Banned by the State, Napoleon’s image became the badge of political resistance, and throughout the period between 1815 and 1830 the French police fought a losing battle trying to track down the Emperor’s image: Napoleon found his way on to busts, statues and portraits, but also jackets, ties, breeches, walking sticks, tobacco boxes, scarves, handkerchiefs, knives, sweets and cakes. For every such object which was destroyed, thousands made their way through into private and public spaces, threatening the symbolic legitimacy of the Bourbon regime and revealing it for what it was: an authoritarian and repressive regime, contemptuous and fearful of its own people. The message from the archives is simple, if only M. Sarkozy wished to hear it: respect for public institutions and their emblems can neither be generated nor maintained by the State; it has to be earned.

  So why, it might be asked, is such a simple lesson from history ignored by a State which constantly invokes the concept of ‘memory’? The first answer is that ‘memory’ is not really a neutral category in France, but an ideological one. It has generally been used in French public discourse for instrumental rather than scientific reasons, in order to celebrate the particular heritage of the Republic, the regime which has been governing France almost without interruption since the late nineteenth century. ‘Memory’, in this sense, entails the exclusion of all those political forces which do not belong to the Republican tradition. The contribution of Bonapartism to the making of modern France is an excellent case in point. The French are still obsessed with Napoleon, and every year dozens of books, articles, exhibitions and works of creative fiction are devoted to this remarkable figure. One recent film is Antoine de Caunes’s Monsieur N, a period drama set in the final years of Napoleon’s life on the island of St Helena (which, in a characteristic piece of Gallic wishful thinking, sees the imprisoned Emperor outwit his English jailers). This film is in one sense a good reflection of Napoleon’s status in French collective imagination: he is greatly admired, but he almost belongs outside history, in the realm of political legend and mythology ….

  While such an instrumentalisation of ‘memory’ is perhaps understandable on the part of the Republican State, it is also important to note that it has received strong support from the French historical establishment. The living embodiment of this symbiosis is the historian Pierre Nora, the father of the modern concept of ‘memory’ in France, and one of the country’s foremost intellectual barons; since 2001 he has been a member of the Académie Française. Les lieux de mémoire [The Places of Memory], the seven-volume work which brought him this promise of immortality, was published under his direction between 1984 and 1992 (it has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia and Chicago University Presses). The appearance of this monumental piece of work was heralded as a major landmark in France’s reconstruction of its recent past. But Nora’s approach is as interesting for what it leaves out of the remit of ‘memory’ as for what it includes. The volume in English devoted to ‘The State’, for example, focuses on the way in which French collective identity has been fashioned by public institutions; among the topics analysed are the emergence of national borders, the political and symbolic attributes of monarchical power, the Napoleonic Civil Code, and the memoirs of great statesmen. And yet this is only one side of the story. One of the distinctive features of the modern French experience is that the State has often directed its violence against its own citizens. But there is little mention of such unpleasantness in Nora’s work. In his ‘pantheonisation’ of French national memory, there is no room for the victims of state violence and their ‘memories’ – workers beaten up by the police, Algerians thrown into the Seine, or women excluded from the public sphere. It is not in Nora’s collection, either, that we should expect to find a chapter on the Drancy concentration camp, through which thousands of Jews transited during the Second World War on their way to Nazi death camps – even though it is a physical site, and the object of much remembering by those who survived their internment there (I once heard Nora actually deny that death camps were ‘sites of memory’). The subtext underlying all this, of course, is that we are not dealing with ‘memory’ in the abstract, but with a particular form of ideologised memory. As wielded by Pierre Nora and his disciples, ‘memory’ has effectively become a history of national good deeds, a sort of virtual Republican theme park which rivals the concrete version built by EuroDisney in Marne-la-Vallée.

