Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  What is new, at least in the modern era, is the neglect of history. Every memorial, every museum, every shorthand commemorative allusion to something from the past that should arouse in us the appropriate sentiments of respect, or regret, or sadness, or pride, is parasitic upon the presumption of historical knowledge: not shared memory, but a shared memory of history as we learned it. France, like other modern nations, is living off the pedagogical capital invested in its citizens in earlier decades. As Jacques and Mona Ozouf gloomily conclude in their essay on Augustine Fouillée’s educational classic Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: “Le Tour de la France stands as witness to that moment in French history when everything was invested in the schools. We have completely lost our faith in the realm of pedagogy, which is why Mme Fouillée’s sharply etched portrait seems to us so blurred.”28

  For the moment, at least, Pierre Nora’s themes are still material for a study of lieux de mémoire. But to judge from the virtual disappearance of narrative history from the curriculum in school systems, including the American, the time may soon come when, for many citizens, large parts of their common past will constitute something more akin to lieux d’oubli, realms of forgetting—or, rather, realms of ignorance, since there will have been little to forget. Teaching children, as we now do, to be critical of received versions of the past serves little purpose once there no longer is a received version.29 Pierre Nora is right, after all—history does belong to everyone and to no one, hence its claim to universal authority. Like any such claim, this will always be contested. But without it, we are in trouble.

  The selection of essays from Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, translated by Arthur Goldhammer and published in 1998 by Columbia University Press, was reviewed by me in the New York Review of Books in December of that year. Since then, the University of Chicago Press has published a different selection of essays from the same French work under the title Rethinking France, making available in English some of the essays not included in the Columbia collection. However, the Goldhammer translations are distinctly superior.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER XII

  1 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 5. See also Daniel Sherman, “Art, Commerce and the Production of Memory in France after World War I,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 186-215.

  2 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 128.

  3 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  4 Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992), 1:3.

  5 Les Lieux de mémoire. Vol. 1, La République; Vol. 2, La Nation; Vol. 3, Les Frances, all under the direction of Pierre Nora. In addition to the translation under review here, four volumes on the themes of the state, space, cultures and traditions, and historiography will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

  6 Philippe Burrin, “Vichy,” in Realms of Memory, 1:182.

  7 “In France . . . the intensity of the phenomenon [of commemoration—TJ] owes less to the accidents of chronology than to the richness of the French historical repertoire, to the radical nature of the revolutionary break, and to the memorial rumination to which the country has been condemned by the feeling that it is no longer a place where history on the grand scale is made.” Pierre Nora, “The Era of Commemoration,” in Realms of Memory, 3:610.

  8 Pascal Ory, “Gastronomy,” in Realms of Memory, 2:443.

  9 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory 3, 6-7.

  10 “En fin de parcours, le lecteur étranger perd le fil. Qu’est-ce qui n’est pas lieu de mémoire?” Pim den Boer, “Lieux de mémoire et l’identité de l’Europe,” in Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales,ed. Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1993), 17. See also Pierre Nora, “Preface to the English-language edition,” in Realms of Memory, 1:xvii.

  11 Nora, as well as being a respected teacher, is editorial director at Gallimard, France’s premier publishing house, and responsible for Le Débat, the country’s most important intellectual periodical. He has drawn on the work of some close collaborators from this enterprise.

  12 Nora, “The Era of Commemoration,” in Realms of Memory, p. 614.

  13 Nora, “Introduction” to Volume 3 of Realms of Memory, xii.

  14 Pierre Nora, “La notion de ‘lieu de mémoire’ est-elle exportable?” in Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, p. 9.

  15 Chateaubriand is quoted by Jacques Le Goff in “Reims, City of Coronation,” in Realms of Memory, 3:245.

  16 For a fine example of what can be done with the study of towns and cities as sites of memory (or forgetting), see Sophie de Schaepdrijver, “Bruxelles, ‘lieu sans identité’ ou le sort d’une capital incertaine, voué à l’imitation,” in Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, p. 90: “Le sort de Bruxelles est, je crois, exemplaire de ce qui se passe lorsqu’une ville devient lieu d’oubli, lieu d’une course à la modernité qui n’est freinée par nul instinct de conservation (car au nom de quoi conserverait-on?).” [“Brussels’ fate seems to me an exemplary instance of what happens when a town becomes a site of forgetting, of a rush to modernize restrained by no instinct for conservation—for in the name of what would one conserve?”]

  17 Though some contributors, notably Pascal Ory, make a sustained effort to apply a comparative perspective. As he writes, “It makes no sense to accumulate supposed gastronomic references taken out of context from Gallic or Gallo-Roman sources unless one can show by similar methods that other peoples were somehow different.” Ory, “Gastronomy,” in Realms of Memory, 450.

