type of
monument will be lacking. What other museum in Europe will offer such an
"^"^
unusual, stimulating, and novel spectacle.''

Legrand 's proposal, along with his excavation plans, was taken up by another
collector of Gallic and Gallo-Roman artifacts, Grivaud de la Vincelle, in conjunc-
tion with others interested in the subject. The goals of the project changed, how-
ever, 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 in that, rather than give pride of place to works of art and the
Middle Ages, it would make room for every available vestige of France 's most
remote past:

If there were a place in the capital especially designed to receive every ancient
monument discovered in France, that collection would, with a modicum of
care and at very little expense, grow daily in extent and richness. Since each

object would be classified along with the date and place of its discovery, schol-
ars engaged in research on ancient Gaul would find among the exhibits evi-

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

dissertations and would certainly revive throughout the country the taste for

antiquity, which today is almost extinct. One could excavate, with the cer-
tainty of finding an abundant harvest, the Chatelet plateau, two-thirds of
which has not been touched; the Mom Seleucus, whose ancient 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, who first became interested in the

Palais des Thermes (baths) in Year II of the Republic, called for the creation of a
Gallo-Roman museum. Ten years later, the political climate had changed and the

government had issued a decree closing the Museum of French Monuments, in the
wake of which Grivaud renewed his earlier proposal; Quatremere wrote a review

of his book on his collection and claimed to have initiated the 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 came close to realization. Taking advantage of the
Due d'Angouleme's visit to the Palais des Thermes, he secured a promise of funds
for the preservation of the edifice and had himself appointed curator of the future
Gallo-Roman museum. In 1820, however, after the fall of the Decazes government,
''^
work on the project was halted.

The idea of a national museum did not resurface until after the July Revolution.
In 1 83 1 the city of Paris bought the Baths. The vogue was now for the Middle Ages,
however, and writers, artists, and people of fashion were flocking to the Du
Sommerard collection on display in the Hotel de Cluny. It will come as no surprise,

then, that among the numerous proposals floated at the time for a museum of
national monuments, the public favored that of Albert Lenoir, whose central idea

was to link the two adjoining buildings at the site, one ancient, the other medieval,
so as to offer the public a "complete chronology" and in order "to display the mon-
uments of our history in a series of architectural spaces contemporary with the
major epochs that bequeathed them to us."
Lenoir proposed that the exhibits of Roman monuments, which were naturally

to be housed in the Baths, be preceded by an exhibit of "Druidic monuments," to be

collected in a "Gallic court" with entry by way of bridges constructed "in the man-
ner of dolmens, that is, 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 at

Saint-Landry in 1829, should provide ample matter for the Gallic exhibit that is to
 Franks and Gauls 43

lead up to the Roman one. These could be augmented with the Venus of Quinipily
and the statue of Vercingetorix, a celebrated general, discovered this past century in
Auvergne, which is probably stored in some obscure place from which it is to be
hoped it may be retrieved."'''*

The rest of the story is well known. In 1843 National Assembly and Senate
approved the allocation of funds to purchase the Du Sommerard collection.

Francois Arago, 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 sav-

ages of Oceania have been neglected. It is high time that we gave some thought to
our ancestors. Let us see to it that the capital of France also includes a French his-
torical museum. His call was heeded. The Musee de Cluny, which was dedicated
on March 17, 1844, in general reflected Lenoir's proposal, except that the Gallic
exhibit was omitted. The lion's share of the space went to the Middle Ages.^*"
Although the museum proved quite popular, it therefore failed to satisfy those who
had hoped to see the establishment of a museum of French antiquities — a group
whose numbers were growing.
By the 1820s excavations were being organized virtually everywhere in France
by local organizations, private individuals, and government bodies. The artifacts

they unearthed went into private collections or were displayed in one of the archae-
ological museums that many provincial cities established.^^ The Gauls, introduced
into literature by Chateaubriand at the turn of the century and featured in a num-
ber of operas devoted to Velleda as well as in Bellini's Norma and Gounod's cantata
Gallia,^^ also figured in a growing number of historical works after 1830. One
gauge of the growing public interest in the nation's ancient past is the number of
editions through which some of these works went, and I have already mentioned the
increased attention paid to the Gauls by painters and sculptors after 1850. Another
measure of the intensity of this interest is the number of works devoted to the loca-
tion of Alesia (as well as the degree of passion invested in them). Was it Alise-
Sainte-Reine in Burgundy or the new contender that entered the race in 1855, Alaise

in Franche-Comte.'' 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 public.''^

In 1 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
44 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

French archaeologist to the Louvre, whose cosmopohtan galleries are open to antiq-

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 in Celtic."^" The end of this state of
affairs was imminent. Napoleon III, who in 1858, at the height of the battle over
Alesia, created a Commission on the Topography of 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), pro-
director of the

vide him with reproductions of Germanic and Roman arms.^' It was in these cir-
cumstances, apparently, that Legrand d'Aussy's old idea, updated to meet the needs
of the moment, finally began to move toward accomplishment.
On November 8, 1862, a decree was issued establishing the chateau of Saint-
Germain-en-Laye as "a museum of Celtic and Gallo-Roman antiquities subsidiary
to the Museum of Antiques," that is, the Louvre. The new institution was to be

called the Gallo-Roman Museum, later changed to the Museum of National

Antiquities, the name that it still bears today. The museum was dedicated on May 12,

1867, its holdings enriched by the acquisition of the Boucher de Perthes collections
(which Cluny had rejected in 1858) and by donations from Napoleon III, whose
name appears on the donors' list twenty-five times and whose gifts included mainly
Gallic and Gallo-Roman artifacts.^^ Initially traces of the institution's association

with the history of Caesar project were quite apparent, so much so that visitors were
astonished to "see a French museum of national archaeology start off with monu-
ments located in Italy celebrating a Roman emperor's victories over the Dacians."^^
Under the Third Republic the Saint-Germain museum accentuated both its scien-
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 Museum
of National Antiquities exists and that anyone who tours the fifteen or twenty halls

it contains will be making a quick but comprehensive survey of our ancient history

from the most remote past to the beginning of the Middle Ages."^^
Over the past hundred years archaeological museums in France have to one
degree or another undergone changes and reorganizations that have ultimately
affected the ways in which visitors perceive the exhibits and therefore the image of
the past they take away with them. Today, in contrast to a hundred years ago, objects
are no longer restored and displayed in such a way as to efface their history and cre-
ate the illusion of a direct confrontation between the spectator and a past ostensibly

brought back to life in 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 45

described. Furthermore, the manner of display is different from what it was a cen-

tury ago. New interpretations determine the arrangement of artifacts as well as the

accompanying commentary and thus the significance attached to each object.

These new interpretations are in part the result of recent finds, such as the dis-
covery of a princely burial site at Vix in 1953, as well as modern dating techniques
(especially the use of carbon 14), pollen studies, and metallurgical, chemical, phys-
ical, and other analyses. Advances in Celtic and Indo-European linguistics have also
been important, from Zeuss's Grammadca celtica (1853) and the work of Arbois de
Jubainville to Vendryes, Benveniste, and beyond; the same can be said of the inno-

vative work on beliefs, myths, and religions done primarily by Georges Dumezil
and his followers. In short, the oldest representations of the Gauls, in the form of
surviving artifacts once treated as worthless junk, embody all later representations,

in that their significance and in some cases even their physical appearance bear the

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

Montfaucon and Caylus to the archaeologists of today.

From Caesar to Louis XIV

The number of ancient texts that instruct us about Gaul prior to the mid-fifth cen-
tury of the Common Era is impressive. According to Paul-Marie Duval, who has
established the most comprehensive bibliography, "by the year 460 some 350 works
by single authors, anonymous authors, or several hands yield some mention of Gaul
proper or its inhabitants and in some cases a good deal more. More than 190 of these

are in Latin, the others in Greek; roughly 275 are in the pagan tradition, while 75 are

of Christian inspiration. These texts did not all play the same historical role. Some
were exhumed only recently, whereas others have been known and used for a long
time. But one and only one has never been forgotten. Only one work has, ever since

it first 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 succes-

sion: 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 numerous French translations, which are espe-
cially significant since scholars know Latin, so that the existence of vernacular ver-
sions demonstrates that the work was being read by a broad audience. The first

translated edition dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century; it 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
 '

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.'

Finally, to round out the picture, I should also mention the many biographies of
Caesar, commentaries on his work, and discussions of its details. In 1880 there were
some 70 of these, 55 of which had been published in the previous thirty years, and
these figures are surely far from complete.'^

There is little mention of Gauls and Romans in French oral traditions, and it is

highly probable, moreover, that what mentions there are derive from books.'^ 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 pro-
fane entity. The word Gallia, which many writers used as a geographic term, also

took on political significance in the twelfth century, 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 known in French as les Gaules and
in Latin as Galliae (e.g., Lodoycus rex Galliarum) or of the Gallic people (e.g.,

Philippus rex Gallorurri)?''

More than the name was at issue, however. For sixteen centuries, from the time
of the Roman conquest to the French elite 's discovery that the Gauls were their
ancestors, it was solely thanks to a few ancient authors, Caesar first and foremost
among them, that memory was kept alive of the people who had once inhabited the

various parts of Gaul, of various episodes in their history, of their customs, institu-
tions, 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
erected a 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

would have remained intact. If one had to single out one place —one formative
place —where the memory of things Gallic was and is still preserved, it would
surely be that diaspora of individual places constituting all 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 Caesar, and
inscribed in their martyrology.'^ This is a good example of the use in local and
sacred history of knowledge derived from the ancients. An example of the use of
 Franks and Gauls 47

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 Italy.'*' This preface served as the inspiration for the
Grandes Chroniques de France: "But since 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."'^
Implicit in Almoin and explicit in the Grandes Chroniques, the idea that what had
been called Gaul now bore the name of France seems to have been quite widespread
from the twelfth century on:

France aveit nun Galle a eel jur.

Si n'i aveit rei ne seinnur.

Romain en demainne I'aveient

[France in those days went by the name Gaul.

It had neither king nor lord.

The Roman had it in his dominion]

we read in the Roman de Brut by Wace (1155). Similar formulations can be found
elsewhere, and the same opinion is expressed in Li Fait des Romains, whose wide cir-
culation has already been mentioned.'^ In short, from at least the twelfth century on,
men 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 it possible to explain how, why, and
under what circumstances Gaul had changed its 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 this idea was echoed not only by French historians,

naturally enough, but also by Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Belgians, Poles, and
Scandinavians. Only a few Englishmen remained skeptical of these Frankish
claims, and they ascribed Trojan roots to either the inhabitants of Britannia or its

ruling dynasty. This virtually unanimous European opinion began to break down
in the fifteenth century, when Italian 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. '"^ This "Italianization"
of the Trojans (did not Antenor die in Padua.'*) had its counterpart in other
48 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

European nations in the form of a search for

a glorious past that was purely national, a

search that was facilitated by the revival and
circulation of long forgotten or little known
texts: Livy, for example, was rediscovered in
the fourteenth century, along with Tacitus'

Germania and various Latin and Greek geo-

graphers, especially Strabo. Of a total of
thirty-four manuscripts 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" — those

whose feats had implications for all

mankind —was not somuch Trojan ancestry

as ancientness, especially when attested by
FIGURE 1.4 Julius Caesar, Commenfa/res; French translation (1482).
the allegedly most ancient authors, and mili-

tary exploits, especially against the Romans.

Thus the modern Germans drew glory from their Germanic ancestors, the Spanish

from the Iberians, the Poles 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 definitely had Gallic ancestors he did not have in 1400."'"^ To be
sure, these new ancestors were not yet in a position to replace the Trojans, to whom
the French felt attached by long habit and who, throughout the sixteenth century,
coexisted with the Gauls, resisting repeated attempts to purge them from the history

of France. But in the end the Trojans lost this war too: by the seventeenth century

it was no more than a memory.

Universal history also had its sacred component, however. This was vastly
more important than the profane component, because Genesis provided the ulti-

mate answer to the question of national origins in the genealogy of Noah's descen-
dants and the story of the diaspora following the failed attempt to build the tower
 —
Franks and Gauls 49

FIGURE 1.5 Remus presents his daughter to Francus with the city of Reims in the background; sixteenth-century tapestry, studio
of Beauvais.

of Babel. The Trojans had held a place in this genealogy for more than a thousand
years: they were descendants of Japhet. The ancestors that the European nations
chose for themselves in the fifteenth century — Germans, Sarmatians, Gauls
therefore had to legitimate themselves by producing their own genealogies going
all the 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, it also had to be
authenticated by authority adequate to ensure its acceptance. Annius of Viterbo
resolved both of these problems by a stroke of genius that ensured his work an
audience throughout Europe. He claimed to be publishing for the first time texts
of very ancient historians, among them Manetho and Berosus, writers who had
been widely quoted and highly respected in antiquity but whose works had disap-
peared. On its face there 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. In connection with
the Gauls, for example, the pseudo-Berosus gave a list containing the names of
their first twenty-five kings. It did not take long for Annius to be labeled a
forger, but the controversy over the authenticity of the texts he published lasted for
'^'^
nearly two centuries.
5° 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 texts at least partly devoted to the subject. "^^ Berosus was
published many times both with and without the comments of his self-styled editor,

and his list of Gallic kings was included by Jean Lemaire de Beiges in his influential
book, Les 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 suf-
ficiently well known for a canon of Beauvais cathedral, about 1530, to commission
five tapestries depicting, respectively, Samothes, the first king of the Gauls with the
Celtic Jupiter; Hercules of Libya, the tenth king of the Gauls and the founder of
Alesia; Galathes, the son of Hercules 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, finally, Francus and Remus, the twenty-third and
'^^
twenty-fifth kings of the Gauls.
The Gauls' introduction into the history of France raised an immediate problem:
their relation to the Franks. As long as the Franks were identified with the Trojans,
the problem could be solved by invoking mythical genealogies.'^' But when that

identification ceased to be taken for granted, things 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 rea-
sons there always had to be unity at the beginning. Two types of solutions were
worked out. Frangois Hotman identified the Franks with the Germans, who had
always been allies of the Gauls in their struggle with Rome and who came to Gaul
as liberators: the two united peoples formed a nation and elected their first king.'"^

For Hotman, in other words, ethnic difference became blurred within a single polit-
ical community. Bodin proposed a different solution, which was popularized by
Claude Fauchet and others. He held that "the Franks mixed easily and united with
the Gauls because they sprang from the same origins and shared similar cus-
toms."'" In other words, the Franks were Gauls who had migrated across the
Rhine. What began as one community subsequently divided, but in the end the
divided segments reunited to form a single nation. There is no doubt that in speak-

ing of Gauls and Franks Hotman was also thinking of Catholics and Protestants; he
says as much 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
tracing the ancestry of the Gauls back to Noah continued to hold a certain attrac-

tion. A book by Father Pezron, who was by no means the only person to cling to
such notions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, is a good example of
 Franks and Gauls 51

how intellectual interests and methods, some of which dated as far back as the early
Middle Ages, coexisted with more recent developments, such 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 in the study of European prehistory than in other
historical disciplines. The biblical-etymological speculations of Father Pezron are

not so far removed from the techniques employed in seemingly more modern his-

tories 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, by the

book of Genesis, they were hamstrung by biblical chronology, as well as steeped in

historically minded patriotism. Hence they were doomed in advance to revive old
myths and create new ones, as can be seen in the work of Dom Jacques Martin"''

and, later, Simon Pelloutier."^ Despite criticism by Leibniz and Freret, the Franks

could thus still be seen as Gauls who had returned to their homeland."^ Even rela-
tively 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 archaeol-
ogy, which was mentioned previously.

Franks versus Gauls

To be completely comprehensive, we should also include research by local schol-

ars, 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."^ Of marginal importance
in the history of France, which truly began only with the Franks, they did not
arouse great passions. Toward the end of Louis XIV's reign, however, relations
between the two groups began to be redefined, and this eventually led to a new view
of the history of France in its entirety and, in particular, to a new approach to the

Gallic period. It is impossible here to delve into the political, ideological, and social
context of this turning point, whose effects were soon felt in the debate over the
French constitution."' Over the course of the next century there would be further
profound effects on historical research and the overall presentation of French his-

tory: rather than view the history of France in the traditional terms of unity and
harmony interrupted only by accidents, people began 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 it will suffice to recall the principal

views of the Comte de Boulainvilliers, who was the first to envision the national
'^^
past in this new way.
52 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

According to Boulainvilliers, French history began with the conquest of Gaul by

the Franks. The territory was divided up, and the Gauls were subjected to rule by
new masters. At the time of the conquest, moreover, the Franks were not subjects
of any king. All were noble, and they lived in an aristocratic regime under an elec-
tive kingship, with no obligation to the monarch other than military service.'^'
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 was consti-

tuted only after it was emancipated by the Lords. It sought the protection of the
Kings and claimed to be immediately subject to the monarch. In this undertaking it

was supported in contravention of the obvious rights of the Owners of land and of
the fundamental law of the Government. "'^^
From the time of Clovis on, kings had tried to strip the Franks of their liberties

and privileges by relying, if necessary, on the Gauls and helping them in their strug-
gle against their masters. Had Clovis lived longer, he might have succeeded in
reducing the Franks to servitude. '^^ This finally did happen during the reign of
Pepin, but Charlemagne restored harmony between the king and the Franks: "This

great Prince saw that despotic and arbitrary government, of the kind that his grand-

father Charles Martel had hoped to establish, was absolutely contrary to the genius

of the Nation and its certain and evident rights and therefore that it could not last,

and he consequently decided to give the French the justice due them by reestablish-
ing the ancient form of government."'^'*
It was Charlemagne who consecrated feudal rights and introduced fiefs "without
doing undue violence to the laws."'^^ He also revived the role of the national assem-
blies as supreme tribunals and authorities with the power to make all decisions con-

cerning taxation, war, armed forces, and alliances and to settle differences between
lay and ecclesiastical lords. These assemblies consisted exclusively of the clergy and
nobility, because "the French, after conquering the Gauls during the reign of Clovis
I, established their government entirely apart from the subject Nation, which,
remaining in a state 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 axis of French history from Charlemagne to his
own day was the erosion of feudal rights and, as a necessary consequence, of the

rights of peerage, that is, a degradation of the nobility, one of the causes of which
was "the policy of the Capetian family," together with a rise of the third estate,

which consisted of emancipated serfs abetted by the same Capetians.'^'' In the end
the Franks lost and the Gauls won. Against this it might be objected that nothing is

left of the Gauls in this formulation other than the name, which is used, moreover,

to refer not to the inhabitants of independent Gaul but to the Gallo-Romans, indeed
as a synonym for their enslavement. True enough, but this truth only scratches the
 Franks and Gauls 53

surface. In the first place, "Gaul" was not just any name: it was the name of a peo-
ple that for two centuries had enjoyed the reputation (either directly or by way of

the Franks) of being the ancestor of the French nation. For Boulainvilliers, how-
ever, only a part of the French nation descended from the Gauls, namely, the com-
moners. The nobility, therefore, was in his view like a foreign body. To be sure, he
acknowledged that mixed marriages and other factors had resulted in a situation

where, "by the accession of Hugh Capet, the two peoples had become fused in
shared rights and a single national body."'^^ Nevertheless, he saw the rights of con-
quest 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-
lished between the history of the Gauls, ancestors of the third estate, and the his-

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

rights and feudal rights.

This became flagrant from the moment Abbe Dubos published his methodical
refutation of Boulainvilliers's idea of French history. Boulainvilliers was wrong
because in the fifth century there were no Gauls in Gaul; they had all "metamor-
phosed" into Romans. '^^ The Franks, moreover, were by no means savages encoun-
tering civilization for the first time: they had for centuries been trading and form-
ing alliances with Rome, and many of them had served Rome. Indeed, they were
"the most civilized of the barbarian nations."'^" Thus there was no "Frankish con-
quest," except of the territory held by Syagrius, but rather voluntary submission'^'
of Romans to Frankish kings. Furthermore, this submission was ratified by the
Empire, which conferred power and legitimacy upon those kings and, pursuant to
valid legal forms, ceded to them rights over Gaul.'^^ That is why Frankish settle-

ment initially had such negligible effects: "The general 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, at first glance, much the same as it had been under Honorius and
Valentinian III." Of course barbarians now filled offices that had previously been
closed to them, and a foreign prince was pretorian prefect. "As for the rest, the face
of the country was the same. Bishops governed their dioceses with the same author-
ity they had before the Franks became rulers of the Gauls. All Romans continued to
live under Roman law. In every city the officers were the same as before. The same
taxes were levied. The same shows were staged. In short, manners and customs
were the same as when people were obedient to the sovereigns of Rome."'^^
Dubos 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

arrival in Gaul. He insisted that the Frankish monarchy had always been hereditary,
and rejected the notion that the nobles had elected the king.'^"* He showed that the
Franks paid taxes under the sons of Clovis'^^ and that the Merovingian kings
54 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

wielded absolute authority over their subjects.'^'' He maintained that some Franks
had been slaves while others were free and that the free men formed a single

order, '^^
and he denied both that the only profession of free men was that of arms
and that in Gaul after the arrival of the Franks only the Franks bore arms: Romans
'^^
were also soldiers. All this evidence provided further support for Dubos's central

argument: that the Franks did not subjugate the Romans, who rather became sub-
jects of the French monarchy. In so doing, the Romans retained the right to hold any
employment; entered into marriages with the Franks, who quickly and adeptly mas-
tered 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
Charlemagne. A much later development, these so-called rights were in fact a vast

usurpation: the lords entrusted by the prince with 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 to them-
selves the right to administer justice or else entrusted it to officers whom they nom-
inated and removed as they saw fit. Finally, they asserted the right to levy both per-
sonal and real taxes at will. It was then that Gaul truly became a conquered land."'""^

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

emerged, rather, as a result of the institution of feudalism by a tyrannical and arbi-

trary nobility working to the detriment of both monarchy and people. In Dubos's
eyes, moreover, this conflict was a social conflict devoid of ethnic coloration,
because the two nations had merged and become one. They had begun to speak a

common derivative of Latin, to dress in the same fashion, and to live under one
law.''*' 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 society, especially their natural

flightiness and their haste to resort to arms and violence, which has so often caused
them to fight when no real issue was at stake. These vices, which opened the gates of
Gaul to the Romans and later delivered the country into the hands of the Barbarians,

will 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 55

The idea, introduced into French history by BoulainvilHers, of an enduring

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 criticism.''*^ It suffered further from his insistence on the need for

unity when the climate was one of conflict between nobility and third estate.

Boulainvilliers's way of looking at things made it possible to think about this con-

flict in 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 under-
lying factors, of such problems as the relation between the monarchy and represen-
tative institutions, the role of the parlements, and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of
noble privileges.''*'* In the political-polemical mode, the Gauls became symbols of
the third estate and the Franks of the nobility. Writers speaking in the name of the

third estate could thus identify that group with the nation as a whole and ask, as

Sieyes did, why it did not dispatch "to the forests of Franconia all those families that
cling to the absurd pretension of having sprung from a race of conquerors and of
having inherited the rights of conquest.'' The Nation, thus purged, will be able to
take consolation in being reduced to the belief that it consists solely of descendants

of the Gauls and the Romans." The exclusionary principle in politics, which
Boulainvilliers employed against the noblesse de robe and the third estate, was thus
turned back against the nobility.''*^ The idea of an enduring antagonism born of the
Frankish conquest would thus serve throughout the Revolution to justify the exclu-
sion of the nobility. From now on, a person could be French only if his or her ances-
'^'^
tors were Gauls.

Amedee 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 noth-
ing 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
various languages back to their roots in the "Celto-Breton of Armorica." As for

relations between the Gauls and the Franks, the most plausible hypothesis, in his

view, was that the Franks were the progeny of "one of the many colonies that
Sigovese established in Germany." If so, he argued, "the Franks, in driving the
Romans out of Gaul, were merely reclaiming their ancestors' ancient heritage,

returning to their country of origin."'''^ We thus come full circle back to the six-

teenth century.
56 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

Jean Picot's book took a very different who prided himself on not
line. Picot,

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
was interested not just in historical events but also in the climate and soil of Gaul
and in what the country produced as well as in the physical and moral characteris-
tics of the Gauls along with their diet, clothing, education, marriage and funeral
customs, techniques of hunting and making war, government, religion, population,
and wealth. As the titles of his treatises indicate, he did statistics as well as history.
If La Tour d'Auvergne's book corresponds to the pre-romantic sensibility, Picot's

was close to that of the ideologues}'''^ He presents relations between the Gauls and
the Franks in an imperial spirit, emphasizing the reconciliation of two formerly
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 qualities of the Franks who had once inhabited Germania,
"'^^
other than the name and the conquests.

Perceptible in the Charter of 1814, this spirit of reconciliation was attacked by the
ultras at the beginning of the Restoration — as evidenced, in our domain, by
Montlosier's book'^' —and subsided rapidly after 1820. The liberal response was
not long in coming. It 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 of France." Against the nobility, associated with
"Chlodowig's Sicambrians," he insisted on his own ancestry: "We are the sons of

themen 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
conquest."'^^ Meanwhile, Guizot proudly asserted "that since the beginning of our
monarchy France has been troubled by a struggle between two peoples, and the rev-

olution 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 took just a few years for Guizot and Augustin Thierry to discover that this idea,
if generalized, could render historical progress intelligible, both in France since the

arrival of the Franks and in England since the Norman Conquest. Both Guizot and
Thierry assumed that history has a direction: 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 57

with public power. Both 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
view five such conditions or classes: royalty, clergy, nobility, bourgeoisie, and peas-
antry. Thus Guizot and Thierry introduced a major innovation in the study of the
political life of the past: the idea that a nation, as subject and object of history, is not
a unified, homogeneous entity personified by its king and court but a composite of
various groups in conflict, whose antagonistic coexistence is a source of progress.'^"*

Guizot and Thierry did not agree on every point. The latter, inclined to view all

social conflict in the light of the Greek struggle for independence, emphasized the
ethnic dimension, whereas Guizot stressed the "class struggle." '^^ Still, both writers
were interested in how nations, which by nature incorporated conflict, 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 on
force alone, arbitrary domination for the benefit of private interests: such was the
original form of aristocratic rule. Revolution also found its place: through 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 mechanism that caused them to occur.

In 1828, Amedee Thierry, Augustin's brother, published the Histoire des Gaulois,
which between then and 1 877 went through ten editions (one of which, the 1857, was
reprinted four times), despite criticism by archaeologists in the i86os.'^'' Thierry's

description of Gallic life found its way into the school curriculum. It was repeated
by every writer on the subject, and there were a 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 in painting or sculpture, with

their horned or winged helmets crowned by tall, bushy plumes and their four-sided,

multicolored shields, seem to have come from Thierry as well: "A wrought metal
breastplate in the Greek or Roman style, 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, and rings encircling the arm and middle finger; breeches and cape in

bright diamond patterns or magnificently embroidered; and, last but not least, a

long reddish mustache: so we may imagine the military accoutrement of the

Arvernian, Aeduan, or Biturigan noble of the second century b.c."'^^
For the nineteenth century, Amedee Thierry's book thus served as a reference

book on the earliest periods of French history, and it so happens that the historical
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 Greek civilization, which softened them and corrupted the purity
of their way of life'^° but at the same time led them to renounce such savage cus-
toms as drinking from human skulls at banquets "honoring the conqueror and the
victory of the nation." Thierry tells us that "such brutal and ferocious customs long
held sway throughout Gaul. Civilization in its gradual advance slowly but surely
did away with them. By the beginning of the second century, they were confined to

the fiercest tribes of the north and west, where Posidonius found them flourishing
still.... By the middle of the first century no trace of such barbarism remained any-

where in Gaul."'^'

In transalpine Gaul, to which the influence of Greek civilization was transmitted

via Marseilles, the Gauls experienced two major political revolutions. Initially they

lived under the rule of priests. This theocracy'*'^ was abolished by the tribal chief-

tains, who arrogated to themselves the political power they took from the Druids.
But "if the aristocratic revolution benefitted Gaul, it was because it sowed the seeds

of another, more salutary revolution. As cities grew in number and size, they cre-
ated a unique people in an excellent position to understand and covet independence.

And the people did in fact covet independence, and, encouraged by dissension
among the leaders of the aristocracy, succeeded gradually in conquering it. A new
principle and new forms of government were born inside city walls: popular elec-

tion replaced the ancient privilege of heredity." '""^

This was so in all the cities of the

region, although "the constitutions that emerged from the popular revolution" var-
ied according "to particular and local circumstances." The movement began in the

east and south, where people were most susceptible to the influence of Greek civi-

lization. "By the middle of the first century, it had already made itself felt through-
out Gaul."'*''' This account of the social history of the Gauls is obviously in many
ways analogous to the history of the Middle Ages as it was presented in the time of
Amedee Thierry, with the War of Investitures and the emancipation of the com-
munes as central episodes.

Following this account, then, the Romans came to Gaul at a time when the cen-

ter of gravity was in the process of shifting from rural villages to cities beginning
to develop their own distinctive civilization.'^^ To what extent were the inhabitants

of this Gaul the ancestors of the French.'' In genealogical terms, "nineteen- twenti-

eths" of the latter were descended from the former. '"^"^

But for Amedee Thierry, the
bond between the two peoples was far stronger. He defined it in terms of belonging
to a single "race," a word that for him meant a temperament, a psychic character, a
"moral type." To be sure, it was but a short step from the moral to the somatic, as is

evident from a pamphlet on the "physiological characteristics of the human races"

 Franks and Gauls 59

that was inspired by Thierry's book.'^^ But Thierry himself was interested only in

the "moral type," whose "salient traits," the defining characteristics of the "Gallic

family," he summarized as follows: "A personal gallantry without equal among the

ancient peoples. A frank, impetuous spirit open to all impressions, eminently intel-
ligent; but also an extreme fickleness, a lack of constancy, a marked repugnance for
the ideas of discipline and order that are so powerful among the Germanic races, a

great deal of ostentation, and, last but not least, a perpetual disunity born of exces-
sive vanity."'*'^ For Amedee Thierry it was the apparent permanence of these traits

FIGURE 1.6 Gaul Invaded: The Franks; illustrations by Raffin for Devinat and Toursel, Histoire de France.

1. Un chef, ClOVis. —
Oa eat le chef? Sur 2. Les Francs pillards. — oa sont entrfs
—
boudifr pav<iU. c'rtt Clopis. —
Qui le porte? Qualre gnrj' Francs? Richr villa. —
font-Que Meurtrr, pillage.
ott
riert Iranct, d'autrfi iaednm^. dirt pourquoi. Amies —
li'S

Qu'eniportent-ils? Coffrttn. belUg Hoffrt, vases pricifur. —

dM guemers? Anoon ou lance d crochet. /ranci$(fue, bouclicr. Que vont-ils en f»ire? Partage. —
I.a Gaule n'cta t done pas
— Vetements? Toilf, peauz. —
Vrsage? Chevcux, moutta- d^fentlue? Mai df/endue, tongue poijr. peu de totdals. proit
chet. — VoHt par hnruien. d^vicndrnnt maitret de la Oaulf. facile La QaiUe, pillitt ruinff, mft thru reuse.

3. Les Francs cruels. — Que f»it rhomme 4. L© roi Dagobert. —

Cent ant apr^a Clo
—
i cheval? Regarde hriUe en flammes. —
Poarquoi des soldata ris. Dngobfrt dan$ ion palriis; d ivi^uf.
ttft c/itfig, Les ha-
oomwcnt-lU la (Kirte? Oens en/ermis qu'ils emptcherU de tor- bits du roi? Commf nnrietu ehefg rovxaxm: en outrr, rouronne.
'<> —
C<to« Cliramne. /lis rimlU du roi Clolaire. .Ion pire — Geate? Pourqun.? (In trdne d'or. —
Saint Eloi nrait rrfu
U laitail brUler vil aree la lemme et set tn/ants. — Que i>en- de Vor pour faite un tr^mf. trit fuibUf rf tris honnfte, xl en arait
Mt-Toiu de oe roi fru>c7 Barbare, saru pitH. fait deux; dttint miniUTt dt Dagobert.
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 in turn caused the French
to feel a natural sense of solidarity with and sympathy for the Gauls.
Furthermore, Amedee Thierry recounted the Roman conquest from the point of
view of the Gauls. He emphasized the unfortunate effects of Massalian policy,
which culminated in an alliance between Rome and the Aedui, whom the Romans
henceforth treated as friends and allies. "Thus were uttered for the first time in the
history of the Gallic nations the words allies, friends, brothers of the Roman people,
words of discord and ruin, fatal powers that would, for an entire century, isolate,

sow conflict among, and weaken those nations, ultimately to reunite them all, with-
out exception, in a common servitude." '^^
This indignant and patriotic tone is par-
ticularly noticeable in the passages devoted to Vercingetorix, whose party is charac-
terized as the "national party" and whose army was a "national army" serving the
"national cause," the "cause of liberty." ''''^ As for Vercingetorix himself, this was the
first 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
against the Roman invaders, whose words in sending the cavalry to bring help to
Alesia resounded "as the distress cry of the fatherland itself."'"" Had he not been
alone in his struggle, he would have won. "If Comm the Atrebate, Virdumar, and
Eporedorix had backed Vergesilaun's stubborn efforts; if the outer line toward the
plain had been attacked as boldly as Vercingetorix attacked the inner line, Gaul
would have been saved, and the name Caesar, which came to stand for danger to the
peace and freedom of all nations, would have gone down in history alongside the

names Crassus and Varus for the comfort of peoples and the everlasting terror of
[would-be] conquerors."''^
Thus there can be no doubt about Amedee Thierry's judgment of the Roman
conquest. 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

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 enlight-

ened, more impartial, more preoccupied with general views and truly public inter-

ests than the former national governments had been.""^ As 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 61

"encouraged by the government, absorbed the anxious energy of the GalUc charac-
ter and miraculously eased the transition to the institutions of the conquest."'^''
While he sympathetically described every manifestation of Gallic resistance, he
nevertheless did not condemn the Gauls for participating in the cultural and politi-

cal life of Rome. For him, Roman civilization, while not a value superior to national
independence, apparently compensated for its loss. For Gaul, caught between the
Romans and the Germans,'^^ it was certainly better then a relapse into barbarism.

The Gauls Between the Romans and the Germans

The eighty years that elapsed between Amedee Thierry's Histoire des Gaulois and
Camille Jullian's Histoire de la Gaule witnessed an explosion of interest in the Gallic
and Gallo-Roman periods, several symptoms of which we have already mentioned.
There was, in particular, a rapid increase in knowledge. A rough estimate of that

increase can be made by comparing the three volumes of Thierry's work with 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 (at least ten times as
many in Jullian as in Thierry). There is nothing surprising about this. Archaeology
was flourishing: the discipline had had its own journal since 1844, and Jules
Quicherat had been teaching it at the Ecole des Chartes since 1847.'^'' Many excava-
tions were under way, most notably on Mount Beuvray (Bibracte) under the direc-
tion of BulHot and de Dechelette'^^ and at Alesia, initially from 1861 to 1865 under
the patronage of Napoleon III 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 III in 1858, and Joseph Dechelette's

'^^
textbook, which is still in use today.

Other "sciences ancillary to history" were by no means left behind: historical

geography produced the summa of Desjardins,'^'' epigraphy contributed the vol-
umes devoted to Gaul in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (after 1888), numis-
matics offered the work of Blanchet,'^' Esperandieu catalogued sculpted monu-
ments,'^^ and Henri Gaidoz's founding, in 1870, of the Revue celtique provided a
forum for reporting on the latest work in philology and linguistics.'^^ Most of the
material thus made accessible referred to the period of Roman domination, but there
was also much more work than before that shed a new light on independent Gaul.
Even the situation in higher education was changing, at long last rendering
superfluous Henri Martin's bitter comments (quoted earlier) 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
62 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

same at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he devoted most of his teach-
ing on Roman epigraphy and antiquities to Gaul, while Arbois de Jubainville was
elected to the chair of Celtic literature at the College de France. '^"^ In December
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
stones, documents and monuments: "A true national history must be constantly in

touch with the soil that nourished men and the stones they erected upon it. To speak
of the past without studying that soil and those stones is nothing less than to sever
'^^
our history from its roots."

During 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 entirety:

from fifty-odd pages in Michelet (1834) to a hundred in Henri Martin's first edition

(1833) to more than three hundred in the third edition (1844) and the fourth (1855),

to a thick volume by Gustave Bloch (191 1) in Lavisse 's Histoire. Yet while everyone
agreed that it was absolutely essential to include Gaul in any history of France, sev-
eral issues remained controversial. Was there a genuine connection between Gaul
and France.'^ If so, what was its nature.'* And finally, what was the state of Gaul on
the eve of the Roman conquest, and what were the effects of that conquest and of
the Germanic invasions.-* The old problem of the Franks' relation to the Gauls and
Gallo-Romans had survived, even if it was stated differently now from the way it

had been a century before, and along with it subsisted the old division between
"Germanists" and "Romanists."
Sismondi appears to have been the person who went the farthest in denying that
there was any link between the history of France and the history of Gaul. "Two
nations whose characters are dissimilar and whose institutions are absolutely differ-

ent, the Gallic and the French, successively occupied the beautiful country that
extends from the Alps and the Rhine to the Pyrenees and the two seas. The history

of one is independent of that of the other; each is complete unto itself." To be sure,

many French people were descendants of Gauls, and the "race" had not been com-
pletely 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 cen-
turies... during which the Gauls were merely a province of the Roman Empire, with-

out 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 so, Amedee Thierry was react-

ing. It represented an 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 63

there had evolved to this: "The people who first populated the center and west of
Europe were the Gauls, our true ancestors; for their blood 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 traits of their physical type, recognizable
beneath the degeneration induced by a change of mores and a mingling of popula-
"'^^ For Martin, in other words, the French
tions, still attest to that ancient origin.

were still effectively Gauls, physically as well as morally. Politically, however, they
were not Gauls, because the French were a nation, whereas the Gauls, having been
a nation once, became captives of the Roman Empire. It was therefore necessary for

the German barbarians to come and liberate them, thereby reviving the martial char-
acter and virtues of a people gone soft: the Germans were needed in order to "pro-

vide at last the mortar that would bind together the building blocks of French nation-
ality."'^^ 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,'^^ whose work also influenced other

historians and archaeologists who studied Gaul, including Jules Quicherat, perhaps
Fustel de Coulanges, and certainly Camille Jullian.'^" Michelet, though an adver-

sary of the "tyrant" he saw in the Thierry brothers' "exclusive, systematic perpetu-
ity-of-race viewpoint,"'^' was unwilling to go to the other extreme of assuming
a radical discontinuity 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 races, which had successively occupied the ter-

ritory of Gaul, multiplying there and superimposing their distinctive contributions,

were simply "elements," "living components," without which the French nation
could not have become what it was yet which by themselves were incapable of con-
stituting France. Before the nation could come into being, these elements had to be
subjected to "internal processing," or self-transformation. "The process or series of
changes that our fatherland underwent in the course of transforming itself — that is
'^^
the subject of the history of France."

For Michelet, then, there was continuity in the history of France, for the French
nation was present virtually from the first, internalizing and assimilating what came
to it from outside and building its own body from what it took in. But there was also
discontinuity, for in so doing France revealed its latent potential, transformed itself,

and changed its identity yet remained the same, just as an acorn changes its identity

yet remains the same when it becomes an oak, to borrow a Hegelian —and quintes-
sentially Gallic —metaphor used by Michelet himself. ''''
In the beginning were the
Celts, with their clannish spirit, their "warrior's resistance to discipline," their dis-
unity and self-regard — in short, their "barbarian and bellicose chaos," which the
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 this

came first from Greece, later from Rome.'^^ It was Rome that brought organization,
administration, and urban life to Gallic soil. If, 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,"''^ it did so only within the framework of Roman orga-
nization, whose power proved such that even as "the barbarians seemed on the verge
of destroying it, they would be subjected to its force in spite of themselves. Like it

or not, they would have to dwell beneath invincible vaults that they could not shake.
Vanquishers though they were, they would neverthelessbow their heads and accept
the law of defeated Rome." Among the fundamental tenets of that law, which Rome

had implanted in French soil, was the "idea of equality under one monarch, so con-
trary to the aristocratic principle of Germania." Taken up by the Church, preserved
in 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 obsti-
nate discord of heterogeneous elements" only by force, yet their effects left a last-

ing stamp on French institutions, just as Celtic traditions left a lasting stamp on
French individuals. In other words, Michelet disputed Amedee Thierry's con-
tention that the Gauls were a nation before the Roman conquest. On this point

Fustel de Coulanges sided with Michelet: "The Gauls were not a nation; they were
no more unified politically than they were racially. They did not possess a system of
public institutions and practices capable of forging them into a single body. They
were roughly sixty tribes not united by any federal bond, higher authority, or even

a clear idea of a common fatherland. The only kind of patriotism they were capa-
ble of knowing was love of the tiny state of which each of them formed a part."^'^'^

The 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 persis-
tence of local allegiances: "Three-quarters of our French cities are former Gallic
cities. Until fairly recently, moreover, these civitates retained their ancient bound-

aries. The pagi or pays [rural regions] still exist, and the memories and affections of
rural people remain firmly attached to them. Neither the Romans nor the Germans
nor feudalism destroyed these living units, whose very names have come down to

us through the ages."^*^' 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 its inability to resist

first the Cimbri and, later, Ariovistus. To resist an invasion, Fustel insists, individ-

ual courage is not enough. Nations are defended only by the strength of their pub-
 Franks and Gauls 65

lie institutions and social discipline. ^"^^ Although he was speaking of Gaul before the
Roman 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

followed Guizot, although Michelet believed even more strongly that the progress of
civilization coincided with the formation of the French nation, which led to the posi-
tion that the Roman conquest was both an ordeal and a blessing: violent and cruel, it

was nevertheless necessary 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 Amedee Thierry, for whom an independent Gaul was
almost an end in itself, Michelet saw it exclusively as a stage in the development of

France. He accordingly absolved the Roman conquest in the name of reason, even
though his heart remained Celtic. And he treated Roman Gaul the same way: once
Gaul, along with the rest of the Empire, fell into decadence, the invasions became
necessary so that the barbarians might regenerate the country with new blood, albeit

at great cost in devastation, brutality, and a temporary regression of civilization.

Wary of romantic myths and visions, historians born around 1830 had good rea-
son, concerning Gaul and other matters, to trust more in archaeology than in poetry
and to repudiate their elders' fascination with the barbarians.^^^ The defeat of 1871

further accentuated this tendency to regard the Roman conquest as qualitatively dif-
ferent 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. The
Romans made Gaul into a "substantial and solid body" and enabled its inhabitants

to gain access to civilization and in that sense to become Romans without relin-

quishing their Gallic identity. The inhabitants of Gaul were intelligent enough to

take advantage of this opportunity. Therefore "one should not say that the Romans
civilized Gaul, cultivated it, turned forest into farmland, drained the swamps, built
roads, and erected temples and schools. Rather, one should say that under Roman
rule, and thanks to the peace and security it secured, the Gauls became farmers, built
roads, toiled, and, as a result of that toil, came to know wealth and luxury. Guided
by the Roman spirit and by laudable imitation of what was best, they erected tem-
ples and schools."^"''

Unlike the Roman conquest, the Germanic invasions, as Fustel saw them, were
spread out over several centuries and took various forms involving "slow infiltra-
tion, one at a time, by individuals and small groups." They did not immediately
transform the country or establish anything new.^*^^ In advancing this view Fustel
was close to Dubos and still closer to Guizot, who argued that "the invasions

were essentially limited, local, sporadic events." But Guizot took up one of
66 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

Montesquieu's themes with his assertion that "the Germans brought us the spirit of
liberty,"^^'^ an idea that Fustel rejected. In his view, the Germans as such brought
nothing at aU: new blood or a new language or a new religion or private law or
not
novel institutions. The Germanic invasion had the effects that an invasion by any

people would have had. It disrupted the normal functioning of society and influ-
enced its evolution, but "it did not result in the supplanting, on Gallic soil, of the

FIGURE 1.7 The statue of Vercingetorix rides in an automobile; cover of the illustrated supplement to Le Petit
Journal {December 22, 1901).
 Franks and Gauls 67

Gallo-Roman character and spirit by a

Germanic character and spirit. "^"^ Thus

Fustel saw the Germanic invasions as a side

episode, an important one, to be sure, but

comparable to others, whereas the Roman
conquest, which brought about a synthesis of
the Roman spirit with the Gahic spirit, was a

unique act, nothing less than the founding act

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 felt that the Roman conquest
had violently imposed foreign rule.^°^ Between
1 871 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

especially during festivities honoring
Vercingetorix where subtleties would have
been out of place, but it appears to have been
missing from academic historiography.
Academic writers were rather inclined to argue

that the Roman victory over the champions of

Gallic independence was not only a lesser evil,

as Amedee Thierry implied, but actually a

boon for Gaul and hence that there was no rea-

son to grieve over it: "When I see everything

that we owe to Rome,... when I realize that the

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, qualities of which I

am proud as well as defects to which I am as

attached as I am to my qualities, and that, in

short, I am almost as much a Roman as Iam a

FIGURE 1.8 Gallic warrior's costume; Paris, Musee de I'Armee.
Gaul, I confess... that it is impossible for me to
feel annoyed with Caesar and that the defeat of
our forefathers seems to me not something to be ;ready deplored."^"'
68 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

These words of Gaston Boissier's were echoed five years later by the judgment of
Camille JuUian: "Gaul had no alternative but to choose between two dominations. By
ridding it of Germans, even at the price of its liberty, Rome rescued it from barbarism
and may have saved its race and its historical existence. It should therefore come
as no surprise that in 191 5, Pro Alesia, the "journal of the Alise excavations and of
questions concerning Alesia," which, though it strove to maintain a tone of scientific

neutrality, was also the journal of the cult of Vercingetorix, which flourished in what
Salomon Reinach called the "holy shrine of Gaul,"^" changed its orientation and
became a "Gallo-Roman journal." Here is the crucial passage in the editorial justify-

ing this decision: "At stake in the struggle between Vercingetorix and Caesar was the
very future of Gaul. Had victory bestowed its favors on the Gauls, Gaul might have

remained, as Germania did after the Varus disaster, outside the Roman Empire for

several more centuries. The defeat of Vercingetorix was poignant and painful, but its
consequences were incalculable. Out of it Roman Gaul was born."^'^ Less than a cen-
tury earlier, Amedee 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 lived in freedom. Patriotic principles were still at work now, but
hatred of Germany had intervened to produce the belief that the effects of a Gallic
victory 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 real-
ization of an ambition that its author had conceived in 1873, when as a student in his
next-to-last year of high school, he received Amedee Thierry's Histoire des Gaulois
as a prize, read it, and resolved to rewrite that history in his own way.^'^ He there-

fore made his book a compendium of all the research, all the thinking, and all the

controversies concerning Gaul and its inhabitants not just since the publication of

Thierry's book but 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 line written on his subject in antiquity, the Middle
Ages, and modern times. It would be impossible in the space available to do justice

to a summa which, taken as a whole, remains unsurpassed even today, even though
certain points must of course be rejected, corrected, or revised in light of more
recent work.^'"* I shall therefore confine my remarks to a discussion of Jullian's posi-
tions on some of the controversial issues discussed above.

Before turning to that task, however, I must mention how strikingly original the

Histoire de la Gaule was compared with the historical literature of its day. Jullian was
 Franks and Gauls 69

in fact the first French historian to challenge, both in his statements of intention and
in his practice, the dogma that history is 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 la

France, to which he devoted courses in 1905— 1906 and 1906—1907,^'^ Jullian began
his great book with a sort of tableau of Gaul: a description of its structure, of its sit-

uation in the ancient world, and of the nature and aspect of its terrain. Similar chap-
ters, imbued with the Vidalian spirit, can also be found in other volumes.^'^
Jullian's history was thus associated with geography. It was also connected with

archaeology and above all 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 figura-
tive monuments and everyday objects such as tools, artifacts, and weapons.^'^ Last

but not 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 recon-
structing the past in all areas to which the sources granted access. "For history," he
wrote, "is a portrait or narrative of what human actions produce. Everything that

emanates from man, from his will, his intelligence, and his sentiments, is within the

FIGURE 1.9 Monument to the dead; Boen, Loire. FIGURE 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-
thing that he setdown 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
first appears on a piece of flint, the historian has the duty to intervene. Arrows, dol-

mens, and painted caves are as much his business as the Acropolis, Notre-Dame of
Paris, or the Maison Carree."^'^
The Histoire de la Gaule was the realization of this program. But it was also (and

in this respect by no means exceptional) the work of a patriot and, indirectly, of an

ideological and political conjuncture. Such factors cannot be neglected, especially

when it comes to subjects as delicate and controversial as the state of Gaul before
the Roman conquest and the effects of that conquest. On both of these matters
Jullian staked out new ground. The central axis of the history of Gaul during the
half-millennium between the arrival of the Celts and that of Caesar was, he argued,
the formation of the Gallic nation, which led it to adopt a political organization.

The Gauls, he argued, had the idea of a common fatherland and referred to them-
selves by a single name. If they were divided into tribes, those tribes were linked
by language and commercial exchanges, by alliances and relations of domination,
and by "a community of traditions, institutions, teachings, and hopes" that were
kept alive in "periodic gatherings around gods, priests, and common sanctuar-
ies."^'' All the elements of a "national fraternity" were therefore present. The des-
tiny imposed on Gaul by the configuration of its terrain and the dreams of its

inhabitants was to form "a single empire, similar to those that had come into being
in the vast natural regions of the oriental world. "^^^ Jullian did not neglect the
forces that worked against this unifying tendency. He analyzed them at length in
geographic and political terms.^^' Nevertheless, 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
with homogeneous parts obedient to a very powerful sovereign." The bonds that

tied the various Gallic tribes to it "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 progres-
"^^^
sive fusion.

All this was destroyed by the Romans sixty years before Caesar. It was destroyed
in the first place by arms, when the legions that came to defend Marseilles defeated
the Arverni king Bituit, thereby reducing part of Gaul to a colony and eventually a

province of Rome. And it was destroyed thereafter by Roman policy, which favored
the municipal nobility by abolishing kingship among the Arverni, thus undermin-
 Franks and Gauls 71

ing their domination of Gaul. Rome also served its own interests by awarding
favorable treatment to certain tribes, allowing anarchy to smolder: "In this way,
through favors still more pernicious than violence, Rome completed the destruction
of Gaul's unity."^^'* The decline of Gallic civilization and the "moral poverty" of

Gaul by the time of Caesar's arrival were thus the fruit of the Romans' own efforts,
as was the Gauls' inability to defend themselves first against the Cimbri and the

Teutons and 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 more than a Roman machination. Unlike Michelet and Fustel, how-
ever, he 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 from the
outside. His view of the Roman conquest and his judgment of its evolution and
effects point up what he regarded as essential in the history of independent Gaul,
namely, its incomplete development as a nation. It was the Romans' violent inter-

ruption of Gaul's national development that marked the beginning of the conquest.
In fact, it was more than the beginning: after the defeat of Bituit and the creation of

a Roman province, the conquest was already half completed. Caesar had only to
carry it through to its conclusion. In order to do so, however, he had to contend with
what was left of national sentiment among the Gauls, a national sentiment fed by
memories of lost unity.The cooperation of the Gallic tribes and the choice of
Vercingetorix as supreme commander were possible only thanks to that residual
national sentiment and the memories that sustained it. "In this crisis, which would
decide its future, Gaul reverted to the old forms of its national life, and, as in the
previous century, it was the king of the Arverni who put himself forward as its
"^^''
champion before the Roman people.
To Jullian the facts of the matter were thus clear: Vercingetorix represented both
the memory and the dream of a "free, united, and powerful" Gallic fatherland,^^^
and in the confrontation with Caesar he alone deserves sympathy and admiration.
Jullian makes this point unambiguously: "Between Caesar and [Vercingetorix] I

have no hesitation: [Vercingetorix] was the true hero."^^^ He says this without anx-
iety at the 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 enemies. In short, in narrating this episode in
the history of Gaul, Jullian plainly and unequivocally championed the Gallic cause.
In his view no mitigating circumstance lessened the crime of the Romans, not even
the superiority of their civilization, and Caesar embodied two kinds of oppression.
72 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

of the Romans themselves and of the peoples he conquered in their name, as was
symbolized by the deaths, three months apart, of Cato and Vercingetorix.^^" In later

volumes on Gallo-Roman civilization Jullian would stress the positive aspects of

Rome's effort in Gaul, but he became more critical in dealing with the Late Empire.
In the general conclusion, he insisted on the harm that the Roman Conquest did to

Gaul:^^' "If Domitian and Caesar had not come, a great nation would have com-
pleted its formation on the ground, where it would have cut a noble figure." Starting
from a fascination with Rome and its civilization, so evident in Gallia, Jullian ulti-

mately came, in the Histoire de la Gaule, to regard the national interest of the Gauls
as the only valid criterion. It would take a more detailed analysis to gauge the rela-

tive importance of the various factors contributing to this change of attitude: objec-

tive data (one generally speaks of Augustan Rome differently from the empire in

decline), the evolution of Jullian's own opinions, and changes in the ideological and
political climate in which he wrote, owing first and foremost to the First World War.

From a Genealogical Issue to an Object of Memory

The Histoire de la Gaule marked the end of an era. From the 1920s the Gauls were
no longer a fixture of the common culture, widely represented in art, literature, and
publications aimed at the general public. Even archaeology gave up on them: the

Bibracte excavations, halted after Dechelette's departure in 1907, would not be

resumed until 1984, and Pro Alesia ceased publication in 1932, although Toutain
bucked the tide to continue exploration of the site. 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 now
attract seems profoundly different from the kind of interest they aroused in the past:
the great issues of national identity, which were central to almost every work on the
subject from the sixteenth century up to and including the writings of Camille
Jullian, are no longer framed in terms of France's relation to Gaul. The Gauls are

irrelevant. It is the very notion of national identity that has changed in essential

ways since the beginning of the twentieth century.

At that time people believed that national identity was based on a hereditary

national character that was assumed to be connected with certain equally hereditary
physical peculiarities. In other words, national identity was based on "race," in both

its 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 the length of time that a particular people had been settled on the
land it now occupied — a land that was supposed to have contributed to shaping its

collective consciousness and behavior. They also concerned the place that each peo-
 Franks and Gauls 73

pie's ancestors had occupied in the history of Europe and of the world and the
rights that that place was supposed to justify. To be sure, nationalist ideology, which
invokes (sometimes implicitly) blood and soil, still rears its head from time to time
in the form of outbursts of racism and xenophobia. It has nevertheless become mar-
ginal. National identity is today held to be based on cultural continuity, where cul-
ture is understood as both a semiotic and a material fact, whose continuity is ensured
by the transmission of works of 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-
toire. Hence the problems that national identity raises are nowadays stated in terms

not of genealogy but of memory.

One result of this is that our attitude toward "our ancestors the Gauls" has
become rather ironical. Another is that, while we are no longer interested in a sup-

posed kinship between the inhabitants of pre-Roman Gaul and the French popula-
tion today, we are interested in how these alleged Gallic origins are reflected in our

national traditions. What effects did the Gallic past have, and what role did it play.'^

This has led to looking at the Gauls themselves in new ways. Some current archae-
ological investigations are focused on their sanctuaries and 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. Still other scholars are
working to understand the Gauls' sense of space and social organization. All this

work is aimed at demystifying the Gauls and restoring them to their rightful place
in the history of France, which is a religious and cultural as well as a social and eco-
nomic history. The "return of the Gauls" that has apparently been going on for
some time now^^^ is thus very different from earlier returns. This time it is not so
much the Gauls themselves who are coming back as it is France 's Gallic memory,
which is becoming a subject of historical and intellectual investigation. My purpose
in the pages that remain is to understand the nature and function of that memory.
France 's Gallic memory is a memory of long duration. Having been in continu-

ous existence since Caesar's publication of the Gallic IVars, it is the longest-lived of
France 's historical memories. None of the predecessors of the Gauls left evidence
sufficient to enable us to pierce their anonymity. For some fifteen centuries, the
Gallic Wars and a few works of lesser importance were all there was to preserve the

memory of the Gauls and assure them of a place in history. In the sixteenth century,
narratives concerning the Gauls proliferated, incorporating various ancient testi-

mony along with modern fables. Research on Gallic relics began tentatively in the

seventeenth century and was carried on more systematically in the eighteenth cen-
tury.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

superimposed itself on its predecessors and exerted a retroactive influence: owing

74 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

to historical criticism and archaeology, our reading of Caesar is different from what
it would have been a century ago, just as the visual images of that time differ from
images of the Gauls that we are nowadays prepared to accept as accurate.^^''

memory is first of
Envisioned over five centuries, the history of France 's Gallic
all the history of the growth in the number of texts and objects supposed to embody

that memory. This is so despite the elimination of texts and objects that failed to
withstand ever more rigorous standards of critical scrutiny. It is also the history of
a qualitative diversification of the whole body of texts 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 in charge
of preserving and studying those texts and objects. It is, furthermore, the history of
an ever wider diffusion of historical knowledge and legends concerning the Gauls,
all of it brought within reach of the entire population through compulsory school-
ing and inexpensive books. Last but not least, it is the history of the changing func-

tion and status of the Gallic theme within French national memory.
Careful scrutiny shows that these changes did not come about in a uniform way.
One 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 New Regimes continued unabated, while France was at war with all of Europe;
the social struggles of 1848 and the Commune and the two wars with Germany.

Only the last thirty years, symbolized by Asterix, appear not to fit the pattern, which
is probably related to the fact that the Gallic theme is now dealt with at one remove,
in either a burlesque or a reflective mode.
It is by examining these periods one after another that we have been able to per-

ceive the changes in the function and status of the Gallic theme. At the outset it fig-

ured in a myth of ethnic origin that was at first associated with and later supplanted
the Trojan myth; in this 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
place of the father and the nobles occupied the place of elder brothers, whose superi-

ority, immediately perceived as natural, needed no justification. As French society

 Franks and Gauls 75

transformed itself from a society of orders into a society of classes (the very word
class first came into use at the end of the seventeenth century), the legitimacy of noble

privileges became a subject of controversy. There were only two ways to legitimate

such privileges: as recompense for services rendered to the monarchy or as prizes won
in open combat in the remote past and passed down through the generations.

The attempt to justify noble privileges as the spoils of conquest by identifying

nobles with Franks and commoners with Gauls altered the function of the Gallic

theme: a unifying myth based on ethnic origins gradually gave way to an ideology
that articulated and justified social conflict. Despite efforts to restore the original
function of the Gallic theme, the pitting of Gauls against Franks, of the vanquished
against their vanquishers, served, from the beginning of the eighteenth century to

the end of the Second Empire and beyond, as a way of thinking about the con-
frontation within French society 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, however. They were also
involved in struggle with the Romans on the one hand and the Germans on the
other. This was how they were seen first by antiquarians, readers of ancient texts,

and collectors of ancient objects, and later by archaeologists, who turned the
national past into an object of science, and historians, who increasingly relied on the
results of archaeological research. Unlike the "class" conflict between the Gauls
and the Franks, the triangular struggle among Gauls, Romans, and Germans set

nation against nation. In the eighteenth century, however, no clear distinction was
made between the two. It was only after the 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 in its status and function.
The status of the Gallic theme changed because now it was supposed to be the
role of historical science to prove that these two nations had always been hostile to
each other. Its function changed because from the mid-nineteenth century until 19 14
the idea of everlasting Gallo-German hostility served to unify France in the face of
a threat from outside. Thus the Gallic theme was restored to its original role, except

that now its function was to unify not a monarchy but a nation. To be sure, the

national bond was reduced by some to a matter of "race" — a dangerously ambigu-

ous term at first that later became sinisterly unambiguous — or "blood," which
opened the door to all kinds 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."
76 KRZYSZTOF POMIAN

More recently, however, a broad consensus has held that nationality and culture are
inseparable. Indeed, it was the identification of national bonds with cultural com-
munity that would emerge victorious from World War II.

Enlisted initially in the class struggle and later in the struggle between nations,

the Gauls served in every war in which Frenchmen confronted other Frenchmen or
foreign enemies. Now, however, they are free to become what they are: from
mythological self-mockery to object of research, a unique and central lieu de

memoire of the nation France.

FIGURE 1.11 Late nineteenth century advertisement for "Gallic Elixir."

FIGURE 2.0 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen; poster by Charles Fournigault, 1905.
 CHAPTER 2

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

Francois Furet

If the French Revolution hes at the root of the political civilization in which we still
live today, two hundred years after it appeared on the historical scene, it is primar-
ily because the Revolution wanted it that way. Through the voices of its principal

actors and the actions of a people, it thought of itself as a foundational event, a

memorable occurrence if ever there was one: the regeneration of humanity through
individual liberty at long last won from the hoary powers of oppression. The past

that preceded it was nothing but an "Ancien Regime," a lapidary definition that

erased from the national memory everything that came before, feudalism and
monarchy alike. The Revolution thus occupied the whole space of history as the
necessary instrument of its redemption. Henceforth there would be nothing but the
Revolution itself to commemorate, honor, or celebrate, as if continually to ward off
the return of what it abolished.

—
how much this ambition upon which Burke offers the most
In order to measure
profound commentary —
shook things up, we must restore its strangeness, which
was to unite history with reason: the Revolution sought to reinstitute society in the

manner of Rousseau, that is, to regenerate man through a veritable social contract.

This universal ambition was akin in its abstraction to a religious message but differ-
ent in its content, since regeneration 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 political, but there was a
transfer of function from one to the other. The Church had given its hand to the

monarchy, and it paid the price. More profoundly, the Revolution, quite apart from
its effects on institutions, delivered human action from its subjection to higher
authority of any kind, granting man full sovereignty over the ultimate ends of his-
8o FRANgOIS FURET

tory: the revolutionary investment in the poHtical thereby invaded the realm of the

religious, replacing divine reward with its own earthly promise. Conversely,
Catholic tradition became the bulwark of the Counterrevolution. It was this philo-

sophical radicality that was the most profound characteristic of the French
Revolution, the feature that distinguished it from both the English and the
American Revolution.
The English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century saved the nation from
the corruption of the monarchy but did so in the name of the Holy Bible and Anglo-
Saxon liberties. Finally, in 1688, the replacement of the old dynasty by a new one
founded a durable regime based on a return to religion and tradition. A century
later, just prior to the French earthquake, the American Revolution did indeed begin
a new nation, but independence was acquired in the name of the inextricably reli-

gious and political values of the original immigrants, indeed as the faithful fulfill-

ment of 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, for instance, how the insurgents of the Thirteen
Colonies conceived of their own past. To do this, let us look at two relatively early

texts in the history 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 — the two names more or less mark the limits of the political scene of the

time, on the right and on the left.'

Adams based his thinking on an idea of human history taken from Scottish phi-
losophy: as 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. This sequence, perfectly exemplified by English history, is in con-
formity with human nature and reason as God constituted them. Adams's thought
thus combined the theme of English liberties with a providential model of histor\;
a reconciliation through God of the particular and the universal. From the outset,

the American version of English history was more universalist than the original.

In fact, there was an "old regime" in England. The words are not found in Adams
but the thing is: it was inherent in the combination of canon and feudal law that was
characteristic of medieval England. Although many forms of tyrarmy existed in the

epoch separating barbarism from libertv', none was so miserable as the combination
of spiritual and temporal oppression, at once clerical and aristocratic. Spiritual

oppression availed itself of God's name to bestow absolute power on the Roman
clergy, which sustained its rule through a carefully 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 81

among the people. This period of darkness, during which freedom, enlightenment,
and virtue all were trodden under foot, lasted until the Reformation: "From the
Reformation to the first American settlement, Enlightenment gradually spread
through Europe, especially in England. And with this progress, ecclesiastic and civil
tyranny, that is canon law and feudal law, seem to have lost their strength and influ-

ence."^ Eventually there was rebellion against both forms of tyranny under the
reign of the "execrable" Stuarts.

It was this rebellion, this combat, that brought people to America. The Puritans
who crossed the Atlantic, fleeing persecution for their love of enlightenment and
their spirit of free inquiry, came to the New World to establish a civil and religious

society that was the exact opposite of the clerical and aristocratic tyranny they left

behind: it was a society led by men of learning, faithful to 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 tem-
poral power. In the civil realm they knew that "government is a thing without mys-
tery, simple and comprehensible, founded in nature and reason and within reach of
common sense."^ They wanted nothing to do with the dependency of one individ-
ual upon another, such as had existed even in the democracies of antiquity but above
all in the feudal regime. They established a 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. And just as the founding of the
American colonies was a consequence of the Enlightenment, so, too, was the
Enlightenment responsible for an extraordinary improvement in 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, which formed the context of Adams's pam-
phlet, the reason for it was none other than the political and cultural gap separating

the 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, but the country had been unable or unwilling to continue that struggle
to the end. Upon the ruins of Catholicism it had reinstated a hierarchical church led
by an archbishop with ties to the state. It had replaced the Stuart dynasty with
another ruling family, faithful at first to the contract of 1688. But the Hanoverians
had revealed their intention to return their subjects, the Americans first of all, to

their former state of slavery. Why.'' Because the systems of canon and feudal law,
"though largely undermined in England, are not yet destroyed." Traces of the old
laws remained, and with them, the spirit of domination they embodied. The proof
of this was George Ill's determination to rule America in that spirit.
82 FRAN90IS FURET

Not only was there no "old regime" in the colonies, but the colonies must fight

to keep from being contaminated by one, for that absence was their chief distinc-

tion, the very essence of their identity. In fact, the English Revolution of the sev-
enteenth century had nothing like an "old regime" in the French sense either, since
it was shaped in part by the biblical spirit and in part by memories of the Magna
Carta. But John Adams constructed an old regime for it in order to bestow upon
America the revolutionary privilege of the tabula rasa. For America was born of a
desire to go a step beyond English liberty, to establish, in virgin territory devoid of
all prior tradition, a homeland based on human rights and human nature. It was the
best of English society transplanted to another clime, to a new land, and purified, as

Louis Hartz recognized, of any of the old spirit's contamination by the journey
itself: the new country was to have no past other than its passion for religious and
political freedom.'* America has no history but the history of an idea. Born in

Europe, that idea had to cross the Atlantic in order to find the tabula rasa upon
which it could flourish unopposed. It embodied itself in a new society, which for
that very reason was not a nation in the European sense, slowly shaped by circum-
stances and the vagaries of princely ambition, but a community born subsequent to

the discovery of liberty, which shaped itself and recruited its population in the light
of that principle. In 1765 John Adams was not telling his compatriots anything rad-
ically new. He was simply repeating the original choice of the American colonists
to 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 that constitution had
always been harmful (Paine agreed with Sieyes that it marked an advance over the
dark age in which it came into being), but because it included oppressive elements
such as a hereditary crown and an aristocratic House of Lords, both in contradic-
tion to the principle of equality (as was the sacerdotal hierarchy). The republican
component, the House of Commons, was not strong enough to compensate for the
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 it in toto on the
grounds that it was incompatible with the rights of humanity. In this respect he was
closer to the French Revolution than to John Adams, since he wanted 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 between England and her colonies, writing that "Europe, not
England, is America's motherland." By that he meant that England was no better
 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 83

than the rest of Europe, since she, Hke other countries, had exported to America
those whom she persecuted on civil and rehgious grounds.
But if America's revolutionary novelty had no precedent, no ancestor, the obsta-
cle that it had to overcome was not, as in France, within itself, lurking in its inner-

most sanctuary to thwart its purpose. England was a foreign power in the strongest
sense of the word: foreign because it was remote, and foreign too because it was of
a different 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 as Adams's treatise: the war of 1776
was merely a repetition of the act 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 late eighteenth century were twin events, and the second therefore had
no "old regime" to liquidate but only a foreign power to defeat.

Compared with the France of 1789, therefore, America had the good fortune of
being able, without difficulty, to associate the radicalism of the tabula rasa with the
circumstances of its history. From the beginning, it left behind, it relegated to the

Old World, to England, the ghost of the "old regime" that has haunted French rev-
olutionary culture and politics for two hundred years. The United States could face

the future squarely without having to settle any scores with its past. It knew noth-
ing of the anguish and conflict of a history severed in two, yet it enjoyed the revo-
lutionary advantages inherent in the manner of its birth.

In the American case there was no contradiction between the existence of a past

and the wish to rebuild society on an absolutely new foundation. The "revolu-
tion" of 1776 repeated that of the Mayflower. So far from being incompatible,
American history and the tabula rasa were one and the same thing, for that his-

tory, whose beginnings were still, 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 the American tabula rasa, unlike the French,

was not an abstraction. Indeed, it was the very historical origin of the United
States, the heart of its identity, that distinguished it from Europe as a society and
a nation.

European intellectuals sometimes see this paradoxical character of the United

States as a consequence of the brevity of its history: Americans, it is 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
84 FRANCOIS FURET

example, of the French obsession in the nineteenth century with the Revolution.
What is unique about the American experience is that it had as its genetic code, so
to speak, a true tabula rasa, a true recommencement of society — a unique historical
experiment, an almost miraculous success of negativity. The American obsession is
not with the past but with the "frontier" — that is, the future.
As a result, 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 and 1787 but had to contend with the formidable weight of the national
past. By contrast, the American colonists had no history but that sanctioned by a

voluntary contract among themselves and by the contract that tied them to the

English monarchy until the king violated its terms. In emancipating themselves
from a king who betrayed their confidence, the colonists restored the original con-

ditions of their partnership. From there it was but a short step to formalizing its

terms. That was the purpose of the Constitution.

In the France of 1789, as in the American colonies, the idea of instituting society de

novo was also at the center of what would soon, by autumn, be called the

Revolution. The most spectacular aspect of the event, that which contemporaries
found most striking, was indeed the ambition to rise above the details of how the
Revolution had come to pass, to abstract from the particularities of the moment in
order to attain the universal. The men of 1789 wanted to emancipate not the French
but man in general. In their attempt there was something akin to Descartes's rejec-

tion of everything that had been thought before him: a negation of what preceded
them in the history of France, all of which was branded irrational and particular.
The idea that society was to be made over from top to bottom, literally recon-
structed, was in any case so intimately intertwined with French philosophical ratio-

nalism that it predated the Revolution. It could be found in the royal administration
well before it became the weapon of the monarchy's enemies in 1789: among the
Physiocrats, for example, and in the experiment that has come to be known as
Turgot's ministry (1774—1776).^
The French idea of tabula rasa thus differs from the American in having been a
philosophical view rather than an experience. The American colonists had invented
out of whole cloth a society that did not exist prior to their arrival. The French rev-
olutionaries of 1789 passionately wanted to create a new world, but on the ruins of
a long history that had shaped their territory into an old nation and their commu-
nity into a monarchy. Their project implied a negation of what was irrational and
particular in their past and presupposed the birth of a new man, regenerated by the
actions of a new public authority. Instead of repeating the origins of French soci-

ety, the Revolution was to rescue that society from the curse of its past. Instead of
 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 85

an event to be relived in its original spirit, a whole history was to be jettisoned in

order to create a new spirit. If the two revolutions share a common cult of will in
the service of a universalist ambition, if both sought to invent a novel society based

on the free consent of the contracting parties, the French project was beset from the
outset by formidable tensions between the historical circumstances in which it came
to pass and the abstraction inherent in its very nature.
The idea of a radical break with the past in the name of a rational reconstruction

of the social was present from the first, even before the outbreak of the Revolution,
for example in Sieyes's famous pamphlet Qu 'est-ce le tiers etat?oi January 1789. The
emergence of this idea coincided with the rapid disappearance of references to an
ancient customary "constitution" of the kingdom, which were still quite common in
pamphlets that date from the period 1787— 1788. It was accompanied by calls for a

completely new written constitution, which would set down in black and white the
rules governing the organization and powers of the government. Furthermore, the
idea of the tabula rasa was not limited to men of learning steeped in the rationalism
of the Enlightenment. It was also widely diffused in the sensibility of the time. One
sign of this is the number of people who, in the spring of 1789, began dating their
letters "the first year of liberty." Nothing at the 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. There can be no doubt that these people had much more vivid sense of a rup-
a

ture in the chain of time than did the Americans who had preceded them twenty
years earlier, for it was their own history that they suddenly perceived as something
separate from them and not, as had the Americans of 1776, the history of a metrop-
olis that had little by little grown as remote as the maps said it was.
This powerful sense of a break in the continuity of time, which would give the
idea of the Ancien Regime the peculiar force that it had in France, is inseparable

from the rationalist, voluntarist radicalism of the men 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 American Founding Fathers, since they eschewed
any reference to God and ignored Christian pessimism about the nature of man.
Not only that, but they were also without the legal and constitutional moorings that
the English common law and political legacy of Whiggery (including opposition)
afforded the Americans. In what preceded it the French Revolution found neither
Coke nor Bolingbroke nor a taste for, much less practical experience of, the balance
of power; it found absolutism.
What did absolutism mean in this context.-^ A first subversion of the "constitu-
tional" tradition of the monarchy. Tocqueville is unforgettable as the historian of
86 FRANCOIS FURET

the pathological relationship between the French Revolution and absolutism. As he

showed, the final two centuries of what the Revolution called the Ancien Regime
witnessed the destruction of traditional society from within. For one thing, the
growth of the state and the concentration of administrative as well as political

power in one place drained the feudal hierarchy of meaning and stripped its author-
ities of power. For another, this dispossession of society by the state 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 was henceforth defined solely in terms of privileges. The
growth of the fiscal and administrative machine resulted in something like a "caste"
society, composed of corps kept meticulously separate from one another and by their
very nature unconcerned with the public interest.

In order for the absolute monarchy to occupy the whole space of public author-
ity, however, it had to reduce its subjects to equal obedience: this was the condition

of uniformity of its laws. Its actions therefore tended to have a leveling effect, even

when, for financial reasons, it sought ever more ingenious ways to milk cash from
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 what Burke failed to grasp: that the

ancient monarchy had nothing to bequeath to the Revolution other than the pure
negation of what it was. The tabula rasa of 1789 was born of this paradox: the
French revolutionaries' passionate repudiation of history was itself a product of
their history.*^

One can imagine extending Tocqueville 's analysis by approaching the subject
from a somewhat different angle, closer to the symbolic than to the sociological.

The monarchy developed as a power embodying the nation, the head of a "body
politic" conceived of as something very ancient, fundamental to communal exis-

tence, and represented by the king of France (in the old sense of the word repre-
sented, meaning identically reproduced). It was this constellation of things that con-
stituted the essence of what the Revolution would soon baptize the "Ancien
Regime" and, in the few months from May to September of 1789, demolish once
and for all.'' It first abolished the organic society of orders, which in one night was
transformed into a society of free individuals, and it then severed the king from the
nation, making him simply its delegate. Henceforth it would be the deputies, the

representants, who would be charged, as the word suggests, with "incarnating" the

nation, but on the basis of a society henceforth composed of autonomous atoms.

Such an exercise would be difficult in any case, and all the more so because it was
 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 87

FIGURE 2.1 The Frenchman of the Past; anonymous FIGURE 2.2 The Frenchman of Today; anonymous
engraving, 1790. engraving, 1790.

quite new at the 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 body.
This difficulty 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 first great constitutional debate in late
August—early September 1789, even as the deputies were planning the devolution
to the people of the absolute sovereignty of the king — a devolution that had been
in the cards since June 17, when the assembly of the Third Estate renamed itself

simply the National Assembly, thereby accomplishing the first and most funda-
mental act of the Revolution. In this tremendously important debate, the right
wing of the revolutionary camp, the first moderates of the Revolution, argued in
favor of English-style co-sovereignty, with supreme power divided between the
king and a bicameral parliament. But this idea of joining the national past to the
Revolution by dividing power between the old monarchy and the new national
representatives ran afoul of two impossibilities. First, the Monarchiens were
appealing to a tradition, a monarchy, that either did not exist or, if it had even so
much as begun to exist in France's past, no longer had any reality. And the
attempt to "restore" it, along with a second chamber that would have revived the
old specter of an aristocratic power base after two centuries of absolutism, was
88 FRANCOIS FURET

FIGURE 2.3 The Oath of June 17, 1789; anonymous engraving.

made to seem even more unrealistic by the Revolution's radical condemnation of

the "feudal" principle, which having existed before absolute monarchy, now out-
lived it.

In this sense, the radical part of the revolutionary camp was unwittingly more
traditionalist than the moderate part: it 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 disconti-
nuity 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 place. Pure
democracy supplanted absolute monarchy. Since there was no place in the old con-
ception of sovereign power for anything but the monarch, there was no place in the

new conception for anything but the people or its supposed representatives. Thus,
in the idea 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 89

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 its extraordi-

nary power over people 's minds as well as its power to mask the legacies of the past.

In rejecting the tyranny of the Hanoverian kings and even in denouncing the prin-
ciple of monarchy itself, the American colonists had no difficulty remaining faith-

ful to English liberties: even Thomas Paine drew the essence of his political think-

ing from the English tradition. By contrast, it was against their will and without
their knowledge that the French of 1789, bent on forgetting or wiping out all mem-
ory of previous centuries, were constantly digging up old constraints in new forms.
They wished to make a clean slate of the past even though that was impossible. No
people on earth were in less of a position to found a new society based purely on
convention, neglecting the substance of their history. The French abolished aristo-
cratic society on the Night of August Fourth, but that very abolition led them to

reaffirm the unity of the new sovereignty all the more vigorously. Indeed, the
specter of the Ancien Regime would continue to haunt the Revolution and drive it

forward. The surviving monarchy would haunt it like its own ghost until it was
finally exorcised on August 10, 1792, even before the execution of the king. It was
then and then only that the Convention decided to begin time anew with Year I, rel-

egating the first four years of the Revolution to the Ancien Regime, as if the
national past had never stopped contaminating the great national recommencement.
To understand this, take, among a thousand other possible examples from the
same month whose gist would be identical, a memorandum circulated by Roland,
minister of the interior, to the municipal governments of France, dated August 19,

1792.^ The purpose of this document, issued a little more than a week after the

seizure of the Tuileries and the fall of the monarchy on the tenth, was to allow the
minister to explain to local authorities the meaning of what had happened in Paris:

nothing less than a new revolution, relegating to the corrupt past the years since

1789. To be sure, Roland conceded, "despotism was destroyed in 1789." But "1792
will be the epoch of the reign of equality." The popular 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 new regime and of equality among citizens. Strangely,
however, this theme of the inertia of custom, which was destined to achieve vast
influence later on, in no way limited the revolutionary reaffirmation of the Tenth of
August: "The Revolution having just been completed, let us hasten to assure its

beneficent effects. Our representatives have sworn to uphold liberty and equality.

Never again shall the two be put asunder." For the next few weeks Le Moniteur and
administrative documents would continue to be dated "the fourth year of liberty."
9° FRANfOIS FURET

There followed a brief transitional phase, in which documents bore the inscription
"the fourth year of liberty and first year of equality." But in the end, after the
Convention reconvened, as of September 25, all official texts were to be dated "the
first 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 Ones" and
several constitutions. A series of commencements and recommencements, a work
endlessly completed and rebegun, it offered those who came after it the idea of a tra-
dition created ex nihilo and of an endless battle against a constantly renascent past:

the Ancien Regime was what the Revolution, in order to fulfill its promises, would
have to overcome now and forever. Always lurking within what the men of 1789
wished to invent, a curse hidden even from those who wished to abolish it, the
Ancien Regime withstood the repeated annunciations of a new age. What is para-
doxical about France is that a solemn rejection of the past was intimately inter-

The rejection of the past signified more than

twined with an obsession with history.
the tendency of modern democracy to build the future upon human will. It also
reflected the Revolution's inability ever to achieve its ends.

Within the Revolution, as a result, the ghost of the past was always present, and
the revolutionaries were obsessed with arriving at a destination they never reached.

It would be impossible to list the men whose principal goal, or the moments whose
principal theme, was to bring the Revolution to an end. First there was Mounier in
July 1789, followed by Mirabeau, Lafayette, Barnave, the Girondins, Danton, and
Robespierre — each, moreover, to his or their own advantage —and ultimately
Bonaparte, who succeeded for a time, but only for a time (and only by allowing the
Revolution, gone amok, to wreak havoc on all of Europe). In no case did the
Revolution demonstrate any real capacity to found a new social order. The very
number of attempts to do so in such an extraordinarily short period of time bring
out the narrowly instrumental character and philosophical vanity from which all of
them suffered. Even the Festival of the Supreme Being (June 1794), 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 anything other
than an attempt at manipulation by a provisional government. The ambition inher-

ent in the Revolution, which was of a fundamental order, never ceased to be a ter-

rain of maneuver and suspicion. It never achieved any independent or higher exis-
tence, as if the Revolution as history could not overcome its own internal contra-

diction, which was to be at once political and a foundation of the political.

In effect, the French Revolution was never anything but a series of events and
regimes, a sequence of power struggles: power was to rest with the people — this

remained the unique and unchallenged principle of the whole business — but it was
embodied in men and groups of men who, one after another, arrogated to them-
 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 91

selves a legitimacy that, though elusive, remained indestructible, or at any rate was
repeatedly reconstructed each time it was destroyed. Instead of arresting time, the

Revolution accelerated and fragmented it because it was never able to create insti-

tutions. It was a principle and a politics, an idea of sovereignty around which unreg-
ulated conflicts developed: between that idea and the struggles for power there was
nothing —an ideal formula for historical drift. No reference point in the past, no

institutions in the present, just a future forever possible but always postponed. The
French Revolution wavered endlessly between that which held it in place and that
which propelled it forward. It legislated for eternity, and it was tightly constrained

by circumstances. It was the Declaration of the Rights of Man but also July and
October of 1789. It was the constitutional monarchy of 1790— 1791 but also the

schism in the Church, the king's resistance, the flight to Varennes. It was the

RepubHc of September 1792, Year I, the Constitution of 1793, but also the de facto

dictatorship and the Terror. Its true essence was 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. What was fixed or durable in the
Revolution was its principle, together with the set of collective beliefs and passions
associated with that principle: whence the infinite elasticity of the bids for power in

the politics that it inaugurated, and the attempts to put an end to it, all in vain yet

forever tried anew.

It was in the character of the Revolution, therefore, to snatch France from its

past, which was condemned in toto, and to identify it with a new principle without

ever being able to root that principle in institutions. This gave rise to two sets of
antagonisms whose memory the French would meticulously keep alive. One of
these centered 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. The French of the nineteenth

century were a people who could not cherish as one what 1789 had put asunder:
those who loved the Revolution detested the Ancien Regime, and those who loved
the Ancien Regime detested the Revolution. But alongside that fundamental split,

in relation to which the right and the left would define themselves, the clashes that
took place between 1789 and the Empire left behind a second series of conflicts over
the men and ideas of the Revolution itself. The revolutionary tradition consists not
of unified homage to a common beginning but of a range of loyalties to legacies
that are not just diverse but contradictory: the left is united against the right, but it

has nothing else in common. The men of 1789, 1793, and 18 Brumaire may have
embarked upon parallel careers in combat against the same adversary, but they
bequeathed to their successors memories and ideas that, once deprived of the excuse
of le salut public, proved to be incompatible.
92 FRANfOIS FURET

FIGURE 2.4 Allegory of the Rights of /Wan; "Aristocracy and its agents are buried beneath the ruins of the
Bastille. From these ruins rises Liberty, armed with a sword and trampling the hydra underfoot. Prisoners,
the victims of arbitrary power, prostrate themselves in thanksgiving before the Altar of the Nation;" engrav-
ing, 1791.

FIGURE 2.5 Allegory of Liberty: "The King takes up residence in Paris. In the procession behind his family
are the Deputies of the National Assembly. The Parisian Militia keeps the people in line in order to show that
its mission is to maintain order and ensure that the Laws are executed;" engraving, 1789.

FIGURE 2.6 Allegory of the Festival of the Supreme Being; engraving, 1794.

The whole history of the century that runs from the French Revolution to the
Third Republic attests to this reality. No nineteenth-century historian or politician
attempted to explain his time without first casting an eye not just on the French
Revolution itself but even more on the fact that its unpredictable events were con-
tinually being reenacted owing to divisions within France whose causes ultimately
stemmed from the Revolution. The history of this period can therefore be orga-
nized in terms of two chronological cycles.^ The first runs from 1789 to 1799 (or
1804 if one wants to include the creation of the Empire), the period that saw the cre-

ation of a repertory of political forms invented by the Revolution to institutional-

ize the new public sovereignty. Indeed, this prodigious inventiveness was the

Revolution's quintessential trademark.

 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 93

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 con-
stitutional monarchies after that of 1789— 1792, two victorious Parisian insurrections
(July 1830, February 1848) and two insurrections smashed (June 1848, March 1871),

a second republic modeled on the first, and even a second Bonaparte, even though
the first had been taken to be a unique historical phenomenon. This series of repe-
titions was unprecedented: it reveals the extraordinary constraining influence of the

Revolution on nineteenth-century French politics. In the middle of the century,

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 it began with the republic and its Jacobin phase was stillborn
(the June Days). But all the actors were present, lined up with their illustrious ances-
tors: farce followed tragedy, as Marx said. The fact that the play ended with a sec-

ond Bonaparte demonstrated in almost insulting fashion how completely French

politics was owned by the revolutionary tradition. 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 now be seen, a halfcentury
later, as the fatal consequence of revolutionary republicanism. The mediocrity of
the beneficiary revealed the influence of a deterministic mechanism independent of
human will: this 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 of revolution-
ary politics, which never relied on powerful state structures. The Revolution, in

1789, settled into a space abandoned by the monarchy, and until the Consulate it

never succeeded in reorganizing that space in a durable and systematic way. By con-
trast, 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 to transform. French political life in the nine-

teenth century was characterized by a profound consensus around state structures

coupled with permanent conflict over the form to be taken by that very same state.

Why this consensus.'' Because these state structures were both a monarchical tra-

dition and a legacy of the Revolution. This is what Tocqueville showed in unfor-

gettable fashion: there was an Ancien Regime in France that the Revolution, for all

its ambitions, was never able to extirpate and ultimately identified itself with. By
contrast, the Revolution's only legacy to the living memory of the French con-
94 FRANCOIS FURET

FIGURE 2.7 David, The Triumph of the French People; drawing, 1794.

sisted of doubts about legitimacy and conflicting allegiances. It was precisely

because the crisis in France was more a crisis of legitimacy than of substance,
moreover, that its solution proved so difficult: the consensus around the adminis-
trative apparatus of the state made revolutions technically easy, and the conflict
over the form of the state made them inevitable. What is more, no one was aware
of the consensus, including the political actors, while everyone, including those
most indifferent to politics, endlessly dredged up old conflicts. This was because
conflict was fueled not only by the memory of the Revolution but also by the belief

that the Revolution bequeathed to the French — to all the French, left and right
alike —namely, that political power is the key to social change. These two facts

account for the oft-noted paradox that the French are at once a conservative and a
revolutionary people. Through the Revolution the French love a far more ancient
tradition, which is that of the monarchy; into that tradition they infuse equality all

the more easily because the monarchical administration spent centuries laying the

groundwork for it. But the Revolution also made the French a people that cannot
love both parts of its history at once, as well as a nation that since 1789 has been
obsessed with the reinstitution of the social. And they cannot build a new legiti-

macy out of fragments of their recent history, which has left them with building
blocks that do not fit together properly.
 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 95

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-

vistes (eighty-nineists) against

quatre-vingt-treiiistes (ninety-
threeists). For one side the prob-
lem is to pin down 1789, to root
the new 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, and of Gambetta and Jules
Ferry at the end of the century.
For the other side, by contrast, the
problem is to deny 1789, to tran-
scend it in the name of 1793, to
reject 1789 as a foundation and celebrate 1793 as an anticipation whose promise has
yet to be realized. Here we have two exemplary instances of the alternative that the

Revolution continues to provide to those 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 is 1789, which saw the advent of political
citizenship and civil equality, because that is the point of national consensus. What
remains is to find a definitive form of government for this new society. To those who
wish to continue it, however, the Revolution also offers a point of departure, pro-
vided that one is upon 1793 not as a temporary dictatorship in an hour
willing to look

of need but as an abortive attempt to go beyond bourgeois individualism and recon-

stitute a true community by transcending the principles of 1789.

Indeed, to the observer the French Revolution has the extraordinary property of
being, in the sequence of its events and periods, the concrete embodiment of the the-

oretical critique of liberalism that Rousseau conceived thirty years earlier. It brings
down to the level of actual history the quintessential philosophical problem of the
eighteenth century: What is a society, if we are individuals.'' Classical "English-style"

liberal philosophy escaped from this impasse by begging the question of the social
character of the natural individual: that is the secret of the final order to which the
interplay of the passions and the interests gives rise. But nearly a century before Marx,
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 "instituted" by denaturing the
natural individual, erasing the individual of selfish passions and interests in favor of

the abstract citizen, the only admissible party to the social contract. It is easy to under-
stand 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, by iso-

lating Rousseau from the century's other philosophers 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 far: they simply had to reread first

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 one after the other.

To end the Revolution or continue it. These two objectives or representations

very soon gave rise to 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 it meditated on and
even wrote the history of the French Revolution before moving on to practical
work in July 1830. Thiers, Mignet, and Guizot invented historical determinism, the

class struggle as the motor of that determinism, and 1789 and the victory of what
they called the middle class as the crowning moment of this historical dialectic. The
events of 1793 were but a passing —and deplorable — ^episode in this history of the

bourgeoisie, an episode attributable to exceptional circumstances whose repetition

was to be avoided: the "government of the multitude," to use Mignet 's terms, was
not part of the inevitable. The essential, in

effect, the sense of history, was still the transi-

tion from aristocracy to democracy, from

absolute monarchy to free institutions. In this

respect the history of France was, along with

that of England, one of two fundamental

components of European identity, which is to

say, of civilization itself. The advantage of the

French over the English case was that in

France the victory of democracy was more

FIGURE 2.8 Allegory of the Constitution of 1793, engraved

by Allais.

FIGURE 2.9 Between Two Stools, Ass on tfie Ground;

caricature of the coup d'etat of 18 Fructidor, Year V
(September 4, 1797).
 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 97

decisive, but France also had the disadvantage that free institutions took longer to
develop there.
The reference to England expressed a deep kinship of values and ideas, particu-
larly 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
98 FRANfOIS FURET

wish to borrow the British example of a free government rooted in history and sup-
ported by the propertied ehte — these aspects of the Enghsh tradition appealed
strongly to this generation of French liberals, who drew many of their philosophi-
cal principles 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. It was the example of a people who, like the French, had executed
their 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 hit on the
middle way of a conservative revolution out of which came a moderate parliamen-
tary regime. To end the Revolution was thus also to adopt an "English" strategy.
In this respect 1830 marked a turning point, and Guizot, Thiers, and their friends

were quick to go to work. The Trois Gloriexises were supposed to mark a new 1789,
but the accession of an Orleans to the throne was to avoid another 1793. The intel-

lectual "eighty-nineism" of the liberal historians of the Restoration was not radical,

because it allowed a place for the dictatorship of Year II, which it saw as a secondary,

and deplorable, necessity. But their political "eighty-nineism" was radical. The goal
was to avoid at all cost a repetition of 1793 by halting the Revolution in its initial

phase through recourse to Louis-Philippe. In short, the aim was an improved 1789
based on the 1688 English model, to be achieved by daring what the men of 1789 had
been unwilling to try: a change of dynasty, putting an Orleans on the throne and
thus founding a monarchy of the Revolution. This political strategy met with
apparent success, since it resulted in the July Monarchy, but at a deeper level this

success only concealed the inconsistency of the 1830 liberal interpretation of 1789.
That interpretation fell short first of all intellectually, for if all that had been
needed to avoid a terrorist dictatorship was a change of dynasty, the Revolution's
ever-mounting promises must have been rooted not in "circumstances" but in the
conflict with Louis XVI. It 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 itself. The July Days were followed by
four years of brutal combat between the new government and the republican people

of the street, who felt cheated of "their" revolution. 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 an abortive "1793." But on the level of intellectual

analysis, it remains the case that this new "canonical" 1789 did nothing to prevent the
revival of street Jacobinism. On the contrary, the experience proved that without an
Ancien Regime monarch, without aristocrats, without foreign or civil war — in a

word, without "circumstances" — Jacobinism emerged from the July Revolution as

a river emerges from its source. If a radical eighty-nineism could exist in politics, it

could also exist in history: there is some of 1793 in every 1789. It was this unavoid-
able truth that the crushing of the barricades on the Rue Transnonain was meant to
 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 99

FIGURE 2.10 Ah! Ah! This Is the History of France from January 21, 1793, to November 20, 1815. Look at It! anonymous engrav-
ing, 1815.

exorcise, but how could it? The July bourgeoisie had replayed the process of mem-
ory in the street, proving that the dynamics of revolution are, at least part of the
time, uncontrollable. Compared with their ancestors of la Grande Revolution, the
men of 1830 had the advantage of their memories, as well as greater class conscious-
ness, more political experience, and fewer humanitarian scruples, yet with the same
uncertainties they rediscovered and dealt with exactly the same problem as

Mirabeau, Brissot, Danton, and Robespierre, namely, how to stop a revolution.

Now at the same time, but for symmetrically opposite reasons, this radical

eighty-nineism led to the crystallization of the contrary belief, that the Revolution
can succeed only if it remains true to own dynamic and runs no greater risk than
its

that of being betrayed in mid-course. The Orleanist confiscation of les Trois

Glorieuses gave rise to a dramatic and decisive confrontation within the national rev-
olutionary tradition. It seemed almost natural to interpret that confrontation by
analogy with the fall 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 by Buonarroti and
the Babouvist tradition, which held that what happened on the Ninth was that a

clique of wealthy bourgeois overthrew the hero of an egalitarian republic who

looked favorably on the people's cause. The juste-milieu regime of 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, borrowed from
the liberal historians but now situated between the bourgeoisie and the people.

Thus a Jacobinism completely divorced from the circumstances that supposedly

gave rise to it became fixed in revolutionary historiography and tradition. This

image survived the entire nineteenth century as something far more than a memory:
it was a constellation of intellectual and political convictions, an interpretation, a

memory crystallized as doctrine. But what memory.'*

It resulted first of all in an important chronological displacement within and
through the history of the Revolution. The liberals had put down their anchor in

1789. The 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. What he had
excused, they celebrated: among the necessities of the Revolution, 1793 occupied in
their eyes not a secondary, derivative place but a central and decisive one. This was
the period during which the Revolution escaped from its own clutches by crushing
its enemies, internal and external, while at the same time adumbrating the first truly

egalitarian image of the social contract.

FIGURE 2.11 Lordereau, The Throne Burned; lithograph, 1848.

 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 101

Behind the celebration of le salut public there was not only patriotic investment

in and retrospective love for a France threatened and saved but also, more simply,

the cult of the state in all its forms: military, economic, political, educational, and
even religious. In this respect it is significant that the great Jacobin historians of the

Revolution were even more systematic proponents of absolute monarchy (up to

I02 FRANCOIS FURET

and including Louis XIV) than their liberal predecessors, whose work they drew on
freely. Like the liberals, the Jacobin historians admired the monarchy as the instru-
ment of nation building and the embodiment, representation, and defense of the
public interest above the various classes, but they also saw it as protecting the com-
mon masses from bourgeois individualism, selfish private interests, and the cruelty
of the market. They reworked the whole Ancien Regime to bring it into line with

1793. In their eyes the Jacobin state carried on and magnified 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 way for 1789: the

alliance of the Third Estate with the kings of France to create a modern nation.

Buchez and Louis Blanc admired only that which prefigured 1793: the incarnation,
le salut public, the government of 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 all the work of the

Constituent Assembly on the grounds that it 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-

tantmoment 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
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 the Revolution's great error, for the rights of man were not a
principle capable of reconstituting a community. It was Jacobinism, rather, that was
like a latter-day Annunciation, heralding the advent of a 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 on the grounds that it

was temporarily indispensable, because that dictatorship was now to be celebrated

as fundamentally liberating. They were used only to distinguish the Terror, alleged

to be a pure product of the exceptional situation, from Jacobinism or Robespierrism

 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution 103

as the case might be, these being

the very embodiment of the Revolu-

tion's meaning. Thus the distinguish-

ing criterion of nineteenth-century
Jacobin historiography was not the
theory of circumstances, a by-prod-
uct of the theory of necessity, which
the Jacobins in fact shared with the
Uberals. What 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 goal was to strip the bourgeoisie

of its title to the revolutionary

legacy, which it had irrevocably
renounced in the deceptive game it

played in July—August 1830. Jacobin

history saw 1789 as merely marking
the end of the Ancien Regime,
whereas 1793 invented the future.
(Quinet would argue precisely the
opposite.) The Jacobin historiogra-

phy that was born in the July

Monarchy was the product of a
chronological displacement that

linked two powerful ideas: the

Revolution as the power of the peo-
ple, culminating under Robespierre
and smashed on the Ninth of
Thermidor; and the Revolution as a
rupture in the fabric of time, as
advent, as prefiguration of the
future. The eighty-nineism of the

FIGURE 2.14 Patrioty, The Republic That Decent

People Do Not Want; lithograph, 1848.

FIGURE 2.15 Alfred Le Petit, The Two Republics;

1871.
I04 FRANgOIS FURET

men of July was the acceptance of one kind of society and the quest for a govern-

ment suited to that society. The ninety-threeism of those defeated in the July
Revolution was the inventory of an aborted promise and of a society to be remade.
The July regime can thus be seen as the period when national memories of the
French Revolution crystallized —remembrances, passions, and ideas all mixed up
together and quite difficult to unravel. The July Days created legitimism, embodied
in the vanquished party, giving the Counterrevolution an appellation controlee that

would retain its rights until the death of the due de Bordeaux. In the victorious parry
the July Revolution created Orleanism, but the heirs of 1789 would soon find them-

selves in the same situation as their predecessors: divided over the type of govern-

ment likely to guarantee the famous principles the greatest stability, and threatened
by republican outbidding. Not only did the substitution of Louis-Philippe for the
republican dynamic of the Trois Glorieuses leave years of civil disturbance in its

wake, but after a brief period of stability between 1835 and 1840 revolutionary agi-
tation returned more vigorous than ever in the last eight years of the Orleanist reign.
The 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 to the first systematic effort to bridge the gulf that had opened up
in 1789 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 less

set down in writing. As a result, the revolution of 1848 killed not only a monarchy
but the ideas that had surrounded its inception. It thus gave renewed vigor to all that

those ideas had sought to dispel. With the action in Paris in February, the new rev-

olution reclaimed the fundamental heritage of French politics, even its birth certifi-

cate, namely, the ambition to begin society anew on the ruins of the past. As a result,
democratic make-believe may never have enjoyed a finer moment than it did in the

late winter of 1848 in Paris: with socialist utopianism adding its effects to those of
the revolutionary tradition, practically anyone with a thought in his head set up
shop selling the best of all possible societies. Some found the spectacle laughable,

others touching, depending on their cast of mind. Among the former, Flaubert is

without rival, but one could be just as moved by the social imagination set free 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 mul-
tiplying providential advents and felicitous combinations. 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 105

rather than a presence or a threat, it was now a memory. The future, by contrast, was
more than ever 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 its course or the talent of its political leaders or the

brilliance of its achievements but from the fact that it restaged the great founding

scene of French politics, the revolutionary rupture, with renewed vigor. In retro-
spect July 1830 had come to seem little more than a matter of some fiddling about

by politicians. February 1848 aimed to be a reincarnation of illustrious ancestors.

The proof of this 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 Regime and the

Revolution, whereas the latter, Michelet primarily but also Quinet, Louis Blanc, and
even Lamartine, had it in mind to begin the Revolution anew.

The French obsession with 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 in the

1870s in part by forging an alliance with the Orleanists, in part by reinterpreting the
whole history of France, monarchy and democracy combined, as hitched first to the

FIGURE 2.16 Rougeron Vignerot, The Promised Land; engrawnq, circa 1891.
io6 FRANCOIS FURET

rise of the Third Estate and then to the education of the people. The dream of an
absolute new beginning migrated at this time to the socialist movement, where it

prospered: du passe faisons table rase, goes the famous line of VInternationale.
Not that this dream is necessarily inseparable from the socialist idea: to see this

one has only to consider Marx's dogged efforts to distinguish himself from the
Utopians. In his work the collective appropriation of the means of production is

made necessary by what goes before, above all by the formidable economic growth
characteristic of bourgeois society. But Marx combined his concept of objective
laws of historical development with a revolutionary messianism that, to the con-
trary, emphasized the role of human initiative in history: this reconciliation of sci-

ence and will may lack intellectual coherence, yet it had an extraordinary power to

seduce the intelligence. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they
gave immense power to this fragile synthesis by associating Marxism with revolu-
tion and by reviving, dressed up this time in scientific finery, the French idea of
regenerating 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 redis-
covered the idea of the tabula rasa in the form of a recommencement of a first,

abortive attempt remembered as a promise. Paradoxically, it was when the

Communist Party sought to portray itself as the faithful heir of revolutionary his-

tory that it revived what was by definition ahistorical in the Revolution's legacy: the
fiction of a purely conventional refoundation of society. The French left is revolu-
tionary because of what is conservative in its makeup.
The idea of Ancien Regime even survived the decline of communism for a time,

because in the 1970s Frangois Mitterrand's Socialist Party regained its dominance of
the left only at the price of shouldering the revolutionary heritage. Not only was the
idea of a break with capitalism and bourgeois society the key to the Programme
Commun, but anyone who was in France at the 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 3

Catholics and Seculars^

Claude Langlois

On July 5, 1904, the National Assembly approved a law prohibiting members of

Catholic "teaching congregations" from teaching in the public schools. The secular

camp had at last emerged victorious from a long struggle, the stakes of which were
portrayed in the March 19 issue of L'Assiette au beurre, with that satirical publica-
tion's usual ferocity. That issue bore the title "Freedom of Education," and in it

Grandjouan and Roubille set up two opposing educational models, each countering
the other, symbol for symbol and slogan for slogan.^ As in a mirror, every image had
its symmetrical counterpart. Two old crones tower menacingly over a small child.
Both order him to show respect, though in each case to a different idol: "Kneel before
the Savior!" or "Take off your hat to the Fatherland!" The crucifix or the flag, the

catechism or the Rights of Man — the alternative is hardly one to gladden the heart.
The women — a desiccated nun and an overstuffed, pop-eyed Marianne (symbol of
the Republic) —egg the child on: "Go ahead, choose. You're free." Gone are heaven
and hell, gone are the broad highway leading to perdition and the narrow path to sal-

vation: ahead lie two identical roads.^ Both rise steeply but toward the same capital-
ist hell, represented in one case by a church, in the other by military barracks.

A battle between proponents and opponents of religious education.'' Don't be mis-

led by appearances! the magazine warned. In fact, the drawings insinuated, both sides
are in it together. Teachers from both camps understand each other perfectly: "Au
revoir, mon cher collegue, let's hope the children won't notice the change." At the cen-
ter of a perfect circle two men shake hands, like horse traders at a fair, while the chil-
dren remain prisoners. "The grand seminaire is dead, Vive I'Ecole Normale! The cur-
riculum hasn't changed." A pointless revolution. The morality of the state would
replace that of the Church; the government's truth would replace the Vatican's.
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 the

Republic's strategy for shoring up its nascent

memory: the cult of the great leader from

Joan of Arc to Carnot; the continuity of the

nation's history from monarchy to republic,

as contrasted with the wound inflicted on the

nation's geography through the loss of Alsace

and Lorraine; and last but not least, the new
trinity of secular values, comprising Kant's
morality, the immortal principles of 1789, and

the fatherland. And all of this against a back-

ground of generalized Hugolatry — the ado-

ration of the national poet, Victor Hugo.

In a country that could stoop to a sordid
battle over the future of its children, liberty

was dead. As if by instinct, Grandjouan

recaptured the spirit of the caricatures of
1789, and instead of the lamentable political
theater in which complicitous so-called ene-
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 chas-
ing Lilliputians, laymen as well as priests. A
female Samson, she brought down temples
and smashed idols yet emerged unscathed.
Freedom would come from socialism, or so

the artist would have us believe.

FIGURE 3.1 Roubille, Choose, You're Free; drawing in

L'Assiette au beurre, special issue on freedom of educa-

tion (March 19, 1904).

FIGURE 3.2 Grandjouan, Always Idols; drawing in

L'Assiette au beurre, special issue on freedom of educa-

tion (March 19, 1904).
 — 1

Catholics and Seculars 1 1

¥ox L'Assiette au beune, with its anarcho-syndicalist leanings, it was long past time
to 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 to step aside. It was time to be
done with these "sacristy quarrels" that simply made it possible, as the Dreyfus Affair
had done earlier, to mask what was essential, namely, the class struggle. The appar-
ent complicity of old enemies, stuck in roles they had already played a thousand

times, is not, however, entirely convincing proof that this was simply a shadow the-

ater. Quite apart from the ritual designation of enemies — Jesuits during the

Restoration, Freemasons under the Third Republic^ — the very excessiveness of the

nineteenth-century polemic, the very extremity of the insults, the fantastic nature of
the obsession, all point toward very real issues and distinct camps. The history is also
filled 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 (1956),*^ along with forced baptisms of Jewish children and
sexual crimes by members of the clergy. These attacks from the secular camp were
met with equal vehemence from the Catholic side: there were attacks on the univer-

sity, culminating under the July Monarchy, and on the Republic after 1880. And
"mainstream" history was not immune from the consequences of this long antago-
nism: the alliance of Throne and Altar during the Restoration led to anticlerical vio-

lence in 1830, and the compromising favors that the authoritarian Empire handed out
to the Catholic Church met with dramatic sanction in the execution of hostages by
the Commune. The list 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. The "Two Frances"
that Father Besse, in the wake of many others, saw in 1907 as naturally opposed do
indeed exist: "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 that

can help us get a better grasp of this major conflict in French history. On what bat-
deground was the conflict really fought: ideological or practical.'' Was it a struggle

for minds or a struggle for power.'* What bound the contestants together.-* If there
are indeed laics, people of secular disposition, is laicite, or secularism, an equally
palpable reality.'' And finally, how are we to interpret the excessive prominence
accorded these debates.'' Even if posed differently, the magazine 's blunt question
"What does all this hide.''" —remains pertinent.

The Age of Historians

After World War I, as the conflict was beginning to subside after a half century of
incessant confrontation, a number of historians attempted to answer these ques-
112 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

FIGURE 3.3 Catholic ceremony in the Italian community of Marseilles.

FIGURE 3.4 Islamic ceremony in front of the city hall of Charvieu-Chavagneux (Isere), 1989.

tions. Three works appeared within the space of ten years. Their outlooks were
quite different, even though all dealt with the same subject: secularism. The first

came out in 1925, as the Catholics were mounting a "second rally" and just after the

failure of Edouard Herriot, who had believed that it was still possible to hold the
Cartel des Gauches together with the mortar of anticlericalism that had worked so
 Catholics and Seculars 113

well before the war. Georges Weill produced a work of impeccably intelligent eru-

dition and careful objectivity, which extended his Histoire 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, professor at the grand
seminaire of Toulouse, inaugurated a series of books on "the contemporary history
of secularism in France."' One year earlier, in 1934, Georges de Lagarde had pub-
lished the first volume of his monumental Naissance de Vesprit laique au declin du
Moyen Age)^ The three authors not only had different attitudes about the desirabil-

ity 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 all three authors to combine a structural with

a genealogical approach. "Born of Christianity," Lagarde pointed out, "the word

laique follows it like a shadow. It adheres to it even as it thinks to be working itself

free. It inevitably recalls what it claims to suppress. Its very rallying cry rivets it to

the chain it wants to break as firmly as the prisoner's leg iron is riveted 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 eigh-
teenth century, but not in the sixteenth. It is instructive to find Canon Caperan, in

1957, invoking the names of both Jean Jaures ("Our French genius withheld itself

from the Reformation so as to preserve itself intact for the Revolution") and
Ferdinand Buisson ("France is not Protestant but secular") to bolster his argument
that the Reformation, despite the reproaches that Catholics traditionally heap upon
it, should be left out of the inevitable investigation of paternity; indeed, he shares
the classic view of his adversaries that the origins of the Revolution, and therefore
of the secular idea, were necessarily philosophical.'^
Historians thus first tackled the issue between the two world wars, as the conflicts
surrounding it were subsiding. The new political situation after 1945 seemed to rel-

egate the whole matter to the past once and for all: 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-

Catholic) alliance known as the Third Force (between the Communists and the
right). In 1984 the Savary Law was intended to restore peace to the educational sys-
tem. Instead, it revived old divisions: a huge demonstration on June 24, 1984, forced
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 this most recent confrontation? It is tempting to
dismiss it as a throwback, since the debate had moved onto new ground in the

"thirty glorious years" of postwar growth: 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 bat-
des picked up where they had left off. One last time, in any case, left and right acted
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 1 88 1, or of deciding whether specific groups of people had the right to teach
as in 1904, but one of effective autonomy for recognized private schools, most of
them Catholic, which received substantial state subsidies.

Of course anything can be explained. Consider, to begin with, the changes that
had taken place within Catholicism. The situation in the 1980s was substantially dif-

ferent from that of the 1950s. Owing to a shortage of priests and lay brothers and
sisters, the Catholic hierarchy no longer exercised effective control over its system
of ecoles libres (parochial schools), which were increasingly in the hands of their

users, that is, the parents of their pupils. The dwindling number of practicing
Catholics were ever more firmly attached to the right, whereas the more left-wing
"militant" Catholics were on the decline.''* The educational issue was thus still a

political issue. 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 consol-
idate the fragile unity of the republican side, whereas the battle over parochial
schools under the Fourth and Fifth republics has served mainly to revitalize strug-
gling right-wing parties. Nevertheless, this all too visible confrontation cannot by
itself 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 on the existence of a substantial

and intransigent Catholic opponent, it 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 Catholic-secular split that is so peculiar to France
reflects the exclusive domination of Catholicism in the country after the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes. 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 115

majority (more than 95 percent) of French people and because it maintained a

steady institutional as well as monumental visibility. Neither Protestantism nor
Judaism wished to or could take advantage of the system of religious organization
to reinforce their stature vis-a-vis Catholicism. Indeed, both religions were far more
affected by liberal influences in the nineteenth century than Catholicism was, and as
a result many Protestants and Jews poured their energies into civil society and
became the staunchest supporters of the new Republic.
Some would suggest that French Catholicism itself began to secularize under the
combined influence of Vatican II and May 1968 and that in so doing it followed a
course plotted by any number of new theologies. Several factors worked in the oppo-

site direction, however. To begin with, there has been a revival of self-conscious
Catholic identity, partly in reaction to the unchallenged domination of academic his-
tory and the resulting "secularization" of religious history. While Protestants have
found at least four opportunities since 1980 to repeat the celebration of their origins.
Catholics have taken on the more difficult task of writing new "church 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 24, 1982, he had this to say about the his-
tory of religious education in France: "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, we can pride ourselves
on the fact that our culture has been able to accommodate the three religions that
Emperor Napoleon I recognized: Catholicism, the Protestant Church, and Judaism.

But what a difficult 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, and above all the dramatic outcome of the Algerian War,
led some 250,000 to 300,000 Jews to emigrate from North Africa to France between
1950 and 1970.^'' The 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 much more
keenly aware of the new presence of Islam on French soil. Gilles Kepel sees the
birth of a new religion in France as a consequence of the economic crisis that shook
the capitalist economies, leaving many North African immigrants as permanent res-
idents of France.^' Although other causes must surely be taken into account as well,
ii6 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

it is clear that the number of Muslim places of worship in France increased sharply
after 1975, proof that a minority of Muslims had become determined to satisfy the

requirements of their religion wherever they happened to be living and raising chil-
dren. Statistically, Islam has become France's second most important religion, as

measured by the number of people living on French soil who claim to be of Muslim
descent (some 3 to 4 million). This is a recent development, even though France has
been involved in dealings with Islam since at least the conquest of Algeria, if not
before. Indeed, the point is that France can no longer take a colonial attitude toward
Islam, treating it as an alien, and inferior, religion. French Muslims will no longer
tolerate being treated as second-class citizens.

The greater visibility of Judaism and the presence in France of an Islamic com-
munity that has yet to exercise its full potential power are entirely new ingredients
in the situation.^^ Now, if it is true that the Catholic-secular split became established

in France as a result of the failure of Protestantism and thus of the absence of true
religious pluralism, it may well be swept aside as the religious landscape is trans-

formed before our very eyes. Does not the "new secularism" that some have pro-
posed as a solution to the parochial school issue that erupted in 1984 risk becoming
a dead letter if it is envisaged solely as a way of resolving an old conflict between
Christians and seculars.''

The "Islam of a thousand mosques" is surely a fantasy, the result of a more or

less deliberate confusion between a simple place of worship and the full-scale
mosques complete with minarets that some see replacing village churches through-

out France. Yet the fantasy is revealing of a new sense of vulnerability, for the con-
struction of minarets 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 all neo-Gothic churches precisely to underscore

that point, and in the twentieth century the Church has called upon modern archi-

tectural technology to promote a new sacred art. In terms of monuments, the lesson
is clear: France is either Catholic or secular. There is no middle term.

Choosing Sides

It was when statues of Marianne were erected in republican town squares in delib-

erate opposition to statues of the the Virgin on the heights overlooking those same
towns that the secular camp really made its existence known for the first time.^'

That moment is remembered in two symbols, one a text, the other a motto. The text

is from Sainte-Beuve, an influential orator in the Bonapartist Senate, who in 1868

spoke out against Catholics who dared to challenge the materialism of the medical
faculties by calling for an end to state control of higher education. In response to
 Catholics and Seculars 117

the threats of the clerical party Sainte-Beuve drew 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 all in agreement on
one point: that the greatest need of all is to be liberated from absolute author-
ity and blind submission; an immense diocese (or, if you prefer, an indetermi-
nate, boundless province); which counts among its members thousands of
deists, spiritualists, and disciples of so-called natural religion, pantheists, pos-

itivists, realists... skeptics and seekers of all kinds, adepts of common sense and
champions of pure science; this diocese. ..this great intellectual and rational
province, has no pastor or bishops, it is true, and no consistory president or
other designated leader authorized to speak in its name, yet each member in

turn has the duty, when the occasion arises and conscience compels him, to

recall the rights of truth, science, and free inquiry to the attention of anyone
who might be tempted to forget or neglect them.^'*

An astonishing definition: Sainte-Beuve rejects Catholicism in toto in the name

of individual autonomy and unfettered reason, yet at the same time he projects onto
the lay camp that he is trying to define two caricatures borrowed from traditional

religious controversies: one an image of Catholicism as wholly identified with the

Jesuits, a body with many "branches and enclaves," the other an image of
Protestantism, defined a la Bossuet as a source of continual sectarian proliferation.
In contrast to this convoluted self-definition we have the concise motto that
Gambetta borrowed from Peyrat less than ten years later: "Clericalism — that is the

enemy."^^ The terms clerical and laic had already begun to take on connotations
beyond their technical meaning (clerical and lay) during the Second Empire. The
two adjectives always appeared together as opposites and were soon joined by the
nouns clericalisme and laicite. As late as 1876 there was no such thing as "clerical-
ism," only a "clerical" spirit, party, or policy; but on May 4, 1877, Gambetta made
"clericalism is the enemy" the new republican war cry. One has to read the great
orator's speech to understand what remains, after one hundred years, astonishing:
that it was indeed the denunciation of clericalism that held the republican camp
together, and that this was indeed the terrain on which Gambetta, having won an
election, now 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.
ii8 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

This was in part pure fiction. The denunciation of clericalism was a convenient

way for the republicans to invoke history, not only the avowable history of 1789
but also the unavowable history of 1870 and 1871 — in other words, it was a way of
raising two specters at once, that of a return to the Ancien Regime and that of a
revival of socialism. Even more, it was a way of evoking an image of the battered

nation. Eckmann-Chatrian typifies these bellicose fantasies.^^ Chambord's return,

he says, would lead to conflict with Italy if France should attempt to restore the for-
mer papal states to the Holy See. "The Jesuits would saddle us with a religious

war," in some ways like the war in the Cevennes, in some ways like the Thirty
Years' War. Apocalypse would follow: France would be devastated, depopulated,
and bled white. She would be delivered into the hands of the Prussians, who this

time would exact an even higher toll: ten billion francs and all of Champagne. It

would mean the breakup of France, with the south seceding from the north and 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
size of a garden." This nightmare — as in Lavisse's history textbook, but back-

wards, with history destroying France rather than building it piece by piece —was
one that Gambetta continued to evoke, though in more 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 way in which the Republic did indeed
come to power, in the wake of efforts to establish a new dynasty and of a war and
the Paris Commune. In order to gain support, the republicans emulated Thiers's
skill at embodying pacifism and conservatism, but they also backed the Orleanist
parliamentary tradition: it was difficult for them to accuse their adversaries of res-

urrecting the "party of order" when that was precisely the role they wished to play

themselves. In any case, there was no immediate dynastic threat, as both royalists
and imperials were at least 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, if it had failed to give France a king, nevertheless out-
did its predecessor in supporting the Church. So the enemy was indeed clericalism.

But clericalism was more than just a convenient substitute for a missing political

opposition. The term also designated a Catholicism that had undergone a thorough
overhaul during the July Monarchy and another transformation in the 1860s: facing
changes of many kinds that threatened both its place in society and the credibility of

its doctrinal foundations, it responded by making the ultramontane, counterrevolu-

tionary spirit of the Syllabus its own.^^ Gallicanism died, and with it went what was
left of the spirit and practice of the Concordat. French Catholicism, which had in fact

proved incapable of establishing a party of its own on the model of the German
 Catholics and Seculars 119

FIGURE 3.5 Dumont, Law on Public

Ignorance; engraving after Bertall, circa
1850.

FIGURE 3.6 Valery Muller, The Last 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 on soci-

ety and, as a result, on the state.^^

The Republic, in effect, estab-

lished itself just as old local soli-

darities were disappearing for-

ever: the fin des notables^'^

coincided with the fin des ter-

roirs^'^ — that is, the effective uni-

fication of once self-sufficient

regions coincided with the col-
lapse 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 that had formed in

the final years of the Empire were repressed, along with the
legitimate memory of the nascent proletariat. In effect, the

triumphant republicans had returned to the ideology of

1789:^' the individual alone, isolated, without a past — the

tabula rasa — but facing a Catholic Church riveted to its his-

tory and strengthened by state backing for its parish clergy

and by the energy of its congregations of men and espe-

cially of women as well as by the active support of orga-

nized lay groups, most of which came to the Catholic camp

from legitimism. Meanwhile, the state lost control of the
secular clergy, who became ultramontane. Under the cir-

cumstances it is 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
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. "^^ What emerged from this unusual junc-
ture and unique conjunction was thus by no means chimerical.

If the Republic was to achieve stability, it needed solid local roots. As republicans
turned their attention to this task, they encountered Catholicism, both as an ideolog-
ical model and as a social force. What they called clericalism was in fact the mobiliza-

tion of an impressive apparatus of social control, together with a simultaneous denun-

ciation of the paths that the new society hoped to take toward modernity. Under the
circumstances it is not difficult to see 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 young women
threatened to realign control of the elite and because the institution of secular pub-
lic 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 compensa-
tion. As Claude Nicolet rightly noted, the battle over secularism made republicans

aware of "the fundamental and ineluctable link between the political and the spiri-

tual." For them, the anticlerical battle was the prerequisite of all political action; it

was "literally the motor of history."^^

That is why the process of educational secularization, affecting both teachers and
curriculum, was so important. The reform process was begun by Jules Ferry and the
Opportunist Party.^"* The first impact was on the curriculum: the catechism disap-
peared from the program, and under pressure from the Radical Party all religious

instruction was eliminated from the public schools. Thursdays (later changed to

Wednesday afternoons) were reserved for religious instruction, and the time lost

was made up in Saturday classes. In recent years this has led to protests from par-
ents upset about losing weekend time with 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 121

Just as compulsory education in France marked the final stage in the long process
of virtually eradicating illiteracy,^"^ the secularization law completed a similar, and

equally irreversible, evolution in primary education: traditional religious texts such

as the Royaumont Bible and Les Devoirs du chretien were replaced by new and more
"functional" texts such as Francinet and Simon de Nantua; sacred history ("In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth") was replaced by profane history
("Our ancestors the Gauls"); and new disciplines such as geography appeared, in

which curiosity about the things of this world took the place of the afterlife as the

substance of children's lessons.'^ A good example of the change is the famous Tour
de la France par deux enfants by G. Bruno, the provocative pseudonym chosen by a

writer with a flair for teaching, whose work illustrates how the new curriculum sup-
planted a traditional religious program that was clearly outdated.

The secularization of the teaching staff came about somewhat later, as lay teach-

ers trained in the new normal schools replaced Christian Brothers, who by now con-
stituted only a minority of the teaching staff in public schools for boys, and teach-
ing sisters of various orders, 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, as Catholic teachers died

off or quit their posts. In any case, the new law heightened antagonism in religious

regions, where the public school and the church school often vied for pupils.

Reality is of course never neat. At the village level one wonders how many fam-
ilies like the Sandres continued to produce generation after generation of school-

masters and -mistresses almost as if the law had never been passed. In how many
regions was there no battle of the schools at all, because there was no real opposi-
tion and no enthusiasm for conflict.'' How much real change was there in the Doubs,
for example, where a majority of schoolmistresses were laywomen (that is, not sis-

ters) before 1880 but were nevertheless practicing Catholics (hence not "secu-
lars") — as indeed they would remain afterward.'' Still, the Republic's "black hus-

sards" were quite real: if the typical village schoolmaster of the early nineteenth
century also served as choirmaster, usher, and sacristan, he was likely to be replaced
at the end of the century by a man who doubled as mayor's secretary, town librar-
ian, and local bandleader. An idea of the magnitude of the change can be gleaned
from a glance at the 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 the former had declined to

48 million versus 130 million on the latter. Minutes of parliamentary debates, for
1883 especially, show how republicans saw every decrease in the budget for religious

functions as a direct contribution to the progress of public education.""^

122 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

Secularization affected all levels of the educational system. Religious officials

soon disappeared from the Conseil Superieur de I'Enseignement Piiblic, and theol-
ogy faculties, already moribund 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, left the women's prisons
to which they had been systematically assigned after the 1839 reform.'*^ By contrast,
they remained at their posts in provincial hospitals, though not in institutions run by
the Assistance Publique in Paris, where lay nurses replaced Sisters of Charity. The
secularizing wave also swept through cemeteries and courts. In 1880, Sunday ceased
to be an official Was this political progress or social regression.'' In 1884
day of rest:

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

the cost of a slight modification to the Constitution.''^ Divorce was reinstated that

same year, so that the Catholic conception of marriage ceased to be a universal

requirement. But certain symbols had a more direct impact. When the Assump-
tionists inaugurated a new daily newspaper in 1883, they called it La 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 seculars was never-
ending, namely, science and ethics. As it happens, the vocabulary of the time is

revealing: contemporaries spoke of "Catholic science" and "secular morality," as if

both contenders were required to prove their mettle on the enemy's 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 expres-
sion 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 after 1870, discoveries in scientific disciplines ranging
from German philology to Darwinian biology challenged biblical truth more and
more directly. Meanwhile, scientists such as the illustrious Marcellin Berthelot were
quick to throw their support to the Republic. Catholics found themselves in a defen-
 !

Catholics and Seculars 123

BRANLY CROIT..! FOCH CROIT... PASTEUR CROfT..

^5 Vertu3 pique5^

^5 VertSp'iques

... mait M. Homait, lui, ne croit poM

FIGURE 3.7 Catholic scholars and secular virtues. Gignoux, draw-

ing for Le Pelerin (May 1929).

FIGURES 3.8 AND 3.9 Grandjouan, The Secular Virtues; for La

Raison (August, 1907).

sive situation, defended only by the still young science faculties of

the Instituts Catholiques and reduced to issuing lists of scientists

who were also believers in order to prove that science need not be
atheistic: fortunately there was Pasteur. They were also obliged to

refight old battles, as their enemies purposely raised again and

again the trial of Galileo. Fortunately, anniversaries raised 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 celebrated.''Was it "the triumph of positive science over the chimerical sci-
ence of theology.-^" Or was it the advent of a new missionary fired by an "almost
124 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

supernatural desire to bring Christ... to the unknown peoples who waited so long for
Him in the shadow of 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 course in hygiene:

Those submissive to the clergy rarely bathe because their religion teaches

them to prefer filthy modesty: one may not look at or touch certain parts of
the body, the sexual parts for example.... A 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]. He found that it was the Catholic reli-

gion, which is understandable since this religion teaches no, or virtually no,
principles of hygiene....! am speaking to you scientifically, honestly and
decently but above 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: it was through these clubs that soccer, and later basketball, came
to France, and they also popularized all sorts of gymnastic activities.

If the Catholics were called upon to demonstrate their mettle in science, the sec-
ulars were obliged to do the same in the moral realm. Anticlericals were of course
in the habit of responding to attacks in this area by pointing accusatory fingers at

Christian Brothers found guilty of various crimes by the courts. And while repub-
licans were only too glad to reprint Diderot's salacious novel of the religious life La
Religieuse, they also knew that such tactics were useless at the grassroots level,
where the "good sisters" were generally held to be above suspicion. By contrast, lay
schoolmistresses, often isolated single women, were relatively vulnerable to attack

on moral grounds, or at any rate more open to suspicion than their religious coun-

terparts, as 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 con-
science." At Sevres, the first headmistress, Mme Favre, daughter of an Alsatian pas-
tor 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 i860— 1910, the antagonism between seculars and
Catholics found visible embodiment in every village in France, where from 1880 on
combined town hall— school buildings went up opposite clerical compounds (church
plus rectory) renovated during the Second Empire; and in every city, where gov-
 —

Catholics and Seculars 125

ernment buildings and statues of great men in the main squares counterbalanced the
downtown church steeples 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 earlier.

Not even Paris was exempt from this battle of symbolic architectures. For more
than a century the two sides fought over Soufflot's neoclassical edifice: Was it a
church or a pantheon.'' The issue was finally decided by the death of Victor Hugo
(1885), which came at the right moment to weigh definitively in favor of the latter

choice, today's Pantheon. But soon each side in the dispute would be able to claim

a still more modern emblem: Sacre-Coeur for the Catholics, the Eiffel Tower for the
seculars. Both drew criticism from within their own camps. Everyone knows of the
hullabaloo unleashed by the construction of Eiffel's tower. But Sacre-Coeur had its

Catholic detractors. Its Romano-Byzantine architecture (actually it was an extrap-

olation of the Romanesque of southwestern France) was hard to take. "Will Sacre-

Coeur of Montmartre be built in our national style or in some foreign style.-^" It was
a vexing question, and those who signed one protest petition were unanimous in
their answer: the church should be French and Gothic and not a "mosque.
Before long, however, these initial quarrels gave way to out-and-out antagonism
between seculars and clericals. The construction of Sacre-Coeur was a "national
vow" approved by the Assembly on July 24, 1873, t^^t is, at the height of reaction.
Those who made the vow had of course denounced the imperial 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:

CLEMENCEAU: We ask only one thing, and that is to repudiate the work of the cler-
ical reactionaries in the National Assembly, to disavow it publicly.

ADMIRAL DE LA RONCiERE DE NOURY: No to the revolutionary spirit!

THE MARQUIS DE BELCASTEL: Catholicism is for all times

M. CORDON: I beg your pardon. Catholicism did not exist before it existed and
will not exist after it has ceased to exist.

THE MARQUIS DE BELCASTEL: It has existed since the first day of the world and
will exist forever.^'

And that was not the end of it. Before long it was being alleged that Sacre-Coeur

had been built in expiation for the crimes of the Commune. This was not the initial

intention, but the choice of site lent itself to this interpretation, which many
Catholics did not shrink from proposing as a justification.
As for the Eiffel Tower, aesthetic debate should have been enough. But
the Tower was built on the Champ-de-Mars, which Michelet had called the

Revolution's only monument, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of

126 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

FIGURE 3.10 The Christ of the Criminal Courts; postcard, 1904.

FIGURE 3.1 1 Christ Will Stay, despite the Sectarians; engraving. La Croix illustree (November 11, 1905).

1789. That was too much. To many outraged CathoHcs, the new monument was a

modern Tower of Babel that 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 God" and "white citadel." The Breton publication
Semaines religietises, from which these compliments were taken, even offered this

pastiche of Victor Hugo in mockery of the project:

Nains de quatre-vingt-neuf, singez les grandes choses,

Multipliez I'enorme, artisans, apprentis:

Creez des tours de fer pour vos apotheoses,

Mais vos reves sont 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. No one denies that the antagonism was
fierce at the time the republicans came to power. Like it or not, Protestants and Jews
were forced to adapt to this Procrustean bed. Events also played a part. There were
 Catholics and Seculars 127

many Protestants among the republicans, and their educational militancy worked
miracles. And what is there to say about the unfortunate Catholic Bank of the

Union Generale, whose collapse was blamed on a conspiracy of its alleged

Protestant and Jewish enemies?

In any case, the real antagonism that developed in the wake of the major secu-

larization legislation of the i88os dictated certain political positions but failed to
impose a permanent structure on either the right (both Orleanists and Bonapartists
being only sporadically pro-clerical) or the left (where anticlericalism was an issue
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 it prevent many Catholics from offering their per-
manent support to the Republic. Nevertheless, the presence of vociferous activists

and eager followers in both camps — the Assumptionists of La Bonne Presse on the
right, for example or the editors of La Libre Pensee on the left
— precluded any real
effort to restore peace.

If we focus for a moment on the Catholic side. La Croix can tell us a great deal
about the new state of mind among Catholics in the early years of the Republic.

Founded in 1883 by Father Vincent de Paul Bailly in the spirit of Le Pelerin, La

Croix, which was aimed at a broad audience and spawned many local affiliates in

order to extend its roots into the provinces, was a daily paper with an obvious zest

for polemic: its choicest words were reserved for Freemasons obviously, Jews above
all, and schoolteachers, "the teaching Republic's chain gang." La Croix attacked the
secular state ("the state-god that expelled the real God and lives solely on universal
suffrage"), parliament ("a chamber of disorder"), and above all the university, that

"mortal illness," which "discovered a secret that had previously eluded humanity:
how to increase the number of suicides by young people." Apart from polemic,
however, the political battle never really amounted to anything: one can understand
why the time was not ripe for "proper" royalist combat, yet despite Pope Leo XIII's
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, and they failed regularly in election

after election. La Croix revealed a powerful capacity for invective coupled with a
weak capacity for organization: up to the time of the Dreyfus Affair, this was the
disconcerting public face of the Assumptionists' private newspaper.^"*
Thus the "separation of church and school" induced combative Catholics to
wage ideological warfare without real contact with the new political realities.^^ On
the educational battlefield, at any rate, it held its own. By the end of the nineteenth
century both sides had reason to be satisfied. Seculars were pleased that secular edu-
cation was a reality: nearly three quarters of all elementary school pupils attended
128 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

secular public schools, and lycees and colleges for young women had become popu-
lar. The revitalized university system still enjoyed a near monopoly, with little com-
petition from the five Instituts Catholiques thus far established. But the Catholic
educational system (which now included most of the private schools in France) still

had its strong points. In certain regions such as the west of France it held its ground
against its 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-

leges with priests and monks as teachers attracted more and more students every
year from 1887 to 1898, increasing its share of the male secondary school popula-
tion from thirty-two to forty-two percent of the total. In education, the battle
strengthened both sides without designating a victor.
Hence something had to be done, and to the detriment of liberal principles a

series of anti-congreganist measures were passed in the wake of the Law of 1901:
France now enjoyed freedom of association for all except the "congregations,"
which previously were the only legal associations. What had been a privilege

became grounds for discrimination; the exceptional status remained. To the detri-

ment of the Concordat as well: from 1905 the Republic no longer recognized or
assumed the cost of supporting any religion. The battle now shifted to new and
more delicate terrain: not the school but religion itself. Was the Radical Party's
Republic prepared to revisit the Revolution.'' Catholics 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 on both sides, however, the Republic did
not revisit either 1791 or 1793. It sought neither schism nor dechristianization. Let
inventaires turn to confrontation resulting in death, and Clemenceau would have the
troublemakers arrested. No new persecutions for a few candlesticks! Let the pope
prohibit cultuels, and other procedures for the devolution of church property would
be negotiated. The separation of church and state presented a paradoxical situation:
because it was 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 129

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, how-
ever, as at the end of 191 5, when a "vile rumor" circulated that the country harbored

some "15,580 shirker priests." Verbal excess was always possible; images of revolu-

tionary violence sprang readily to mind, even if it was only to deny their reality. Le
Bonnet rouge, for example, began one polemic with this blast: "We have never
insisted that conscript priests should have to die. We have no intention of refloating
Carrier's scuttlable boats."^^'^^

Tactical errors of this sort did not stand in the way of reconciliation in the

trenches. After the war the religious conflict seems to have come to a standstill, as

the neither side was new themes. The Cartel des Gauches would
able to develop

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
worn 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. The sec-

ular camp was probably never more highly organized than in the interwar years, and
verbal clashes were not uncommon. Take the case of Joan of Arc, for example. In

1920 Rome 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. A counterattack was inevitable, and it

came in 1930 in a series of ten articles published in VEcole liberatrice, the organ of

the Syndicat National des Instituteurs, in which Gaston Clemendot set out to top-

ple "the idol of Domremy."^'

When 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." Had the entente

between "those who believe in heaven and those who do not" failed to survive the
Resistance.'^ In any case, those who refused to lay down their arms enjoyed a mar-

velous second season.

The Revolution as Matrix

where did this terrible family battle begin.'' If we ask those involved, we will come
away with genealogies but not explanations. Perhaps there is a sign in the fact that

whenZa Calotte resumed publication in 1945, it remained faithful to the republican

calendar. Other secular voices invoked precursors from before 1789: the 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
130 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

FIGURE 3.12 Peree, The Rights of Man; engravmg. 1793.

end, but their heroes and martyrs had different names. A glance at the history text-
books used in Catholic and secular schools under the Third Republic is all the con-

firmation one needs.^^

Everyone pointed to the Revolution, but was this really the origin of Catholic-
secular antagonism? I prefer to call it the matrix — but in what sense? The two camps
 Catholics and Seculars 131

did not exist as such at the time, and the vocabulary was not yet fixed. Or at any rate,
the noble vocabulary was not yet fixed; common parlance was something else again.

The clergy were ferociously mocked. Indeed, political caricature was invented for
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
to the lampposts" as patriots emerged from the theater where the actor Talma
thrilled crowds with his portrayal of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacres in
Marie Joseph Chenier's Charles IX. In November 1789, Camille Desmoulins inau-
gurated his soon-to-be-famous newspaper Revolutions de France et de Brabant with

this lapidary summary of the situation: "The king is in the Louvre, the National
Assembly is in the Tuileries...the mills are turning, the traitors are fleeing, la calotte

[literally, the skullcap, that is, the clerical party] is prostrate, aristocracy is on its last

legs." He happily adapted Voltaire 's anticlerical polemics, including the famous slo-
gan ecrasei I'infdme (crush the vile thing!), to the needs of a daily struggle against
the "swindling and stupid bonzes." When the first religious tensions arose in 1790,

he came up with this formula, the first of a long line: "There appears to be a strug-
gle to the death going on between the skullcap and the tricolor sash."'''*

The 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 what happened in 1789 and 1790 have their
own way of putting things: it is possible, for example, to suggest that the

Revolution initiated a twofold process of secularization, half of which succeeded

while the other half failed. On the one hand there was the immediate, irreversible

secularization of political space, which took place almost by consensus.

Catholicism disappeared not only as the first order of the tripartite medieval sys-
tem but also as the kingdom's leading landowner and primary source of legitima-
tion of government power. The divine-right monarchy gave way to popular sover-

eignty. In the new political landscape the religious dimension had no relevance. In
the new, regenerated France there were in theory no longer Catholics, Protestants,
and Jews but only free citizens enjoying equal rights. No longer was Catholicism a
fundamental reference. On the contrary, it was reduced 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 —one form of the tab-
ula rasa of which the revolutionaries were so fond —encountered no immediate
obstacles 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 new definition of lib-

erty. In any case, the clergy saw concretely that the installation of the new polit-

ical order was in fact working out to their disadvantage: the Church's property was
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 engraving. Note the ungram-
matical legend (protege should be protegentl.
 Catholics and Seculars 133

nationalized to finance the Revolution, their religious vows were nullified in the

name of individual freedom and public utility, and Catholicism was denied recog-
nition as the national religion in the name of the brand-new principle of freedom
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 sec-
ularize that very same Catholicism by incorporating it into the new administrative

order that was beginning to be established by late 1789. "Secularize the Church":
this paradoxical formulation is borrowed from Jaures.''^ In the present context we
may take this to mean the imposition on the Catholic Church of new "norms" estab-

lished for the nation as a whole: the redistricting of space through the creation of
departements, with which the Church's new dioceses were to coincide, and through
the realignment of mainly urban parishes, which took more account of the popula-
tion; and new procedures for choosing religious officials, primarily bishops and
parish priests, involving the same multistage electoral system used for selecting

administrative officials. What is more, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy also
regulated the finances of the Catholic Church, offering more equitable and more
generous compensation to the parish clergy generally and introducing reforms in
church procedures desired by a majority, along with a pinch of Presbyterianism and
a dash of Gallicanism.
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 collateurs, or patrons, also left a great deal to be desired.
The repudiation also concerned the manner of the reform: the Catholic hierarchy
in particular could not accept a reform without either agreeing to it itself, in

accordance with Gallican tradition, or submitting the proposed changes to Rome

for the customary negotiations. But the Constituent Assembly, in the flush of its

new sovereignty, could not agree to a national council, which would have revived
the Church of France, and did not wish 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 all concerned priests, from bishop down
to vicar, to take the oath (in common after February 1790) and assent to a
Constitution that by now included the new law against which many clerics

had protested.
What followed was the paradoxical spectacle of an oath, a sacred act of national
unity, 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
134 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

France.''*' The Civil Constitution, which had laid down the implicit principle that

Catholicism coincided with France — a state religion but not a national one — thus
led, as a result of the oath, to the first perceptible sign of division at the national
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
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 it took on the precise outlines of
Catholicism. The Third Estate had of course initiated the Revolution by refusing
to maintain three distinct orders. But the Revolution was able to attach "figures" to

the abstractions it excluded only by transforming the noble into the "aristocrat"
and the priest into the calotin. The pejorative term calotin in fact combined three
distinct images that would merge into a single image for posterity: the fanatic
preacher of an intolerant and superstitious religion, the representative of the
Ancien Regime who had lost his property and privileges, and, last but not least, the

refractory who, by refusing to take the oath, excluded himself from the new civic

order.^' There is a direct line of descent from the Revolutionary 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 its history. The rest of the story is familiar: a

renewal of secularization, this time directed at society as well as the clergy, coupled

with dechristianization: by the end of the Terror, the Revolution of Year II had
become vehemently antireligious. For collective memory, whether spontaneous or
more often than not revived, the dominant image is not one of uniform hostility to
religion but rather of different treatment for the two rival churches, the one refrac-

tory, the other constitutional, that grew out of acceptance or rejection of the Civil

Constitution: on the one hand the martyred priest, on the other the clergyman who
discarded his surplice and took a wife. The aureole and the stigma. And of course
people would also remember the Vendee and the way in which a rural population

organized an armed opposition to defend its faith and its king.

The crisis around the oath soon raised another related but distinct issue. It was
not only that nonjuring priests found themselves at odds with the Constituent
Assembly, but that Catholicism found itself at 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 moment in which, pure of all clerical

taint, the Revolution inaugurated itself in a unanimous outpouring. The great rev-
olutionary scholar Albert Mathiez gave an excellent summary of the novelty of the
 Catholics and Seculars 135

situation in the conclusion to his thesis, written when he was still just a young man
in 1903: nowadays, he explained, republicans

no longer give any thought to dreaming up new religions. They do not care to

establish a new church, but they have not given up hope of resolving the prob-
lem of democracy. Today, in order to impress the republican stamp on gener-
ations to come, we have free, compulsory, secular education.. ..Our ancestors
of the Revolution hoped to achieve the same goal of imparting a republican
education by establishing a religion.''^

Why do I bring up the subject of revolutionary religion.'' Because the effort to

define the new cult brought out another type of tension between Catholicism and
the Revolution: along with secularization went a transfer of sacrality. A century
later Jules Ferry would set out to resolve practical questions: What kinds of teach-
ers did the Republic need.'' What curriculum for its schools.'' The Revolution had

much more Utopian dreams for education, and these reveal the central issue at the

heart of the debate over secularization in terms similar to those used by the young
Mathiez: How were the people to be wedded new course of politics.'' How
to the

were free citizens to be persuaded to embrace the new system, founded on reason.''
Those who took part in this thinking were unanimous in seeking a substitute for

discredited Catholicism but disagreed about what that substitute ought to be. There
were, however, two primary models. The first, more or less inspired by Rousseau,
was implemented to a degree in Robespierre's project to establish a cult of the
Supreme Being. The idea was that every society requires a common religious foun-
dation as the basis of its morality. "Religion is therefore the first point I want to be

stressed in primary education.. ..What the primary schools must instill in their pupils

is a religious principle, the essence and basis of all faiths — a religion as simple and
"^^
grand as nature.
This first model remained mainly theoretical; the second aimed above all at

becoming operational. It began with the observation of the immense ability of

Catholicism to "mobilize" the faithful; the Church, with its impressive liturgy and
a theology that offered comfort even as it stirred feelings of guilt, clearly had the
resources to indoctrinate large numbers of people.'''* When it came to training

today's patriots or tomorrow's republicans, it therefore made sense to tap into

Catholicism's sources of energy in order to generate genuine revolutionary enthu-
siasm. According to a well-known text by the pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne,
"National education consists in seizing the child still in the cradle, and even earlier,

for the unborn child already belongs to the nation. The nation takes hold of the
whole person and never lets go, so that national education is not an institution for
the child but for a lifetime."^^ The new catechism, essential to the salvation of the
future republican, is to be inculcated from birth.
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 —found a radical

critic in Condorcet. "Fanaticism," Bouquier pronounced, following Rabaut's lead,

"once had a temple in every commune. Let those temples now become the temples

of liberty, of education."^'' But Condorcet replied that "if you call a school a
national temple," you would introduce the principle of authority, the very basis of

fanaticism, into education.''^

Neither the French constitution nor the declaration of rights should be pre-
sented to any class of citizens as tablets from heaven that must be worshipped
and believed.... As long as there are men who do not obey reason alone, who
receive their opinions from an alien opinion, all chains will have been broken
in vain. Even if those guiding opinions are useful truths, the human race
would nevertheless remain divided into two classes, those who reason and
those who believe, masters and slaves.''^

Between the light of reason and the darkness of belief no compromise is possible.

Condorcet was even more vehemently critical of "revolutionary enthusiasm" in

his Memoires. Were some people advocating that students be taught the text of the
Constitution.-^ "If they mean that it must be taught as a doctrine conforming to the

principles of universal reason or that one should whip up blind enthusiasm in its

favor so that citizens will be incapable of assessing its true worth; if they are propos-

ing to tell people that this is what you must worship and believe; then what they pro-
pose is the creation of a kind of political religion." Responding directly to Rabaut

Saint-Etienne and others who hoped to form future citizens by controlling the edu-

cation of the young, Condorcet strongly denounced those who "propose to seize

the child in its very first moments in order to fill its mind with images that time can-

not destroy, to bind individuals to the laws and constitution of their country by
blind emotion and introduce them to reason only through the miracles of the imag-
ination and the confusion of the passions." Were such people "more certain of their
political truths than fanatics of all sects feel they are certain of all their religious

delusions.-^.-.To declare it permissible to dazzle men rather than enlighten them, to

seduce them in the name of 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 most

forceful of terms. If Religion and Reason are antinomical, a reasoned critique of

religion cannot permit a religious administration of knowledge and power without

contradicting itself. Condorcet 's remarks are valuable not only in themselves but

also because of Condorcet 's strategic position as a link between the philosophes and
the ideologues. Both directly, through his writings on education, and indirectly.
 Catholics and Seculars 137

through his influence in transmitting the legacy of the Enhghtenment in the form of
scientism, Condorcet transmitted to the 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 its early stages demonstrated: if politics is to be based on ratio-
nality alone and independent of all authority, then it cannot assume direct control
of religion in any form. Condorcet 's critique thus explained the imbalance that
would emerge later in the relation between secularism and religion: the state tended
to renounce religion (secularization) rather than appropriate it (secular religion).

Mediations

of course the passage from the fundamental experiences of the Revolution to the
later Catholic-secular split involved a number of mediations, three of which I shall

discuss here. First, Napoleon brought stability to French society and its institutions.

A postrevolutionary order emerged that included effective secularization of state

and society through the Civil Code; the existence of multiple faiths was recognized,
while the Concordat consecrated a special place for Roman Catholicism as the
majority religion; and the university was given responsibility for managing public
education under the control of the state. Catholic-secular antagonism was hence-
forth constrained by a system of institutions that, reflecting both the effects of rev-
olutionary secularization and France 's distinctive religious history, resulted in a

high degree of stability. No matter whether Catholics sought to control the univer-
sity or to rival it, 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 and retain its Roman roots. Napoleon's aim was
to achieve a stable 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 —and in a sense legiti-

mate — the 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 all the theoretical
elaborations and new forms and new words, I still see only two great facts, two prin-
ciples, two actors, two persons on the stage: Christianity and the Revolution. "^^
The second mediation is not institutional in nature but has to do, rather, with the
implantation of a tradition. It has been said, rightly, that the Revolution created the
Vendee as a region based on the memory of a murderous history.^^ Indeed, all of
France continues to bear the stigma of revolutionary division. The most enduring
and visible and therefore most profound of those divisions is religious in nature. A
138 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

map showing the proportion of priests who took the oath to support the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy in 1791 is strikingly similar to a map showing the fre-
quency of religious practice just after World
War II. Areas where a high proportion of
priests refused to take the oath became areas

where a high proportion of the population

continued to go to church, whereas "consti-
tutional" areas became "dechristianized."
The problem is how to interpret these facts,

and two errors in particular are to be

avoided. The map of the oath already
reflects a long religious history, as Timothy
Tackett has shown.^'* Furthermore, the con-
trasts in religious practice are already notice-

able in the nineteenth century thanks to epis-

copal surveys conducted under the July

Monarchy and afterward.
The crucial 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 in 1797. Strack, Atheism Tries

and fa/7s; engraving, 1797.

FIGURE 3.16 Strack, The Magic Lantern, 1797.

 Catholics and Seculars 139

decades following the oath of 1791. The crisis surrounding the oath seems to
reveal the existence of two distinct religious models, a traditional one in the

refractory regions and a new one in the constitutional regions. In areas where the
clergy, in accord with their flock, accepted the autonomy of the political and a

degree of secularization of the church, they would have difficulty in the future
maintaining its spiritual hegemony through preaching and confession among men
who had largely committed themselves to the revolutionary process or simply
benefitted from it. There was also another, more immediate, 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 fol-

lowed the Concordat, and ended with the elimination of the last surviving consti-
tutional clergy during the Restoration. Of the many consequences of this sys-

tematic elimination of the constitutional clergy, two deserve explicit mention.

Areas in which the constitutional clergy had dominated found themselves without
any priests at all or, at best, with no priests of their "own." In some particularly
hard-hit dioceses, up to forty percent of the parishes were therefore eliminated.
These "devastated" regions were also, for obvious reasons, quick to become
dechristianized, especially in view of the fact that, at the national level, the

destruction of the constitutional church resulted in the total triumph of the refrac-
tory, of which revived nineteenth-century Catholicism was the direct heir. It is

not difficult to understand how such a monopoly helped to perpetuate rather than
attenuate hostility.^^
One result of this forgotten "schism," lost in the silence surrounding the destruc-
tion of the constitutional church in which so many parties had a hand, was that old

differences were preserved in the forms of religious practice itself. Was the cleav-
age really between "practicing" and "nonpracticing" Catholics.'' No, because each
group had its own "version" of religion. The real difference was rather between, on
the one hand, a Catholicism in which, as in the past, the clergy continued to moni-
tor beliefs and control practice through the catechism, liturgy, sacraments, and
above all confession, a Roman 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 's misfortunes. The first of these two mod-
els is linked to the clergy, the second more directly to the laity. Thus the old
medieval distinction between lay and ecclesiastic was revived within Catholicism as
a result of the Revolution. Furthermore, this difference in religious practice served
as the matrix within which a quasi-religious, quasi-political opposition between sec-
ulars and clericals could develop.
140 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

FIGURE 3,17 The Revolution Today. Above the entry to this church in Houdan (Yvelines), the text of 18 Floreal, Year II, can still be
read; "The French people recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul."

The third type of mediation was the restoration of normal poHtical life, which
occurred in two stages: the first began in 18 14— 181 5, with the institution of public

debate within a constitutional framework, and the second in 1848, a year that

marked the beginning of an irreversible process of democratization.

The Restoration brought with it the possibility of nonviolent political con-

frontation, although within a narrow framework. In fact the postrevolutionary
 Catholics and Seculars 141

equilibrium had to be left untouched in most essential respects; external constraints

imposed by the allies in the wake of Napoleon's defeat had to be taken into account;

and, last but not least, the fragile legitimacy of the new regime had to be maintained.
Under these conditions both sides had little room to maneuver. It was legitimate,
however, to debate the Revolution in historical or philosophical terms, just as it was
also legitimate to debate religion by arguing about the role of the Jesuits or the

Congregation or, better yet, grappling over educational issues. The very visible role
played by influential Catholics in the new regime and the 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 back in as a discriminating factor in contrasting political

choices. It was the liberals versus the ultras, a situation that was in many ways a pre-

cursor of what would come to pass in the early years of the Third Republic.
One clear sign of this situation was the new importance of debates over educa-
tion, 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 of new legislation concerning primary education.^^ Every occa-

FIGURE 3.18 Demonstration protesting the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses; Paris, 1989.
142 CLAUDE LANGLOIS

sion was an opportunity for conflict. A new theme appeared with a long future
ahead of it: the division of society resulting from two different educational systems.

But whereas Destutt de Tracy, in Year X, as the Revolution was ending, still saw the
dual system of education as a reflection of class division (working class and edu-
cated 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 spirit is

not entirely the same are a source of division in society. When young people leave
their preparatory or church schools, they enter the world filled with serious preju-
dices against one another. They accuse each other of ignorance and impiety. They
feel contempt and hatred without knowing one another. "^^ Such ideas, common
during the Third Republic, were still new in the Restoration, where it would be six

more years before the liberal deputy General Foy would initiate public debate over
the question.^^ As it happens, the quoted passage is from a priest with Jansenist lean-
ings who began his career on the eve of the Revolution as the principal of the col-

lege of Vannes after the expulsion of the Jesuits. Another case in which critical

thinking simply leapt over the Revolution was the denunciation of the "priestly
party" by Montlosier in 1826.'" Montlosier was a Gallican who had somehow wan-
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 earliest clinical

descriptions of clericalism. It was an odd trick 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 many published
editions of Voltaire and Rousseau. There were no seculars yet, nor were there cler-

icals, but there were two camps that bore an uncanny resemblance to them.
Debate, however, remained narrowly circumscribed. It began to spread, how-
ever, after 1830 and especially 1848, affecting minor provincial notables like the

pharmacist Homais (in Flaubert's Madame Bovary) and the elite of the urban work-
ing class like Pierre Proudhon, as well as rural people. In the end, with the estab-
lishment of universal suffrage, the people decided, once the issue was openly raised,
as in 1877. But this outcome required not only the introduction of universal suffrage

but a new politicization of Catholicism. The history of the former is well known,
but the latter process is less well 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 relations with Rome, the teach-

ing congregations, schools, and even 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 sec-

ular parties squared off in village elections. The cure of the 1870s ventured beyond
the boundaries of the reservation to which the Concordat system had confined him,
 Catholics and Seculars 143

at the same time replacing the notables —prominent local citizens —whose power
was on the decline. In any case, "the cures possessed the kinds of knowledge that
politics required: historical, philosophical, and theological. No one was better
equipped to deal with the issues facing civil society."^^ Indeed, clericalism reflected
a desire to bring older modes of knowledge to bear on the political process, and this

inevitably meant invoking a different set of memories to justify one 's actions.

It is customary to portray the clash between seculars and Catholics as a uniquely

French phenomenon, along with the variety of French cheeses and the insatiable
French thirst for history. There have of course been clashes just as pronounced and
outbursts of anticlerical sentiment even more violent in southern Europe and Latin
America, but the enduring mix of radical secularism and Catholic dominance is no
doubt unique to France. There is nevertheless reason to ask whether this unique
heritage can survive the expansion of our horizons to embrace worldwide models
and regional alliances.

Have we ultimately plumbed the deeper meaning of this novel couple.'^ It is

tempting to see it as the symptom of a structural imbalance, a sign of the modern

coexisting with the archaic. What is undeniably modern in France is the affirmation
of individual autonomy and the secular character of the state, the plurality of faiths
and the privatization of religion. What is probably archaic is the internalization of
civil 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 has also been exorcised. Based on
differences over the oath of 1791, exacerbated by revolutionary violence, the dis-
pute was quickly institutionalized and soon civilized. From it derives France's
unique partition of liberties: seculars enjoy those of 1789, while clericals enjoy free-
dom of religion and education. 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 fade.'' Is it one of the old-fashioned

charms of a France that no longer exists.'' Surely it is too soon to draw any such con-
clusion. Events always send people back to the past in search of precedents. There
will always be someone —and perhaps not the someone one expects — to invoke the
ghost of that champion of anticlericalism, Emile Combes (1835-1921).'''
FIGURE 4.0 Antiracist demonstration by the group S.O.S.-Racisme, November 1987.
 CHAPTER 4

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
major La France aux Franfais/ This old nationalist slogan, which the extreme
cities.

right has made its war cry, has been countered by antiracist organizations with a slo-

gan 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 immi-
gration: the front of memory.

Reasons for the Repression

"Peoples always reveal their origins. The circumstances surrounding their birth and
development influence them throughout their history."^ This idea of Tocqueville 's
tells 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 United States was aware of the realities of
immigration from the inception of its national history."^ The American model of
immigration even today still preserves aspects of its initial function of populating a
territory. It was in the period during which the nation was born that Crevecoeur
originated the myth that in America a fusion of different peoples was giving rise to

a "new man." From this it was for a long time assumed that every immigrant was a
potential American citizen. This has given rise to a widely shared feeling that
America is still an "unfinished country," to borrow a phrase from Nathan Glazer,
 ^

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 also a part of the American myth of origins, and so it has always
been an important topic in history books. For many people the American example is

the principal if not the only historical model of immigration in the world. A glance
at the statistics, however, is enough to see that since the beginning of the twentieth
century immigration has had a proportionately greater impact in France than in the
United States. After a massive influx in the first decade of the twentieth century,
America established a strict system of ethnic quotas. Thereafter France became the
world 's leading immigrant host country, with a rate of increase in its foreign-born
population of 515 per 100,000, compared with 492 for the United States (in 1930).
Forty years later, at a time when Western economies were once again calling for
massive influxes of immigrants, the percentage of foreign-born residents in France
reached eleven percent; while it was less than six percent in the United States.
If, despite these figures, France until recently was not seen as a historic host

country, it was because immigration did not coincide with the building of the.

French nation. On the contrary, the distinctive feature of the French model as

compared with the American is that the purpose of immigration in modern 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 implementation of strict revolutionary government. It

was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that mass immigration
began in France. At the time this immigration was seen as closely linked to indus-

trialization, and this perception is corroborated by a comparison of curves of

industrial activity with foreign population as well as by an examination of the areas

in which the immigrant population was concentrated. At first, 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 activities were
traditionally subject to close government regulation and police scrutiny, whereas

the American authorities, obedient to the law of supply and demand, were far more
liberal. In France, a whole system of identity cards and labor contracts was set up
by the government to funnel immigrants into industrial areas where workers were
in seriously short supply (most notably in heavy industry and agriculture). The
authorities also saw to it that workers would be flexible by organizing a dual labor

market: one for French workers (skilled and settled), another for immigrant work-
ers (unskilled and mobile). As Gary Cross has shown, France thus invented the
"modern" model of immigration, which other industrialized countries would
adopt after World War II.
 French and Foreigners 147

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 it needed to expand (even though France
was the most populous country in Europe in 1800) because most French peasants
were not only immune to the charms of big industry but resourceful enough to
elude its grasp. In my view this state of affairs was one consequence of the French
Revolution that rarely receives the attention it deserves. By spreading the "passion

for equality" and the urge for ownership into even the most remote rural areas, the

Revolution not only encouraged the Malthusian behavior that manifested itself on
a broad scale in France a century before it developed elsewhere in Europe, but at the

same time discouraged peasants from fleeing the countryside for the city.

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 by Marx sorely
lacked. Hence big industry had no choice but to seek the workers it needed through
immigration. Surely it is no accident that the massive importation of foreign work-
ers by other major European countries after World War II illustrates the same cor-
relation between industrialization, Malthusianism, and political democracy.^
The importance of the Revolution for the French model of immigration is evi-

dent in many other areas as well. Two events were crucial in establishing the legal
status 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 all.

"From then on nationality was the criterion that defined the foreigner."^ The 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 is the source of the radical differ-

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 man" was
repeatedly stressed by spokesmen for groups that had been relegated to inferior sta-

tus under the Ancien Regime. On August 23, 1789, Rabaut Saint-Etienne based his

case for the Protestants on the following logic: "Gentlemen, you would not wish to

lay yourselves open to the reproach of having contradicted yourselves by declaring

a few days ago that all men are equal in rights and today that they are unequal; of
having declared previously that they are free to do whatever is not harmful to oth-
ers and today that two million of your fellow citizens are not free to worship in a

way that harms no one."' A few weeks later the "people of color of the French
islands and colonies" filed a motion based on a similar argument, which earned
them this reply from President Freteau: "No part of the nation will ask the

Assembly of its representatives for its rights in vain. Those who, by dint of the seas'
148 GERARD NOIRIEL

expanse or prejudices concerning differences of origin, seem to be placed farther

from its regard, will be drawn closer by these sentiments of humanity, which char-
acterize all its deliberations and inspire all its efforts.""' Still, if all individuals were
recognized as having equal rights, it was on condition that the realm of religious and
ethnic practice (which belonged to the "private" sphere, in which every individual

was his own master) be strictly separated from the political arena, to which each cit-

izen came divested of all traces of his origins. As Clermont-Tonnerre put it in his

brief in favor of allowing Jews to occupy municipal and provincial offices, "we
must deny the Jews everything as a nation and grant them everything as individu-
als. They must not constitute a political body or order within the state. They must
individually be citizens.... If they do not wish to be so, let them say so, so that they
may be banished forthwith.""
These few excerpts from the parliamentary debates of 1789 bring out an essential

and permanent ingredient in the French conception of immigration. In the United

States the immigration issue is invariably associated in theory, practice, and attitude

with race and ethnicity, whereas in France the Declaration of the Rights of Man
marks the triumph (or at any rate the legal triumph) of a repudiation of any form of
segregation based on race, religion, or ethnic origin. In exchange, however, all cul-

tural and religious practices were to be confined to the private sphere. Any political
grouping based on cultural or religious criteria was prohibited. This is an essential
feature of French immigration policy today. Even when 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," which precluded the adoption
of ethnic quotas as in the United States.'^ 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 from Southeast Asia.'^

An exciting problem for social history would be to study the concrete modalities

by which these traditions stemming from the French Revolution were transmitted.

Philosophers all too often confine themselves to the analysis of texts, as if words by
themselves were enough to fashion traditions capable of enduring for centuries. As
recent polemics abundantly illustrate, one can, by confining one 's attention exclu-

sively to discourse, bring out an image of France as the "homeland of liberty" or, by
using different texts, develop a picture of France as a testing laboratory for national
socialist ideology. Yet a century ago Emile Durkheim showed that one could not
understand political traditions by studying discourse alone. "Yesterday," he wrote at

the height of the Dreyfus Affair, "everyone was all for cosmopolitanism. Today,
 French and Foreigners 149

patriotism has the upper hand. And all

this turmoil, all this ebb and flow, takes

place without the slightest change in
the cardinal precepts of law and moral-
ity, which are immobiliied by their hier-
atic form." Thus for Durkheim dis-

course becomes tradition only if it suc-

ceeds in embodying itself in legal rules,

codes, or institutions. The numerous

Declarations of the Rights of Man
since 1789 and the great constitutional
principles of the Republic are the true

underpinnings of the French tradition.

In order to understand how those
great principles affect the collective
consciousness, however, we cannot
rely on legal texts alone. We must
explore the thousand and one material
channels that, unconsciously and
therefore all that much more effec-

tively, orient our everyday perception

of the social world. An excellent exam-
ple to illustrate this point is the official

statistical apparatus of the govern-

ment. It has often been said, and
rightly so, that statistics are the lenses

through which modern man observes

the society in which he lives. A com-
parison of U. S. and French immigra-
tion statistics is enough to demon-
strate, once again, the importance of
the French Revolution as a founda-
tional moment. Until the 1960s,
American immigration statistics were
based on racial and ethnic categories
(race, religion, language, parents' FIGURE 4.1 Game of the goose, circa 1790. The caption on the top card
reads: "Foreigners who acquire National Properties in accordance with
place of birth). By contrast, French
the Law are regarded as French." The bottom card says: "Non-Catholics
statistics since the nineteenth century under the Safeguard of the Law."
have incorporated the principles of
1789: hence there are no questions about religion or parents' place of birth, and the
I50 GERARD NOIRIEL

most important criterion is the legal one of citizenship (French or foreign). A thor-
ough comparative study would reveal the crucial effects of these initial differences
in nomenclature in determining how the Americans and the French have perceived
immigration over the past century and still perceive it 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 Man is, it is equally important to
see its limits. In the debate that followed Clermont- Tonnerre 's declaration in favor

of the emancipation of the Jews, quoted earlier, one speaker pointed to a fundamen-
tal contradiction in the ideology of human rights. Abbe Maury justified his opposi-

tion to Clermont- Tonnerre by an argument based not on a racist or ethnic logic but

on the same "national" ground on which the revolutionaries themselves stood. The
Jews, he argued, were a nation and therefore foreigners on French soil, hence they
could not become full-fledged citizens of France: "To call Jews 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 we shall see, to have an important impact on the treatment of
immigrants in France to this day. In fact, as Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out, the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Cidien is a contradiction in terms.