  It is not all bad. The study of ‘memory’ has brought some positive consequences for French history, most notably perhaps the collective (and ongoing) reassessment of the Vichy years – not only in terms of the events themselves, but their wider significance. After subscribing for decades to the convenient myth of a nation united behind the Resistance – peddled by both Gaullists and Communists

  – France has finally awakened to confront the realities of the 1940–44 period. The specificities of French collaboration, the role of Vichy in the deportation of Jews, the deep strain of xenophobia in certain sections of French society, and the authoritarian underpinnings of the political culture of the late Third Republic – all this is now the subject of debate and controversy, further kindled by the trials of Klaus Barbie, Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier (at the last, a number of historians were invited to give testimony). This is not a purely academic phenomenon, either: an important mass of testimonies on the Vichy era has been published over the past decade, and numerous associations (of résistants, victims of deportation, etc.) are also extremely active at national and local levels.

  In this specific area, memory has genuinely enabled a more comprehensive understanding of France’s recent past – even though there have been some perverse consequences: most notably the tendency in some circles to view the entire Vichy experience through the prism of the Holocaust, thereby forgetting the other victims of the regime (notably the Communists and other Republicans who resisted).

  But in overall terms, French memory remains highly selective. If Vichy has re-entered French public consciousness, the Algerian War (1954–62) and its social and political consequences have remained essentially buried. Since 1999, this conflict has been officially recognised as a ‘war’ – a belated acknowledgement of the obvious, perhaps, but in fact a testimony to the French collective reticence to face up to one of the most sinister episodes in its modern history. Every now and then, it is true, a specific event brings the matter to public attention – most recently the publication of the memoirs of General Paul Aussaresses … who freely admitted to the widespread use of torture and summary executions by the French Army in its fight against the FLN resistance fighters. But there is no ‘collective memory’ of this conflict in France; many aspects remain under-researched (the relevant archives are still very difficult to get hold of) and there is little ongoing public discussion. A recent study illustrated this by examining the place of the Algerian War in the Modern History curriculum in French secondary schools. The findings were edifying: in most textbooks, French colonialism continues to be presented as a ‘globally positive’ phenomenon, with little mention of how locals were treated as second-class citizens. As for the Algerian War itself, the textbooks offer no explanation or contextualisation of the conflict from a wider anti-colonial perspective (the FLN resistance is generally described as ‘Muslim’ or ‘terrorist’); the French Army’s practices of torture are mentioned, but invariably minimised or even justified on grounds of acceptable retaliation or military necessity. Why this schizophrenia between Vichy and the Algerian War, between remembering and forgetting events which are separated by barely a decade? There are several answers, which take us to the heart of contemporary French collective imagination: Vichy was an authoritarian regime which is now part of ‘history’, whereas the Algerian War was fought by the Fourth and Fifth Republics; the indelicacies of Vichy were part of a wider European phenomenon of war and occupation, whereas the Algerian War was distinctively (and almost uniquely) French; and the perpetrators of state torture and violence in Algeria were not sinister Fascists or mindless thugs, as in the Vichy years, but soldiers and officers of a French Army which included a considerable number of Resistance heroes. Above all, the victims of this violence were different in the two cases: under Vichy, they were essentially Europeans, while in Algeria they were Arabs. France is still not ready to confront its historical and contemporary quandaries in dealing with ‘its’ Arab populations.

  The Times Literary Supplement (21 March 2003).

  Richard Holmes, ‘A Meander through Memory and Forgetting’

  [1]

  There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.

  [2]

  For example, right now I am a sixty-one-year-old biographer and writing this at a tin table under an olive tree, on the banks of a tiny streamlet known as La Troubadore. In April La Troubadore gushes over a bed of shimmering white shingle, through the young vine fields, until it vaults into the River Droude, a minor tributary of the River Gardon.

