The Memory of the Modern.

By Matt K Matsuda (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. vi plus 255 pp. $49.95/cloth $18.95/paperback).

Matt K Matsuda intends his account to be a "general history of France" (and Europe "in some ways") between the Franco-Prussian war and the First World War. The book's nine chapters present histories of French "memory objects" or "locations," ranging from the destruction of the Vendome column in May 1871 to the "tango-mania" of pre-1914 Paris. At the outset the author concedes that his chosen "memory objects" are but "fragments" with which he will "fitfully evoke" a period. (p. 17) But he also assures the reader that his topics will not be so disparate or strange to historians as they first appear. Throughout the book Matsuda works to develop a number of themes characterizing "modern memory" and giving a unifying "style" to an era. For the latter notion he cites Hippolyte Taine, and on memory he draws inspiration and ideas from the work of Francis Yates and Pierre Nora as well as Henri Bergson.

The first chapter recounts the period's most dramatic, overtly political struggle over memory: the Communards' toppling of the Vendome monument, which represented the tradition of the imperial ruler - from Trajan to Napoleon. "The grand tradition ...," the author maintains, "is overthrown by the modernity of a fugitive moment, an unremarkable instant." (p. 36) But it remains unclear just how such a "modern" act differed from the destruction of statues in the French Revolution. In any case, after overthrowing tradition, the Communards never realized their project of erecting a new monument to their own values, as the author points out, and by 1875 the statue of Napoleon was put back on a column.

In the other case studies that follow, Matsuda's interpretative line of thought is more strikingly original - and often takes surprising turns. The chapter on "numbers" and the Bourse, for example, observes that the Paris stock exchange was not a memory site but rather a place of "amnesias for capital" (p. 42) - indeed, "a palace for nothing" (p. 52). By such startling formulations Matsuda means that only the ever-fleeting information of the moment counted at the Bourse. From there he moves to a discussion of French thinking about "patrimony" - a concept embracing everything from rural small holdings to the nation's resources and heritage. At the Bourse, investors tried to preserve and enhance their patrimonies, yet globally their transactions were bringing drastic changes to the landscape and memory, both urban and rural. At the same time cheap daily newspapers, dispatching the latest stock quotations and political reports, were creating "the first memory accelerated: public opinion." (p. 58) As French investments expanded abroad, news of foreign markets and international political events - troubles in the Balkans, for example - assumed a growing place in that modern memory.

The following chapter examines popular memory systems, showing them to be based on words rather than the older favorite, images. In the minds of forward-looking republicans and mnemonic specialists, French words were bearers of a great legacy of classical civilization and also keys to future "progress." As Matsuda puts it, language itself was a rich and fructifying "memory," which lived on not only in the spoken words but also in the speakers' bodies - the French people's voice organs, properly trained and disciplined.

Most of the points made about "the modern" are drawn from such now-classic observers as Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin: a heightened consciousness of the transitory and the contingent, a prominence of language positing experience as flux and multifarious, and a sense of the acceleration of history. Much of this is set forth more directly in Stephen Kern's book The Culture of Time and Space (among others). And a number of monographs over recent years have already placed spotlights on such words and concepts as generation and "degeneration" in the late nineteenth century. Still, Matsuda's history breaks new ground by showing those features of modernity emerging in unexpected places. For example, a "modern" sense of the self as "indeterminate," moved by buried memories and the "irrational," turns up in the writings of legal scholars, discussing how to determine the truthfulness of testimonies. Ironically, that "modern" understanding perpetuated old prejudices, making women and children more suspect than ever, while reinforcing belief in male professionals.

The recasting of so many disparate activities as "memory" is, I think, the main contribution of this book. Matsuda's conceptual approach opens fresh ways of seeing the importance of writing and the democratized print culture of the late nineteenth century. It also casts new light of understanding on the expansion of state records and files (the "memory of state"). And he fruitfully brings his framework to bear on the functions of such new "memory machines" as photography and cinema. Individually, several chapters stand out as most engaging and insightful. The account of the penal colony of New Caledonia shows the state using distance, forgetting, and exile as the bases of a reform program for convicted criminals, requiring them to work their way back to civilized society. The fascinating chapter on the tango guides us through several layers of memory embedded in the dance. As Matsuda presents it, the Argentine tango in pre-war Paris was an enactment of nostalgia and yearning, a focal point of French fantasies about a more youthful people and of French desire for a revival of lost energies and strength. Like Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring, this account ends with dance as a harbinger of the coming war.

The "modern memory" that emerges from this book is extremely complex. The varied views culled from the sources never come together in a unified system. At times the presentation of "multiple interpretations" does not make clear which views were the most widespread and influential. Yet generally an important line of thought comes across: witnesses disagree and struggle over versions of the past and, in the process, they structure and change memory over time - with the powerful usually prevailing. The book concludes with the point that even now our collective memory is making "the history of the present," as we remember and forget, bear witness, and choose our actions.

Charles Rearick The University of Massachusetts, Amherst