Although the universalist logic of the French revolutionaries was able to reconcile

religious and ethnic origins through nationality, it inevitably ran up against the ques-
tion of the foreigner, since the foreigner is defined precisely as one who does not
belong to the nation. The blindness of the men of 1789 to this issue is all the more
surprising in that the contradiction had not escaped Rousseau several decades ear-
lier. "One must choose between making a man and making a cit-
In Emile he wrote:
izen, 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."'^

Revolutionary events would reveal the pertinence of this observation in dra-

matic fashion. As Albert Mathiez pointed out, universalist enthusiasm prevailed

over all other considerations during the 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) was unanimously abolished, because the deputies
felt that it was "contrary to the principles of fraternity that ought to bind all men,
no matter what their country and their government; that this right, established in

barbarous times, should be proscribed in a nation that has based its constitution on
the rights of man and the citizen and that free France should open its bosom 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 was at

war and its 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
and freedom fighters throughout the world (such as 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."
According to Mathiez, it was not until the middle of 1793, following a series of mil-
itary defeats, domestic troubles, and an economic crisis, that the attitude toward for-

eigners underwent a total reversal. Within a few months, as if no halfway measures

would do, one logic replaced another. It was then that 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 moment
were "explained" as the effects of a conspiracy hatched abroad. That conspiracy
was political: foreigners were 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 with foreign
members were banned, and noncitizens were removed from public offices and the
army. Foreigners were also among the first victims of the Terror. Police checks
were stepped up. Lists of suspects circulated, and many whose names appeared were
ultimately guillotined despite their roles in the first years of the Revolution. The

greatest champion of universal values, Anacharsis Cloots, was executed as a

Prussian agent. Thomas Paine was thrown in prison. Even though most of these
measures were abandoned after the Terror, they 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 that can be

explained by the Revolution has to do with historical amnesia. The very fact that

republican rights and their concomitant statistical categories erased every last ves-
tige of origin in the definition of the individual is important for understanding why
the history of immigration remained invisible in France for so long. More generally,
the myth of origin that was built upon the events of the Revolution made it impos-
sible for "foreigners" to have a place in the collective memory of the nation. While
many American 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 always approached as a question extrinsic to the country's history. It

is seen as a temporary 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

as the Toul selection center, which processed most Central European immigrants in

the interwar period, have been torn down, as if something dictated that a history so
starkly at odds with the myth of the soil had 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 work has any usefulness other than the satisfaction of curiosity,
surely it is to discover beneath changing appearances what is permanent, what
remains, so as to distinguish it from what passes, what is accidental." His purpose
in this —
work to highlight common features in French attitudes toward foreigners

in wartime— 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 intensi-

fies French hostility toward foreigners, and this xenophobia makes itself felt at the

political level. The issue of immigration then becomes a national problem.

It was at the end of the nineteenth century that this pattern was first noticed. The
industrial expansion of the Second Empire led over a ten-year period to a doubling

of the number of foreigners in France, to approximately one million in 1880. The

majority came from neighboring countries, primarily Belgium (40 percent) and
Italy, and they lived mainly in departements near the borders (Nord, Bouches-du-
Rhone).^*^ The importance of immigration for the French economy was already rec-
ognized by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu: "France," he wrote in 1886, "is a land of immi-
gration, just as the republics of Argentina and Australia are. An average of forty to
fifty thousand foreigners a year come here to settle 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 was particularly

fierce in the mining and construction industries, 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 a particularly

effective means of mobilizing French workers for strikes, petitions, and demonstra-
tions.^^ In these clashes Flemish Belgians were the first victims. 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. In 1892 at the Drocourt Mines in Pas-de-Calais, Belgian workers, who consti-
tutedthree quarters of the local workforce, were obliged to flee the commune in
haste under threat from the French population. "Their return, which was nearly
complete by 3 1 August, was accomplished under difficult conditions. Trains from
France arrived crowded with large families of poor people carrying cheap bags.
There were housing problems at their destination. They also had to find furniture

to replace what the French miners had destroyed." An official Belgian inquiry set
the losses of each family due to vandalism at forty to fifty francs.^^

At 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

for the Petit Marseillais, "brawls broke out between French and Italians in various

parts of the city.... At five-thirty, as workers gathered at Belsunce for hiring, a gang
of youths began chasing Italians, shouting at them and striking some rather hard

blows. Faced with such a welcome, the Piedmontese fled in panic as their pursuers
chased them into the Rue de la Couronne and the Rue de I'Echelle, ordering them
to shout Vive la Republiquel" Within days hundreds of Italians left the city.^'' Hatred
of Italians reached a fever pitch at Aigues-Mortes in 1893. Following brawls
between French and Italian laborers in the salt marshes, three hundred people
armed with clubs, shovels, and branches set out after foreign workers. A convoy of
eighty Italians being escorted out of town by gendarmes was attacked by rioters,
and several people were left dead. Some of the injured were bludgeoned to death.

The official toll was eight dead and fifty injured, but according to the Times the
actual toll was fifty dead and a hundred and fifty injured.

What was new at the end of the nineteenth century was that acts of popular vio-
lence 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 on Italians in the

streets 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 left. Boulangism was the first major political

movement to make systematic use of popular hostility toward foreigners for elec-
 .

French and Foreigners 155

^cl etjpui[ m/me y lil

^ I

Indications (• service.

. A.

PAi, Ttf NIMtS EN 1RANSP0HT A AI6UES MOKTfS

CAUMSE PAR U PResfNCe DE LA UOUPf tT
AUVFB QU'/i SRAND PEIME

SERA TRfS DiFFSi ,

'
|»">ii" nr.rnt,, fipiire aprfj le noiii .In lieu
AVIS, Dunk Ic* clrpArhc^ iiDprinuVs in f3^arl^^es i-omains [tar »[i|iai> il l.-lr^cfai'l'iq'"'. 1" ''"p'^\)t
est nn nnmifro d'ordre, le wconil inilitine le; nomUiT .Ici molt loids . let aulro 'IWgnent i'licurc ilo a^pfll. /^

toral purposes. That was one reason

for its initial success in socialist ranks,

which responded 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 respective positions of
the left 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 of the

right, harping mainly on the issue of
security (which particularly appealed

to the groups most affected by the cri- FIGURE 4.3 Telegram concerning the anti-Italian demonstrations in

sis), emphasized the "national inter- Algues-Mortes in 1893.

est" and proposed vigorous measures FIGURE 4.4 Disturbances atAigues-Mortes: The Departure of the Italian

Workers, engraving from Le Petit Parisien (September 3, 1893).

against immigrants, whereas the left
was more apt to invoke the "rights of
156 GERARD NOIRIEL

man" in calling for equal treatment of French and foreign workers, while at the

same time advocating strict measures to stanch the influx of new immigrants.^^
The 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 many as in 1920. Workers were
recruited over a much wider area than before. Belgian workers formed just one con-
tingent among many, and if Italians were the most numerous, it was other national-

ities, such as the Poles, that experienced the most rapid growth in their numbers.^^
Once again, the economic crisis that hit France in the 1930s halted the recruitment

of new workers and led to a renewal of xenophobic speech What made and acts.

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 compara-
ble to those that they or their parents had known before their exile. Hence foreign

competition on the labor market was not limited to the working 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 "far more inclined than the left to make the

issue of protecting the national work force an electoral warhorse," as Jean-Charles

Bonnet has shown,'^ nationalist pressure was such that the issue gained in popular-

ity even on the left, except for the 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 to come under Vichy. Under pressure from lawyers and doctors, a bill to

revise the Code of Nationality of 1927 was filed on June 22, 1934. Rushed to the
floor within weeks, the new law was passed by the Chamber, including the
Socialists, and went into effect on July 19, 1934, less 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 fall under the rubric
of fonction publique. And that was not all. Contradicting the entire republican tradi-
tion, the Council of the Order of Attorneys decided to reject applications for mem-
bership submitted by any individual naturalized before 1934, thus giving the new

law a retroactive interpretation that was upheld by the Paris Court of Appeals.^'
The third high point of French xenophobia coincided with the country's third
major economic crisis in a century. The industrial expansion of the 1960s relied on
a massive recruitment of foreign 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 157

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, who
called for immigrants to be sent back where they came from. Racist attacks prolif-
erated, particularly against North Africans, reaching a peak of violence in the

bloody summer of 1977, which left fifteen people dead in Marseilles. Various legal
and administrative measures were taken to deal with the situation, from the
"Fontanet memo" 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 left

along much the same lines as in previous periods. And surely the most important
consequence of these polemics was to have facilitated the rebirth of the extreme
right in France in the 1980s.

To some it may be worrisome or incomprehensible that, in the very year in which

France celebrated the bicentennial of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen, timeworn demagogic themes, such as "national preference" in employ-
ment, housing, and health or that miracle cure for unemployment, sending all for-

eigners home, could still attract a not inconsiderable segment of the electorate. But
when Jean-Marie Le Pen justified this program of exclusion by asserting that "citi-

zens have equal rights, not men," he put his finger on one of the Republic's oldest,

deepest wounds. Clearly France has yet to overcome the initial contradiction
between the rights of man and the rights of the citizen.^^

Beyond "changing appearances," the history of immigration illustrates another

invariant, namely, an intrinsically French way of approaching the matter of "inte-
gration."^'* Recent arguments concerning North African immigrants begin from the
premise that today's problems are new.^^ For some observers, what is novel about
the present situation has to do with the unprecedented pace and magnitude of immi-
gration since the 1960s. The minister of justice explicitly introduced the proposed
revision to the Code of Nationality as a way of preserving "French identity" in the

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 we have to

contend with accelerating change. "^"^

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 this

view allege, because most immigrants were Europeans, hence similar in cultural
background to the French: "France is a European nation, that is, a territory located
in Europe and populated by Europeans, which has always remained open to its

European neighbors.... Today's immigration, unlike that of the nineteenth century

or the 1930s, is extra-European. The majority of immigrants are now North

158 GERARD NOIRIEL

Africans, Black Africans, Turks, and Indo-Pakistanis. In terms of background and

cultural references, these foreigners have no connection with the major periods of
European history: Antiquity, the Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the

Enlightenment."^^
Let us now cast our eyes backward one century. Commentators were already
referring to the "novelty" of the migratory situation and already proposing the argu-

ment that the sudden influx of foreigners posed a threat to the "national identity"
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 is grown 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."^^
Fears for the future were often spelled out more explicitly. In 1883 a doctor stated
that "if our population is holding steady or even increasing to a very slight degree,
the reason is foreign immigration. It is the foreigner who is filling our empty spaces,
and this introduction of generally hostile elements is an invasion in disguise, a threat
for the future. A people that recruits abroad quickly loses, as a result of this com-
merce, its character, its customs, and its intrinsic strengths. Over time it loses its

most precious possession, its nationality."^' Twenty years later Vacher de Lapouge
confirmed that "the French population as I have just described it will not last for-

ever. Over the past half-century immigration has introduced more foreign elements
than all the barbarian invasions put together.... Add a little yellow blood to top it all
off and the French population would truly become a nation of Mongols. Quod Dii
/"40
omen avertantl

At the time, of course, discussions of "cultural distance," that is, of criteria for

measuring the foreignness of foreigners, did not rely on "European culture" as a

standard of proximity. On the contrary, it was because the "enemy" was at our gates
that the problem was said to be so serious. Some authors were critical of the natu-
ralization of German immigrants in eastern France: "The naturalization of a fam-

ily, if it is to be complete and definitive, requires not just interbreeding but the pas-
sage of two or three generations. The presence in the east of recently naturalized
citizens, still 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 whom "we are all only the
substantial continuity, the still living thought and word with their train of gestures,
 French and Foreigners 159

habits, and hereditary reactions in virtue of which the dead contain the living; and
the intrinsic ethnic and national characters, born of secular variations, that differ-

entiate the Frenchman of France from the foreigner, are not metaphors but phe-

nomena as real as the anatomical components of our nerve centers.... That is the

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
nationality.'"*^ For Barres, this irremediable "cultural distance" explained why Zola
was "predestined for Dreyfusism": "Because his father and ancestors were
Venetians, Emile Zola quite naturally thinks like a rootless Venetian."

The discourse of the interwar years was cast in the same mold, except that now
a contrast was drawn between the troubling present and an idealized past, in which
the immigrants of the late nineteenth century were seen as a positive model. Charles
Seignobos, for example, argued that the foreigners who came to France before 19 14
did not alter the anthropological character of the population because they were "our
neighbors." By contrast, he insisted that the influx of Polish workers to replace sol-

diers killed at the front had given rise to a "new" problem.'*'* "Before the war,"
Georges Mauco observed in terms repeated virtually word for word fifty years later
by Albin Chalandon, "immigration was unregulated. It was a slow process, the

result of individual decisions, and this allowed for rapid fusion with the population.
Since the war, the arrival of 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 still quite high in 1910.... It is no longer the

same in 1940. Our absorptive capacity has been all but abolished because we are no
longer faced with immigration by recruitment but rather with a sudden flood, which
threatens to drown all that remains of the French race."'**'

Anxiety about the future can even be found in theses in political science written

in the interwar period. "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 its components.'' And won't it then promote the characteristics of
that component in such a way as to alter our public customs.''"'*^ There was consid-
erable anxiety about France 's ability to assimilate newcomers, be they Russians,
Armenians, or Poles.'*^ The most respected authorities even drew up a list of inas-
similable groups, whose "customs, cast of mind, tastes, passions, and age-old habits
are in contradiction with the profound orientation of our civilization."'*^
i6o GERARD NOIRIEL

The Memory of Origins: A Controversial Battle

The secretary of the Conseil General of Meurthe-et-Moselle, Maria

Liberatore-Lefebvre, 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

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 book is agreeable, and many of the situations are delicious.
The author, aged twenty-nine, embarked on this literary adventure as a
unique gift for her mother and father, who will celebrate their thirtieth wed-
ding anniversary on January 22.^*^

Because immigration has not until now been a legitimate object of national mem-
ory, a whole segment of France's collective history has been relegated to the realm
of private memoirs. Over the past few years, however, there have been growing
signs that people who came to France from other countries want to make this offi-

cially neglected history public. The above example of an autobiographical work

published by the author at her own expense is 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 tell previ-

ously untold stories. The struggle to preserve the memory of one's forebears can
take many forms. It would be useful to have an exhaustive 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.^' There has also been a sharp increase in the number of organiza-
tions whose stated purpose is to keep immigrant culture alive. Among French peo-
ple of Armenian descent, for instance, especially in communities with large
Armenian populations, one finds new newspapers and organizations supplanting
earlier village-based groups. At Issy-les-Moulineaux, to take one example, one
finds the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation Armenienne and the
Association Audio-Visuelle Armenienne. A similar determination to hold on to

memories of one 's roots can be found among descendants of Spanish refugees in

the south of France. At Bedarieux, for example, high school students and teachers
have published an account of their history with a preface by the Communist
mayor, Antoine Martinez, who did not hesitate to give his introduction the title

"Spain at Heart" or to assert that his town bears "the indelible imprint" of Spanish
immigration.^'* The Italians, who formed the first foreign community in France,

appear to have been in the forefront of this effort to reappropriate the past. Thanks
to the energetic efforts of its president, Pierre Milza, the Centre d 'Etude et de
Documentation de I'Emigration Italienne (cedei), founded in 1983, has funded
 FAINS PAIRS
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PAINS FRANCAIS - PAINS VIENNOIS
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PHTICCCtlli; rtwc OtT.TC PnriDP (tpno-rti-

FIGURES 4.5-4.8 Billheads of the Giai bakery on the Rue Nationale, where it first opened for business around
the beginning of the twentieth century.

FIGURE 4.9 Seraphin Giai and his family in front of their bakery in 1906.
l62 GERARD NOIRIEL

research, conferences, and exhibitions on the sub-

ject of ItaUan immigration. In the early 1980s the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Hsted more than 325
Italian associations in France, two thirds of them
established since 1970. Of these, membership fig-

ures are available for 258, with a total of 52,000

members. Half of them are of French nationality
(many having been naturalized). For participants

in these groups, what counts most is not national-

ity but the fact of being "from somewhere." A
study of the ties that have been maintained over
the past century between certain towns in the Val-

de-Marne and the Italian town of Casalvieri in

Lazio finds that descendants of immigrants are

more likely to join these kinds of groups and
points up the importance of "bilateral references"
among French people of Italian descent.^'
This revival of memories should not be taken
to imply that a communal life based on "culture"
or "ethnicity" has managed to sustain itself over

all these years, however. The time has come for

an end to the false debate between those who,

being rather too quick to embrace the republican
view of the nation, continually idealize the

assimilation of successive waves of immigrants

without inquiring about either the nature of that
integration or its cost, and those who wish to

limit the discussion to a cursory denunciation of

the Jacobin state by glorifying this or that mem-

ory or identity as the mythical refuge of all resis-

tance to oppression. In order to do so, we must

first step back from debates in which so many
passions have been engaged. Rather than defend
a cause, let us try to make an accurate assessment
of the situation.
FIGURE 4.10 Fernand and Andre, the children of Seraphin
Glai. The study of French immigration points up

FIGURE 4.1 1 Giai descendants return to Italy for a birth- the existence of a permanent process, and this
day celebration. The Usseglio-Giais, who have been bak- must serve as our point of departure. Every
ers in Paris for four generations and nearly all of whom
group of immigrants, no matter where it comes
have taken French spouses, are perfectly assimilated into

French society yet remain attached to their native village. from, tries to protect itself against the destructive
 French and Foreigners 163

FIGURE 4.12 Interior of a Polish worker's home in the Pas-de-Calais.

effects of deracination by reconstructing a communal life. The language, culture,

and customs that testify day after day to the group's "foreignness" are the most
powerful instruments for preserving this memory of origins. First-generation
immigrants are the ones most often accused by "native" French of "not being like

us," and at least in the first few years of exile most immigrants look upon complete
integration as an inaccessible goal — a fact that reinforces their tendency to with-
draw into a community of their own and to cultivate nostalgic memories of the old

country. Preserving those memories in the hope of one day returning home is a

major concern of the group. From the Flemish societies of working-class Lille in

the late Second Empire to today's Portuguese organizations, one finds the same
concern with maintaining the community and preserving memory. There is no
exhaustive study of this phenomenon: the number and type of such organizations
remains obscure, as does the history of immigrant publications, holidays, and
demonstrations.^"^ The Polish groups are the ones about which we know most,
thanks to the work of Janine Ponty. These groups were particularly active in the
interwar years, and they often organized communal festivals as though they were
joyous battles whose purpose was to preserve communal memories. "Celebrations
were an important activity of these organizations. All the members took part,

marching together with flags and banners, men, women, and children all dressed
in regional costumes marching to mass and then moving on into the streets of
town, led by a band. The day might end with a play or sporting event of some
GERARD NOIRIEL

FIGURE 4.13 Polish miners in Noeux.

kind."^^ Of course immigrant groups also offered members mutual aid and sup-
port, which the poorest members of the community often needed in order to sur-

vive. But a great deal of evidence suggests that the need to re-create a "homeland
in exile" was a constant concern. This obsession with memory can be seen clearly,
for example, in the words of Arnam Turabian, founder of the Office National
Armenien, a group that aided new refugees in the aftermath of World War I: "In
the future, when my daughter reaches the age of reason and finds a flourishing
Armenian colony, she will be able to say with pride, 'Well, anyway, that is my
"^^
father's work.'

Like all forms of collective memory, immigrant memory needs material forms
in which to make itself concrete. Forms give permanence to the often intense emo-
tions of exile. Yet no comprehensive inventory of immigrant places of remem-
brance has ever been compiled in France, despite the fact that there are many such
sites throughout the country. There are Russian churches, for example, in Paris
and Nice, Armenian churches in Paris and Marseilles, a Russian cemetery in

Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, a Polish cemetery in Troyes, and monuments, like the

one dedicated in 1979 in Lille, which bears the inscription: "To Polish men and
women, with gratitude, the Nord— Pas-de-Calais region." Still, the bulk of the evi-
dence concerning the history of immigration takes a much more modest form: the
personal archives, furniture, photographs, and memories of immigrant parents
and grandparents.
 French and Foreigners 165

FIGURE 4.14 Polish Miners Expelled from Escarpelle; drawing by Damblans in Le Pelerin (September 2, 1934).

FIGURE 4.15 Polish miners expelled from Escarpelle.

In the struggle by first-generation immigrants to hold on to memories of their

roots, writing is frequently an indispensable instrument, particularly for those who

were forced to flee their homelands for political reasons. They write lest others for-
get. Such is the justification most commonly invoked by those not accustomed to
wielding a pen but who nevertheless feel compelled, often toward the end of their
i66 GERARD NOIRIEL

lives, to leave a record of their singular fate. Consider, for example, the Polish exile
who lived under the July Monarchy and wrote a historical chronicle beginning with
these words:

Several thousand Poles are moldering in exile. One day history and prosper-
ity [sic] will ask to know their names. Even today, compatriots of ours who
remained on their native soil wish to know the names of those exiles who did
not shrink from this sacrifice. To rescue these martyrs to the most sacred of
causes from oblivion, to offer up their names for other nations to admire and
to inspire hope at home — that was my purpose in publishing this Historical

Almanac: A Souvenir of the Polish Emigration, which lists the names of Poles
scattered abroad and chiefly in France, that noble France which, in the midst

of our disasters, remembered its old friendship and took us into the shelter of
its embrace.^'

A hundred and fifty years later, it was the same desire to keep faith with his people by
preserving their memory that drove Khoren Margossian, an orphan of the Armenian
genocide and a copper engraver, to publish at his own expense the story of his life:
"When I wrote this little book, my sole thought was of my sister. She was determined
that I should tell the world of our misfortunes. That is what I have done."^'^
memory of origins is shot through with contradictions from the first gen-
Yet the
eration on. Those who now insist on the "plurality of memory" and continually
impugn the Jacobin state forget that many of the people in whose name they speak
did all they could to stop others from reminding them of their past. "I am not afraid
of living," Mary Antin, an immigrant living in the United States, proclaimed in

1912, "as long as I am not obliged to remember too much."*^' Similar feelings were
not uncommon in France in the interwar years, particularly among refugees from
pogroms against the Jews and from the Armenian genocide, who were keen to for-
get the trauma of their previous lives. Simone Signoret described this attitude in her
last novel, in which she wrote of the steadfast refusal of her parents, Ukrainian

Jews, to talk with their children about their experience of the pogroms.*"^
Another reason why memories of immigrant origins fade is that not all members
of an ethnic group share similar recollections of the past. One constant feature of
xenophobia (which one also finds among some champions of the immigrant cause)
is to apply a uniform label to individuals whose histories may in fact be quite dif-

ferent and who may not even see themselves as members of the same group.
Chicago sociologists long ago discovered that Sicilian immigrants did not discover
that they were Italians until they came to the United States, where they were
depicted as such by anti-foreign propaganda. Under such conditions, what would
a phrase like "Italian memory" mean.'' Similarly, the word Pole strictly speaking
refers to the members of an ethnic group defined by a common language, a com-
 French and Foreigners 167

mon religion (Catholic), and a common sense of coming from a martyred nation;
but in a broader —and legal — sense a "Pole" is any citizen of Poland, including the
third of the population that in 191 9, according to Janine Ponty, consisted of minor-
ity groups, primarily Ukrainians, Jews, and Byelorussians. Such legal composites
can of course be broken down into ethnic groups with memories of their own, but
one then runs into other problems having to do with social and occupational back-
ground. In his memoirs, Giorgio Amendola, a leader of the Italian Communist
Party in exile in Paris and the son of a Liberal Party minister who was assassinated

in 1926, described the Italian immigrants who worked in the steel industry in
Lorraine in order to show that he had nothing in common with them: "Generally
speaking, they had no Italian culture. They spoke and wrote a Frenchified Italian, a

Franco-Italian jargon full of French loanwords. Most of them were illiterate when
they left Italy. Among themselves they spoke not Italian but a regional dialect."'''^

Such social differences are further compounded by political ones. Practically all

"immigrant communities" split along left-right lines, and these political differences

are reflected in community organizations, further weakening the sense of belonging

to a single group and fragmenting a collective memory no longer supported, in

exile, by the nation-state. When a nation celebrates "at home," it is a way of affirm-
ing its sense of rootedness and continuity, but when immigrants abroad celebrate

their "national" holidays it is primarily to keep alive the hope of one day returning
to a home remote both in space and in time.

In contrast to "culturalist" approaches to immigration which isolate culture from

its concrete context, it is important, I think, to recognize that immigrants are obliged

to adapt to local conditions on a daily basis in order to survive, and that this adap-
tation in itself constitutes a kind of "betrayal" of one's origins. Seventy years ago,
Robert Park pointed out that the cultural institutions of immigrant communities
"are not purely inherited but the product of efforts by immigrants to adapt their past

to American conditions. "^^ The reconstruction of native cultural traditions is

marked from the beginning by conflict between the (subordinate) norms of the
native country and the (dominant) norms of the new homeland. In any case, col-

lective memory is unwittingly dependent on a context composed of thousands of

ingredients missing new environment. Traditional cos-
from or ill-adapted to the

tumes may not be practical for new types of work. The ingredients needed for tra-
ditional cooking may not be available. Moreover, modern societies are individualis-

tic in ways that affect many aspects of life from a person's daily schedule to the

nature of housing, and such individualism may be incompatible with traditional

communal customs.
Before looking at the role of the state in weakening immigrant culture, we must
therefore note the many factors that contribute to the dissolution of group memory:
the wish to forget, the pressure of dominant norms, and the need to adapt to a for-
i68 GERARD NOIRIEL

eign setting are the principal among them, as we have just seen. Studies done in the
early 1950s reveal the rapidity of cultural change. Take Italian immigrants in Haute-
Garonne, for example. Although many of the immigrants in question were
employed as farm workers and sharecroppers, hence often relatively isolated from
the French population, men ceased to wear their traditional broad-brimmed hats
after a few years and women gave up their scarves. French food gradually sup-
planted polenta. French words insinuated themselves into the vocabulary of every-
day life. About the same time a survey conducted by Alain Girard and Jean Stoetzel
among Italian and Polish workers who moved to various parts of France in the

interwar period yielded statistical proof of the destructive effects of adaptation.

Among Italian construction workers in the Seine departement, 97 percent dressed
French manner; 94 percent of Italian merchants in the same region
entirely in the

and 86 percent of farm workers in the Lot-et-Garonne had similarly adapted to

French clothing norms. The same was true of 96 percent of Polish miners in the

Nord. Dietary habits underwent a similar transformation. The percentage of those

whose diet had become totally French ranged from 1 5 percent for the Italian con-
struction workers to 82 percent for Polish farm workers in Aisne. Figures concern-

ing the reading of newspapers tell a similar story. While 38 percent of the Polish
farm workers in Aisne and 30 percent of the Polish miners in the Nord continued to
read Polish papers, only i percent of the Italian merchants and 9 percent of the con-
struction workers in the Seine read Italian papers, in stark contrast to the 28 percent

of Italian farm workers in Lot-et-Garonne who continued to the scan the news from
back home. Fertility rates also reveal a rapid adaptation to French norms. "One can-
not help being struck," the two authors note, "by the birthrate decline that occurred
in Paris in both groups of Italians that we observed, workers as well as merchants.
Fertility fell to a level close to that of the French population of the city." Still, the

clearest sign of a renunciation of the country of origin can be seen in attitudes

toward naturalization. Among first-generation immigrants, the survey found that

13 percent of the masons and 41 percent of the merchants in the Seine and 18 per-
cent of the farm workers in the southwest had already become French. Among
Poles, the naturalization rate was 5 percent for farm workers and 23 percent for min-
ers in the Nord. Thus after just twenty years in France, the decisive factor in deter-

mining behavior was already occupation as opposed to national origin.^^

The French studies nevertheless point out that traces of the country of origin can
never be completely erased in the first generation. Sociologists in Chicago had
arrived at similar findings much earlier: "An individual can never completely shed

all traces of belonging to his original group. Some sign, word, gesture, or sentiment
gives him away."''' This fact accounts for the tendency, observed among immigrants
in both France and the United States, to distinguish sharply between public behav-
ior, where one attempts to conform to the norms of the receiving country, and pri-
 French and Foreigners 169

vate behavior (whether within the family or among peers), where one can keep faith

with native traditions, safe from prying eyes. Social psychology can help us to
understand why first-generation immigrants bear traces of their original culture

throughout their lives. It is during the first few years of life that individuals acquire

the decisive (and often unconscious) dispositions that shape their future personali-

ties: children learn their mother tongue, encounter the world for the first time, and

experience things that will have a major impact in later life. These attitudes, which
form the basis of one 's sense of belonging to a particular group, are acquired in the

future immigrant's native land, on home soil, which can never be entirely forgotten.

The memory of immigrant communities can therefore be analyzed as

collective

a never-ending struggle between what Emile Durkheim called "native disposi-

tions," which impel the individual to turn back to his native traditions, and every-
day life in a foreign land, which requires some form of adaptation, that is, a sacri-

fice of the past for the sake of the present and future.
Turning now to collective memory in the second generation, we find a much
more pronounced withering away of the sense of community than in the parents'

generation. Any number of citations could be adduced in support of this assertion.

Three examples involving groups reputed to be profoundly inward-oriented will

suffice. The authors of one recent study note, for instance, that their work confirms
other work on "young Muslims born and raised in France: their acculturation and

secularization has been much more rapid than the general public imagines. "^^
Studies published fifteen to twenty years ago of second-generation Armenian
immigrants in France came to similar conclusions. Parents complained of their chil-
dren's indifference to traditional holidays, commemorations, culture, and monu-
ments recalling the genocide. The explanation for this was said to lie in the "irre-

sistible force that impels the sons and grandsons of immigrants to disappear into the

French melting pot." Soon, we are told, "the family name will be the only remain-
ing sign of their distant roots."*^' In the 1930s, even as French investigators were
claiming that Russian immigrants were failing to assimilate, studies published by
Russians complained of the impossibility of passing Russian culture on to the sec-
ond generation. "The children speak Russian poorly. Most cannot read or write it.

Neither their parents, at work all day, nor Thursday schools can do anything to alter

the situation."^"

The explanation for this indifference to or, in many cases, rejection of the par-
ents' culture is fundamentally the same as the explanation for the first generation's
attachment to its roots. For the members of the second generation, the crucial
moments of early socialization take place in the country of their birth, the country
they grow up in, which is the host country. For them, the memory of their family's
roots can no longer draw on souvenirs of actual experience. The children of immi-
grants know the country of origin only by proxy, through the words of their par-
GERARD NOIRIEL

ents. If the first generation's "conflict of memory" pits one phase of Ufe against
another, the conflict for the children occurs primarily in early childhood, when two
forms of socialization, two value systems, clash. Through language, customs, ges-
tures, and memories the parents transmit the norms of the country of origin, and the
children become familiar with these early in life, but those norms are already crum-
bling because of the family's having been uprooted. The second generation soon
discovers the dominant norms, moreover, which the host society conveys in a thou-
sand and one ways, primarily through the educational system. These contradict and
even discredit the culture of the original group. This situation is often a cause of
inner conflict, from which many immigrant children suffer. Among numerous
accounts of such difficulties, I shall cite two from different communities and differ-

ent times in order to bring out the fact that what is happening is a general process not
restricted to any particular group, although it seems likely that individuals belong-
ing to groups that are the target of the worst xenophobic hatred will suffer the most
severe effects of stigmatization. Benigno Caceres in one of his novels describes a
Spanish child living near Toulouse in the period before World War II. Because the
child's classmates call him a "foreigner," he goes to the town hall to obtain a copy of
his birth certificate in order to prove that he is French: "How, then, could he be a for-

eigner.'^ Emmanuel stared at himself in a mirror, looking for signs that distinguished

him from us. He found none. When he went to bed, he looked carefully at the color

of his skin and saw nothing unusual." Finally he asks his teacher, "Why am I a for-

eigner.''"^' More recently, an architect of North African origin and French national-
ity wrote of a similar traumatic experience when he and others like him "discovered
our difference from other children" and became aware of "the way in which the
other children saw our parents. And since that image was often negative, we rejected
our own parents and tried to make friends with the other kids. These problems con-
tinued throughout our school years, culminating at around fourteen or fifteen years
of age, in adolescence, a time that for me felt something like insanity."''^

These initial traumas (which occur at an age when, as many psychoanalysts have
shown, the child has a profound desire to identify with "others," that is, with the
dominant norms) are an extremely powerful factor in favor of internalizing the
national culture. The term internaliiadon is essential, for it indicates that what is

going on is not an educational process, not a conscious acceptance of certain rules,

but a mechanism that operates within the scene of psychic experience itself, in large

part unconsciously but often with extraordinary effectiveness, as is clear from the
ease with which immigrant children learn French even when their parents do not
know a single word of the language. The fact that some people contest the immi-

grant child's right to call himself a citizen of his native land — for he is as much a

"native" as the child descended from a "native French" family — only reinforces his
identification with the values of the environment in which he grows up. The at
 French and Foreigners 171

times desperate struggle to be fully recognized as a member of a national group

accounts for the frequent rejection of the parents' culture, which has no value in the
child's eyes and therefore must be kept at arm's length.
It is therefore legitimate to speak of assimilation, in the sense of an appropriation

of the dominant culture.^^ As Etienne Balibar says of language acquisition (the idea

can be generalized), "the second-generation immigrant.. .inhabits the national lan-

guage (and through it the nation itself) in a manner as spontaneous, as 'hereditary,'

as imperious for the emotions and the imagination, as the children of one of our
'home regions' (most of whom only a short while ago did not even speak the
national language at home)."^"* One must add, however, that the transmission of the
national culture takes place through the mediation of the local milieu in which the
immigrant child grows up, and this is usually a working-class milieu. Shared mem-
ories, tastes, and manners, including even tics of language (the ironic banter of
Parisian street argot, the accent of Lorraine or Provence), reveal how deeply sec-
ond-generation immigrants identify with their local models. When the archbishop

of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger (who was born a Jew but raised a Catholic after his par-
ents were deported), called himself a Polish Jew from the hills of Montmartre, he

captured in a memorable formula the importance of the local environment in the

assimilation of those who still harbor memories of the experience of deracination.
The very fact that for the children of immigrants "home" is France, a specific
part of France, explains their loss of interest in the memory of the group of origin.
But other factors reinforce this tendency, in particular the disintegration of the
"community" due to social mobility, which is common in the second generation.
The change in social status often results in a change of dwelling place, a move out
of the "ghetto" in which most of the instruments of communal fervor are located.
Mixed marriages have an even more corrosive effect. Studies have shown that the
spouse of foreign origin and, to an even greater degree, the children generally adopt
the customs and habits of the French-surnamed partner. Rare in the first genera-

tion, mixed marriages are far more common in the second, as table 4.1 indicates.

TABLE 4.1 PROPORTION OF MIXED MARRIAGES AMONG ITALIANS AND POLES

IN THE EARLY I950S
First Generation Second Generation
Italians

Seine (workers) 27% 56%

Seine (merchants) 44 84
Lot-et-Garonne 7 51

Poles

Aisne (farm workers) 4.5 55

Nord-Pas-de-Calais (miners) 9 24

Based on the Girard and Stoet\el survey.

172 GERARD NOIRIEL

The figures show that the places most propitious to mixed marriage are either

large cities, like Paris (which offers a great number and variety of ways for couples

to meet), or small villages (where the number of immigrants is too small to form a
"community"). By contrast, the presence of a dense foreign population (Hke that of

Poles in the Nord) encourages endogamous marriage.

If the analysis is carried further, one finds that it is chiefly between the second
and third generations that the objective criteria of membership in the group of ori-

gin collapse. Take the Armenian population of Decines, for example: the propor-
tion of mixed marriages was 1.4 percent between 1925 and 1929; it rose to 6.4 per-
cent in the 1930s, to nearly 52 percent in the 1960s, and attained a peak of 75 percent
in 1970—71.^^ Similarly, a poll of people of Polish descent showed that in the third
generation fewer than 10 percent spoke Polish and fewer than 7 percent could read
the language.

The Problem of Integration

Historians can contribute to the current debate over the integration of immigrants
by analyzing the factors that aided the integration of previous waves of immigrants
and showing which continue to be operative and which have become obsolete today.
The first area for useful comparative study is the labor market. Upward social

mobility is of course a powerful factor for integration. The study by Girard and
Stoetzel that I cited earlier shows that the children of Italian and Polish immigrants
who came to France twenty years earlier generally succeeded in rising to a higher
social status. Among Italian workers in the Seine, for example, half the children of

working age had moved out of the manual trades. Similarly, fifty percent of the sons
of Polish agricultural workers in the Aisne had achieved higher skill classifications

than their fathers. The survey's major finding was that in France the most impor-
tant factors in integration were not ethnic or national origin but occupation and
geographical location. No matter what their nationality, the children of immigrants
living in the Paris region in the 1950s were much more likely to improve their social

status than were those living in rural areas or in monoindustrial regions of northern

and eastern France.^^

A recent study published by insee (one of the few sources of quantitative data
on our subject) enables us to compare second-generation integration in the 1950s

and today. After examining immigrant families living in France for roughly twenty
years, the authors found that "the common view of the social mobility of immi-
grants and their children does not fit the facts." In reality, "after eighteen years in

France, the majority of the immigrants we studied fared as well as other workers

and enjoyed an average financial situation. Most children born to them in France
before 1968 moved into white-collar jobs and generally enjoyed a higher social sta-
 French and Foreigners 173

FIGURE 4.16 Muslim immigrant family in Marseilles, 1988.

FIGURE 4.17 Two girls who attempted to wear veils to school, at home with their family, 1989.

tus than their parents." Another of this study's major conclusions, one that will no
doubt surprise those who believe that North African immigrants do not assimilate,
is worth quoting: among immigrant children, "the ones who were least successful

were those whose fathers came from eastern Europe, perhaps because many of them
lived in regions strongly affected by the recession (such as the Nord— Pas-de-Calais
174 GERARD NOIRIEL

and Lorraine). The majority of the moved upward in society, including the sec-
rest

ond-generation Arabs. The second-generation Arab community is fragmented,

however, because it includes both many individuals who have moved up and many
others who have remained poor."^^ Further studies are needed before any definitive
conclusions are possible. Still, the most likely hypothesis when one compares occu-
pational patterns of integration over a forty-year interval is that the "French model"
remains intact. In other words, the job market in France is such that it does not cre-
ate ghettos to which the children of immigrants are confined on account of their

backgrounds. The parents' occupation and geographical location count more than
their national or ethnic origins. Even today, these are statistically the most impor-
tant factors for explaining the fate of the second generation (as the case of children
of eastern European immigrants in northern and eastern France confirms).
Although most recent studies show that the French model of immigration is not
in crisis, it would be misleading to deny that recent immigration has given rise to

problems that did not exist in previous decades. The insee study cited above
shows that what is unusual about the "Beurs" (second-generation Arabs) is not that
the "community" has any special difficulty with integration but that it is fragmented
into two groups, those who have risen and those who have not. What accounts for
the simultaneity of these two contrasting fates.'' That is the real problem that today's

immigration raises. Compared with the 1930s or the 1950s, the change, I think, has

to do with a new conception of immigration.

Previously, xenophobia, as well as political discussion of immigration in general,

was focused on foreigners, that is, on a group of people defined by legal criteria

(since in general the second generation acquired French citizenship virtually auto-

matically). Today, for the first time in the history of the French Republic, the whole
debate around immigration is focused on the second generation, which is to say on
people who are legally French citizens but who are stigmatized because of their

"ethnic" origin. Over the past thirty years a number of factors have conspired to

bring this about. A new social category has appeared since the 1960s, that of
"youth," whose very existence confuses the old picture of social classes. Contrast
this with the past, when the sons of immigrants passed imperceptibly from child-

hood to adulthood, generally moving easily into blue-collar jobs. The extraordi-

nary urban development of France over the past thirty years has considerably
heightened the visibility of this youth group. Cities, where life is more anonymous
and family controls are weaker than in smaller towns and villages, generate their

own pathology. Juvenile delinquency among the children of immigrants, already a

central feature of Chicago sociology in the interwar years, became a problem in

France with the advent of planned cities and large urban housing projects in the

postwar period. The phenomenon was made even more visible by the media's pre-
occupation with social issues. Acts of violence against immigrants were far more
frequent in the 1930s than they are today but were rarely publicized beyond the local
 French and Foreigners 175

press. Today such incidents can easily make the front page of national newspapers,

lending additional credibility to the idea that immigration is a fundamental social

"problem." The growth of the welfare state has had a similar effect, increasing the

number of sociologists, social workers, and others whose jobs involve looking after

the needs of immigrants.

FIGURE 4.18 Cover of Le 6re/of (September 4, 1892), attacking Belgian immigrants.

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FIGURE 4.19 Posters for the National Front; Marseilles, 1988.

FIGURE 4.20 Hansi, My Village, 1911.

FIGURE 4.21 Cartoon by Plantu at the time of the municipal elections of 1983.
St so;
178 GERARD NOIRIEL

This new vision of French society has been consolidated by another crucial

development, the decline of the workers' movement. Whereas immigrant children

were once seen, and saw themselves, primarily as "workers," today they are seen,

and see themselves, increasingly as "Beurs"; that is, in terms not of what they do but
of where they come from. Itmay be that this major break with the basic principles
of republican ideology, while it may not yet have affected either the law or admin-
istrative regulations, is one of the main causes of the dual trajectories mentioned
earlier (some second-generation immigrants rising in status, others not). On the one
hand, the political importance of "integrating North Africans" has meant that con-
siderable resources have been allocated to social assistance, the creation of new
teaching positions, and other measures to aid the Beur community. Hence the most
fortunate Beurs, who readily present themselves as spokesmen for the "commu-
nity," have enjoyed an upward social mobility greater than that of young people
from other immigrant groups. On the other hand, however, the discourse of ethnic
identity has helped to establish the stereotype of the "Arab as problem" which
underlies much of present-day French racism.^'' Hampered, whether they like it or

not, by this definition of themselves, second-generation immigrants who are per-

fectly assimilated but unemployed or downwardly mobile are forced to resort to the

available vocabulary to decry their situation.^' In the 1950s that vocabulary was
drawn from the rhetoric of Communism. Today, the unfortunate are apt to lay the

blame for their misfortune not on capitalist exploitation but on racism ("the French
don't like Arabs"). Following this logic, they may turn to Islam (as they know it) in

search of the language they need to proclaim their rebellion. If, in spite of every-
thing, this phenomenon remains of relatively minor importance, it is no doubt
because it is far more difficult, in our disenchanted secular societies at any rate, to

mobilize large numbers of people around ethnic or religious issues than it used to
be to mobilize people around issues of class.
t

i
Figure 5.0 Joan of Arc Festival, Place des Pyramides, Paris, May 8, 1988.
 CHAPTER 5

Vichy
Philippe Burrin

Vichy: the name is symbolic of a regime that lasted only four years yet is deeply
ingrained in the memory of the French. This assertion needs no documentation,
substantiated as it is by countless films, novels, political speeches, and works of his-

tory. Fifty years later the atmosphere still becomes charged with passion whenever
conversation turns to this period. Even the calls for an end to the debate attest to the

persistence of this particular memory.

There are obvious reasons why Vichy has been so difficult to forget. The regime
was an exception, as the location of its capital indicates. Paris, which had been
France 's center through monarchy and revolution, was dethroned by a city previ-
ously noted chiefly for its medicinal hot springs. True, the so-called government of
national defense also abandoned Paris during the Franco-Prussian War
(1870— 1 871), but not for so long a period. And true, Vichy did not leave Paris of its

own volition: Petain wanted to return to the capital, but the Germans objected.
Nevertheless, the obligatory encampment in central France accorded admirably
with the new regime's rural-oriented "deep France" outlook.
Obviously Vichy is also remembered because it grew out of France 's defeat at

the hands of the Germans and coincided with a period of occupation, with its atten-
dant division and suffering. Memories of that period are still vivid in the minds of
many people living today, people in a position to influence both public debate and
scholarly research.

Finally, and more fundamentally, Vichy is remembered because it offers a con-

venient contrast to other regimes. The Fourth Republic grew out of resistance to the
German occupation and rejection of L'Etat frangais (as the Vichy regime officially

called itself, in opposition to la Republique frangaise). Similarly, the Fifth Republic

l82 PHILLIPE BURRIN

reacted against the Fourth, but because the founder of the Fifth was General de
Gaulle, the new regime contributed as much if not more to the condemnation of
Vichy. Politicians often invoke the history of Vichy in order to marginalize anti re-
publican groups and, at times, to discredit political enemies of whatever camp.
Is there anything unusual about this.'' If memories of Vichy are alive today, is the

situation any different from, say, that of the Third Republic in the late nineteenth

century, when people looked back to the Second Empire.'^ Or from the period after
the revolution of 1848, with its memories of the July Monarchy.'' And Vichy itself,
for that matter: the regime defined itself in opposition to the Third Republic, just as

the Third Republic had defined itself in opposition to the Second Empire.
Indeed, this series of regimes can be followed all the way back to the beginning:

the French Revolution was the major rupture, the matrix of all that followed.

Within a period of a few years nearly all possible forms of government were tried.

The experience left the stamp of historical conflict on French political culture, by
which I mean that France has tended to conceive of its conflicts in historical terms

and to conceive of its history in terms of conflict. It also made memory a key ele-

ment in the definition of all subsequent regimes as they searched, in one direction
or another, for a stable equilibrium.
Each of those regimes was obliged to situate itself in relation to the great

founding event as well as to what preceded it and what grew out of it. Each car-

ried with it the memory of a predecessor, whether as model or anti-model. The

Revolution, animated by the Promethean ambition to create a new society and a
new man, ended by placing an enormous burden on the future: the past became a

dynamic agent, its divisions constantly replayed, with the result that all postrevo-
lutionary regimes, including the republics, have been to one degree or another
"memory regimes."
The Third Republic, which looked to the future, also forged a tradition for itself

and worried about integrating the country's prerepublican past. Still, memory
clearly played a more important and more central role in those regimes that can

properly be called reactionary. The Restoration, the Second Empire, and Vichy
were all attempts — each with its own distinctive features — to turn things around, to

set the clock back, though admittedly each of these regimes was obliged to strike
some sort of compromise with changes deemed to be irreversible. The success of
these attempts at reaction diminished over time, moreover, to judge by the decreas-

ing duration of each successive regime (1815— 1848, 1851— 1870, 1940— 1944) com-
pared with the lengthening intervals left to the Republic to establish its roots.

In this family of reactionary regimes Vichy nevertheless enjoys a place apart,

which entitles it to be called the memory regime par excellence. Although it resem-
bled its predecessors in seeking to tailor the future to the pattern of the past, it also

differed from them in a number of important ways: it did not aim to restore a pre-
 Vichy 183

vious regime, it did not attempt to restore power to political leaders or social groups

that had held it before, and it did not try to revive the glory of a defunct empire.

Vichy's memory was filled with pure representations, the quintessential one
being "France," but a France that was no longer linked to God through a divine-
right monarchy and even less associated with humanity by way of a universal form

such as the republic. Vichy was a deliberate, persistent, and futile effort to organize
reality around such a memory, to reconstruct a national spirit in which the memory
of a mythologized past would shape the perception of the present to create a unified
way of feeling, thinking, and acting.

An Ambiguous and Shifting Past

Before examining this project of Vichy's, however, we must digress a moment to

recall briefly what the Etat fran^ais was and how it was perceived by contempo-
raries. We will then be in a better position to appreciate the subsequent work accom-
plished by memory, the way in which it in turn organized the reality of a period
whose experience was ambiguous, shifting, and divided.
There was a great deal of diversity in the Vichy regime, and chronology cannot
be neglected. The picture of Vichy that certain elements of the Resistance, espe-

cially the Communist Party, tried to paint in the immediate postwar period — that of

a uniformly black regime, totally abject before the occupying power and completely
united in its oppressive policies against the French — has been substantially modi-
fied by subsequent historical research.

In fact, the regime harbored a number of rival tendencies, to the point where
Stanley Hoffmann has proposed calling it a pluralist dictatorship. Other scholars
have noted various phases in the regime's sinister evolution, with Laval's return to
power in April of 1942 marking one turning point, followed by another in
November of 1942, when the extension of German occupation to cover all of met-
ropolitan France placed the principal reins of government in Laval's hands. Still

others have tried to connect Vichy with the prewar and postwar periods, noting the

prevalence of xenophobia before 1940 and the increasing state intervention in vari-
ous aspects of French life after 1945.'

It is now clear that Vichy was not a monolith. Nevertheless, despite its internal

diversity and evolution over time, there are good reasons for seeing the regime as

fundamentally unified. As often happens, the outcomes and consequences of

Vichy's policies did not always coincide with the original intentions or calculations
of the policy makers. Some programs went awry, while others veered out of con-
trol, but these failures were not all the result of unforeseeable circumstances, such
as the fact that the occupation continued for four years during which the Germans
demanded ever greater sacrifices as the fortunes of war turned against them. Some
PHILLIPE BURRIN

of the failures were ineluctable consequences of the logic inherent in the regime 's
initial choices and goals.
To put it in a nutshell, the outcome was a foregone conclusion from the moment
Vichy decided not simply to accept the consequences of defeat but to attempt a

national revitalization in its wake. Once it was decided that the war was definitively

lost, the only thing left to do was to save what could be saved. When Petain
announced that the time had come for France to break with Great Britain and pursue
itsown national interest, he was in effect assessing the outcome of the policies of the
interwar period as many others did: mutual security had failed and the alliances to
which France had committed herself had proved disappointing, not to say danger-

ous. France, the marshal declared, was left "alone to face her destiny." She had no
choice but "to free herself from so-called 'traditional' friendships and hostilities."^
In the short run the defeat made it possible to embark on a renewal of French
institutions, perceived as the only guarantee of a better future. Because France 's
new leaders had become convinced of the need for such a renewal before the war,
they were all the more inclined to believe that the judgment of the battlefield had
confirmed their analysis. In launching their effort to revitalize the nation, they set

forth their priorities. No one expressed those priorities more clearly than the radical
right-wing writer Charles Maurras, despite the marginal role that he played at Vichy.
In La Seule France^ a book that he published in 194 1, Maurras drew the following
parallel: in 1429, Joan of Arc chose to go to Reims and the king's coronation even
though by continuing her military campaign she might "have shortened by twenty
years —who can say.-* — the fight to drive the English out of France." But, "then as

now," the military aspect of the situation was only one element. "As harsh as the
English conquest was, it was merely the effect of more profound causes that would
have remained even if the English had The conquest grew out of France 's divi-
left.

sion, fragmentation, enfeeblement, and anarchy.... The war might have been ended,
but not without breaking out again soon thereafter as a result of the new divisions

that would soon have engulfed a France without a Leader."^

Maurras treated the military struggle against the occupying power as secondary.

A thorough overhaul of the nation took priority over regaining control of French
territory and full sovereignty within its borders. To be sure, Vichy's leaders, whose
views were by no means uniform, never defined their task with such clarity and
rigor. Nevertheless, their actions followed the lines that Maurras had sketched out.
And given the unforeseen course that the war would take, it was this establishment
of a link between acceptance of defeat and national reform that would turn out to
be the crux of the issue.

Vichy had counted on a rapid end to hostilities, which would have allowed the
government, though left to rule an admittedly grievously wounded and subjugated
nation, to concentrate on building a new France. Despite the forecasts of a quick
 Vichy 185

end to the war, however, the battle

continued to rage. England refused
to give up, and Germany, it turned
out, lacked the power to force
England to do The French gov-
so.

ernment was obliged to accommo-

date itself to a continuing occupa-
tion, which exposed it to daily pres-

sures from the occupying power.

Instead of a regime obliged to
accept a German-dictated peace,
Vichy became the regime that col-
laborated with the Nazis.
In order to preserve what auton-
omy the armistice had allowed it,

and above all to outmaneuver

London and de Gaulle and hold on
to the Empire, which, along with
the fleet, was the principal guaran-

tee of that autonomy, as well as to

pave the way for peace on the most
favorable possible terms, Vichy DesK Paul

made the strategic decision to adopt

a policy of collaboration, a choice

that was a logical consequence of
the armistice that its leaders had
sought. The collaboration in ques-
tion was to involve mainly eco-
nomic matters; it was to avoid open
conflict with London and alignment
of France with the Axis powers. Yet
it was based on a wager that the

Third Reich would ultimately win,

ti
or at any rate that the British would LE MARECHALINSHTUA LACORf ORAnON.£
certainly not win. r ' r I < I' I I I .( 1 I

Vichy's leaders claimed that this

FIGURE 5.1 Andre-Paul and Louis Simon, long Live France, Long Live the
policy was based solely on a "realis- Marstial; poster.

tic" assessment of the situation. But Marstiai Established the Peasant Corporation; postage
FIGURE 5.2 7/76

their realism was hampered by their stamp, 1943.

own domestic policy preferences, to

i86 PHILLIPE BURRIN

which they clung even as the war raged on and which ukimately led the regime into

a blind alley. If the government renounced the policy of collaboration, it would risk

losing all remaining autonomy while remaining vulnerable to German retaliation.

To quit France for North Africa in order to join the Allies would have meant giving
up any chance of authoritarian reform in France for the foreseeable future.
The events of November 1942 proved that the leaders of Vichy, Petain above all,

refused to acknowledge the utter futility of their initial decisions. Instead, they
clung to their policies, showing, to be sure, some signs of doubt and foot-dragging
but never more than hinting at any possibility of fundamental change.
Collaboration continued to be advocated and practiced, and while Vichy now bar-
gained more than ever with the Germans, it nevertheless accepted responsibility for
enforcing the recruitment of French workers for "compulsory labor service" in
Germany (the so-called Service de Travail Obligatoire, or STO) as well as for

deporting Jews.
Meanwhile, the National Revolution remained on the agenda, although much of
the original enthusiasm had gone out of it. By the autumn of 1943, Petain and Laval
separately sought to revive the National Assembly. At the same time they turned to

the Milice, a paramilitary national militia, to maintain order, and both leaders
would back its oppressive activities right to the bitter end. By agreeing to remain in

power after November 1942 and thus choosing to owe their political survival to the

occupying power, they ended up being made to look like partners and accomplices
to Nazi perfidy. Ultimately Petain was reduced to claiming that he had wished to

serve as France's "shield," a wretched end to a policy that began with very differ-
ent ambitions.

Although Vichy's course was by no means predetermined, the lines of force that
it eventually followed were present from the beginning. In hindsight the regime can
be said to have been unified, which is just how it appeared to many resistance fight-

ers and to much of the French population immediately after the Liberation. Vichy

thus entered history as the antithesis of the republicain tradition, the anti-Republic.
Simultaneously, people who now saw the regime in the blackest of terms forgot that
initially, especially in 1940 and 1941, many contemporaries to whom the future still
seemed opaque were quite ambiguous in their attitudes toward Vichy.
Indeed, the regime's very inception was ambiguous. Continuity and rupture
coexisted. Petain did not come to power in the manner of Louis Bonaparte, who dis-
pensed with legality only after being duly elected. Nor did his government take
power by proclamation, as the government of national defense did in 1870 in the

wake of military defeat. In July 1940 the Third Republic voted itself out of exis-

tence and transferred full power, seemingly quite legally, to Marshal Petain.''

After the war there were attempts in various quarters to challenge the legality of
this vote on the grounds that it was not a free or deliberate decision by the deputies
 Vichy 187

of the National Assembly. Nevertheless, the fact is that the deputies, none of whom
protested the armistice, knew exactly what they were doing, and the vast majority

of them were ready to trust their fate to the man of the hour, onto whose shoulders
they were perfectly willing to shift responsibility for whatever ensued. Was this the

result of a failure of nerve or of a deep sense of blame for France 's failure.'' In any

case the vote was an expression of the collapse of democratic values among the very
people sworn to uphold them.
Vichy was in no sense an antirepublican conspiracy led by a seditious gang ready
to take advantage of the country's disarray in order to impose their own counter-
revolutionary beliefs. It was first and foremost an expression of the authoritarian
metamorphosis that afflicted much of the republican establishment. More specifi-

cally, the regime grew out of ideas developed by a loose network of small reformist
groups coupled with a widespread collapse of faith in democratic values that began
in the 1930s and was completed by the defeat. The collapse of faith in democracy
affected nearly the whole of the French elite and much of the population as well.

True, the new regime was to a large extent the revenge of the Republic's mortal
enemies, along with all who had merely paid lip service to republican values. The
extreme right could not restrain itself from applauding the overthrow of la gueuse
(literally "wench," a derogatory term for the Republic) and quickly threw itself

into the breach. Yet it failed to win places in the government for its leaders.

Maurras was excluded, and such aspiring leaders as Deat, Doriot, and Bucard left

Vichy to try their luck in Paris. It was not until early 1944, however, that Deat,
Henriot, and Darnand joined the government under pressure from the Germans,
indicating not that Vichy had become a fascist regime but that it now contained a
notable fascist presence.
The Catholic Church, which had reluctantly acquiesced to the Republic, offered
the new regime its enthusiastic support, especially during the first two years, a time

of inflated hopes of a new role for the Church. But Vichy never allowed itself to be
defined as a pro-Catholic regime. Although Petain and Darlan allowed the Church
a much greater role than it had recently enjoyed and harped on the old theme of a
"Christian France," in the end they found it preferable to limit their concessions
rather than revive long-dormant religious conflict.

In fact, Vichy employed officials of many stripes and drew support from a fairly

broad segment of the political spectrum, including dissident left-wing fringe

groups. A solid core of reactionaries and men who had been involved with the fas-
cist-oriented extreme right of the 1930s, such as Benoist-Mechin and Marion, was
joined by others of varied background and outlook, all convinced, however, of the
virtues of authority after the doubly chastening experience of the Popular Front and
the defeat. Among them were former liberals such as Flandin and Barthelemy, tech-
nocrats like Bichelonne, and even Rene Belin, a former leader of the anti-
i88 PHILLIPE BURRIN

Communist wing of the C.G.T. (Confederation Generale du Travail, a labor

union), who was supposed to demonstrate that the new regime enjoyed backing
among workers and was keen to enlist the support of all social classes.

Even if well-intentioned people had continued to join the government in num-

bers as large as in the summer of 1940, the regime still would have been far from
establishing itself on a firm footing had it not received the support of people of
more modest background but decisive importance: civil servants at all levels appar-

ently felt no particular compunction, given the vacuum created by the legislature 's

resignation, about taking up the reins of a government at long last turned over to
those with the "competence" to keep its machinery running smoothly. Defections in

the first two years were rare, even in the diplomatic corps.^

Nor did the army withhold its approval. After hesitating for a short time after the
armistice, it threw its full support to the new government, whose ranks swelled with
military officers. The Army of the Republic helped to bury the Republic: Petain,
unlike Hindenburg, was not a monarchist who had agreed to serve a republican gov-
ernment against his innermost convictions. He had served the Third Republic and
no other power throughout his long military career. In fact, he had been a distin-

guished military leader in the previous regime, just as Pierre Laval had been a dis-
tinguished civilian leader.
We see the same divorce between army and republic, but for diametrically
opposed reasons, in the behavior of the first man to challenge Petain's authority.

After de Gaulle escaped to England, where on June 18, 1940, he issued a call to the

French to continue the struggle against the Germans, he broke with a govern-
ment — the Petain government — that was duly constituted and at that point still rep-

resented the government of the Republic. The transfer of power was approved only
three weeks later, and the ensuing inception oi L'Etat franfais changed de Gaulle's
status in a way that he could not possibly have foreseen when he rebelled. Gaullism

sprang primarily from a rejection of the armistice, not of the National Revolution.
It was not just the elites and the bureaucrats of the Republic who welcomed the

new regime with open arms. The desperate situation of France in the summer of
1940 inclined much of the population to accept a strong government. Given the dis-
array that followed the defeat, the widespread disaffection with parliamentary
democracy, and the general relief at the cessation of combat, many people were
only too glad to welcome a government that promised to get things back in hand.
For many long months the resistance would have to grope its way in darkness.

Petain was the chief beneficiary of this climate of opinion, as shown by his tri-

umphal journeys through the free zone from the autumn of 1940 on. To judge by
figures gleaned from the postal censorship records, the government and its minis-
ters never enjoyed more than limited popular support. The National Revolution
aroused little enthusiasm or even sustained interest. The people were primarily con-
 Vichy 189

cerned with two things: food and the repatriation of French prisoners of war.
Darlan and especially Laval bore the brunt of dissatisfactions to which Petain
alluded publicly as early as the spring of 1941, but he himself would remain exempt
from the public's wrath for some time to come.''

And yet, immediately after meeting Hitler at Montoire, he had personally

assumed responsibility for a policy of collaboration that would soon encounter con-
siderable hostility: "I alone shall be judged by History." Once anti-English senti-

ments triggered by the massacre at Mers el-Kebir had dissipated, the majority of the

French clearly hoped for a British victory; they rejected a policy of collaboration
whose benefits were by no means evident but which raised the danger of a disas-

trous confrontation with France 's former ally.

As in Nazi Germany, people in France distinguished to an astonishing degree

between the leader and his minions, reviving the ancestral myth of the good king
flanked by wicked advisors.^ Petain, to be sure, encouraged such confusion both by
his acts — such as the dismissal of Laval in December 1940, which many people
quite wrongly interpreted as a repudiation of Montoire —and by the image he cre-
ated through speeches and public appearances.

He rarely, for example, struck a note of command, intimidation, or threat. An

interesting exception occurred in a message delivered on August 12, 1 941, in which,
after denouncing the "veritable malaise" from which the French were suffering, he
announced a series of harsh new measures. Citing his "duty to defend" France, he
said: "I put an end to the mutinies in 1917. 1 put an end to the rout in 1940. Today I

want to save you from yourselves."^ As consent evaporated, the regime 's repressive
vein rose to the surface; the Milice was already in gestation.

Ordinarily Petain used a very different tone: that of persuasion, exhortation, and
preaching, filling his speeches with Christian references that were not without effect
on a population still deeply imbued with Christian culture. He addressed the French
as "my friends," "my dear friends," and even "my children," speaking as a father or
a pastor.' He was at first the providential man, the honored savior, prepared to sac-

rifice himself: Petain "gave the gift of his person" to France in its hour of greatest
need. Later the father began to sound more like a grandfather, the savior more like

a martyr. Six months after the "ill wind" speech of January i, 1942, Petain made a
show of his chains in order to win his compatriots' assistance: "In the partial exile

that has been imposed on me, within the limits of the quasi-liberty that I am
allowed, I aim at doing my duty to the fullest possible extent. Every day I work to

rescue this country from the asphyxiation that threatens it, from the troubles that lie

in store. Help me."'"

Petain offered the French a range of perceptions and images. Some — a large

minority — subscribed to the program of National Revolution that he set forth; as

events unfolded, they would either withdraw into inaction or enlist in the Milice.
FIGURE 5.3, 5.4, AND 5.5 "Love," "Kepi," "Eyes"; three plates from The Marshal's Alphabet (\3AM
 Vichy 191

The Others — certainly far more numerous — felt for Petain a loyalty, or at any rate

a respect, that they believed he deserved because of his glorious past and advanced
age, his image as the savior-martyr of his country, and his role as a symbol of
national continuity. Over time this admiration and devotion turned to compassion
and pity more often than hatred.
To many French people Petain and Vichy were not at all the same thing. Because

of their respect for the man, however, they were loyal in a sense to the regime he
headed. This attitude, a product of various assumptions and expectations, slowly
eroded without vanishing altogether, and surely it is a crucial factor for explaining

some of France's later difficulties in coming to terms with the past. In September
1944 a majority (58 percent) in France felt that Petain should be acquitted. In the
summer of 1945, after the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps, their number
had dwindled to 17 percent. But in the 1970s and 1980s it rose again to more than 30
percent (35 in 1976, 31 in 1983)." Vichy is condemned in toto, but Petain is still

judged separately.
Here there is a considerable gap between the judgment of the public and that of
historians, among whom there is universal agreement that Petain headed the regime
until the autumn of 1942 and bore ultimate responsibility to the very end. Even at

the time it was clear that the government of Vichy saw itself as something other
than a Roman-style dictatorship for extraordinary times. Beyond purging the
bureaucracy and stifling political life, the steady stream of measures that the regime
adopted in its very first months heralded an ambition of global reform.
To take just one example, the "Jewish statute" of October 1940 can hardly be

described as an ad hoc measure. It apparently pleased many people and was pas-
sively accepted by the majority, without noticeable opposition, in contrast to what
happened summer of 1942 when the police began arresting and deporting
in the

large numbers of Jews. The widespread protests that erupted then stemmed from
compassion for the victims combined with a now deeply ingrained hatred of the
occupying forces.'^

Furthermore, Petain himself was constantly issuing messages and proclamations

to explain his ambitions and goals. Indeed, his role in the articulation and formula-
tion of Vichy's program was so central that it is hard to see how, in this respect, the

regime can be separated from the man.

The "Reconstruction of the National Soul"

To pool energies and revitalize the nation: that was Petain's goal, and he alone
would establish the lines that that revitalization was to take, a road map to a radical

Utopia. In the present context it matters little how this project was carried out and to
what extent its goals were realized. Because various tendencies coexisted within the
192 PHILLIPE BURRIN

regime, and because the war did not end and the occupation continued, certain cor-
rections, detours, and ampUfications were required.
The new order was to be based on so-called natural communities: family, com-
mune, occupation, region. Revitalized, these would again become the nation's
essential skeleton. The family, the "essential cell," the "very foundation of the

social edifice," was to be restored by returning women to the home and encourag-
ing a higher birth rate. Young people were to be better educated and disciplined in

school. Occupations were to among the various cat-

be organized, with cooperation
egories of productive workers being the touchstone of social harmony. And among
those productive workers a special place was to be reserved not only for artisans but
especially for peasants, who were once again to be France's backbone.
This strategy was designed to foil and defeat the nation's principal enemy, indi-

vidualism, which eroded social bonds and sapped France's strength. It would
restore the "concrete" reality of corps intermediaires, organizations standing
between the individual and the state and said to be the only real framework within
which individual liberty made sense. The state, for its part, was to be the culmina-
tion of the hierarchy of natural communities, capping them without crushing them.
A strong state was necessary, but Petain rejected etadsme^ especially in its extreme
totalitarian form. "Family rights," he affirmed, "are prior and superior to the rights
of both states and individuals."'^
The strong state was to be a state "reduced to its genuine functions"''* and based
on principles of authority and hierarchy in accordance with a thoroughly military

model. Such a state would need elites, who would have to be raised and trained with-
out regard to social origin. At the summit one man would govern, taking advice
from a select few and seeking the consent of the many. There was to be no place in

this system for political parties, much less for a unique party. Petain chose instead to
have a single organization of veterans to convey messages between himself and the
general public.
The goal of the whole enterprise was to revitalize the nation. Petain stressed the

role of the school in this regard, along with that of youth organizations, which were
charged with instilling into French youth a team spirit, solidarity, a sense of service

to the community and of obedience to the authorities. In place of a France under-

mined and divided by conflicts among parties and special interests, and, more pro-
foundly, by individualism and materialism, there would arise a new France, its ener-
gies mobilized by a "new spirit," a "spirit of social and national communion."'^
Petain defined his project as an "organic realignment of French society."'^ The
goal was to reattach those parts of the nation that had been severed from the main
body, or, varying the metaphor, to bring back into the flock sheep allowed to stray
by "bad shepherds." Along with the theme of inclusion, there was a parallel theme
of exclusion that Petain never discussed publicly: groups recently arrived and
 Vichy 193

deemed unassimilable, such as Jews, were to be weeded out. The nation was to be
brought together by persuasion if possible, but if necessary by force: the govern-
ment would act for the good of the people, if need be against its will. Like any pro-
ject based on an obsession with unity, Vichy's unification project incorporated the
potential for exclusion and repression from the outset, and these tendencies would
be strengthened as the unity of the people with its leaders was increasingly deferred.
Vichy's project is often characterized as counterrevolutionary, and the regime is

sometimes taken to represent Maurras's triumph.'^ A coincidence of values and

goals does not imply identity, however. Petain had no intention of restoring the
monarchy, nor was he concerned with expunging the French Revolution from his-

tory in order to bring back what it had eliminated.

Clearly the marshal's philosophy of man and society, according to which indi-

viduals need supervisory authority and are properly subordinate to the community,

derived from the counterrevolutionary tradition. But the nationalists of the late
nineteenth century had already integrated this aspect of counterrevolutionary
thought into their own thinking, in addition to which they had made their peace with
the Revolution, which was now an accepted element of the nation's past. Petain,

too, accepted the Revolution, though reinterpreted in the light of his own values.
If he continued to celebrate Bastille Day and kept France 's tricolor flag, he replaced
the old triad of republican values — liberty, equality, fraternity —
with a new triad of
his own: work, family, fatherland. Nevertheless, he did not condemn the old values
outright, arguing instead that they needed to be limited and complemented by new
ideals. Yet his words and actions in effect negated the core of the old repiablican val-
ues to which he continued to pay lip service.

For late-nineteenth-century nationalists, monarchy was no longer viable, but

republicanism was not up to what they saw as the essential task. They therefore
invented "France," a timeless, eternal, ideal form that had found imperfect
embodiment in a series of different regimes. Petain was a fervent if unimaginative

disciple of this line of thinking. What was central to his project was not the ques-

tion of the type of regime but the question of "France." The purpose of L'Etat
franfais was to protect and revitalize the substance of France, and this included a
wish to purge France of all that was not properly a part of it or that claimed to
transcend it.

It would, however, take more than institutional reform or a new governmental

structure to revitalize "France." Beyond enumerating a series of fundamental prin-
ciples, Petain had strikingly little to say about constitutional reform. This discretion
was only partly the result of circumstances, actual promulgation of the constitution
having been put off until peace was concluded. Although the point has been little

noted, the fact is that the precise organization of the state did not matter to him as

much as social and national reform did, society and the nation being the only pro-
194 PHILLIPE BURRIN

found realities. Petain's stated ambition was to "rebuild society" and "reconstruct
the national soul."^*^

Underlying this vast project was the conviction that there existed an "eternal

France," the bedrock of any possible salvation. The defeat provided a unique
opportunity to rediscover that bedrock, and the best way to do it was to promote a

return to the soil. In 1938, Petain said that "prosperity, like victory, puts us to sleep,"
whereas "defeat always awakens the French."^' He took his generation's experience
from 1870 to 1940 and turned it into a philosophy of history. Defeat did not frighten

him, and he was prepared to accept it for its virtues.

In so doing he explored an avenue first opened up by Ernest Renan, who, after

France's defeat in 1870, asked if the country would "continue down the slope of
national enfeeblement and political materialism as it had been doing" or "respond
to the knife that had been plunged into its living flesh as Germany did in 1807 by
taking its defeat as the beginning of an era of renewal." The comparison with
Prussia in 1807 was a staple topic of conversation at Vichy, where the idea was again
"^^
that war could be "more useful to the vanquished than to the victor.

Thus the defeat was seen as an opportunity for reflection, a pooling of energies,
and a new commitment to the essence of the national identity: Vichy was above all

the memory of this mythical kernel, a concept that could not be formed until two
Napoleons had tested the limits of national power. It was also a highly French con-
cept, an exemplary expression of which can be found in the myth of Vercingetorix,
which was so very different from the mythical soil from which the dreams of Fascist

Italy and Nazi Germany drew their sustenance. Could a nation that celebrated

defeated warriors such as Vercingetorix and Joan of Arc as heroes kindle with pas-
sion for a "Thousand-Year Reich".''

The way to rediscover "eternal France" and, along with it, a promise of survival,
was to return to the earth: the earth which does not lie, which "continues to be your
solace," which "is the fatherland itself."^'* In order to restore the substance of
France it would be necessary to "reroot, so far as possible. Frenchmen in French
soil" by putting an end to those practices that led to "the best elements in every

class" being "uprooted" and condemned to a life of "wandering in a bureaucratic

desert" {nomadisme administratif)P

The land was a key category in the Petainist vision, which was far more than an
expression of nostalgia for the past. Evoking the future of France, which was to
become "what it should never have ceased to have been, an essentially agricultural
nation," Petain added that "like the giant of myth, [France] would recover her full

strength by reestablishing contact with the soil."^'^ The earth had literally magical

powers, which guaranteed that the nation would regain its identity and its strength.

Finally, history itself testified to the existence of an eternal France and offered
its portion of comfort. For what was history but a series of successes and misfor-
 Vichy 195

tunes, with success in each instance growing out of misfortune? Petain's senten-
tious, moraHstic style, much given to the timeless present and to natural metaphor,
nicely captured his belief in "eternal certitudes."

"One day, a peasant, a neighbor of ours, sees his crop destroyed by hail. He does
not lose hope in the next harvest. He continues, with the same faith as before, to

plow the same furrow to receive tomorrow's seed."^'' The point of this little parable
was of course France 's defeat, here reduced to a natural disaster that could be over-
come by persistence, stubborn determination, and courage to "withstand the
inevitable staunchly and patiently."^^ Suffering not only brings redemption but
guarantees it: France is eternal because it persists even through the cycle of victory
and defeat.
Vichy's project was a radical one in the proper sense of the word, a search for
roots blessed with the power of eternal survival. Was this too vague to qualify as a
project.'* If the details were never really worked out, the central vision was clear

enough. Whatever vagueness there was came from the quaking emotion that
inevitably accompanies any dream of returning to a golden age.
Everything in Petain's vision expressed a powerful aspiration to escape from
time: it was the reactionary Utopia of a nation challenged by disruptive socioeco-
nomic change and by more dynamic nations on the attack. Ultimately Vichy was a
regime that no longer wished to confront history, that wanted no further part of it

so long as history meant continuous creation. The destiny of France was to experi-

ence fortune and misfortune: What did Hitler and Nazism matter alongside such an
"eternal certitude".'' Vichy's policy expressed nothing more than the wish to go on
living of a country that had retreated into its own backyard.
Nevertheless, the memory of a timeless France that Vichy hoped to turn into an
active presence was already dated: it was as old as Petain. It was the memory, exalted
as myth, of a man and a generation: the memory of a vanishing society of crafts-
men and peasants, of contested moral and political values (service and sacrifice),

and of a historical experience interpreted as a timeless paradigm (the cycle

1870— 1918— 1940). Last but not least, it was also the memory of a set of images
inherited from nineteenth-century nationalism, the imagination of a national com-
munity transformed into an eternal reality.

Paradoxically, it was through this reactionary memory that Vichy revealed its

modernity: ex-republicans attempted to restore not a regime but a substance that

transcended both monarchy and republic or formed their common foundation.
Benjamin Constant had seen the truth as long ago as 18 14: any authority that
attempted to restore the Ancien Regime "would try to claim that it was merely
reviving ancient institutions. But those ancient institutions would simply be absurd
and unfortunate innovations."^^ The judgment applies to Vichy all the more in that

its primary ambitions were to rebuild society and reconstruct the national soul.
196 PHILLIPE BURRIN

Vichy did not go so far in its efforts to modernize as to conceive of its project as
the fascist regimes did, in totalitarian terms. To be sure, "reconstructing the national
soul" implied a need for resolute action to transform both the society and the edu-

cational system. Consider, for example, the major importance that Petain attached

to schools and the values they were supposed to instill into the minds of French stu-

dents. Or consider the steps taken to encourage folklore and popular traditions.^**

Reviving old costumes and forms of expression was supposed to rekindle interest in

the communal experiences of yesteryear. Fundamentally, however, Vichy had blind

faith in the belief that the "old" could be restored if traditional institutions were
once again allowed to exercise their full influence on society.

Were the French fully aware of how Utopian this project was.'' Did they even per-
ceive that there was a coherent, overall plan.'^ It was in fact quite easy to hear the

official rhetoric as an echo of the kinds of things that people said at home or to inter-
pret Petain's words in the humblest of terms as befit the circumstances. He cele-

brated the earth at a time of shortages; he extolled the family in a time of separa-
tion; he appealed to authority in the midst of war. The radical goals of the Petainist
program could be obscured, the program itself reduced to a panacea for a time of
trial, an act of faith in the country's survival, and, in its innermost but perhaps most
comforting aspect, a profession of national identity. The continuation of the war,
which prevented Petain from carrying out his program, brought him a popularity
that it would have been difficult for him to achieve in peacetime, but at the cost of

misinterpretations and ambivalence.

A Vivid Memory
The Vichy regime did not revitalize France as it had hoped, nor did it restore the

nation's independence and grandeur. Instead it first divided the nation, then united
it in opposition to its policies of repression and collaboration, which chiefly served
the interests of the Germans. Instead of "reconstructing the national soul" by fill-

ing it with memories of an invented "France," it left vivid memories of a very real

France that continues to be a source of embarrassment and outrage. During Petain's

trial, Mornet, the prosecutor, spoke of "four years to be stricken from our history."
The idea was bizarre and striking, especially in its expression of a fervent desire to
forget. But the past that we try to forget has a way of coming back to haunt us.

The history of the memory of Vichy — or, at any rate, of its public memory — is

a good example of this, as Henry Rousso has shown in a remarkable and path-break-
ing book.^' There is no need here to go into the wealth of detail he offers about the
phases of repression and activation of Vichyite memory or about the propagation
of what he calls "the Vichy syndrome." It will suffice to note the overall pattern of

evolution, especially the turning point that occurred in the 1970s, before moving on
 Vichy 197

to consider the change in themes and perspectives as well as the issues that have been
forgotten or obscured even as others were remembered.
When the war ended, Vichy was discredited, and along with it all the various fac-
tions of a right wing that was summarily identified with the regime. The trial of its

leaders, the execution of Laval, the imprisonment of Petain (in deference to the spe-
cial status he enjoyed in the minds of many Frenchmen, a status that, as a result of
this decision, he would go on enjoying) made it clear how the general public had
chosen to remember the recent past. There were two main charges against the for-
mer head of state: that of having conspired against the Republic, culminating in the
vote to transfer full power to Petain on July lo, 1940; and that of intelligence with
the enemy, since the policy of collaboration had been adopted in what was officially

still wartime, the armistice having simply called a halt to armed hostilities.

A complex history was reduced to a basic scenario — an underground conspir-

acy, treason —whose one advantage was to limit the number of those responsible.

Many people had reason to be pleased with an interpretation that defined Vichy
exclusively in terms of the armistice and the July 10 vote. The left stressed the lat-

ter theme, as well as its continuation in the National Revolution. De Gaulle con-
centrated on the armistice: as a government Vichy was "null and void," and it had
failed to mislead the French people, who had formed a united front in resistance to

the Germans.
As the war receded into the past, French concerns turned to other matters. New
political differences arose to obscure the old ones, laying the groundwork for the
amnesties of 195 1— 1953. Formerly prominent figures not scared off by Vichy found
their way back into government thanks to Cold War anti-Communism. Even de
Gaulle was not averse to taking part in this effort at rehabilitation.^^ Meanwhile,
Petainists joined together after the marshal's death to defend his memory, appeal the
verdict in his trial, and win permission to transfer his ashes to Verdun: the hero of
World War I, it was hoped, would redeem the head of state judged guilty of injur-
ing his nation.

In the first half of the 1950s the resistants were no longer alone on the political

scene, nor did they enjoy the same unquestioning prestige as in the immediate after-

math of battle. But the Resistance itself remained a central reference that could not
simply be tossed aside. De Gaulle's return to power gave it a second life. Gaullist
rhetoric lent authority to an image of France as "Free France," a France from which
a handful of traitors had excluded themselves only to receive their just deserts at the
Liberation. France, Resistance, de Gaulle: together these three magic words substi-

tuted a glorious, mythic past for a complex, shifting, and divided one.

The myth, however, was already dying. De Gaulle's departure from power in

1969 and his death the following year led directly and indirectly to a major change
in the public's memory of Vichy. With the general gone from the scene, it was in a
198 PHILLIPE BURRIN

sense possible for Vichy to die: not just the interpretation of Vichy that Gaullism had
sustained but the universe of values from which de Gaulle had drawn just as much
as Vichy. De Gaulle was steeped in the same late-nineteenth-century nationalism as
Petain; he, too, believed in an "eternal France," a France whose history was a series

of fortunes and misfortunes but which was only truly itself in times of grandeur.
Though nurtured on the same values as Petain, de Gaulle looked at the way
things stood in the summer of 1940 and drew the opposite conclusion. The
grandeur and honor of "France" required that priority be given to the pursuit of
combat rather than to the national revitalization that de Gaulle too believed was
indispensable, but not until after the victory had been won. De Gaulle did not share
Petain's belief in the redemptive value of suffering, or his mystique of the soil, with

its attendant ignorance of technology, or his dogmatic authoritarianism: he could

live with the Republic, provided that it remained strong. In other respects he shared
Petain's views: a substantialist view of the nation and a belief in the importance of

memory in shaping the future. In proposing his interpretation of the war and of
Vichy, de Gaulle hoped to rally the nation around a single, unifying memory.
In 1970, however, the mirror was shattered, as Henry Rousso so eloquently put

it. In part this was a reaction against the ideological straitjacket imposed by
Gaullism; in part it was a sequel to the protests of 1968; and in part it was simply a

reflection of generational change.Men and women born during the occupation or

immediately thereafter wanted to know more about their parents' world. And so the
past returned, heterogeneous and complex. Each person held a piece of the mirror,
adding his or her own reflection to a memory that had become kaleidoscopic. Even
those who had emerged from the war as losers had their word to add — the price to

be paid for a liberating freedom of speech.

The Gaullist memory of Vichy was a state-centered memory, centered around an
event thatin any case was not strictly speaking the work of Vichy at all, namely, the

armistice. Because of the armistice it found the Vichy regime guilty of dishonorable
conduct and treason. The National Revolution was in a sense set aside. After de

Gaulle's death, public memory of Vichy expanded to include the regime's internal

policy and the attitude of the French under the regime.

The film The Sorrow and the Pity is the perfect symbol of the change that was
under way. Shot in 1969 but banned from French television (until 1981) and not
shown in theaters until 1971, this documentary film presented a scathing view of the
occupation. The image of the French as a nation of resisters gave way to an image
of a nation in which many citizens remained passive while others compromised

themselves in relations of one kind or another with the occupying forces. In short,
it portrayed a France without grandeur, preoccupied with survival above all else.

The remainder of the decade witnessed the airing of a series of long-suppressed

versions of the past.^"* Children of collaborators such as Marie Chaix recounted

 Vichy 199

their experience. Novelists offered fragmentary images of the period. The con-
demned part of the past also returned in the form of a fascination, not always inno-

cent, with collaborationist intellectuals such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert
Brasillach. All of these things helped to shatter the Gaullist myth. Since then the
occupation has been subjected to a variety of interpretations, with due attention
paid to the diversity of individual situations. At times the pendulum has swung far

in the opposite direction: Louis Malle's film Lacombe Lucien, for example, offers a
stylized account of how one good-for-nothing loser became a collaborator.
In the meantime there was also a reawakening of Jewish memory, focusing on
Vichy's role in the persecution and deportation of Jews. In the immediate postwar
period the nation had bestowed its honors exclusively on those deported for politi-

cal reasons. No distinction was made between concentration camps and extermina-
tion camps. The public took little interest in the camps anyway, and many survivors
preferred to suffer in silence. For all these reasons, a veil was drawn over this aspect

of the past and remained in place for a long time. Even French historians were
unusually circumspect on the subject. Until recently the only available studies were
the work of either survivors or foreigners.

A published interview with Darquier de Pellepoix in 1978, followed by the

Faurisson affair the following year, focused public attention on the existence of peo-
ple who denied that the extermination of the Jews had taken place. The reaction to

this information, coupled with a television broadcast of the film Holocaust^ helped
to mobilize public opinion and galvanize the government. Additional impetus came
from the assumption of power by the Socialists in 1981 and the reemergence of an
extreme right behind Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the National Front; growing
pressure on the government to do something led finally to the arrest and trial of the
former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie.
Even more important, perhaps, was the initiation of investigations into the
actions of certain French officials under Vichy. Among the high officials accused of
involvement in the persecution of the Jews were Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon, and
Rene Bousquet. Leguay died in 1989 before being brought to trial; Bousquet was
assassinated by a lunatic in 1993; the case against Papon is still pending. Despite the
long delays in prosecution, these cases signal a fundamental change in attitude on
the part of the government.

In the past the authorities were careful to distinguish between French and
German responsibilities. The Vichy leaders who were tried and convicted and the
civil servants who carried out their orders ostensibly had no choice but to obey. But
World War II was not a war like other wars: it was a conflict in which elements of
the occupied nation joined forces with the occupying power to wage war on certain
common enemies. The persecution of the Jews, so central to current memories of
Vichy, has made it impossible to ignore certain truths about the past.
FIGURE 5.6 Hitler and Retain Shaldng Hands in a Field of Ruins (perhaps an unconscious echo of the hand-
shake at Montoire?); fresco in the Salle Wagram for the "anti-Bolshevik exhibition" of March 1942.

FIGURE 5.7 Departure of soldiers of the League of French Volunteers, who fought on the German side in

World War II. The soldiers salute the flag in the presence of German ambassador Otto Abetz, September 1941.
 Vichy 201

As a result, Vichy can no longer be seen as just Petain and Laval and a handful of
Parisian collabos. It was also a bureaucracy that went about its business "normally,"

drafting, commenting on, and enforcing the Jewish statute. And it was a population
whose attitude was shot through with ambivalence, in partial (active or passive)

agreement with certain aspects of the regime. Few French people desired or
approved the deportation of the Jews, yet many acclaimed Petain, who discrimi-

nated against the Jews and delivered some to the Germans.

Such critical scrutiny of the past can have the effect of driving judgment to the
opposite extreme. As has been the case with Italian Fascism, Vichy, long seen as a

diversion from the main stream of French history, has lately been transformed into

the most authentic expression of that history,^^ and fascism, long said to be alien to

France and its democratic traditions, has been portrayed as a quintessentially

French invention.
Vichy is today of more topical interest than at any time since the Liberation. The
main reason for this obviously has to do with the existence of the National Front,
whose recent successes have focused attention on Vichy as a regime of xenophobia
and exclusion.
Paradoxically, the Front's leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, cannot make any public
appeal to memory. He cannot invoke Vichy or Petain as models unless he wants to
limit his party's base to a small group of nostalgic reactionaries, most of whom
already back him. He is therefore obliged to adopt a strategy of forgetfulness, or
else, when there is no other option, to hide behind word-play or minimize the grav-
ity of the past. In either case his adversaries are naturally inclined to raise the issue
of the past in order to shed light on the present.

Since the Liberation the memory of Vichy has remained a dark spot in French his-

tory, even as perspectives and emphases have changed. Today Vichy is remem-
bered, and reviled, more for its repression and persecution of individuals and
minorities than for having signed the armistice. Collaboration with the Germans is

now a less serious charge than cooperation with the Nazis and contributing to their

ideological war. We have gone, in a sense, from a regime guilty of harming a col-
lective person, "France," to a regime guilty of infringing the rights of man.
Although the outlook has changed, the old view shares certain features with
the new. Both emphasize certain aspects of Vichy (armistice, repression, persecu-
tion) while overlooking or ignoring the radical Utopia that was at the heart of
Petain's project.

The Gaullist view minimized the importance of this aspect of Vichy in order to
promote its own version of the past: that of a France reinvigorated by struggle and
once again on the path to greatness. Today's view, fostered in part by the discredit
now attaching to the great ideologies of the past and by a certain widespread rela-
202 PHILLIPE BURRIN

tivism, neglects Vichy's Utopian program because it no

longer makes sense to people brought up in an urban-
ized, individualistic society (and that includes the sup-

porters of the National Front, with the possible exclu-

sion of its Petainist fringe). How can we understand the
memory that inspired the Vichy program when its

social underpinning has disappeared? All that remains

is an old-fashioned and rather exotic image of a ruralist

regime, capable only of provoking smiles or sarcasm.

Both views portray Vichy as a regime without roots
or origins, a monolith whose crimes are ticked off and
denounced but that seems to have come from nowhere,
to have fallen out of the sky. It is worth remembering,
MENSONGE therefore, that this authoritarian regime grew out of
je hais... les mensonges
the Third Republic, that it was a product of the crisis
qui vous ont fait tant de mal of democratic values in the 1930s as much as of the
Ph.PtJMN
shock of defeat.
The evolution of French society has made Vichy's
project obsolete and consigned it to oblivion. The col-
FIGURE 5.8 "Lie," from the educational card game
lapse of nationalism and progress toward European
Life's Trumps, circa 1941. The card reads: "Lie: I

hate. ..the lies that have done you so much harm. unity have made the armistice less plausible as the pri-
Philippe Retain." mary count in the indictment of the regime. It is

unlikely that a similar fate will befall the themes that

are currently at the center of public memories of Vichy, for those touch on the fun-

damental principles of democracy, the dignity of man and his imprescriptible rights.
The memory of Vichy is therefore likely to live on as long as democracy lives. Its

critical value will be that much greater if we heed the lesson it teaches: that the most
dangerous threat to democracy is that which comes from loss of confidence in itself.
FIGURE 6.0 Wall poster from a 1965 campaign, photographed by Chris Marker.
 —

CHAPTER 6

Gaullists and Communists

Pierre Nora

The Work of Time

"It's either us, the Communists, or nothing." Malraux's celebrated remark at the

national convention of the nascent GauUist party, Rassemblement du Peuple

Fran9ais (R.P.F.), in 1949 a year in which it was the "nothing" that made the dif-
ference — has survived many ups and downs. Looking back, however, the two polit-
ical forces that dominated French political life with their polarizing power from the
Liberation to the mid-1970s have not enjoyed the same fate. The liquidation of
Communism has been accompanied by a retrospective curse, a demonization,
whereas Gaullism, its influence similarly eroded, has been wreathed in the sacred
aura surrounding its founder.
The change has been prodigious. For anyone wishing to explore how, over time,
the clash of Communism and Gaullism has turned into a lieu de memoire, it is

impossible not to notice the magnitude of the change that has occurred in less than
twenty years: the moment of truth — perhaps only a provisional one —came in 1989

and 1990, when the historical collapse of Communism nearly coincided with the
centenary of Charles de Gaulle 's birth, which also became the occasion of his his-
torical consecration. The negative has been flipped not once but twice, however: the
price paid for the general's canonization was that his personal image has been stood
on its head.
This is how things stand: according to all the polls, the statesman who, during his
lifetime, was more hotly contested than any other has become, within twenty years
of his death, the indubitable champion of French national memory. ' The man who
divided the nation more than any other has been transformed into the ultimate sym-
bol of unity and cohesion. The man of the coup d'etat permanent is remembered as
2o6 PIERRE NORA

the founder of the most universally approved French institutions of the past two
centuries. The general whom many people suspected of harboring Boulangist
imperialist pretensions now tops Victor Hugo, Jules Ferry, and Georges
Clemenceau among the pantheon of republican heroes. The apostle of nineteenth-
century nationalism and the man most hostile to a supranational European organi-
zation is hailed as the most skilled of artisans in the construction of Europe. The
spiritual contemporary of Barres and Peguy has become the visionary who foresaw
the twenty-first century. Vhomme de la difference, the glacial, taciturn commander,
has become, thanks to the media —owing to the sympathy induced by caricature and
the power of endless commentary— the cliche most easily digested by the popular

imagination: le grand Charles, our national Asterix and Eiffel Tower. Meanwhile,
Communism, only yesterday the future of the world and promise of a brighter
tomorrow, and Stalinism, an insult worn as a badge of honor, an ideology experi-
enced by its apostles as the soul of human warmth if not the milk of human kind-
ness, today stands accused by its former champions of bureaucratic and totalitarian

atrocities, of responsibility for the Gulag, of falsehood and perversity. Even if de

Gaulle never entirely freed himself from classical authoritarian nationalism, no one
today would interpret Gaullism in such terms: the phenomenon is now seen as hav-
ing had the amplitude the general wished it to have. Nor would anyone today inter-

pret Communism as a radical form of humanism temporarily gone astray, a charac-

terization that survived even Solzhenitsyn's seemingly devastating critique and that

once seemed ineradicable. Today the more common comparison is with Nazism,
and in the hands of some writers Nazism seems almost the lesser of the two evils,

for it at least did not hide behind the mask of liberating Marxism or order armored
columns to roll beneath doves of peace. In both cases memory has effaced the gritty
reality of history. The Communist credo has become a mystery, even — perhaps
especially — to those who once believed in it and cannot help trying to understand
why, while anti-Gaullists feel a retrospective need to justify themselves.^

This outcome is all the more surprising in that, viewed globally. Communism is
undoubtedly the more substantial phenomenon, the one less bound up with local

circumstances and an exceptional personality, the one more oriented toward the
future and more saturated with history, in logic and in reason, in space and in time.
Communism was a secular eschatology that entailed its own politics, morality, phi-

losophy, science, aesthetics, way of life, and everyday behavior; and it was a praxis
equipped with its Bible (Marx, Engels, Lenin), its Sacred History (that of the party),
its Promised Land (worldwide revolution), and its Chosen People (the proletariat).

How can one compare the grandeur of all this to Gaullism, which from the outset
was afflicted with a narrow, backward-looking nationalism and by definition bound
up with a purely individual political adventure.'' What one can compare and contrast
is that which, from a political point of view, de Gaulle and the French Communist
 Gaullists and Communists 207

Party (P.C.F.) shared in the form of intimate negative polarities: the lively vicissi-
tudes of their confrontations, their duel and duet, in which both figured as confed-
erates and accomplices.^ One can also compare the aversion that each side felt

toward the other: for the Communists the general with the particule could, at vari-

ous times, be nothing other than a reactionary, a dictator, or a potential fascist,

whereas for the champion of nationalism the Communists could only be

"Moscowteers," separatists, or totalitarians. Yet between the two adversaries there
was also a profound kinship, born of sharing the most deeply rooted traits of French
political culture and tradition: a Jacobin patriotism, a haughty nationalism, a heroic

and sacrificial voluntarism, a sense of the state, an understanding of the tragic in

history, and a shared hostility to American modernity and the world of capitalism
and cash. As to weight of historical memory and intensity of hope for the future,

one cannot compare a great secular religion of the democratic age, which infused
even primitive societies with the dynamic of class struggle and whose church, the
French Communist Party, the French Section of the Communist International,
envisioned its work as part of a worldwide strategy, with a simple "idea of France"
and its man who embodied it. Yet the
"rank," an idea destined to disappear with the
Communist idea, that organic totality, has, despite the survival of a rump party,
evaporated so completely that the rich memories once associated with it now seem
comparatively artificial and meager, whereas GauUism, completely dissociated
from the political coalition that still lays claim to the name, has, through the mira-
cle of de Gaulle, insinuated its memory deep into French consciousness, there elic-

iting the most profound echoes and so becoming the central reference point of
France 's present-day collective and national memory, at once an indelible mark and
an unavoidable influence.
How much further will this divergence go.'^ Will the future confirm today's inter-
pretation or point up the need for a new one.'' Will the image of de Gaulle shrink to
less invasive proportions, or will it survive in history and legend as the last embod-
iment of a grandeur forever lost.'' Will something new emerge from the purgatory
in which the Communist saga has ended, or will Communism be consigned to the
eternal damnation of the century's great black hole.'' If it is impossible to answer
these questions, it is also impossible to avoid them. Indeed, they dictate the

approach that I will take in the remainder of this essay. Before proceeding, however,
it is important that we be clear about different possible levels of analysis.

To speak of GauUist or Communist memory, or of Communism and GauUism

as lieux de memoire, is to speak of several things at once. First, there are the memo-
ries that the two movements have left behind them, which we have just surveyed in

the broadest of terms but whose detailed traces remain to be elucidated.'' There is

the intertwined history of these two major political forces, with their reciprocal
strategies, their mirror images, their parallel lives, and their intersecting romances,
208 PIERRE NORA

whose endless vicissitudes form the subject of a political history that has for the

most part been told, and quite well told at that; this will concern us only indirectly
here. Yet there is also a very different aspect of the question: both political phe-

nomena were, as it happens, in large part based on memory. Memory, that is, was an
important dimension of the identity of each. It played a role, it occupied a place in
the orchestration of both movements, far greater than in any other political groups
or movements. Both fed on history. Both were scrupulously careful about their own
histories. Both played powerfully on memory. Hence one can and should explore
both Gaullist and Communist memories in all their wealth and distinctive individu-
ality. Each has its own structure and baggage, its own technique and tonality, its own
symbolism, didactic apparatus, rituals, instruments, and history.^ These are not the
things that chiefly interest us here, however. Most important of all, there is the fact

that both GauUism and Communism were, in themselves, phenomena of memory.

They derive their very existence from memory. Both de Gaulle and the French
Communist Party drew their appeal and power to mobilize not so much from their
ideological coherence, the number of their supporters, or their relation to power as

from the historical legitimacy they claimed to embody, from their ability to repre-
sent France, all of France, the true France. Both were able to synthesize the two
major themes around which the history of contemporary France has been built:

Nation and Revolution. We thus have two versions of national legitimacy, two syn-
cretic, rival, and complementary visions of France, whose opposition structures the
historical memory of contemporary France in an emotionally intense way, which
illustrates in particularly and perhaps ultimately striking fashion how politics in

France is driven by the invocation of great memories and the emotional manipula-
tion of the past. While other factors may contribute to the same end, it is for this

reason and in this sense that Gaullism and Communism constitute a lieu de memoire

in the strict sense.

The details are important, all the more so in that the two phenomena offer what is

probably a unique example of opposing trajectories in memory. A whole series of

circumstances and mediations had to intervene before the GauUian memory of
Gaullism could reassert itself and consolidate its position in terms of celebration.

The key element was the order of presidential successions, whose subtle and unex-

pected influence greatly favored the gradual amplification of the last strong image
of French national identity: first came Georges Pompidou, the Louis-Philippard

banker and industrialist, the closest in time to de Gaulle but the most remote in
spirit; next was Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the young technocratic economist who
hoped to lower the level of tension in the country but whose image never came into
clear focus and failed to resonate in the lives of ordinary Frenchmen; and finally
Frangois Mitterrand, de Gaulle's most implacable adversary yet the man actually
 —
Gaullists and Communists 209

most responsible for fixing his image. First, the fact that the general's most persis-

tent detractor adopted the very institutions that de Gaulle had created and that those
institutions were put to the test by the experience of "cohabitation" (in which a

right-wing prime minister and legislature held power under a left-wing president)

absolved them of any suspicion of partisan bias and bestowed on them the anoint-
ing of the nation: Caesar and Sulla became Solon.'' Second, Fran9ois Mitterrand
himself became the artisan of a mirror-image consecration, joining his defunct rival

in one of those summit dialogues filled with political and literary allusions of which
the French are so fond, a dialogue implicit in the very notion of a two-party system
and perfect for all sorts of exercises in symmetry.^ Above all, Mitterrand's work
made it possible and legitimate for the left to offer de Gaulle its posthumous sup-
port, which was the most important —and striking — element in the establishment of
the general's image.' "Have we all become Gaullists.''" Max Gallo asked even before
the left came to power (at which time Gallo became President Mitterrand's official

spokesman)."' This major shift of opinion was reinforced by another, which also
contributed significantly to recentering the general's image. Even as the collapse of
proletarian internationalism revitalized the national idea, bestowing new youth on
what now seemed to be the old law of the world, the rebirth in France of a nation-
alism of the extreme right, which had been thought dead since the end of World
War II, purged as if by contrast Gaullian nationalism of its more caricatural traits,

thus opening it up, making it more patriotic, and investing it with ecumenical fea-
tures sufficiently undifferentiated to allow all political families and sensibilities

from Barres to Peguy, from Michelet to Renan — to recognize themselves, and

transforming Gaullism into a banner that could be honorably invoked in what was
all in all a rather idealized fashion entailing no particular commitment. Meanwhile,
the reduction of the revolutionary ethic to the philosophy of the rights of man,
which would be the central focus of the bicentennial of 1789, made it possible to

inflate the general's image with the whole legacy of the French Revolution. Thus
the base of Gaullian memory was expanded in three directions: from individual
adventure to constitutional inscription, from right to left, and from narrow nation-
alism to republican ecumenicism. This triple transgression of de Gaulle's natural

historical space was intelligently managed by the high priests of a memory that was
launched by the general himself' ' and paradoxically served by the right turn taken
by his purely political heirs, thus rescuing the general from the confines of partisan
opinion to place him very soon at the center of the national mythology.
Very soon indeed: for while the mythologization of General de Gaulle was a

long-term affair, an integral part of a history that began when he first arrived on
the public scene, it is clear in retrospect that his present image first crystallized and
took hold in the eighteen months that elapsed between the general's repudiation by
French voters in the referendum of April 28, 1969, and the worldwide apotheosis
2IO PIERRE NORA

afforded by his funeral on November 12, 1970.'^ The orchestration of themes and
acts was nothing less than magical. First there was the Retirement, a major theme
modulated in three ways: in its historical and political significance, from the laconic
communique of April 28 ("I am relinquishing my functions as President of the
Republic. This decision takes effect today at noon.") to the no less laconic final
message ("I shall say no more."); in its private significance, with the premortal

burial at La Boisserie, which had already become the pilgrimage site for close

friends and superloyal supporters of the felled "oak" {Les Chines qu'on abat —
"Felled Oaks" —was the title of a book that Malraux wrote about the general in

this period); and finally, in its imaginative and quasi-metaphysical significance, in

the retreat within the retreat, into that abyss, the Elsenor of Connemara, from
which came the images, soon flashed around the world, of de Gaulle as mournful
menhir. Then came the thundering publication of the first volume of the Memoires
d'espoir: Le renouveau, which sold 175,000 copies in three days (October 7—10,
1970), a fabulous success. And then, one month later, death, in the midst of this
success and fraught with symbolism, for the end came almost instantaneously, as if

a still-living saint had been snatched from earth by the hand of God. Finally, in

accordance with wishes expressed in the general's will, drawn up in 1952, hence
before his return to power, he was given two solemn funerals: one at Notre-Dame
in Paris, with an empty coffin around which gathered leaders of all the world's

nations except, for the greater glory of de Gaulle, the South Africa of apartheid
and the Greece of the putschist colonels; the other at Colombey, with "the parish,

the family, the Order; a knight's funeral."'^ It was thus a double ceremony, both
intimate and global,''* and topped off by the spontaneous homage of the anony-

mous crowd that gathered in the rain on the Champs-Elysees and all night long
marched up the avenue where he had marched with another crowd on the luminous

twenty-sixth day of August 1944. There, through an interplay of accident and will,
at the intersection of presence and absence, between what was already no longer
life but not yet death, there was enacted a symbolic sequence, an extraordinary the-
ater of memory, whose miraculous plotting and precise gestural language seemed,

though no one at the time was fully conscious of it, almost a counterpoint to that
other celebrated staging of memory, the emotional explosion of May 1968. There
one had had symbolic barricades reminiscent of the Paris of 1848 and the
Commune, the black flags of anarchism mingled with the red flags of revolution,

soon followed by the Grenelle Accords, which mimicked the accords between the
Matignon and the Popular Front; one saw Communist memory wrested away from
the high priests of Communism by the youthful outpouring, the spontaneous
uprising of young students and workers. Here one had the great escape of the soli-

tary man, the reemergence of another de Gaulle, forgotten during ten years in

power: the rebel of June 18, the man who had crossed the desert alone, the author 1
 1

Gaullists and Communists 21

of the Memoires de guerre, to whom time had offered, in the end, a chance to
recover his true destiny.
This triumph of memory stands in striking contrast to the Calvary the
Communists were forced to endure. The first thunderclap sounded with the
Khrushchev Report to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in
February of 1956, in the wake of the acknowledgment of the Yugoslavian schism
and on the eve of the crushing of revolt in Hungary by Soviet tanks. To be sure,

there had been no shortage of denunciations of official memory or analyses of its

manipulations before that date. But for the first time Stalin's "crimes" and "errors"
were attacked in the most official forum of the Communist hierarchy, and once
Pandora's box was opened it could never again be closed. The spell was broken;
Communist memory would never be the same. Indeed, Khrushchev's efforts to

limit the indictment to the "cult of personality" would prove all the more damaging
in France because the Stalinism of French Communist leader Maurice Thorez had
always conceived of and presented itself as the perfected form of Marxism-
Leninism. By striking at the keystone, the attack thus threatened to bring down the

whole edifice. The idea that democratic centralism was inherently infallible in prac-
tice was permanently discredited. Faced with this central menace to the integrity of
its memory, the party's official reaction was typical —and fatal. There was never
any candid concession or public recantation or expiatory denial which might have
threatened the core of the party's identity. Yet this was a world in which words had
double and triple meanings, in which all language was coded; and beyond all the

vociferous denials and protests of candor and unbroken continuity there were insid-
ious shifts, structures that crumbled only to be shored up at once, and adjustments
calculated to the last millimeter; the more intolerable rhetoric was gradually toned
down, while certain new key words were surreptitiously introduced — it was a tried

and true formula. The shock of 1956 would trigger a great diaspora, especially
among intellectuals, which soon gave historical visibility to the category of "ex-
members" of the Communist Party, but meanwhile the party would condemn itself

for the next twenty years to hiding behind the formula of the "so-called report
attributed to Comrade Khrushchev." It was not until 1977, at the height of the

Union de la Gauche (or Socialist-Communist alliance around a Common Program)

and the flirtation with Eurocommunism, in the context of a Twenty-Second
Congress dedicated to the theme of a sham modernization of the party, and in the

wake of a series of dark and ambiguous polemics initiated by Jean Ellenstein in Le

Monde and by the television broadcast of the iWm L'Aveu, that the politburo of the

P.C.F. published in L'Humanite of January 13 one of those long, labored explana-

tory communiques that can be deciphered only by initiates: "In the course of prepa-
rations for the Fourteenth Congress of the French Communist Party [immediately
after the Khrushchev Report], in order to allow all militants to participate usefully
212 PIERRE NORA

in discussions of the problems raised by Comrade Khrushchev's report, the polit-

buro asked the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for

the text of that report, whose contents were known to the members of certain
Communist and workers' parties." Curtain. The shift from Georges Marchais's
admission of "delays" in the reevaluation of "certain theoretical positions" in the
period 1955— 1960 to the general theory of "the complex and contradictory" so
prominent in the explanation of what Roger Martelli, party historian and Central
Committee member, finally in 1982 termed a "strategic blockage," leaves the heart

of the matter untouched.'^ It was simply not in the party's nature to confront its past
head on.
The Stalinist grip on the apparatus had the effect of compromising the funda-
mental heritage to the point where it was ultimately claimed or challenged by oth-

ers, who had freed themselves from Stalinist hegemony, and who threw the party
onto the defensive and attacked it from two angles: socialists and social-democrats
worked hard to escape Communist attempts to discredit them, while the ultra-left

deprived the party of its monopoly of the revolutionary tradition and, with help

from the Sino-Soviet split, Cuba, and the Algerian War, reinvested the legacy in

Maoism and third-worldism, only to end up in the nebulous world of gauchisme with
its many groupuscules and sects. Thus there was a vast shift of memory along two
fronts. Before any socialist renaissance would be possible, and before the non-
Communist left could, as the idea of revolution lost its hold on men's minds, cleanse
itself of the endless allegations of "treason" that grew out of a Leninist interpreta-
tion of history, a great cultural mutation had to take place. It came about — a devel-

opment that I can do no more than evoke here — as a result of a conjunction, in the

1970s, of Catholic with Marxist doctrine. With the Second Vatican Council the
Church had begun to change its direction, and for the first time the hierarchy was
prepared to enter into a "dialogue" with workers' hopes. Meanwhile, a multiform
Marxism had flowered on the ruins of Leninist orthodoxy. It drew on the refur-

bished tradition of Jaures and Blum as reinvigorated by Gramsci to become, in a

vague and diffuse way, the all-purpose reference of French-style socialism, which it
remained until the political break with the Communists in 1983 (and even then it was
never officially repudiated).'^ On the other front, among gauchiste, Trotskyite, and

libertarian militants, a whole range of revolutionary moments once overshadowed

by Leninist Bolshevism was systematically revisited both before and after 1968:

from the sailors of Kronstadt to the Spartacist leagues, from Makhno to the work-
ers' councils to the anarchists of the Spanish C.N.T., old movements were brought
to light. The heroes and casualties of the "unknown revolution" were rehabilitated
the better to discredit the monolithic official party history.^*' Indeed, that monolithic

official history was itself so dull, so inconsistent, and so "revisionist" that propo-
nents of a return to a more uncompromising orthodoxy advocated a rereading of
 Gaullists and Communists 213

the classics of Bolshevism, such as the lectures that Andre Ferrat had delivered to

the cadres of 1930,^' which for a long time remained the only history of the French
Communist Party prior to the Popular Front.^^ Indeed, Communism's darker mem-
ory had become almost its only memory. It had lost across the board, to the point
where it was jeered, misused, and caricatured even by its most vigilant guardians.

L'Humanite had to have come a long way from the heroic days of yore to reach the

point where, on the final day of the Mundial, it could deride once-sacred values by
running this four-column headline: "This is the final struggle!"

This contradictory evolution has yielded two exemplary types of historical mem-
ory, which the contemporary historian rarely has the opportunity to study in such

crystalline purity: a mythified memory and a historicized memory.

In the case of Gaullism, it is as if posterity, generally implacable, not only rati-

fied an individual's policy and intention with respect to memory,^^ subscribing with
overwhelming approval to the image that de Gaulle had deliberately forged for him-
self, but also seized upon certain elements of that image to extend it, illuminate it,

enrich it with new material, and allow it to respond to posterity's needs by con-

I
structing an autonomous lieu de memoire. With each new commemoration^'' and
round of poUs,^^ with each new wave of books,^"" collection of photographs,^^ and
television series,^^ the personage was transformed. It was stylized by a gradual

obliteration of memorially dubious periods: the R.P.F., May 1958, the Algerian
War, May 1968. It was reduced to a stereotype by the addition of features not found

in the initial version: good father, good son, good husband, good Christian. It was
academicized as a subject for examinations^' and institutionalized by the work of the
Institut Charles-de-Gaulle. Just as the publication of Marcel Proust's Contre

Sainte-Beuve and Jean i'anreKz/ provided background for the meteoric appearance of
A la recherche du temps perdu, so the first of twelve volumes of Lettres, notes et car-

nets revealed a de Gaulle before de Gaulle, a man both prepared and not prepared
for the striking entrance of June 18, 1940, while also illuminating the carefully hid-
den part of the edifice, the private man.^' One sign and consequence of the rising

power of the mythic figure is the regular failure of counter-memory offensives pro-
pelled by periodic revivals of the Algerian affair or the question of mass support for
Vichy. The personage has assumed the dimensions of a Father of the French, who
has not only taken his place in the portrait gallery of great ancestors but also been
brought closer to home by humor, by the intimacy of derision, which Jean-Pierre
Rioux felicitously calls the "privatization of fervor." In 1978, Claude Mauriac wrote
a book filially entitled Aimer de Gaulle^^ and twelve years later the now fraternal

Regis Debray produced A demain de Gaulle?^

Yet despite the nearly 3,000 books that have been written about him (more than
about any other figure in the history of France, including Napoleon), de Gaulle has
214 PIERRE NORA

not yet entered his historiographic age; he may even have escaped it altogether.^'' In
all this enormous outpouring of books, most of them written by eyewitnesses, jour-
nalists, and political scientists, how many can really claim to be historical?^^ How,
moreover, can one write the history of a myth without also writing the history of a
counter-myth?^*^ Nearly all the historians who have looked at some aspect of
GauUism or of the general's activity would probably concede that the case can be

argued two ways. On every major issue, particularly since 1958, de Gaulle's
achievement is subject to contradictory interpretations and judgments, starting with
the return to power and the war in Algeria, but including as well Germany and
Europe, the Constitution, France 's attitude toward the United States, and even de
Gaulle as writer. Even the sweeping general assessments vary between extremes:
from the activist realist that Francois GogueP^ sees in de Gaulle to the "artist of his-

tory" first brought to our attention by Stanley and Inge Hoffmann.^^ A historical

treatment cannot consist in contrasting one de Gaulle with another, truer de Gaulle
but mustsomehow place the undecidable ambiguity at the center of each historical
problem. Meanwhile, among the possible interpretations, collective memory has
chosen as the general would have wished, and that must be the starting point for the
historian's work. Whatever historians do, they are caught in a fundamental
dilemma: either they grant, from the outset, the Gaullist phenomenon and the per-
sonage of the general the status of absolute exceptionality that de Gaulle claimed
for himself, and thus abandon the essential, which for the historian is to free himself

from the grip of that in his subject which is still that subject speaking through him;
or they must refuse that exceptionality at the risk of missing what is essential, which
consists precisely in what was exceptional about Gaullism and de Gaulle. The best
biographers — Jean Lacouture in particular^^ —have not avoided this dilemma, for
they begin by interpreting de Gaulle in terms of categories and criteria by which he
himself would have wished to be judged: those of the providential hero, the
Lancelot rising to every challenge. Once that crucial concession is made, one can
introduce all the qualifications and nuances one wants and still miss what for histo-
rians ought to be the central question: the personage is judged by self-imposed
norms. It is the subject who dictates the rules of the game, as in a painting by La
Tour or Vermeer, in which the light that seems to illuminate the scene comes from
within the scene itself. This is not "ego history" but "echo history," which prolifer-
ates and branches out from a fundamental central source, developing ever more
refined and ramified genres that invoke each other's works in a perpetual round, in
which each witness calls forth a counter-witness and a corroborating witness, in
which official commentary elicits private confidences, and in which the endless
round of daily news reports calls for a periodic overview. The hierarchy of prox-
imities obliges some to speak and others no less eloquently to hold their tongues.
The uniqueness of the model elicits portraits and psychological analyses; its nobil-
 Gaullists and Communists 215

ity sets the noblest of pens to paper, its solemnity is a goad to caricature and to the
publication of private witticisms, and its foreignness attracts the foreign eye: the

escalation feeds on itself. Gaullology has its laws and its rhythms, its high priests
and its choirboys; it even has its historians. Yet even then the history of Gaullism
and de Gaulle can only be written from within a history itself "Gaullized" or
"Gaullified." Here, then, is tangible proof that, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, historical work is not always possible.
By contrast, it was on the terrain of history, and history of the most critical kind,

history devoted to the establishment and comparison of facts, that Communist

memory was attacked, undermined from within and without, and finally

destroyed."*' This was sensitive terrain, all the more sensitive in that the Communist
Party had always abused history for strategic purposes. As a Marxist party, how
could it avoid reverting to historical explanation at every turn.'^ "History teaches us
that...." As a people 's party, a proletarian party, how could it deny the justice of edu-
cating memory on the broadest possible scale, through party primary schools, pro-

paganda publishers, memoirs of revolutionaries, and constant celebration of work-

ing-class struggles and of clandestine attacks on the Nazi invaders — a deluge of edi-

fying literature.'* Surveys have even shown that, at comparable levels of education.
Communists know more history than non-Communists. In late 1938 the party

appointed an official historical commission, and it was never reluctant to grace its

official podiums with historians. What is more, no other party was so conscientious
about its own historical portrayal, about the representation of its own history. No
other party imposed the duty of remembering as such a key element of its identity.

But Communist history was a very special kind of history, a "memory-history" with
well-worn and regulated mechanisms.''^ Until the early 1970s there was no profes-
sional party historian. Whatever self-styled historical materials were produced came
exclusively from party officials, foremost among whom was the nonpareil Maurice

Thorez, "son of the people." The party's history was therefore purely official and
politicized. Even when it did not emanate directly from party authorities or profes-
sional historians whom the party discredited by calling upon them to produce pro-
paganda instruments (like La Virite. sur 1939, published by Jean Gacon and Jean
Bouvier in 1954), it remained an "institutional expression," written with the "party
spirit" in mind, a spirit still explicitly invoked in 1964 by those who contributed the
preface to the first, long-awaited, and very disappointing textbook Histoire du Parti
Communist Frangais^^: "The basic principle of this study is the party spirit in science,
this being the only approach that combines vigor with scientific honesty." It was a
history that was all the more pedantic for being a close imitation of a model imposed
from without, for the P.C.F. never looked back without keeping one eye fixed on a
history that was not its own, whose standard and tone were set as early as 1937 by the
celebrated History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) It was .
2l6 PIERRE NORA

essentially an interpretive, adaptive history, whose emphatic and peremptory

rhetoric reflected an intrinsically ahistorical internal structure. It was also a totally

linear and positive history, invariably a matter of going, as any number of titles ham-
mered home, "From A to B.'"''' It was a history of fixed elements and roles assigned
in advance, with the imperialist bourgeoisie on one side, the heroic party of the
working class, the true incarnation of the repudiated fatherland, on the other. This
structure was so rigid and invariable that Georges Lavau went so far as to analyze it

in much the same terms as Vladimir Propp analyzed folk tales. Even today some fine
specimens crop up from time to time, the last remaining fossils of a particular style

of history writing that Communists have slowly been obliged to abandon.

For the past twenty years, in fact, the party has had to deal with having its own
memory thrown back in its face as that memory has been dismantled piece by piece
in a series of assaults, each more lethal than last. In these sapper attacks, historians
have drawn on the work of memoir writers — in some cases the historians and mem-
oirists are one and the same. Firsthand accounts, reminiscences, and autobiographies
of former party officials and ordinary activists have become a genre to be studied as

such, a rich and diverse corpus of documents constantly replenished by the party

itself, which has acted as a kind of filter, a locus of memory unto itself, an instru-
ment through which Communism's official memory has been funneled into the
minds of individuals, where it shaped private memories in blissful indifference to

matters of truth or falsehood.''^ All in all the genre may have contributed more to the
endurance of Communism than to its decomposition, but there were some sensa-
tional shocks (such as Edgar Morin's Autocridque in 1958 and Artur London's Z!<4ve«
in 1968'"') as well as a steady flow of timely information for analysis by the experts.
All sorts of things found their way into this literature, beginning with the condi-
tions under which Communism was born.'*'' Then there was the personality of
Maurice Thorez.'*^ Above all there was the dark period from the German-Soviet Pact
of September 1939 to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which
raised the crucial issues of revolutionary defeatism and the date when party leaders
decided to join the Resistance.''^ No recess of memory went unexamined. The
Communists were forced to acknowledge the secret protocol added to the German-
Soviet Pact,^° the fabrication of a phantom issue of L'Humanite dated July 10, 1940,^'

the requests to the Propagandasstaffel to allow the party newspaper to resume pub-

lication, and the letter from Billoux to Petain asking that imprisoned Communists be
freed. All these were sore points that remained major issues within the leadership
for a long time.'^ Communist historians are still fighting pitched battles over them

today.^'* Annie Kriegel was the first historian to provide an overall framework for a

critical reevaluation of the party, and she has since been joined by a battalion of his-
torians whose ranks include members of the generations marked by the Algerian

War, 1968, and Union de la Gauche. Communists have been forced to respond to
 Gaullists and Communists 217

their work. Although the Central Committee, meeting in Argenteuil in 1966, issued

a timid proclamation that no official truth should be in contradiction with "actual

history," the gap has slowly widened between what Marie- Claire Lavabre and Denis
Peschanski have felicitously called "reference history," that is, the politics of the

past, and "substantive history," which has been treated in a relatively autonomous
way since 1970.^^ Once the "subject" of history, the party has now become an
"object" of history. The Manuel of 1964 was entirely controlled by the political
leadership. This had ceased to be true of Etudier le P.C.F. (1979) ox Le P.C.F., etapes
et problemes, igzo-i^jz (1981), two noteworthy publications by the Institut Maurice-
Thorez.^'' Even the professionals among Communist historians remained imbued
with a sense of the political issues at stake in historical research: as one has said,

"even a sincere refusal of an essentially justificatory history must not entail a simple

reversal of position that would induce the P.C.F. to quit a battleground important to

itself and to the ideological battle. "^^ This extends right up to the present day the
limits laid down by Georges Marchais just after the Twenty-Second Congress, when,
after stating that it was henceforth "unthinkable for us not to tell the truth on all sub-
jects," he extended an invitation to historians "to issue a judgment on our past behav-
ior" but then rendered that invitation rather Platonic by adding: "We are unanimous
in our belief that, in the main, the policy of our party from its foundation to the
Twenty-Second Congress has served the interests of socialism well."^^ However
attached historians may be to old issues, the battle is virtually over now, having lost

its polemical edge. Whereas Gaullist memory has taken the upper hand in the battle

with history, the history of Communism has defeated its memory.

The passage of time has thus created two diametrically opposed situations.
GauUism offers the strange case of a mythified historical memory, and even histor-

ical analysis that aims to be scientific and "objective" must somehow deal with a his-

tory that coexists with a myth and cannot be understood without it. Communism
offers the no less peculiar case of a fully historicized historical memory, to the point
where the memory is no longer intelligible unless reconstituted by history. Without
the history, the memory makes no sense. It was important to delineate these two
"ideal types" of memory before exploring, as we shall do next, the ways in which
they were parallel.

The Dual System of Memory

It began with exorcism and forgetting: the fact that GauUism and Communism are

"memories" as well as realities and necessarily twinned stems from the historical

dream-state that both existed to create and sustain. This is the fountain from which
springs the common capital that divides them, the inexhaustible foundational legit-

imacy that both derived from Free France and the Resistance.
2l8 PIERRE NORA

The Second World War was not only a military and diplomatic operation but
also an operation of memory. When it was over, France's shame had to be
cleansed, the unprecedented humiliation of what Marc Bloch called the "strange

defeat" and the trauma of national collapse had to be effaced, the general guilt of
the summer of 1940 and the weight of German oppression had to be laid to rest.

When Liberation came, the priorities were clear: a nation of wait-and-seers, pris-

oners, and finaglers had to be taught the lesson of its own heroism; a ravaged
country had to be made to believe that it had liberated itself, virtually unaided, by
virtue of the battle it waged inside and outside its borders; that country's "rank"
had to be restored by making sure it had a place in the councils of the conquerors;
it had to be persuaded, by means of a selective, controlled purge (epuration) of
collaborators, that apart from a small minority of misguided individuals and trai-

tors, the vast majority of Frenchmen had never wanted anything but what was best
for France. The pillars supporting the two fundamental myths were erected even
before the Paris insurrection was over. In an editorial published in the first issue

of L'Humanite after it resumed publication (August 24, 1944), Marcel Cachin,

referring to the German-Soviet Pact obliquely as "the event of 23 August 1939,"
set out to justify both the U.S.S.R.'s passivity and the patriotism of unjustly con-
demned Communists:

L'Humanite was shut down because it denounced Hitler, the traitors, and
those in favor of the Munich Accord. Bonnet promised the Germans that

L'Humanite would be shut down, and it was shut down.... France has heard
nothing but lies about the causes and circumstances of 23 August, the date
when the Soviet Union thwarted a plot hatched by the appeasers against it and
against peace.

The next day, August 25, 1944, General de Gaulle, speaking at the Hotel de Ville,
did not mention France 's "cherished and admirable allies" until nearly the end of

his speech:

Paris outraged! Paris crushed! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated

by itself, liberated by its people with the cooperation of the armies of France,
with the support and cooperation of all of France, of fighting France, of the
only France, of the true France, the eternal France.

Two concurrent versions of "resistantialism" were thus quickly put in place.^" De

Gaulle's version denied the Vichy episode and insisted on the continuity of repub-
lican legitimacy. Hence his reply to Georges Bidault, on the same day and in the

same place as the speech just quoted: "The Republic has never ceased to exist....

Why would I want to proclaim its existence.-*" De Gaulle 's theme of a "thirty years'
war" effectively obliterated the ideological content of the war while stressing its
 Gaullists and Communists 219

significance in national and military terms. The Gaullist version of events also min-

imized the importance of both the Communist-dominated internal Resistance and

the collaboration, which in its legal definition was limited to "intelligence avec I'en-

nemi," so as to exalt the unity of a combative, patriotic France. By contrast, the

Communist version attached primary importance to the clandestine struggle waged

on French soil, out of which came the myth of the "75,000 /Ki-zY/ej" (men and
women allegedly shot to death by the enemy); to the antifascist nature of the war
and of a victory won primarily through the efforts of the Red Army, hence of the

F.T.P. (the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, the principal Communist Resistance

group); and to the class combat implicit in that victory, which must now be carried
on and intensified "in the Resistance spirit" against all those who had betrayed
France. Over time these two versions gave rise to numerous variants, as details were
modified and adapted to new circumstances. They soon elicited fierce protests

within their own camps and fueled constant polemics: as late as 1964 passions ran

high among former Resistance members when it was decided to transform Jean
Moulin^' into a symbol of the Resistance by transferring his ashes to the
Pantheon.^^ Nevertheless, these two versions provided the basic themes of a col-
lective iconography whose mystique was continually reinforced by both academic
historiography and official commemoration. This iconography went virtually
unchallenged until the early 1970s. Once again 1968 marks a break with the past.

Over the past twenty years a once-solid illusion was blown to bits as France com-
pulsively and obsessively revisited the darker aspects of the war, every year adding

new ingredients to what Pascal Ory called retro-satanasP Yet its psychological and
institutional force can still be gauged by the magnitude of the furor unleashed by
the first challenges to the established view: the scandal stirred up by Patrick
Modiano's first novel. La Place de I'Etoile (1968), the polemics attending the publi-

cation of a French translation of Robert Paxton's Vichy France (1973), and the ten-

year ban on broadcasting the documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) on
French television.^
The compensatory mechanism and historical prestidigitation intrinsic to both
phenomena were by no means necessities of war. Regardless of whether one
stresses the realism of de Gaulle 's policies or his intensive use of myth, it remains
the case that in thirty years on the national scene de Gaulle's historical genius pre-

sumably consisted in cloaking the actual diminution of French power in the

rhetoric of grandeur. He transformed, as if by magic, the most crushing of French
military defeats into a form of victory. He made France forget that it had been

forced to lower its flag in Algeria by ushering it almost simultaneously into the
club of nuclear powers. He hid the new constraints of Atlantic dependency
behind a mystique of independence and an exploitation of populist anti-
Americanism. He compensated for the abrupt arrival of the third industrial revo-
220 PIERRE NORA

lution by an emotional appeal to eternal France, as if the French could confront

the harsh trivialities of capitalism only if one spoke to them in a more exalted lan-

guage. The old-fashioned illusionism may even have been the most charming
thing about the memory of de Gaulle. "France is herself only when she dreams,"
Malraux once said on de Gaulle 's behalf. This was an oracular way of saying that,
in the long relationship between de Gaulle and the French, "what the French will
be most enduringly grateful for is de Gaulle's having obtained for them the relief

of amnesia.'""^
Amnesia: the word may, on the other hand, seem incongruous when applied to

the action of the Communist Party, which always liked to see itself as closely

aligned with the realism of working-class struggle. The more we know and the

more we learn, however, the more clearly we can see that the phases of the struggle
in which Communist energies were most fully engaged — the Popular Front, the

Liberation, the Cold War —were in fact the times when the French Communist
Party learned, both in regard to its credibility in Moscow and its actual capacity to
influence events in France, the painful lesson of the limits of its power and so

resigned itself to impotence. A close look at the year 1947 is particularly revealing

in this respect.'''' With twenty-five percent of the vote, five ministers in the govern-

ment, its legend and its prestige at their zenith, "France's leading party" never

seemed more powerful or more menacing to the fragile new Fourth Republic. The
insurrectional strikes of November had truly set the regime tottering on its new
foundation. Yet from the dismissal of the Communist ministers in May to

Zhdanov's condemnation of the French party leadership in September for "parlia-

mentary cretinism," that year of endless turmoil, dominated by the "clandestine

conductor" {dixit Paul Ramadier), was in fact nothing but a series of disasters in

which the party repeatedly gave ground in every confrontation until it was forced
to admit publicly that it was undertaking a "strategic withdrawal." The Communist
Party never unleashed more of a storm than its congenitally cautious leadership
could handle. As a revolutionary party, it was forever obliged to await the coming
revolution, which was forever delayed, promised only to be postponed: the "objec-
tive conditions" were never right, and the leadership always chose to avoid real

risks in favor of holding on to what it had, falling back on its secure internal iden-
tity. The outcome was really determined at the Liberation, behind the scenes, and
historians have always wondered whether the party was not merely pretending to

want to play a role.*^^ It was then that the Communists lost the game once and for

all — to de Gaulle. Thereafter the party ensconced itself in a purely ideological con-
struction of reality — the general crisis of capitalism, the Soviet Union as agent of

peace against American imperialism, Gaullism as "a presidential regime oriented

toward personal dictatorship and opening the way to fascism," etc. —which forced
 Gaullists and Communists 221

it not only to speak a wooden language but to think and act in such wooden fashion
that its incessant harping on the same theoretical points, its repetitious aggressivity,

served only to divert attention from the past and surreptitiously erase it from mem-
ory. To what extent can we interpret French Stalinism's steadily increasing

demands, its verbal excesses and outrages, as admissions of its inability to accom-
modate itself to reality, the price to be paid for the historical hesitancy it felt obliged
to impose on its troops?
The compensatory mechanism did not work the same way in both cases, nor did
it have the same meaning. With de Gaulle, word was made action; he exalted the
poetry of legend over the prose of reality, France over those veaux, the French, his-
torical will over "inevitable consequences." Stories about de Gaulle ranged widely
in tone, from heroic narratives of the man prepared to face every maelstrom and
respond to every challenge to small, Ubuesque anecdotes about the general's pri-
vate life. Meanwhile, the P.C.F. worked to orchestrate forgetfulness; in this it was
helped for a time by a rapid and massive generational turnover in its membership.
For the Communists, the manipulation of memory was a technique of power and
an instrument of mobilization, away of hiding errors and changes in the party line,
a form of terror and intimidation, and a way of consolidating party identity by

forcing its members to forget. De Gaulle offered a projection with which all the
French were invited to identify: "Everybody was, is, or will be Gaullist." The
Communists offered a manipulation of the past that was binding only on those who
agreed to subject themselves to it. But — fatality in the one case, finality in the

other — ^both served the function of a historical exorcism, and this, far more than
their respective ideologies or political capabilities, explains why both proved so
attractive and powerful. In effect, this "counter-history," far more than the consis-
tency or persuasiveness of their answers to history's contingencies, accounts for the
success of both antagonists.

Two memories, then, both charismatic, combative, strategic, and associated with
referents from which they derive some of their transcendental gravity (la France, la

Revolution). Yet behind their affinities the two are so radically alien, so different in

their internal organization and existential economy, that one can easily oppose them
term by term. Communist memory is militant, anthropological, and sectarian;
Gaullist memory is contractual, symbolic, and ecumenical. One is open, the other
closed; one eternalized, the other immobilized.
If there is such a thing as a true memory, produced by physical and mental con-
ditioning of the entire individual, then Communist memory is it.*"^ French
Communism was a closed, self-sufficient world, with its local roots, its deeply
ingrained customs and souvenirs, its rites, its codes, its traditions, its symbols, its

language, its repetitive rhythms, its liturgy of the quotidian, its mental reflexes, its
222 PIERRE NORA

celebrations, and its key sites, foremost among which was the headquarters of the

Central Committee at 120 Rue La Fayette, celebrated by Aragon in his 1933 poem
Enfants rouges:

C'est rue La Fayette au 120

Qu'a I'assaut des patrons resiste

Le vaillant Parti communiste

Qui defend ton pere et ton pain.
[At 120 Rue La Fayette,

The valiant Communist Party withstands

The bosses' onslaught and defends
Your father and your bread.]

No other political party or group created a universe so thoroughly mapped out, so

reassuring, so full of signs and markers, so warm, protective, or comforting. Its

principle was the principle of happiness: a history in which nothing happens,**^ a sus-
pension of time, a reality of unrivaled intensity sheltered from all other realities. All

the party's militant activity was taken up with the subtle and absorbing business of
confining time to a present without hierarchy or perspective.^^ A glance at

L'Humanite, or for that matter at Pravda,^^ is enough to reveal how time was seg-
mented and compartmentalized, detemporalized as it were, because the purpose of
the myriad small news items published in the party organ was always to repeat the
same news, the good news, the good word of a brighter tomorrow. Each campaign
effaced all memory of the previous one, because in each case the purpose was to gal-
vanize militant ardor around the stated objectives of the moment, to give, through
salvos of slogans, the illusion of the final battle. In each case it was the future of the

fatherland of socialism that was at stake, and all progressive forces were engaged in
the battle. In this hermetically sealed universe of blessed repetition, facts did not

accumulate, because the good militant absorbed in his work was like a good student,

for whom each moment of the present symbolically epitomized the whole of the
past and the hope of the future. Indeed, the whole history of the Communist Party
can be and has been written in terms of a dialectic of identity and change. "Has the
Communist Party changed.''" Answers to this eternally recurrent question can be

collected almost all the way back to 1920. Now we can

why Communists were see

so inordinately fond of celebrations,^^ commemorations, funerals,^^ rituals of mem-

ory without any real remembering, celebrations of a participatory legend in which
the essence of what makes up the Communist memory could be deployed.
Important sites were marked out for visible appropriation by the masses: from the

Wall of the Federes (where defenders of the Paris Commune were massacred by the
French Army in 1871) to the Vel' d'Hiv (Velodrome d'Hiver, the one-time bicycle
racetrack that served as a holding area for Jews rounded up in the great sweep of
 Gaullists and Communists 223

July 1942), from May Day to the metro station. The crowd in its togetherness is

swelled by the presence of those who are no more, and the natural bombast of
Communist speechifying with its wooden rhetoric is infused with the "living spirit"

of the working class.^''

Communist memory had great penetrating power. It struck deep roots and
spread widely. Its force can be measured only as one measures the waves created by
tossing a stone into water: by its effects, by what it touched. Take, for example, the
traces that remain in the minds of so many people who no longer believe in the
movement but who have retained something of its manner and intonation. If Mme
de Maintenon invented "good posture" and Gambetta invented the rhetoric of the
republican banquet, Thorez invented a language of gesture and phrasing, a special
Stalinist bearing, compounded of working-class familiarity, aggressive, earnest

didacticism, and a first person singular-plural, an "I-we," redolent of both the rev-

olutionary past and the new world to come. Just as the Baron de Charlus's bizarre
chuckle revealed to Proust the unconscious legacy of a great-granduncle the baron
had never known, many former Communists of the golden years would be sur-
prised if one pointed out to them how a certain tone of voice, a certain grandiosity

of inspiration, a certain stiff optimism in argument, a certain whiff of bleating

humanism or virile violence could betray, after an interval of twenty years, traces of
their former allegiance. Their memory has literally been incorporated into their
identity. " The ^rear Russian Revolution," "our ^rear enthusiasm," "the immense tide

stemming from the social republic established in Moscow," "that achievement, the
first of its kind in the history of the world": these are just a few early seeds taken
from a speech by Marcel Cachin to the Congress of Tours. Before developing into
the stereotypical images of the wooden rhetoric to come, such turns of phrase could
find their way into the speech of a man so thoroughly steeped in the nineteenth cen-
tury only because Bolshevism encountered a strong predisposition in its favor in the
secular republican heritage. There would have been no Fils du peuple had there been
no Tour de la France par deux enfantsJ^ Bolshevism could not have grafted itself onto
so distinctively French a mentality unless the party that claimed a monopoly of the
republican legacy and sharpened certain of its features to its own ends had also

duplicated its most general and enduring traits: Christian piety was converted into

the patriotism of the French people; submission to state authority became democ-
ratic centralism; rationalist, secular humanism pointed toward the logic of revolu-
tion. It was this concentrated reinvestment of the republican legacy that gave
Communist Manichaeanism such power to intimidate well beyond the limits of the
party's sphere of influence, that gave it hegemony over the entire left and even
beyond. Anyone exempt from the charge of "primary, visceral anti-Communism"
more or less internalized something of the Communist point of view. The left

respected the logic of Communist thought, recognized its political culture, and,
224 PIERRE NORA

because it shared some of Communism's baggage, implicitly accepted its frames of

reference and norms of interpretation. Communist memory has its own purely
national genealogy, but in the besieged citadel of socialism it became a barricaded

memory, haunted by its constitutional relationship to the internal adversary and

regulated by the law of orthodoxy and heresy, inclusion and exclusion. The earliest
memoirs of former Communists,^^ those firsthand accounts and narratives of what

Claude Roy has felicitously called "the long alienated season of our lives,"^' were
built around this passage: entering/ leaving, conversion/ apostasy. When one reads
these accounts, including the latest, Ce que j 'ai cru comprendre by Annie Kriegel,'^

when one views the television programs that have been based of late on such mem-
oirs such as Mosco's Les Memoires d'ex,^'^ one inevitably feels a strange sense of dis-

tance in proximity and mystery in what is obvious. These ex-Communists tell all

except what is essential. They give the facts but not the faith, the how but not the
why. Memory has taken its secrets with it.

The world of the "companion" of General de Gaulle was nothing at all like that
of the Communist "comrade." Based on the notion of loyalty, it revolved entirely
around duration. It was a compound of filiation and affiliation, a dialectic of una-
nimity and solitude, of high times and low times. "Everybody was, is, or will be a
Gaullist." Gaullist memory is a memory with eclipses, with ups and downs, with
compressions and elongations, and the graph of waxing and waning political sup-

port reveals only the outer shell. Its central principle is a strange and perhaps
unique example of the telescoping of ultra-personification with absolute deperson-
alization. The commander's secret was of course to make a symbol of himself, and
his historical course seems to run from opportunistic self-assertion ("I, General de
Gaulle, currently in London...") to the anonymity of the constitutional text.

Historical doubleness seems to have marked him from birth (by what providential
chance did the father of a man called to such a destiny name him Charles.'*) to death,

with his two funeral ceremonies and the homage of the world at Notre-Dame. It all

began on June i8, 1940, as the solitary adventure of a man of forty-nine suddenly

driven "beyond any known path,"^' but also as history in the form of eternal France
and the inextinguishable flame of the Resistance. Even as a man, de Gaulle was a
troubling mix of uncommon individuality and astonishing conformism.

Nowhere is this counterpoint more visible than in the confrontation with nature,
by definition the most ahistorical of phenomena. De Gaulle played powerfully on
this image, as if to underscore his transition from submission to the "nature of
things" to rapid historical decision, the agitation of the tempest, and the timeless
significance of action. January 1946: "While meditating by the sea, I planned my
departure." From Antibes on the Mediterranean to the west coast of Ireland, "in a

wild place remote from any town, with access to a beach as deserted as possi-
ble, ...bordering on or not far from a forest," this extraordinary setter of scenes
 Gaullists and Communists 225

always situated his action so as to place himself in profound harmony with the land-
scape, a description of which ends the first volume of his Memoires de guerre: "From
the corner room where I spend most of the day, I can see far off to the west... vast,
untouched, mournful vistas; melancholy woods, meadows, fields, and wastelands;
the relief of ancient hills, eroded by time and forlorn; quiet, not very prosperous
villages whose soul and location have remained untouched for millennia. And so it

is with mine...." The historical presence of the immemorial: that was the general's
emotional geography, a spiritual culture of the neatly checkered landscape that
reveals a great deal about the rich soil in which Gaullian memory is rooted.^^

The same syncretic, combinatorial plasticity can be found in the historical regis-

ter. De Gaulle possessed the gift not only of evoking the memory of great figures
from French history but of embodying by turns the most contradictory personages:
Joan of Arc and Louis XIV, Saint Louis and Clemenceau, Napoleon and
Gambetta.^^ He could incorporate all the historical strata of nation building:
Christian and medieval France, absolutist France, revolutionary and Napoleonic
France, reptiblican France. All the strands of the national tradition were combined
in his person, and he knew how to pluck each string and make it sing: the military,

the political, the literary. Thus Gaullist memory was a synthesis, a confluence, and
therefore less interesting for its content, which reflected all of France and nothing
but France, than for the manner of its construction.^"* It was a projective memory
(unlike Communist memory, which was introjective), which consisted entirely in

acts, in public expressions, and in demonstrations through action. It was not partic-
ularly interested in proselytism through education, yet it displayed itself exclusively
through the middle range of the national imagination.
Gaullist memory was thus a permanent mixture of the personal and the imper-
sonal, the particular and the general, the individual and the collective, the circum-
stantial and the transhistorical, as evidenced by the difficulty of selecting its most
representative sites. There is no shortage of candidates.^^ A brief list would include
various places outside France (Carlton Gardens, Algiers, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon,
Brazzaville, Dakar), Parisian sites (Mont Valerien, the Champs-Elysees, the Rue de
Solferino), and a number of coastal and border locales often cited in connection with

the Resistance (the lie de Sein, Bayeux, Bruneval, Lille, Strasbourg). The problem is
that there are toomany such places; they fragment the story into too many pieces to
carry conviction. The only two genuine Gaullist lieux de memoire clearly reflect the

bipolar character of the whole Gaullian saga: the Constitution of the Fifth Republic,
the epicenter of de Gaulle 's legacy, and his country place. La Boisserie, which has
become the true center of the memorial cult: "This is my home."

Both these memory machines therefore refer back to France, but to two types of
France, two extreme forms of historical memory and national identity. One makes
226 PIERRE NORA

France the promised land of revolution, projecting the rationalism of the

Enlightenment onto revolutionary universalism and thus in turn onto the idealized
Russian Revolution. The other returns repeatedly to the deep emotional sources of
filial and religious patriotism, endlessly reaffirming the miraculous permanence and
timeless essence of France. Both Communist and Gaullist — or in this case more
precisely Gaullian —memory filter the national past and operate in a dualist mode,
but the dualism is different in each case. For the Communists there is a good France
and a bad France, and from the Franks versus the Gauls to the "multinationals ver-

sus the people of France" there is, based on this division, a consistent, simplified,

Manichaean version of history whose high points include the medieval communes,
Etienne Marcel, the seizure of the Bastille, the Paris Commune, and the Popular
Front. In the Gaullist vision the dividing line passes instead between France and the
French, between the stagnant periods of French history and the great redemptive
outbursts of national energy, between the vicissitudes of history and the genius of
the fatherland. On the one hand, a linear and dynamic France beginning in Year I of
the Revolution; on the other, a cyclical and eternally reborn France. Yet both mem-
ories, the revolutionary and the national, share a common conviction of the singu-
larity and exceptionality of France 's destiny, of what there is in France by virtue of
history or Providence that is unique, universal, and sacred. The song of the Union
des Jeunesses Revolutionnaires de France, "Nous continuons la France," echoes the
Gaullian theme of "France as an unclaimed legacy" {la France tombee en desherence).
"Take up the theme of history,. ..respond to something that lies deep within this

nation that we are delivering,.... become necessarily a moment of eternal France":

these phrases are not from the pen of General de Gaulle but from a celebrated edi-

torial by Paul Vaillant-Couturier \n L'Humanite o( July ii, 1936, when, amidst the
enthusiasm of the Popular Front, the headiness of popular marches, strikes, and fac-

tory occupations, the joy of the Matignon Accords and paid vacations, the tiny
Communist Party of 30,000 revolutionaries swelled within the space of a few
months to a mass party of 300,000 members and its leadership immediately set
about celebrating the marriage of Lenin and Joan of Arc to the commingled strains
of "L'Internationale" and "La Marseillaise." The major difference between the two
memories was this: the rupture that the Communist Party desired and indeed rep-

resented in national memory and French tradition wreathed itself in the theme of
continuity, whereas the essential continuity that de Gaulle wished to embody and
secure could manifest itself only through an act of rupture. Yet both held an equally
messianic vision of France, a vision intensified all the more by the fact that it was
the Communist Party's mission to fulfill and reveal its revolutionary destiny and de
Gaulle's mission to embody personally a moment of the eternal return.

This shared vision accounts for the power of these two forms of memory as well
as for the unbridgeable gulf between them. Both arose out of the same anti-German
 Gaullists and Communists 227

reaction, both were spontaneously anti-American, both were hostile to the

European Defense Community, both joined in opposition to the Third Force, both
opposed the Secret Army Organization (O.A.S.) and the proponents of keeping
Algeria French, both were hostile to a supranational organization of Europe, and
both rejected the libertarian spirit and "bed-shitters" {chienlit: de Gaulle's word for
the protesters) of May 1968 — but never for the same reasons or in the name of a

shared idea of France. This was because the memory of both sides consisted of two
strands that seemed indistinguishable to the faithful yet quite distinct to the other

side, and that distinction made all the difference. Once the decision was made to join
in the Popular Front, Communist memory came to rest on the twin foundations of
Jacobinism and Bolshevism: in the words of Thorez, "everyone has two father-
lands, France and the Soviet Union." Because Gaullist memory was purely patri-
otic, it was both national and nationalist. With these dual foundations the two sides

inevitably shared common ground yet just as inevitably clashed. They shared com-
mon ground because, while the Communists embodied "the dream of social jus-

tice," according to Malraux, "we stand for fidelity to France in its legendary, which

is to say exemplary, part."^*' Yet they inevitably clashed because they were locked in

fierce, ongoing battle over the legacy of the past and in a radical conflict over legit-

imacy.^^ "The Communists are neither on the left nor on the right, they are to the
east": de Gaulle persistently exploited this neutralizing, disqualifying argument.
Meanwhile, the Communist Party trimmed its strategy to suit its interests but was
never able to get a theoretical grasp on GauUism, a shortcoming in which it was by
no means alone. Unable therefore to take the measure of the phenomenon, it spent
the entire Fourth Republic trying to demystify the "heroic period" of Gaullism, and
until the general's death it clung to the definition that Maurice Thorez gave in the

summer of 1958, just before de Gaulle robbed him of a million votes: "Either

Gaullism is nothing or else it is a political and social phenomenon, in which case de

Gaulle is inseparable from the social forces that brought him forth and continue to

drive him."^^

The Communists were forced to engage in acrobatics to bring together the two
parts of their heritage; Gaullism, on the other hand, was able to achieve symbiosis

between its two components, which often were separated by only the thinnest of
boundaries. In the end this led to a fundamental asymmetry between the two mem-
ories, in the various senses in which we are using the word. Communist memory
was constantly being touched up and refurbished. Going all the way back to the

Congress of Tours, it was handicapped by scandal and dubious personalities whose

role had to be covered up from time to time. Members were expelled or denounced
as "traitors" and " renegades. "^^ Skeletons emerged from closets, and stories were
fabricated. Communist memory was clouded, moreover, by endless internal reor-
ganizations and by the concoction of imaginary biographies, beginning with that of
 —
228 PIERRE NORA

Maurice Thorez. Whatever state arcana may have been concealed by MachiavelHan
Gaullists fond of invoking raison d'etat, they are as nothing compared with the

notorious "party secrets." Communist memory was never accountable to any

authority but itself: its tactics had to be adjusted continually to accommodate an
international strategy over which the French leadership had no control, indeed of
which it was usually among the last to be informed: single front, Bolshevization,

German-Soviet Pact, Khrushchev Report, repudiation of the Common Program

these were just a few of the more bitter pills that had to be swallowed. GauUian
memory has its dark spots, too, such as the executions of Pucheu^^ and Brasillach,
but these are nothing compared with the difficult task of the Communists, who were
constantly forced to hide or embellish the truth. The party maintains tight control
over its archives and releases precious few documents, and then only when they are

no longer of any interest or have been rendered utterly anodyne. General de

Gaulle saw to it that his papers were regularly handed over to the Archives

Nationales.'^ His Memoirs, along with official and private documents, can be dis-

puted by witnesses or contradicted by historians.'^ As one-sided as they are, there

has been no need to publish repeatedly revised and corrected editions as there has
been with the oeuvres of Maurice Thorez.^'' The diffusion of Communist memory,
even when party influence was at its height, never extended beyond the limits of, if

not precisely a sect, then at best a sector of public opinion, remaining alien even to
much of the left. Gaullism, even in the darkest days of the R.P.F. or the "desert
crossing," always benefitted from the prestige of the "most illustrious of
Frenchmen" and his place in that most officially representative of national institu-

tions, the army. No one protested the tricolor cover of his Memoires de guerre. And
few people were outraged in i960 when the general referred to "the national legiti-

macy that I have embodied for the past twenty years. "'^ And no matter how deep
the ties that the Communist Party was able to forge with "the people of France" at

the height of its communion with the nation, during July 1936 and the Popular

Front or in the dark night of the Resistance, those bonds are relatively insignificant
compared with a historical experience whose supreme moments and most cele-

brated images are part of every Frenchman's family album. Gaullism not only ruled
the country for a long time but crystallized itself in institutions that are still in place

today; it has become a part of the French national memory. Because of this asym-
metry, Communism and Gaullism occupy similar yet different places in French his-

torical memory.

Inside France's Historical Memory

We have emerged from the world of war, poverty, and revolution from which
Gaullism and Communism derived their significance and influence. A long period
 Gaullists and Communists 229

of conflict has come to a close, including not just the "thirty years' war" that de

Gaulle evoked at the Liberation so as to bury the disaster of 1940 in a broader mem-
ory of Franco-German conflict but also the Cold War and the threat of nuclear

apocalypse associated with a bipolar division of the world, and the colonial wars in
which the stakes were the material and symbolic substance of French power. It was
war, which helped to revive the idea of revolution, that bestowed upon both
Gaullist and Communist memories mobilizing power, lyrical grandeur, and a
degree of sacredness. War runs through the one as through the other, from a time
well before the key dates at which each attained maximal intensity to a time well

after: all the way back to the Dreyfus Affair, the rise of French irredentism after the

Franco-Prussian War, and the advent of international socialism, and forward to the
Algerian War and its aftermath, the consequences of economic growth, and the rise

of thivd-woAdist gauckisme. This history thus covers the whole totalitarian age.
When did things begin to change.'' If a date has to be fixed, it would probably be
1965. It was then that de Gaulle failed to achieve an absolute majority in the first

round of voting in the first election of a president of the Republic by universal suf-
frage in the history of France: a first chink in the armor of Gaullian infallibility, an
anticipation of the chant that would be heard in 1968, "Ten years is long enough!"
In that same year the Union des Etudiants Communistes, the weak link in the

Communist chain, collapsed, in a parallel that seems striking now but was invisible
at the time. Out of this micro-event came the host of gauchiste groupuscules that
would become visible three years later in the events of May 1968.'^ Symbolically,

moreover, 1965 was also the point of convergence of a series of economic, demo-
graphic, social, and cultural changes in which sociologists like Henri Mendras have
taught us to see the beginning of a "second French Revolution" :^^ a decline in the
birth rate, a decrease in the workweek, a sharp rise in the number of working
women, a return of the economy to the level predicted by a projection of the growth
curve for the period 1900— 19 14, and the end of Vatican II, not to mention the wide-
spread diffusion of paperback books, the discount store, and —why not.-^ — the first
appearance of nudity in magazines and films. It was the end of one world and the
beginning of another, whose effects Mauriac anticipated when, for example, he
asked in his De Gaulle of 1964 "what makes today's world, which de Gaulle 's adver-
saries do not recognize, so different.-^.... In fact, the washing machine, the television,
and the family automobile have become the visible signs of a paradise that manifests
itself in the three weeks of annual paid vacation.... It was not de Gaulle, the last pal-
adin of the old world, who invented this new one."'^
This exit from la grande histoire, as the century's tragedy receded into the past,
should have stamped both memories with the same sign of obsolescence, the pal-
adin's more so than the Communists.' But de Gaulle's was lucky. He had a hand in

two ages of French history and operated on two distinct levels: on the level of dis-
23° PIERRE NORA

course with a rhetoric of national grandeur that was out of Une with the historical
reality of the moment; and on the level of reality, with the advent of a society that
was completely alien to that discourse, indeed most apt to dissolve and subvert it, a
society based on economic enrichment, hedonistic individualism, and consumer
euphoria. Such was the ruse and irony of history: the wartime dinosaur emerged
from the museum to which he had repaired to write his memoirs, memoirs that
ended with the affirmation of a man who "never tired of waiting in the dark of
night for the first glimmer of hope." By the miracle of another, equally archaic war,
the Algerian conflict, this man presided over the birth of a new world, which ulti-

mately rejected him but with which we still identify, a world that he equipped with
institutions that his successors made viable if not fully democratic. Can we then say
that de Gaulle was saved by "thirty glorious years" of postwar growth and the
industrial policies of Georges Pompidou.'' There is nothing absurd about the
notion, given the care that de Gaulle took after 1958 to leave the prose of necessity

to his prime minister while reserving for himself the poetry of history, rich with

memories of the great adventure. The idea can even be stood on its head: it was the

"thirty glorious years" of postwar economic growth that necessitated de Gaulle's

return to power, because the French could not bear the thought of building super-
highways unless the task was presented to them in the language of the Crusades. By
crystallizing Gaullism's political heritage around the modernizing, industrializing
right, de Gaulle's half-approved, half-repudiated successor enabled the hero to
"strike to his left," as the political wisdom of the Third Republic recommended,
thereby hastening the transformation of the personage into the myth. To explain the
periodic resurgences of Communism despite repeated historical defeats, some com-
mentators have pointed to the replacement of one generation of militants by
another, thus drawing a contrast between Communism and Gaullism, which was
presumably bound up with one man and destined to vanish with him. All the suc-
cessive brigades of forgetful generations were unable, however, to prevent the ide-

ological collapse of Marxism or the sociological disintegration of its working-class

base or the demise of the Soviet myth or the breakup of the internal Communist
system, these being the main causes of the collapse of the French Communist Party.
The hermetic nature of Communist memory has been compounded by the histori-

cal demise of Communism, which has made that memory even more enigmatic. We
no longer understand the ardor, the rage of commitment, the logic of violence, or
the passion that sustained it. The age of opulence has swept all that away, while in

direct contrast allowing Gaullist memory, symbolized by de Gaulle himself, the

possibility of survival.

Both phenomena drew their historical energy from the same source: the series of
crises that beset France after 1914, which reached its apogee with the disaster of
1940, whose aftereffects would continue to be felt for another twenty years.'' It was
 Gaullists and Communists 231

a period in which French morale and faith in democracy suffered grievous blows,
and particularly hard on Captain de Gaulle, for whom France's humiliation could
be traced back to the Treaty of Frankfurt, the national disgrace largely responsible
for the decision by the Congress of Tours to affiliate with the Third International.
The Great Depression led to the political crisis of February 1934, during which the
Communist Party emerged from the shadows to mount the ramparts against fas-
cism; meanwhile, a solitary Charles de Gaulle wrote two books in quick succession,
Le Fil de I'epee (1932) and Vers Varmee de metier (1934). Then came the Czech crisis

and appeasement at Munich in September 1938, a foretaste of the 1940 debacle that
laid bare France 's economic, political, and psychological unfitness for the modern
world. It was a crisis of national identity, to which, broadly speaking, three kinds of
response seemed possible: that of the national right, adaptive and technocratic; that
of a segment of the right which was drawn into the orbit of counterrevolutionary
and profascist revolution; and that of the revolutionary left. The Communists' time
had come; de Gaulle 's moment still lay in the future. Once the height of the crisis

was over, however, the revolutionary right found itself discredited by the defeat of

Nazism; the reformist right found itself discredited by its association with Vichy;

and the only contestants left in the game were the two active branches of the

Resistance. To the sense, hard to swallow, of national decline (whose only prewar

expression had been the reactionary lament of decadence), to the urgent need for
modernization to catch up with other countries, only de Gaulle and the Communists
responded with plans, tempting yet in the end unacceptable, for France 's rescue.
Both expressed a will to rebuild, a radical approach, a faith in the revolutionary and
universalist capacity of France, yet each believed in a different revolution, a differ-

ent France, a different universal. The fact that the Gaullist solution won out no
doubt stems not so much from the intrinsic advantages that with hindsight one can
see in it, nor from its strategic superiority, but rather from historical realities that

hastened the fall of the one and allowed the other to occupy the terrain.

In order to assess properly how the two phenomena were related and gauge cor-
rectly the likelihood that each would gain a hold on memory, we must first investi-

gate how each stood in relation to the central fact of the republic. What strikes one
immediately is that both Gaullism and Communism derived an essential part of
their capital from their ability to present themselves as the syncretic reprise and ulti-

mate synthesis of a number of major antirepublican traditions: Gaullism combined

memories of monarchism, Bonapartism, and nationalism, whereas Communism
incorporated revolutionary memory in its terrorist, socialist, and internationalist
forms. Each was the revitalized embodiment of its respective tradition. De Gaulle,
whose family was monarchist though not anti-Dreyfusard, long labored under, the
reputation of having been a Maurrassian."'*^ At the Seventh Congress of the
PIERRE NORA

International, moreover, just before the Communists abandoned the "class against
class" strategy, the same Paul Vaillant-Couturier whose chauvinistic lyricism I

quoted earlier expressed the official position of the tiny French Communist Party
of Bolshevik agitators \n L'Humanite iox February 19, 1935: "Defend the Republic,
says Blum? As if fascism were not yet the Republic! As if the Republic were not
already fascism!"
Still, while GauUism and Communism both battened on antirepublican memory,
each took a radically different, if ambiguous, stance toward the republican tradi-

tion. Appearances were deceiving, moreover, since it was the man who embodied
the memory of everything the Republic stood against who restored it twice,"" while
it was the party that claimed to be the Republic's natural child and ultimate shield

that posed the most direct threat to its existence. Gaullism and Communism
assumed their memorial legacies in very different ways. General de Gaulle never
alluded to or acknowledged his manifest affiliations.'^^ He allowed his adversaries
to attach labels to him, to establish a continuity that certainly did not exist in his own
mind, and to blur the contours of this past in a way that he never deigned explicitly

to clarify. On August 25, 1944, at the Hotel de Ville, he refused Georges Bidault's
request to proclaim a Republic that in his eyes had never ceased to exist; in a press
conference on May 19, 1958, he limited himself to the famous gibe "Who becomes
a dictator at age sixty-eight.'^"; and he never scotched rumors of a possible restora-
tion of the monarchy, alluding in admittedly private messages to the possibility of a

dynastic succession. "^^ Yet de Gaulle never claimed that the sovereignty of the exec-
utive could stem from any source other than universal suffrage.'"'' Napoleon did not
belong to his personal pantheon, whereas Carnot did, and what emerged from var-
ious references and allusions to the latter was his role not so much as the founder of
a regime but rather as the man who consolidated the Revolution. In his memoirs de
Gaulle devotes only a few lines to the R.P.F., which of all his ventures bears the

most direct relationship to late-nineteenth-century nationalism.'"^ His essential

obsession was not to combat the Republic but to remedy its congenital weakness by
"equipping the state with institutions designed to restore. ..the stability and conti-
nuity of which it has been deprived for 169 years." '""^
By contrast, the Communists aggressively wreathed themselves in the revolu-

tionary heritage, while offering their own interpretations of both the French and

Soviet Revolutions. They did everything they could — see the work of Fran9ois
Furet'"^ — to fold '93 back into '89 and to denounce the formal democracy of the
rights of man in the name of the proletarian vocation supposedly inherent in the

Revolution, a vocation periodically frustrated by the victories of the capitalist bour-

geoisie.What is more, they tried to bring all French history since the Gauls into line
with the unwavering course of revolution.'"^ They immediately latched onto the
Bolshevik image of themselves as emulators of the Jacobins,'"^ so much so that the
 Gaullists and Communists 233

twenty-one conditions imposed on the socialists before they could join the Third
International influenced the Congress of Tours far less than the enthusiastic pass-

ing of the revolutionary torch evoked, for example, by L.-O. Frossard in his speech

at the Cirque de Paris: "Lenin and Trotsky, the authorized representatives of the
Soviets, in bidding us to convey to you their greetings of socialist fraternity, said: 'It

is inconceivable that the French proletariat in Paris, the sons of the Jacobins of '93,
of the insurgents of 1830, of the revolutionaries of June 1848, of the heroic warriors
of March 1871, should fail to understand that we are the heirs to all their revolu-
"'"^
tionary tradition.'

Ultimately, this blurring of distinctions in both camps, although denied by the

Gaullists and loudly proclaimed by the Communists, served as the basis for a vague,
ambiguous, uncertain relation to democracy and the republican regime, a relation
that ranged from passionate identification to a spectrum of suspicion and was per-
meated by a strange dialectic of continuity and rupture, depending on whether the
"republican tradition" was identified, on the one hand, with the "system" (by
Gaullists) or "bourgeois power" (by Communists) and, on the other hand, with
national defense and public safety. At times together, at times in opposition to each

other, Gaullism and Communism were thus able to portray themselves as either the
gravediggers of the Republic or its ultimate defenders; they could share and yet vie
over the prize of being its true representatives. Take, for example, the 1947 muni-
cipal elections, in which the P.C.F.'s 30 percent and the R.P.F.'s 40 percent of the
vote reduced the legitimacy of the Republic to its lowest level in history. Or take

1958, when the Communists demonstrated in defense of the Republic on the Place
de la Republique in May, and the Gaullists did the same in September. Or 1961,
when Communist battalions, responding to a call from the president of the
Republic, made ready to defend the Republic against the threat of parachutists
launched by rebellious army generals in Algiers — a revival of the taxis of the
Marne. On 96 5, during the first campaign for the election of a president by univer-
sal suffrage, when Andre Malraux, speaking at the Vel' d'Hiv', berated the
Communists' ally Frangois Mitterrand: "Sole candidate of republicans, let the
Republic sleep!" At all times, even times of institutional or revolutionary rupture,

both Communists and Gaullists wanted to and were able to represent necessary,
ineluctable, natural continuity. Both were as plausible in the role of champions of
continuity as the rival republican tradition.

The point is that, on the one hand the GauUist, or rather Gaullian, refusal to iden-
tify with the legacy evoked by their leader's personal history, on the other hand the
Communist adherence to the revolutionary ideal, respectively account for the hege-

mony of each, for their resistance to any attempt to reduce or dilute their substance,
and for the impossibility of marginalizing either one even in the worst moments of
shared fury against republican centrality or the darkest days of mutual ostracism.
234 PIERRE NORA

These features, even more than the services that each rendered to France during the
war, are most responsible for legitimizing both Gaullism and Communism. The
degree of their legitimacy is not measured by their respective party memberships or
by the size of their votes in any particular election but rather by the effective role

that each played in the national imagination: in one case a subtle reinvestment of the
monarchic image in support of the democratic system, in the other a forceful rein-
vestment of the revolutionary idea through projection onto a worldwide revolu-
tionary movement temporarily limited to the Soviet Union. These were vacant
places in the national memory just waiting to be filled, and the memories that filled

them thereby acquired a kind of magisterium.