  18 Nora, “Generation,” in Realms of Memory, 1:528.

  19 Nora, “Introduction” to Volume 3 of Realms of Memory, xii; see also “La notion de ‘lieu de mémoire’ est-elle exportable?” in Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, 4: “Ni l’anglais, ni l’allemand ni l’espagnol ne peuvent lui donner d’équivalent satisfaisant. Cette difficulté à passer dans d’autres langues n’indique-t-elle pas déjà une manière de spécificité?”

  20 Jacques Le Goff, “Reims, City of Coronation,” in Realms of Memory, 211.

  21 Claude Langlois, “Catholics and Seculars,” in Realms of Memory, 1:116; Proust is quoted by André Vauchez in “The Cathedral,” Realms of Memory, 2:63.

  22 Armand Frémont, “The Land,” in Realms of Memory, 2:25, 34. In 1976 Georges Duby and Armand Wallon edited a four-volume, multiauthored, uncompromisingly scholarly history of rural France, from ancient times to the present (La Fin de la France paysanne was the elegiac title of the final volume). It was a national best seller.

  23 “Dans ce livre, tu apprendras l’histoire de la France. Tu dois aimer la France, parce que la nature l’a faite belle, et parce que son histoire l’a faite grande.” [“In this book you will learn the history of France. You must love France because nature has endowed her with beauty and history has made her great.”] From the frontispiece of the 1912 edition of Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France (cours moyen), reproduced in Realms of Memory, 2:168.

  24 Antoine Prost, “Monuments to the Dead,” in Realms of Memory, 2:328.

  25 See René Rémond, “Mémoire des guerres,” in Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, 266.

  26 In the little town of Péronne, at the heart of the Somme battlefields, there is now a “Historial” devoted to the history and memory of World War I. Unlike most such museums, its installations are not merely commemorative but deliberately and self-consciously historical; they offer historians’ interpretations, sometimes controversial and from a German and British perspective as well as a French one, of aspects of
the war experience that were not displayed or emphasized in traditional evocations of the grandeur and misery of the war.

  27 See Armand Frémont, “The Land,” in Realms of Memory, 28. In the 1930s there was already a gnawing sense that peasant France was receding into the past—the 1929 census had revealed that, for the first time, less than half the national population lived in communities defined as “rural.” Various exhibitions and fairs displayed “working models” of farms, artisanal occupations, and village communities, and much anticipatory effort was devoted to remembering and reproducing an idealized country past. See Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), and James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

  28 Jacques and Mona Ozouf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: The Little Red Book of the Republic,” Realms of Memory, 2:148.

  29 In Patrick Hutton’s words: “No culture can sustain itself with autopsies of the institutional forms and modes of discourse of its discarded past.” See Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), xxiv.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain’s “Heritage”

  In the spring of 2001, during a BBC radio discussion of the forthcoming British general election, a young journalist voiced her frustration. “Don’t you agree,” she asked her fellow panelists, “that there’s no real choice? Tony Blair believes in privatization, just like Mrs. Thatcher.” “Not quite,” replied Charles Moore, editor of the (Conservative) Daily Telegraph. “Margaret Thatcher believed in privatization. Tony Blair just likes rich people.” That is indeed so, and although Moore’s witticism doesn’t really address the question, it points, perhaps inadvertently, to something seriously amiss in England today.

  Two weeks after that exchange Blair and his New Labour Party duly won the British general election, overwhelming the hapless William Hague and his moribund Conservatives by a sweeping majority. He could hardly acknowledge it, but this famous victory, like much else in Blair’s glittering political career, was only possible thanks to a threefold inheritance from Mrs. (now Lady) Thatcher. First, she “normalized” the radical dismantling of the public sector in industry and services and its replacement with the “privatized” Britain whose praises Blair enthusiastically sings. Second, and in the process, she destroyed the old Labour Party and facilitated the task of those who fought to reform it: Blair had merely to reap the reward of their work. Third, her asperity and her intoleranceof dissent and disagreement have fractured her own party and rendered it unelectable. The British never much cared for the woman or her policies, but they conceded a grudging admiration for her style and they tolerated her excesses and eccentricities. Her successors, John Major and William Hague, have enjoyed no such latitude.

  Even so, New Labour’s performance was far from glorious. For the first time in modern British history, abstainers (41 percent of the electorate) vastly outnumbered those who voted for the winning party (25 percent). There were some good reasons to vote Labour: Blair’s government has introduced a minimum wage, addressed the disgracefully high level of child poverty in Britain, taken a firm and honorable stance over Kosovo, and urged the cancellation or reduction of third-world debt. There were also credible grounds for voting against: the scandal of the Millennium Dome, political cronyism, overcozy relations with Labour Party donors, mismanagement of the foot-and-mouth disease crisis, and the embarrassing condition of public education, the National Health Service, and the railways.