  Actually the Gardon is several rivers – Les Gardons – though no one can agree on quite how many. But they all flow out of the wild hills of the Hautes Cévennes, the two main branches emerging at Anduze and at Alès (famed for its municipal fountains). Both are much subject to spring and autumnal flooding (la crue), and regularly carry off the cars and houses of the plain. They join forces further south, near Avignon, and as one mighty waterway sweep under the Pont du Gard, the noble Roman bridge built by the emperor Augustus, with its fifty-three striding stone arches, one row balancing airily upon another, like some brilliant troupe of performing circus elephants, those creatures that never forget.

  Paradoxically this famous Roman bridge is really an aqueduct, and the river beneath it never becomes the Gard. Indeed there is no River Gard at all, except possibly, momentarily, at the point where it goes under Le Pont du Gard. I have heard a local fisherman quote Heraclitus on this subtle question. Certainly, when it comes out the other side, the river is still Le Gardon and flows on down to join the stately River Rhône near Arles and Tarascon, and so out into the Mediterranean, untroubled by its many identities.

  Yet they change constantly. By August my sparkling young Troubadore is quite dry and silent. Its shingle is hot and dusty, like a line of white bones laid along a ditch. The cheerful Droude has dwindled to a fretful ghost, green and malodorous, skulking under the trees. Even the two muscular Gardons have fallen into a brown study, a long slack chain of slumbering rock pools, barely threaded together by a trickle of live water, marooning thousands of tiny distracted fish. So, it seems, are the seasons of Memory and Forgetting, for ever alternating between flood and drought.

  [3]

  Here at my tin table, with the cicada beating their jazzy Django Reinhardt sound, I am flooded with memories of the Cévennes of forty summers ago. I arrived on the night train from Paris, with its dark creaking woodwork and circular windows, and the pink dawn coming up over Pont-Saint-Esprit and Orange. Getting out at Avignon, I was told that all the autocars were ‘en Grève’. I studied my map for some time to find this desirable place, Grève. Later it was explained that Grève was not a location, but a condition. To be en grève meant to be ‘on strike’. It now occurs to me that to be en grève could also be a state of mind.

  So I hitch-hiked instead to Uzès in the van from the Cave Cooperative. We drove past the cimitière, to the Mas St.-Quentin, where Monsieur Hugues was ploughing between his vine rows with his grey horse called Mistral. He completed his row and came over to the side of the field, pushing his cap on to the back of his head, and shook my hand with a certain caution. ‘Un jeune Anglais, pardee!’ I stayed with his family in the mas for the next five months, and, in a series of long walks westwards, discovered the Cévennes.

  But just here memory falters, and runs dry. I see Monsieur Hugues so clearly at that moment at the field’s edge, the walnut-brown face, the outstretched arm, the shy glance from under the cap, the big old leather belt with the army buckle, and the red-check handkerchief pulled out to wipe his face. But red-check – was it? Or did that belong to the other farmer who, weeks later, I met in a high, alpine field near Mont Lozère in the Cévennes, under a burning midday sun. The farmer who stopped his hay-making to give me an ice-cold swig of water from his canteen, tucked under the tractor seat, and wrapped in a damp cloth to keep it cool. A red-check cloth perhaps? Was it his?

  Or was it even the neckerchief that belongs to Monsieur Rolland, the farmer who lives across the track from us now, a seventy-year-old, who adores his vines, his dog and his grandchildren, and shakes my hand across the stone wall, bringing us grapes. Whose red-check handkerchief, whose walnut-brown face, whose eternal shy kindness of the Midi, am I actually remembering? And was that horse that I used to groom in the evenings in the courtyard of the Mas St.-Quentin, to the smell of roasting chicken and rosemary, really called Mistral?

  So here is Memory mixed with Forgetting, and maybe combined with what the neuroscientists call confabulation, or ‘unconsciously making it up’.fn1 Two sparrows dive down and brawl in the dust under the apricot tree. Little bursts of hot wind from the south scrape the big, heart-shaped leaves of the murier d’Espagne across the terrace. I listen to this drowsy orchestration of the leaves, the cicada, the fountain, the tractor, the mid-afternoon bell from the village. I fall asleep for a few moments while making these notes. I dream, something about rivers and flooding. But when I wake I cannot remember what it was. I find myself wondering if the rivers used to dry up like this, forty years ago, when I was young?