The two sides exercised that magisterium in very different circumstances, how-
ever. The Communists relied on repeated protestations of undying loyalty to the

revolutionary promises of the national past, while the GauUists claimed to be pur-
suing something radically new in politics, guided by a providential leader who had
nothing in common with other "providential leaders" of the past. The Communist
Party was wholly absorbed in preserving the sacred legacy that made France, the
promised land of revolution in the nineteenth century, the eldest daughter of world
Communism and that turned intellectual Marxism into a secular clerisy. This task

was made easier by the fact that the P.C.F., unlike other Communist parties in

Europe, enjoyed a long and continuous legal existence (interrupted only by World
War II). It was also made easier by the good fortune of its having been allowed to
bask in opposition, thereby avoiding any compromise with the bourgeois Republic.
Yet that task was entrusted to the most sectarian, dogmatic, fiercely Stalinist party
apparatus in Europe, an apparatus that was also more dependent than any other on
its heritage of souvenirs and traditions, and this in the end led to stalemate. The
P.C.F. immediately met every historical and social change with a ready-made inter-

pretation based on the assumption of a worldwide crisis of capitalism which, in its

ultimate phase, would inevitably lead to imperialism and fascism.'" During its life-

time the party had to face three historically new phenomena, namely, Hitlerian

Nazism, postwar economic growth, and Gaullism, yet in each instance it responded,
undaunted, with its usual reflex reactions: the struggle of class against class, the
Cold War, the absolute pauperization of the working class, the denunciation of
Gaullism as a "personal and military dictatorship imposed by force and threat.. .by

the most reactionary, chauvinistic, and colonialist elements of the grande bour-

geoisie." Every effort to open things up, such as Waldeck-Rochet's, for example,

was nipped in the bud."^ The party quickly lost touch with reality and ensconced
itself in a frozen memory.
The process by which the figure of the sovereign was revitalized within the

republican system was quite different. Unplanned, it depended on two factors, one
psychological, the other institutional: the personality of Charles de Gaulle and the
 Gaullists and Communists 235

Constitution of the Fifth Republic. The executive was certainly uppermost in the

general's political and constitutional thinking, yet he made no attempt to restore

royal prerogatives. A strong executive was simply the remedy, advocated by every
reformer since the end of the nineteenth century, to the weaknesses of a regime
dominated by the legislature and with a long tradition of limiting presidential pow-
ers. As applied to the Fifth Republic, "presidential monarchy" was simply a

metaphor, almost a form of folklore."'* It was a spontaneous reaction to a man who

assumed the trappings of a king without possessing a kingdom and who was per-
sonally appreciative of the forms and magnificence of monarchical style, so much

so that the Constitution of 1958 and the Law of 1962 providing for the election of
the president by universal suffrage seemed not so much the source and confirmation
of his powers as a regime tailor-made for the general (with, as the keystone, the
famous Article 16, granting special powers that were never invoked) plus a royal
gift. It is true, nevertheless, that the shift of the center of gravity of the political sys-
tem to the chief executive has allowed and fostered the development of regalian
practices whose style new president must define and whose forms and limits
each
are open to experiment."^ The image and place of the king in the national memory
and imagination are ambiguous, a matter of pure fantasy, a mixture of magic and
nostalgia."*^ They can be revived only through empirical reacquaintance, allusion,
and symbolism careful not to violate invisible boundaries. They are essential to the
system and yet peripheral, entirely a matter of nuance and almost of smiles. What
made General de Gaulle a constitutional "king" was the fact that he occupied a place
that by tacit accord, and only after the sanction of universal suffrage, was acknowl-
edged to be his and his alone, and as long as he did occupy it there was no one who
could take it away from him. That is why the electoral joust with Frangois
Mitterrand in 1965 seemed so strange and yet so familiar: it was David versus
Goliath. But once the students took to the streets in May 1968 and began shouting
"Ten years is long enough!" His Royal Majesty lost his footing. And when Georges
Pompidou said in Rome on January 17, 1969, that he would be a candidate for pres-
ident "whenever there is an election," sacrilege had been committed and the gen-
eral's exile followed soon thereafter. The Gaullian "king" was a two-stage mecha-
nism. Initially it functioned as a kind of time machine, moving quickly back through
the centuries in a manner that was not so much threatening as amusing: this was
symbolized early on by a well-known column in the satirical weekly Le Canard
enchatne entitled "The Court." After the general left office, however, the contrap-
tion began to function as a memory machine, spewing forth images with which all

of de Gaulle 's successors would have to cope in one way or another, either by com-
peting with him or distancing themselves from him. As a result the memory of de
Gaulle remains in a sense curiously incomplete, and paradoxically that incomplete-
ness has played a role similar to that of the closure of Communist memory: de
236 PIERRE NORA

Gaulle allowed the French to reconstruct their past history, whereas the Commu-
nists allowed the "people of France" to live history in anticipation.

Therein, ultimately, lies the long-term significance of both phenomena: to have

contributed in symmetric, opposite ways to the conclusion of the vast historical

cycle initiated by the French Revolution. Gaullism lodged the republican idea deep

in the culture of the right, whereas Communism integrated a previously segregated

working class into the French nation. Gaullism was the route by which a patriotism
still unreconciled to postrevolutionary France opened itself up to democracy.
Communism was the route by which the universal values of the Revolution,
embodied in the proletariat, were integrated. These may seem modest achieve-
ments, but their effects on memory were powerful and of lasting consequence.
Neither of these two operations was deliberately premeditated, but Gaullism and
Communism provoked them, went along with them, and at times orchestrated
them. Four factors helped right-wing memory to accommodate itself to the repub-
lican idea. First, the traditional parties of the right vanished through the trapdoor
of the Liberation, an unprecedented disaster from which a segment of the right
would recover only thanks to the R.P.F."^ Second, although the mechanisms of
growth and the effects of the third industrial revolution were in themselves politi-

cally neutral, they had the effect of transferring to the traditionally backward-look-
ing right the values of realism and modernism that the left, with its unrepentant ant-
icapitalism, seemed to abandon. Third, de Gaulle worked to bring Catholics back
into the orbit of the Republic and, with the Debre Law of 1959, to secure what he
hoped would be peace on the educational front. Fourth and most important of all,

although the general never acted as a party leader except with reluctance, and
although Gaullism had many components, including some from the left, the general
was able to unite all the parties of the right, excluding extremists, under one author-
ity, de Gaulle's."^ Gaullian republicanism exonerated the right of the charge of
antirepublicanism that Vichy had incurred (see "Vichy," by Philippe Burrin, in this

volume). Meanwhile, the Communist Party's representation of and symbiosis with

the working class broadly coincided with a long period of economic growth and
expansion of labor, which had established a solid base in heavily industrialized
regions and remained structurally quite stable from the early 1930s to the late 1960s.
It was this working-class world that erupted in the Popular Front, when strikes and
factory occupations symbolized the newfound public role of those whom Simone
Weil described as "foreigners, exiles, uprooted refugees" in their own country, on

behalf of whom Leon Jouhaux and the representatives of the C.G.T.U., awkward
in manner and openmouthed in astonishment, nevertheless successfully negotiated

the first labor-management agreements with employers who had until then ruled by
divine right; when red bastions grew in northern France and the Paris region; when
 Gaullists and Communists 237

the new young workers born of the second industrial revolution developed the

political, trade-union, and symbolic instruments with which to represent them-

selves; when the "metal worker" of Marcel Game's Le Jour se live and the films of
Rene Clair became an object of fascination when the
for intellectuals and artists;

legendary epic of Billancourt began and the working class evolved a memory of its
own, with its own fictitious but remarkably influential genealogy."^ One historian
has called this "the singular generation."'^" Or rather generations, for it was the
same working class —one animated by a now forgotten combative violence and
tightly disciplined by the C.G.T. and P.C.F., whose carefully monitored demands
shrewdly combined calls for greater prosperity with political objectives — that for

thirty years supplied the manpower for Communism's battalions and shock troops:
from this world came the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (F.T.P.) of 1943, the national-
izations of 1945, the insurrectional strikes of 1947, the demonstrations against

Ridgway-the-Plague in 1952,'^' the anti-GauUist marches from Bastille to

Republique in 1958, and even the Crenelle Accords of 1968. The symbolic integra-
tion of this working class was achieved with Jacques Duclos's candidacy for presi-

dent of the Republic in 1969, shortly after de Gaulle's departure from power, and
just before the old working-class base began to fall apart under the impact of dein-

dustrialization and social realignment.

This dual and parallel process of acculturation cannot in any sense account for
the end of political and social violence or head-to-head conflict, nor can it explain
the partly invisible resurgence of class struggles that one might have thought to be
a thing of the past. It does, however, mean that these phenomena must assume new
forms, for theynow unfold within what can only be called a democratic or republi-
can frame of reference. The mode of political expression has also had to change as
France has developed a new political culture in response to the withering away of
both Gaullism and Communism and to the simultaneous embrace of and estrange-
ment from the memory of de Gaulle himself, a political culture that gives fresh cur-
rency to ideas and words hitherto alien to French tradition: consensus, pluralism,
and constitutional review. '^^ The change has brought joy to some people, who see
in it the end of a political culture of conflict and exclusion, as well as of a national
messianism of which Gaullism and Communism were extreme forms, grandilo-
quent parodies of an already transcended historical reality. Yet it has also brought
despair to others, for whom these ultimate forms of French grandeur, singularity,
and universalism are survived by nothing but mourning and melancholia. For the
French feel an emptiness, a sense of a void, born of the retrospective discovery that
if Communism and Gaullism did not occupy the whole of the political sphere, they
had at least achieved the miracle of occupying the whole of the political imagina-
tion, may not be far off when this sharing
and perhaps also of a sense that the day
of the imagination even by two parasitic phenomena may well be looked back upon
 238 PIERRE NORA

as a blessed time of tranquil democracy. One thinks of Michelet, for whom the

Revolution-Revelation was the swan song of L'Histoire de France,^^^ and of the

pages of Memoires d'outre-tombe in which Chateaubriand described the insipidness
of Restoration political society after the fall of Napoleon: "I blush to think that I

must now drone on about a host of insignificant creatures, myself among them,
shady, nocturnal people on a stage from which the great sun had disappeared."'^''

For the historian the metamorphosis may be of a different order. Communism

and Gaullism represented two extreme and fully developed forms of the French his-

torical and political model, the product of a longer, more continuous history than
that of any other western country, and of a country that long believed itself to be

rational and therefore superior. This model both imploded and exploded.
Fundamentally national and state-centered, it exploded on contact with new reali-

ties for which it was not made: the transition from the status of great power (which
it had been) to that of middling power; the end of imperial consciousness; the need
to adjust to a world controlled by two systems beyond France 's influence; the aspi-

ration to build a regionalized, decentralized society; and the uniformity required by

France's membership in the European Community. Fundamentally logical and

rational, the model also imploded because, in response to these external forces, the

FIGURE 6.1 Wall posters in Paris in the year (1970) of Costa Gavras's film L'Aveu, starring Yves Montand. Photo by Chris Marker.
 Gaullists and Communists 239

Communists pushed Enlightenment rationaUsm to the point of perverting it into

something totally absurd, while the Gaullists reverted to an ideal France, a France
they imagined as a sort of sleeping princess lost in the forests of history. Both gave
the French powerful illusions to live by: for some the illusion of a revolutionary

break and new beginning, for others the illusion of a periodic epiphany of redemp-
tion. Today all have awakened, sober yet nostalgic in the aftermath of two such

exhausting dreams, to discover how strange yet special the French historical model
was in itself and what kind of rationality was bound up with the country's sense of
singularity and special relationship to the universal. This is a moment in which his-

torians must pause to take stock: we must look at the history of this century with a

fresh eye and reexamine all of our political traditions and representations. We must
"reconceptualize" the Revolution and pursue a new exploration of "French iden-
tity." This calls for a vast reformulation of our relation to the past and a thorough
inventory of our memory, which the present work is intended in its way both to

demonstrate and to embody.

FIGURE 7.0 Public consecration of the left-right division during the first Restoration; parliamentary topography becomes a news
item. This "Tableau" is one of the first of its kind, and there would be many other attempts to visualize the precise distribution of

parliamentary forces and positions.

 CHAPTER 7

Right and Left

Marcel Gauchet

It should come as no surprise that so little has been written on the history of the cou-
ple "right and left," paired terms firmly ensconced in the intellectual and symbolic
workings of contemporary societies. Thinkers are never keen to reflect on that

which enables them to think.

Countless definitions have been attempted. There are essays that do a remark-
able job of clarifying the terms of the opposition. A rich political history has taught
us to recognize and follow the various components of right and left on the French
scene. What all these works have in common is the assumption that the terms them-
selves are well understood and that their classificatory role is accepted. As for their

origin, it is presumed to be enough to refer in ritual fashion to the French

Revolution. In fact, a great deal of water flowed under the bridge between the
Revolution, when people hesitantly spoke of the assembly as divided between a
"right side" and a "left side," and the Restoration, when the terms were perma-
nently enthroned in the parliamentary lexicon. And it is an even bigger jump from
the jargon of the Chamber of Deputies to the quintessential emblems of political

identity, the fundamental categories of democratic confrontation, that right and left

have become for us — usages that were not firmly established until the beginning of
the twentieth century. Yet we are so accustomed to organizing political opinions and
differences in terms of the left-right dichotomy that we apply it to the past without

noticing its absence, at least in the fully developed sense it has for us, from the
speeches and representations of contemporary actors. Indeed, this is all the more
true in that the idea caught on in part because it suggests a continuity of struggle
that can be traced all the way back to 1789. The pairing of right and left signifies a

permanence of division that discourages us from looking into its origins. On the
242 MARCEL GAUCHET

Other hand it encourages us to examine the fluctuations and metamorphoses of the

content of the notion, an avenue of inquiry that promises to be fruitful. If the estab-

Hshed terminology covers up its past, the purpose of this essay is to examine the
process by which it became established. It will add nothing to our knowledge of the

electoral, social, anthropological, cultural, or geographical realities that the left-

right division overlaps. Here, our only interest is in the system of denomination.
Tracing this dualist representation of political reality through the pages of the lex-

icon may not be a bad way to learn more about the forces governing that represen-
tation. From the inception of representative government to the era of mass parties,

this survey in a sense condenses a complete memory of democratic development.

Furthermore, it directly confronts the difficult problem of the universal applicabil-

ity of French history. Indeed, one of the most mysterious aspects of the left-right

dichotomy is the way in which it has been taken up by countries around the world.
The goal is to understand why it caught on in some places and not in others, and

why the specific conditions under which it emerged could elicit a response general
enough to permit such identification. The history of right and left: how the French,
with the aid of a history unlike any other, produced a simplifying symbolism whose
widespread applicability suggests that it contains some secret of modern politics

and citizenship.

The Revolutionary Assemblies and the False Start

As indicated above, it is rather superficial to say that right and left leapt fully armed
The terms did appear there and did gain some acceptance but
out of the Revolution.
remained narrowly circumscribed. The story might well have ended there without
originating a tradition.

The terms right and left were actually used much earlier to denote the parts of an
assembly. They occur, in fact, in a 1672 translation of Chamberlayne's account of
contemporary England, L'Estat present de I'Angleterre, in which the author describes
the members of the House of Commons as arrayed "on the King's right hand and
the King's left hand."' It is doubtful, however, that there was any connection
between this and the revolutionary usage of the words, which appears to have been
reinvented for the purpose. This is not to say that the English example was neces-
sarily without influence on the de facto choice of a spatial arrangement of deputies
in those confused weeks of the summer of 1789 when the National Assembly began
to meet. It is well known that the term "Commons" was chosen by the representa-

tives of the so-called Third Estate to replace an appellation that to them seemed
insultingly inappropriate. Arguments about the rules of debate turned on discus-

sion of British forms. Mirabeau proposed the British example as a model but it was
rejected.^ British influence was nevertheless perceptible in such earlier propositions
 Right and Left 243

as the "provisional rules of order" of June 6, for example in the stipulation that

"those who speak may address themselves only to the chair."^ In the end a different

rule would prevail: the speaker, rather than remain in his place to have his say, was
required to mount the podium, from which he would harangue the entire assem-

bly — a point of some consequence for our subject. In general what is interesting

about the English precedent is how the French case differed from it in important

ways. It is not inconceivable that it was the squaring off of government party and
opposition that inspired the bipartite division of the National Assembly that gradu-
ally solidified in July and August 1789, but it was precisely to the extent that the two
segments of the legislature diverged from the logic of government versus opposi-
tion that they developed into right and left.

It took time, however, for the situation to clarify itself and even longer for names
to be applied. The idea may actually have originated somewhat earlier, in a form of
voting briefly adopted by the Third Estate in the early days of the Estates General.
Indeed, on May 8, when it came time to vote on rival proposals by Mirabeau and
Malouet concerning the combination of the orders, the deputies apparently decided
to count heads "by inviting the assembly to divide itself in such a way that those of
Malouet 's opinion should pass to the right and those favoring Mirabeau should
array themselves on the left.'"* Such a procedure was too cumbersome to be used
often, however, and it way from there to the crystallization of
was of course a long

a stable political geography. Unless, that is, we imagine that this was an occasion for

the minority in particular —

since "the greater number" moved to the right to dis- —
cover itself and regroup. That could be what happened, assuming we can rely on
retrospective testimony which, without mentioning the episode, dates the division

of the assembly into "two sections separated by the chairman's desk" from the time
of the "chamber of the Third," before the three orders were combined. "Whether
by chance," we are told, "or because shared feelings impelled the friends of the peo-
ple to band together and separate themselves from those who did not share their

opinions, it was clear that they favored the left side of the hall and never failed to

gather there. "^ To this one should perhaps add the fact that after the three orders

began meeting together, the clergy returned to their original place in the Estates

General, which may have furnished the right side with its core.'' In any case, it was
toward the end of August, in the debate over the rights of man and the royal veto,

that the phenomenon first called itself to the attention of observers. Significantly,
Duquesnoy remarked it in connection with the session of August 23, the occasion
of a clash over the clause concerning religious freedom in the Declaration of the
Rights of Man: "It is remarkable," he wrote in his diary, "that the hall is divided in
such away that in one part sit men who no doubt hold exaggerated opinions at times
but who in general hold a very high idea of liberty and equality."^ He does not say
which part, being struck only by the division, and the first prominent feature that
244 MARCEL GAUCHET

leaps to his eye is the unnamed "left." "The other part," he continued, "is occupied
by men whose less exalted ideas and less pronounced opinions give them a charac-

ter of weakness and pusillanimity most unfortunate under the present circum-
stances." This tendency for a group to form on the left, gradually pushing its adver-
saries to the right, appears to be corroborated by notes made a few days later, on
August 29, the day after the assembly began discussion of the royal veto, by a right-

wing deputy, the Baron de Gauville, who remarked on the completion of the
process: "We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and

the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths,
and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp." The most revealing
part of his account, however, is to be found in the recital of his own peregrinations:
"I tried to sit in different parts of the hall and not to adopt any marked spot, so as to
remain more the master of my opinion, but I was compelled absolutely to abandon

the left or else be condemned always to vote alone and thus be subjected to jeers
from the galleries."^ Here the baron reported not only the fact of the division but
also the reason why he would continue throughout the Revolution to oppose grant-
ing any kind of legal status to it: his dislike of being compelled to follow the crowd.
This was not a personal trait but a consequence of the fundamental political ideal
that would continue to define revolutionary experience to an almost obsessive
degree. There were supposed to be only private interests and the general interest,
according to the celebrated formula of Le Chapelier, hence in deliberation all opin-

ions were supposed to be strictly individual, for there was no other way to arrive at

the authentic general interest. In other words, there were to be no "parties" or "fac-

tions." The unity and universality of collective representation would emerge natu-
rally, it was believed, from the diversity of individual points of view. Yet from late

August 1789, revolutionary assemblies would always be divided. They adjusted to

this fact in practice without ever acknowledging it as a normal or even significant

aspect of their operation.

There was also a certain delay between the clarification of the division as partic-
ipants observed it and its public designation. Pierre Retat has reviewed the contem-

porary press and determined that news of the division did not appear before
September 12: "The first clear but isolated reference to the localization of the par-
ties appeared in the Nouvelles poUtiques of Berne, in a definition of the 'Palais-Royal
corner': 'This is the term applied to the left side of the hall, where this party usually

gathers.' The idea did not really catch on until December, when Camille
Desmoulins for the first time gave "substance to both sides of the hall." In his report
on the session of December 19, which saw the creation of assignats (paper currency)
backed by church property, it was no longer the right side but "the right of the chair"

that Abbe Maury urged to withdraw, and it was no longer the left side but "the left"

that clapped its hands "as it did when Mounier resigned." Whereupon, Desmoulins
 Right and Left 245

continued, "the right preferred not to let the matter drop but raised a hell of a ruckus,

and the priesties shrieked like banshees."'^ Although the historian's reverence for

beginnings compels me to call attention to this instance, I am bound to add that sim-
ilar usages remained quite rare. A few cases can be found. Duquesnoy, for example,
remarked early in 1791 on "the extraordinary conduct of some members of the

right, " and a little later observed that "the left is divided into two quite distinct, quite
opposed parties."" A close topographical association with a side or part of the

chamber, however, remained the rule, even when the expression was used as a
synecdoche. Thus Chabot told the Jacobins in September 1792 that he "had seen all

the right sides of the national assembly come almost fawning on him."'^ The geo-
graphic influence remained apparent, moreover, even after the "right part" evolved
into the somewhat more abstract "right party."^^ It was still felt in 1791 in the tense

final months of the Constituent Assembly, which witnessed the emergence of the
left extremity, at first as the left extremity of the left part but later in the abbreviated

extremity of the left part and subsequently in even more simplified forms.''*
Essentially, however, the applications of these terms were limited to descriptive
accounts of parliamentary proceedings.
Meanwhile, these divisions had become an accepted part of assembly practice, as
became apparent after the Legislative Assembly met. The Constituent Assembly
having declared its members ineligible for reelection, the Legislative Assembly was
filled with new faces. Furthermore, the old structure of orders, which had left its

impress on the Constituent, was now a thing of the past. It was not unreasonable to

assume that the traditional cleavages of the old order would vanish along with the
men involved in that particular historical episode. Instead, the division of the
assembly into left, right, and center immediately reappeared. "The places on the left

side that had been occupied in the Constituent Assembly by the true champions of
liberty were invaded and seized by the most spirited innovators," according to one
participant, the Feuillant Mathieu Dumas. "A far larger number of enlightened men
of moderate opinions, reputed to be wise and almost indifferent observers, hastened
to the center, where their mass and packed ranks might, by dint of numerical weight
and strength, take on in their own eyes the appearance of an immense majority,
comforting to them in their timidity. There remained to conscientious friends of the
constitution only those places on the right which in the previous assembly had been
occupied by the defenders of the ancien regime." The reader will have grasped that
our witness ranged himself among these "patriots," now transformed in the eyes of

the people into an "aristocratic minority" by the sheer force of geography. "Thus
the pattern of the Legislative Assembly was set in its first sessions," he concluded,
"and nothing in this local disposition was changed as long as it continued to meet."'^
It was as if a law of legislative seating had been established. In reading these lines

one cannot help being struck by a sense of witnessing an accelerated repetition of

246 MARCEL GAUCHET

what had happened in the summer of '89. It was the left that took the initiative, with
the right reacting after a sizable centrist reflex had asserted itself. The latter point

was omitted from our earlier account, yet it bears emphasizing. Duquesnoy, for
example, noticed more than just the polarization of the hall on August 23, 1789. He
also observed the significant position of those who "occupy the middle": "They are
in favor of everything that is being done," he says, "but they would like to see it

done more slowly and with less disruption."'*' The Impartiaux would be an impor-
tant part of the structure of the Constituent Assembly and of the political tradition

that in a rather confused way it prefigured. The conceptual dichotomy of right and
left is closely related to an actual tripartite division articulated around a center.

The same scenario apparently repeated itself when the Convention met. The left
of the Legislative Assembly, minus its "left extremity," became the "right side" of

the Convention. For a period of several months tensions were often high between
the two parts of the assembly. But following the coup d'etat of June 2, 1793, and the
arrest of the Girondins, a novel situation developed: the right vanished. According
to Thibaudeau, "the summit of the Mountain, which passed for the highest level of

republicanism, absorbed everything; the right side was deserted once the Girondins
were rooted out; those who had sat with them, being too conscientious or too fright-
ened to become Montagnards, took refuge in the helly, which was always ready to

receive men who sought their salvation in its indulgence or nullity."'^ The place

thus liberated was ostensibly reserved for "envoys of the people": on August 12 one
Montagnard proposed "placing the right side of the hall at the disposition of

deputies from the primary assemblies; they will purify it, while only the left side

deliberates."'^ Thermidor would restore symmetry between the contending forces.

This was a time of high expectations, during which the division of the assembly
took on special significance, as can be seen particularly in the crisis of Germinal and
Prairial, Year III, which ended in the exclusion of the most visible representatives
of the "left extremity." In keeping with a custom that can be traced back at least as

far as the early days of the Convention, the confrontation among the deputies was
mirrored in the galleries, where spectators also arranged themselves according to

their political views. On 12 Germinal, for example, the petitioners who invaded the

assembly "marched to applause from members and galleries of the left extremity.""

It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that despite this polarization we find no

greater identification with the vocabulary than in previous periods. "Right side"
and "left side" at this point reflect a well-established, smoothly running parliamen-
tary practice, but they were not yet terms with which people identified. Even within
the walls of parliament, where the opposition of right and left had become a de facto

rule, it was not perceived as the inevitable expression of deep leanings but as the

pathological product of unfortunate discord that a healthy organization would not

tolerate. Thus the Convention's last word on the subject would be to dismiss it. The
 Right and Left 247

Constitution of Year III was capped off by a code of rules for future assemblies
expressly designed to "break up the party groups that treat the legislative chamber
as a battlefield on which a number of armies are engaged in a bitter struggle for vic-

tory."^*^ On September 14, 1795, La Revelliere-Lepeaux spoke at length on the

"extremely serious drawbacks" of a situation in which deputies were obliged to
express not their own wishes but those "that the public and the members of the
assembly themselves believed ought to emerge from the place we occupied."^' At
his instigation the deputies voted that seating would be determined by lots to be
drawn every month. Thanks to this frequent rotation, he explained, deputies would
get to know each other better yet remain freer from influence: the resulting opin-
ions, being more distinctively individualized, "would merge more easily into a truly
general opinion."^^ So while it may be true that the French Revolution introduced
the terms left and right into the language of politics, it protested strenuously all the

while. True, there were a few surprising people, Sieyes among them, who drew a

different lesson from the experience, concluding that the phenomenon was
inevitable. Had not Sieyes gone so far as to concede, on July 20, that "the existence

of two parties similar or analogous to those that are known elsewhere as the minis-
terial party and the party of opposition is inseparable from any kind of representa-
tive system. Let us tell the truth: they occur everywhere, regardless of the form of
government". '^^^
He was wasting his breath. The dominant view, in the waning days
of Thermidor, was to bestow practical consecration on the fundamental philosophy
of unity that Sieyes in his day had done so much to establish. It is not enough, there-
fore, to say that the Revolution created our favorite political categories; we must
also say that it did its utmost to abolish them. This was not so much a beginning as
a false start.

The Restoration and the Origins of the French Parliamentary Tradition

The true beginning was the Restoration. In this area it was the Revolution's worst
enemies who completed its work. In 181 5 the ultraroyalists were in command. Their
impatient initiatives led to the resurgence of "parties" in the so-called Chambre
introuvable. These formed groups and organized, not without raising anxieties in the
mind of a public still traumatized by the Revolution. "Shortly after the chambers
began meeting," one contemporary observer reported, "word spread among the
public that deputies were meeting in several groups known as clubs. The two prin-
cipal ones were named.... The mere idea of these clubs spread alarm among those
who recalled the unfortunate influence that clubs had wielded during the
Revolution, and indeed from its very outset."^'* And it was not just the bad memo-
ries; at bottom there was a prejudice in favor of the "noble independence that should
be the first characteristic of a deputy." The same observer continued: "People asked
248 MARCEL GAUCHET

how it would benefit the public interest if a deputy sacrificed to a party by adopting
an opinion not his own." The quest for unity on one side forced opponents to band
together. Moderates counted heads to gauge their strength vis-a-vis the ultras. Two
months after the session began, on October 7, 181 5, the fracture appeared to be
irreparable: "The battle was on, the parties were set; in the chambers there was a

constituted majority and a constituted minority."^^ Crucially, the ultra majority,

after "a moment of doubt," according to Duvergier de Hauranne, "ultimately
decided to take up its position on the right."^'' It certainly would have been world-
shaking if the ultras had decided to sit on the left! As is well known, increasing dis-

sension over the next few months between a ministry compelled to adopt a basically
realistic attitude and overzealous champions of the monarchy would force the king
to dissolve the legislature in September 18 16. The ultras were severely beaten in the
October elections, and the ministry thereafter sought the support of deputies favor-
ing compromise in the spirit of the Charter, who were known as "constitutionals"

and who soon became "the center." This happened after the elections of 1817, which
led to the emergence of a group of "Independents" large enough to constitute an

opposition on the left, which gained strength in the elections of 1818 and especially
1819. Given a regime with a government of the center faced with opposition on both
its left and its right, the crystalline simplicity of the English two-party system no
longer captured the reality. As late as August 1816, Vitrolles, one of the ultra lead-

ers, could still call for the adoption of the British party system. By 1820, Louis
XVIII could only look back, sadly nostalgic, to a vanished ideal: "O Tories! O
Whigs! Where are you.''"^^ The logic of the French parliament was very different,
and much more difficult to manage because of the possibility of shifting coalitions.
It was this unique distribution of political forces that gave meaning to the appella-

tions left and right. The period 181 5— 1820 was thus crucial in establishing the ulti-

mate sense of the two terms.

The establishment of the couple required, if I may put it this way, a preliminary

menage a trois. Left and right were the product of an anomaly relative to "the nor-

mal state of parliamentary government, whose mechanism runs more smoothly if

there are only two parties present." Yet, Duvergier de Hauranne continued, "how
could there be just two parties, when one was hostile to the Charter and the other
hostile to the Dynasty.-* A ministry faithful to both the Charter and the Dynasty was
of course obliged to keep its distance from both and pursue a middle course."^'
With this double secession, ultramonarchists on one side and intransigent liberals

on the other, France entered a period of fixed positions: alternation of the parties in

power was impossible, and there could be no rotation of ministries. The system was
therefore one in which the positions of the parties took on intrinsic significance,

since the government necessarily defined itself in relation to them. In order to

obtain a working majority, the government was usually forced to seek a coalition
 Right and Left 249

between its natural centrist constituency and at least a faction of one party or the

other. At the end of 1818, for example, Decazes and de Serre tried to govern "in the

sense and with the support of the left, although the left was not represented in the

government," whereas in 18 19 they changed their orientation and tried to govern

"in the sense and with the support of the right, although the right had no part in
power."'^ Some "constitutionals" consequently favored alliance with the right and

others with the left (or at any rate with those factions of the right and left capable of
parting company with the exageres in their own camps). Deputies were therefore
inclined to seat themselves with extraordinary subtlety so as to express the nuances

of their position relative to both the extremes of both parties and the center defined
by the action of the government. Since this position was the key to the political

game, it became a matter of public knowledge. The revealing topography of par-

liament was publicized in a series of Statisdques, Tableaux, and Plans, such as the
Plan figuratif de la Chambre des deputes indiquant avec exactitude la place qu 'occupe
chacun des membres, a title sufficiently eloquent to make commentary superfluous.^'
The editor of one Statistique (for the session of 1819) took the trouble to explain that
it was not enough to pay heed to the three major portions of the hemicycle, for not
only were right and left both divided into two "sections" but each of these sections
itself revealed significant differences: "The deputies who sit in the second section
of the left, the second section of the right, and in the center are placed in such a way
as to indicate the division of the assembly toward which they lean." What is more,
the horizontal order of the chamber was supplemented by a vertical order. "The
three columns are divided imperceptibly into three degrees. "^^ In order to describe
this exquisitely mapped terrain one needed a terminology capable of capturing not
only the major divisions but the internal variegation as well. The terms right and left
were thus supplemented by extreme right and extreme left, center right and center left.

"But these classifications," an observer would comment somewhat later, "are far
from indicating all the nuances of the parties that compose our assemblies. How
many diverse complexions there are from the extreme right of the center left to the

extreme left of the center right! "^^ Note in passing that this is surely one of the
sources of the power of the left-right couple: it allows one to conceive simultane-
ously of both radical opposition and a continuous, infinitely subdividable spectrum.
The 1819—20 session of parliament marks one of the great moments in the his-

tory of political vocabulary. The whole lexical system was apparently clarified and
consecrated at this time. Newspapers, pamphlets, and private correspondence all

confirm that the terms left and right now began to be used not just in isolated

instances but in a consistent and regular fashion. To be sure, the circumstances were
favorable. The first part of the session witnessed the perfection of the system of
government through shifting coalitions. After the liberals made a good showing in

the September 1819 elections, Decazes reversed direction, dropped his pro-left pol-
250 MARCEL GAUCHET

icy, and formed a center-right ministry seeking allies on its right. Inevitably he ran
up against the hostility of the irreductibles. Villele, who conducted the negotiations,
declared in December 1819 that "Fievee and La Bourdonnaye would indeed like to
raise a banner of their own on the extreme right. The logic of the process dic-

tated a policy of isolating the extremes. In that vein, Le Censeur europeen noted two
months earlier the discrepancy between "the praise heaped on the left and the blame
leveled at the extreme left."^^ But such a policy of course created the possibility that
the extremes would join forces, a phenomenon with important implications for the
coalescence of the semantic system that was beginning to emerge. The elections

offer an excellent example: the regicide Gregoire won election thanks to the support
of ultra voters, a fact that caused an enormous scandal. An advocate of the policy
of ultimate victory by making things worse in the short run, the ultraroyalist
Quoddienne asked if, "rather than reject the regicide, it might not be better to allow
him to sit in the middle of the left, to rise with it, and thus by his presence to

enlighten doubting royalists as to the dreadful intentions of the Revolution."^'' By

contrast, after the election was declared invalid, the Bibliotheque historique

expressed outrage that "an elderly man honored by sixty years of virtues did not

find one champion in the left."^'' When the time came to vote on the budget, how-
ever, the same Quoddienne did not shrink from calling for a union of opposites:

"The left and the right should come to an understanding in order to manifest their

common outrage against M. Decazes."'^ In lieu of an agreement, there was at least

a common enemy, the ministerial party, which drew gibes from both sides. The cen-

tre was scornfully dismissed as the ventre (belly), reviving a play on words inherited
from the Revolution. Writing of the 1819 session, Beranger lampooned the ventru,

the deputy made plump by all "the dinners the ministers threw for him," for hav-
ing "learned his lesson and taken up his place ten paces from Villele and fifteen
from d'Argenson." (It is interesting to note the familiarity with parliamentary
topography that the writer assumes on the part of his audience.^') Then, in

February 1820, the Due de Berry was assassinated, and the ensuing reaction dis-
rupted the subtle game whose rules were in the process of being established. It was
back to the simplicity of head-to-head combat. The government joined forces with
the ultras to pass a series of restrictive laws. Liberals of every stripe, reunited by

adversity, engaged in a delaying action that provided a great opportunity for the
display of oratorical eloquence. The parliamentary debates were followed with
passionate interest in Paris, where students made a much-noticed entry onto the
stage of political action. The bitterness of the debate by no means diminished in the
wake of the November 1820 elections, which gave the ministerial party and the
right an overwhelming majority. The eighty liberal survivors fought the counter-
revolutionary onslaught tooth and nail in a session that Duvergier de Hauranne
characterized as "civil war." Meanwhile, some liberal forces went underground.

1
 Right and Left 251

Surely this polarization of attitudes played a part in persuading the public for the
first time to identify itself with political positions expressed in terms of parliamen-
tary geography. Take, for example, Paul-Louis Courier's account of the 1820 elec-

tions: "Among us the prefect called upon three sorts of men: men of the right, eas-
ily counted, men of the left, equally few in number, and men of the middle, a

bunch.'"*" Stendhal took yet another step in 1824, when in describing the Salon exhi-

bition of paintings that year, he said that his "opinions in painting are those of the
extreme left," whereas in politics they were "center left, like those of the vast
majority.'"*' The language of taking sides was thus emancipated from the electoral

context in which Courier still used it; indeed, it had attained sufficient expressive

generality to support a metaphorical extension. But it was not simply the intensity

of parliamentary combat that made symbolic substantivization possible. Tacit

recognition that the terms left and right expressed the underlying reality of a his-
torical situation was also needed. The context puts the matter in a clear light. The
conflict between liberals and ultras could not be mistaken for a relatively artificial

factional struggle for power. It was plain to everyone that this was how the country
was and would remain divided. One of the great differences between this situation

and that of the revolutionary period was, moreover, the clearly intelligible con-
tours of the confrontation, an intelligibility in fact created by the memory and
legacy of 1789. With hindsight what had been at stake in a now
confused battle was
clear. No one had the slightest doubt that the old and the new France were now
squared off face to face, and the question was whether compromise was possible
between "two nations." Meanwhile, Montlosier on the reactionary side and Thierry
and Guizot on the liberal side provided historical interpretations that took the long
view, seeing duality as inevitable in a France "condemned by its history to form two
'"'^
rival and irreconcilable camps. To the extent that political division thus seemed
to everyone justified, ineluctable, real, and persistent, it made sense to identify with
it, to transform the distribution of parliamentary forces into a concept, to convert
the accident of their spatial disposition into something essential about French polit-
ical reality. Historical dramatization plus political subtlety formed a volatile mix-
ture in 1820, and the resulting explosion blasted the terms left and right indelibly

into the political bedrock of France. The goal of restoration revived the cleavages
of the Revolution with new clarity, and party identification lent gravity to the sit-

uation. Nevertheless, the outcome depended on the prior incorporation of the

antagonism into a complex political game whose descriptive semantics came into

wide use.
The result was further reinforced by what happened in 1828. There was exten-
sive debate in the parties and the press about how to respond to the elections of
November 1827, debate that once again brought the language of political classifica-
tion to the forefront. Interest in the subject had subsided somewhat after 1824,
252 MARCEL GAUCHET

owing to the right's overwhelming domination of the so-called Chambre retrouvee,

even though the talents of the fifteen opposition deputies huddled in their fortress
on the extreme left, and even more dissension within the majority, divided between
the hotheads of the extreme right and the moderates of its "left," were sufficient to

sustain lively parliamentary discussion. In 1827 the antigovernment coalition was

revived, and it was back to the tripartite situation of the Decazes era. The ministe-
rial party, reduced to 180 deputies, faced opposition on both flanks, with 70 royal-
ists on its right and 180 liberals on its left. Thus the issue of forming coalitions capa-
ble of sustaining a majority was once again on the agenda. Should the ministerial

center right join forces with the center left.'' Some people thought so, arguing, as
Stendhal had done a few years earlier, that "the general opinion of France and the
spirit of the age lies there: all of France is center left."'*^ But this proposal drew vehe-
ment criticism from both the right and the left, each side insisting on unity as the
guarantee of its own hegemony. The Journal des debats, for example, argued that
"the cabinet should march with the entire left.... It would be madness to wish for a
union of the center right and center left strong enough to withstand the attacks of
the two extremities.'"''* Similarly, Benjamin Constant denounced as Utopian any
attempt to sever the center left from "what is called the extreme left." "The left will

remain united," he said, "even though it has in its ranks some who are impatient and
others who are resigned.'"*' The young men of Le Globe confirmed this, disdain-

fully dismissing "the distinctions of center left and left, reHcs of 1819.... The true

elements of the majority are on the left, without distinction as to center or extrem-
ity.'"*^ On the right, however, the Vicomte de Saint-Chamans, an influential pam-
phleteer, sought to prove in quite parallel fashion "that the alliance between the cen-
ter right and center left is impossible, and that there is more distance between the
most moderate man of the center right and the most moderate man of the center left
than between either one and the most ardent man in his party.'"*^ He therefore
favored an "alliance of the right with the center right."'*^ In support of his thesis he
advanced the interesting argument that "the four parties and their delicate shadings

really exist more in the Chambers than in the nation," where by this time "only
clear-cut opinions of the right and left have any power.'"*' In practice, Martignac's

center-right ministry would venture, throughout the year and a half of its existence,
to keep open precarious lines of communication with the left in the hope of an
unlikely "fusion" with moderate liberals. This was a perilous course to take, for it

left the government at the mercy of a concerted opposition, which in the end
brought it down. The result, ultimately fatal to the regime, was to hazard "the folly
of a ministry of the extreme right," as Villele had warned. In any case, the
episode, which entailed a general revision of terminology and tactics, contributed
to the definitive enthronement of terms describing parliamentary divisions as cate-

gories of political understanding.

 Right and Left 253

The Era of the Masses: From Topography to Identity

We now turn our attention to understanding how right and left became the primary
categories of poHtical identity. This was a long, drawn-out process that lasted more
than three quarters of a century, until the first decade of the twentieth century. It

transformed the specialized language of parliament into the basic idiom of univer-
sal suffrage. The exemplary clarity of the early Restoration did not last. After 1830,
the words right and left remained, but the political deck was reshuffled. It was no
longer the case that the division of the National Assembly accurately reflected the
issue facing the country: to preserve the gains of the Revolution or accede to the
counterrevolution. With the victory of liberal Orleanism, the scene became more
complicated, the mirror turned cloudy. Old antagonisms waned as extreme royal-
ism, which had served to harden everyone's position, disintegrated. "Since the July
Revolution," one pamphleteer wrote in 1842, "a dozen honorable members, left-

overs of legitimist opinion, have found themselves scattered among deputies of

every stripe. As a result, the words right and right side no longer refer to a political

party."^' Politics was increasingly a matter for professionals, in which rivalries

between individuals and cliques mattered more than doctrine. Official debate
became rather esoteric because the two great issues of the day, the republican ques-

tion and the social question, were studiously avoided. The descriptive terms right

and left remained by force of tradition, but they lost much of their appeal, much of
the identificational power they had had during the memorable battles of the 1820s.
Thus when universal suffrage arrived in 1848, the right-left language did not
spring spontaneously to mind. The words were too closely associated with the inter-
nal workings of parliament to lend themselves readily to the description of funda-
mental divisions in public opinion. They were institutional terms, words for assem-

bly minutes or political analyses. But when Proudhon, for example, sketched a

typology of the parties in his Confessions d'un revolutionnaire, he was careful, after
establishing the need for two middle-of-the-road parties to occupy the space
between the two parties of the extreme, to clarify his meaning by invoking a differ-

ent but familiar vocabulary: "in parliamentary terms, a center right and a center
left."^^ As it happens, the vocabulary adopted to describe electoral competition and
party politics took a different turn entirely. The elections of May 1849 (which, as is

well known, set the pattern of political confrontation in France for a long time to
come) pitted what ordinary people referred to as the democ-socs against the reacs

(democratic-socialists against reactionaries). The banners flown by the opposing

parties also established a very powerful symbolism of colors: reds versus whites. The
red-white opposition would remain the key distinction between the two camps for
the next half century. In the Breton village of Plozevet in the 1960s, Edgar Morin
found that these two colors were still the primary symbols of party affiliation.^^
MARCEL GAUCHET

Well into the twentieth century, long after the terms right and left had taken hold,
red and white banners were still flown in times of tension, indeed at moments when
there was a need to emphasize the stark character of the choice. "I am for the forces
of revolution and against the forces of counterrevolution. There are whites and
reds, and I am with the reds!" proclaimed the radical Malvy at a 1923 demonstration
in favor of the Cartel des Gauches.^'* And in 1936 there were still candidates who
referred to the "eternal struggle" between the "red bloc" and the "white bloc."^^

The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Universal suffrage immediately

created an enormous need for political identification. Everyone was called upon to

choose sides. People did so at first by identifying with either the red or the white. It

was this opposition that both simplified the terms of conflict to the utmost and
allowed people to indicate immediately where they stood. It was not until later that

right and left supplanted white and red. The symbolism of color had established
deep roots, even insinuating itself into folklore, especially in certain parts of the
south. The symbolic battle developed its own panoply of costumes, masquerades,
and ritual clashes of color. And of course red and white, both rich in symbolic over-
tones, were ideally chosen to speak to the imagination and the heart. In the end this

makes it all the more mysterious that right and left, despite their cold abstractness,

could have achieved the same emotional resonance, the same earnestness of identi-
fication or repulsion.

Perhaps the first thing that this shift points to is the success of the parliamentary

regime. By the beginning of the twentieth century the institution had taken firm

hold. Not only did people by now conceive of politics in terms of parliament, but
they measured social forces in terms of electoral power. Even the regime 's worst
detractors spoke its language. It had taken thirty years to achieve this result, thirty

years (i 871— 1900) during which democracy in fact adapted itself to France. It may
well be that the vicissitudes of the political vocabulary can themselves shed light, as
from within, on some of the psychological aspects of this process.

The words right and left came back into circulation with the liberalization of the

Second Empire, or, more precisely, with the legislative elections of 1869. According
to one journalist, the ninety deputies of the opposition "will oblige the assembly to

revert to old definitions: left, extreme left, center left, center right, extreme right."^''

He was right about the new dynamic, as can be seen from the open letter that
Gambetta dispatched two weeks later "to the voters in the first district in the Seine

departement," in which he tried to clarify how things stood on the left: "The pre-

sent left," he said, "should be divided into two parts," a center left (although he did

not use the word) and a true left. What he wanted to do was to give the word left its

"precise, definite, exact meaning: it refers to and defines a political party of homo-
geneous composition, of identical origin, of common principles," a party consist-

ing of all those for whom the emancipation of universal suffrage must ultimately
 Right and Left 255

lead to democratic institutions.^' The text can be seen as a turning point. On the one
hand it looks forward to the idea of a modern political party, that is, a group unified

by acceptance of a common doctrine: "We must organize a left consisting solely of

citizens in support of a common set of principles." Yet its conceptual world is essen-

tially that of parliamentary debate, as can be seen from the following passage: "A
checkered, heterogeneous left comprising opinion of all sorts can harangue, criti-

cize, and verbally harass the common adversary, and that is a great deal; but in
"^^
action it will always amount to nothing. This limitation would continue to be the
rule for many years to come. The revival of the terms right and left thus came about
in the midst of war, the fall of the Empire and the collapse of the Commune, and
then the return to normal with a parliamentary regime capped by the approval of

the new Republic in 1875. The February 1871 elections introduced a Republican

Left, a Center Right, and a Center Left as official parties in the National Assembly.
To these were added an Extreme Left in 1876 and a Radical Left in 1881. In 1885 the

Extreme Left formed a group in the Senate with a manifesto that says a great deal
about the familiarity of these labels: "The characterization 'extreme left' is a suffi-

cient indication of the motives behind the formation of this group."^" After the 1885
elections a Union of Rights was formed in the chamber. In the following year Raoul
Duval took the initiative in creating a Republican Right, a name later taken over by
Jacques Piou in 1893 for the former Constitutional Right. In parliamentary dis-
course and political analysis, a genre whose development was greatly fostered by
the growth of the press, right, left, and derivative terms flourished and became
indispensable. There were two circumstances in which their use was almost
inevitable: in the heat of polarized political debate, and in the cold light of political

analysis of the strength of opposing camps, especially the internal structure of the
various parties composing rival groups. In the latter vein the earnest commentators
ior Le Temps are an inexhaustible source. In 1873, for example, one of them
deplored the fact that "not a single of the right's advantages was not created by
some imprudence on radicalism's part."''' A year later the same paper observed that
"''^
"the left and center left are infinitely more united than the right and center right.
Examples were no less numerous in the realm of language to describe tension. In
July 1876 the Bonapartist Cassagnac proclaimed that "we have republican intoler-

ance to thank for bringing total unity to the right." In January 1879 ^he radical
Floquet called for a union of the left in what was perhaps the first use of that for-
mula: "What saved the Republic was the Union of the The Union of the
Left....

Left — therein lies the truth. ""^^

Allowances must of course be made for the phe-
nomenon of coalition between extremes, which earned Gambetta the chairmanship
of the budget committee in January 1877: "It was the right that settled the issue
between two roughly equal factions of the left," according to one Bonapartist jour-
nal. "It voted almost unanimously, and openly, for the radical candidates, whose
256 MARCEL GAUCHET

victory it was delighted to see."^'' This was a common enough tactic for Jules Ferry
to make it a central issue of his 1881 campaign, whose goal, he said, was to eliminate

enough intransigent monarchists to "protect the government desired by the major-

ity from coalitions of the right and the extreme left."^^ The resulting "republican

concentration" was to be safe from extremist minorities, and it was this context that

gave rise to one of the most famous dicta of Opportunism, inaccurately attributed
to Ferry himself: "The peril is on the left." Ferry was content merely to make the
point by implication, as in a speech at Le Havre on October 14, 1883, in which he
discussed the "partial successes of the intransigent party": "The peril of monarchy
no longer exists, but it has been replaced by another, which we must face head on."*^
It was his enemies who took it upon themselves to recast and popularize the slogan.
On the eve of the 1885 elections, the Manifeste de la commission du congres republi-

cain radical socialiste branded him a "pernicious man who, forgetting our eternal

enemies in his hatred of radicals, did not shrink from telling the country that the
peril is no longer on the right, it is on the left."*^ Any number of additional exam-
ples could easily be cited. For the sake of balance I shall quote a statement of Raoul
Duval, made in a period when former Bonapartists and monarchists were throwing

their support to the conservative republic (1886—87): "If I turn to the left [of the

Chamber], I see mistrust and suspicion. If I look to the right, I see many colleagues
who for fear of a word [Republic] shrink from openly backing the policy that in
their hearts they find most reasonable. "^^ Thus ready-made labels and traditional

divisions no longer corresponded to the actual situation: this, too, was a theme with
a great future ahead of it, the inception of which is worth noting.
This flurry of examples risks creating a misconception. All remain closely asso-
ciated with parliamentary politics and reflect its specialized vocabulary. The only
difference is that with political stability achieved and new means of publicity in

place, the news circulated more widely. If we focus on elections, however, the left-

right distinction pales to insignificance. Militants mobilized around other cate-

gories, and voters identified with other themes, although left and right do reappear
after the voting in analyses The Commune revived the colors of 1848.
of the results.

In particular it attached an ineradicable luster to the word red (and in consequence

to white) —
a positive identification for some, a repellent emblem for others.

Revolution itself became "red" for its proponents, while "reds" were the very
embodiment of bourgeois fears.*^^ In fact, the language of denunciation would con-
tinue to draw on the Commune for decades, and the language of denunciation
would play an important part in familiarizing people with the friend-enemy vocab-

ulary that went along with elections. As for the more tranquil matter of the labels

claimed by each side (and recognized by the other), the period was dominated by
the contest between "conservatives" and "republicans." Under the electoral system

adopted in 1 875, each district elected a single member by majority vote in two stages,
 Right and Left 257

and in the second round, voters, in accordance with their allegiances, cast their votes
for the surviving conservative or republican candidate. This was the system that
would finally bring republicans to power after the decisive elections of October
1877, and it remained in effect throughout the 1880s, despite a temporary return to
voting by list in 1 885 . We have a unique instrument for appreciating the value of this
system, an anthology of professions of faith by victorious candidates; the radical

Barodet sought and won approval for the compilation of such an anthology in 188 1,

in order to determine more accurately what wishes the voters were expressing
through the ballot box.^*^ And in that respect the texts are indeed quite eloquent.

Until the late 1890s right and left did not figure in candidates' statements to the vot-

ers. When the terms did appear in a platform, appeal, or proclamation, it was in a

purely parliamentary sense, as for example when General de Frescheville explained

in 1889 that he, "together with [my] colleagues on the right, have done all that it was
within the power of a minority to do," or when Montgolfier explained to the voters
of Tournon that "the platform I wish to place before you is the platform of the

right. These terms are relatively neutral compared with more inflammatory
labels such as "the reaction" or "the reds," applied to the opposition, and the more
laudatory labels of "republicanism" or "conservatism" attached to one 's own party.
These were the primary categories in use in the early days of the Third Republic.
Things changed about 1900, at the time of the "republican defense" and the
major conflict triggered by the Dreyfus Affair. Right and left would soon establish

themselves as the terms for describing the two Frances that clashed so passionately
over the most fundamental issues of truth, justice, religion, nation, and revolution.
By the eve of World War I, their fundamental role was established once and for all.

Parliamentary topography became the primary reference in terms of which citizens

expressed their political beliefs. The change was already apparent in the 1902 elec-
tions, which saw the victory of none other than the Bloc des Gauches. It assumed its

full dimensions in the elections of 1906, even though the period of most acute con-
frontation, of "bloc against bloc," over the religious issue had ended with the fall of
the Combes government the previous year. It would survive the vicissitudes of the

alliance of Radicals and Socialists in the years to come. Circumstances ceased to

matter. From now on, no matter what was happening internally in terms of relations
among the various constituents of right and left, the competition for votes would be
played as a contest between right and left, for this was the language of the voters

even more than of their representatives, hence the language the candidates were
obliged to speak.
We must now try to understand the minor psychological revolution behind this

shift in vocabulary. In my view the change largely reflects the advent of democracy
in the modern sense and what this implied in the realm of representation. In addition,
this profound transformation of the political order was powerfully affected by cer-
258 MARCEL GAUCHET

tain accidental features of a very specific historical moment. Structural changes and
conjunctural factors were inextricably intertwined. The subtle interplay of these

various forces is what we must now try to unravel, taking the linguistic symptoms
as our starting point. To reduce the answer to simple, if rather schematic, terms, the
adoption of the right-left dichotomy by the mass of voters simultaneously solved
three main problems: how to deal with change in the very grounds of confrontation,
resulting from the continual emergence of new parties; how to cope with contra-
dictions, given the differences within each camp as well as between them; and how
to cope with the interchangeability of actor and observer, when representation por-
trayed itself as an objectification of social divisions.
The moment was of course defined most of all by the civil war of the mind that

began in early 1898 with the polemic over the guilt of Captain Dreyfus (Zola's
J'acctise appeared on January 13). For seven years the conflict of opinion took a par-
ticularly bitter turn, first with the rise of nationalist sentiment, followed by a repub-
lican riposte and later an anticlerical offensive by the Combes government. It was in
this tense atmosphere, so favorable to the emergence of dualist categories, that the
shift we are interested in mainly occurred. Still, the vehemence of public debate by
itself explains nothing. The existing categories were perfectly adequate to express

the divisions, and the situation could easily have solidified the opposition between

republicans and conservatives or reds and whites. Indeed, it was under the banner

of "defense of the Republic" that the left and extreme left joined forces to confront

nationalist agitation in 1899, from the demonstration of June 11 to the inauguration

of Dalou's Triomphe de la Republique on November 18. Yet instead of reinforcing

the existing categories, the situation substituted a different one. In order to under-

stand this, we must consider the evolution of the political forces, which sapped the
strength of some and led to the realignment of others. In this connection the central

fact was of course the emergence and growing power of the Socialists. What Jaures
called "the dawn of 1893," the breakthrough the party made in elections in which
the social question was the central issue, brought full visibility. Although the new
party was divided and still limited in its electoral and parliamentary influence, its

arrival was the crucial new factor that changed the rules of the political game. It was
in relation to this development that other changes took on their full meaning. To
begin with, the advent of the Socialists illustrated in striking fashion the law that
Andre Siegfried would discover in 1913, that French politics moves from left to

right, "tending to squeeze the parties, to drain them of their left-wing energy and
propel them toward the center, the paradise of the satisfied," while at the same time
spurring the development of new forces of protest on the left.^^ The replacement of
the Opportunists by the Radicals offered a first, spectacular illustration of this law,

and the arrival of the Socialists seemed to corroborate it. The elections of May 19 14

produced this strange portrait of a chamber in which "the entire left half of the hall
 Right and Left 259

was occupied by groups born within the past third of a century and bearing the epi-

thet sociahst (unified socialist, repubUcan sociaUst, socialist radical)," while "all the

groups that kept the name left (radical left, left republicans, democratic left) were
seated in the right half; the two progressive groups formed from the debris of the
old (1880— 1898) republican majority were forced all the way over to the extreme
right."^^ This picture shows the degree to which the old labels were discredited. Not
only did parties labeled "left" sit on the right in parliament, but the term right, once
reserved for monarchists irretrievably on the wane, now became confused. Clearly,

the appropriation of the terms right and left by the public went hand in hand with
dissatisfaction with the way in which the words had been used in the National
Assembly since 1871. The terms were not simply transferred or extended from one
domain to another but redefined. Meanwhile, other identifying labels were also
affected. For example, the term republican was challenged by the Socialists for its

political narrowness, and it lost some of its defining resonance after some former
conservatives became supporters of the Republic. The embarrassment is apparent
in campaign literature from 1902, much of which was given over to denunciation of
counterfeit republicanism. "Unite against all the parties of the right that fraudu-

lently deck themselves out with the name 'republican,' " proclaimed, in typical fash-
ion, one Radical candidate in Lyons. ''''
What is more, the same conservatives showed
a new readiness to concern themselves with social issues, as illustrated by Piou's cre-
ation of the Action Liberale Populaire in 1902. Meanwhile, other conservatives ral-

lied under the banner of nationalism, a "new word that deceives no one," accord-
ing to an often repeated allegation.''^ These two factors further confused the issue of

party origins. All these processes of erosion and destabilization led in the end to a
need for identification: the resulting void was filled by the opposition of right and
left. We can see now what gave the terms their newfound force: they restored a sta-
ble identity to the confrontation, at the price of a relativization of the opposed
terms.'^ They registered the shift that had occurred thus far and protected the prin-
ciple of division from further changes yet to come. Instead of replacing more or less
obsolete doctrine with new doctrine, the new opposition abstracted the fact of con-
flict from its ideological content. It separated the permanent principle from the ran-
dom variability of its substance. The wonderful power of right versus left comes
from the infinite openness of the terms, whose meaning can always be added to or
altered. The search for an ultimate meaning is thus inevitable yet pointless, since it

was the very latitude of the pair that allowed it to take hold. In their abstraction left

and right functioned as memory notions through which historical continuity could

be maintained. They allowed people to believe that political conflict is political con-
flict, that from the Girondins versus the Montagnards to the nationalists versus the

socialists by way of the liberals versus the monarchists the story was always the
same. That is why it has been so difficult to pin these terms down as products of his-
26o MARCEL GAUCHET

tory: words that help us find our way through history come to seem coextensive
with it.

There is a phrase from the 1890s that can be credited with a definite role in help-

ing the new system to establish itself: "no enemy on the left." This was the slogan
of young reformers from the Radical group who joined forces in 1894—95 to push
for an alliance with the Socialists.^'' They deliberately stood the Ferryist slogan of

the previous decade on its head. Indeed, according to one of the reformers, this was
the slogan of those who refused "to see a peril or threat on the left" but only
"friends, brothers in democracy."^^ It captured the prevailing mood of the Radical
Party convention of 1901. A memorandum from the Comite d'Action pour les

Reformes Republicaines, which organized the convention, explicitly acknowl-

edged it: "In confronting the common enemy, it will eliminate whatever may divide
republicans and, in accordance with the Committee 's formula, the convention will
see no enemies to its left."^' The success of this slogan takes us straight to the heart
of the second set of factors that favored the shift to right versus left: the need for

symbolic unification of deeply divided political groups. Of course splits "on the
left" did not begin when the Socialists came on the scene. But the arrival of the

Socialists dramatized old divisions, many of which could be traced all the way back
to the Revolution, after which they were rediscovered in 1848 and revived by the
Commune. The development of the workers' movement and the language of class
gave new substance to these old divisions and provided new terms for interpreting
them. Understood in terms of faction and social struggle, they came to seem insu-
perable obstacles, and the concrete results were obvious when "republican disci-
pline" failed to ensure that votes cast in the first round for "left-wing" candidates

were transferred in the second round to "bourgeois" candidates (Clemenceau paid

the price in 1893). What made alliances with the new parties problematic was not
so much intransigence in matters of principle as their very nature as class-based
parties. Meanwhile, "on the right," particularly in the Catholic camp, the divisions
were no less profound but of a different nature, as the elections of 1898 and after

made clear. Some on the right had rallied to the Republic, others remained uncom-
promisingly antisecular, and still others were nationalists; the result was profound
doubt and fierce disagreement. Under Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes the reli-

gious issue became a matter of bitter conflict, which as a result of these internal
divisions took on paradigmatic significance. It was not simply, as is so often said, a

resurgence of the fundamental antagonism of Ancien Regime and Revolution in

the new guise of clericals versus anticlericals. What deserves just as much attention
is the way in which the battle led to the realignment of two camps divided as they

had seldom been before. If the basic conflict was irreconcilable, the forces in con-

tention were fundamentally divided: despite the "duality of tendencies," as

Francois Goguel puts it, there was a "multiplicity of parties and groups."^*^ These
 Right and Left 261

two dimensions of the moment make it the perfect epitome of the tradition inau-

gurated by the French Revolution, in which the simphfying polarization of the cen-
tral conflict is equalled only by the complex heterogeneity of the parties involved.
Specifically, the need for unity against a background of tension in each camp is

what the sacralization of the right-left opposition conceals. The factors we find at

work here are the same as those discussed earlier from another angle. In particular,

the abstract neutrality of a classification in terms of spatial poles adepts nicely to a

situation in which no single party is capable of forcing its camp to identify with its

key symbol. In other words, if there had been only two major parties in France, the

lexical need for right and left would not have existed. The terms caught on precisely
because there was in reality more than one right and more than one left. The offi-
cial nomenclature reflected this, moreover, in designations ranging from the dele-
gation des gauches that was supposed to coordinate parliamentary action under
Waldeck-Rousseau to the Bloc des Gauches organized to wage the election cam-

paign of 1902.^' The more lefts (and rights) there were in actuality, the greater the
need for an ideal left (or right). Within this unifying power, however, it was always
possible to discern potential divisions, as when Vaillant told the chamber in 1907

that "the right begins for us much further left than you think." Another benefit of
the purely formal and therefore infinitely reproducible distribution was that the

terms of union were also the terms of division. It is significant that it was in the

1906 elections, when right and left were mobilized as signs of identity, that they
found their way into the Barodet anthology mentioned earlier.^^ On the one hand
were the accomplishments of long years of intense struggle, which surely helped
the new terminology to catch on. But on the other hand there was the recurrence
of division on the left. After the Congress of Amsterdam condemned the policy of

class collaboration in 1904, the Socialists, rebaptized the Section Frangaise de

I'lnternationale Ouvriere (S.F.I.O.), adopted a new line, rejecting any alliance
"with any portion whatsoever of the capitalist class." This was a warning that had
to be taken seriously, particularly because the governmental axis had, after the fall

of the Combes ministry, shifted noticeably toward the center. Nevertheless, the

elections took place with republican discipline in effect, but these menacing noises
surely were not unrelated to the fate of the new unifying categories in this cam-
paign. Consider these revealing snippets of rhetoric: "Vote against the right bloc

and for the left, more compact and unshakable than ever"; "The unshakable unity
of the parties of the left must be affirmed in the first round"; "I plant my flag in the
center of the bloc, with those who recognize no adversary on the left and who will
"^^
accept no compromise on the right. To be sure, this was shortly after the tem-
pest stirred up in early 1906 by the "inventories" provided for in the previous year's
law separating church and state, a law that had not met with unified opposition
from Catholics but that, given its relative moderation compared with the
262 MARCEL GAUCHET

"Combesian spirit," had rather revealed certain hesitations, doubts, and divisions.

As far as the flourishing of our dualist system is concerned, the equation was there-
fore ideal, with mobilizing tension (resulting in the highest voter turnout since

1877) offset by just enough relaxation to allow differences to emerge. The combi-
nation of bipolar antagonism with internal contradictions in each camp could thus
produce its full effect.

A third set of factors having to do with a profound transformation of the politi-

cal system also contributed to the consecration of right and left as categories of
political identity. These factors were connected with the development of a new
economy of representation connected with modern democracy. Right and left were
the words that would result in a change in the function of the representative scene
and, with it, a change in the way in which citizens located themselves in the politi-

cal realm.

Once again, the emergence of the Socialists offers a good way into the subject.

Both aspects of the new situation were most clearly visible in the socialist camp: true
political parties were born, and their inception was connected with a demand for

social representation. These were not the first or the only parties in France.
Unification, as we have seen, did not take place until 1905, whereas the Radical

Party had been constituted, admittedly in a rather loose fashion, since 1901. On the
right, Piou's Action Liberale Populaire, whose organization, interestingly enough,
was based on that of the German Zentrum, was born in 1902. Nevertheless, the
S.F.I. O. was the only prewar political organization to practice exclusive identifica-

tion of the parliamentary group with the party. In any case, the party phenomenon
in France was far weaker than in Germany or Great Britain. (Recall, in passing, that
the two great books on the emergence of modern political parties, written as the
phenomenon was taking place by Ostrogorski and Michels, appeared in 1903 and

191 1, respectively.^'') The meager influence of the parties in reality must not be
allowed to create the impression that the symbolic break was unimportant. It was
extremely important, particularly since French tradition had been hostile to parties
since the Revolution for powerfully articulated reasons.

The purpose of representation, in the French tradition, was to reveal the general

will, which was in essence unified. For that reason the deputy had to remain an
absolutely independent individual. Only if his opinion reflected his true conscience
could he validly exercise his function, which was to speak as a universal representa-
tive of the entire country. Representation, in other words, was the nation's means of
expression, since for reasons both practical and "mystical" the nation could not for-
mulate its will in person. In return, the nation had no other voice than its represen-

tatives; they were its sole organ. The ambition to make the law the emanation of the
body politic as a whole thus led to an identification of the nation's representatives

with the nation, which was in fact a substitution of one for the other. Election was
 — a

Right and Left 263

an act of delegation of the collective will to an individual, who, once that transfer
was made, was in principle entirely free vis-a-vis his constituents.

The new forms of political organization and discipline struck at the very foun-
dation of this whole conceptual framework, the core of the French republican tra-
dition.What makes the French case unique and interesting is that in France democ-
racy was obliged to constitute itself in opposition to the Republic. The mere exis-
tence of political parties pointed to an organization of society outside of its

representation and, potentially at least, an inversion of the relationship that was

supposed to reveal the general will: the deputies of the parties would then simply
transfer into the field of power a preexisting system of organizations, which would
determine the result in advance. The idea of a class-based party, or, more gener-
ally, the idea of a party as the organized expression of specific interests and groups,

only reinforced this quality of exteriority and anteriority. The image and very
nature of representation were thus transformed: instead of a monist image of rev-
elation of the unified collective will, one now had a dualist image of a correspon-

dence to be established between two distinct spheres. To represent had meant to

give face and body to an entity incapable of expressing itself in any other way;
henceforth it would mean to reflect adequately the complex realities of a structured
society, politically and in other ways, through the free initiative of its members
and once again, the secession of the working class proved decisive as an example.
Accordingly, demands for just representation began to be voiced at the same time.

The vigorous campaigns for proportional representation that began in 1902 were
the most visible illustration of this. They brought conservatives and Socialists
together but failed in the face of opposition from the Radicals. Proposals for pro-
fessional representation that surfaced in this same period should also be placed

under this head. So should the violent antiparliamentarism of the end of the
decade, which stemmed from frustrations due not so much to governmental insta-

bility after years of rule by the Bloc as to the spectacle of an assembly left to its own
internal machinations. In negative terms this reflected a wish to see parliament

reflect a reliable, stable image of the country's own divisions and debates —
desire that would be incorporated, timidly, into the 1910 reform making parlia-
mentary groups official and requiring deputies to affiliate exclusively and publicly
with one group. This search for a faithful match between a dynamic society and the
defining locus of its political identity forms the common substance of these vari-
ous protests and expectations. What people wanted was a parliament that would be
not a substitute for the body politic but a mirror capable of giving an accurate
reflection of the diversity of views and multiplicity of forces, not to say the divi-
sion of labor, in society itself. This parliament was not to be a closed body
removed from the community the better to arrive at an image of the general will

but a reflective body in every sense of the word, open to society in order to make
264 MARCEL GAUCHET

disputes and difference visible and conceivable and thereby to allow bargaining
and compromise.
In this context the meaning of the act of voting itself changed. It ceased to be
simply a matter of delegating a substitute to work in behalf of the voter's views and
became a way for the voter to define himself, to identify himself, to situate himself

on a political terrain whose salient features were recognized and understood. In

other words, the voter became not just a participant in but an analyst of politics,
though in an elementary mode to be sure, and this is probably the secret of the
vote 's symbolic efficacy. Democracy, which first began to emerge in its developed
form at the beginning of the twentieth century, is more than just de facto and de jure
coexistence of the contending parties. It consists above all in the pacifying repre-

sentation of the existing correlation of forces as epitomized in the structure of par-

liament. Its heart lies in that singular process of competitive objectification whereby
each person becomes a spectator of a division in which he is also an actor. The citi-

zen-voter is in fact a split personality, in whom political commitment coexists with

the detachment of the observer who records results, evaluates their consequences,
and orients himself with respect to the map that emerges.

Left and right —terms fraught with passion yet at the same time neutral
markers —would prove to be appropriate landmarks in this twofold process: they

made it possible to assert a clear-cut partisan identity while at the same time reckon-
ing one 's position on the overall political battlefield. Indeed, it was because the terms
left and right lent themselves to such dual functionality that they enjoyed a decisive
advantage over other pairs of contrasting terms such as red and white. Because of the
very intensity of their contrast, red and white were excellent symbols for implacably
opposed camps. But the problem now was not so much for allies to recognize one
another and estimate their strength vis-a-vis the opposing force. More fundamen-
tally, it was to understand the reasons for battle in a setting where the opposing forces
were constantly taking each other's measure. Now we see why the vocabulary of

parliamentary division corresponded to the vocabulary of political affiliation. The

unique subtlety of right and left in characterizing relative positions was an amazing
marriage of radical simplification with the possibility of broadening nuance. When
social warfare, instead of developing its own categories by widening the gulf
between the spontaneous signs of social division and the prevailing code in the polit-

ical arena, ultimately adopted the pre-formed language of representation as its prin-

cipal language of action, democracy had taken a definitive step toward establishing
itself in people 's minds. From now on, democracy was conceived of as a means of
domesticating conflict by organizing the major players on a vast scale and by ritual-

izing their clash down to its very vocabulary. The replacement of red versus white
by left versus right implied acceptance of the reversible two-sided relationship of
party supporter and political analyst over the one-sidedness of the partisan.
 Right and Left 265

I
This entry into the age of permanent, irreducible, institutionalized political con-
I flict would prove terribly traumatic, however, and its chain of negative effects
would become the tragedy of the twentieth century. There was something
extremely ambiguous about the antiparliamentarism I described earlier: on the one
hand it was associated with the misguided search for a representativity not guaran-

teed by the classical forms of parliamentary government, while on the other hand it

was part of a broad refusal to accept the prospect of an irreparably fractured public
space. Indeed, that fracture symbolized nothing less than the collapse of a very
deeply rooted cultural bias that made it impossible to conceive of society other than
under the sign of unity. The culture of unity sprang from at least three roots. The
traditionalist current left its imprint on the founders of French sociological thought

from Comte to Durkheim before being reinvented, significantly, at the turn of the
century by Charles Maurras, who saw the organic solidarity of communities, cor-

porations, and ranks as a necessary condition of collective cohesion. The Jacobin

current treated the active identity of people and power as the supreme republican
ideal. In addition to these two sources of cultural unity, there was the loss of cer-

tainty that conflict would come to an end. When republicans were battling with
monarchists, the objective was clear; both sides believed that when the goal was
achieved, the adversary would simply disappear. But now the goal was achieved: the
republicans had won conclusively if without great enthusiasm. Nearly all political

forces in the country had pledged to support the Republic and found their place in
it. Yet conflict continued. More than that, it had become a constitutional rule of the
Republic itself. Come what may, there would always be division and discord
between a right and a —
left such was the promise of perpetual conflict that the two
terms in their deepest sense conveyed. Looking back, it is not easy to appreciate the
disorientation that many people felt at this prospect of being imprisoned in conflict,
which seemed to contradict deeply rooted beliefs and certitudes about the nature of
the good society. Out of this disorientation grew a powerful reactionary movement,
to which the disaster of 1914 and its aftermath brought emotional amplification.
This reaction took two opposed forms, one on the extreme right based on back-
ward-looking rejection, the other on the extreme left based on future-oriented tran-
scendence. The extreme right believed that intellectual dissension and clashes over
material interests were signs of a pathological deviation, in response to which soci-

ety must seek to recover its former solidarity, for which the natural context was the
nation. Meanwhile, the extreme left believed that society's contradictions must be
played out to the end, not because they were good in themselves but because they
promised, through revolution to bring reconciliation. Between these two extremes
there were all sorts of hybrid positions, from reactionary modernism to revolution-

ary nationalism. Note, by the way, that we have here, in this discussion of extrem-

ism, the key to the asymmetry in the attitudes of right and left toward the existence
266 MARCEL GAUCHET

of the right-left division. Clearly the division was promoted by the left, while the
right, which had little use for it, tended to deny its existence or refuse to acknowl-

edge it. This is because the left in general, even the moderate left, sees division as a

driving force and hope for a future of concord, whereas the right sees it as damag-
ing, artificial, and a distraction from the essential, which is the quest for unity and

harmony. Yet these two dissimilar ways of dealing with division are in fact quite

similar at bottom when it comes to rendering the idea of division less scandalous. If

we refine the actor-observer distinction, we can say that the right, suppressing its

instinctive repugnance, treats the right-left division as a subject for cold analytical

reason, whereas the left sees itself as protagonist and opts for enthusiasm, only to

encounter that much more difficulty in trying to reduce the phenomenon to normal
intellectual dimensions. Yet these attitudes are not the permanent results of some
sort of political characterology. They are the products of a well-defined historical

moment, when the liberal image of the representative process gave way to our

democracy of parties and conflict. Perhaps the clearest sign of the change is the shift

in attitude on the right toward the term right, which was easily accepted through the
1890S only to be rejected, for the most part, after 1900. Not that the right had
changed, only the sense and scope of the denomination. It caused no difficulty as
long as it referred only to a location in parliament. It began to encounter resistance

when, wedded to its antagonist, it introduced the certainty of interminable discord.

It would take several decades of convulsive history for the right to learn to live with

this redoubtable truth of democracy, which, when it came in with the new century,

was mostly seen, even by those who welcomed it, as an anomaly to be overcome.

The Age of Extremism and the Rites of Division

"A mystique of the pure left, a religious character attached to the word left—do
these things exist today in the sense in which they existed during the militant repub-

lic's battles against clericalism.''" It is interesting to find so astute an observer as

Albert Thibaudet asking himself such a question in 193 1. "I do not think so," he
answered, adding a warning to "wait for the elections of 1932."^^ Healthy caution.
The question was provoked by a famous survey initiated by the monarchist publi-
cist Beau de Lomenie on the theme "What do you mean by right and left?" It was in
response to the same survey that Alain came up with a formulation that had a bright
future ahead of it: "When people ask me if the division between parties of the right
and parties of the left, men of the right and men of the left, still makes sense, the

first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not

a man of the left." The author of Propos was already, even in his prewar debut, an
excellent example of the essentialization of right and left. Yet Thibaudet 's observa-
tion rings true for the time, for there was a certain vagueness about the left-right
 Right and Left 267

opposition in the period after World War I. A firm fixture of the landscape, it was
nevertheless perceived for a time as an old-fashioned legacy with which the forces

of the new were not obliged to encumber themselves. The cartel of 1924 rekindled
the flame somewhat after the great collapse of old structures brought on by the war
and the lengthy interval of Union Nationale. It did not generate enough heat, how-
ever, to overcome doubts and objections to this dusty symbol of the old Radical
Republic. The problem was not simply that the left-right split no longer aroused the

same passions and fever as in the past but that it was actually denounced. On the

extreme left it was attacked in the name of the proletarian revolution and on the
extreme right in the name of national restoration. What had been an embryonic ten-
dency in the first decade of the century now took the form of formal doctrine and
organized political forces whose first imperative was to do away with the harmful

and foolish political game symbolized by the pseudo-rivalry of right and left. In the
end, however, this double rejection of the right-left opposition led to its reinforce-

ment. Five years after Thibaudet's diagnosis in 1936, it was more vital, more cen-
tral, and more sacred than ever. It had become, in a word, ineradicable. The
Communists, who had originally attacked it from the left on the grounds of rigor-

ous class analysis, helped to consecrate it by joining the Popular Front. Meanwhile,

pro-fascist ideologues and movements insisted on their symmetric proscription,

"neither right nor left," which only helped to consolidate the position of the two
terms as definitive markers.
In fact, what happened with the Communists was the same thing that had hap-
pened with the Socialists before 19 14: protest led to integration. The vehement insis-
tence on separation ultimately reinforced the need for unity. At first the
Communists were even more intransigent about refusing to play the "republican

game." The new revolutionary party that emerged from the schism of 1920 was not
content merely to pour scorn on class collaboration; it rejected outright both tradi-

tional contenders as "two factions of the bourgeoisie."^'' In the 1924 elections, the
first major elections in which it took part, the Communist Party could not find
words harsh enough for the "bloc of newly rich bourgeois" that was running as the

"left" against the "bloc of satisfied bourgeois."^'' In opposition to the incumbent

Bloc National and alongside the revived "union of the left" in which Radicals and
Socialists joined forces as the Cartel des Gauches^^ after the disappointing results of
1919, in which the parties had taken their case to the voters separately, the P.C.F. ran
a Bloc Ouvrier et Paysan, whose propaganda focused on denouncing the false polit-
ical alternative being offered to the voters, an alternative that masked the only real

division, that between capital and labor. "Right-wing capitalists and left-wing cap-
italists are the same."^^ The left was merely another face of the right: "Behind two
masks, one face: On May 11 you will not be faced with a single National Bloc: there
will be two, one on the right, the other on the left."'*^ From this came the definitive
 ;

268 MARCEL GAUCHET

campaign, which was repeated

"No to the rightist National Bloc
like a leitmotif:

and no to the
PLAN FIGURil
leftist National Bloc."'' Yet one cannot help emc m
noticing that the rejected categories played an
extraordinarily significant role in the culture
and even the practice of the new party. At the
Congress of Tours, delegates were seated
according to the old parliamentary divisions of
right, center, and left. The official minutes noted
"applause from the center," "protests on the
right," and "turmoil on the left" just like the

most routine bourgeois assembly. At the

moment the decisive vote was taken, we learn
that "the left sang L'Internationale. The right
repeated L'Internationale. Shouts on the right:
Vive Jaures! Shouts on the left: Vive Jaures et
Leninef"'^^ Even more significant, the inner

councils of the party were divided along the

same lines. In November 1924, Monatte,
Rosmer, and Delegarde published an open letter

to party members in which they complained of

being labeled "right-wing" by party leaders:
"We are quite certain that we do not belong to
the right of the party." They insisted on being
put down as members of "a tendency that might
be called the workers' left" rather than of "the
pestilential right" to which the leadership
wished to assign them.'^ Party leaders repeat-
edly proclaimed the need to do battle on two
MMK iir MM. IT» D^pi tvi . per atsUy ( Cifft J« NorJ } .... ft.

orurr alfi'iaitillqiii; injffaarl Ic Hr..i;i«.l . I» L.m.lf'i S>--nr J„fer'^y c.

opportunism" on the
.

fronts, against "right-wing il,-p<trtrmtiil

nnmin^t ,
par Uiju^l i/t onl tit
qie It €i>lf oit lit ir
n.ennn.i'ttxoniEurc). r..

R.^niont. M." .Ic ( Sm,- rl 0<l< ) '.u

. . ,

pLitrnl ilitni In tlaiiibrr tlUnqujH it n..llcul lo Uiiun ( Pai ,

JtC<il''-i ) tn.
one hand and against "self-styled radical leftist .',.-a..Xi .mi.l,-.!.- C,.-.*.1.*.,.l.f. Hn-nc
Ito';
.1*

(CArr)
\w ,1c tht»." (HU^re)
.... , . rr,
c.

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Viromirdc{ A^^}mt) D
practice" on the other. All these signs attest to .\.|.->) tJoM( r.harea/f InfMeure). 6

AM.cit ( CLartHU- J t.o

HooilJ
Uol.il* ,
,
1«

If Comic dc f iHjr.- i t,. . . .

Al.l..m«.. lcBA.nr..l'(^//.>r) . . r, Kool'dt It'o kI ( Oit^ ) . r.Ti .

.\,i>(M„KC.r. Ic l oniW a", Marcrliil i< ll..uf.Kt Ic » om>c ( M^</rr/iC >

, Cf.
Itixirdrari ( ifdu/i- f'Unne),
( Co/T, I, )
f,.^.
C l> . .

llaui.lonn*!* le Comt* dcia ( Moiat

,

rt h-r^ 1 D rt I^-ir.'\ . D.
Iir4rkct.h.>a>> ( £nj A«m). n.t.xr
A.n!c.< tU'Uri Afprt). . . t.r .
. . . r.. :

A<.i;i>»i! ,<1 ( iStnei I'yrMei). C... Htrlouf ^Vi»r ) CP-

FIGURE 7.1 Another example of the "representation of repre- .^tni'iii tic l'riiiwi«jn Ic tlictalier Utjgndc. IfUuon ao
,
(NW) . . (I.

, bautt A/p.-, ) c r. ilioElK-ltl'tinrinlc ( O/'nr ) . CO. .

XiiSict .le U(«4iid( Crtiite ) Ilr.i* dc \ illMft . U

B/ " ( Z^rr/v) c.C UfltCMlB-Fu
sentation." The date, April 1820, is no accident. The Due de V.,ri.n »lc1'>r..ffcu ( Var ). .
.

.
.

r.ii
I>

\.'.i.ic-(lum»irjnc { Monchf ) f..r, D«UimIu(4

r(
Berry had just been assassinated, an event that triggered an llnrf^i) Ar \j:\gUA' ( fii-rUogne) ex..
\\:>tW< I U-rf l'>Jcr.r,.f^ ). . c l. . \.-t I'anoft (
Jw/v
Srinr
(i I.tiirf ). Dcliuniy

)Urt,>.o..,kll..oo(i^O. . . CC t.it»t M*dt<llAti, DfltuK ( OA

offensive by the forces of reaction and resistance by liberal ll.tlli.-l.sl.-t:a»( ) , . . f..P, Cmillc-Joidan ( A-n )
lUltMn UI .

llj.lM".»it (
Pyrfntct ) . 0 *
Pi-/ (.»rj<tr»licl xit Tom PtdutHft
speakers. Because of this sharp antagonism and passionate ), . . f.r.. t ) (
(
fit .iirr[.j:ie . Je .Mirquii lU ( Saiinf et t.tf." ( C.:'«^<i H<.ri\ f
Jo.nr) t.D C.;».4iKi>">'". <l> (Crrf) I

commitment to the issues, the 1820 session played an impor- lIcA'iirjuur (

ll(r()>i<:} ,
Chamtf
D^rctfUt AeyVauu
Infenrare). c,
clCll*<ii>
Laiitl-lta)jc,
Gtimnne
! Ticonre dc , ( A<nrf*
I Dtnu ICk
vft( ftiiulf Muff ) . . .
<.ai>i>uil<n { CAtfJ'Or) '

tant role in crystallizing the left-right distinction and leading a.,J..fli ( Cormr ) I. L»lout. I.- It^ontGorJ) C.(
i I..I-1J.I Doii«.I«MJ
DoublM( y*
tlfflitt. ClHrT^I.»r ). . . c.n t.hibril|jn.ttnisrfiiii>ilt(Dnifnf) I .

( bihrnl Ae. ChlititlBC , l« ComIC d DrMtOnm

different sectors of public opinion to identify with parliamen- lU.™»i(.T/a.«^r7-.'V. ) . , . D. " Uk.brutl{ AiW

tary factions.
 ; ,

Right and Left 269

LA CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES,

( Avril i8ao.

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lolttviUe , I( >atqa;i(le {i.a/^aUv Lroorchaijl de Goniitourt ,
Ic < bctitic Cl.l(J>'i./f'l') f.

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(.S.,mm.) I ,

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,

....
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ftUu(r,rnf,>)- H»ut(f<^.ll!c , If CMi- {Ca/vaJoi} as (*.c, Ic H," iLandrs) r..'.

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Fi(.cdttiBoobj«(M«n(f), . . Httnoux(C<f/<'-J'0/) ,' ."

,
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270 MARCEL GAUCHET

the deep inroads made by the new organizational geography. Even if the left-right
distinction was declared meaningless in the official elections, it was inevitably in
terms of that distinction that one oriented oneself politically and thought about the
parry's own everyday activity. Hence it should come as no surprise that the Central

Committee deplored the force of left-right identifications in the 1928 legislative

elections. In the meantime the election laws had been modified. The proportional
system used in the 1919 and 1924 elections had made it fairly easy for a candidate to

run as his own man. The return to uninominal voting by district once again raised
the delicate problem of whether a candidate should remain in the running in the sec-

ond round or drop out and throw his support to another candidate. The Communist
leadership was under no illusion: "Many workers still see the Party as the farthest

left of all the parties," so that a "mechanical tactic of resignation in favor of the

best-placed 'left-wing' candidate ahead of the Communist candidate allows people

to assume, despite our statements, that the Communist Party is the extreme wing o
the Cartel des Gauches or a participant in some neo-cartel."^'' This made it difficult

to bring out the uniqueness of a party that, "by its very essence, is steadfastly

opposed to all political formations of the bourgeoisie," because the psychological

mechanism of the vote, by this point firmly established in the public mind,
inevitably imposed the prevailing symbolism. In order to break out of this tradi-

tional encirclement the Central Committee proposed the "proletarian formula class

against class" as opposed to "the republican formula reds against whites."'^'' The
Communist tactic of systematically maintaining its candidate in the second round
led to a series of three-way races from which the right profited, although some
Communist voters defied party orders to vote for the candidate of the "republican
left." Tradition would ultimately prove stronger than the will to secede. The 1932
elections revealed the limits of the "class against class" strategy: the Communist
Parry vote declined from 1 1.3 to 8.3 percent. The party nevertheless insisted, rather

half-heartedly, on maintaining its candidates, but this time 500,000 of its 800,000
voters broke ranks and voted for the better-placed left-wing candidate. This spelled
the end of the attempt to defy established polarities in the name of class conflict.

Despite their rhetoric of social difference, the Communists were integrated into the
established political opposition. On the whole, even "class-conscious" proletarians
identified with an all-inclusive left opposed to the right more than they saw them-
selves specifically and exclusively as proletarians opposed to the bourgeoisie.

This is not the place to recount the story of how the P.C.F. ultimately decided to

follow the lead of its own voters. I will not retrace the obscure path that Maurice
Thorez followed between February 6, 1934, when he vilified "fascist gangs" and
"left-wing ministers and deputies" in the same breath as "the cholera and the
plague,"'*^ and October 10, 1934, when he first pronounced the words "popular
front." If the party had been firm in its will to secede, it was even more fervent in
 Right and Left 271

support of the "triumphant union of the lefts" of 1936, a marriage around which a
veritable mystique developed. The left was reinvigorated by the extreme left: the

1936 Barodet was notable for the number of expressions linking "the left and the

extreme left," both positively and negatively. In the March 1934 issue of Marianne,
Emmanuel Berl noted the contrast between "the strong sentimental significance"

that the words right and left continued to have in the country and their vagueness
and therefore lack of effectiveness on the political level.''' It seems accurate, more-
over, that the challenge to the right-left dichotomy from two sides —on the one hand
the very small but intellectually influential extreme right and on the other hand the
very isolated but socially representative extreme left — seriously hindered its practi-

cal usefulness. The realignment of the left, which took place against a background
of antifascism, greatly clarified the situation. Thorez was thus correct to distinguish
between the prewar Cartel (and its 1920s offshoots) and the Popular Front: "One
sometimes hears or reads," he said in his report to the Villeurbanne Congress early
in 1936, "that the Popular Front is nothing but the old Cartel des Gauches expanded
to include Communists. This is not correct." There is no need to go into the obvi-
ous reasons why he felt obliged to clear himself of the charge of class collaboration,
which presumably had been the fatal defect of these earlier alliances: "The Cartel
des Gauches was a segment of the working class hitched to a bourgeois clique....

The Popular Front is the working class through its own activity influencing the

workers of the middle classes and dragging them into battle against the bourgeoisie,
capital, and fascism."'^ Beyond the stereotypes and the wooden language, an impor-
tant idea emerges from this. The Popular Front was not a mere extension of a well-
honed set of preexisting alliances. The participation of the Communists led to a

realignment of the left and a recasting of its identity to transcend the diversity of its

concrete components. In that recasting, events played an important part: Leon Blum
became the first Socialist to serve as president of the council, and the Communists
nearly doubled their vote. Once again the same mechanism was at work: a unified
identity was reestablished by integrating a force that had previously seemed uninte-
grable. More precisely, class difference was digested and metabolized into political

affiliation; whether that difference was real or imagined is of little importance here,
because it was representations and symbols that were at stake. Having long thun-
dered against the "left," the P.C.F. would soon hold the key to the "real" left, and
for a long time to come. To that end it received powerful help from memory and his-
tory. Its reintegration into the nation at the time of the Popular Front allowed the
party to benefit from the unique legitimacy attached to the heritage of the Jacobin

Revolution: it availed itself of a primogeniture that accrued from "having breathed

the spirit of the people back into La Marseillaise," as the celebrated "Letter to

Daladier" put it in October 1936.'' World War II and the Resistance then added the
credit attaching to defense of the endangered fatherland. Standing at the intersec-
272 MARCEL GAUCHET

tion of the national past with the future of mankind as embodied in the Bolshevik

Revolution's fulfillment of the promises of 1793, the party of the proletariat osten-
sibly became the standard of reference against which left-wing values were mea-
sured, for all that the party's political behavior raised doubts and for all its own
ambiguity about the term "left," which was cultivated precisely because it symbol-
ized a broad coalition but which was therefore always used with caution by a party

bent on preserving its own revolutionary distinctiveness.'^^ But all this simply
amplified and deployed the effects of the formative operation of 1936, the last and
ultimate of its kind. The symbolic unity of the left worked in favor of the partner
which for fifteen years had embodied implacable division. More precisely, unity

bestowed symbolic mastery of the situation on the party that had embedded social

division within political division and that could always undo what it had done.
Once again the left had the initiative in this process. It would be artificial to pro-
ceed by symmetry with the right. It was on the left that the division between right

and left was affirmed, underscored, and dramatized in parallel with the redefinition
of the left as left. Under pressure the right set itself up as the party of resistance. Its

reluctance even to call itself "the right" concealed an even stronger distaste for the
antagonism that the left was now so keen to emphasize. Significantly, the right's

campaign rhetoric was far more likely to denounce the left than to assert its own
identity as the right (or even simply to call itself by that name). Rather than pro-
mote itself, the right preferred to blacken the name of the opposition and to forecast

disaster "if the lefts should triumph. In doing so, however, it played the game of
division that it liked to denounce, if only in the mode of denial. It is as instructive,

perhaps, as it is paradoxical that the militants of the extreme right, who insisted that

they had no use for either right or left, did not shrink from using the term "right."

To be sure, they generally did so in order to mark their distance, unambiguously,

from those closest to them in the political spectrum, for whom they felt nothing but
contempt. In March 1936, for example, Brasillach launched a memorable attack on
the "cuckolds of the right" for their public disapproval of a physical attack on Leon
Blum by militants of the Action Fran9aise: "The real scandal in what has to be called
the Blum Affair.. .is the attitude of the deputies of the right." '"^ In more measured
terms Thierry Maulnier made the same point a few months later when he warned
"the traditional right" that it had best not count on the support of "stalwart and
hopeful youths." To compel the right to recognize itself as such was to rescue it

from the torpor into which it had sunk with "the amorphous mass of moderates."
Hence this ought to be the first action of those on the right who wished to react

against its "bankruptcy." Sometimes the appellation was accepted in the name of
realism only to be treated with a hint of disdain if not held at arm's length with scare
quotes. Take Jean-Pierre Maxence, the founder of the pro-fascist journal L'Jnsurge,

who began one article with a summary of the grounds for abandoning hope in the
 Right and Left 273

"organized right," the "bourgeois right," and the "corporaUst right" {droite capo-
raliste). In those dark weeks of December 1936 and January 1937, he went on,
I
L'lnsurge wished to ahgn itself with the reaction against "the disillusionment, dis-
couraged solitude, and impotent rage of the best in the face of the collapse of the
"'"''
'right.' The difference was between the moderates who hoped to remain igno-
rant of what was troubling them and the activists determined to take a cold, hard
look at reality because they intended to transcend it. Moderates were still trying to
deal with real divisions abstractly, whereas activists were determined to abolish

them and so had no difficulty naming them. Sternhell dates the first use of the slo-

gan "neither right nor left" about 1927. Georges Valois was supposedly one of the
I first to use it in his book Le Fascisme}^^ Note, however, that this was some time after

the Communist dismissal of the two "bourgeois blocs," with which it has a great
deal in common, except that for the Communist Party the idea was to denounce a

false division that was supposed to conceal a real division of class, whereas for the
ultra-right the point of rejecting the artificial opposition of the parties was to

restore the nation as the supreme unifying principle. What is more, the Communists
in the end would consecrate the division by appropriating it, while their most
implacable adversaries would seize upon this as grounds for clinging to their refusal

of the whole notion.

This phase of extremist protest was a crucial moment in annealing the opposition
of right and left. It made the pair's status more complex: the reference became indis-

pensable, yet its relation to reality was relativized. It emerged from these various
challenges on the whole stronger than ever. The Communist turn infused it with
new energy. The rejection by pro-fascists helped in a roundabout way to preserve
it: even those determined to escape its hold could not do so. To reject the right-left

dichotomy was still to define one 's position in relation to it, if only in the hope of
transcending it. Those who proclaimed its disappearance dug themselves into a
hole. In a general sense, the revolutionary promise to restore unity, whether in the

form of a classless society or an organically unified nation, tended to corroborate

the notion that political division is intrinsic to the present era. Criticism did have its

effects, however. It altered the relation of the terms decisively. By forcefully focus-

ing attention on the wide gap between political categories and social ones, critics

showed that right and left were conventional appellations, and this in no small way
helped to make them more flexible and adaptable. It was understood that the bound-
ary between right and left did not coincide with the boundary between proletariat
and bourgeoisie. It was accepted that citizens of one nation could oppose one
another as right and left. In other words, political division was one dimension
through which realities of a different order could be represented by means of a con-
structed language. It was precisely because right and left were artificial constructs
not precisely coincident with social realities that they could be manipulated in such
274 MARCEL GAUCHET

a way as to subsume those realities. On the one hand, in a cHmate of combat and
revolution, the right-left opposition was pregnant with meaning and importance,
while on the other hand, under the influence of similar absolute visions of earthly
salvation, it was the political relativity of the pair that stood out, to the point where
suspicions, at times ironic and at times indignant, of a false left or pseudo-right

became intimately bound up with the use of the terms in the 1930s."''' The two
developments might seem contradictory if we were not duly warned about the split
functioning of these identifying labels. In fact they were complementary, one in the
realm of involvement, the other in the realm of observation. The whole secret of
the right-left couple lay in its ability to attract militants while simultaneously pro-
viding analytic distance. Magical adherence to sacred names and wariness of being
taken in by misleading labels or abstractions actually reinforced each other. From
this came the full deployment of a system of definitions whereby actors could deal
simultaneously with their convictions and calculations.

The dramatic polarization of Communism and Fascism ultimately reactivated the

structural factors that had helped to root the right-left dichotomy in the heart of

French political life. In this respect the convulsive decade leading up to World War
II was the culmination of a long history. Although conditions had changed radi-
cally, the age of mass politics and totalitarian passions continued to exhibit the same
interplay of unity and division, the same dialectic of center and extremes, that once
drove the constricted parliamentary politics of the Restoration. In 1935 the scale,

content, and stakes of the political contest were no longer what they had been in

181 5, but the order of battle was formally analogous. Hence the game did not
destroy the old left-right opposition but actually reinforced it. What was crucial was
for a radical division of public opinion to coincide with a political game in which

there are more than two players. If there are only two parties, then there is no need
for any additional identification beyond party name. People can identify themselves
as "Democrats" or "Republicans" as in the United States. If there is to be a left and
a right, there must also be a third term, a center. But if there is a center, then each of

the lateral parties is itself subject to radical tendencies. Hence there are at least two

rights, a "right right" and an "extreme right," and similarly there are at least two
lefts. What is more, the attraction of the poles divides the center into a center right
and a center left. This division of opinion, insofar as it complicates the situation of
each camp when it comes to power, has the practical political result that left, right,

and center all become virtually tripartite. This is the basic configuration that leads

to the adoption of right and left as basic terms of identification. It is the result of an

untenable bipolarity, a bipolarity so intense that it cannot be contained within a two-

party system, so that factions tend to multiply rather than unite. Now, it was this

basic logic that the historical situation revitalized with particular clarity after the
 Right and Left 275

Bolshevik Revolution and the triumphs of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in

Germany. Not that right and left had ever disappeared in France: as we have seen,

the combination of conflict with fragmentation had remained a permanent feature

of French politics, the defining characteristic of its style. But the radical movements
of the twentieth century restored a clarity to the pattern that circumstances had at
times obscured.
What helped to clarify matters most of all was the unprecedented prominence
of the extremes, which achieved ideological dominance in this period.
(Significantly, the Larousse dictionary records the first use of the term extremisme
in 1922.) I say ideological dominance because while the clash between revolution
and a newly revolutionary counterrevolution inundated public space with its sym-
bolism, it was a long way from such omnipresence on the social scene to political

predominance. To be sure, the million and a half votes received by the Communists
in the 1936 elections made them a third force to be reckoned with on the left,

slightly ahead of the Radicals and still far behind the Socialists. But they remained
outside of the political game, and their ability to influence their own partners in
effective political terms remained quite limited, even though it was their vision of
society's future that obsessed everyone who thought about such things. The dis-

proportion was much more flagrant on the right, where the Action Fran9aise
received relatively few votes despite the far-reaching intellectual and moral influ-
ence it had achieved over bourgeois opinion. Then there were also explicitly Fascist

groups, which were able to make very little political capital out of the increasingly
marked sympathies on the right, and particularly in the right-wing press, for the
regimes they admired. Indeed, this disparity between left and right is a large part of
the story. It was responsible for the dual dynamic of head-on confrontation cou-
pled with factional tendencies in both camps. The prevailing rhetoric of combat
made party competition seem like an ineluctable confrontation of two hostile blocs
whose absolute divergence on all issues offered two stark historical alternatives to

thehuman race. Nevertheless, in the moments of greatest tension it was not

Communism and Fascism that squared off but, once again, indeed more than ever,
left versus right. This was because the two camps were so divided internally that
they had to be held together metaphysically, and no single party was in a position

to impose its own name or distinctive trademark. Those who dominated symboli-
cally did not wield effective power, and those who were politically powerful were
symbolically subordinate. Hence the division was as indeterminate as it was fervent
and clearly delineated. Right and left prevailed as ideal identifying categories in a
situation in which it was impossible to identify the terms of political division with
concrete protagonists. Unifying labels were needed to achieve the intensity associ-
ated with the duality of friend and enemy; those labels could not be borrowed from
the name of any particular party; hence people resorted once again to the abstract
276 MARCEL GAUCHET

neutrality, to the infinite flexibility, as well as to the drastic simplification of right

versus left.

Contrary to what a superficial view might suggest, then, Manichaean dualism

actually feeds on fragmentation of the political contest. Manichaeanism does not
occur in two-party systems, where the center is generally the main batdeground, but
in a system in which the camps are irreducibly composite. If France has been the
'

scene of clear-cut, dramatic political contests that have earned it a reputation as a

locus classicus of political conflict, the reason is that it has always been a country in
which a considerable variety of political thought, opinion, and parties have flour-

ished. This is particularly clear in the 1930s, a time of veritable dissociation between
]

the sphere of realities and that of political identities or, if you will, between politics
as thought and politics as practice. A tacit division of labor was established between |

the conduct of political affairs and the governance of political consciences. In prac-

tice moderates for the most part continued to collude, centrists continued to share
power. Exceptions to this rule were rare and short-lived. This did not prevent the

doctrinaires of the extreme right and the extreme left from gaining the upper hand,
however; indeed, it was grist for their mill. The compromises of the moderates only

pointed up the rigor of the extremists (while conversely the intransigence of the
extremists justified the inglorious malleability of the moderates). The ideologues
did not determine how people behaved but did determine how people defined them-
selves. Political identities were determined, not primarily by the prosaic choices
associated with the administration of things as they are, but by options as to soci-

ety's ultimate salvation. Thus the influence of ideological panjandrums with no

stake in electoral politics but a lock on symbolic mastery turned the political arena

into a pitiless battlefield of good versus evil, light versus darkness. Yet this implaca-
ble and virulent dualism not only did nothing to prevent dissension and irreparable
splits in each of the armies so pathetically at grips, it actually grew out of and lived

on that dissension. One can even say that dualism and internal opposition consti-
tuted a system: within each camp you had governmental centrism and Utopian
extremism. And this kind of system becomes more active and visible when the his-
torical situation is such as to encourage extremes.
Let us look a little more closely at the distribution of forces and the composition

of the two camps. In the totalitarian era the tension between center and periphery
comes to be associated with a very clear issue: the acceptance or rejection of demo-
cratic coexistence. Both the extreme right and extreme left propose a permanent
solution to the political division of the present: unification either in the bosom of a

unanimous nation or in the form of a classless society. In such a situation, that of a

democracy living with the challenge to its own right to exist, one has a schism of
principle on both the right and the left between a party for which preserving demo-
cratic competition is paramount and another party which engages in that competi-
 —
Right and Left 277

tion (with sufficient ardor, moreover, to dominate it) for the sole purpose of doing

away with it. There will most likely also be an intermediate party attempting to
strike a compromise between the ideological aspiration for a definitive solution and
democratic realities. In other words, there will be three lefts and three rights. A rad-
ical (in the French sense of the relatively moderate Radical Party) left, trusting in

the Republic by itself to resolve the social question; a Communist left, committed
to revolution and the socialization of property; and, between the two, a Socialist left

hoping to marry doctrinal collectivism with republican practice. On the right there
will be a liberal right (again in the French sense of liberale) fervently supportive of
free enterprise and the free market; a traditionalist right, preoccupied with the need
to restore a hierarchical order undermined by individualism (and itself divided
between anciens and modernes, classical reactionaries nostalgic for the monarchy
and fascists more confident in the nation and the leader than in the king as sources
of organic cohesion); and between the two an authoritarian right, anxious to recon-
cile popular sovereignty with the supreme imperatives of government.
Note that in this distribution the divisions on the right are potentially more seri-

ous than those on the left. The various lefts share a similar idea of the opposition
and a similar faith in the necessity and fruitfulness of struggle, which helps to bring
them together. The radical may regret the Communist's brutal language of class yet

be ready himself to resort if need be to denunciation of the clerical peril, and so the
two can manage to wage war as comrades. On the right, however, distaste for the

very idea of antagonism is reflected in a sharp divergence between extremists and

moderates. Even the most conciliatory have no choice but to confront opponents on
the attack, but the tendency on the right is to characterize one 's opponents as sow-
ers of a discord that would not otherwise exist. This is expressed in another way by
the refusal to avow explicitly that one is on the right, even if one 's outspoken hos-
tility to the left is tantamount to declaring one 's colors by contrast with the enemy's.
The reason for such refusal is that to do otherwise would be tantamount to admit-

ting that there are structural reasons for division and discord within what one would
prefer to think of as a harmonious collectivity or a united nation. If sharpened and
radicalized, the same idea can be used to justify the opposite behavior, however:
denial turns into frantic accusation. Given the belief that the existence of the com-
munity ultimately depends on absolute unity, the totalitarian spirit derives its iden-

tity from a constitutive menace and a fatal enemy, for which blame is invariably
imputed to the undermining efforts of some alien element (there being no possible
internal cause of dissension): often that enemy is unmasked, with elective anguish,

as that unassimilable yet indistinguishable presence, the Jew. To the extent that there
is combat — the inevitable combat required if the national organism is to survive

there are camps that the militant persuaded of his mission does not hesitate to join.

This explains the frequently observed fascination of the extreme right with the
278 MARCEL GAUCHET

rhetoric and methods of the extreme left, where it found more useful models for its

disputatious tendencies than among its natural allies. However deep the gulf created
on the left by the debate over democratic forms, there was a common left-wing cul-
ture of conflict capable of overcoming political differences in the name of a shared

identity. On the right, however, the free-marketer's tendency to minimize contra-

dictions was at the opposite extreme from the Fascists', and even the authoritarians',
absolute repudiation of democratic conflict; the differences in outlook, language,
and style seemed almost insurmountable, even inconceivable. Ultimately, however,
this did not prevent ideological cooperation in the name of an ideal polity free of the
pernicious ferment of division. It did, however, make it all but impossible to forget
the underlying differences, even in times of coalition. In short, while the left was at

least mythically one, the right was in practice divided. This difference derives in

large part from the contrast between a symbolism of implicit unity and an irre-
'^^
ducibly plural identity.
This approach may also offer a new perspective on the difficult question of
whether, as Rene Remond suggests, the plural forms of the right in the nineteenth
century stand in a relation of continuity to the several currents of the right in the
twentieth century. To what extent did legitimism, Bonapartism, and Orleanism

extend their influence through the ultra-nationalist, authoritarian, and free-market

sensibilities that dominated in the realignment of the right that led to the flourish-
ing of new parties after 1900.'' The question can also be raised in regard to the left,

as the often-asked question of the relation of Jacobinism to Communism shows.

While I do not pretend to resolve this issue here, I think that it is possible to shed

light on what it is that makes this question so profoundly important. If there is con-
tinuity, it is primarily a consequence of structure. What remains relatively intangi-
ble is the rule of distribution in consequence of which there are always (roughly)
three ideal types of right and left. Since representative government was established
in France under the sign of radical conflict —from the outside in the name of a tra-

dition to be maintained, from the inside in the name of the social content to be

imputed to the new regime — its concrete political realization implied a more or less
permanent division between moderate proponents (whether of monarchical or
republican leanings) and resolute adversaries (including those determined to wipe
out the new regime and those determined to move beyond it), in addition to which,

the starkness of this opposition gave rise to reconciliatory tendencies on both sides.

Very quickly the Napoleonic regime gave remarkably durable force and influence
to this need for synthesis, ending the Revolution by combining nostalgia for per-
sonalized authority with a plebiscitary legitimacy stemming from the revolutionary
past. From the Girondins to the democs-socs of the Second Republic, the search for

a balance between greater liberty and the demands of collective sovereignty in eco-

nomic and social matters certainly occupied many minds. Of course the location of
 Right and Left 279

the main battle lines did not remain stable. The pendulum having swung in a reac-

tionary direction, public debate between 1815 and 1848 returned to the narrowly
political issue of monarchy versus republic. Nevertheless, even within the restric-

tive framework of the institutions of that period, there was room enough for polit-

ical forces to array themselves in what might be called their "classical" pattern, with

a centrist government facing opposition from both extremes, at once separated and
bound by mixed forms intended to bring together the idealism of the doctrinaires

with the realism of the possible. The important point is that the revolutionary
legacy defined the extremes once and for all in a way that would remain surprisingly
untouchable for almost two centuries. As a result, the "advanced liberals" of the
1820s, who did not even go so far as to call themselves republicans, nevertheless car-

ried the burden of being identified with Jacobinism. This was not merely a polem-
ical ploy: the identification had real symbolic value stemming from the primal scene
to which all political action had to be related in order to be understood. Hence the

development first of republicanism and later of socialism within and alongside the
republican movement would also be interpreted in terms of the same primal scene.
The same can be said of the advent of the Communists. Despite the reservations of
Marxism about Robespierrism's bourgeois limitations, the Communists did not hes-
itate to make all they could out of the comparison. Thus despite the formidable
"leftward shift" entailed by the democratization of French politics over the course

of the nineteenth century, the symbols marking the limits of the political domain,
from ultraroyalism to ultra-Jacobinism, would remain remarkably constant. This
was an important element of continuity, the significance of which must be measured
in conjunction with the persistence, over the same period of democratization, of tri-

partite organization in both the party of order and the party of change.
In this respect the political recomposition that has taken place since the beginning
of the century is exemplary. With the parallel reformulation of both the revolu-
tionary project and the counterrevolutionary program, it was as if the twentieth

century was going to repeat or replicate the nineteenth. It seemed that democracy
had become an accepted part of political life. In a deep sense it had: its principle of

legitimacy was sufficiently well established for even its adversaries to be obliged to
respect it. Yet even in victory it spurred two Utopian challenges, one backward-
looking, the other forward, which would subject it to an assault of unprecedented
magnitude. Under the pressure of these challenges a new family of political views
emerged, a family quite similar in structure to that which the Revolution
bequeathed its successors. In terms of content, of course, continuity is illusory,

even when it is explicitly claimed. Whatever Charles Maurras may have believed, he
had little in common with his royalist predecessors of the nineteenth century, from
whom he was separated by a crucial event, the conversion to nationalism.
Nationalism obliged the right to redefine itself around an image of collective
28o MARCEL GAUCHET

power, which propelled it in spite of itself into individualistic modernity. The recy-

cling of nostalgia for the Ancien Regime as ultranationalism brings us to the "age

of fascisms." Make no mistake: I am not claiming that the reference to the past
played no real role. On the contrary, if one wants to understand how the Action
Fran9aise, one of the first expressions of fascist sentiment, differed from the more
virulent expressions that followed it in Italy and Germany, one has to give careful

consideration to this commitment to the past. Indeed, there was something like an
inverse proportion between totalitarian intensity and the determination to uphold
tradition. If the common objective of all fascisms was to ensure unity through
authority, it is also true that the greater the degree to which social forms were explic-
itly borrowed from the monarchical, hierarchical, organic past, the less comprehen-
sive and violent was the associated totalitarianism. By contrast, the less powerful the
faith in tradition, the greater the need for power and the rivalry with Bolshevism
(most notoriously in the case of Nazism, the reinvention of the nation as a force
united for war around a leader and a race), and the more likely it was that totalitar-

ianism would veer out of control. In France it was probably the vigor of the coun-

terrevolutionary spirit and the cultural prominence of the Ancien Regime model
that limited the spread of fascisms of the Mussolinian or Hitlerian type.

As far as collective symbolism is concerned, it was a matter of some importance

that the new was so strongly linked to the old, to the point where all that was new
about the twentieth century was submerged in the changeless conflict launched in

1789. The same was true on the left, despite the desire for a break with the past, and

even allowing for the importance of the tradition of the workers' movement in

Bolshevism. The Leninist party was indeed something new, not only as an instru-
ment for seizing power but even more as a bridge to the classless society. Yet this

image of perfect military unity of minds, wills, and actions, of precise subordina-
tion of every cog to the overall doctrine of the machine — a unity destined to extend

to the entire collectivity once the party subsumed the state —was easily assimilated

in France into the rich imagery of '93, the Committee of Public Safety, popular una-

nimity, and the necessary Terror. In a strange way, because of these multifarious

roots, the age of totalitarianism would be an almost classical period in French polit-

ical history, reviving the most canonical distribution of forces while at the same time
infusing new vigor into basic historical emblems. Under pressure from the implaca-
ble and systematic enemies of democracy, the division within each camp over the
question of liberty would be reduced to its elementary simplicity, complicated by
the inevitable attempt to avoid the dilemma. On the left the configuration of the

parties corresponded almost exactly to the ideal tripartite pattern, with the Socialists

holding the balance between those worried champions of individual rights, the

Radicals, and those uncompromising worshipers of social power, the Communists.

There was nothing comparable on the right, not even the extreme right, where par-
 Right and Left 281

ties as a rule were fragmented and ill-defined. Our typology proves useful in this sit-
uation, however, for with it we can identify three broad allegiances roughly com-
parable to legitimism (systematically hostile to an individualistic world view),
Orleanism (willing to accept a version of modern industrial society and representa-
tive government), and Bonapartism (obsessed with the need to transform popular
sovereignty into authority). Of course these labels apply only if we are not too

insistent on demonstrating any actual connection with their historical bearers, the

credibility of which depends entirely on the apparent (and fundamentally mislead-

ing) analogy with intransigent royalism.

What actually persists and counts, however, is the structure that imposes these

symmetrical tripartitions. While the content and issues may change, the central
question remains the same, and with it the range of possible fundamental choices.

What the structure determines is of course not parties or even "spiritual families"
in Thibaudet's sense. It is rather a probability that opinion will form itself into

certain clusters whose content is relatively indeterminate but whose configuration

is remarkably stable. This framework of opinion establishes a political infrastruc-

ture, upon which the pressure of circumstances, the impress of historical experi-

ence, and the influence of individuals works to create relatively complex and shift-

ing political alliances that to one degree or another reflect the underlying pattern.
Yet not everything in the public arena can be traced back in a simple way to this

structuring kernel. There are authentic spiritual families that grow out of specific

situations or concerns and cannot be explained in terms of infrastructure. One such

family is associated with industrialism, which Thibaudet rightly singles out. It arose
in response to the peculiar difficulties that France, starting with its elites, had in con-
verting to material modernity. Another example is the Christian Democratic family

and its representative effort to make a place for religious consciousness in the world
of liberty. Indeed, this second example points up the inadequacy of the notion of
"spiritual family" when it comes to answering the question we have posed. The idea
deserves credit for introducing an essential distinction between what is unstable and
what is permanent, which in turn helps to clarify the high degree of stability of cur-
rents of feeling and thought behind the ceaseless revision of party programs. In
pursuit of such deep historical continuities, however, it confuses phenomena of dif-
ferent levels under a single head based on a single, too narrowly descriptive crite-

rion. Not all of what persists is of the same order. Spiritual families exist, and they
are characterized by a combination of psychological embeddedness and semantic
inertia, but these factors cannot account for the powers of permanence evident in
the truly fundamental divisions in the political realm. That permanence is rooted in
the internal coherence of the positional system. It stems from the logic of a mode
of definition of political duality that divides each camp in two before effecting a
final realignment into three. The lines of force determined in this way are therefore
282 MARCEL GAUCHET

relatively independent of the historically specific content. All this remains within

the limits of the basic question: Where does liberty stand between revolution and
counterrevolution? Not only does the question remain the same, but so do the
extremes in opposition. But if the continuity of attitudes and mentalities over time
in part reflects what we know in general about the viscosity of representations and
passions, it is also in part an optical illusion. In reality it is the rule of distribution
that it is invariable: despite the changeless language of tradition, the forms in which
the various components express themselves change profoundly. Since the frame-
work is fixed, however, one has the largely illusory impression of watching the
metamorphoses of a singular object. Out of this comes the interminable debate
between the proponents of discontinuity, whose attention is focused primarily on
the huge shift in the nature of politics over the past 125 years, and the advocates of
continuity, who focus more on the perpetuation of certain regular patterns in the

midst of change. There is no point in trying to settle the issue. It is better to try to
understand how such a dilemma arises out of the interaction of structural con-
straints with a prevailing symbolic system.
The obsessive centrality of the right-left pairing, whose culmination came in

1939, was therefore not a product of chance but the epitome of a history. It is by no
means inconsequential that these two words possess the astonishing property of
absorbing and reducing everything to one common denominator: their elementary
Manichaeanism is in effect a concentrate of the twists and subtleties of an entire
political tradition. They offer a simple formula to sum up the complex algebra of a
system of many variables. Their simplifying dualism is the result of combining at
least two overlapping triples: the tripartite internal structure of both the party of
order and the party of change, and the tripartite rule that governs the structure of
political space around a governmental center with opposition on two flanks.

Features of this system that may seem contradictory at first sight are actually per-
fectly compatible. It may seem strange, to say the least, that such a simplifying
opposition can coexist with the irreducible (and conflict-ridden) plurality of sup-
posedly simple essences. And it may seem astonishing that the discourse of con-
frontation that dominates at the ideological level can coexist with accommodation
at the practical level. In fact, these are different aspects of a single system, the sys-
tem engendered by the conditions under which representative government found its
embodiment in France.'" In the aftermath of the Revolution opinion was so torn
that the only way to establish a government of opinion was for power to be shared
among the various camps, each of which found itself inexplicably faced with con-
flict between extremists and moderates within its own bosom. This was the basic sit-
uation in which the French developed a system of political definition with three dis-
tinctive features: i) in contrast to the two-party system, the government-opposition
polarity is reproduced within each camp; 2) as a result, an evolving rule of internal
 Right and Left 283

distribution ultimately takes the form of a tripartite structure; 3) politics as thought

is consequently dissociated from politics as practice, because control over identity
and boundaries is ceded to the extremes. To the extent that political life is organized
around a fixed central pivot rather than an alternation in power of two blocs, the

right-left terminology is likely to take hold. To the extent that the system reflects a

radical division dependent for its vitality on the extremes, only a drastically simpli-

fied opposition will do (although further divisions within this basic system are by
no means excluded). And finally, to the extent that such a system can take shape only
in a coalition in which no single party dominates, neutral denominations are neces-

sary: unlike party names, these denominations must be acceptable to all yet impos-

sible to appropriate. Dry terms of classification, right and left were thus able to rise

to the rank of ultimate identifications, quivering with passion and laden with mem-
ories. It is a rare thing indeed for so many passions, events, and ideas to have been

poured into two meager words to disappear as into a melting pot. Each word encom-
passes the soul, the memory, of a way of political being. The vibiquitous use of these
terms expresses what is most paradoxical about them: the primacy of identification

over membership. To speak the language of right and left is to identify with a camp
without belonging to a party — but it is difficult to belong to a party in a world where
motivating issues are always dividing against themselves, and it is this difficulty that

has redounded to the benefit of the right-left opposition, the indubitably expressive

totem of a society strange in so many ways, not least for having combined a tradi-
tionally high degree of politicization with chronically weak political organizations.

On the Dualist Organization of Contemporary Societies

Two sets of questions remain. First, what exactly is the role of the right-left oppo-
sition in a world profoundly different from that in which it first took hold.'' What
significance does it still have, and how likely is it to survive.'* These questions are not
unrelated to the second set. Indeed, the right-left opposition has in the meantime
become a universal idiom, and this fact has naturally had an impact on its use. How
did such a quintessential product of what is most singular in French history become
a universal figure of speech adaptable to any context.'' Did this occur at the price of
a distortion of the pair's original meaning.-* Or did the peculiarities of French expe-
rience have the effect of bringing to light a truly universal dimension of modern
political experience, hence one that could easily be appropriated and incorporated
into a range of political categories.''

Superficially, it might seem that French politics in its traditional form has sim-
ply persisted since 1945. It continues on its old course, and the right-left division
has survived with To be sure, the extreme right all but disappeared, destroyed by
it.

the defeat of fascism. What is more, the traditional right emerged from the trial
284 MARCEL GAUCHET

deeply discredited. As its opposition it faced a left wreathed in victorious heroism,

more than ever inclined to identify itself as "the left," and more than ever domi-
nated by the Communist extreme. For there to be a left, there must be a right. The
symbolic and moral domination of the left normally would have helped to perpet-
uate the strength of the old division. Of course that division was rejected more
vehemently than ever by the supposed right, whose traditional reluctance to iden-

tify itself as "the right" was reinforced by its determination to separate itself from
a dishonorable past. The Gaullist current was ideally placed to herald this view.
Even the presidential phenomenon (since 1962) has not diminished the right-left

opposition. It has, however, altered one of the chief factors that contribute to main-
taining it by giving an absolute parliamentary majority to one party, the president's

party, on several occasions. At the same time it has helped to harden the right-left
opposition by turning it into the basic fact about the supreme election, the iron law

of presidential politics. The voting system — the winner must receive an absolute
majority in the second of two rounds of voting —promotes a system in which
many parties run candidates in the first round only to group into two
"Manichaean" blocs for the final battle: the tried and true formula of republican
discipline. The multiparty system survives, and it is only the pooling of all the

votes on the "right" or the "left" that elects the president. The de Gaulle years
shook the system, for the majoritarian logic implicit in the selection of the chief

executive by plebiscite seemed irresistible, so that "between the Communists and

us" everyone else was "nothing" and had no choice but to accept that position of
insignificance. But the revival of the Socialist Party and the emergence of the

Union of the Left in the 1970s ushered in an era particularly rich in celebrations of

the fundamental antagonism. Politically, the center all but evaporated, yet the
recurrent insistence on the need to find an "opening" to what was left of it shows
that the basic structural tropism remained intact. As one president (Valery Giscard

d'Estaing) revealingly put it, "France wants to be governed in the center." The
moment he chose to say this was also interesting: it was a moment when the

Socialist renaissance on the left and a split between the presidential party and the
Gaullist party on the right had established a clearly quadripartite structure in

France. With four parties the basic mechanism that we have identified was safe:

right and left resulted from coalitions between parties fated to come to some kind
of agreement, given that one side had a lock on power while the other seemed
almost inevitably drawn to the role of opposition. Indeed the mechanism survives
virtually intact if one considers the president's place in the system. His job was to
locate the center in such a way as to provide a firm basis for governmental action.

The location of that center did not have to be politically consistent to be symboli-
cally quite powerful. The result was that in an institutional setting profoundly at

odds with long-standing republican traditions, the most traditional formula for the
 Right and Left 285

distribution of political forces once again found favor — further evidence of

France 's invincible fidelity to her traditions.

Yet something changed in 1945. Something new began to make its way quietly at
first, then more noisily, until at last it erupted to reveal the full range of its conse-
quences. The date 1945 is somewhat arbitrary. It is chosen to draw a contrast

between two postwar periods, which differed in both overall ambience and direct
political impact. The reader hardly needs to be reminded that 191 8 saw the emer-
gence, on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution, of a Communist movement in

France, which led to a radicalization and eventually complete realignment of the

The same year marked the radicalization of the extreme right, even if its themes
left.

already existed in embryo before 19 14. The terrifying experience of total war pro-
voked new outbursts of old fears. By contrast, 1945 marked the beginning of a new
era, even if it took a long time for it to be noticed. It was the end of France 's left-

ward drift, of the notorious sinistrisme that had determined the direction of French
politics since 181 5. No new force would emerge to the left of the Communists to

move the whole mechanism one notch to the left. For a brief moment after 1968 it

seemed as if some such development might be taking place under the influence of

various gauchiste sects. But this time the fire on the left was only a flare-up, not a

conflagration, and it prefigured a radical change of direction even on the part of the
very same individuals who participated in it. It would not be long, in fact, before the
gauchiste critique of Communism turned into a liberal critique. This time it was not

simply another case in which the old well refused to yield new water. It was the
beginning of an erosion, a folding inward of the extremes, most strikingly illus-

trated by the spectacular decline of the Communist Party during the 1980s, even as

the Soviet system was beginning to lose its direction and finally disintegrate. It

would be a mistake, however, to focus on the most evident aspect of the crisis with-

out attempting to discern its more general implications. A similar though less fla-

grant disintegration could also be observed on the right. The Catholic "isolate" fell

apart, the values of an industrialized, market society were broadly embraced, and
more modern social norms were accepted: whatever remained of reactionary loyal-
ties and hostility to egalitarian, capitalist, democratic modernity on the right suf-
fered a setback no less serious than that inflicted on the extremism of the left.

Perhaps the most telling example of this was the fact that the xenophobic extreme
right, which has regained some of its strength in recent years, itself subscribed to an
ultra— free market ideology imported from the United States, a doctrine that would
never have passed muster with earlier nationalist extremists. The Great Depression
heightened totalitarian passions and whetted the appetite for power. The long eco-

nomic recession that began about 1974, which to be sure followed three decades of
glorious growth and expansion of the welfare state, was reflected instead in a new
sacralization of the individual, an aggressive return to liberal principles, a profound
286 MARCEL GAUCHET

embrace of pluralist values, and a marked disillusionment with radical programs

based on the primacy of the collective over the individual, whether reactionary or
progressive. This was true to such an extent that the Revolution, as the 1989
Bicentennial revealed, had ceased to function as the primal scene of French politics.
There was no longer any significant family or force prepared to claim the tradi-

tionalist heritage. The influence of the last remaining champions of Jacobin dicta-

torship and of public safety through overwhelming governmental authority

appeared to be on the wane. For the first time in two hundred years, the principles
of a liberal polity went unchallenged in France, safe from extremist challenges. If

this change proves durable, it will certainly alter the classical uses of the left-right

opposition in essential ways, because it strikes directly at that opposition's funda-

mental principle. In the absence of extremes well enough defined to influence the
structure of politics in general, France may well move toward a two-party system,

with two major political forces clashing in the center without pronounced ideolog-
ical differences. Right and left would then become mere vestigial labels, drained of

the spirit that once gave them life, a spirit born of an overriding need to unify

irreparably divided forces. Yet culture becomes a second nature that must be reck-
oned with: even as politics moves toward the simplicity of a contest between a parry

of government and a party of opposition, are there not new parties emerging on the

extremes.'' Political analysts once claimed that the resurgence of nationalist, xeno-

phobic sentiment was but a flare of protest not likely to have long-term influence,
yet it seems to have left a mark on the political landscape that may well be perma-
nent. Similarly, the ecological movement was not supposed to develop into more
than a marginal, if not unwelcome, influence, yet it has already acquired the dimen-
sions of a true "spiritual family." If so, we may only be in a transitional period,
about to cross a threshold not unlike the one we saw in 1900, when growing accep-
tance of the democratic principle refocused political debate around the question of
how best to embody democracy. Ultimately this led to a resurgence of the tradi-
tional distribution of political forces, albeit in a new guise. Reform or rupture.'' The
question typifies the major uncertainties affecting French identity today, as that
identity remains as always torn between the continuity of its history and "the end

of an exception" that would reduce the nation's past to pure memory.

Come what may, right and left now have a life independent of the matrix in which
they first developed. They have conquered the planet to become universal political
categories. They are among the basic notions that shape the functioning of contem-
porary societies generally. To conclude, I will investigate this prodigious good for-

tune. Why these words in particular.'' It is not enough to note, as people often do,
the tendency of democratic elections to come down to a choice between two alter-

natives. One must also explain why this reduction is generally expressed in the Ian-
 Right and Left 287

guage of right versus left, though more so in some places than in others (more in

Europe than in North America, for example)."^ A common argument runs like this:
universal suffrage requires an extreme simplification of the choices offered to citi-

zens. Suppose for the moment that this is true. There is no shortage of binary oppo-
sitions capable of symbolizing such two-way choices: examples abound in the his-
tories of particular countries as well as in the world's stock of symbolism. We saw
an excellent example earlier with the rise and fall of the pair "red and white." Of all
I
the possible oppositions, why did "left versus right" finally win out, and not just by
supplanting the others but by establishing itself as the last resort, the epitome of all

other oppositions, whether democrat versus republican, labor versus conservative,

socialist versus bourgeois, or progressive versus reactionary.'^ Another common
argument is the following: In forward-looking societies open to history, societies

that know they are changing and debate the issue of how they are to change, it is

inevitable that a party of the past will emerge in opposition to a party of the future.
Proudhon put it well after 1848: "Since humanity is progressive, and since it acts

only on the basis of memories and predictions, it naturally divides into two great
classes: one that is more affected by the experience of its forebears and reluctant to
march forward into the uncertainties of the unknown; and another that is impatient
of present ills and inclines more toward reforms." '^^
This split between conserva-
tion and change is a fundamental, constitutive dimension of societies whose mem-
bers believe themselves to be in the grip of change. In that case, however, why not
"order versus change," which Frangois Goguel's studies of the Third Republic
show to be the opposition most relevant for understanding voting patterns in that
regime.''"'* Although "order versus change" fits the facts and captures a basic aspect

of life in contemporary society, it remains a scholarly category with no resonance

in the general public. At most itmay have infiltrated the realm of social representa-
tion in the form of "reaction versus revolution." And despite the fact that "right
versus left" has little inherent capacity to express duration or convey temporal ten-
sion, this spatial opposition has been able to subsume the central rift between love
of established tradition and hope invested in what is new. What feeds this multifar-

ious expressivity.''

A convincing explanation would require a patient study of the spread of ideas

from country to country. Among many important cases to be examined, it would be
very useful, for instance, to study how right and left came to Great Britain, from the
1906 elections, which first established the Labour Party as a third force on the polit-

ical scene, to the moment when Labour supplanted the Liberals as the number-two
party in the interwar period. A series of comparative studies would help to reveal
the factors that allowed "right versus left" to supplant whatever national divisions
were previously in place. But such a project is well beyond the scope of the present
essay. Since I can do no more than outline a research program, I shall instead ven-
288 MARCEL GAUCHET

ture to suggest two hypotheses, or, rather, a two-part hypothesis concerning the rea-

sons for the universal acceptance of "right versus left." The first part of the hypoth-
esis has to do with the subjective roots of the opposition, the second with its objec-

tive place in the political sphere as defined by certain fundamental principles of con-

temporary One major reason for the success of "right versus left," I submit,
society.

is that it allows political actors to identify in a physical way with the groups to which

they adhere. Indeed, the right-left division is a substitute for the age-old organic

symbolism in which society is depicted as a body, a substitute that takes hold in mod-
ern societies which, unlike their predecessors, can no longer be represented in

organic terms. The second reason is quite different in origin. It is a consequence of

the logic of democratic legitimacy and of the antinomies inextricably associated
with it. In a society that recognizes no basis other than individual rights, not only is

there inevitable conflict over how to translate those rights into practice, but there is,
as I shall attempt to prove, no political position based on the claim to be carrying out
such a translation which is not itself riven by internal contradiction. And this takes

us back to reason number one. The right-left identification permits each individual
to subsume the whole symbolically and to embody these internal divisions. In my
view it is therefore at the point where the two forces intersect — the requirement that

society be representable by the individual and the requirement that it be possible for

the individual to embody the contradictions implicit in our fundamental social val-

ues — that the source of this omnipotent and omnivorous lateralization of politics

resides. Right and left, in other words, belong among those primary reference
points that enable us to live in the world.
Indeed, one of the fundamental requirements of any political symbolism is to

justify the identification of the individual with the collective. The singular actor

needs to be able to find his place in the whole; he needs to feel a part of a larger
structure that makes sense in a way he can understand. For millennia this was the

function of images of society as a body, in all their countless variants and ramifica-
tions. This organic symbolism had a very clear architecture. It was inseparable from
a religious organization of the world. Its cornerstone was the union of the tangible

community with its invisible foundation, from which derived the corporeal cohe-
sion that bound the members of the community together. To put it in somewhat dif-
ferent terms, organic symbolism was natural to what Louis Dumont has called the

holistic model of social organization. When the whole takes primacy over its parts,
when the principle of collective order is prior to and takes precedence over individ-

uals, then the imperative of belonging necessarily finds itself represented in terms

of encompassment within a body. The bond between men can be symbolized as an

organic one so long as it is metaphysically posited as being above their will. In many
societies, and especially powerfully in the West, this expressive economy found its

ideal support in the person of the king. The king's body epitomized the entire body
 Right and Left 289

politic, and by holding out a mirror to his subjects allowed them to represent the
physical solidarity that held them together as subsumed in a materially and mysti-
cally defined individual. We must bear this root in mind if we want to understand

the once all but ineradicable nostalgia for monarchical personification. What was at
stake was more than a carefully considered belief; it was the possibility for individ-

uals to achieve a stable, comprehensible representation of their society. The advent

of individualistic, historical, and democratic modernity involved a break in the
symbolic order, which took the form of an ineluctable loss of incorporation of the
social. All dependence on a divine source evaporated, along with any sacred moor-
ing; all at once society became something subject to change. The bonds between
individuals were loosened, as the innate autonomy of each was recognized as the

only possible source of order. Impersonality was ascribed to a new form of power,
which emanated from the will of citizens. When unity ceased to be the defining
characteristic of society at every level, it became impossible to conceive of contem-
porary societies as bodies. As a result, it soon became clear that modern societies

were subject to a major problem of identity, by which I mean a problem of identifi-

cation for society's own members. Not for nothing would these societies be chal-
lenged by waves of protest and radical subversion in many guises, yet all similar in

their desire to reestablish the communal cohesion, clear self-definition, and holistic
consciousness essential for individuals to represent to themselves the society in
which they live — the kind of reassuringly inexhaustible, straightforwardly com-
prehensible representation that throughout much of human history the organic
image provided. Not for nothing, too, did revolutionary (and counterrevolution-
ary) passions come to a head in this century, when it became clear that the realiza-

tion of democracy involved the explicit division of society and institutionalization

of conflict, and, more specifically, when it became clear about 1900 that the tacit

model of democracy was no longer the unifying revelation of the general will but

the staging of civil discord. Claude Lefort was quite right to see a fantasy of rein-
corporation, of restoration of the social as body, as one of the underlying goals of

totalitarianism, a restoration in which the investment in the egocrat, the intense

repersonification of power, also played a decisive role. If, on the other hand, demo-
cratic societies have, after so much difficulty, enjoyed a remarkable period of calm
since 1945, a stability quite striking when compared with their prior history, much
of the credit must go to the establishment of a symbolic apparatus capable of
responding to previously frustrated needs. Was the old organic and sacral organiza-
tion finally forgotten, thus making it possible for people to accustom themselves to

increased activism, to the internal externality of the state, and to continual conflict.'*

Or was it because people found the resources necessary to deal with those aspects of
collective experience that had been sources of rebellion and scandal.'* Was that why
the primitive model to which desperate people had wittingly or unwittingly clung
290 MARCEL GAUCHET

suddenly lost its attraction and disappeared? In any case, the age of nostalgia
seemed this time to have come to a close; the rupture was complete. For the first

time democratic societies seemed to have discovered a foundation firm enough to

permit them to live in harmony with themselves — a harmony that included, among
other things, an acceptance of discord. In this evolution the development of a series
of symbolic responses to the basic uncertainties inherent in a society of individuals
played an important role. These responses were contained in various practical mea-
sures, whose impact as reforms has often been stressed but generally without their

significance on the level of collective representations being measured. The welfare

state was a response to concrete needs for protection, but it also had the effect of

giving tangible form to the abstract cohesiveness of a society lacking the natural
sense of belonging and solidarity that had made social cohesion immediately tangi-
ble in the past. More than that, it revealed the hidden law of our world, which is soci-
ety's responsibility in the production of individuals. The reinforcement of the

executive does not simply make representative regimes more governable. Through
the personalization of power that goes along with it, it ends the bewilderment
induced by the inconceivable notion of anonymous government. It affords citizens

an identifiable grasp on the agency that is supposed to embody the collective will.

Similarly, the development of an information society, which parallels that of a

regime of public opinion, represents not just a technical achievement but a new way
of shaping the demands implicit in the functioning of democracy, namely, the need
for public control of governmental actions and for a clear expression of the general
will. The universalization of right and left is one aspect of this process. It is part of
a process of creating a frame of reference whose purpose is to make the underlying

order of society more legible, more intelligible, and more acceptable to its members.
In this process the left-right distinction occupies an important place. It symbolizes
membership in a society whose law is division. It provides the symbolic vector that

makes possible what would otherwise be highly improbable: identification with a

fragmented collectivity. For a long time that fragmentation made the collective
impossible to grasp as a whole, apprehendable only in parts. But the left-right cou-
ple relates division to a deeper organic unity. It provides a way of conceptualizing
an organically integrated dualism. This was not the reason the pair first gained cur-
rency, and it was not primarily usedway in French politics until recently. But
in this

this new fact does explain why the pair was so widely embraced, why it became a

universally acceptable cliche. This symmetrical dichotomy made it possible to sym-

bolically reduce social division to the dual indivisibility that characterizes each of us

in our individuality. For millennia the body had stood for the supposedly unbreach-
able unity of the community; now it was mobilized to represent the community's
constitutive division. I can easily and without risk project myself into this division

because it already runs through me and defines me. What appears as fragmented in
 Right and Left 291

public space is something I carry whole within myself. If from the standpoint of
politics I place myself either on the right or on the left, within myself I can be simul-
taneously right and left; I can switch momentarily from one to the other; I can at any
moment explain the division to myself. This, by the way, amounts to saying that the

expansion of the categories right and left has taken place in a climate very different
from that which prevailed during most of the period in which they were used in the

French tradition. Ordinarily the pair implied Manichaeanism and a spirit of exclu-
sion. But lately, in contrast, they have spread as tokens of an ultimate solidarity of
opposing terms. I can be on only one side at a time, but it is inevitable, indeed nec-

essary, that there be two sides. Here, then, is yet another of the pair's resources: a

flexibility that enables it to stand not only for conflict of the most radical sort but

also for a regulated system whose parts happen to be in conflict. Right and left were
once banners for the most extreme political passions. Now they are embarked on a
second career as emblems of moderation. As the two terms take on this organic
sense, they inevitably lose some of their virulence, or so it seems. Only the future
can tell, for it seems highly likely that this symbolic reconstitution of individual
commitment to an organic society marks the beginning of a new historical epoch
that will endure for a long time to come.
This embodiment of conflict takes on its full meaning only when we relate it to

the underlying expansion of the feeling that the contradiction is a part of social real-

ity, indeed to such an extent that it is refracted in each of us. This vague perception
takes us close to the source of the fundamental change of climate that is occurring
in modern societies in the post-totalitarian age, which is to a large extent a change
in the social actors' spontaneous representation of what the normal form of society
is. The driving force behind totalitarianism was the feeling that contradiction was
somehow a scandal to be eliminated, and on the subjective level this went along with
a misapprehension of one's own contradictions. This was particularly clear in the

Communist case, where the expansion of collective power soon proved to be at

odds with the individual emancipation it was supposed to help bring about. But the
contradictions, if less apparent, were no less real on the fascist side, where a covert
affirmation of the individual distorted the restoration of the nation's organic pri-

macy. Ideology posited the necessary return to Oneness in the form of a theory of
history. If there was change, it must be moving toward some end. Fascists had an
impoverished conception of that end, as a simple restoration of a communitarian
and racial truth obscured by materialist and revolutionary modes of thought.
Communists had a more powerful conception, as the ultimate reconciliation to be
achieved at the end of the human species' long march toward self-consciousness of
its production of itself. The sense of the journey from present to future was never-
theless fundamentally the same: the future inevitably meant an end to today's intol-
erable divisions. Bear in mind that it was by way of such myths, in which the future
 —
292 MARCEL GAUCHET

figured as the solution to all of today's problems, that the idea of history gradually
insinuated itself into the collective consciousness over the past century. It is there-

fore impossible to overstate the importance of the "crisis of the future" that sud-

denly, under the impact of the great crisis of the 1970s, discredited all these images

of reconciliation, whether reactionary or progressive, radical or moderate."' What

evaporated in this moment of crisis was all prospect of an "end of history."
Suddenly one faced a future with no end in sight. The gaping void of the unknown
accounts for the return to the doctrinal sources and legitimating principles of our
world: human rights, liberalism, individualism. What gives meaning to this revival

is the idea that no transcendence lies in store, but rather that an open-ended creative
process is possible on the basis of these existing principles and rules. Along with this
goes the intuition that the insurmountable oppositions that beset modern society are
rooted in these same principles. Those oppositions do not merely divide the public
mind; they are also refracted into contradictions within each of us. Events generally
reveal things that have been in gestation for a long time. Lucid, unfettered thinkers

long ago observed the effects of these irreconcilable forces on themselves. Paul
Valery, for example, made this note at a most interesting moment, in 1934: "Ego
right by instinct; left by spirit; right among the lefts and left among the rights. Here

the ideas repel me, there the type.""*^ He goes on, in a variation of the same thought,
to flesh out his views: "My political opinion.'' I have none. But if I question my
instinct — I find contradiction in all of them. Anarchy. Monarchy.""'' This shows
that the development of which I speak has been a long time coming. But the whole
complexion of the matter changes when what was once a flash in a single mind
becomes an integral part of a belief system and shared mentality. The discovery
then ceases to be a mere exercise of intelligence marginal to reality to become a
force capable of transforming practice; it begins the long, slow process of changing
attitudes, behavior, and expectations, ultimately perhaps giving rise to a new way of
relating to politics.

It would be an error at this point to attribute to psychological disposition what

actually stems from an objective social logic. The contradiction does not come ini-

tially from individuals; individuals feel its effects, but the original contradiction is

inherent in society's defining axioms. It is an intrinsic, insurmountable feature of

any society of individuals, of any society that recognizes no other foundation or
source of rights than the original independence of its members, than the liberty and
equality of originally separate beings. In the most general possible terms, the con-
tradiction is inherent in the structure of any society that tends to mistake its social

nature and therefore finds itself torn between the requirements of its explicit ideol-

ogy and the constraints implicit in its systemic functioning. Put slightly differendy,
it is a contradiction between the visible and the hidden face of the individualist prin-
ciple of legitimacy. The society that thinks of itself and (with what potent effects we
 Right and Left 293

well know) behaves as if it were a society produced by the will of individuals is also

in reality a society whose basic norm is to have individuals as members, individuals

whose reproduction is therefore society's task. In the first case, however, it is up to

each individual to assume his own responsibilities in a situation in which the public
sphere is to be limited as much as possible, whereas in the second case the collective
authority is charged with instituting and protecting its subjects in their very status

as individuals, with all that that implies in the way of expansion of that authority's
competence and resources. Therein lies the deeper meaning of what would explode
as the "social question" after the Industrial Revolution but which in fact had already
arisen as part of the political transformation initiated by the French Revolution.
There was no coherent, fully achieved liberal order that workers somehow modi-
fied or imposed social correctives on through their struggles. There was rather an
internal dilemma within the liberal order, between its public face, governed by the

principles of liberty and individual self-interest, and its hidden face, which in the

service of the same goals called for extension of social power. Hence the compro-
mise achieved in one way or another between these two logics, which resulted in the
welfare state, was the inevitable and normal destiny of liberal societies (regardless

of what libertarians might think). It is not enough to say, as Louis Dumont argues,
that the holistic dimension must necessarily survive, if only in a diffuse or unac-
knowledged form, in the reconstruction of society brought about by the ideology
of individualism. It not only survives but transforms itself and, more than that, in

some respects multiplies. The redefinition of the whole on the basis of individual
wills is also the source of a dynamic of collective power whose consequences in
terms of coercive membership can be devastating. The example of the nation is

proof of this assertion. Recognizing individual liberty as the supreme value opens
unlimited possibilities for the expansion of social authority, since individual inde-
pendence is apt to be converted into a popular sovereignty virtually extended to
everything. The holistic society was one whose parts all functioned according to an
identical logic, the logic of subordination. The individualist reversal leads to diver-
gence between the individual and the collective points of view, thereby giving rise

to two intimately associated yet antagonistic logics, a logic of emancipation and a

logic of socialization. These are intellectually exclusive yet inseparable. The impos-
sibility of keeping the two dynamics is what determines the pattern of political con-
tradictions in modern societies. Both dynamics will repeatedly appear, intertwined

yet opposed, in various symmetrical and inverse versions.

It is important to be clear about the connection between the demand for inde-

pendence and the obligation of membership as it relates to Dumont 's analysis,

because Dumont gives a very interesting interpretation of the left- right polarity.''^
In substance, Dumont proposes looking at the left as the party of the individualist
ideology that grew out of the French Revolution. The right, on the other hand, is
294 MARCEL GAUCHET

supposed to represent the party of the holistic imperative, which necessarily sur-

vives. Thus the ideological domination of the left is presumably balanced by the real
powers that the right continues to wield within the society. The result is a conflict
ual expression of hierarchical complementarity by incorporation of opposites,
whose rules Dumont elucidates."^ This interpretation has the considerable merit o
deriving political division from the very principle on which modern societies are

based and of shedding a great deal of light on the resulting social tension. But the
formulation is too sweeping, and it results in a one-sided view of both the right and

the left by seriously underestimating the internal contradictions within each. To fit

the historical material, each term of the model must be made more complex: the ten-
sion between the two components is also found within each party. Dumont 's inter-
pretation actually fits the starting point of the history that concerns us here: it gives
a more or less accurate image of the distribution of forces in 1815. The "left" (inso-

far as such an anachronistic substantive can be used) corresponds to the principles

of 1789, to the "bourgeois" liberties, whereas the "right" stands for tradition, hier-

archy, and ascriptive social position. By the second Restoration the picture had
changed, however, and in 1848 it became unrecognizable. Socialism brought into

being a left concerned primarily with collective organization and capable of con-
ceiving individual emancipation only in the framework of a clearly materialized pri-
macy of the general interest. In other words, a lasting split developed on the left

between those who gave priority to political liberties and those who ascribed
absolute necessity to social authority. This split also appeared in the form of an
internal contradiction on the extreme left, which found itself ineluctably divided
between a desire for individual emancipation through an end to the alienation of
labor and the impossibility of conceiving of such a goal without coercive organiza-
tion, as Elie Halevy rightly diagnosed in 1936.'^^ On the right, meanwhile, similar

complexities evolved. The expansion of industry gave rise to an entrepreneurial

wing of the right, committed to the values of individual initiative and competition,
whose coexistence with the proponents of a stable hierarchical order proved to be

highly problematic. Between libertarianism and conservatism, between the lan-

guage of self-interest and devotion to the spiritual, between the mobile power of
money and the ideal of a landed community unified by ancestral loyalties and nat-

ural hierarchies, the internal tensions of the right were no less significant than those

of the left.'^' Hence it was no longer a party of the individual confronting a party

of the whole. One party did in fact trace its origins back to the rights of the indi-

vidual, but its history had forced it to confront from within the persistent issue of

collective primacy. And the other party had indeed come into being in order to pre-
serve authority, but its history forced it to acknowledge the ineluctable requirements
of economic actors. In the end, two versions of individual preeminence confronted
two versions of hierarchical order. The left emphasized the values of freedom of
 Right and Left 295

consciousness and individual choice, while the right promoted self-interest and
entrepreneurial efficiency. In opposing this emancipation of self-interest, the left

insisted that self-interest must be subordinated to the will of all. And against the

anarchy of opinion and the atomistic dissolution of social bonds the right mobilized
spiritual authority, moral constraint, family ties, the force of tradition, and the ben-
efits of communal roots. Of course neither camp was monolithic, and each of these
points became in turn a source of new divisions. There is a right which, in the name
of heredity, community, and true hierarchy, detests money, industry, and the mar-
ket, and there is a right that the logic of the marketplace tends to move farther and
farther away from conservative authoritarianism. And there is a left which, in its

collective intransigence, feels nothing but contempt for the miserable demands of
the bourgeois ego, just as there is an individualistic left which is highly suspicious of
the means of government. If there is to be conflictual complementarity, it is by way
of such splits that it introduces itself into the system.
It is in relation to the development of this network of contradictions within and
between camps, as exacerbated by historical change, that we can begin to under-
stand the rise of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is nothing other than a desperate
attempt to escape the contradiction within oneself through murderous violence
toward one 's enemy. It stems from a kind of dim awareness of the inner fragmen-
tation caused by conflicting demands whose sting precipitates a flight of avoidance.

Individual autonomy through total collectivism, fusion of citizens into a single

nation as a means of authentic liberation —antinomy erected into solution by way
of annihilation of the enemy: this was the historical driving force behind the vio-
lence toward reality and human beings that has dominated this century. The histor-

ical process continues; ideals once opposed to an intolerable degree have now
become intimately intertwined to reshape our world. The phase of rebellion is over,

and we stand on the brink of a period of peaceful resignation, a time in which social

actors will begin to discover the solidity of the system of which they are a part. We
are beginning to understand the connection between our own inevitable contradic-

tions and the inexorable opposition we encounter in the political sphere, and we are
also beginning to grasp the higher solidarity that holds this bundle of dissensions
together. I cannot avoid contradiction, and I cannot avoid being contradicted. It is

impossible to affirm the prerogatives of the individual without being forced to rec-
ognize the need for collective inscription, and to that extent it is impossible to avoid
coming face to face with who confronts you with a mirror image of
an antagonist
your own dilemmas. Those on the right who dream of a diminished role for the state
also insist on a central government strong enough to ensure law and order. And

those on the left who detest coercion and repression nevertheless hope to extend
public control over the economy. They want open borders when it comes to immi-
gration, while the right would put the national interest first. We cannot help want-
296 MARCEL GAUCHET

ing both, yet we are impelled to choose one goal over another. Yet what we are pow-
erless to hold together takes on global coherence through confrontation with adver-
saries no less implicated in contradiction than we are. This makes it meaningful to
identify with the whole range of interchangeable positions, even as we recognize
that the focal point of contradiction is within ourselves. We are of the right and the
left to the extent that at any given moment we can only situate ourselves on the right

against the left or on the left against the right.

For more than a century political struggle had the air of a battle between past and
future, between Ancien Regime and Revolution, between monarchy, hierarchy, and
privilege on the one hand and the Republic on the other. What compromise was
possible between two strictly incompatible systems of thought and value.'' After the
Republic emerged victorious, the basic requirements of social coherence and inte-
gration were completely transformed. Although those requirements were no longer
expressed in the language of the old society, they continued to exist, and it became
impossible to miss the fact that they were part of the democratic world-view. As the

contrast with the Ancien Regime faded and it became increasingly apparent that the

crux of the conflict was the organization of society, people began to believe that we
were on the verge of deliverance from all conflict. This belief mobilized formida-
ble energies, ravaged the century, and turned the world upside down, yet conflict

remains, unchanged, even as our entire frame of reference has changed: conflict is

indeed an intrinsic part of our world. It has become difficult to ignore its construc-

tive role. Our growing awareness of this is exemplified by the new status that has

gradually been conferred on the right-left pair. We are in solidarity with our ene-

mies in two senses: first, it is through opposition that the truth of our world is

revealed, that truth which by nature can only come to rest in a unique position; sec-
ond, what divides us from our enemies is also, in principle, what divides us within
ourselves. This helps to explain why central issues can so easily move from one side
to the other, the shift of the national theme from left to right being only the most
famous illustration of this.'^^ Contrary to what skeptics believe, this inconstancy is

much less an argument for relativism or for the inconsistency of the opposition than
it is an argument for its solidity: although positions on this or that point are apt to

be exchanged, the gap remains. It is a unique property of the left-right opposition

that it allows simultaneous expression of both dimensions. That expression gives

form to the final solidarity of the antagonists while echoing the division within
each. It allows me to formulate within myself a coherent image of what is given out-
side me as fragmented, but at the same time points up the inner division that each

individual experiences as a consequence of being part of a larger whole. Through a

miracle of the body which effects a conversion of objective space into subjective
space, by the grace of an endless conversion of mutual exclusion (in objective

space) into reciprocal integration (in subjective space), right and left become the
 Right and Left 297

vehicle of the symbolic reversibility of the individual and the collective. They
become the cognitive tool through which the dualist organization of modern soci-

ety and the concomitant necessity of mobilization through dissent become organi-
cally apprehensible and intelligible. And thus they constitute the basic frame of ref-
erence in terms of which the law of contradiction of the world in which I am des-
tined to live is at once epitomized and resolved within myself, since I can thereby
both embody a contradiction and transcend it, take a stand on one side of a divisive

issue and yet embrace the whole.

Clearly, then, it is illusory to assume that the calm that has come of late to political

life betokens an imminent disappearance of the split between left and right. To do
so is to mistake the surface for what lies beneath it in both functional and symbolic
terms. True, the Manichaean magnetism of left and right has lost something of its

mobilizing intensity. But what has been lost in passion has been gained in function-
ality. The deflation of combativeness has gone hand in hand with anthropological
implantation. If the emblems have lost some of their luster, the opposition now
underpins one of those identifications that enable social actors to achieve symbolic
mastery of their world. The role of right and left can no longer be measured in
terms of attraction and repulsion. Their new vocation is to make a world structured
in terms of contradiction representable. Just because contradictions now manifest

themselves with less violence than in the past, it does not follow that they are des-
tined to disappear. Moderation of expression is one thing, fundamentality of prin-
ciple is another. Issues may seem to lose their importance, and the substance of con-
flict may appear to become confused over time, yet the core logic that governs the
distribution of antagonistic positions remains intact. That logic is a feature of the

structure of modern society itself. To the extent that our world is built on individ-
uals, politics will take the form of confrontations around the always problematic
relation between private powers and public authority. The resulting, ever-recurring

contradictions will not vanish overnight. Even if negotiation takes place at the cen-
ter, moreover, it seems likely that we will continue to conceptualize those contra-

dictions in terms of right and left for a long time to come.

The nature of the metamorphosis is such that it will be felt peculiarly acutely in
the country that invented the left-right identifications as names for what was inex-
piable in its internal discords. In France the cooling of the passions associated with

these terms seems to herald, more than it does elsewhere, their imminent relegation
to oblivion, when in fact it means, as elsewhere, simply that the role of these desig-
nations has changed. In any case, this ultimate revival gives the terms left and right

a special status in France, at the cusp between the past and the present. Right and left

epitomize the era in which French politics thought of itself as universal politics pre-
cisely because of the clarity of the alternatives for which it provided the theater:
298 MARCEL GAUCHET

181 5, a choice, yet again, between Ancien Regime and Revolution; 1900, a choice

between faith and enUghtenment, between human rights and the nation; 1935, a con-
frontation between fascism and sociahsm. Three key moments in which the opposi-
tion crystalHzed around the immutable primal scene of 1789, three moments in

which debate revolved around ultimate choices and fundamental issues. We have
seen how the uniquely French nature of the apparatus ensuring the preponderance

of ideological universalism was translated into the primacy of the categories right
and left. That universalism was in a sense corroborated by the worldwide accep-
tance of its fetish terms. But the diffusion of those terms was part of a general

process of democratic stabilization, which led in France to a questioning of the

belief in an exceptional status that caused the French to project themselves into the

universal arena. If France 's peculiar idiom became the language of the entire world,
it was by way of a shift in the meaning of right and left, which now referred to the

ordinary, insurmountable coexistence of opposites rather than to the relentless

antagonism they once signified. The spread of the terminology actually reflected a

decline of the model. As France's terminology conquers the world, France itself

rejoins the ranks of other nations, accepts its unexceptional status, and increasingly
becomes a democracy like other democracies. By dint of comparison the country is

also learning to see what French historical figures in general understood as univer-
sally exemplary as having been instead singularly insular. The achievement of true
universality compels us in retrospect to appreciate the consummate singularity of a

tradition that saw itself as universalistic. This has created a tension between past and
present which now permeates the notions of right and left and turns them into mem-
ory-notions. They actively refer to the past precisely because they remain alive, but
in a function that acts as a continual reminder of the difference between their pre-

sent and past grounds for existence. They serve today as one of the forces working
to bring France into the mainstream. But France cannot rejoin the ordinary without
reminding itself of its former exceptionalism. The more the terms right and left

come to evoke the new norm, the more they will also serve to evoke the unique past

of dissension and struggle that made France, once the eldest daughter of the
Church, for many years the chosen homeland of the political.
 I
PART II

I
MINORITY RELIGIONS
I
 CHAPTER 8

Port-Royal: The Jansenist Schism

Catherine Maire

At the gates of Versailles, in the depths of a marshy glen surrounded by forest, the

ruins of the abbey of Port-Royal des Champs stand in strange contrast to the sov-

ereign magnificence of the nearby palace and its park. Only the pigeon house, barn,
and a part of the outer wall built at the time of the Fronde have escaped the destruc-
tion ordered by Louis XIV in 171 1.

Even the hotel of the Duchesse de Longueville, sister of the Grand Conde and
soul of the first Fronde, who liked to take her retreats, accompanied by her entire

entourage, in proximity to the monastery, was completely razed. The Gentlemen's

Lodge, erected in 1653 at the behest of illustrious friends of Port-Royal, suffered the
same fate.

Yet by some irony of history nothing could destroy the impression of "solitude,"
"desert," and "hermitage" (Thebai'de) that so struck Mme de Sevigne. The founda-
tions of the Cistercian abbey built in the early thirteenth century by Robert de
Luzarche, the architect of the cathedral of Amiens, remain gaping heavenward,
while a few avenues of trees hint at the cloister's outline.
The cemetery is completely empty. On orders of the king the bodies were
exhumed when the abbey was destroyed, as if, not content to demolish buildings,
the absolute monarch wished to erase the monastery's invisible roots, the cult of its

dead, the circle of its friends. Anything likely to evoke the spirit or memory of the
place was ruthlessly obliterated.

Nevertheless, not only is the memory of Port-Royal still alive today, but even more
astonishing, it has remained continuously alive since the seventeenth century. The
monastery's archives, miraculously saved from destruction, the works of the sev-
 3

302 CATHERINE MAIRE

enteenth- and eighteenth-century Port-RoyaHstes that were destined to keep the

abbey's memory aUve, the entire Hterature of the long Jansenist struggle, nearly
fifty thousand volumes in all, were patiently assembled in an authentic lieu de

memoire that replaced the abolished physical site: the Bibliotheque de la Societe de

Port- Royal, which also owns the ruins of Port-Royal des Champs.'

The society in fact styles itself the direct heir of the boite d Perrette, a relief fund

founded by Pierre Nicole himself. Throughout the eighteenth century the fund was
constantly replenished and passed on through an ingenious system of inheritance to

a number of "friends of truth." These friends were called upon to make good use of
the fund in the battle against the Roman Constitution or papal bull Unigenitus of 171
and in defense of persecuted clerics.^ After the Revolution, the fund was reconsti-
tuted in the form of a mutual annuity, the Reunion Catholique. During the nineteenth
century, the society, which took the name Societe Saint-Augustin in 1845, gradually

became the repository of the Jansenist archives. One of its members, Jean-Amable
Paris, secretary of the Conseil d'Etat, bequeathed it the library of the Jansenist

lawyer Louis-Adrien Le Paige, whose heir he had become during the Revolution.
Throughout his long life, Le Paige, bailiff of the Temple and advisor to the
Prince de Conti, strove to assemble his library of "witness to the truth," collecting
every available record of the battle waged by the adversaries of the bull Unigenitus,
not only the so-called appelants who made their appeal to the Concile de la Nation
but also the convulsionnaires and, later, the parlementaires. He collected some 2,500
volumes, including 228 thick compilations containing some 12,000 printed and hand-
written documents. All in all, some 15,000 documents were represented, covering
more than two centuries of France 's religious and parlementary^ history, from Port-

Royal to the Revolution. It was also Le Paige who recovered most of the copies and

originals from the archives of the destroyed monastery, roughly 1 50 volumes' worth.
This exceptional collection forms the core of the library, which has been
enlarged through the addition of other Jansenist collections. It is located today at

169 Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. In particular, the library of Port-Royal contains a

large portion of the archives of Abbe Gregoire, who represented the spirit of Port-
Royal during the Revolution. With the purchase of the ruins in 1868, the symbolic
patrimony of Port- Royal was gathered together under the auspices of the Societe
Saint-Augustin, rebaptized the Societe de Port-Royal in 1954.

Over the course of the nineteenth century the Jansenist controversy that had long

raged within the Catholic Church gradually abated. It survived in the form of a
spiritual ancestry and sensibility. But Jansenism survived even more importantly as

a cultural memory, as evidenced by the creation, after World War II, of another,
larger group, the Societe des Amis de Port-Royal.
Looked at closely, this seemingly unified memory actually consists of two dis-

tinct strata. There is "Port- Royal" and there is "Jansenism." Sainte-Beuve conse-
 Port-Royal 303

crated the idea of Port-Royal as the epicenter of French classicism. Port-Royal is

often portrayed as a rosette of classicism, with Pascal, Saint-Cyran, Racine, Boileau,

Philippe de Champaigne, Antonin Arnauld, Nicole, Duguet, Mme de Sevigne, and

Descartes as its petals, touching every facet of the seventeenth century. Port-Royal
is also celebrated for the pure French of its translations, the modernity of its

Grammaire, and the intelligent teaching methods employed in its Petites Ecoles.

"Jansenism" means resistance to absolutism. Powerful images have found their

way into history texts: the confessor Saint-Cyran's opposition to Richelieu's poli-

cies based on raison d'Etat and the refusal of the nuns of Port-Royal des Champs to

sign a document condemning the five propositions taken from Jansenius's

Augusdnus. On the right the Jansenists are suspected of somehow having instigated
the French Revolution. On the left they are associated with the development of
republican ideas. Sometimes they are even regarded as the precursors of "a height-
ened awareness of the rights of the person, and above all of personal thought, in the
face of absolutisms of authority.'"*

The different images actually hide a judgment of different epochs. What the
cliches make it difficult for us to see is the difference between the two Jansenisms,
that of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth. Though seventeenth-
century Jansenism survives thanks to its writers, the political Jansenism of the eigh-

teenth century is little known or has had a bad press. Port-Royal is the incarnation
of Jansenism in its moment of greatness, as opposed to its "unfortunate" evolution
in the battle over Unigenitus and the affair of the convulsionnaires. Sainte-Beuve did
a great deal to forge the image of this divorce. He attempted to preserve the myth-
ical purity of the monastery's golden age under Saint-Cyran by portraying it as

gradually overtaken by a disputatious, caviling spirit which was first introduced by

Arnauld and which he alleges ultimately led the movement into complete decadence
in the following century.
The paradox, however, is that it was the political Jansenists of the eighteenth
century who constructed the memory of the Port-Royal du Grand Siecle for the
needs of their cause. Sainte-Beuve followed in their footsteps and read their books.
He relied on their sources and completed their work. He excluded them from his-
tory, yet he completed their design. One of the novel features of Jansenism in the
century of Enlightenment was the role that the battle over history played in its

development. It may be that the whole Jansenist movement can be reinterpreted by

examining the ways in which it has been remembered.

The Enigma of Jansenism

There is something enigmatic about Jansenism. Few religious sects have given rise

to so many contradictory views of their nature. For such typically French dissi-
dence to break out within the Catholic Church in modern times remains mysterious.
CATHERINE MAIRE

It constitutes one of the major cleavages in the history of France, the ramifications
of which were central to public life for a century and a half, and yet the significance
of the sect and the details of its development remain baffling and have given rise to

endless interpretive controversies.^

The difficulty of grasping Jansenism probably has a great deal to do with its

being intimately intertwined with the whole theological and political structure of

the French Ancien Regime. It accompanied absolutism in its course and followed its

phases, from its establishment to its collapse. It is absolutism's profoundly revealing

double, its religious mirror, its ghost. It refracts the difficulties of the modern reli-

gious consciousness within the framework of absolutist construction. Jansenism

opposed the political religion of raison d'Etat with its own religious politics, that of

God as absolute.

