Review Essay: Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2, Tradition.

Edited by Pierre Nora, Lawrence D. Kritzman. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, xii plus 591 pp.).

By Joseph Amato Southwest State University

Traditions is the second volume of what is to be the three-volume English edition of Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Traditions, like the other two volumes, is a selection from Pierre Nora's original seven-volume French Lieux de Memoire. The pieces for the English edition were chosen, according to editor Lawrence Kritzman, because of their potential appeal to an American audience, while more complex historiographical pieces were left for subsequent gleaning. The authors of this work, who include a range of historians, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and other representatives of French cultural and intellectual academic life, are unfortunately not identified with short biographies and bibliographies.

Traditions is a collection of fourteen beautifully translated and high-quality essays, although in a few instances, in the French intellectual tradition they are over-argued and too-bright-for-their-own-good. Analyzing distinct traditions around which the French experience, remember, and make history out of their memories, the essays are divided into three major sections.

In Part One, 'Models," there is Armand Fremont's instructive geographic overview, "The Land"; Andre Vauchez's "The Cathedral," an institution which after mediating a thousand-year discourse between town and countryside, bishop and people, man and God, has become an imposing, costly, and even embarrassing heap of mute stones. There is also Jacques Revel's study of "The Court," which as an inherited way of conceiving and practicing power, continues to stamp the political society of the Fifth Republic, defining both the poles of majesty and Machiavellianism typfied by a Mitterand.

"Books," Part Two, is an astute collection of essays. Jacques and Mona Ozouf lead off describing how Le Tour de La France par deux enfants served as "The Little Red Book" of the nascent Third Republic. Jean-Yves Guiomar, explains how the geography of Paul Vidal de La Blache defined the "plenitude and density of France," while meeting the scientific task for the new Republic of laying the foundations of patriotism. In "The Nation's Teacher," Pierre Lavisse explains how this professor, whom republican Charles Peguy despised so singularly, provided as no one else a kind of intellectual orthodoxy for the emerging Third Republic, which threaded its way between crisis and ideology on its path from one century to the next. In Antoine Compagnon's "Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past," the reader encounters the artist whose work, although it be fiction, defines The Realms of Memory more than any other. Proust's dawning and towering importance converges with an entire age's need - not just that of its compulsive historians - to clarify what it remembers and the terms of its remembrance. While progress is hoped for in twentieth century France, nostalgia, it has been argued, rules.

"Singularities," Part Three of Traditions, features distinct French ways of experiencing, representing, and commemorating the past. In "La Coupole," Marc Fumaroli explains how the Academie Francaise, the spiritual rudder of French eloquence, charted across centuries the just measure between art and truth. In "The Pulpit, the Rostrum, and the Bar," Jean Starobinski shows how France's orators, up to the last century, defined meaning by exhortation - first the church's, then the revolution's, and finally the law's - until mass media books, newspapers, photographs, and films, muted its eloquence. Just perhaps, contemporary France has less to say, with fewer places to say it, and with proportionately far fewer people listening.

Antoine Prost methodically demonstrates that France's "Monuments to the Dead" don't speak with the same voice. Standard historical prejudices aside, these monuments do anything but express a consistent jingoistic nationalism. Gerard de Puymege cleverly concludes in his inquiry "The Good Soldier Chauvin," that Chauvin was an invented myth of the soldier-peasant which had the function of unifying France beyond class and party against national enemies until Vichy's final embrace proved mortal. In "Street Names," Daniel Milo demonstrates how French city names illustrate how they went from belonging to "a spontaneous organic system of the Middle Ages to a semi-state-oriented system emphasizing the history and the nation." Accenting a major theme of the entire work, street names reveal the overall three-step national transition from natural memory to official historical memory to the advent of a post-history and anti-memory in whose kingdom new towns receive only neutral names.

Two additional pieces - Pascal Ory's "Gastronomy" and Georges Vigarello's "The Tour de France" - also capture modern and contemporary France as self-defining. The first demonstrates the recent and contrived character of French eating and cooking, while the second, shows just how recent, commercial, staged, and all-consuming the Tour is.

The entire volume of Tradition is only put in focus by Vol. 1 of Realms of Memory, Conflicts and Divisions. Conflicts, another collection of analytic essays about French historical self-definition, addresses principal territories of French experience. These essays focus around such abiding political divisions as Franks and Gauls, political right and left, Catholics and seculars. They trace the place in France of minority religions - Protestants, Jansenists, and Jews. They sketch elemental French divisions of time (generations) and space (in Paris and the provinces).

