Realms of Memory: Traditions

Realms of Memory is a monumental collective endeavor by France's leading intellectuals, exploring the cathedrals and palaces, the rituals, legends, and episodes that form the landscape of French consciousness. The first volume, Conflicts and Divisions, reflects on symbols of political, religious, regional, and generational difference that structure France's self-definition. The book begins with the political clashes that have carved a path through French history and memory, between Franks and Gauls, French and foreigners, Vichy and all other regimes. Contributors explore shifting conceptions of political meaning over centuries, from the often irreverent portrayals of Gauls in such popular media as the Asterix comics to nostalgic reimaginings of pre-revolutionary France by modern ultranationalists. A second section analyzes sites and events of the religious conflicts that underlie French identity. The authors chronicle the manufacture of remembrance, as seen in the Protestant festivals held each September to commemorate the persecution of Huguenots in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion; and of the processes of forgetting, witnessed in the assimilative tradition among French Jews that has hindered, if not prevented, rediscovery of a distinctively Jewish past and acknowledgements of the French legacy of anti-Semitism. Conflicts and Divisions concludes with a section on issues of time and place, and analysis of the cleavages that separate Paris and province, north and south, and human generations as demarcated by such transformative years as 1789 and 1968.