Theologically, the movement began in Louvain in the context of discussions, fol-

lowing the Council of Trent, concerning free will and grace in reaction to the

Protestant schism. The Jesuits gave it a name, based on that of Bishop Jansenius,
whose Augustinus (1640) was the most elaborate expression of the doctrine that
^

would eventually trigger the controversy. In opposition to Molina, the theologian of '

the Jesuits, Jansenius pointed to man's fundamental corruption and God's omnipo-
tence. But since the battle was now being waged on two fronts, not only against the
Jesuits but also against the Protestant doctrine of predestination by grace alone,

Jansenius also stressed the necessity of good works on the part of Christians: in the
work of salvation constant effort and total conversion were indispensable. In oppo-
sition to the Protestant tendency toward desacralization, Jansenius reaffirmed the
sacraments in precisely the same spirit as the Counter-Reformation.
In any case, it was in France, through Jansenius's great friend Duvergier de
Hauranne, abbe de Saint-Cyran, that the Jansenist movement in the strict sense

found its true home. There, theological rigorism encountered the problem of poli-

tics in the form of Richelieu's policies of raison d'Etat. Things came to a head
around 1635. Jansenius published Marj Gallicus, a pamphlet that explicitly attacked

the policies of the cardinal, who did not shrink from forging an alliance with
Protestant countries to serve France 's needs in its war with Catholic Spain. Saint-

Cyran, who in that same year, 1635, became the confessor of Mother Angelique, the

mother superior of the Port- Royal convent, assumed the symbolic status in this con-
text of leader of the religious party and defender of the rights of conscience. For
Richelieu, he became an enemy to eliminate, especially since he attracted proselytes.

Saint-Cyran, meanwhile, had actually begun recruiting solitaires, who had made up
their minds to withdraw from the world under his spiritual guidance and to live

henceforth only for the purpose of "making it to heaven." The first of these was an
avocat with the Parlement of Paris, Antoine Le Maitre, soon joined by two brethren,
the priest Antoine Singlin and the grammarian Claude Lancelot. The three men
 Port-Royal 305

lived as "Christian friends" in buildings attached to the convent of nuns of Port-

Royal, temporarily located at the Hotel de Clagny in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques.
The nuns had a history of their own. The first reform of Port-Royal des Champs,
undertaken by Mother Angelique in 1608, when she was just seventeen, actually pre-
dated Jansenism. The convent followed the Cistercian rule and was influenced by a

peculiarly French brand of spirituality associated with Rerulle and Saint Francis de
Sales. The future of the convent was determined, however, by Angelique 's
encounter with Saint-Cyran and later, under his influence, with other Jansenist
directors and confessors such as Singlin, Le Maitre de Sacy, and Arnauld. The nuns
would become at once the focal point of the Jansenist movement, the eye of the
ensuing storm, and the quintessential repository of Jansenist memory.
It was in 1638 that Port-Royal des Champs became the Port-Royal that we know.
Saint-Cyran was arrested. The "gentlemen" then moved to the original site of the

monastery, which the nuns had abandoned ten years earlier in favor of a healthier
home in the capital. The solitaires undertook to drain the land and improve the
property, after which some of the nuns, whose numbers had grown too large for the
new convent built to Lepautre's plans in 1646 in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques,
remrned to the old abbey. The solitaires, their ranks significantly expanded after the

sensation created by the publication of the great Arnauld 's Frequente Communion in

1643, then retired to the hillside farm. The history of Port-Royal de Paris parts
company with that of Port-Royal des Champs in 1665, the dramatic moment when
the nuns fell under royal repression. Because of their refusal to sign a document
condemning five propositions from Augustinus, as required by the Assembly of the

Clergy in 1655 and reaffirmed by the king in 1664 and 1665, they were punished.
Leaders of the opposition, such as Mother Angelique de Saint-Jean, the niece of the
convent's foundress. Mother Angelique, who died in 1661, were dispersed to vari-
ous convents in Paris and its environs. The rest of the company was confined to
Port-Royal des Champs. From 1665 to 1669, eighty "rebellious and disobedient"
nuns were obliged to live in custody under the authoritarian command of the nuns

of the Visitation, cut off from all contact with the outside world and, worse still,

deprived of the sacraments. In 1666, Louis XIV legally severed the property of the
two houses and, to consummate the rupture, appointed as abbess of Port-Royal de
Paris one of the jureuses, or nuns who had agreed to sign the document. The con-
vent in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques would have nothing further to do with the fate

of Jansenism. There, the royal policy proved successful: the building, today a
maternity hospital, bears no trace of the party whose soul and fortress it was for

thirty years.

From the beginning the Jansenists were suspected of being, in Louis XIV's
famous jibe as reported by Saint-Simon, "a republican party in church and state." It

is true that the kind of obedience to temporal authority that they advocated consid-
3o6 CATHERINE MAIRE

4
MM

•^ *• # ,a .

erably underplayed the power of great lords and even in a sense desacralized the
monarch in comparison with the one valid absolute, that is, Jesus Christ. In a state
whose affirmation repressed the Reformation, Jansenism in a sense represented
Catholicism's crisis of individualism. How was Catholicism, a religion of mediation,
to be reconciled with modern religious experience, the devotio moderna, rooted in
 Port-Royal 307

FIGURE 8.1 Madeleine de Boulogne,

View of the Abbey of Port-Royal des
Champs; after an engraving by

Magdeleine Horthemels.

individual consciousness? This

was the fundamental question

from which Jansenism's con-
tradictory nature arose. It was
constantly torn between affir-
mation of the principle of
authority within the visible
Church and the development
of invisible personal belief,

brought on by the individualiz-

ing process of God's abso-
lutism, the other face of
"divine right," distinct from
that invoked by the monarch.
Similarly, the theology of

"the hidden God" expressed

the contradictory search for a

God among but incom-

active

prehensible to human beings.

The God of the Jansenists was
therefore both present and
absent at the same time.

Outside the world like the God

of the Protestants, he never-
theless continued to act and
bear witness to his presence in
the world, in particular by the
distinctive means of miracle.

The internal tensions of

Jansenism were most intense

in regard to the Church.
Jansenism aspired to reform
the Church but from within, as opposed to the Protestant challenge from without.
For Jansenists, the Church was capacious enough to incorporate the insistence on
faith within the broad spectrum of conflicts that could not fail to arise from the inte-

gration of what one might, at the risk of being provocative, call the "Protestant
spirit" into the Catholic structure.
3o8 CATHERINE MAIRE

The potential for conflict is particularly clear in the area in which "Jansenism"
probably exerted its greatest influence on French religion and culture, an aspect of
the question that has strangely enough been neglected by historians until now:
namely, the translation and distribution of the Bible and other religious works. After
1660 the "gentlemen" published not only such fundamental works of Christian spir-

ituality as De I'imitation de Jesus-Christ (1662), the Psaumes de David (1665), Mons's

Nouveau Testament (1667), the Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament (known as
'
the Bible de Royaumount, 1670), and the Bible de Sacy (1672— 1708), but also a
series of texts that brought the liturgy within reach of ordinary Christians: service
books, books of hours, missals, and breviaries. Like the Protestants, the Jansenists
encouraged people to read the Bible in the vulgar tongue and in the original text

rather than a paraphrase. What differentiated them from the Protestants was the

role accorded to the priest, in whom was vested the meaning of the text. It was his
|

job to help others to understand that meaning.

Moreover, it was probably this sacralization of the priestly function, which is

quite accentuated in the Nouveau Testament enfrangais avec des reflexions morales by
the Oratorian Quesnel,'' that crystallized the consciousness of the lower ranks of

the clergy, who became such an explosive force in the early eighteenth century.
Quesnel's commentary on the New Testament was in a sense the epitome and cul-

mination of all Port- Royal's efforts to put the Bible in the hands of ordinary people.

In highly didactic fashion Quesnel discussed Sacy's translation, the so-called Bible
de Mons. It was this commentary that drew the fire of Rome and that was con-
demned in Unigenitus, the 1713 papal bull. A tenth of the condemned propositions
pertained explicitly to the right of ordinary Christians to read the Bible in the vul-
gar tongue.
The anathema was thus pronounced at a time when most of the major transla-

tions were already widely available in France. It is easy to understand why many
parish priests would have felt outraged by an anathema from Rome challenging
what they had come to consider as their most eminent priestly function: teaching

Scripture and explaining the word of God.

The Sacrament of Memory

Port-Royal's grip on posterity cannot be accounted for simply by pointing to the
indelible traces of Jansenist disputations or the enduring memories of persecution
of the convent's nuns. And while I have no wish to detract from Angelique
Arnauld's reputation for courage and determination, the famous "day at the grille"

of September 25, 1609, which Sainte-Beuve transformed into the first act of a

tragedy, was not the kind of extraordinary event that leaves an ineradicable imprint.

The young abbess's decision to return to the old Cistercian rule and honor the clois-
 Port-Royal 309

ter was typical of a Catholic revival movement whose effects were widely felt after

the beginning of the seventeenth century

The roots of Port-Royal's enduring hold on the imagination are to be sought

rather in the sect's novel insistence from the beginning on the importance of mem-
ory The nuns and solitaires looked upon themselves as a community of saints,

exemplary in their humanity and destined to edify others through their charitable
acts. In order to set an example for others, those acts had to be recorded and publi-

cized.^ In addition, Port-Royal held to a distinctive mystical interpretation of the

Eucharist, of a nature to reinforce this commemorative inclination still further.

When the nuns moved to the new convent in Paris, they were given the name "sis-

ters of Port-Royal of the Holy Sacrament." Distinguished by splendid scapulars of

white serge emblazoned with a scarlet cross, they practiced a fervent, and not merely
external, adoration of the eucharistic body of Jesus: they became literally "Christ-

Bearers," to borrow a formula of Saint Cyril's that was incorporated into their

Constitutions. They thought of themselves in eucharistic terms, "as bearing Jesus

Christ in their hearts and exposed to the view of others." The latter expression is

characteristic of Jansenist theology with its fondness for a dialectic of the visible
and the invisible, the exterior and the interior, the hidden and the veiled. It is easy
to imagine how the kind of devotion peculiar to "the daughters of Christ's passion"
predisposed them to embrace the theme of martyrdom and flourish in persecution.
It is also easy to see how, even before the persecution, anyone associated with Port-
Royal could become worthy of memory through the mystery of the Eucharist. One
of the distinctive features of Port-Royal as a spiritual environment was its passion
for hagiography.

It was out of determination to rescue the memory of such spiritual guides as

Saint-Cyran, Le Maitre de Sacy, and Arnauld d'Andilly from oblivion that solitaires
such as Lancelot, Fontaine, and Du Fosse wrote their memoirs. It was for the same
reason that nuns such as Marie de Sainte-Claire Arnauld, Catherine de Sainte-
Agnes Arnauld d'Andilly, Catherine de Sainte-Suzanne Champaigne, and, later,

Elisabeth de Sainte-Agnes Le Feron piously set themselves the task of retranscrib-

ing the works of the illustrious "gentlemen." The case for the canonization of
Mother Angelique was tried, so to speak, during her lifetime.^ Under Singlin's
direction, Mother Angelique was obliged to begin her own autobiographical narra-
tive as early as 1654, albeit "with such distaste that one could not persuade her to fin-
ish it.""' Some of her letters, in particular those to the queen of Poland, were spir-
ited away for copying before being dispatched to their intended recipients.

In creating the legend of Mother Angelique, her niece and disciple Mother
Angelique de Saint-Jean played a fundamental role." While Antoine Le Maitre
transcribed his edifying conversations with his aunt, the niece set out to compile the

memories of the older nuns even before her aunt's death. For more than twenty
FIGURE 8.2 Death mask of Mother Angelique.
 Port-Royal

years, from 1652 to 1673, she gathered accounts of the foundress's hfe, which she
stored in secure places outside the convent during the period of persecution. When
calm was restored, she relied on this own memory in writing
source along with her
a history of the life and works of the order's foundress up to the time when the Paris

convent was established.'^

During the long, patient years of archival work and composition, external cir-

cumstances — namely, the order to sign the document condemning the propositions
of Jansenius — led to a change in the work's primary objective: it became an apolo-
gia for a successful and complete effort of reform. The sanctions compelled
Angelique de Saint-Jean to recount the history of a martyrdom, the unjust persecu-
tion of reform. There was a shift from the mystery of the Eucharist to the theme of
the Passion, a shift also evident in diaries and journals of captivity written in this

period by nuns dispersed to various convents or confined at Port-Royal from 1665 to

1669. A certain uniformity of style in these accounts suggests, moreover, that all were
revised by Angelique de Saint-Jean. Her Relation de captivite (171 1) and Reflexions sur
la conformite de I'etat des religieuses de Port-Royal avec celui de Jesus-Chnst dans
I'Eucharistie (1710) contain the seeds of the heroic myth of Port-Royal, a myth that
i would be developed later by any number of writers from Quesnel to Montherlant.

Not that this form of apologia was Angelique de Saint-Jean's personal invention.

The same model also shaped the writings of other solitaires, such as the Apologie
pour les Religieuses of 1665 and even the prophetic letter from Lancelot to his mas-
ter Louis-Isaac Le Maitre de Sacy dated January i, 1665. That letter clearly demon-
strates the Port-Royaliste conviction of belonging to a community of saints and
martyrs whose fate would one day be to edify the entire Church: "The ruin of Port-

Royal is its glory. It is the salvation of the souls it contains, it is the edification of the

Church through the centuries, and it is the protection of all virgins that God will in
consequence offer through his Church, for no one will hazard this kind of attack in
the future if people see that the nuns remain unshakable to the end."'^
Persecution was the cornerstone of Port-Royal's memory, because it allowed the
heroic potential implicit in its mystery of the Eucharist to realize itself. It also

offered the support of a social function by justifying a recourse to public opinion. It

overcame scruples that might otherwise have hindered the keeping of journals of
captivity, a practice not at all consistent with the Cistercian rule of silence and mod-
esty. Arnauld invoked the persecution as a justification, moreover, at the beginning
of his Apologie pour les religieuses du Saint-Sacrement, which was published in 1655
I
as a contribution to their defense. And it was owing to the imminent destruction of
the convent that Quesnel in 171 1 withdrew his objections to the publication of
Mother Angelique 's Relation de captivite.

Two years later the condemnation of his Reflexions morales in Unigenitus gave
new significance and a new destiny to the Port- Royal archives. This precious repos-
itory was seized in 1790 by d'Argenson, the lieutenant de police, but was later
312 CATHERINE MAIRE

restored owing to some mysterious scruple of conscience. It was this hagiographic

treasure that enabled the Jansenists of the eighteenth century to erect a monument
to the glory of the abbey and its spiritual enterprise. After being buried or hidden
for more than half a century, these invaluable archives would enter history in the

wake of the struggle over the Roman Constitution of 1713. By the middle of the
eighteenth century nearly all the primary documents in the Port-Royal reposi-
tory — letters, memoirs, journals, narratives of captivity, obituaries —were pub-
lished. This first batch of published documents served as the basis for the great his-
tories of the second half of the eighteenth century.
The survival of these manuscripts is almost miraculous, given the king's express
wish to annihilate every last vestige of Port-Royal. It was in fact the work of two
women, Frangoise-Marguerite de Joncoux (1648— 171 and Marie-Scholastique 5)''*

Le Sesne de Themericourt. The former was the key figure in the reorganization of
the Jansenists at the beginning of the eighteenth century. She was in contact with

both centers of the "Jansenist party": the theologians of the Saint-Magloire semi-
nary and Quesnel, Fouillou, and Petitpied in the Netherlands. Modest in her appear-
ance, she wore no color other than "that of very darkened tree bark" and a black

scarf with none of the "then customary trimmings," yet she was regularly received
by the archbishop, at court, and by several high magistrates. She had already exerted
herself in defense of the nuns even before their forcible eviction. It was to her that

d'Argenson, who valued her greatly for her works of charity, returned the seized
manuscripts, whereupon she hastened to have copies made and distributed to sev-

eral of her friends. Meanwhile, she made

FIGURE 8.3 Shell reliquary in memory of Deacon Paris and
Port-Royal. The deacon's portrait is in the center.
efforts to collect various documents that rela-

tives and friends of the nuns had been able to

assemble. In her will she bequeathed the orig-

inals to the library of the Benedictines of
Saint-Germain-des-Pres. These documents
were probably used by the Benedictine Rivet
de la Grange for his Necrologe de Port-Royal as

well as by the author of a Histoire de Port-

Royal, the Benedictine Dom Clemencet.'^
Following Mile de Joncoux's premature death
in 1 71 5, the work of copying and collecting

documents was carried on by a former inmate

of Port-Royal who had been expelled in the
second major wave of persecution in 1679:

Marie-Scholastique Le Sesne de Themeri-

court, who was aided in her work by several

anonymous copyists. '"^ She was the first

 Port-Royal 313

cousin of Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Menilles d'Etemare, the principal theologian

involved in the battle against Unigenitus. In 1740, informers employed by the lieu-
tenant de police kept watch on his home in the Hotel du Petit-Luxembourg near the
montagne Sainte- Genevieve in Paris, "the trash heap of the convulsionnaires," where
"the fabricators of miracles," that is, the leaders of the Jansenist party, "used to

gather."''' Most of the copies produced by the Themericourt workshop found their

way into the library of Le Paige, the archivist of the struggle for the appeal to a

council. In the meantime it has now been established that the manuscripts circulated
among Jansenists, especially in the Netherlands, where several of them were pub-
lished through the efforts of various exiles.'^ All these efforts reflect the passionate

fervor with which the documents, the authentic witness to the life of Port-Royal,
were preserved, completed, copied, and passed on.

The Emblem of Resistance

The history of Port-Royal's commemoration and exaltation after 1720 divides into

two main phases. Before that date, a series of texts concerning the expulsion of the
nuns, the destruction of the abbey, and the memory of the illustrious foundress
Mother Angelique had found their way into print. But this publishing venture was
limited in its scope and modest in its influence. By contrast, the publication of the

abbey's hagiographic treasure that began fifteen years after its destruction and ten

years after the promulgation of Unigenitus was massive and systematic. It would
continue for the next thirty years, into the 1750s. Memoirs and fragments of mem-
oirs, letters, diaries, narratives of captivity, obituaries, and autobiographies were
piously and methodically printed.^*' Around the middle of the century this com-
memorative enterprise entered its second phase: no longer content merely to pub-
lish documents attesting to the memory of Port-Royal, scholars now sought to cap-
ture the history of the abbey and set it down on paper according to the scholarly
norms of the day.^' During this process of exhumation, the image of Port-Royal's
destruction took on a new significance. What had been relics constituting a memo-
rial now acquired the status of examples of resistance to the
to sanctity Roman
Constitution. An emblem of a new struggle was gradually constructed around the
image of an abbey and its venerated foundress. Had it not been for the quarrel over
Unigenitus and the needs of the battle waged by the heirs of the Grand Siecle dissi-

dents, the moral reliquary of Port-Royal would no doubt have remained in the

utmost oblivion.
The few histories of Jansenism published in the final years of the seventeenth
century would not have sufficed to keep the fading memory of Port-Royal alive.^^

They represent the rump of old polemics, their chief object being to establish that
the so-called Jansenist heresy was nothing but a "ghost" fabricated by the Jesuits.
314 CATHERINE MAIRE

FIGURE 8.4 Procession of nuns of Port-Royal during the feast of the Blessed Sacrament in the cloister of
Port-Royal; engraving by Magdeleine Hortehmels.

In fact, even before the first shovelfuls of dirt had been thrown over the remains,
Port-Royal was nothing but a shadow of its former self. The great solitaires were

gone, and there remained only twenty or so elderly but still determined nuns.
Indeed, it was an act of resistance on their part that led to the destruction of the
abbey. They refused to sign a new document required by the bull Vineam Domini.

The response was sudden and disproportionate. But the nuns' removal, followed by

the razing of buildings and the exhumation of bodies from 1709 to 1711, met with
relative indifference. Before the bull no more than fifteen short briefs had been writ-
ten in defense of the nuns.^' Thus the destruction of the abbey by itself was proba-
bly not enough to trigger the building of the memorial monument to Port-Royal

that was soon to come.

The briefs defending the nuns much impact at the time, but
may not have had
they did play a nonnegligible role in the crystallization of a new theme: they began
to shift attention away from the Jansenist movement as a whole and toward the site

of Port-Royal. Henceforth the imperative was to remind people of the existence of

Port-Royal des Champs. To answer the challenge of the moment, the Jansenists
revealed certain unpublished texts of Mother Angelique de Saint-Jean concerning
the most painful episodes of the "past troubles."^'' The first of these, published in

1 710, was the Reflexions sur la conformite de I'etat des religieuses de Port-Royal avec

celui de Jesus-Christ dans VEucharistie, written at the time of her captivity with the
annonciades. In the following year Quesnel himself provided a preface to the Recit

de la captivite, in which he developed the theme that the nuns were "martyrs of truth
and Christian sincerity" whose deeds deserved to be recorded. Sites became relics.

Just prior to the demolition, the former secretary and biographer of Le Nain de
Tillemont, Michel Tronchay, declared, in his Histoire abregee de Vabhaye de Port-
 3

Port-Royal 315

Royal, which appeared just after the removal of the nuns in 1710, that "the very
ruins of this place, so worthy of veneration, will as it were raise their voice and
stand as eternal witness."^^ It was in this spirit that the Memoires sur la destruction de

I'abbaye de Port-Royal des Champs, published in the Netherlands by Fouillou in 1711,

offered the first detailed description "of the inside and outside of Port-Royal." Sold

as separate sheets, this series of small engravings by Magdeleine Horthemels, the

widow of a bookseller on the Rue Saint-Jacques and a friend of the abbey, portrayed
Port-Royal from every possible interior and exterior angle. The image of the site
was henceforth sacred.
Thus the stage was set for the transformation of Port-Royal into an emblem of
the coming battle. But still nothing might have come of the new imagery, which
could well have been nothing more than a final flare-up of an obscure ecclesiastical

controversy from the age of Louis XIV, soon to be forgotten. It was the promulga-
tion by the pope of the bull Unigenitus against Quesnel's Reflexions morales in 171

that turned a mere possibility into a reality. The bull launched a second wave of
Jansenism, of far greater amplitude than the first wave. This time the controversy
was not confined to a narrow elite but spread to all classes of society. The bulk of
the clergy in Paris and various other dioceses backed the appeal initiated by the
Jansenist bishops. Ordinary Christians became passionately involved in the "affairs

of the day." It was in the midst of this collective passion that the convulsionnaires
went so far as to exhibit their own twitching bodies as witnesses to the truth.
^'^

Lawyers and parlementaires wedded the cause of God's rights in this world. From
1713 to 1775, Jansenist dissidence would provide a religious theater for a protopolit-

ical opposition, which also served as a matrix for the unequivocally political oppo-

sition of the parlements.

It was in the service of this important cause that the memory of Port-Royal
would be mobilized. Proposed as models of conduct in the "time of troubles," trou-
bles associated with a Constitution that posed a challenge to the fundamental truths
of Scripture, the lives —outwardly obedient but inwardly free — of the nuns and
solitaires of Port-Royal were now made available to a broad public. The Necrologe
published in Amsterdam in 1723 and the "journals of captivity" published clandes-
tinely in Paris in 1725 praised Port-Royal for exhibiting an attitude said to be exem-
plary for a large community consisting not only of nuns and solitaires but also of
"outside friends." There was nothing extraordinary about these lives: they offered
models with which any Christian could identify, successful examples of resistance
within the Church. Anyone, without distinction as to estate or class, could see him-
self or herself in these stories. In the preface to the Necrologe, the Benedictine Rivet
de la Grange introduced these accounts as "sure rules," "the sincere actions of indi-
viduals who have sanctified themselves in our own time, who lived in a manner of
speaking before our eyes and in our own country." The community of saints was
3i6 CATHERINE MAIRE

national. Port-Royal was praised for giving France "an advantage over the other
countries of Christendom" thanks to its "purer faith, less fettered by human tradi-

tions and superstitions," its "more enlightened piety," its "taste for reading

Scripture and pious works," and its "augmentation of the educational level of the
people and Clergy."
These edifying texts were more than just weapons in the spreading opposition to
Unigenitus. They were the result of a careful, deliberate strategy adopted by the
"Jansenist party" leadership gathered at Saint-Magloire. Indeed, this Oratorian
seminary in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques became, in addition to the Quesnel group
in the Netherlands, a second center of loyalty to Port-Royal, led by Duguet, the
other great latter-day Jansenist theologian. The seminary did more than just pro-
vide theological and clerical instruction to Oratorian students; it also welcomed
other priests and members of the elite in a position to assume high offices in the

future. One of these, the Abbe Le Sesne des Menilles d'Etemare, later became,
along with his contemporary the philosopher Boursier, the leading theologian and
driving force behind the campaign promoting the "appeal to the national council."
The theologians of Saint-Magloire were well prepared to respond to the Roman
Constitution from the moment it was announced. In the summer of 1712 Duguet
and his faithful disciple d'Etemare had inaugurated a series of lectures on a ques-
tion of exegesis: the need for a figurative interpretation of the Bible in order to pre-

serve the concordance of the Old and New Testaments.^'' At the time Duguet had
ventured to put forth an idea that would prove to have serious consequences for his
student. This was connected with the prophesied conversion of the Jews, which tra-
ditionally was postponed until the end of time. Duguet suggested that it might come
much sooner. Perhaps the time had already arrived. D'Etemare, generalizing and
systematizing this suggestion, developed it into an exegetical system that his adver-

saries characterized as "figurism." It involved interpreting events in the history of

the Church, including very recent ones, in the light of their prophetic figuration in

sacred texts. Nothing that happened nowadays was without its biblical precedent.

The persecution of the Jansenists and the Roman Constitution were simply mani-

festations of the "iniquitous conspiracy" that was to precede a broad and general
reestablishment of the Church.
In this exegetical system Port-Royal was to occupy an important place. When
read in the light of Scripture, the history of the Church in fact showed that it had
always been divided into two opposed camps. Like Rebecca, it bore within its own
body two hostile peoples: Jacob and Esau, Saint Augustine and Pelagius, Jansenius
and Molina, Port-Royal and the Jesuits. Within the Church there existed an unin-
terrupted series of repositories of truth, Augustine 's community of saints. That tra-
dition of truth culminated in Port-Royal and its cause, which stood to become the

foundation of a new lineage.^^ Thus emboldened by the idea that they were the only
 Port-Royal 317

branch of the Christian family in which the sap of God's chosen people continued
to flow during the time of troubles, the "figurists" of Saint-Magloire ardently
embarked on the mission of bearing "witness to truth," as indicated by the title of a
programmatic work published by one of them, Father Vivien de la Borde, in 1714:
Temoignage de la Verite.

Their novel strategy actually built on earlier Jansenist efforts to make the Bible
available to a broad public. Since the papal bull, in the view of the Jansenists, ques-

tioned the truth of the fundamental sacred texts, it, too, must be brought to the

attention of as broad a public as possible. Public opinion was the best tribunal for
deciding where the true word of God was to be found. The appeal to a council
within the body of the Church, an appeal orchestrated in every way by the Saint-

Magloire group, was thus accompanied by a campaign to educate the general public
of ordinary Christians. This propaganda campaign was redoubled after the failure
of a second appeal in 1721, which had attracted much less support among parish
priests than the earlier petitions of the four Jansenist bishops.^' It therefore became
even more important to carry the message over the heads of the priests and directly
to their flocks. This was the background behind the launching of a new campaign in
the form of Rivet de la Grange's Necrologe. From 1728 to 1735 a large number of
texts, intended to be clear statements accessible to even the humblest of readers,
were circulated to the public.^" The best example of this desire to inform the general
public about the background and evolution of the religious controversy was the cre-
ation in February 1728 of the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques, the first newspaper of broad
social impact, with a circulation estimated at 6,000.^' Meanwhile, figurists published

a series of works intended to be read by parish priests, so that they might in turn give
currency to a theology of history capable of saving them from discouragement
despite their "small number."^^ So the history and doctrine of Port-Royal were pre-
sented to the general public in the form of a figurist interpretation of sacred history,
one of continuous resistance by the defenders of truth within the Church. From
now on the appeal to a general council would forever be confounded with the cause
of Port-Royal: the general public made no distinction between the two.
This educational effort had unintended consequences, however. The convulsion-
naires drew their own practical conclusions from the figurist lessons they received

in a number of Parisian parishes. They believed that their own bodies had become
"corporeal figures" of martyrs to persecuted truth. The ensuing episodes of "con-
vulsions" and figurative ceremonies divided and plunged into disarray a Jansenist
party already weakened by actions taken by the new minister Fleury.^^ The
Jansenists now sought to disassociate themselves from the present and preserve
intact, in the past, the golden age of the sainte maison. This nostalgic turn eventu-
ally led to changes in the business of exhuming accounts of the abbey's edifying
period of greatness. The most important documents in the historical record were
3i8 CATHERINE MAIRE

published between 1735 and 1750, and it is difficult to grasp their point outside the
contemporary context of the defeat of the Jansenist party. It is the defeat that
accounts for the interest attached to these glorious attestations at a time when the
party had split over the issues of convulsionism and figurism. It was in the same
period, moreover, that the Jansenists began to think of writing a history of Port-
Royal, as is indicated by the titles of a number of works, such as the Memoires pour
servir d I'histoire de Port-Royal. Members of the group that had organized the pro-
Appeal campaign bore the cost of printing these works under the ironic pseudonym
"Aux depens de la Compagnie" (that is, at the expense of the Jesuits). Much of the
burden was assumed by Jansenists who had fled to Utrecht, especially Nicolas

Legros, the author of the Renversement des libenes gallicanes (1716).^''

Besides the nuns' personal narratives, the published texts consisted mainly of
accounts of the lives and spiritual itineraries of the great solitaires, written at the
behest of surviving members of the community for their own edification. Fontaine,
Sacy's secretary, while in Melun for his last retreat (1696— 1700), painted for poster-

ity a portrait of the master translator and other solitaires, basing his text on papers
in his possession. He also included several invented dialogues, such as the celebrated
"Conversation between Pascal and Sacy," which is supposedly based on a text by
Pascal. Even earlier, at the behest of Sacy himself, Lancelot, whom Sainte-Beuve
called the "teacher par excellence," compiled souvenirs of that directeurde conscience
par excellence, Saint-Cyran. Lancelot so revered Saint-Cyran that he divided the
inmates of Port-Royal into two groups: those who were "of the time of M. du
Verger" and those "who knew not Joseph."^'' And in 1697 and 1698, five or six
months before his death, Du Fosse, who continued Sacy's work of explaining the
books of the Bible, obedient to the wishes of the Jansenist Themericourt family (we
have already encountered the son, the Abbe d'Etemare, and his cousin Mile de
Themericourt), had recounted his education at Port-Royal by Le Maitre as well as
the everyday life and cultural pursuits of the illustrious men who had preferred soli-
tude to the world.
Since these authors did not write in order to be published, they contented them-
selves with collecting various kinds of information: details of conversions, retreats,

portraits, pious exercises, travels, intellectual work, polemical works, waves of

repression, marriages and exiles. These were assembled in more or less chronolog-
ical order and in a manner befitting the relatively limited perspective they brought
to the task. The editors therefore had not only to correct and rework the texts but

also to collect additional documentation to supplement what was already there.

These works continue even today to form the basis of any study of Port-Royal. The
1740 Recueil d' Utrecht, for example, was originally conceived as a "supplement" to
the previous memoirs of Fontaine, Lancelot, and Du Fosse. It contains a large num-
ber of miscellaneous documents concerning, in particular, a number of solitaires
 Port-Royal 319

about whom too little had been said in earlier works, including the famous
"Memoire sur la vie de M. Paschal," based on papers of Pascal's niece, Marguerite
Perier. The preface to Fontaine 's Memoires indicates that some changes were made
"for correctness of style and to avoid repetitions." In order to compensate for the
lack of chronological order, particularly flagrant in the work of Sacy 's secretary, the
editors preceded his work with Tronchay 's Abrege de Vhistoire de Port-Royal. Either

in footnotes or in the body of the text they also indicated the dates of various events,

and they compiled an "index of persons and subjects." An appendix included three

short documents to complement the account of the daily lives of the "gentlemen. "^^
Finally, in 1742, all the nuns' accounts and documents concerning the foundress of
the order were collected in a three- volume set with a uniform style.

memory
All this effort reveals a determination to preserve, clarify, and exalt the

of the great personages involved in the history of Port-Royal. The memory of the
abbey was envisioned as a sort of "portrait gallery," and one could add new portraits
or rearrange existing ones to tell a clearer story. Conceived in terms of a perfect
unity among nuns, solitaires, and "outside friends," Port-Royal became synony-
mous with true piety, which was to be saved from oblivion. Given the disarray of the
movement, the very identity of the Jansenists was at stake in this transfiguration of
Port-Royal. As Abbe Goujet put it in his preface to the first Memoires pour servir a
Vhistoire de Port-Royal oi 1734, "men have indeed been able to destroy the substance

of Port-Royal, to disperse its society, to prevent its continuation, and to destroy its

walls, but it is not in their power to deprive it of its spirit or to dispel the fragrance
of life that it gave off, and it is to that spirit that we must devote ourselves."

After being used as a living emblem in the service of an ongoing struggle, Port-
Royal began to be relegated to the past, though for the time being that past remained
quite abstract, almost atemporal, a link in a chain of examples drawn from sacred
history. Idealized as belonging to a golden age reminiscent of early Christian fer-

vor, the exemplary lives of nuns and solitaires would ultimately lead to "the triumph
that truth must sooner or later win over errors that are allowed to gain credence

temporarily only so that their eventual defeat may seem that much more impres-
sive." The memory of Port-Royal solaced the appellants for their defeat and
enabled them to cling to an ideal of purity unsullied by the vicissitudes of the age.

Writing History

It was the great conflict between king and parlement triggered by the dispute over
the billets de confession that provided Jansenist authors with the perspective and
overarching theme needed for writing a sustained, systematic history of Port-
Royal. History was repeating itself in a most peculiar fashion: the "refusal of the
sacrament" in the middle of the eighteenth century was reminiscent of the episode
 i.ylxTiP.rrmqvE

c/are man/^/h/nent da/iJ /a Ca^nLiL- J/i J\iU(iii/nr.I)'\i ///titfi/h;t/:<

ijia^ font revehiJ WunSacercfore Kfncre etipii i/i'n\-/if /ujr r'Ai/ i\'t//t'
iiu //t<ji>7h^n /a H^/ic^i^i Je /a Pitta- , pcinvnl t/,^ o^yw^tf
avec /Tiy {/ez^'/t'! iCt cm t'^ttA'tt L\< cntji',', /u f </<7i///;.Vi ^'/wA A*
a/ieafitir Kien rw iL^it <Anir cityc^/ii't -
/ritt- -^ /c .V /•///• iir/trt/f .

Cejl^-ctr liifa^e BiUet^ Ji'L \mf\.'<\n<m .jfiw /I'li fomL' S</it<'/n<'

P(mniu(s.'onJ a /ixmaii^ jcrfterti/tt t/.iaiyc, >///['/! fatf^>u'n'Trai\\^

FIGURE 8.5 The Refusal of the Sacraments; engraving, 1752.

 Port-Royal 321

in which the nuns of Port-Royal were denied all the consolations of religion in 1664.
It became possible to compare two distant epochs, setting each in perspective.

Once again the memory of Port-Royal was implicated in an ongoing religious

and political struggle. This time, however, it emerged detached from its religious

context, perhaps even somewhat secularized, and thus as a gleaming pendant to the
dark myth of a "Jesuit conspiracy" that Jansenist authors concocted in the same
period. The virtues and vices of the two religious adversaries tended to become sec-
ularized in the heat of a parlementary battle in which both were implicated as sym-
bols. Published between 1752 and 1754, the three great histories of Port-Royal, by
Clemencet, Besoigne, and Guilbert, coincided exactly with the unfolding of this lat-

est controversy, the final offspring of the battle over Unigenitus?^

In the hope of flushing out Jansenist sympathizers and suspect priests,

Christophe de Beaumont, the new archbishop of Paris, introduced a system of so-

called iillets de confession in 1749. A person suffering from a life-threatening illness
was required to show the priest a billet de confession (or confession certificate) signed

by a non-Jansenist confessor before the administration of viaticum or extreme unc-

tion or authorization of burial in consecrated ground.

These measures triggered a huge scandal in Paris. For the parlement, which had
already taken up the defense of clergy persecuted for their rejection of the papal
bull, this was an opportunity to intervene in a major way by pointing out that the
Constitution could not be an article of faith since it had not received the unanimous
approval of a council. The constitutional bishops were therefore abusing their

authority. By 1750 the courts were taking action against priests responsible for refus-
ing the sacraments to dying individuals, and several vehement remonstrances were
addressed to the king. In the "great remonstrances" of April 1753, which would
result in the parlement's being exiled to Pontoise and replaced by the Chambre
Royale, the parlementaires (among whom an active Jansenist group was led by the
avocat Le Paige) resorted to an expression that le grand Arnauld had used in his

Apologie pour les religieuses de Port-Royal to characterize their enemy: the heresy of
domination.'*'^ The characteristic forms and diction of the seventeenth-century
Jansenist resistance thus resurfaced in the midst of the parlementary struggle.

In this context Port-Royal served as an image of sincerity, of constant devotion

to the truth in the face of persecution, of the cultural wealth of the nation, and of
the value attached to the individual through education; this was contrasted with the
"party of disguise and dissimulation," as the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques termed it."" All

the histories share a common subtext: the tale of an enormous injustice, of a "rape
of the laws," to borrow Guilbert 's phrase. The political machinations had been
secretly organized long before by Jesuits contemptuous of the fundamental laws of
France. Not once, however, was the king named as the person responsible for the
destruction of Port-Royal.
322 CATHERINE MAIRE

The meaning of the three historical narratives emerges from the chronological
perspective they establish. For the first time these three texts dare to recount the his-

tory of the abbey as one long tale of arbitrary persecution met by heroic resistance.
Three great waves of sanctions hit Port-Royal one after another until it is com-
pletely obliterated. "There is nothing in history more astonishing than the virtually
constant vexations visited upon this sainte Maison until it was utterly destroyed,"

wrote Jerome Besoigne (1680— 1763), the first historian of Port-Royal as well as a
doctor of the Sorbonne and important member of the "Jansenist party."

The abbey now had a history of its own, independent of sacred history. The task
now was to establish the facts of the matter according to the rules of Benedictine
scholarship rather than to cast the history of Port-Royal as yet another example in
the timeless tableau of the defenders of truth within the Church. All three authors

carefully quote from the printed sources. Guilbert (1697— 1759), '^he preceptor of
Louis XV's pages and defender of the convulsionnaires, even went so far as to

express doubts about the printed sources and advocate a systematic use of manu-
script documents only. He criticized the religiosity of those who viewed the abbey's
archives as relics, on the grounds that they contributed to the fragmentation of the

record by scattering invaluable manuscripts all over the place. His scholarly passion
drove him to initiate a violent dispute among the three authors, even though all were
on the same side in the struggle, over questions of sources, narration, and interpre-
tation. Of the three he was the only one to draw the full chronological consequences
of treating his subject independent of sacred history. Although he began, like his

rivals, by recounting the abbey's history from the reform of 1608 to its destruction,

he chose to trace the history all the way back to the foundation of the abbey between
1204 and 1350, convinced as he was that the spirit of the place could be found even
in the etymology of its name, "Porrois," a soggy, uncultivated patch of land. His
account of the intervening years (which would no doubt have caused him great dif-

ficulty) was never published.

The project of writing the history of Port-Royal was not an isolated phenome-
non. In the same period other Jansenist writers concerned themselves with the his-

tory of their hereditary enemy, the Jesuits, in a form different from the traditional
compilation of the past century's worth of grievances. Le Paige, for example,
together with Boursier's student the Abbe Coudrette, wrote a vast history of the
Jesuits, the second part of which dealt with their political theology."*^ The allegation
of a cabal, traditionally (since the Fronde) raised against the Jansenists, was now
turned back against the Jesuits, who were suspected of hatching dark plots and of
seeking "to establish themselves as a monarchy or, rather, a universal despotism."
The heroic image of resistance in the name of obedience developed in the various
histories of Port- Royal had its dark counterpart in the myth of the "Jesuit conspir-
acy" that other Jansenist authors elaborated simultaneously. Guilbert, in his first
 Port-Royal 323

volume on the founding of the abbey (pubHshed in 1758), included a long digres-
sion on Damiens's attempt to assassinate Louis XV, which he compared to the hor-

rors of the Ligue. It was of course the Jesuits who accused Port-Royal of entering
into leagues, factions, and other conspiracies against the sovereign. Guilbert coun-
tered that "the heirs to the sentiments of Port-Royal" had always respected the king,
preferring, "in perfect fidelity, to endure prison and exile, to suffer the uttermost
misery and privation of all temporal solace during their lifetimes and of all spiritual

assistance at their deaths." Dom Clemencet (1703— 1758), a Benedictine of Saint-

Maur celebrated for his Art de verifier les dates, also contributed to both the anti-
Jesuit myth and the glorification of Port-Royal. Both perspectives can be found in

his Histoire generate de Port-Royal, which might have been called "the century of

Port-Royal." Even as "the century of Louis XIV" was becoming an object of ven-

eration in the wake of Voltaire 's eloquent account, Clemencet pointed out that the

true splendor of the age was to be found in Port-Royal, which was responsible for
advances in education and culture in general, criticism, history, and the enrichment
of the language. Of the three Jansenist historians, it was Clemencet, the author as

well of a "Histoire litteraire de Port-Royal" that remained in manuscript, who did

most to point out the central cultural contribution of Port-Royal, which he saw in
some respects as a spiritual precursor of the Enlightenment. He placed particular
emphasis, for example, on the attention paid to individuality in Port-Royal's theory
of education, a conception totally opposed to the Jesuit precept perinde ac cadaver.
He also arranged for the publication of the Conferences de la Mere Angelique de Saint-

Jean in Utrecht in 1760, as a sort of counterpoint to the Constitutions of the

Company of Jesus which were subjected to such close scrutiny by the parlements in
the same period.
When the Company of Jesus was expelled from France, Port-Royal, at the cul-

mination of this decisive phase in the recording of its history, became an "official"

pilgrimage site, complete with a Manuel des pelerins de Port-Royal des Champs,
which recommended an itinerary including several stops, and was published in 1767
by that fierce enemy of Abbe Jean-Antoine Gazaignes (1717— 1802),
the Jesuits the

known by the pseudonym Philibert.'*^ Designed to serve as a pocket guide, the book
also contained prayers, an obituary list, and an abridged history of Port- Royal des
Champs along with a bibliography of works by the solitaires. What Gazaignes mag-
nified even more than the examples of piety was a set of lay virtues, "the testimony
to a clear conscience," "the cradle of our attachment to truth and of our courage
and steadfastness in its defense," and "the love of justice." "In their state of servi-
tude," he went on, the saints of the Societe de Port-Royal "found the secret of how
to become free."

This politicization of the image of the two principal, and antagonistic, religious
groups of the seventeenth century played an important part in determining the
324 CATHERINE MAIRE

course of events themselves. The united parlements scored their first major victory
against the Jesuits, putting an end to a century-old dispute.'*''

The histories of Port- Royal were far more than a mirror image of the parlement's
remonstrances and decrees, which in turn drew censure, oversight, and orders of
exile from the king and his ministers. If the struggle over the parlement played such
an important role in the construction of Port-Royal's history, it was because the par-
lements had already taken up the religious ideal defended by the Jansenists in the

ecclesiastical sphere and carried it over into the political sphere. Like the Port-
Royalistes, the parlementaires advocated resistance in the name of obedience, not
only to God's absolutism but also "to the fundamental laws of the Kingdom,"
which transcended the person of the king. The nuns, solitaires, and appellants were
the "repositories of truth in the Church," and the parlementaires saw themselves as

"defenders of the repository of laws in the State." In order to grasp fully what was
new about the resistance to Unigenitus, it is not enough simply to invoke the concil-
iar tradition or the traditional liberties of the Galilean Church. It was the
Augustinian and figurist ecclesiology of preserving a "deposit of faith" in the

Church through the community of saints, including both clergy and laity, that ini-

tially fueled the appeal to the national council and later guided the interventions of
the parlements. As the religious struggle shifted to the political arena, it was simul-
taneously secularized within the framework of figurist theology. The role of the

parlements as guardians of the law was legitimized, much as earlier the appellants

were sacralized because they had taken up Port-Royal's sacred combat within the

Church. The parlementaires and the appellants shared the same attitude, one of
intransigent opposition in the name of obedience to the truth, whether in church or
state. The example of Port-Royal shaped the course of parlementary politics, as if

the abbey's history did indeed prefigure that of the parlements.

The Archivist

After the Appeal, the resistance of the parlements too thus became an integral part
of the history of Port-Royal itself, one of its continuations. The archives of the
"battle for truth," whether waged by the appellants or the convulsionnaires or the
magistrates, became as precious as the moral treasure of the abbey itself. These
additional documents were now collected and published with the same concern to

bear witness to exemplary conduct.

When the Necrologes were published in mid-century for the purpose of exalting
thememory of the principal appellants much as earlier necrologies had exalted the
memory of the Port-Royalistes, certain parlementaires were included along with
them.''^ In addition, important documents bearing on the parlementaires' struggle
began to appear in religious works. The fifth volume of Cerveau's Supplement au
FIGURE 8.6 The Evils of the Constitution in Parlement; engraving, 1732.
326 CATHERINE MAIRE

Necrologe, the most important compilation of obituaries of the "defenders of

truth," included the Paris Parlement's principal remonstrances before 1764. In

other words, these legal documents were treated as the equivalents of the great
ecclesiastical attestations of the Appeal. The Recueil general des actes d'appel inter-

jettes aufutur Concile generalhy Nivelle, a pupil of Boursier's, included "decrees and
other acts of the Parlement of the Kingdom which have to do with these matters."
The figurists' key work of historical vulgarization, the Catechisme historique et dog-

madque by the Abbe de Fourquevaux (one of d'Etemare's Saint-Magloire disci-

ples), was revised by Troya d'Assigny (the first editor of the Nouvelles ecclesias-

tiques) to include an appendix on the "progress of the dispute" through 1760.'**^ The
Nouvelles ecclesiastiques reported in great detail on the debates that took place in the
chambers of the Parlement of Paris. Its 1760 index contained 318 columns in fine
print recapitulating "measures taken by Parlement for the public good and means
used to oppress this illustrious Company." "Editorials" regularly interpreted recent

events by setting them in a historical context that began with the destruction of
Port-Royal, which became the universal cause of all the woes of church and state.

In 1790 the Revolution itself was interpreted as a logical consequence of the perse-
cution of the abbey and the appellants, which had opened doors for the first time to
the impious spirit promoted by the Jesuits and the philosophes.
One man would devote his life, with remarkable devotion and abnegation, to the
immense effort of preserving this historical record: Louis-Adrien Le Paige
(1712-1803). As party spokesman he would hail the Constituent Assembly's eccle-
siastical reforms. His efforts led to the assembling of an imposing archive of docu-
ments concerning the history of Jansenism from Port-Royal to the revolutionary

crisis: more than 15,000 printed and handwritten documents intended to pave the
way for restoring truth within the Church. This modest figure, all but unknown to

history, was nevertheless one of the principal actors in the parlementary politics of

the eighteenth century. Overshadowed by his voluminous polemics and occasional

historical pieces, a single book constitutes Le Paige's claim on posterity: the Lettres

historiques sur les fonctions essentielles du Parlement, the one visible product of an
enormous output, much of it anonymous. It was published in 1753 under the same
imprint ("Aux depens de la Compagnie") used previously for the publication of the

Memoires pour servir a. Vhistoire de Port-Royal. Fired by the belief that he alone was

the repository of the history of one of the most important affairs involving church
and state, the humble attorney secretly pulled strings and successfully manipulated
the outcome of the political struggle over the parlements.

Le Paige himself was the link between the figurists of Saint-Magloire and the
Jansenist group in the parlements. His career demonstrates how it was possible to

move from figurist religious beliefs to political action. His education took place at

the height of the struggle against Unigenitus, when the lawyers joined the battle to

defend the Jansenist bishop Soanen after he was deposed by the Council of Embrun
 Port-Royal 327

FIGURE 8.7 Louis-Adrien Le Paige, after a drawing by Mile Helene Dehaussy.

in 1727. Three of his uncles, including M. Hideux, a syndic of the Sorbonne, were
fervent appellants. Having become intimately familiar with the figurist message
through his reading of Jansenist propaganda, Le Paige was quick to wax enthusias-
tic about the miracles of Saint-Medard, of which he recorded several eyewitness
accounts. Along with some forty companions, he became a regular participant in the
 328 CATHERINE MAIRE

figurative ceremonies of the convulsionnaires. He continued to follow the sect's

activities and ascetic practices right up to the time of the Revolution.

Le Paige the attorney was encouraged to enter into public affairs by his belief

that he was representing the defense in the "trial of God's cause." In 1732, when he
was just twenty, he was already bold enough to defend the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques

after their condemnation by viaticum, the archbishop of Paris."*^

His great chance came at the end of 1756, when he was nominated bailiff of the
Temple, a post that would guarantee him immunity from prosecution and allow him
considerable freedom to maneuver. He was appointed to this position by the Prince

de Conti, the grand prior of Malta, who, having quarreled with Louis XV, gave up
his post as head of the king's Secret Council and assumed leadership of the par-
lementary opposition. He no doubt chose Le Paige to head his staff because the
lawyer had already proved his worth in the affair of the denial of the sacraments.''^

FIGURE 8.8 Diagram showing tlie distribution of the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques, 1728-1803.

trmoit. en S^frtt yiw t y'iuJrurncjt ixmrm iftuAe Sej trtnj CerrjpandtUU : i^ or* iju uiw dr ttif Perronnrj .ru Sr.ftpaj ralAu. tions la tterm- It^urc amvemtt chc^
CiiU Jl Ljiu cEc di^tt u^mfter >:eUi jUmurr vu danj I tnjbiitt tLjfu imc ^UaLun uxiuinfr pew Im Jemr Jr KcfuJtt^etJeiiii^Jwr di scj nauvt&u a son CcrtspeniianL
 Port-Royal 329

From 1750 to 1774, in the thick of the struggle over the parlement, Le Paige played
a leading role as the chief theoretician of the Jansenist magistrates. He occupied a
key position in the party structure, maintaining relations with Presidents Durey de
Meinieres and de Murard, the head of Conti's council, with party theologians such
as Gourlin, with canonists such as Maultrot, with the editors of the Nouvelles ecclesi-
astiques, with Harlay and Montazet, the bishops of Cambray and Lyons, and with
provincial parlementaires. Not only was he the author of major works on the history
and background of the various parlements, he also participated in drafting the "law
of silence" as well as various proposals to bring peace to church and state by elimi-
nating Unigenitus as a rule of faith/' He also developed the main political argu-

ments against the Jesuits and coordinated the decrees of the various parlements at

the time of their expulsion. During the Maupeou revolution, he was credited with
being the author of any number of pamphlets that thwarted the chancellor's efforts
to reform the monarchy. Suspected of having a hand in the drafting of a pamphlet
entitled Correspondance [de] Maupeou avec son coeur Sorhouet and of operating a

clandestine printing shop within the Temple walls, he was obliged in 1772 to go into
hiding for two years in Beauce. The magistrates appreciated the extent of his his-

torical knowledge and above all his collection of documents, reputed to be one of
the most comprehensive of the age, as can be seen by a glance at the article entitled

"Parlement" in xhe Encyclopedie (attributed to Boucher d'Argis). Le Paige provided

several notes and excerpts from parlementary decrees of centuries past to the com-
mittee that drafted the Great Remonstrances of 1753. He readily lent out his books
and documents and revised or completed texts written by a number of magistrates.
"^"^
He was "the Parlement 's secretary.
Without the figurist theology of history that provided the impetus for his activi-
ties, it is impossible to understand either Le Paige 's perseverance as a collector or the
size of the collection he amassed. His 15,000 documents were concerned exclusively
with "affairs of the day" relevant to the Jansenist controversy, excluding for instance
all contemporary historical works not written by friendly hands. Le Paige's collec-

tion made him the trustee, secretary, and archivist of God's cause. This was his

secret lifelong battle, which earned him the nom de guerre the chevalier de Jerusalem.

He began both his career and his collection in 1732, at a crucial moment in the

religious and political crisis, during the strike of the Paris Parlement and the related
emergence of the convulsionnaires. In a note drafted in his minuscule hand in 1733,
he described his method of classification, which was both chronological and the-
matic. His initial collecting bore on the question of miracles and, later, of convul-
sions, which elicited an outpouring of books, pamphlets, and drafts of speeches. He
also collected documents connected with the parlementary controversy that was
erupting at about the same time, but they went into a separate category of the col-
lection that received no greater emphasis than the archives of the convulsionnaires.

What made these documents worthy of belonging to a single archive was that all
330 CATHERINE MAIRE

were strands of a single historical thread. Here we see a clear sign of the influence

of the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques and of the figurist theology of history on the convul-
sionnaire attorney, who followed all the ins and outs of the Unigenitus controversy

and scrutinized events as so many signs of God's will: "Compilations of this sort

are nothing but storehouses in which one finds the indicated documents, which
form a historical unit {corps d'histoire), arranged according to the time of their

appearance in the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques, which connects the various documents to

one another and would, had I stayed with my original intention, have served as an

index."^' Le Paige kept no diary or register. His outlook was not that of an author;
on the contrary, he considered himself a modest observer caught up in the provi-

dential course of history. His personal notes, outlines, and projects, recorded on
separate sheets, can be found scattered throughout his collections of documents.
Often he covered printed or handwritten documents with notes that served as

reminders in his own reflections. He did not make judgments but sought to under-

stand, to gather all the available information, as if in the final analysis the ultimate

meaning of all these earthly records would be left to the one infallible judge, who,
when the time came, would render his verdict to humanity.

Safe behind the walls of the Temple, Le Paige indefatigably documented all the

important religious and parlementary controversies through 1789. After Conti's death
in 1776, however, his enormous, systematic compilations seem to thin out somewhat,
only to disappear mysteriously about 1785. In fact, despite his growing blindness, Le
Paige was still collecting printed documents. He must have lent out the final volumes,
having to do with the Turgot edicts, the parlementary troubles of 1787 and 1788, the
Assemblies of Notables, and the Estates General of 1789, because the Archives
Nationales recently regained possession of them. During the Revolution, driven from
the Temple, ruined, and almost completely blind, he probably lacked both the money
and the physical capacity to purchase pamphlets, yet he carried on, at his home in the

Rue Chariot, organizing and annotating his work during the very height of the

Terror, still convinced that he was working for "the future of the Church."
The question of the origins of the Jansenist dispute was of course one that inter-
ested Le Paige passionately. He gradually worked his way back into the past, first

collecting pamphlets and other texts from the early stages of the Appeal, then mov-
ing back toward Port-Royal, the petites lettres, the controversies over grace, and
finally the treatises of Jansenius himself. It was Le Paige who collected the bulk of

the manuscripts in the so-called Themericourt Collection, probably with the assis-

tance of d'Etemare, who had inherited many of the documents from his cousin in

1745. At the end of the century Le Paige even managed to purchase the original of

the Verite des miracles demontree, the very copy that its author, the Jansenist and con-

vulsionnaire magistrate Carre de Montgeron, had been so bold as to place into the

king's own hands in 1737, in defiance of all the rules of etiquette.

 Port-Royal 331

Le Paige 's many connections, together with his wiUingness to lend volumes from
his library or provide references on demand, made it possible for the whole Port-
Royaliste tradition of resistance, preserved in document after document, to transmit

its influence to the parlements themselves. And as that tradition inspired any number
of parlementary texts, they were in turn added to the collection. Thus the Le Paige
collection became the source of Port-Royal's future image. Even historians who
work today on the history of the parlements are in Le Paige 's debt, for the archives

on the Rue Saint-Jacques were used to prepare the critical edition of the

Remonstrances of the Paris Parlement}^

Opposition in the name of obedience to the truth, insistence on sincerity in the

face of all opposition, adherence to inward freedom in spite of outward constraint,

the exemplary heroism of Port-Royal: all these were omnipresent in the behavior
and language of the principals in our tale, whether they be called appellants or par-
lementaires. All saw themselves as the direct spiritual heirs of the nuns and solitaires

of Port- Royal. Because the ideal of Port- Royal was so deeply implicated in some of
the major intellectual controversies of the last seventy-five years of the Ancien
Regime, it was inevitable that after 1789 people would raise the question of

Jansenism's responsibility in paving the way for the Revolution.

Port-Royal and the Revolution

It was during the revolutionary period that the myth of the Jansenist party's subver-
sive political activity reached full maturity. In fact, Jansenism had all but disappeared
as an active force by 1774. The number of publications of works from or about Port-
Royal also dropped sharply.^^ The allegations of a "Jansenist conspiracy" or "Port-

Royal republicanism" thus stemmed not so much from any obvious Jansenist
involvement in the politics of the Revolution as from the fact that the intimate con-
nection of Jansenist issues with political matters earlier in the century had left pro-
found traces. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, the last royal historiographer, expressed this

suspicion of Jansenism quite well in his Souvenirs: "Anyone who has followed the
chain of events will readily agree that the controversies over the Constitution
Unigenitus, in which the ministry repeatedly took such unreasonable and untenable
positions, led by degrees to the terrible disputes over our Political Constitution."^''

It was a revolutionary figure, and one of religious background at that, who lent

credence to the view that Jansenist political theology had a republican coloration:
namely, the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, friend of Blacks and champion of the
"regeneration" of the Jews, constitutional bishop of Blois, and defender of freedom
of religion. In his Raines de Port-Royal, written in 1801 in the wake of the Concordat,
which put an end to all the Constitutional Church's hopes of reconstruction, the
Ecole de Port-Royal was cast in retrospect as the embodiment of the true revolu-
332 CATHERINE MAIRE

tionary tradition. This republican transfiguration of Port-Royal, which cast the

abbey's solitaires as theoretical proponents of popular sovereignty, would be echoed
by a number of voices in the nineteenth century, and most notably by certain histo-
rians of the Revolution: Jules Michelet, Louis Blanc, Henri Martin, and Jean Jaures.
After the parlementary Jansenists succeeded in thwarting the monarchy's
attempts to reform itself under Chancellor Maupeou, the opposition movement lost

much of its political raison d'etre. Ten years earlier it had destroyed the principal
underpinning of its religious existence by expelling the Jesuits. After the chancellor

closed the parlements in 1772, Le Paige, at once lucid and fatalistic, foresaw the con-
sequences of the governmental stalemate: "The State has come to such a degree of
evils through the abuses that have corrupted its excellent constitution that its ruin is

almost inevitable.... I see only too clearly that the government's present course will

end sooner or later in either the ruin of the State or some spectacular reform, which
may go too far."^^ Once the parlements were restored, the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques

lost much of its foothold in the political news of the day. Its pages increasingly

seemed nostalgic for the golden age of the battle in favor of the Appeal, while tire-

lessly continuing to hurl accusations at both Jesuits and philosophes, said to be the
chief culprits in the rise of impiety. The taking of the Bastille was simply ignored.
The Jansenist party's last theologians were much weaker metaphysicians than
their predecessors. Gourlin (died 1775) Bon-Frangois Riviere, known as Pelvert
(1714— 1781), were unable to respond to the new questions of the day. Even worse,
they fell to bickering over the most crucial issue in Christianity, the nature of the
eucharistic sacrifice. The party's learned canonists proved more influential: Mey
(1712— 1796), Jabineau (1724— 1790), and Maultrot (1714— 1803). But they pursued a
secular path that moved ever farther away from the Port-Royaliste tradition, incor-

porating elements of natural-law thinking. In the end Maultrot, after affirming, as

early as 1775, the nation's right to convoke the Estates General, became openly crit-
ical of Arnauld and Nicole 's arguments in favor of absolute monarchy. In contrast

to what one might have expected, this group, which was generally considered to be
the enlightened, "progressive" faction of the party, was the most vehemently
opposed to the religious reforms attempted by the Constituent Assembly.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy that was adopted on July 12, 1790, reduced
the clergy to a corps of civil servants subject to the strict authority of the people and

local officials. Both prelates and parish priests were to be chosen by election. The
political at last took full precedence over the spiritual: Louis XIV himself would
never have dared to hope for such a total victory. To register their disagreement,

Maultrot, Jabineau, and Mey created an oppositional newspaper under the title

Nouvelles ecclesiastiques ou Memoires pour servir d I'histoire de la Constitution preten-

due civile du clerge, which appeared from September 1791 to August 10, 1792. After

heated attacks on the "despotism of the bishops," they contradicted their own ear-

lier writings by reaffirming the political independence of the spiritual authorities.

 Port-Royal 333

Having argued for the nation's rightful authority over the monarch, they now con-
demned the king's deposition.^^

The Jansenists were among the first to be taken unawares by the Revolution,
which completed their division by forcing them to take positions on the issues of the

day. The party's canonists, who had explicitly transported the religious reasoning of
the Gallican and conciliar tradition into the political domain, now drew back, terri-

fied at the thought of completely depriving the Church of any independent juris-

diction and breaking the mold of monarchical representation. The only exception
was the Jansenist attorney Camus, who fully accepted the king's death. By contrast,
the figurist faction of the party associated with the Nouvelles ecdesiastiques as it was
run by d'Etemare's students, though suspected of "fanaticism," accepted the trans-
formation of the Gallican Church through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as
a sign that the long-awaited reform or "regeneration" of the Church had at last

begun. Since the Church's only power was spiritual, it was essential to confiscate the

propert}'^ of wealthy ecclesiastical despots in order to compensate for past abuses.

The suddenly revolutionary tone of the paper's editorials after January 1790 is sur-

prising. The early steps toward the reorganization of church and state were natu-
rally interpreted within the framework of the theology of history that the paper had
embraced ever since its inception. These recent developments were consequences of
the destruction of Port-Royal, of the promulgation of the Constitution, of the per-

secution of the appellants, of the rise of ignorance and impiety, and of the spirit
common to both Jesuits and philosophes. Despite their opposition to the
Enlightenment, the Jansenist broadsheets had indeed in their own way laid the

groundwork for the emergence of a kind of revolutionary mentality.

Perhaps the contradictions inherent in the movement throughout the eighteenth

century erupted in this revelatory moment of crisis. The "political" strand of

Jansenism, involving reflection on public law, unwittingly laid the groundwork for

popular sovereignty, but in the final analysis it could not conceive of itself outside
the framework of monarchical representation and a politically independent
Church. The more "religious" branch, involving the figurist theology of history,
fought the philosophes throughout the Ancien Regime yet readily embraced the new
political constitution as a manifestation of history's providential course. In both
cases, but most strikingly in the most religious of the Jansenists, Augustinianism
with its insistence on the absolute rule of God had the effect of countering hierar-
chy and promoting secularism.
Where there is smoke, there is fire. There is some basis to the myth of the
Jansenists' spiritual responsibility for the new organization of the Church despite
the negative findings of historians. Research has in fact shown that there were at

most a tiny number of Jansenists among the deputies of the Constituent Assembly
and that only four of the attorneys on the ecclesiastical committee responsible for
drafting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy can be considered Jansenists, and then
334 CATHERINE MAIRE

only with respect to the nature of their training in canon law: Durand de Maillane,
Martineau, Lanjuinais, and Treilhard. Nevertheless, rumors of a Jansenist plot
began circulating immediately after the vote. In the Decouverte importante sur le vrai

systeme de la Constitution du clerge decretee par I'Assemblee nationale, which was pub-
lished in 1 79 1 and which the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques attributed to Abbe Barruel, the
Civil Constitution was denounced as an amalgam of Richerism, Calvinism, and
Jansenism, the latter being the supreme heresy subsuming the two others. The
Jansenists, it was alleged, had hidden behind the ecclesiastical committee, "in accor-

dance with their custom of always making themselves invisible. "^^ The Comte
d'Antraigues also accused them of making common cause with the Protestants and
philosophes for the purpose of destroying Catholicism in France.^' On May 27, 1791,
Sieyes himself reproached "certain" members of the ecclesiastical committee,
whom he refused to name, for seeing "the Revolution as nothing more than a per-

fect occasion to apotheosize the spirits of Port- Royal."

Only after the wave of dechristianization had subsided did the abbey regain its

positive political image. Port- Royal was reborn as a precursor of the Constitutional
Church that Abbe Gregoire attempted to revive in the wake of Thermidor. And so,

for example, on Corpus Christi in 1796 the bishops who were working to reestab-

lish religion in France'^*' went to Saint-Medard, the only parish church open at the

time, to celebrate a solemn service intended to make amends for the insults heaped

upon Jesus during the Revolution. Interestingly enough, the objects used in the rit-

ual ceremony came from Port-Royal des Champs.*''

In a similar vein, the members of the Societe de Philosophic Chretienne, a "reli-

gious and republican society" founded by Gregoire in 1797, which counted Le Paige
among its members, made a pilgrimage to the ruins of Port-Royal des Champs
every October.
As things began to look worse and worse for the Gallican proposal put forward

by the Constitutional bishops, Port-Royal was invoked more and more often as a

symbol. After the 1801 ratification by Napoleon and Pope Pius VII of the
Concordat, which restored the authority of the Holy See over all French Catholics,
Gregoire went to Saint-Lambert to meditate prior to submitting his resignation.
There he composed a brief pamphlet entitled Les Ruines de Port-Royal, a sort of vis-

itors' guidebook. "^^ The reverie du promeneur around the ruins of Port-Royal of
course owed much to the preromantic vogue for poetic ruins and cemeteries, but its

nostalgia was more political than religious. Although Gregoire cannot be termed an
unambiguous Jansenist on the basis of any of his initiatives within the Constituent

Assembly or Convention or even of his pastoral work at Blois, when the Revolution
was over he became an adept of a sort of Utopian Port-Royal based on the same
alliance of revolutionary and Christian ideals that had inspired his political action.

His Port- Royal was that of the good Revolution, of the liberal, republican, moral.
 Port-Royal 335

and Christian tradition. Unlike the party newspaper, the abbe was not content sim-
ply to associate the events of the Revolution with the history of the Jansenist con-
troversy. He found the principles of the Revolution within the very political theol-

ogy of the "Ecole de Port-Royal." All the theologians of that school had raised "a
double barrier against the encroachments of political and ultramontane despotism."
Gregoire admired the "splendors of republicanism" not just in the eighteenth-cen-
tury writers Maultrot, Legros, and d'Etemare but in the very first text by Jansenius,
the Mars Gallicus. In Saint-Cyran's Question royale he saw "the principles of popu-
lar sovereignty." He even found traces of the same idea in Pascal and pointed to a
text in which Arnauld attacked William III, the Prince of Orange, as a "tyrant" and

usurper.'^'' He was nevertheless obliged to concede that Maultrot had been right to

combat the celebrated theologian's "less liberal ideas concerning monarchy." In an

error that says a great deal about his desire to see Jansenism as a precursor in the bat-

tle for "the superiority of the Estates over the king," Gregoire attributed the

Protestant Jurieu's Soupirs de la France esclave qui aspire a la liberie to an "adherent

of Port-Royal."
Port-Royal became an intellectual focal point of the Enlightenment. It took part
in the "progress of the human spirit" through its useful contributions to educational
theory and practice as well as works such as the Grammaire generale and Logique,
which won the admiration of the editors of the Encyclopedie. In addition, the orga-
nizational structure of the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques served as a model of how to cir-

cumvent the vigilance of the "French Inquisition." Gregoire went so far as to com-
pare the history of Port-Royal to the situation in his own day, "when a number of
European governments, joined in a conspiracy against the freedom of the press, are

attempting to tighten the irons in which their people, their dethroned sovereigns,
are held." Eventually, of course, Gregoire came to meditate over the ruins of the
Revolution. He could not dismiss the swerve into terrorism and dechristianization.
Even if Port-Royal had not been destroyed by Louis XIV, it would have been
assailed by "vandals" with axes and torches. Gregoire would have liked to see soci-

ety reborn "along the lines of that of the children of BeruUe" but knew that his wish
was "fanciful." For the first time the memory of Port-Royal, which until then had
functioned as an emblem of combat, consolation, or hope, offered no prospect on
the future. Gregoire 's text ends on a highly nostalgic note. Port-Royal was reduced
to nothing more than a Utopia, yet he immortalized that Utopia and in so doing laid
the groundwork for a new republican and secular posterity.

The Quintessence of the Grand Siecle

In the nineteenth century Jansenism was no more than a shadow of its former self,

and what little life remained in the movement was all but snuffed out by the Vatican
 Port-Royal 337

Council of 1870. The Loi Falloux, which restored the Jesuits' right to teach, fol-

lowed by the promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, marked the final

defeat of Galilean forces. Yet even as the last vestiges of the Jansenist sensibility

were being eliminated, Port-Royal was enjoying its most illustrious period as a cul-

tural icon. Instead of fading into oblivion, Port-Royal entered the cultural sphere,
where it was exalted as the quintessence of the Grand Siecle. The latest transfigu-

ration carried with it an implicit value judgment concerning the history of the
movement that had sustained the abbey's memory. The literary and spiritual Port-

Royal of the seventeenth century would forever after be identified with all that was
best in Jansenism. The "other" Jansenism, the political Jansenism of the eighteenth
century, was discredited and consigned to oblivion.

Traces of the Jansenist presence in the nineteenth century are diffuse. There
were of course pilgrimages to the ruins of Port-Royal, which drew sympathizers
from all over the world, from the Italian Jansenists of the Risorgimento''^ to English
feminists who looked upon the nuns of Port-Royal as their own sisters.*"*" Shortly
after the Revolution a Jansenist philanthropic society was established, and much of
the movement's remaining resources and energies were funneled into it, but its

activities were limited to the realms of charity and education as well as to perpetu-
ating the memory of Port-Royal.''^

Apart from this last gasp of militancy, there was one final outbreak of Galilean
versus ultramontane emotion during the Restoration. In opposition to the ultra-
montanes Bonald, Lamennais, and de Maistre, who advocated restoring the prerog-
atives of the Holy See and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, liberals and Galileans joined

in a coalition against the ultraroyalist Villele ministry and denounced backstage

manipulations by Jesuits and the "priestly party."*"^ Included in this group were a

few descendants of important Jansenist families such as Royer-Collard, Barante,

Mole, Pasquier, Remusat, and Montlosier, but it is impossible to find any sort of
doctrinal coherence within this rather ill-defined group of occasional allies.

In this spooky atmosphere, marked by the resurgence of old disputes, the invet-

erate enemy of the Jesuits picked up the banner of liberty, and the old fantasy of a
Jansenist plot resurfaced. Villemain, in his "Tableau du Grand Siecle," painted

Arnauld's and Pascal's struggle against the Jesuits as a precursor of liberalism's

struggles in his own day.*"' Conversely, de Maistre completed Barruel's portrait of
the origins of the French Revolution by including the Jansenist "sect" among those
responsible for the upheaval and casting Jansenius as a disciple of Hobbes.^"
Lamennais went even further, denouncing the Jansenists as a "dangerous faction"
highly reminiscent of Calvinism, "especially in its energetic genius, incapable of
submitting to obedience and always ready to rebel."''
Yet this last stirring of Jansenists reduced to Gallicanism soon fizzled. Under
Napoleon III, and following the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate
338 CATHERINE MAIRE

Conception, ultramontane ideas, widely publicized by Veuillot's L'Univers,

emerged victorious. Priests in training would henceforth be required to read new
textbooks that portrayed the Jansenist writers and even the Benedictines of Saint-
Maur as direct disciples of Calvin and Luther combined.'^
If the spirit of Port-Royal could not be passed on, an idealization of its image
could be saved. After 1830, thanks to critical studies and scholarly editions, a new
picture of the seventeenth century began to emerge. In this construction of French

"classicism," Port- Royal would figure as the period's finest flower. The emblem of
Port-Royal lost its polemical and political edge as it was transferred to the cultural

sphere. The most important stage manager of this transformation was surely the lit-
erary critic Sainte-Beuve.^^ Of the many nineteenth-century figures from
Chateaubriand to George Sand who daydreamed of monarchy, he was far from the
only one to take an interest in Jansenism. The history of Port-Royal also attracted

the interest of historians. At the College de France, Jean-Jacques Ampere offered a

course in France 's early seventeenth-century religious awakening. Antoine Latour,

in his Esquisses historiques (1834) devoted to the nuns and solitaires of Port-Royal,
explained why his contemporaries were so interested in the subject: "Our century,

which is as much literary as political, loves Port- Royal for having reminded national
studies of past sources of genius."^'*

Fashion alone, however, cannot explain the success of Sainte-Beuve 's interpreta-
tion. Previously Port-Royal had been inextricably associated with Jansenism. For
Sainte-Beuve 's contemporaries the abbey was most celebrated for the persecution it

had suffered and for Jansenist support of Gallican liberties. Sainte-Beuve 's original-
ity was to sever political Jansenism on the one hand from spiritual and literary Port-

Royal on the other. The author's distaste for theological disputation was already
apparent in Amaury, the hero of his novel Volupte. In Lausanne, where he was invited
by people associated with the Protestant "awakening," Sainte-Beuve gave a course of

some twenty intensive lectures, from the autumn of 1837 to the spring of 1838. In
them he sketched the outlines of a classic drama. It began with the "day at the grille,"

continued with scenes devoted to Saint-Cyran and Pascal and several other distinc-
tive solitaires, and culminated with Racine 's Athalie. The conclusion of the tragedy
was cast in the form of a long autumn, a period of decline, a desiccation already
apparent in the overly disputatious Arnauld. Port-Royal's theologians were treated
more as writers than as men of religion engaged in a battle to reform the Church from
within. This central aspect of the Cistercian monastery's activity is strikingly absent

from Sainte-Beuve 's account. Sainte-Beuve denied that he was writing a history of
the abbey like others that had gone before. He claimed instead to be painting a "por-
trait of Port-Royal" whose purpose was to reveal the soul of this august "personage."
What interested him was discovering the abbey's spiritual and literary contribution to
French classicism. The gallery of portraits of Port-Royal authors is therefore psy-
chological, cut off from Jansenist controversies as such and omitting much of the
 Port-Royal 339

eighteenth-century historical sequel: "What I wanted to create was a History not of

Port-Royal but of the Spirit of Port-Royal, and, within that spirit, of what was pure,
rare, unique, and eternally worthy of memory — the spirit that flowered in Athalie

and not the spirit that went to the grave with Deacon Paris. "^^ Sainte-Beuve's stated

purpose loses some of its apparent originality when one begins to examine his

sources. His library in fact included all the histories of Port-Royal, including the

manuscript literary history of Clemencet as well as the compilation by the Oratorian

librarian Adry (1749— 1818), which contains a great deal of information on the Petites

Ecoles. We also know that Sainte-Beuve read six volumes of records of convulsion-
naire ceremonies, which apparently so frightened him that he ever after spoke only of
the "ignominy of the convulsions" and withdrew his admiration for the theologian

Duguet. His documentation mentions almost none of the works of Quesnel and not
one document from the abundant polemical literature against UnigenitusJ^ Indeed, by
using his predecessors' work uncritically, Sainte-Beuve only fulfilled the aim of the
eighteenth-century Jansenists on whom he relied, which was to exalt the example of
the illustrious men of Port- Royal in order to draw a discreet veil over the subsequent
theological defeat. Perhaps part of the reason for the success of his work was that it

was the realization of this century-old project. Even Sainte-Beuve's accentuation of

character study simply continued and reflected the concern with the uniqueness of

exemplary figures that was such a distinctive feature of Jansenist historiography. The
first volumes of Sainte-Beuve's Port-Royal, which came out in 1840 and 1842,
enjoyed only modest success.^^ It took longer for the work to establish itself as a new
way of approaching religious history, with a mixture of respectful sympathy and
detachment, but its influence was certainly felt by Renan and by Taine, who charac-
terized the work as one that explored the "vast province of human psychology. "^^ It

was not until 1904, however, in ceremonies marking the centenary of Sainte-Beuve's
birth, that Brunetiere honored the work as a "masterpiece of French criticism."''^ As
the fortunes of Sainte-Beuve 's book rose along with the study of French literary clas-
sics in the schools, Pascal — in a case unique in the whole history of letters —became
the modern man par excellence, the figure with whom readers identified. Victor
Cousin, who launched the vogue for philological studies of Pascal manuscripts with
his celebrated 1842 report to the Academic Frangaise "Sur la necessite d'une nouvelle
edition des Pensees, " caught the spirit of this identification most eloquently. He too
hoped to distill the pure Pascal from the altered texts of Jansenist editions prepared
with polemical intent: "Our skepticism and our exaltation, our discouragements and
our pride, our need to believe and to love and our difficulty in doing so — he felt all of
this."^" Esprit de finesse and esprit de geometrie, sublime misanthrope, frightful genius,
pessimist, ironist, precursor of impiety, skeptic, apologist, scientist, Protestant,

Catholic, ascetic, victim of hallucinations, rationalist, moralist, anguished soul, exis-

tentialist: Pascal's projective plasticity is astonishing. Rarely have the enigmatic

ellipses in an author's unfinished work elicited so many contradictory interpretations.
34° CATHERINE MAIRE

FIGURE 8.10 Louise Conte and Simone Valere in Henry de Montherlant's Port-Royal {]S83).

The Secularized Heritage

By 1850 the principal components of the memory had been defined. Little would
change afterward, apart from the revival of one or the other face of that memory:
the republican political version or the cultural icon of classicism. We are still living
 Port-Royal 341

off this divided, secularized legacy, which was established once and for all when
Port- Royal's literary butterfly emerged from its Jansenist cocoon.

Not only did Port-Royal in its cultural form enter the university, but its new
image changed Jansenist society itself. Under the influence of a new director,

Augustin Gazier, a professor from the Sorbonne, the Societe Saint- Augustin and the
library on Rue Saint-Jacques took on a new, more scientific and cultural orientation.

It was Gazier who opened the bulk of the Port-Royal ruins to the public and whose
historical note to visitors presented the history of Port- Royal as that of "liberal and
intelligent Catholicism."^' He also built a museum-oratory on the premises and
placed a bust of Racine there in 1899, on the occasion of the second centenary of the
playwright's death.
In fact, Gazier was by no means a stranger to the Port-Royal tradition. The fortu-

itously named Augustin was born in the parish of Saint-Severin, in the shadow of the
Jansenist bell-tower, in 1844. His father, named president of the Societe Saint-
Augustin in 1863, had been a student and later a teacher at the Ecoles Jansenistes de
Charite in the Faubourg Saint- Antoine. He married a former pupil of the Sisters of
Sainte-Marthe, an order founded in the eighteenth century in imitation of Port- Royal
and which his sister Louise joined.^^ Gazier recounts in his "Souvenirs" that after the
shock of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, the library, which had ceased
to be the meeting place of the Societe Saint- Augustin, had been virtually abandoned,
left to be tended only by the spinsters Sophie and Rachel Gillet. Daughters of a
wealthy entrepreneur who belonged to the Societe Janseniste, the two women had
devoted themselves entirely to the cult of the ancestors. Somewhat earlier, around
i860, they had even published figurists and eschatological texts in Abbe d'Etemare 's
own hand, texts that had never seen the light of day before (one wonders for what
audience they were produced now). In 1872, however, Gazier took charge of the
library with all the joy of a scholar discovering an unexploited gold mine, and it

became the basis of his many learned publications. Like his great rival Bremond on
the Jesuit side, Gazier created a center for the scholarly study of Jansenism to serve

the new disciplines of religious and literary history at the turn of the century.^^
Although Port-Royal's classicism became the dominant image, the republican
interpretation of Jansenism did not disappear entirely. It, too, entered the univer-

sity, where it played an important role in the educational battles over the republican
school under the Third Republic. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the hostility of
leading academics to "Jesuitism" had laid the groundwork for the coming battle

over secularized education. Jules Michelet devoted his 1843 course at the College de
France entirely to the Jesuits, for whose teachings he came up with some striking
descriptions: "the spirit of death," "moral mechanism," a "police mentality applied
to religious matters," a "spirit of pious intrigue and sanctimonious slander." In the
same year his colleague Edgar Quinet also indicted the practices of the Company of
Jesus, contrasting the "spirit of servitude" with that of "liberty and democracy"
342 CATHERINE MAIRE

and perpetuating the tradition of republican anti-Jesuitism. Under the Third

Republic, amidst the ambiance of secular faith that animated the school of Jules
Ferry, Port-Royal recovered some of its symbolic value. Indeed, the abbey had the
virtue of allowing republicans to encroach upon the territory of their Catholic
adversaries. Port-Royal embodied the good side of Christian education, "the glori-

ous conquest of the modern spirit, the abhorrence of intolerance and respect for lib-
erty."^'' Two anthologies of texts by the masters of the Petites Ecoles appeared in

1887. They were published by Felix Cadet and Irenee Carre, both Inspectors
General of Elementary Education, who hailed the texts as veritable treatises on edu-
cational theory.^^ They praised Nicole, Lancelot, Coustel, Guyot, and Wallon de
Beaupuis for having fostered individual development and independence and con-
science and critical acumen. The Logique "clearly and boldly set forth the rights of

human reason as against the pretensions of authority." They sought to retain only

the secular aspect of Port-Royal's educational system while rejecting its theology.

Carre contributed several articles on Port-Royal to Ferdinand Buisson's

Dictionnaire de pedagogic. While expressing reservations about the "somber doc-
trine" of a system that treated education as "a drama of salvation," Carre admired
the Jansenists' "profound respect for the human person, and particularly for the soul
of the child, their religious awe at the enigma of the child, who may grow up to
become either a saint or a demon."^^ He also noted the elitism and intimacy of small
classes as well as the exceptional gifts of the Port- Royal teachers, "apostles of a kind
who do not appear in every age." Nevertheless, he urged his readers in search of
"experimental precedents" and authentic continuity of inspiration to look to Port-
Royal rather than to the Jesuits, who failed to foster "a sense of personal dignity."
Despite the anticlericalism of the republicans, Port-Royal was a fundamental ref-

erence for the founders of French secular education, particularly such liberal
Protestants as Steeg, Pecaut, and Buisson, who sought to establish "a lay religion
and moral ideal without dogma, catechisms, or priests."^^ Pecaut, who, according to

Buisson, wanted to be a "secular republican Saint-Cyran," took his students to visit

the ruins of Port-Royal after being appointed to the post of directeur d'etudes at the

Ecole Normale Superieure of Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1880.^^ A similar atheist

admiration for Port-Royal can be seen in the Union pour I'Action Morale that Paul
Desjardins founded in 1892 on the basis of Jules Lagneau's program "for social
pacification through education." This philanthropic organization considered itself

to be "a small-scale, purely rational trial of Port-Royal. "^^ The many other groups
in which Desjardins subsequently played a role, from the Union pour la Verite (so

renamed after the Dreyfus Affair) to the Foyer d 'Etudes et de Repos de Pontigny,
would also partake of the memory of Port-Royal and its fondness for the shadows,
j

From after World War I until about i960, Sainte-Beuve's work remained the
implicit basis of all studies of Port-Royal. The image it established remains influen-
 Port-Royal 343

tial, but increasingly it is no longer Port-Royal but Pascal as its finest and most
robust incarnation who draws most of the attention. Pascal has been the subject of
countless essays by authors from Barres to Peguy to Mauriac. The three-hundredth
anniversary of his birth in 1923 and of his death in 1962 occasioned fervent acts of
homage to the man. The expansion of the universities after World War II stimulated
the production of innumerable theses. The geometer obsessed with the abyss
evinced an attractive intensity of mind born of an unusual combination of aesthetic
gifts with spiritual concerns.^" In 1952 the sale of the Les Granges estate, that is, of
the Petites Ecoles (which the nineteenth century mistakenly took to be the maison

des solitaires with "Pascal's cell" often reproduced in postcard images), provoked
such an uproar in the press that the government decided to turn the property into a
museum. The first expositions of the mid-1950s, on "Racine and Port-Royal,"
"Pascal and Les Provinciales, " and "Philippe de Champaigne and Port- Royal," drew
on the Sainte-Beuvian image of the abbey as the cradle of literary classicism. Only
Montherlant dared to venture gingerly beyond the boundary separating the "great"
Jansenism of the seventeenth century from the "other," more political Jansenism,
in a play presented for the first time at the Theatre-Fran^ais on December 8, 1954,
which met with considerable success. Based on the Recit de captivite de la Mere
Angelique de Saint-Jean, the tragedy represented the difficult personal and political
issues involved in the choice between resistance and obedience. Structuralism, with
its interest in discourse, turned the spotlight on yet another Port-Royal, but one that
also belonged to the seventeenth century, namely, the Port- Royal that produced the
Logique and the Grammaire, texts that were reprinted and hailed as major milestones
in the founding of the queen of sciences, linguistics.^'

Since then, the image of Port-Royal has been fading, and reference to it is

increasingly limited to scholars. Yet something of the Port-Royal spirit remains

indomitably alive, even if only in the form of a diffuse influence on the French sen-
sibility that extends well beyond its original religious setting. One might examine
this by studying the semantic filtering that has kept the adjective Jansenist in the

psychological and moral vocabulary while gradually pruning away its historical and
spiritual roots. Not that the latter have disappeared entirely. Long after the last ves-
tiges of the Jansenist "party" disappeared, there remains a distinctive strand within
the French religious tradition notable for the austerity of its independence. A sort
of Jansenist piety has survived doctrinal Jansenism. The connotation of religious

rigor is powerful enough for the language to have preserved the word Jansenist to
denote an inflexible self-discipline. This quality may be associated with other forms
of severity, whether internal or behavioral, as when Leszek Kolakowski character-
ized Georges Sorel as a "Jansenist Marxist. "^^ In this connection Jansenism joins

puritanical intransigence with the virtuous activism of the Jacobin. But there is also

another sign of the deep imprint that this Catholic protest left on French society:

Jansenism is also the name of an aesthetic ideal. Indeed, the construction of Port-
344 CATHERINE MAIRE

Royal as an icon of classicism established this "Jansenist" ideal as one of an

extremely purified form of classicism, the mythical figure of an art concentrated on
the essential, extremely spare in its resources and style. Thus for Paul Valery, Degas
and Mallarme are the "Jansenists of painting and poetry,"'^ while Blaise Cendrars
spoke of "the messianic spirit and Jansenist demeanor of the N.R.F." (the Nouvelle
Revue Frangaise)^^ and Andre Bazin praised "the Jansenist direction" of filmmaker
William Wyler.^^ Words have a memory of their own, and their fate is to continue

indefinitely to spell out a history that one might have thought to be on its last legs.

Yet even as I write, as the bicentennial of the French Revolution is being cele-
brated, the political dimension of Port-Royal has once again reared its head, made
topical by Tocqueville 's analysis, according to which the French Revolution origi-

nated within the very structure of the monarchy. As a central element in France 's

distinctive religious and political configuration from the wave of reforms and
counter-reforms to the revolutionary outburst of "dechristianization," the enigma
of Port-Royal is once again a topic of major interest.'*" Perhaps posterity will soon
again be able to see the Jansenist struggle in all its historical fullness and complexity.

APPENDIX I

A Short Critical Bibliography of Studies of French Jansenism

Jansenism has given rise to a vast literature as well as to the most contradictory
interpretations, examination of which would have led us quite far afield. I have
therefore chosen to give, in this separate appendix, a brief but organized survey of
major developments in recent research.

It should be borne in mind that those who considered themselves to be "disciples

of Saint Augustine" always rejected the reality of Jansenism. For Arnauld it was a

mere "phantom" {Fantome du jansenisme, Cologne, 1686).

"Reforme ou Contre-Reforme.''" asked Jean Orcibal of the early Port-Royal

{Nouvelle Clio [Brussels, 1950] 138—280), thus stressing the ambiguity of the move-

ment. Jean Laporte called Jansenism "Catholicism in its purest form" ("Le
Jansenisme," Histoire generale des religions [Paris: Quillet, 1947], 4: 195—218),
whereas the Dictionnaire de theologie catholique brands it a "singular heresy": in a jest

destined to become famous, Mazarin once called it "warmed-over Calvinism."

In the first historiographical reflection on Jansenist studies from the early 1950s,

"Qu'est-ce que le jansenisme.''," Cahiers de I'Association internationale des etudes

franfaises, nos. 3, 4, 5 (July 1953): 39—53, Jean Orcibal concludes that historians must
give up the idea that there is any "substantial unity" to Jansenism. Indeed, attempts

to reconstruct the doctrine since the turn of the century had contributed to frag-

menting it into several distinct tendencies, each associated with different Jansenist

personalities: Jules Paquier, Qu'est-ce que le jansenisme? (Paris, 1909); Albert de

 Port-Royal 345

Meyer, Les Premieres Controverses jansenistes en France (Louvain, 1917); Jean

Laporte, La Doctrine de Port-Royal: Saint-Cyran (Paris, 1923), La Doctrine de Port-
Royal: Les verites de la Grace (Paris, 1923); La Doctrine de Port-Royal: La morale
d'apres Arnauld, 2 vols. (Paris, 1951— 1952). The publication of documents concern-

ing the history of the Jansenist movement by Father Ceyssens revealed the exis-
tence of several distinct periods: Sources relatives atix debuts du jansenisme et de I'an-

tijansenisme (Louvain, 1957), La Fin de la premiere periode du jansenisme, sources des

annees (Louvain, 1968), La Seconde Periode du jansenisme, les debuts, sources des
annees /67J-Z676' (Brussels, 1968), La Seconde Periode, sources des annees 1680-1682
(Brussels, 1974), Autour de la bulle Unigenitus (Louvain, 1987). There has been no
attempt to synthesize any number of regional monographs, which in any case may
not lend themselves to any kind of generalization.
For a summary of regional studies, one can consult the already somewhat out-
dated bibliography of Preclin, LesLuttes politiques et doctrinales aux XVIF et XVIIF
siecles, 2 vols. (Paris, 1955— 1956) i: 235 and 236 (the work constitutes vol. 19 of the
Histoire de I'Eglise depuis les origines jusqu'd nos jours, ed. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle

and Eugene Jarry), as well as Emile Appolis, "L'Histoire provinciale du jansenisme

au XVIIP siecle," Annales ESC, 7 (1952): 87—92. The old survey by Jean Carreyre
in Introduction aux etudes d'histoire locale, 3 vols., ed. Victor Carriere (Paris,

1934— 1940), 3: 513—635, is still a useful source of interesting avenues of research.

One major object of controversy involved the question of Jansenism's role in the
decline of mysticism and the baroque aesthetic and, more generally, its contribution
to "dechristianization." Whereas Bremond, in the fourth volume of the Histoire lit-

teraire du sentiment religieux (Paris, 1932), was harsh toward Port-Royal, which he
held responsible, through the controversy it instigated, for the "retreat of the mys-
tics," Orcibal saw Duvergier de Hauranne, the abbe de Saint-Cyran, as belonging
to the mystical tradition and as a devotional descendant of Berulle and Francis de
Sales (Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbe de Saint-Cyran et son temps, 2 vols. [Paris,

1947— 1948]). For Louis Cognet, the ascetic and antimystical strand in Jansenism
could be traced back to Mother Angelique herself (La Reforme de Port-Royal [Paris,

1951]). In Morales du Grand Siecle (Paris, 1948), Paul Benichou emphasized the
"demolition of the hero" that he saw at work in Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and
Nicole, but Rene Taveneaux saw "the heroism of sanctity," a compound of poverty
and charity, as the basis of Jansenist piety {Hero'isme et creation litteraire sous les
regnes d'Henri IV et de Louis XIII [Paris, 1974]).
In Etudes de sociologie religieuse, 2 vols. (Paris, 1955— 1956), Gabriel Le Bras
blamed the spare Jansenist notion of piety for the "dechristianization" so apparent
in several of their bastions: the Paris basin, Sens, Troyes, Chalons-sur-Marne,
Reims, the Beauvaisis. But Rene Taveneaux's monograph Ze Jansenisme en Lorraine
(Paris, i960) brought to light a notable exception: "old-fashioned Augustinian
346 CATHERINE MAIRE

Jansenism" remained as alive in eighteenth-century Lorraine as it had been in the

seventeenth century. In a searching review of Taveneaux's book, "Jansenisme et

frontiere de la catholicite," Revue historique, 227 (1962): 115— 138, the Protestant his-

torian Pierre Chaunu proposed an interesting hypothesis distinguishing between

Jansenist regions "on the frontiers of Catholicism" — Lorraine, perhaps Normandy

owing to a strong Protestant presence there, the Spanish Netherlands, the United

Provinces —and Jansenist regions sheltered from interconfessional conflict, where

Jansenism was ultimately transformed into a political and Presbyterian tendency in

the eighteenth century. In the confrontation with the Protestants, Jansenism could

reveal its true function, which was both to convert Protestants and serve as a sub-

stitute for Augustinianism. Dominique Dinet is currently pursuing research on the

secularizing influence of Jansenism in certain of its bastions ("Le Jansenisme et les

origines de la dechristianisation au XVIIT siecle, I'exemple des pays de rYonne,"in

Du jansenisme a la laicite (Entretiens d'Auxerre, 1983; Paris, 1987).
In the wake of Sainte-Beuve, the eighteenth century, marked by "the ignominy
of the convulsions," was for a long time deemed unworthy of inclusion in the his-

tory of Jansenism. Edmond Preclin's thesis, Les Jansenistes du XVIIP siecle et la

Constitution civile du clerge (Paris, 1929), restored the full historical importance of
the appellants' struggle against Unigenitus, which he saw as laying the groundwork
for the ecclesiastical reforms of the French Revolution. Taking a "history of ideas"
approach, his thesis rests on a fragile foundation, however: "Richerism." Why and
by what avenues would a conception of the Church developed by university syndic
Edmond Richer in the context of early seventeenth century Gallican-Jesuit strug-
gles— a conception of the Church as an aristocracy moderated by pastors instituted
by Christ —have suddenly spread through the clergy in the early eighteenth cen-
tury, when it was ignored by Jansenists at the end of the previous century.'' Jacques
Parguez's thesis. La Bulk Unigenitus et le jansenisme politique (Paris, 1936), high-
lighted the problem of "parlementary Jansenism."
The second phase of studies of political Jansenism was strongly influenced by the
Marxist model. Lucien Goldmann's Le Dieu cache, published in Paris in 1956 and
hailed as an event in Le Monde on September 25, 1956, though criticized by some
Marxists (e.g., Michel Crouzet in La Nouvelle Critique, 79 [1956]), remains contro-
versial even today: see Gerard Ferreyrolles, "Un Age critique: Les trente ans du Dieu
cache," Commentaires, 34 (summer 1986). Goldmann's essay continued a German
historiographic tradition. Although Max Weber neglected Jansenism, which he saw
primarily as a mystical movement that rejected the world, Marxist intellectuals were
drawn to the subject after World War I. Bernard Groethuysen, whose Origines de Ve-

sprit bourgeois en France was translated for the first time in 1927, used Jansenist liter-

ature from the early eighteenth-century campaign against Unigenitus. He was the

first to the note the ambivalent nature of Jansenist apologetics: "In fighting for
God's cause, they helped to bring about its defeat." His colleague Franz Borkenau,
 Port-Royal 347

in a study of the "history of philosophy in the manufacturing period" in Der

Ubergang vom feudalen lum biirgerlichen Weltbild (Paris, 1934), specifically attributed

Jansenism to a group that he called the French "gentry," a comprehensive but

anachronistic term according to Lucien Febvre ("Fondations economiques et super-

structures philosophiques: Une synthese," L'Esprit du mecanisme, Cahiers sts-cnrs

[1985], 81—85).The French noblesse de robe, it was argued, played a role in the gene-
sis of modern thought because modern thought was a product not just of capitalism

but, more significantly, of the contradictions within capitalism. Pascal was thus the
inventor of modern dialectics. Jansenism's failure and the triumph of the irreligious
spirit in the eighteenth century were consequences of the consolidation of the bour-
geoisie with its alleged emphasis on capitalist rationality. Following a similar line of
reasoning but working more with literary evidence, Goldmann attempted to recon-

struct the paradoxical Jansenist IVeltanschauung from the works of Pascal, Racine,
Arnauld, and Nicole, which he interpreted as nothing other than the tragic world-
view of officiers (venal officeholders, who purchased their offices and could not be
removed) thwarted in their social ascension by a bureaucracy of commissaires
(salaried employees who served at the king's pleasure). The flaw in Goldmann's
argument, however, was that he failed to provide any detailed sociological study of
just which families were Jansenist sympathizers and which sided with the Jesuits.

Roland Mousnier quite pertinently pointed out that two attitudes and two career pat-
terns were equally prevalent among robins: preservation of the religious conscience
by withdrawal from the world coexisted with engagement in affairs of state. These
objections were restated in a note on pp. 115— 116 of Goldmann's thesis (see also

Mousnier, "Le Conseil du Roi," inZa Plume, la Faucille et le Marteau [Paris, 1970],

and the special issue of Dix-septieme Siecle, 122 [January— March 1979]). The
Jansenist group, moreover, was far from being exclusively pessimistic and fatalistic

with respect to action in the world: one of Goldmann's own disciples, Gerard
Namer, has shown that after 1661, Jansenist circles expanded to include, alongside
the Barcosian group and the Arnauldian centrists, an extreme intramundane faction
around Abbe Le Roy and the bishop of Alet, Nicolas Pavilion, who promoted a spirit
of uncompromsing struggle {L'Abbe Leroy et ses amis: Essai sur le jansenisme
extremiste intramondain [Paris, 1964]). An indirect refutation of Goldmann's thesis

can be found in Paule Jansen's Le Cardinal Maiarin et le mouvementjanseniste (Paris,

1967), which shows how much the Machiavellian Mazarin himself contributed to

shaping the negative image of Jansenism to serve his diplomatic maneuverings vis-
a-vis the Holy See. Richard M. Golden has posed a further challenge to the Marxist

view by demonstrating that a high proportion of Parisian cures were Jansenists in

the seventeenth century, and that many of them took the side of Cardinal de Retz in
the religious Fronde of the 1650s {The Godly Rebellion: Parisian Cures and the

Religious Fronde, 1682-1662 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981]). Even the evidence concern-

ing the close ties between early Jansenism and the parlement has been cast in a new
348 CATHERINE MAIRE

light by Albert N. Hamscher, "The Parlement of Paris and the Social Interpretation

of Early French Jansenism," The Catholic Historical Review, 69 (1977): n 3—4.

Over the past ten years historians have once again turned their attention to the

role of Jansenism in the cultural origins of the French Revolution, a subject pio-

neered by the work of Daniel Mornet. For Alexander Sedgwick, early Jansenism
was already a political oppositional movement and must be studied in the context of

the Fronde: see his Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France: Voices from the Wilder-

ness (Charlottesville, 1977). Similarly, Robert Kreiser relates the episode of the mir-
acles and convulsions to the great religious and parlementary struggles against
Unigenitus in the first third of the eighteenth century {Miracles, Convulsions, and
Ecclesiastical Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century [Princeton, 1978]). Dale Van
Kley notes the influence of the parlementary "Jansenist party" in the second half of
the eighteenth century {The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France,

iy5y-iy65 [New Haven, 1975]). Pursuing an interpretation of the political theology

of Jansenism put forward by Rene Taveneaux,ya/uenw/?2e et politique (Paris, 1965),

and Antoine Adam, Du mysticisme a la revoke (Paris, 1968), Van Kley has called

attention to the influence of Jansenist conciliar thinking on prerevolutionary

politics ("The Jansenist Constitutional Legacy in the French Prerevolution,
1750— 1789," Historical Reflections /Reflexions historiques, 13, no. 2 and 3 [1986]; "The
Estates General as Ecumenical Council: The Constitutionalism of Corporate
Consensus and the Parlement 's Ruling of September 25, 1^^%%" Journal of Modern
History, 61 [March 1989]: 1—52). The political theology of Jansenism has also
attracted the interest of Monique Cotteret, "Aux origines du republicanisme jan-

seniste: Le mythe de I'Eglise primitive et le primitivisme des Lumieres," rhmc, 31

(January— March 1984): 99—115, and Yann Fauchois, "Jansenisme et politique au

XVIir siecle: legitimation de I'Etat et delegitimation de la monarchie chez G. N.
Maultrot," rhmc, 34 (July— September 1987): 473—491.
Timothy Tackett's book on the oath of \-i<^\^La Revolution, I'Eglise, la France

(Paris, 1986), demonstrates the geographical coincidence of Jansenist regions with

regions receptive to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. It thus demonstrates the

structural influence that this religious cleavage had on French society into the nine-
teenth century and perhaps beyond.

APPENDIX 2

Eighteenth-Century Memorials of Port-Royal

Le Necrologe

Rivet de La Grange (1683— 1749), Necrologe de I'abbaye de Notre-Dame de

Port-Royal des Champs, ordre de Citeaux, institut du Saint-Sacrement qui contient

I
 Port-Royal 349

les eloges historiques avec les epitaphes des fondateurs et bienfaiteurs de ce

monastere, et des autres personnes de distinction qui I'ont oblige par leurs services,
honore d'une affection particuliere, illustre par la profession monastique, edifie par
leur penitence et leur piete, sanctifie par leur mort ou par leur sepulture
(Amsterdam, 1723).

Journals

Divers actes, lettres et relations des religieuses de Port-Royal du Saint-Sacrement,

touchant la persecution et les violences qui leur ont etefaites (1725).

On the foundress and the nuns

Abbe Goujet (1697— 1767), Memoires pour servir a I'histoire de Port-Royal, 3 vols.

(1734— 1737): Contains stories of the nuns of the Arnauld family, "le recueil de la Mere
Angelique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d'Andilly," and the "Memoires pour servir a la vie

de la Reverende Mere Marie-Angelique de Sainte-Magdeleine Arnauld, reformatrice

de Port-Royal."
Memoires pour servir a I'histoire de Port-Royal et a la vie de la Reverende Mere
Angelique de Sainte-Magdeleine Arnauld, reformatrice de ce monastere, 5 vols. (Utrecht:

Aux depens de la Compagnie, 1742).

Angelique Arnauld, Extraits de Lettres, part i (Leyden, 1734).

Lettres de la Reverende Mere Marie-Angelique Arnauld, ahhesse et reformatrice de

Port-Royal, 3 vols. (Utrecht, 1742— 1744).

Entretiens ou Conferences de la Reverende Mere Marie-Angelique Arnauld, ahhesse

et reformatrice de Port-Royal, (Brussels, 1757).

Discours de la Mere Angelique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d'Andilly, appeles
"Misericordes ou Recommandations faites en chapitres de plusieurs personnes unies
a Port-Royal des Champs" (1735).
Discours sur la Regie de Saint Benoit de leur Reverende Mere Angelique de Saint-

Jean, Ahhesse de Port-Royal des Champs (1736).

Reflexions de la Mere Angelique de Saint-Jean pour preparer ses soeurs a la persecu-
tion, conformement aux avis laisses sur cette matiere par la Mere Agnes (1737).
Sister Eustoquie de Bregis, attrib.. Relations sur la vie de la Reverende Mere Marie
des Anges (1737).
Pierre Leclerc (subdeacon of the diocese of Rouen, champion of the convul-
sionnaires, in refuge in the Netherlands), Vies interessantes et edifiantes des
religieuses de Port-Royal et de plusieurs personnes qui leur etaient attachees, 5 vols.

(1750-1751).
Idem, Histoire des religieuses ecrites pare elles-memes (Utrecht, 1753).
350 CATHERINE MAIRE

On the solitaires

Histoire de Vorigine des Penitens et solitaires de Port-Royal des Champs (Mons, 1733).
Relation de la retraite de M. Arnauld en les Pays-Bas en 1769. Avec quelques anec-
dotes qui ont precede son depart de France (Mons, 1733).
Relation du voyage d'Aleth contenant des memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de la vie de

messire Nicolas Pavilion, eveque d'Aleth, par Monsieur Lancelot, dediee a Mgr I'eveque
de Senei, exile a la Chaise-Dieu (probably about 1728).
Abbe Goujet, Vie de Nicole, in Continuation des Essais de Morale, vol. 19
(Luxembourg, 1732).
Relation de plusieurs circonstances de la vie de M. Hamon, faite par lui-meme sur le
modele des Confessions de Saint Augustin, 1734, in-12.
Memoires de Messire Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, ecrits par lui-meme, 2 vols.

(Hamburg).
Le Febvre de Saint-Marc, Supplement au Necrologe de Vahhaye de Notre-Dame de
Port-Royal des Champs (1735).
Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de Port-Royal par M. Fontaine, 2 vols (Utrecht,
1736; 2d ed., Cologne, 1738).
Memoires touchant la vie de M. de Saint- Cyran, par M. Lancelot, pour servir d'eclair-
cissement a Vhistoire de Port-Royal, 2 vols (Cologne: Aux depens de la Compag-
nie, 1738).

Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de Port-Royal, par M. du Fosse' (Utrecht, Aux

depens de la Compagnie, 1739).
Barbeau de la Bruyere, attrib., Recueil de plusieurs pieces pour servir a VHistoire de
Port-Royal ou Supplement aux Memoires de MM. Fontaine, Lancelot et du Fosse
(Utrecht, 1740): known as the "Recueil d'Utrecht."

Jean Racine, Ahrege de Vhistoire de Port-Royal, par feu M. Racine, de VAcademie

franfaise, part i (Cologne, 1742): the complete work would appear in Paris in 1767
and 1770.

The "outside friends"

Villefore, La Vie de Madame la duchesse de Longueville, premiere partie, and sec-

onde partie, 2 vols. (1738).
Villefore, La Veritable Vie d'Anne Genevieve de Bourbon, duchesse de Longueville,

par Vauteur des Anecdotes de la Constitution Unigenitus, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1739).

La Vie de Messire Felix Vialart de Herse, eveque et comte de Chalons en Champagne,
pair de France (Cologne, 1738).
A Port-Royal bibliography by Augustin Gazier appeared at the end of a new edi-
tion of the Abregede Vhistoire de Port-Royal (Paris, 1908).
 Port-Royal 351

On the history of the pubUcation of the complete works of Antoine Arnauld, see
Emile Jacques, "Un anniversaire... 1775— 1783," Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique, 70
(1975): 705-730-
On the fate of Pascal's manuscripts and anthologies of printed texts, and in par-

ticular on the work of Mile de Themericourt and the Jansenist milieu, see Jean
Mesnard, "La Tradition pascalienne," in Pascal, Oeuvres completes (Paris, Desclee
de Brouwer, 1964), i: 27—394.
FIGURE 9.0 The Musee du Desert, Mas-Soubeyran.
 CHAPTER 9

The Museum of the Desert:

The Protestant Minority
Philippe Joutard

For the past eighty years, on the first Sunday in September, several thousand
Protestants have gathered in the Cevennes region of France (Gard departemeni) a few
miles from Mialet, in the hamlet of Le Mas-Soubeyran, the birthplace of Roland
Laporte, one of the two great leaders of the Camisards. In the morning they perform
baptisms at various locations in the surrounding forest of chestnut trees, and then
they attend services, just as in the days after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,

when French Protestants held clandestine services "in the Desert." Toward the end

of the morning the worshipers visit the Museum of the Desert, which is in the very
house that Roland lived in. They pause for a long while before the list of those con-
demned to the galleys for their faith, and some point out to their children the name of
an ancestor. They purchase Huguenot crosses and religious and historical literature
before sitting down to picnic lunches. The afternoon is devoted to lectures on a topic

chosen annually, usually to mark the anniversary of some great event (such as the
edict of tolerance in 1987), celebrate a major Protestant figure (Farel in 1965, Guizot
in 1974, Cavalier in 1981), or consider other matters of interest to the community
(such as family day at the Museum of the Desert in 1973, the Refuge in 1986, or
women and the Bible in 1982). At intervals during these sessions the group will sing

hymns favored by the Camisards, such as Psalm 68: "Let God arise, let his enemies
be scattered." Other favorite songs include the Complainte des prisonnieres de la tour de
Constance and especially La Cevenole, a veritable hymn of regional identity. Among
those attending this day of remembrance are not just Cevenols and Languedocians
but Protestants and descendants of Huguenot refugees from all over Europe.
As a site of remembrance, a place for families to gather, the home of the
Museum of the Desert, and, for a time, home as well to a publishing house, Le
354 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

Mas— Soubeyran is today a focal point of French Protestant memory — a fact that is

paradoxical in two senses.

History and Protestant Culture

The first paradox has to do not just with the choice of the Museum of the Desert
but with the very existence of Protestant lieux de memoire. Calvinism, the source of
much of French Protestantism, is of all Christian theologies the least hospitable to
the existence of a profane as opposed to a sacred memory. The only historical event

worthy of recollection is Christ's sacrifice, memorialized in the sacrament of the

Lord's Supper. Because human works play no role in salvation, they do not deserve
to be remembered. The Calvinist refusal to worship saints was another obstacle to

commemoration. The location of Calvin's grave is not known. Calvin was afraid
that his followers might wish to honor his memory, and in any case sixteenth-cen-
tury Protestants were wary of burials: the Ecclesiastical Discipline of the Reformed
Churches of France states that "ministers shall not offer prayers or sermons during
burials, in order to ward off superstitions."

Yet French Protestants have a longer memory than any other religious group.
The name by which they like to call themselves. Huguenots, comes from the six-

teenth century, presumably from eidgnossen, or confederates, a term that originally

referred to Swiss Protestant soldiers and that French Catholics applied to their
adversaries during the Wars of Religion. They have a historical culture that is

closely bound up with their religious culture. For that reason many Protestant pas-
tors in the early part of this century thought it useful to supplement their teaching

of the catechism with lessons from history textbooks such as the Histoire abregee des
protestants de France, textes et recks d Vusage des cours d'instruction religieuse, by Jean
Bastide. Clearly inspired by the petit Lavisse, this work consists of brief lessons

divided into numbered paragraphs followed by a story and a list of questions. The
goal was also quite similar to that of the Lavisse, as the preface made clear: "Our
Reformed Church is, for us Protestants, a second homeland: you must know it, love
it, and serve it as you would France."' Along with textbooks, Protestants also pro-

duced a wide range of historical literature for children, such as Henri Lauga's Fleurs
du Desert, C. Duval's, Recits des guerres cevenoles, and Charles Bost's Le Theatre
pour la jeunesse} The fact that a pastor who developed a scientific approach to

Protestant history and who was the author of a thick treatise on Protestant preach-

ers also wrote five books for young people shows the importance that the Huguenot
community attached to history.^ Indeed, every Protestant publisher of edifying

works, from the Societe Religieuse des Livres of Toulouse in the late nineteenth

century to La Cause in more recent years, has published numerous works on the
"heroes" of the Huguenot adventure.
 The Museum of the Desert 355

This saturation in history goes far beyond reUgious education, however. It suf-

fuses all of Protestant culture, as can be seen from an examination of oral legends:
comparison with Catholics is significant in this respect. Take Mont Lozere.
Cevenols are well aware that this peak at the southern end of the Massif Central is

a major religious boundary: "Papists" live on the north slope. Huguenots on the

south. Clearly both sides of the mountain have witnessed the same tormented his-

tory over the past four centuries: Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, distur-

bances after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and in 1702 the outbreak of the
Camisard uprising with the murder of the Abbe du Chaila at Pont-de-Montvert on
the banks of the Tarn. At the end of the eighteenth century the northern slope of

the mountain was the scene of a Cevenol Vendee. And the inventories of 1906 led

to the most recent incidents. Catholic peasants have forgotten all this: they tell wolf
tales and horror stories that sometimes include bits and pieces of memory but only
after it has been transformed into folklore and stripped of all historical connotation.

Protestants, on the other hand, never tire of commemorating their war. The
American journalist Caroline Patterson discovered this in doing a piece iox National
Geographic: retracing Stevenson's journey through the Cevennes a century later,

she found herself on the slopes of Mont Lozere. "We were invited to a picnic in the

yard of Mme Turc, a venerable widow whose whitewashed stone house enjoys a
magnificent view of the mountains across the river. As she pointed to the summits,
her first words were that these were 'battlefields during the war,' by which she
meant of course the war of the Camisards.'"* Her experience was the same as that of
her Scottish predecessor, who in visiting Florae a century earlier had been aston-
ished to "see what a lively memory still subsisted of the religious war." Stevenson

went on: "These Cevenols were proud of their ancestors...; the war was their cho-
sen topic; its exploits were their own patent of nobility... They told me the country
was still full of legends hitherto uncollected."^
Similar examples from other places could easily be adduced. Speaking of the
Ardeche group, Andre Siegfried pointed out that "in the middle of the twentieth
century one found, barely attenuated, the same passions that sustained the reli-

gious wars; people there still breathe the air of the sixteenth century."'' Marc Bloch
found the same thing in Montpellier: "Was the worthy headmaster of the
Languedocian lycee in which I experienced my baptism by fire as a teacher so
wrong when he warned me, in the gruff voice of a captain of learning, that 'here
the nineteenth century is not so dangerous, but when you come to the Wars of
"'
Religion, be very careful.'''

Apparently the Protestant capacity for commemoration extends beyond religion

per se. In the Drome, for example, they are more likely to recall the resistance to the

coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, than are their Catholic compatriots, even when the
latter's ancestors were more active.^ Furthermore, when French Protestants aban-
356 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

FIGURE 9.1 Re-creation of a Bible reading in a home in the Cevennes in the eighteenth century. Here the
museum curators are trying to emphasize the family-centered nature of the Protestant resistance. One finds
this as well in the construction of Protestant memories and what is called "Huguenot loyalty."

FIGURE 9.2 Desert Assembly; engraving, 1775. Such images were an early form of commemoration, even
before the Protestant community had been officially recognized.

don religious practice or even give up the faith, their historical culture remains. The
oral tradition is as rich among nonpracticing Protestants as among practicing ones
and a source of fierce loyalty to the community: "I never set foot in church, but if

anyone tried to destroy it I would take up arms." This oft- repeated phrase is in part

explained by another that is heard just as often: "The church is a piece of history."^

Huguenot culture produces its own private lieux de memoire, which serve a com-
 The Museum of the Desert 357

munity much as Protestantism is built around local churches. But the choice of a
single site to represent the entire Protestant community of France was another mat-
ter entirely: it was a long-range project.

The Creation of Institutional Lieux de memoire

In the beginning was the Societe de I'Histoire du Protestantisme Frangais

(S.H.P.F.), founded in 1852 by Charles Read, a high civil servant and chef du service

des cultes non-catholiques. Earlier Protestant leaders were primarily preoccupied

with restoring their own churches, and for this they were criticized at the society's
first meeting: "If we are not mistaken, French Protestantism earlier in this century

was misled by other interests and apparently failed to realize how important it was
to know its own history. In some ways it therefore deserves criticism for having

neglected if not altogether abandoned its major share in the common legacy of our
country's history."'" The founding of the society was not an isolated phenomenon.
Six years earlier an important biographical anthology of La France protestante had

been published, and in 1850 a pastor by the name of Gaston de Felice published the
first major Histoire des protestants de France.
At a time of stormy debate between liberal and orthodox theologians, the newly
founded society united the rival factions in a defense of Protestant history, as can be
seen from the makeup of the first committee, which included both Felix Pecaut, a
future collaborator with Jules Ferry and an extreme liberal, and Adolphe Monod,
known for his uncompromising orthodoxy. This concern for reconciliation around
history and for equilibrium among the various religious sensibilities within the
reformed church would be a constant feature of the society's activities. In the year
it was founded it began publishing a Bulletin, twenty-four years before the still-

extant Revue historique (1876). The society also initiated a series of commemora-
tions, at first through the intermediary of the Bulletin, which published articles on
various anniversaries. The first, in 1859, honored the first national synod of 1559,
which prepared final versions of French Protestantism's theological doctrine (the
Confession defoi) and organizational structure (the Discipline^. In 1866 the commit-
tee proposed the inauguration of a Reformation Festival modeled on that of the
churches of the Augsburg Confession, which every year celebrated the anniversary
of the day on which Luther posted his theses in Wittenberg (October 31, 1517). It

suggested the first of November, "a holiday adopted by our brethren of the
Augsburg Confession. Every section of the Evangelical Church should associate

this pious anniversary with commemoration of events from its own history, so that
from the variety of memories a unity of spirit might emerge."" This proposal was
accepted by both the liberal and the orthodox factions, and by November 1866 sev-
eral churches, mainly in the south, were holding Reformation Festivals with the
358 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

same basic structure that would later be incorporated into the ceremony at Le
Mas— Soubeyran: several pastors officiated, sermons were given on the lessons that

could be drawn from the history of Protestant forebears, and various psalms and]
songs were sung. At Uzes, for example, the congregation sang this song:

A la memoire de nos peres

Nous venons consacrer ce jour.
Seigneur exauce nos prieres
Rends-nous avec leurs moeurs austeres,

Leur foi vivante et leur amour.

[We devote this day
To the memory of our fathers.
Lord, grant our prayers.
Give us back not only their austere customs
But also their living faith and their love.]

Sometimes the crowds were so large that the festival was held in the open air, thus

directly recalling the assemblies of the Desert. In Breau, near Vigan, where the evi-

dence showed numerous clandestine meetings to have taken place, "in a few min-
utes, armchairs, benches, and seats were transported or improvised in a vast and
magnificent old chestnut forest, and beneath the vault formed by those magnificent
trees the God of our fathers spoke once again through the mouth of his servants."'^
A further step was taken with the first provincial annual general assembly in

1883. Significantly, the committee chose Nimes and the Cevennes, thus inaugurat-
ing those geographic sites as fountainheads of memory. In Nimes the participants
first listened to the Complainte des prisonnieres de la tour de Constance by the felibre

(Provengal dialect) poet Bigot. The next day they went to Aigues-Mortes, and the
day after that to Le Mas— Soubeyran to visit the birthplace of Roland Laporte, which
the society had just purchased from his last surviving descendant. There they held
an open-air meeting as in the Desert: texts were read from Roland's old Bible, and
a liberal pastor, Viguie, gave a sermon commemorating the Camisard leader. That
night, an orthodox pastor, Bersier, honored the memory of Coligny.'^ Thus the
program largely anticipated that of the "first Sunday in September." It would be
another twenty years, however, before things were finally settled.

In the meantime commemorations proliferated, beginning with the bicentennial

of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In Paris this was an opportunity for

Protestants to give a loud and clear declaration of their loyalty to the nation in a
period of heightened nationalism: of the five speeches given at the Temple de
I'Oratoire, four ended with a celebration of France strangely intertwined with
prayers of thanksgiving. The liberal Viguie told his listeners that "we are preserved
by God for the good of France," while Senator de Pressense, speaking for the
 The Museum of the Desert 359

Independent Churches to which the most orthodox Protestants belonged, implored

heaven in these terms: "Cloak of ignominy and glory, descend, descend upon our
shoulders, so that we may be ready for any duty, for any struggle, wherever God has
placed us to glorify Christ, revive the fatherland, and save souls."''*
In the Cevennes the commemoration was more closely connected with
i
Protestant history. At Saint-Roman-de-Tousque, for example, the Free Evangelical

Churches gathered two thousand people on August 23. The site, on one of the royal
highroads created by Baville to keep an eye on Protestants, was chosen for its cen-

j
tral location in the heart of the Camisard stronghold in the Cevennes. The date, the

eve of Saint Bartholomew's Day, was also chosen as a reminder of past persecu-
tions. The keynote speaker "rapidly retraced the major events of the Camisard War,
mentioning the places where each had occurred." Then La Cevenole was sung for
the first time. The song was composed by an Evangelical with Baptist leanings, a
native of Saint-Jean-du-Gard named Ruben Saillens. The text had already been
published under a headline that read, significantly, "Patriotic and Religious Song"
in the first issue of a newspaper published by the Free Evangelical Churches, La
Cevenole, whose express purpose was "to rescue from oblivion any number of
instructive facts about the glorious history of our mountains and valleys" and to be
"a humble, discreet messengeramong all friends of evangelization in our ancient
and beloved Camisard homeland."'^ The very wording shows how difficult it was
to distinguish between regional attachment and religious loyalty. Note, too, that the
initiators of the movement in the Cevennes were the Evangelicals most loyal to the
thought of Calvin, whose misgivings about the exaltation of heroes have already
been mentioned.
The words of La Cevenole bear out what has been said thus far. From the first
lines the poet establishes a close connection between a landscape and a history:

Salut, montagnes bien-aimees,

Pays sacre de nos aieux,
Vos vertes cimes sont semees

De leur souvenir glorieux.

Elevez vos tetes chenues,
Esperou, Bouges, Aigoual,"'
De leurs gloires qui montent aux nues,
Vous n'etes que le piedestal.

[Hail, beloved mountains.

Sacred land of our forefathers.
Your green peaks are sown
With their glorious memory.
Raise your hoary heads,
PHILLIPE JOUTARD

Esperou, Bouges, Aigoual:

You are but the pedestal

Of their glories, which rise to the clouds.]

The Camisards and the earlier and later nonviolent resistance were also honored:

Les uns, traque de cime en cime,

En vrais lions surent lutter;
D'autres, ceux-la furent sublimes,
Surent mourir sans resister.

[Some, tracked from mountain peak to mountain peak,

Fought like lions;

Others, sublime, found the courage

To die without resisting.]

And the final verse is a prayer:

Cevenols, le Dieu de nos peres

N'est-il pas notre Dieu toujours.'^

Servons-le dans les jours prosperes

Comme ils firent aux mauvais jours;
Et, vaillants comme ils surent I'etre,
Nourris comme eux du pain des forts,
Donnons notre vie a ce maitre
Pour lequel nos aieux sont morts.
[Cevenols, is not the God of our fathers
Still our God.''

Serve him in these prosperous days

As they did in harder times.
And brave as they were.
Like them nourished on the bread of the strong.
Let us give our lives to the master
For whom our forefathers died.]
This hymn met with immediate success. It was published again in 1906 in a very
popular collection of hymns, Sous les ailes de lafoi. Hence it is not surprising to find
that it was featured in the first congregation held at the Museum of the Desert.
Two years later the liberals, who did not want to be left behind, seized on the
hundredth anniversary of the edict of tolerance to organize a major gathering of
their own, on the plane of Fontmort, another high plateau on which combat took
place during the Camisard War. There they erected a huge monolith with the fol-
lowing inscription: "On the occasion of the centenary of tolerance, the sons of the
 The Museum of the Desert 361

Huguenots have erected, on the former theater of combat, this monument to reli-

gious peace and to the memory of the martyrs."''' Evangehcals and Uberals refused
to allow partisan ceremonies, however: "You have also learned that the great
lessons of the past... are not addressed to a few individuals or to the members of one
particular denomination," La Cevenole pointed out, and Le Foyer protestant urged
"all our Protestant brethren to forget that they belong to this or that religious

denomination."'^
Finally, on September 25, 1910, the society's acting president, the historian Frank
Puaux, came to Saint-Jean-du-Gard to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the found-
ing of the Reformed Churches of the Cevennes. Along with his childhood friend
Edmond Hugues, he visited the Laporte home, in which a distant grand-nephew of
the Camisard leader had died in 1891:

The house was empty, dilapidated, abandoned. Was it possible to leave the

poor and rarely visited rooms in such a state, rooms that contained the

indomitable captain's old bed, kneading trough, pitchfork, and Bible.'' No, it

was essential to turn this sacred spot into a vibrant center and to create a sort of
museum that would collect souvenirs of the time when our church was "under
the cross," days of mourning and suffering of incomparable grandeur.'^

Within a year the two men had established a first museum from their own private

collections together with gifts from various families. It consisted of four rooms,
each bearing the name of one or more heroes symbolizing one of four Desert peri-

ods: Brousson, the age of preachers; Roland and Cavalier, the Camisard War;
Antoine Court, the reconstruction of the church after 171 5; and, finally, the calmer
Desert of Paul Rabaut. The museum was dedicated on September 24, 191 1, before
an audience of 2,500.
Puaux and Hugues were not content to leave it at that, however. At the second
assembly, Puaux proposed "a memorial of the time when our churches were under
the cross" to be located next to the museum. This was completed after the war, in

1921. The contrast with the museum was deliberately stark: alongside the traditional
Cevenol home rose an impressive marble sanctuary in the neoclassical style com-
plete with stained-glass windows. Each of the four halls was dedicated to a different

category of victims: executed pastors and preachers; exiles; galley slaves; and other
prisoners, male and female. In the center were lists of names and dates that gave
meaning to the adjacent rooms. A library was added, and families developed the

habit of bequeathing their still-rich religious archives to the museum, including

Bibles, psalters, hymnals, and prayer books.
In addition to the museum-memorial, Puaux and Hugues succeeded in institu-

tionalizing the annual commemoration ceremony. Except for the war years 19 14,
362 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

1916, 1917, 1939, and 1944, Protestants have gathered at the end of every summer
since then to celebrate their history. In 1928 the date of this ceremony was fixed as

the first Sunday in September, and in the following year the organizers decided that

a specific theme would be chosen every year.^'* The event caught on with the pub-
lic: in the 1920s there were already five to six thousand people in attendance; after

1945 the number rose to around 10,000, and after i960 to 15 to 20,000.^' The
Museum of the Desert became the great annual meeting place for Huguenots.
In turn, as the Museum of the Desert gained autonomy from the society that cre-
ated it, it spawned other lieiix de memoire by posting commemorative plaques in var-
ious locations, each of which helped to revive memories and create places where
open-air assemblies gathered on the model of the first September Sunday services.

In 1921, Edmond Hugues presided over the posting of a plaque commemorating the
first synod of the Desert in 171 5 at Monoblet, which restored clandestine
Protestantism after the tortured episode of the Camisards. Between 1921 and 1962,
twenty-four additional ceremonies followed this one in lower Languedoc and the
Vivarais, with one incursion into the Deux-Sevres commemorating the days of the

Camisards with twelve inscriptions.^^ Radio and television broadcasts amplified the

museum's role.

Meanwhile, another set of commemorations grew up around Marie Durand, who

was imprisoned in the tower of Constance at age thirty-eight and who was the

author of the celebrated inscription "Register, Resister" on the stone walls of her
cell. Through her both Huguenot women and nonviolent resistance were honored.
Commemoration of her began at about the same time that the Camisard sites were
rediscovered in 1883 with the visit to Aigues-Mortes and Bigot's lament. In 1925

Edmond Hugues organized a ceremony at the birthplace of Marie Durand and her

brother, the pastor Pierre Durand, at Bouschet-de-Pranles in Ardeche. Two pastors

serving in Ardeche then took it upon themselves to arrange a service on the site

every year on the Monday after Pentecost. In 1930 the ceremonies at Le

Mas— Soubeyran alluded to Marie Durand 's imprisonment in the tower of
Constance. To top it all off, there was the commemoration in 1968 of the two-hun-
dredth anniversary of the liberation of the last female prisoners, first at Bouschet-
de-Pranles, where the Protestant museum of the Vivarais was inaugurated in the

Durand home, then at Aigues-Mortes, and finally at the Museum of the Desert,
where the audience exceeded 25,000.^^ Since that time the Vivarais museum has
drawn four to five thousand visitors annually. The commemoration of Marie
Durand has been a counterpoint to the exaltation of the Camisards. It gained in

popularity as pacifism increased after World War I and especially with the success
of the idea of nonviolence after 1945.
Other sites associated with Protestant memory have proliferated in recent
years, each intended to celebrate the history of a particular community: at Poet-
FIGURE 9.3 Inauguration of the Musee du Desert in Mas-Soubeyran, September 24, 1911.

FIGURE 9.4 Protestant gathering at Mas-Soubeyran in 1987. The two photographs show the importance of

the "great ancient chestnut" trees in this September meeting.

364 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

Laval, for example, for the Dauphine and at Bois-Tiffrey in Vendee for western
France. But these places remain obscure, and none can really rival the Museum of
the Desert. Despite the diligent efforts of volunteers, these places draw no more
than three or four thousand visitors annually, only a tenth to a twelfth the number
of Le Mas— Soubeyran. The most surprising case is the Musee Calvin in Noyon,
located in the birthplace of Calvin himself, which in 1988 drew fewer than three
thousand visitors.^'' Even the Rue des Saints-Peres in Paris, where the Societe de
I'Histoire du Protestantisme has been located for the past hundred years, is less

well known, even to Protestants, than the Museum of the Desert. Of course the
Paris site serves a different clientele (pastors, scholars, and Protestant leaders),
whereas the Museum of the Desert attracts not only average Protestants but also
people of other religions, for many of whom it provides an initial lesson in the his-
torical peculiarities of French Protestantism. But this sociological difference is not
the only reason for the museum's success, which also reflects certain choices from
the Protestant past — choices that constitute a second paradox in French
Protestant memory.

A Paradoxical Historical Choice?

Initially, the society's plan was to cover the entire history of French Protestantism,
according just as much space to the sixteenth century and the origins of
Protestantism as to the so-called Desert period of clandestinity. This much is clear

from the society's early recommendations of work to be done. Among the high

points in the Protestant past, Charles Read mentioned, in his third report of 1855,

"the conduct and actions of the parlements at the beginning of the Reformation and
in reaction to it..., various incidents related to Saint Bartholomew's Day and the

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, those two great moments that are the supreme
questions of our history, then the abjuration of Henri IV, an important problem and
the crux of our modern history (as we are beginning to understand today), and

finally the assemblies and synods of the Desert, those noble gatherings of
Protestantism beneath the Cross. "^^ Indeed, the early summaries published in the
Bulletin from 1852 to 1902 reflect this concern with balance. The figures who
aroused the greatest interest were all from the sixteenth century, from Calvin, by far
the leader, to d 'Aubigne, with Court appearing only in sixth place and Rabaut fils et

pere in eighth and tenth places, respectively. True, the table of subjects gives a
somewhat different impression: the sixteenth century is no longer dominant, with
the clandestine assemblies in first place, galley slaves in third place, and the
Revocation in fifth place, with Saint Bartholomew's and the national synods in sec-
ond and fourth places respectively.
 The Museum of the Desert 365

RANKING BY SPACE IN THE BULLETIN (iN PAGES AND FRACTIONS THEREOF)

Persons Pages
I. Calvin 5-25

2. Beze 3.25

3- Cohgny 3

4. Henn IV 2.5

5. D Aubigne 1.6

6. Duplessis-Mornay 1-5

y. Court
0. rvL/naii 1.4
T A

10. Ra,ba.ut, Paul

1 nemes P3Q6S
I. Clandestine assemblies 4.2

2. Saint Bartholomew's Day 3.2

3. Galley slaves 2.6

4. Synods 2-3

5. Revocation 2.2

The museum, which was housed in a room in the library from 1885 to 1923,

reflected this program in the amount of attention devoted to the sixteenth century

and Henri IV and the relatively limited attention devoted to the period of the
Revocation, which received only one-eighth of the display space and one-quarter of
the document space.

The decision to establish the Museum of the Desert in the home of a Camisard
leader reflected two choices, to focus on the period of the Desert and, within that

period, on the Camisards. These chronological choices implied a shift in geograph-

ical focus as well. The balanced presentation had made it possible to focus on the
north of France as well as the south. Calvin hailed from Picardy, and the first

national synod, to say nothing of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, took
The Desert was essentially south of the Loire, and the Camisard War
place in Paris.

was confined to the Cevennes and lower Languedoc. To be sure, the commemora-
tions at Le Mas— Soubeyran sometimes touched on matters outside the Desert

period, but such occasions were relatively rare. It was not until 1930 that they first

dealt withAgrippa d'Aubigne and the Augsburg Confession. The assembly of 1959
celebrated not the four-hundredth anniversary of the first synod, the true founding
act of the French Reformed churches, but the abduction of children and their
placement in convents under Louis XIV. All in all, there were fewer commemora-
tions of events outside the Desert area than there were strictly Camisard celebra-
tions: in the sixty-three years for which we have data, the former numbered twelve,
the latter sixteen.^* The regional connection became clear when the Museum of the
Desert chose to mark the early years of Protestantism in i960, a date commemo-
366 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

rating the advent of the Reformation in the Cevennes, as well as the fiftieth anniver-

sary of the museum's founding.

The Museum of the Desert even influenced the society, to judge by the concerns
reflected in its Bulletin: although sixteenth-century figures such as Calvin, Beze,

Coligny, and Henri IV remain in the lead, the names Cavalier and Roland appear in
the list of Camisard leaders. As for subjects, the Revocation has taken the lead over

Saint Bartholomew's Day. Beyond any doubt the Revocation has become, if I may
put it this way, the founding event of French Protestantism as a whole. True, the
society marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the massacre with a major inter-

national colloquium out of which came an important book, but virtually no other
notice of the occasion was taken apart from the congregation at Le
Mas— Soubeyran. As for 1959, another important anniversary for French
Protestants, it went entirely unnoticed except for a few articles in the Bulletin. By
comparison, the three-hundredth anniversary attracted attention from well beyond
the professional community of the S.H.P.F. and museum staff, indeed from outside
the Huguenot community.
Initially, the only event planned was a major historical colloquium, to be orga-
nized of course by the S.H.P.F. For ecumenical reasons the Protestant Federation of
France was not in favor of other commemorations. But some people were not satis-

fied with a purely scholarly approach, particularly since descendants of the

Huguenots in the countries of refuge were already preparing to celebrate this

anniversary in a more public fashion. One academic, Jean Beauberot, called for a
"modernizing commemoration" of the Revocation in an article published in March

1979 in the Protestant weekly Reforme: "It is essential, I feel, that this reminder of
the infringement of liberty and justice suffered by most French Protestants of the

time should be an occasion for the Protestant community to interrogate itself and the
rest of the country about how things stand with liberty and justice today. "^^ In 1982,

Beauberot joined with several Protestant groups

'

in organizing the Protestantism

and Liberty Committee, which in the end persuaded the Protestant Federation of
France that a formal commemoration of the Revocation would be useful. The mag-
nitude of the event exceeded even the most optimistic predictions of its promoters:
following a formal opening ceremony at unesco on October 11, more than 6,000
people attended two days of meetings on "Protestantism and liberty" during which
present-day implications of the Revocation were discussed. Meanwhile, countless
coUoquia and exhibitions were held in the provinces. A spate of books appeared,

offering further evidence of interest in the event: more than thirty titles were pub-
j

lished, ranging from reprints of classics (such as works by Michelet and Vauban) to

show catalogs to scholarly monographs and popularizations.^"

j

The choices mentioned earlier remain surprising. That of the Camisards to begin 1

with: for a long time they were despised and disavowed because of their violence
 The Museum of the Desert 367

and weakness for prophecy. To be sure, the general attitude toward them had
changed completely since the middle of the nineteenth century.^' But even the
monopoly of the Desert raised problems for some Protestant institutions and lead-
ers. Bear in mind the connection that existed between Protestantism and the emer-
gence of nation-states. In Germany and England the secular ruler took the place of

the pope and became the supreme spiritual authority. Everywhere Protestants used,
in place of Latin, the language of the state, which was not, despite what is often said,
necessarily the language of the people: in southern France, for example, services

were conducted not in Occitan but in French, which some people understood better
than others. The royal expulsion was a traumatic event from which the French
Protestant community has only recently recovered, which explains the nostalgia for

the sixteenth century and the emphasis on participation in the national life and gov-
ernment. It is highly significant that for the commemoration of the bicentennial of
the Revocation, the Temple de I'Oratoire was decorated with the names of "the
most famous Huguenots," among whom the men of the Desert were a small minor-
ity (five out of fifteen); the organizers clearly preferred artists (Palissy, Goudimel,
and Goujon) and even more statesmen and military leaders (Coligny, Mornay,
Rohan, and Duquesne).^^ That is why the first Protestant to be honored with a
statue was Coligny (whose image stands near the Louvre), and it also helps to

explain Charles Read's remark that the abjuration of Henri IV was the "crucial
event of modern history."

Why, then, should Protestants stubbornly persist in commemorating primarily

their period of exclusion from national life.-^ This attitude is even more surprising
given the general tendency of memory to seek the earliest possible founding events.

Memory, Force of Identity

At several points the commemorators betrayed their awareness of the contradiction

between the celebration of one's ancestors and a theology that attributes glory to
God alone. Many justified themselves on religious grounds, as the orthodox Babut
did at the time of the first assembly in 191 1: "Remembering our ancestors should
lead us to measure the extent of our infidelities and the depths to which we have
fallen." The Baptist Ruben Saillens alluded to possible errors in 1922: "To be obedi-
ent to God. ..it is not enough to be an assiduous participant in Huguenot pilgrimages;
to be a true child of God, one has to have experienced the same inward, personal rev-
olution as our ancestors." Pierre Bourguet put it even more clearly in 1954:

"Protestants, beware! Here we are caught between the magnificence of a memorial

and the just appreciation of the acts in question in the light of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ; between our duty to grant legitimate recognition to martyrs and our obliga-
tion to worship God alone!... No servant, moreover, can hold a candle to the divine
368 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

master. We are not here on a pilgrimage in the strict sense.

And we do "^^
not worship 'saints.' The most forceful for-

mulation of the difficulty was given by the present conser-

vator of the Museum of the Desert, Dean Carbonnier, in an
article significantly entitled "Le Desert, lieu de memoire.'*":
"Sons of the Reformation, has not the Reformation caused
us to Our churches broke with the apostolic suc-
forget.''...

cession, and from each of them we expect a new birth. Can

and should the past mean anything to Protestants.'' Are they

not theologically ahistorical .''... Are not our Protestant
commemorations and Desert Assemblies constantly in dan-
ger of becoming hagiographic.''"^'*
Such feelings led some Protestants to oppose the cre-

ation of the Museum of the Desert itself, as Frank Puaux

pointed out: "Glorify the champions of freedom of con-
science.'' Why not canonize them.'' You are trying to create
Protestant saints! What discouraging responses our first

appeals received!"^^ After World War II, many pastors,

influenced by Earth's teachings and hoping for a revival of

FIGURE 9.6 In the Musee du Desert, lists of five thousand galley slaves who died for their faith from 1684 to
1775. Here, individual, family, and collective identities come together.
 The Museum of the Desert 369

Calvinism's original inspiration, refused to pay homage to the Huguenot heritage.

The same sentiment contributed to early doubts about plans to commemorate the

three-hundredth anniversary of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The amplitude of the commemorative phenomenon grew despite the reserva-
tions, however. The vocabulary used, at least until the 1960s, by those who spoke at

Le Mas— Soubeyran is unmistakable: the terms most commonly employed in con-

nection with the period of resistance in the Desert were giant, hero, and epic. There
were even some explicit allusions to the cult of the saints, as in this statement by
Rev. Trial (though an Evangelical) in 1912: "Those who take these venerable relics

as the goal of their pious pilgrimage will feel as though they had been transported
into the midst of the Desert and share a few moments of the experience of the
Desert heroes."^^ Protestants were a tiny minority in France, scarcely two percent
of the population at the end of the eighteenth century: could they preserve their
identity and therefore their existence without a historical memory.'' Of course the
doctrine of predestination, the idea that they, the elect, constituted a small flock, was
already a powerful support, but it was not enough in a society for which the notion
of unity presumed an end to difference.
The recourse to the past was already an important stratagem in the controversy
in which educated Protestants were invariably enlisted, as Elisabeth Labrousse has
noted of the eighteenth-century: "The Huguenots were such a small minority and
so constantly persecuted that any educated man among them was a potential con-

troversialist.... For more than a century the exigencies of debate had led
Protestants into serious debate concerning not only the exegesis of biblical and
patristic texts but also the history of the Church through the ages as well as of the
still recent Wars of Religion, which could so easily be presented in such a way as to
discredit the French Reformation. Every cultivated Huguenot was at least an ama-
teur historian."^'' Gaston de Felice had a similar goal in mind when he published his

Histoire des protestants de France, the first major work in that field: "In the opinion
of the nation Protestantism has suffered the fate of minorities, and of defeated
minorities. The moment people ceased to be afraid of it they no longer deigned to
learn about it, and abetted by such indifference prejudices of all kinds grew up and
took hold. Protestantism should not accept this injustice and must strive to over-
"^^
come the misfortune.

To use history in this way seemed quite abstract to the vast majority of French
Huguenots, however. Personal and family memories were much more effective in
linking the humblest of Protestants to an ancestor who long ago summoned up the
courage to make the "right choice." Such sentiments go back a long way: one finds
signs of them as early as the seventeenth century, and even in men like Pierre

Bayle. When Bayle reverted to Calvinism after a period as a Catholic, he did not
invoke theological motives or arguments from general history of the kind he was
370 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

accustomed to using in his discussions; in his journal, the Calendarium, he simply

noted "ad paternam legem redit" (he returned to the religion of his fathers).^'
Three centuries later we find the same sense of loyalty to a family tradition in

these thoughts of a Protestant from Luberon: "If our parents, our great-grand-
parents, chose this ideology, I think that we, as descendants, can be proud of what
they did.
One reason why French Protestants spontaneously choose to remember the

eighteenth-century Desert period rather than the sixteenth-century Wars of

Religion, and the Revocation rather than Saint Bartholomew's Day, is that these

choices help to form family as well as communal memories. The Wars of Religion
were fought by great nobles and princes of the blood, illustrious figures far from
everyday life and further estranged from the average Protestant by the role they
played in French national history. It was just this feeling that Puaux and Hugues
evoked in their appeal for contributions to help build the Protestant memorial: "In
Paris, opposite the Louvre and a short distance from Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, a

statue of Coligny stands by the apse of the Oratoire. The obscure host of unknown
martyrs who for a century, from the Revocation to the edict of tolerance, died in

order to preserve and perpetuate the Reformation in France still await their monu-
ment.'"" The long repression of an entire population had given rise to a large num-
ber of oral traditions piously transmitted from generation to generation, so that
every Protestant felt that his or her ancestors had been historical actors. Take, for
example, one peasant woman from the Nimes region who described her distant

forebear in these terms: "She was taken to the church and as she stood on the thresh-
old grabbed the wooden door frame. It seems that her nails dug into the wood, and
the gendarme who was prodding her was so moved that he let her go, uttering words
to the effect that he had 'seen enough.' In our view she saved the dynasty [dynastie].

because if she had been baptized a Catholic, all who came after her would have been
Catholic... That is the story we were told, even though it goes back several gener-
ations, so it must have been What I know I told my children, and
told and retold....

they still know it, and my grandchildren know it, and so it will go on, it will go on,
and where it will end no one knows.'"^^ The humblest of Huguenots thus knows that i

he is the heir to a religious lineage to which he must remain loyal: in this respect the

use of the word "dynasty" speaks volumes.

The force of this memory comes from the fact that it is constructed, like French J

Reformed Protestantism itself, of family networks: some people use the popular
image of the tricot protestant: "If you pull one strand, the whole skein comes with
j

it." Intermarriage has allowed this very small minority to survive. Symbolically, '

the Museum of the Desert itself is the product of two family traditions. That of
Frank Puaux was recalled by his son Gabriel, the ambassador, to the 1949 assembly
in the Desert:
 The Museum of the Desert 371

It is with a sense of filial piety that I come today to commemorate this great

The name of Frank Puaux remains, along with that of Edmond

past with you.

Hugues, closely associated with the Museum of the Desert.... My father set
himself the task of preserving an attachment to the historical traditions of this
church in Protestant thinking.... If he illuminated the Huguenot epic, it was in

truth with light from a torch passed to him by his predecessor in life. When he
rose to speak to the inaugural congregation on September 24, 191 1, his first

words were in honor of the memory of his father, Francois Puaux, the popu-
lar historian of French Protestantism in the time of the Awakening, a man
with a talent for providing our Protestant churches with a vibrant and color-
ful account of their past. Among my childhood memories I still have an image
of the man whom Auguste Sabatier called "the last and most authentic repre-

sentative of the old Huguenot type..".. When I used to listen to him telling his
grandchildren stories from our history... I tried to imagine the face and
demeanor of Claude Puaux, our direct ancestor, who in 1 585 was Vallon's del-

egate to the Protestant Assembly at Privas. Will I be worthy, I used to ask

myself, of being a link in the chain.'^'*^

Edmond Hugues was also the son of a pastor who wrote a history of Anduze. His
son, Pierre-Edmond, would later become conservator of the museum and an orga-
nizer of assemblies, and today his son-in-law, Jean Carbonnier, performs the same
functions, even though the S.H.P.F. is officially the owner of the museum.
Traditions were more readily established if they could be related to familiar fea-

tures of the landscape: the cave in which the underground preacher hid, the hidden
valley where the clandestine congregation gathered, the hiding place for the Bible

in the big house, and various markers that stake out the individual geography of
each Protestant family's private memories. Such features cover a wide area,
although the highest density is found in the Camisard stronghold of the Cevennes
and lower Languedoc. The Vivarais, Dauphine, upper Languedoc, and Poitou all

contain numerous reminders of the Desert period. There are also folktales and
laments from all these regions dealing with the martyred preachers and pastors of
the eighteenth century, men who were "heroes" yet at the same time closer to ordi-
nary Protestants than a Coligny — heroic cousins of the faithful. The tone of cer-
tain verses leaves no doubt about this feeling of closeness, as in the opening lines of
this lament, which does not even mention that the hero Desubas, executed in 1745 at
the age of twenty-six, was a minister:

Chers protestants de France,

Venez pour ecouter.
La severe sentence
Qu'on vient de prononcer
372 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

Contre un de nos chers freres,

Dit Monsieur Desubas,

Qu'une main meurtriere
Vendit a nos soldats.
[Dear Protestants of France,
Come hear the severe sentence
Just handed down
Against one of our dear brothers,
Known as M. Desubas,
Sold to our soldiers
By a murderous hand.]'*''

When oral tradition dwindles or disappears, family historical legend can draw on
other sources, beginning with the old Bible in which births, marriages, and deaths
were recorded, as well as copies of prayers, catechisms, and poems piously pre-
served to the present day.''^ What Puaux and Hugues foresaw was the day when
even those sources might fail, and so they created the Memorial at the Museum of
the Desert in which every Protestant family can find its galley slave on the wall.

Such aids are increasingly necessary in an age when rural societies, which had kept
the old traditions alive, are disintegrating. But the intuition of the museum's
founders was even more profound: by bringing all French Protestants together in

one place, they transformed family memories and melded what had been separate
fragments into a unified whole, as Jean Carbonnier points out: "Commemoration
transformed them into a people, the Protestant people, which has a reality in space

and time.'"''' Scholarship and institutionalized commemoration have thus main-

tained the link between Protestants and their glorious past. Group memory, family

memory, and local memory mutually reinforce one another.

The Revocation and the Desert: Multiple Meanings

The memory of the Protestant minority has not been at odds with French national
memory since the nineteenth century. First liberal and later republican historians
treated the Protestant resistance, and especially the Camisard War, as a precursor of

the revolutionary struggle for liberty in 1789: these events fit neatly into the repub-

lican tradition. Thus for Michelet the Revocation was an event of concern not just

to Protestants but to all Frenchmen: "The place that the Revolution occupies in the

eighteenth century was occupied in the seventeenth century by the Revocation of

the Edict of Nantes.... The whole century gravitates toward the Revocation." The
author of L'Histoire de France felt desperate: "The desire to turn back to France's

great love and great pity." The Revocation was in effect the triumph of the anti-
 The Museum of the Desert 373

Revolution, of fate, and the Camisards were the first adepts of "the new church of
modern times," the church of the "Holy Revolution founded on justice and lib-

"The thing was absolutely democratic and popular.. .it was national....
erty":

Nowhere was France greater or more terrifying."'*'' Edgar Quinet went even further
in Za Revolution (1865), a work that caused quite a stir when it appeared, triggering
a violent polemic in the republican camp because of its condemnation of the Jacobin
dictatorship.''^ Not only did Louis XIV's intolerance and 1685 prefigure the Terror

and 1793, but the Revolution, Quinet argued, failed to live up to its principles

because France in the sixteenth century had been unable to complete its religious

revolution. The republican philosopher thus became the leader of all who saw
Protestantism as the form of Christianity best adapted to modern times and 1789.''^

He launched a theme that would enjoy a certain success in years to come: that
France did not fully succeed in modernizing because it failed to become Protestant.

A century later Alain Peyrefitte would take this idea up once more in his best-sell-
ing bookZe Malfrangais (1971).
In commemorating 1685 and celebrating the resistance to absolute monarchy,
Protestants were no longer in danger of calling attention to the difference between
them and the majority of Frenchmen; rather, they cast themselves in the role of an
avant garde, a prefiguration of contemporary France.
Before 19 14, however, there was by no means unanimous agreement about
including Huguenot memory in France's national history. Republicans favored
inclusion, but Catholics and royalists accused Protestants of being in the pay of for-
eign governments. Consider the words of one Languedocian priest, the Abbe
Rouquette: "Always false. Protestantism, which is essentially an antinational polit-

ical party, has tried to pluck strings that strike deep into the human soul in order to

elicit pity for the greatest of crimes. It was in the name of freedom of religion that

they betrayed the fatherland and sold our ports to the English. Matters pro-
gressed slowly until 1950. Abbe Dedieu was still emphasizing political relations

between Huguenots and foreign powers in the thick volume he published in i92i,Ze
Role politique des prostestants frangais de i685 a iji5. But in Camisards et dragons du
Roi (1950), Agnes de La Gorce made no attempt to hide either the length of time
during which Protestants were persecuted in France or the harshness of the repres-
sion. Five years later, the celebrated Histoire religieuse of Fliche and Martin cast no
doubt on "the fundamental patriotism of the Huguenots."^' And the very well
known Catholic historian Daniel-Rops wrote in 1965 that "in its most powerful,
most noble aspect French Protestantism is a religion of the persecuted, of martyrs

for a faith."^^ Since then the distinction between Protestant and Catholic historiog-
raphy has become increasingly tenuous, as the former has abandoned its hagio-
graphic perspective while the latter is no longer willing to justify the policies of
Louis XIV.
374 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

The tercentenary commemoration marked the culmination of these develop-

ments. Catholic periodicals such as La Vie, Temoignage chretien, and Notre histoire

published lengthy articles on the events, and prominent Catholic historians took
part in the occasion through books, colloquia, and debates. The presence of
Cardinal Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, at the unesco ceremony was highly
symbolic, as was the communique issued by a combined Protestant-Catholic com-
mittee on March 21, 1985:

This commemoration is for us an opportunity to reflect together on a history

that at once unites and divides us and on the conflicts that marked it.... Today,
in the eyes of all, the Edict of Nantes of 1598 marked the search for a peace-

ful, progressive solution. Its revocation was an act of intolerance and an insti-

gation to persecution.... We today have a duty to maintain a vigilant eye on the

inalienable right of religious freedom for individuals and communities, and
every majority group has an obligation in ail circumstances to respect the
expression of religious and cultural minorities.^^

More broadly, this three-hundredth anniversary was a truly national commemora-

tion, unlike the two previous centenaries of the Revocation.^'' For one thing, it was
included in the official list of commemorations drawn up by the Ministry of
Culture, as a result of which the National Archives organized a major exhibition
that drew many visitors. Far more significant, however, was the extensive coverage
in the press, from Le Monde to Le Figaro, and including Liberation, L'Express, Le
Point, Telerama, and Le Nouvel Observateur. "Minor Protestant Music" and "The
Return of the Huguenots" were among the titles featured in newspapers that redis-

covered the importance of this minority group in French history, an importance that
far outweighed its tiny numbers: "The Protestants were a major influence, and their

traditions and values have left a deep imprint on today's society."^^ Even more sym-
bolic of the national recognition accorded to the occasion was the participation of

the President of the Republic, Francois Mitterrand, in the evening commemoration

at UNESCO. Appearing with him were a number of government ministers as well as

representatives of other religious groups, as well as numerous descendants of

Huguenot refugees from various countries in the world. Paradoxically, it was this

international dimension that gave the anniversary its national importance, as if

French memory were willing to recognize as fundamentally important only events

recognized as world-historical beyond its borders.

In this respect, too, the tercentenary marked the culmination of a trend that
began in Le Mas— Soubeyran before the end of World War I. In July 191 8, Edmond
Hugues invited the American pastor Mac Farland to preside over the assembly at the

museum, and on Roland's Bible the American speaker took an "oath of allegiance

to Huguenot France" and begged God to "choose him as His humble instrument in
 The Museum of the Desert 375

bringing about a spiritual rapprochement between the French and American

churches."^*" Clearly the museum's promoters no longer feared the accusation of
complicity with foreign powers, which had paralyzed the 1885 commemoration and
practically precluded the presence of foreign delegations. Six years later, the

Huguenot New Netherland Commission organized a "Huguenot pilgrimage" to

Europe in honor of the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of New

Amsterdam (New York). The travelers visited the sites of recent battles as well as

sites of Protestant resistance, including the galleys of Marseilles, the tower of

Constance, and the house of Roland, where they took part in the eleventh assembly
at the Museum of the Desert. From then on descendants of Huguenot refugees reg-
ularly participated in the ceremonies. The movement gathered strength after World
War II, particularly in connection with "army pilgrimages" in which Protestants
from various nato nations participated.
This internationalization was based on the idea that the Huguenot resistance was
a precursor not only for France but for all humanity. At the 1924 assembly, a Boston
clergyman named Leete proclaimed that "nearly 250 years ago these parts witnessed
one of the greatest events in history. Here your parents died for the right to worship
as they pleased. Here they fought for you, for us, and for the whole world.... For two
hundred years you have been our inspiration. You have preached by example. "^^
The rise of totalitarianism and the outbreak of World War II fueled this idea, which
could be glimpsed in several speeches as early as the assembly of 1935, which com-
memorated the 250th anniversary of the Revocation: those who were persecuted for
their faith were compared to the early victims of the Nazis. After 1940 the com-
memoration was deliberately oriented toward the present by the choice of themes:
in 1941 it was "Under the Cross," in 1942 "Loyalty," in 1943 "Freedom" (with a

focus on Rabaut Saint-Etienne as one who had championed freedom during the
Revolution), in 1945 "Resistance," and in 1946 "Restoration." The assembly of
1942 went even further in the direction of reliving the past, for it actually served as

a cover for helping persecuted Jews to escape from Nimes and find hiding places in

the Cevennes; chartered buses were used for the purpose. During the ceremony the
clergyman Boegner asked all present to act as "good Samaritans" toward Jews, and
that night he was even more explicit in a speech to pastors, whom he informed of
the death threat hanging over the Jews and urged to do whatever was possible to
help save them.^^ Many members of the underground resistance in the Cevennes
were of Protestant background and eager to proclaim themselves the heirs of the
Camisards. Among them was Jacques Poujol, the young leader of the Aigoual-
Cevennes resistance unit, who wrote this hymn:

Les fiers enfants des Cevennes

Refractaires et maquisards.
 —
376 PHILLIPE JOUTARD

Montrent qu'ils ont dans les veines

Le sang pur des camisards.
[The proud children of the Cevennes,
Noncooperators and resistance fighters,

Show that the blood in their veins

Is the pure blood of the Camisards.]^'

Memory thus helped to create history.

After the war the Desert period served as a symbol for various forms of totalitar-
ianism and repression. In 1968 various speakers at Le Mas— Soubeyran referred to the

Prague Spring and the subsequent crushing of the Czech liberation movement by
Soviet tanks, and the same theme was of course the centerpiece of the unesco com-
memoration in 1985, as is clear from the conclusion of President Mitterrand 's speech:

The dragonnades, the galleys, the Camisards — are these ancient history.'' Not
at all: they are today's history all over the world. Everywhere minorities are
excluded and rejected, and there are those who would expel — to what
refuge.'^ — those who live with and among memory of what
us.... From the

was, I say again, one of the bloodiest persecutions in our history, we can draw
lessons of fidelity and courage. There is a generation — my generation
which in its youth experienced another drama of exclusion: a choice of death
against conscience or of death with conscience. How can we forget what we
went through.'' Only one duty remains: to teach it to those who will follow us.''"

Yet the multiplicity of meanings implicit in the Desert period does not end there. In
the late 1960s, when many people became concerned with their "roots" and various
regionalist movements developed, the Protestant resisters of the south proved far

more attractive than the memory of Saint Bartholomew's Day in Paris. The six-

teenth-century Wars of Religion lacked the local identification of the Camisard

guerrillas, which the veterans of May '68 saw as a kind of prototypical people 's lib-

eration movement, while the proponents of nonviolence preferred to look back to

Marie Durand, the prisoner of Constance.

Conditions therefore favored the emergence and lasting success of a memory of
the Revocation and the Desert rather than of Saint Bartholomew's Day and the bat-
tles of the sixteenth century. The latter memory left Huguenots trapped in defeat

and misfortune with no prospects for the future. Victims in 1 572, French Protestants
could not even cling to the Edict of Nantes, because 1685 wiped out 1598: all they

had was the Cross without the Resurrection. Then, too, the Revocation made vic-
tims of the Huguenots, but their resistance turned them into a "triumphant people":
"Under the Cross, Triumph." Even in the violent form of the Camisard War, the

Desert offered another advantage over the Wars of Religion so far as memory was
 The Museum of the Desert 377

concerned: in the latter Protestants were one of the "factions"

2"CENTENAiR£ DE lA UBEJRATION
who fomented division and civil war, whereas in the former the D£S PfUSONNlERES HUGUENOTES
persecuted, rejected minority became a precursor of liberty. The ! deiaTocrdeConstance

message, which in the nineteenth century was a message for the

French nation, became international in the twentieth century
with the rise of totalitarianism. The Refuge gave the event a
European dimension that made it even more topical. It was in this
context that theMuseum of the Desert achieved its success, thus
firmly implanting a memory that was a product of oral tradition,
of a century of historical literature, and of the feelings of a com-
munity that saw itself not just as a federation of families and
churches but as a people.
Meanwhile, national consciousness was following a parallel
path. The Revocation, like Saint Bartholomew's Day, was the
result of a political miscalculation by the government, and the
average Frenchman found it easier to identify with the victims of FIGURE 9.7 Stamp commemorating
the two-hundredth anniversary of the
and resistance to misguided policy than with the policy itself. For freeing of the Huguenot prisoners from
the past twenty years, moreover, French culture has sought to the Tower of Constance in Aigues-
IVlortes (1968). Does this memory com-
become less uniform and more diverse though not quite multi-
pete with or complement that of the
cultural. The Protestant minority offers a form of diversity that Camisards?

French culture is capable of accepting.

 CHAPTER lO

Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the

Rue Copernic: Jews at the Heart of
French History
Pierre Birnbaum

In the early 1980s various administrative and political authorities in Paris refused
one after another to provide sites for statues of Captain Dreyfus, Leon Blum, and
Pierre Mendes France, three Jews who at one time or another found themselves at

the center of Franco-French conflict and thus the object of the most violent pas-
sions. It was unthinkable that the head of the Ecole Militaire, where Captain
Dreyfus was dramatically stripped of his rank, should be forced to make amends by
allowing a statue of the man who was deported to Devil's Island to be placed in the
famous courtyard. As for Blum and Mendes France, only the most patient of pedes-
trians would have been likely to stumble upon their statues, at one time hidden in

out-of-the-way nooks of the Jardin du Luxembourg and later in the Tuileries.'

In an area somewhat farther from central Paris, a determined visitor may catch a
glimpse of a small marker, located between two modern high-rises and next to a gas
station, indicating the site of the old Vel' d'Hiv (Velodrome d'Hiver), the one-time
bicycle racetrack that served as a holding area for Jews rounded up in the great

sweep of July 1942. Later, during the Fourth Republic, the same spot was the scene
of a rally in support of the extreme right-wing populist Pierre Poujade, during
which the most vile anti-Semitic outbursts could be heard to emanate from the
crowd. This place of remembrance par excellence has simply vanished. Even worse,
there is apparently no surviving photograph of the July 1942 roundup to preserve a
visual record of the event. The camp at Drancy through which nearly 70,000 Jews
passed in total destitution on their way to Auschwitz and other death camps is today
just a station on the suburban express railway. Recently a barrier of tall bars was
erected around an area within which stand a few buildings that were once part of the
concentration camp. A strange monument bears witness to this fact, but already, in
380 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

this highly urbanized setting, the memory is fading.^ The same is true of the other
camps in which, as early as 1939, so many foreign and, later, French Jews lived in
dreadful conditions before eventually being deported (in nearly all cases). Argeles

and Saint-Cyprien are pleasant summer vacation spots. "Rivesaltes has built its

fame on the flavor of its muscatel, and cows graze around the Noe water tower. No
sign indicates that there were once camps here."^ Beaune-la-Rolande and Gurs are
of course exceptions, but broadly speaking the camps in which the most tragic
moments of the contemporary history of French Jews unfolded are not the objects
of any particular commemorative attention.
Physical sites of Jewish memory in France are quite rare. Jewish memory often
takes a different form: vestiges of the ancient past such as religious objects and man-
uscripts are housed in museums and libraries. In various cemeteries largely

unknown to the public, including those at Haguenau, Rosenwiller,'' and Carpentras,

steles, some of them dating back to the fifteenth century, are slowly sinking into the

earth, and their Hebrew inscriptions, almost entirely effaced, recall the existence of

Jewish communities that have long since vanished. In other cemeteries of more
recent vintage, also located in the east, near the battlefields of the two world wars,
stars of David mark the graves of fallen Jewish soldiers, but here, too, time has
already begun to do its work, slowly erasing these symbols of a tragic history. The
few ancient synagogues in Mende (twelfth century),
France, such as those in
Carpentras, and Cavaillon, are little more than historical monuments for guided
tours. In many small towns in eastern France travelers may still happen upon a busy

rue de la Juiverie, but many of these one-time ghetto streets have been turned into

picturesque tourist traps.

Traces of Jewish memory are thus the exception in the landscape of France, a

profoundly Catholic country dotted with abbeys and churches. The jleur de lys rid

France of heretics as well as serpents, as one poet noted:

Le royaume tres chretien

Oia la foi est enluminee,

Ou n'habite ni juif ni paien.
[The most Christian kingdom.
In which the faith is illuminated.