More importantly, for our purposes, this volume contains Pierre Nora's introductory essay, "Between Memory and History," which provides the raison d'etre for the vast undertaking of Lieux de Memoire. Nora's intention is universal and dramatic. He seeks to offer more than just another survey of French history. He does not intend this work to be merely a Gallic response to English historian Theodore Zeldin's monumental two-volume, cross-sectional sociological approach to the Republic. Nor does he content himself with offering an Annales-like multi-dimensional survey of France's past. Instead, Nora conceives the work as rethinking the French experience and self-conception which stand in his opinion at a singular historical crossroad.

Nora - intensely conscious French historian that he is - argues that France has arrived at a historiographical kairos. Consciousness itself has now come fully upon itself - and with it, as Hegelian as the formulation is, has come no synthesis. Memory, according to him, has been ground up by critical self-awareness. Self-doubt and critical self-reflection have destroyed all eternal verities and French assumptions and presumptions. History, the disciplined practice of the mnemonic faculty, which swallowed memory, is presently being consumed by historiography, which has turned on itself, becoming a victim of its own epistemological consciousness. In other words, as Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and others declared a half century ago, the era of substantiality is over. The age of pure intellectual manipulation of experience is past, and that of historical forms of representation has begun.

If Nora's diagnosis is correct, Nietzsche's prognosis was right. The acid of critical history has digested monumental and commemorative history. The past is no longer out there for mere identification and facile reordering. French historians have reached the end of history.

Historians, Nora contends, have exhausted the past from which memory itself has largely vanished. That is, natural memory - spontaneous, concrete, singular, and filled with gesture and emotion - has been exhausted. As peasant culture, a primary repository of tradition, has been done in by globalization, democratization, and the advent of mass culture, so French society at large has lost its anchoring in past and memory. The very institutions that transmitted values from generation to generation - churches, school, families, government - have ceased to function as they once did. As if he took a page from American Henry Adams' Education, Nora names the culprit to be the acceleration of history: Change rips up the planking from the human house of memory. It disrupts the equilibrium between past and present, and sweeps away all that was once familiar. Critical consciousness embodied in historiography - "so iconoclastic and irreverent in France" - frees history from memory. It "runs the blade of a knife between the heartwood and the bark of history."

The vanishing of the times, places, feelings and metaphors that clustered to history justifies, for Nora, the importance of les lieux de memoires. The realms of remembrance are the remaining points of intersection between memory and history. They are the last enduring composites of a France once remembered, then given histories, and now engulfed by change.

Yet, however diminished these singular hybrids of memory are, they - as both sublime and banal, material, symbolic, and functional - remain, if I read Nora correctly, the last places where the French can still read their own past and history. These lieux are the vestiges of exhausted traditions and canons, shelled out ceremonies, depleted polarities, spent institutions and customs, and wasted historiographical schools.

Their study, which more and more resembles an art rather than a science, is the ultimate way the mind can take up the deepest matters of the heart. There alone can contemporary historian squeeze meanings out of a world largely devoid of sense. At the same time, before them, historians - stripped of myth, tradition, and ritual - experience what Mircea Eliade over a generation ago aptly characterized as "the terror of history": Without a pattern, a purpose, or a myth to impose on raw change, events overwhelm significance, meaning, and purpose. Contexts are ripped apart and transferentiality is destroyed. Nothing is inherited; nothing can be predicted. Common discourse no longer holds its ground - and neither idealism, nor positivism, nor even historicism assure any significance to occurrence.

Historians, Nora concludes his analysis, have less and less to say about more and more. With the help of the recording and archiving state, documents accumulate into an infinity of unexplained bits and pieces. (Nora notes in France alone, telling shelves of social security records are now measured in hundreds of linear miles, and there is, he fears, no gentle archivist beneficiently destroying them to put the historian out of his interpretative misery.) The past, as Nietzsche wrote a hundred years ago, becomes the great rock that European consciousness - even the keen and generalizing French mind - can't digest.

Nora's explanation does not escape two powerful ironies. The form and style of Nora's jeremiad reveal, despite the transformation and even annihilation he postulates, a continuity of French education, intellectual style, and eloquence. And his rhetoric, like so many other contemporary products of French culture, seems all too Hegelian, all too Nietzschean, all too German in its abstractions.

Perhaps Nora could have more simply and directly asked: How do the French interpret themselves today when France has become a mere province of the world and is no longer easily assumed to be Europe's best mirror and the truest reflector of the Western mind? Or he could have asked: How do French national historians of today resemble French provincial historians of yesterday? Or yet he could have directed his query towards explaining how French intellectuals react to the condition of no longer absolutely believing themselves capable of spinning a tale big enough to beguile world, nation, and, above all else, self.

On any count, Nora wrote a fine provocative introductory essay to a lovely collections of essays. One can only wait the third and final volume of Realms of Memory and other pieces harvested from this monumental French effort to know themselves as humans and nations never quite can.

Department of History Marshall, MN 56258