  But many people didn’t vote at all. There are various possible explanations for this. Characteristically, Blairites sought the most “spinnable”: According to Baroness Jay, Labour leader in the House of Lords, people stayed away from the polls because they were “contented” with their prosperous lot (an imprudent echo of Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1959 claim that the British people had “never had it so good”). Even if true this adds scant luster to Blair’s achievement. He inherited a stable economy and a benevolent international economic environment; the best that can be said of his first government is that it did not squander its advantages. Meanwhile, within twenty-four hours of their victory, some Labour members of Parliament were proposing a solution to electoral apathy: Voting, they suggested, should be made obligatory.

  That hint of sanctimonious compulsion—Nanny knows best—is something many people find distasteful in Blairite triumphalism. But it isn’t the real problem. What seems to grate most is the ersatz quality of Tony Blair and his politics. He doesn’t exactly believe in privatization (but nor is he against it . . . ), he just likes rich people. He talks the talk of devolution, but as prime minister he is notoriously obsessed with control. He is a populist who shuns direct contact with the voters (witness his palpable distaste and embarrassment when confronted with unscripted questions or disapproval during carefully orchestrated walkabouts). In one preelection speech he urged Labour activists to “work not for ourselves” but “for what we can do for our country” (even his friends had the grace to find this a little much). He conveys an air of deep belief, but no one knows in quite what.1 He is not so much sincere as Sincere.

  There is nothing contrived about Tony Blair’s inauthenticity. He came by it honestly, as it were. Old Labour stood for the working class, trade unions, state ownership, and the nostalgic little-England socialism of William Morris and the Webbs. Its last leader, Michael Foot, led it to electoral catastrophe in 1983 with a political program so fatuously anachronistic that one of Labour’s own spokesmen famously called it “the longest suicide note in history.” Blair has always seen it as his first task to put all that far behind him. His Labour is resolutely “New.” There is frequent mention of gender but none of class.2 Blair has experimented with various catchy identification tags—“Third Way,” “Cool Britannia”— whose common message is youth and novelty. It is not quite clear what they actually mean—there is much talk of the need to be “post-tribal” and inclusive. In any case, it is their appearance that counts.

  In London, this seems to work. It is an international truism today that London is once again “swinging.” It is prosperous, bustling, cosmopolitan: a world-class financial and cultural mecca, etc. Among young Europeans it is the place to be. And something odd has happened to Londoners themselves—they actually seem to believe everything they hear about their city, which may account for Labour’s success there. The skeptical, mocking Cockney has been replaced by a town full of civic cheerleaders. No one seriously denies that Britain’s capital city is overpriced and overcrowded, that its transport system is inadequate, its laboring classes cannot afford housing, and its Victorian-era sewage system is dangerously dilapidated. But Londoners today happily entertain a form of cognitive dissonance: Yes, it’s all true, they concede—but all the same, London is “back.”

  There is a superficial patina of prosperity about contemporary London, a glitzy, high-tech energy that makes other European capitals feel a bit dowdy and middle-aged, just as Tony Blair seems fresh and forward-looking when contrasted with some of his continental counterparts. But the gloss is two centimeters deep. The contrast between private affluence and public squalor is actually greater now than at any time I can remember. As for the often repeated assertion that what has made London (and by extension Britain) great again has been the rise of private initiative and the reduction of a debilitating dependence on the state, this is just cant. Londoners today, like everyone else in Britain, may be employed in the private sector, but they are as dependent on the state as ever.

  In an economy shaped by relatively low wages for all but a few, and quite high fixed costs for everyone, they rely on the government for their education, their health, their transportation, their civic facilities and amenities. Even their “private-sector” job itself is frequently underwritten by state assistance in the form of tax ind
ulgences or direct subsidy. And in an age of job insecurity, a very large number of people have at some time or another had occasion to draw unemployment assistance. This is a truth hidden from Londoners: partly by Blairite rhetoric and partly by the ultravisible but quite unrepresentative world of the city financial institutions. But it is a lot clearer once you go north of the capital.

  Of the ten administrative regions of England, only three (London, the South East, and East Anglia) reach or exceed the national average wealth per capita. All the rest are poorer, some far, far poorer. The North East of England in 2000 had a gross domestic product per head just 60 percent that of London. After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist countries, Great Britain is the largest current beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying that parts of Britain are among the most deprived regions of the EU.