And no Jew or pagan dwells.]^

Even today in the cathedral of Strasbourg the Synagogue is clearly represented as a

blindfolded figure, symbolizing the permanent blindness of the Jews. Although the
triumphant Republic curbed the public expression of purely Christian values, its

heroes were champions of omnipotent Reason, hence monuments honoring them

evoke only faith in the Nation or in Progress. The national myth in its various ver-

sions pays little heed to representations of any particular group, and those who can-
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 381

not claim a privileged relation to a specific area, to memories rooted in a particular

region, are more or less excluded from the national scene: no public lieu de memoire
gives them substance. In 1953, moreover, when Jews themselves broke with a long

tradition of hostility to monuments and respect solely for books to build in the heart
of Paris the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, they chose an architectural
style that avoided any reference to a specific tradition, and the dedication ceremony
was patterned after the austere ritual of the republican "cult of the dead" and secu-
lar tradition.*^

Absent from the memory of the kingdom and of the nation, French Jews them-
selves often behave as if suffering from amnesia. Their memory is almost entirely
identified with that of France. They have forgotten the events of their own history.
At best their past is hidden away in books of reminiscences. Until quite recently
almost no French Jews were aware of the splendid work of the eleventh-century

rabbi Rashi of Troyes, who wrote authoritative commentaries on the Bible and
Talmud in the local dialect, Champenois, but with the aid of Hebrew characters; or
of the massacres of Jews in Blois and Occitania, in Toulouse and Verdun, when the

Pastoureaux passed through in June 1320;'' or of the Carrieres in Avignon and so

many other episodes, happy or unhappy, in the history of the various Jewish com-
munities that one after another have thrived on French soil over the centuries.^ For
Yosef Yerushalmi all that remains is transhistorical memory, memory of the
the

Exodus from Egypt and the destruction of the Temple, the memory contained in
daily rituals and annual holidays and in moments of passage from birth to death,

during which collective prayers nurse for a brief instant the illusion of time as a con-
tinuum unaffected by history.' This atemporal memory, with its ignorance of the
many episodes that shaped the destiny of the Jews in France, has also been fading,
however, as the general secularization of society proceeds under constant pressure
from the state. The collective consciousness of France has long since been trans-
formed by a secularization of customs and values. This slow erosion of ritual prac-
tices is surely weakening the faculty of memory at a time when everything, or
nearly everything, has already been forgotten.

The Negative Imagination

Since time immemorial the Jews have been a subject of myths of all kinds, and

French memory of them from the Middle Ages to the present is filled with caricat-
ural images. Peasants have never gotten over the fear of the wandering Jew, who,
dressed in rags and starving, anxiously roams the countryside. On seeing him dogs
bark and children run wild. Condemned by Christ to wander about the world, he is

the author of countless crimes, which the peasants of eastern France recount end-
lessly. Accused of pilfering, the Jewish hawker also symbolizes the outsider, the per-
382 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

son who comes from some far-off land and whose mere presence poses a threat to

order and to age-old tradition. Rural and Catholic France sees him as a demon, a
devil whose tricks are to be feared, a sorcerer whose presence is so corrupting that
he deserves to be burned. Though sometimes received courteously, the wandering

Jew is usually driven mercilessly from one region to the next. He turned up unex-
pectedly in Beauvais in 1604, while folktales from other regions have him haunting
the countryside of Brittany or the mountains of the Alps, destroying crops and

riches as he goes. Popularized in the early nineteenth century by Beranger's lament

and boulevard theater, he entered the realm of legend thanks to Eugene Sue, who
etched the image of the wandering Jew into the national consciousness.'^ A magi-
cian accused of ritual crimes, he was repeatedly expelled like the Jews as a group:
the history of the French monarchy was inextricably intertwined with ruthless
repression of the Jews.
In the late nineteenth century Edouard Drumont was still pointing an accusatory
finger at "this race of nomads," and barely half a century ago other anti-Semites

were still pursuing his relentless campaign against "the tribes of Israel.... Beware
Ahasuerus, you wandering Jew! The people's awakening will be terrible." Many
anti-Semitic pamphlets treated Leon Blum as the incarnation of the "wandering
Jew, the destructive Jew" who must once again be expelled. For Maurice Bedel, "the

President of the Council comes from a wandering race and landed in France only
by chance, when fortune might just as easily have taken him to New York, Cairo, or

Vilna." And Marcel Jouhandeau had this to say right at the start of Le Peril juif:
"Although I feel no sympathy for Hitler, Blum inspires a far deeper repugnance in

me. The Fiihrer is where he belongs, whereas Messrs. Blum and Benda do not
belong among us." The same image was used repeatedly to describe such figures as

Georges Mandel and Pierre Mendes France; of the latter it was said that he is "pre-

sumed to be camping now somewhere between the Atlantic and the Pyrenees."

According to one myth, repeated as recently as i960 by the Petit Larousse,

Blum's real name was "Karfunkelstein," and Mendes was often called "Mendes
Bessarabia," "Mendes Jerusalem," "Mendes Palestine," and even "Mendes anti-

France." In the 1980s one heard the term tribu Fabiiis (Fabius tribe) applied to asso-
ciates of Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, who was Jewish.
Forbidden to own land and therefore without ties to it, Jews performed functions
of which the Church disapproved: in traditional imagery they were identified with
usury, speculation, and manipulations of all kinds made possible by their lack of

fixed abode and permanent nonintegration into tightly cohesive social groups.

From age-old Alsatian legends to the novels of Balzac, Jews were depicted as
greedy bankers shamelessly mocking their poor Christian victims. In L'Argent,
Emile Zola paints a terrifying portrait of "unadulterated Jewry, that implacable,

unfeeling conqueror" that makes itself "master of the earth" by means of gold,"
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 383

while Maurice Barres in Les Deracines railed against the corrupting power of money
with which Jews could buy the government, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle in Gilles
self-indulgently dwelt on the unhealthy degeneracy of his Jewish banker father-in-
law. Even Proudhon, Fourier, and Pierre Leroux, theorists of French-style social-

ism, founders of anarchism, and bold Utopian architects, helped to propagate the

symbolism of the Jew as a corrupter of Frenchness and the human race.

Counterrevolutionary literature was just as likely as socialist tracts to pour unre-

lenting scorn on the Rothschilds, the very embodiment of evil and symbol of the
domination of Jewish money. Georges Dairnwaell recounted the Histoire edifiante

et curieuse de Rothschild I ^'^

, Roi des Juifs^ Jacques de Biez denounced Rothschild et le
peril juif, and Jules Guesde, the author of "A mort Rothschild," blasted the "evil
Jew from Frankfurt who for nearly a century has been living like a giant octopus in
the heart of France, sucking its blood through his countless suckers."'^ The myth of
"the two hundred families" further magnified this alleged plot by the great banks,
from which the Jews were allegedly the first to profit. In the period between the two
world wars. La Fleche, Gringoire, and L'Humanite pointed an accusatory finger at

Rothschild, the personification of big Jewish capital, along with his putative allies
of la grande banque protestante. As far as Paul Vaillant-Couturier was concerned, all

of France, "from the Capetians to the Communists," including many of the

nation's industrialists, would do well to band together to outlaw all trusts. And the

chief of all the trusts, according to Andre Marty, was none other than Leon Blum,
the "intimate friend of the greatest cosmopolitan financiers." Maurice Thorez
meanwhile described the socialist leader as "a repugnant reptile, a jackal. ..with

long, crooked fingers,... closely tied to monopoly capitalism," and Florimond Bonte
simply called him "the bourgeoisie's pet.. .the reptile who, when angered, lifts its

head and spits venom."

The leaders of the Communist Party, who frequently identified Jews with inter-
national capitalism, would later shift the brunt of their attacks to other prominent
Jews such as Pierre Mendes France or Frangois Bloch-Laine. Their language is

astonishingly similar to that of the extreme right-wing writer Hector Ghilini, for
whom "the allure of the golden calf explains Blum's shift toward the mur d'argent
[the moneyed interest]." The myth that the leader of the Popular Front dined on sil-
ver dishes was a key image of the period, during which the Action Frangaise tire-

lessly assailed "little Blum, the silverplate Jew of the Conseil d'Etat." In a symbolic
system that was widely shared, the image of the filthy-rich Jew was often completed
by that of the eternal Jew, the revolutionary who from Leon Blum (note the versa-
tility of the symbolism) to the underground militants of the Mouvement
d'Ouvriers Immigres (M.O.I.) to Alain Krivine provoked fears, and was indeed still

a source of alarm when Henri Krasucki took over as head of the Confederation
Generate du Travail (C.G.T.). Different images could run together, as in the case of
384 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

Pierre Goldman, the pro— Third World revolutionary and bank robber, who
became an object of public fascination, and the idea of revolutionary Judaism could
become threatening, as when crowds marched through the streets of Paris in sup-

port of the May '68 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, chanting "We are all

German Jews" as they marched.

In the French political imagination, revolutionary Jews thus coexist easily with
their capitalist coreligionists. Both are modern transformations of the image of the
wandering Jew, which is deeply rooted in the collective memory, and both fuel the
fear of a plot of outsiders to undermine the specific identity of French society. Jews
are accordingly perceived as outsiders availing themselves of the most varied strate-

gies to ensure their own domination. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising

of the Elders of Zion should have been produced in late

that the notorious Protocols

nineteenth century France, given the extent to which the text alludes to traits pecu-
liar to that society. While the Protocols have traveled around the world and been
translated into every language, their acceptance in France was rapid, particularly

since they reinforced firmly rooted beliefs.'^ And there are those who have
attempted to preserve those beliefs right up to the present day by seeing to it that the

Protocols continue to be published: in 1990, Revision and Lectures frangaises, two

periodicals associated with the extreme right, published the full text.

Aliens to la France profonde, instruments of corrupting capitalism, money mas-

ters who pervert morals, instinctive revolutionaries responsible for every social
upheaval, the Jews were almost always spurned by Catholic tradition with its

organic and conservative conception of society. From Abbe Barruel to the liberal

and progressive Francois Mauriac, Catholicism produced countless pamphlets and

textbooks in which the Jew was caricatured as a doomed malefactor. The Jews
threatened to dechristianize France, and for Bonald, for example, their necessary
punishment, following the divagations of the French Revolution, heralded a

redemptive return to the France of an earlier era. In the minds of many Catholics a

latter-day Passion was a prelude to the triumph of Christ. In his Journal oi 1892,

Leon Bloy recorded his "contempt for the filthy, venomous yids who poison the
world." In 1901, Louis Veuillot offered this outburst: "I, a Catholic Christian of
France, as old as the oaks and with roots just as deep... I am governed by vagabonds
in spirit and custom. Renegades or foreigners, they have none of my trust, my
prayers, my memories, or my hopes. I am a subject of the heretic, the Jew, the athe-
ist, and of a mongrel of all those breeds who looks a lot like a brute."
Despite an attitude that led him in the end to recognize Jewish values, Paul
Claudel believed that Jews, by rejecting the Gospel, had excluded themselves from
humanity and that their values were mostly incompatible with the values of the

French. Many of his plays contain highly critical portraits of Jewish characters, and
he often expressed vehemently anti-Semitic sentiments: on the Jews' flight from
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 385

Egypt, for example, he said, "Israel came out of Egypt as one says of smallpox that
"
it 'came out.'

Even Catholics with relatively liberal political views who were outspoken oppo-
nents of anti-Semitism often accepted many of the cliches put forth by Drumont

and his followers. The pro-Jewish, pro-Protestant Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, for

example, did not hesitate to paint a portrait of Gambetta that Drumont would have
had no trouble claiming as his own: "Take Gambetta's profile, with its pronounced
Judaic line: there the Jew's narrow face broadens out into a leonine mask." More
than a half-century later, Frangois Mauriac, as much a philo-Semite as Anatole
Leroy-Beaulieu, remarked in 1937 that "for a Catholic anti-Semitism is not just a sin
against charity. We are connected to Israel, we are united to it, whether we like it or
not," before going on to say that the Jews "cannot monopolize international finance
without making nations feel dominated by them. They cannot pullulate wherever
one of them happens to get in [viz., the Blum ministry] without arousing hatred."

Time and again even the most benevolent Catholics avail themselves of anti-Semitic
images dredged up from the depths of their memory. Even Emmanuel Mounier,
who in 1939 courageously fought against the anti-Semitism of Je suis partout, which
he considered to be "of foreign origin," nevertheless conceded that "there are other
Jewish problems, in that Jews at times have a tendency toward clannishness if not
secession, toward forming foreign bodies [induration] within the national commu-
nity. The cinema, as a matter of fact, is infested by a particularly shady group of
Jews. Higher education before the war was to some extent monopolized by a partic-

ular category of Jews, the rationalists and sociologists. M. Blum imprudently

included in his entourage too many men drawn from a subgroup of politicians, the

Jewish socialists." During this same period, just prior to Vichy and the statutory
exclusion of Jews from the national community, the novelist Georges Bernanos,
who would intervene on behalf of the excluded, seemed to be thinking back to the
message propagated by the newspaper La Croix in the 1880s. Still celebrating the
importance of Drumont 's political thought, Bernanos proclaimed that "the Jew is

the enemy: that has been the Christian cry from Golgotha to the present." And Jean
Giraudoux, the author of a strange Judith, denounced, also in 1939, the "horde" of
"hundreds of thousands of Ashkenazis escaped from the ghettos" only to find him-
self officially charged with the mission of defending the French race.
Even in the writing of authors who prided themselves on pacifism and toleration,
the Jew often figured as a corrupting influence afflicted with various congenital

physical defects. In Jean-Christophe, for example. Remain Rolland associated Jewish

characters with "the ironic, corrosive spirit that gently attacked. ..religion and coun-

try." Furthermore, "Parisian Jews (and Judaized Christians), so numerous in the

theater, had introduced that mishmash of sentiment that is the distinctive feature of

degenerate cosmopolitanism." Rolland mocked his character, Sylvain Kohn, "the

386 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

little German Jew, the oaf [who] had made himself the chronicler and arbiter of
Parisian elegance." Similar stereotypes can also be found in the work of Jacques de
Lacretelle, a writer as well-intentioned as Rolland: his hero, young Silbermann, is

"small and outwardly unprepossessing.... His complexion was pale, verging on yel-
lowish; his eyes and brows were black, his lips thick and cold in color." The "little

Jew" at times transforms himself into the "Messiah" and ultimately decides to go to
America "to make money," leaving the narrator to total up the damage: "It was in

our foyer that Silbermann's devastation was most noticeable. All my gods were
overturned. Once-honored ideas, our minor domestic laws, our conception of the
beautiful — everything had lost its prestige."''^ Andre Gide himself had this to say

about Blum in his journal for January 27, 1914: "The qualities of the Jewish race are
not French qualities." In 1925 he judged Blum's book Du manage to be evidence that
"the Jews are past masters in the art of disrupting our most respected and venerable
institutions, institutions that are the very foundation and cornerstone of our west-
ern civilization, for the sake of I know not what licentiousness and looseness of
morals, which fortunately is repellent to our sensibility, our good sense, and our
instinct for Latin sociability." Twelve years later, in quite a different tone, to be sure,
Louis-Ferdinand Celine poured forth a torrent of scatalogical and sexual insults in

his Bagatelles pour un massacre, in which he accused the Jews of perverting the pure
but naive women of France.
The beautiful Jewess was the female equivalent of the rootless, poisonous Jew. A
sorceress and seductress, she posed a threat to the French male. Over the centuries

Judith symbolized the danger to Christian France. From Balzac to Zola,

Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Romain Rolland, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle,
beautiful Jewesses ready to prostitute themselves in order to deprive Frenchmen of
their manhood were a staple of literature and therefore an obsession in the minds of
any number of men. They embodied a fatal attraction, which according to

Drumont led straight to "the circumcision of all Frenchmen," an idea reformulated

by Paul Lapeyre in his book La Sociologie catholique, in which he lashes out at the

"demons of the Talmud with their pruning shears." For Alfred Fabre-Luce, Proust
and Leon Blum were both "courtesans." Leon Daudet applied the nickname
"Fifille" to the leader of the Socialist Party, a "Hebrew Adonis who wets his bench
in the Chamber," while Charles Maurras made fun of "Fleur-Bleue, baptized with
a pruning shear." The historian Pierre Gaxotte caricatured Blum as an "old
Palestinian mare, forever neighing, moaning, writhing, and fainting." Modeled
after Leon Blum, Lucien Levy-Coeur, one of the central characters of Romain
Rolland 's Jean-Christophe, was supposed to be drawn to pornography and a stranger
to "all that is virile, pure, healthy, and popular," yet he got on "admirably with the

perverted ingenues of bourgeois society, idle, wealthy women." In recent years the
extreme right-wing press of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National described Prime
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 387

Minister Laurent Fabius as a "sexual bomb" with a "mouth such as one might find
on a fat odaUsque in the harem of the SubUme Porte."

Franco-Judaism and the Dissolution of Jewish IVlemory

The survival and periodic resurgence of stereotypes like these is astonishing, indeed
almost incomprehensible, for if there is a country in which Jewish assimilation has
been successful, it is surely France. Indeed, France produced a cultural synthesis,
Franco-Judaism, more complete than that achieved anywhere else: the term implies
a complete unification of values and destinies, a mutual permeability of world-
views, and an identity of behavior. Even in the German Reich, in which the sym-
biosis of German and Jewish culture was so intimate that it yielded in some sense a
common culture that only Nazism was able to destroy, Jews could never fully iden-

tify with the profoundly Christian structure of the state and of society as a whole.
In despair some Jews converted, while others became ultra-patriots or rebelled by
subscribing, for example, to Marxism or quit the Reich for Palestine or the United

States. Those who remained, clinging in spite of everything to their faith in the
Germany of the Enlightenment and of civilization, ultimately experienced the hor-
ror of the camps. Despite an entirely different history, many French Jews met with
the same fate. Indeed, it was their identification with France, and more precisely
with the Republic, that placed them, as we shall see, at the center of Franco-French
conflict, revived the primitive virulence of archaic anti-Semitic stereotypes, and
cast the Jews as absolute enemies of all antirepublican and antidemocratic forces.
The Jews' real encounter with France dates from the events of 1789. At the time
most Jews lived in tight-knit communities in eastern France and virtually governed
themselves. The vexations they had to put up with were mainly local, and they had
little contact with the central government. The far smaller number of Jews who
lived in Bordeaux'^ or Bayonne were already participating in French society as indi-
viduals, but their integration often meant that they lost some of their own identity.

The marriage of France and the Jews thus took place as Enlightenment values were
gaining the upper hand: the authorities' increasing determination to unify the coun-
try required a pool of equal citizens entirely beholden to the liberating state.

Abbe Gregoire hoped to complete the "regeneration" of the Jews, to rescue them
from "moral depravity" and the "sewer" so that they might permanently escape the
condition of "parasitic plants." A man of the Enlightenment and a faithful follower
of the Jacobins and their centralizing practices, Gregoire, like Robespierre, aimed
to do all he could to "dissolve the Jews in the mass of the Nation." "Let us take the
generation that has just been born, that is growing into puberty," he proposed, "and
guide them into state schools," so that they might acquire "healthy ideas" that will
make them forget their "esprit de corps."
 ,»,,, ,» « , ,» , , ; , , . , , :
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par premier Janvier
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Viile biei rcnommie , Je faii bto ir du rkimb Lc9tnontaa'nc'&!i.« roteaux Jc In at traverl^ ,
(^tuod ikis an^
la dMca-DOM, On , c'eft moi , mo cnf P -arl* anquwDC fow; Lcs pk-intrx it Iks va'U}n<t Sans £tre blefS.
SI c*dl flrcaicM toi» Q>u me nom at; Juif crrafiK- Chacttfi mcurtifoDUort Toua chesuua me fontbo^ i'ai Tu dam fAmtiiqM

FIGURE 10.1 The True Portrait of the Wandering Jew, popular image of the eighteenth century.
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 389

It was part of the explicit plan of the revolutionary government to eliminate out-
dated particularisms by strictly requiring students to absorb the civic language and
morality. Jews "are people like us," Gregoire pointed out, "before they are Jews."
Once they learn to stop awaiting the arrival of the Messiah, as they had been doing

for so many centuries, they might be willing to "convert" to some hybrid of

Catholicism and Protestantism compatible with the fraternal ideals of 1789.
The revolutionary government thus took up the Jewish cause in the name of a

liberating messianism of its own, a messianism that was admittedly destructive of

communal institutions, traditions, and values yet ready to adapt itself to the mes-
sianism of the Jews so long as they did not seek to embed it in institutions of their
own. While Mirabeau hoped that microsocieties with cultures of their own could be
preserved within the new nation, the revolutionary proposal that established the
contract setting the terms of Franco-Judaism's existence was prepared to accom-
modate the messianic hopes of the Jews provided that the Jews in turn were willing
to transform those hopes into a rationalist deism acceptable to all citizens.'''

Throughout the history of modern France, the foregoing conditions would

serve as a normative basis for a French-Jewish symbiosis that would over the course
of two centuries arouse the enthusiasm of large numbers of Jews. The Jews of rev-
olutionary Paris made no bones about their commitment: "A single goal dominates

and preoccupies our souls: the good of the Fatherland and the desire to devote all

our strength to it." Once Jews became citizens, they declared themselves ready to
submit "to a uniform plan of public order and jurisprudence." For the next two cen-
turies it was taken for granted that Jews from Adolphe Cremieux to Joseph
Reinach, Emile Durkheim, Marc Bloch, and Raymond Aron would unreservedly
subscribe to Franco-Judaism thus defined. Whether practicing or nonpracticing,
countless French Jews fully identified with the emancipatory goals of the
Revolution. "France," one of them wrote in 1791, just after the vote on emancipa-
tion, "the first country to extinguish the shame of Yehudah, is our Palestine; its

mountains are our Zion."

In a similar vein, Adolphe Cremieux, who served as a minister in several gov-
ernments, also drew a parallel between France 's mission and the messianic vision:
"To the God of Abraham, Isaac, we give our adoration; to our France of
and Jacob
1789 we give our filial admiration; to the Republic of 1870 we give our absolute
devotion. This is our great Trinity."'^ For Cremieux, who in 1870 proposed extend-
ing French nationality to the Jews of Algeria, the France of 1789 truly embodied "a
divine flame" that had since become the expression of Judaism itself. When the
deputy Camille Dreyfus celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Revolution in
1889, he too naturally reverted to the same religious vision: for him, "the men of the
Estates General had, to the sound of thunderclaps, demolished the old law and
founded the new.... You were the Christs of the new passion and the authors of the
39° PIERRE BIRNBAUM

new humanity." Similarly, according to the historian Marc Bloch, "the time of the
Messiah came with the French Revolution." And Theodore Reinach straightfor-
wardly declared that "any Jew today with heart and memory has for his second
homeland, his moral homeland, the France of 1791."^*^ From now on the "memory"
of the Jews would thus trace its beginnings back to the events of 1789.
Even the rabbis were quick to look upon the French Revolution as a divine mes-

sage incarnate. In their patriotic speeches French rabbis liked to draw a parallel
between the Revelation of Mount Sinai and the Revolution, with France in the role

of a "second Moses." Rabbi Abraham Bloch stressed the degree to which "the prin-
ciples of 1789 protect us.. .we live in the land of justice and equality, and in our
hearts we know that we have done all that was expected of us." Rabbi Kahn of
Nimes declared that for him the Revolution was "our exodus from Egypt. ..our
modern Passover," while Rabbi Hermann of Reims drew the ultimate conse-
quences from this religious rapprochement when he stated that France had been
"chosen by Him who guides the destiny of mankind to work for the emancipation
of all the oppressed and to propagate throughout the world the great and beautiful

ideas of justice, equality, and fraternity that were formerly the exclusive heritage
of Israel."
"Israelites," Grand Rabbi Aron of Strasbourg wrote in 1848, "the flag that today

flies above the national courtyard of the French Republic is the sacred banner that

the Eternal One entrusted to Moses.... It is the symbol of the rights of humanity,
which our prophets courageously proclaimed." Jews thus literally identified with
France. French memory and Jewish memory merged, leading to a kind of religious
j

syncretism that made it easy for many Jews to "convert" to the ideology of the

Republic and for a far smaller number to convert to Catholicism, the dominant reli-

gion in the emancipatory France that Jews so adulated.^'

As a result, and even discounting the extreme of conversion to Catholicism,
Jewish life in general was profoundly altered. In a meeting of the Grand Sanhedrin
it was decided that Jewish consistories would become "appendices of the state."

Their mission was to strictly monitor Jewish activities in France in close consulta-
tion with the Ministere des Cultes. For the Grand Sanhedrin "it is the religious duty

of every Israelite born and raised in a state... to regard that state as his or her home-
land.... His interest absolutely must not be separated from the public interest."
Napoleon's Civil Code henceforth took precedence over specific religious laws.^^
The "Frenchification" of the rabbis can be gauged by their choice of models from
French history as well as the Bible, by their official participation in events of

national importance, by their passionate sermons on behalf of the fatherland, by

their new costumes, which made them look more like Catholic priests, by the intro-
duction of organs into synagogues whose facades offered no particular distinguish-
ing marks to passersby, by changes in religious services, and so on.
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 391

At the beginning of the twentieth century, proponents of liberal Judaism even

considered changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday as well as dropping cer-
tain central rituals. For Theodore Reinach, "the religious costumes of the Jews.. .are
delaying their moral fusion with compatriots of other religions. "^^ And Benoit
Fould told the Chamber of Deputies, "in the name of those who profess the religion
to which he has the honor to belong, that they are ready to sacrifice the Sabbath day
of rest on the altar of the nation. More traditionalist, the rabbis of eastern France
tried to slow such transformations of Judaism, but after the Rabbinical School of
Metz was moved to Paris and the Central Consistory imposed (as one can see by
reading the record of its internal deliberations) draconian controls on its provincial

subordinates, nothing seemed capable of halting the process.

Later, the gradual extension of secularizing legislation, which was supported and
in part shaped by numerous Jews from Camille Dreyfus to Paul Grunebaum-Ballin,
was at first opposed but subsequently accepted by the rabbinate. These laws would
contribute to the suppression of public displays of religious particularism, which
would not be revived until Jews from eastern Europe began to arrive after the

beginning of the twentieth century and again when more traditionalist Jews from
North Africa came to France in the aftermath of decolonization. Secularism sym-
bolized the victorious Republic, which had at last succeeded in imposing its order on
a society previously dominated by the Catholic Church. By removing religion from
the public sphere and relegating it to the private, and by transforming the educa-
tional system, whose teachers, steeped in rationalist and positivist doctrines, joined

in the combat against religious forces, secularism, as some rabbis had feared, further

eroded Jewish attachment to communal structures and groups.

The decline of religion, which accelerated over the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury, also led to a decline of a peculiarly Jewish form of collective consciousness and
opened the way to further assimilation, with its reductive effects on both memory
and history. Paradoxically, however, this very assimilation, which was so inti-

mately connected with the very nature of Franco- Judaism, can also be seen as an
inverted form of Jewish messianism, with France as the new Zion.^'' This led, in

Germany as well as France, to a positivist science of Judaism, which, by historiciz-

ing it, stripped away the mythical significance of its unique destiny, which was an
essential ingredient of a specific Jewish identity that could be passed on from one
generation to another. "Jewish science," which understands Judaism purely in
terms of moral values, destroys memory: Jews are seen as the bearers of universal
values which predispose them to form a "community of the spirit" rather than "of
blood" or even merely a specific social entity.

In the 1860s a certain number of Jewish scholars, some of whom had attended
the Ecole Normale Superieur and passed the agregation required to teach particular

subjects at the higher levels, gained access to important academic positions at the
392 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

College de France and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Salomon Munk,
Adolphe Franck, Joseph Derenbourg, did nevertheless participate in various reli-

gious and educational activities in the Jewish community. Many of these same
scholars, including Derenbourg and Munk, had also attended major German uni-
versities, where they studied with teachers like Leopold Zuns. When they returned
to France they brought with them the positivist and rationalist methods developed
by the German scholars who had pioneered the new "Jewish science." Franck, for

his part, was trained in France in the similar methods of Victor Cousin. These
scholars helped to found the Societe des Etudes Juives, where they joined Theodore
Reinach. All gave positivist interpretations of the major Jewish texts.^^

Pursuing this line of thought, Joseph Salvador attempted to analyze Judaism his-

torically as a "positivist religion" which took its inspiration from the French
Revolution, whose efforts to institutionalize equality Salvador deemed similar to
those of the ancient Hebrew republic. James Darmesteter, who taught at the

College de France, also embarked on rigorous research into the intellectual founda-
tions of Judaism since the emancipation, stressing from the outset that "I am a bib-

lical scholar and only the tiniest bit a Jew." Rejecting, as Renan had done, the Mosaic

Law, he argued that "there is no place in France for a history of the Jews; there is

nothing other than a history of French Judaism, just as there is a history of French
Calvinism or of French Lutheranism —nothing other and nothing more." For
Darmesteter, France was the very goal that Judaism had always set for itself in its

prophetic and universalistic vision, the logical consequence. Paris was in the end the
place where Judaism could flourish, for the republican synthesis had finally
achieved a reconciliation with Christianity. For the Jewish academic elite of the
period, as for many rabbis, Jewish universalism was simply conflated with republi-

can universalism, thereby relinquishing any claim to a collective historical incarna-

tion of its own.
In this connection, the creation of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, in which
many of these same scholars and rabbis participated, further reinforced the sym-
biosis whose legitimacy was such that it found itself exported beyond France 's bor-
ders into North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East for the purpose of

continuing the work of regenerating unemancipated Jews undertaken by the

Revolution and Abbe Gregoire: here too, French universalism, which furnished the
mold within which Jewish educational efforts operated, helped to obliterate the cul-

tures and memories of the various communities whose values, practices, and rituals

were deemed to be anachronistic.

In furtherance of the struggle against the "fanaticism," "superstition," and
"obscurantism" of the rabbis, teachers of the Alliance followed the French model
of accelerating the secularization of these Jewish societies, seeking for example to
combat local "jargons": "Jargon must be wiped off the slate," one of them said in
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 393

Casablanca in 1898, unwittingly adopting the perspective of Abbe Gregoire 's

Jacobin report on patois, "translations must be defended, and the French form must
be insisted on." The founding charter of the Alliance had this to say in i860:
"Israelites.. .if you believe. ..that the influence of the principles of '89 is omnipotent
in the world and that it is desirable for the spirit of '89 to make itself felt every-
where. ..join us, give us your cooperation." In this way the Alliance was perpetuat-
ing the ideas of the Haskala, the Jewish movement in the Enlightenment, which also
influenced the pioneers of Jewish science. It used those ideas to denounce tradi-
tional Jewish cultures in the name of emancipation, which alone was capable of
engendering new citizens.^^

Jews in the Republic

The enthusiasm of Jews for the principles of the Revolution as codified in the

Declaration of the Rights of Man, along with their identification with France, can-
not be separated from their actual integration into French society, in which they
increasingly came to occupy positions of prominence. In the July Monarchy certain
Jews achieved considerable visibility in the economic sphere: the Pereire brothers,
for example, were active supporters of Saint-Simon and played a role in creating a
banking system adapted to the needs of an industrializing society. Little by little,

they, along with the Eichtals, the Foulds, the Rothschilds, the Mireses, and many oth-
ers, acquired a public role by way of their role — actually not all that extensive — in

the business world and upper-class society. The press described the receptions,
galas, and balls they attended in the company of the highest aristocracy and even, at
times, the king or, before long, the emperor. These Jews were so visible that the pop-
ular perception of them changed. Where Jews as a group had once been thought of
as vagabonds and beggars, they were now increasingly seen among people of power.
This new image was blurred somewhat by the frequent conversion of Jews in the

public eye. In a sense only the Rothschilds continued to be seen as "court Jews," at

once close to the ruling authorities and in solidarity with other Jews, and for a long
time they were therefore the target of much of the new anti-Semitic animosity.

After the Third Republic triumphed, other Jews suddenly entered the public
arena and slowly established the image of the republican Jew devoted both to the

new political ideal and to the rationalist philosophy that formed the bedrock on
which that ideal rested. Adolphe Cremieux was the first to typify the new Jewish
statesman: after serving as minister of justice in 1848, he briefly became the head of

government in charge of the national defense after the fall of the Empire.
Tocqueville in his Souvenirs characterizes him as an "eloquent louse" and notes his
ugliness and "disheveled" look a few lines after remarking of Goudchaux that
"nothing in his face betrayed the Jew in him, though both his father and mother
 ,

MOTION
% ENFAVEURDES JUIFS,
Par M, GRtcoiRE, Cure d' Embermenil ^
Depute dc Nancy ; precedee d^une Notice
hijlorique , fur les perjecutions quails
viennent d'ejfuyer en divers lieux , no*
lamment en Alface , (jfur I'admiffion
de leurs Deputes a la Barre de I'AJJem.
blee Naiionalc.

A PARIS,
Chez BxiiN, Libiaice , rue Saint- Jacques
N». 17-

1789.

FIGURE 10.2 Motion in favor of the Jews by Abbe Gregoire (1789).

 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 395

were Jews."^^ Closely associated with Gambetta, who had worked in his office as a

young lawyer, Cremieux unwittingly played a crucial role in the birth of the anti-

Semitic myth of the "Jewish Republic."^*^ It was rumored that a clever plot had been
hatched, under which Cremieux, working in Gambetta's shadow, would seize con-

trol of France. To replace the old elites, which remained hostile to the Republic, the

FIGURE 10.3 Adolphe Cremieux (second row,

second from the left), with other members of the

provisional government, 1848; lithograph by

Maurin.

FIGURE 10.4 Visit of Napoleon III to the

Rothschild Estate at Femeres (1862); engraving

from the Five-Hundredth Anniversary Brochure
of Rothschild Brothers.
396 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

leader of the Opportunists did in fact turn to new groups among whom there were
Protestants and Jews. One of his closest friends was Joseph Reinach, who became

secretary of the government in the grand ministere; Gambetta even entrusted

Reinach with the publication of his writings.

With the triumph of the Republic, Jews took advantage of the meritocratic route

to social advancement, entering the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Ecole
Polytechnique and going on to climb toward the highest positions in government.
A new image of the Jew developed: the Jew as an "examination grind" quick to con-
form to the principles of a rationalist and positivist Republic. Joseph Reinach's
brother Theodore offers an excellent example. He won eighteen prizes in the
Concours General, more than any other student of his generation; he could play
Sophocles in the original and went on to become a brilliant numismatist who pub-
lished any number of learned works on ancient Greece and was elected to the

Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The "learned" Jew was born, yet

another caricature often found in novels from the end of the nineteenth and begin-
ning of the twentieth century.^'
Many Jews were now successfully taking the recruitment exams for the civil ser-

vice, embarking on military careers after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique
or Saint-Cyr, becoming magistrates, joining the prefectural corps, passing the agre-
gation, teaching in the university, and even being honored by invitations to join the
College de France or the Institut. Some became prominent figures in French his-

tory: along with Joseph Reinach, a leading political figure before going on to chron-
icle the exploits of the French Army in World War I, there was Abraham Bloch, the
rabbi famous for dying in the same war while holding out a crucifix to a fatally

wounded soldier, a deed that earned him the enthusiastic approval of Maurice
Barres himself; David Raynal, a close friend of Lepine, the prefect who ordered a
crackdown on anarchists at the beginning of the century; Abraham Schrameck, pre-
fect who also became famous for quelling another demonstration, this one
of Paris,
by the Action Fran^aise; Georges Mandel, who established an image of himself as
the tough Jew, showing even right-wing nationalists how to be firm; and the pitiless

strikebreaker Jules Moch. A far cry from literary and artistic Jews such as Offenbach
and Proust and Henry Bernstein, these men and others like them changed the pub-
lic perception of the Jew because, along with other politicians who favored strong
methods, they came to symbolize the quintessence of republican order.
Of course the image of the Jewish intellectual dedicated to truth and beauty was
also current in France in this period, in large part thanks to the work of Charles
Peguy. It was Peguy who opened the pages of his Cahiers de la quiniaine to Jewish

writers such as Edmond Fleg, Julien Benda, and Andre Spire, who created an image
of the Jew as a quasi-mystical being, rendering traditional stereotypes anachronis-
tic. The election of Henri Bergson as the first Jewish member of the Academie
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 397

Frangaise in February 19 14 bestowed institutional recognition on the new figure of

the Jewish thinker. A few other Jews would be similarly honored, from Andre
Maurois, whose Judaism was as ambiguous as Bergson's, to Joseph Kessel, who suc-
ceeded the Due de La Force in 1962. To his adversaries, led by Pierre Gaxotte,
Charles Maurras's erstwhile secretary and the driving force behind all the anti-
Semitic campaigns, Kessel said: "To replace the companion whose magnificent
name has gloriously resounded in the annals of France for a thousand years, whose
ancestors, great soldiers, great lords, great dignitaries, friends of princes and kings,

occupied an illustrious place in France 's history — to replace this man, whom have
you chosen? A Russian by birth, a Jew to boot. A Jew from eastern Europe."
Even before the massive immigration of east European Jews in the late nine-

teenth century once again confused all the conventional images of the Jew, the sym-
biotic period gave rise to the "Israelite," for whom the various kinds of state Jews

served as prototypes. Not only the prefects and generals but also important profes-

sors at the College de France such as James Darmesteter and Jacques Hadamard,
members of the Institut like Salomon Reinach, and a host of Sorbonne professors
including Emile Durkheim, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Leon Brunschvicg, and Marc
Bloch changed the perception of Jews in intellectual circles and perhaps also in the

public at large. Some were almost charismatic thinkers who exercised considerable
influence on their contemporaries. Later, Jews honored by the College de France
from Marcel Mauss to Claude Levi-Strauss to Raymond Aron would exert a moral

influence on generations of students and researchers: in the 1980s Levi-Strauss and

Aron were among those considered to be the leading "master thinkers" of the age.
Take the example of Emile Durkheim. His image was that of a Jew of severe
mien, a zealous proponent of secularism and positivism whose teaching influenced
generations of teachers. A proud patriot and earnest moralist, this son of a rabbi
became the symbol of the rationalist Republic, and in countless pamphlets down to

the time of Vichy he was denounced as the very embodiment of "Jewish science,"
whose cult of reason was blamed for the decadence of organic France. Marc Bloch,
the Jewish historian of the Middle Ages who along with Lucien Febvre founded the

celebrated journal Les Annates, was also the author of a celebrated and poignant tes-

tament composed on the eve of his execution by the Germans for acts of resistance.
In this text he proclaims, one last time, his love of France and his refusal, as a man
steeped in French culture exclusively, to be buried in the presence of a rabbi: "I die
as I lived, a good Frenchman."
More recently, Claude Levi-Strauss and Raymond Aron have been seen by their
fellow citizens as important teachers capable of unraveling the mysteries of primi-

tive cultures and understanding the burning issues of the day. Men of rigor and
learning, they came across on television as scholars of whose Jewish origins not a

trace remained other than their names. Crowning achievements of Franco- Judaism,
398 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

these great men almost succeeded in making their fellow citizens forget that Jews
were in any way different from themselves. Similarly, when Rene Cassin was
interred in the Pantheon along with Abbe Gregoire, the Republic was in effect
bestowing the ultimate recognition on its state Jews, who were now admitted into
the most highly symbolic of mausoleums, a monument that unifies the national
imagination around its Grands Hommes, even if it is still capable of arousing the
indignation of the extreme right.
Henceforth the official national memory would virtually erase the Jews from
France's history: their assimilation into the nation was such that their disappearance
seemed inevitable. Historians of the contemporary period are all but silent on the
subject, at best casting a quick, neglectful glance at Jewish matters. In any number
of conferences and multiauthor works on French identity in the second half of the
twentieth century Jews are purely and simply ignored. Even scholarly works on the

Popular Front and Vichy periods used to maintain a discreet silence about the role
of Jews in those crucial moments in French history. Many historians wrote about

Pierre Mendes France as though he had no specifically Jewish dimension. Because

Jews were assimilated into the Republic, official history avoided any mention of
their origins, almost as though there were something unseemly about the topic.

As a result there is a danger of failing to notice that on the eve of World War II

there were precious few Jews among candidates for the agregadon; or that Jews were
for a long time barred from the Quai d'Orsay, the Inspection des Finances, and the

Cour des Comptes; or many top-notch social clubs still refuse to admit Jews.
that

This same taboo leaves the way clear for foreign scholars, especially Americans and
Israelis, to raise the questions that their French colleagues shy away from. Within
France the history of the Jews in modern times is not a recognized area of study.
Jews can be studied in antiquity or at the latest in the Middle Ages, but modern
Jewish studies, which have been flourishing in many countries for years, have
almost no legitimacy in France. Foreign historians come to consult the archives

about the history of the Jews of Bordeaux, say, or Alsace, subjects on which few
scholarly works have been published in France. Until recently, moreover, it was
mainly foreign scholars who led the way in producing professional studies of the
Dreyfus Affair, the history of the violently anti-Semitic radical right, Vichy, and
even the Poujadist Movement of the 1950s —major episodes in French history in
which the Jews played a central role.

At the Heart of Franco-French Conflict

The strikingly successful assimilation of Jews into French society and their integra-

tion into the state were achievements paradoxically made vulnerable by the close

association of Jews with the fate of the Republic. The emancipation of the Jews by

the French Revolution created an unbreakable tie between the fate of the Jews and
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 399

FIGURE 10.5 Rene Vincent, Philosophy Lesson Amid Flowers {Henn Bergson's first lecture at the College de
France after fiis election to the Academie Frangaise in 1914).

that of the revolutionary tradition from which the Third Republic still saw itself as

drawing its inspiration. The very fact that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen was often presented as symbolizing the Tables of the Law was enough
to convince some observers that the events of 1789 were the result of a conspiracy
of Jews, Protestants, and Freemasons bent on destroying the Catholic soul of
400 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

French society. From Abbe Barruel to various nineteenth- and twentieth-century

right-wing groups, the enemies of the Revolution and the RepubHc repeatedly
directed their hostility at the Jews in particular, and the very repetitiousness of the

caricatures inevitably shaped the consciousness of certain of their fellow citizens.

From General Boulanger to Jean-Marie Le Pen, enemies of the Jews have

depicted them as playing a major role in French history. Jews have consequently
been thrust into the limelight in such a way as to foster any number of contradic-
tory myths. As the Archives israelites perceptively observed, "Caesarism,
Boulangism, nationalism — in short, all the movements that have opposed the
Republic and against which it has had to defend itself —have drawn on the enemies
of Israel in recruiting impassioned spokesmen and valuable, energetic agents.
Militant anti-Semitism has been involved in all the conspiracies whose aim has been
to rid France of the regime of liberty that it had chosen." In 19 14 the same newspa-
per added: "All that anti-Semitism has managed to achieve thus far with its abom-
inable campaign of slander has been to direct the Israelite vote to the republicans

and socialists, for Israelite voters have a natural interest in voting for the side that

poses the least threat to the conquests of 1789." The conclusion was self-evident:

"Nationalism, Boulangism's heir and successor, inevitably arouses tremendous sus-

"^^
picion among French voters.

Of course not all Jews shared this view. It was the rare Jew, however, who
actively campaigned for the Republic's enemies. Apart from Alfred Naquet, the

faithful friend of General Boulanger; the pro-royalist journalist Arthur Meyer; the
lawyer Edmond Bloch, who sat in parliament alongside Maurras and Doriot in the
interwar period; Pierre David, a passionate supporter of the Action Frangaise who
died while paying his last respects to Charles Maurras; Maurice Sachs, whose shady
activities during World War II brought him to the edge of collaboration; and a few
Jewish supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen — apart from these, nearly all French Jews
supported the Republic. This was true of the Reinachs during the Panama scandal,
of Bernard Lazare and the Reinachs during the Dreyfus Affair, of Leon Blum and
Jules Moch during the Popular Front, of Pierre Mendes France and Jean-Jacques
Servan-Schreiber during the Algerian War and Poujadism, and at the present time
of Robert Badinter, Simone Veil, and Lionel Stoleru, favorite targets of the
National Front.
French nationalism, whose main features were fixed in the aftermath of the
defeat of 1870, was rooted in unshakable anti-Semitism, which satisfied the need to

blame the nation's failures on a scapegoat. Edouard Drumont raised anti-Semitic

propaganda to a new level, fashioning and reinforcing stereotypes with such metic-
ulous care that he left an unmistakable imprint on the national consciousness.
Although very few French historians have bothered to take any notice of
Drumont,^^ he undeniably succeeded in transforming the nature of Franco-French
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 401

conflict by offering a single answer to all of France 's social anxieties, a single key to
the solution of all problems, a single remedy for the many conflicts that pitted

Frenchman against Frenchman to the benefit of their common adversaries: the

Jews! Drumont and his many successors captured the French political imagination,
introducing new themes that have been tirelessly repeated ever since. From Dreyfus
to Vichy to Le Pen, the same leitmotif has been sounded. The same old tune has
been sung steadily by the extreme right and occasionally by the extreme left, and it

has even been taken up at times by the moderate right and reformist left: the gist of

the message is that a Jewish conspiracy is to blame for France 's degeneracy, decline,
misfortunes, and military defeats. This refrain has had an irremediable impact on
the place of Jews in French memory. The problem has been compounded by the fact

that traditionalist Catholics (integristes) and, in a different register, some progres-

sive Catholics have also heaped obloquy on the Jews: By imposing rationalist val-

ues that poisoned the country's spiritual heritage, were they not ultimately respon-
sible for all that corrupted Christian France and undermined its true identity.'^

Drumont 's La Francejuive was a best-seller in its day, sold in the millions through-
out rural France with priests often promoting the work. The book combined various
ingredients of thenew nationalism affecting different levels of France 's shared mem-
ory. Echoed as well by La Libre Parole and La Croix, two mass-circulation newspapers

with several regional editions daily, the corrosive theme of the Jewish conspiracy
served as the foundation for a "national Catholicism" whose goal was to undo the
emancipation of the Jews undertaken by the French Revolution; the movement drew
support from socialist "national populism" as well. The Barres episode was emblem-
atic: Maurice Barres, the "prince of letters" adulated by no less a figure than Marcel
Proust himself, argued that "French nationality is intimately associated with
Catholicism," which he called "the expression of our blood." The image of the Jews

was like the negative of that expression: not only could they not understand Berenice
however cultivated or educated they might be, but this foreign "race" must, for all its

assimilation, be rejected because it was fundamentally a source of perversion.^"* In

Mes cahiers, Drumont in these terms: "I love you above all
Barres apostrophized
because I was born a nationalist." And he frequently paid homage to Drumont's "true
genius." Intransigent Catholicism, nationalism, socialistic populism, and anti-
Semitism melded into a single prism, which ultimately affected most aspects of French
historical consciousness. Charles Maurras once remarked that "the nationalist for-

mula was almost entirely the work of Drumont, and Daudet, Barres, and all the rest
of us began our work in the light he shed." Maurras, the theoretician of the Action
Frangaise and pitiless scourge of the Jews, could easily have extended the variegated
list of Drumont's successors, who came from all parts of the ideological spectrum.
The Drumont-Barres-Maurras alliance set the stage for future Franco-French
conflict, pitting the powerful Leagues against the republican state, which was
402 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

accused of being a slave to Jews, Protestants, and

Freemasons, united by a common will to destroy French
identity for the benefit of foreign and cosmopolitan

interests. From Barbey d'Aurevilly to Rodin, from

Cezanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas to

Celine, Lucien Rebatet, and Marcel Jouhandeau,

Gaxotte, Montherlant, Massis, Morand, Drieu, and
Autant-Lara, the adepts of a pure France of the people,
a France embodied by Joan of Arc, Bayard, and Petain,

wished that all the demons perverting her soul might be

consigned to hell. Their fantasies were fed, moreover,

by the ravings of Bernanos and Leon Bloy and other
writers of their school. In many respects the most offi-

cial institutions of legitimate culture, such as the

Academie Frangaise and the Institut, were often tainted

by their influence. And a moderately scrupulous read-

ing of the great French writers of the twentieth century
would reveal any number of embarrassing thoughts and
statements from artists of the stature of Andre Gide,
Paul Valery, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Giraudoux,
Emmanuel Mounier, Anatole France, and Romain
Rolland, proof that the stereotypes invented by the far
right had a considerable unconscious effect where one
least might least expect it.

Take one of the most surprising cases, that of

Anatole France: the plot of L'Orme du mail revolves

around a prefect, M. Worms-Clavelin, the husband of
one Noemie Coblentz, whose father's name was Isaac.

As host to his friend Abbe Guitrel, the prefect, whom

the author has several times identified as an "Israelite,"

"felt in a confused way that, in the presence of this cler-

gyman of peasant stock, as French in his priestly man-
FIGURE 10.6 Alfred Naquet. A very active political ner and type as the blackened stones of Saint-Exupere
leader and author of the divorce law, which gave
and as the old trees of Le Mail, he was become more
rise to violent polemics, Naquet played an impor-
tant role in Boulanger's campaign and was the tar- French himself, naturalizing himself, shedding the
get of continual anti-Semitic attacks. cumbersome remains of his Germany and his Asia. The
FIGURE 10.7 Joseph Reinach. A leading figure of close friendship of a priest flattered the Israelite func-
French Judaism, Reinach, one of the preeminent
tionary. In it he unwittingly savored the pride of
"state Jews," was detested by the nationalists. He
was one of Gambetta's key advisors and later a
revenge. To master and offer protection to one of these
leader of the battle to save Dreyfus. tonsured heads, for eighteen centuries bent by heaven
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 403

and earth on excommunicating and exterminating the cir-

cumcised, was for the Jew an invigorating and flattering

success." Thus the amiable liberal author of La Rotisserie

de la reine Pedauque and of L'lle aux pingouins was the cre-

ator of a portrait of a Jewish prefect that men like

Drumont, Daudet, and Gaxotte would have had no diffi-

culty claiming as their own. And leave it to dear old

Anatole France to lay it on still thicker: "His large, fleshy

nose, his thick lips... his receding forehead above large
pale eyes, betrayed a resistance to all moral delicacy. He
pressed his points and offered Masonic arguments against
Christian dogma." Clearly Anatole France shrank from
nothing. To finish off his portrait, he added that his

Jewish prefect "had inherited no faith from his parents,

who were as much strangers to all superstition as they

were foreigners in every locale," and that if they had any

religion at all, it was the "religion of money."^^ Nothing FIGURE 10.8 General Leopold See. Another
prominent Jewish official, See became the first
is left out, and much to our astonishment we find France,
Jewish general in the French army, in

for a moment at any rate, in the same camp as Drumont, November 1870.

Maurras, and Celine. Even Jean Jaures could lapse long

enough to write an article in which he said that "if Drumont truly had the clairvoy-

ance on which he used to pride himself every morning, he would have confined
himself to denouncing the doings of the Jews as a particularly acute form of the
doings of capitalism.... Such socialism tinged with anti-Semitism would have
aroused few objections among free spirits."^*'

Beyond any doubt, it was the collapse of the Union Generale in 1882 that brought
radical economic anti-Semitism, whose roots can be traced back all the way to the

Middle Ages, once again to the forefront. The explosion of finance capitalism trans-
formed Shylock into an omnipotent monster gnawing away at France 's wealth. The
case was comprehensible: people believed that Jewish bankers had maneuvered to do
in the Catholic bank, deliberately plunging millions of small savers into despair. La
Croix wrote that "the Jewish banks have triumphed on the Paris market.... The Jews
are the kings of finance."^'' A few years later the Panama scandal accredited the
image of the Jew as stockjobber and unscrupulous influence-peddler. As a people's

capitalism came into being, that image spread to the humblest peasant cottage.
Cornelius Hertz and Baron Jacques de Reinach would henceforth haunt the imagi-
nation: the latter's surprising suicide only made the scandal that much more sensa-

tional. La Libre Parole issued daily calls for murder. La Croix screamed for
vengeance against the Jews, while Henri Rochefort, a brilliant polemicist for

Vintransigeant, denounced Jews day after day as "traitors and influence-peddlers."^^

404 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

These various economic disasters were particularly hard on traditionalist

Catholic France: anxiety and panic were the result, as thousands of stunned savers
discovered they had been wiped out in the collapse of a Catholic bank. This hap-
pened at the same time as crowds, portrayed by sociologists such as Le Bon and
Tarde as emotional and wild, seemed to surge into the public sphere.^' This first

full-scale economic crisis occurred just as the "era of the crowd" was undermining
traditional norms, and this made it easier for the image of the Jew, allegedly
responsible for all these misfortunes, to fix itself in the popular imagination, espe-
cially since the Jew was perceived as a foreigner own
concerned solely with his

interests. "Kill the Jews," shouted thousands of ruined savers, joined by those who

seized on the situation to advance themselves and, they hoped, bring down the

Republic. "Kill the Jews": the words resounded in the streets of Paris and large
provincial cities and even in out-of-the-way villages. Panama rekindled the fears
of rural France, reinforced the identification of Jews with capitalist modernity,

and, through a series of bankruptcies, trials, and resignations, assigned them a

demonic role.

Panama prefigured the Dreyfus Affair.'"' It was the latter, however, that dealt a

fatal blow to the idea that many non-Jews held of their Jewish fellow citizens: from
now on it was assumed that the danger came from within the government. If repub-

lican meritocracy could allow treason to insinuate itself into the military, the '

upholder of order and guardian of tradition, the very foundations of the nation-
state were in jeopardy. The fantasy of a Jewish conspiracy was intensified because
the state was seen as a kind of foster father on whom all its citizens depended. The
all but timeless, virtually universal image of the Jew as simian, oriental, thick-
lipped, greedy, and fond of Christian blood no longer applied; the danger now came
from the state 's who had attended the best
loyal servants, those assimilated Jews
schools, who had learned a strict code of discipline, who were steeped in the ethic

of public service, and who retained virtually no trace of their origins. From now on
it was these state Jews who became the object of popular hatred; it was against them

that vengeful fists were raised.

The dramatic events that marked this crucial moment in the history of Franco-
French conflict, from the arrest of Captain Dreyfus to the trial, deportation, and

ultimate rehabilitation, spanned a decade on either side of the turn of the century.

This period, during which France entered modernity, was marked by powerful pop-
ular anti-Semitic actions growing out of the Affair all over France, by an avalanche
of hostile literature affecting even the normally calm pages of local papers in the ,

quiet provinces, and by calls for murder issued by people ranging from the humblest
of scullery maids to Paul Valery himself. The Dreyfus Affair created a new image
of the Jews, which led as if logically to a new expiation, this time that of the nation:

whence the "divine surprise" of Vichy.

FIGURE 10.9 Meaulle, The Degradation, a "great French allegory for the punishment of Dreyfus," after Lionel
Royer, published in Le Journal illustre (January 6, 1895).
4o6 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

Under constant critical pressure from Drumont and his countless followers, the

French political imagination became a battleground in a clash between nationalist

and universalist ideas, a battle in which the Jews were hostages and perhaps victims.

The involvement of intellectuals, which began with the Dreyfus Affair, further
accentuated the new symbolism of the Jews, who were now rejected by nationalist
thinkers as well as considered foreigners to soil, region, and nation by organicist
theorists. It was all rather like boulevard theater written not by cheery fellows like

Offenbach or Halevy but by Corneille and Racine as revised and corrected by the
haughty, indefatigable Barres. France seemed about to embark on a new epic with

new traitors and heroes. The dramatic scene in which Dreyfus was stripped of his

rank in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire by itself inflamed the imagination; end-
lessly reproduced and caricatured, it left a deep imprint on France 's collective con-
sciousness. For many people, perhaps. Devil's Island, to which Dreyfus was
deported, was ideally named to evoke any number of associations and memories.
Zola's "J 'accuse," a forceful plea on behalf of the captain, threw people into still

more consternation, further accentuating the rigid, antique character of this mod-
ern tragedy. Dramatic events followed in quick succession, with a series of unex-
pected and astonishing deaths and suicides. And there was also an almost burlesque

or melodramatic side of things, such as the discovery of Col. Henry's forgery, his
suicide, leaks from certain figures in the case, duels, slaps. The Dreyfus Affair

became a paradigm for all French political theater.

In the memory of French Jews, the Dreyfus Affair remains even today as the
symbol of their always-precarious status as citizens. The fact that a Jewish officer
could so easily be tossed to anti-Semitic mobs calling for his blood throughout
France and even in Algeria, even though he had diligently satisfied all the rules for

integration, was absolutely loyal to the army, and was thoroughly steeped in patri-

otic values, defied understanding and weakened the fundamental contract on which
Franco-Judaism was based. The notorious degradation of Dreyfus remains deeply
embedded in Jewish memory, for the state was not just punishing a captain but pub-
licly denying its Jews, even as the army he had served enthusiastically came together
as one to repudiate his fellow Israelites.

In 1898 there were several hundred anti-Semitic riots throughout France, from
Paris to cities and towns of all sizes. They occurred in nearly every departement,

thus defying the usual explanations in terms of political geography. Crowds of

thousands, drawn from all social classes, gathered to shout "Kill the Jews!"

Sometimes they attacked synagogues or destroyed Jewish homes and stores. Scenes

of rare collective violence, bordering on general hysteria, erupted here and there in

an atmosphere that La Libre Parole, La Croix, and many local papers further poi-

soned day after day. The most sordid forms of anti-Semitism were on display in city
streets, on walls, in printed matter, in poems, in songs, and in widely distributed
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 407

postcards. Well-known artists did not hesitate to lend their talents to the movement.
Degas, who delighted to hear his maid Zoe read to him out loud from La Libre
Parole while he ate lunch, was an all-out anti-Dreyfusard, and joining him in that

camp were Cezanne, Forain (who drew ferocious caricatures of Dreyfus's sup-

porters), Toulouse-Lautrec (who did illustrations for anti-Semitic papers), Rodin,

and Renoir.
An analysis of the justifications offered by the 25,000 people who contributed to
the fund established by La Libre Parole to build a monument in memory of Col.
Henry, the man who forged the document used as evidence against Dreyfus and
who, when found out, killed himself, gives further evidence of the extreme charac-
ter of French anti-Semitism at this stage: one butcher's apprentice said that he
"would gladly spill Reinach's guts"; a lowly priest in Poitou said that he "would hap-
pily chant the Requiem for the last of the yids"; while other contributors poured
venom on "Jewish vermin," "Jewish microbes," and "the Jewish cancer." Some said
that the Jews should be drowned as opponents of the Revolution had been drowned
in Nantes, while others said that they should be broken on the wheel as in days of
yore. The most merciful simply called for the expulsion of noncitizens. More than
4,500 members of the armed forces contributed to this fund, along with many
deputies, university professors, students at the top schools, and professionals.
Among France's leading intellectuals, Paul Valery contributed. Indeed, the poet, in
speaking of Captain Dreyfus, allegedly said to Paul Leautaud, "Let's shoot him and
stop talking about it."'*' Equally striking is the repetitive nature of the desire
expressed by any number of professional organizations and political parties that

Jews should be expelled from the army, the bureaucracy, the legal and medical pro-
fessions, and so on. These calls marked the beginning of a long series of vehement
protests that would bear fruit later, under Vichy, but which would henceforth con-
tinue to fill the pages of the national and local press to say nothing of countless tracts

and pamphlets. Hundreds of examples could easily be cited: invariably these articles

named names in demanding that Jews be expelled from France and that a large num-
ber of occupations henceforth be reserved exclusively for "native" Frenchmen.
While older forms of anti-Semitism based on religious, economic, or racial

motives sometimes proposed that Jews be banned from society, political anti-
Semitism focused its energies on the republican state, calling for an end to the recog-
nition of Jews as equal citizens on the grounds that such egalitarianism was incom-
patible with respect for an organic national identity. This rejection of meritocracy
in any form led straight to the idea of a Judenrein state, a state that would at last be
suitable to a still Catholic France. Between Dreyfus and Vichy, Leon Blum became
the chief scapegoat of this political anti-Semitism, particularly in the Popular Front

period. A graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure, member of the Conseil d'E-

tat, and brilliant literary critic, he was the quintessential assimilated Jew. He became
FIGURE 10.10 >4 Clear-Cut Case; caricature
published in Le Gre/of (October 9, 1898).

Justice outweighs Drumont and his allies.

FIGURE 10.11 National Tramway: carica-

ture published in Le Gre/of (June 12, 1898),

depicts the "Franco-French" war between

right and left.
 —

Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 409

the object of a ferocious, insane hatred, and his presence at the summit of political

power swelled the ranks of the anti-Semitic movement, which grew so powerful
that it almost succeeded in bringing down the republican regime. As in the days of
the Dreyfus Affair, two concepts of legitimacy clashed: one based on the idea of a

rational, secular. Jacobin state open to all citizens, the other based on an idea of
"Frenchness" understood in terms of local roots, of an organicist localism said to
foster a virility capable of overcoming the decadence brought on by effeminate,
cosmopolitan humanism. From Barres to Maurras, Gaxotte, Leon Daudet, and
Henri Beraud, the proponents of a return "to the land and the dead" spoke out
against Jews as wandering nomads drunk on Christian blood, branding them per-
verse seducers as well as incipient homosexuals and revolutionaries. Marx Dormoy
to the contrary notwithstanding, a Jew was not worth as much as a Breton, who nat-
urally embodied the whole history of France. Not only Blum but also Jules Moch,
Georges Mandel, Pierre Mendes France, and any number of Jewish prefects, judges,

and generals were quick to learn this lesson, so immense was the hatred that most of
them had to face. Anti-Semitism grew stronger in the society as a whole even as it

flourished in numerous national and local newspapers across the political spectrum
as well as in songs, poems, and chants at countless meetings throughout France,
during which huge crowds gathered and marched. It was also rampant within the
government itself, as the personnel files of many high functionaries can attest. Long
after the official separation of church and state, these internal administrative docu-
ments continued to identify individuals explicitly as "Jews."

Vichy

The defeat of June 1940 and the subsequent establishment of the Vichy regime

which Maurras called a "divine surprise" —marked the end of the republican

regime that had long amazed both assimilated Jews and more recent immigrants
from Germany and eastern Europe. Jewish history and memory no longer coin-
cided with the history and memory of other French citizens. Even before the defeat,
in 1939—40, German Jews, including some 5,000 children, were interned in camps
like the ones at Saint-Cyprien, Rieucros, Gurs (where more than a thousand
German Jews died of hunger, dysentery, and typhoid), and Vernet, where condi-
tions were even worse than those in German camps at that time.

After Montoire, camps sprang up all over France, from Beaune-la-Roland to

Pithiviers, Noe, Les Milles, and above all, after August 1941, at Drancy. The French
police handed German Jews over to the German police. Vichy issued explicit orders

to begin a ruthless hunt for French and immigrant Jews, almost exclusively carried
out by the French police, which also maintained order in the camps themselves."*^
Excluded from public offices by the Jewish Statute of October 1940, Jews lost all
PIERRE BIRNBAUM

their legal protections.'' Subject to capricious orders, they were required to wear
yellow stars sewn to their clothing and to register with the authorities. Those who
complied were turned over to the Germans and deported. Nearly 70,000 eventually
ended up at Drancy, where they lived under French police guard in dreadful condi-

tions before being shipped off to death camps.

The expulsion of Jews from public office and the various roundups, including the
largest of all, conducted in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1942, were carried out by the

French police and bureaucracy, which lent their services to a Gestapo that had very
few agents on French soil. The prefectoral corps was of great help to the Germans.
A very active role was played by members of other grands corps, including the
Conseil d'Etat, which with the help of such illustrious law professors as Joseph-
Barthelemy, Achille Mestre, Julien Laferriere, Georges Ripert, and others, provided
a legal basis for the exclusion and repression of Jews."*"* Of all the functionaries

charged with carrying out the state 's anti-Jewish policies, virtually none resigned,
and the efficiency of the French bureaucracy earned it the admiration of local

Gestapo officials. All these things prove that the republican regime was over, that it

had been transformed into an authoritarian system. The new regime dreamed of
striking its roots deep into the immutable farmland of France and of focusing the
national memory exclusively on its most Christian kings. '^^ Quite apart from the

German occupation and its policy of racial persecution, Jews henceforth had no place
in France's future. Vichy was not only the end of the process of Jewish emancipation
begun by the Revolution, it was also the brutal destruction of Franco-Judaism.

With their most cherished values under attack, state Jews nevertheless could not
bring themselves to believe that they were being sold out by the very government
in which they vested all They blamed
their hopes. the Nazis for the ostracism that

made them so bitter. Thus Georges Wormser, a one-time collaborator with

Clemenceau, wrote to Marshal Petain on August i, 1941, in these terms:

On December 7, 1792, in Soultz, a small town in Alsace, my great-grandfather

Abraham Bloch, "chief" of the Israelites as his father and his father's father
had been before him, took a solemn civic oath, on behalf of all the people he

represented, as the first mark of the emancipation they owed to the tireless

efforts of Abbe Gregoire. A century and a half has gone by. Yesterday I had
to endure, along with my wife and four children, the humiliation of signing a

statement separating us from the French community. I should forfeit all dig-

nity if I failed to make my protest known to you in the strongest possible

terms.... Disavowed today, reviled as a group in ways we do not deserve, we

appeal to the Soldier, the Chief of State. Because we have brought our chil-

dren up to believe in our pious heritage, will these innocents be deprived of the
only lasting source of contentment there is, that of serving one's Country.'''*^
 1

Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 41

Rene Cassin also observed that "in supposedly free France the work of Abbe
Gregoire and the Declaration of the Rights of Man are trodden underfoot." To the

Jews he said that "no sacrifice —none— will be too great to pay back in part the debt
of emancipation by helping France to regain her liberty and greatness." Similarly, the
deputy Pierre Masse, interned at Drancy before being deported to Auschwitz, wrote
Marshal Petain on the day after Jews were ordered expelled from the French Army:

I would be obliged if you would tell me if I must remove the stripes from my
brother, sublieutenant of the 36th Infantry Regiment, killed at Douaumont in
my son-in-law, sublieutenant in the 14th Dragoons, killed in
April 19 16; from
Belgium in May 1940; from my nephew Jean-Pierre, killed at Rethel in May
1940. May I allow my brother to keep the medal he won at Neuville-Saint-
Vaast, with which I buried him.'^ Finally, can I be sure that no one will take
away my great-grandfather's Sainte-Helene Medal.'^ I want very much to

abide by the laws of my country, even when they are dictated by the invader.

A delegation of eighteen veterans with a total of twenty-five wounds and fifty-six

citations, led by General Boris, had this to say in 1941 to Xavier Vallat, then com-
missioner in charge of Jewish Affairs:

Those French Israelites who gave their lives or who, wounded, gave their

blood or who survived to wear their crosses did not believe they were doing
so for a country that would renounce them. The fathers and progeny of our
dead, our survivors, our maimed, and our wounded, declare through us that,
far from renouncing France in spite of all they have endured, they intend to
add their silent sacrifice of today to their gallant sacrifices of another time. In
this way they hope to be doubly deserving, in a juster, freer future, of the title

Francais, which in their hearts they will never give up even if it be taken from
them by force.

Upon learning of proposed laws excluding them from the French community,
another group of Jews, including Leon Lyon, honorary councillor of the Cour de
Cassation; Louis Halphen, member of the Institut; Robert Debre, member of the

Academy of Medicine; and Leon Rheims, brigadier general, wrote Marshal Petain
in June 1941:

We, Israelites by religion or descendants of Israelites but almost all of old

French families, many with more than a century of history behind them, wish
to state that, born French, we are French and will always remain French. We
constitute neither a race nor a population (peuplement) but an integral part of

the nation, from which nothing can separate us. That is why we unhesitatingly
call upon the venerated Leader, in whom the idea of the nation One and
FIGURE 10.12 A Jew who lost his leg fighting the Nazis in 1940 is exempted from having to wear the yellow
star, while his daughter, being above the age of six, must wear hers.

i
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 413

Indivisible is today embodied, and with anguished consciences urge him to

intervene in order to avoid the tragic consequences of the crudest of decisions.

In February 1941, Senator Moise Levy sent Petain the following letter: "I protest in

the most strenuous terms against the law of October 3, 1940, which was imported
from abroad. In the Homeland of Liberty, the French will one day regain their free-

dom of conscience.'"''' Forced to register as a Jew, Paul Grunebaum-Ballin, who had

played a crucial role in drafting the laws concerning the separation of church and
state and who became president of the honorary section of the Conseil d'Etat, said
this:"We refuse to see ourselves as members of the Jewish religious community, the
only community to which we belong being the French nation." Addressing the pre-
fect, he added this:

Yes, Monsieur le Prefet, for any truly French heart, the violation of the prin-

ciples that have progressively been distilled from the noble, centuries-old tra-

dition of this country, that the French Revolution proclaimed and spread

throughout the world, and that the royalist Charter of 181 5 preserved in their
totality, is a source of pain that nothing can assuage.... The only comfort that

we are allowed is that which stems from an unshakable confidence in an ulti-

mate return to the true spiritual destiny of this "eternal France," this "stan-
dard-bearing" Nation in defense of which so many of my kin met with death
or captivity on the field of battle and that I, for my modest part, have humbly
served for almost half a century with passionate love."*^

Excluded, persecuted, and in many cases exterminated, these state Jews remained
confident in France and its leader, mistakenly ascribing sole responsibility for the

atrocities that they and so many other Jews would suffer in these dark times to

Hitler's Germany. And yet, not only did Laval propose on his own to "deport chil-

dren under sixteen as well," as Dannecker wrote to Eichmann in July 1942, but
Petain, an adherent of Maurrassian ideology, directly associated himself, through his

"lawful" collaboration, with the bloody repression of the Jews and the Resistance."*^
Meanwhile, the entire government embraced the policy of its leaders, going so
far as to withdraw French nationality from those who acquired it under the law of
1927, including nearly half of all Jews, thus deliberately increasingly the likelihood
that these people would be deported.^*^ The Church and its spokesmen ceremoni-
ously sanctified the marshal and for a long time said nothing about the fate of the

Jews, until Monsignor Saliege, Cardinal Gerlier, and Monsignor Theas coura-
geously broke the silence.^' The most celebrated writers and artists carried on with
their activities, which often brought them into direct contact with the occupying

forces.^^ Leading publishers agreed to publish a number of violently anti-Semitic

works.'^ And for most people life continued peacefully enough, virtually the only
 T-

FIGURE 10.13 AND 10.14 Georges Moran, Drancyithe arrival of a boxcar full of children and the showers. Dedicated by
the artist "to the memory of the twelve thousand Jews deported to Germany and exterminated, to hostages martyred
in France, to the precious few companions who escaped, and to the 'friends of the Jews.'"

FIGURE 10.15 Drancy, symbol of the Jewish genocide, was a concentration camp that served as a staging area for
the shipment of Jews in death trains to eastern Europe. Conditions in the camp were dreadful.
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 415

disturbances for several long years being the work of the foreign, mostly Jewish
"terrorists" of the Mouvement d'Ouvriers Immigres.^'' While all this was going on,
a campaign of ruthless terror was being waged by regular French government agen-
cies and police before it was taken over by the Milice, Vichy's paramilitary militia.

Every day saw new Jews enter the camps for shipment to Drancy and eventually to

death, and nothing interfered with the operation of this finely tuned mechanism.

Not one train transporting Jews to Germany was sabotaged, and not one Resistance
attack intentionally targeted one of these death trains on French soil. In August

1942, four thousand Jewish children separated from their parents were deported in

two weeks from Drancy Germany in trains that were guarded by French gen-
to

darmes until they reached the German border. How could Jewish memory not crys-
tallize around such tragic moments, which had the further effect of relegating the
blessed time of emancipation to the distant past.'*

Nevertheless, this "second Inquisition," this Saint Bartholomew's for which so

many anti-Semites had devoutly wished since the Dreyfus Affair, failed to shake the

faith of most French Jews in the basic contract of Franco- Judaism. Confidence in
France the emancipator almost prevailed, as it gradually became clear that outside
the government and its elites a segment of the population repudiated the policy of
annihilation as early as the 1942 roundups^*' As in the time of the Dreyfus Affair,
when the efforts of Zola, Bernard Lazare, Clemenceau, Peguy, Lucien Herr, and,

after a brief delay, Jean Jaures inspired those who supported the Republic and equal-
ity among citizens to confront the other France, anti-Dreyfusard France, and ulti-

mately to restore justice and save the threatened union of France and the Jews,
under Vichy, when the political and intellectual elite played far less of a role in a
struggle for liberty whose stakes were far higher, it was often more modest folk who
did not hesitate to come to the aid of hunted Jews, despite the fact that much of the

public remained, if not always anti-Semitic, at best indifferent to the Jewish plight.

Ordinary policemen warned Jews of impending raids, peasants and priests hid
them, Protestant communities offered them protection. With the belated but crucial
statements by church dignitaries^'' and the actions of a host of civil and religious
associations decisive aid came from the depths of French society and not from the
government, which had given up its claim to embody universal values. After the
war, memories of that aid opened up new possibilities for contacts between Jews
and non-Jews, yet differences remained in the recollections of both sides.

A "New Deal" for Franco-Judaism?

Despite the magnitude of the trauma, nothing changed overnight when the war
ended. The uniqueness of the fate reserved for the Jews was swallowed up in con-
demnations of Vichy. It took nearly fifteen years for Auschwitz to take on symbolic
FIGURE 1016 Ceremonies commemorating the roundup of Jews
and their confinement in the Vel' d'Hiv' on July 16, 1942, held in

Paris on July 16, 1969. Rabbi Kaplan, the chief rabbi of France, is

speaking.

FIGURE 10.17 Paris, July 16, 1992. Robert Badinter is speaking at

ceremonies attended by the president of the Republic.

 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 417

value. Significantly, it took the work of independent and foreign historians in the

early 1960s to reveal the specific French responsibility in the persecution, exclusion,

and martyrdom of more than 70,000 French Jews in a way that began to gnaw at the
national conscience. Indeed, it can be argued that the revelation of the genocide and
the legal proscription of incitement to racial hatred in the immediate postwar period
restored and solidified the terms of the Franco-Jewish consensus as a normal part of
French reality with deep historical roots. After the rehabilitation of Captain
Dreyfus, the Archives israelites stated in July 1906 that "the Dreyfus Affair is over as
far as Israelites are concerned. Its conclusion only makes us love our country all the

more, if such a thing were possible." Similarly, the sociologist Georges Friedmann,
whose encounter with Israel in 1965 was to be the real shock and whose participa-
tion in the Resistance he said only deepened his roots in French soil, observed in ret-

rospect that "it was not France that drove me out of its schools and insulted me, it

was Hitler and Goebbels.... am a French citizen. I am so and shall

Civis gallicus sum, I

remain so, come what may."^^ It was as if the wound had healed in a general climate
of forgetfulness. No more attention was paid to the final squeals of the few remain-
ing anti-Semites, people like the journalists of Rivarol or Maurice Bardeche, than to
the first accounts of the deportees, who went unnoticed despite their numbers.
Night and fog shrouded what was to become Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1956);
silence surrounded the Holocaust about which Claude Lanzmann would make
Shoah (1985). No one wanted to hear what the deportees had to say. The parenthe-
sis had been closed. It was taken for granted that Vichy was in no way representa-
tive of the real France, only an unfortunate excursion. There was deep repression of
two kinds: much of France repressed its guilt, and French Jews repressed knowledge
of the ultimately inexplicable fate that had been visited upon them. Such was the
force of the French-Jewish symbiosis, so powerful was the consensus around the tri-

umphant Republic, that in France, the country in which Zionism was born, few Jews
felt much enthusiasm for the Zionist solution beyond contributing to charitable

funds intended to allow persecuted Jews from eastern Europe to make their way to

Palestine; and not even the creation of the State of Israel in 1949 had much effect on
the adherence of French Jews to the values of integration.^'
The earliest signs that an autonomous Jewish memory might be possible began
to emerge while this consensus was still in effect. For example, the word Jew began
to replace the euphemism Israelite, as if an insult were being turned into a form of
self-affirmation, and this in itself reflects an abrupt and widespread resumption of
a heavy legacy of identity.'''' A new solidarity developed among Jews, both French
and non-French, who through misfortune had suddenly been reminded, if they had
forgotten, that even without a native community, a historical community, or a com-
munity of belief, a community of destiny was always possible to bring them
together with coreligionists of whatever background or nationality who remained
FIGURE 10.18 Transfer of Rene Cassin's ashes to the Pantheon: the symbolic interment of a "state Jew" in

the Pantheon of the Republic.

 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 419

Jews. Sartre 's stinging Reflexions sur la question juive opened up an extrareligious
space of legitimacy for Jewish identity: "The Jew is perfectly assimilable by mod-
ern nations, but he is defined as the one whom nations do not wish to assimilate. The
Jew is a man that other men take to be a Jew." This view is today considered to be
outmoded, but at the time it had a powerfully liberating effect: it provided a first

explanation of what had just happened. Although it did not yet formulate any kind

of "right to be different," it portrayed anti-Semitism not as something for Jews to

endure or disarm but as something for non-Jews to overcome in order to achieve
humanity. This new set of issues became in a sense official at a time when the last

overt and covert barriers to the social and national integration of Jews were disap-
pearing; at a time when the law itself prohibited fomenting racial hatred or discrim-
ination; when the Church, thanks largely to the efforts of Jules Isaac, was renounc-
ing the "teaching of contempt" in the form of the idea that the Jews were a deicide
people, and beginning the evolution that would culminate in the Second Vatican
Council; and finally, when the young state of Israel, with its kibbutzim and farmer-
soldiers was once and for all dispelling the negative image of the cringing, wander-
ing,money-grubbing Jew not only among non-Jews steeped in anti-Semitic
mythology but even among Jews still vaguely influenced by what Heinrich Heine
referred to as "self-hatred." Andre Schwarz-Bart would make use of this new posi-
tive sensibility in Le Dernier des justes (Prix Goncourt, 1959), the first Jewish novel

to offer most Christian France a specifically Jewish dimension of its own history,

the first book to attach flesh and blood to a still skeletal memory.
It was under these circumstances that the outbreak of the Six-Day War was able
to crystallize a new attitude. The renewed specter of a total destruction of the Jewish
nation gave rise within days or even hours to an outpouring of solidarity. For one
thing, a latent memory, which neither the Dreyfus Affair nor Vichy had truly shaken,
suddenly came to life, allowing for historic reawakenings whose roots lay outside
France. For another, General de Gaulle categorically condemned the Israeli offen-

sive, imposed an embargo on miUtary shipments to Israel, which depended mainly

on France for its supplies, and in a vocabulary laden with symbolic language stigma-
tized not just the Jewish state but the Jews as an "elite people, sure of themselves and
domineering." This language was particularly provocative and ill-chosen given the
fact that the end of the Algerian War had recently brought to France, among one
million repatriated citizens, fifty thousand Jews who at that time had few reasons to
feel particularly sure of themselves or domineering and for whom the specter of

expulsion evoked recent and still painful memories. A fissure began to develop.
Even Rene Cassin, one of the first Gaullists and the most honored of state Jews,

suddenly expressed the view that "France is identifying with injustice"^' and split

with the general, whom he accused of being unfaithful to Abbe Gregoire 's emanci-
pating vision. Even Raymond Aron, who as spokesmen for the most assimilated sec-
420 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

ular Jewish opinion was a man above suspicion, voiced his worry and anger, seeing
the beginning of "a new period in Jewish history and perhaps in the history of anti-

Semitism. Anything is possible now, everything is coming back. Persecution, of

course, is out of the question, only malevolence. It is a time not for contempt but for
suspicion."''^ That suspicion had a name: dual allegiance. It suggested a hypotheti-
cal "memory" whose frame of reference no longer coincided with that of France or
the Republic. Later, after a bomb exploded in front of a Paris synagogue on the Rue
Copernic, Prime Minister Raymond Barre aroused further suspicions when in a
strange lapse he distinguished between the Jewish victims of the explosion and the
"innocent French" victims.
A new period.'' In fact, the period between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur
War (1967— 1973), or between May 1968 and the oil crisis of 1974, or between de
Gaulle 's departure from office and the presidency of Valery Giscard d'Estaing, wit-
nessed a series of events which, without altogether undermining Franco-Judaism,
tested its premises in a way that led to changes in three of its traditional tenets.

It is surely an exaggeration to say that assimilation was intended ultimately to

lead to the end of Judaism. In centralized Jacobin France, however, it was supposed
to remain a purely private religious practice. When it expressed itself in other ways,
moreover, it was either in secular humanist terms perfectly compatible with the pos-
itivist Kantianism of republican ethics or in the form of a revolutionary messianism

voluntarily or involuntarily blind to its Mosaic component. This compartmentaliza-

tion now broke down, however, giving French Jewish life, history, culture, practice,
sites, and expressions a more palpable, visible presence than ever before. The col-

lapse of revolutionary utopianism in its Communist and gauchiste forms, which

took place in the 1970s, led two generations of disillusioned socialists to rediscover

their religious roots. This did not always lead to a revival of religious practice and
faith but sometimes to the rediscovery of philosophical and cultural traditions long
obscured by secular rationalism, beginning with the Bible, which the Congres des
Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Frangaise made the center of its program for the first

time in 1982.''^ The rediscovery of Judaism took many forms, from traditional reli-

gious observance to public rallies, from a sharp increase in the number of Jewish
schools to a flourishing of Jewish organizations and celebrations, all expressing in

one way or another a return to Jewish roots and an extension of Judaism beyond its

traditional religious and institutional setting.

A second change had to do with a shift in the composition of the Jewish popula-
tion with the arrival of large numbers of Jews from North Africa. Previously, the

primary tension within the French Jewish community was between Jews of French
origin (whether from Alsace, Bordeaux, or Provence) and immigrants, chiefly from

eastern Europe, who came to France either at the end of the nineteenth century or
in the 1920s and 30s. Now a new tension developed, as austere, discreet Ashkenazi
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 421

Jews lost power within the Jewish community to active, flamboyant Sephardic Jews.
The Sephardim were much more Hkely to observe the traditional injunctions of
Jewish law and were also largely unfamiliar with the French consensus. Like other
repatriated North Africans, moreover, they were more or less consciously resentful
of metropolitan France for failing to defend them. And they were steeped in com-
munity traditions and had learned from long experience of anti-Semitism how to

defend themselves. Sephardic Jews were therefore likely to openly declare their sol-
idarity with Israel and to invest the genocide with intensely sacred status. They also
taught French Jews without a real communal identity the true meaning of "com-
munity." During the 1970s, Sephardim gained control of most of the representative
organs of the French Jewish community, which until then had played little or no real
role in public life because few Jews participated in them. It was mainly young
Sephardim who led the Jewish revival and organized major public demonstrations
in which the Israeli flag was openly brandished, including the Twelve Hours for

Israel (1980), the reaction to the bombing of the synagogue on the Rue Copernic
(1980), and the reaction to the desecration of Jewish graves in the cemetery at
Carpentras (1990). If the Jewish community, like the Jew, was still "imaginary,"
demonstrations that spilled over into the public sphere, though not in violation of
the laws on secularism, could be seen nonetheless as a threat to accepted norms.
The third change in classical Franco-Judaism was connected with the suspicion
of dual allegiance, or, if you will, the idea that a visceral Zionism is in one way or
another responsible for the actions and opinions of French Jews. Here again, as long
as Israel, in the era of left-wing Zionism, could be seen as acting in the tradition of
the national emancipation of oppressed peoples, in keeping with the ideals of revo-

lutionary France, the in any case rather sentimental and idealized Zionism of most
French Jews presented no obstacle to the more or less spontaneous philo-Israeli sen-
timent of the national majority. But the same factors that transformed French
Judaism affected Israel as well, at the same time and for the same reasons but with
far more serious consequences because of the closed nature of Israeli society and

the seriousness of the external threats to its existence. Labor Zionism was sup-
planted by a national and nationalist Zionism, and in the meantime the religious par-

ties grew more powerful and the populist right also made gains. The image of Israel
changed from that of a potentially emancipating country to a power that was in
some respects oppressive: no longer did the waters of the Seine and the Jordan flow
inevitably in the same direction.

This metamorphosis of the classical terms of French Judaism is at once

extremely important and beside the point. Extremely important because, having
developed over a period of fifteen years, it may eventually give rise to an explosive
situation, particularly as the last survivors memory
of the Holocaust die out, for the
of the genocide remains the black hole around which a specific Jewish memory has
FIGURE 10.19 Attack on the Rue Copernic synagogue,
December 1980.

FIGURE 10.20 Demonstration against racism and anti-

Semitism after the desecration of a Jewish cemetery

in Carpentras, May 1990: Grand Rabbi Sitrul< together
with Jean-Pierre Soisson, Charles Miilon, Pierre
Mehaignerie, Pierre Beregovoy, Georges Sarre, and
Yvette Roudy.
 Gregoire, Dreyfus, Drancy 423

been organized. Jewish memory is

going through a period of enthusiastic

reaffirmation associated with the need
to preserve, understand, and above all

transmit a patrimony threatened by the

fatal erosion of time. At the same time,
the lifting of French culpability, which
was the primary instrument through
which that memory was recovered, has
raised fears that banished demons may
return in new or more resistant forms.'^''

The exceptionality of Jewish history

has been questioned in ways that

threaten the sacred status of Jewish

memory. And there have even been
attempts to deny the reality of the exter-
mination.^^ Yet the metamorphosis
is also beside the point because it has
taken place within the now definitively
Figure 10.21 Jews Considered to be French in Accordance with the
established framework of the French game of goose of the revolutionary period, circa 1790.
/.aw; from a

Emancipated by the French Revolution in 1791, the Jews became

Republic. A long-neglected history is
active citizens for the first time.
neglected no longer. A majority consen-
sus exists, and to repudiate that consen-
sus would be all the more difficult in that centralizing Jacobinism is no longer as

strong as it once was and, furthermore, the Catholic Church is striving to develop a

more positive relationship with French Jews.

Basic changes are at work, and Jewish memory is experiencing those changes
both as recognition of a hard-won legitimacy and as a threat to Jewish identity. This
paradoxical situation is quite illustrative both of the ambiguous place that Jews have
occupied and still occupy in French memory as a minority that history has placed at

the heart of the national identity and of the role that France has played — that of a

central laboratory, from Gregoire to Dreyfus to Vichy — in the destiny of the Jews.
 PART III

DIVISIONS OF TIME AND SPACE

FIGURE 11.0 A Street in Landerneau, from Nodier, Taylor, and Cailleux, Voyages romantiques dans
I'ancienne France: La Srefagne; lithograph by Ciceri after Gaucherel, 1846.
 CHAPTER I I

Paris-Province
Alain Corbin

On November 27, 1 796, the Theatre-Frangais performed Les Heritiers by Alexandre

Pineu Duval. In the play the valet Alain learns that an officer thought to have been
lost at sea has unexpectedly returned home, much to the dismay of his family, which
has been busily dividing up his property. The action is set in a castle in the Finistere
region of Brittany, and several of the valet's lines provoked the mirth of the
Parisian audience: "His death caused a stir in Landerneau" (scene i); "It's good for

at least a week's conversation" (scene 2); "Oh! There will be a scandal in

Landerneau" (scene 18); "Oh! What a fine turn of events! I won't say anything, but
it will cause a stir in Landerneau" (scene 23).' The expression "will cause a stir in

Landerneau" entered into common parlance.

The actor who played Alain, Baptiste Cadet, was much appreciated by vaudeville
audiences for his remarkable knack of milking the comedy of repetition. That alone
cannot account for the force of the sketch, however. By the late eighteenth century,
a script like this could count on certain long-standing comic conventions. Along
with Pezenas, Carpentras, Brive-la-Gaillarde, Pontoise, and Quimper-Corentin, a
Landerneau of the imagination was one of a long list of towns whose mere names
sufficed to provoke mirth in Parisian audiences. At that date none of these comic
places had been truly described. They existed in that ill-defined space known as la

province. What fueled the comedy was the supposed inanity of the talk to be heard

in such ridiculous places. Pineu Duval hammered the point home: the lost sailor's

return, he noted, was "good for at least a week's conversation."

Obviously the gap that justified Parisian laughter was not simply geographic.
The notion of la province, moreover, was not an analytic one based on some form of
difference or inequality; it depended, rather, on the perception of a deficiency, an
428 ALAIN CORBIN

estrangement, a privation — the absence of the capital. North and South might be
separated by a concrete Hne of demarcation, but Paris and la province were defined
by their mutual relation.^ So conceived, la province is not to be confused with "the
countryside" (la campagne), nor does it coincide with "the provinces" (les

provinces), which were territorial units with their own history, privileges, institu-

tions, and forms of administration, whose geographic identities were just beginning
to be defined. The province that concerns us here is not the sum total of France 's sev-
eral provinces; it takes the form, rather, of a highly complex sociocultural reality, a

reality that, remarkably enough, evolves in large part independently of political his-

tory. In other words, the history of la province tells one story of how France has been
represented, a story different from the political history of provincial imagery.
La province first appeared in French literature in the mid-seventeenth century, as

the taste for heroism waned and the vogue for the baroque subsided. Its inception

coincided with an "extreme constriction of ideal space,"^ whose dimensions would

ultimately be dictated by the limitations of the Parisian stage. Semantically, la

province was associated with the centralization of both the representation and the

reality of power; based on exclusion, it therefore had connotations of derision from

the beginning. La province figured in, indeed tended to monopolize, a certain com-
ical representation of space. "In the singular," Father Dominique Bouhours wrote
in 1692, "one can scarcely say 'he is a provincial' without laughing,"'' and the vis

comica of the places evoked in Scarron's novel Le Roman comique could be felt only
by contrast with Paris.^

In this period la province also denoted an experience of a particularly intense and

vivid kind. Born of curialization, it was defined as a space deprived of the king's
radiant presence — the hell of disgrace, the banishment of internal exile, the obses-

sive fear of oblivion. La province was defeat; there one was in danger of withering
on the vine, of being contaminated by rust (Bussy-Rabutin) or mildew (Mme de
Sevigne). It was identified with lethargy and hibernation or, worse, symbolic death.
La province was where one went to be "buried alive." "You people of the court,"
Bussy-Rabutin wrote to Benserade, "count the people of province as dead," while
Mme de Sevigne characterized provincials as "people of the other world.
At best la province could become the "desert," that is, a place of refuge devoted
to contemplation, a theater where inner life developed beyond "disillusionment,"
where, borrowing Stoic images of retreat, one waited in triumphant renunciation in

anticipation of the heavenly beatitude to come.

When exile was not voluntary, the irreparable rupture stemming from disgrace
triggered the provincial metamorphosis. Thereafter, if the banished individual
returned to grace, it could only be as a figure of ridicule or a person so broken that
a decision to renounce the world must soon follow. Well-known examples of this

painful experience include Bussy-Rabutin, who, having been banished by the king
 Divisions of Time and Space 429

only from Paris and the court, at first suffered, then resigned himself to his fate; and
Mme de Sevigne, who was forced periodically into exile in Brittany in order to pre-
serve her modest fortune.
Remote from the society of the Place Royale, the salons of Paris, and the

Academy, la province meant privation of proper usage and refined discourse. It was
the opposite of preciosity. The involuntary provincial expected to be condemned to

an absence of conversation and to endure the inevitable patois. One 's command of
language was therefore in danger of being lost, and Mme de Sevigne feared that just
such a calamity would befall her owing to the mediocrity of the company available

in Vitre. For the provincial exile the only hope lay in the joys of hospitality or the
good fortune of finding a great lord sojourning on a nearby estate; short of that, the

best one could do was to befriend the more erudite residents of the larger provin-
cial towns, although such scholars were apt to be woefully out of touch with the lat-

est fashions. No Parisian could hope to sustain his or her linguistic facility on such
learned commerce for very long, not even with the supplement of correspondence,
that essential substitute for genuine conversation that was in those days a crucial ele-
ment of the Paris-province relationship.

The provincial who settled in Paris and hoped to gain recognition there was in

turn obliged to renounce all ties to the milieu from which he sprang. Disparagement
of la province was an obligation incumbent on anyone who wished to win the confi-
dence of the City.^ Moliere himself begged the king's pardon for having exercised
his art so far from Paris for so long. He knew that any portrayal of the provincial
was apt to provoke the laughter of the court. The necessity of self-denial reinforced

a notion of la province that was by no means limited to the Paris-born.

La province, which at the time meant estrangement from both the court and the
City^ and whose strangeness impressed itself on people 's minds more and more
vividly, did not denote any well-defined piece of territory. Racine never actually
described the city of Uzes in which he was condemned to live and which he saw
above all as a place inhospitable to the Muses.^ La province was perceived as a vague
intermediate space between the center of action, which was in Paris, and an exotic
fantasy world.

Yet French soil was not all provincial to the same degree. Remoteness from Paris
heightened provinciality. Caen, the Norman Athens and seat of a prestigious acad-
emy as well as the home of such distinguished sons as Huet, Segrais, and Moisant
de Brieux, all familiar names in the capital, basked in and reflected the light of the
City.'" By contrast, France south of the Loire, especially the Midi, symbolized a sort

of exacerbated province. The inhabitants of that remote territory epitomized the

height of bad taste. Their language was mere gibberish. Gradually these figures

were "carnivalized" and became unreal, like the caricatural puppet Gascons that
amused a Paris eager for symbolic revenge against the once overbearing men of
 '

430 ALAIN CORBIN

Navarre. In this golden age of the gasconnade, the depiction of the boasts, oaths, and
jabbering of these "Gascon" figures eUcited laughter from spectators unconcerned
'
with the realistic portrayal of manners.
Between 1650 and 1670, the theater and to a lesser degree the novel elaborated a

catalog of stereotypes that constituted a portrait of the provincial, whose ridicu-

lousness stemmed from remoteness from the sources of power, if not knowledge.'^

But we must be careful: the provincial was not the same as the rustic. He (or she)

was not one of the countless Parisian domestics sprung from the rural populace.

They, too, were objects of laughter but not as representatives of la province. They
never so much as ventured to utter a well-turned phrase, and the artificial language
that was imputed to them draws on other sources of comic energy. Nor should la

province be confused with those still rustic places close to Paris — Auteuil, Passy,
Vincennes, Vaux, Fontainebleau — places semantically identified with la campagne,

the countryside.'^ Owing to a sort of extraterritorial privilege, moreover, the

chateau of the seigneur with a solid position at court was exempt from provincial-

ity, as was that other temporary refuge of Parisianness, the spa town.''' The charac-
ters in Florent Dancourt's Eaux de Bourbon, for example, are exempt from the
ridicule ordinarily aimed at devalued provincial space. '^
The minor provincial nobility, immune to the allure of the court, now
still

became the focal point of Parisian mockery. The curialized aristocracy sought to
discredit the manners of this group along with its evident devotion to old values.
On the stage, such local worthies as the bailiff and his spouse, the wife of the alder-
man, the provost, the notary, the tax collector, and the magistrate peopled the

reviled province}^ Nobles were given ridiculous names whose characterological

connotations triggered laughter: M. de la Dandiniere, de la Prudoterie, de
Sotenville, de Pourceaugnac, le Baron de la Crasse.
The same basic traits recur frequently. The local worthies invariably yearn to be
gentlefolk, people of quality.They burn to know, to understand, and to imitate
Paris. They hunger for recognition. They are eager to show off their good gram-

mar and refined speech. And needless to say, they are doomed to failure. After
enduring, along with M. de Pourceaugnac, repeated disappointments and suffering
from an obsessive fear of being duped, they eventually return to la province, which

they should never have left in the first place.

In the eyes of the Parisian, the provincial was characterized first of all by his

appearance, his "provincial look." Yet the impatient newcomer's first wish was to

rid himself of his embarrassing cloak in order to "live in the Parisian style" — an

impossible dream.
The provincial was further characterized by extreme pretentiousness. In every
sphere he betrayed himself by excess, a consequence of insufficient self-control,
incomplete mastery of the necessary codes, and lack of discretion and tact in the use
 Divisions of Time and Space 431

of artifice. To counterfeit society and pass for something other than what one is:

these were the provincial's principal goals, and it was of course child's play for the

Parisian to outwit him. Moliere 's precieuses ridicules are foolish rustics who put on
airs of intelligent refinement.
The final defining characteristics of la province are narrowness and backward-
ness. The provincial lives in a constricted space. His gaze is limited. His interests are

petty. His circle of acquaintances is narrow. The major events of his life unfold
within a narrow ambit. In M. de Pourceaugnac's Limoges, everyone knows every-
one else and all their business. And Dorine's portrait of provincial marriage in
Tartuffe is well known.
While suffering from the slow diffusion of news, la province lived in slow
motion. The delay in receiving the news and the impossibility of taking it in close

to the source engendered avid curiosity in people condemned to live as remote

spectators and forever forbidden to be actors on the central stage. And the women
of the provinces, try as they might, would always remain one step behind the lat-

est fashions.

The men, for their part, continued to partake in some vague way of the sur-

rounding rusticity. They were inappropriate and improper: their crudeness, "thick-

wittedness," and rages fatigued the Parisian, and La Bruyere for one did not fail to

pour scorn on them for that very reason.

Over the years the catalog of stereotypes grew longer, the gamut of traits

widened, and the definition of ethnotypes became more precise. Images of the
provinces enriched the image of la province. One result of the neo-Hippocratic
vogue in medicine was the constitution of a portrait gallery of provincials as their
characters were etched by different climates and bearing even in their physiog-
nomies the stamp of the local patois. As early as 1665, Raymond Poisson paraded a
series of ethnotypes before the reader of his L'Apres-souper des auberges, and this

was soon augmented by Dancourt. Humorous place-names only added to the

ridiculousness of Banneret de Kergrohinizouarne, M. de Kerbabillard, the Norman

Vivien de la Chaponnardiere, and the Gascon Fourbignac.'^
Fascinated by the City and the court, in thrall to a desire for acceptance, immobi-
lized by the expectation of correspondence from Paris, la province offered no coun-
terimage to oppose the disparaging figures of satire, patiently allowing the erudition
of its scholars and prestige of its jurists to be mocked for the amusement of court
society. So eager were provincial academies for the grant of letters-patent from
Versailles that they allowed their growth to be regulated and subjected to scrutiny
and modeled their very activities after Parisian exemplars. Until 171 5, at any rate, the
spread of the academic movement may well have signified, in Daniel Roche 's words,
"the slowing of a provincial dynamism."'^ The academies proclaimed their adher-
ence to the norms of the capital. The academic movement contributed to the spread
432 ALAIN CORBIN

of French and the liquidation of baroque culture. Like satire, the academies no doubt
figured in a strategy whose purpose was to domesticate the provincial nobility.'^

What is striking about this period — the end of the Great Century — is the suc-

cess of an image of la province at first decreed by the center but later accepted, if not
actively internalized, by the very people that image was intended to disparage. The
attitude that emerged then would continue to regulate the Paris-/?rovmce relation-

ship for a long time to come: an attitude of docility, acceptance, even voluntary sub-

mission on the part of provincials who recognized themselves and identified with
the image they saw in the mirror held up by the City. As early as the seventeenth
century, according to some sources, Gascons experienced a desire to make their atti-
tudes coincide with an image imposed on them by others, a literary trope. By mak-
ing themselves accomplices in the strategy, they hoped to free themselves from their
condition; what they got instead was "institutionalization of the trope."^'' Indeed,

Philippe Joutard finds that the people of Marseilles exhibited an astonishing desire
to embody an ethnotype rooted in fiction. The basic desire to conform, which man-
ifested itself on the periphery, thus deepened the division without any deliberate

intention on the part of the central power.

Meanwhile, another factor added further complexity to the configuration of

provinciality. In 1666, Furetiere, in his Roman bourgeois, invented a fictional province
that, strangely enough, was also Parisian. He describes residents of the Place
Maubert quarter of Paris, who, cooped up within the narrow confines of their

neighborhood and subjected to the scrutiny of their neighbors, inaugurate a process

whereby noble ridicule is transferred to the narrow-minded petty bourgeois, soon
destined to become the central figure of provincial society.^'

By the end of the seventeenth century, the notion of province, whose contours
had been firmly outlined some decades earlier, lost its clarity. The shrinking of
space had reached an extreme: Paris was no longer interested in anything but Paris.
Owing to this blinkering of vision, the eighteenth century is less fundamentally
important to our subject than are the middle years of the Great Century. The
semantic history of la province owes relatively little to the later period. The per-

ceived identity and range of sentiment associated with provinciality did not change
profoundly. For the time being, Paris, the countryside, and the chateau were the
favored settings. To be sure, the notion of province survived and was periodically
reinterpreted. After Regnard, Marivaux, for example, examined the character of the
stupid provincial fascinated by the capital and an easy prey for Parisians.^^ But la

province was no longer central to the representation. It came to be seen more and
more clearly as a space that threatened nobility with contamination by the trivial

interests, values, and codes of the rising bourgeoisie.

Several important phenomena affected this relatively recent trope, however. First

was a shift in the social center of gravity. Paris once again became the center of high
FIGURE 11.1 Gavarni, Illustrations for the Physiologie du provincial a Paris, P. Durand (1842).
434 ALAIN CORBIN

society. Scholars in any case have probably overestimated the loss of prestige that
Paris suffered when king and court moved first to Saint-Germain and later to

Versailles. Helene Himmelfarb has shown that the king's sojourns followed a complex
pattern, even after 1682.^^ Robert Mandrou observes that the City, a fertile hotbed of
fashion blessed with numerous salons, academies, and people of talent, had always set
itself up as a competitor to the court. And in the eighteenth century, as Marc
Fumaroli points out, Parisian cliques determined who was talked about and who won
election to the Academic. This primacy of the City bears emphasizing, because until
the end of the nineteenth century it was here that the system of representations and

emotions that defined la province took place. For a long time it was in high-society

conversation in Paris that the Paris-/>rovmce split was defined as well as experienced

and there, too, that the provinciality of the individual was most easily gauged.
Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, a centrifugal process

was set in motion, a process that would continue until the fall of the monarchy. Little

by little the capital began to criticize itself. Hints of denigration of the city are already
perceptible in Lesage and Montesquieu, and these would be reinforced by denuncia-
tions of urban pathology launched by neo-Hippocratic physicians well before Louis-
Sebastien Mercier contributed his hallucinatory diatribe.^'' Denunciations of the City
stimulated idyllic discourse. Indeed, it was not la province but la campagne, the coun-
tryside,^' that most obviously profited from the hunger to escape.

The degree to which the academic movement spread outside Paris in the Age of
Enlightenment might seem to point toward a successful effort of emancipation or
even a cultural primacy of la province. Without denying the novelty of develop-
ments that in some cases demonstrate real initiative on the part of provincial actors,

Daniel Roche's important study suggests a need to modify this positive interpreta-

tion.^^ Indeed, the academic movement spread by perpetuating a social model inher-
ited from the Great Century. Furthermore, "a person who frequented the academies
of his province and the salons of Paris was, however devoted he may have been to

his city, governed more by Paris than by his provincial academy."'" In this connec-

tion the example of Montesquieu is revealing. While it is true that a genuine desire

for independence from Paris developed in this milieu between 171 5 and 1750, that

desire subsided in the second half of the century, when the thirst for local power was
on the rise. The 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 all

regionalism. By the same token, anything that helped to promote the several

provinces tended to devalue la province.

Retouching the portrait of la province in countless ways, some more subtle than oth-
ers, the Revolution reshaped the conception of the Paris-/?rovmce relationship. The
 Divisions of Time and Space 435

first thing to look at in this regard is the effect of the Revolution's creation of the

departements and the resulting spatial rearrangements.^' On the eve of the convo-

cation of the Estates General, the concept of la province as a territorial and admin-

istrative entity remained on the whole rather vague. The territorial redistricting car-

ried out by the Constituent Assembly had the paradoxical effect of spurring provin-
cial consciousness. People began to delve deeper into provincial identity in their
efforts to resist the abolition of the provinces. I shall have more to say presently
about this process, 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 territorial representation. This proved to be a deci-
sive episode in the history of the spatial imagination and its relation to nature.

To be sure, the elaboration of a new departemental identity did not in itself rad-

ically transform the image of either Paris or la province. Immediately following the
reform, the adjective departemental naturally inherited all the stereotypes associated

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, who hoped to weaken the
grip of territorial imagery, individuals over time became more intensely identified

with their departements.

The creation of the new entity and the reflection it encouraged marked an impor-
tant 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 exis-
tence 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 in depth. They show
clearly that the initial hostility was associated with an anti-urban bias of more gen-
eral import. It was one aspect of an ongoing polemic that pitted small towns against
"capital cities," countryside against devouring metropolis. In addition, the drawing
up of a new administrative map rekindled old interurban conflicts, whose remote
roots have been unearthed by historians studying urban networks and hierarchies.
It is 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 to the sociocultural realm. As the capital, Paris

tightened its grip on the rest of the country by turning itself into a symbol of har-
mony between the parts and the whole. The new territorial division gave the capi-
tal clearer authority over the totality of French territory. The city benefitted from
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 its capital. The revisions of the administrative map carried

out first by the Montagnards and later under the Consulate and Empire merely clar-

ified a centralizing tendency already apparent work of the Constituent

in the

Assembly during the final quarter of 1789. Of course the members of that body
were already aware of the risks that the capital's new preeminence entailed, as is

apparent in the lucid report prepared by Target as secretary for the Constitutional
Committee in the fall of 1789. The balance that would have to be struck, he noted,
was not between Paris and each of the provinces taken singly but between Paris and
la province in its entirety.^'*

The creation of the departements and the new images of centrality imposed by
the reforms were by no means the Revolution's only contribution to the new rela-

tionship between Paris and la province. We have yet to identify the consequences of
a complex To that end, we must keep our eyes fixed firmly on the
political history.

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.

As Le Moniteur noted at the time, "everyone felt that Paris ought to be regarded not

as an individual city so much as the general meeting place and common city of all

the French."''^

The lapse of time between events in Paris and provincial reactions to those

events attests to the capital's preeminence. In any case, it was Paris 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. The network of political societies, together

with their associated procedures of affiliation and correspondence, established the

figure of an initiating city. The press in the capital established a highly Parisian
image of la province. The journalists of the big city set themselves up as sentinels.

They saw themselves as the educators of the rest 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 la

province. This occasion was a sort of "national investiture," conferring a new sacred
status on the capital. The travels of the federes, 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 showed that representations of Paris and la province were
quite complex. There was a kind of tension between two conceptions of space: in
 Divisions of Time and Space 437

the course of their travels to and from Paris, the federes, 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 10, 1792, was
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 is surely not, as is often
stated, the increased centralization of Jacobin France. In this area, as we have
seen, the work of the Montagnards merely continued a process begun by the
Constituent Assembly. What was decisive, by contrast, was the near identifica-

tion that was established between the democratic populace of Paris and the
national image.
In the eyes of provincial patriots who recognized that the people of Paris felt

called to take upon themselves a mission of revolutionary surveillance, incitation, and

initiative, the capital long remained the center and sentinel of the Revolution. The
Thermidorians themselves would attempt, at least initially, to legitimate their actions

by invoking the image of a populace blessed with a gift for thwarting conspiracy.
To my mind, the crucial development was the introduction of a new system of
representations. The Girondins had developed a type of discourse which the
Thermidorians, once victory was assured, were content to recycle as often as the
circumstances required. What the provincial felt toward Paris was no longer simply
a vague hostility but a deep and specific hatred. From the summer of 1792 to mid-
June of 1793 the diatribe was at its most intense. Federalism, which built on a

departemental base, developed a range of stereotypes whose influence on political

representation would endure for some time. Alan Forrest, Mona Ozouf, and
Raymonde Monnier see this system of images as a caricature intended to deprive

Paris of its sacred status^' The dialectical relation between the capital and la province
was thus based on an evolving dialectic of good and evil. Paris, accordingly, was
nothing but a blind, rebellious, faction-riven city. It was a center of intrigue and
conspiracy, anarchic, turbulent, even tumultuous, much as Rome had been in the

final years of the Republic, or better yet, under the Empire, when it was obsessed
with the demands of the plebs.
Paris also showed itself to be an arrogant city, at once slavish and domineering.
The Girondins denounced the dictatorship of the despotic city, obviously aiming
their criticism at the Paris 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 hostility.

La province was not to blame for the federalist crisis. As the Girondins saw it, Paris

itself had long been trying to secede from the rest of France. Parisians had no sense
438 ALAIN CORBIN

of political legitimacy. "Destroy the imperious federalism of the Paris sections,"

read a petition from the Republican Society of Champlitte that arrived on June 20,

1793. "Nationalize this immense city, so that it may at last learn to obey the sover-
eign will of the people, to cut down to the level of the departements.'"*" Some
itself

even called for the designation of a new center: the sections of Bordeaux proposed

that this role be assigned to Bourges/'

Yet the summer of '93 was of course the point at which the political influence of
the Parisian people in arms was at its height. It was Thermidor — July 1794 — that

led to the collapse of the power of the capital, which was soon deprived of its

municipal government.''^
However important this process may have been, the essential changes that were
made at this 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 — Bescherelle's, Littre's, Larousse's — illustrated

their definitions with quotations from Moliere, La Bruyere, and Mme de Sevigne.
Deprivation, denigration, and ridicule remained the crucial semantic components,
although a new sense of propriety may have somewhat moderated the denigration

and mollified the diatribe.

At 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-

tion was to 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 the

chief feature of comic characterization in this period. The provincial lout visiting

the capital and making a fool of himself became the paramount theme, supplanting
the comedy of pure geography."*^ In 1802, Paris made a triumph of Picard's Les

ProvinciaiLx a Paris, which depicted the members of the Gaulard family from Ligny,
a group of "nice folks who repeatedly allow themselves to be swindled." Vaudeville
tacitly consented to the disappearance of M. de Pourceaugnac; there was no longer
any need to poke fun at country squires.'*''
 Divisions of Time and Space 439

Under the July Monarchy the fooUsh provincial visiting Paris remained popular,
but over the years the characterization of the ethnotype acquired new depth.
Perpetually harassed, swindled, and robbed, forever deceived, quick to fall into

every trap, the provincial suffered an endless series of "tribulations." In 1842,

Eugene Guinot, writing under the pseudonym Pierre Durand, enumerated them in

a humorous vein in a work entitled Physiologic du provincial a Paris.^'^ In 1844,

Delphine Gay, Mme 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 air,""**" the provincial scurried about his business

if he did not actually run through the streets. His gestures, manners, and gait all

pointed up his clumsiness. Provinciality was a somatic reality, a fact well understood

by petty criminals.'*^ In 1837, Balzac noted: "The most obvious signs of provincial

life are to be found in gesture, behavior, and movement, which suffer a loss of the
agility that Paris continually communicates."''^

The provincial belonged to a strange "species" that was utterly ignorant of the

City, and his efforts to satisfy his curiosity were inevitably in vain. Paris eluded the
grasp of provincials, who, Mme de Girardin tells us, stood no chance of discover-
ing its reality because they saw only "its public pleasures" and "knew nothing of its

high society."'*' Situated at the confluence of public and private, the inaccessible
places frequented by the 2,000 individuals who made up "society" constituted the
only theater in which a metamorphosis was possible; the rest was mere illusion, a
counterfeit integration into the ways of the City. Ignorant of the city's codes,

provincials committed errors that were not just foolish but "frightful." Having no
contact with genuine Parisians, they copied one another: "A lady from Grenoble
admires the stole of a lady from Beauvais, whom she mistakes for a lioness of
Parisian society.... An elegant fellow from Cahors covets the jacket of a dandy from
Abbeville.... It would be too cruel if they were to return from the capital with the

latest fashions from Alsace or Berry!... After this trip, they will have seen Paris, no
doubt, but let them be under no illusion: they will not have seen Parisians." Like M.
de Pourceaugnac and the Gaulards of Ligny before them, these bewildered provin-
cials have no choice but to go home.
Ridiculous though such visits to Paris were, they could nevertheless serve as a
kind of initiation. The provincial who visited Paris somewhere retained "a trace of

his pilgrimage, the indelible mark of a more or less complete experience."

According to the Parisian, in fact, the provincial, "having once touched the streets
"^°
of the capital, loses his primitive character, his departemental naivete.
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
being reshaped. Michelet made this explicit in his The process
Tableau de la France.
has been analyzed by Marcel Roncayolo and Jean- Yves Guiomar.^' The new con-
44° ALAIN CORBIN

ception of a foundational center would henceforth determine the picture of the

nation. The search for the local genius of each province suggests that consciousness
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 all the rest." The provinces, on the other
hand, "see themselves in [the center]. In it they love and admire one another in a
superior form."^^ This semantic imperialism brings us to a fundamental paradox of
this analysis: anything that heightened provincial individuality, anything that
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. The capital, which rose above the local genius of each of its compo-
nents even as it marveled at their diversity, transcended the provinces. It emerged as

the cornerstone of French unity, as the exclusive space of national expression and

consecration.

The mapping of the territory and fabrication of regional images that took place

at this time were carried out in accordance with this transcendence. Initially these
projects were shaped by the discovery of the strangeness of the provinces. An
astonished Parisian elite was eager to understand the resistance to reason demon-
strated during the Revolution: the surprising, vexing, or just simply amazing attach-
ment to old beliefs, superstitions, and prejudices, to the antique calendar, to out-

dated weights and measures, and to local patois. The investigation that Chaptal

ordered prefects to undertake, the research conducted by the Celtic Academy,^'*

the venture organized by Charles Nodier and Baron Taylor, and the proliferating

geographical narratives exemplified by L'Ermite en province were all organized

implicitly with reference to the center. Regional images emerged in the capital.

Between 1820 and 1835 the Parisian elite imposed its tragic view of Armorican
Brittany.^^ In 1829, Jules Janin popularized a plutonic image of the city of Saint-Eti-
enne.^** Under the July Monarchy tourists from the capital sketched the portrait of

the Pyrenean savage, studied by Jean-Fran9ois Soulet.^^ And the portrait that was

painted of the peasants of the Limousin mountains owed 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 summary of
all that 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. The
importance of the division that interests us here emerges strikingly from this ambi-
tious work.

Local elites soon developed their own counterimages, about which I shall have
more to say presently. Brittany was particularly quick in its response. Backed by a

talented bourgeoisie, native nobles attempted at the height of the July Monarchy to

establish the figure of the Arcadian Arcoat, exalted by Brizeux. This is not the place.
 Divisions of Time and Space 441

however, to delve into a broad process that interests us only to the extent that it was
influenced by the complex relationship among Paris, la province, and les provinces.

More important in the present context was the ambiguous emergence of a new
fictional figure in the 1820s followed by a sudden explosion of interest in the sub-
ject after the Revolution of 1830. The small provincial town became an object of lit-

erary interest. Nicole Mozet has provided an excellent analysis of its rise, which
reflected the primacy of the petite bourgeoisie in provincial imagery.^^

The new precision in the topographical description of small towns paralleled the
rise of archaeology.^^ As the fascination with the exotic temporarily waned, la

province became a museum, a vast antique gallery. Balzac, one of the creators of the
new imagery, even planned a moral and social archaeology based on the study of a
small provincial town.^'' The 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 in the open air. Paris was a surface on which it was easy to read

a present perpetually in the process of creation, whereas the countryside was still an
entity distinct from la province. Compared with either of these, the small provincial

town was far more successful at preserving the vestiges of the past. Each of them
offered the key to reconstructing vanished centuries. A fictional provincial itiner-

ary — 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 The
la province.

latter was no longer a comic space peopled by fools so much as a static vacuum "of
emptiness, boredom, negativity"''' and "mediocrity of ideas,"''^ where women
withered in "eternal virginity" and "non-life."''^ It was a trap, suggesting impris-

onment in the infinite triviality of the everyday. Bussy-Rabutin's image of rust and
Mme 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 theater of a new kind of
tragedy. Here, close to nature, artifice had yet to draw the sting of vigorous passions

as in Paris. Here the violence of desire, further exacerbated by the scarcity of

opportunities, the mediocrity of available partners, and the length of the wait for

love 's impact, accounted for the vehemence of the act*''' and the alacrity with which
the torment of dishonor is embraced.*'^ It is because he is a Breton from Guerande
that Calyste du Guenic attempts to hurl pretentious Beatrix from the top of a cliff.

A fatherless world at a time when the king's exile had reawakened memories of
regicide, the imaginary province — an empty stage on which the only actors were
boredom and "buried" love*''' — 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
 442 ALAIN CORBIN

of Paris.'^'' The capital resorted to a variety of tactics to fan the

flames of desire that it kindled. Like the Illustrious Gaudissart,

clever image makers set out to seduce la province the better to

swindle or even conquer it. Many people —salesmen, journal-
ists, fashion designers, novelists, politicians — shared the same
goal, as we shall see in a moment. In novels, the simple provin-
cial woman, ardent but 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 worn down by the harsh and unremitting war-

fare of Paris society.

This enrichment of the imagery, which reshaped the Paris-

province relation in contemporary minds, was also reflected—

the point is important — in a fundamental reversal of the fig-

ures of exile. La province no longer connoted only disgrace,

J J. fiUNDmU.

111 l-.>

FIGURE 11.2 Gaudissart, a fast-talking Parisian flinnflam artist, sets out to conquerthe provinces. Gaudissart's renown suggests
something of the complexity of the ?ar\%- province psychology. Illustration by Piau for Balzac's Scenes de la vie de province.

FIGURE 11.3 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 Space 443

estrangement from the center, and the staleness of existence. Its feminization
allowed it to become a "spatial metaphor for the mother figure."^' The obligatory
youthful sojourn in Paris turned la province into a refuge. Back to one 's "roots": the
romantic sensibility fostered such regressive tendencies, and the anxious expectancy
of mothers and sisters made young men all the more impatient to return, however
briefly. Private diaries and letters reveal the intensity of the exchanges that traveled
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, masculine Paris, boiling over with revolutionary ideas and eager to
mount the barricades, /a province, which became a place of initiation, was apt to

become a focal point of reactionary interpretation.

In all of this the real and the imaginary were inextricably intertwined. Novels
new mirror to provincial female readers eager to discover their identity
offered a

and we know that their numbers were large. Literature fostered a new conscious-
ness of provinciality and instilled a desire to conform. It was no longer a matter of

embodying an ethnotype, like the Gascons of old, but merely of conforming to an

image of oneself produced by the capital.The care with which novelists described
the private sphere when evoking the atmosphere of a provincial town surely made
it easier for female readers to identify with the text.

Meanwhile, Paris was also developing new attractions. The collapse of the edu-
cational system and its subsequent reorganization and centralization under the
Revolution made it necessary for ambitious young men who in the past probably
would have remained in their native provinces to come to Paris to study. Nicole
Mozet rightly calls attention to the intensity of the experience of deracination for
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 young men interested

in going into politics^'*) —made Paris an obligatory stop on the ambitious youth's
itinerary for years to come.
Such deracination was pleasing to individuals eager to jump into the social swim
and convinced that la province did not provide a grand enough stage for their inner

selves. New forms of social mobility coupled with the rise of individualism helped
refashion the relationship between Paris and province. The effect was a new division,
if not a fracture, within the heart of each individual, at once keen to get to Paris and
nostalgic for the provincial refuge.

The capital more than ever became the focal point of all ambition. All images of
social and emotional success were centered in it, the culmination of every career. La
444 ALAIN CORBIN

province, formerly the hell of exile, stood out more and more clearly as the theater

of failure: the provincial overcame hurdles and waited anxiously and achingly for

Parisian promotion only to return in failure to a static life of disappointment and

resignation. What was 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 desire for a prestigious mistress, the abundant varieties

of male camaraderie — all these things made Paris the ideal place to learn the diffi-

cult arts of making love with finesse and boasting of it afterward. Within this space
of freedom, moreover, one could, without great risk, provoke the bourgeoisie. At
times the capital also offered, in its theaters and even in its streets, the intoxicating
inducements of political turmoil.

In this Paris of juvenile tribulations, even as young scholars flocked to the city
and the "younger generation" emerged as a distinct reality, provincial martyrs dis-

covered new forms of suffering. The youth who arrived in the capital from
Grenoble or La Cote-Saint-Andre found that it was not easy to gain acceptance.

Poverty beckoned; the pleasures of the capital were subtly undermined by the bitter
certainty of some day being forced to swallow one 's ambitions and return to a medi-
ocrity that was both bourgeois and provincial.''^ Novels depicting small-town life

meanwhile reveled in the pleasures and torments of the Parisian apprenticeship. In

1829, Gustave Drouineau's Ernest ou le Trovers du siecle enjoyed a huge success. The
wretched fate of the hero, who had come to Paris from La Rochelle to study law,

drew attention to the misfortunes of young people uprooted from their native soil.

The problem was that a stay in Paris by itself was not enough to complete the
provincial's initiation or metamorphosis. The indispensable skills of the true
Parisian included knowing how to present oneself, mastering the capital's codes, a

certain nonchalance in demonstrating that mastery, familiarity with fashionable

places, habituation to the rhythm of Parisian life, and a capacity to decipher allu-

sions quickly enough to make easy conversation. Such skills 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 to achieve it.

A narrow but active circle of people determined who would be blessed with favor
 Divisions of Time and Space 445

and recommendations. Success depended on meeting the right people, even for the
young man of talent or the genius awaiting anointment. Refinement of one 's man-
ners, progress in one 's sentimental education, and realization of one 's ambitions:
there is little point in attempting to make hard and fast distinctions, for apprentice-

ships in all these areas were closely intertwined.

In this connection it is important to distinguish between two levels of provin-
ciality. 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 pitfalls

of high-society conversation could flush out. Once again, however, it is difficult to

distinguish the imaginary from the real in 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, in sum, was that provincial elites were not so much supplanted
as they were nullified by Paris. No longer was there such a thing as a provincial
elite, because the talented provincial metamorphosed into something other than a
provincial, whereas the elite Parisian who ventured outside the capital enjoyed a
privileged exemption from provinciality.^^ So long as they did not overstay their

welcome, the aristocrat in his chateau and the wealthy bourgeois in his country
house remained Parisians. The high-ranking functionary serving in the provinces
was pawn manipulated by Paris and in no danger of contamination by his sur-
a

roundings. Nor was his wife, the femme administrative whom Balzac so carefully
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 who arrived in Paris by postal
coach. ^' A few decades later, 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 — the "horticulture of vulgari-

ties"^'' —had established itself in the center of Paris. Each quarter of the city had its

own subculture, and there were bourgeois who continued to take their meals
according to the old timetable. The Marais, for instance, was "a separate province
that has nothing to do with Paris proper, and its inhabitants are in general less famil-

iar with things Parisian than are the citizens of Quimperle or Castelnaudary."^^ The
judgment would be repeated a quarter of a century later in Larousse's dictionary:
"The resident of the Chaussee d'Antin hardly distinguishes any more between a
446 ALAIN CORBIN

render of the Marais and an impeccable notary from Carpentras. The Marais is now
la province in the very heart of Paris."^''

For the true Parisian the danger of provincial contagion was quite real. Just how
dire was the risk? To answer the question we must hark back to a social practice that
can be traced all 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 in

conversation, which feeds on the effects produced by reporting and commenting on

fresh news. But commentary on the news is a senseless activity unless one is situated

close to the source. La province, being remote from that source, is perforce reduced
to awaiting eagerly the news from Paris, only to greet that news with commonplaces
and "retarded humor."^^ It is difficult if not impossible to be witty in Sancerre.
Delphine Gay had some intelligent things to say on this subject in the "Paris

Mailbag" column she published in La Presse. The purpose of the column was pre-
cisely to provide the frustrated provincial with brief reports on Parisian fashion.

According to Gay, a brief stay in the provinces was enough to create a dangerous
gap. "We no longer feel in harmony with the ideas of the moment. Society seems
wildly strange when one returns to it after a lengthy absence." "We arrive. ..and are

soon asking what we should do, what we should see, what we should say, because
we are as ignorant as can be about the interests of Parisians." "This is because
Parisian life is a study that takes years" and implies "the habit of society." "What
rock did you crawl out from under.'' " people ask the Parisian who has stayed away
from the capital too long. "It's impossible to talk to you any more."^^ It will take "many
days to regain that tireless activity, that elasticity of character, that agility of judg-
ment, that constant presence of mind, that perpetual courage in every detail that
constitutes the Parisian intelligence."

Here I must digress a moment. These words were written during the July

Monarchy, a time when the necessities of parliamentary politics actually tightened

the links between Paris and the provinces. The doctrinaires, following Guizot, hoped
that through representative government the nation would transform itself and pro-
duce new elites at an accelerated pace, drawing even upon the masses buried in the
depths of la province}'^ In fact, this decanting of the superior portion of the provin-
cial population more than ever required a metamorphosis of the provincial.
Political convictions aside, the Chamber consisted of three types of deputies.
The first was the Parisian who seduced a small provincial town, the seat of an elec-
toral district. An immeasurable distance separated this deputy from his constituents.
For the time being the elected representative felt no need to tailor himself to fit the

provincial mold. 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 Space 447

close to the center of power and ready to serve as mediators.'" Saint-Marc-Girardin

never lifted a finger to please the loyal voters of Saint-Yrieix; prefects complained
bitterly about this. Emile de Girardin — to confine ourselves to examples from the
Limousin^' —seems to have been a perfect stranger to Bourganeuf, which he served
as deputy.'^

The restoration of universal suffrage in March 1848 made it necessary for would-
be deputies to appeal to the voters. Many aristocrats who lived in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain and who in the past had simply gone through the motions of endur-
ing 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
in the district where he had his estates.'^ Meanwhile, the leaders of the Club des
Clubs and later the 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 manner, the
spread of Parisian political fashions and debates to provincial territory.^''

The second type of deputy in the Chamber was the man who, though a provin-

cial native, was nevertheless possessed of talent. After undergoing a virtually

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 Chamber packed with ridiculous provincials
but dominated by powerful speakers. Men such as Berryer, Guizot, and Lamartine
turned the Chamber into an important place on the social circuit, one of the most
fertile sources of conversational material. In the evening, assiduous frequentation
of this or that salon allowed these renowned speakers to consolidate their successes
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 who fell asleep
in the Chamber beneath Daumier's ferocious gaze and who was a regular fixture at

the mirth-provoking "bust-ups" {cohues) that made the Tuileries and the hotel de
ville under the July Monarchy places that society ladies were loath to visit.'^ Under
the Second Republic the ranks of these anonymous provincials would be swelled by
the kinds of candidats ambulants ("carpetbaggers" in American parlance) and ora-

teurs de treteaux (tinpot gasbags) at whom Tocqueville poked fun.'*' In 1852, how-
ever, the Prince-President and his friends introduced reform: they reduced the
number of deputies, eliminated the speaker's podium, and prohibited public debate
in the Corps Legislatif.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the established relationship
between Paris and la province, through its profound impact on countless individuals
and subtle portrayal and analysis in fiction, gained in both refinement and depth. For
ALAIN CORBIN

a particularly illuminating example of the richness of this experience and the inter-
action between reality and fiction, we may turn to the Memoires of Marie Cappelle.
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
twenty-three. A cultivated though not very wealthy orphan, she felt nothing but
contempt, occasionally tempered by pity, for the boorish fellow she was obliged to
marry, a man by the name of Lafarge. Accused of poisoning her husband with
arsenic and sentenced to life in prison, she recounted her sad experience of provin-
cial life.

Her case was unusual, and her knowledge of la province went far beyond that of

any tourist. Through marriage Marie Lafarge 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 and Uzerche. Anxious to

exonerate herself, Marie hoped to move her Parisian readers to pity by feeding them
stereotypes of the fictional small town. The tactic was evidently effective, because
this "poor flower lost among the brutes of the Limousin" won the sympathy of
Parisian society.

La province as she described it was by no means la campagne. In portraying the

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 able to sample the pleasures of "return-

ing to the civilized world. "'^ A few talented bourgeois, such as the attractive attor-
ney Lachaud, who so brilliantly managed Marie 's defense, also escape her scathing
commentary. By contrast, the lengthy visits to Uzerche immediately after her mar-
riage are recounted as though they were tantamount to a Sadeian torture. Marie

Lafarge experienced a sense of extreme strangeness upon discovering the bour-

geoisie of that small town and all the "incredible new things" surrounding it.^^

To begin with, she was flabbergasted by the uncivilized and archaic customs: "I
was shocked by the things I was obliged to see and hear." The local manners are
rudimentary at best: guests are received in the kitchen, hugs are exchanged, no tea
is served, the tete de veau is served au naturel, wine is offered as a refreshment. But
this "degree zero" of civility is less appalling than the content of the conversation,
or "Correzian chatter," as she calls it. The women unabashedly discuss the quality

of the silver 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, at

what passes for a ball, these scarlet women "could neither appreciate nor understand
my simple gown of India muslin trimmed with twine."
Tulle, like Uzerche, utterly lacked a social life: "There is no society; everyone

stays home and entertains no one else." The tragic setting is thus subtly portrayed.
 LcBinsien passe ave.c dedam devaniles raonis dAuvergne.TOagmfiijues rnais entierementpeupkis de portem
d eau au dire des voyageurs
,

lEWOSmoN IINIVCRSELLE . 31,

Expo'iitioii tn plein vcnl des provinciaiis venus a Paris.pour voir le Palais (it 1 iiiduslne. , ,

FIGURE n.4 Veyron, The Parisian in the Provinces; lithograph, circa 1860. The caption reads: "The Parisian
disdainfully drives past the mountains of Auvergne, which are magnificent but, to hearthe travelers tell it,

populated exclusively by water carriers."

FIGURE 11.5 Daumier, The Exposition L/n/Verse/Ze; lithograph, 1855.

45° ALAIN CORBIN

The sense of stifling imprisonment transmitted to the reader is more persuasive than
a lengthy plea. The text successfully conveys a sense of the Paris-province cleavage
that is the subject of this essay; it 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
universal male suffrage and the slow process of familiarization with the new politi-
cal system altered the Paris-province relationship yet again by raising a challenge to

Paris's imperial domination over what la province now implied, namely, the rest of

France. The problem was keenly felt as early as February 1848, when the provisional
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, Ledru-

Rollin, Albert, and Flocon, on the other hand, felt that Paris was sovereign in this

instance and that the rest of the country, less politically aware, had no right to undo
what the people of the capital had decided. If Louis Blanc is to be taken at his word,
he carried the day because he enjoyed the backing of armed revolutionaries.'*"'

The subsequent introduction of universal suffrage, however, transferred politi-

cal predominance to the provinces as early as April 1848. The suppression of the
June riots in Paris reflected the rest 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 itself. On December 10, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's election
as president of the Republic was rightly interpreted, by no less a commentator than
Karl Marx himself, as proof of the peasantry's new role in politics."" In December
1851, while the "yellow gloves" hissed at Louis Napoleon on the boulevards, thir-

teen departements constituting what might be called la province rouge rose in rebel-
lion at the news of the coup d'etat, as if the domination of the provinces by Paris
was about to be overturned. Ted Margadant has shown that the insurgency flour-

ished in the very same small towns, many of them subprefectures, that figured so

prominently in contemporary fiction: Beziers, Bedarieux, Clamecy, Marmande,

Forcalquier.'"^ After September 4, 1870, Paris would no longer be able to make and
unmake political regimes. Thanks to universal suffrage, la province — here defined
as the rest of France — slowly asserted its power over the nation as a whole.

Through the ballot box on February 8, 1871, and then, 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" is apt to discover that, despite internal divisions on both sides

(especially among youths), class-consciousness militates in favor of unity with the

previously reviled province.
 Divisions of Time and Space 451

Meanwhile, however, new developments helped to reinforce provincial fascina-

tion with "Parisian life" and thus increase the intervening social distance. The new
railway system was designed expressly to serve the needs of the capital. The inven-
tion of the telegraph meant more rapid dissemination of the news. This, together
with new modes of 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 city fathers eager to

embark on projects of urban renewal to accept the Parisian model.'"' Paris, now the
"city of grocery displays" —one immense, illuminated shopwindow as well as

the site of world's fairs in 1878, 1889, and 1900 — adapted to the reign of the com-
modity.'"^ Nowhere else were the rites of modernity so handsomely celebrated.
The exalted spectacle of the capital was further heightened by new ways of dra-
matizing power. During the Second Empire a cosmopolitan court was assembled.
(The novelty of this court deserves further analysis.) The sovereign once more
became the focal point of fashionable society. The process of senatorial nomination
consecrated new symbols of superiority. Shows, parades, receptions for foreign
guests, and birthday celebrations kept the streets noisy. This extroversion, spurred
on by who anticipated the image of the modern city'"^ while decried by
artists

republicans who viewed the "imperial feast" with austere contempt, altered both the
trope of provinciality and the image of "Parisian life," whose animation it revealed.
The primacy of the private sphere gradually gave way to immodestly ostentatious
rites and pleasures.
Hundreds of thousands of provincials flocked to Paris for the "Expo," the caf
cone' {or cafe-concert, which provided music hall entertainment along with drinks),
and the funeral of Victor Hugo. First Carnot and then Loubet invited all the may-
ors of France to vast federational banquets. In an era fascinated by exploration, a

trip to Paris was like a tour of the world. The i86os clearly marked a major turning
point in the history of the desire inspired by the capital. The tendency, prevalent in
all fields in the 1880s, to 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, which in symbolic terms was perceived as an essen-
tially Parisian phenomenon.
New techniques of fascination perpetuated the contrast. Compared with the
hedonism of Paris, la province more than ever evoked images of hibernation. Cities
were now ranked according to how "Parisian" they were, that is, how alive or dead.
Hippolyte Taine, who traveled throughout "greater France," took morose pleasure
in provincial mustiness. Listen to 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
ALAIN CORBIN

dismal solitude after eight o'clock and more often than not all day long.. .carriage

gates on hinges that seem frozen in place, moss between stones, silence, and a vague
impression of coundess stale, cloistered lives." "One would 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 the region is flabby

and inert," and "this species of moral inertia is painted on people's faces," includ-

ing the "stupid and ignorant" faces of the young. '"^ For Taine, la province meant the
"attenuation of the individual," who was condemned to "kill time.""*'

The theme of social fragmentation would remain a stereotype until well into the
twentieth century. Fran9ois Mauriac was still harping on it as recently as 1964: the

provinces, according to him, were ignorant of the pleasures of conversation and of

"enrichment through closeness to others."'" For the owner of the country estate

Malagar, provincial life meant first of all "bitter separation from society" and there-

fore an obligatory retreat into home and family. Here the hypertrophy of the pri-

vate, the secret, contrasts with the extroversion of the capital. The theme forms a

leitmotif in the work not only of Mauriac but also of Andre Maurois and Marcel
Arland, but it was Herve Bazin who finally exhausted the last of its possibilities.

Meanwhile, the tragic figure of the fictional province took on dark new tones: la

province was a place where people "knew how to hate," the stamping ground of
long-nursed vengeance as well as violent desire. Here things moved slowly enough
for an individual to be "more apt to hear the groaning of his flesh." "^ Accordingly,

there is in Mauriac's work a moral frontier separating Paris from la province.

All of these feelings were intensified by an objective reality: the rural exodus. It

was not only the peasantry that was 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 many nobles abandoned their chateaux
for good, some to try their luck in the colonies or other exotic places, others to live

in nearby cities, and still others to embark on a career in the army or diplomacy or
simply to squander what remained of their fortune in the whirl of Parisian life. The
respectable rural and small-town bourgeoisie, a favorite target of parody in the fic-

tion of an earlier period, was also affected. Further study is needed in order to shed
light on the mobility of this group, which found it increasingly difficult to survive
on its inherited capital. Taken together, the many varieties of exodus further impov-
erished la province, nipped early stirrings of a more animated social life in the bud,

led to the closing of theaters, hindered the spread of learned societies, and, more
irrevocably than before, consigned the cultivated elite to the secondary task of
reproducing what was created elsewhere. Rene Bazin, who traveled in the provinces
in 1893 at the behest of the Journal des debats, stressed the "decadence" of local soci-
eties, the decline of "social life in the evenings," and, more generally, the thinning

of audiences."'' By the end of the century, while rural villages, disencumbered of

 Divisions of Time and Space 453

the heavy burden of poor laborers, were enjoying a revival of solidarity and a new
wealth of organizations, festivals, and recreational activities, many small provincial
towns languished and withered, looking forward to the day when Poincare would
threaten to deprive them of their subprefectures.

Meanwhile, the lengthening of vacations did nothing to lower the barriers

between Capital and province but actually increased the intervening social distance.

The ostentatious presence in isolated places of a Parisian society eager to witness

the spectacle of nature but still indifferent toward if not contemptuous of la province
stirred envy and heightened irritation. As the habit of vacationing spread to all seg-

ments of society, the 'PdiVis-province split became firmly rooted in the social subcon-
scious. The Parisian cousin instilled a sense of social distance even in the peasantry.

La campagne, the countryside, was provincialized. Maids and nannies who returned
to their native villages brought with them a longing for the capital, images of which
furnished their dreams. The wife of the rural town grocer emulated the doctor's

wife by employing the services of one of the seamstresses whose numbers prolifer-
ated as women's magazines popularized "patterns" based on the latest Paris fash-

ions. Once a campagnarde, she became a provinciate.

On the Parisian scene the ethnotype changed as well. "The old-fashioned, suspi-
cious provincial who arrives in Paris with one hand on 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

his bed at the who comes down with a fever and colic the day after arriving
inn and
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 tem-

pest without comprehending what it is all about — that provincial is virtually nonex-
istent nowadays except in the memory 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 willing to content them-
selves with a brief visit, a sort of pilgrimage. All they hoped was to catch an exter-
nal glimpse of the city in all its brilliance. Unlike the ambitious youth of old, most
no longer hoped to penetrate to the city's secret core, access to which remained
difficult.They did not aspire to visit the laboratory from which Parisianness radi-
ated. 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

with them.'""^
This ridiculous touristification, which Labiche mocked in La Cagnotte, produced
a new comic figure to light up the pages of the ordinarily serious Dictionnaire
Laroiisse. Paris in fact continued to rely on the same tactics to keep its distance and
FIGURE11.6 The 1900 Banquet of Mayors — View Inside the Huge Tent Set Up in the Tuilerieson
September 22. The inset shows President Loubet reading his speech, flanked by Waldeck-Rousseau,
Fallieres, and Deschanel. The Third Republic took root because it managed to capture the sense of local-
ity and weave together distinct regional identities. Here, the provinces came to Paris in a spirit of frater-
nity linking the mayors of all the country's communes.
 Divisions of Time and Space 455

even widen the gap. Listen to

the prestigious dictionary's
description of the new influx

of tourists. Provincials now

poured in through the capi-
tal's railway stations. It was a

strange new species that

stepped onto the station plat-

forms, a species admirably
symbolized by "the rubi-
cund gentleman arriving on
the train from Bordeaux."
Drunk with desires inspired

by the tales of "cousin

Michel" and keen to have sto-
ries of his own to tell upon
his return, 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 on
a binge, Paris was the place to

go to escape from 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."^

45^ ALAIN CORBIN

FIGURE 11.7 Felix Vallotton, The Cafe, or the Provincial The timid provincial has come to be
devoured. He is about to become the victim of a woman of Paris, symbolically more a sphinx than a
creature of dreams.

Parisian tourism took on a certain ritual quality. This calmed visitors' anxieties

but made each visit less of an individual adventure. The provincial tourist tended to
follow a fixed schedule and itinerary: a dinner for forty-five sous at the Palais-

Royal; a visit to the Invalides, the Vendome column, and the Jardin des Plantes;

some purchases from the stalls of La Belle Jardiniere; and the "odd encounter with
the orphan girl willing to let a stranger buy her a ticket to L'Amiigu"^^^ taught the

hesitant hayseed a thing or two about the ways of the big city. A brief stay in Paris
taught the provincial visitor a whole new scale of sizes, values, and ranks. He expe-
rienced Paris, our dictionary tells us, as a "vast diminution of himself." He suffered
a "kind of annihilation." Discovering the national sphere tended to relativize
provincial hierarchies. It was a changed individual who returned home "with a lit-

tle of the mud of our advanced civilization sticking to the soles of his shoes." In
 Divisions of Time and Space 457

short, according to Larousse, the chief result of the trip to Paris was 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 to measure. One positive new factor was a
growing reluctance to disparage la province. The 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 as an archaic artifact of language. Obviously the republicans,
whose most solid bastion was for a long time Paris, had plenty of reasons until well

into the summer of 1871 to display bitterness toward a rural and provincial France

that had first sustained the Empire and then elected conservatives.'^^ They never-
theless felt a certain embarrassment at accepting the old cleavage, which first came
to prominence, after all, under the monarchy, as anything other than an outdated,
amusing, and on the whole nonsensical relic of the past.
This new sensibility emerged just as counter-images, developed by regional
elites determined to do battle against the imperialism of the Parisian gaze, were
coming into their own.'^' Let us pause for a moment to examine a minor, relatively

late example of this effort of rehabilitation. In 1874, J- F- Daniel, a historian from

Landerneau, protested against the connotation that his city's name had taken on in
common parlance. He attempted to prove that "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 cen-
tury, it was seen as the "Sybaris of Brittany on the eve of the Revolution. "'^^ Thus
nothing could be famous unless it 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. This use of history as justifi-

cation, this mistaken fabrication of a prestigious etymology intended to draw the

sting of mockery, to stand the contemptuous jibe on its head, was a common provin-
cial tactic. 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.-^ The ref-
erence to luxury and pleasure in the implicit argument is also significant: J. F. Daniel
borrows these elements of superiority from the description of the capital in order to

protect Landerneau from mockery.

Somewhat later, when scholars began meticulously recording the tales and ritu-

als 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 in the town's
"'^^
squares. Until 1920 or so, the mayor and other prominent citizens used to march
ALAIN CORBIN

through the streets to the sound of drums collecting money for the poor while
shouting en gain an ed. It was argued, in other words, that "the stir in Landerneau"
was simply a matter of fidelity to ancient customs.

Certain malevolent Parisians, among them 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. In any case, noisy
Landerneau became a tourist attraction. Charles Monselet admits to having set out

from Paris to visit the Breton city on account of the popular expression. He was of
the opinion that Landerneau's comic reputation stemmed from the moon affixed to

the bell tower of its old church. '^"^ In short, the counterimage does not appear to
have been totally effective in this case.

There were other kinds of rehabilitation as well. Following the vogue for the rus-
tic novel (which enjoyed great popularity between 1836 and 1856), the rise of agrar-
'^^
ian ideology stimulated research into provincial identity and sharpened the fic-

tional portrait of village life.'^^ The agrarian movement, which flourished in the
final decade of the nineteenth century under the progressives, and later under
Vichy, relates to the subject of this essay only indirectly. Writers who sang the
praises of the soil, including that champion of the extended family, Rene Bazin, as

well as Gustave Thibon and Pierre L'Ermite, hoped to restore traditional values and

structures and to tar Paris, the modern Babylon, with a black brush. But 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 movement paradoxi-
cally increased yet again the distance between Paris and la province. Agrarian ide-
ology posed no threat to Parisian transcendence. It was the capital that chose the

leading talents among the regionalist writers, bestowing a national renown on the
'^^
few lucky enough to enjoy its favor. Essentially nostalgic, the agrarian move-
ment reinforced the identification of la province with the past and with conser-
vatism. It 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 as agrarian literature was triumphing in the
'^^
provinces, the capital was feasting on mockery of the village mayor, the village

fireman,''^ the piou-piou ("doughboy"),'^'* and, before long, the servant

Becassine.'^^ These figures were attacked because for Parisians they embodied
oafishness as well as rusticity. By 1880 new hygienic norms also tended to devalue
the man of the soil.'^*^ In other words, as la campagne turned increasingly into la
 Divisions of Time and Space 459

aONNE PRI'-SSt - PAKIS

FIGURES 11.8 AND 11.9 A naive provincial girl goes to her death in the modern Babylon, the victim of its

venomous pleasures, while rejection of the capital is rewarded by lucid happiness and a healthy life.

Illustrations by Damblans.

province —by which I mean that the countryside increasingly opened itself up to the

dream of Parisianness — it became the butt of ever more aggressive mockery.

Historians specializing in the Third Republic have long emphasized the growing
influence of la province on political life. The gradual decline of the process of
choosing official candidates, often selected in Paris, and of the efficacy of media-
tion by citizens of great prominence led, we are told, to a transfer of power to new
provincial elites and the nouvelles couches, or new segments of the population, that

they represented.'^^ Indeed, Jean Estebe has shown that the number of government
ministers born in the provinces rose sharply between 1870 and 19 14, while the rela-

tive number of Parisian ministers fell. Estebe also showed what an important role
politicians born in the south and east of France played in shaping the future of the
Third Republic. '^^
On the eve of World War I, Jules Lemaitre, Jules Delafosse, and
the Quercy native Maurice Colrat attacked the outsized political influence of the

Midi.'^' In Parisian circles passions were further heightened by the feeling on the
part of traditional elites that they 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.
460 ALAIN CORBIN

Christophe Charle, meanwhile, has shown how the "political-administrative sys-

tem" composed of ministers, prefects, and high magistrates — all elite groups
affected by republican purges —was also provincialized.''**' Candidates were thus
obliged to take more care than before in demonstrating their compliance with local

customs; they had to assume the characteristic traits of an ethnotype, to prove their
provinciality. There is no denying that these things were true at a time when, owing
to the absence of party organizations, deputies were forced to rely on personal con-
tacts to "hold" their districts.''"

But was the fundamental configuration of the Paris-province relationship altered

as a result.'^ No simple answer can suffice. New procedures ensured that the roads to
success still passed through Paris. The Ecole des Sciences Politiques, the Inspection
des Finances, the Conference du Stage, and the ministerial staff appointment
became the approved stepping-stones to political careers. In addition, Parisian con-

tacts became increasingly essential, and Parisian salons and high society remained
as important as ever. Sons born into politically prominent provincial families were
henceforth obliged, Gilles le Beguec points out, to take a detour by way of Paris. It

was more important than in the past for the future politician to legitimate his posi-

tion by acquiring the proper credentials. The result was the establishment of subtle

interlocking networks "based on a complex system of provincial support and

Parisian contacts."'''^ What 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 staff, and Ponts et Chaussees) and, even more
dramatically, of the economic elites, which now contributed much more than in the

past to the animation of Paris society.''*^ Paris reaped the benefits of the centraliza-

tion of large businesses and the common practice of private companies' hiring for-

mer top civil servants. Meanwhile, the intellectual elite avoided provincialization
altogether. Paris remained the culmination of every career. While it is true that

many engineers who graduated from the grandes ecoles married provincial women,
this was because, 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 capital invented. As seen from Paris, national issues recast in local terms
seemed to lose some of 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 Space 461

A LA BODINIERE, I 8, Rue Saint-Lezare

FIGURE 11.10 Groups of provincials living in the capital

popularized folkloric images of their native regions, while,

conversely, anything that sharpened the contrast with the
provinces made Paris that much more distinctive. Poster by
Le Mouel for the Exposition of Bretons of Paris, 1895.

own employment offices; they organized celebrations of holidays and banquets and
helped families realize their matrimonial strategies.''*'* Gone were the days when the
provincial who came to settle in the capital could be seen as a lonely victim, an exile
from his native land. People now looked to their provincial roots with a kind of
vague nostalgia fostered by extended vacations, but such feelings were far less

intense than the homesickness of a previous generation of immigrants.

462 ALAIN CORBIN

To be sure, the president of a group of "Limousins de Paris" could help to medi-

ate between Paris and the home province. Such groups turned mockery into a force

for mobilization and helped change the provincial image. But at the same time they
insidiously reinforced the ascendancy of the capital and ensured the continued dis-

qualification of provincial elites. They allowed certain Parisians to claim provin-

ciality on ancestral grounds; they sometimes chose local candidates and helped
"carpetbaggers" win elections back home. Gilles le Beguec has shown, for example,

how Correzians living in Paris influenced political life in their native region.'''^
Associations of provincials living in Paris sometimes allowed candidates to claim
counterfeit provincial roots, enabling outsiders to defeat entrenched local elites. In

1964, Frangois Mauriac went so far as to assert that the provinces had no way of tak-
'^^
ing stock of themselves other than from the vantage point of Paris.
Le Beguec's 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, Le
Beguec's work points up the gradual decline of local elites in the face of a new
model of political competence, a model exemplified by the remarkable success
enjoyed by veterans of the Paris bar's Conference du Stage.
In the meantime, however, many journalists remained blind to the capital's

growing role. Jacques Fourcade, for one, helped to perpetuate the hoary stereotype
of the "provincial Republic" by publishing a series of essays under that title in Le
Temps. In these articles he portrayed la province as a place of pure opinions and
strong views. Once elected, however, the "party men.. .shed their doctrinaire opin-
ions much as sheep leave their wool on the brambles along their path." Periodically,

therefore, they must "plunge back into their districts," where they are once more
'''^
caught in "the vise-like grip of their electoral clientele." Fourcade 's derisory por-
trait of political life as perceived from a small-town Cafe du Commerce only helped
to shore 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 in Octave
Mirbeau's Foyer, both published before World War I.
Over the past thirty years, la province has become more sensitive and Paris has
learned to moderate its tone. Disparaging references to the provinces are no longer
as tolerated as they once were. La province has benefitted from this new sensitivity.

The very term is becoming obsolete. Mail slots in Parisian post offices no longer
distinguish between Paris and province; now there are three slots rather than two,

marked, respectively, Paris, banlieue (suburbs), and autres departements.

Nevertheless, 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 463

published by the Academie: "'Province. Invar, adj. Fam. and pej. Said of a person or
thing whose characteristics contrast with the refinement, elegance, or vivacity typ-

ical of the capital. 'Il a un air province; il est tres province.' " Or this: "Provincial.

Noun (1640. Guez de Balzac), sometimes pejorative.... Elsa Triolet: 'fatigues des

provinciaux meme quand ce sont des intellectuels [tired of provincials even when
they are intellectuals].' " In other words, the provincial is no longer an object of
laughter, at least not openly, but he can be portrayed as a person who thinks, acts,
and expresses himself without grace or genuine distinction, a person who bores or
tires 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 tried, not without success, to create
for themselves an image capable of rivaling that of the capital. The delay involved
in the transmission of information is 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 terri-
tory. Provinces once obliged to await anxiously the arrival of the news can now
revel in the delights of immediate commentary. There has been no concomitant
abolition of the delay in the transmission of fashions, however.

This Parisianization of the provinces is counterfeit, however, insofar as the ready

availability of information confers no corresponding power to initiate, to partici-

pate in the circles from 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 is just

anotherway 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 domi-
nation is exemplified by the "turbo-prof" (who commutes to a provincial teaching

job by high-speed rail) and the difficulties that universities in provincial cities such
as Amiens, Reims, and Orleans face owing to the attraction of nearby Paris.
Consciousness of the uniqueness of Paris remains acute. The tempo of life in the

capital continues to be more rapid than elsewhere. La province and la banlieue (the

suburbs) are still 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 all, the most significant change in the relationship has been the result not

so much of the promotion of la province as of challenges to the role and position of

the capital. The decline in Parisian imperialism has gone hand in hand with a reduc-
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. The 1984;
edition of Le Grand Larousse records the manifestation of these developments in the

cultural sphere: "The Landerneau of something, said of a constricted environment

closed in on itself and perpetually agitated by trivial squabbles: for example, 'le
"
Landerneau de la litterature parisienne.'
FIGURE 12.0 In 1826, Baron Dupin drew a line from Geneva to Saint-Malo "separating northern and southern France." On the
map, "enlightened France" is all white, and "dark France" is gray and black. Map Representing the Level of Education of the
French Populace {:82e).
 CHAPTER 12

The Saint-Malo-Geneva Line^

Roger Chartier

Over the past thirty years, few itineraries have been more traveled by French histo-

rians than that which leads from Saint-Malo to Geneva. Taking this journey has
become a convenient way of pointing out the major contrasts between the two
Frances that join along a line drawn between these two cities. On either side of this
diagonal, which cuts the map 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, at individuals' heights and weights or their
mastery of the written word. The litany of such disparities, doggedly extended over
the years, has revealed the contrast between northern and southern France as an
enduring phenomenon, and one whose effects are often still perceptible.^ Compiling
and comparing new or refined indices — or both — is thus a permanently essential
requirement for anyone who would bolster or, more recently, challenge this basic

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. First, I hoped to

shed light on our national heritage: the "two-France" motif is by no means a recent

invention, nor is it the work of historians. Tracing its genealogy can thus help to
clarify the ideological factors that allowed it to emerge and that it in turn reinforced.

Second, the study of geographical representations is an excellent way to demon-

strate how the development of the social sciences was linked to the political and eco-
nomic debates that absorbed the French elite from Louis XV to Louis-Philippe.

Understanding how and why a divided France was constructed can give us a better
468 ROGER CHARTIER

grasp of what progress meant and what stakes it involved. Hence I have chosen to

work backward in time, emphasizing first the period of the July Monarchy, during

which the "two-France" theme triumphed 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 spatial divisions within the kingdom's
boundaries, while at the same time examining the question of why interest in the

theme at that time remained limited.

The history of a divided France began in 1822, buried in the pages of a book by
the prolific Italian geographer Adrien Balbi. In volume two of his Essai statistique

sur le 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 fac-

ulty in royal and communal secondary, primary, and boarding schools in each acad-
emic district. These figures were then compared with the population of each district

in 1 821.'' Twenty years before Villemain,^ this compilation thus offered a new statis-
tical indicator, for which Balbi received due credit, as in this appreciation offered by
Guerry in 1832: "This work by the learned Venetian geographer contains the first

published documents concerning the state of public instruction."*" Published but not
exploited: indeed, it was Konrad Malte-Brun, a Danish geographer who settled in

France during the Empire, 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 Malte-Brun's innovation possible was the fact that the academic sta-

tistics fell neatly into two broadly homogeneous groups. By comparing the number
of boys in school at various levels to the size of the male population, Malte-Brun
discovered that "if we divide France into two parts, one to the north and east, the
other to the south and west (and excluding, if you will, Paris), we have two very dif-
ferent results." In the first area, 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 this fundamental diagnosis: "Public education in southern
and western France is to that in the North and East as i is to 2'." Malte-Brun's arti-

cle did not indicate 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 dif-
ferences into a myriad of small contrasts, a clearly decipherable and rationally treat-
able 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 Line 469

thinkers. 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 con-
tinent 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 in criminality: "Certain recent

administrative reports note with pleasure that the number of crimes decreases in

proportion to the increase in the number of primary schools." So far as Malte-Brun

was concerned, however, this observation, which would later become controversial,
was not of crucial importance. What mattered most to him was the relation between
education and "administration." The effective use of power depended on a certain
social homogeneity, but the figures showed that France was by no means uniform
and that vast cultural disparities existed between provinces. Politicians, he cau-
tioned, should pay heed to these differences, which careful study showed to be sys-
tematic rather than random.
In 1826, Baron Charles Dupin traced the frontier that divided the two Frances
identified by Malte-Brun. Having marked on a map for each departement the ratio of
the population to the 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 to Saint-Malo, which separates
northern from southern France. North of this line 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 young people to school; the eighteen million inhabi-

tants 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, and the
south, 20,885. 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 which another man would receive the credit.

He was also the first to designate the northern part of the country as "enlightened

France"^ and, somewhat later, the south as "dark France." His text, less innovative
perhaps than has sometimes been claimed, calls for two remarks. First, it shifted the

ground of the debate over popular education from the political to the economic. For
Malte-Brun, the value of elementary education as a "means of civilization" ulti-

mately depended on the authority of the government: "Knowing how to read,

47° ROGER CHARTIER

march in a straight Une, and shoot a rifle accurately are skills that, whether in a

democracy or 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 different: it was the pre-
requisite for progress in general, both economic and intellectual. "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 demon-
strate 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, his lecture also

proposed another spatial interpretation, one that would be somewhat neglected in

Forces productives et commerciales. Southern and western France, it turns out, did not
constitute a unified region: thirteen of his departements, in the regions of the
Rhone, Languedoc, and the Pyrenees, constituted a "more industrious and opulent"
section of the south because public education was "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 it did not go
unnoticed, not only by Edward Fox," but even earlier by Stendhal: "A minister of
the interior interested in doing his job rather than engaging, as M. Guizot does, in

intrigues with the king and in the Chambers would do well to ask for an allocation

of two million a year for the purpose of raising the educational level of the popula-
tion 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 more subtle geography

and established the dualist interpretation in its place.

Dupin devoted the sixth book of his great work. Forces productives et commer-
ciales de la France, to a "Parallel 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 471

istic terms as in his lecture of the year before. In so doing, he raised a new question:
How, in spatial terms, was the nation's economy organized? Previously, imperial
administrators who relied on prefectural statistics had formulated their own con-
ception of geography, which drew on two distinct modes of spatial representation,

one sensitive to the infinite diversity of reality, the other firmly wedded to the idea

of national unity.''* In the summaries of J. Peuchet, prefectural 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 in the empire as a
whole. By contrast, for Jean-Antoine Chaptal, the unitary vision was paramount:
even if his figures were arranged in tables by departement, his favorite descriptive

categories were "everywhere" and "nowhere," indicative of a homogeneous con-

ception of French territory. Between these two extremes there was no room 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
the economic rather than the political sphere).'^ This observation helps to make
clear what was new in the contribution of the Restoration "arithmeticians."
Reasoning in terms of the value of agricultural and industrial products, average
income per inhabitant, and public revenues, Dupin concluded that northern France
enjoyed an undoubted lead over southern France: the Saint-Malo (or
Cherbourg)— Geneva Line clearly divided two distinct economic universes.
Underlying this conclusion one can make out the broad outlines of an explanation

based on three factors. First, northern France reaped the benefits of its natural
advantages: at the beginning of book 7, for example, which is devoted to internal
transport, Dupin stresses northern France's advantages in natural waterways and
consequently in canals. But this factor could not have been decisive, because the
south enjoyed natural advantages of its own, including a climate that permitted
growing crops unsuited to the north. Hence other factors were needed to account

for the inequality in economic development. Dupin was discreet about one of them:
history. 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 if they fall ill or are injured or grow old, they sink into dis-

tress and can no longer support themselves or their families without private charity,
the refuge of the hospital, or what have you. Such was the deplorable situation of
peasants everywhere in the kingdom prior to the Revolution" (emphasis added)." Here
the argument is based on history, moving from the determination of a disparity to a
process of differentiation. History has stopped, as it were, along the Saint-
Malo— Geneva line, and the nondevelopment of the south has become, owing to the
progress of the north, a question of underdevelopment. The key to such an evolu-

tion is cultural: not only is elementary education more widely available in the north,

scholastic competition is also harsher there. For every hundred pupils admitted to
472 ROGER CHARTIER

the royal colleges there were 1 5,980 children in primary schools in the north but only

6,931 in the south: "Thus subjects taken from the common class to be elevated to the
superior schools are chosen from among a much larger group of competitors in the

north than in the south. This, in my view, is the reason for the superiority of the
northern French in letters, science, and the arts."^*' One might add, moreover, with-
out being false to the spirit of Dupin's argument, that this superiority was limited to
those activities and businesses dependent "not on the fertility of the land but on the
knowledge of its inhabitants."

This pre-Darwinian version of "educational Darwinism" was Dupin's basic

explanation for northern France 's lead, and Dupin therefore held the north up as an

example for his "compatriots 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 I offer a

model of one part of the realm. He then takes his readers on an imaginary jour-
ney through the thirty-two departements on the more prosperous side of France's

internal frontier. Their advantage is most evident in the area 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, spirits, oil, livestock, wool, silk and silk products, and
so on. In return it receives wrought iron in a thousand forms, objects of the gold-
smith's art, jewels, fine furniture, woolens, spun and woven cotton, books, engrav-

ings, and many products of the arts. Thus 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 thesis,

however, because he sees the imbalance in the structure 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 473

and optimal equilibrium had been established between agricultural and industrial
populations. By heeding the lessons of this example, northern France would enjoy
still further progress and southern France would begin once more to move forward
and close the gap. Once the surplus agricultural population was shifted into indus-
try and public education became available to all, the Saint-Malo— Geneva line would
disappear, and all of France, unriven by internal boundaries, would enjoy the ben-
efits of England's good fortune.
The two opposed pairs, enlightened France and obscure France, prosperous
France and poor France, were now joined by a third, which transformed the geog-
raphy of values. The publication in 1827 of the first Compte general de Vadministra-
tion de la justice criminelle introduced a new set of statistics into the picture, height-

ening the debate over the various "influences" likely to account for criminal behav-
ior.^'* These new statistics were soon widely publicized, as evidenced by their
inclusion in a pamphlet published in 1828 by Adrien Balbi under the title La
Monarchie francaise comparee aux principaux etats du monde}'^ Even more important,
they became the basis of the new science of "moral statistics," which the Academie
des Sciences in 1833 would "rank first among the branches of general statistics." It
was in this area that the lawyer Guerry set out to do research that made him one of

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 neu-

tral geographic criteria: "We shall therefore divide France into five natural regions:
the north, the south, the east, the west, and the center, each composed of seventeen
contiguous departements. There is nothing arbitrary about this grouping, which
does not favor any system, because it is entirely geometric, and the extent of each
district is determined by that of the four others."^'' Guerry 's plan is interesting for

two reasons. First of all, his explanations are aimed at reconciling nature with
geometry and at justifying a purely theoretical division of French territory, one that
draws its lines in perfect freedom on a neutral surface with reference to a permanent
feature, in this case, the obvious existence of "natural regions." In this we perceive
a 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 by drawing boundaries on the ground or
defining territories on a map, is hard put to it to deal with an absence of natural or

historical guarantees. By 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
 9

DE L'ETAT T)R L IXSTUrCTIOX ET DU XOMB

dans les «livers Arron^^ semens its Academies et des Gm
(^AR A.BALBI &_A.M.GUEHinr, im<lt

CRIMES CONTRE LKS PtlRSOKNES

.MSTW^t'TIOX

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 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 475

first, the east second, the north third, the west and cen-

ter last. But crimes against property yielded a different

result, with the west and center still in last place, the

east in second, but the order of south and north

reversed, with the north most likely to provoke crimes
of this type. There was reason for optimism in this

pattern, since "the parts of the kingdom that produce

the most attacks against persons produce very few
crimes against property."^*^ Nevertheless, the figures
raised a crucial question, that of the relation between
ignorance and crime. Guerry used new data on educa-
tion to bolster his argument. The figures on school
attendance on which Malte-Brun and Dupin had relied
were inadequate; it was better to use information on
the percentage of recruits able to read and write, fig-

ures that were available from 1827 on. These new sta-
tistics revealed a France divided into three parts: in the
north and east nearly three-quarters of all youths were
literate; illiteracy was highest in the center and west;
and the south occupied a median position. Guerry
thus rediscovered the tripartite division of French ter-
ritory outlined by Dupin in 1826 and used it to refute

the idea of a link between crime and ignorance. People

in the north were better educated yet committed more

crimes against property, and the south was violent but
not the most illiterate of the country's regions.
iUf/rtf//tvi rf^ Ar . J(f.\Afr tru/i/ue//ryftv/r /fir tr/r/trrj-
Guerry thus claimed to have proved that "the departe-
rmiifire e/ntviii/ii//i/ii:t /a^Mi^tt/^Ao/t /n»
9i*yuf /if -iiir/t/ /itrrtaa/zxirj/if/i/
tf

t/r
f/ftfijr

c/utyur /ot/j-
ments where there is the most ignorance are not, as

Sv m/'tes, /niiis ttii i^^renfra yu'r//crMr tiui/ nv/yfu/vA/a people say every day, the ones where the greatest
ffi§ ineiiie <itJ-/e /fj fAt^rrf uu/tytirjt/ Jt/t - nwfU-iefr i/e'

number of crimes against persons are committed. And

favr iQci^tx/u/ t/r //I fiiurnytt/f t/'it/iitru / fur yt.voo
tff/tr fiiJ-fr.f/uMTrryirtrMtitf/rjmrs r/^n/ Irf atTHm/tirsf there is no point in speaking of crimes against proper-
yur trt/u </5w loitrjt m^i/r^, (a I'm v^^/a/t
//ir//ifj-

re yut rrssvr-/ i/t- / 'etra//r/mv t/a^rrs /ef ties here, since they occur primarily in the departe-
^yui /a/wn/eit/ a /iS:i,/e nyy*or/ //a (/ft
ments where there is the most education."^'
tr//r'(/fv /ft/i/fjT rorrcytfwii/ d /tyrwrOfier If* cA/^rrs
tiii-yiifj /if/rt^re (/%tii/m!*i/jfu ijnaylicj' (hi vet/ Guerry 's argument offered no new ideas, yet it
^/'arrcndxsattfji/ de /'ofo^eintf t/f Jiawrs.//tbi Irwi/pe
appears to have set a pattern for later theorizing

FIGURE 12.1 In 1832 in the Reme encyclopedique, and later in an

Essai suria statistique morale de la France, Guerry examined the link
between crime and ignorance. The better-educated parts of the

country were also the areas were crimes against property were most
numerous, and the most ignorant parts of the country were not the
most violent
476 ROGER CHARTIER

because of the very terms in which it was couched. In fact, Guerry was not the first

to question the relation between better education and reduced crime rates. Similar

objections were raised by other writers, among them Benoiston de Chateauneuf,

who had this to say in 1827:

If one observes the religious countries, one does not find that they are less fer-

tile in crime than the others, while those in which ignorance reigns often pro-
duce fewer crimes than those in which enlightenment shines. It has long been
accepted that in Berry, Poitou, Auvergne, and Savoy, regions to which acade-
mies and the sciences have not brought much enlightenment, the courts rarely
had a criminal to punish, while robbery and murder were common among the
Spaniards, an eminently religious people, as well as among the English, an
eminently enlightened nation.

