French History Advance Access originally published online on April 20, 2009
French History 2009 23(2):193-215; doi:10.1093/fh/crp008
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Conflicts of memory: republicanism and the commemoration of the past in modern France
* The author is fellow and tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, and may be contacted at sudhir.hazareesingh{at}politics.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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The question of how State institutions should commemorate the past has generated considerable public controversy. Recent polemics point to the dilemma which political elites have grappled with since the Revolution: what content to give to the nation's ‘civil religion’ and which specific set of historical and ideological values should be collectively celebrated. Since its emergence after 1870, the Republic has sought to create a consensus in France through the sheer power of its commemorative force. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article will delve deeper into the complexities of modern republican collective memory. It will be argued that this memory needs to be understood in the context of its dialectical relationship with the memory of the democratic struggles of the French Left after 1871. The article touches on four interrelated themes: first, the ongoing debates about the heuristic value of the memory ‘label’; second, the strengths and dissonances of republican collective memory in the century that followed the French Revolution; third, the tension between republicanism and democracy in France, and how this was played out in the arena of the nation's civil religion in the early decades of the Third Republic; and finally, the continuing reflection of these divisions in contemporary French political culture.