Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Volume 2 - Traditions

by Pierre Nora, Lawrence Kritzman, Arthur Goldhammer

Overview

This text is the second of three volumes looking at the history of France. This volume examines how and why events and figures become part of a people's collective memory. It emphasizes the shared aspects of French history and cultural instrumental in the development of a national identity. It includes 14 essays on subjects ranging from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past to the Tour de France.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231106344
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/01/1997
Series:	European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	643
Product dimensions:	7.06(w) x 10.31(h) x 1.71(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lawrence Kritzman is the Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professor in the Arts and Sciences and professor of French and comparative literature at Dartmouth. He is the series editor of our European Perspectives series and the editor of Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, by Michel Foucault (Routledge, 1990). His publications include: The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge, 1991); Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France (Routledge, 1994); and several monographs published in French (French Forum Publishers).
Pierre Nora is Editorial Director of Editions Gallimand. He is editor of the journal Le Debat and is Directeur D'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Pierre Nora

Part I: Emblems1. The Three Colors: Neither White nor Red, Raoul Girardet2. La Marseillaise: War or Peace, Michel Vovelle3. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Mona Ozouf4. Bastille Day: From Dies Irae to Holiday, Christian Almavi

Part II: Major Sites1. Lascaux, Jean-Paul Demoule2. Reims, City of Coronation, Jacques Le Goff3. The Louvre, Royal Residence and Temple of the Arts, Jean-Pierre Babelon4. Versailles, the Image of the Sovereign, Edouard Pommier5. The Pantheon, The Ecole Normale of the Dead, Mona Ozouf6. The Eiffel Tower, Henry Loyette7. Verdun, Antoine Prost

Part III: Identifications1. The Gallic Cock, Michael Pastoureau2. Joan of Arc, Michael Winock3. Descartes, Francois Azouvi4. Paris, A Traversal from East to West, Maurice Agulhon5. The Genius of the French Language, Marc Fumaroli6. The Era of Commemoration, Pierre Nora

Notes Index of NamesIndex of Subjects

Editorial Reviews

A magnificent achievement.... [The essays included] are the high-carat jewels of the project.

The New Republic

A magisterial attempt to define what it is to be French.

Times Literary Supplement

Provides arresting genealogies of a number of the major cleavages in French history, with chapters on the embattled relationship of Jews to the French republic, the peculiar affinities of Gaulism and Communism, and... Paris' haughty condescension toward la province.... Without resorting to polemics, the volume reminds us that the image of the French past is confected as much out of amnesia as out of memory.

Lingua Franca

This unusual book deals fascinatingly with everything from the creation of the rousing anthem "La Marseillaise" to the changing role of Joan of Arc in France's collective memory. Even the Eiffel Tower shines forth in surprising new facets.

Chicago Tribune

This is an indispensable guide to understanding France and the French. As usual, Arthur Goldhammer's translation is superb.

Foreign Affairs

Pierre Nora has always insisted that he intended his project to be a sort of counter-commemorative history, de-constructing, as it were, the myths and memories it records. But as he ruefully concedes in his concluding essay in the final volume, the work has had a strange destiny: commemoration has overtaken it and it is now a sort of scholarly lieu de mémoire in its own right. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, Nora is a very powerful figure in French intellectual life and for his magnum opus he secured the services of some of France’s best scholars; their essays are small masterpieces, classic contributions to their subject.....Are these distinctively French characteristics of Les Lieux de mémoire—the book and the things themselves—not an insuperable impediment to translation? No: the English-language version...is a major publishing event in its own right. It is as copiously and beautifully illustrated as the original, and the translation, by Arthur Goldhammer, is wonderful—sensitive to the different styles of the various contributors and superbly confident and learned in its grasp of a grand variety of technical and historical terms. The books are a pleasure to read, in English as in French.

New York Review of Books - Tony Judt

The original French edition of Realms of Memory, which appeared in three installments during the presidency of Francois Mitterrand, was the intellectual equivalent of the period's monumental public architecture....the essays selected for inclusion here (roughly one-third of the total) are the high carat jewels of the project and some of the best France in historical writing produced in this century. And, far from losing anything in translation, some of the essays have gained considerably more lucidity than they have in the original French. Arthur Goldhammer deserves a medal...

New Republic

But in "Realms of Memory," the general level is uniformly high, the scholarship accessible, lashings of information are invitingly presented and the approach is superficial but never shallow; just as it should be in accounts of dead folk and events from a past that is even less penetrable than the present.
Most specialists will prefer to read the essays in the original French. For the average reader, what "Realms of Memory" offers is an unusual look at the French looking at themselves, at France and at their historical memory being simultaneously made and unmade.

Los Angeles Times

French-Jewish historian and publisher Pierre Nora is renowned for editing the monumental series of volumes
“Lieux de Mémoire” for the French publisher Gallimard. Literally, the title means, “Places of Memory,” and the series is the ultimate repository of modern Gallic concepts of national identity. Its brilliant scholarship was recognized by Columbia University Press, which, from 1996 to 1998, released a plushly appointed threevolume translation by Arthur Goldhammer as 'Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past.'

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