This proposition by itself did not prove that its converse was false, however, nor did
it put an end to the endless round of arguments that the available evidence was
insufficient to settle. For Guerry, therefore, the observed data had to be reinforced
by constructing the statistics and geography in such a way as to make the desired

conclusion seem as incontrovertible as the facts themselves. Guerry resorted to geo-

graphical argument, and thus to a scheme of territorial division, in the context of his
efforts to put widely held opinions and popular beliefs to the test. French territory
became his experimental laboratory, and his researches led him to two conclusions:
explicitly, that schools alone cannot prevent "demoralization" of the population,
and, implicitly, that morality remained most robust in the most culturally backward
parts of France. In his own quiet way he thus initiated the revenge of disinherited,
illiterate France.
That revenge took a more blatant, as well as more polemical, form in research on
pauperism. Bigot de Morogues^^ and Villeneuve-Bargemont^'' turned the argument
about the two Frances into a political war machine aimed squarely at the views of
Baron Dupin. They accepted the Saint-Malo— Geneva line, but only to place an
entirely different construction on its significance. For Bigot de Morogues, the line

marked the frontier of prosperity and morality in such away that the fifty-four

departements of the south enjoyed all the advantages: a smaller number of convicted
criminals, less frequent crimes against property, a lower suicide rate. He summed up
his findings prettily: "Those who speculate and calculate with our great northern

industrialists often drown themselves in the river, while those who laugh and dance
with our southern peasants are careful not to fall in."^^ In addition to the statistics
celebrating the sociability of the south, Villeneuve-Bargemont, in Economic poli-
tique chredennc, cited another important indicator having to do with the distribution
of poverty. According to his data and calculations, the north counted one pauper for
every nine residents, whereas the south had only one in twenty. If, moreover, one
 The Saint-Malo — Geneva Line 477

looked carefully at the statistics of men invalided out of the military for infirmity
or deformity, it became clear that "the physical state and condition of health of the
working classes of the south is incomparably better than that of the same classes in

the north. "^^ The two Frances thus exchanged places on the scale of values because
industrial development was equated with the physical, material, and moral squalor
of the majority.
This lesson was true not only of France but also of Europe. An astonishing map
showing the gradations of pauperism yielded the following ranking: one of every
six Englishman was a pauper, compared with one in seven Dutchmen, one in ten
Swiss, one in twenty Germans, one in twenty-five Austrians, Danes, French,
Italians, Portuguese, and Swedes, one in thirty Prussians, one in forty Turks, and
one in a hundred Russians. The logic of this distribution was simple: "Everywhere
one finds that the number of paupers increases owing to the growth and crowding
of the working-class population, the predominance of manufacturing industry over
agricultural industry, the application of English doctrines of civilization and polit-
"^^
ical economy, and the abandonment of the charitable and religious principle. In
locating hell in England and paradise in Russia Villeneuve-Bargemont gave away
his ideology as Christian, aristocratic, and agrarian, and identified his enemy,
broadly characterized as Protestantism, philosophy, and industry. France, which
stood in the middle range of European pauperism, was divided by the "front" sep-
arating two political economies, the English and the Christian. Wherever English
political economy had already prevailed, namely, in northern and eastern France,

industry had ushered in its train of woes: "The system of industry and agriculture
followed in this part of France tends constantly on the one hand to increase the man-
ufacturing population and on the other hand to lower wages, concentrate industrial
capital and profits, and introduce all the factors that promote pauperism. "^^ This
iron law could be reversed only by adopting the model set by southern France,
where a proper balance had been struck between charity and agriculture, and by
denouncing the views of those who, like Dupin, would force the entire country to
accept the "bitter fruits of modern material civilization." The Saint-Malo— Geneva
line must be erased, but only by rejecting innovations stemming from the north.
This text by Villeneuve-Bargemont, while in part naively reactionary, is worthy
of attention in two respects. First, it shows how the two-France theme could become
a staple of political struggle under the July Monarchy. The choice of statistical
indices, the way in which they were related, and the value attached to a region or ter-
ritory were by no means innocent but reflected radically opposed programs or plat-

forms. References furnished by history were combined with or replaced by contra-

dictory conclusions based on social data. Clashes over old issues hid behind battles
over figures and maps. Politics thus took on a new guise, as the investigation of the

spatial distribution of recently compiled statistical data for a time moderated the for-
 ,

478 ROGER CHARTIER

mative influence of history since the Revolution. Second, L'Economie politique chre-
tienne more than any other work set France in its European context. In the work of
Dupin or, later, of Angeville, French territory remained hermetically sealed. No
doubt there were administrative reasons for this, for the statistics used were difficult

to correlate with data from foreign sources. But that may not be the key factor: if one
wanted to think in terms of differences and their distribution, it was in fact essential

to reason in terms of a closed totality. In order to analyze France in terms of

regional subdivisions, the country already had to be isolated from its context. It took
all of Villeneuve-Bargemont's ideological Manichaeanism to place France within a

larger cultural space that explained much of what one observed domestically.

This early effort was followed by the better-known text of Adolphe d 'Angeville,
published in 1836.^' In several respects this work can be regarded as definitive, not

least owing to the unusual breadth of the statistical data it contained. Ninety-seven
different indices were compiled in eight tables. Thirty-three of these had to do with
"moral statistics," twenty-seven with data pertaining to physical and cultural
anthropology, seventeen with economics, and sixteen with population. With such an
abundance of data, d 'Angeville was able to correlate his indices in many ways and
try out "all sorts of combinations" for the purpose either of testing previously

asserted relations among social facts, such as education and criminality (p. 69) and
industry and poverty (pp. 102—103), '^^ proposing new ones, such as Catholic
spirit and morality (p. 104) or education and diet (p. 116). The Essaisur la statistique

de la population franfaise is thus a summation of fifteen years of work and statistical

controversies. It was not innovative in either its use of quantitative data or its

reliance on correlations, but it pursued its goals with an amplitude unrivaled by ear-
lier arithmeticians.

In his work one also finds a juxtaposition of perceptions of French space on sev-
eral different scales. The basic grid was defined by a "study of departmental
France," in the form of a series of individual reports, each presented in a similar
fashion and arranged in alphabetical order, thus eschewing both Dupin's device of
presenting his findings in the form of a fictional journey and the regional groupings
occasionally found in works published during the Empire. Of the large number of
indices examined, sixteen were displayed on maps in such a way as to exhibit legi-

ble "groupings" and thus an apparent segmentation of the national territory.

Beyond that, the maps and statistics together revealed a single central division, thus
harking back to Dupin and his dichotomy: "The more one studies human statistics,

the more rational this division seems when viewed in terms of facts pertinent to the
population. Indeed, one is almost tempted to think that two populations entered
France and collided along the line that joins the port of Saint-Malo to the city of
Geneva.'"*^ D'Angeville added only two minor corrections to Dupin's two Frances:
he quietly included the Loiret departement in northern France and the Ain in the
 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 479

south, and he used geographical terminology borrowed from Buache to express the

fundamental division, with the Rhine, Seine, and Saone "basins" on one side, and
the Rhone, Garonne, and Loire "basins" on the other. He thus combined all the var-

ious spatial approaches to French reality into one, and in this, too, he was simply
accepting and systematizing the legacy of the age.
What got him into difficulty was the need to pronounce judgment on which
France was the better of the two. For him, the comparison of north and south
revealed no clear winner. The maps by departement themselves showed discor-
dances among the indices: size and diet were better in the north, but life expectancy
was longer in the south, whose citizens were more robust; education was more
widely available in the north, but crime was also more common there; the north was
wealthier than the south but morally inferior. The final diagnosis merely summa-
rized these contradictions in a discourse whose tone was factual rather than polem-
ical.'*' With d'Angeville, spatial reflection lost its pedagogical and polemical force
to the extent that it was no longer so completely defined by reference to a preexist-

ing model, whether it be that of the English manufacturer or the traditional agrar-
ian. An agricultural modernizer, d'Angeville was also a political conservative, yet

he made a case for manufacturing: "If France were to join the industrial system,
parts of the center, which are so backward and lifeless, might prosper; the country
would become more homogeneous." Yet he also knew the cost and, after 1834, the

risks of industrialization, and unlike Dupin he wanted to slow its pace: "It is to be
hoped that no one will confuse the orderly development of industry, which is desir-

able for our rural areas and second-rank cities, with the kind of industrial central-

ization which accumulates masses of proletarians in the same cities and masses of
capital in the hands of a few; we are far from being envious of England for its so-

called advantage in this regard."'*^ No doubt d'Angeville was a "developmental the-

orist," but, alerted by the complex lesson of the two Frances, the development he
dreamed of was dispersed in nature.

Over the fifteen years between 1822 and 1836, a theme emerged, took hold, and
became the focal point of a whole series of political and scientific debates. It makes
sense to end with d'Angeville, our last and exemplary specimen from the period

prior to the Statistique generate de la France, but it is nevertheless tempting to look

back to the eighteenth century to see what spatial readings of France were proposed
then. Though my research led me first to the Physiocrats
necessarily incomplete,

and the political arithmeticians, both of whom mapped out global perceptions of the
kingdom's spatial organization, though in different ways. The Physiocrats' theory

of space relied on distinctions set forth by Quesnay in two Encydopedie articles. In

"Farmers" he asserted that "land is commonly cultivated by farmers with horses or

by sharecroppers with oxen."''^ And in "Grains" he had this to say: "We have
already examined the state of agriculture in France and the two types of cultivation
48o ROGER CHARTIER

found there: large-scale cultivation (la grande culture), which is done with horses,
and small-scale cultivation (la petite culture), which is done with oxen.'"''^ These two
economic categories, defined in abstract terms within a theoretical framework com-
bining technology with mode of cultivation, became the primary analytic tools of
the Physiocratic school. As evidence for this statement, consider the following pas-

sage, in which de Butre is still more explicit about the contrast between grande and
petite culture: "In France there are two types of cultivation, la grande culture, which
is practiced by wealthy Farmers and carried out with horses; and la petite culture,
which is practiced by Sharecroppers who use only oxen. These two types of culti-

vation differ markedly in their use of land, cost of production, and products.'"*^
Although the Physiocrats used these two categories as central economic con-
cepts, they could also be translated into spatial terms. With them it was possible to
map the geographical contours of what was presented as a fundamental economic
difference. Both Quesnay and de Butre sought to show how geographically limited
la grande culture was in order to encourage rational imitation of what they consid-
ered to be superior agricultural practice. Listen to Quesnay: "La grande culture is at

present confined to roughly six million acres of land, comprising primarily the
provinces of Normandy, Beauce, Ile-de-France, Picardy, French Flanders,
Hainault, and a few others.'""' De Butre mentioned these same provinces but added
Artois and part of Champagne while excluding part of Normandy.''^ Six million

acres out of a total of thirty million under cultivation left vast expanses to la petite

culture: "Nearly all the provinces of the interior have succumbed to la petite cul-

ture."^^ Thus the Physiocrats' France was also divided in two, but its two parts were
even more unequal than they would be for Dupin insofar as their geographical divi-

sion invoked a past in which things were different, a history that could be read as a

process of decay. To say that the regions of la grande culture were shrinking away
to nothing was also to say that the agriculture of the kingdom had fallen into a
degraded state.

With the help of further distinctions, both the economic analysis and its geo-
graphical correlates could be extended. De Butre actually argued that there were
three types of grande culture, which could be ranked in terms of the ratio between
capital advanced and net product: in the case of opulent properties, the ratio was loo
percent; in average properties was no more than 70 percent; whereas weak prop-
it

erties produced little or no net product. Once again, theoretical economic categories

could be translated into geographic regions on a map. As it turned out, what gov-
erned the distribution of the resulting regions was proximity to urban areas. Thus,
la grande culture opulente "is rarely found outside provinces located close to the cap-
ital or some other large city, which offers outlets and ensures commodity prices high
enough to defray the costs of cultivation.'"*' Similarly, la petite culture could also be

broken down into three groups and located geographically. Here, however, the
 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 481

groups were defined in terms of the amount of income on cultivable land. In the
top-ranked petite culture group, that income was sufficient to pay "i. Costs; 2. Taxes;
and 3. A very small income to the landowners." In the next group, "land yields no
income in itself, the harvest being just sufficient to pay costs and taxes. What is

called income is the product of pasturing, which yields slightly less than the inter-

est on the money capital invested in the herd or flock." The third and final group
comprised "land that does not even earn enough to pay costs and taxes, the bulk of
which must be derived from the yield on pasturing. The three groups of prop-
erty formed concentric circles around urban centers. The first type of petite culture
is found "only in the vicinity of capitals and other cities in the petite culture

provinces." The second emerges "after one has passed through the capital suburbs

and other large cities in the provinces of petite culture and as one moves away from
the banks of rivers." The third is limited to "the interiors of provinces far removed
from the capital."^'

De Butre's text thus laid the foundations for a spatial economics, a forerunner in

some respects of Thiinen's.^^ It also yielded a simple principle for classifying space

that owed nothing to either history or the picturesque. Interestingly, moreover, the
geographic distribution was defined by urban centers, especially provincial capitals.

Even the basic division between grande and petite culture depended on the location
of the capital, the city of cities. So strong was the urban influence that it over-
whelmed natural factors, so that the city itself became the primary force governing

the development of the rural area around it: "Compared with the provinces of la

grande culture, those less accessible to the capital are in many ways reminiscent of
"^^
new-world countries and climates. Whereas later schemes tended to obscure the
role of cities, here we see their full importance as centers of the imbricated and
overlapping spaces of which the kingdom was composed. Though the full com-
plexity of de Butre's scheme was forgotten, the Physiocratic interpretation did not
disappear without a trace. For example, in the work of Chaptal, who thought in

terms of unities, the only global division of French space is precisely that proposed

by Quesnay.^'*
For the demographers of the eighteenth century the situation is not as clear.
Different writers relied on different principles of spatial interpretation, each invok-

ing whatever factor he considered decisive for the study of population-related phe-
nomena. For Moheau, the key to demographic behavior, as reflected in population

density, lay in the nature of economic activity. He ranked agricultural sites in terms
of their aptitude to support a dense population. Seacoasts ranked first, "because
people living there can easily procure fish as a dietary staple and find steady wages
in the jobs with which workers are provided by trade." Next came vine-growing
regions, followed, "a long way back," by wheat-producing regions, pasture lands,

and, last of all, forests and moorlands.^^ This scale of densities was purely theoret-
482 ROGER CHARTIER

ical, however; in reality, different types of production tended to overlap: vines

never existed without other crops, wheat and other cereal grains were never totally

absent, and therefore it was impossible to divide up the territory in a clear, legible

manner on the basis of agricultural activity alone. Defeated by his own premises,
Moheau never succeeded in developing a geographical interpretation capable of
making sense of the demographic data. His example is interesting, however,
because it shows how a theoretical distinction can lead to a quandary when it comes
to taking in the facts of concrete geographical reality.

Nevertheless, other political arithmeticians did produce workable classifications

that allowed them to gather statistical data and propose interpretations. Des
Pommelles, for one, divided France into five strips delimited by parallels of lati-

tude. ^'^
He was clearly influenced by atmosphericist {aeriste) theories that saw the

nature, heat, and humidity of the atmosphere as the key factors governing human
behavior. Neo-Hippocratic medical theorists of the eighteenth century stressed the
importance of geographical location and thus encouraged a theoretical division of
French territory along purely geometric lines. Messance, for his part, divided
France into three rather than five strips, one in the north, a second in the middle, and
a third in the south. In spite of appearances, atmosphericism was not the only basis

for this division, which its author claimed was justified by a complex combination
of natural, demographic, and economic factors: "Since justice requires that all bur-
dens be distributed proportionately among the provinces in accordance with their

respective strengths in number of inhabitants, productive output, industry, com-

merce, and location, and since reason requires that one compare neighboring
provinces as partaking more or less of the same things, analogy illuminates and con-
tinues the comparison in ever greater detail, until enlightenment extends from one
extremity to the other."^^ This passage reflects the inescapable fact that the roots of
political arithmetic lay in fiscal policy, while at the same time expressing the hope
that with information and reflection it should be possible to define geographic
regions that could serve as a basis for analytic investigation.
All eighteenth-century demographers agreed that population phenomena were
governed by a simple logic, a steady, regular progression from south to north.

Messance made the point in relation to density: "Why is the north of France more
[densely] populated than the south, and why is the south less [densely] populated
"'^
than the middle.-^ So did des Pommelles: "It will be seen that population per square
league diminishes steadily for every two degrees one moves from north to south.

In seeking the cause of this progression, des Pommelles found an opportunity to

flesh out the atmosphericist view of the matter: in the north, he argued, "the land-
scape is less taken up with mountains, and the land, being more fertile, provides its

inhabitants with more ample sustenance." Messance, however, gave a different rea-

son: "It is because there are more cities in the north of France than in the two other
 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 483

parts, and until such time as it is proven that the greater population of the north is

due to some other cause, the larger number of cities that exist there and form a larger

base of consumers can be regarded as one of the main causes, if not the only cause.
In that case, moreover, cities would populate the countryside, which is the reverse

of what people have said."*'" Demographic differences thus served as an argument

in one of the century's major debates, and the discovery of population-density dif-

ferences between north and south offered an opportunity to refute the idea that cities

were death-houses, parasites on rural areas, and a drain on their population.

If density decreased from north to south, fertility increased. Both Moheau and
des Pommelles emphasized the point. The latter saw this as proof, if proof were
needed, of atmosphericist theories: the ratio of births to marriages "increases
steadily as one proceeds from north to south, with the exception of provinces in
which the extent of wood and pasture land is great enough to make the air very

moist (e.g.. La Rochelle, Poitiers, etc.); it seems to me that one can conclude from
this that when bad habits and other moral factors do not hinder the influence of
nature, marriages are more fertile in warm regions, where the air is dry, and in ele-

vated sites, than in low-lying, swampy areas where the air is thick. Ten years
later, Moheau accepted this analysis with a slight proviso having to do with diet:

"The type of nourishment has no less influence and effect, and individuals who
drink wine or spirit beverages and eat astringent foods possess greater prolific
virtues than others."^^ Mortality was a more difficult matter to approach, owing to
the lack of a statistical index as simple as the birth/ marriage ratio. Investigators

therefore tended to focus on life expectancy instead. Once again, air quality was
found to be decisive: "In the north, where lack of heat leads to less active individ-

ual development, the periods of formation, perfection, and decay should be

longer.""^^ Topographical factors could intervene, however: "People appear to
enjoy longer lives in hilly and mountainous regions. Life is shortest in marshlands.

Plains and valleys can, depending on their orientation, either preserve or shorten

the lives of their inhabitants."^''

For the political arithmeticians of the eighteenth century, organizing French

space into homogeneous entities was a source of tension. Nearly all of them worked
within comprehensive systems of thought that influenced their views on every sub-
ject. Atmosphericist medicine revealed the primary cause because, as Moheau put it,
"the imperious law of the climate acts on anything that vegetates or breathes."
Their France was therefore above all a place of varying climates, in which the deci-
sive factors were latitude and elevation, which, taken together, determined the
properties of the air. The same principle held good at each stage. It explained
regional differences and at the same time governed the division of the kingdom into

its principal parts, whether three or five in number. Once that was done, however,
the original certainty abated somewhat. Indeed, it was not easy to eradicate other
484 ROGER CHARTIER

factors capable of influencing demographic phenomena autonomously, even if they

depended in some way on the climate. Thus it was conceded that economic activity,

cultural habits, and moral attitudes could play a part. The primacy accorded to

atmospheric qualities governed the perception of space, which involved not so

much an opposition between north and south as a progressive gradation. On this

broad canvas, however, other pictures began to emerge, pictures that owed nothing
to the tyranny of climate: Messance, for instance, contrasted urbanized France with

rural France and a wholly agricultural central France with a France of the periph-
eries, to the north, west, and south, where "large factories and major commercial
enterprises" were concentrated.^^ In terms of the construction of space, these con-
tradictory tendencies were a major embarrassment at the very heart of the old
demographic epistemology.
What determined France 's position on the map of Europe was thus not so much
demographic facts as the data of physical anthropology, which until d'Angeville
came along writers were likely to overlook. First Moheau and then Expilly focused

on physical size, noting that the French were not as tall as the Swiss or Germans.
One possible explanation for this was historical: "In France, whose ancient inhabi-
tants were, according to the Romans themselves, notable for both their height and
strength, I believe that the main reason why the race may have degenerated is that
"''^
subsistence became more difficult for the bulk of the population. But the rela-

tively short stature of the French was due not so much to a shrinking process as to

the north-south law that governed all such statistics. For one thing, stature was
indicative of France's place in Europe: "In France, as well as in countries farther to

the south, such as Spain, Portugal, the states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli,

and so on, one finds people among the wealthiest, tallest, and strongest of human
beings, but their numbers are not as great in those places as in northern countries

such as Switzerland and Germany."*^^ Furthermore, the same principle could

account for contrasts observed within France: "The provinces of France differ
among themselves, and it has been observed that the northern ones generally exhibit
a taller population than the southern ones. The case records of deserters from var-

ious provinces, which contain data on physical characteristics, reveal that deserters
"^^
from Flanders and Picardy are markedly taller than deserters from Provence.
Despite this monotone north-south decrease in height, it was still possible for the

French to feel that, on the whole, they belonged to southern Europe. Expilly made
the point almost in passing: "France cannot boast of the height of its inhabitants....

The same is true of the other southern countries." Similarly, Moheau, in discussing

the high fertility rates of the southern provinces, mentions that the kingdom
appears to enjoy the same advantage "vis-a-vis the north of Europe." The theme
according to which France itself was divided because it was torn between northern
and southern Europe had yet to be stated, no doubt because it depended on the prior
 The Saint-Malo — Geneva Line 485

recognition of a dividing line marking a sharp division within France itself. For the
demographers of the eighteenth century, and perhaps for others (yet to be exam-
ined in detail), France belonged to the community of southern nations. This con-

sciousness of belonging to the south remains to be explained in terms of political

allegiances, economic relations, and cultural divisions.

Thus for the Physiocrats and the political arithmeticians a global organizational

scheme for classifying French territory was conceivable. By using such a scheme,
writers could identify those areas most propitious (as well as least propitious) to

achieving the goal of their school, whether it be to extend the area of grande culture
or to increase the population. No such interpretation of space occurred outside
these two schools, however, and this absence is what I shall now try to explain by
examining two parallel bodies of work. If one looks at the geographers of the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century, it is clear that their primary purpose was to pro-
duce regional monographs, more often than not with the words "natural history" in
the title. By far the larger proportion of such monographs was devoted to the
provinces of the south, in part no doubt because learned institutions were more
prevalent there but also perhaps because the pre-Romantic preference for moun-
tainous landscapes was already exerting an influence. The internal organization of

these "natural histories" reveals a tension between the administrative (with the facts

being set forth in a framework determined by such administrative divisions as bail-

liage, senechaussee, diocese civil, and generalite) and the geographical, as the more
innovative writers based their descriptions on Buache 's theory of river basins. This
regionalist writing produced its own theoretical legitimations. Among the princi-
ples invoked was that local studies must necessarily take precedence over global
ones: "Only after the provinces have been accurately described through direct
observation by observers living in the area can we hope to see a general and com-
"^'^
plete description of France. It was also argued that local studies, more than sim-
ply gratifying curiosity, were pragmatically useful: "If the purpose of the natural
history of a province were simply to enumerate its fossils and describe its mountain
ranges, climate, and production, it would be useful only for gratifying curiosity. It

is perhaps a much more valuable exercise to relate these different areas to one
another and attempt to draw conclusions relevant to the human race and, insofar as
possible, the public welfare."''' The most pressing and justifiable task was that of
regional description of a fairly wide area; such wide-ranging natural histories made
it easy to see how different phenomena were related and could be framed in eco-

logical terms. To the extent that their geographical curiosities did not wander
abroad, the Philosophes made such regional studies a major genre (and soon forged

ties with firms specializing in provincial cartography); the more or less moribund
tradition of Piganiol de La Force, with its comprehensive catalogues of France,
went into relative eclipse. A corollary of this emphasis on regionalism was that it
486 ROGER CHARTIER

became impossible, at least initially, to conceptualize the kingdom as a whole and

therefore to describe its large-scale spatial organization.

The same regionalist self-affirmation is evident in some of the collective ven-

tures of the provincial academies.''^ Indeed, half of them set out to produce local
histories, whether of a city or a province, and a few, such as the academies of
Bordeaux, Clermont, and Auxerre, proposed to catalogue the wealth and resources
of their regions. The limited horizons of the petite patrie were emphasized not only
for obvious emotional reasons but also because the local setting was one suitable for

observation. The Benedictines had had the same idea long before the provincial aca-
demicians: they had planned a series of regional histories to cover the entire king-
dom. In the end, these remained in manuscript, except for the one on Languedoc.^^
For the purposes of "natural and literary history," space once again proved quite
malleable: spatial limitations were defined in way as to permit exhaustive cat-
such a
aloguing and useful, logical categorization of the data. In their own way the provin-

cial academies thus reflected the discovery of the provinces that marked the second
half of the eighteenth century, another sign of which is to be found in the variety of
literary forms (comedies, novels, essays) that drew a contrast between society in the

capital and in the provinces.^'' Neglected by the cartographic statisticians of the July
Monarchy, this tension occasionally resurfaced, as in Guerry's geography of sui-

cide: "In general, no matter what place in France one is speaking about, the number
of suicides increases as one proceeds toward the capital. "^^ This reminder of the
nefarious influence of big cities bears the imprint of another old idea: namely, that
Paris and the provinces also represent two distinct Frances whose differences are

worth exploring. It was no doubt this contrast with which people of the period were
most familiar.^'' The provinces did not form a homogeneous unit, however, and in

order to understand them it was necessary to compile inventories of individual

provinces one at a time, given the way in which the territory of the nation had been
fragmented by history and nature.
An excellent illustration of the method is provided by medical topographies of
France. Their history is well known. It unfolded in three stages: to begin with,
Lepecq de La Cloture organized a network of correspondents from Rouen in 1768.

Then, in August 1776, the Conseil created the Societe Royale de Medecine and
undertook a national inquiry into the causes of epidemic disease. Finally, in
October 1778, the Societe Royale approved plans for compiling a series of regional

monographs, which, taken together, would provide a physical-medical description

of the kingdom. Out of this grew a genre that developed in the local and provin-
cial setting and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century. This vast resource has
yet to be fully catalogued, but a look at Normandy gives an idea of the scale of
investigation: some focused on individual cities (with or without their surrounding

countryside), others on electoral districts (arrondissements), still others on the

 —
The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 487

departement as a whole7^ In 1778 the Societe Royale had recommended the "canton"
or province. The medical topographies illustrate the consolidation of a regional
consciousness that deliberately confined itself to relatively narrow areas; without a
doubt it was the development of such regional consciousness in the eighteenth cen-

tury that constituted the principal obstacle to seeing the kingdom in macroscopic
terms. This representation of France persisted into the next century: it was a picture
of a country divided not into two or three major sections but fragmented into a mul-
tiplicity of units, each withown irreducible originality. Here, then, is proof that,
its

while the "two-France" theme may have structured the major debates, it did not
altogether eliminate persistent recognition of local roots.

The crucial question raised by this brief survey, limited both as to its source materi-
als (a single corpus of documents) and its time frame (a single century), has to do with
the relation between statistical and geographical thinking and the exercise of power.

For a considerable time the political authorities seem to have accommodated them-
selves to the disparities that made French territory so checkered. They accepted
indeed, except for a few people of systematic cast of mind, they appreciated — the fact

that France was an "aggregate of disunited peoples." Vis-a-vis the capital, la province

existed as an entity, but an entity with many facets. Eagerly and earnestly the men of
the late eighteenth century compiled careful catalogues of each province 's past and
future promise. In the last days of an absolutism that had always had to cope with this

flourishing diversity, projects of reform were put together in a regionalist and provin-
cial context, and projects of rebellion grew out regionalist and provincial conscious-
ness. Revolutionary and imperial Jacobinism would attempt to alter the terms on
which a self-styled centralizing government coexisted with a fragmented nation. The
success or failure of these efforts is of little importance here. What is clear is that the
attempt changed the relation between political power and the terrain on which it was
exercised. Homogeneity of the national space became at once a desire and a goal, a
condition and a token of successful policy. It should come as no surprise, therefore,
that under the July Monarchy we find prominent political leaders writing as arith-

meticians. Their awareness of continuing disparities, be they economic, cultural, or

moral, was a clear indication of both a failure of policy and a risk to stability; the way
to deal with the situation was to take differences that could and did seem arbitrary and
reduce them to a set of simple laws. Ideally, any program for changing society wants
a smooth surface to which it can apply itself, or at the very least a broad agreement as
to what the primary inequalities are. The two-France theme, born of nostalgia for

unity, embodied contradictory hopes. In its very ambiguity it expressed a new way of
conceiving of the relation between society and power.
After the beginning of the nineteenth century, social statistics abandoned the
region to the archaeological curiosities of local learned societies and used a differ-
488 ROGER CHARTIER

ent set of spatial categories as a basis for the scientific study of social facts. Early in
the twentieth century, a bitter dispute between geographers and sociologists revived

the old opposition between these two ways of apprehending space. Looking into the

terms of this debate, from which the Saint-Malo— Geneva line seems to have van-
ished, is perhaps a way of shedding light on the reasons why, fifty years later,

French historians began once again to focus on this primary dividing line, thereby
to some extent disassociating themselves from the geographical tradition of their
forebears. For Vidal de La Blache and other adepts of the "human geography"
school, the region was in fact the only space within which it was legitimate to rea-

son about the relation between the influence of the natural environment and the vol-
untary behavior of human social groups. This emphasis on regional monographs
was also what distinguished the French school of geography from Ratzel's "anthro-

pogeography," which worked with space on a broader scale and was therefore more
likely to believe in some form of determinism based on natural conditions. Within

the space of five years, several theses — Demangeon's on Picardy in 1905,

Blanchard's on Flanders in 1906, Vallaux's on lower Brittany in 1907, and Sion's on

eastern Normandy in 1909''' — established a distinctive method of describing the

geographical roots of social organizations. Basic to the method was a division of

space into regions that were neither too large nor too small, whose coherence was in
some sense clearly visible and capable of being treated as self-evident. What exactly
did the word region mean to these Vidalian geographers.'' It was an expanse of terri-

tory that could be defined neither by history nor by the conscious designation of its

residents but solely by its geographical individuality. It was a space to be con-

structed in such a way that it was homogeneous in its fundamental characteristics
and clearly distinct from the regions surrounding it. The Vidalian geographers' nat-

ural regions were thus spaces inscribed on the surface of the earth itself, yet regions

whose existence and boundaries had been neither sanctioned by political borders
nor perceived by the societies that they had sustained and would continue to sustain.

Designating such regions was an intellectual operation, a matter of geographical

identification. This operation revealed the unity of the regions that it designated
and thus established them as a legitimate setting for scientific description.

Even when a natural region bore the same name as a historical one, the two spa-
tial entities did not necessarily coincide. For example, the Flanders defined by
Blanchard contrasted with the surrounding regions in that it was low, flat, and
moist: "The territory that is a natural region in view of these characteristic traits

does not correspond exactly to the territory customarily regarded as the historical
Flanders; its boundaries sometimes extend beyond political borders and sometimes
remain inside them."^° In other places the geographer is obliged not only to identify
the natural unit in terms of purely geographical criteria but also to name it. Such is

the case with the plain of Picardy:

 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 489

This area belongs to three different provinces of Old France, Picardy, Artois,
and Cabanel. Yet one passes from one of these provinces to the next without
perceiving any difference. On either side [of the provincial border] one finds
the same fields, the same rivers, the same villages. Yet the people who live here
have apparently never noticed this unity. Never in history has the area borne
a unique name. Neither the cultivated nor the uncultivated, the official nor the
commonplace language possesses a word that encompasses and defines the
whole territory. No province, no state, no human group owes its existence or
individuality to the area.... While the region thus possesses no historical per-

sonality, its geographical personality is written all over it, based on the unity
of its physical nature and consolidated by the works of its inhabitants."^'

Similarly, eastern Normandy is a territory whose very designation stems from geo-
graphical observation alone. It is "an organic ensemble of natural regions":
"Physical geography does not separate them.... Human geography is even less

capable of distinguishing these territories, which have all had the same history and,
but for a few exceptions, the same laws. It notes that the very variety of their prod-
ucts has involved them in continuous relations for a long time.... This unity also
"^^
manifests itself in the social state.
If, from one text to the next, the operation by which a natural region is identified

and denoted as a purely geographic space is similar, the criteria on which that oper-

ation is based change somewhat. The unity of Blanchard's Flanders is based on the
nature and impermeability of the soil and on the flatness and low elevation of the
land. By the use of these criteria, it proves possible to isolate a homogeneous terri-

tory and draw the outlines of a Flanders that owes nothing to existing political or

linguistic boundaries. Demangeon's initial definition is not purely natural, because

the chalky stobsoil extends beyond the limits of the Picardian Plain, which is taken
to be a grain-growing region, distinct from the forests, pastures, and industrial areas
that surround it: "The Picardian Plain thus fails to coincide exactly with either the
natural extent of any particular terrain or the artificial compass of any administra-
tive territory. In a country like France, civilized and populated since ancient times,
it often happens that a geographic region is instead defined by a set of relations
between man and the natural environment.... The distinctiveness of a geographic
physiognomy is therefore the product of a synthesis of natural and human fac-
"^^
tors. Hence it is the very concept of contingent as opposed to necessary relations

between natural conditions and human social action that is invoked here to justify

the designation of a geographical entity. Jules Sion places still greater stress on
human factors in defining his area of study. Despite its (comparative) natural unity,
eastern Normandy is in fact a composite of regions that are "diverse as to soil and
crops." If it can nevertheless be treated as a homogeneous entity, it is basically for
49° ROGER CHARTIER

socioeconomic reasons having to do with the ownership and exploitation of the

land, trade, and industrial history. It therefore follows — a key point — that the
region's "geographical unity comes from man more than from nature."^''

The foregoing survey of the Vidalian geographers suggests two things. First, all

of them clearly set out to invent new ways of dividing up French territory. Regions
as they defined them were based neither on historical patterns nor on their inhabi-
tants' sense of belonging. They were objective data, more often than not forgotten
by history and overlooked by man, so that only the geographical analyst stood in a

position to restore their true contours by identifying certain distinctive factors.

However —and this second point is sometimes forgotten — the nature of these dom-
inant factors varied widely from writer to writer. Although the natural and the
human were generally balanced in the school's rhetoric, different authors empha-
sized one or the other to varying degrees, from Blanchard, who identified a topo-

graphical unity, to Sion, who based his definition of the region essentially on eco-
nomic criteria. This disparity led, moreover, to some symptomatic inversions.
Blanchard 's Flanders may have been unified in its physical definition, but that unity
fell apart as his description proceeded: "Thus within this Flemish plain, apparendy
so uniform and unvarying in all its aspects, a variety of unexpected characteristics

reveal themselves, defining regions whose crops, industry, customs, and interests are

as different as their temperatures, soils, and streams. These differences are not sub-
tle: they define distinct territories, known to inhabitants and named by them in view
of their differences [my italics]. "^^ On the other hand, the diversity of the "natural

regions" that make up Sion's eastern Normandy (Caux, Bray, Vexin, the Seine val-
ley, and so on) is gradually transformed into unity through analysis of their com-
mon structures. The vocabulary of the geographers, who used the word region to

refer to territories of vastly different scale, reveals in its very ambiguity a funda-
mental uncertainty: how to relate one region to another, how to individualize terri-
tories whose internal diversity somehow left homogeneity — or at any rate, as

Maximilien Sorre put it, "a certain homogeneity of the component parts" — intact.

Less assured and unanimous in the final analysis than they might at first seem,
the Vidalian geographers had to endure the critical onslaught of Durkheimian soci-
ology. Here, the fundamental text is a brief critical analysis by Francois Simiand of
the four books by Blanchard, Demangeon, Vallaux, and Sion. Published in L'Annie
sociologique,^^ this text, along with a review of a book of Ratzel's by Maurice
Halbwachs, constituted the first half of the section on "Social Morphology," which
bore the title, "The Geographical Bases of Social Life." Simiand 's critique of the

geographers was threefold: i. They unduly extended the notion of a geographical

fact to include all material and mental facts, thus destroying what ought to have
been the proper domain of geography (namely, the study of those facts for which
physical localization was a constitutive or explanatory factor). 2. They assumed
 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 491

the existence of an "essential action of the physical milieu" on economic facts and
social institutions, whereas their own observations often contradicted the existence
of such a relation; furthermore, "the true explanatory fact is human and
[always]

psychological, and the physical fact is at most a condition." 3. They condemn them-
selves to uncertainty by limiting their observations to the narrow framework of
regional description. For Simiand, this was probably the major error. It little mat-
tered how the region was defined. Whatever the criteria, the definition inevitably

masked the true explanatory relations: "To limit oneself to so narrow a region is to

close off the only path that permits distinguishing between accidental or noninflu-
ential coincidences and true correlations, for it is to close off the path of compari-

son among a relatively large number of different entities; in a matter so complex, to

limit oneself to a single observed case is to condemn oneself in advance to the

impossibility of proving anything."

The procedures that a "science of social morphology" ought properly to adopt

were contrasted one by one with the misguided approach of the geographers. What
one ought to do, it was argued, was consider not how the territory should be divided
up but how various interesting phenomena should be analyzed. The most conven-
tional of territories (France or western Europe, say) could therefore serve as legit-
imate frameworks, for their very breadth increased the number of sites from which
it was possible to observe relations between the relevant social facts and the various
factors likely to account for them. The only spatial prerequisite of social morphol-
ogy was extension, hence the region was totally disqualified as a pertinent analytic

space. The social sciences were offered a research program in which the number one
task was analysis of various social facts. Geographers had a role to play in this pro-

gram provided they turned their methodology on its head and gave up on the mis-
guided attempt to write regional monographs: "Suppose that, instead of devoting
themselves to a problem that for the time being (and very likely for a long time to
come) remains quite insoluble, the same men, conscientious, erudite, careful in their

research and determined to be scientific in their approach, had applied themselves

to studying, say, types of habitation or the localization of particular industries
throughout France or even, if need be, throughout western Europe, in the present

and also, as will no doubt prove necessary, in the past as well. Does anyone think
that they would not have come up with more conclusive results or penetrated more
quickly and more accurately to the heart of phenomena that a science of social mor-
phology can legitimately set itself the task of explaining.'^"

Such an approach, which implicitly assumes that geographical conditions have

only a minor influence on social phenomena, makes regional description the ulti-

mate stage of knowledge, to be undertaken only after the general laws governing
each of the elementary social facts have been ascertained: "If one assumes that the
regions considered are in fact unified human and geographic entities (often, in fact.
 —
492 ROGER CHARTIER

more human than geographic), and if one begins by studying the region as a whole,

by attempting to grasp and explain all the relevant factors at once, one will make the

mistake of beginning with what is most difficult, what can at best be conceived of as
a goal of science. It is tantamount, in effect, to wanting to explain all the complex
individuality of the individual rather than begin, as in all science, with the analysis

of simple general relations." This criticism was aimed squarely at a credo that the
geographers of the twentieth century had inherited from their eighteenth-century
forebears: the necessary primacy of local studies, a sufficient number of which had
to be amassed before any attempt was made to examine things at the national level.

For Simiand, regional description was at best still premature. Only a comparative,
analytical approach, conducted within a territory whose precise contours were of
no importance provided it was sufficiently large, was capable of revealing the gen-

eral laws governing the forms of social life.

After Simiand 's radical critique, the notion of a natural region as used by
Demangeon, Blanchard, and Sion also faced a challenge mounted within the
Vidalian school itself. It is in this sense that one must understand Maximilien Sorre's
thesis, Les Pyrenees mediterraneennes (published in 1913).^^ This was not a regional
geography, and in any case it cannot be placed on the same footing as the earlier
monographs (although this is what Lucien Febvre did in La Terre et revolution

humaine^'^). Sorre in fact points out two ways in which his approach is original. In the
first place, the territory he was studying was in no sense a natural region but rather

a "collection of small, relatively individualized regions,"^" lacking homogeneity

within itself and not sharply distinguished from surrounding areas. Furthermore,
his goal was not to set forth the totality of natural and human facts circumscribed by
the area under examination but rather to state a problem: "To show how ways of life
are transformed under the impact of transformation in the vegetal environment

and vice versa —upon contact with two societies and under the influence of climatic
changes."^' The terrain was chosen not for the unity but for the diversity of its sites,

which were differentiated by elevation, distance from the sea, and climate. Sorre
thus laid out a laboratory space that did not correspond to any natural region and
gave it a somewhat paradoxical name: the Mediterranean Pyrenees.

Though ostensibly faithful to Vidal de La Blache, Sorre 's book unavowedly and
perhaps unwittingly placed the sociologists' concerns at the heart of his investiga-
tion. Among his themes, for instance, we find Simiand 's contention that the way to

identify universal laws is to increase the number of comparisons and observations

of repetitions.

We would not have deliberately dispensed with the notion of natural region if
we had not believed that the loss was compensated by an appreciable gain.
When one studies a region, one hopes to point out what is singular about the
 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 493

combination of phenomena that occur there. One studies individuaUzed geo-

graphical areas that are fundamentally distinct from neighboring areas.

Finally, one presents the facts or groups of facts in light of their opposition. But
it is just as essential, in doing science, to present the facts in light of their rep-
etition.... The advantage of the viewpoint that we have adopted is precisely
that it allows for comparisons.... In sum, the advantage of our method is to
"^^
give prominence to the general character of the phenomena under study.

For Sorre, the region is therefore an artifact constructed in such a way as to test the

possible interactions among natural milieus and ways of life. Choosing a limited

space enables him to make careful observations of differences (such as the interre-

lationship of four distinct ways of life in the "Mediterranean Pyrenees"), but the
aim of his descriptions is to establish the principles by virtue of which equivalent
natural conditions at different sites define comparable ways of life, which then in

turn have a similar transformative effect on the milieu. Unlike the "natural regions,"
which were held to be distinctively individual, the regions identified by Sorre were
supposed to exhibit a broad spectrum of combinations also visible elsewhere. The
definition of a limited framework of study is in no way in contradiction with the
generalization of results that it makes possible: on the contrary, it is a prerequisite of

such generalization. On the terrain of biological geography we thus find morpho-

logical analysis combined with localized observation.

In the debate between "anthropogeographers" and sociologists, Lucien Febvre's

position was quite clear, for two fundamental reasons. The first had to do with his

very conception of scientific work. For him, the only way to amass a large body of
data (whether in the field or in the archives) was through monographs tailored to

the dimensions of individual research. Only by imposing spatial limits on research

could one be sure of gathering reliable data. It was therefore illusory to try to estab-

lish "simple general relations" before compiling preliminary descriptions of terri-

torial units. Conversely, it was only through the accumulation of local studies that

one could hope to develop a pertinent set of questions for investigating the forms
and distributions of the fundamental social facts: "Only when we have in hand a few
good new regional monographs will we be able, by comparing and contrasting them
in minute detail, to take up the fundamental question and take a new and decisive

step toward our goal. To proceed in any other way would be to embark on a sort of
rapid survey equipped with two or three simple, crude ideas. In most cases it would
mean missing the particular, the individual, the irregular —which is to say, what on
the whole is most interesting."'^ This text repeats an idea that Febvre had expressed
earlier in the foreword to his thesis, namely, that any comparative approach would
have to be based on gauging the disparities between regional situations described in
the most thorough manner possible. In 1912, for example, he called for additional
494 ROGER CHARTIER

historical studies of the provinces that joined the French kingdom at a relatively late

date, which he said were "in a sense like comparative, experimental laboratories

placed and maintained on the borders by life and the centuries themselves."'
Whether one focused on the natural regions of the geographers or the politicall

distinctive regions of the historians was of little importance: the methods wer
identical insofar as they relied on the monograph as the basis of all comparison.
Beyond the primacy accorded to regional studies, moreover, was an underlying
conception of social description more concerned with difference than with repeti-
tion. Choosing a limited framework was thus not simply a matter of convenience or

feasibility but also a way of defining the object of study itself, for in this area vari-

ations and singularities were more common than stable and universal relations. The
choice of the regional thus involved an unavowed investment in a particular repre-

sentation of social facts, of their causes and relations, which was precisely the oppo-

site of Simiand's.
Victor Karady's research suggests several hypotheses concerning, among other
methodological differences, the contrasting conceptions of what constituted a
legitimate and relevant space for social science at the beginning of the twentieth

century.^^ When the Vidalian geographers and Durkheimian sociologists clashed,

the position of the two disciplines was not identical. Geography, the first among
the social sciences to break the monopoly of the classical disciplines in the facul-

ties of letters, already enjoyed substantial institutional legitimacy, reinforced by

the fact that the geographers had been able to tap into the legitimacy of history
itself, having attracted the interest of normalien and a^re^e historians (that is, grad-
uates of the Ecole Normale Superieure and others who had passed the difficult

agregation required for admission to higher teaching posts in the fycees), who stood
at the top of the academic hierarchy. It also enjoyed increasing scientific legiti-

macy, based on the definition of a specific object (the region) and a novel research
methodology (involving landscape analysis, correlation of natural and human
data, and other new methods), without having renounced that crucial warrant of
respectability that comes from working in a historical dimension. In order to win
recognition of this growing legitimacy, Vidalian geographers used various tactics
common to all the new disciplines of the beginning of the century: somewhat cir-

cumspect references to German science, in this case Ratzel's inspirational yet crit-

icized anthropogeography; the creation of a journal, the Annates de geographie,

founded in 1891, which both presented an intelligible, unified image of the group
and enabled it to discredit older or competing approaches; and a new manner of
presenting its results, which were, to be sure, cast in a traditional form, the thesis

for the doctoral d'Etat, but reinforced by new signs of scientificity, such as the use
of maps, not as an aid to locating places but as a device for presenting observa-
tional data, of photographs, not as illustrations but as ways of defining objects for
 The Saint-Malo— Geneva Line 495

further study, of sketches and monographs borrowed from the natural sciences,
and so on.
In this period, the Sociological School appeared to be overshadowed in two
respects. To be sure, it too recruited from the cream of the academic system, attract-
ing normaliens and agreges, yet it still had a difficult time establishing itself within

the university system and gaining universal recognition of its scientific legitimacy.

It therefore resorted to a strategy on which Karady has shed a good deal of light:

In order to guarantee the scientific legitimacy of sociology and win a place for

it equivalent to that of the classical disciplines in the curriculum, links of

interdependency had to be forged with those sciences of man already estab-
lished in the universities (primarily history, geography, and philosophy but
also psychology). This was done both by offering services and by initiating an
effective and radical critique of their epistemological presuppositions. The
strategy was thus one of alliance with the legitimate disciplines while at the

same time attempting to supplant them and take their terrain away by occupy-
ing it.^^

When applied specifically to relations between sociologists and geographers and to

the question of the division of space, the foregoing description helps us to under-

stand the twofold significance of sociology's rejection of the notion of region. On

the one hand it justified a takeover of the subject matter of human geography while
totally redefining the framework within which that subject matter was treated. The

results of geography were incorporated even as they were rejected, pushed in the
direction of "social morphology," which allowed a description of the basis of social
life richer than that of a mere economic infrastructure. On the other hand the rejec-
tion of region enabled the sociologists to play one of the few trump cards they held
against the historians and geographers, namely, their philosophical background,

hence their status as an abstract theoretical science committed to concepts and gen-
eralizations, whereas geographical studies, more than any other social science and
no doubt especially on account of regional description, remained confined to the

concrete and the terrain, to local observations and a descriptive approach. To reject

regional monographs in favor of comparative, analytical studies on the grounds

that only the latter could reveal general laws was to translate into terms of discipli-
nary methodology one of sociology's most remunerative features: its proximity to
philosophy, indeed its claim to be philosophy. Though peripheral to the academic
chessboard, sociology attempted, in compensation, to define its subject matter in
terms of universal method and national scope. It therefore denied all legitimacy to
disciplines within the heart of the academic system that treated, or rather mis-
treated, the same subject matter in a fragmented fashion, dividing it up in accor-

dance with a piecemeal empiricist method.

I
496 ROGER CHARTIER

For historians, the debate over the region proved to be of decisive importance.
In the wake of Febvre, and following a certain latency period — the major theses in
"regional" history were undertaken in the 1950s — they devoted their efforts to
achieving a global understanding of a carefully circumscribed territory. To be sure,
the "region" as defined by Vidalian geographers was no longer the obligatory mod-
ulus, or spatial unit, and the spaces explored differed widely in nature, size, and def-
inition: from a pays (the Beauvaisis) to a province (Languedoc) to a nation (albeit

a stifled one, Catalonia), to mention only the three greatest successes, often imitated
by subsequent researchers. Yet while the scale varied, the overall approach was sim-
ilar: research focused on majority groups, took the long view (generally embracing
a century or more), and sought to describe basic demographic, economic, and
social structures.

Over the past twenty years, the rediscovery of the Saint-Malo— Geneva line as a

key for organizing French disparities in some sense offered a counterpoint to this
long-standing interest in regional peculiarities. The widely held but unsubstantiated
perception of a divided France was developed into a scientific finding supported by
a variety of data.^^ This helped French historians to move away from the catalogue
approach inherited from their old association with human geography. In the past
history had sought to map peculiarities whose explanation was thought to lie in the

diversity of natural conditions and local histories. The discovery of sharp macro-
scopic differences on either side of a readily identifiable line opened the way to a dif-

ferent approach, a search for large-scale patterns and correlations, which harked
back to the long-rejected tradition of social morphology as defined by Durkheimian
sociology. Thus restored to a central place in our thinking about French history, a

division first discovered by the political arithmeticians of the Restoration took on a

twofold significance. First, by "de-regionalizing" historians' descriptions of the

social world, it helped to give (or restore to) history the status of a general science.
Meanwhile, outside the academic world, it established a way of looking at France's
unequal development as well as an explanation for it. Today, of course, the gap
between northern and southern France alone no longer seems sufficient to account

for certain long-term internal disparities and imbalances. Nevertheless, the division
remains as one of the fundamental ways in which the nation's consciousness and
memory of internal division have found their expression.
 CHAPTER 13

Generation
Pierre Nora

It is difficult to think of a notion that has become more commonplace yet at the

same time more opaque than that of "generation." Or of a notion more ancient,
one that draws on biological roots that stretch all the way back to the Bible,

Herodotus, and Plutarch, yet takes its meaning exclusively from the more recent
universe of democratic individualism. Wholly "epidermic," it clings to the surface

of the young and to their times, and to fashion, yet no other notion strikes more
directly to the vital core of our historical perception of the present. How much of
this idea of "generation" belongs particularly to France.'' In precisely what sense is

it a lieu de memoire? And what sorts of distinctions does it permit us to make in the
present context.''

For twenty years there has been a spate of sociological, economic, demographic,
and historical investigations centered on the idea of "generation."' The theme, a

favorite of pollsters everywhere, has been harped on to the point of exhaustion. Yet
none of this might have come to pass without May '68. And of course the "events"
that occurred in France at that time must themselves be understood in the context of
the international youth rebellion that Margaret Mead was the first to interpret as a
symptom of the worldwide generation gap.^ Long viewed, by historians at least,
with skeptical indifference, the elusive idea of a generation suddenly became a focal
point of countless studies, all haunted in one way or another by the specter of '68.

This sudden surge of interest is all the more curious in that, concerning the explo-
sion of '68 itself, a number of excellent observers have found it impossible not to
deplore the paucity of serious historical research, as distinct from the unstanchable
flood of (spontaneous or commissioned) reminiscence and self-celebratory obser-

vance by those who took part,^ as if one could somehow sum up a conflagration that
500 PIERRE NORA

no one saw coming and that no rational account could fully explain as nothing more
or less than the affirmation of a "generation."
The fabrication of the sacrosanct generation of '68 did not begin with the
"events" themselves. At intervals of a decade, anniversary celebrations in 1978
and 1988 set the pace, albeit in markedly different historical contexts.'* The tenth

anniversary of the "events" was an occasion for nostalgic stocktaking, for melan-
choly reassessment of the gauckiste adventure, of those doleful "orphan years"' at

the end of which one journalist went in quest of a "lost generation" and its mem-
ories. The twentieth anniversary came at the tense conclusion of a period of
"cohabitation,"^ a period caught in a pincers between, on the one hand, what
Serge July, a central figure in the saga, did not shrink from calling the "premature
ejaculation" of theDecember 1986 student movement^ and, on the other, the
already-launched campaigns for upcoming presidential and legislative elections
and ongoing preparations for the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. What
emerged, however, from those two anniversaries —crowned by the publication of

Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman's Generation, the first work ever to bear that

simple and majestic title —was more than anything else the capacity of a handful
of ex-Trotskyite, ex-Maoist, ex— Gauche Proletarienne activists and chroniclers,
risen to positions of leadership, to set themselves up (or persuade others to set

them up) as spokesmen for an entire generation, for whose commemoration they
assumed sole responsibility.'

This mania for celebration is in itself significant. No historical event of substan-

tive content has elicited anything of the kind: World War I, the Popular Front, the

Resistance, the Liberation. It is profoundly revealing of the very nature of May '68:
its capacity to serve as a looking glass, its symbolic malleability, its historical elas-

ticity, and its characteristic tendency to ascribe greater importance to the subjective

moment than to the objective substance of the facts. Memory was

experience of the
germinating even as the movement unfolded, for what was it, with its barricades as
historical quotation and its theater of allusion, but an enactment of revolutionary

memory without a revolutionary opportunity.-*

Generation, memory, symbol: May '68 was its own commemorative anniversary.
The construction of a memory went hand in hand with the self-affirmation of a

generation, two faces of a single phenomenon. The elimination of the historian as

intermediary only highlighted the generational dynamic of 1968 and the uniquely
symbolic content attached at the time to expression, culminating a vast historical
cycle that began with nothing less than the French Revolution and ended in the
events of May. The emergence of a "generation" in its pure, intransitive state

revealed the sovereignty of the notion's retrospective explanatory power, thereby

constituting it, from its inception and in a primary, purely temporal sense, as a lieu

de memoire.
 Generation 501

A Retrospective Overview of the Notion

whether in an international context or a more specific French one, the culmination

of the idea of "generation" in '68 can only be understood by returning directly to the
root of the phenomenon, the French Revolution. I am by no means unaware that to

telescope '68 and '89 may strike some readers as indecent or incongruous,^ as if the
Event in its pure state, the advent of the modern event, were in any way commensu-
rate with the later so-called events, about which it was immediately asked in what
respect they could be said to constitute events at all. The short circuit is nevertheless
enlightening. It reveals the existence of a sort of historical watershed and a gamut of
definitions of generation from the properly historical to the essentially symbolic.

The event of '68 magnified the generational dimension, whereas '89 minimized
it. Yet it was omnipresent. Restif de La Bretonne noted this at the time: "It was
[Rousseau's] Emile that brought us this teasing, stubborn, insolent, impudent, head-
strong generation, which speaks loudly, shuts the mouths of the elderly, and with
equal audacity demonstrates now its innate folly, reinforced by education, now its

immature wisdom, as raw and sharp as grapes pressed in mid-August."^'' It had

already made its appearance in the twenty years that preceded the revolutionary
explosion, in the form of youth movements and demonstrations, which recent
research has shown to have existed in both Paris and the provinces." It erupted in
the Tennis Court Oath, the first triumph of the principle of fraternal solidarity over
paternal judgment.'^ It might have remained more in evidence, moreover, had it not
been quickly overshadowed by the idea of faction. The generational concept found
clear expression in revolutionary explorations of the link between the end of hered-
itary rule and the legitimacy of representative government, as can be seen in a curi-

ous pamphlet, The First Principles of Government (5 Messidor, Year III) by Thomas
Paine, in which the Anglo-American propagandist, steeped in the Jeffersonian tra-

dition,'^ after some rather tricky calculations pertaining to the substitution of the

young for the old delineated the precise rights of each:

Since every generation has equal rights, it follows that none has the slightest
right to establish a hereditary government.... Every age, every generation is

and should be (with respect to rights) as free to act for itself in all cases as were
previous ages and generations.... If we have another gospel on this point, we
behave as slaves or as tyrants; as slaves if we believe that some first generation
had any right whatsoever to fetter us; as tyrants if we arrogate to ourselves the
authority to bind the generations that shall follow us.'"*

The concept of generation can also be found, in the most solemn of terms, in the
founding texts of the French Republic. The Declaration of the Rights of Man of
1793 — Condorcet's text — goes so far as to proclaim that "a generation has no right
 .

502 PIERRE NORA

to subject any future generation to its laws" (Article 30).'^ The same concept was
already implicit in the Constitution of 1791, which at one stroke abolished both]
hereditary rights and corporate regulations, thus laying the groundwork for a soci-
j

ety of free and equal individuals. It was also implicit in revolutionary measures con-
cerning the family and paternal authority, particularly those that responded to the
demands of youth, such as abolishing primogeniture, setting the age of majority at

twenty-one, allowing marriage without paternal consent, and denying fathers the
right to disinherit their children. Saint-Just, typical of the rising generation,

summed up these measures: "You have therefore decided that one generation can-
not place another in chains."'^ The Revolution was intrinsically generational,

nowhere more so than in its rhetoric, its ambition to be a historical, initiatory rite of
passage from the night of despotism to the bright day of liberty. Generation-
Regeneration: the two themes were closely associated in all their biological, psy-

chological, moral, religious, and messianic connotations.'^ In a more profound

sense, the Revolution was generational in its pedagogical obsession and reversal of
time, in its eschatology of rupture, in its instantaneous transition from the Old to
the New. The twilight of legitimacy, the dawn of the notion of generation. The past
is no longer the law: this is the very essence of the phenomenon.
The Revolution thus marked the absolute but invisible advent of the notion of
generation. It has often been noted that the careers which the revolutionary adven-
ture and the abolition of privileges opened to talent progressed rapidly, as evi-

denced by that of Bonaparte. But people were more struck by individual youthful-
ness, such as Saint- Just's, than by a general rejuvenation of history's personae. The
care that Chateaubriand, for one, took to postdate his birth by one year — 1769
rather than 1768 — has generally been attributed to a wish to hitch his star to
Napoleon's rather than to a desire to count himself among those who were "twenty
years old in 1789." Only recently, in the light of our retrospective interest in the
generational theme, have scholars (most of them English-speaking, by the way)
thought to calculate the average age of assembly members.'^ And so the sudden
burst of youth onto the political scene stands revealed: if the average age of
deputies in the Constituent Assembly was still forty, that of deputies in the

Legislative Assembly was only twenty-six: a fantastic rejuvenation of the historical

cast. This neglected aspect of the Revolution calls for a wholesale reinterpretation
of the event. It emerges even more clearly when we look into the details of things:

the Montagnards, for example, were far younger than their rivals, the Girondins.

But the youthful dimension of the Revolution passed largely unnoticed, melted
back into the Revolution itself. The dynamism of a particular group, youth, fused
with the universality of the Revolution's principles to become not the extreme or
radical form of revolutionary politics but its fundamental reality. From a historical

point of view this is the deeper meaning of the Burke-Paine polemic, which with-

1
 Generation 503

out exaggeration can be described as having marked the historical baptism of the
notion of generation. Against Burke 's Reflections on the merits of tradition, so full

of irony toward the "usurpers," those "political novices," those "summer flies" that

had "given themselves carte blanche to set themselves in business without a stock in
trade" and to "refuse the government of examples," Thomas Paine, invoking novel
inaugural formulas against the "usurped authority of the dead," championed each
generation's right to set its own course: "Man has no property in man; neither has
any generation a property in the generations which are to follow."'^

Thus the Revolution established the notion of a generation, not only because it

gave birth to one (a proposition whose proof would itself be an effect of retrospec-
tive genealogy) but because it cleared the way for, made possible, and accelerated
the advent of a world of change, an egalitarian world in which "generational con-
sciousness" was born. The phenomenon was not limited to France, although there

the longevity of monarchical succession and the Oedipal brutality of the king's
murder lent particular intensity to the French case. It was intrinsic to the Atlantic

revolution and the principle of representative democracy. In the United States,

however, the problem was resolved at one stroke, and so successfully that the issue
of generational replacement has never arisen there in the political sphere as such,
whereas in France the Revolution inaugurated an enduring conflict and infused into
politics a rhythm with a perceptible generational pulse. French political history

could indeed be written in terms of generations and generational themes: from

Louis XVIII to Thiers, from Petain to de Gaulle, that history could be read as a
story of youth's revolt against the authority of the fathers. This narrative is the

ground bass, the warp and woof of French political life; it forms the political back-
bone of French memory, and, in a country where political change has been rapid as
well as rocky, it has made the seizure of power a central feature of the generational

concept. For that reason alone, the word generation in French is almost invariably
associated with the

The two dates

—wordand —
'89
dominant.
'68 thus mark the ends of a broad spectrum of social

representations. In 1789 the Event completely subsumed the generational symbol-

ism by allowing it full expression, thereby masking its presence. In 1968, by con-
trast, the event owed its existence to its generational dimension, so that one may ask
Ranke's question: Wie es eigentlich gewesen? or. What, apart from the individual

experiences and effects on the lives of those involved, actually happened.'' And the

answer, in Hegelian terms and in the eyes of that History which is written in letters

of blood, is Nothing.
Precisely this historical vacuum was necessary, however, in order for the truth to

bubble up: what happened in '68 was a symbolic rupture, and it is just this kind of
rupture that is the key to the generational concept. A generation is a category of rep-
resentative comprehension; it is a violent affirmation of horizontal identity that sud-
PIERRE NORA

denly dominates and transcends all forms of vertical solidarity. Sixty-eight revealed

the essence of the generational phenomenon: a dynamic of belonging, simple in

some ways and complex in others. The "youth movement" developed throughout
the world, yet it had no crucial shared experience on which to find common ground,
unless it was the experience of having missed such traumatic engagements as the

World War II resistance against fascism or the opposition to the Algerian War. The
revolutionary mime of 1968 ran against the tide of the moment: it occurred at the

peak of a period of rapid economic growth and in a time of full employment, as

orthodox revolutionary ideologies were crumbling. Even the participants were sur-
prised by the rapidity with which strategic population centers erupted in flames. A
"demand to be heard" was of course part of the event itself, and would-be author-
itative analyses appeared immediately in its wake, yet this purely generational
explosion was so disconcerting that some commentators tried hard to shift the blame
to other generations and events. Demographers, for example, argued that the
force of the eruption reflected the accumulated explosive potential of three distinct

generations: the demobilized generation of the Algerian War (people born between
1935 and 1941), followed by a relatively small generation untouched by ideology
(people born during World War II), both of which were ostensibly energized by the
first wave of the post— World War II baby boom.^' For the cultural psychologists,
attuned to the movement's romantic nostalgia and its analogies with the revolution

of 1848, it was the very absence of historical events that served as the triggering

trauma, a hypothesis confirmed by the Utopian and narcissistic character of this

adolescent and rather anarchical protest.^^ For one journalist of sociological bent,
the generation of 1968 was merely the shadow cast by the Algerian War generation,
much influenced by de Gaulle 's return to power ten years earlier.^^ And for one for-

mer gauchiste lately repentant of his youthful commitments, the '68 generation was
rather the midwife of the 70s generation, marked by fading memories of the

Algerian episode and liberated from the fascination that the Communist Party still

exerted on its predecessor. The pendulum has not stopped swinging.

The difficulty of simply defining or even identifying the last and most visible of

our generations mirrors the difficulty faced by a whole series of analysts since
Auguste Comte the moment they try to move from the concrete, empirical descrip-

tion of a group of people of roughly the same age held together by some common
set of experiences to a more theoretical definition. It has been argued, in fact, that

the notion has no operational or scientific interest unless clear and precise answers
can be given to four key sets of questions: temporal, demographic, historical, and
sociological. How long does a generation last.'' How quickly are generations
replaced, given that sons are perpetually taking over from their fathers.'' What date
defines a generation: the date of birth or the conventional benchmark of the twen-
tieth year, which is assumed to mark the end of the adolescent's period of maximal
 Generation 505

receptivity? Exactly what role do events play in the determination of a generation,

where the term events, broadly construed, encompasses both ordinary experience
and the traumatic event? Is generation a conscious or unconscious phenomenon? Is

it something imposed from without or freely chosen? Is it a statistical or a psycho-

logical phenomenon? Or, to put it another way, who does and who does not belong
to a given generation, andhow does that belonging manifest itself, given that one or
more different age cohorts may identify with a generation without taking part in the
vicissitudes of its existence?

Bringing all these questions together in one place makes it clear that the notion

of generation inevitably leads to insoluble contradictions and uncertainties. These

are too obvious to dwell on here, and much ink has already been spilled in dis-

cussing them. Even the most innovative of the thinkers who have found the notion
of generation interesting enough to explore have encountered these dilemmas.
Take, for example, the sociologist Karl Mannheim, who in his classic 1928 essay

saw generations as "one of the fundamental factors in the unfolding dynamic of

history" yet found it difficult to distill a clear concept from an impure compos-
ite.^*^ Most writers who use the notion have moved from a flexible, concrete,

almost neutral definition to a rigid mathematism, or vice versa. After World War
I, for example, Frangois Mentre saw a generation as embodying "a new way of
feeling and understanding life, opposed to or at least different from what went
before. "^^ And after World War II, the literary historian Henri Peyre defined a

generation as "united initially by shared hostilities and by having been subjected

to the same influences between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, if not ear-
lier."^^ Yet neither writer had the slightest hesitation about drawing up endless,
tedious tables demonstrating the march of generations from some arbitrarily cho-

sen initial date: 1490 for one (Clouet, Du Bellay, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais,
Marot), 1600 for the other (Descartes, Poussin, Mansart, Corneille, Claude
Lorrain, Fermat). One of the most surprising examples of the kind can be found
in the work of the Spanish writer Julian Marias, a disciple of Ortega y Gasset,
who, in attempting to give a systematic demonstration of his teacher's ideas, came

up with the following rather startling series of dates for the significant genera-

tions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 1812, 1827, 1842, 1857, 1872, 1887,
1902, 1917, 1932, 1947.^' In contrast, Yves Renouard, who in 1953 became one of
the first historians to hail the idea of generation as "an illuminating beacon"
which "alone could help to compose a dynamic portrait of a society," called for a

more precise definition: "A collection of age cohorts, a group of men and women
whose ideas, feelings, and lifestyles are the same, and who are shaped by the same
physical, intellectual, and moral conditions as the major facts and events affecting

the society of which they are a part." Yet he advocated caution and prudence in
applying his narrow approach.'*^
5o6 PIERRE NORA

The problem is that all the writers who have ventured to treat the subject in

terms of rather vague categories and approximate definitions invariably become

prisoners of what might be called the "dialectic of the hard and the soft." The gen-
erational instrument seems scientific to them only if it is precise, but if it is applied
precisely one runs up against life 's inconsistencies. The attempt to escape from the
impressionistic ends up being impressionistic. After so many brave attempts one is
reminded of the fellow who discovered that rubber had every imaginable quality,

its only problem being its lamentable elasticity. The generational concept would
make a wonderfully precise instrument if only its precision didn't make it impossi-
ble to apply to the unclassifiable disorder of reality. As for the duration of a gener-

ation, any number of equally plausible answers have been given, from Albert
Thibaudet's ambling thirty years (in Histoire de la litterature frangaise depuis 1789,

a book based entirely on the idea of generation^'), to Ortega y Gasset's and Yves
Renouard's quicker-paced fifteen to Henri Peyre 's and Frangois Mentre's blistering
ten. One is left with a situation in which some authorities confidently see a dozen
literary generations from 1789 to the present where others see only five. As for

birth dates, not even the authorities are above a certain amount of juggling and
finagling. Thibaudet, for example, is quite unhappy with the idea of including in

the generation that led the assault on 1789 not only men born in the period

1766— 1769 (such as Chateaubriand, Napoleon, Senancour, Benjamin Constant, and

Maine de Biran) but also writers such as Rivarol and Joubert, who were fifteen

years older than Napoleon and Chateaubriand. Nor does he hesitate to place
Montherlant alongside Proust in the generation of World War I, even though thirty
years separated the two men. What if we make major events our sole criterion."^ We
must then differentiate between events endured and events freely chosen, between
formative events and determinative events. All events are multigenerational, more-
over, and the greater their magnitude (like World War I), the less simple it is to

identify the groups most affected by them. Yves Renouard proposes four types of
generational reactions to events: the indifference of the elderly, the unconscious-
ness of children, and, between the two, the reactions of those who wield power over
events and of those who challenge that power. And what, finally, if we choose to

rely on statistical criteria.'' On the one hand there is the clear and simple demo-
graphic definition: a generation is nothing but a cohort, a group of people born in

a given year. Economists and statisticians have found this objective definition quite

useful. On the other hand there is the undecidable question of generational repre-

sentativity. In other words, what entitles us to say that people who knew nothing of
Victor Hugo's famous play belonged to the "generation of Hernani, " or that peo-
ple who took no part in World War II belonged to the "generation of the
Resistance.''" Can we identify a generation with those who speak in its name, avail-

ing ourselves of a natural confusion that has proved particularly fruitful and
 Generation 507

rewarding when applied to such articulate groups as artists, intellectuals, and men
of letters?

Although each of these solutions offers its share of persuasive insights, in every
attempt to hone a sharp analytic scalpel, the recalcitrance of the material has ended
by blunting the instrument's cutting edge. Hence it will come as no surprise that the

most careful historians, though by no means unaware of the unique light that the

notion of generation can shed on the past, have generally rejected the concept as
schematic, unworkable, crude, and in the end less enriching than reductive. In par-
ticular, the founders of the journal Annales, who in their desire to work with the
most concrete social data inevitably encountered generational phenomena, were
severe in their judgment, dismissing the idea of generation as an artifact, an illusion
that people engaged in social action held about themselves. Marc Bloch somewhat
grudgingly allowed it the virtue of "laying the preliminary groundwork. "^^ Lucien
Febvre, however, had no doubt about the verdict: "Better forget it!"^^ Despite some
successful recent attempts to breathe historical life into the phenomenon, to identify,

with subtlety and tact, generational constellations in the political^'* and intellectual^^

realms, the fundamental judgment has not wavered.

The problem is that any attempt to give a precise definition of generation, or at

any rate to provide as much precision as any definition requires, inevitably falls into

a trap — or twin traps — inherent in the notion itself. First, a generation is by its very
nature a purely individual phenomenon that only makes sense when seen collec-

tively. And second, although the notion originated in a philosophical framework of

continuity, it makes sense only in a framework of discontinuity and rupture.
Although the idea is based on a biological analogy, it thrives when time is chopped
up into symbolic segments rather than treated as a continuous chronological quan-
We are all conscious of belonging to several generations, to which we feel con-
tity.

nected in varying degrees. We do not necessarily feel that we belong to the genera-
tion to which the dates of our birth would consign us. What accounts for the special

interest in this very distinctive type of periodization (the only type not somehow
mathematically determined) is not the material and temporal determinism that it

fatally entails but the dynamics of belonging that it authorizes. As for the notion of

generation, there are two basic attitudes, not to say two radically contradictory
philosophies. According to one view, a generation is essentially determined by a
principle of inclusion, of assigned social membership and defined existential limits,

hence it is a reinforcement of the notion of finitude that caused Heidegger, follow-

ing the German romantic philosophers, to say that "the fact of living in and with
one 's generation concludes the drama of human existence. "^^ The other view is that

egalitarian democracy has unleashed an incredible potential for identification,

which has been invested in identification with one 's generation because such iden-
tification allows for freedom and self-amplification. Pure generational solidarity,
 —
5o8 PIERRE NORA

which is the whole essence of the phenomenon, is freedom, insofar as the horizon-
taUty that it assumes is in a sense the ideal and idealized image of egalitarian democ-
racy. A generation embodies and epitomizes the principle of equality out of which
it was born. Surely this is what endows it with its potential for radical simplification.

At one stroke it abolishes all other differences. Or better still, the idea of generation
completes the squaring of the circle that is the problem of all democracy: it converts
the imposed into the willed, the simple fact of birth into an affirmation of existence.

This is perhaps the only way to feel free nowadays while being bound to something.

"The generation" is the daughter of democracy and of the acceleration of history.

Identification with events corresponded to an era of slow changes and clear tempi

that impressed themselves on the minds of participants. The absence of an unmis-

takable reference point for truly collective memory, together with an increasingly

rapid pace of change, has led to the opposite situation: the identification of tempo-
ral flow with the very notion of generation. Not that great events have vanished
quite the contrary. But events too have changed in nature: they are banalized by
their very multiplicity, made unreal by the way in which they are received and expe-
rienced, and extended in their impact to a much broader population. The historical
milieu in which events unfold has exploded to include the entire world. France,
which long saw history as centered on itself, is increasingly bound to acknowledge
that the center is elsewhere. The social upheavals of the past twenty-five years have

reinforced this view, expanding the middle class and introducing a convergence of
lifestyles and consumer habits.^' The accent of novelty now falls on microevents,
on technological or social innovation. Finally, demographic changes have accentu-
ated the transformation of the phenomenon, with the aging of the population, a

result of increased life expectancy and decreased birth rate, coupled with a relative
increase in the number of the young owing to a delayed commencement of work
life and the emergence of the new stage of "post-adolescence.'"*" This simultaneous
increase in the French population of the proportion of the young and of the old

makes for a situation of ever more stark confrontation, since whatever is not
"young" is immediately perceived as "old." History, society, and demography have
thus powerfully conspired to democratize an essentially democratic phenomenon.
The notion of generation has thus been subverted from within in much the same
way as the modern "mediatized" event.'" There is no longer a "dominant genera-
tion" or total historical phenomenon; atomized, what the generational theme now

conveys is social everydayness in all its aspects. People used to reckon three gener-
ations per century. Nowadays we count a new generation almost daily. As I write

these lines in May of 1989, several of the month's periodicals have appeared with
articles on generational topics: the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur has a

feature on "Thirty- Year-Olds: Portrait of a Generation"; a major daily newspaper,

 —

Generation 509

Liberation, has a literary supplement entitled "The Vernant Generation," after Jean-

Pierre Vernant, a retired scholar; the magazine Infini has baptized a group of young
writers "The '89 Generation"; a special issue of the journal Vingtieme Siecle is

devoted to "Generations"; and two graduates of the prestigious Ecole Nationale

d 'Administration, members of the group "Generation 1992," have published a
book entitled Generation Europel For journalists and ad agency copywriters "gener-
ation" is a notion that floats as freely as the franc in the European monetary system,
drifting —Moulinex
from the key of technology generation, Pampers generation
to that of psychology— Generation X, the rap generation, the singles generation.

The —
latest in political advertising call it a bluff or a stroke of genius as you will
is a poster touting the "Mitterrand Generation," and it is hard to say whether the
noted adman who thought it up was motivated more by a propitiatory reflex or
ironic loyalty. This destructive, obsessive inflation of the idea —what the
Situationists used to call a detournement — has been described, quite understandably,
as the premature obsolescence of a notion well-suited to the explanation of a long
and arduous nineteenth century but inappropriate to a momentarily more frivolous
age.'*^ The obsolescence of the notion is not obvious, however. Its atomization, not
to say banalization, has done nothing to limit its sacralization, radicalization, and
transgressive vocation — quite the contrary.

The real question raised by the contemporary transformation, use, and diffusion
of the notion is this: As the pace of change increases, how and why has the hori-
zontal identification of individuals of roughly the same age been able to supplant

all forms of vertical identification.-* In the past, generations were identified by

other categories, such as family, class (in both the social and scholastic senses),
career, and nation, but nowadays the generational phenomenon is more powerful:
the old categories have been blasted away to make room for the assertion of new
identities. The generational idea took wing, as it were, even as it took on weight. It

proved its strength by demonstrating its capacity to make and unmake social cate-

gories. This was possible only because the importance of traditional criteria of
social classification diminished and traditional social identities proved inadequate.
Earlier modes of filiation and affiliation did not disappear but did to some extent
lose the power to create structures. The subsequent void strengthened the genera-
tional concept. As Paul Yonnet and other sociologists attuned to contemporary
realities have shown,''^ the generational idea simultaneously simplified and compli-
cated the network of social allegiances. Superimposed on older forms of solidarity,
generational solidarities created a sturdy yet flexible new structure that defined
new limits and new forms of transgression. It was the very plasticity of this new
structure that made it so effective; the void that it filled ultimately became its con-
tent. Thus a vague, imprecise, supererogatory notion became an instrument with
substantial, precise, and crucial consequences. In a curious reversal, the generation
PIERRE NORA

affirmed its classificatory hegemony to the precise extent that its original historical

function weakened.
Such a reversal can be understood only in terms of an inversion of what one
might call the age-prestige pyramid (by analogy with the "age pyramid" of the
demographers). And that brings us to a thorny problem: the growing autonomy of
that new continent, Youth, an autonomy that over the past twenty-five years has

increased at a rapidly accelerating pace.'*'' Youth has ceased to be a transitory stage

of life; it has emancipated itself from the sociological reality of being a social
minority and even freed itself from the symbolism of age to become an organizing
principle for society as a whole, a mental image that guides the distribution of roles
and positions, an end unto itself. Youth is not "merely a word.'"*^ A great deal of
research suggests that its status has been transformed in three main stages. In the

aftermath of the Revolution, which broke an age-old cycle and at the cost of deep
upheaval opened up a new world, the young really did take on adult roles. They car-
ried much of the burden of social and political transformation. A revealing detail is
that the word gerontocrade first appeared in 1825 (was it Beranger who coined it or
the pamphleteer J. J. Fazy.'*'*^). In other words, the word came into use at the very

beginning of the liberal assault on the Restoration's attempt to consolidate a return

to the habits of the Ancien Regime. All the revolutions of the nineteenth century
began as youth insurrections. The second stage in the transformation of youth
occurred as the structure of the family evolved and other social changes initiated by
the Revolution gradually took hold: wealth was redistributed as a result of new laws
of inheritance, intensifying conflict between fathers and sons; careers were opened
to talent, and the brightest young men sought to enter the Grandes Ecoles. In the
process of generational renewal youths can assume adult social responsibilities ear-
lier in life or later, violently or peacefully, calmly or frenetically. Much of the liter-

ature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on this theme, from
Balzac to Jules Romains, from Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale to Marcel
Arland 'sL'Ordre and Jean-Paul Sartre 's SursisJ^^ More recently the subject has been

taken up for scientific study by economists and sociologists, in whose literature it

appears under the head of "generational cycles.'"*^ In this long process of stabiliza-
tion, during which the generational concept also first crystallized, youth move-
ments and organizations from the Scouts to various Catholic and Communist youth
groups were essentially just structures for preparing young people for or integrat-
ing them into the structures, ideologies, and parties of adult society.'*' Then, sud-
denly, came the secession and democratization of the phenomenon. When precisely
did this occur.-^ There can be no doubt that it was sometime between 1959, when
polls and social images suggest that the youth myth for the first time began to take
on negative connotations (associated with the "black leather jacket" of the "rebel

without a cause"), and 1965, when statisticians first noted a decline in the birth rate,
 1

Generation 51

which within ten years fell below the level needed to sustain a stable population. In

that same year Roger Daltrey with his blue-eyed Cockney look sang "My G-gener-
ation." Suddenly youth erupted into the public consciousness^^ as a world unto
itself, with its own laws, clothing, vocabulary, recognition signs, idols —Jack
Kerouac, Johnny Halliday —mythology (from Planete to Salut les copains), and its

great celebratory occasions, the first of which, the memorable Nuit des copains
(Buddies' Night), held in Paris on June 21, 1963, drew more than 150,000 young
people and is still remembered as a revelation.^'

The more important point to notice, however, is that the definition of youth now
became exclusive and discriminatory: this fixation on age was precisely what
enabled the generational idea to assert its hegemony over all ages and to explode in
all directions. The triumph of the principal of horizontality, which offers no assur-
ances and promises no future, may have established the independence of youth, but
it did not guarantee young people any actual preeminence or promise them a
monopoly of the generational idea. On the contrary, it merely laid the groundwork
for all age groups to appropriate the notion and for society as a whole to internalize
the phenomenon. The increase in life expectancy helped in this: as the spectrum of
ages expanded, so did the number of possible generations, and it would not be dif-

ficult, for example, to demonstrate a subtle range of generational shadings from the
young-old all the way to the old-old. This marks the end of the road and signals

what the idea of generation has become: a purely psychological notion, private and
individual, an identity for internal use only. In a world in the grip of democratic
atomization, belonging to a generation is not simply a way to be free, it is also the

only way not to be alone.

The Historical Construction of the Model

In every country, it seems, one generation has served as a model and pattern for all

subsequent generations. In Russia it was the political and ideological generation of

Chernyshevsky (early 1860s). In Spain it was the legendary generation of 1898, in
which Unamuno spearheaded a literary reaction. In the United States it was not
until after World War I that a secession from "the American way of life" gave rise

to the "Lost Generation." But the truest parallel with France is to be found in
Germany: the histories of the two countries have been closely intertwined since the

Revolution, each influencing and reacting to the other.^^ One can therefore ask
what generation in Germany had the same fundamental, archetypal significance as

the "romantic generation" in France.'' By general agreement the answer is not the
generation of the Aufkldrung or of Sturm und Drang but the generation of Prussian
youth that from 181 5 to 1820 fought for intellectual freedom and national unity.^^

In any case, the romantics, who "gave the nineteenth century its principal for-

i
512 PIERRE NORA

mula"^'' and were hailed as "a sort of natural entelechy,"'^ left a blazing trail in his-

tory and myth.

In 1836, Musset belatedly gave the romantics a poetic name: enfants du siede. This
flight of lyricism, which wreathed its object in a "je ne sals quoi of fluctuation and
drift,"^'' nevertheless points toward a very specific historical situation. First came
the repression of student and carbonari demonstrations in 1819—20. Then, in 1823,

the short-lived Muse franfaise, the cradle of France's poetic revival, appeared for

the first time. In 1825, the generation's flagship newspaper the Globe appeared.
j

Finally, out of the eruption of 1830 came a generation that would reign for the next
twenty years — brilliant enough to dazzle and all but overwhelm even the likes of
Baudelaire and Flaubert. Call this the generation of 1820 or 1830, it makes no dif-

ference which. It had, according to the American historian Allan B. Spitzer, some
183 members, mostly born between 1795 and 1802: Thierry (1795), Vigny (1797),
Thiers (1797), Michelet (1798), Comte (1798), Pierre Leroux (1797), Cournot
(1801), Delacroix (1798), Balzac (1799), and Hugo (1802), to name a few. Spitzer

was able to show what youthful connections existed among the members, what
groups they formed, and what kinds of influence they exerted on one another.
Taken as a whole, the generation formed a tactical alliance in which young royalist

writers engaged in literary insurrection joined forces with militant republican stu-

dents involved in conspiratorial sects. They were quick to proclaim themselves a

generation, moreover, most notably in a celebrated text by Theodore Jouffroy

(born in 1796). Jouffroy, a carbonaro who lost his position as a professor at the Ecole
Normale, wrote his piece in 1823 but did not publish it in Le Globe until 1825.

Though mediocre, it attracted a great deal of attention, and Sainte-Beuve would

later recognize it as "the most explicit manifesto of the persecuted young elite.

A new generation is rising, a generation born in a skeptical age when two par-
ties shared the podium. It listened and it understood. These children have
already sensed the emptiness of their fathers' teachings and gone beyond
them.... Superior to all that surrounds them, they will not accept either a

rebirth of fanaticism or a faithless selfishness such as that which envelops

today's society.... They have a sense of their mission and an understanding of
their age. They understand what their fathers did not understand, what cor-
rupt tyrants will never understand. They know what a revolution is, and they
know it because they came on the scene at the right moment.^^

These gestational years left them with blessed, electrified memories of a kind of

new dawn in the world. "What marvelous times!" Theophile Gautier put it later,

describing the meetings of the first Cenacle in his Histoire du romantisme?^ "How
young it all was, how new, how full of strange colors and strong, intoxicating fla- !

vors! Our heads were turned. We seemed to be venturing into unknown worlds." j

1
 Generation 513

And a quarter of a century later, Alfred de Vigny, still under the charm of this early
Eden, recalled how at La Muse francaise he found "a few very young men, strangers
to one another, meditating on a new poetry. Each of them, in silence, had felt a mis-

sion in his heart. What gave this group, or, as Thibaudet might call it, this
"brood," this squadron of "recruits," its poetic or social or political mission was its

historical situation: it was the revolutionary generation deferred. That is why it was
immediately recognized and hailed by the very people whom it intended to replace:
the baptism of the fathers is in fact the primary and crucial condition that a genera-
tion must meet if it is to be deemed legitimate. It was old Lafayette himself who, as

early as 1820, spoke of "this new generation, enlightened and generous, above suc-
cumbing to the influence of Jacobinism and Bonapartism, which will, I'm sure, sup-

port the right to pure liberty."^' And it was Benjamin Constant, speaking from the
podium of the Chamber of Deputies in 1822, who hailed "today's youth, less friv-

olous than the youth of the Ancien Regime, less impassioned than the youth of the
Revolution, which stands out by dint of its thirst for knowledge, its love of hard
work, and its devotion to truth."''^ To these youths, born at the turn of the century,

educated in the barracks-schools of the Empire, and familiar with Napoleon only
through the saga of France 's glory and humiliation, the Restoration entrusted the
task of expressing in the form of generational consciousness the capital that the

Revolution had invested in action. This was the source of its Herculean enthusiasm
and of the juvenile belief that it constituted an army: "In the romantic army as in

the Army of Italy," Gautier later wrote, "everyone was young."^^ It was also the

source of its sense of responsibility, its cohesiveness, and its idea that an enemy
front was there to be breached. If chronology laid the groundwork, the political and
social situation consolidated it.^'* Although there were those among the bureaucratic
and political personnel of the Restoration who were quick to climb or premature to
reach the top of the ladder of success, those happy few were not numerous enough
to counter the regime's reputation as a place for powdered old men, "screech owls
afraid of the light and contemptuous of newcomers," as Balzac, indefatigable on the
svibject, once put The Restoration was the very image of political reaction, of a
it.

historical enfeeblement compounded by the partial failure of 1830, social retrench-

ment, provincial traditionalism, frenetic competition, and a career crisis, a shortage
of opportunities, that gave rise to the Balzacian phrase, not to say myth, of "the vast
graduating class of '89," whose way forward was blocked and barricaded, another
crucial condition for the formation of a generational consciousness being precisely
a sense of persecution.

The historical underpinning was not the whole story, however. What made the

romantic generation a dominant model was not simply that it was a complete gen-

eration, by which I mean a cohort whose social, political, intellectual, and academic
profile made it representative of the crucial moment in modern French history, a
514 PIERRE NORA

cohort, moreover, whose contours had been sharpened by social evolution and
which had witnessed the brutal clash of July 1830. What turned this generational

panoply into a creative, formative pattern was the linking of all these features to the
two dimensions that have always been central to the idea of a generation in France,

namely, politics and literature, power and words (here construed as an active mag-
ical force, poetry, upon which the romantics bestowed truly miraculous powers).^^

Therein lies the core of French generational identity. Other countries may con-
struct their patterns around other key factors: Russia, for example, around the tri-

angle of state power, civil society, and public education; or the United States around
the breakdown of a consensus concerning prosperity. In France, generations are
identified by their relation to power on the one hand and to expression — literary,

intellectual, or musical —on the other. Together these two ingredients are the yeast
that makes the bread rise. No doubt there have been generations, such as the sym-
bolists and surrealists, that were confined mainly to literary circles, although

Mallarme's involvement in the Dreyfus Affair and Breton's in revolutionary poli-

tics might suggest otherwise. And no doubt there have been generations such as that
of the Resistance or of Cold War Communism, whose sensibility was exclusively
political, though here, too, Eluard and Aragon run counter to the main current. But
these are a historian's quibbles, unimportant compared with the primary factor, the

distinctive mixture of the political and the literary that gives each French genera-
tion its unique stamp. Could there have been a "Dreyfus generation" without
Peguy's visceral lyricism.'^ Could there have been an "existentialist generation"

without Sartre and his concept of "existence".-^ Since generation implies conflict and
self-conscious self-proclamation, what better arenas for self-expression could any
generation find than politics and literature.'' It was the yoking together of the polit-

ical-historical and the literary-symbolic that gave the concept explanatory ampli-
tude and enabled it to survive for two centuries — the period during which politics

and literature have been linked. We rarely think of political generations in isolation
from literary generations. Indeed, the related spheres of literature and politics over-
lap the concept of generation; that why the concept has been so useful in writing
is

the political history of France since the Revolution, and why it has proved so prof-

itable to study first literary generations, then ideological generations, and now

finally intellectual generations. It all goes back to 1820, that key moment in the his-

tory of the parliamentary monarchy, when the two Frances, one aesthetic, the other

political, confronted each other. The Restoration and the beginnings of the July
Monarchy intensified generational conflict of a type that the Revolution had origi-

nated but had not resolved, and at the same time made it more visible. A basic
binary opposition thus left its indelible trace on the nation's collective memory, and
this encouraged a whole series of binary splits: father-son, young-old, old-new. In
 Generation 515

this light it can be seen that the question of generational representativity becomes a
false problem.
There is another aspect of the construction of the 1820 generation that should
not be neglected: the importance that the generation itself attached to its engage-
ment in history as well as to the inscription of that engagement in the historical

record. It is striking to note that the same "generation" discovered both history and
the concept of generation. Marcel Gauchet had occasion to point this out in an
essay^^ in which he meticulously reconstructs the intellectual climate surrounding
the inception of Augustin Thierry's Lettres sur Vhistoire de France in 1820.
"Historical reform," he noted, "smacked of the sudden emergence of a genera-
tion." Thierry was twenty-five when he formulated his program for a total revision

of historical memory and a completely new approach to the past. He was among the
younger of the group of historians responsible for the conception of history as a

constitutive element of collective identity. He was born in 1795, Mignet in 1796,

Thiers in 1797, Michelet in 1798, Quinet in 1803. He did not experience the
Revolution as a child, unlike Guizot, born in 1787, or the Genevan Sismondi, a pre-
cursor who always remained on the margins yet who clearly set forth a basic frame-
work for historical reform in the introduction to his Histoire des Fran^ais: "The
Revolution, by putting an end to rights and privileges, arranged it so that all the cen-

turies of the past are at virtually the same distance from us.... None governs us any
longer through its institutions." The coincidence bears emphasizing, for it is funda-
mental: the same cohort simultaneously discovered what Gauchet rightly calls "the
past as past" and therefore what can only be called "the present as present," a for-

mula that could, if one absolutely must have a formula, be taken as the best histori-

cal definition of a generation. The two moments are inseparable. The advent of
generational consciousness presupposes an idea of history. It was the historical rad-

icality of the Revolution that made of generation a phenomenon initially national

and French; but the revolutionaries did not conceive of their action as historical or
insert it into history. On the contrary, they were intent on breaking with the past, on
subverting it, on beginning history anew, free of the laws of filiation and the
requirements of continuity. It was not until the next stage, in the vacuum created by
inaction and under the full scourge of reaction, that a group united by age and dom-
inated by the revolutionary event discovered not just history as man's production of
his own existence but also the power of collective action and social germination and
the role of time in the unfolding historical process. This deep immersion in history

is absolutely inseparable from the emergence of an active generational conscious-

ness: no rupture without a hypothesis of continuity, no selection of memory with-
out resurrection of another memory. The importance attached to the reform of his-
tory and the romantics' new attitude toward the past, the Middle Ages, and its ruins
5i6 PIERRE NORA

consummated their invention of the concept of generation. There could be no

future history of generations had that particular generation not discovered a past

history. Out of this came the whole dynamic of generational replacement.

The dynamic of generational replacement: this assumes to begin with the whole
ponderous, stable framework of the great cycle that runs, as we have seen, from the

Revolution to 1968, with an offshoot extending to the present day and an abrupt
change of direction sometime during the period i960— 1965. No matter how one
views the pace or form of generational replacement, its endless round would be dif-

ficult to interpret were it not for certain durable, constant elements, which form a
fixed background against which a variety of patterns stand out. This stability is

sometimes described in terms of the "solidity" of French society, only the barest
outline of which can be attempted here. The exceptional continuity of French
national unity is the source of that solidity, despite internal cleavages. The supreme
symbol of that unity is still the simple phrase "Union Sacree." France has enjoyed
exceptional demographic stability: with a population that stood steady at forty mil-
lion from the end of the Second Empire to the government of Vichy, France
achieved the miracle in Europe of zero population growth. Social mobility in

France was slower than in any other industrialized country; peasants remained tena-
ciously rooted to the soil, with 50 percent of the active population still on the land
in 1914 (and that percentage did not fall below ten percent until 1970). And the

fourth and final source of French solidity has been the deep stability of political tra-
ditions and voting What is distinctive about generational replacement in
habits.

France, then, is not so much the quick pace of political life, as might at first appear
to be the case, but the enduring features of the national, social, demographic, famil-
ial, and political context. These factors are crucial for understanding the potential

force, in France, of the simple expression "a succession of generations" as well as

the omnipresence of the generational theme in the definition of identity, in which it

constitutes both the surface froth and the underlying current. They are also essen-

tial for understanding the intimate association between the overthrow of the fathers
by the sons and such seemingly alien and unrelated notions as the nation, intellec-

tuals, the future, and politics.

It is within this framework that the important natural mechanisms of genera-

tional replacement were able to operate. First — at the end of the Restoration and
during the July Monarchy —came the bizarre and disparate coalition that suddenly

gave rise to the generational phenomenon: a generation, Delecluze remarked,

"which prior to the revolution of 1830 was said to be so well-behaved and studious
and which immediately thereafter turned out to be sneeringly merciless and
ungrateful toward people of previous generations."*'^ The generation that Balzac
had called a "steam boiler" suddenly turned into a locomotive,''^ the force behind
 Generation 517

the sudden upsurge of violent political rioting in the aftermath of 1830 and its dis-

appointments. Caught up in the new violence were what Guizot called "trans-
plants," ambitious provincials drawn to the capital and suddenly liberated from
family discipline; students from the first classes to attend the Grandes Ecoles,
"young scamps who," in Musset's words, "sow terror in the Faubourg Saint-
Germain";'^^ and, for shock troops, apprentice physicians and lawyers competing
for social advantage, young workingmen impatient with the corporative traditions
of their trades, young peasants tired of village charivaris — the whole menagerie of
those whom Balzac in 1833 described as "condemned by the new legality," excluded
from politics and the ballot box, and with whom we are so familiar from literature:

the Marcases, Julien Sorel, the Deslauriers gang.

After this, and so long as the great institutions of Church, army, family, and
above all school remained unshaken, came a second phase, during which genera-
tions were increasingly defined by the nineteenth century's mechanisms of democ-
ratic advancement, by systems of civic and meritocratic selection that sifted through
the whole of society, set "barriers and criteria,"^" organized generations into more
or less annual platoons by "class" and "graduation date," and filled the yearbooks
of the Grandes Ecoles and the ranks of graduate organizations. Although these
avenues of promotion have lost nothing of their operational efficacy even today,
they have nevertheless begun to reek of obsolescence. Meanwhile, within the offi-
cial institutions — obligatory stops on the road to advancement — associations of a

more voluntary kind found room to flourish: youth groups and movements of var-
ious kinds in which age alone was sufficient to create networks, to establish hidden,

informal, yet often powerful solidarities that could and did last a lifetime. These
ranged from personal friendships to generational solidarity of the sort that young
people derive from participation in demonstrations, music festivals, organizations,

groups, clubs, or circles — the "concrete groups" that Karl Mannheim saw as the

fountainhead of generational expression.

More recently, in the third phase of the evolution of the generational phenome-
non, the regular succession of generation after generation has ceased to operate as
in the past. This phase coincides with the advent of a civilization of the image, a
growing consumer economy, advances in technology, the internationalization of
youth ("We are all German Jews!" as the '68 wall slogan had it), the crisis of tradi-
tional education, and a lowering if not complete elimination of the barriers that
once separated middle-class and working-class youth.
The heart of the generational dynamic is not to be found in this mechanism of
replacement, however. It is crucial to understand the inversion of the time vector:

by this I mean the process whereby society invests that mythical age during which
access to power is supposed to be possible — the twenties — with certain values, with
an idea of what society itself could and should be, and in the light of which it passes
5i8 PIERRE NORA

judgment on what it actually is. Earlier we saw this crucial mechanism at work
under the Restoration, at the very inception of the generational split that bestowed
upon the sons of the Revolution the task of making a still better revolution. This

same mechanism reproduced itself at each stage. The older generation endlessly
congratulates itself on (and through) the wonder of its progeny. Take, for example,
the enthusiastic welcome that the nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard old guard
accorded to the various youth surveys that preceded the outbreak of World War I,

the best known of these being "The Young People of Today," published by Henri
Massis and Alfred de Tarde under the pseudonym Agathon in L'Opinion (1912).^'

The elders had been obsessed with fears that the younger generation had been
ruined by socialist schoolteachers: it turned out that young people were athletic,

combative, patriotic, reasonable, and respectful toward tradition. "The new and ris-

ing generation promises to be one of the best our country has ever known," Maurice
Barres confided to his Cahiers. "Vive la jeunesse frangaise!" And Paul Bourget had
this to say in his response to Emile Boutroux's speech accepting a seat in the
Academic Frangaise:

So we see generations rising for which the heavens are once again filled with
stars, generations whose best spokesmen tell us that, because they, too, turn
to experience for the verification of thought, they have begun again to
believe without ever having ceased to understand, generations that remain
resolutely, consciously attached to the religious and philosophical tradition of
old France.

A half century later and at the other end of the political spectrum, one is equally
astonished to read, say, Edgar Morin's instant analysis of May '68 in La Breche or
Laurent Joffrin's of the 1986 demonstrations by high school students.^^ Of all the

problems that the notion of generation raises for historians, perhaps the most seri-

ous is to understand how and why adult society has gradually transformed youth

into a repository, conservator, and projection screen for all that is best in itself. How
did this occur.-* What malaise, What secret
what transference, made it possible.-*

acquiescence on the part of the older generation in its own failure, its own incom-
pleteness, its members' own individual self-destruction, was required.-* What

accounts for this drive for fulfillment by proxy.-* Without this initial investment of
the fathers in the sons, without this summons to complete the fathers' work by
killing them off, it would be impossible to understand how a phenomenon that is in
essence one of rupture and negation could also incorporate aspects of continuity
and revival of tradition.

Such is the model in basic outline, but historians have written the music of gen-
erations in many keys and endless variations. Often the political-historical and artis-
tic-literary threads are intertwined.^^ But one can blend the basic elements in differ-
 Generation 519

ent proportions. Some like to contrast "strong" generations (1800, 1820, 1840, etc.)
with "weak" ones (1810, 1830, 1850, etc.). Others set "complete" generations, which
explode in every direction, against "those relatively pallid intermediate cohorts" in
which, for example, writers like Paul Thibaud and Claude Nicolet modestly place
themselves on the grounds that, since their generation came of age between the
Resistance and the Algerian War, it had only the Cold War with which to identify

itself.'''* I know that generation, for it is my own, and I do not recognize myself in

that description. And then there are writers who, being concerned more with the
actual experience of "concrete groups," strive for more subtle forms of analysis. If,

for example, you are interested in the Jews of France, you might single out the gen-
eration of the Holocaust, that of the awakening of Jewish consciousness following

the Six-Day War (1967), that of the arrival of the Sephardic Jews from North
Africa, and that of the disenchantment with Israel in the wake of the Israeli inva-

sion of Lebanon. If you are interested in the women's liberation movement, you
might distinguish between the pioneer generation (women in France obtained the
right to vote in 1945; Simone de Beauvoir wrote Le Deuxieme Sexe in 1947; and
Brigitte Bardot starred in God Created Woman in 1956, the year that also saw the
institution of France 's first official family-planning agency) and the assertive gen-
eration that culminated in the legalization of abortion (Veil Law, 1975) — in short,

the Beauvoir generation and the generation of the women's movement. Along the

way you can take your pick of milestones: Fran9oise Sagan's novel Bonjour tristesse

or the birth-control pill, the washing machine, ''^

painless childbirth, a female student

finishing at the top of her class at Polytechnique. The choice makes no difference
unless you are concerned with its degree of representativity. The range of possibil-
ities is in fact infinite, and the interest of any particular choice stems not from the
available spectrum or the history that it enables you to reconstruct but solely from
the rules governing the model, with its implicit hierarchy and invariant features.

Beating beneath the history of France from the Revolution to the present one can
indeed make out the generational pulse. Why.-^

One question remains: If generation is truly a lieu de memoire, why has France been
its promised land.'' The question is in fact inescapable, and I see three possible

answers. The first invokes a kind of historical predisposition: France has always
been divided and pitted against itself. Indeed, the present volume of Les Lieux de
memoire is based entirely on such internal cleavages, which one does not find in
other countries to the same degree or on the same scale. France's consciousness of
itself is therefore also divided, and these divisions have become bound up with and
reinforced the simple yet fundamental father-son split that is at the root of the prob-
lem of generations. In spatial terms, there is the relation of center to periphery, of
Paris to the provinces. In terms of statecraft, there is the relation of the central gov-
520 PIERRE NORA

ernment to local governments. In historical terms, there is the relation of unity to

diversity. In social terms, there is the relation of the majority to minorities. In

national terms, the alien is defined in relation to some norm. In France the problem
of power is therefore consubstantial with the problem of generations. In the final
analysis it is always a question of maintaining or losing control. The very long
period during which monarchical authority and divine right held sway over the
French mind, together with the slow and far-reaching process of building a cen-
tralized state, surely contains part of the explanation for the ubiquity of conflict at

the heart of France 's relation to itself. The Revolution forced open that internal
structure, yet — as Tocqueville pointed out —without altering the symbolic concen-

tration of power. The whole national dramaturgy could mold itself around, pattern
itself after, and adapt itself to the spontaneous dramaturgy of generational replace-
ment, which in some ways still constitutes one of its basic dimensions. Now we can
see why Freud always saw France as the country that would be most allergic to psy-
choanalysis. There, the conflict that he delineated in anthropological, psychologi-

cal, and individual terms was already genetically inscribed in national, political, and
collective ones. Geography, history, politics, and society all are imbued with a

latent, persistent generational brew. For a proof by contradiction, note that the
recent progress toward consensus that has been so much remarked on coincides
exactly with the obvious disappearance of conflict between fathers and sons over
the issue of generational autonomy.

The second answer has to do with the conservatism, backwardness, and tradi-
tionalism that led Raymond Aron to say that France was a country that could
achieve reform only by means of revolution. This inertia, apparent in every sphere,
has given rise to a particularly striking contrast between the universalism of French
principles and the immobility of French realities. It was therefore relatively easy to

superimpose an oppositional, generational model on the persistence of features of

the old regime within the very heart of the new. This contrast and this persistence

at the heart of French existence leapt to the eye of foreign observers of France,
especially the group of researchers from Harvard who, taking up Michel Crozier
and Stanley Hoffmann's ideas of "stalled society" and "republican synthesis," set

out "in search of France"^*^ in the early 1960s, at precisely the moment when moder-
nity gripped a country they knew well yet no longer recognized. Without the aid of

such detached ethnographic scrutiny the French might have failed to appreciate the
degree to which age-old monarchical. Christian, and agrarian traditions had been
reinvested in a democratic, secular, and capitalist society. Themselves alien to those
traditions, the Harvard researchers were the first to emphasize the continuity of
aristocratic values within bourgeois values; the incorporation of the idea of salva-
tion in that of success; the shift of sacrality from church to state; the preservation,

in a society that began with their abolition, of privileges of all kinds associated with
 Generation 521

office and seniority;^^ passive resistance to the egalitarian procedures of democ-

racy; and the preference for security over liberty. From Turgot to Mendes France,
the lack of aptitude for reform and the tendency to cling to the past have made gen-
erational reaction central to the French collective identity.

The same sources feed into the third factor underlying the special importance of
the generational phenomenon in France, which might be called "the rebelliousness

of the French." Every country develops its own particular mode of contesting the
established order. Russia forced its protesters into terrorism and, in the more recent

past, into dissidence. The United States produced its California counterculture to

follow up its Lost Generation. The English, thanks to their aristocratic tradition,
have made eccentricity a natural right. France, owing to its history and its civiliza-

tion, has developed a reflex of rebelliousness, a habit linked to the formalist, hierar-
chical style of authority inherited from the divine-right monarchy and perpetuated
by governmental and bureaucratic centralization, and this style has insinuated itself
into all French institutions from top to bottom, including the army, the school, and
the factory, while at the same time affecting social relations down to the level of the

couple and the family: La France, terre de commandement (France, land of com-
mand). The upshot of this has been a latent anarchism, a dialectic of order and
subversion that forms the background of intellectual as well as political history.
This can be seen in men of genius as typically French as Paul Valery, a paragon of
conformism as well as the author of Principes d'anarchie pure et appliquee. It can also
be seen in historical situations as typically French as the Dreyfus Affair, in which the
writer Paul Leautaud could, with deep irony and disgust, send the Action Frangaise

a contribution toward a monument for Colonel Henry together with these words:
"For order, against justice and truth." In what other country would such a gesture
be conceivable.'' Indeed, the same reflex animates every crucial episode in French
history (Petain—de Gaulle, for example) to emerge as the crucial element in the stu-
dents' May '68. It can also be felt at work setting the pace of all intellectual life,

which is similarly imbued with an invisible hierarchy,''^ controlling the replacement

of generations from the romantics to the surrealists to Michel Foucault. The "avant
garde," a notion whose historical efficacy precisely parallels that of generation (to

which it clings as shadow to object or, rather, as light to shadow), has long held out
the promise of generational subversion in two associated spheres, the political and
the intellectual.

The cult of authority gives rise to the culture of revolt and legitimates it in

advance. Therein, perhaps, lies the final mystery surrounding the central role that

the idea of generation has played in the historical cycle initiated by the French
Revolution: in the reason why French society established and bestowed upon youth,
its supreme hope and supreme thought, the mission of fulfilling a destiny with
which it is prepared to identify itself fully. In its ultimate and sacred form, this mis-
522 PIERRE NORA

sion requires individuals to sacrifice themselves in violence, whether of war, for

which youth bears the brunt of the cost, or of revolution, in which youth serves as

the spearhead. Ultimately, it is because youth bears this sacrificial responsibility that

the legitimacy of its rebellion is secretly recognized. Thus the theme of a "sacrificed
generation," which Barres and Peguy successfully planted in the French collective

consciousness around the beginning of the twentieth century, is intimately inter-

twined with the theme of generation itself. "People are always right to rebel," Sartre
said,^" but he proposed this formula for predestined radicalism at the very moment
it was ceasing to be true, after two centuries during which the volume of blood shed
in the Europe of nations and the France of revolutions was ultimately responsible
for the density of memory in the national model of the generational phenomenon.

Immersed in Memory
Generations have always been mixtures of memory and history, but the amount and
role of each in the mix appear to have shifted over time. The least abstract, most car-

nal, temporal, and biological historical notion

—
"from Abraham to David are four-
teen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen

generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen gen-
erations" (Matt. 1:17) — is also, from our standpoint, the least susceptible of histor-
ical explanation, a pure memory.
Yet it is also completely saturated in history, if only because it is concerned with
a basically constructed phenomenon, a fabrication of hindsight. A generation is not
something that emerges spontaneously from the heat of action: it is an observation,
a summing up, a self-examination for the purpose of giving a firsthand historical

account. However "generational" it may have been, the '68 generation defined itself
as such only later, in the waning years of gauchisme. It was ten years after the

Dreyfus Affair that Peguy looked back on Notre jeunesse (1910). By the time Musset
baptized the enfants du siecle, they had become adults. The attempt at rejuvenation

in fact added to their years. When a writer takes note of his date of birth, it is a sign
of his years (in this case Victor Hugo's): "This century was two years old." A gen-
eration is a product of memory, an effect of remembering. It cannot conceive of
itself except in terms of difference and opposition.
This very general phenomenon has never been more clear than it was in the cri-

sis of the late nineteenth century, in which the generational theme was reshaped and
took on new depth as its Dreyfusard and nationalist extremes came together
through their representative spokesmen, Peguy and Barres. Both men were able to

express more clearly than anyone else the nature of their strong conviction of
belonging to a generation, which was the same for both yet also different. For Peguy
it was a generation that grew up together on the same schoolroom benches and in
 Generation 523

the thurnes (dormitory studies) of the Ecole Normale, a generation compounded of

suffering and amide ("friendship," a word that in his hands took on a very broad
connotation). For Barres it was a generation of "princes of youth" and entirely aes-
thetic in its affihations. For both men, the sacralization of generation was equally
intense and destined to serve their own consecration, but in each case the meaning
of that sacralization and that consecration was different. With Peguy it was a sense

of belonging to the "last generation to share the republican mystique," of having

been a witness to the last defeat ("we are a defeated generation"), of being a unique
repository of a moral experience incarnate. Such was the tenor of his 1909 text,
"Aux amis, a nos abonnes," a veritable epitaph for his generation in which Peguy
spoke in particular of the visit of a fine young man who came to interview him
about the Dreyfus Affair:

He was quite docile. He held his hat in his hand. He listened to me, listened
to me, and drank in my words. I have never understood as clearly as I did
then, in a flash, an instant, what history was; and the unbridgeable gulf that

exists, that opens up between the real event and the historical one; the
absolute, total incompatibility; the total strangeness; the absence of commu-
nication; the incommensurability: literally, the absence of any possible com-
mon measure.... I narrated, I pronounced, I related, I passed on a certain
Dreyfus Affair, the real Dreyfus Affair.. .in which we of this generation
remain immersed.^'

The Barresian and generally nationalist message of generation was quite different.

Barres of course attacked "the failure of our fathers," unable to shake off German
intellectual hegemony or to understand the regenerative traditionalism of the
Boulangist movement. He was highly conscious of his generation's distinctive qual-
ities. But the traditionalism that he discovered and conquered immediately placed
his generation in a long line of others {La Marche montante d'une generation) as a link
in a chain that would continue to grow link by link from the Henri Massis of Evo-
cations to Montherlant, Drieu La Rochelle, and even the Malraux of D'une jeunesse
europeenne (1927), to Thierry Maulnier and the Robert Brasillach of Notre avant-
guerre, and on to the Roger Nimier of the postwar years, only to end up today with
someone like Regis Debray. Here, then, we have two archetypal constructions of
generations, two exemplary ways of inscribing them in history. Every generation is

unique, but one is, as Peguy put it, "a front that rises and falls in the same instant,"

while the other, as for Barres, is "a provisional link in the chain that is the Nation."

Generational memory is therefore historical, but not just by virtue of compara-

tive hindsight or reflection on its own construction over time. It is historical above
all because it is first imposed from without, then violently internalized.
Generational self-proclamation is in fact the outcome of a solicitation from outside,
PIERRE NORA

a response to an appeal, a reflection of external scrutiny by parents, "teachers,"

journalists, or public opinion, which has a cumulative or snowball effect. The
Agathon survey concretized the image of a "1912 generation" that had no demo-
graphic or social counterpart other than a rapid increase in the number of students,
a factor that the authors did not take into account.^^ Nevertheless, the enormous
response it received, the ten other surveys it spawned, the spate of books that
seemed to confirm its findings, the fact that it appeared shortly before the outbreak
of World War I — all these things helped to create out of whole cloth a mythical
image that first captured the public imagination and then found way into works its

of history and textbooks: the World War I era was indeed the period during which
the generational idea reached its zenith. The phenomenon has repeated itself many

times, although on a smaller scale: witness, for instance, the 1957 Express survey of

the "New Wave" or the press campaign launched by the "Nouveaux Philosophes"
in April 1978, both of which served to crystallize generational phenomena. Other
attempts were less successful. On May 30, 1949, Frangois Mauriac published an edi-
torial in Figaro in which he called for a new survey similar to that of Agathon: "The
other day, Gilbert Sigaux, a young writer and editor, suggested to me that perhaps

the time had come for his generation to take stock of itself in much the same way as
another generation did around 19 10 with the publication of the Agathon survey."
Two years later, Robert Kanters, an associate of Sigaux's, published the results of

that survey under the title Vingt arts en igSi (Twenty Years Old in 1951). This was
immediately emulated by La Table ronde and Aspects de la France, where Michel
Braspart (alias Roland Laudenbach) for the first time linked the names of the writ-
ers Antoine Blondin, Jacques Laurent, and Roger Nimier for "their insolent atti-

tude" toward "liberal idols."^^ But still not enough yeast had been added to make the
dough rise. In those days the right wing was probably still too discredited and too
isolated to focus the limelight on itself. It was not until three years later, when Les
Temps modernes published a stinging attack from the left on the same group of writ-
ers, whom Bernard Frank referred to as "hussards et grognards, " that this segment of
a generation finally achieved public visibility.^'' Subsequent polling showed that the
hussard attitude was not limited to a small circle of writers and gave the term a more
sociological and scientific basis. Yet the principle of identifying a generation from

outside remained the same. And since the product sells well, the principle has been

abused. Contemporary society is as rife with generations that never really devel-

oped as the news is full of inconsequential events.

Last but not least, generational memory is also historical in another, infinitely

more significant sense, in that it is imbued with history to its very core, not to say
crushed by history's weight. The moments that loom largest in a generation's con-
sciousness of itself are invariably moments of despair and helplessness in the face
of history's overwhelming, inaccessible majesty, its penchant for denying those
 Generation 525

who aspire to its tragic grandeur. The Revolution for the romantics; the entire nine-
teenth century for the "fin-de-siecle" generations; World War I for the generation

that fought it as well as the Depression generation; World War II for postwar gen-

erations;^' the Revolution again, together with all the wars they did not fight, for the

generations of '68 and afterwards. This obsession with a history that is over and
done with and leaves nothing but a void haunts the imagination of all so-called

strong generations and a fortiori of intermediate generations; it controls the way

theirmemory works. At the inception of a generation there is a sense of lack, some-
thing in the nature of a mourning. Generational memory is stocked with remem-
brances not so much of what its members have experienced as of what they have not
experienced. It is these memories of what stands behind them that the members of
a generation share in common, a painful, never-ending fantasy that holds them
together far more than what stands in front of and divides them. This permanent
antecedence structures the whole economy of generational memory, which there-

fore becomes an interminable discourse about origins, an endless saga. The whole
literature of the 1920s and 1930s from Montherlant to Celine, from Aragon and
Drieu to Malraux, transformed the memory of World War I veterans into halluci-
natory images. May '68 immediately became its own commemoration: by October
1988, 124 books on the subject had been published. The history of romanticism
began with romanticism itself. It is a sobering and striking thing to discover that

Michelet, the greatest of romantic historians and a member of the very generation
that invented the idea of generation so as to savor its experience under the sign of
"genius," gave credit for that invention to the Revolution, for the simple reason that

he was in the grip of a transference and consequently inclined to exalt his forebears'
achievements. The passage is worth quoting:

If one were to seek the cause of this astonishing eruption of genius, one might
of course say that men found in the Revolution the most powerful of stimuli,
a new freedom of spirit, etc. In my view, however, there was an even more
fundamental cause: these admirable children were conceived and delivered
even as the century, morally uplifted by the genius of Rousseau, was redis-
covering hope and faith. With thatdawn of a new religion, women awoke.
What resulted was a generation more than human.^^

It was this intrinsically mythological and commemorative historical celebration that

moved the idea of generation out of history and into memory.

With the idea of generation one indeed memory and

enters into the realm of pure —
that is why, in particular, that idea interests us here. Pure memory is memory that
thumbs its nose at history, that ignores lapses of time and chains of cause and effect,
that forgets the prose of the quotidian and the obstacles to progress. It advances in
526 PIERRE NORA

"flashes," powerful images, jumping from one stalwart mooring to the next. It abol-

ishes time 's duration, leaving only an ahistorical present. In a national context, the
most striking example of such an abolition of time is again to be found in the
Revolution, whose sudden invention, in the late summer of 1789, of the dismissive
expression Ancien Regime detemporalized six centuries of history in one fell swoop
(see Francois Furet's essay in this volume). With each new stage the operation is

repeated at every level from the most general to the most particular. One might even
say that the generational rupture — at once a source of creative fecundity and of
repetitive poverty — consists essentially in "immemorializing" the past the better to

"memorialize" the present. In this sense generations are powerfully, perhaps even
primarily, fabricators of lieux de memoire, or mnemonic sites, which form the fabric

of their provisional identities and stake out the boundaries of their generational
memories. These mnemonic sites generate or become charged with unfathomable
powers of symbolic evocation, passwords and mutual recognition signals, all end-

lessly revivified by narrative, documents, firsthand accounts, and the magic of pho-

tography. The exploration of a generational memory begins with an inventory of

these sites. That, in the end, is precisely the purpose of these volumes, for France

and measured against my own generation. Some will protest that I am here merely
harking back to the old distinction that Bergsonian psychologists like Janet made
between affective memory and intellectual memory or to the work of Durkheimian
sociologists such as Halbwachs on the social contexts of collective memory. But I

am talking about something very different, because generational memory is not a

matter of individual psychology. The sites in which it condenses and finds expres-
sion are public places, centers of collective participation which are nevertheless sus-
ceptible of immediate personal appropriation. For political generations these
include meetings, newspapers, demonstrations, conventions, organizations, and
mass symbols. For intellectual generations they include publishing houses and jour-

nals, cafes and salons, colloquia, bookstores, and preparatory schools. They do not
include the private recollections of individuals who link their personal memories to
important public events, nor do they include shared individual emotions.
Generational memory grows out of social interactions that are in the first place his-
torical and collective and are later internalized in a deeply visceral and unconscious
way so as to dictate vital choices and control reflexes of loyalty — matters in which
"I" is simultaneously "we."
At this level of incarnation and decantation, memory no longer has much to do
with time. It is at this point, no doubt, that we come closest to the truth of the idea

of generation. Closed in on itself and fixed in its identity, impervious by definition

to history and its "lessons," the generational monad is perhaps most closely related
to what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn calls "paradigms," which according
to Kuhn determine the structure of scientific revolutions.^' It is surprisingly easy to
 Generation 527

take the behavior of Kuhn's communities of theorists and experimentalists, united

as well as constrained by a shared explanatory model and held together by crucial

reflexes born of intellectual consensus, a common educational background and

working style, and a shared jargon, and to translate it into the terms used here to

describe generations. And just as scientific communities define themselves by radi-

cal opposition even while sharing implicitly the bulk of the established scientific tra-
dition, each generation shares with others at once almost nothing and almost every-
thing. This comparison of generations with scientific communities, which Daniel
Milo has pursued in detail,^^ is valuable for assigning a proper place, decisive yet
marginal, to those historical markers of memory around which generations, those
fleeting yet crucial phenomena, align themselves. The generational paradigm,
which even though hermetically sealed is traversed by every conceivable temporal
flow, persists without change until it is blotted out and replaced by subsequent gen-
erations, which nevertheless hold what they supplant in reserve for possible revival

toward new ends. Thus, for example, what might be called the "paradigm of war
and occupation," which is central to contemporary French consciousness and iden-
tity, has, after a long conspiracy of silence, lately become the object of a series of
investments. The first wave came in the early 1960s and was limited to a small group
of historians interested mainly in what went before, that is, the 1930s. It originated
with men such as Jean Touchard and Rene Remond who had experienced that tur-
bulent era as youths, and it raised, discreetly and scientifically, the central question
of whether or not a French fascism existed. But it was once again the '68 genera-
tion that made the war its touchstone. It began in 1968 with the publication of La
Place de I'Etoile, the novel with which Patrick Modiano at age twenty began his hal-
lucinatory reconstruction of the lieux de memoire sites of the Occupation. It contin-
ued in 1 971 with the release of the film The Sorrow and the Pity, a documentary that
explored the Occupation years in the city of Clermont-Ferrand. What followed has
been called la mode retro, or "Forties Revival," a headlong plunge into the shadowy
depths of those "four years to be expunged from our history," as Chief Prosecutor
Mornet put it in 1949: those years of darkness were now lit from every possible
angle, including works of history, fiction, social science, and film.'° And no end is

in sight.

We are now in a position to measure how far the idea of generation has come and
how completely it has been transformed. We have in hand a fair sampling of empir-
ical studies, covering the entire social sphere and based on a full spectrum of his-
torical, demographic, and psychological theories. Clearly memory is today the
linchpin of definitions of generation, and consequently a generation is now a purely
symbolic unit of time, a favorite device for representing change whose acceptance
reflects and consecrates the advent of the social actor. In any case, Tocqueville long
ago called attention to the likelihood that age would become an increasingly impor-
528 PIERRE NORA

tant organizing and classifying principle in a democratic era in which "the notion of
the similar is less obscure" than in aristocratic times; yet by "inducing people to for-

get their ancestors and by concealing their offspring" democracy would also "dis-

tend and loosen the bonds of human affection."^' There is no better delineation of

the place, central yet all in all modest, of this very special category of contemporary
periodization. "Generation" lacks the anthropological amplitude of "age," the reli-

giosity of "era," the historical dignity of "century," and the richness of color and
dimension of "epoch" or "period." By instituting a melange of the individual and
the collective, the notion deprives the former of its psychological depth and the lat-

ter of its expressive potential. Yet surely it is an inexhaustible notion, like the uncon-
scious, and just as fascinating, yet at the same time just as constricted, impoverished,
and repetitious. In a world of constant change, in which every individual has occa-
sion to become his or her own historian, the generation is the most instinctive way
of converting memory into history. Ultimately that is what a generation is: the

spontaneous horizon of individual historical objectification.

What makes the notion of generation so topical here and now and gives it its

explanatory force, however, is the unique historical situation of France, which since

World War II has suffered from a split historical personality. On the one hand it has
invested too much in the heavy legacy of the past, in a history more burdensome
than that of any other European country, while on the other hand it has gone
through a profound process of disengagement from world history that has relegated
it to memorial rumination on its own historical experience. The phenomenon is

unique, complex, and so peculiar to France that we have no choice but to measure
its extent and explore the various historical threads that find their point of intersec-
tion here.

Let us rapidly rehearse the major episodes of France 's recent history. France was
the only country to emerge from World War II half victor, half vanquished.
England went united from mortal peril to ultimate victory. Germany of course went
down to defeat, but complete catastrophe simplified the surgical removal of some
of the complexities of its past, and it was not until precisely one generation had
passed that it rediscovered, with the help of youthful Greens and a raucous
Historikerstreit (historians' controversy) some of the dramas of conscience that have
once again moved its history closer to that of France. Spain avoided the debacle
altogether. The pain that followed the Liberation of France, by contrast, impelled
the country, with help from the Resistance and de Gaulle, to seek solace among the

victors while bearing the burden of the vanquished. Shattered, humiliated, and rav-
aged by internal division, France was all the more obsessed with recovering its

"place" in the world because it no longer possessed the wherewithal of a world

power. Just as it was beginning to get back on its feet, the Cold War broke out, com-
 Generation 529

pelling governments everywhere to choose sides. But once again France was differ-

ent, because it had a powerful Communist Party and because it still had to contend
with the thorny issue of decolonization, a problem it had been unable to resolve in

1945. Hence it was the only country in western Europe to internalize the clash
between the Western and Soviet blocs, a dispute it was powerless to resolve; and the
only country obliged to live with a divided conscience, politically impotent and
institutionally paralyzed, to the point of ultimate collapse. This came with the
Algerian War, comparable in its consequences to the American Civil War. The
Algerian War became a means for settling old scores. It mired French history in a

provincial struggle. More than that, the nation's conflict was complicated by a con-

flict within the left, which was the real reason for the war's interminable length and
corrosive moral effects. And it revived Gaullism, which from the standpoint of his-
torical escalation that concerns us here, was an ambiguous episode. On the one
hand, de Gaulle, the champion of nationalism, was the man who disguised France's
retreat into its metropolitan borders behind a partly rhetorical, partly real reinvigo-
ration of foreign policy. On the other hand, he was instrumental in bringing about
a new industrial revolution, an agent of the old Louis-Philippard dream of an
industrialized France, who prosaically lived off the profits of growth.

In broad outline, then, this is the story of France 's overzealous investment in his-
tory. That investment took place, however, at a time when France was withdrawing
from history in a larger sense; having avoided the main thrust of twentieth-century
history, France passively endured its By degrees and with occasional
side-effects.

hard knocks it declined from the status of a great power to that of a medium power.

There were grinding adjustments in 1918, 1945, and 1962: each of these dates, which
respectively mark the ends of World War I, World War II, and the Algerian War,
brought its quota of mutilating reality and compensatory illusions. A country that
previously prided itself on having been the first to know all the historical experi-

ences that shaped the European identity from the Crusades to colonialism by way
of the nation-state, absolute monarchy, dictatorship, and revolution, now knew
only the consequences and aftershocks. France did not bear the full brunt of the
socialist revolution or Nazi totalitarianism or the Depression or consumer society;
it knew these things only by way of invasion, aftershock, or replay. We must grasp
this overlapping of two different and contradictory registers of historical con-
sciousness, this aptitude for becoming so bogged down in the past as to require

painful disengagement, before we can understand why the past repeatedly and com-
pulsively resurfaces in the present, why France is plagued with a tragic overinvest-

ment in a national history that is nothing more than the local version of a neglected

world history perceived by way of memory alone. What is more, France 's histori-

cal memory is itself split and unbalanced: on one level the French celebrate their
unanimity ("In lieu of a great present, we have a great past"), while on another they
53° PIERRE NORA

cannot keep themselves from sifting through the past, especially the recent past, to
find out whether it was really as great or as shameful as it has been made out to be.

Ultimately the Bicentennial of the French Revolution thrived on this divided mem-
ory, which is why it will always be remembered as ambiguous. The Revolution may

be over, or it may not be. It may have been a bloc (a monolithic whole), or it may
not. The Vendee may have been a genocide, or it may not. Robespierre may have

been a great man or a mass murderer. The Terror may have been a product of cir-
cumstances, or it may have set a pattern for French political culture. The
Declaration of the Rights of Man may have set forth universal or universalizable
principles, or it may have served strictly internal purposes. No matter: yes or no, it

all happened in France, and all eyes were once again on the country of the
Revolution. This was the gist of President Mitterrand's message: "The world still

has its eye on us, and I am at center stage."

We thus come back to the explosive potential of the problem of generations and
their interrogative succession, particularly as the pace of succession picks up, as

upheaval becomes constant, and individual life expectancies increase. The past

never passes; those who took part in it linger on the scene, even as newcomers crowd
way in. Together these three factors have made the generational phenomenon
their

more important than ever, turning it into a vast echo chamber for the century's
tragedies. In theoretical and practical terms this raises, in our two-dimensional
model, the question of where the dividing line falls between that which belongs
exclusively memory and that which belongs exclu-
under the head of generational
sively to historical memory, or, if you will, to memory and history. Note that this

division itself has two dimensions. Temporally, there is the moment when memory

passes from the generations that are its bearers to the historians who reconstitute a
past they have not experienced. Intellectually, there is the transition from first-hand
account to critical reconstruction. Neither of these transitions is one-to-one in gen-
erational terms: there can be, and are, excellent critics of their own generation's

memory who become its historians, and there are generations of historians, no less

distinguished, whose work is essentially to reexamine their subject from the stand-
point of their own generational memory. The Bicentennial made it possible to ver-

ify this general truth in the particular case of the French Revolution. France 's with-
drawal from world history and entry into the historically empty era of pregnant
memory both called attention to generational agency and broadened the issue to the
scale of national history in the two most dramatically intense moments of French
history: the Revolution and World War II.
We can now give clear answers to the questions we raised at the outset. There are
indeed "French" generations. If, moreover, a generation is a lieu de memoire, it is not
at all in the simple sense that shared experiences imply shared memories. It is rather

as a result of the simple yet subtle interplay of memory and history, of the eternally
 Generation 531

reemerging dialectic of a past that remains present, of actors who become their own
witnesses, and of new witnesses in turn transformed into actors. When all three of

these elements are present, a mere spark can ignite a blaze. It is their presence in

today's France, that tinderbox of memory, that fuels the "generational" blaze. In

this time and this place. The play goes on, and it is up to each generation to rewrite

its generational history. But how long will coming generations have to wait for such
a combination of circumstances to reoccur and shed a comparably unsparing light.'^
NOTES TO FOREWORD

1 For a discussion of this concept see Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities

(London: Verson, 1983).
2 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and
Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la memoire (Paris: 1925); New York: Arno
Press, 1975.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

1 The term has no precise EngHsh equivalent. For this reason, I suggested that Arthur
Goldhammer keep the French expression wherever possible, while substituting place or
site only when these English words seem to capture the sense adequately. As for the

title, Lawrence Kritzman and I long despaired of finding an adequate English equiva-
lent and therefore thought of retaining the French title. I am grateful to my friend
Robert Silvers for suggesting the best possible translation: Realms of Memory.
2 A selection of the remaining articles, which could not be fitted into the redesigned
series, will be published later by The University of Chicago Press in a series of vol-
umes covering the themes "State," "Space," and "Culture and Historiography."
3 Published in French in 1974 and partly translated into English in 1985 under the title

Constructing the Past (published jointly by Cambridge University Press and the
Editions de la Maisons des Sciences de I'Homme).

4 The sociologist Henri Mendras calls this period the Second French Revolution, whose
appearance he dates from 1965, but I feel that its effects became perceptible only ten
years later. See Henri Mendras, La Second Revolution fran^aise, is)65-ig84 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1988).
534 I. FRANKS AND GAULS

CHAPTER I FRANKS AND GAULS

1 Alain Duval and Henry Rousso kindly shared their knowledge and counsel, the former
in regard to recent developments in Gallic archaeology, the latter concerning the Gallic
theme under Vichy. I wish to express my gratitude to both.
2 C. Eluere, L'Or des Celtes (Fribourg, 1987); Tresors des princes celtes, exhibition cata-

logue, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, October 20, 1987— February 15, 1988
(Paris, 1987).

3 See, for example, R. Amberlin, Les Traditions celtiques: Doctrine initiatique de I'Occident

(1945; repr. Saint Jean-de-Braye, 1977), and, for the antecedents of occult Celtism, A.
Mercier, Edouard Schure et le renouveau idealiste en Europe (Lille, 1980). One key sign

of public interest is a new edition of a book that sums up our knowledge of the subject,
F. Le Roux and C. J. Guyonvarc'h, Les Druides (ist ed., 1978; repr. Rennes, 1987).
4 See Nos ancetres les Gaulois (Clermont-Ferrand, 1982), abbreviated hereafter as
N.A.G., and, on the colloquium itself, M. Ozouf, "Les Gaulois a Clermont," Debat,
6 (1980): 93-103; J. -P. Rioux, "Autopsie de nos ancetres les Gaulois," L'Histoire, 27

(1980): 85.

5 See the 1980— 1984 articles quoted by C. Amalvi, "De Vercingetorix a Asterix, de la

Gaule a de Gaulle ou les metamorphoses ideologiques et culturelles de nos origines

nationales," Dialogues d'histoire ancienne, 10 (1984): 310—312; P.-M. Duval, Pourquoi

"Nos ancetres les Gaulois" (Paris, 1982); P. Quentel, "Et nos ancetres les Gaulois," Le
Monde (October 10, 1987); M. Duverger, "Rendez-nous Clovis et Charlemagne," Le
Monde (November 13, 1987), with this final appeal: "Do not cut the tree off from our
roots. Give us back our ancestors the Gauls. Give us back Vercingetorix. Give us back
Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris. Give us back Clovis and Charlemagne."
6 The Gallic cock has become so common a figure of speech that it appears in the defi-
nition of the word Gaulois in the Petit Robert dictionary. See also Michel Pastoureau,

"Le Coq gaulois," in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire, part 3, Les France, vol. 3,

De Varchive a Vembleme (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

7 See Paris-Soir (August 24 and 25, 1942); L'Oeuvre (August 24, 1942); La Renaissance
nationale (August 27, 1942); L'Avenir du Plateau central (August 27, 1942), with the pro-

gram of the Gergovie ceremonies.

8 The document is quoted in L'Avenir du Plateau central (August 31,1 942). These are not
the only references to the Gauls. The Journal des debats politiques et litteraires, for exam-
ple, published an article on Vercingetorix, the "expression of the purest national mys-
ticism," along with an article on Gergovie in its August 29—30, 1942, issue. Gergovie
was also the subject of an article in the same paper on December 6, 1941.

9 See A. Ehrard, "Vercingetorix contre Gergovie.''" in N.A.G., 313— 315.

10 L'Avenir du Plateau central (August 24, 1942).
11 Broadcast from Radio London, August 29, 1942, in J.-L. Cremieux-Brilhac, ed., Les
Voix de la liberte: IciLondres 1940—1944 (Paris, 1975), 2: 200—201.
12 Quoted in F. Gaspard and G. Grunberg, "Les Titulaires de la francisque gallique," in

J. Bourdin and R. Remond, ed., Le Gouvernement de Vichy et la Revolution nationale

1940-1942 (Paris, 1972), 72.

 FRANKS AND GAULS 535

13 Speech by P. Gaziot, minister of agriculture under Vichy, January 19, 1941, quoted in
C. Faure, "Folklore et revolution nationale: Doctrine et action sous Vichy
(1940— 1944)" (thesis, University of Lyons II, 1986), i: 241 ff.

14 See C. JuUian, Aimom la France, conferences: ic)14—iqic) (Paris, 1919), and Au seuil de
notre histoire, vol. 2, icfi^—igzj (Paris, 1931), 268.

15 See P. Birnbaum, Un Mythe politique: "La Republique juive " (Paris, 1988).
16 See A. Chante, "Les Gaulois dans I'hebdomadaire Tintin"; D. and P. Cogny, "La
'Rhetorix' d'Asterix le Gaulois"; and D.-H. Pageaux, "De I'imagerie culturelle au
mythe politique: Asterix le Gaulois," all in N.A. G., 421—426, 429—435, and 437—444; A.
Simon, "Les Gaulois dans la B.D.," Le Debar, 16 (1981): 96-108.

17 See J. Ehrard and L.-L. Hollopeau, ed., Nos ancetres les Gaulois, exhibition catalogue,

Musee Bargoin, June 25— September 30, 1980 (Clermont-Ferrand, 1980).

18 See H. Martin, Histoire de France depuis les temps les plus recules jusqu'en juillet 1830
(Paris, 1834), i: 52 and 107.

19 See, for example, H. Martin, Les Origines de la France depuis les premieres migrations

jusqu'aux maires du Palais (Paris, 1891), 8, 17, 49, 73.

20 See Ehrard and Hollopeau, Nos ancetres les Gaulois, 6, and E. Delacroix, ybwma/,
1822-1853 (Paris, 1980), 831.
21 See L. Dimier, Histoire de la peinture frangaise au XIX^ siecle (1793— 1903) (Paris, 1914),
224—225; P. Vaisse, "Les Gaulois dans la peinture officielle (1870— 1914)," in N.A.G.,

321—326.
22 See A. Pingeot, "Les Gaulois sculptes (1850— 1914)," in N.A.G., 255-275.

23 See the publicity poster from Editions Furne announcing the fourth edition of Henri
Martin's Histoire de France, which also features an advertisement for a Collection de por-
traits et vignettes pour I'Histoire de France de Henri Martin, Bibl. nat., 8° L 35.202 C; S.
Reinach, Album de moulages et modeles en vente au Musee des antiquites nationales a

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, vol. i (Paris, n.d. [after 1908]); for Gallic objects, see plate 18

ff. In August 1907 there were eight series on sale, and in August 19 14 there were four-
teen series of ten post cards on subjects related to Alesia. Various "Pro Alesia" casts

were also sold. An advertisement appeared on the final cover page of the journal Pro
Alesia every year; the journal's first series was published from 1906 to 19 14.

24 See C. Amalvi, "Vercingetorix dans I'enseignement primaire: 1830— 1940"; A. Gerard,

"La Vision de la defaite gauloise dans I'enseignement secondaire (particulierement entre
1870 et 1914)," and S. Citron, "De la coherence historiographique au bric-a-brac: Les
Gaulois dans quelques manuels recents," all xvlN.A.G., 349-355, 357-365, and 403—409.

25 See A. Stoll, Asterix, Vepopee burlesque de la France (Paris, 1978).

26 See A. Grenier, Manuel d'archeologie gallo-romaine (Paris, 1931), i: 20 ("chaussees
Brunehaut").
27 See S. Reinach, "Esquisse d'une histoire de I'archeologie gauloise (prehistorique, cel-
tique, gallo-romaine et franque)," Revue celtique, 19 (1898): loi— 117 and 292—307.
28 See B. de Montfaucon, L'Antiquite expliquee et representee en figures (Paris, 1719), vol. 5,

part 2: 194—196.
29 See C.-C. Baudelot de Dairval, Description des bas-reliefs anciens trouves depuis peu dans
I'eglise cathedrale de Paris (Paris, 171 1), and for the present state of interpretation. P.-
536 I. FRANKS AND GAULS

M. Duval, "Le Groupe des bas-reliefs des nautae Parisiaci," in Monuments et memoires
de lafondation Eugene Plot, 48, 2 (1956): 63—90, fig. i— 14.

30 See H. Omont, Le Cabinet d'antiquites de Saint-Germain-des-Pres au XVIIP siecle,

excerpted from Recueil de memoires publies par la Societe des antiquaires de France a I'oc-

casion de son centenaire (Paris, 1904), 2, 8 (no. 104), 11 (nos. 222—225);

Montfaucon, L'Antiquite expliquee, ibid. Montfaucon's errors in the publication of

Gallic objects were pointed out and corrected by S. Reinach, "Esquisse d'une histoire
de I'archeologie gauloise." See also A. Laming Emperaire, Les Origines de I'archeologie
prehistorique en France (Paris, 1964), 77 ff., 91 ff.

31 See N.-J. Foucault, Memoires, ed. F. Bauchy (Paris, 1862), xxxviii.

32 See Laming-Emperaire, Les Origines, 97; J.-Y. Veillard, Catalogue des objets d'archeolo-

gie armoricaine {Prehistoire, protohistoire et epoque gallo-romaine) de la collection du presi-

dent de Robien (Rennes, 1972). The Comte de Caylus, Recueil d'Antiquites egyptiennes,
etrusques, grecques et romaines (Paris, 1752— 1767), 7 vols., mentions the names of sev-
eral parlementaires interested in archaeology.

33 See P.-J. Fournier, "Historique de fouilles sur I'emplacement de Gergovie

(1755-1934)," Revue d'Auvergne, 49 (1935): I54-I55-

34 See G. Testart, "Les Anciennes Fouilles du mont Auxois: II, Fouilles de 1784," Pro

Alesia, 2 (1907): 230—236.

35 See S. Maffei, Galliae antiquitates quaedam selectae atque in plures epistolas distributae

(Paris, 1733), and on Caylus's reaction to Maffei's interpretation of an ancient monu-

ment, K. Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux: Paris, Venise: XVP—XVIII^ sie-
cle (Paris, 1987), 193— 21 1; trans, by Elizabeth Wiles-Porter as Collectors and Curiosities:
Paris and Venice, /5oo—i^oo (Cambridge, 1990), 169—182.
36 Caylus, Recueil, 3: 324.

37 Ibid., 6: 406
38 Ibid., 7: 238

39 "These figures seemed to me so clearly Gallic that I wanted to bring them back," ibid.,

3: 375-

40 Ibid., 3: 323.

41 Ibid., 6: 75, 82-83.

42 Ibid., 5: pi. 101-103 and pp. 281-289.

43 Ibid., 6: 328 and pi. 104.

44 Ibid., 5: 325.

45 The oldest drawing depicting a raised stone dates from 1561. See Poitiers: Archeologues

d'hier, archeologie d'aujourd'hui, exhibition catalogue, Musee Sainte-Croix, December

19, i98a-March 2, 1981 (Poitiers, 1980), 11; on megaliths, see Dubuisson Aubenay,
Itineraire de Bretagne {1636), 2 vols. (Nantes, 1892— 1895), quoted in P. Sebillot, Le
Folk-lore de France (Paris, 1968), 4: 4.

46 See E.-T. Hamy, "Memoire inedit de Montfaucon sur les armes des anciens Gaulois et

des nations voisines," Revue archeologique, new sen, 7 and 8 (1906): 37—48.

47 Caylus, Recueil, 4: CXI, 370—373; here, 371.

48 Ibid., 6: pi. 115, 117, 118-121, and pp. 361—363, 367-369, 369—388.

49 Ibid., 6: 384—387.
 I. FRANKS AND GAULS 537

50 See F. Le Royer d'Artezet de La Sauvagere, Recueil d'antiquites dans les Gaules (Paris,

1770); Grivaud de la Vincelle, Recueil de monuments antiques la plupart inedits et decou-

verts dans I'ancienne Gaule; ouvrage enrichi de cartes et planches en taille douce qui peut

faire suite aux Recueils du Comte de Caylus et de La Sauvagere (Paris, 1817), 2 vols.

51 See P.-J.-B. Legrand d'Aussy, Memoire sur les anciennes sepultures nationales et les orne-

mens exterieurs quiy furent employes, sur les embaumemens, sur les tombeaux des rois francs
dans la ci-devant eglise de Saint-Germain-des-Pres et sur un projet de fouilles d faire dans
nos departemens (Paris, Year VII [1798]). I am quoting from an edition titled Des
Sepultures nationales et particulierement de celles des Rois de France (Paris, 1824). See also

Laming-Emperaire, Les Origines, 99 ff.

52 Legrand d'Aussy, ikfe/rzozVe, 181— 182.

53 Ibid., 206—207, 208. "M. Coret" is La Tour d Auvergne ' Corret. On him, see J. Balcou,

"La Tour d'Auvergne, theoricien breton du mythe gaulois," in N.A.G., 107— 113, and
below n. 146.

54 Ibid., 251.

55 Ibid., 225.

56 Ibid., 226.

57 Ibid., 227.

58 J. Cambry, Monumens celtiques, ou Recherches sur le culte des pierres, precedees d'une

notice sur les celtes et sur les druides, et suivies d'etymologies celtiques (Paris, Year XIII
[1805]), xxvii. On the Celtic Academy, see J.-Y. Guiomar, "Le Bariai-Breii," in Nora,
Les Lieux de memoire, part ^, Les France, vol. 2, Traditions (Paris: Galli-mard, 1992).

59 In 1807, for example, Saint-Morys asked that the Celtic Academy be turned into "a
society for national antiquities." See F. Arquie-Bruley, "Un Precurseur: Le comte de
Saint-Morys (1782— 1817), collectionneur d' 'Antiquites nationales,' " Gaiette des

Beaux-Arts, 96 (1980): 109— 118, and 97 (1981): 61—77.

60 See F. Berce, "Arcisse de Caumont et les societes savantes," in Nora, Les Lieux de
memoire, part z, La Nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 2: 533—557.

61 See M. Ozouf, "L'Invention de I'ethnographie frangaise: Le questionnaire de

I'Academie celtique," Annales E.S.C. (1981): 210—230.
62 Martin, Histoire de France, i: 15.

63 Laming-Emperaire, Les Origines, 119— 121. The distinction between Celts and Gauls
seems to have been introduced by Alexandre Bertrand. See his paper "Les Galates ou
Gaulois" (1875) in Bertrand, Archeologie celtique et gaulois e: Memoires et documents

relatifs aux premiers temps de notre histoire nationale (Paris, 1876), 384—421, esp.

413-414.
64 See Cambry, Monumens celtiques, and A. De Laborde, Les monumens de France classes

chronologiquement et consideres sous le rapport des faits histonques et des etudes des arts

(Paris, 1 816), I : pi. 5 and 6, and commentary on 61—62.

65 See, for example, Arcisse de Caumont, Cours d'antiquites monumentales, vol. i, part i,

Ere celtique (Paris, 1830).

66 For Boucher de Perthes the word "Celtic" already meant "prehistoric." See Antiquites
celtiques et antediluviennes: Memoire sur Vindustrie primitive et les arts a leur origine

(Paris, 1864), 3:346—346 and 390 n.

538 FRANKS AND GAULS

67 Bertrand, "Les Monumens dits celtiques," in Archeologie celtique et gauloise, 82—131;

here, 87-88.

68 See S. Reinach, "Terminologie regionale et scientifique des monuments mega-

lithiques" (1903), in Cultes, mythes et religions (Paris, 1913), 3: 434—448.
69 See Alexandre Lenoir, Description historique et chronologique des monumens de sculpture

reunis au Musee des monumens frangais, 7th ed. (Paris, Year V [1797]), 41—55- On Lenoir,
see also D. Poulot, "Alexandre Lenoir et les musees des monuments fran9ais," in Nora,
Les Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation, 2: 497—531.
70 Legrand d 'Aussy, iWe'mo/re, 355—359.
71 Grivaud de la Vincelle, Antiquites gauloises et romaines recueillies dans les jardins du
Palais du Senat pendant les travaux d'embellissement quiy ont ete executes depuis VAn IX
jusqu'a ce jour (Paris, 1807), 239. Grivaud would renew his efforts ten years later. See

Recueil de monumens antiques, 2: i.

72 See Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs etcurieiLx, 206—210 (Eng. trans., 179—184).

73 See R. Schneider, Quatremere de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts {lySS—iSjo)
(Paris, 1910), 85—90.

74 Albert Lenoir, Projet d'un musee historique forme par la reunion du palais des Thermes et

de I'hotel de Cluny, expose dans les salles du Louvre sous le n° 1546 (Vms, 1833), 4—6.
75 F. Arago, "Rapport sur le projet de loi relatif a un credit extraordinaire de 590 000
francs pour I'acquisition de I'hotel de Cluny et de la Collection Du Sommerard," in

Oeuvres completes (Paris-Leipzig, 1856), 3: 522.

76 See P. Marot, "Les Origines d'un Musee d 'antiquites nationales: De la protection du

'Palais des Thermes' a I'institution du 'musee de Cluny,' " Memoires de la Societe

nationale des antiquaires de France, 9th ser., vol. 4 (1968): 259—327.

77 See A. de Caumont, Cours d'antiquites monumentales, i: 209, 211, 214—216, 225, 227, 229,

230, 234, 238, 252-254 (references to private collections, antique displays, and museums
in western France). See also the letter from the minister of the interior to the Comte de
Rambuteau, prefect of the Seine departement, dated May 6, 1839, Albert Lenoir, Ze
Musee des Thermes et I'hotel de Cluny: Documents sur la creation du Musee d'antiquites

nationales suivant le projet expose au Louvre en i8jj sous le n° 1546 (Paris, 1 862), 63—64;
A. Lemaitre, Des Musees archeologiques et numismattques en France (Paris, 1867).
78 See J.-M. Gautier, "L'Episode de Velleda dans Les Martyrs de Chateaubriand," and J.

" 'Oltre ogni humana idea': Le mythe, la tragedie, I'opera dans la Norma de
Joly,

Bellini," in N.A.G., 1 53-1 61, esp. 156— 157 and 165-176; on February 15, 1852, Delacroix
listened to Gounod's Gallic choir, "which seems quite a good thing." The cantata

Gallia dates from 1871. See Delacroix, /oarwa/, 289.

79 See E. Desjardins, Alesia (septieme campagne de Jules Cesar): Resume du debat, reponse
a I'article de la Revue des Deux Mondes du mai 1858, conclusion suivie d'un appen-
dice renfermant des notes inedites ecrites de la main de Napoleon V sur les

Commentaires de Jules Cesar (Paris, 1859); A. Castan, "Jules Quicherat, defenseur

d'Alaise," in J. Quicherat, Melanges d'archeologie et d'histoire: Antiquites celtiques,

romaines et gallo-romaines, ed. A. Giry and A. Castan (Paris, 1885), 468—474. See also

J. Le Gall, Alesia: Archeologie et histoire (Paris, 1980), 38 ff.; and O. Buchsenschutz and
 I. FRANKS AND GAULS 539

A. Schnapp, "Alesia," in Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, part 3, Les France, vol. 3, De
I'archive a. Vembleme (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

80 H. Martin, Etudes d'archeologie celtique: Notes de voyage dans les pays celtiques et scandi-

naves (Paris, 1872), 26—27.

81 See R. Lantier, "Aux origines du Musee des antiquites nationales," in Hommages a

Albert Grenier, ed. M. Renard (Brussels-Berchem, 1962), 940—947.

82 See S. Reinach, Antiquites nationales: Description raisonnee du musee de Saint- Germain-
en-Laye (Paris, [1899.'']), i: 16, 21 ff.

83 Cf. G. de Mortillet, Promenades an musee de Saint-Germain (Paris, 1869), 22.

84 Ibid., 40—56, and F. de Saulcy, "La Salle d 'Alesia au musee de Saint-Germain-en-

haye" Journal des savants (1880): 558—565 and 622—630. See also S. Reinach, Catalogue
illustre du Musee des antiquites nationales au chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 2 vols

(Paris, 1917— 1921), 2: 107—125.

85 G. Boissier, "Le musee de Saint-Germain," Revue des deux mondes, 46 (1881): 721—749;
here, 723.

86 P.-M. Duval, La Gaule jusqu 'au milieu du siecle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1971), i: 49.

87 See Julius Caesar, Guerre des Gaules, ed. L.-A. Constans (Paris: Collection des
Universites de France, 1972), introduction, xx n.

88 Calculated using information from the Catalogue de la Bihliotheque nationale, 25: col.

873-916.
89 See L. F. Flutre and K. Sneyders de Vogel, ed., Li Fet des Romains compile ensemble de
Saluste et de Suetoine et de Lucan, 2 vols. (Paris and Groningen, 1938); L. F. Flutre, Li
Fait des Romains dans les littratures frangaises et italiennes du XIP au XVP siecle (Paris,
1932).

90 M. Schmidt-Chazan, "Les Traductions de la Guerre des Gaules et le sentiment national

au Moyen Age," Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de I'Ouest, 87 (1980): 387—407.
91 Calculated using information from the Catalogue de la Bibliotheque nationale.

92 C.-E. Ruelle, Bibliographic des Gaules, 2 vols. (Paris, 1880), no. 412—483.

93 Sebillot, Le Folk-lore en France, 4:319 ff.

94 M. Lugge, "Gallia " und "Francia " im Mittelalter (Bonn, i960), esp. 180 ff.

95 See Alesia, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1980), 139-141 and 162-163. The ancient literary texts were

ed. by J. Le Gall, E. de Saint-Denis, and R. Weil; the medieval texts by Canon J.

Marilier.

96 See Almoin de Fleury, preface to Historia Francorum, P.L., 139: col. 627, and C. Jullian,
"En lisant la preface d 'Almoin," (Gallo-Roman notes, 67), Revue des etudes anciennes,
17 (1915): 186—192.

97 J. Viard, ed., Les Grandes Chroniques de France (Paris: Societe de I'histoire de France,

1920), i: 22, and Bernard Guenee, "Les Grandes Chroniques de France," in Nora, Les
Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation, i: 189—214.

98 See A. Vincent, "Gallia et Gaule," Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire, 27 (1949):

712—726, here 721.

99 K. Pomian, Pr^esiloscjako pr^edmiot wiary: Historia ifilo:^ofia w mysli sredniowiecia (The

past, object of faith: History and philosophy in the thought of the Middle Ages)
540 I. FRANKS AND GAULS

(Warsaw, 1968), 13 ff., 239 ff. See also C. Beaune, "L'Utilisation politique du mythe des
origines troyennes en France a la fin du Moyen Age," in Lectures medievales de Virgile:

Actes du colloque organise par FEcole frangaise de Rome {Rome, 26—28 octobre 1982)

(Rome, 1985), 331-355.

100 For example Polydore Virgil for English history or Paul Emile for French history. See
T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), 78 ff.; C. Vivanti, "Paulus Aemilius
Gallis condidit historias.-^" Annales E.S.C. 19 (1964): 1117— 1124.

101 Strabo, Geographie, ed. G. Aujac (Collection des Universites de France), vol. i, part i

(Paris, 1969), 68 ff.

102 C. Beaune, "L'Image du fondateur: Vercingetorix et Brennus de 1450 a 1550," in La

Monarchie absolutiste et Vhistoire en France (Paris, 1986), 29—50.

103 C. Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985), 19 ff.; here, 33.

104 G. Huppert, L'Idee de Vhistoire parfaite (Paris, 1973), 77 ff.

105 Annius of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni), Commentarii fratris Joannis Annii Viterbiensis

super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium (Rome, 1498), with several
later eds.

106 R. Weiss, "Traccia per una biografia di Annio da Viterbo," Italia medievale e umanis-
tica, 5 (1962): 425—441; C. R. Ligota, "Annius of Viterbo and Historical Method,"
Journal of the JVarburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50 (1987): 44—56.
107 C.-G. Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois au XVI^ siecle: Le developpement litteraire d'un mythe
nationaliste (Paris, 1972), esp. 177—182.

108 See Les Tresors des eglises de France: Catalogue de I'exposition du Mitsee des arts decorat-

ifs (Paris, 1965), 39, no. 87.

109 H. Duranton, "Le Mythe de la continuite monarchique chez les historiens fran9ais du

XVIIF siecle," in Modeles et moyens de reflexion politique au XVIIP siecle (Lille, 1979),

3: 203—226.
no F. Hotman, Franco-Gallia (Geneva, 1573).
111 C. Fauchet, Recueil des antiquite^ gauloises etfl-anfoises (Paris, 1579), book 2, ch. 2: 3.

112 On these historians, see C. Vivanti, Lotta politico e pace religiosa in Franciaflra cinque e

seicento, 2d ed. (Turin, 1974), and idem., "Zej Recherches de la France d'Etienne
Pasquier," in Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation, 3: 215—245.
113 P. Pezron, Antiquite de la religion et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appeles Gaulois

(Paris, 1703), and J. Sole, "Le Mythe gaulois sous Louis XIV: Paul Pezron et son
Antiquite des Celtes de 1703," vnN.A.G., 37—40.

1
14 J. Martin, La Religion des Gaulois, tiree des plus pures sources de I'Antiquite, 2 vols. (Paris,

1727), and R. Mas, "Dom Jacques Martin, historien des Gaulois (1684— 1751)," in
N.A.G., 41—50.
115 S. Pelloutier, Histoire des Celtes, et particulierement des Gaulois et des Germains, 2 vols.

(Paris, 3 successive eds., 1741— 1750 and 1770— 1771).

116 G. G. Leibniz, De origine Francorum disquisitio (Hanover, 171 5), with a reply by Father
Tournemine, /oKrna/ de Trevoux, 16 (1716): 10—22, and a response by Leibniz in idem..

Opera omnia, ed. Dutens, vol. part 2: 167—173. See also H. Duranton, " 'Nos
4,

ancetres, les Gaulois': Genese et avatars d'un cliche historique," Cahiers d'histoire, 4
(1969): 340-370, esp. 343-347-
 I. FRANKS AND GAULS

117 A. de Valois, Notitia Galliarum, ordine litterarum digesta (Paris, 1675); d'Anville,
Eclairctssements geographiques sur I'ancienne Gaule, precedees d'un traite des mesures

itineraires des Romains et de la lieue gauloise (Paris, 1741); idem, Notice de Vancienne
Gaule, three des monuments romains (Paris, 1760).

118 For an idea of all of this production, see J. Le Long, Bihliotheque historique de la France,

ed. Fevret de Fontette (Paris, 1768), nos. 23 to 389 (ancient geography of the Gauls)
and 3730 to 3952 (history of the ancient Gauls). See also H. Duranton, "La Recherche
historique a I'academie des Inscriptions: L'exemple de I'histoire de France," in K.
Hammer and J. Voss, ed., Historische Forschung im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1976),
207—235, and N.A.G., 75—140.
119 E. Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le probleme de la constitution fran^aise au XVIIP siecle

(1927; repr. Geneva, 1978).

120 On Boulainvilliers, see R. Simon, Henry de Boulainviller [sic].- Historien, politique,

philosophe, astrologue (Gap, 1940), 46 ff., and on Le Laboureur, who anticipated certain
ideas that Boulainvilliers would develop, see Carcassonne, Montesquieu, 1 1— 14.

121 H. de Boulainvilliers, Abrege chronologique de I'histoire de France (The Hague, 1733),

40—44; idem., Histoire de I'ancien gouvernement de la France, and XlVlettres historiques

sur les Parlemens ou Etats-Generaux (The Hague—Amsterdam, 1727), i: 29, 39 ff.

122 Idem., Histoire de I'ancien gouvernement, i: 34—35.

123 Ibid., i: 55.

124 Idem, Lettres historiques, second letter, 218.

125 Idem, Histoire de I'ancien gouvernment, 149— 1 50, and Lettres historiques, third letter, 289.

126 Lettres historiques, second letter, 241—242.

127 Ibid., 325 ff. and 304. See also idem., Essais sur la noblesse de France, contenans une dis-

sertation sur son origine et abaissement (Amsterdam, 1732), 230 ff.

128 Ibid., 66-67.

129 J.-B. Dubos, Histoire critique de I'etablissement de la monarchic fran^oise dans les Gaules
(Paris, 1734), i: 14.

130 Ibid., i: 204.

131 Ibid., i: 12.

132 Ibid., 3: 210— 211.

133 Ibid., 3: 375-376.

134 Ibid., 3: 260 ff., 264.

135 Ibid., 3: 504-505.

136 Ibid., 3: 533-534-

137 Ibid., 3: 294 ff.

138 Ibid., 3: 329 ff.

139 Ibid., 3: 340 ff., 370-371, 408 ff.

140 Ibid., 3: 442.

141 Ibid., 3: 543 ff.

142 Ibid., 3: 460.

143 Montesquieu, De I'esprit des lois, book 28, ch. 3; book 30, ch. 12, 15, 17.

144 "The Comte de Boulainvilliers and Abbe Dubos have both formulated systems, one of
which appears to be a conspiracy against the third estate and the other a conspiracy
542 I. FRANKS AND GAULS

against the nobility," ibid., book 30, ch. 10; see also Augustin Thierry, Considerations
sur I'histoire de France, in Oeuvres completes, vol. 4 (Paris, 1879), ^"^^ Carcassonne,

Montesquieu, 87 ff. and 179 ff.

145 Sieyes, Qu'est-ce que le tiers etati'ed. R. Zapped (Geneva, 1970), 128.
" les Gaulois,' "
146 Duranton, 'Nos ancetres 361—363.
147 La Tour d 'Auvergne Corret, Nouvelles recherches sur la langue, I'Drigine et I'antiquite des

Bretons pour servir d I'histoire de ce peuple (Bayonne, 1792); idem., Origines gauloises,
celles des plus anctens peuples de VEurope puisees dans leur vraie source; ou Recherches sur
la langue, I'origine et les antiquites des Celto- Bretons de I'Armorique, pour servir a I'histoire

de ce peuple et a celle des Frangais (Paris, Year V [1796]), 211— 213 n. Le Moniteur for 15

Germinal, Year 5
(April 4, 1797), published an article of praise by P.-L. David.

148 J. Picot, Histoire des Gaulois depuis leur origine jusqu'd leur melange avec les Francs et

jusqu 'aux commencements de la monarchie Frangaise, 3 vols. (Geneva, Year XI [1804]), i:

xviii and 9 ff.

149 The Decade philosophique for 20 Messidor, Year XII, 82-89, pubHshed an excerpt from
Picot 's book done by Ginguene. On the tenth of the same month it published an
anonymous excerpt from Serieys, Elements de I'histoire des Gaules. These were the only
two books on the subject to which the Decade reacted. See M. Regaldo, Un Milieu intel-

lectuel: la Decade philosophique (^1^94— i8oj) (Lille-Paris, 1976), 4: 173.

150 Picot, Histoire des Gaulois, 3: 187.

151 See F.-D. de Reynaud, Comte de Montlosier, De la monarchie frangaise, depuis son etab-

lissement jusqu 'd nos jours, ou Recherches sur les anciennes institutions frangaises et sur les

causes qui ont amene la Revolution (Paris, 18 14), 3 vols.

