Presentism
1 See “Sur la notion de régime d’historicité. Entretien avec François Hartog,” in Historicités, ed. F. Dosse, P. Garcia, and C. Lacroix (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 133–149.
2 Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, ed. Jennifer Sigler (New York: Monacelli, 1998), 1249.
Introduction
1 Anaximander, fr. B1: “And from what source things arise, to that [source] they return of necessity when they are destroyed; for they suffer punishment and give satisfaction to one another for injustice according to the order of time [kata tou chronou taxin].” Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 6r (24, 19); Theophrastus, Doxography 476, 24:13; Arthur Fairbanks, trans. and ed., The First Philosophers of Greece (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1898); http://history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/anaximan.html#frag.
2 Catherine Darbo-Peschanski, Le discours du particulier: Essai sur l’enquête hérodotéenne (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 72–74. For the case of Croesus, see François Hartog, “Myth Into Logos: The Case of Croesus,” in From Myth to Reason: Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, ed. R. Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 185–195.
3 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge, 1981), 48–79.
4 Krzysztof Pomian, L’ordre du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xii. See also his “La crise de l’avenir,” Le Débat 7 (1980): 5–17, reprinted in Sur l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 233–262.
5 More recently, the theme has been broached from a variety of perspectives, all of which have sought to carry weight beyond their disciplinary boundaries. See, for example, Roger Sue, Temps et ordre social: Sociologie des temps sociaux (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994); Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992); Paul Virilio, in several of his books over the last fifteen years; Günther Horst, Zeit der Geschichte: Welterfahrung und Zeitkategorien in der Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1993); Jean Chesneaux, Habiter le temps: Passé, présent, futur—Esquisse d’un dialogue possible (Paris: Bayard, 1996); Jean Leduc, Les historiens et le temps: Conceptions, problématiques, écritures (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Zaki Laïdi, Le sacre du présent (Paris: Flammarion, 2000); Jean-Noël Jeanneney, L’histoire va-t-elle plus vite? Variations sur un vertige (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Lothar Baier, Keine Zeit! 18 Versuche über die Beschleunigung (Munich: Kunstmann, 2000); Étienne Klein, Chronos: How Time Shapes Our Universe, trans. Glenn Burney (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2005). Having shown that “we still speak of time in the same way people did before Galileo” and that modern physics is intimately involved in questions of time, Étienne Klein ends his book on a more Epicurean note, exhorting the reader to “keep[ing] to a diet of the passing moment, trusting the flavor of the instant, the kairos.”
6 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xv; “Mémoire: Approches historiennes, approche philosophique,” Le Débat 122 (2002): 42–44.
7 Michel Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” in The Certeau Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 48. See also Leduc, Les historiens et le temps.
8 Pomian, “La crise de l’avenir,” 233–262. Marcel Gauchet, La démocratie contre elle-même (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 345–359.
9 In the sense of the term used in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
10 François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 502.
11 Paul Valéry, History and Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1962), 28–29 (a letter that first appeared in English in 1919) and 135–136 (a conference at the Université des Annales, 1935). In another conference held in 1932 at the same institution, Valéry returned to his 1919 analysis of the disarray of “our Hamlet of Europe.”
12 Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History, trans. Barbara Harshaw (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
13 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Anthea Bell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1943), xix.
14 Lucien Febvre, “Face au vent: Manifeste des Annales nouvelles” (1946), in Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), 35, 40, and 41.
15 Lucien Febvre, “A New Kind of History” (1949), in A New Kind of History, trans. K. Folca, ed. Peter Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 41: “History is a way of organizing the past so that it does not weigh too heavily on the shoulders of men.…Organizing the past in accordance with the needs of the present, that is what one could call the social function of history.”
16 René Char, Leaves of Hypnos, trans. Cid Corman (New York: Grossman, 1973), 62. These notes, written between 1943 and 1944, were dedicated to Albert Camus.
17 Étienne Tassin, Le trésor perdu: Hannah Arendt, l’intelligence de l’action politique (Paris: Payot-Rivages, 1999), 32.
18 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1993), 5.
20 See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951).
21 Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Jean-Marc Coudray, Mai 1968: La brèche (Paris: Fayard, 1968).