  [4]

  Later I discovered the answer in my battered copy of Napoléon Peyrat’s Pasteurs du Désert. This was Robert Louis Stevenson’s favourite book about the Cévennes, which forms the haunting background to his Travels with a Donkey. Peyrat vividly recounts the history of the Camisard rebellion of 1702–5, and the memoirs of the visionary young soldier-prophets who came down from the hills to fight against their royalist oppressors on the plain. It was a Protestant insurrection against Catholic authority, but also a mountain people’s insurrection against the centralised power of the city and the plain.

  In the opening chapter of Volume 2 there is a passage describing the dashing Camisard leader, Jean Cavalier. It recounts his successful ambush of the King’s dragoons at the Pont de Ners, just five kilometres from my olive tree, where the Droude meets the Gardon below Anduze. But Peyrat also makes a remarkable observation about the fluctuating state of the rivers, and what they might symbolise.

  In springtime during la crue, the river Gardon often bursts its banks and sweeps like an inland sea towards the village of Boucarain. But in the growing heat of summer, all this mighty torrent shrinks back again to expose a huge dry plain of sand and pebbles. Its panting ardour expires upon the banks of shingle (grève), until it is little more than a tiny pulse of water which the burning sun of the Midi soon dries up completely. So the Gardon is symbolic of the Cevenol revolt, as excessive in its triumphs as in its defeats. Moreover, the river would never countenance a bridge to be maintained at Ners. It would ruthlessly wash away each successive set of arches, as soon as they were built. Beside their eternally ruined stonework, a simple ferry boat, plying between one bank and the other, remained the most reliable method for travellers.fn2

  So the Gardon had always fluctuated violently; and sometimes even became the River Lethe too.

  [5]

  Here is something one of my students at the University of East Anglia, Marisse Clarke, told me about forgotten memories. Marisse was completing her MA in Life-Writing, and working on a project to reconstruct the domestic history of pre-war Norfolk. It was a jump-back of sixty years or more to the pre-fridge era, as she called it. There was lots of written material, especially letters and diaries in the Norwich archives, but she was interested in something more direct and intimate, an oral history. Her main source became groups of old age pensioners, many of them women, who met once a week for ‘Reminiscence sessions’. Initially they were shy, their memories were very scattered, and it was difficult to get more than a few well-worn tales. On subjects such as ‘Christmas’, Marisse suspected many memories were made up of ‘fanciful images’, unconsciously adapted from popular Christmas tales, films or Christmas cards (confabulation again).

  Then a colleague told her about the Memory Boxes which had been taken along to other Reminiscence sessions. A Memory Box typically consisted of a large suitcase containing a number of perfectly humdrum domestic objects from the 1930s – a bar of Lux soap, a packet of Swan Vesta matches, an Ovaltine tin, a tortoiseshell hair-clip, a small mangle, and so on. For a ‘Wash Day and Bath Night’ session, things like stone hot water bottles and men’s old razors were added – and the Memory Box itself became an old zinc bath.

  According to Marisse, what many of us would regard as ‘old junk’ now became ‘little treasures’ of stored-up memory, with a high symbolic value. The effect of the Memory Boxes was often magical. The old women, many in their seventies and eighties, slowly began to handle, identify (eyesight not always so good) and discuss these familiar objects. Amazement was soon followed by laughter, delight and not infrequently indignation, and even some tears. Each physical object began to ‘trigger’ a long chain of recollections. Gradually an extraordinary stream of shared memories, anecdotes, jokes and stories would emerge. The flow – the flood – soon became unstoppable. It was quite unlike anything Marisse or her colleagues had heard before, and the memories had a knock-on or chain-reaction effect, each memory setting off another. Sometimes, it seemed, the evenings would explode into a party, a Memory party.