1 52 Augustin Thierry, Sur I'antipathie de race qui divise la nation franfaise (1820), in Oeuvres
completes (Paris, 1866), 3: 482—487; here, 486.
153 F. Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France depuis la Restauration et du ministere actuel
(Paris, 1820), Hi and 2.

154 M. Gauchet, "Les Lettres sur I'histoire de France d 'Augustin Theirry," in Nora, Les
Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation, i: 247—316.

155 In the case of Thierry, this is most apparent in his Histoire de la conquete de I'Angleterre

par les Normands (1825). In Guizot it is in the Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828).
156 F. Guizot, Cours d'histoire moderne: Histoire de la civilisation en France depuis la chute de
I'Empire remain jusqu'en lySg (Paris, 1829), 4 vols.

157 See, for example, A. Bertrand, Nos origines: La Gaule avant les Gaulois d'apres les mon-
uments et les textes (Paris, 1891), 5, 233, 254—255.
158 On the popularity of Henri Martin's works, seeR. Mallet, "Henri Martinet les Gaulois:
Histoire et mythe," in N.A.G., 231—244. Martin's reputation apparently did not suffer

much from the critique by H. d'Arbois de Jubainville, Quelques observations sur les six

premiers volumes {4 edition) de I'Histoire de France de M. Henri Martin (Troyes-Paris,

^

1857). See also T. Lavalee, Histoire des Frangais depuis le temps des Gaulois jusqu 'en 1830

(Paris, 1838) in any of twenty editions, the last of which appeared in 1876.

159 Amedee Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois depuis les temps les plus recules jusqu'd I'entiere
soumission de la Gaule d la domination romaine, 3d ed. (Paris, 1844), 2: 42.

160 Ibid., i: xiv-xv.

 I. FRANKS AND GAULS 543

161 Ibid., 2: 52—53.

162 Ibid., 2: 65.

163 Ibid., 2: 103—104.

164 Ibid., 2: 107.

165 Thierry applied the term "civiUzation" to the Gauls. See, for example, ibid., i: xiv and
xvii, and also C. Lacoste, "Les Gaulois d'Amedee Thierry," in N.A.G., 203—209.
166 Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois, i: x.

167 W. F. Edwards, Des Caracteres physiologiques des races humaines consideres dans lews rap-
ports avec I'histoire (Paris, 1829).

168 Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois, i: xii.

169 Ibid., 2: 155.

170 Ibid., 3: 88, 90, 99, 140, 141, 148, 167.

171 Ibid., 3: 161.

172 Ibid., 3: 174.

173 Guizot, Cours d'histoire moderne, 2: 61—62.

174 Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois, 3: 255.

175 Ibid., Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois, 2: 5.

176 R. de Lasteyrie, "Jules Quicherat, sa vie et ses travaux," in Quicherat, Melanges, 15.

177 D. Bertin and J. -P. Guillaumet, Bihracte {Saone-et-Loire): Une ville gauloise sur le mont
Beuvray (Paris, 1987), 33 ff., 45 ff.

178 Le Gall, Alesia, 53 ff., 118 ff.

179 J. Dechelette, Manuel d'archeologie prehistorique, celtique et gallo-romaine, vol. i,

Archeologie prehistorique (Paris, 1908 and after).

180 E. Desjardins, Geographie historique et administrative de la Gaule romaint, 4 vols. (Paris,

1876-1893).
181 A. Blanchet, Traite des monnaies gauloises (Paris, 1905).
182 E.-J. Esperandieu, Recueil general des bas-reliefs de la Gaule romaine (Paris, 1907

and after).

183 V. Tourneur, Esquisse d'une histoire des etudes celtiques (Liege, 1905), 212.

184 A. Bertrand, "Cours d'archeologie nationale," in Nos origines, i ff. J. Toutain, "A.
Heron de Villefosse (1845— 1919)," ^''^ Alesia, 5 (1919): 76 ff.; Tourner, Esquisse, 219.
185 C. Jullian, "La Vie et I'etude des monuments fran^ais," in Au seuil de notre histoire

(Paris, 1930), i: 30.

186 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des Frangais (Paris, 1821), i: i, 8, 129.

187 H. Martin, Histoire de France depuis les temps les plus reculesjusqu 'en lySg, 4th ed. (Paris,

1855), 1:1.

188 Ibid., 333.

189 Martin borrowed even his phrasing from Michelet. Compare the passage in ibid.,

332—333, with the passage in J. Michelet, Histoire de France, i (I am quoting from a

modern edition: Michelet, Le Moyen Age [Paris, 1981], 71). On the Gauls in Michelet,
see C. Croisille, "Michelet et les Gaulois ou les seductions de la patrie celtique," in

N.A.G., 211— 219.

190 R. de Lasteyrie, "Jules Quicherat, sa vie et ses travaux," in Quicherat, Melanges, 2, 5—6;

C. Jullian, Notes sur I'histoire en France au isf siecle (1897; repr. Paris-Geneva, 1979),
544 I. FRANKS AND GAULS

esp. Ixxxiii, cii, cxxi; idem, "L'anciennete de I'idee de nation," in Jullian, Au seuil de

notre histoir i: i66 ff.

191 J. Michelet, preface of 1869 to Histoire de France (in ed. cited above, n 188), 17.

192 Ibid., 82.

193 Ibid., 79.

194 Ibid.

195 Ibid., 51.

196 Ibid., 35.

197 Ibid., 82.

198 Ibid., 72.

199 Ibid., 182.

200 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de I'ancienne France: La Gaule
romaine (Paris, 1891), 50.

201 Ibid., 12.

202 Ibid., 84.

203 P. Michel, Un Mythe romantique: Les barbares {1J89—1848') (Lyons, 1981), and "Mythe

barbare et mythe gaulois," in N.A.G., 221—229.

204 Fustel de Coulanges, Za Gaule romaine, 137.

205 Idem, Histoire des institutions politiques de I'ancienne France: L'invasion germanique et la

fin de I'Empire (Paris, 1891), 225—226.

206 Gui:^ot, Cours d'histoire moderne, 2: 288, 297.

207 ¥\isx.e\ Ae CovXan^es, L'invasion germanique, 558.

208 See, for example, the children's book by M. Moreau-Christophe, Les Gaulois nos aieux
(Tours, 1880, repr. 1881, 1885, 1887, and 1889).

209 Boissier, "Le Musee de Saint-Germain," 736—737.

210 C. Jullian, Gallia: Tableau sommaire de la Gaule sous la domination romaine (Paris, n.d.;
preface dated July i, 1892), 5.

211 The journal published poems (see Pro y^^/ejz'a, 3 [1908— 1909]: 405—408, and 5 [1910— 1914]:

750—752, 772—776, 827—832) and reports of visits to excavation sites by officers and stu-

dents (i [1905— 1907]: 190—192). During one visit by five hundred lycee students, a page
of Camilla Jullian 's Vercingetorix was read, along with a poem by L. Matruchot: see 2

(1907-1908): 362-368. See also L. Matruchot, "Alise, lieu de pelerinage patriotique," 3

(1908— 1909): 424.

212 Unsigned editorial, "ProAlesia, revue gallo-romaine," ProAlesia, n.s., 2 (1915-1916): 18.

213 See letters of April 10, 1896, and October 26, 1898, mLettres de Camille Jullian a Henri
d'Arbois de Jubainville, ed. M. Toussaint (Nancy, 1951), 10— 11 and 18; see also A.
Grenier, Camille Jullian: Un demi-siecle de science historique et de progres fi-angais

1880— igjo (Paris, 1944).

214 See Grenier, Camille Jullian, 199 ff.; P.-M. Duval, introduction to Histoire de la Gaule,
by C. Jullian, abridged ed. (Paris, 1971), xvii-xxxiii.
215 For the subjects treated in this course, see "Les Conditions geographiques de I'histoire

de France," in C. Jullian, Au seuil de notre histoire, i : 23 1—233; Jullian and Vidal, see
Grenier, Camille Jullian, 19 and passim.
 2. ANCIEN REGIME AND REVOLUTION 545

216 C. Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule, 8 vols. (Paris, 1908— 1926); here, i: ch. 1—3, and vol. 5.

217 See, for example, i: 159 ff.; 5: 174 ff., 216 ff.; 6: 166 ff.

218 C. Jullian, "Plaidoyer pour la prehistoire," in Au seuilde notre histoire, i: 57—58. When
Marc Bloch, in a famous passage, compared the historian to "the ogre of legend," he
probably had this passage from Jullian in mind.

219 Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule, 2: 443—444.

220 Ibid., 2: 448.

221 Ibid., 2: 449 ff.

222 Ibid., 2: 547.

223 Ibid., 2: 550.

224 Ibid., 3: 29.

225 Ibid., 3: 32-33.

226 Ibid., 3: 30.

227 Ibid., 3: 421.

228 Ibid., 3: 487).

229 Ibid., 3: 535.

230 Ibid., 3: 539-540-

231 Ibid., 6: 528 ff., esp. 533.

232 See, for example, J.-L. Brunaux, Les Gaulois, sanctuaires et rites (Paris, 1986); P.
Meniel, Chasse et elevage chei les Gaulois (Paris, 1987); J.-L. Brunaux and B. Lambot,

Guerre et armement chei les Gaulois (Paris, 1988); A. Duval, "Autour de Vercingetorix:

De I'archeologie a I'histoire economique et sociale," inLe Deuxieme Age dufer en

Auvergne et en Forei (Sheffield— Saint-Etienne, 1982), 298—335; idem, "Economies et
societes en Gaule non meditrraneenne, IIF-P siecle avant notre ere, d'apres les don-
nees archeologiques," in Archeologie et rapports sociaux en Gaule, ed. A. Daubigney,
Annales Htteraires de I'universite de Besan5on (Besan^on, 1984), 55-68; P.-M. Duval,
Travaux sur la Gaule {1346—1986), 2 vols. (Rome, 1990); C. Goudineau, Cesar et la

Gaule (Paris, 1990).

233 P. Vidal-Naquet, "Gaulois a tout faire," and M. Fischer, J.-L. Brunaux, and O. Buchen-
schutz, "L'Eternel Retour des Gaulois," L'Histoire, 109 (March 1988): 7 and 28—37; see
also Revue historique des armies, 167 (June 1986), which contains important information
on Alesia.

234 M. Rambaud, VArt de la deformation historique dans les Commentaires de Cesar, 2d ed.
(Paris, 1966), and M.-T. Moisset, "L'Iconographie de Vercingetorix a travers les

manuels d 'histoire," Antiquites nationales, 8 (1976): 84—90.

235 Fustel de Coulanges, Z7nvcwzo« ^er/waw/^we, 533.

CHAPTER 2 THE ANCIEN REGIME AND THE REVOLUTION

1 The IVorks of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1850-1856; repr.
Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1969); Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings, ed.
Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel, 1945).
2 John Adams, Canon and Feudal Law, part i.
546 2. ANCIEN REGIME AND REVOLUTION

3 Ibid.

4 Among recent writers Louis Hartz is the most profound commentator on the excep-
tional character of the founding of the United States. See The Liberal Tradition in

America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New

York: Harvest/H.B.J. Book, 1955) and The Founding of New Societies (New York:
Harvest/H.B.J. Book, 1964).
5 On this subject, classic since Tocqueville and Taine, see Keith Baker, Condorcet
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), esp. ch. 4.

6 See my article on Tocqueville in Fran9ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, ed., Dictionnaire cri-
tique de la Revolution frangaise (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), trans, by Arthur
Goldhammer as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
7 On the appearance of the phrase "Ancien Regime" in 1789, I am here following the
analysis given in the article "Ancien Regime" in the Dictionnaire critique (see n. 6). See

also Diego Venturino, "La Formulation de I'idee d' 'Ancien Regime,' " in Colin Lucas,
ed.. The French Revolution and of Modern Political Culture,
the Creation vol. 2, The

Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988).

8 See Le Moniteur, 13 (July— September 1792): 441— 442.

9 This is the central argument of my book La Revolution, de Turgot a Jules Ferry (Paris:

Hachette, 1988).
10 On Guizot, see two recent works: Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Gui^ot (Paris:
Gallimard, 1985), and Marina Valenise, ed., Francois Guiiot et la culture politique de son

temps, colloquium of the Fondation Guizot— Val Richer (Paris: Gallimard — Editions

du Seuil, 1991).

CHAPTER 3 CATHOLICS AND SECULARS

1 In French, the word late (a noun or adjective), and its associated words laicite, lai'ciser,

laicisme, and laicisation, refer to a history, a set of practices, and a memory. There is

even a certain ambiguity in the term, since laic can be opposed to pretre (layman versus
priest) or to catholique (secular versus Catholic). In the English text, this family of

words is translated by secular, secularise, secularisation, etc., and where necessary to

avoid ambiguity by laymen, laity. A conceptual difficulty remains, however, since soci-

ologists have for some time now worked with a concept of "secularization," which has
become part of the field's technical vocabulary. Nevertheless, most French historians
and sociologists, including the author of these lines, distinguish fairly sharply between

the two related phenomena of secularisation and laicisation. — TRANS.

2 L'Assiette au beurre (March 19, 1904), in Elisabeth Dixmier and Michel Dixmier,
L'Assiette au beurre (Paris: Maspero, 1974). The present essay intersects with a number
of others in this collection {Les Lieux de memoire in its French form), this being one of
the glories — or is it dangers.'' — of a series published over a considerable number of
years. In particular, the first volume. La Republique, exhibits from a number of differ-

ent angles the emergence of a "secularized" or secular memory. The reader is urged to
 3- CATHOLICS AND SECULARS 547

consult this volume for general background. Here I have availed myself of the excel-
lent work done by others in tracing the more familiar pathways to explore some lesser-

known byways; I also attempt to come full circle and begin an explanation rather than
yet another exercise in remembering.

3 Compare the persistent representations of heaven and hell in the iconography of the

Breton missions: Fanch Roudaut, Alain Croix, and Fanch Froudic, Les Chemins du par-
adis, Taolennou ar Banadoi (Douerarnenez: Editions de I'Estran, 1988).

4 Antoine de Baecque, La Caricature revolutionnaire (Paris: Presses du CNRS, 1988).

5 See in particular Eugen Weber, Satan franc-magon: La mystification de Leo Taxil (Paris:
Julliard, 1964).

6 Rene Remond, L'Anticlericalisme en France de i8i5 a. nosjours, 2d ed. (Brussels: Editions

Complexe, 1985).

7 Besse, OSB, Veillons sur notre histoire (1907), 10. Quoted in Georges Weill, Histoire de

I'idee laique en France au XIX^ siecle (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1925), 359.

8 Weill, Histoire de I'idee laique.

9 Georges de Lagarde, The translated version is as you see it here, beginning with

Lagarde 's work Naissance de I'esprit laique au declin du Moyen Age (Paris: Desclee de
Brouwer, 1934). The subsequent volumes were L'Anticlericalisme et I'affaire Dreyfus
(Toulouse: Imprimerie Regionale, 1948) and Histoire contemporaine de la laicite

republicaine, 3 vols. (Librairie Marcel Riviere, 1957 and i960; Nouvelles Editions
Latines, 1961).

10 Georges de Lagarde, Naissance de I'esprit laique au declin du Moyen Age (Levallois-

Perret: Societe Industrielle d 'Imprimerie, 1934), vol. i, in 2 parts (repr. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1948).

11 Ibid., foreword to vol. i.

12 Caperan, Histoire contemporaine, i: 9.

13 Antoine Prost, L'Ecole et la famille dans une societe' en mutation (Paris: G. V. Labat, 1982).

14 See, for example, the poll by the Institut Fran9aise d 'Opinion Politique, February
10—12, 1973 (La Vie catholique). The vote by Catholic militants for the Socialist Party

(24 percent) and the Communist Party (18 percent) was the same as for the population

generally (24 and 19 percent respectively). By contrast, the vote by regular practicing
Catholics dropped to 10 percent for the P.S. and i percent for the P.C.

15 For a longer-range perspective, see Emile Poulat, Liberte, laicite: La guerre des deux

France et le principe de la modernite (Paris: Cerf-Cujas, 1987).

16 For the 19th century this can be verifiedby using Second Empire demographic statis-

tics that mention religious affiliation or by using the relative allocations to each sect in
the official budget.

17 Claude Langlois, "Trente ans d 'histoire religieuse: Suggestions pour une future
enquete," Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 63 (i): 85—1 14.

18 See the significantly entitled work marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Jean Bauberot, Le Retour des Huguenots (Paris: Cerf-
Labor and Fides, 1985); see also, by the same author, Le Protestantisme doit-il mourir?
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988).
548 3- CATHOLICS AND SECULARS

19 Quoted in Marcel Launay, L'Eglise et I'ecole en France, XIX^—XX^ siecles (Paris:

Desclee), 156.
20 Doris Bensimon, Les Juifs de France et leurs relations avec Israel {^1945-196^ (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 1989), 25—40.
21 Gilles Kepel, Les Banlieues de I'lslam: Naissance d'une religion en France (Paris: Editions

du Seuil, 1987).

22 See Bruno Etienne, La France et I'lslam (Paris: Hachette, 1989).

23 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au pouvoir (Paris: Flammarion, 1989).

24 Remond, L'Anticlericalisme en France, 164—166. Sainte-Beuve is speaking only of the
"clerical party."

25 Ibid., 175-186.

26 Eckmann-Chatrian, Lettre d'un electeur a son depute (Paris, 1873), " ff-

27 Franfois Lebrun, ed., Histoire des catholiques en France (Paris: Privat, 1985), 284—392.
28 Jean-Marie Mayeur, Des Partis catholiques a la democratie chretienne (Paris: Armand
Colin, 1980). According to Mayeur, the obsession with clericalism, which both conser-
vatives and republicans reject, makes it impossible to establish a Catholic party: "This
attitude stems from a conception of Catholicism that distinguishes sharply between the
spiritual and the temporal and is wary of confusing the two" (p. 89).

29 The title of a famous book by Daniel Halevy, reprinted in 1972.

30 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), the

French translation bears the title La Fin des terroirs.

31 See Franfois Furet and Mona Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution frangaise
(Paris: Flammarion, 1988); trans, by Arthur Goldhammer asy4 Critical Dictionary of the
French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

32 The archetype is Albert de Mun. See Philippe Levillain, Albert de Man: Catholicisme

franfais et catholicisme romain du Syllabus au ralliement (Rome: Ecole Fran^aise de

Rome, 1983).

33 Claude Nicolet, L'Jdee republicaine en France {ly 89— 1924): Essai d'histoire critique

(Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 273.

34 Fran9ois Furet, eA., Jules Ferry, fondateur de la Republique (Paris: Editions de I'Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985).

35 His letter to teachers of November 17, 1883, can be read in Launay, L'Eglise et I'Eecole

en France, 81.

36 Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et ecrire: L'alphabetisation des Franfais de Calvin
a Jules Ferry (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977).

37 Pierre Zind, L'Enseignement religieux dans I'instruction publique en France (i85o—iSjj)

(Lyons: Centre d 'Histoire du Catholicisme, 1971). For example, Victor Duruy was the

author of a Histoire sainte d'apres la Bible, which begins with the opening lines of

Genesis. The work was still being reprinted at the beginning of the twentieth century.
38 Mona Ozouf, La Classe ininterrompue: Cahiers de la famille Sandre, enseignants,

iy8s)—is)6o (Paris: Hachette, 1979).

39 Jacques Gavoille, L'Ecole publique dans le departement du Doubs, i8yo—is)6o (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1981).
 3- CATHOLICS AND SECULARS 549

40 Michel Leniaud, L'Administration des cultes pendant la periode concordataire (Paris:

Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1988), 305-364.

41 Vou\dA, Liberie, laXcite, 294—304.

42 Claude Langlois, "L'lntroduction des congregations feminines dans le systeme peni-
tentiaire fran9ais, 1839— 1880," in Jacques G. Petit, ed., La Prison, le bagne et Vhistoire

(Geneva: Medecine et Hygiene, 1984), 129—140.

43 The law of August 14, 1884, abrogated Paragraph 3 of Article i of the Constitutional
Law of July 16, 1874: "On the Sunday following the opening of the term, public

prayers will be addressed to God in the churches and temples asking for His assistance
in the work of the Assemblies."

44 Charles Monsch, "La Naissance de La Croix, " in Rene Remond and Emile Poulat, ed.,

Cent ans d'histoire de La Croix (Paris: Le Centurion, 1988) 21—34.

45 Francois Laplanche, "La Notion de 'science catholique ': Ses origines au debut du XIX*^
siecle," Revue d'histoire de I'Eglise de France, 192 (January—June 1988): 63—90.
46 Jacqueline Lalouette, "Science et foi dans I'ideologie libre-penseuse (1866— 1914)," in
Christianisme et science (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 21—54.

47 Ibid., 32.

48 Danielle Delorme, Nicole Gault, and Josiane Gonthier, Les Premieres Institutrices
laiques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1980).

49 Fran^oise Mayeur, L'Education des filles en France au XIX^ siecle (Paris: Hachette,

1979), 152.
50 Paul Abadie, architecte, 1812-1884, Musee d'Angouleme, 1984—85 exposition catalogue,
p. 143. And see Francois Loyer, "Le Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre," in Pierre Nora, ed.,

LesLieux de memoire, part liLes France, vol. 3, De I'archive a I'embleme (Paris, Editions

Gallimard, 1992).
51 Paul Abadie, architecte, 134.

52 Michel Lagree, "1889, premier centenaire de la Revolution en Bretagne," Annales de

Bretagne et des pays de I'Ouest, 3 (1984): 255. And see Henri Loyrette, "La Tour Eiffel,"
in Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, part 3, Les France, vol. 3, De I'archive I'embleme. a.

53 Besides Ferdinand Buisson, one should mention Jules Steeg, Pauline Kergomard, direc-
trice des ecoles maternelles, as well as Felix Pecaut and Mme Jules Favre, who provided
spiritual and moral guidance at the Ecoles Normales Superieures of Fontenay-aux-
Roses and Sevres, respectively.
54 Yves Marchasson, "La Croix et le ralliement," in Remond and Poulat, Cent Ans d'his-

toire, 69—106.

55 Pierre Chevallier, La Separation de I'Eglise et de Vecole (Paris: Fayard, 1981).

56 For statistics, see Antoine Prost, L'Enseignement en France, 1800— igGj (Paris: Armand
Colin, 1968), 45.

57 Jean-Marie Mayeur, La Separation des eglises et de I'etat (Paris: Julliard, 1966).

58 This was an allusion to revolutionary repression in the Vendee, where Carrier ordered
mass executions using boats that could be towed into the middle of a river and then
sunk TRANS.
58 Le Bonnet rouge, December 23, 191 5, in Remond, L'Anticlericalisme en France, 233.
55° 3- CATHOLICS AND SECULARS

60 In addition to Father Doncoeur's famous letter, "We will not go," glued to walls every-
where, there were the posters of the Ligue des Droits du Religieux Ancien Combattant
(or DRAG, as it soon came to be called). See, for example, Remi Paillart, Affiches 14-18
(Reims: published by the author, 1986), 297.
61 L'Ecole liberatrice, December 6, 1930, summary of the argument.

62 Jacqueline Freyssinet-Dominjon, Les Manuels d'histoire de I'ecole litre, 1882—1959

(Paris: Armand Colin, 1969).

63 Yan Fauchois, Religion et France revolutionnaire (Paris: Herscher, 1989).

64 Revolutions de France et de Brabant, 2, no. 23: 454.

65 Frangois Furet, Penserla Revolution fran^aise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 77 ff., on the aris-
tocratic conspiracy; trans, by J. Mandelbaum as Conceptualising the French Revolution.

66 Claude Langlois, "Religion, culte et opinion religieuse: La politique des revolution-

naires," Revue frangaise de sociologie (1989), 3—4: 471—496.
67 See Henry Cros, Claude Fauchet, 1744—1793: Ses idees politiques, economiques etsociales
(Paris: E. Larose, 19 12), and Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French
Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
68 Bernard Cousin, Monique Cubells, and Rene Moulinas, La Pique et la Croix: Histoire

religieuse de la Revolution frangaise (Paris: Le Centurion, 1989).

69 Jean Jaures, Histoire socialiste de la Revolution (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1968), i: 791:
"The Civil Constitution of the Clergy in some respects secularized the Church itself."

70 Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth- Century

France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);

trans, into French as Za Revolution, I'Eglise, la France: Le serment de 1791 (Paris: Edi-
tions du Seuil, 1986).

71 Claude Langlois, "Crise du serment et retour de I'antichristianisme des Lumieres

(1791)," in Melanges Gadille (forthcoming). The crisis surrounding the oath occa-
sioned a revival of criticisms of the Enlightenment and a new propensity to portray the
clergy as a fundamental element of the Ancien Regime.

72 Albert Mathiez, La Theophilanthropie et le culte decadaire (Paris: Alcan, 1903), 707.

73 Dominique Julia, Les Trois Couleurs du tableau noir: La Revolution (Paris: Belin, 1981),

199. The formula is that of a deputy named Opoix, from Seine-et-Marne, to the

Convention (1793).
74 Read the long argument for the superiority of Christianity by M.-E. Petit (October i,

1793) in Julia, Zej Trois Couleurs, 200—201.

75 Bronislaw Baczko, Une Education pour la democratic: Textes et projets de Vepoque revolu-

tionnaire (Paris: Editions Garnier, 1982), 297—298.

76 Report of 24 Germinal, Year II, in Baczko, Une Education, 297—298.

77 Notes of Condorcet, in Baczko, Une Education, 250.

78 Report of Condorcet, April 20 and 21, 1792, in Baczko, Une Education, 185.

79 Ibid., 259.

80 Nicolet, L'ldee republicaine en France, 76—80.

81 Etienne Fouilloux and Claude Langlois, "Les Parrainages civils a I vry-sur-Seine au XX^
siecle," in, Libre Pensee et religion laique en France (Strasbourg: CERDIC, 1980), 193—210.
 4- FRENCH AND FOREIGNERS

82 Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution fran^aise (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), i: 21.

83 Jean-Clement Martin, La Vendee de la memoire (^1800—1980) (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1989).

84 Tdichttt, La Revolution, 251—318.

85 Claude Langlois, "La Dechirure," afterword to the French ed. of Tackett, La

Revolution, 319—337-

86 See Maurice Gontard, L'Emeignement primaire en France, de la Revolution a la loi Guiiot

(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1959), and Pierre Zind, Les Nouvelles Congregations defreres
enseignants en France de i8oo a 1830 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), 405.

87 Prost, L'Enseignement en France, 13.

88 Claude Langlois, Le Diocese de Vannes au XIX^ siecle: 1800— 1830 (Paris: Klincksieck,

1974), 405-

89 Remond, L'Anticlericalisme en France, 113— 114.

90 Robert Casanova, Montlosier et le parti pretre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1970).

91 Philippe Boutry, Pretres etparoisses au pays du cured'Ars (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986),

641; see also 644.

92 Ibid., 641. The quotation is from the highly official Messager du dimanche in 1875,

response to the declaration that the clergy must not engage in politics.

93 Odile Rudelle, La Republique absolue, i8jo—i88s), 2d ed. (Paris: Publications de la

Sorbonne, 1986).

94 The thought is inspired by the title of an article by Christian Lahalle, "Emile Combes,
reveille-toi!" in Elements, September-October 1989, a publication of the "new right"
organization GRECE. The issue is devoted to the "right of blasphemy."

CHAPTER 4 FRENCH AND FOREIGNERS

I The slogan was chanted by young North African demonstrators in December 1983,
and is quoted in Fran9oise Gaspard and Claude Servan-Schreiber, La Fin des immigres
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985), 184. Such statements are of course exaggerated and
reveal a confusion about the definition of the term immigration. Various (official and

unofficial) statistics make it appear plausible that one in three current residents of
France may have immigrant "ancestors" (going back as far as the great-grandparents).
See Gerard Noiriel, Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity in France {ic)th—20th
Centuries), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). But this is

more a symbolic figure, intended to underscore the historical importance of immigra-

tion, rather than a precise statistic. In keeping with republican political philosophy,

French legal and administrative classifications have omitted any reference to ethnic or
national origin since the nineteenth century. Results based on the few available opinion
polls are not reliable for memories beyond the grandparents' generation. In an excel-

lent illustration of the impoverishment of modern genealogical memory, one recent

poll showed that 24 percent of French people were unable to name at least one of their

eight great-grandparents, while only 13 percent knew the names of two. See Franfois
Decaris, "Les Fran9ais et leurs racines," Ge-Magaiine, i (November 1982). A final rea-
552 4- FRENCH AND FOREIGNERS

son for caution in dealing with the statistics has to do with the complexity of defining
the term immigrant. I shall come back to this subject in what follows. Note, however,
that the word is not to be confused with migrant (for in that case everyone in France
would indeed have immigrant ancestors) or with the legal term foreigner (the inhabi-
tants of Savoy and Alsace-Lorraine were not "immigrants" even when their territory
was not under French sovereignty).
2 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique (ist ed., 1835— 1840; repr. Paris:
Flammarion, 1981), i: 26.

3 The term immigrant is an American invention. It was first used in the year in which the
Constitution was drafted. See Jeanine Brun, America! America! Trois siecles d'emigra-
tion aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Julliard-Gallimard, 1980).

4 Nathan Glazer, ed., Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration (San Francisco:
I.C.S. Press, 1985), 3.

5
Gary Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New Laboring
Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).

6 I elaborate on this question in Gerard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Berg, 1990).

7 The hypothesis of a close connection between peasant resistance to industrialization,

political democracy, and immigration is explored by Don Digan in "Europe's Melting
Pot: A Century of Large-Scale Immigration into France," Ethnic and Racial Studies
(April 1981).

8 Jean Portemer, "L'Etranger dans le droit de la Revolution fran9aise," in L'Etranger:

Recueil de la Societe Jean-Bodin (Paris, 1959), 535 ff.

9 Archives parlementaires, 8: 479. Cited hereafter as A. P.

10 A.P., 9: 478.

11 A. P., 10: 756.

12 Adolphe Landry, who sponsored an immigration bill early in World War I, was the first

to point out that the republican tradition of the rights of man prevented establishing a
truly "scientific" policy for the recruitment of immigrants. See Archives Nationales, C
7725. Many subsequent works would take up this theme.
13 As shown by Jean-Pierre Hassoun and Yinh Phong Tan, "Les Refugies de I'Asie du
Sud-Est de langue chinoise" (research report of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethno-
logique, 1986; typescript).

14 Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide (1897; repr. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1983), 356.

15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959— 1969), i:

248—249; quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: La reflexion fran^aise sur la

diversite humaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 207 and 209.

16 Albert Mathiez, La Revolution et les etrangers: Cosmopolitisme et defense nationale (Paris:

La Renaissance du Livre, 1918).

17 A.P., 17: 629, italics in the original. Note, however, the "modern" quality of the reser-
vations expressed by one deputy, Andrieu, who asked for "limits to be set to the law"
in order to avoid a massive influx of foreigners seeking "to acquire national properties
in our country whose income they would consume in theirs."
 4- FRENCH AND FOREIGNERS 553

18 A full legal survey with historical background can be found in the report of the
Commission on Nationality chaired by Marceau Long, Etrefrangais aujourd'hui, 2 vols.

(Paris: UGE, 1988)

19 Mathiez, La Revolution et les etrangers, i.

20 For this period see especially Pierre Milza, Franfais et Italiens d la fin du XIX^ siecle

(Rome: Publications de I'Ecole Fran^aise, 1981); Judy Reardon, "Belgian Workers in

Roubaix, France, in the 19th Century" (thesis. University of Maryland, 1977); Nancy
Green, Les Travailleurs immigres juifs a. la Belle Epoque (Paris: Fayard, 1985); and the
overview edited by Yves Lequin, La Mosaique France: Histoire des etrangers et de rim-

migration en France (Paris: Larousse, 1988).

21 Quoted in Anne-Marie Faidutti-Rudolph, L'Immigration italienne dans le sud-est de la

France (Gap: Louis Jean, 1964), 96.

22 Michelle Perrot, "Les Rapports entre ouvriers fran9ais et etrangers (1871— 1893),"
Bulletin de la Societe d'histoire moderne (i960).

23 Alain Dantoing, "Une Manifestation de defense ouvriere contre le travail etranger dans
les mines du Pas-de-Calais en 1892," Revue d'histoire beige contemporaine (1974).

24 Le Petit Marseillais (June 19, 1881).

25 For this episode, see Teodosio Vertone's article in Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and Emilio
Serra, ed.^L'emigraiione italiana in Francia prima del 1^14 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1978).

26 The first Italian workers to be attacked were members of the Club Nazionale
Italiano, who jeered at French soldiers from the Vincendon Brigade upon their return
from Tunisia.
27 Over the past century large industrial and agricultural concerns with substantial
demand for foreign manual labor have often defended foreign workers against out-
breaks of xenophobia. In this respect they differ from smaller firms and businesses.
28 The unions fought for equal treatment of French and foreign workers all the more vig-

orously because any penalization of immigrants in terms of wages or working condi-

tions ultimately cost French workers as well (employers will always hire the cheapest

workers available). By contrast, the left's position on employment before 1914 was
much more ambiguous. The Millerand laws of 1899 prohibited public works projects
from employing more than ten percent foreign workers. About this time the unions also
won the right to monitor the hiring of immigrant workers by participating in the oper-

ation of government hiring offices.

29 See Janine Ponty, Polonais meconnus (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988).

30 Jean-Charles Bonnet, "Les Pouvoirs publics et I'immigration dans I'entre-deux-guer-

res" (thesis, Publications du Centre Pierre-Leon, University of Lyons, 1974), 206 ff.

31 See Ralph Schor, VOpinion fiangaise et les etrangers, 1919—1939 (Paris: Publications de
la Sorbonne, 1985).

32 Jean-Marie Le Pen, Les Franfais d'abord (Paris: Carrere-Lafon, 1984), 167, quoted in
Pierre Milza, Fascisme franfais: Passe et present (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 423.

33 Another reason for this constant hostility toward strangers is the number of bloody
wars that France has fought over the centuries, wars that have created a mental climate
receptive to arguments of this type. France has a "long memory" of repeated inva-
sions, passed down from generation to generation, in some cases over many centuries.
554 4- FRENCH AND FOREIGNERS

Ernest Lavisse tells this anecdote about a dance in a village near his native Nouvion: "A
boy, furious that I should have offered my arm to his mistress — was
I then a young gen-
tleman of fifteen — called me a Paulac. I write the word as he pronounced it. He had no
idea, nor did I, for that matter, that he was referring to the Poles, who in the seventeenth
century were called PoUaques, who fought in Picardy in the service of the emperor."
Ernest Lavisse, Souvenirs (1912; repr. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1988), 40.

34 Dominique Schnapper, La France de /'integration (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

35 There is no space here to discuss the reasonableness of this judgment. It is not simply
that recent research does not corroborate it. Various studies challenge the idea that
there is anything special about the problem of North Africans (which many people
confuse with the problem of Muslims). After analyzing a number of works on the edu-
cational issue, Michel Oriol observed (in "Bilan des etudes sur les aspects culturels et

humains des migrations Internationales (1918-1979)," [Strasbourg: Fondation

Europeennes des Sciences, 1981; typescript]): "Various studies of the matter agree that

Portuguese students commonly do worse than Algerians." Similarly, concerning

Muslims in France, Remi Leveau and Dominique Schnapper argue that it is time to
"question the common idea.. .that [Muslims] today are incapable of assimilating into
French society." (Leveau and Schnapper, "Religion et politique: juifs et musulmans
maghrebins en France," in Leveau and Gilles Keppel, ed., Les Musulmans dans la societe

frangaise [Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988], 137.)

36 Albin Chalandon, "La Nationalite frangaise doit etre un objet de fierte," L'Evenement
du jeudi (November 20—26, 1986).
37 Jean- Yves Le Gallon, "Identite nationale et preference nationale," in Le Club de
VWoxloge, L'Identite de la France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985), 246.

38 Jean Laumonier, La Nationalite fran^aise, vol. 2, Les Hommes (Paris: Chamuel, 1892),

350 ff.

39 Jules Rochard, Bulletin de I'Academie de medecine (1883), 281.

40 Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Race et milieu social (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1909), 69.
41 LaumonieT, La Nationalite frangaise, 371.

42 Jules Soury, quoted in Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barres et le nationalisme franfais (1972;

repr. Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1985), 259.

43 Maurice Barres, L'Appel au soldat, quoted in Sternhell, Maurice Barres, 265.

44 Charles Seignobos, Histoire sincere de la nation frangaise (1933; repr. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1982), 337.

45 Georges Mauco, "Memoire sur I'assimilation des etrangers en France" (Geneva:

Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle, 1937; typescript), 23.
46 Rene Martial, Les Metis (Paris: Flammarion, 1942), 26.

47 Jean Pluyette, La Selection de I'immigration en France et la doctrine des races (Paris:

Pierre Bosseret, 1930), 138.

48 After World War II but just before the spodight turned to the North Africans, an INED
study still maintained that "the resistance of Russians to assimilation is such that
French women men appear more likely to adapt to Russian ways
married to Russian
than to serve as agents of assimilation." And this: "Russian children remain Russian in
 4- FRENCH AND FOREIGNERS 555

spite of school." Through careful calculation the author is able to affirm that the pro-

portion of assimilated Russian immigrants declined from 27.8 to 24.4 percent between

1930 and 1936. See Madeleine Dore, "Enquete sur I'immigration russe,"in INED,
Louis Chevalier, ed., Documents sur Vimmigration (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1947), 154—158.

49 Mauco, "Memoire," 42.

50 From Republicain lorrain (November 18, 1988); see Maria Liberatore-Lefebvre, Le

Passe simple (Maxeville: Imprimerie Rubrecht, 1988).

51 For the Spanish see C. Azas, "Migrants espagnols dans le Biterrois (1886— 1934)" (the-
sis, University of Paris- V, 1981; typescript); for the Italians, A. Sportiello, Les Pecheurs
du Vieux Port: Fetes et traditions (Marseilles: Jeanne Laffite, 1981); for the Poles,
Danielle Ducellier, "L'Immigration polonaise dans le bassin de Blanzy dans I'entre-
deux-guerres," Revue periodique de la "PAy^zopAy/e " (Montceau-les-Mines: 1981 and

1982); for the Armenians, Martine Hovanessian, Le Lien communautaire: Trois genera-

tions d'Armeniens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992).

52 Le Monde (April 13—14, 1986).

53 Hovanessian, Le Lien communautaire.

54 A second preface by the proviseur of the lycee, Jean-Paul Llinares, goes even further,
stating that the city's inhabitants "have kept their unique customs and ways. This diver-
sity is what makes the population so abundantly original." Office Departemental

d'Action Culturelle de I'Herault, Paroles: Histoires d'une migration; des Espagnols

racontent (Montpellier, n. d.).

55 Maurizio Catani in Michel Oriol and Marie-Claire Hily, ed., "Les Reseaux associatifs
des immigres en Europe occidentale" (University of Nice, IDERIC, 1985; typescript);
see also the article by G. Campani in the same work.
56 See Laurence Bertoia and Gerard Noiriel, "Aper9u sur I'histoire du mouvement asso-
ciatif chez les immigres en France," in Maurizio Catani and Salvatore Palidda, ed., "Le
Role du mouvement associatif dans revolution des communautes immigrees" (report
for the Fonds d'Action Sociale and the Ministere des Affaires Sociales, February 1987;
typescript) 66—81.

57 Ponty, Polonais meconnus, 167.

58 Arnam Turabian, Trente ans en France: Ma vie (Marseilles: L'Aiguillon, 1928), 20.

59 Alexandre de Kronowski, preface to Almanack historique ou souvenir de Vemigration

polonaise (Paris: Bourgogne et Martinet, 1837-1838).

60 Khoren Margossian, Odysee d'un enfant armenien (Paris: La Pensee Universelle, 1975),
13. The question of writing as a trace or track of origin can even constitute a literary
project, as in the case of Georges Perec, whose father, a Polish Jewish immigrant to
France, died in combat in 1940 and whose mother died in a German concentration
camp. See C. Burgelin, Georges Perec (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988).
61 MaryAntin, The Promised Land {^osion: Houghton-Mifflin, 1912).

62 Simone Signoret, Adieu Volodia (Paris: Fayard, 1985).

63 See Robert Park and Herbert Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (1921; repr. New
York: Paterson-Smith, 1969).
556 4- FRENCH AND FOREIGNERS

64 Giorgio Amendola, L'lle (1981) (Paris: Messinger, 1983), 225.

65 Robert Park, "The Immigrant Press and Its Control," quoted in Ralph Turner, Robert
Park: On Social Control and Collective Behavior (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1967), 119.

66 Alain Girard and Jean Stoetzel, Frangais et immigres, 2 vols.; INED Travaux et

Documents, cahiers 19 and 20 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953 and 1954).
Given the small size of the sample (slightly more than 500 people in all), the figures in
this study are not conclusive but can serve as indications.

67 Park, quoted in Turner, Robert Park, 143.

68 Leveau and Schnapper, "Religion et politique," 137.

69 Genevieve Bardakdjian, "La Communaute armenienne de Decines (1925— 1971),"

Bulletin du Centre d'histoire economique etsociale de VUniversite de Lyon-II {\c)T^; see also

Aznive Keuroghlian, "Les Armeniens dans la region Rhone-Alpes" (thesis, University

of Lyons, 1975; typescript).
70 K. Partchevsky, "Statistique generate et situation legale des emigres en France," Russie
et Chretiente, i (January— March 1937).
71 Benigno Caceres, La Solitude des autres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), 74.

72 Leveau and Schnapper, "Religion et politique," 132.

73 This problem is not limited to immigrants. Norbert Elias argues that assimilation
through inculcation of dominant norms in ever-expanding circles of society was a cen-
tral aspect of the civilizing process in Europe from the Renaissance on. See Norbert
Elias, La Civilisation des moeurs (1939; repr. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1982).
74 Etienne Balibar, "La Forme nation: Histoire et ideologic," in Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe: Les identites ambigiies (Paris: La Decouverte, 1988), 135.

75 Bardakdjian, "LaCommunaute armenienne de Decines."

76 Jan Gruszynski, "La Communaute polonaise en France de 1919 a 1975: Problemes
d 'integration de trois generations" (thesis. University of Paris- V, 1977; typescript).
77 "In an urban environment children are more likely to stay in school," according to

Girard and Stoetzel, Frangais et immigres, 80.

78 Jean-Louis Borkowski, "L'Insertion sociale des immigres et de leurs enfants," Donnees

sociales (INSEE: 1990), 310—314. The figures for this study were taken from a survey

of living conditions in France conducted in 1986—87.

79 See Schnapper, La France de Vintegration.
80 On language issues, see Simone Bonnafous, L'Immigration prise aux mots (Paris: Kime,
1991).
81 Assimilation is defined here as the process whereby the child acquires the cultural
codes of the dominant society, beginning with language. On this point see Stephane
Beaud and Gerard Noiriel, "L' Assimilation: Un concept en panne," in Pierre-Andre
Taguieff, Face au racisme (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991), 2: 261—282.

CHAPTER 5 VICHY

I See especially Jean-Pierre Azema, De Munich d la Liberation 1938—1944 (Paris: Editions

du Seuil, 1979); Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, 1940—1944 (New York: Norton,
 5- VICHY 557

1972); Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal: France since the 1930s (New York:
Viking, 1974).
2 Message of July 11, 1940, in Philippe Petain, Discours aux Frangais, ed. J.-C. Barbas
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 68; message of October 10, 1940, p. 88.

3 Charles Maurras, La Seule France: Chronique des jours d'epreuve (Lyons: Lardanchet,

1941), 32-34-

4 Free French legal scholars held that the National Assembly had exceeded its powers in

delegating an authority that belonged to it exclusively, but here I am simply concerned

with the facts about this vote.

5 Jean-Baptiste 'D\ixose\\Q,L'Abime, is)3S)—i945 (Pms: Imprimerie Nationale, 1982), 449.

6 See Denis Peschanski, "Gouvernants et gouvernes dans la France de Vichy: Juillet

1940— avril 1942," in Vichy, 1940—1944: Archives de guerre d'Angelo Tasca (Paris-Milan:
CNRS Feltrinelli, 1986), 41 ff.; and idem, "Vichy au singulier, Vichy au pluriel: Une
tentative avortee d'encadrement de la societe (1941— 1942)," Annales ESC. (May—June
1988): 639—661; see also Pierre Laborie, L' Opinion frangaise sous Vichy (Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1990).
'•
7 Ian Kershaw, The "Hitler Myth ' Image and Reality in the Third Reich (London: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
8 Petain, Discours aux Franfais, 172.

9 See, for example, ibid., 78 (appeal of August 13, 1940); 85 (appeal of October 9, 1940);
103 (message of December 24, 1940).
10 Ibid., 216.

11 Henry Rousso, Ze Syndrome de Vichy, 1944—198... (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987) 304;

trans, by Arthur Goldhammer as The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1992), based on rev. paperback ed. [Seuil's "Points" collection,

1990]).
12 Robert O. Paxton and Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic
Books, 1981); Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwit^, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1983— 1985).
13 Article published in La Revue des deux mondes (September 15, 1940), reproduced in

Jean Thouvenin, D'ordre du Marechal Petain {La France Nouvelle, 11) (Paris: Sequana,

1940), 90.

14 Ibid., 89.

1 5 Philippe Petain, "Individualisme et nation," Revue universelle (January i, 1941), repro-

duced in idem. Paroles aux Frangais (Lyons: Lardanchet, 1941), 184.

16 Discours aux Franfais, 153 (speech of July 8, 1941).

17 Olivier Wormser, Les Origines doctrinales de la "Revolution nationale " (Paris, 1971).

18 Petain, for example, made an approving reference to the Convention, which, like Henri
IV and Richelieu, had respected "the sacred law of national unity" by crushing "with-
out flinching any disturbances that tended to divide the nation against itself " {Discours

aux Frangais, 120, speech of April 7, 1941).

19 See note 13, pp. 91—92.

20 Discours aux Frangais, 150— 151 (speech of July 8, 1941).

21 Paroles aux Frangais, 14 and 16 (speech of 1938 to the congress of the Union Nationale
des Anciens Combattants).
558 5- VICHY

22 Ernest Renan, La Reforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, in Oeuvres completes

(Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1947), i: 369 and 401.
23 Andre Simon, Vercingetorix et I'ideologie franfaise (Paris: Imago, 1989).

24 Discours aux Frangais, 66 (appeal of June 25, 1940).

25 See note 13, p. 10.

26 Thouvenin, D 'ordre du Marechal Petain, 56 (Petain's statement to a group of American

journalists on August 24, 1940).

27 Discours aux Franfais, p. 62 (appeal of June 23, 1940).

28 Ibid., 78 (speech of August 13, 1940).

29 Benjamin Constant, De I'esprit de conquete et de I'usurpation, in De la liberie che\ les mod-

ernes, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Pluriel, 1980), 252.
30 Christian Fame, Le Projet culturel de Vichy: Folklore et Revolution nationale, 1940—1944

(Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, Editions du CNRS, 1989).

31 Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy. For wartime memory as reflected in fiction, see the

papers by Michael Kelly and Colin Nettlebeck in G. Hirschfeld and P. Marsch, ed.,

Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Na^i Occupation, 1940—1944
(Oxford, New York, and Munich: Berg, 1989).
32 See the discussion of the Remy affair in Rousso, Le Syndrome Vichy, 43 ff.

33 It will suffice to recall a few sentences from the first page of de Gaulle's memoirs: "All
my life I have held a certain idea of France.... Instinctively I had the impression that

Providence created France for great successes or exemplary misfortunes." But "France
cannot be France without grandeur." Memoires de guerre: L'Appel 1940—1942 (Paris:

Plon, 1954), I.

34 See Pascal Ory's 1981 overview, "Comme de I'an quarante: Dix annees de 'retro
satanas,' " Le Debat, 16 (November 1981): 109— 117.
35 Bernard-Henri Levy, L'Ideologic frangaise (Paris: Grasset, 1981).

36 Zeev Sternhell, La Droite revolutionnaire {1885—1914): Les origines franfaises du fascisme

(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978); and Ni droite ni gauche: L'ideologie fasciste en France

(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983).

CHAPTER 6 GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

I For data, see the poll "Les annees de Gaulle" of June 14, 1990, conducted by the IFOP
for Liberation, TFi (a French TV network), and France Inter, which dealt with the
man, the president, and Gaullism. emerges that for 57 percent of the French "little"
It

or "nothing" of de Gaulle remains. Above all see the S.O.F.R.E.S. poll commisssioned
by the Institut Charles-de-Gaulle for the Journees Internationales at UNESCO,
November 19—24, 1990, on "De Gaulle en son siecle," which can be found in Olivier

Duhamel and Jerome Jaffre, ed., S.O.F.R.E.S.: L'etat de I'opinion 1991 (Paris: Editions

du Seuil, 1991).

Three earlier polls were published in 1989: one, the IPSOS—Ze Monde poll of

January 4, portrayed de Gaulle as "the best at carrying on the traditions of the Revo-
lution"; another, by Louis Harris—France {or L'Histoire 124 (July-August), depicted
 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS 559

him as the greatest builder of a united Europe; the third, again by Louis Harris—France,
for L'Express of November lo, found de Gaulle's return to power in 1958 to be "the
most fateful event since the beginning of the century." But these data are truly mean-
ingful only when compared with the results of polls taken on the tenth anniversary of

de Gaulle's death, in 1980. There were four such major polls: the lYOY'-VSD of
February 12—18, which found that 53 percent of those questioned stated that they would
have responded to a new June 18 Appeal (61 percent of those 50—60 years old);
S.O.F.R.E.S.—//wro/Ve Magazine of August 22—28 (published in December), in which
81 percent of the French declared de Gaulle's action to be "very" or "fairly" positive;
Louis Harris—France (or L'Histoire on December 12-17 (published in April 1981, no.

33), in which de Gaulle is pictured as "the figure from French history with whom you'd
most like to spend an hour talking," with the general receiving 19.5 percent to 13 for

Napoleon; and finally, an IFOP-Z,e^ Nouvelles Litteraires poll on January 26—31, 1981
(published February 16, in the middle of an electoral campaign), in which de Gaulle,
was seen as "the most right-wing" president of the Fifth Republic. For earlier polls, see

Jean Chariot, Les Frangais et de Gaulle (Paris: IFOP, 1971).

2 In connection with the Journees Internationales of November 19—24, 1990, the Institut
Charles-de-Gaulle asked a number of people where they stood on the subject of de
Gaulle, among them Francois Bloch-Laine, Claude Bourdet, Raymond Bourgine, Jean
Cathala, Michel Crozier, Jean Daniel, Jacques Fauvet, Fran^oise Giroud, Alfred
Grosser, Andre Jeanson, Alain Krivine, Jean Lacouture, Bertrand Renouvin, Jean-
Franfois Revel, Guy Sorman, and Michel Winock. Their answers can be found in De
Gaulle en son siecle, vol. i, Dans la memoire des hommes et des peuples (Paris: La
Documentation Fran^aise-Plon, 1991), 483—525.

3 For a journalistic overview, see Henri-Christian Giraud, De Gaulle et les Communistes,

2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988—89).
4 See Stephane Courtois and Marc Lazar, ed., Cinquante ans d'une passion frangaise: de
Gaulle et les communistes (Paris: Balland, 1991). I draw on this work frequently in
what follows.
5 Marie-Claire Lavabre has studied the written and oral memories of Communist offi-

cials following a plan sketched out in "Memoire et identite partisane: le cas du P.C.F.,"
(Salzburg: Consortium europeen de recherche politique, April 13—18, 1984; mimeo-
graphed, 16 pp.), which I thank the author for making available, since it is not easy to
find; see also Nicole Racine-Furlaud, "La Memoire du 18 juin 1940," in De Gaulle en

son siecle, i: 549—563. The two views can also be contrasted, as the same authors do in

Courtois and Lazar, Cinquante ans d'une passion frangaise, where the first studies

"Souvenirs et images de De Gaulle chez les militants communistes" and the second
reviews the symbolic battle "18 June 1940 or 10 July 1940." Gerard Namer was the first
to pursue this line of inquiry in his indispensable La Commemoration en France

1944—1982 (Paris: Papyrus, 1983).

6 I oudined the problem in a lecture to the XXVF Rencontres Internationales of Geneva

on power {Pouvoir [Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconniere, 1978]), also published in
revised form as "Quatre coins de la memoire," H htstoire, 2 (June 1979).
 .

560 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

7 For an overview of the problem see Olivier Duhamel, La Gauche et la Republique

(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), and Olivier Duhamel and Jean-Luc
Parodi, ed., La Constitution de la Republique, new ed. (Paris: Presses de la FNSP,
1988).

8 See Alain Duhamel, De Gaulle—Mitterrand, la marque et la trace (Paris: Flammarion,

1991).

9 On de Gaulle 's relations with the left, their original connivance, their repeated engage-
ments and eternally deferred wedding, there is no more perspicacious commentary
than the article published by Jacques Ozouf at the time of the general's death, "Elle et

lui," Le Nouvel Observateur (November 16, 1970).

ID Max Gallo in L'Express (November 8—14, 1980).

1 1 General de Gaulle himself set the theme to music, admittedly on rare occasions, as in

an interview with Michel Droit on December 16, 196^, after he had failed to win an
absolute majority in the first round of the presidential election: "France is not the
left!... France is not the right!" He rarely used either word. See Jean-Marie Cotteret and
Rene Moreau, Le Vocabulaire du general de Gaulle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1969).
12 See Jean Pierre Rioux, "Le Souverain en memoire (1969— 1990)," in De Gaulle en son
siecle, i: 303—315. The paper is based on Rioux's seminar at the Institut d 'Etudes
Politiques in 1988—89, and I am grateful to him for having kindly shared his notes with

me. I lack both space and time to give them the full treatment they deserve.

13 Andre Malraux, Le Miroir des limbes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 729.

14 Bernard Rigaud, "Funerailles nationales, deuils internationaux, 1969— 1970: Les

obseques de J. F. Kennedy, P. Tagliatti, W. Churchill, Ch. de Gaulle" (thesis, Ecole des

Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1985; mimeographed). See also Jacques

Dupuy, "Les Reactions Internationales a la mort du general de Gaulle," in De Gaulle

en son siecle, i : 607—6 1 1

1 5 Branko Lazitch, Le Rapport Khrouchtchev et son histoire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976).
16 After the broadcast of L'Aveu, in which Jean Kanapa stated that if the Communists had
known, they would have reacted and that "the moment they did know, they voiced
their disapproval," Jean Ellenstein wrote in Le Monde on December 29, 1976, that
Communist parties outside the Soviet Union, including the P.C.F., were informed of
the text only the morning before it was to be delivered and were required to promise
not to talk about it. The next day L'Humanite categorically denied Ellenstein's state-
ment, only to be forced to issue a denial of its own denial two weeks later. Kanapa's
remarks can be compared with what he said twenty years earlier from the podium of
the Fourteenth Congress of the P.C.F. after the release of the Khrushchev Report:
"The revelation of certain of Comrade Stalin's acts and certain violations of socialist

legality of course caused us deep pain. ..but regret."^ What have we to regret.'' Our tena-
cious and unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against its systematic detractors.'^

Our having made use of our party spirit to maintain intact the solid front of our
Communist Party and our past.-" No! Whatever trials, difficulties, faults, and hesitations
we may have known in the past, no, we will never regret the beautiful, hard school of
history which has instructed our party in the pastand to which we owe our combative
spirit at the head of the revolutionary movement."
 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS 561

17 Roger Martelli, igSG, le choc du XX^ Congres: Textes et documents (Paris:

Messidor—Editions Sociales, 1982).

18 See, in particular, two documents issued in early July 1977 by the Conseil Permanent
de I'Episcopat Fran9ais, which inaugurated a wide debate: Le Marxisme, rHomme et la

Foi chretienne. The Council affirmed that "we cannot link our Christian hope to the his-
torical and dialectical materialism of the Communist Party." See also Foi et Marxisme
en monde ouvrier, from the Commission Episcopale du Monde Ouvrier, which proposed
"welcoming Marxist philosophy in order to question it" (Paris: Editions du Centurion,
1977) -

19 Implicit in the Socialist Project adopted by the Congress of the Parti Socialiste on
December 13—15, 1991; see Congres du Parti Socialiste, Un Nouvel Horizon (Paris:

Gallimard, 1992).
20 Voline (pseudonym of V. M. Eichenbaum), La Revolution inconnue, igiy—igzi:
Documentation inedite surla revolution russe (Paris: Belfond, 1969; new ed. 1986).

21 To say nothing of Louis Althusser's stubborn insistence on a return to Stalinism; see

his Reponse a John Lewis (Paris: Maspero, 1973); Elements d'autocritique {1964— igyS)
(Paris: Maspero, 1976); Ce qui nepeutpas durer dans le Parti communiste (Paris: Maspero,
1978) .

22 Ferrat's lectures (Paris: Bureau du Mouvement Ouvrier, 1931; repr. Paris: Editions Git-

le-Coeur, 1969). Andre Ferrat, member of the Politburo at 25, in 1927, delegate with

Thorez to the the Sixth Congress of the International, and representative of the P.C.F.
in Moscow from 1924 to 1931, would end by being expelled from the party in 1937 for
leftist opposition.

23 Odile Rudelle, "Politique de la memoire; politique de la posterite," in De Gaulle en son

siecle, i: 149—162.
24 Details in Rioux, "Le Souverain en memoire."
25 Andre Guettard's analysis of polls in "La Legende gaulliste et le dixieme anniversaire
de la mort du general de Gaulle" (master's thesis directed by Raoul Girardet, Institut

d 'Etudes Politiques, 1981; mimeographed) shows that the crucial features of the legend

were already in place.

26 Between the general's death in 1970 and 1974, 132 books and photo collections appeared,
or an average of 26 works per year. Compare this with 17 per year for 1958—69 and 16
for 1975—90.

27 The importance of photographic selection is evident from the original work of Jacques
Borge and Nicolas Viasnof, De Gaulle et les photographes (Paris: EPA-Vilo, 1979).
28 Here again the pace of production is significant: "Mon General" by Olivier Guichard

and "Le Verbe et I'image" by Pierre Lefranc and Pierre- Andre Boutang appeared in

1980. "Fran^ais si vous saviez" by Andre Harris and Alain de Sedouy came as a coun-
terattack in 1982. The important series "De Gaulle ou I'eternel defi" by Jean
Lacouture, Roland Mehl, and Jean Labib was broadcast on TFi in May—June 1988,
while Seuil simultaneously brought out the book under the same title: these works
dominated the period leading up to the centenary. From November 21 to December 11,

1990, the Videotheque de Paris held a major show of television productions concern-

ing de Gaulle.
562 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

29 In Jean-Pierre Rioux's seminar at the Institut d 'Etudes Politiques, Marie-Helene

Pradines catalogued 77 baccalaureate exam questions concerning de Gaulle from the

period 1978-88. Her work showed that some academies were particularly "Gaullist,"

including Nice, Lille, and Montpellier, while others were more or less resistant, such as
Limoges, Dijon, Poitiers, and Rennes.
30 The Institut Charles-de-Gaulle, located at 5 Rue de Solferino, in the building where the
general had offices for eleven years, is a private association launched by the general
when he left office and officially founded on February 20, 1971, with Pierre Lefrance
as president. It has played an important role through its committees, meetings of
"friends," lecture series, colloquia, and courses. It also organizes study groups and

traveling shows and publishes the quarterly Espoir and a collection of books under the

same name, and it maintains the bookstore Notre Siecle, which sells photo collections
and scholarly reference books such as the Index des themes de I'oeuvre du general de
Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 1978). Its mixture of hagiographic piety and scientific scruples, its

organization, at once debonair and military, its vigilant activity and discreet efficiency,

deserve careful study.

31 The selection and introduction to the Lettres, notes et carnets by Admiral Philippe de
Gaulle immediately drew criticism from historians, particularly Jean-Noel Jeanneney
in Le Monde (June i8, 1980).

32 Claude Mauriac's Aimer de Gaulle (Paris: Grasset, 1978) was immediately followed by
a salvo of books from the big guns: Pierre Lefranc, Avec qui vous save^ (Paris: Plon,

1979) ; Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Charles de Gaulle (Paris: Paris-Match/Editions No. i,

1980) ; Marcel Jullian, L'Homme de 1940 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980); Maurice
Schumann, Un certain iSjuin (Paris: Plon, 1980).

33 Regis Debray's A demain de Gaulle (Paris: Gallimard, 1990) was an immediate success,
selling over 40,000 copies.

34 Two thirds of those books have appeared in the past ten years. An international bibli-
ography for the period 1940-1981 has been published by the Institut Charles-de-

Gaulle. Another is in preparation.

35 See especially Pierre Viansson-Ponte, La Repuhlique gaullienne (Paris: Fayard, 1971).

36 I dealt with this topic in De Gaulle en son siecle, i: 172-178, the main points of which I

repeat here.

37 Goguel is paradoxically joined on this point by Jean-Fran9ois Revel in his response to

the question mentioned in note 2 above: see his "De la legende vivante au mythe
posthume," introduction to the 1988 reprint (Editions Complexe) of his Style du

General (Paris: Julliard, 1959)

38 Stanley and Inge Hoffmann, De Gaulle artiste de la politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1973)-

39 Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle, vol. i, Le Rebelle; vol. 2, Le Politique; vol. 3, Le Souverain

(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984-86), which received unanimous praise from the critics;

an English translation by Patrick O'Brian has been published by Norton.

40 See Jean Serroy, ed., De Gaulle et les ecrivains (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de
Grenoble, 1991).
 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS 563

41 See Nicole Racine, "Etat des travaux sur le communisme en France," in Le Communisme
en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1969), 305—346; Annie Kriegel, "L'Historiographie du
communisme frangais: Premier bilan et orientations de recherches," in the appendix to
the first edition of her classic work Les Communistes franfais, essai d'ethnographie poli-
tique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), rev. and expanded with Guillaume Bourgeois in

Les Communistes franfais dans leur premier demi-siecle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985),

appendices i and 2. See also Roger Martelli, "Bref aper^u des publications consacrees au
P.C.F. depuis 1969," Etudier le P.C.F., nos. 29—30 of the Cahiers d'histoire de Vinstitut

Maurice-Thorei (1979): 128-170. Additional information can be found in Marie-Claire

Lavabre and Denis Peschanski, "L'Histoire pour boussole.'' Note sur I'historiographie

communiste, 1977— 1981," Communisme, 4 (1983): 105— 114, and Marie-Claire Lavabre,
ibid., 7 (1985). For a survey of the question, see the discussion between Stephane
Courtois and Roger Martelli, "Ou en est I'histoire du P.C.F..'' Un echange," Le Debat,

31 (September 1984): 149—177.

42 See Georges Lavau, "L'Historiographie communiste: Une pratique politique," in
Pierre Birnbaum and Jean-Marie Vincent, ed., Critique des pratiques politiques (Paris:

Galilee, 1978), 121— 163.

43 Jacques Duclos and Francois Billoux, Histoire du Parti communiste frangais (Paris: Edi-
tions Sociales, 1964), 10.

44 For example, Florimond Bonte, De Vombre a la lumiere (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1965).
45 See, for example, for the Cold War period alone (and taking no account of subsequently

published works) the fifteen titles used by Francine Simon in her thesis, "La Memoire
communiste, les dissidents fran9ais et la guerre froide" (Institut d 'Etudes Politiques,

1978; mimeographed). In chronological order these were Andre Marty, L'Affaire Marty
(Paris: Les Deux Rives, 1955); Pierre Herve, Ce queje crois (Paris: Grasset, 1958); Edgar
Morin, Autocritique (Paris: Les Lettres Nouvelles, 1958); Auguste Lecoeur, Le Partisan
(Paris: Flammarion, 1963); Claude Koy, Moi, je. Nous, Somme toute (Paris: Gallimard,

1969, 1972, 1976); Dominique Desanti, Z,ej Staliniens, zc)^— /cjiff (Paris: Fayard, 1974);
Simone Signoret, La Nostalgic n'est plus ce quelle etait (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976);

Pierre Daix,yaj era aa matin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976); Jean Duvignaud, Le fa per-
che (Paris: Stock, 1976); Jean-Pierre Chabrol, La Folic des miens (Paris: Gallimard,

1977); Raymond Levy, Schartienmurti ou I'esprit de parti (Paris: Albin Michel, 1977);

Philipppe Robrieux, Notre generation communiste (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977); Charles
Tillon, On chantait rouge (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977); Roger Pannequin, Les Annees
sans suite, 2 vols. (Paris: Le Sagittaire, 11)77); and Jean Rony, Trente ans de part, un com-
munist s'interroge (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1978). This list does not include the mem-
oirs of communist officials published during the same period, of which the principal
were Virgile Barel, Cinquante annees de lutte (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1966); Jacques

Duclos, Memoires, 6 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1968— 1972), of which vol. 4, Sur la breche,

ic)45—ic)52, and 5, Dans la melee, igSz—igSS, deal with the period; Leo Figuieres,
Jeunesse militante (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971); Fernand Grenier, Ce bonheur-la (Paris:
Editions Sociales, 1974); Raoul Culas, Souvenirs d'un condamne a mort (Paris: Editions

Sociales, 1976); Etienne Fajon, Ma vie s 'appelle liberie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976).
564 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

46 Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris: Les Lettres Nouvelles, 1958; repr. Paris: Editions du

Seuil, 1966); and Artur London, L'Aveu (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). These two book-
events deserve a study of their reception. On the second, see Annie Kriegel, Les Grands
Proces dans les systemes communistes: La pedagogie infernale (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
47 Annie Kriegel, Aux origines du communisme fraufais, ic)i4—ig20, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton,
1964), initiated the academic study of French communism. See also her introduction to

Congres de Tours (Paris: Julliard, 1964).

48 Philippe Robrieux, Maurice Thore^, vie secrete et vie publique (Paris: Fayard, 1975), and
idem, L'Nistoire interieure du Parti communiste, 4 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1980— 1984).

49 Stephane Courtois, Le P.C.F. dans la guerre, de Gaulle, la Resistance, Staline (Paris:

Ramsay, 1980). See also the proceedings of an important and tumultuous colloquium
on the subject held at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, October 1983: Jean-Pierre
Azema, Antoine Prost, and Jean-Pierre Rioux, ed., Le Parti communiste des annees som-
bres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), and Les Communistes fran^ais de Munich a
Chateaubriant, is)38-ic)4i (Paris: Presses de Fondation Nationale de Science Politique,

1987).

50 Yves Santamaria, "Le P.C.F. et son histoire: le pacte germano sovietique —Etude de
I'historiographie communiste (1943— 1968)" (master's thesis. University of Paris IV,

1983; mimeographed). The secret protocol provided for the partition of Poland after a

joint victory.

51 The appeal of July 10, 1940, is a tract entitled Peuple de France and signed by Maurice
Thorez and Jacques Duclos, of which 23 of 500 lines can be considered a call for a

"Front of liberty, independence, and rebirth for France." A. Rossi, inZa Physiologie du
Parti communiste frangais, denounced this "patriotic forgery" and proved that the clan-
destine issue of L'Humanite' dated July 10, 1940, and containing what in the meantime
had become the official version of the "Appeal" (a facsimile of which was reproduced
in L'Humanite of December 12, 1947) was also a forgery. On the political issues

involved, see Nicole Racine-Furlaud, "18 juin 1940 ou 10 juillet 1940, bataille des
memoires," in Courtois and Lazar, Cinquante ans d'une passion franfaise.
52 Jacques Fauvet, in collaboration with Alain Duhamel, examined this in his Histoire du
Parti communiste frangais, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1964— 1965).

53 Stephane Courtois, "Luttes politiques et elaboration d'une histoire: le P.C.F. historien

du P.C.F. dans la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale," Communisme, 4 (1983): 5—26.

54 Lavabre and Peschanski, "L'histoire pour boussole.''," point out that nearly a third of
the historical articles published in Cahiers du communisme from 1977 to 1982 were
devoted to the wartime years. As recently as 1990, Roger Bourderon of the Institut de
Recherches Marxistes devoted an entire issue of Cahiers d'histoire, 42, to the year 1940,

together with a special section of La Pensee, 275 (May-June 1990).

55 Marie-Claire Lavabre and Denis Peschanski, "Histoire militante: La formation his-
torique dans quatre organisations de gauche," especially "Part communiste, la ligne

generale," Espaces-Temps, 9 (1978): 50-69.

5 6 The distinction is borrowed from Danielle Taratowski's contribution to Etudier le P. C.F.,

in which she writes: "History and Marxism enjoy a special status in Marxism and there-
 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

fore in the P.C.F. Unlike philosophy, history has, I think, finally finished paying the

price." See also her Une Histoire du P.C.F. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982).
57 The Institut Maurice-Thorez, founded immediately after the death of the secretary
general in October 1964, publishes the Cahiers, retitled Cahiers d'histoire, of which one
of the most important was Etudier le P.C.F., 29—30 (1979), which brought together a
whole team of young Communist historians: Roger Bourderon, Jean Buries, Jacques
Girault, Roger Martelli, Jean-Louis Robert, Jean-Paul Scot, Danielle Tartakowsky,

Germaine Willard, and Serge Wolikow. The same team collaborated on Le P.C.F.:

Etapes et problemes, ic)20-igj2 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1981).

58 J. '2>\xr\ti,, 'm Etudier le P.C.F., p. 21. The same point is made by S. Wolikow: "The com-
munist historian cannot ignore the relationship between politics and the history of his

party, but he must define these things as they are today.. .and conceptualize them in rela-

tion to the needs of his political strategy," ibid., 30.

59 Georges Marchais, January 25, 1977, statement to journalists.

60 See Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), which does
not hesitate to define the Liberation as a "screen memory," 25 and 29; English trans, by
Arthur Goldhammer, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1992).

61 See the polemic launched by the publication of the first two volumes of Daniel
Cordier's monumental biography Jean Moulin, Vinconnu du Pantheon (Paris: Jean-

Claude Lattes, 1989). Cordier, Moulin's former secretary, attacked Henri Frenay,
leader of the Resistance group Combat, for having written in November 1940 a "man-
ifesto" sympathetic to the National Revolution, and assigned blame for the betrayal
and arrest of Moulin at Caluire, one of the great mysteries of the Resistance.
62 Andre Malraux's funeral oration for Jean Moulin is the ultimate example of de Gaulle 's
appropriative and identificatory version of resistantialism. For a good analysis see
Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy, 95— iii.
63 Pascal Ory, "Comme de I'an quarante: Dix annees de 'retro satanas,' " Le Debat, 16

(November 1981): 109— 117; and idem, L'Entre-deux-Mai: Histoire culturelle de la

France, mat igSS—mai ig68 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), 118— 127.

64 The best analysis of The Sorrow and the Pity is to my mind that of Stanley Hoffmann,
Decline or Renewal: Essays on France.

65 Jacques Ozouf, "Un Vieux Menage," Le Nouvel Ohservateur, (January 5, 1972), com-
menting on the IFOP poll results presented by Jean Chariot.
66 The enduring contrast between the terrifying appearance of the Communist Party
and its actual weakness is apparent throughout Vincent Auriol's Journal du septennat,
vol. i,L'annee 1947, complete version (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970), as when Thorez
astonished the president at the height of the May crisis by telling him, "I'm at the end
of my tether."
67 Annie Kriegel, "Le Parti communiste fran^ais, la Resistance, la Liberation et I'etab-

lissement de la IV^ Republique (1044-1947)," paper given at the French-Italian collo-

quium in Naples, 1973, repr. in Communismes au miroir frangais (Paris: Gallimard,

1974), 160—176; and Maurice Agulhon, "Les Communistes et la Liberation de la

566 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

France," paper given at the international colloquium on the Liberation of France, 1974,
repr. in Histoire vagabonde (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 2: 177—208.
68 Apart from memoirs, there is a good description of Communist sociabiity in Gerard
Vincent, "Etre communiste? Une maniere d'etre," in Philippe Aries and Georges
Duby, ed., Histoire de la vie privee (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), 4: 427—458; trans, by
Arthur Goldhammer as A History of Private Life, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990). See also Jean-Pierre Bernard, Paris rouge, 1944— ig64: Les
communistes frangais dans la capitale (Paris: Champvallon, 1991). The journal
Autrement devoted a special issue to "La Culture des camarades," 78 (1986), but the
contributions are of uneven quality.

69 See the anthropological analysis in Jacqueline Mer, Le Parti de Maurice Thorei ou le

bonheur communiste frangais (Paris: Payot, 1977).

70 I borrow this idea from Jean-Marie Goulemot, Le Clairon de Staline (Paris: Ly
Sycomore, 1981), on Stalin's seventieth birthday. See also Serge Collet, "La
Manifestation de rue comme production culturelle militante," Ethnologie franfaise, 12,

no. 2 (April— June 1982): 167—176.

71 Gabor T. Rittersporn, "Qui lit la Pravda, comment et pourquoi.''" Le Debat, 2 (June

1980): 82—92.

72 See Noelle Gerome and Danielle Tartakowsky, La Fete de L'Humanite (Paris: Editions

Sociales, 1988).

73 Jean-Pierre A. Bernard, "La Liturgie funebre des communistes (1924— 1983)," Vingtieme
Siecle, revue d'histoire, 9 (January— March 1986): 37—53, offers a rich analysis.
74 Fran9oise Thom, La Langue de bois (Paris: Jullaird, 1987), as well as the special issue of
Mots, 21 (December 1989), "Langues de bois.-*," which indicates the origins of various
expressions.

75 Goulemot, Le Clairon de Staline, makes the comparison. On the Tour de la France par

deux enfants, see Jacques and Mona Ozouf, "Le Tour de la France par deux enfants," in
Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire, part i, La Republique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

76 Annie Kriegel outlined the themes in my seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, 1979. She has gone into greater detail since then. See for example
Marie-Claire Lavabre and Marc Lazar, "Se ressembler a sa ressemblance: Lecture de
quelques recits autobiographiques, 1981— 1983," Communisme, 4 (1983): 114— 119.

77 Claude Roy, Nous (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 396.

78 Annie Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cm comprendre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991).

79 The television series was broadcast on FR3 in 1990.

80 Compare with work in political science such as Jean Chariot, Le Phenomene gaulliste

(Paris: Fayard, 1970).

81 The expression should be read in context: "As the irreovocable words went out into the
air, I felt one life ending, the life that I had led in a solid France and an indivisible army.
At age forty-nine I was embarking on an adventure, as a man whom fate had pushed off
all known paths." Memoires de guerre, i, L'Appel (Paris: Plon, 1954), 71.

82 Well described by Jean-Pierre Rioux, "Les Paysages du general de Gaulle," L'Histoire,

134 (June 1990): 24-29, with many excellent quotations.

 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS 567

83 Alain Peyrefitte, "De Gaulle et les grands personnages de I'histoire de France," in De

Gaulle en son siech, i: 107— 115.
84 Jean Lacoumre was kind enough to sketch the layers of this memory for me as we looked
through his library. From the tide of the "revelation" (Philippe Barres, Lucien Nachin,
Madeleine Bainville, Georges Cattaui, Jean Gaulmier, Maurice Schumann, Colonel
Remy, Jacques Soustelle, the Francois Mauriac of Bdillon denoue) to the ebb after the

return to power (Jacques Soustelle new version, Robert Mengin, Alfred Fabre-Luce,

Jean-Fran5ois Revel, Colonel Argoud, Colonel Trinquier, Fran5ois Mitterrand) by way

of the first wave of criticism of the war, the memoirs, etc. These indications suggest
what might be added to our knowledge of the construction of the personage by a care-
ful examination of the bibliography with proper attention to periods, genres, themes,
and authors.
85 Nicholas Wahl sketched a typology at my seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales (1979).

86 Andre Malraux, speech to Assises Nationales of the R.P.F., February 12, 1949. See
Jeanine Mossuz-Lavau, Malraux et le Gaullisme (Paris: Presses de la Fondation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982).

87 Stephane Courtois, "De Gaulle et les communistes: confrontation de deux legitimites"

(paper read to the Journees Internationales at unesco, November 1990).
88 Maurice Thorez, "Rapport a la conference internationale du P.C.F., 17—18 juillet 1958,"
L'Humanite (July 18, 1958), quoted in Marc Lazar, "Le P.C.F. et le gaullisme,

1958— 1969" (paper read to the Journees Internationales at unesco, November 1990).
For further information, see Marie Claire Lavabre, "Les Communistes et de Gaulle:
Une memoire polemique," in De Gaulle en son siecle, i: 564—573.
89 See Pierre Daix, Les Heredques du P.C.F. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980).
90 Pierre Pucheu, a pugnacious boss, member of the P.P.F. (Parti Populaire Frangais), and
minister of the interior under Vichy before the arrival of Laval, whom he found too
pro-German, went to Morocco in the spring of 1942 with encouragement from Giraud,
who stated his willingness to "give him a place in a combat unit." Arrested, jailed, and
hastily judged in Algiers, he was, under pressure from the Communists, who charged
him with having drawn up the list of 47 hostages to be executed at Chateaubriant on
October 21, 1941, sentenced to death and shot. General de Gaulle refused to pardon him
for "reasons of state," although he did inform Pucheu of his "esteem" and pledge to
oversee personally the education of Pucheu's children. This was the first, and painful,
barrier of blood between de Gaulle and Vichy.
91 A personal experience: in 1963, when I was working on the "Archives" collection for

Julliard, and being aware of the existence of notebooks of Marcel Cachin, I did all I

could to persuade his daughter, Marie-Louise Jacquier, who had possession of them, to
make them available for examination and to permit the publication of excerpts, along
with Jules Yiuniben-Dxoz^ L'Oeil de Moscou a. Paris. My request was of course refused
as though state secrets were at stake. Now that they have been delivered to the Archives
Nationales by Marcelle Hertzog for publication, it is the publisher who needs to be per-
suaded to bring out these huge volumes.
568 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

92 Admiral de Gaulle (the general's son), however, has blocked access even to those

papers no longer protected by archive rules on the dubious ground that these are pri-

vate archives.

93 See the analysis by Stanley Hoffmann in Decline or Renewal.

94 The portrait of Leon Blum in vol. 5 was vituperative and anti-Semitic: "His real name
was Levy-Coeur. He had a caressing voice, elegant manners, and fine, soft hands that

seemed to melt at the touch. He attacked all that was virile, pure, healthy, or popular,
and that had any faith in ideas, in feelings, in great men, or in human beings.... A
worm's instinct.. .a cunning politician... filthy Tartuffe, repugnant reptile.... The jackal

Blum, a recidivist in treason, a police stooge, stool-pigeon Blum... like Lady Macbeth
he must look with terror upon the innocent blood that forever stains his long, crooked
fingers," and so on.
95 An exception typical of the left-wing anti-GauUism of the period is found in Arthur
Delcroix (pseudonym of Fran9ois Furet), "Vingt ans de legitimite," Les Temps mod-
ernes, 167—169 (February-March i960): "It's the 'it is legal because I wish it' of Louis
XVI in 1788, it is the fiction of the '19th year of the reign' in 1814, it is the Maurrassian

appeal to the 'real country' against the 'legal country.' This is the 'divine right' side of
GauUism, which combines monarchical tradition with a political practice much closer

to Bonapartism. Bourgeois France wants it that way."

96 On this episode see Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Generation (Paris: Editions du

Seuil, 1987), vol. I, ch. 9.

97 Henri Mendras, La Seconde Revolution fran^aise (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

98 Francois Mauriac, De Gaulle (Paris: Grasset, 1964), 339.

99 Stephane Courtois, "Gaullisme et communisme: La double reponse a la crise de I'iden-

tite frangaise," in Courtois and Lazar, Cinquantes ans d'une passion frangaise, 305—332.
100 To relieve him of this reputation took Jean Lacouture's very original chapter on de
Gaulle 's relations in the 1920s with the very republican Colonel Emile Mayer, to whom
Henri Lerner had called attention in "Le General de Gaulle et le cercle du colonel
Mayer," Revue historique (January-March 1983).
101 See Jean-Paul Cointet, "De Gaulle et la Republique ou la double reconaissance
(1940— 1944)"; Jean-Pierre Rioux, "De Gaulle en Republique de Courseulles a Bayeux
(1944— 1946)"; Jean Lacouture, "De Gaulle, une certaine idee de la Republique," all in
Paul Isoart and Christian Bidegaray, Des Republiques frangaises (Paris: Economica,

1988), 683—729. See also Maurice Agulhon, "La Tradition republicaine et le general de

Gaulle," and Dominique Colas, "Portrait de la Republique selon Charles de Gaulle,"

in De Gaulle en son siecle, i: 188—202. Also worth consulting are Odile Rudelle, Mai
1968, De Gaulle et la Republique (Paris: Plon, 1988), and "Le Gaullisme et la crise de I'i-

dentite republicaine," in Jean-Pierre Rioux, ed., La Guerre d'Algerie et les Frangais

(Paris: Fayard, 1990), 180—202. For an overview, see Maurice Agulhon, La Republique,
de Jules Ferry d Frangois Mitterrand, 1880 a nos Jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990).

102 After careful consideration, Rene Remond ended by classifying him as a Bonapartist,

however, in Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982), 3 13-350.

103 See especially the letter to his son dated April 30, 1969, which caused a considerable stir

when it was published in the twelfth volume of Lettres, notes et carnets: "My dear
 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS 569

Philippe, If in the near future I should pass away without revealing who, under the pre-
sent circumstances, I would like the French people to elect as my immediate successor
as President of the Republic, I ask you to publish the attached statement. I say: my
immediate successor, because I hope that after him you yourself might wish and be in

a position to assume the burden of leading France."

104 See the extensive analysis of Lucien Jaume, "L'Etat republicain selon de Gaulle,"
Commentaire, 51 and 52 (autumn and winter 1990): 523—532 and 749—757.
105 Yet the episode was significant and had numerous consequences. See Jean Chariot, Le
Gaullisme d'opposition, 1946—1958 (Paris: Fayard, 1983).
106 Memoires d'espoir (Paris: Plon, 1970), i: 23. For de Gaulle 's reference to the Revolution,
see Odile Rudelle, "Lieux de memoire revolutionnaire et communion republicaine,"

Vingtieme Siecle, revue d'histoire, 24 (October-December 1989).

107 In particular in Penser la Revolution frangaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), ch. "Le
Catechisme revolutionnaire."
108 See "Communisme et Revolution fran9aise," Communisme, 20—21: 1988— 1989.
109 See Tamara Kondratieva, Bolcheviks et Jacobins, itineraire des analogies (Paris: Payot,

1989).
no L.-O. Frossard, Z)e Jaures aLenine (Paris, 1930), 155. This dogma was consistently reaf-
firmed. For example, Andre Freville: "Its [i.e., the Communist Party's] creation was
due neither to chance nor to arbitrary will but was the result of the evolution of the

entire French workers' movement," La Nuit finit d Tours (Paris: Editions Sociales,

1950), 160. Or Georges Cogniot at a colloquium marking the anniversary of the

October Revolution: "The event of December 1920 is the very type of the necessary

historical event," Cahiers de I'l.M. T., 78 (November-December 1967).

111 See Frederic Bon, Les Discours de la politique (Paris: Economica, 1991), ch. 3.

112 Maurice Thorez, "Union et action de tous les Republicains pour le nan au referendum
plebiscite," Cahiers du communisme, 34, 8 (August 1958): 1128.
113 See, in particular, concerning Waldeck-Rochet's attempt at de-Sovietization, the
analysis of Philippe Robrieux, Histoire interieure du Parti communiste,^ ^< 2: ch. 8.

114 Pierre Viansson-Ponte, Zej Gaullistes, rituel et annuaire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963).

115 See Jacques Revel, "La Cour," in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire, part 3, La
France, vol 2, Traditions (Paris, Gallimard, 1986).

116 See Alain Boureau, "Le Roi," in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire, part 3, La
France, vol 3, De Varchive a Vembleme (Paris, Gallimard, 1992).

117 See the eloquent sentence with which Rene Remond begins the chapter on the Fourth
Republic in Les Droites en France, p. 238: "In 1945, it truly appeared that the time had
"
come to finish off the history of the right with the phrase 'The End.'
1 1 8 Although this would be essential to take into account in a political analysis, it was not
necessary for the purposes of this essay.
119 See Michel Verret, "Memoire ouvriere, memoire communiste," Revue frangaise de sci-

ence politique, 34, 3 (June 1984).

120 Gerard Noiriel, Les Ouvriers dans la societe franfaise, XIX^-XX^ siecle (Paris: Editions

du Seuil), ch. 6. See also Marc Lazar, "Le Mineur de fond: Un exemple de I'identite du
P.C.F.," Revue franfaise de science politique (April 1985): 190—205.
570 6. GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS

121 The historical importance of the May 28, 1952, demonstration against General
Ridgway, Eisenhower's successor as commander of SHAPE, has always been empha-
sized. See Michel Pigenet, "De la demonstration 'dure' a I'affrontement physique," in

Pierre Favre, ed.. La Manifestation (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des

Sciences Politiques, 1990), 245—268.
122 Fran9ois Furet, Jacques Julliard, and Pierre Rosanvallon, La Repuhlique du centre

(Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1989).

123 Paul Vaillaneix, "Michelet et la Revelation de 1789," Romantisme, 50: 61—74.
124 Chateaubriand, Memoires d'outre-tome (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 2: 4.

CHAPTER 7 RIGHT AND LEFT

1 Edward Chamberlayne, L'Estat present de I'Angleterre (Amsterdam, 1672), 2: 59.

Quoted by Eraser Mackensie, Les Relations de la France et de I'Angleterre d'apres le

vocabulaire, vol. i (Paris, 1939).

2 According to Etienne Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau et sur les deux premieres assem-
blees legislatives (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 107—108. For another
version see his "Discours preliminaire" to the translation of Jeremy Bentham, Tactique
des assemblies legislatives (Paris, 1822), i: x. In general see the introduction to Fran9ois

Furet and Ran Halevi, Orateurs de la Revolution fran^aise (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), and

Patrick Brasart, Paroles de la Revolution: Les assemblies parlementaires, ijSct—ijgi

(Paris: Minerve, 1988), as well as the older work of Gaston Dodu, Le Parlementarisme
et les parlementaires sous la Revolution {1789— lygc)) (Paris, 191 1).

3 Brasart, Paroles, 32.

4 Pierre-Paul Naitac, Journal, quoted in Edna Hindie Lemay, La Vie quotidienne des

deputes aux Etats generaux (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 189.

5
Reimpression de I'ancien Moniteur (Paris, 1850), i: 393. This occurs in one of the stories

that thosewho reprinted the Moniteur in Year IV put together to re-create the missing
issues from May 5 to November 24, 1789, when the Moniteur actually first appeared, in

order to have it cover the entire Revolution from the opening of the Estates General.
The accounts are taken from firsthand narratives and from the first histories of the
events, which began to appear toward the end of 1789.
6 Brasart 's suggestion, based on an analysis of Helmann's celebrated engraving of the

Night of August Fourth: Paroles, 241. On the basis of other evidence I am inclined to

believe that the process of clarification was much more gradual.

7 Journal d'Adrien Duquesnoy, depute du tiers etat de Bar-le-Duc, sur I'Assemblee constitu-
ante (j mai lySg-avril 1790), ed. Robert de Crevecoeur (Paris, 1894), i: 311. For an
analysis of the August 23 session, see my La Revolution des droits de Vhomme (Paris:

Gallimard, 1989), esp. 167—174.

8 Journal du baron de Gauville, depute de la noblesse aux Etats generaux, ed. E. Barthelemy
(Paris, 1864), 20.

9 Pierre Retat, "Partis et factions en 1789: Emergence des designants politiques," Mots,

16 (1988): 68-89.
 7- RIGHT AND LEFT

10 Revolutions de France et de Brabant, no. 5

(December 26, 1789): 194—195.
11 L'Ami des patriotes, no. 13, vol. i: 371 n, and no. 21, vol. 2: 142: "The members of the

right of the assembly have long since been reduced to such insignificance that it is hard
to count them for much in any political speculation; but the left is divided into two very
distinct, very opposed parties." See also no. 26 (May 21, 1791): 285—286 n: when Cazales
asked for the floor, "the whole right rose to refuse his request, while the whole left

granted it to him." Also in early 1791, a time of agitated debate over the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, the Moniteur refers to interventions by "several members
of the right" (8: 44). During the session of January 14, we read that "applause on the
left smothered murmurs and shouts on the right" (8: 135). On February 25, "the right
shouts No! No! while the left murmurs" (ibid., 184). There are references to "voices on
the left" and "members of the right." Such instances are relatively rare, I repeat, com-
pared with the large number of geographical references to "sides" or "parts" of the
chamber; in keeping with the rules for professional argot, these shortened forms appear
to be merely elliptical variants.

12 Alphonse Aulard, La Societe des Jacobins: Recueil de documents (Paris, 1889), 4: 276
(session of September 10, 1792).

13 Mme Roland, Lettres (Paris, 1902), 2: 252 (letter of March 29, 1791), quoted in
Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue fran^aise, vol. 9, La Revolution et I'Empire
(Paris, 1967), 769. (An exception: Mme Roland generally speaks of the right side as

"blacks.") See also Max Frey, Les Transformations du vocabulaire frangais a I'epoque de la
Revolution (Paris, 1925), which gives other examples.

14 The account of this trajectory is somewhat idealized. In reality, simple and complex
denominations overlapped and were superimposed until "left extremity" finally caught
on. To concentrate on the Moniteur alone, "the extremity of the left side" appeared in

a report of the session of February 20, 1791, (7: 439), whereas "loud cries from the left

extremity" appeared on March 24 (8: 343). "The extremity of the right part" is men-
tioned along with "right extremity" in a report of the session of March 26, 1791 (8:

726). One even finds "extreme right" on February 14, but only to note the sudden
alacrity of a deputy who broke several minutes of silence: "M. Foucault, on the
extreme right, strode hastily to the podium" (ibid., 390).

15 Mathieu Dumas, Souvenirs (Paris, 1839), 2: 4—5.

16 Journal de Duquesnoy, i: ^iz.

17 A. C. Thibaudeau, Memoires sur la Convention et le Directoire (Paris, 1824), 47—48.

18 Moniteur, 17: 382. Other examples in Brasart, Paroles 149—150.

19 Moniteur, 24: 115. The report of the session points out that when the petitioners
entered, "the members seated on the left extremity, as well as the people in the gallery

above them, applauded vigorously" (ibid., in). There are a great many illustrations
from the period in which the left extremity is particularly prominent, and many parlia-
mentary accounts bear this out.

20 Account by L.-M. La Revelliere-Lepeaux, Moniteur, 25: 748.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., 749.
572 7- RIGHT AND LEFT

23 Moniteur, vol. 25: 296. In a similar vein, Lezay-Marnesia distinguished between "the
constitutional or conservative side, commonly called the right side, and its opposition on
the revolutionary or destructive side, also known as the left side." The left sides, he
notes, "begin revolutions, the right sides finish them, and the middle parties pull them
along." (^De lafaiblesse d'un gouvernment qui commence [Paris, 1796], 58—59).

24 Annales historiques des sessions du corps legislatif, by X and Gautier du Var (Paris, 1817),

covering the years 1814, 1815, 1816; 2: 392-393. In 1815 the president of the chamber
urged a deputy to refrain from expressions suggesting that the assembly contained "not
only the formation but the consolidation of a party," Archives parlementaires, 2d series,

vol. 16: 594.

25 Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire en France

(Paris, 1857), 3: 293.
26 Ibid., 348.

27 Vitrolles, "Aper5u de la situation de la France au 15 aout 1816," in Memoires (Paris:

Gallimard, 1951), 2: 450. Ministers complained "about party passions and spirits,"
according to Vitrolles, "so that they are unaware that the government adopted is noth-
ing other than the regular constitution of the parties," where "the balance of Whigs
and Tories over the past 140 years" provides the right model to follow.
28 Letter to Decazes, October 10, 1820, quoted in Ernest Daudet, Louis XVIII et le due
Decaies (Paris, 1899), 74.

29 Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire, 4: 535.

30 Ibid., 5: 315.

31 These documents apparently began to appear during the 18 18 session. They are col-

lected in Series Le 55 at the Bibliotheque Nationale (abbreviated hereafter as B.N.).

32 Statistique de la Chambre des deputes. May 6, 1819 (B.N. Le 55 13).

33 Eugene Duclerc and Laurent Paguerre, ed., Dictionnaire politique (1842; repr. Paris,

1868), 207.

34 Letter to his wife dated December 18, 1819, in. J., Comte de Villele, Memoires et corre-

spondance (Paris, 1888), 2: 248.

35 Le Censeur europeen, October 30, 1819. On January 15, 1820, the same newspaper
referred to "all the deputies of the extreme left." On February 16, 1820, it mentioned
"four other members of the extreme right." Abundant documentation in Bernhard
Monch, "Der Politische Wortschatz der franzosischen Restauration in Parlament und
Presse" (thesis, Bonn, i960).

36 Quoted in Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire, 5: 287.

37 Ibid., 306.

38 Quoted in Paul Thureau-Dangin, Le Parti liberal sous la Restauration (Paris, 1888), 21 1.

39 Alphonse Berenger, "Le Ventru, ou compte rendu de la session de 1818," in Oeuvres

completes (Paris, 1839), 2: 2. Villele alludes to a possible "fissure between the right and

center right" in 1821 (quoted in Thureau-Dangin, Le Parti liberal, 233). In 1819,

Remusat wanted to "reinforce the center left" (Correspondance de M. de Remusat pen-

dant les premieres annees de la Restauration [Paris, 1833], 6: 96). Ini8i8 he also proposed
a humorous political classification that was particularly ferocious toward the ventres
 7- RIGHT AND LEFT 573

(ibid., 4: 157). Finally, a critical brochure of 1820, Les Hommes du centre, observed that
"it is remarkable that the center is itself divided in three parts: it has its right side, its

left side, and its central point" (p. 26).

40 Paul-Louis Courier, Lettres particulieres, in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard,

1951), 63.

41 Stendhal, Melanges d'art (Paris, 1932), 6, quoted by Francis Haskell, "L'Art et le lan-

gage de la politique," in De I'art et du gout (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 152.

42 Augustin Thierry, Considerations sur I'histoire de France, in Oeuvres completes (Paris,

1858X4: 117.

43 According to the Vicomte de Saint-Chamans, De I'etat des partis dans les chambres
(Paris, 1828), 43.

44 Quoted in Thureau-Dangin, Le Parti liberal, 408.

45 Ibid., 408.

46 Ibid., 409.

47 Saint-Chamans, De I'etat des partis, 41.

48 Ibid., 177.

49 Ibid., 173.

50 Quoted in Thureau-Dangin, Le Parti liberal, 408.

51 Duclerc and Paguerre, Dictionnaire politique, 425. Good evidence for this state of
affairs can be found in Joseph Tanski, Voyage autour de la Chambre des deputes (Paris,

1845), who remarks on the difference between this and the first Restoration, noting the

"scattering" of parliamentary personnel and the "little overall coherence in its action,"

as well as the confusion of topographical markers: for example, Lamartine, "who voted
alternately with the centers, the left, and the extreme left, is seated in the first seat of
the third bench on the extreme right" (277).

52 P.-J. Proudhon, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1929), 8: 77.

53 Edgar Morin, Commune en France: La metamorphose de Plodemet (Paris: Fayard, 1967).

54 Quoted in Michel Soulie, Le Cartel des gauches (Paris: Dullis, 1975), 83.

5 5 The socialist H. Boulay in Macon, for example. See the Recueildes textes authentiques des
programmes et professions defoi et engagements electoraux des deputes proclames elus (cited
hereafter as Recueil Barodet, with the year of the election) for the elections of 1936

(Paris, 1937), 1251. These volumes were published under the auspices of the Assembly,
generally in the year following the elections. Another socialist, R. Muager, in Blois:
"Red against whites: this, once again, is characteristic of this battle" (ibid., 662). Recall

the slogan of the Croix de Feu: "Neither white nor red but blue, white, and red."

56 L. Ulbach, La Cloche for June 12, 1869, quoted in Jean Dubois, Le Vocabulaire politique

etsocialde la France de 1869 a i8j2 (Paris: Larousse, 1962), 311.

57 Discours et plaidoyers politiques de M. Gambetta (Paris, 1881), i: 432.

58 Ibid. We find the word used in a broader sense, but one noted by the writer as unusual,
in a text by Eugene Aubry-Vitet from the following year: "A remarkable thing is the

left, the advanced party, that is, the portion of voters who should be most satisfied by
the mere universality of the right to vote" ("Le Suffrage universe! dans I'avenir," La
Revue des Deux Mondes [May 15, 1870]: 387).
574 7- RIGHT AND LEFT

59 The formation of these groups has been minutely reconstructed by Rainer Hiidemann,
Fraktionsbildung im franidsischen Parlament: Zur Entwicklung des Paneiensystems in. der

friihen Dritten Republik {i8ji—i8y5) (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1979). For later devel-

opments, see M. Tournier, "Vers une grammaire des designations socio-politiques au

debut de la IIP Republique, 1879— 1905," Mou, 2 (1981): 51—71.
60 Manifesto of February 28, 1885, quoted by Jacques Kayser, Les Grandes Batailles du
radicalisme, des origines aux pones du pouvoir (Paris: Riviere, 1962), 125.

61 Le Temps, April 27, 1873, after the Barodet election, quoted in Kayser, Les Grandes
Batailles, 70.

62 Le Temps, March 11, 1874, quoted in Fran9ois Caron, La France des patriotes de i85i a.

1918 (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 256.

63 Quoted in Kayser, Les Grandes Batailles, 105. Another point of crystallization might be
"the union of the left" that Gambetta failed to achieve in March 1876.

64 A Bonapartist newspaper quoted in L'Annee politique (Paris, 1877), 5—6.

65 Speech at Epinal, June 19, 1881, in Discours et opinions (Paris, 1897), 6: 60.
66 Speech at Le Havre, October 14, 1883, ibid., 172.

67 Recueil Barodet (Paris, 1886), 79.

68 The debate has been analyzed by Odile Rudelle, La Republique absolute: Aux origines
de I'instabilite constiutionnelle de la France republicaine (Paris: Publications de la

Sorbonne, 1982), 177.

69 Dubois, Le Vocabulaire politique et social, 121— 122 and 41 1—412, provides abundant evi-
dence of this effervescence.

70 Recueil Barodet. Antoine Prost has systematically analyzed samples of these statements
from a limited period in Le Vocabulaire des proclamations electorales de 1881, i885 et i88g

(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974).

71 Recueil Barodet, 1889, 587 and 59.

72 Andre Siegfried, Tableau politique de la France de I'Ouest sous la IIP Republique (Paris:

Armand Colin, 1913), 496—497.

73 Charles Seignobos in the multiauthor work Politique republicaine (Paris, 1924), 60.

74 Cazeneuve, 4th district of Lyons, Recueil Barodet, 688. In Joigny, Loup spoke similarly
of "true republicans" and joked about "monarchist republicans": "There must be
some, otherwise the series would not be complete" (ibid., looi).

75 Renoult in Lure, Recueil Barodet, 713.

76 Which corresponds, by the way, to the identity that Siegfried rationalized and hyposta-
sized in his theory of "political temperaments," in a book that is as valuable a document
concerning the establishment of right and left as it is an analysis. Platforms, parties, and
labels change, while temperaments remain the same, so that if Lamartine, Thiers, or
Gambetta were to return to the political scene, they would not sit in the place marked
by their former ideas but would instinctively align themselves with "people of the same
temperament as themselves, whether on the left, in the center, or on the ceiling." See

Siegfried, Tableau, 497, for more in this vein.

77 On the history of the Comite Central d 'Action Republicaine, which merged with the

Association pour les Reformes Republicaines in 1895 to become the Comite d 'Action
 7- RIGHT AND LEFT 575

pour les Reformes Republicaines, see Kayser, Les Grandes Batailles; Jean-Thomas
Nordmann, La France radicale (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1977); Serge Berstein,

Histoire du parti radical, vol. i (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, 1980).

78 Rene Renoult, February 24, 1895, quoted in Kayser, Les Grandes Batailles, 226.

79 Acts of the Premier Congres du Parti republicain, radical et radical socialiste (1901), 4.

Repeated in Mesureur's speech, 10.

80 Fran9ois Goguel, La Politique des partis sous la IIP Republique (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1958), 19.

81 It is striking to discover that Combes, for example, never used other expressions in the

campaign speeches collected in Une campagne laique {ic)02—ic)03) (Paris, 1904).

82 This assertion calls for lengthy substantiation. A purely quantitative analysis would be
insufficient, though the number of mentions clearly rose sharply. What is needed is a

careful analysis of significant occurrences, those for example that reveal a substitution
of terms, as in this speech by Empereur at Moutiers: "Its army constitutes the right bloc
or the reactionary bloc. On the other side is the left bloc, the republican bloc." Recueil
Barodet, 808. Every conceivable permutation is represented.

83 The examples are taken, respectively, from Isoard at Forcalquier {Recueil Barodet, 46),
Chenavaz at Grenoble (437), Dehove at Avesnes (619).
84 Moisei Ostrogorski, La Democratie et I 'organisation des partis politiques, 2 vols. (Paris,

1903); Robert Michels, Zur So^iologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie:
Untersuchungen iiber oligarchischen Tenden^en des Gruppenlebens (Leipzig, 191 1).
85 In response to a survey conducted by Emmanuel Beau de Lomenie, Qu'appelei-vous
droite et gauche? (Paris, 1931), 77.

86 Renaud Jean, June 15, 1923, quoted by Georges Bourgin, Manuel des partis politiques en
France (Paris, 1931), 77.
87 Statement of the Bloc Ouvrier et Paysan of Charente-Inferieure, Recueil Barodet, 169.
The manifesto of the Bloc Ouvrier et Paysan of Seine-et-Oise is also worth quoting,
for it inaugurated a use of the word "left" in quotes that would have a bright future:
"Against the National Bloc you will be pitiless. Against the candidates of the 'left' you
will be ruthless" (ibid., 846).

88 The formula was proposed by the Ligue de la Republique, which was created in

October 1921, whose manifesto states: "The essential aim of the league is to pave the
way for the union of the left." Quoted in Bourgin, Manuel, 207.
89 M.eurxhe-et-M.o%e\\e^ Recueil Barodet, 538.

90 Ardennes, ibid., 71.

91 Allier, ibid., 34.

92 Minutes of the Congress of Tours, quoted in Annie Kriegel, Le Congres de Tours {igzo):
Naissance duP.C.F. (Paris: Julliard, 1964), 241. This language was taken up by the ora-
tors themselves: Frossard, for example, whose arrival on the podium was greeted "with
applause on the left," spoke of "our friends of the right and center" (ibid., 159).

93 Cahiers du bolchevisme, December 12, 1924, text in Louis Bodin and Nicole Racine, Le
Parti communiste frangais pendant I'entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 135.
576 7- RIGHT AND LEFT

94 Central Committee, Lettre ouverte aux membres du parti, in Bodin and Racine, Le Parti
communist frangais, 96.

95 Ibid.

96 Oeuvres de Maurice Thore\ (Paris, 1950), book 2, vol. 5: 20, in Bodin and Racine, Le,

Parti communist fran^ais, 228.

97 Marianne, March 28, 1934, quoted in Claude Estier, La Gauche hebdomadaire

{ic)i4—ic)62) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), 102.

98 Oeuvres de Maurice Thore^, book 3, vol. 11: 104, in Bodin and Racine, Le Parti commu-
nist frangais, 243.

99 Lettre du Comite central a Edouard Daladier, October 17, 1936, in Bodin and Racine, Le
Parti communist frangais, 257.

100 The unsurpassed source in this genre is Les Temps modernes, special issue on "The
Left," no. 112— 113 (1955). See especially the articles by Jean Pouillon, Dionys Mascolo,
and Jean-Toussaint Dessanti, brilliant illustrations of the ambiguity whose principle
we are trying to discern here. Sacralization and suspicion go hand in hand.
1 01 The expression, among dozens of possible sources, is taken from Blaisot at Caen in

1936 {Recueil Barodet, 222). For the ultimate in this vein, see the proclamation of the
republican and national union list in the 1924 elections: "[To put] the parties of the left

in power is tantamount to making foreigners masters in our home" {Recueil Barodet,

31). Abel Bonnard provides a very interesting example in Les Moderes, where he
speaks abundantly of the left but not of the right, which he explains thus: "Since there
is only one party in France, the party that encompasses the left and the extreme left,

and the moderates are not a separate party, what are they then.-*" ([1936; repr. Paris:

Livre-club du Labyrinthe, 1986], 75). "There is but one excess in French politics,"
Bonnard went on, "that of the left: it exists without counterweight, it reigns, it gov-
erns, and the moderates, in their ideas, feelings, and actions, are directly dependent on
it" (ibid., 122).

102 "Lettre aux cocus de la droite," Combat, March 1936. Quoted in Louis Bodin and Jean
Touchard, Front populaire, /ijj6' (Paris: Armand Colin), 35.

103 Quoted in Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche: L'ideologie fasciste en France (Brussels:
Complexe, 1987), 40. Sternhell's book is full of examples.
104 Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans (Paris, 1939), 328—329.
105 Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche, 145; Georges Valois, Le Fascisme (Paris, 1927), 67 and 139.

106 We saw this with Maxence 's quotation marks. An eloquent title in the press of the time:
La Droite, celle qui n'abdique pas {1930—1937)- In the other camp there were "leftist"

variations such as opposition de gauche, gauche revolutionnaire, and ultra-gauche, as well

"
as the significant emergence of Communist irony toward "intellectuals of the 'left.'

107 In Barres's Cahiers one finds a self-confidence that is quite revealing of the choice that

this division of labor implied for individuals engaged in politics: "I would prefer Mun,
I would prefer Jaures, but we must resign ourselves to order. Resign ourselves to the

center, humiliate ourselves in the center along with the average man, who wants only
to sleep, eat, and multiply." Quoted in Michel Toda, Henri Massis: Un temoin intel-

lectuelle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 180. In Alain we also find a remarkable exam-
 -

7. RIGHT AND LEFT 577

pie of this dialectic of the center and extremes: "It's anarchy, this extreme left, on
which the whole left lives. And it is the monastic spirit, dumbstruck with obedience, on
which the whole right lives" {Propos [Paris: Gallimard, 1956], i: 1285— 1286, a comment
dating from 1935). This does not, however, prevent him from noting elsewhere that

"man is man is mixed, man is of the center, and all come back to it, like those
average,
radicals among whom I'm not sure I don't belong who beat a more or less dignified
retreat when they saw the francs in their pockets melt away. Men of the right also have

these natural movements" (ibid., 984, comment of 1930).

108 Rebatet makes a penetrating remark on this point in the midst of the abrupt rhetoric of
Decombres: "The entire left had received the same party education, which created,
according to individual temperaments, Communists, hard-core socialists, soft-core

socialists, or more or less Marxified Radicals.... The right, apart from a few dyed-in-
the-wool Maurrassians and independents of our sort, were raised on liberal princi-

ples.. .which admirably prepared families of moderates steeped in cheap individualism,

while the most intelligent minds turned to jelly in interminable, anarchic, and sterile

debates." Les Memoires d'unfasciste, vol. i^Les Decombres, ic)j8—ig40, (repr. Paris: J.

J. Pauvert, 1976), 52.

109 La Droite en France de i8i5 a nos jours: Continuite et diversite d'une tradition politique
(Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1954). The title was changed to Les Droites en France with

the 1982 edition.

110 Albert Thibaudet, Les Idees politiques de la France (Paris, 1932).

111 My position here is similar to that of Jacques Julliard in Andre Burguiere and Jacques
Revel, Histoire de la France: L'etat et les conflits, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990),

343—347. Julliard distinguishes three enduring systems within French party culture: an
ideological system, an electoral system, and a governmental system. I would add that

there is also a system of systems, which coordinates all three.

112 Data in J. A. Laponce, Left and Right: The Topography of Political Perceptions (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1981), and in R. Inghehart and H. D. Klingemann, "Party
Identification, Ideological Preference and the Left-Right Dimension among Western
Mass Publics," in I. Budge, I. Crewe, and D. Farlie, ed.. Party Identification and Beyond:
Representations of Voting and Party Competition (London— New York: Wiley, 1976),
243-273-
113 Pierre Proudhon, Confessions d'un revolutionnaire, vol. 8 in Oeuvres completes, 71. The
whole text is remarkable for its effort to construct a rational typology of parties.
Particularly worthy of attention is the way in which Proudhon shows the rise of two
middle parties between two extreme parties (77).

114 Fran9ois Goguel, La Politique des partis sous la IIP Republique (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1958).

115 Krzysztof Pomian, "La Crise de I'avenir," Le Debat, no. 7 (1980).

116 Paul Valery, Cahiers (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 2: 1494.

117 Ibid., 1491— 1492.

118 Louis Dumont, "Sur I'ideologie politique fran5aise: Une perspective comparative," Le
Debat, no. 58 (1990).
 —

578 7- RIGHT AND LEFT

119 See especially the afterword to the new edition of idem, Homo hierarchicus: Le systeme
des castes etses implications (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), and "La Valeur chez les modernes
et chez les autres," in Essais sur rindividualisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983).
120 Elie Halevy, L'ere des tyrannies: Etudes sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris: Gallimard,

1938;, new ed. 1990), 213 ff. Jean Labasse emphasizes the "respective splits on the right

and left stemming from the economic realm, where class interests clash" in Hommes de
droite, hommes de gauche (Paris, 1947), 51.

121 See the powerful passages by Raymond Aron in Espoir et peur du siecle: Essais non par-
tisans (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1957), esp. "De la droite," 13-21. See also the remarkable
studies by Aurel Kornai, "Konservatives und revolutionares Ethos," in Rekonstruktion

des Konservatismus, ed. G.-K. Kaltenbrunner (Freiburg-im-Brisgau: Verlag Rombach,

1973), 95—136, and "The Moral Theme in Political Division," Philosophy (July i960):

234—254. Kornai goes so far as to suggest in an unpublished note, "La Dialectique de

I'extremisme et la dialectique de la moderation," that the division and reversal of posi-
tions is part of the nature of things. It is impossible not to choose and impossible to
master the dialectic of historical reality: "Utopia, by coming to pass, refutes itself," and
"every success of moderation has the character of a lucky accident" which leaves it at

the mercy of a resurgence of extremist forces.

122 This is the argument of Guy Rossi-Landi, Le Chasse-croise: La droite et la gauche en

France de ijSg a nos jours (Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattes, 1978). For the roots of
division in cultural "temperaments," see Alain-Gerard Slama, Les Chasseurs d'absolu:

Genese de la gauche etde la droite (Paris: Grasset, 1980).

CHAPTER 8 port-royal: THE JANSENIST SCHISM

1 Cecile Gazier, Histoire de la societe et de la bibliotheque de Port-Royal (Paris, 1966).

2 Recueilde factum sur plusieurs questions importantes de droit civil (Lyons, 1710; B.N.F.

14 305) and Recueil de pieces et de memoires concernant le testament de M. Rouille des

Filletieres attaquepar ses heritiers et confirmepar arret de la Grande Chambre du Parlement

de Paris le 5 avril ij8i apres 8 audiences et sur les conclusions de M. Seguier, avocat general

(B.N., factum 28 446) make it possible to trace how the Nicole collection was passed on
through the end of the eighteenth century.

3 Being judicial, rather than legislative, bodies, the French parlements were quite differ-
ent from the English Parliament, and it is therefore misleading to use the adjective par-

liamentary to refer to them. In this article, therefore, the term parlementary, formed by
adapting the French adjective parlementaire to English spelling, has been used with the
meaning "of or relating to the parlements or their members or supporters." trans.

4 Louis Cognet, Le Jansenisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), 124—125.

5 See the brief bibliographical essay in appendix i to this article.

6 The Nouveau Testament en franfais avec des reflexions morales, the first complete version

of which appeared in four volumes in 1692, originated in Quesnel's commentaries on

the evangelists, which were printed in 1672 under the title Abrege de la morale de I'E-
vangile ou pensees chretiennes.
 8. PORT-ROYAL 579

7 Genevieve Reynes, Convents defemmes: La vie des religieuses cloitrees dans la France des
XVir etXVIir siecles (Paris: Fayard, 1987).
8 Les Constitutions du monastere de Port-Royal du Saint-Sacrament (Mons, 1665; Brussels,
1674; Paris, 1721), and L'Image d'une religieuse parfaite et d'une imparfaite: Avec les occu-

pations interieures pour toute la journee (Mons, 1665), by Jeanne Catherine Arnauld
(Mere Agnes de Saint-Paul), were circulated as works of piety.

9 Louis Cognet, La Refo'-me de Port-Royal (Paris, 1950), 263.

10 Memoires et relations sur ce qui s 'est passe a. Port-Royal des Champs (1716), 6.

11 F. Ellen Weaver, The Evolution of the Reform of Port-Royal: From the Rule of Ctteaux
to Jansenism (Paris, 1970); idem, "Angelique de Saint- Jean, abbesse et mythographe de
Port-Royal," Chronique de Port-Royal (lets')) 93-108.
12 She tells her story in the foreword to the Memoires pour servir a I'histoire de Port-Royal
et d la vie de la Reverende Mere Angelique (Utrecht, 1742).

13 Bibliotheque de Port-Royal (hereafter cited as BPR), PR 6, P 129. Thanks to Mile

Odette Barenne, the director of the library and the editor of an inventory of the library
of Louis-Isaac Le Maitre de Sacy, Une grande bibliotheque de Port-Royal (Paris: Etudes
Augustiniennes, 1985), for calling this unpublished text to my attention.
14 See the obituary by Abbe de Sartre, published as a Memoire in 1784, and the study by
Cecile Gazier, "Une Amie des derniers jours de Port-Royal: Fran9oise-Marguerite de
Joncoux (1668— 171 5)," Revue de Paris, no. 36 (April 1929).

15 The Saint-Germain collection was moved to the Bibliotheque Nationale during the

Revolution.
16 According to the "Memoire pour servir a la vie de M. Collard," which prefaces her
Lettres spirituelles (Avignon, 1734), 19, and La Vie de Monsieur de Paris, diacre (1731),

76, it appears that a small community that formed around Deacon Fran9ois de Paris,
theAbbe Collard, and the brothers Desessarts in the parish of Saint-Medard on the Rue
de Bourgogne between 1724 and 1727 was responsible for many of these copies, espe-
cially the memoirs of Lancelot and Fontaine.
17 Fran5ois Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille, 19 vols. (Paris, 1866— 1904), 15: 55.

18 There are also copies in the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Arsenal, Sainte-Genevieve,

the municipal library of Troyes, which was a Jansenist refuge in the eighteenth century,
and the Utrecht library.

19 Among the most important: Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Menilles d'Etemare and Pierre
Boyer, Gemissements d'une dme vivement touchee de la destruction du Saint-Monastere de
Port-Royal des Champs, 3 vols. (1710— 1713). This was followed by a Quatrieme gemisse-
ment d'une dme vivement touchee de la Constitution de N.S.P. le pape Clement ^¥7(1714);
Michel Tronchay, Histoire ahregee de Vahhaye de Port-Royal, depuis safondation en 1204
jusqu'd I'enlevement des religieuses en IJ09 (1710); Jacques Fouillou, Memoires sur la
destruction de Port-Royal des Champs (171 1); Pasquier Quesnel, Relation de captivite de

la Mere Angelique de Saint-Jean (171 1); idem, Memoires et relations sur ce qui s 'est passe

d Port-Royal des Champs depuis le commencement de la reforme de cette abbaye (1714;

repr. 1716).

20 See appendix 2.
58o 8. PORT-ROYAL

21 Abbe Pinault, Histoire abregee de la derniere persecution de Port-Royal, 3 vols. (1750).

The abbe, who died in 1737, produced a history that is more an anthology of docu-
ments than a continuous narrative.
22 Franfoise-Marguerite de Joncoux, Jacques Fouillou, Jean-Baptiste Louail, Histoire
abregee du jansenisme avec des remarques sur I'ordonnance de M. I'Archeveque de Paris
(Cologne, 1698), in response to the condemnation of the publication of Barcos's
Exposition de la foi in 1697. Gerberon, Histoire generale du jansenisme, 3 vols.

(Amsterdam, 1700), an attack on the manuscript "Histoire generale du jansenisme" by

the Jesuit Father Rapin.

23 Pinault, Histoire abregee, 2: 178.

24 Henri Schmitz du Moulin, "L'Edition de la Relation de Captivite de la mere Angelique

de Saint-Jean (171 1)," Chroniques de Port-Royal (1985): 40.
25 Tronchay, Histoire abregee, 58.

26 Catherine L. Maire, Les Convulsionnaires de Saint-Medard (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

27 Jacques- Joseph Duguet, Regies pour I'intelligence des Saintes Ecritures (Paris, 1716). On
d'Etemare, see Bruno Neveu, "Port-Royal a I'age des lumieres," Lias, vol. 4 (1977):
115-153, ni.
28 D'Etemare, Quatrieme Gemissement.
29 Concerning the percentage of signatures in support of the various Jansenist interven-
tions against the papal bull, see Marie-Jose Michel, "Clerge et pastorale janseniste a

Paris (1665— 1730," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 27 (April-June 1979): 182,

and Dominique Minet and Marie-Claude Dinet-Leconte, "Les Appelants contre la

bulle Unigenitus d'apres Gabriel-Nicolas Nivelle," Histoire, economic et societe, 3

(1990): 365-385.

30 In particular, Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Menilles d'Etemare, La Quatrieme Colonne des

Hexaples, 2 vols. (1723); Jean-Baptiste Raymond de Pavie de Fourquevaux, Catechisme

historique et dogmatique sur les contestations qui divisent maintenant I'Eglise, 2 vols.

(1729— 1730); L.-F. Boursier, L'Explication abregee des principales questions quiont rapport
aux affaires presentes (1732); Nicolas Legros, Abregee des principales questions qui ont rap-

port aux affaires presentes (1732); idem, Abrege chronologique des principaux evenements qui

ont precede la Constitution Unigenitus (Utrecht, 1730), with several subsequent versions

extending to 1762; idem., Abrege historique et chronologique dans lequelon demontre par les

faits (1733); idem., Etrennes jansenistes (1733); Louis Adrien Le Paige, Annales pourservir
d'etrennes aux amis de la verite (no place or date of publication given, probably 1734); the
three works titled Fie du diacre Paris published in 173 1 belong to this corpus.

31 Fran^oise Bontoux, "Paris janseniste au XVIIF siecle: Les Nouvelles ecclesiastiques,"

Memoires de la Federation des societes historiques et archeologiques de Paris et de Vlle-de-

France, 7 (1955): 205—220.

32 The most complete bibliography of Jansenist figurist prophecies is in Alfred-Felix

Vaucher, Lacun^iana: Essais sur les propheties bibliques, 2d ser. (CoUonges-sous-Saleves,

1952).

33 J. Dedieu, "L'Agonie du jansenisme," Revue d'histoire de I'Eglise de France, 14 (1928):

loi— 214.
 8. PORT-ROYAL 581

34 Rene Cerveau, "Grillot" entry, Necrologe des plus celebres defenseurs et confesseurs de la

verite au XVIIP siecle (1760— 1778), 6: 406.

35 Jean Mesnard, "Le Maistre de Sacy et son secretaire Fontaine,"in Chroniques de Port-
Royal (1984).
36 Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), i: 804; 2: 104.

37 See the "Journal de Le Maitre," the "Recit de la conduite et des exercices des illustres
solitaires," and the "Memoire des ecoles de Port-Royal."
38 Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de Port-Royal et a la vie de la Reverende Mere Angelique
de Sainte-Magdeleine Arnauld, reformatrice du monastere, 3 vols. (Utrecht, 1742).

39 Jerome Besoigne, Histoire de Vabbaye de Port-Royal — Premiere partie: histoire des

religieuses; Deuxieme partie: histoire des Messieurs, 6 vols. (Cologne, 1752); idem. Vie
des quatre eveques engages dans la cause de Port Royal, M. d'Aleth, M. d'Angers, M. de
Beauvais, M. de Pamiers, 2 vols. (1756); Charles Clemencet, Histoire generale de Port-
Royal, depuis la reforme de Vabbaye jusqu'd son entiere destruction, lo vols. (Amsterdam:

Jean Vanduren, 1755— 1757); idem., "Histoire litteraire de Port-Royal" and "Histoire de
la vie et des ouvrages de Claude Lancelot" (MS, B.S.H.P.F.); Pierre Guilbert, Memoires

historiques et chronologiques sur Vabbaye de Port-Royal des Champs, 7 vols. (Utrecht,

1755— 1756); idem, Memoires historiques et chronologiques sur Vabbaye de Port-Royal des
Champs depuis sa fondation en 1204 jusqu'd la mort des dernieres religieuses et amis de ce

monastere, partie premiere, 2 vols. (Utrecht, 1758— 1759)

40 Les Tres Humbles Remontrances au Roi (1753), I35-

41 Nouvelles ecclesiastiques (1751): 94.

42 L.-A. Le Paige and Abbe Coudrette, Histoire generale de la naissance et des progres de la
Compagnie de Jesus et analyse de leurs constitutions et privileges, 5 vols. (Amsterdam,
1760; repr. 1784, 5
vols.).

43 Author of five quarto volumes of Annales des soi-disant Jesuites (1764).

44 Dale Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1975).

45 Pierre Barral (author of the Manuel des Souverains [1754]), Appelans celebres (1754);

Pierre-Fran9ois Labelle (an Oratorian priest), Necrologe des appelans et des opposans a.

la bulk Unigenitus (1755); Rene Cerveau (a priest in the Jansenist parish of Saint-Eti-
enne du Mont), Necrologe des defenseurs de la Verite, 7 vols. (1760— 1778).
46 J.-B.-M. de Pavie de Fourquevaux and Louis Troya d Assigny, Catechisme ' historique et

dogmatique, 5 vols. (Nancy, 1750— 1768).

47 Louis-Adrien Le Paige, Lettre a. un cure de Paris par les fideles de sa paroisse au sujet du

mandement de Mgr I'Archeveque de Paris contre les Nouvelles ecclesiastiques (1732).

48 Idem, Lettres pacifiques ou lettres adressees a MM. les Commissaires nommes par le Roi
pour deliberer sur Vaffaire presente du Parlement au sujet du refus des Sacrements (1752; rev.

and repr. 1753).

49 Among the major works of Le Paige are Lettres historiques sur lesfonctions essentielles du
Parlement, 2 vols. (1753); Memoire au sujet d'un nouvel ecrit contre le Parlement (1754);
La Legitimite et la necessite de la loi du silence contre les reflexions d'un pretendu docteur en
theologie sur la declaration qui impose le silence (1759); Observations sur les actes de
582 8. PORT-ROYAL

I'assembUe du clerge de ij65 (1765); Le Philosophe redresse (Au Bois Valon, 1765);
Principles de la legislation fran^aise provues par les monuments de cette nation relatifs aux
affaires du temps (1771).
50 Term used by certain parlementary correspondents on letters to Le Paige, B.P.R., LP 541.
51 B.P.R., LP 480.

52 Jules Flammermont, Remontrances du Parlement de Paris (Paris, 1888); idem., Le

Chancelier Maupeou et les parlements (Paris, 1883).

53 Mile Poulain, Nouvelle Histoire abregee de Vabbaye de Port-Royal: [ . . .

] Ony trouvera

tout a. lafois de I'amusement, de I'edification et une grandeur d'ame quifrappe et qui ravit,

4 vols. (Paris, 1786); Mother Angelique de Saint- Jean, Exercices de piete d Vusage des
religieuses de Port- Royal du Saint-Sacrement, (1787), a book of edification; Dupac de
Bellegarde, La Vie de Messire Antoine Arnauld Dr. de la Maison et Societe de Sorbonne,

43 vols. (Paris-Lausanne, 1775— 1783); Noel Castera de Larriere, La Vie de Messire

Antoine Arnauld (Paris and Lausanne, 1783).

54 Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Mes souvenirs, 2 vols. (Paris, 1898— 1901), i: 44 and 50.

55 Louis Adrien Le Paige, Letter to de Murard, March 20, 1772, B.P.R., 541.

56 Maultrot, Mey et al., Maximes du droit public fran^ais, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1775);
Maultrot, Origine et etendue de la puissance royale suivant les livres saints et la tradition, 3

vols. (1789— 1790).

57 Yann Fauchois, "Jansenisme et politique au XVIir siecle," Revue d'histoire moderne et

contemporaine, 34 (July-September 1987): 473—491.

58 \nh\s Memoires pour servir dl'histoire dujacobinisme, composed after a wave of dechris-
tianization, Barruel no longer included the Jansenists in his list of conspirators.

59 Emmanuel, Comte d'Antraigues, Denonciation aux frangais catholiques des moyens

employes par I'Assemblee nationale, pour detruire en France la religion catholique (London,

1791).

60 Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, Jean-Baptiste Royer, Eleonore Marie Desbois de Rochefort,

Jean-Pierre Saurine, Augustin Jean Charles Clement, Charles Saillant.
61 Memoires secrets sur la vie de M. Clement, Eveque de Versailles, pour servir d I'eclaircisse-

ment de Vhistoire ecclesiastique du XVIIP siecle (1812) 53—54.

62 The group included former Jansenists, some of whom had belonged to the constitu-
tional clergy (Baillet, Girard, Cady, Varlet, Rondeau, Constantin), and published a

periodical, the Annales de la Religion.

63 Les Ruines was published in May 1801 in the Annales de la Religion and later as a sepa-

rate brochure.

64 Antoine Arnauld, Le Veritable Portrait de Guillaume Henry de Nassau, nouvel Absalom,

nouvel Herode, nouveau Cromwel, nouveau Neron (no place or date).

65 Maurice Wzusszrd, Jansenisme et gallicanisme, aux origines religieuses du Risorgimento

(Paris, 1959); Edmond Preclin, "L'influence du jansenisme fran9ais a I'etranger," Revue
historique, 182 (1982).

66 Ruth Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port-Royal (Cambridge, 1932), mentions Mary
Anne Schimmelpennick, a friend of Hannah More 's, who wrote Select Memoirs of
Port-Royal (London, 1835); Frances Martin, Angelique Arnauld, Abbess of Port-Royal
 8. PORT-ROYAL

(London, 1876); Ethel Romanes, The Story of Port-Royal (London, 1907); M. E.

Lowndes, The Nuns of Port-Royal as Seen Own Narratives (Oxford, 1909).
in Their

67 From 1818 to 1821 La Chronique religieuse; from 1838 to 1848 La Revue ecclesiastique;
from 1855 to 1863 L'Ohservateur catholique. On this subject see Rene Taveneaux,
"Permanences jansenistes au XIX^ siecle," Dix-huitieme siecle, no. 129, 32nd year
(1980): 394-414-
68 Rene Remond, L'Anticlericalisme en France de i6i5 a nos jours (Paris, 1985).

69 PubHshed in Les Nouveaux Melanges historiques et litteraires (Paris, 1827).

70 Joseph de Maistre,De I'Eglise gallicane (Paris, 1821).

71 FeHcite de Lamennais, De la religion dans ses rapports avec I'ordre politique et civil (Paris,

1826), 188.

72 Austin Gough, Paris and Rome, the Galilean Church and the Ultramontane Campaign,
1848-1853 (Oxford, 1986), 225.

73 Raphael Molho, L'Ordre et les tenebres XVIP siecle chez

ou la naissance d'un mythe du
Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), the work on which I rely for my account of
Sainte-Beuve.

74 Revue de Paris, January—February 1834.

75 Quoted in Molho, L'Ordre^ original in Collection Spooelberch de Lovenjoul, D 581,

fol. 57.

76 His Jansenist library of 678 volumes was acquired by the Societe d'Histoire du
Protestantisme Fran^ais in 1872. On this question, see the article by Cecile Gazier, "Les
Sources de Sainte-Beuve," Revue bleue, 17 (July 1926), and "Une Heure avec M.
Royer-CoUard," in Jean Pommier, Dialogues avec le passe (Paris, 1967).

77 Along with two insignificant articles by Lerminier in the Revue des deux mondes of
June I, 1840, and Frederic Chavannes in the Revue suisse of July 1840, and the overtly
hostile, not to say vicious, article by Balzac in the Revue parisienne of August 25, 1840,
only the Protestant pastor Vinet, in two articles that appeared in Semeur of December
2 and 30, 1840, expressed sincere admiration for the study's "Christian spirit," "under-
standing of true Christianity," and "moral method."

78 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la litterature anglaise, i: xii-xiv.

79 Brunetiere, Livre d'or de Sainte-Beuve (Paris, 1904).

80 Victor Cousin, Blaise Pascal (Paris, 1842). Cousin also sought to give due credit to
those women of letters, the "belles amies de Port-Royal, " in Jacqueline Pascal (Paris,
1842); Madame de Longueville (Paris, 1853); Madame de Sable (Paris, 1854). See also
Cecile Gazier, Les Belles Amies de Port-Royal (Paris, 1930).
81 Port-Royal des Champs (1874; rev. and expanded 1893 and 1913), a historical note for
visitors.

82 Augustin Gazier, "Les Ecoles de charite du faubourg Saint-Antoine, ecole normale et

groupes scolaires, 1713— 1887," Revue Internationale de Venseignement, 51 (1906):

217—237, 314—326. Cecile Gazier, Apres Port-Royal, I'ordre hospitaller des soeurs de
Sainte-Marthe (Paris, 1923).

83 Among his major works: Etudes sur I'histoire religieuse de la Revolution frangaise (Paris,
1887); Histoire generale du mouvement janseniste, depuis ses origines jusqu'd nos jours
584 8. PORT-ROYAL

(Paris, 1922); Une Suite d I'histoire de Port- Royal d'apres des documents inedits: Jeanne de

Boisignorel et Christophe de Beaumont {lySo—iySz) (Paris, 1906).

84 Felix Cadet, L'Education a. Port-Royal (Paris, 1887), 79.

85 Irenee Carre, Les Pedagogues de Port-Royal — Histoire des petites ecoles (Paris, 1887).

86 Carre, article "Port-Royal (Petites Ecoles)," in Buisson, Nouveau Dictionnaire de peda-

gogue (191 1), 1663.

87 Speech by Ferdinand Buisson at the grave of Jules Steeg, quoted by Jean-Marie

Mayeur, Les Debuts de la IIP Republique, 1 871— 1898 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973),

114.

88 Fact reported in brochure of L'Union pour Taction morale, no. 19 (August i, 1903): 899.

89 Ibid., 884.

90 Philippe Sellier, "Port-Royal ou le 'genie ' du christianisme," Destin et enjeux du XVIF

siecle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).
91 Grammaire generale et raisonnee, with an introduction by Michel Foucault (Paris, 1969);
Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983); Arnauld a.rxA'i^'icoXt^ La Logique ou
I'art de penser (Lille, 1974; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965; Geneva, 1972;

Paris, Flammarion "Champs," 1970; Paris, Gallimard "Tel," 1992).

92 Leszek Kolakowski, "Georges Sorel, Jansenist Marxist," Dissent, 22 (1975).

93 Paul Valery, Degas (Paris, 1936), 179.

94 Blaise Cendrars, L'Homme foudroye (Paris, 1945), 135.

95 Andre Bazin, "William Wyler ou le jansenisme de la mise en scene," Qu'est-ce que le

cinema (Paris, 1958), i: 149—173.

96 Colloquium on "Jansenisme et revolution," Chroniques de Port-Royal (Paris: Vrin, 1990);

Catherine Maire, "L'Eglise et la Nation: Du depot de la verite au depot des lois —La tra-

jectoire janseniste au XVIIF siecle," Annales E.S.C., 5

(September— October i990-
177-205.

CHAPTER 9 THE MUSEUM OF THE DESERT: THE PROTESTANT MINORITY

1 Jean Bastide, Histoire ahregee des protestants de France, textes et recits a I'usage des cours

d'instruction religieuse (Dieulefit, 1910; 2d ed. 1933), v. For another example, see
Charles Bost, Histoire des protestants de France en trente-cinq lemons pour les ecoles, which
met with great success and went through three editions (1924, 1926, and 1931).

2 Respectively, 1927 and 1925.

3 Charles Bost completely abandons the hagiographic perspective and does not hesitate
to show Camisard violence. See Philippe Joutard, La Legende des camisards (Paris:

Gallimard, 1977), 252-258. Besides Histoire pour les ecoles, Bost wrote four historically
inspired plays.

4 Insert to National Geographic Maga-^ine (October 1978): 8.

5 Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (London: Macmillan,

1962), 96.
6 Protestantisme frangais, collective work (1945), 23.
 9- THE MUSEUM OF THE DESERT

7 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour Vhistoire ou metier d'historien, 4th ed. (Paris: Armand Colin,

1961), 10.

8 Pierre Gaudin and Claire Reverchon, "Le Legendaire historique dromois" (thesis,

University of Provence, 1982; mimeograph).

9 Oral inquiry in Cevennes from 1967 to 1973.

ID Bulletin de la Societe de Vhistoire du protestantisme frangais, i (1853): 499; hereafter
abbreviated B.S.H.P.F.
1 1 Memo to the pastor reproduced in Notice sur la Societe de Vhistoire du protestantisme

frangais, 1852— 1872 (Paris, 1874), 80.

12 B.S.H.P.F., 16 (1867): 571, and 18 (1869): 170.

13 B.S.H.P.F., 32 (1883): 435 ff.

14 B.S.H.P.F, 34 (1885): 547 and 558.

15 See La Cevenole, i (1885): i and 2; the ceremony is described in the September 1885
issue.

16 After Mont Lozere, the three highest peaks in the Cevennes.

17 Le Foyer protestant (August 1887).
18 La Cevenole (September 1885): i, and Le Foyer protestant (August 14, 1887): 8.

19 Musee du Desert, 1685— 1787, Fondation Frank Puaux et Edmond Hugues, Guide du
visiteur, notice historique et regionale, in Cevennes (Le Mas-Soubeyran, Mialet, Card,
1964), 5.

20 Ibid., 71—73: list of invited speakers and themes from 191 1 to 1962. See Florence
Morillere, "Essai sur les assemblies commemoratives du musee du Desert" (thesis,

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 1981; mimeograph).

21 Ibid.

22 Guide du visiteur, jT,—-]').

23 Quatre dernieres assemblies, is)24—ig25, in Cevennes, 1924— 1925), 41 and 74, and
Deuxieme centenaire de la liberation des dernieres prisonnieres huguenotes de la tour de

Constance, ly 68— 1968, supplement to Bulletin de la Societe de Vhistoire du protestantisme

frangais, 115 (January—March 1969).

24 "Rapport de Jacques Bompaire presente a I'Assemblee generale de la S.H.P.F. du 19
juin 1989," B.S.H.P.F., 135 (October— December 1989): 477.
25 The general outline of the program and Charles Read 's intervention are reproduced in
Notice sur la Societe, 20—27 snd 43.

26 Based on the number of pages and fractions thereof referring to each subject. As crude
as this index is, it yields a clear measure of the relative importance of each area of inter-

est.

27 Jacques Pannier, Catalogue du Musee de la Societe de Vhistoire du protestantisme frangais:

Une heme de promenade historique a travers quatre siecles, livret-guide du visiteur (Paris:

S.H.P.F., 1927).

28 Statistics based on tables compiled by Morillere, "Essai sur les assemblees," 258-267,
which I completed for the present period on the basis of reviews in B.S.H.P.F.

29 Quoted in "Protestantisme et liberie, rencontre des 12 et 13 octobre 1985 a la Mutualite,

Paris," Bulletin du C.P.E.D., 313 (June-July 1986): 209. On the history of this com-
586 9- THE MUSEUM OF THE DESERT

memoration, in addition to pp. ii— 17 of this issue of the C.P.E.D., see Jean Beauberot,
Le Protestantisme doit-il mourir.^ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988), 142—145.

30 See the critical notice by Remy Scheurer, "La Revocation de I'edit de Nantes et le

refuge huguenot," Revue suisse d'histoire (1986), 3: 346—367.

31 I have studied this reversal of perspective in my Legende des camisards, 188—212.

32 B.S.H.P.F., 35 (1885): 552.

33 Morillere, "Essai sur les assemblees," 234—235.

34 Allocutions prononcees le dimanche i" septembre 1935, (Musee du Desert, n. d.), 16.

35 Reforme (August 31, 1985): 5.

36 Morillere, "Essai sur les assemblees," 234—235.

37 Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle et Vinstrument critique (Paris: Seghers, 1965), 46.

38 Gaston de Felice, Histoire des protestants de France (1850; quoted from the 6th ed.,

Toulouse: Societe des Livres Religieux, 1874), 9.

39 Quoted in E. Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, vol. i, Du pays de Foix d la cite d'Erasme (The
Hague—Paris: Mouton, 1963), 53.
40 Nicole Thevenet, "Sensibilite protestante dans la vallee d'Aigues" (master's thesis in

history. University of Provence, 1978; typescript), 32.

41 Quatre Dernieres Assemblees, \.

42 Joutard, La Legende des camisards, 304.

43 Predication et allocutions de I'Assemblee du dimanche 4 septembre 1949 (Anduze, n. d.),

15—16. Fran9ois Puaux published his Histoire de la Reformation fran^aise in 1863, Vie de

Jean Cavalier in 1868, and Histoire des camisards in 1872, which met with great success
and was reprinted in 1878 and 1898. His son Frank published the first edition of
CdcvaXitrs Memoires in 1919.

44 Vingt complaintes sur les predicants des Cevennes martyrises au XVIIP siecle, in

Cevennes, (1932) 152. The title is somewhat misleading, since the complaintes (laments)
concern not just lay preachers, and many of the victims were not from the Cevennes.
Desubas himself was a native of the Vivarais.
45 Pastor Manen and I have shown an example from the parish of La Pervenche in the

Vivarais: Une foi enracinee: La Pervenche (Valence, 1972).

46 Reforme (August 31, 1985).

47 Quoted in Joutard, La Legende des camisards, 206—207.

48 Fran9ois Furet, La Gauche et la Revolution frangaise au milieu du XIX^ siecle: Edgar

Quinet et la question du jacobinisme (1865— 1870) (Paris: Hachette, 1986).

49 BedL\ibetoi,Le Protestantisme, ')T,-6i.

50 Joutard, La Legende des camisards, 230. Additional examples in subsequent pages.

51 Ibid., 262—263.

52 Quoted in "Evangile et liberte, pour la commemoration du tricentenaire de I'edit de

Nantes," Unite des chretiens (July 1985): 8.

53 Ibid., 22.

54 Philippe Joutard, "La Revocation de I'edit de Nantes et le protestantisme fran9ais en

i685,"in Actes du colloque de Paris {i5—ic) octobre 198S), collected by Roger Zuber and
Laurent Theis (Paris, 1986), 299—311.
 lO. GREGOIRE, DREYFUS, DRANCY

55 See the press review in Reforme (October 19, 1985): 7. The quotation is taken from
L'Express.

56 Quatre Dernieres Assemblees, 27.

57 Ibid., 24—25.

58 Philippe Joutard, Jacques Poujol, and Patrick Cabanel, Cevennes, Terre de Refuge,

1940—1344 (MontpelHer: Presses du Languedoc, 1987), 250—253.

59 Quoted in Robert Poujol, Aigoual 44 (Ganges, 1951), 52.

60 i?e/or/we (October 19, 1985): II.

CHAPTER 10 GREGOIRE, DREYFUS, DRANCY, AND RUE COPERNIC:

JEWS AT THE HEART OF FRENCH HISTORY

1 In June 1991 the statue of Leon Blum finally found its natural place on Place Leon-
Blum in the Eleventh Arrondissement of Paris.
2 Jacques Durin, Drancy, 1341—1344 (Paris: Le Bourget, 1982).
3 Anne Grynberg, Les Camps de la home: Les internes juifs des camps frangais, 1939—1944
(Paris: La Decouverte, 1991), 10.

4 Robert Weyl, Le Cimetiere juif de Rosenwiller (Strasbourg: Editions Salde, 1988). More
generally, see Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine,
i8yi—i9i8 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

5 Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 213. On the
place of the Jews in the French nation, see Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein,
The Jews in Modern France (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1985).

6 Annette Wieviorka, "Un Lieu de memoire: Le Memorial du martyr juif inconnu,"

Pardes, 1982.

7 Georges Passerat, "L'Emeute des Pastoureaux et le massacre de Verdun (1320)," in

Juifs et sources juives en Occitanie (Albi: Vent Tarral, 1988).
8 Rene Moulinas, Les Juifs du pape en France: Les communautes d'Avignon et du Comtat

Venaissin aux XVII^ et XVIIF siecles (Toulouse: Privat, 1981).

9 Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor (Washington: University of Washington, 1982).

10 Roland Auguet, Le Juif errant (Paris: Payot, 1977), 35, 117, and 139.

11 Emile Zola, L'Argent (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, n. d.), 438.

12 Georges Dairnwaell, Histoire edifiante et curieuse de Rothschild f', Roi des Juifs (Paris,

1846); Jacques de Biez, Les Rothschild et le peril juif (Paris, 1891); Jules Guesde, "A
mort, Rothschild," in £tat, politique et morale de classe (Paris: Giard, 1901), 446. On
this legend and its influence in France, see Jean Bouvier, Les Rothschild (Paris:
Fayard, 1967).
13 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish IVorld Conspiracy and the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Pierre Nora, "1898:

Le Theme du complot et la definition de I'identite juive," in Le Racisme, Mythes et sci-

ences: Pour Leon Poliakov (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1981); Pierre Birnbaum, "Les
Protocoles dans I'imaginaire politique fran9ais," in Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Les
Protocoles des sages de Sion (Berg, 1992).
588 lO. GREGOIRE, DREYFUS, DRANCY

14 On the image of Jews in French CathoUc thought, Pierre Sorlin, La Croix et les Juifs

(Paris: Grasset, 1967); Pierre Pierrard, /wr/} et Catholiques frangais (Paris: Fayard,

1970); Jacques Petit, Bernanos, Bloy, Claudel, Peguy: Quatre ecrivains catholiques face a
Israel (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1972); Charlotte Wardi, Le Juif dans le roman frangais,
1933—1948 (Paris: Nizet, 1973); Beatrice PhiUppe, Etre juif dans la societe frangaise

(Paris: Pluriel, 1979); Lazare Landau, De I'aversion a Vestime: Juifs et Catholiques en

France (Paris: Le Centurion, 1980); Jeffrey Mehlman, Legs de I'anitsemitisme en France

(Paris: Denoel, 1984); Pierre Birnbaum, La France aux Frangais (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1993).

15 Frances MaHno, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in

Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press,

1978).
16 Abbe Gregoire, E^sai sur la Regeneration physique, morale et politique des Juifs (Paris:
Flammarion, 1989). See Paul Catrice, "L'Abbe Gregoire, 'Amie de tous les hommes,'
et la regeneration des Juifs," Melanges de science religieuse, -1,6 (1979); Pierre Birnbaum,
"Sur I'etatisation revolutionnaire: L'abbe Gregoire et le destin de I'identite juive," Le
Debat, 53 (January— February 1989).
17 David Feuerwerker, L'Emancipation des juifs en France, de I'Ancien Regime a la fin du
second Empire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976); Bernhard Blumenkranz and Albert Soboul,
ed., Les Juifs et la Revolution frangaise (Toulouse: Privat, 1976); Shmuel Trigano, La
Republique et les Juifs (Paris: Les Presses d'Aujourd'hui, 1982).
18 Quoted in S. Posener, Adolphe Cremieux (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1943), 2: 149 and 220; see
also Daniel Amson, Adolphe Cremieux, I'oublie de la gloire (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1988).

19 La Nation (May 6, 1889).

20 Theodore Reinach, Histoire des Israelites depuis I'epoque de leur dispersion jusqu'd nos

jours (Paris: Hachette, 1885), 325.

21 Michael Marrus, The of Assimilation: The Jewish Community in France at the

Politics

Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Laurent Bensaid,
"Cent ans de fidelite a la Republique," H Histoire, 3 (1979); Jean-Marc Chouraqui, "De
I'emancipation des juifs a I'emancipation du judaisme: Le regard des rabbins fran^ais
du XIX^ siecle," in Pierre Birnbaum, ed., Histoire politique des juifs de France (Paris:
Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1990).
22 Phyllis Albert Cohen, The Moderniiation of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in
the Nineteenth Century (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1977); Eric Smilevitch,
"Halakha et Code civil, questions sur le Grand Sanhedrin," Pardes, 3 (1986).

23 Reinach, Histoire des Israelites, 384. See also, by the same author, the article "Juif" in

the Grande Encyclpedie (Paris, 1894), and his speech, "Ce que nous sommes" (Paris:

Union Liberale Israelite, n.d.).

24 Quoted in Christine Piette, Les Juifs de Paris {1808—1846): La marche vers I 'assimilation

(Quebec: Presses de I'Universite du Quebec, 1983), 137.

25 Doris Bensimon-Donath, Socio-demographie des juifs de France et d'Algerie (Paris:

A.L.C., 1976).
 lO. GREGOIRE, DREYFUS, DRANCY 589

26 Yosef Yerushalmi, "Un Champ a Anathoth: Vers une histoire de I'espoir juif," in

Memoire et histoire (Paris: Denoel, 1986), 106.

27 The foregoing draws heavily on Michael Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIX^ siecle: De
la Revolution fran^aise a I'Alliance Israelite universelle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989),
and the doctoral thesis of Perrine Simon-Nahum, "Contribution a I'etude de la bour-
geoisie intellectuelle juive, 1830— 1914" (Paris, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences

Sociales, 1989).

28 Aron Rodrigue, De I'instruction d Vemancipation: Les enseignants de I'Alliance Israelite

universelle et les juifs d'Orient. i86o—is)3S) (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1989); idem, French
Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling
in Turkey, iSGo—igzS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
29 Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 163—165.

30 Pierre Birnbaum, Un Mythe politique: "La Republique juive, " de Leon Blum a Pierre
Mendes France (Paris: Fayard, 1988).

31 Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation; Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992).

32 Archives Israelites, successively June 11, 1908; May 14, 1914; April 24, 1902.

33 On Drumont see Robert Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France (New Brunswick,

1950); Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of
the Dreyfus Affair (London: Associated Press, 1982); Michel Winock, Edouard Drumont
et C'^: Antisemitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982); Frederik
Busi, The Pope of Antisemitism: The Career and Legacy of Edouard Drumont (New
York: University Press of America, 1986).

34 Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barres et le nationalisme frangais (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972).

35 Anatole France, L'Orme du mail (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1986), 31, 67, 80, and 183.

36 La Depeche (February 5, 1890).

37 La Croix, (January 28, 1882). See Pierre Sorlin, La Croix et les Juifs, and Jeanne
Verdes-Leroux, Scandale financier et antisemitisme catholique: Le krach de I'Union
nationale (Paris: Le Centurion, 1969).

38 Jean- Yves Mollier, Le Scandale de Panama (Paris: Fayard, 1991).

39 See, for example, Robert Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the
Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage, 1976); Suzanna
Barrows, Miroirs deformants: Reflexions sur lafoule en France a la fin du XIX^ siecle

(Paris: Aubier, 1990).

40 Michel Winock, "Les affaires Dreyfus," Vingtieme Siecle (January—March 1985).

41 Pierre Quillard, Le Monument Henry (Paris, 1889); Wilson, Ideology and Experience^
Marcel Thomas, "Le Cas Valery," in Les Ecrivains et I'affaire Dreyfus (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1983); Nelly Wilson, Bernard-La\are: Antisemitism and the

Emblem of Jewish Identity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975);

Pascal Ory and Jean-Frangois Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France: De I'affaire Dreyfus

a. nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986); Norman Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair:

Art, Truth and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Michael Burns,

Dreyfus: A Family Affair (New York: Harper's, 1991).

59° lO. GREGOIRE, DREYFUS, DRANCY

42 Michael Marrus, "Vichy before Vichy: Antisemitic Currents in France during the
1930s," Bulletin of the JViener Library, vol. 3 (1980); Michael Marrus and Robert
Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Georges Wellers,
Andre Kaspi, and Serge Klarsfeld, La France et la question juive, 1940— 1944 (Paris:
Sylvie Messinger, 1981); Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwiti (Paris: Fayard, 1985); Denis

Peschanski, "La France, terre de camps?" in Karel Bartosek, Rene Gallisot, and Denis
Peschanski, De Vexil a la resistance: Refugies et immigres d'Europe centrale en France,

1933—1945 (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1989).

43 Le Statut des juifs de Vichy: Documentation (Paris: Centre de Documentation Juive
Contemporaine, 1990).
44 See Joseph-Barthelemy, Ministre de la Justice: Vichy 1941-1943 (Paris: Pygmalion,
1989). The notes are a gold mine of information concerning the role of high Vichy
officials.

45 Roderick Kedward and Roger Austin, ed., Vichy, France and the Resistance: Culture and
Ideology (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Christian Faure, Le Projet culturel de Vichy

(Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989).

46 Georges Wormser, Frangais Israelites (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963), 11— 14.

47 Archives du Consistoire Central, boxes 9 and 32.

48 Quoted in Brigitte Bergmann, "Paul Grunebaum-Ballin, un siecle au service de la

Republique, 1871— 1969" (thesis, D.E.A., Institut d'Etudes Pohtiques, Paris, 1988).

49 Marc Ferro, Retain (Paris: Fayard, 1987).

50 Bernard Leguerre, "Les Denaturalises de Vichy, 1940— 1944," Vingtieme Siecle

(October-December 1988).

51 Pierre Pierrard,yi/z/i et Catholiques frangais (Paris: Fayard, 1970).

52 Gerard Loiseux, La Litterature frangaise de la defaite et de la collaboration (Paris:

Publications de la Sorbonne, 1984); see also Fran9ois Gar^on, De Blum d Retain (Paris:

Editions du Cerf, 1984).

53 Pascal Fouche, L'Edition frangaise sous Voccupation, 1940—1944 (Paris: Bibliotheque de

Litterature Fran9aise Contemporaine de I'Universite Paris-VII, 1987).

54 Stephane Courtois, Denis Peschanski, and Adam Rayski, Le Sang des etrangers (Paris:
Fayard, 1989).

55 Jacques Derville and Simon Wichne, Drancy la Juive ou la deuxieme Inquisition

(Cachan: Breger Freres, 1945); Georges Wellers, L'Etoile jaune a I'heure de Vichy ou de
Drancy a Auschwiti (Paris: Fayard, 1973).

56 Pierre Laborie, L'Opinion frangaise sous Vichy (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990).

57 Henri de Lubac, Resistance chretienne a I'antisemitisme (Paris: Fayard, 1988).

58 Georges Friedmann, Fin du peuple juif? (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 8— 1 1.
59 Catherine Nicault, "La France et le sionisme" (doctoral thesis, University of Paris-I,

1985); Michel Abitbol, Les Deux Terres promises: Les Juifs de France et le sionisme (Paris:

Olivier Orban, 1989). And, more generally, Annie Kriegel, Les Juifs et le monde mod-
erne, essaisur les logiques d'emancipation (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977).

60 Dominique Schnapper,/^?/} et Israelites (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), trans, by Arthur

Goldhammer as Jewish Identities in France: An Analysis of Contemporary French Jewry
 II. PARIS-PROVINCE

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983); Chantal Benayoun, Les Juifs et la

politique (Paris: Editions du Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 1984).

61 Marc Agi, Rene Cassin, fantassin des droits de Vhomme (Paris: Plon, 1979), ch. 11.

62 Raymond Aron, Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine (Paris: Editions de Fallois,

1989), 51 . On this period, see Henry Weinberg, The Myth of the Jew in France, igGy—igSz
(Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1987).

63 Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since ic)68 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
64 Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: ic)44—ic)8... (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987),

trans, by Arthur Goldhammer as The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1992).

65 For example, the "revisionist" campaign associated with the name of Robert Faurisson,
which erupted into public view in 1980 with the publication of his Memoire en defense,
and a devastating critique by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Un Eichmann de papier," Esprit

(September 1980), repr. in Les Juifs, la memoire et le present (Paris: Maspero, 1981); and
idem, Les Assassins de la memoire (Paris: La Decouverte, 1987), trans, by Jeffrey
Mehlman as The Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993).

CHAPTER II PARIS-PROVINCE

1 Alexandre Pineu Duval, Les Heritiers ou le naufrage (Paris: J. N. Barba, 1820).

2 "Za^roviMce does not exist by itself," Balzac wrote in 1841. See "LaFemme de province,"
in "Province," in Les Fran^ais peints par enx-memes (Paris: L. Curmer, 1841), i: 8.

3 Jean Emelina, "Comique et geographic au XVII* siecle," in Les Provinciaux sous Louis
XIV, 5th Marseilles Colloquium, Revue de Marseille, no. loi (2d quarter 1975): 198,
cited hereafter as Les Provinciaux.

4 Quoted in Isabelle Landy-Houillon, "Bussy-Rabutin et Mme de Sevigne, provinciaux

malgre eux," in Les Provinciaux, 16. 1 have drawn on this fine article for material con-
cerning the two exiles as well as for several remarks on the emergence of the notion of
province.

5 Jean Serroy, "Le Roman comique et Le Roman bourgeois, romans provinciaux ou romans
parisiens.'^ " in Les Provinciaux, 164.
6 Quoted in Landy-Houillon, "Bussy-Rabutin et Mme de Sevigne," 11.

7 See Jean-Pierre Collinet, "Rene le Pays, precieux de province," in Les Provinciaux, 23.
8 "Province — said also of regions remote from the Court or the capital city. // est alle

demeurer en Province. C'est un homme de Province, qui n'a pas Vair du beau monde."
Antoine Furetiere, Dictionnaire universel, 1690. Bear in mind that the notion of
"province" also refers implicitly to ancient Rome, especially in the age of Cicero and
Augustus.

9 See Emelina, "Comique," 198.

ID See Jacques Bailbe, "Quelques ecrivains provinciaux de I'Academie de Caen," in Les
Provinciaux, 30.
 .

592 II. PARIS-PROVINCE

11 On the foregoing, see Fausta Garavini, "Les Gascons contre eux-memes?" in Les
Provinciaux, 1 89 ff.

12 In 1654, Quinault mocked the provincial in L'Amant indiscret. Les Precieuses ridicules

appeared in 1659. In 1662, Raymond Poisson coarsened the parody in Le Baron de la

Crosse. A few years later Moliere depicted Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and La Comtesse
d'Escarbagnas.

13 See Emelina, "Comique," 198.

14 Balzac, deploring the absence of a word to define the Parisian nature, proposed
parisienisme. See "La Femme de province," 5.

1 5 Jean-Louis Vissiere, "Le Provincial chez Dancourt, 1661-1725," vcvLes Provinciaux, 153.

16 For what follows, see ibid., 153, and Robert Mac Bride, "Le Provincial dans la comedie
de Moliere," in Les Provinciaux, 149—152.
17 See Vissiere, "Le Provincial," 155.

18 Daniel Roche, "La Fondation des premieres academies provinciales," in Les

Provinciaux, 134; and the introduction by Robert Mandrou, ibid., 98.

19 Interpretation of Jean-Marie Goulemot, "Pouvoirs et savoirs provinciaux au XVIII^

siecle," Critique, 397—398 (June—July 1980): 603—613.

20 See Garavini, "Les Gascons contre eux-memes.'*" followed by a comment by Philippe

Joutard on p. 195.

21 Serroy, "Le Roman Comique," 167.

22 M ari vaux, La Provinciale ( 1 76 1 )

23 Helene Himelfarb, "Versailles, fonctions et legendes," in Pierre Nora, ed., LesLieux de

memoire, part 2,: La Nation, 2: 235 ff. Concerning the establishment of the court at

Versailles, she writes that there was "no wrenching break — rich with future signifi-

cance and implication —between Versailles and Paris."

24 Mandrou, comment, quoted in Les Provinciaux, 33.

25 Marc Fumaroli, "La Coupole," in Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation, 3:

321—388, and "La Conversation," part 3, Les Frances, vol. 2, Traditions (Paris:

Gallimard, 1992).
26 For a more extensive treatment see my Le Miasme et lajonquille: L 'odorat et I'imaginaire
social, XVIIP-XIX^ siecles (Paris: Aubier, 1982), 60—65, trans, as The Foul and the

Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press: 1986).

27 In 1943, Edouard Estaunie emphasized, in this connection, the importance of the

publication of La Nouvelle Heloise, the fundamental work in a series of provincial
novels whose history he sought to trace in Roman et province (Paris: Robert Laffont,

1943), 55-
28 Even more revealing in this regard is the English case. The vogue for spas and the new
yearning for gardens, seasides, lakes, and mountains are familiar features of England
under the early Hanoverian monarchs, but these cannot be taken as signs of an exalta-

tion of provincial life.

29 Daniel Roche, Le Siecle des lumieres en province: Academies et academiciens provinciaux

(Paris— The Hague: Mouton, 1979).

 II. PARIS-PROVINCE 593

30 Goulemot, "Pouvoirs et savoirs provinciaux," 604.

31 Here I am relying primarily on the very detailed study by Marie- Vic Ozouf-Marignier,
La Formation des departements: La representation du territoire frangais a la fin du XVIIP

siecle (Paris: Editions de I'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1989). See also
the article "Departement" by Mona Ozouf in Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution

frangaise, ed. Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), trans, by
Arthur Goldhammer as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

32 Ozouf-Marignier, La Formation, 302.

33 Ted Margadant, "Urban Crisis, Bourgeois Ambition and Revolutionary Ideology in

Provincial France, 1789-1790" (paper given at the 28th Annual Congress of the
Society for French Historical Studies, 1982).

34 Quoted in Ozouf-Marignier, La Formation, 112.

35 On the evolution of the image of Paris during the Revolution, see the well-docu-
mented article by Raymonde Monnier, on which I have relied heavily: "L'lmage de
Paris de 1789 a 1794: Paris capitale de la Revolution," in L'lmage de la Revolution

frangaise, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989), i: 73—82.

36 Le Moniteur (13 October 1789), 2: 50; quoted in Monnier, "L'lmage," 74.

37 Mona Ozouf, "La Revolution fran9aise et la perception de I'espace national: federa-

tions, federalisme et stereotypes regionaux," in L'Ecole de la France (Paris: Gallimard,

1984), 37-38.

38 Ibid., 38.

39 See the well-documented article by Alan Forrest, "Le Federalisme et I'image de la

Revolution parisienne," in Vovelle, L'lmage, i : 65—72; as well as Ozouf, "La Revolution,"
and the article "Federalisme" in Furet and Ozouf, ed., Dictionnaire critique, 85 ff.

40 Quoted in Ozouf, "La Revolution," 44.

41 Forrest, "Le Federalisme," 70.

42 On the role of Paris and its relations with the rest of revolutionary France, see Michel
Vovelle, ed., Paris et la Revolution (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989).

43 Which did not disappear, however. In 1801, Picard presented La Petite Ville, which
enjoyed success for more than a century.
44 On the contrary; in 1817^^ Nouveau Pourceaugnac by Scribe portrayed the Limousin
Rouffignac. Pineu Duval, however, took his inspiration from Moliere when he created
the character of Vernissac, a landowner with property near Pezeenas, in La Vieille

Tante ou les Collateraux (181 1).

45 Pierre Durand (Eugene Guinot), Physiologie du provincial a. Paris (Paris, 1842), illus-
trated by Gavarni.
46 Vicomte de Launay (pseudonym of Delphine Gay, Mme de Girardin), letter 9, May 1
8,

1844, in Lettres parisiennes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 2: 259 and 264.

47 Especially the "sneak thieves" who robbed "simple-looking" provincials: see Memoires
de Canler (Paris: Mercure de France, 1968), 121.

48 Honore de Balzac, La Muse du departement (Paris: Le Club Fran9ais du Livre, 1963),

9: 50.
594 PARIS-PROVINCE

49 Vicomte de Launay (Delphine Gay), ibid., 265; subsequent quotations are from the
same source.
50 Durand, Physiologie du provincial, 7.

51 Marcel Roncayolo, "Le Paysage du savant," in Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, part 2, La
Nation, i: 487—529; Jean- Yves Guiomar, "Le Tableau de la geographie de la France de
Vidal de La Blache," ibid., 569—599.
52 Jules Michelet, Tableau de la France, 156—157, quoted in Guiomar, "Le Tableau," 575.

53 See Marie-Noelle Bourguet, "Race et folklore: L'image officielle de la France en 1800,"

Annales E.S.C. (July—August 1976): 802—824.

54 Mona Ozouf, "L'Invention de I'ethnographie fran9aise: Le questionnaire de

I'Academie celtique," Annales E.S.C. (March—April 1981): 210—230.

55 See Catherine Bertho, "L'Invention de la Bretagne: Genese sociale d'un stereotype,"

"L'Identite," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 35 (November 1980) and Denise
Delouche, "Les Peintres de la Bretagne avant Gauguin" (thesis, University of Rennes
II, 1978).

56 Jules Janin, "La Ville de Saint-Etienne," Revue de Paris (August 1829): 319—331, esp.

320-321; on this fabrication of imagery, see Jean Lorcin, "La Region de Saint-Etienne
de la grande depression a la second Guerre mondiale" (doctoral thesis, University of
Paris I, 1987).

57 Jean-Francois Soulet, Les Pyrenees au XIX^ siecle (Toulouse: Eche, 1986), i: 13—46.

58 Nicole Mozet, La Ville de province dans VOeuvre de Baliac (CDU-SEDES, 1982). What
follows is greatly indebted to this important work.

59 This, too, occurred in the capital: see the excellent book by Jeannine Guichardet, Baliac

"archeologue " de Paris (Paris: SEDES, 1986), which contains some important observa-
tions on Balzac as "moral archaeologist."
60 A plan set forth in the introduction to Beatrix, the foreword to the Comedie humaine, and

the first few pages of La Recherche de I'Absolu. In Beatrix, for example, Balzac wrote:

"Anyone who wishes to travel as a moral archaeologist and observe men rather than
rocks can find an image of the century of Louis XV in a village of Provence, one of the
century of Louis XIV in the depths of Poitou, and of even earlier centuries in the wilds
of Brittany." In effect, the provinces contained "a number of cities that have been
wholly insulated from the social changes that have given the nineteenth century its phys-
iognomy." Honore de Balzac, ^e'ar/Tx, '\x\.La Comedie humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1976),
2: 637—638.
61 Moztt, La Ville de province, z^.

62 Balzac, La Muse du departement, 46.

63 Mozet, Za Ville de province, 145.

64 Stressed by Balzac, "La Femme de province," 8.

65 Mozet, Za Ville de province, 15.

66 Balzac, La Muse du departement, 48.

67 Theme developed by Michel Butor, "Les Parisiens en Province," Repertoires III (Pans:

Editions de Minuit, 1968), 169 ff.

