French commemoration: The centenary effect and the (re)discovery of 14–18
A centenary effect is bringing the First World War back into the public sphere in France, even though state authorities have struggled to generate momentum around its national commemorations. First, this article synthesises France's memory of the First World War, comparing it with Australian commemoration, arguing that it is generally consensual and that, to date, there has been an absence of debate over its commemoration. Second, it examines the Mission du Centenaire, France's official board for the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War, the key commemorations announced and the articulations between local, national and international commemorative events. Finally, the article analyses the economic rationale behind the French authorities’ desire for an internationalised centenary, the political messages articulated through the memory of the conflict and the level of popular interest in the centenary commemorations since 2013. 在法国，一战的百年效应就是让一战回到公共领域，政府当局大力营造国家纪念的声势。本文首先对法国的一战记忆做了综述，并同澳大利亚的纪念活动进行比较，指出法国的特点是普遍共识，至今关于一战的纪念并无辩论。本文还研究了法国官方的大战百年纪念委员会即“百年使命”，宣布的主要纪念活动以及地方、国家、国际层面的纪念活动的结合。本文最后分析了法国当局希望百年纪念国际化背后的经济理性、通过战争的记忆所传达的信息、以及2013年以来公众对于百年纪念活动热情的程度。
Performing the past: memory, history, and identity in modern Europe
Table of Contents - 6[-]Preface - 8[-]Acknowledgements - 10[-]CH1. The performance of the past: memory, history, identity - 12[-]CH2. Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past - 36[-]CH3. Repetitive structures in language and history - 52[-]CH4. Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past - 68[-]CH5. Co-memorations. Performing the past - 106[-]CH6. 'Indelible memories': the tattooed body as theatre of memory - 120[-]CH7. Incongruous images. 'Before, during, and after' the Holocaust - 148[-]CH8. Radio Clandestina: from oral history to the theatre - 176[-]CH9. Music and memory in Mozart's Zauberfl te - 188[-]CH10. The many afterlives of Ivanhoe - 208[-]CH11. Novels and their readers, memories and their social frameworks - 236[-]CH12. Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation - 258[-]CH13. 'In these days of convulsive political change'. Discourse and display in the revolutionary museum, 1793-1815 - 288[-]CH14. Restitution as a means of remembrance. Evocations of the recent past in the Czech Republic and Poland after 1989 - 306[-]CH15. European identity and the politics of remembrance - 336[-]About the Authors - 362[-]List of Illustrations - 368
Burying the dead, creating the past
Professional historians tend to be ambivalent about one of the prime historical phenomena of our time: the desire to commemorate. The amount of attention given to memory (collective or not) and trauma bears witness to the fact that historians really do want to give in to that desire; the fact that they treat these subjects in a rather "positivist" way suggests that they regard it as a bit improper to do so wholeheartedly. As a result commemoration is all over the place but is never taken as seriously as it should be. This essay argues that effective commemoration should start with a question Giambattista Vico might have asked: "who are we that this could have happened ?" Posing this question means relinquishing the identity-enhancing, self-celebrating stance from which we tend to commemorate "unimaginable" events. Commemorative self-exploration is a confrontation with what we don't like to be confronted with: the fact that occasionally we behave in utter contradiction to what we regard as our identity. Heterodox, "monstrous," and therefore Gedachtnisfahig behavior comes in three varieties: things we are proud of, things we are ashamed of, and the sublime "mutations" in which we "commit" history and embark on the unimaginable. Because sublime mutations change consciousness, commemorating them confronts posterity with almost insuperable epistemological difficulties. Commemorating sublime mutations means burying them-not in the sense of "covering" them, but in the sense of "inventing" a way in which they keep on living.