68 See the definition of the "provincial woman" in Za Muse de departement, 50.

69 Mozet, La Ville de province, 37.

 II. PARIS-PROVINCE 595

70 For example, Eugenie de Guerin or Fanny Odoard. See Rambert George, Chronique
intime d'une famille de notables au XIX^ siecle: Les Odoard de Mercurol (Lyons: Presse
Universitaires de Lyon, 1981).

71 Gabrille Houbre, "Freres et soeurs dans la premiere moitie du XIX^ siecle" (master's

thesis, University of Tours, 1985).

72 Mozet, Za Ville de province, 10.

73 Ibid., 34, n i.

74 Anne Martin-Fugier has shown the importance of these in "La Formation des elites:

Les 'conferences' sous la Restauration et la Monarchic de juillet," Revue d'histoire mod-

erne et contemporaine, 36 (April—June 1989): 211—244.

75 On the important influx of young scholars, see Philippe Aries, Communications, no. 35,
and especially the thesis of Jean-Claude Caron, "La Jeunesse des ecoles a Paris,
1815— 1851" (University of Paris I, 1989), from which I take the following statistics:
Between 181 5 and 1848, Parisian faculties and schools conferred 66 percent of all doc-
torates in letters, 51.72 percent of all bachelor of science degrees, and 70 percent of
pharmacy degrees. Paris was just as dominant in the realm of law. Under the July
Monarchy, nearly two thirds of all law students studied in Paris; 55.4 percent of licen-
tiates were conferred there, along with 58 percent of doctorates. Between 181 5 and
1848, Paris trained rwo thirds of all French doctors. During the July Monarchy, 92 per-
cent of Parisian students were born in the provinces.

76 These feelings were described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables.

77 On the importance of such connections in the first half of the century, see Christophe
Charle, Les Hauts Fonctionnaires en France au XIX^ siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).

78 In Jules Janin, Le Chemin de traverse, which relates the tribulations of the hero, who has
come to Paris to seek his fortune.

79 As Balzac showed in La Muse du departement.

80 Balzac, "La Femme de province," i.

81 Guinot, Physiologic du provincial, 9.

82 Entry "Provincial," in Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX^ siecle. Following Pascal

Ory ("Le Grand Dictionnaire de Pierre Larousse, alphabet de la Republique," in Nora,
LesLieux de memoire, part i, Za Republique, 245), I shall treat the several authors as one
"collective writer."

83 Balzac places great stress on the provincial's reluctance to own up to boredom. The
"provincial woman," he contends, is obsessed with a need to justify her condition: "She
boasts about her rancid nuts and lard and extols her economical mousehole and her
gray life with its monastic odor." See "La Femme de province," 4.

84 La Muse du departement, 46.

85 Durand, Physiologic du provincial, 38.

86 Grand dictionnaire.
87 "Here," notes Balzac, "jokes, like the past six months' rent under the Empire, are
almost always late." See "La Femme de province," 2.

88 VicomtedeLaunay(DelphineGay),letterof December II, 1842, ibid., 2: 157—158, 163,

and of October 12, 1844, 2: 316. My italics.

89 See Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guinot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

 .

1 1 PARIS-PROVINCE

90 On this theme, see the excellent book by Andre-Jean Tudesq, Les Grands Notables en
France {1840—1849), etude historique d'une psychologie sociale, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1964).

91 Taken from Alain Corbin, Archaisme et modernite en Limousin au XIX^ siecle (Paris:

Marcel Riviere, 1975).

92 Worth noting are his wife's efforts not to disparage one of the most provincial small
towns in the kingdom, which became, during the summer when Mme de Girardin came
to visit, "a strange melange of boulders and bankers, lawyers and waterfalls, wolves
and plumed hats, wild boar and lace, flounces and snakes." See Vicomte de Launay
(Delphine Gay), letter 5, November 24, 1838, ibid., i: 345-346.

93 See Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs, vol. 1 1 of Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard,

1964), 106 ff.

94 Historians have not sufficiently emphasized the importance of Parisian mockery of

provincial "reds" in the aftermath of the June Days of 1848. Countless satirical poems,
tales, and plays attacked the saucialistes and clubistes of the provinces. See, for example,
those quoted in Francis Ronsin, "Du divorce et de la separation de corps en France au

XIX^ siecle" (thesis, University of Paris VII, 1988), 2: 442 ff. (especially the one-act
play Un socialiste en province by Louis Dubrel and Le Club champenois by Lefranc and
Labiche); and Jean- Yves Mollier, Michel et Calmann Levy ou la naissance de I'edition

moderne (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1984), 143 ff.

95 A leitmotif in the letters of Delphine Gay, who nevertheless supported the July
Monarchy. See Anne Martin-Fugier, "La Cour et la ville sous la Monarchic de juillet

d'apres les feuilletons mondains," Revue historique, 563 (July— September 1987):
107—133.

96 Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, 108.

97 These words of Jules Janin were widely reported by annoyed Limousin journalists.

98 Mme Lafarge, nee Marie Cappelle,7V/e'/wo/rei (1841; 2d ed. Paris: Michel Levy, 1867), 215.
99 Ibid., p. 220; subsequent quotations may be found on pp. 214, 219, and 222.
100 Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Revolution de 1848 (Paris: Michel Levy, 1870), 304—306.
101 To be sure, "peasantry" and "province" were not the same thing.
102 Ted Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

103 From June 1848 to October 1877 the attitude of la province was shaped by a desire to

defend universal suffrage and the legitimacy of governments based on it. As a result, la

province was frequently wary of, and at times hostile to, the Paris populace.

104 Well described in Howard C. Payne, The Police State of Louis Napoleon (Seattle, 1966).
105 For example, Jean-Pierre Chaline, Les Bourgeois de Rouen (Paris: Presses de la Fondation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982), 161— 190.
106 Jeanne Gaillard, Pam, la Ville, i852—i8yo: L'urhanismeparisiendl'heure d'Haussmann —
Des provinciaux aux Parisiens (Paris: Champion, 1977), 246. The author investigates

how provincials were integrated into Parisian society, emphasizing the importance of

schools, restaurants, and hospitals.

107 See Pascal Ory, Les Expositions universelles de Paris: Panorama raisonne (Paris: Ramsay,
1982).
 II. PARIS-PROVINCE 597

1 08 See Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (New York: Knopf, 1984).

109 Hippolyte Taine, Garnets de voyage: Notes sur la Province, 1863—1865 (Paris: Hachette,

1897), 169—170 and 231.

I ID Late nineteenth century anthropology noted the superiority of the capital. Gustave Le
Bon, for example, began a summary of various observations with the following: "In
the most intelligent races, such as the Parisians.... " See Le Bon, "Recherches
anatomiques sur les lois des variations du volume du cerveau et sur les relations avec
I'intelligence," Revue d'anthropologie, 2d series, vol. 2 (1897), 27—104.
111 Franfois Mauriac, La Province (Paris: Hachette, 1964), 8 and 95.

112 Ibid., 39. In 1943, Edouard Estaunie wrote that la province yields the "leisure of pas-

sion": "En province, unlike Paris, one has time to love and hate."
113 Michel Denis, Les Royalistes de la Mayenne et le monde moderne —XIX—XX^ siecles

(Paris: Klincksieck, 11)77).

114 Rene Bazin, En province (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1896), 153.

115 This and subsequent quotations are from the article "Provincial," Grand Dictionnaire.
116 Ibid. Note the allusion to Carpentras, one of the comical provincial towns of an earlier

period.

117 Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce (Paris: Aubier, 1978), trans, by Alan Sheridan as

JVomen for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after i85o (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1990).
118 Dominique Amrouche-Antoine, "Esperaza, 1870— 1940: Une ville ouvriere chante,"
Ethnologic frangaise, 14, no. 3 (July— September 1984): 234—249.
119 This and subsequent quotations are from the Grand Dictionnaire.
120. See Jean Dubois, Le Vocabulaire politique et social en France de i86c) a i8y2 (Paris:
Larousse, 1962).
121 There was a rebirth of provincial consciousness in French literature in this period, as

scholars have noted for some time now. See, for example, Pierre Moreau, "La Litterature
et le retour a la province," Actes du IV^ Congres international d'histoire litteraire mod-
erne (1948) (Paris: Boivin, 1950), 83-93. The author dates the beginning of this new
consciousness as 184 1, when the series Les Franfaispeints par eux-memeshegan to appear.
The pace accelerated in 1852, when Fortoul and Jean-Jacques Ampere detailed their

plans for studying regional folklore. According to Moreau, the phenomenon culminated
in 1902, when Gustave Lanson proposed a vast program for the study of provincial lit-

erary life in France and inaugurated a series of literary geographies.

122 J. F. Daniel, Historique de la ville de Landerneau et du Leonais (Brest, 1874), ^i-

123 Ibid., 17.

124 The origins of "stir in Landerneau" phrase were explored in a number of articles. See
Jehan Bazin, Landerneau, ancienne capitale de la province de Leon (Brest: Presse Liberale

du Finistere, 1962), esp.130— 131, "Du bruit a Landerneau," which contain a brief bib-
liography of the subject.

125 Bazin, Zczn^/erweatt, 131 and 132.

126 S.v. "Landerneau," Grand Dictionnaire,

598 II. PARIS-PROVINCE

127 See Pierre Barral, Les Agrariens franfais de Meline d Pisani (Paris: Armand Colin,
1968).
128 On the fictional village of the 1950s and 1960s, see Rose-Marie Lagrave, Le Village

romanesque (Le Paradou: Actes-Sud, 1980).

129 A pair of books by Msgr. Edmond Loutil (Pierre L'Ermite), La Fille auxyeux ouverts
(Paris: Bonne Presse, 1946) and Za Fille aux yeux fermes (Paris: Bonne Presse, 1946),
is quite revealing in this regard. The eponymous heroine of the first book understands
Paris to be a place of perdition, whereas maintaining one 's roots in the provinces is

seen as the way to salvation, happiness, and a moral life; the title character of the sec-
ond book naturally confirms the thesis by going to Paris and losing her soul.

130 In the literary realm as well, twentieth-century Paris continued to transcend the
regions and regional styles exemplified by Ernest Perochon, Eugene Le Roy, Louis
Pergaud, Jean de La Varende, Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Andre Chamson, and
Maurice Genevoix; it was Paris that distinguished Jean Giono from this cohort of lesser
writers. Among the authors of the first half of the nineteenth century, Emile Souvestre
deserves further study from this point of view. In 1870 the town library of Landerneau
owned thirty-three of his works, making him by far the best represented author. (The
Landerneau library catalogues are preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale.)

131 Joris-Karl Huysmans, En rade.

132 According to Jocelyne George, "Les Maires dans le departement du Var de 1800 a

1940" (thesis, University of Paris 1, 1987), 601, it was during the i88os, and thus shortly
after the publication of Tartarin de Tarascon, that "a negative, satirical image of the
southern rural mayor began to spread."

133 See Hubert Lussier, "Associations volontaires en milieu populaire: Les compagnies de
sapeurs-pompiers fran5ais au XIX^ siecle" (thesis. University of Paris I, 1985).

134 Odile Roynette, "Les Images du troupier dans la litterature du debut de la \W

Republique" (master's thesis, University of Paris I, 1988).

135 Anne Martin-Fugier, La Place des bonnes: La domesticite feminine a Paris en 1900 (Paris:
Grasset, 1979), 149—156.

136 See Jules Renard's Journal.

137 Daniel Halevy, La Fin des notables (Paris: Grasset, 1930), and Jean Lhomme, La Grande
Bourgeoisie au pouvoir, 1830—1880 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, i960). More
recently, Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime has strongly chal-
lenged the notion of an early collapse of the old elite.

138 Jean Estebe, Les Ministres de la Republique, 18J1—1914 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982), 51-78. The author notes, moreover, that

many of the southern deputies were "humble folks," which allowed the old mockery to
continue. On this, see Alphonse Daudet, Numa Roumestan.

139 See Gilles Le Beguec, "L'Entree au Palais-Bourbon" (doctoral thesis. University of

Paris X-Nanterre, June 1989). In L'Opinion (18 and 25 March 191 1) Maurice Colrat
published an article entitled "La preponderance du Midi: Souillac, capitale de la

France," inL'Opinion (March 18 and 25, 19x1) to which Henri Poincare and Henry Joly
responded.
 12. SAINT-MALO-GENEVA 599

140 Christophe Charle, Les Elites de la Republique, 1880— igoo (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 58—59.
141 See La Vie politique et le personnel parlementaire dans les regions du Centre-Ouest sous la

Iir Republique (Limoges: Souny, 1987). This work was the proceedings of the pre-
liminary session of the colloquium on the deputies of the Third Republic held by the
Centre d'Histoire du XIX^ Siecle of the Universities of Paris I and IV, whose still pre-
liminary findings inspire what follows.

142 Le Beguec, "L'Entree," 475.

143 Charle, Zej 58.

144 From the abundant literature on this subject, see especially Fran^oise Raison-Jourde,
La Colonie auvergnate de Paris au XIX^ siecle (Paris: Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville

de Paris, 1976), and the special issue of Ethnologie frangaise, "Provinciaux et province
a Paris," 10, no. 2 (April— June 1980). See my article, "Les Paysans de Paris," pp.
169—178 in this issue, for more on Limousins in Paris.

145 Gilles Le Beguec, "Caracteres generaux du recrutement parlementaire dans les regions
du Centre-Ouest durant la seconde moitie de la IIF Republique, Groupements de
jeunesse et societes d'originaires," in Za Vie politique et le personnel parlementaire,
43-50.
146 Mauriac, La Province, 86: "Paris is la province become aware of itself."

147 Jacques Fourcade, La Republique de la province: Origine des partis, fresques et silhouettes

(Paris: Grasset, 1936), 123 and 128.

148 Jean Planchais, Les Provinciaux ou la France sans Paris (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), 9.

CHAPTER 12 THE SAINT-MALO GENEVA LINE

1 This essay combines revised versions of two previous articles, "Les Deux France:
Histoire d'une geographie," Cahiers d'histoire, 22 (1978): 393—415, and "Science sociale

et decoupage regional: Note sur deux debats 1820— 1920," Actes de la recherche en sci-

ences sociales, 35 (1980): 27—36.

2 On the correlation of demographic, economic, and anthropological data, see Emmanuel

Le Roy Ladurie, "Un Theoricien du developpement: Adolphe d'Angeville," introduc-
tion to a new edition of E^sai sur la statistique de la population fran^aise, consideree sous

quelques-uns de ses rapports physiques et moraux, by Adolphe d Angeville (The Hague:

'

Mouton, 1969), repr. mLe Territoire de Vhistorien (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 349—392, and
idem,"Nord-Sud," in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation (Paris:

Gallimard, 1986), 2: 117— 140.

3 For two recent discussions of the pertinence of the Saint-Malo— Geneva line to an expla-
nation of developmental inequalities within France, see Bernard Lepetit, "Sur les
denivellations de I'espace economique en France, dans les annees 1830," Annales E.S.C.

(1986), 1243— 1272, and Marcel Roncayolo, "L'Amenagement du territoire XVIIP-XX^

siecle," in Histoire de la France: L'espace frangais, ed. Andre Burguiere and Jacques Revel
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 539—551, "Decouvertes des inegalites geographiques."
4 Adrien Balbi, Essai statistique sur le royaume de Portugal et d'Algarve compare aux autres
etats de I'Europe (Paris, 1822), 2: 134—149 (the table listing numbers of students in each
6oo 12. SAINT-MALO-GENEVA

of the twenty-six academies is on p. 146). I wish to thank Catherine Duprat for point-
ing out the existence of this text and for answering my questions with patience and
knowledge.

5
Dominique Juha and Paul Pressly, "La Population scolaire en 1789: Les extravagances
statistiques du ministre Villemain," AnnaUs E.S.C. (1975): 1516-1561.
6 A. M. Guerry, "Statistique comparee de I'etat de I'instruction et du nombre des
crimes," Revue encyclopedique (August 1832).

7 Konrad Malte-Brun, review of a book by A. Balbi, in Journal des debats (June 17, July

4, and July 21, 1823); the quoted passage occurs in the third part of the review.
8 Charles Dupin, Effets de Venseignement populaire de la lecture, de I'ecriture et de I'arith-

metique, de la geometrie et de la mecanique appliquees aux arts, sur les proprietes de la

France, initial lecture in the regular course in applied geometry and mechanics, deliv-
ered on November 30, 1826, at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers (Paris, 1826), 27.

The map used to illustrate this lecture was reproduced in Force productives et commer-
ciales de la France (Paris, 1827), plate i, repr. by Marie-Madeleine Compere in Roger
Chartier, Marie-Madeleine Compere, and Dominique Julia, L'Education en France du

XVr au XVIirsiecle (Paris: SEDES, 1976), 17.

9 Dupin, Effets de I'enseignement populaire, 28.

10 Ibid., 34-35.

1 1 Edward W. Fox, L'Autre France (Paris: Flammarion, 1973).

12 Stendhal, Vie de Henri Brulard, published in its entirety for the first time by Henry
Debraye (Paris: Champion, 1913), i:. 240—241; text quoted and commented on by
Fran9ois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, "Trois siecles de metissage culturel," Annales
E.S.C. (1977): 500—501.

13 Dupin, Forces, 2: 249—280.

14 See Jean-Claude Perrot, "L'Age d'or de la statistique regionale (an IV-1804)," Annales

historiques de la Revolution frangaise (April— June 1976): 215—276, and Marie-Noelle

Bourguet, Dechiffrer la France: La statistique departementale a Vepoque napoleonienne
(Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1988).

15 J. Peuchet, Statistique elementaire de la France (Paris, 1805), and, with P. Chanlaire,

Description topographique et statistique de la France (Paris, 1810).

16 Jean-Antoine Chaptal, De I'industrie frangaise (Paris, 1819). Here are two examples of
the mode of description used: "Everything was returned to cultivation, and harvests
multiplied tenfold. Examples of this kind can be found in all parts of France" (p. 153);

and "the number of livestock is insufficient everywhere, except for two or three
provinces" (p. 154; my italics).

17 On the tension between the particular and the uniform in prefectural statistics, see
Bourguet, "Passion taxinomique," in Dechiffrer la France, 238—253.
18 Dupin, Forces, 2: i<^i.

19 Ibid., 263.

20 Ibid., 273—274.
21 Ibid., i: I.

22 Ibid., 2: 267.
 1

12. SAINT-MALO-GENEVA 60

23 Ibid., i: I.

24 On this essential document, see Michelle Parrot, "Delinquance et systeme penitentiaire

en France au XIX*^ siecle," Annales E.S.C. (1975): 67—91.
25 The full title of this "broadsheet" (in the strict typographic sense), which sold for six
francs (or eight if glued to canvas), tells us a great deal about both the elements of sta-
tistics and its audience: La Monarchic Frangaise comparee aux principaux Etats du Monde
ou Essai sur la statistique de la France consideree sous les rapports geographiques, moral et

politique, offrant, dans un seul Tableau, le maximum, le minimum et le terme moyen de sa

population, de la nchesse, de I'lndustne, du commerce, de I'lnstruction et de la moralite de

ses habitants, compares a leurs correlatifs dans plusieurs pays de I'Ancien et du Nouveau
Monde; a. I'usage des hommes d'etat, des administrateurs, des hanquiers, des negociants, des

voyageurs, et specialement de MM. les pairs de France et de MM. les deputes (Paris, 1828).

26 A. M. Guerry, Essai sur la statistique morale de la France (Paris, 1833); an excerpt from
this work had been published in the Revue encyclopedique in August 1832.

27 Ibid., 9.

28 Dupin, /brce^, 1:1.

29 Marie- Vic Ozouf-Marignier, La Formation des departements: La representation du terri-

toire frangais a. la fin du XVIIP siecle (Paris: Editions de I'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, 1989).

30 Guerry, Essai sur la statistique morale, 42.

31 Ibid., 47.

32 Benoiston de Chateauneuf, De la colonisation des condamnes (Paris, 1827), 3—4.

33 P. Bigot de Morogues, De la misere des ouvriers et de la marche d suivre poury remedier

(Paris, 1832).

34 Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economic politique chretienne ou recherches sur la nature et les

causes du pauperisme en France et en Europe (Paris, 1834).

35 Bigot de Morogues, De la misere, 120.

36 Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economic politique, 2: 46.

37 Ibid., 10.

38 Ibid., 23.

39 Adolphe d'Angeville, Essai sur la statistique de la population fi-angaisc, consideree sous

quelques-uns de ses rapports physiques et moraux (Bourg-en-Bresse, 1836).

40 Ibid., 15—16.

41 Ibid., 125—126.

42 Ibid., 124.

43 Fran9ois Quesnay, article "Fermiers (Econ. polit.)," January 1756, in Frangois Quesnay
et la physiocratie (Paris, 1958), 2: 428.

44 Ibid., article "Grains," November 1757, 2: 461.

45 De Butre, "Apologie pour la Science Economique sur la distinction entre la grande et

la petite culture centre les critiques de M. de R," Ephemerides du Citoyen (1769), vols.

9, ID, II (here, 10: 8—9). I wish to thank Jean-Claude Perrot for pointing this reference

out to me.

46 Quesnay, "Grains," 2: 461.

6o2 12. SAINT-MALO-GENEVA

47 De Butre, "Apologie," 9: 21.

48 Le Trosne, La Liberie du commerce des grains toujours utile et jamais nuisible (1765),

28—29.

49 De Butre, "Apologie," 9: 21.

50 Ibid., 10: 133—134.

51 Ibid., 10: 78, 88, and 119.

52 Jean-Claude Perrot, Genese d'une ville moderne: Caen au XVIIP siecle (Paris— The

Hague: Mouton, 1975), i: 237—240.

53 De Butre, "Apologie," 10: 80-81.

54 Chaptal, De I'industrie frangaise, 140.

55 Moheau, Recherches et considerations sur la population de la France (Paris, 1778), 67—69.

56 Des Pommelles, Tableau de la population de tomes les provinces de France (Paris, 1789),

55-

57 Messance, Nouvelles recherches sur la population de la France (Lyons, 1788), 43.

58 Ibid., 48.

59 Des Pommelles, Tableau de la population, 56.

60 Messance, Nouvelles recherches, 87.

61 Des Pommelles, Tableau de la population, 63.

62 Moheau, Recherches, 139.

63 Ibid., 191.

64 Ibid., 202.

65 Messance, Nouvelles recherches, 87.

66 J.-J. Expilly, Tableau de la population de la France (Paris, 1780), 28.

67 Ibid.

68 M.o\\eau, Recherches, 11%.

6c) Numa Broc, La Geographic des Philosophes: Geographes et voyageurs frangais au XVIIP
siecle (Paris, 1975), 406—419.
70 E. Beguillet and C. Courtepee, introduction to Description generale particuliere du duche
de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1774— 1785), quoted in Broc, La Geographic, 415.

71 M. Darluc, Histoire naturelle de la Provence (Avignon, 1782-1786), vii, quoted in Broc,

La Geographic, 407.

72 Daniel Roche, Le Siecle des Lumieres en Province: Academies et academiciens provinciaux

{i68o—iy8ci) (Paris— The Hague: Mouton, 1978), ch. 6.

73 Blandine ^dirret-Y^ntgtX, Les Academies de I'histoire (Paris, 1988), 82—94, which extends
the work of M. Lecomte, "Les Benedictins et I'histoire des provinces," Revue Mabillon
(1927-1928).

74 J.-C. Perrot, Genese d'une ville moderne, vol. 2, appendix 28, p. 1028, provides a partial
catalog of the literature on the Vans-province pair, with 21 titles published between 1737
and 1793. See Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturelles de la Revolution frangaise (Paris:

Editions du Seuil, 1990), 220-225, trans, by Lydia Cochrane as The Cultural Origins of
the French Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 199 1).

75 Guexry, Essai, 6^.

 .

12. SAINT-MALO-GENEVA 603

76 The following text, one among many, is taken from Roche, Le Siecle des Lumieres en
Province. It is from a letter by the perpetual secretary of the Academic of Marseilles to

the members of the Academic Fran^aise dated January 12, 1726: "You, Sirs, have
already secured good taste within the heart of the kingdom, and all that remains is to

provide for it on the frontier."

77 Jean-Pierre Peter, "Une Enquete de la Societe royale de medecine (1774-1794):

Malades et maladies a la fin du XVIIP siecle," Annates E.S.C. (1967): 711—751, and J.

C. Perrot, "L'Age d'or de la statistique regionale," 222.

78 J.-C. Perrot, Genese d'une ville moderne, 2: 892, n 168.

79 Albert Demangeon, La Picardie et les regions voisines, Artois-Cambresis-Beauvaisis

(Paris, 1905); Raoul Blanchard, La Flandre: Etude geographique de la plaine flamande en

France, Belgique et Hollande (Lille, 1906); Camille Vallaux, La Basse Bretagne: Etude de
geographic humaine (Paris, 1907); Jules Sion, Les Paysans de la Normandie orientale:
Pays de Caux, Bray, Vexin normand, vallee de la Seine (Paris, 1909).

80 B\ar\c\i^rd, La Flandre, ij

81 Demangeon, 2—3.
82 Stion, Les Paysans de la Normandie orientale, 12.

83 Demangeon, La Picardie, 455-456.

84 Sion, Les Paysans de la Normandie orientale, 12.

85 Blanchard, La Flandre, 117.

86 Fran9ois Simiand in L'Annee sociologique, vol. 11 (1906— 1909): 723—732.

87 Which explains Simiand's praise for Vacher's Le Berry, published in 1908, which stays
within the legitimate domain of geography by confining its attention to "truly" geo-

graphical facts such as the soil model, hydrography, and climate.

88 Maximilien Sorre, Les Pyrenees mediterraneennes: Etude de geographic biologique (Paris,

1913).

89 Lucien Febvre, La Terre et revolution humaine: Introduction geographique a I'histoire

(Paris, 1922; repr. Paris: Albin Michel, 1970), 29.

90 Sorre, Les Pyrenees mediterraneennes, 2.

91 Ibid., 17.

92 Ibid., 12—13.

93 Febvre, La Terre et revolution humaine, 92—93.

94 Lucien Febvre, Philippe II et la Franche-Comte: Etude d'histoire politique, religieuse et

sociale (Paris, 1912; repr. Paris: Flammarion, 1970), 11.

95 Victor Karady, "Durkheim, les sciences sociales et I'Universite: Bilan d'un semi-
echec," Revue frangaise de sociologie, 15 (1976): 267—311, and idem, "Strategies de reus-

site et modes de faire-valoir de la sociologie chez les durkheimiens," Revue frangaise de

sociologie, 20 (1979): 49—82.

96 Karady, "Durkheim," 305.

97 On the relation between the preconstruction of a prejudice and a scientific formula-

tion, see Pierre Bourdieu, "Le Nord et le Midi: Contribution a une analyse de I'effet

Montesquieu," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 35 (1980): 21—25.

 —

6o4 13. GENERATION

CHAPTER 13 GENERATION

1 Here it will suffice to mention only a few key works with extensive bibliographical
notes, starting with the article "Generation" in the Encyclopoedia Universalis by
Philippe Parrot and S. N. Eisenstadt, the latter being the author of the classic From
Generation to Generation (Glencoe, II.: The Free Press, 1956), and Hans Jaeger,
"Generations in History: Reflections on a Controversial Concept," History and Theory,
2 (1978): 273-292, which sheds light on the historiography of the notion. See also Alan
B. Spitzer, "The Historical Problem of Generations," American Historical Review, 78

(December 1973): 1353— 1385, which investigates some implications of the notion and
surveys the abundant American sociological bibliography. Also Claudine Attias-
Donfut, Sociologie des generations (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), and
Pierre Favre, "De la question sociologique des generations et de la difficulte a la

resoudre dans le cas de la France," ch. 8 of Generations et politique, ed. Jean Crete and
Pierre Favre (Paris: Economica, 1989), a revised version of a paper read to the collo-

quium "Generations et changements politiques" at the Universite Laval in Quebec,

June 1984, and his introduction, "Generation: Un concept pour les sciences sociales.'',"
to the round table organized by Annick Percheron at the Paris convention of the
Association Fran^aise de Science Politique, Generation et Politique, October 22—24,

1 98 1 . A bibliography of 277 books and articles was assembled for the occasion. Current
interest in the topic in connection with the history of contemporary France is evident
from the special issue "Les Generations" of Vingtieme siecle, revue d'histoire, 22

(April— June 1989). The use of the notion in psychology, ethnology, economics, and
demographics will be apparent from succeeding notes.
2 Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (London,
1970).

3 In particular, Antoine Prost, "Quoi de neuf sur le mai fran9ais.''" Le Mouvement social,
143 (April—June 1988): 81—89, devoted to "memoirs and histories of 1968," surveys the
topic.

4 Jean-Pierre Rioux, "A propos des celebrations decennales du Mai fran9ais," Vingtieme

siecle, revue d'histoire, 23 (July-September 1989): 49-58, a rich analysis that I follow
closely here.

5 Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Les Annies orphelines {ig68—ic)y8) (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1978).
6 Jacques Paugam, Generation perdue (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977), which contains inter-
views with F. Levy, J. -P. Dolle, C. Jambet, J.-M. Benoist, M. Lebris, J.-E. Hallier, M.
Butel, J.-P. Faye, B. Kouchner, B.-H. Levy, M. Halter, P. Sollers, A. de Gaudemar.
7 During which France was ruled by a rightist coalition government under a Socialist

president trans.
8 Serge July, "La Revolution en creux," Liberation (May 27, 1988).

9 Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Generation, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1987-1988).
ID The comparison is sketched out in Espaces-Temps, no. 38—39, 1988: "Concevoir la

Revolution, 89, 68, confrontations."

 13- GENERATION 605

10 Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris (yijSg—iyg^), ed. Patrice Boussel (Paris:
Union Generale de I'Edition, 1963), 193.

11 As a result, in fact, of renewed interest in the subject of generations: see Jean Nicolas,
"Generation 1789," L'Histoire, 123 (June 1989): 28—34.
12 See Mona Ozouf, article "Fraternite," in Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution frangaise,
ed. Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 731—740; trans, by

Arthur Goldhammer as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and, subsequent to this, Antoine de Baecque,

"La Revolution fran^aise et les ages de la vie," in Age et politique, by Annick Percheron
and Rene Remond (Paris: Economica, 1991), ch. 2, 39—59.

13 Jefferson gave the clearest formulation of the right of generations to determine their
own fate: "The dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own some-
thing." Letter to Samuel Kerchevol, July 1816, Writings (New York: Literary Classics,

1984), 1402. And this: "We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a
right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding

generation more than the inhabitants of another country." Letter to John Wayles
Eppes, June 24, 1813, ibid., 1280. See Patrick Thierry, "De la Revolution americaine a
la Revolution fran9aise," Critique (June—July 1987). Jefferson came to the conclusion
that all laws should be submitted to a fresh vote every nineteen years.
14 What is interesting about this little-known text, taken from a French edition, whose
existence was pointed out to me by Marcel Gauchet, is its awareness of the practical
consequences of the transition from a natural definition of generation to a social and
political one, which "includes all individuals who are more than twenty years old at the

time in question" and which will remain in power for fourteen to twenty-one years,
"that is, until the number of minors coming of age is greater than the number of sur-

vivors of the first class."

15 Text in Marcel Gauchet, La Revolution des droits de Vhomme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989),

328. On p. 193 he also cites a letter written by Condorcet on August 30, 1789, congrat-

ulating Comte Mathieu de Montmorency on having this idea. Montmorency was one
of those political newcomers in whom Condorcet was amazed to discover "a young
man bred for war giving the peaceful rights of man an extent that would have aston-
ished philosophers twenty years ago." Condorcet, Oeuvres, vol. 9.

16 Le Moniteur, 16: 21').

17 See Mona Ozouf, article "Regeneration," Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution

frangaise, 821—831, and idem, L'Homme regenere (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). See also

Antoine de Baecque, "Le Peuple briseur de chaines, fracture historique et mutations de

I'homme dans I'imaginaire politique au debut de la Revolution fran^aise," Revoke et

societe, Actes du IV^ coUoque d'histoire au present, Paris, May 1988 (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, February 1989), i: 211—217; and idem, "L'Homme nou-
veau est arrive: L'image de la regeneration des Fran^ais dans la presse patriotique des

debuts de la Revolution," Dix-huitieme Siecle (1988).

18 Marie-Helene Parinaud, "Membres des assemblees et volontaires nationaux
(1789— 1792): Contribution a I'etude de I'effet de generation dans la Revolution
6o6 13. GENERATION

fran9aise" 2 vols, (thesis, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985; mimeo-
graph).

19 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; repr. New York: Bobbs-
Merril, 1955); Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (2 parts, 1791, 1792; repr. in Common
Sense, the Rights of Man, and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine [N.Y.: New
American Library, 1984]). On the controversy, see Robert B. Dishman, Burke and
Paine, on Revolution and the Rights of Man (New York, 1971), and, more recently,
Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1984; 2d ed., 1988). See also Judith Schlanger,
"Les Debats sur la signification du passe a la fin du XVIIF siecle," in Le
Preromantisme, hypotheque on hypothese?. Colloquium at Clermont-Ferrand, June
29—30, 1972 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975).
20 See in particular "Le Mystere 68," proceedings of a round table organized by Le Dehat,
50 and 51 (May—August and September— October 1988).
21 As Herve Le Bras maintains, for example. See ibid.
22 For example, Didier Anzieu, Les Idees de mai (Paris: Fayard, 1969); Andre Stephane,
L'Univers contestationnaire (Paris: Payot, 1969); Gerard Mendel, La Crise de generations

(Paris: Payot, 1969).

23 Pierre Viansson-Ponte, "La Nouvelle Generation perdue," Le Monde (September 6,

1967; repr. in Couleur du temps qui passe, vol. 2 [Paris: Stock, 1979]), 247. This chroni-
cle inspired the November-December 1976 television programs of Jacques Paugam,
and Viansson-Ponte contributed the preface to Paugam's Generation perdue, a book
with the subtitle "Ceux qui avaient vingt ans en 1968.'' Ceux qui avaient vingt ans a la
fin de la guerre d'Algerie.'' Ou ni les uns ni les autres.'' [Twenty years old in 1968.''

Twenty years old at the end of the Algerian War.'' Or neither.'']: "Let's not quibble

about whether or not you form a generation. That is secondary. But lost you are! Lost
with keys in your pockets: your identity, your credentials, your assurance."
24 Eric Vigne, "Des Generations 68.''" Le Dehat, 51 (September— October 1988): 157— 161.
25 Auguste Comte was the first to reflect on the importance of the rhythm of generational
replacement for the evolution of society and the progress of the human spirit. See his
Cours de philosophic positive (Paris, 1839), vol. 4, 51st lesson.

26 Karl Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations," in Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 278-322, trans, of "Das Problem der
Generationen" in Kolner ViertelJarhrsheftefUr Soiiologie, 1928.
27 Francois Mentre, Les Generations sociales (Paris: Bossard, 1920).
28 Henri Peyre, Les Generations litteraires (Paris: Goivin et Cie, 1948).

29 Julian Marias, El metodo historico de las generaciones (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1949).

30 Yves Renouard, "La Notion de generation en histoire," Revue historique (1953): 1—23,

repr. m Etudes d'histoire medievale, 2 vols. (Paris: Sevpen, 1968).

3 1 Albert Thibaudet, Histoire de la litterature frangaise de lySc) a nos jours (Paris: Stock,

1936). Thibaudet devoted one of his columns to the criticism of Francois Mentre: see
La Nouvelle Revue franfaise (May i, 1921), repr. in Reflexions sur la litterature (Paris:

Gallimard, 1938).
 13- GENERATION 607

32 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour I'histoire ou metier d'historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961),

94.

33 Lucien Febvre, "Generations," Revue de synthese historique (June 1920).

34 See in particular Annie Kriegel's analyses of generations of Communists in Les
Communistes frangais, essai d'ethnographie politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968).
And, most recently, Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-Fran9ois Sirinelli, ed., La Guerre
d'Algerie etles intellectuels frangais, Cahiers de I'lHTP, no. 10 (November 1988).

35 See especially Jean-Francois Sirinelli, Generation intellectuelle: Khdgneux et normaliens

dans I'entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988), and idem, ed., Generations intel-

lectuelles, Cahiers de I'lHTP, no. 6 (November 1987).

36 See, for example, Raoul Girardet, "Remarques perplexes sur le concept de generation
et les virtualites de son bon usage," paper read to the First Congress of the Association
Francaise de Science Politique, October 22—24, 1981, exp. and repr. in "Du concept de
generation a la notion de contemporaneite," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine,

30 (April—June 1983): 257—270; and Jacques Le Goff: "I remain wary of the use of the
notion of generation in history, for what is a generation and when can we speak of
one.''" in Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d'ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 238.

37 See the views of the semiotician Eric Landowski, "Continuite et discontinuite: Vivre la
generation," paper read to First Congress of the Association Frangaise de Science
Politique, October 22—24, 1981, pr- in La Societe reflechie (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1989), 57-73-
38 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, (1927); the quotation is from the French trans, by
Jean-Francois Vezin, Etre et temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 449. The passage is inter-

esting in part because it refers to Wilhelm Dilthey, the first thinker to exploit the idea

historically.

39 See Henri Mendras, La Seconde Revolution frangaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

40 See Herve Le Bras, "LTnterminable Adolescence ou les ruses de la famille," and Andre
Bejin, "De I'adolescence a la post-adolescence, les annees indecises" both part of
"Entrer dans la vie aujourd'hui," Le Debat, 25 (May 1983).

41 See Pierre Nora, "Le Retour de I'evenement," in vol. i of Faire de I'histoire, ed. Jacques
Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).

42 This is the thesis of the important article by Annie Kriegel, "Le Concept politique de
generation: Apogee et declin," Commentaire, 7 (autumn 1979).

43 Paul Yonnet, "Faits de generation, effets de generation," unpublished.

44 Michel Philibert, L'Echelle des ages (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968); Philippe Aries, "Les
Ages de la vie," Contrepoint, i (May 1970): 23—30, and idem, article "Generazioni" in the
Encyclopedia Einaudi; John Gillis, Youth and History (New York, 1974); Kenneth
Keniston, "Youth: A 'New' Stage of Life," American Scholar, 39 (autumn 1970); Rapport
au temps et fosse des generations, proceedings of a colloquium, CNRS/Association des
FED'ages, Gif-sur-Yvette, November 29—30, 1979. Nothing essential will be left out
thanks to the Proceedings of the International Colloquium on the History of Childhood
and Youth, Athens, October 1—5, 1984, Archives historiques de la jeunesse grecque, no. 6
(Athens, 1986), with a substantial bibliography. See also Olivier Galland, Les Jeunes
6o8 13. GENERATION

(Paris: La Decouverte, 1985), and the results of two colloquia held in 1985, the

International Year of Youth: Classes d'age et societes de jeunesse, Le Creusot, May

30—June I, 1985, synopsis in Bulletin de la Societe franfaise d'ethnologie, 12 (1986), and
Proceedings of the Colloquium Les Jeunes et les autres, contribution des sciences de
rhomme a la question des jeunes, Ministere de la Recherche et de la Technologic,
December 9—10, 1985, introduction by Michelle Perrot and Annick Percheron, 2 vols.

(Vaucresson: CRIV, 1986), See also Gerard Mauger, Tableau des recherches sur les jeunes
en France (report PIRTTEM-CNRS, 1988).

45 See Pierre Bourdieu, "La 'jeunesse' n'est qu'un mot," in Questions de sociologie (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1980), 143—154.

46 Robert's dictionary attributes the word to Beranger in 1825, but Fazy, De la geronto-

cratie ou abus de la sagesse des vieillards dans le gouvernement de la France (Paris, 1928),
writes of "this new word, which I have put together out of the language of the
Greeks."

47 Jean- Yves Tadie, "Le Roman de generation," in Le Roman au XX^ siecle (Paris:

Belfond, 1990), 99—102.

48 See Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Economie de lafamille et accumulation patrimoniale

(Paris: Editions Cujas, 1977); Accumulation et repartition des patrimoines. Proceedings
of the International Colloquium of the CNRS, July 5—7, 1978 (Paris: Economica,

1982); Claude Thelot, Tel pere, tel fils? Position sociale et origine familiale (Paris:
Dunod, 1982); and Denis Kessler and Andre Masson, ed.. Cycles de vie et generations

(Paris: Economica, 1985). See also Xavier Gaullier, "La Mutation des ages," Le Debat,
61 (September— October 1990).
49 See in particular Antoine Prost, "Jeunesse et societe dans I'entre-deux-guerres,"
Vingtieme Siecle, revue d'histoire, 13 (January— March 1987): 35—43.
50 The phenomenon was immediately reflected in the work of economists and demogra-
phers: Alfred Sauvy, La Montee des jeunes (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1959); historians:
Philippe Aries, L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous I'Ancien Regime (Paris: Plon, i960);

sociologists: Edgar Morin, Z!£jr/?r/r du temps (Paris: Plon, 1962); "Salut les copains," Le
Monde (July 6—8, 1963); Georges Lapassade, L'Entree dans la vie (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1963). A chronology of "the adventure of ideas" prepared for Le Debat, 50
(May-August 1988), by Anne Simonin and published in expanded book form as Les
Idees en France, 1945— igSS, une chronologic (Paris: Folio-Histoire, 1989), offers a rich

series of convergent landmarks for this period.

51 See Paul Yonnet, "Rock, pop, punk, masques et vertiges du peuple adolescent," and
"L'Esthetique rock," Le Debat, 25 and 40, repr. in Jeux, modes et masses (Paris:
GaUimard, 1986).
52 Witness this note by a historian of the period, Capefigue, in Le Gouvernement de juil-
let, les partis et les hommes politiques, 1830— 1836 (Paris, 1835), i: 22: "It was in 181 8 that

the effect of Germany was first felt in France: bold thoughts of German unity
resounded, and the youth of our schools fraternized with the ardent generation that
Schiller had favored with so many of his plays and which had been organized as a mil-

itary government by mass conscription in 1812 and 1813."

 13- GENERATION

53 On the romantic generation the most important recent book is Alan B. Spitzer, The
French Generation of 1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). The conclu-
sion contains a comparison with contemporary German student movements, in partic-

ular the Burschenschaften, and there is a bibliography (p. 267). Spitzer's judgment indi-
rectly corroborates the temperate views of Henri Brunschwig, La Crise de Vetat

prussien a la fin du XVIIP siecle et la genese de la mentalite romantique (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1947), 104 and 270.

Certain aspects of the generational comparison of the two countries that deserve
systematic treatment can be found in Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensee
frangaise, 18J0—1914 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), which is based on
a generational analysis, and Robert Wo hi, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980), with successive chapters on France and Germany.
Published after this article was written is Jean-Claude Caron, Generations romantiques:
Les etudiants de Paris et le quartier Latin {1814— i85i) (Paris: Armand Colin, 199 1).

54 Augustin Challamel, Souvenirs d'un hugolatre, portrait d'une generation (Paris, 1885):
"For the past twenty years or more orators have been likely to utter these words over
the grave of this or that illustrious personage: 'He belonged to the vibrant, valiant gen-

eration of 1830..'.. No one will deny it: in politics, in literature, in science, in art, the

generation of 1830, including all or nearly all the French alive at that time, has done
splendid work from the beginning of this century and into its second half."

55 Sebastien Charlety, La Monarchie de juillet, vol. 5 of L'Histoire de France contemporaine,

ed. Ernest Lavisse (1921), 47.

56 The formula deserves to be put back in its context: "Three ingredients went to make up
the life that was open to young people at the time: behind them, a past forever destroyed,
still squirming on its ruins, with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them,

the dawn along a vast horizon, the first glimmers of the future; and between those two
worlds. ..something like the ocean that separates the old continent from the young
America, aje ne sais quoi of fluctuation and drift, a stormy sea in which many a ship went
down and across which, in the distance, passed from time to time a white sail or a ship
spewing thick clouds of steam; in a word, the present century, standing between the past
and the future, neither the one nor the other yet resembling both, so that with every step
you never knew whether you were walking on new growth or old debris." Alfred de

Musset, La Confession d'un enfant du siecle. Remember that Musset, who was born in

1 8 10, was ten years younger than most of the romantic generation.
57 Sainte-Beuve, born in 1804, made several attempts to arrange his portraits by genera-
tion. Severe toward his contemporaries, he noted everything that linked him to them
by their twentieth year: "Every literary generation dates from itself.... For the genera-
tion that is twenty today, the melancholy of Olympio will produce the effect of
Lamartine's 'lake.' It takes a good deal of firmness and breadth of mind for judgment
to triumph over such impressions" {Notes etpensees, no. 187). For additional references,
see the short chapter on Sainte-Beuve in Peyre, Les Generations litteraires, 53—58.

58 Theodore Jouffroy, Comment les dogmesfinissent, quoted in S. Charlety, La Restauration,

vol. 4 o( L'Histoire de France contemporaine, ed. Ernest Lavisse, ch. 3, p. 197.
6io 13. GENERATION

59 Theophile Gautier, Histoire du romantisme (Paris, 1872), 11. Recall that Gautier, born
in 181 1, represents, like Musset, the disillusionment of the post-romantics. See Paul

Benichou, Le Sacre de ricrivain (Paris: Jose Corti, 1973), 452—462, and Les Mages
Tomandques (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

60 Alfred de Vigny, Discours de reception d I'Academie franfaise, January 26, 1864, in

Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), i: 968. See Benichou, Sacre, 288 ff.

61 Letter from Lafayette to James Monroe, July 20, 1820, in Gilbert de La Fayette,
Memoires, correspondance et manuscrits du general La Fayette (Paris, 1837— 1838), i:
93,
quoted in Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820, 4.

62 Archives parlementaires, 2d series, 35: 466.

63 Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, 9.

64 See the enlightening article by Louis Mazoyer, "Categories d'age et groupes sociaux,
les jeunes generations fran5aises de 1830," Annates d'histoire economique et sociale, 53

(September 1938): 385-419.

65 Yves Vade, L'Enchantement litteraire: Ecriture et magie de Chateaubriand a Rimbaud
(Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

66 Marcel Gauchet, "Les Lettres sur I'histoire de France d'Augustin Thierry," in Pierre
Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation, i: 266.

67 Delecluze, "De la politesse en 1832," in Le Livre des Cent-un (Paris, no date), 13: 107.

68 Honore de Balzac: "Youth will explode like the boiler of a steam engine," Z. Marcos,
mLa Comedie humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 8: 847.

69 Alfred de Musset, Melanges de litterature et de critique (May 23, 1831).

70 See Edmond Goblot, La Barriere et le niveau, etude sociale sur la bourgeoisie frangaise

moderne (Paris: Alcan, 1925).

71 See the extensive analysis of the Agathon survey in Philippe Beneton, "La Generation
de 1912— 1914: Image, mythe et realite.''" Revue frangaise de science politique, 21 (1971):

981—1009.

72 Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, Jean-Marc Coudray, Mai 1968: La breche (Paris: Fayard,

1968); Laurent Joffrin, Un Coup de jeune, portrait d'une generation morale (Paris:
Grasset, 1987).

73 Michel Winock did just this in a sxabtle reconstitution of the eight intellectual genera-
tions which, in his view, succeeded one another from the Dreyfus Affair to 1968. See
Vingtieme Siecle, revue d'histoire, 22 (April—June 1989): 17—39.

74 Paul Thibaud: "This generation was conformist. It followed the model of the elder
generation and —what is rarer — of the younger." See "Les Decrocheurs," Esprit (July
1985). Claude Nicolet: "We were, in short, a generation abandoned by history." See
Pierre Mendes France ou le metier de Cassandre (Paris: Julliard, 1959), 37. Quoted in

Jean-Pierre Azema, "La Clef generationnelle," Vingtieme Siecle, revue d'histoire, 22

(April-June 1989).

75 Yves Stourdze, in "Autopsie d'une machine a laver, la societe fran9aise face a I'innova-

tion grand public," Le Debat, 17 (December 1981): 15-35, pointed out how reluctant

women were from 1965 to 1970 to buy a machine that would free them from a difficult

but traditional household chore.

 13- GENERATION 6ll

76 S. Hoffmann, ed., In Search of France (pub data???). See in particular the article by
Jesse Pitts.

77 Francois de Closets, Toujours plus! (Paris: Grasset, 1982), and Alain Mine, La Machine
egalitaire (Paris: Grasset, 1987).

78 "La France, terre de commandement," was the title of an article by Michel Crozier in

a special issue of Esprit (December 1957):

79 See Marc Fumaroli, "La Coupole," in Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, part 2, La Nation,
vol. 3.

80 Jean-Paul Sartre, On a toujours raison de se revolter (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974).

81 Charles Peguy, Oeuvres en prose (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 2: 1309. It is significant of the

process of generational remembrance that this — striking — passage should have

reemerged in the work of a Jewish essayist of the 1968 generation, Alain Finkielkraut,

who uses it to begin his reflection on the trial of Lyons Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie: La
Memoire vaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

82 Beneton, "La Generation de 1912— 1914," also shows how the survey results were
biased either by the choice of questions or by the elimination of inconsistent answers
such as that of Emmanuel Berl, A contretemps (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 155. He lists

other surveys, the best known of which, after the Agathon, is Emile Henriot's in Le
Temps (April—June 1912), published in 1913 under the title A quoi revient lesJeunes gens i"

Also published at the same time were Etienne Rey, La Renaissance de Forgueilfrangais,
Gaston Riou, Aux ecoutes de la France, and Ernest Psichari, L'Appel des armes. The
chapter on France in Robert Wohl's The Generation of 1914 relies entirely on such
expressions of opinion, which it takes for coin of the realm.

83 See Marc Dambre, Roger Nimier, hussard du demi-siecle (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 253.
84 Bernard Frank, "Hussards et grognards," Les Temps modernes, repr. in bound edition
(Paris, 1988).

85 A curious illustration can be found in an editorial in the journal Courrier which Armand
Petitjean addressed to the "mobilizable" youths of 1939, reprinted in Combats prelimi-

naires (Paris: Gallimard, 1941). Two examples related to Communist commitments in

the Cold War period: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier P.C.—P.S.U.
1945—1963 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), and Maurice Agulhon, "Vu des coulisses," in
Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 20 ff. And, from a slightly later period, Philippe Robrieux,

Notre generation communiste, 1953— 1968 (^axx^: Robert Laffont, 1977).

86 Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), book 4, ch. i.

87 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1962).
88 See Daniel Milo, "Neutraliser la chronologic: 'Generation' comme paradigme scien-

tifique," ch. 9 of Trahirle temps {Histoire) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1990).
89 The essay by Jean Touchard, "L'Esprit des annees 1930," published in Tendances poli-
tiques dans la vie frangaise depuis IJ89, ed. Guy Michaud (Paris: Hachette, i960),

directly inspired the classic by Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes des

annees 30 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969). The question had been broached as early as

1954 with the publication of Rene Remond's La Droite en France (Paris: Aubier-
6l2 13. GENERATION

Montaigne, 1954), which, with the publication of the 4th ed. in 1982, became Les Droites
en France, of which ch. 10 begins with the question "Is there a French fascism?" The
question has engendered a good deal of commentary since then, including the work of
Zeev Sternhell and the polemic surrounding it.

90 See in particular Pascal Ory, "Comme de Tan quarante: Dix annees de retro-satanas,"
Le Dehat, 16 (November 1981): 109— 117, which includes a useful chronology for the
period 1968—1981.

91 Alexis de Tocqueville, "De I'individualisme dans les pays democratiques," ch. 2 of vol.

2, part 2 of De la democratie en Amerique (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 106.

 INDEX OF NAMES

Note: Illustrations are indicated by an "i" after the page number.

Abetz, Otto, 2ooi Arnauld, Angelique: Apologie pour les

Adams, John: Dissertation on the Canon and religieuses du Saint-Sacrement, 311, 321;

the Feudal Law, 80—82; idea of human reputation, 308

history, 80 Aron, Raymond, 397

Agathon, see Massis, Henry; Tarde, Arouet, Francois Marie (Voltaire), 4

Alfred de Assigny, Troya d,' 326

Alain (writer): Propos, 266 Aussy, Legrand, d,' 40, 44; report on
Allais (artist), 96 French burial sites, 38—39, 41
Amendola, Giorgio, 176
Amiel, Henri: Journal intime, 17 Babut (Protestant commentator), 367
Ampere, Jean-Jacques, 338 Badinter, Robert, 4i6i

Andre-Paul (artist): Long Live France, Bailly, Father Vincent de Paul, 127
Long Live the Marshal, 1851 Balbi, Adrien: Essai statistique sur le

Angeville, Adolphe d': Essai sur la royaume de Portugal et d'Algarve

statistique de la population frangaise, compare aux autres etats de I'Europe,

478-479 468; Monarchie frangaise comparee

Annius of Viterbo, 49 aux principaux etats du monde,
Antin, Mary, 166 La, 473
Anville, d' (historian): historical geogra- Balibar, Etienne, 171

phies, 51 Balzac, Honore de, 439; on Ancien Regime,

Arago, Fran9ois, 43 513; on provincial life, 439, 441; Scenes de
Aragon, Louis: Enfants rouges, 222 la vie de province, 4421

Argenson, d' (policeman, 1790), 311 Barbes (artist): Allegory of 1848, loii
Ariovistus, 65 Barbie, Klaus: arrest and trial, 199

Index compiled by Fred Leise

 1 1

6i4 INDEX OF NAMES

Barres, Maurice, 158-159, 522; Cahiers^ 518; Bodin, 50

Deracines, Les, 383; views of own gener- Boissier, Gaston, 44, 68

ation, 523; views on Drumont, 401 Bonaparte, Charles Louis Napoleon, see
Bayle, Pierre: Calendarium, 369—370 Napoleon III

Bazin, Rene, 452 Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon I

Beauberot, Jean, 366 Bonnet, Jean-Charles, 156

Beau de Lomenie (monarchist publicist), Bonte, Florimond: views on Leon Blum, 383
266 Borde, Father Vivien de la: Temoignage de
Beaumont, Christophe de, 321 la Verite, 317
Bedel, Maurice, 382 Bossuet, Jacques, 4
Belgius (king, Gaul), 50 Boucher (de Crevecoeur) de Perthes,
Belin, Rene, 187 Jacques: Antiquites celtiques et antedeluvi-
Bellini, Vincenzo: Norma, 43 ennes, 40
Beranger, Pierre Jean de, 250 Bouhours, Father Dominique, 428
Beregovoy, Pierre, 4231 Boulainvilliers, Comte de, 22, 51

Bergson, Henri, 396; first lecture at Boulogne, Madeleine: View of the Abbey of
College de France, 399!; memory as cen- Port-Royal des Champs, 3061-307!
tral issue, 1 Bouquier, Gabriel, 136
Berl, Emmanuel: article on terms right and Bourget, Paul: response to Emile

left, 271 Boutroux, 518

Berosus, 49—50 Bourguet, Pierre: on Protestants remem-
Berry, Due de (assassinated February bering ancestors, 367—368

1820), 250, 268i Boutroux, Emile, 518

Berthelot, Marcellin (scientist), 122 Boutry, Philippe, 142
Bertrand, Alexandre, 40, 41 Brasillach: attack on political right, 272
Besoigne, Jerome: histories of Port- Braspart, Michel (Roland Laudenbach), 524

Royal, 322 Braudel, Fernand, xiv; Identite de la

Besse, Father, 1 1 France, ix

Bidault, Georges, 218, 232 Brennus, 48

Bigot de Morogues, P., 476 Brun, Jeanine, 145
Birnbaum, Pierre, 379 Brunetiere (writer), 339
Bituit (king, Arverni), 70 Bruno, G.: Tour de la France par dettx
Blanc, Louis, 102, 332, 450 enfants, ix, 15—16, 121

Blanchard (geographer), 488—489 Buchez: views of Declaration of the Rights

Bloch, Abraham, 396 of Man, 102
Bloch, Gustave, 62 Buisson, Ferdinand, 113
Bloch, Marc, 355, 507 Bulliot: excavations at Mount Beuvray, 61

Blum, Leon: anti-Semitic slurs about, 382, Buonarroti, Michel, 99

383; attacked, 272; Du manage, viewed Burke, Edmund, 79; Reflections, 503
by Gide, 386; president of council of Burrin, Philippe, 181

Popular Front, 271; scapegoat for politi- Bussy-Rabutin (courtier), 428—429, 441
cal anti-Semitism, 407—409; statue by Butre, de (sociologist): divisions of grande

Garel, 378 culture and petite culture, 480—481

 INDEX OF NAMES 615

Caceres, Benigno, 170 Childeric: tomb in Tournai, 34

Cachin, Marcel, 223 Chlodowig, 56

Cadet, Baptiste, 427 Clemenceau, Georges, 128, 260
Cadet, Felix, 342 Clemencet, Dom (Benedictine, 1703— 1758):
Caesar, Julius: Commentaries on the Gallic Art de verfier les dates, -^ly, Histoire de

Wars, 45—46, 48i, 73; embodiment of op- Port-Royal, 312

pression, 71—72; in Vichy propaganda, 30 Clemendot, Gaston: articles against Joan of

Calvin, John: birthplace, 364, 365 Arc, 129
Cambry, J.: book on Celtic monuments, 40 Clermont-Tonnerre (lawyer), 148
Campet, General, 29 Cloots, Anacharsis, 151

Caperan, Canon: L'Invasion laique, 113 Clovis, 52, 53

Capet, Hugh: election, 18, 53 Combes, Emile, 143, 258, 260

Carbonnier, Jean, 368, 372 Commynes (historian), 4

Carne, Marcel: Jour se leve, Ze, 237 Conde, Louis II, Prince de, 301
Carnot, Lazare Nicolas Marquerite, 451 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicholas
Carre, Irenee, 342 de Caritat, Marquis de, 136
Cassagnac (Bonapartist), 255 Constant, Benjamin, 95, 195; on politics,
Cassin, Rene: ashes transferred to 252; on youth, 513

Pantheon, 4i8i; views of Gregoire, 411 Conte, Louise, 34oi

Caylus (historian), 39, 51; on Gallic arti- Conti, Prince de (grand prior of
facts, 34—36; promotes Gallo-Roman Malta), 328

museum, 42; Recueil d'antiquites, 34, 37i Corbin, Alain, 472

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 386 Coudrette, Abbe, 322
Cerveau (historian): Supplement au Courier, Paul-Louis, 251
Necrologe, 324—326 Cousin, Victor, 339
Chabot (politician?), 245 Cremieux, Adolphe, 389, 393—396, 395i
Chalandon, Albin, 157, 159 Crevecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean de, 145
Chamberlayne, Edouard: Estat present de Cross, Gary, 146
I'Angleterre, L, '242

Chambord, Henri, comte de, 118 Dalou, Jules: Triomphe de la Republique, 258
Champaigne, Philippe de: Mother Angelique Dambians (artist), i65i

Arnauld, 300 Dancourt, Florent: Eaux de Bourbon, 430

Chaptal, Jean-Antoine, 471, 481 Daniel, J. F., 457
Charle, Christophe, 460 Daniel-Rops (Catholic historian), 373
Charlemagne, 52, 64 Darlan, Jean Louis Xavier Fran9ois, 187
Chartier, Roger, 467 Darmesteter, James, 392
Chateaubriand, Fran9ois August Rene, Darnand, Joseph, 29
Vicomte de: changed age, 502; Memoires Daumier, Honore: Exposition Universelle,

d'outre-tombe, 17, 238 The, 449i

Chauvin, Nicolas: as lieu de memoire, xiii David, (Jacques) Louis: Triumph of the
Chenier, Marie Joseph: Charles IX, 131 French People,
Chevalier de Jerusalem, see Le Paige, Debray, Regis: A demain de Gaulle, 213
Louis-Adrien Decazes, Elie, 249, 250
6i6 INDEX OF NAMES

Dechelette: excavations at Mount Duclos, Jacques: candidacy for president,

Beuvray, 6i 237
de Gaulle, Charles, 17, 18, 182; appeal, Du Fosse (Jansenist theologian), 318

208; burial site, 19; centenary of birth, Duguet (Jansenist theologian), 316

205; changing interpretations, 209—211, Dumas, Mathieu, 245

214; condemned Six-Day War, 419; Dumezil, Georges, 28, 45

country home, 225; effects on France, Dumont (engraver), iigi

529; escape to England, 188; Fil de Dumont, Louis, 288, 293

I'epee, Le, 231; historical doubleness, Dupin, Charles: Forces productives et com-
224; Memoires de guerre, iiy, modes of merciales de la France, 470; Saint-Malo-

operating, 229—230; nature of genius, Geneva line, 466i, 469; significance of

219—220; personage transformed, 213; popular education, 470; tripartite divi-

provides papers to Archives Nationales, sion of French territory, 475; views of

228; return to power, 197; as sovereign, northern and southern France, 471—472

234—235; speech at Hotel de Ville (1944), Duquesnoy (political diarist), 243, 245

218; two funerals, 210; values, 198; f'irs Durand, Marie: commemorations of, 362
I'armee de metier, 231 Durand, Pierre, see Guinot, Eugene
Dehaussy, Helene, 327i Durkheim, Emile: image, 397; on political

Delacroix (Ferdinand Victor) Eugene, 32 traditions, 148—149, 169; see also

Delecluze (historian), 516 Durkheimian sociology in Subject Index

Demangeon (geographer), 489 Duval, Alexandre Pineu: Heritiers, Les, 427
Deschanel (politician), 4541 Duval, Paul-Marie, 45
Desjardins, E.: historical geography, 61 Duval, Raoul, 255, 256

Desjardins, Paul: Union pour I'Action Duvergier de Hauranne, Jean (Abbe de

Morale (1892), 342 Saint-Cyran), 248, 303, 304
Deslandes, 36—38
Desmoulins, Camille: report on National Eckmann-Chatrian (politician), 118

Assembly, 244; Revolutions de France et Ellenstein: polemics in Le Monde, 211

de Brabant, 131 Esquiros (historian?), 102

Des Pommelles (demographer), 482, 483 Estebe, Jean, 459

Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 142 Etemare, Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne de

Diderot (writer): La Religieuse, 124 Menilles, d,' 316; battle against

Dreyfus, Alfred: rehabilitation, 417; see also Unigenitus, 313

Dreyfus Affair in Subject Index Expilly (demographer), 484

Dreyfus, Camille, 389—390

Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre: Gilles, 383 Fabius, Laurent, 382; viewed by Le Pen,
Drouineau, Gustave: Renest ou le Travers 387
du siecle, 444 Fallieres (politician), 454!

Drumont, Edouard: anti-Semitic propa- Fauchet, Claude, 50

ganda, 400—401; caricature mLe Grelot, Favre, Madame, 124
4o8i; views on Jews, 382 Febvre, Lucien: on generations, 507;
Dubos, Abbe, 53-54 methodology, 493—494
 1

INDEX OF NAMES 617

Felice, Gaston de: Histoire des protestants de Gauville, Baron de, 244

France, ^6c) Gaverni: illustrations for Physiologie du

Ferry, Jules, 95, 120, 256 provincial . . . Paris, 4331

Flaubert, Gustave, 104 Gavras, Costa: Aveu, L, '238!

Fleury (minister, eighteenth century), 317 Gay, Delphine (Mme. de Girardin):
Fleury, Aimoin de: Historia Francorum, 47 description of provincials, 439, 446

Fliche and Martin: Histoire religieuse, 373 Gazaignes, Abbe Jean-Antoine (Philibert),

Fontaine (Sacy's secretary), 318, 319 323

Foucault, Nicolas-Joseph, 34 Gazier, Augustin: "Souvenirs," 341

Fourcase, Jacques, 462 George III (king, England), 81

Fournigault, Charles: Declaration of the Germanus, Saint, 46
Rights of Man and the Citiien, 78 Gernanos, Georges, 385
Fourquevaux, Abbe de: Catechisme his- Ghilini, Hector, 383

torique et dogmatique, ^16 Giai, Fernand and Andre, i62i

Foy, General (liberal deputy, Restoration), Giai, Seraphin, i6ii

142 Gide, Andre: views on Leon Blum, 386

Francus (king, Gaul): portrayed in tapes- Gignoux (artist): drawing for Ze Pelerin,

try, 491, 50 1231

Frappie, Leon: L'Institutrice de province, 124 Gillet, Sophie and Rachel, 341
Frescheville, General de, 257 Girard, Alain: survey of immigrant work-
Freteau (president of Assembly), 147—148 ers, 168, i7ii, 172
Freud, Sigmund: memory as central issue, 1 Giraudoux, Jean, 385
Friedmann, Georges, 417 Giscard d'Estaing, Rene: document in
Froissart, Jean, 4 Vichy cenotaph, 29
Furet, Francois, 79, 232 Giscard d'Estaing, Valery, 16, 208; on
Furetiere, Antoine: Roman bourgeois, 432 importance of political center, 284; pres-

Fustel de Coulanges (historian), 63—67 idency as Ancien Regime, 106

Glazer, Nathan, 145—146

Gaguin, Robert: translation of Fait des Goguel, Francois, 214, 260, 287
Romains, 46 Goldman, Pierre, 384

Gaidoz, Henri: founded Revue celtique, 61 Goujet, Abbe: Memoires pour servir . . . I'his-

Galathes (king, Gaul), 50 toire de Port-Royal (1734), 319

Galileo, 123 Gounod, Charles: Gallia, 43

Gallo, Max, 209 Grandjouan (writer, artist), 109, no;

Gambetta, Leon, 95, 223, 395; chairman of Always Idols, iioi; Secular Virtues, 1231

budget committee (1877), 255; on cleri- Gregoire, Abbe Henri-Baptiste, 331, 335;

calism, 117; definition of political left, 254 archives in Port-Royal des Champs,
Garel, Philippe: Leon Blum, 378 302; Les Ruines de Port-Royal, 334;
Gauchet, Marcel, 241, 515 Motion in favor of the Jews, 394i;

Gaudissart (fictional flimflam artist), 4421 views on Jews, 387, 389; won election

Gautier, Theophile: Histoire du (1819), 250

romantisme, 512 Grunebaum-Ballin, Paul, 413
 . . 1

6i8 INDEX OF NAMES

Guerry (lawyer): criminal geography, Jaures, Jean, 113, 133; anti-Semitism, 403;

473-476 on election of 1893, 258; republican view

Guilbert (historian, 1697— 1759), 3^^~3^3 of Jansenism, 332
Guinot, Eugene (Pierre Durand): illustra- Joan of Arc, 129
tions for Physiologic du provincial . . Joffrin, Laurent: analysis of student riots

Paris, 433i; Physiologic du provincial . .

(1986), 518
Paris, 439; views on provincials, 445 Joncoux, Franfoise-Marguerite de, 312
Guizot, Fran9ois Pierre Guillaume, 102, Jouffroy, Theodore: manifesto of romantic

104; historical interpretations, 96, 251; generation, 512

kinship with English values, 97; need to Jouhandeau, Marcel, 382

end the Revolution, 95; views of Franks Jouhaux, Leon, 236
and Gauls, 56, 60, 65 Joutard, Philippe, 353; on oral history, 9; on
people of Marseilles, 432
Halevy, Elie: on divisions of extreme left, Jubainville, Arbois de: teaching post, 62

294 Jullian, Camille: Histoire de la Gaule, 61;

Hamon, Herve: Generation, 500 inaugural lecture, 62; influences on, 63;
Hansi (artist): My Village, 1761 views of Gaul, 70-72
Hartz, Louis, 82 July, Serge, 500
Helias, Pierre-Jakez: Le Cheval d'orgueil, 16

Henry, Hubert Joseph, 407 Kanters, Robert: Vingt arts en igSi, 524

Hercules of Libya (king, Gaul), 50 Kaplan, Rabbi, 41 6i

Heri (Benedictine), 46 Karady, Victor, 494, 495
Herriot, Edouard, 112 Kepel, Gilles, 115

Hitler, Adolph: meets Petain, 189 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich: report to

Hoffman, Inge, 214 the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet

Hoffman, Stanley, 183, 214 Communist Party, 2n

Honorius, 63 Kriegel, Annie: Ce que j'aicru comprendre,

Horthemels, Magdeleine: engravings of 224; reevaluation of Communist party,

Port-Royal, 3 14i, 315; View of the Abbey 216

of Port-Royal des Champs, 3o6i-307i Kuhn, Thomas: paradigms, 526

Hotman, Fran9ois, 50
Hughes, Edmond: at assembly of 191 8, 374 Labrousse, Elisabeth, 369
Hughes, Pierre-Edmond, 371 La Bruyere, Jean de, 43

Hugo, Victor: death, 125; funeral, 451; Lacretelle, Jacques de, 386

Hugolatry, no; pastiche in Semaines Lacroix: Vercingetorix, 32

religieuses, 126 Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch

Hugues, Edmond, 361, 362, 370; father, 371 Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de, 513

Huysmans, Charles Marie Georges: image La Gorce, Agnes de: Camisards et dragons

of la province, 458 du Roi, 373

Lamennais, Felicite Robert de, 122
Jansenius, Cornelis, 303, 304; Mars Lancelot (Jansenist teacher), 318
Gallicus, 304, 335 Langelot (artist): Jesus the Montagnard, loii
Japhet: as father of Europeans, 49 Langlois, Claude, 109
 INDEX OF NAMES 619

Lansmann, Claude: Shoah, 417 Loubet, Emile, 451, 4511

La Popeliniere, 4 Louis, Saint: idea of equality under

Laporte, Roland, 353 monarch, 64

La Revelliere-Lepeaux, L.-M., 247 Louis Philippe, 98
Larousse, Pierre: Grand Dictionnaire, 445 Louis XIV: conflict with Port-Royal des
Latour, Antoine: Esquisses historiques, 338 Champs, 301, 305, 312; viewed by
La Tour d'Auvergne Corret, 55 Quinet, 373
Laudenbach, Roland (Michel Braspart), 524 Louis XVI, 98
Laumonier, Jean, 158 Louis XVIII, 248
Lavabre, Marie-Claire, 217 Lugdus (king, Gaul), 50

Laval, Pierre, 183, 186, 189 Luminais, Evariste: Gallic Lookouts, yj'v,

Lavallee, Theophile, 57 paintings of Gauls, 32

Lavau, Georges, 216 Lustiger, Archbishop (later Cardinal):

Lavisse, Ernest, 4; Histoire de France^ xi, 17; attended UNESCO ceremony, 374; on
type of history, xv history of religious education, 115;

Leautaud, Paul, 521 Jewish origin, 171

Le Chapelier: views on private versus pub- Luzarche, Robert de, 301
lic interests, 244
Lefort, Claude, 289 MacFarland (American pastor), 374—375
Legros, Nicholas: Renversement des libertes Maffei, S., 34, 42
gallicanes (1716), 318 Maintenon, Frangoise d'Aubigne, Marquise
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von: paper de, 223

memory, 8 Malavy (radical): speech in favor of Cartel

Lemaire de Beiges, Jean: Illustrations de la des Gauches (1923), 254
Gaule et les singularite^ de Troye, Les, 50 Malle, Louis: Lacombe Lucien, 199
Le Mouel (artist): poster for Exposition of Malouet (member of National Assembly),
Bretons of Paris, 46 li 243
Lenoir, Albert, 42—43 Malraux, Andre, 205, 227; Chines qu'on
Leo XIII (pope), 127 abat, 210; speech at the Vel' d'Hiv, 233

Le Paige, Louis-Adrien, 326—331, 327i; on Malte-Brun, Konrad, 459—470

government stalemate, 331—332; history Mandel, Georges, 396
of Jesuits, 322; library, 302 Manetho (ancient historian), 49
Lepecq de La Cloture (demographer), 486 Mannheim, Karl, 505

Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 157, 199, 201; anti- Marat, Jean Paul, 437
Semitic views, 386—387 Marchais, Georges, 217
Le Petit, Alfred: Two Republics, i03i Margadant, Ted, 435, 450
Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole, 385 Margossian, Khoren, 166
Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 152 Marias, Julian, 505
Levi-Strauss, Claude: image, 397 Martel, Charles: government under rule

Levy, Moise: letter to Petain, 413 of, 52

London, Artur: Aveu, Z, '211, 216, 238i Martignac, 252

Longueville, Duchesse de, 301 Martin, Henri: comments on value of his-

Lordereau (artist): Throne Burned, looi tory, 57; Histoire de France, 32, 39;
620 INDEX OF NAMES

reports on visit to British Museum, 43; of Declaration of the Rights of Man, 102;
republican view of Jansenism, 332; view of French history, 63—65; view of
views of French origins, 62—63 Revocation of Edict of Nantes, 372
Martin, Dom Jacques, 36, 51 Mignet (historian), 96, 100, 102

Martinez, Antoine, 160 Millon, Charles, 423i

Marty, Andre, 383 Milza, Pierre, 160

Marx, Karl, 106; on Napoleon III, 450 Mirabeau, Honore Gabriel Riqueti, Comte
Masse, Pierre, 411 de, 242, 243

Massis, Henri (Agathon): survey, 524; Mitterrand, Fran9ois, 530; adversary of de

"Young People of Today, The," 518 Gaulle, 208—209, 235; participated in

Mathiez, Albert, 134, 150—152 UNESCO ceremony, 374, 376; Savary

Mauco, Georges, 159 Law, 114; Socialist Party, 106
Maulnier, Thierry, 272 Moch, Jules, 396
Maultrot (Jansenist theologian, Modiano, Patrick: La Place de I'Etoile, 219
1714-1803), 332 Moheau (demographer), 481, 483, 484
Maupassant, (Henri Rene Albert) Guy de: Moliere: portrayals of provincials, 429;

image of la province^ 458 Tartuffe, 431

Mauriac, Claude: Aimer de Gaulle, 213 Monod, Adolphe, 357

Mauriac, Francois: De Gaulle, 229; editorial Monod, Gabriel, 5

in Figaro, 524; views on anti-Semitism, Montand, Yves, 238i

385; views on provinces, 452, 462 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat,
Maurin (artist): lithograph of provisional Baron de la Brede et de: criticism of
government (1848), 3951 Dubos, 55

Mauroy, Pierre, 114 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 36, 39

Maurras, Charles, 184, 187, 397; separation Montgeron, Carre de, 330

from royalists, 279; Vichy regime as tri- Montgolfier (politician in Tournon), 257
umph, 193; views of Drumont, 401; Montherlant, Henry de, 343; Port-Royal,
views on communities, 265 34oi

Maury, Abbe, 150 Montlosier, F.-D. de Reynaud, Comte de,

Maxence, Jean-Pierre, 272 56, 142, 251

Mead, Margaret, 499 Moran, Georges: Drancy, 4141

Meaulle (artist): Degradation, The, 4051 Moreau, Macob-Nicolas: Souvenirs, 331
Mehaignerie, Pierre, 423i Morin, Edgar, 253, 518
Mendes France, Pierre, 382, 398 Mornet (prosecutor at Petain trial), 196
Mendras, Henri, 229 Mosco (writer): Memoires d'ex, Les, 224
Mentre, Francois, 505 Motte, Henri: Cutting Mistletoe, 351

Merimee, Prosper, 441 Moulin, Jean, 219

Messance (demographer), 482 Mounier, Emmanuel: views on Jews, 385
Michelet, Jules, 238; course on Jesuits (1843), Mozet, Nicole, 441

341; Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, Musset, Alfred de, 512

137; Precix d'histoire moderne, 17; republi-

can view of Jansenism, 332; Tableau de la Napoleon I: career, 502; Civil Code,
France, 439—440; type of history, xv; view 390—391; God and the Head of the Church
 1

INDEX OF NAMES 621

Protect Napoleon^ 132!; ratification of Peree (artist): Rights of Man, n,oi

Concordat, 334 Perrot, Michelle, 152

Napoleon III: government reforms, 447; Peschanski, Denis, 217

interest in Gauls, 44; Jansenism under, Petain, Marshal Henri Philippe, 23;

337; patronage, 61; visit to Rothschild attempt to revive National Assembly,

estate, 39 5i 186; background, 188; compared with
Naquet, Alfred, 402i Vercingetorix, 29, 30; concern with
Nicole, Pierre, 302 reform, 193—194; how perceived,
Nicolet, Claude, 120 189—190; letters from Jews, 410—413;
Nivelle (historian): Recueil general des philosophy of man and society, 193;

actes d'appel interjettes aufutur Concile quoted in card game, 202i; relationship
general, 326 with Catholic Church, 187
Nodier, Tayler, and Cailleux: Voyages Peuchet, J., 471
romantiques dans Vancienne France: La Peyre, Henri, 505
Bretagne, 4261 Peyrefitte, Alain: Maifranfais, Le, 373
Nora, Pierre, 205 Pezron, Father, 50—51
Philibert (Gazaigns, Abbe Jean-Antoine),
Ory, Pascal, 219 323
Ozouf, Marie- Vic, 435 Picard (author): Provinciaux . . . Paris, Les,

438
Paine, Thomas: basis of political thought, Picot, Jean, 56

89; Common Sense, 80; condemnation of Piou, Jacques, 255, 259, 262
English constitution, 82; First Principles Pius VI (pope), 133

of Government, The, 501; imprisoned, Pius VII (pope): ratification of

151; on rights of generations, 503 Concordat, 334

Paris, Frangois de, 336i Planchais, Jean: notion of province, 463

Paris, Jean-Amable, 302, 3121 Plantu (cartoonist), 176

Park, Robert, 167 Pluyette, Jean, 159

Pascal, Blaise: increased attention to, Poincare, Jules Henri: Journal, 17

342-343 Poisson, Raymond: Apres-souper des

Pasquier, Etienne: Recherches de la France, auberges, Z, ' 43
17 Pomian, Krzysztof, 27
Pasteur, Louis, 123 Pompidou, Georges, 208, 235
Patrioty (artist): Republic That Decent Ponty, Janine, 163, 167
People Do Not Want, loy Poquelin, Jean Baptiste: see Moliere
Patterson, Caroline, 355 Portalis (writer), 137

Paxton, Robert: Vichy France, 219 Posidonius, 58

Pecaut, Felix, 342, 357 Poujade, Pierre, 379
Peguy, Charles: opened Cahiers de la quin- Poujol, Jacques: "Fiers enfants des

laine to Jews, 396; views of own genera- Cevannes, Les," 375

tion, 522—523 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph: Confessions d'un
Pelloutier, Simon, 51,55 revolutionnaire, 253; on natural division
Pepin: status of Franks under, 52 of humanity, 287
622 INDEX OF NAMES

Proust, Marcel: description of lost love, 20; Roland de La Platiere, Jean, 89

memory as central issue, 11; views of Rolland, Romain: anti-Semitic views in

Barres, 401 Jean-Christophe, 385, 386
Puaux, Frank, 361, 368, 370—371 Rothschilds: denounced, 383; Visit of

Napoleon III to the Rothschild Estate at

Quesnay (sociologist): Physiocrat theory Ferrieres, 3951

of space, 479—480, 481 Rotman, Patrick: Generation, 500

Quesnel, Pasquier: Nouveau Testament en Roubille (writer, artist), 109; Choose, You're

franfais avec de reflexions morales, 308, Free, iioi

311, 315; views on Port-Royal nuns, 314 Roudy, Yvette, 4231

Quicherat, Jules, 43, 61, 63 Rougeron Vignerot: Promised Land, iO') \

Quincy, Quatremere de, 42 Rouquette, Abbe, 373

Quinet, Edgar, 93, 103; on Jesuits, 341; Rousseau, Jean Jacques: critique of liberal-

Revolution, La, 373 ism, 95—96; Emile, 501; on social con-

tract in society, 79; view on man versus

Rabaut Saint-Etienne, 135, 147 citizen, 150

Racine, Jean Baptiste: life in Uzes, 429 Rousso, Henry, 196, 198
Raffin: Gaul Invaded: The Franks, 591 Roy, Claude, 224
Rashi of Troyes (rabbi), 381 Rushdie, Salman: Satanic Verses, 14 li
Read, Charles, 357, 364, 367
Reinach, Joseph, 402i Saillens, Ruben, 359, 367
Reinach, Salomon, 68 Saint-Chamans, Vicomte de (pamphle-
Remond, Rene, 278 teer), 252

Remus (king, Gaul): portrayed in tapestry, Saint-Cyran, Abbe de: see Duvergier de
49i, 50 Hauranne, Jean
Renan, Ernest, 194 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin: on
Renouard, Yves, 505, 506 Angelique Arnauld, 308; defined secu-
Resnais, Alain: Night and Fog, 417 larism, 116— 117; interpretation of Port-

Restif de La Bretonne, Nicolas, 501 Royal des Champs, 302-303, 338—339;

Retat, Pierre, 244 Port-Royal, 339
Reybaud, L.: Jerome Paturot ...la recherche Saint-Jean, Angelique de (founder of Port-

d'une position sociale, 4421 Royal de Paris convent), 304, 305; death
Richelieu, Armand Jean de Plessis, Due de: mask, 3ioi; Relation de captivite, 311;

opposed by Duvergier de Hauranne, unpublished texts, 314

303, 304; Testament, 17 Saint-Jean, Angelique de (niece), 305,

Rioux, Jean-Pierre, 213 309, 311
Rivet de la Grange: Necrologe de Port- Salvador, Joseph, 392
Royal, 312, 315, 317 Samothes (king, Gaul), 50
Robespierre, Maximilien Fran9ois Marie Sarcey, Francisque, 124

Isidore: established cult of the Supreme Sarre, Georges, 423i

Being, 135; viewed as having double Sartre, Jean-Paul: funeral, 19; Reflexions sur

meaning, 530 la question jutve, 419

Robien, President, de, 34, 36 Sauvage (artist), 1321
 1

INDEX OF NAMES 623

Sauvagere, La, 36, 38 Target (secretary of Constitutional

Schrameck, Abraham, 396 Committee, 1789), 436
Schumann, Maurice, 29 Themericourt, Marie-Scholastique Le
Schwarz-Bart, Andre: Dernier desjustes, Sesne de, 312—313
Le, 419 Thibaudeau, A. C, 246
Serre, de (poHtician), 249 Thibaudet, Albert, 266, 506, 513
Sevigne, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Thierry, Amedee, 55—61, 102; Histoire
Marquise de, 301, 429, 441 des Gaulois, 57—58, 61; historical inter-

Siegfried, Andre, 258, 355 pretations, 251; views of French history,

Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph, 55, 85, 247 62—6y, views of French race, 58—59;

Signoret, Simone: views on remembering views of Roman conquest of Gaul,

past, 166 60, 67
Sigovese, 55 Thierry, Augustin, 22; Lettres sur I'histoire

Simiand, Francois, 490—491, 492 de France, 17, 515; views of direction in

Simon, Louis: Long Live France, Long Live history, 56—57

the Marshal, i85i Thiers, (Louis) Adolphe, 95

Sion, Jules, 489 Thorez, Maurice, 270; on contrast of

Sismondi, J. C. L. Simonde de, 62 Cartel des Gauches and Popular Front,
Sitruk, Grand Rabbi, 423i 271; definition of Gaullism, 227; histori-

Soisson, Jean-Pierre, 423! cal materials, 215; imaginary biography,

Sorre, Maximilien: Pyrenees 228; language of gesture, 223; personal-
Mediterraneennes, Les, 492 ity, 216; revised editions of works, 228;

Soufflot, Jacques Germain: Sacre-Coeur, 125 Stalinism, 211; views on Leon Blum, 383
Soury, Jules, 158 Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Maurice
Stalin, Joseph: crimes, 21 Clerel de, 80, 85-86, 93; on age, 527; on
Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 252; descrip- peoples' origins, 145; remarks about

tion of Salon of 1824, 251; recognized Jews, 393

geographic divisions, 470; Vie de Henry Tournus, Firmin-Louis, 336i
Brulard, 17 Toutain (historian): excavations at Alesia,

Sternhell (historian?), 273 72

Stoetzel, Jean: survey of immigrant work- Trial, Rev., 369

ers, 168, i7ii, 172 Tronchay, Michel: Histoire abregee de Vah-

Strack (artist): Atheism Tries, i38i; Magic baye de Port-Royal, 314—315
Lantern, 1381 Turabian, Arnam, 164
Sue, Eugene, 382 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 84
Sully, 17

Sygarius, 53 Usseglio-Giais (family), i62i

Tackett, Timothy, 138 Vacher de Lapouge, Georges, 158

Taine, Hippolyte, 451 Vaillant (politician, 1907), 261

Talma, Joseph, 131 Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 226, 232, 383

Tarde, Alfred de (Agathon): survey, 524; Valentinian III, 53

"Young People of Today, The," 518 Valere, Simone, 34oi

624 INDEX OF NAMES

Valery, Paul, 521; on political right and Villeneuve-Bargemont (sociologist), 476,

left, 292 477
Valery Muller (artist), 1191 Vincelle, Grivaud de la, 41—42
Vallat, Xavier, 411 Vincent, Rene: Philosophy Lesson Amid
Vallatton, Felix: Cafe, or the Provincial, Flowers, 3991

The, 456 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), 4

Valois, Adrien de, 51

Valois, Georges: Fascisme, La, 273 Wace: Roman de Brut, 47

Vercingetorix: cult of, 68; described by Waldeck-Rousseau, Pierre, 4541
Amedee Thierry, 60; monument of 1901, Waldeck-Rousseau, Rene: delegation des

29; myth of, 194; statues, 43, 66; supreme gauches, 261; government embroiled in

commander of Gauls, 71 religious issues, 260

Veyron (artist): Parisian in the Provinces, Weil, Simone, 236

4491 Wormser, Georges, 410

Vidal de La Blache, Paul, xv, 492; Tableau
de la geographie de la France, xii, 69; Yates, Francis: The Art of Memory, vii

views on regions, 488; see also Vidalian Yerushalmi, Josef, 381

geographers in Subject Index Yonnet, Paul, 509
Vigny, Alfred de, 513
Viguie (pastor), 358 Zeuss: Grammatica celtica, 45

Villefosse, Heron de, 61—62 Zola, Emile Edouard Charles Antoine:

Villele, J. Comte de, 250 Argent, L, '382—383; image of la

Villemain: "Tableau du Grand Siecle," province, J'Accuse, 258, 406; viewed

337 by Barres, 159

 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Note: Unless otherwise noted, headings refer to things French, e.g.. Revolution refers to the

French Revolution. Headings to general topics are indicated by "(gen.). " Illustrations are des-
ignated by "i" following the page number.

Abortion: legalization, 519 Agriculture: geographical differences,

Absolutism: Ancien Regime, 85-86 479—480; spatial mappings, 481—482;
Academic movement, 434; see also see also Grande culture; Petite culture

Provincial academies Ah! Ah! This Is the History of France from

Academic Celtique, 39 January 21, 1793, to November 20, i8i5.

Academie des Sciences: on moral statis- Look at It! (engraving), 99

tics, 473 Aigues-Mortes: anti-Italian demonstra-

Academie Frangaise: anti-Semitic influ- tions, 154

ences on, 402; Jewish members, 396; Aimer de Gaulle (Mauriac), 213

speech by Bourget, 518 Alesia, 60, 68; postcards (1906— 1914), 33;

Action Fran5aise: difference from siege, 46

other fascisms, 280; lack of votes Algeria: Jews, 389

for (1936), 275; militants attack Blum, Algerian War (1954— 1962): consequences,
272, 383 529; effect on Jewish population,
Action Liberale Populaire: creation (1902), 115— 116, 419

259; inception, 262; see also Political memory

Alienated (gen.), n— 14; see also
parties Memory (gen.)
A demain de Gaulle (Debray), 213 Allegory of /^'v^' (Barbes), loii
Aedui (Roman allies), 60 Allegory of Liberty (engraving), 921
Agathon survey, 524 Allegory of the Constitution of lygj
Age of Enlightenment: academic move- (Allais), 961

ment, 434 Allegory of the Festival of the Supreme

Age-presitge pyramid, 510 Being (engraving), 921

Index compiled by Fred Leise

626 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Allegory of the Rights of Man (engraving), Assistance Publique, 122

92i Assumptionists, 127
Alliance Israelite Universelle, 392—393 Asterix (comic book), 32, 33, 72

Alsace and Lorraine, 1 10 Atheism Tries and Fails (engraving), I38i

Always Idols (Grandjouan), iioi Atmosphericist medicine, 483

Ancien Regime, 79—106; connection to Atmosphericists: theories of human behav-
Jansenism, 304; death, 106; durability, ior, 482
93; as memory, 104—105; radical nega- Augsburg Confession: commemorated, 365
tion, 89; views of Jacobin historians, Augustinianism, 333
1 01— 102; see also Revolution; Old regime Augustimis (Jansenius), 304
(England) Auschwitz: symbolic value, 415
Ancient texts, 51 Authority: style, 521
Annales, Les (journal), 397, 507 Auvergne, 32
Annales de geographic, 494 "Aux amis, a nos abonnes" (Peguy), 523

Antiquites celtiques et antedeluviennes Averni Empire, 70

(Boucher de Perthes), 40 Aveu, Z' (London), 211, 216, 238i
Anti-Semitism, 379—423; by artists, 407;
economic factors, 403—404; portrayed Banking system: Jewish role, 393

by Sartre, 419; publications, 401; Bank of the Union General, 127

renewed under de Gaulle, 419—420; riots Barbizon: monument to the dead, 691

(1898), 406; Rue Copernic explosion, Bastille Day: became official lieu de

420, 423i; stereotypes, 385, 386, 395-396; memoire (1880), 7

see also Dreyfus Affair; Jews Belle Epoque: Parisian phenomenon, 451
Apologie pour les religieuses de Port-Royal Belle Helene, La, 33

(Arnauld), 321 Benedictines, 312, 486

Archaeological museums, 43—45 Between Two Stools, Ass on the Ground (car-
Archaeology, 61, 441 icature), 96i

Architecture: embodiment of Catholic-sec- Beurs (Arab immigrants), 174, 176-178

ular conflict, io8i, 124—126 Beuvray, Mount: excavations, 61
Archival memory (gen.), 8-10 Bible: figurative interpretations, 316; vul-

Archives Israelites, 400; on Dreyfus Affair, gates, 308

417 Bible de Royaumont (1670), 308

Archives Nationales: annual report (1982), Bible de Sacy (1672— 1708), 308

10; de Gaulle provided documents, 228; Bibliotheque de la Societe de Port-Royal,

as lieu de memoire, 18 302

Argent, Z'(Zola), 382 Bibliotheque Nationale: as lieu de
Aristocracy: abolished (1789), 89 memoire, 18
Art: Jansenist references, 344 Bibracte, 61, 72

Art de Verifier les dates (Clemencet), 323 Billancourt, 237

Art of Memory, The (Yates), vii Billets de confession, 319, 321

Aspects de la France (Braspart), 524 Biot: church in, io8i

Assiette au beurre, L, '109, iioi, iii Bloc des Gauches, 257, 261
Assimilation: see under Immigrants Bloc National, 267
 ,

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 627

Boen: monument to the dead, 69! Catholic Church: divisions, 316; English
Boisserie, La (de Gaulle's country home): old regime, 82; finances, 133; Jansenist

Gaullist lieu de memoire, 225 controversy, 302, 321; political indepen-

Boite a Perrette, 302 dence, 332; property nationalized,

Bolshevism, 227 131— 133; during Revolution, 79; support

Bonapartism, 281 for Vichy regime, 187; see also Catholic-

Bonapartists, 255—256 Secular antagonism; Constitutional

Bonne Presse, La, 127 Church; Religion (gen.)

Bonnet rouge, Le, 129 Catholic educational system, 128; see also

Boulangism, 154 Education; Religious education

Brunhilde (queen, Gaul), 34 Catholicism: ceremonies, ii2i; distinction
Buildings: Chartres, 18; Eiffel Tower, between lay and ecclesiastic practice,

125—126; Notre-Dame de Paris, 34; 139; influence on society, 118— 119;

Palace of Versailles, 18; Pantheon, 125; monopoly of religious architecture, 116;

Sacre-Coeur, 18, 125; see also Museum of opposition to Revolution, 134; politiciza-

the Desert; Port-Royal des Champs tion, 142—143; secularization, 115, 133;

Bulletin (Protestant publication), 357; table shortage of priests in 1980s, 114; as state
of subjects published, 364—365 religion, 134; see also Jansenism; Port-

Burial mounds, 39 Royal des Champs

Catholics: capacity for organization, 127;

Caen, 429 divisionamong (after 1898), 260; service

Cafe, or the Provincial, The (Vallotton), 456i during World War 1, 128
Cahiers (Barres), 518 Catholic Scholars and Secular Virtues

Cahiers de la quin\aine (Peguy), 396 (Gignoux), 123

Calendar: see Revolutionary calendar Catholic science, 122—129
Calendarium (Bayle), 370 Catholic-secular antagonism, 108—144, i38i;
Calotin, 134 choice between religious and secular life,

Calotts, La: resumed publication (1945), 129 116— 122; effect of Revolution, 129—137;
Calvinism, 354 mediations, Napoleonic stability, 137; —
Camisards, 355, 362 religious divisions, 137—139; — , return of

Camisards et dragons du Roi (La Gorce), 373 regular political life, 140—143; science
Camisard War, 365, 372 versus morality, 122—129; '^^^

Campagne, la: becomes la province, 458—459 Architecture; Education; Revolution;

Canard enchaine, Le (weekly newspaper), Religious education

235 Celts: identified with Gauls, 28, 40; influ-

Canon and feudal law (England), 80 ence on French history, 63; linguistics, 45
Carnac, 38 Censeur europeen, Le, 250
Cartel des Gauches, 112, 129; contrast with Center (political), 246; see also Right and
Popular Front, 271; demonstration for Left; Right-left division

(1923), 254; formation, 267 Center Left (political), 255; see also

Catechisme historique et dogmatique Political parties

(Fourquevaux), 326 Center Right (political), 255; see also

Cathedral of Chartres: as lieu de memoire, 18 Political parties

 1

628 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Centre d 'Etude et de Documentation de Clericahsm, 117— 118, 120, i^z;see also

I'Emigration Italienne (CEDEI), i6o Catholic-secular antagonism
Ce que j'ai cm compTendre (Kriegel), 224 Cocherel: excavations, 36
Cevannes, 358, 359 Code of Nationality, 156, 157; see also

Cevenole, La (newspaper), 359 Foreigners; Immigration

Cevenole, La (Protestant song), 359—360 Collective consciousness (French), 381

Cevenols: see Protestants Collective consciousness (gen.), 6

Chamber of Deputies, 241; seating at 1820 Collective identity, 521

session, 268i; types of deputies, 446—447 Collective memory (French), 508; absence
Chambre retrouvee, 252 of foreigners, 151; context dependent,
Champ-de-Mars, 125 167; dissolution, 167—168; GauUism, 207;
Charivaris: in Landerneau, 457—458 immigrant communities, 169; religious
Charles IX {Chemtv), 131 division in Revolution, 134; second-gen-

Charter of 1814, 56 eration immigrants, 169; Tour de la

Chartres: cathedral as lieu de memoire, 18 France par deux enfants, La, 16

Charvieu-Chavagneux: Islamic cere- Collective memory (gen.): in peasant cul-

monies, ii2i ture, i; transformation, 11; see alsoLieux

Ch^es qu'on abat, Les (Malraux), 210 de memoire; Memory (gen.)

Cheval d'orgueil, Le (Helias), 16 Collective representation, 244

Choose, You're Free (Roubille), iioi College de France, 62

Christian Brothers, 121 Colors: used to distinguish political par-
Christian Democrats, 281 ties, 253
Christ of the Criminal Courts (postcard), I26i Comedy: in nineteenth century, 438

Christ Will Stay, Despite the Sectarians Comite d 'Action pour les Reformes
(engraving), i26i Republicaines, 260; see also Radical
Church of France, 133 Party
Church of Sainte-Genevieve, 134 Commemorative sites (gen.): as lieux de
Church-state separation (early twentieth memoire, 19
century), 128 Commentaries on the Gallic JVars (Caesar),
Cities: role in spatial economics, 481 45-46, 48i, 73
Citizen: compared to individual, 96 Commoners, 53
Civil Code, 137, 390 Common Sense (Paine), 80

Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 133, 134, Communism, 205—207, 212—213, 215—217;
332,333 Communist/ GauUist polarity, 22; influ-
Civil servants: support for Vichy regime, ence in France from 1920, 106; see also
188 Gaullism and Communism
Civil service: Parisianization, 460 Communist memory, 211, 221-228;

Classes (social): defined by Guizot and attacked, 215

Thierry, 57 Communist Party (gen.): conception of

Class struggles, 3 goals, 291; decline during 1980s, 285;

Clear-Cut Case, A (caricature in Le denunciation of Jews, 383; manipulation

Grelot), 4o8i of memory, 221; see also French
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 629

Communist Party; Gaullists; Gaullism Contemporary culture (gen.), 13, 14

and Communism Contemporary societies: dualist organiza-

Communist Party (Italian), 167 tion, 283—298

Company of Jesus: see Jesuits Contradictions: basis for politics, 295

Compte general de Vadministration de la jus- Convention: loses political right (1793),

tice criminelle, 473 246

Concentration camps, 379—380, 4i4i; Convulsionnaires, 317, 328, 329; see also

established, 409; memory of, 199; see Port-Royal des Champs

also Drancy Corps Legislatif, 447
Concordat, 334 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum: volumes

Conferences de la Mere Angelique de Saint- devoted to Gaul (1888-), 61

Jean (1760), 323 Council of the Order of Attorneys: anti-
Confession de foi (Protestant publication), 357 foreign policies, i')6;see also Foreigners;

Confessions d'un revolutionnaire (Proudhon): Immigrants

typology of political parties, 253 Council of Trent, 304
Conflict: central to generationality, 520; Counterrevolution, 80—91
intrinsic part of world, 296 Coup d'etat of 1797, <)6i

Congres des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Crime: crimes against property, 475; link
Frangaise, 420 with education, 4741—475i, 475—476
Congress of Amsterdam (1904), 261 Criminal geography, 473—474
Congress of Tours, 223, 268 Croix, La (newspaper): anti-Semitism,

Conseil d'Etat, 410, 413 406; attacks on secular state, 127;

Conseil Superieur de I'Enseignement began publication (1883), 122; Christ
Public, 122 Will Stay, I26i
Conservatism: central to generationality, 520 Cult of continuity (gen.), 12
Constituent Assembly, 88, 102, 245; abol- Cult of the dead: as lieu de memoire, 16

ished privileges, 147; average age of Cult of the Supreme Being, 135
deputies, 502; centralizing tendency Cult of Vercingetorix, 68

(1789), 436; Jansenist deputies, 333; Cultural psychologists, 504

religious reforms, 133, 332; territorial Cutting Mistletoe (Motte), 351

redistricting, 435

Constitution (English), 82 Darwinism: educational Darwinism, 472

Constitution (U.S.), 84 Debre Law (1959), 236
Constitutional Church, 139 Decines: Armenian immigrants, 172
Constitutional debates, 51 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Constitutional Right, 255; see also Political Citizen (1789), 102; double meaning,

parties 530; effect of debates, 243—244; effect on

Constitution of 1791, 502; as lieu de concept of immigration, 147; enthusiasm
memoire, 16 of Jews for, 393; symbolism, 399; view
Constitution of 1793: as lieu de memoire, 16 of generations, 501
Constitution of the Fifth Republic, 225, Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
234-235 Citiien (Fournigault), 78i
630 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Decouverte importante sur le vrai systeme de shift in political vocabulary, 258; jee also
la Constitution du clerge decretee par Anti-Semitism; Jews
VAssembUe nationale (Barruel?), 334 Drocourt Mines, 154
Degradation, The (Meaulle), 405! Druides recueillant le gui sacre, Les (engrav-
Democracy: defined, 264; how constituted, ing), 32

263; resulted in division of society, 289; Druids, 28, 58, 64

threats to, 202 Durkheimian sociology, 490, 496, 526
Democratic societies: stability since 1945, Du Sommerard collection of antiquities,
289—290 42,43
Democratic values: collapse (1930s), 187
Democ-socs, 253 Eaux de Bourbon (Dancourt), 430
Demographers, 481—483, 504 Echo history, 214—215

Departmental identity, 435 Ecole de Port-Royal: embodiment of revo-

Departments: creation, 436, 473 lutionary tradition, 331
Deputies: as universal representatives, 262; Ecole des Chartes, 61
see also Chamber of Deputies Ecole du Louvre, 61
Deracines, Les (Barres), 383 Ecole liberatrice, L': articles against Joan of
Dernier des justes, Le (Schwarz-Bart), 419 Arc (1930), 129
Desert Assembly (engraving), 356i Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 62
Devoirs du chretien, Les (religious text), Economic cycle: effect on immigration,
121 152, 156-157
Dictionnaire archeologique de la Gaule Economic development, 471—473
(i875-i878),6i Economic politique chretienne, L': article by
Dictionnaire Larousse: description of Villeneuve-Bargemont, 476; set France
provincials, 453—456 European context, 477
in

Discipline (Protestant publication), 357 Economy: spatial organization, 471

Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Edict of Nantes, 374; see also Revocation of
Law (Adams), 80 Edict of Nantes
Divisions (political), 266—283; Education: Catholic system, 128; geo-
Right-left division graphic differences, 475; link to crimi-
Divorce: reinstated (1884), 122 nality, 469, 474i—475i; national, 135;

Divorce law: author, 402i reorganized under Revolution, 443; sec-

Dolmen: origin of term, 38 ularization (late nineteenth century),

Dolmens: revised attribution, 40 120— 121; state's role, 137; statistical

Drancy (concentration camp), 409, 410, analysis, 468; see also Catholic science;

4i4i; faded memory of, 379—380 Higher education; Schools

Drancy (Moran), 4i4i Educational Darwinism, 472
Dreyfus Affair, 23, iii, 257; anti-Semitism Eiffel Tower, 125—126
during, 407; concluded, 417; created Eighty-Nineists, 95, 99, 103
new Jewish image, 404; Degradation, Election laws, 270

The (Meaulle), 4051; foreign scholars of, Elections: November 1820, 250

398; paradigm for political theater, 406; Ellis Island, 1^1; see also Immigration
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 631

Emile (Rousseau), 150, 501 Extremism (political), 266—283

Enfants rouges (Aragon), 222
Enlightenment (gen.): resulted in founding Facisme, Le (Valois), 273

of American colonies, 81 Fait des Romains (thirteenth-century his-

Epigraphy, 61 tory), 45

Ernest ou le Travers du siecle (Drouineau), Family rights: under Vichy regime, 192

444 Farmers, 471

Escarpelle: Polish miners expelled, i65i; Fascism, 201, 280
Polish Miners Expelled from Escarpelle Fascists: conception of goals, 291
(Dambians), i65i Faurisson affair (1979), 199
Esquisses historiques (Latour), 338 Federalism: provincial stereotypes, 437
Essai statistique sur le royaume de Portugal et Federes: travels, 436

d'Algarve compareaux autres etats de Fertility rates, 168

I'Europe (Balbi), 468 Festival of the Federation (July 14, 1790),

E^sai sur la statistique de la population 436

frangaise (d'Angeville), 478 Festival of the Supreme Being (1794), 90
E^sai sur la statistique morale de la France Feudal rights, 54
(Guerry), 474i-475i Fiefs: introduced by Charlemagne, 52
Estates General, 243 Fifth Republic (1958-): origins, 181— 182

Estates General of Burgundy, 34 Figurism: described, 316

Estat present de I'angleterre, L' Fil de I'epee, La (de Gaulle), 231

(Chamberlayne), 242 Finistere: as lieu de memoire, 16

Etat franfais: perceived by contemporaries, First Principles of Government, The

183; spawned Fourth Republic, 181; see (Paine), 501

also Vichy regime Flanders, 488

Ethnic groups (gen.), 10, 57; see also Flavigny: martyrology, 46

Immigrants Fontanet memo (1974), 157; see also
Etudier le P.C.F. (1979), 217; see also French Foreigners; Immigration

Communist Party Fontenay: Upper Normal School, 124

Eucharist: interpretation at Port-Royal des Forces productives et commerciales de la

Champs, 309 France (Dupin), 470—471, 472

Europeans: opinion of United States, Foreigners, 145—178; addition to labor

83-84 force, 146; affected by economic cycle,

Events: changing nature of, 508; as lieux de 152, 156—157; French model of immigra-
memoire, 17—18 tion, 147—152; hostility toward, 152—154,
Evils of the Constitution in Parlement, The i55i; integration, 159, 172—178; memory
(engraving), 325 of origins, 160-172; victims of Reign of
Exegesis: Jansenist lectures on, 316 Terror, 151; see also Immigrants
Exposition of Bretons of Paris (1895), 46ii Fourth Republic (1945— 1958), 181, 220
Exposition Universelle (Daumier), 4491 France: conflict between the modern and
Extreme Left (political), 255; see also the archaic, 143; contrast between north

Political parties and south, 4661, 467—496; divisions, 468,

 x

632 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

473, 519-520; endurance of Catholic- 1924, 267; exercise of magisterium, 234;

secular split, 1 14; European context, Histoire du Parti Communist Fran^ais
477—478; historiography, 3—4; idea of (textbook, 1964), 215; identity incorpo-
nation, viii—ix; identified with Gaul, 47; rated by memory, 223; influence in
importance to Jews, 423; Liberation, 218; 1930s, 275; joins Popular Front, 267; key

memory-history, 21; microscopic repre- sites, 222; legal existence, 234; limits of
sentation, 487; modern political culture, power, 220—221; as part of tripartite pat-

237; national origins, xv, 22, 31; physical tern, 280; position on immigration
attributes, 484; as political ideal, (1930s), 156; process of integration,

193—194; presidents (late twentieth cen- 267—272; published communique in

tury), 208; recent history, 528—529; L'Humanite {}<)']']) ^ 211; reintegration

rejection of past, 90; split historical per- into nation, 271; representation of

sonality, 528; as symbolic reality, x; time- working class, 236; right-left divisions,

less, 195; unity/ diversity, 21—23; ^^^^ 268; rituals of memory, 222; view of
Fifth Republic; Fourth Republic; French Vichy, 183
territory; Northern France; Southern Frenchman of the Past, The (engraving),
France; State; Third Republic 871

France, Les (Nora): construction, ix— Frenchman of Today, The (engraving), 871
Francinet (religious text), 121 Frenchness, 31, 55, 409; see also National
Francisque gallique (Gallic axe): adopted as identity

symbol by Vichy regime (1940), 30 French people: claim of descent from

Franco-French conflict, 398—409, 4o8i Trojans, 47; Gallic origins, 28, 60; ori-

Franco-Judaism, 387—393; after World War gin, invasion by barbarians (406), 62

11, 416—423; destruction, 410; metamor- French race: viewed by Amedee Thierry,
phosis, 421—423; see also Jews; Judaism 58-59
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (F.T.P.) French territory: divisions by Guerry, 476;
(Communist Resistance group), 219, 237 global organization, 485; homogeneity,

Franks: as the first French, 31; in 487; methodology for studying regions,

Germania, 56; invasion of Gaul, 53, 59i; 491—492; natural versus historical
place in French history, 47, 51—55; rela- regions, 488; north-south division,

tionship to Gauls, 50; status at time of 496; spatial categories in eighteenth

Gallic conquest, 52; symbols of the century, 479—487; spatial categories in

nobility, 55; iee also Gauls nineteenth century, 488; tripartite divi-
Freedom of association, 128 sion, 470, 475; unitary vision of, 471;

Freedom of religion, 133 see also Natural regions; Regions; Saint-

Freemasons, in Malo— Geneva line

Freethinkers Convention, iigi Frequente Communion (Arnauld), 305

French Communism: described, 221—222 Fronde, 301
French Communist Party (P.C.F.), 207; Frontier (American), 84

abuse of history, 215; Bloc Ouvrier et

Paysan, 1.6'j; Central Committee, views Gallia: see Gaul
on right-left division, 270; collapse, 230; Gallia (Gounod), 43
in de Gaulle memoires, 232; elections of Gallicans: during Restoration, 337
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 633

"Gallic Elixir" (advertisement), 76! Gaullist memory, 73-76, 209, 221-228;

Gallic imagery, 32, 33 central principle, 224; described, 221;

Gallic Lookouts (Luminais), 37i projective nature, 225

Gallic unity, 70 Gaullists: view of Vichy regime, 201; see

Gallo-German hostility, 75 also Communism; Gaullism and

Gallo-Roman civilization, 30 Communism
Gallo-Roman Museum, 42, 44; see also Gauls, 61—68; ancestors of French nation,
Museum of National Antiquities 31, 53; central lieu de memoire of France,
Game of the goose, i49i 76; changing perception of, 72, 76; fea-
Gascons: change to meet outside image, tured in musical works, 43; in French

432; puppets of, 429—430 national memory, 28—29; Gallo-

Gaul: archaeology, 38; artifacts, 32—40; Romans, 52; Greek influence on, 58;

changing views of, 68; coins, 37i; con- images and relics, 32—40, 57; interest in,

nection to France, 62; conquest by 50, 51; memory recalled by monuments,

Franks, 52, 59i; early texts, 45; Germanic 27; modern views of, 73; nationhood,
invasion, viewed by Fustel, 65—67; gov- 64; Noah as ancestor, 50; relation to

ernment after Roman conquest, 60; Franks, 55, 56; social history, 58; status

kings, 50, 74; name preserved by the after conquest by Franks, 52; symbol-
Church, 46; nationhood, 70; opinions ism, 30—31, 55; in Vichy propaganda, 30;

of, in late nineteenth century, 67; viewed by Amedee Thierry, 59; war-
Roman conquest recounted by Amedee rior's costume, 67i; see also Franks;
Thierry, 60; tombs, 38; see also Gallo-Roman civilization

Transalpine Gaul Genealogical research (gen.), 10

Gaul Invaded: The Franks (Raffin), 591 Generation (Rotman), 500

Gaullism: autonomous lieu de memoire, 212; Generation (social grouping), 499—531;

exceptionaliy, 214; Gaullian memory of, advent in Revolution, 502; articles in

208; part of French national memory, periodicals, 508-509; background to

228; political heritage, 230; reduced influ- political history, 503; basic philosophies

ence, 229; revived by Algerian War, 529 of, 507—508; central qualities, 520-521;
Gaullism and Communism, 205—239; complexity as lieu de memoire, 530—531;

clash of, as lieu de memoire, 205; com- contemporary transformation, 508—509;

pared, 206—207; contribution to contradictions, 505; current idea of, 511;

Revolutionary cycle, 236—237; dual definitions, 501; described, 503, 505;

system of memory, 217—228; end of duration, 506; historical construction of

influence, 238—239; legitimization, 234; model, 511—522; identified from outside,

lieux de memoire, 207—208; phenomena 523—524; immersed in memory, 522—528;
of memory, 208; polarity, 22; relation influence of events, 506; nature of, 507;

to democracy, 233; role in national problems of defining, 504—505; reasons

imagination, 234; synthesis of antire- for importance, 519—522; rights, 501; of

publican traditions, 231—232; see also student riots (1968), 504, 527; symbolic
Communism; Communist memory; unit of time, 527; variations, 518—519

French Communist Party (P.C.F.) Generational consciousness, 503, 515—516

Gaullist lieux de memoire, 225 Generational identity, 514
634 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Generational memory, 523—526 Grelot, Le: cover attacking Belgian immi-

Generational replacement, 516—519 grants, I75i

Generation gap, 499 Grenelle Accords (1968), 237

Geographers, 485, 491; see also Vidalian
geographers Hanoverians (English rulers), 81

Geographic divisions: as lieux de memoire, Harvard: ethnographic researchers, 520

18 Haskala (Jewish movement), 393
Geographic regions, 489 Haute-Garonne: Italian immigrants
Geography, 494 (1950s), 168

Gergovie, 29, 30, 34 Health: geographic differences, 477

German Jews: interned in French camps, Heritiers, Les (Duval), 427
409 Higher education: north-south difference,
German Reich: Jewish culture in, 387 472
German-Soviet Pact, 218 Histoire abregee de I'abbaye de Port-Royal

Germany: occupation of France, 183; see (Tronchay), 314—315

also Vichy regime Histoire de France (Devinat and Toursel):
Gerontocratie, 510 Gaul Invaded: The Franks, 591
Gilles (Drieu La Rochelle), 383 Histoire de France (Lavisse), xi; as lieu de

Girondins, 246, 437—438, 502 memoire, 17

Globe, Le (newspaper), 252, 512 Histoire de France (Martin), 32, 39—40
Glory: fundamental French idea, viii Histoire de la Gaule (Jullian), 61, 68—72
God: Jansenist ideas of, 307 Histoire de la litterature frangaise depuis ij8g

God and the Head of the Church Protect (Thibaudet), 506

Napoleon (engraving), i32i Histoire de la Revolution frangaise

Government: coalitions of parties, (Michelet), 137

248—249, 252; history linked to history of Histoire de Port-Royal (Clemencet), 312

Gauls, 53; power, 131 Histoire des Frangais (Sismondi), 515

Grammitica celtica (Zeuss), 45 Histoire des Gaulois (Amedee Thierry), 61;

Grand Dictionnaire (Larousse): definition read by Jullian, 68

of Parisians, 445—446 Histoire des protestants de France (Felice),

Grande culture (large-scale cultivation), 369

480—481 Histoire du catholicisme liberal 113

Grandes Chroniques de France, 47; as lieu de Histoire du I'idee laique en France an Xl)^
memoire, 17 siecle (Weill), 113

Grand Larousse de la langue frangaise: defi- Histoire du Parti Communist Frangais (text-

nition of province, 462—463; on book, 1964), 215

Landerneau, 458, 464 Histoire du parti republicain en France
Great Britain: genesis of right and left (Weill), 113

(political positions), 287 Histoire religieuse (Fliche and Martin), 373

Great Century (seventeenth century): Historia Francorum (de Fleury), 47

notion of province, 432 Historians: as intermediaries, 500

Great Depression, 152, 231, 285 Historians (French), 105, in— 116, 496
Greece: influence on French history, 64 Historians (gen.): changing roles, 13
 8

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Historical Almanac: A Souvenir of the Polish History textbooks, 130

Emigration, i66 Hitler and Petain Shaking Hands in a Field
Historical criticism (gen.): transformed by of Ruins (fresco), 20oi

lieux de memoire, 20 Holocaust, 421

Historical determinism, 96 Holocaust (film), 199

Historical geography, 61 Hotel de Cluny, 42

Historical knowledge (gen.), 11 Houdan: church, 1401

Historical memory, 228—239; Commentaries House of Commons, 82, 242

on the Gallic IVars, 73; of contemporary House of Lords, 82
France, 208; importance to Protestants, Hugolatry, no
369; unbalanced, 529—530 Huguenots: as amateur historians, 369;
Historical peoples, 48 commemorative stamp, 3771; derivation

Historical texts, 45—47 of name, 354; family memory, 369—370,

Historicized memory (gen.), 10— 11; see also 371; international importance, 375; lieux

Memory (gen.) de memoire, 356—357; memory included in

Historiography: changed to historical national history, 373; see also Protestants

memory, viii; distinction between Humanite, L': article on Bolshevik agita-

Protestant and Catholic, 373; freedom tors (1935), 232; detemporalized time,

from memory, 4; Jacobin, 102—103; 222; editorial by Vaillant-Couturier

Jansenist, 339; United States, 4 (1936), 226; phantom issue (1940), 216;

History (French): association with geogra- resumed publication, 21

phy, 69; collective consciousness, 292; Hymns: Protestant, 353

continuity/ discontinuity, 12, 63, 85; dif-

fering views of, ix, 62—63; direction, Ideal, viii

56—57; in educational system, 61; forma- Identite de la France (Braudel), ix

tion of generation, 522, 524—525; funda- Identity (French): current status, 286; per-

mental to European identity, 96; intellec- manence, 23; sustained by divisions, 21

tual methods, 51; origins, 52; relation to Identity (gen.): modern search for, 13

Gallic memory, 74—76; relation to mem- Illustrations de la Gaule et les singularite^ de

ory, 530; relation to Saint-Malo-Geneva Troye, 50

line, 471; replaced by statistics, 477—478; Immigrant places: as lieux de memoire, 164

revisions after World War II, 218; seen in Immigrants: Arab, 174; Armenians, 160,
terms of conflict, 182; status, 496; viewed 172; assimilation, 157—158, 159, 162, 171;

by Adams, 80; viewed by Boulainvilliers, created United States, 145; factors influ-

52—53; viewed by Michelet, 63—65 encing integration, 172; German, 158;

History (gen.): acceleration, i; described, impact in France, 146; Italian, i53i, 168;

3; of history, 3, 4; methodological revi- — ,

culture, 160, i6ii, i62i; juvenile delin-

sions, xiii—xiv; redefined, 6; substitute quency, 174; means of preserving mem-

for imagination, 20; transformation, 5, 6; ory, 163, 164—169; memories of origins,

see also Historiography (gen.); Oral his- 163, 166—167; mixed marriages, 171;

tory (gen.) Muslims, 169, i73i; North African,

History of the Communist Party of the 157-158, 159, 1731; Polish, 163, i63i; -,
Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (1937), 215 during World War 1, 159; -, exile chron-
636 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

icle, 166; -, miners, 1641, 1651, 168; pub- 1830, 98; in revolutionary historiogra-
lic ;
public versus private behavior, 168; phy, 100
reconstruction of native culture, 167; Jansenism, 22; aesthetic ideal, 344;
Russian (1930s), 169; socialization, archives, 326—331; bibliography,

169—170; Spanish, 160; violence against, 344—348; contradictory nature, 306-307,

154, 1551, 156, 157, 174-175, 1751 333; as cultural memory, 302; differing
Immigration, 22; importance to economy, views of, 303; enigma, 303-308; histo-
152; invisibility of history, 151; object of ries, 313; importance of memory, 309;
national memory, 160; pace, 158—159; importance of public education, 317;
perception by Americans and French, influence on religion and culture, 308;

149, 150; permanent process, 162—163; last theologians, 332; during nineteenth
purpose, 146; quotas, 148; relation to century, 335-339; obedience to temporal

democratic politics, 154; response across authority, 305; place in Catholicism,

political spectrum, 155 306—307; political theology, 331; republi-

Individualism: English conception, 97—98; can interpretation, 341; spread after

as viewed by Vichy regime, 192 papal bull of 1713, 315; texts published in
Individual liberty: effect on society, 293 1887, 342; theology, 309
Individuals: compared to citizens, 96; place Jansenist historiography: distinctive fea-

in society, 288 tures, 339

Industrialism: source, 281 Jansenists: appeal to council, 317; disassoci-

Industry: effects of immigration, 146, 156 ation from present, 317—318; journals of
Information society, 290 captivity, 311; literature as lieu de

Institut: anti-Semitic influences on, 402 memoire, 302; in parlement, 328; taken
Institut Charles-de-Gaulle, 213 unawares by Revolution, 333; transla-

Institutrice de province, Z'(Frappie), 124 tions of religious works, 308; writings

Instituts Catholiques: competition to uni- on Jesuits, 322; see also Convulsionnaires

versity system, 128; science faculties, Jean-Christophe (Rolland), 385

123; see also Religious education Jehovah of the French (engraving), 1321

Insurge, Z,' (journal), I'ji—i'j-t, Jero (circumflex) e Paturot a la recherche d'une

Integration: see Assimilation under position sociale (Reybaud), 4421

Immigrants Jesuits: history, 322; Loi Falloux, 335; polit-

International (Communist party), 231—232 ical machinations, 321; reputation in

International Congress on Prehistoric 1843, 341; status during Restoration, iii
Anthropology and Archaeology Jesus the Montagnard (Langelot), loii

(1867), 40 Jewess: as threat to French males, 386—387

Internationale, L,' \ oG Jewish history, 409
Invasion laique, Z'(Caperan), 113 Jewish memory, 199; affected by Vichy
Islam, ii2i, 115 regime, 409; based on Holocaust,
Italian immigrants: see under Immigration 421-423; of deportations, 415; dissolu-
tion, 387—393; earliest signs, 417;
Jacobin historians, loi— 102 merged with French memory, 390;
Jacobinism, 265, 487; foundation of physical sites, 380
Communist memory, 227; revival in Jewish revival: led by Sephardim, 421
 ,

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 637

Jewish Statute (1940), 191, 409 Judaism: affected by liberal influences, 115;

Jewish studies, 398 positivist science, 391—392; rediscovery

Jewish universalism, 392 in 1970s, 420

Jews, 519; absence from memory, 379; Judith (Biblical character): symbolism, 386
accounts of deportees unnoticed, 417; July Monarchy (1830), 96, 98; attacks on
amnesia, 381; assisted during Vichy the university, in; intensified genera-

regime, 415; careers, 391—392, 396, 403; tional conflict, 514, 516; links between
collapse of Bank of the Union General, Paris and provinces, 439, 446; national

127; debates over rights (1789), 147; memories during, 104; Polish exile

dual allegiance, 420, 421; fate tied to chronicle, 166; political leaders as arith-

revolutionary tradition, 398—399; heart meticians, 487; two-France theme, 477;

of French history, 379—423; illustration visibility of Jews, 393

from game (c.1790), 4231; increase after June Days, 93
Algerian War, 115; individual versus

collective status (1789), 148; during Kings: place in national memory, 235; sum-
later twentieth century, 398; loss of bolism of bodies, 288—289; see also under
nationality, 411—413; memory of Gaul; Merovingian kings; Monarchy;
Dreyfus Affair, 406; population shift, Monarchy (Frankish)
420; portrayals, caricatures, 381-387,
396; — by,
enemies, 400; — image
,
in late Labor market: dual system, 146
nineteenth century, 397; prophesied Lacombe Lucien (Malle), 199
conversion, 316; purported source of La'icite, see Secularism
political disunity, 277; during Landerneau, 427, 454, 457—458, 462i
Revolution, 387n, 387—389; support for Land use: Gallic heritage, 64

Republic, 400; symbolism, 406; tension Language: in la province, 42^

between Ashkenazi and Sephardic, Languedoc, 486
420-421; during Third Republic, Lascaux cave paintings: as lieu de memoire,

393—398; treatment, denunciations of, xii

383, 384; -, deportation, 410; -, forced Last Idol (MuWer), 1191

baptisms, in;—, French persecution, Law on Public Ignorance (Dumont), 1191

417; — , massacres (1320), 381; — Laws: anti-congreganist (1795), 128; anti-

required to wear yellow stars, 4i2i; dur- Jewish statute (1940), 23; Debre Law
ing World War II, 191, 375, 379; see also (1959), 236; Divorce law, author, 402i;
Franco-Judaism Election laws modified in 1920s, 270;

Jews (gen.): exploration of past, 11; people Jewish Statute (1940), 191, 409; Loi
of memory, 2 Bonnet (198), 157; Loi Falloux, 336; reli-
Jews Considered to be French in Accordance gious education (1904), 109; Savary Law
with the Law, 5911 (1984), 113; separation of church and
Joan of Arc Festival, i8oi state (1905), 261-262; Veil Law (1975),
Journal (Amiel): as lieu de memoire, 17 519; see also Canon and feudal law

Journal (Pomczxk): as lieu de memoire, 17 (England); Roman law

Journal des dehats, 252, 452; article by Lay schoolmistresses, 124
Malte-Brun, 468 League of French Volunteers, 20oi
638 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Learned societies: Academic Celtique, 39; of, 14—15; defined, ix; described, 15; dis-

Academic des Sciences, 473; Academic tortions of, 15; examples, 16—18; fabri-

Frangaise, 396, 402, 518; Congres des cated by generation, 526; Gaullism, 212;
Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Fran^aise, Gaullist, 225; Gauls, 76; generational

420; Societe de I'Histoire du Protestant- complexity, 530-531; history of, 20;

isme Fran5aise (S.H.P.F.), 357; Societe Huguenot culture, 356—357; immigrant
de Philosophic Chretienne, 334; Societe places, 164; importance, 2, 6, 7; Jansenist

de Port-Royal, 302; Societe des literature, 302; lack of referents in real-

Antiquaircs de Franc, 39; Societe des ity, 20; Lascaux cave paintings, xii; Mas-
Etudes Juives, 392; Societe des Sciences Soubeyran, 354; Nicolas Chauvin, xiii;

Historiques et Naturelles, 61; Societe Protestant, 354; in Proust, xii; provide

Litteraire of Clermont, 34; Societe historical continuity, i; purpose, 15;

Royale de Medecinc, 486—487 Right and Left (political positions), 298;

Lecavene: origin of term, 38 sites of the Occupation, 527; student

Left (political): common culture, 278; riots (May 1968), 500; study of, 6; Tour
defined by Gambetta, 254-255; internal de France, xii; Tour de la France par deux
tensions, 294—295; see also Right and enfants, La, ix, 15—16; varied status,
Left; Right-left division 16—17; '^^0 Museum of the Desert;

Legion (veterans' organization), 29 Port-Royal des Champs

Legislative Assembly, 245, 502 Life: legitimating principles, 292
Legislature: dissolved (1816), 248 Life expectancy, 483

Legitimism, 281 Life's Trumps (educational card game),

Lion Blum (Garel), 3781 2021

"Letter to Daladier" (1936), 271 Linguistics: Revue celtique, 61

Lettres, notes etcarnets (de Gaulle), 213 Literature: heralded fall of regimes, 104;
Lettres historiques sur les fonctions essentielles influence on provincial behavior, 445;
du Parlement (Le Paige), 326 new consciousness of provinciality, 443;
Lettres sur Vhistoire de France (Thierry), relation to generational identity, 514

515; as lieu de memoire, 17 Literature (gen.): loss of, 20

Liberals, 249—251 Local studies, 485, 492

Liberties: partition of, 143 Loi Bonnet (1980), 157; see also Foreigners;
Libraries: Bibliotheque de la Societe Immigration
de Port-Royal, 302; Bibliotheque Loi Falloux, 336
Nationale, 18 Long Live France, Long Live the Marshal
Libre Parole, La: anti-Semitism, 406 (Andre-Paul and Simon), i85i

Libre Pensee, La, 127 Louvre, 44

Lieux: derivation of term, vii

Lieux de memoire: basis for French history, Magic Lantern (Strack), 1381

x; Bastille Day, 7; Boisserie, La (de Malthusianism, 147

Gaulle's country home), 225; clash of Manichaeanism, 223, 276, 478
Gaullism and Communism, 205; com- Manifeste de la commission du congres repub-
memorative sites, 19; complexity, 14; licain radical socialiste: described Jules
Constitution of 1 791, 16, 502; creation Ferry (1885), 256
 5

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Manuel (of French Communist Party, Memory: converted into history, 528; of

1964), 217 democratic development, 242; disinte-

Manuel des pelenns de Port-Royal des gration, 11; importance to Jansenism,

Champs (1767), 323 309; invoked by political regimes,

Manufacturing, 477, 479 181— 182; merged with Jewish memory,

Map Representing the Level of Education of 390; of origins, 160—172; place of Jews
the French Populace, 466i in, 401, 423; redefined, 6; relation to his-
Maps: statistical, 478, 494 tory, 530; see also Generational memory;
Marais (Parisian quarter), 445, 446 Historical memory; Pure memory
Marianne, 271 Memory (gen.): Collective heritage, vii;

Marianne: statues erected, 116; symbol of current non-existence, i; described, 3;

the Republic, 109 forms, 2; modern preoccupation, 11;

Marseilles: anti-Italian demonstrations, 1 54; psychologization, 11; relationship to his-

anti— North African violence (1977), 157; tory, 2—4, 8—10; role in French idea of
Catholic ceremonies, ii2i; Muslim immi- nation, viii; see also Alienated memory
grants (1988), 1731 (gen.); Archival memory (gen.);
Mars Gallicus (Jansenius), 304, 335 Collective memory (gen.); Historicized
Marshal Established the Peasant Corporation, memory (gen.); National memory;
The (postage stamp), 185! Private memory (gen.)
Marshal's Alphabet, The (boo\i), i<)oi Memory-based societies (gen.), 2

Mas-Soubeyran, Le, 353—354, 358; as lieu de Memory-Fiction (gen.), 20

memoire, 354; Protestant gathering, 3631 Memory-History (French), 215

Medical topographies, 486 Memory-History (gen.), 1—7; demise,

Medicine: atmosphericist, 483 10, 13, 20; incarnation as memory-

Megalithic monuments, 36, 38—39 nation, 6

Memoires: of Communists, 216; of Memory-Nation (gen.), 6

Jansenist solitaires, 309; as lieu de Memory regimes, 182—183

memoire, 17 Menhir: origin of term, 38
Memoires (Cappelle), 448—450 Menhirs, 40
Memoires (Condorcet), 136 Merovingian kings, 53—54
Memoires (Fontaines), 319 Middle Ages: English canon and feudal
Memoires de guerre (de Gaulle), 225 law, 80; intellectual methods from, 51

Memoires d'espoir: Le renouveau (de Milice (Vichy militia), 29, 186, 415
Gaulle), 210 Ministerial party, 250, 252

Memoires d'ex, Les (Mosco), 224 Mode retro. La, 527

Memoires d'outre-tombe (Chateaubriand), Monarchie franfaise comparee aux principaux

238; as lieu de memoire, 17 etats du monde. La (Balbi), 473
Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de Port- Monarchiens, 87, 88
Royal (Goujet), 319 Monarchy, 86; during 1789— 1792, 89;
Memoires sur la destruction de I'abbaye de French love for, 94; problem of origins,

Port- Royal des Champs (171 1), 3 1 50; relation to representative institutions,

Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr 55; views of Jacobin historians, loi— 102;

(1953), 381 see also July Monarchy

640 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Monarchy (Prankish), 52, 53; effect on feu- Napoleon I: brought stability to French
dal rights, 54 society, 137

Montagnards, 102, 246, 502 Nation: French idea of, viii—ix; redefined, 6
Mont Auxois, 34 Nation, La (Nora): construction, viii

Mont Lozere, 355 National Archives, 374

Monuments, 27, 6()i, 360—361 National assemblies: under Charlemagne, 52
Moral statistics, 473, 478 National Assembly, 87; British influence
Mother Angelique Arnauld (Champaigne), on, 242—243; divisions, 253; law against
30oi religious education (1904), 109

Motion in favor of the Jews (Gregoire), 3941 National Convention, 102

Mouvement d'Ouvriers Immigres, 415 National culture: internalization, 170
MRP (political party), 113 National education, 135

Musee Calvin, 364 National Front, 176!, 199, 201

Musee de Cluny, 43 National Geographic: article by Patterson,
Musee de I'Armee: Gallic warrior's 355
costume, 67i National heritage: as lieu de memoire, 16
Musee du Desert: see Museum of the Desert National history, xiv, xv; see also Lieux de
Muse frangaise. La, 512 memoire
Museum of National Antiquities, 41—45 National identity: based on Gauls, 31—32;
Museum of the Desert, 352i, 353—377, 363i; changing nature of, in twentieth century,

attention to sixteenth century, 365; con- 'ji—'jy, crisis of 1940, 231; identified
text of success, 377; created additional with culture, 76; need for new explo-
lieicx de memoire, 362; first museum ration of, 239; threatened by immigra-
dedicated, 361; focus on Camisards, tion, 158—159; Vichy regime as memory
366—367; historical choices made at, of, 194

364—367; lists of galley slaves, 368i; National integration, 31—32

Memorial, 372; memorial hall estab- Nationalism: anti-foreign rhetoric, 156;
lished (1921), 361; multiple meanings, effect on political right, 279-280; late

372-377; opposition to, 368; product of nineteenth century, 193; rooted in anti-
family traditions, 370—371; regional Semitism, 400
connection, 365—366 Nationalist Zionism, 421

Museums: archaeological museums, 43—45; Nationality, 150

Gallo-Roman Museum, 42, 44; Musee National memory: de Gaulle as champion

Calvin, 364; Musee de Cluny, 43; Musee of, 205; erased Jews from history,

de I'Armee, 671; Museum of National 398; Gaullism, 207, 228; during July
Antiquities, 41—45; Protestant museum Revolution, 104; place of kings in, 235;

at Vivarais, 362 sources, x

Myths (gen.): in historical research, 51; sec- National Revolution: lack of interest in,

ularized versions, 12 188, 198

My Village (Hansi), i76i National Tramway (caricature in Le

Grelot), 4o8i

Naissance de Vesprit laique au declin du Nations: formed from ethnic groups, 57;

MoyenAge (Lagarde), 113 means of defense, 64-65

 8

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 641

Nation-States: connection to Protestant- Objects: as history, 69

ism, 367 Office National Armenian, 164; see also

Natural history, 485 Foreigners; Immigration

Natural regions, 492 Old regime (England), 80, 81, 82

Necrologe de Port-Royal (Rivet de la Opportunist Party, 120, 258; see also

Grange), 312, 315, 317; inclusion of Political parties

parlementaires, 324 Oral history (gen.), 9—10, 13; see also

New Netherland Commission, 375 History (gen.)

New Wave, 524 Oratorians, 316

Nimes: fountainhead of Protestant mem- Oratory: importance in Chamber of

ory, 358 Deputies, 447
igoo Banquet of Mayors— View Inside the Orleanism, 253, 281
Huge Tent Set Up in the Tuileries on Orme du mail, /.'(Anatole France),

September 22, 454i—455i 402—403

Ninety-threeists, 95, 102 Ossuary of Cocherel, 34
Ninth of Thermidor, 99—100 Outsiders, 384; see also Jansenists; Jews

Nobility: defined, 86; instituted feudalism,

54; national assemblies under Charle- Pagi (rural regions), 64

magne, 52; place in Gallic society, 74; Paintings: as lieux de memoire, i8

privileges, 55 Palace of Versailles: as lieu de memoire, 1

Noeux: Polish miners, 164! Palais des Thermes, 42

Norma (Bellini), 43 Panama scandal, 403—404; see also anti-

Normandy (eastern): described, 489—490 Semitism

North Africa: integration of immigrants Pantheon, 125; Cassin's ashes transferred

from, 157; Jews from, 420, 421 to, 41 8i; Jews interred in, 398; transfor-

Northern France, 471, 479; see also Saint- mation from Church of Sainte-
Malo— Geneva line Genevieve (1791), 134
Notre-Dame de Paris, 34 Papal bulls: see Unigenitus; Vineam Domini
Notre jeunesse (Peguy), ^22 Paradigms: defined by Kuhn, 526—527
Nouveau Testament en franfais avec des Paris: battle of symbolic architectures,
reflexions morales (Quesnel), 308 125—126; as capital of Revolution, 436;
Nouveaux Philosophes, 524 character established by Revolution, 438;
Nouvelle politiques (newspaper, Berne), 244 cornerstone of French unity, 440; eroti-
Nouvelles ecclesiastiques ou Memoires pour cization of image (i860— 1900), 455; hos-
servir a I'histoire de la Constitution preten- tility toward, 435; Joan of Arc Festival,
due civile du clerge (newspaper), 326, i8oi; place for sentimental education,

328i, 329, 332 444; prestige, 434; relationship to

Novels, 430, 444 provinces, 439—440; as seen by la province

Nuitdes copains (June 21, 1963), 511 (1792— 1793), 437; self-criticism in eigh-
Numismatics, 61 teenth century, 434; social centrality,
Nuns: see under Port-Royal des Champs 432-433> 443-445, 451; tourism to, 456;
wall posters, 238i; see also Province, la
Oath of June ij, lySg, The (engraving), 88i Paris Commune, 6
642 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Parisian intelligence, 446 Philology: Revue celtique, 61

Parisian in the Provinces, The (Veyron), 449i Philosophes, 485
Parisian lawyers, 462 Philosophy Lesson amid Flowers (Vincent),
Paris-province relationship, 427—464, 449i; 3991
during Third Republic, 4541—455! Physical anthropology, 484
Paris-/>rovmce relationship: early twentieth Physiocrats, 84, 479—480, 485

century, 460; expansion, 435—436; first Physiologic du provincial a Paris (Guinot),

half of nineteenth century, 447—450; 4331, 439

modern status, 453—464; nineteenth cen- Picardy, 488-489

tury, 438; republican view of, 457; sec- Piganiol de La Force, 485
ond half of nineteenth century, 450 Pilgrimage of Piety, The, 336!
Parlement, 319, 321; reports of debates, 326; Pilgrimage sites: Port-Royal des Champs,
victory against Jesuits, 324; role of Le 323
Paige, 328 Place de I'Etoile, La (Modiano), 219, 527
Parlementary controversies, 330 Places: focus for memory, 18

Parlements, 55 Plozevet (Breton village), 253

Parliament: mirror of body politic, Poitiers, 36

263—264; reform (19 10), 263; terms Poland: minority groups, 167
describing divisions, 247-252; topogra- Politic: system, 282—283
phy, 24oi, 249, 257 Political analysis, 255

Parliamentary regime, 254 Political arithmetic, 482

Parliamentary tradition, 247 Political arithmeticians, 479, 485

Pas-de-Calais: Polish worker's home, 163! Political caricature, 131

Past: presence as lieu de memoire, 16 Political classification, 251—252; see also

Patriotism: motivated interest in Gauls, 36 Political parties; Right and Left

Pays (rural regions), 64 Political divisions, 260, 273—276
P.C.F., etapes et problemes, Le (1981), 217; Political elite, 460
see also French Communist Party Political groups: Action Fran9aise, 275,
Peasant culture, i 280, 283; Action Liberale Populaire, 259,
Pelerin, Le: Catholic Scholars and Secular 262; Bloc des Gauches, 257, 261; Bloc
Virtues, 123!; Polish Miners Expelled National, 267; Cartel des Gauches, 112,

from Escarpelle (Dambians), 165! 129, 254, 267, 271; Christian Democrats,
Petainists, 197; see also Petain in Name 281; Comite d 'Action pour les Reformes
Index Republicaines, 260; Francs-Tireurs et

Petite culture (small-scale cultivation), Partisans (Communist Resistance

480—481 group), 219, 237; National Front, i76i;
Petit Journal, Le: statue of Vercingetorix, S.O.S.-Racisme (political action group),
66i i44i; Union des Etudiants Communistes,
Petit Journal illustre: engraving of Italian 229; Union des Jeunesses Revolution-
immigrants, 153! naires de France, 226; Union of Rights,
Petit Larousse, 382 255; Union of the Left, 284; Union pour
Petit Marseillais: article on anti-Italian vio- I'Action Morale, 342; Whites (reac-

lence, 154 tionaries), 253-254

 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 643

Political history, 63, 503 terns, 280—282; two-party system, 274;

Political identity, 253, 276 see also Political parties; specific parties

Political Jansenism, 337; see also Jansenism Popular education 469—470, 469
Political life, 140—143 Popular Front, 236, 271
Political movements: Boulangism, 1 54; Population: Essai sur la statistique de la pop-

Monarchiens, 87, 88 ulation frangaise (d'Angeville), 478

Political parties: confusion of origins, 259; Population density, 483
constitutionals, 248, 249; continuity, Port-Royal (Montherlant), 340

278—283; distribution, 24oi; independent Port-Royal (Sainte-Beuve), 339

deputies instead of, 247—248; moderates Port-Royal de Paris, 305
versus ultras, 248; modern, defined, 255; Port-Royal des Champs, 301—344; abbey,
MRP, 113; multiplicity in 1930s, 276; 3061—3071; archives, 302, 311; bibliogra-
nature of, in 1890s, 260; quadripartite phy, 344—348; cultural contribution, 323;
structure (1970s), 284; recomposition in current influence, 343—344; destruction,

twentieth century, 279; seating as indica- 301, 313; documentation, 313, 318; effect
tion of alliances, 249; in Vichy regime, on Ancien Regime, 331; effect on
192; see also specific parties Enlightenment, 335; effect on parlements,
Political religion, 136 324, 330; effect on Revolution, 331—335;
Political science, 57 eighteenth-century memorials, 348—351;
Political symbolism, 288—291 engravings, 315; heritage, 308—309,
Political traditions, 148—149 340—344; histories of, 319, 321, 322; his-

Political vocabulary, 249—250, 253; basis for tory, 317, 322, 324; image, during nine-
shift, 257—266; language of denuncia- teenth century, 335—339; — emblem of
,

tion, 256-257; during late nineteenth resistance, 313; idealized, 337—338; — in ,

century, 254; of parliamentary division, 1750s, 321; -, in 1850S, 340s, 340-341;

264; see also Right and Left importance, 3 14; as lieu de memoire, 302,
Politics: anti-Semitism, 407—409; basis in 305; memory of, 311, 315, 321, 339;

contradictions, 295; campaigns, 2041; nuns, 305, 314, 3141; symbolic value,
changes in 1990s, 286; conflict, 265; cul- 342; texts reprinted, 343; viewed by
ture of unity, 265; elections of 1924, 267; Gregoire, 334
exclusionary principles, 55; importance Postage stamps: Huguenots freed from
of center, 284—285; influenced by statis- Tower of Constance, •^^ji; Marshal
tical data, 477—478; left-right shifts, Established the Peasant Corporation, The

258—259, 279; during nineteenth century, (1943), 1851

93; owned by revolutionary tradition, Poverty, 476—477

93; parliamentary democracy (1840s), Power: relationship to society, 487; relation

147; parliamentary session (1819— 1820), to generational identity, 514

249—250; persistence of traditional form, Precis d'histoire moderne (Michelet): as lieu

283; during post—world war periods, 285; de memoire, 17

power, 94; prominence of extremes, 275; Present (gen.): connection to past and
reactionary movement after 19 14, future, 12—13

265—266; secularization, 131; separation Preservation (gen.), 8

from religion (1789), 148; tripartite pat- Presidential politics, 284
644 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Principes d'anarchie pure et appliquee 427—464; image transformed, 441; influ-

(Valery), 521 ence on political life, 459; relation to

memory (gen.),
Private 11; see also time, 463; seduction by Paris, 442;

Memory (gen.) semantic history, 432; term became

Private schools, 114 obsolete, 462; see also Paris

Pro Alesia (journal), 68, 72 Provinces, 440, 485

Promised Land, The (Rougeron Vignerot), Provincial academies, 431—432, 486
io5i Provinciality: within Paris, 445

Propaganda: Atheism Tries and Fails provinciality: levels of, 445

(engraving), i38i Provincial nobility, 430

Propos (Alain), 266 Provincials: attitudes toward image, 432;

Protestant Federation of France, 366 basic traits, 430—431; capture of

Protestantism: commemorative phenome- Tuileries, 437; develop counterimages,

non, 367, 3699; connection to nation- 440—441; elites nullified by Paris, 445;

states, 367; Desert period, 376—377; ethnotypes, 453; fates in Paris and at
important of history to, 357; interna- home, 459i; living in Paris, 460-462,
tional dimension, 374—375; liberal influ- 46ii; stereotypes, 431, 437, 462-463;
ences, 115; saints, 368 touristification, 453—457; viewed during
Protestantism and Liberty Committee: July Monarchy, 439
organized (1982), 366 Provincial towns, 441

Protestant liberals: monument to religious Provinciaux a Paris, Les (Picard), 438

peace, 360—361 Pure memory, 525-526
Protestant lieux de memoire: paradoxes, 354 Puritans (gen.), 81

Protestant memory, 362—363, 377 Pyramid of the Camisards, 368i

Protestant resistance, 356i Pyrenees mediterraneenes, Les (Sorre), 492
Protestants, 353—377; as avant garde, 373;

blamed bank collapse, 127; character- Qu 'est-ce le tiers etat? (Sieyes), 85

ized, 377; commemorations, 355—356, Question royale (Saint-Cyran), 335

361, 365, 372; debates over rights (1789),

147; family life, 3561; institutional lieux Rabbis, 390—391

de memoire, 357—364; literature for chil- Radical Left, 255; see also Political parties
dren, 354; memory subjects, 370; oral Radical Party, 120; in 1890s, 260; conven-
traditions, 355, 356, 370; see also tion (1901), 260; join forces with

Camisards; Huguenots Socialists, 267; as part of tripartite pat-

Protestant songs: Cevenole, La, 359—360; tern, 280; reason for inception, 262
lament, 371-372; at Uzes, 358 Raison, La: Secular Virtues, 1231

Protocols of the Elders of Zion (anti-Jewish Raison d'Etat, 303, 304

tract), 384 Rassemblement du Peuple Fran^ais (RPF)
Province: defined, 428-429 (Gaullist party), 205

Province, la: as administrative entity, 435; Reacs, 2')^

asserted power over nation, 450; Realms of memory: see Lieux de memoire
described by Taine, 452; effect of agrat- Realms of Memory (Nora), x—xi
ian movement on, 458; gap from Paris, Rebelliousness, 521
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 645

Recherches de la France (Pasquier): as lieu Reliquary: in memory of Port-Royal des

de memoire, 17 Champs, 3i2i

Recit de la captivite, 3 14 Renversement des libertes gallicanes

Recueil d'antiquites (Caylus), 34, 37! (Legros), 318

Recueil d' Utrecht (1740), 318 Representation (in government), 262, 263,
Recueil general des actes d'appel interjettes 437
aufutur Concile general (Nivelle), 326 Republic: Marianne as symbol, 109; need

Reds (democratic-socialists), 253—254 for stability, 120

Reflections (Burke), 503 Republican Left, 255; ^ee also Political parties

Reflexions sur la conformite de I'etat des Republican Right, 255; see also Political

religieuses de Port-Royal avec celui de parties

Jesus-Christ dans I'Eucharistie (Saint- Republicans: control of educational sys-

Jean), 311, 314 tem, 120—122; denunciation of clerical-

Reflexions sur la question juive (Sartre), 419 ism, 117— 118; ideology, 119

Reformation, 23 Republican Society of Champlitte, 438

Reformation Festival, 357—358 Republic That Decent People do Not JVant
Reformed Churches of the Cevennes, 361 (Patrioty), io3i

Refusal of the Sacraments, The (1752), 320! Resistance, 218—219, 375~37^

Regional consciousness, 487 Resistantialism, 218—219

Regional monographs, 493 Restoration (1814-1848): alliance of

Regional studies, 494 Throne and Altar, iii; Gallican versus

Regions: constructed by Sorre, 493; ultramontane emotion, 337; liberal histo-

defined by Vidalian geographers, 488; rians, 98; nonviolent political confronta-

see also French territory; Natural regions tion, 140— 141, i4ii, i44i; origins of
Reign of Terror, 151, 530; see also French parliamentary tradition, 247—253;
Year 1793 parliamentary topography, 24oi; political
Reims, 49i society, 238; purpose, 182

Relation de captivite (Saint-Jean), 311 Reunion Catholique, 302

Religieuse, La (Diderot), 124 Reveil du peuple, 110
Religion (French): antithesis of reason, Revocation of Edict of Nantes, 114; bicen-

136; geographic divisions (after World tennial, 358—359; doubts about commem-
War II), 138—139; Jansenist vestiges, oration, 369; founding event of French

343; removed from public sphere, 391; Protestantism, 366; multiple meanings,
separation from pohtics (1789), 148; see 372—377; nature of tercentenary com-
also Catholic Church; Huguenots; memoration, 374—375; represented in

Jansenism; Judaism; Port-Royal des Museum of the Desert, 365

Champs; Protestants Revolution (1789), 22, 79—106; bicenten-
Religion (gen.): seventeenth-century nial, 500; constitutional debate (1789),
England, %\\see also Catholic Church 87—88; cycles, 92-93, 521; death, 106;

Religious conflict, 134, 137—139; see also distinguishing features, 80; double

Catholic-secular antagonism meaning, 530; effect on Port-Royal des

Religious education: opposed to secular Champs, 331—335; fueled conflict, 94;

education, 109— 115, 120—129 generational aspects, 502, 503; ideas of,
646 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

103; interpretations of, 96, 326; inven- Right (political), 272, 277-278, 294—295
tion of term Ancien Regime, 526; Right and left (as terms): basis for success,

invoked by Communists, 232; lack of 283; change from topography to identity,

new social order, 90; legacy, 91, 93—94, 253—266; at end of nineteenth century,
182; matrix for Catholic-secular antago- 255; expressed historical reality, 251; hide
nism, 129—137; mobility of laborers, 147; complexity of parties, 261; mobilized in
open-ended status, 93—95; openness to 1906 elections, 261; origin, 241—244; as
foreigners, 151; origins as viewed by political identity, 253; power, 259; status
Caperan (1957), 113; philosophical basis, in France, 297; subtlety, 264; at turn of

84—85; possible forms of sovereignty, twentieth century, 259; used in parlia-

88—89; promoted antiquities, 38; mentary sense, 257; use in 1930s, 274
reshaped conception of Paris-/>rovmce Right and Left (political positions),

relationship, 434; root of French political 241—298; during 181 5— 1820, 248; cogni-
civilization, 79; universalist enthusiasm, tive tool, 297; dependence on multiple
1 50— 1 51; see also Ancien Regime; Year parties, 274—275; distribution of forces,
1789; Year 1793 276—278, 294; division discouraged, 247;
Revolution (American), 80—84, 89; see also essential qualities, 266; genesis, 287;

Puritans (gen.) ideal types, 278—279, 280; importance

Revolution (English), 80; exemplar for for individuals, 288; as lieux de memoire,

French Revolution, 98 298; Manichaeanism, 282, 291; not

Revolution (gen.), 57, 99—100; theories of, reflected in elections, 256; observed in

57 Estates General, 243-244; opposition

Revolution, La (Quinet), 373 versus continuity, 249; origins, 247; sym-

Revolutionary assemblies: use of right and bolism, 290; tripartite splits, 277; univer-

left, 242 salization, 286—290; used as form of vot-

Revolutionary calendar, 89—90; as lieu de ing, 243; used in Revolutionary assem-
memoire, 15; spontaneous origin, 85 blies, 242; see also Political parties

Revolutionary identity: linked to Jewish Right-left division: adoption by voters, 258;

emancipation, 22 attitudes toward, z6')—z66; cemented in

Revolutionary Judiasm, 384 1930s, 274; developments after World

Revolutionary religion, 135—136 War I, 267; properties of expression,
Revolutionary tradition, 331 296; Restoration parliament, 24oi; role
Revolutionary utopianism, 420 in contemporary societies, 283; as

Revolution of 1848, 104—105 viewed by Dumont, 293—294; see also

Revolutions de France et de Brabant (news- Right and Left

paper): began publication (1789), 131 Rights of Man (Peree), 130!

Revolution Today, i^oi Role politique des protestants frangaise de

Revue celtique: founded (1870), 61 i685 a ijiS (Dedieu), 373
Revue encyclopedique, 474i—4751 Roman bourgeois (Furetiere), 432

Revue historique, 357; editorial by Monod Roman conquest (of Gaul), 64—67, 68, 70
(1876), 5
Roman Constitution (1713), 312, 316, 321
Rhine: as lieu de memoire, 16 Roman de Brut (Wace), 47
Ridgway-the-Plague, 237 Roman law, 54
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 647

Romans, 53, 54; living in Gaul, 53 122—129; ^^-^^ Catholic-secular

Romantic generation, 511— 516; see also antagonism

Generation Secular Virtues (Grandjouan), i23i

Royalism, 253 Self (gen.): relationship to memory, 11

Royaumont Bible, 121 Self-reference: in lieujc de memoire, 16

Rue Copernic: explosion at synagogue, Semaines religieuses (Breton publication),

420, 422i; see also Anti-Semitism 126

Rue Transnonain, 98 Semur: excavations, 61

Ruines de Port-Royal, Le (Gregoire), 331, Sentimental education, 444

334 Sephardic Jews, 115, 421; see also Jews

Rural exodus, 452—453; see also Paris- Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO), 186

province relationship, 452 Seule France, La (Maurras), 184

Rustic: difference from provincial, 430 Sevres: Upper Normal School, 124
Sharecroppers, 479—480
Sacre-Coeur: as lieu de memoire, 18; sym- Shook (Lanzmann), 417
bolic architecture, 125 Sicambrians, 56
Saint-Magloire, 316 Simon de Nantua (religious text), 121

Saint-Malo— Geneva line, 467—496; divided Sisters of Charity, 122

economic universes, 470; first identified, 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, 488 Socialism, 212, 294

Salon of 1824, 251 Socialist Party: during 1970s, 106; in 1981,

Salon of 1831, 32 199; increased power (late 1890s), 258;

Salon of 1901, 35i joined with Radicals, 267; as part of tri-

Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 141! partite pattern, 280; revival (1970s), 284;

Savary Law (1984), 113 Section Frangaise de I'lnternational

Scenes de la vie de province (Balzac), 4421 Ouvriere (S.F.LO.), 261, 262
Schools: Ecole de Port-Royal, 331; Ecole Socialists: in 1890s, 260
des Chartes, 61; Ecole du Louvre, 61; Social mobility, 443

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 62; Social morphology, 491, 495, 496

private schools, 114 Social organizations, 488

Scientific communities, 527 Social sciences, 467

Second Empire (1852— 1870), 451; industrial Social security archives, 9

expansion, 152; purpose, 182 Social statistics, 487—488

Second Republic (1848— 1852), 93, 447 Social status, 428

Second Vatican Council, 212 Societe de I'Histoire du Protestantisme

Section Fran9aise de I'lnternational Fran^aise (S.H.P.F.), 357, 366
Ouvriere (S.F.LO.), 261, 262 Societe de Philosophic Chretienne, 334
Secular clergy, 119 Societe de Port-Royal, 302

Secular education, 109— 115, 120—129 Societe des Amis de Port-Royal, 302
Secularism, 121; defined by Sainte-Beuve, Societe des Antiquaires de Franc, 39

117; histories, in— 116; morality. Societe des Etudes Juives, 392
648 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Societe des Sciences Historiques et Suicide: geographical differences in fre-

Naturelles, 61 quency, 486

Societe Litteraire of Clermont, 34 Supplement au Necrologe (Cerveau),
Societe Royale de Medecine, 486—487 324—326
Societe Saint-Augustin, 302, 341 "Sur la necessite d'une nouvelle edition des
Societies: modern, structure, 297 Pensees" (Cousin), 339
Society: center of gravity, 432; class struc- Syllabus, 120

ture, 76, 174; described, 446; divided by Symbolic history (gen.), ix-x; described,
educational systems, 142; foundation for 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, Tableau de la France (Michelet), 439—440

289; changing nature of, 6, 291; contra- Tableau de la geographie de la France (Vidal
diction in defining axioms, 292—293; de La Blache), xii; seen by Jullian, 69
England in Middle Ages, 80; as frame of Tableau du Grand Siecle (Villemain), 337
reference, 290; Puritans in New World, 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), 84, 85, 86, 106

unity, 289 Tapestries: Gallic kings (1530), 50; Remus

Sociologists: methodology, 495 and Francus (sixteenth century), 49i
Sociology, 490, 492, 495 Tartuffe (Moliere), 431

Solitaires (religious recluses), 305, 315; at Temoignage de la Verite (Horde), 317

Port-Royal des Champs, 305 Temple de I'Oratoire: commemoration of
Sorrow and the Pity, The (film), 198, 219 Revocation of Edict of Nantes, 367
S.O.S.-Racisme (political action group), Temps, Le: political commentators, 255

1441 Temps modernes, Les: published attack on

Southern France, 471, 476, 479; see also hussards, 524

Saint-Malo— Geneva line Tennis Court Oath, 134, 501

"Souvenirs" (Gazier), 341 Testement (Richelieu): as lieu de memoire, 17

Souvenirs (Moreau), 331 Texts (French): comic books, 33

Souvenirs (Tocqueville), 393—394 Texts (gen.), 51

Sovereignty, 88-89 Theater: anti-Semitic, 384—385; provincial

Space, 4^6-4^7 stereotypes, 430

Stalinism, 206 Theater of memory, 210

State: 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 Thermidorians, 437
Stuarts (English rulers), 81 Third Estate, 52; alliance with kings of
Student movement (1986), 500 France, 102; confrontation with nobility,
Student riots (May 1968), 499, 503; as lieu 75; Gauls as symbols of, 55; origins, 56;

de memoire, 500 use of left side of hall, 243

 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 649

Third Force, 113 Bibles, 308; launched new wave of

Third RepubHc (i 870-1 940): definition of Jansenism, 315
French national identity, 31; educational 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- France: song, 226

tionship, 454i— 455i; political categories, Union General, 403, 404

257; studied by Goguel, 287; tradition of Union Nationale, 267
French memory, 5; transferred power to Union of Rights, 255; ^ee also Political

Petain (1940), 186—187 parties

Throne Burned, TAe (Lordereau), looi Union of the Left, 284

Time: abolished by memory, 526; genera- Union pour I'Action Morale, 342
tion as symbolic unit, 527; see also "Union Sacree," 516
Generation United States: distinguished from Europe,
Totalitarianism, 276, 289, 295 83; historical continuity, 83; immigration
Toul selection center, 1 52; see also policies, 148; origins, 145, 1466; see abo
Immigration Revolution (American)
Tour de France (bicycle race): as lieu de Universal history (gen.), 48—49
memoire, xii Universalism, 392
Tour de la France par deux enfants. La Universal suffrage: approved (1848), 253;
(Bruno), 121, 223; as lieu de memoire, ix, created need for political identification,

15—16 254; effect on Catholic-secular debate,

Tourist sites: as lieux de memoire, 18 142; effect on Paris-province relation-

Tournai, 34 ship, 450

Trade: between northern and southern Utrecht: Jansenists in, 318
France, 472
Transalpine Gaul, 58 Vacations: effect on Paris-province relation-

Treaty of Frankfurt, 231 ship, 453

Treaty of Nijmegen: as lieu de memoire, 16 Valogne, 34

Triomphe de la Republique (Dalou), 258 Vatican Council of 1870, 335
Triumph of the French People, The Vaudeville, 427, 438; representation of la

(David), 94i province, 427

Trois Glorieuses, 98, 99 Veil Law (1975), 519
Trojans, 47, 49 Vel' d'Hiv (Velodrome d'Hiver), 222,
True Portrait of the Wandering Jew, The, 388 379, 4i6i
Tuileries, 437 Vercingetorix (Lacroix), 26i, 32

Two Republics, \oyi Vercingetorix devant le tribunal de Cesar

(engraving), 32
Ultra-right, 272—273 Verdun: as lieu de memoire, 16
Ultras, 248, 250, 251 Versailles: as lieu de memoire, 18

Unigenitus (papal bull, 1713), 302; battle Vers I'armee de metier (de Gaulle), 231

against, 313, 316, 324; condemned Veterans' organizations: as lieux de

Quesnel, 311; condemned vulgate memoire, 19

 1

650 INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Vichy France (Paxton), 219 War of 1776, 83

Vichy regime (1940— 1944), 181-202; as War of Investitures, 58

ambiguous past, 183— 191; anti-Semitism, Wars of Religion, 355

409—415; changing memories of, 181, Welfare state, 290

196—202; compared with previous Whiggery, 85

regimes, 182-183; exploitation of GaUic Whites (reactionaries), 253-254

past, 30, 31; guardian of territorial Women's liberation movement, 519

integrity, 29; Jewish statute (1940), 191; Words: fundamental French idea, viii

officials, 187—188; policy of collabora- Workers' movement, 60, 176

tion, 185—186; policy of exclusion, Working class, 237
192—193; renewal of French institutions, Works of history: as lieu de memoire, 17

184; revived debate on secular education, World War I: effect on religious conflict,

113; role in deportation of Jews, 199; 129; generational idea, 524; German sur-

source of later divisions, 22; strategy for render, 18

national revitalization, 191— 196; use of World War II: Hitler and Retain Shaking
Gallic references, 29—32; use of rightist Hands in a Field of Ruins (fresco), 20oi;
ideology, 3 League of French Volunteers, 20oi; as

Vidalian geographers, 488—490; see also operation of memory, 218; see also Vichy
Vidal de La Blache in Name Index regime
Vie de Henry Brulard (Stendhal): as lieu de
memoire, 17 Xenophobia, 156, 166, 174; ^ec also

View of the Abbey of Port-Royal des Foreigners; Immigration

Champs (Boulogne), 3o6i— 3071

Villele ministry, 337 Yalta Conference (1944): as lieu de

Vineam Domini (papal bull), 314 memoire, 17

Vingt ans en igSi (Kanters), 524 Year 1789, 95—104; interpreted in 1830, 98;

Visit of Napoleon III to the Rothschild Estate place in Jacobin history, 103; reflected by
at Ferrieres (engraving), 3951 Trois Glorieuses, 98

Visual images (gen.), 13 Year 1793, 95—104; centrality to Jacobins,

Vivarais: Protestant museum, 362 103; dictatorship celebrated, 102; latent

Vix: princely burial site discovered (1953), in Year 1789, 98; revised view of, by
45 1 830s Jacobins, 100—102; viewed in
Voting, 256-257, 264, 284 nineteenth century, 96; see also Reign
Voyages pittoresques (Nodier, Taylor, and of Terror
Cailleux), 32 Year 1830, 98; historians of, 105; interpreta-

Voyages romantiques dans I'ancienne France: tion, 100; see also July Monarchy
La Bretagne (Nodier, et. al.), 462i Year 1848, 105
Year II, 98
Wall of the Federes, 222 Year III: crisis of Germinal and Prairial,

Wandering Jew, 381—382, 388i, see also Jews 246

War: effect on GauUist and Communist "Young People of Today, The" (Massis
memories, 229 and Tarde), 518
Youth: growing autonomy, 510— 511; inter-
nation rebellion, 499; as new social cate-

gory (since 1960s), 174; transformed by

adult society, 518

Youth movements, 501, 504

Zionism: in France, 417, 421

 Text: Fournier

Compositor: Columbia University Press

Printer: Edward Brothers

Binder: Edward Brothers
 (continuedfrom frontflap)

More than a linear chronicle of critical

moments in the nation's history, Realms of

Memory is a richly evocative meditation on
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 is editor of the journal

Le Debat^ and is Directeur d'Etudes at the

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences

Sociales, Paris.

LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN is Ted and Helen

Geisel Third 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 its readers

with a remarkably coherent view of the many lines 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 York
Review of Books noted "how very valuable the concept behind the book will be for historians of many differ-

ent kinds."

Realms of Memory, the three-volume English-language edition of this critically acclaimed work, distills

what Pierre Nora calls "the very marrow of the work." France's leading intellectuals survey how the French

have reinvented their past across the centuries and reflect on how myths become fused with history in the cre-

ation of a collective national heritage.

This first volume, Conflicts and Divisions, explores the political, religious, geographical, and generational

clashes that structure France's self-definition. Volume Two, 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 its national identi-

ty. Realms of Memory is a bold, innovative form of critical practice, a stunning achievement to be appreciated
by anyone interested in the rich culture of the French.

CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 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 York

ISBN 0-a31-0aM04-fl

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