22 Olivier Rolin, Paper Tiger, trans. William Cloonan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 23.
23 Michel Deguy in Au sujet de Shoah: Le film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris: Belin, 1990), 40.
24 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington, 1982), xxxiii. Sylvie Anne Goldberg, La Clepsydre: Essai sur la pluralité des temps dans le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), 52–55.
25 Charles S. Maier, “Hot Memory…Cold Memory: On the Political Half-Life of Fascist and Communist Memory,” Tr@nsit 22 (2002), in which the author discusses an open-air museum, which is slightly off the beaten track and not really finished. It contains communist-era statues—a case of conserving in order to destroy.
26 Renaud Dulong, Le témoin oculaire: Les conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1998); Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); François Hartog, “Le témoin et l’historien,” Gradhiva 27 (2000): 1–14.
27 Kerwin L. Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000): 127–150; see also Politiques de l’oubli, Le Genre Humain 18 (1988). On the historian as one who both unsettles collective memory and preserves it, see Pierre Laborie, Les Français des années troubles (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 2001), 53–71; Régine Robin, La mémoire saturée (Paris: Stock, 2003).
28 François Hartog, “Temps et histoire: Comment écrire l’histoire de France?,” Annales 1 (1995): 1223–1227. Zaki Laïdi has described an “autarchic present”: Le sacre du présent, 102–129. Jérôme Baschet, wearing his two hats of medievalist and observer of the Zapatist movement, talks of a “perpetual present,” in “History Facing the Perpetual Present: The Past–Future Relationships,” History Under Debate, ed. Carlos Barros and Lawrence J. McCrank (New York: Haworth, 2004), 133–158; Marc Augé, Le temps en ruines (Paris: Galilée, 2003), in which Augé stresses the perpetual present of “our violent world, in which rubble does not have time to become ruins” (10). He sets this against a time of ruins, a sort of “pure, undatable time, which does not figure in our world of images, simulacra, and reconstitutions” (ibid.).
The meaning of presentism in this book is broader than the almost technical sense given it by George W. Stocking in his essay “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences” (included in his Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 2–12). A presentist approach considers the past with one eye on the present, whereas a historicist approach focuses on the past for itself alone.
29 René Rémond, Écrire l’histoire du temps présent. En hommage à François Bédarida (Paris: CNRS, 1993), 33. Henry Rousso, “For a History of the Present,” The Haunting Past, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 25–47.
30 See Olivier Dumoulin, Le rôle social de l’historien: De la chaire au prétoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 11–61.
31 François Hartog, “Marshall Sahlins et l’anthropologie de l’histoire,” Annales 6 (1983): 1256–1263.
32 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (1985; New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 3.
33 This text first circulated as one of the working documents for the conference and was then published in L’état des lieux en sciences sociales, ed. A. Dutu and N. Dodille (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 29. See Detienne’s presentation of the volume in Comparing the Incomparable, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 40–56..
34 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, xvi, and “Mémoire: Approches historiennes…,” 60–61.
35 Jean-François Lyotard, “Les Indiens ne cueillent pas de fleurs,” Annales 20 (1965): 65 (article on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind).
36 For example, Günter Grass, Too Far Afield, trans. Krishna Winston (London: Faber, 2000); Cees Nooteboom, All Souls Day, trans. Susan Massotty (New York: Harcourt, 2001). In a different register, Emmanuel Terray, Ombres berlinoises: Voyage dans une autre Allemagne (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996); Régine Robin, Berlin chantiers (Paris: Stock, 2001).
37 Étienne François, “Reconstruction allemande,” in Patrimoine et passions identitaires, ed. Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 313 (for the quotation from Scharoun), and Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, “Les monuments de l’histoire contemporaine à Berlin: Ruptures, contradictions et cicatrices,” in L’abus monumental, ed. Régis Debray (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 363–370.
38 See, from a philosophical perspective, the similar conclusions of Bertrand Binoche, “Après l’histoire, l’événement,” Actuels Marx 32 (2002): 139–155.
39 Pomian, L’ordre du temps, 101–163. Karl Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967).
40 Daniel 2:28–45 (King James Version).
41 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Daniel and the Greek Theory of Imperial Succession,” in Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, trans. Maura Masella-Gayley, ed. and intro. Silvia Berti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chap. 3, 29–35.
42 Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Elborg Forster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 4, 109.
43 Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, ed. Philip Schaff (New York, Cosimo, 2007), chap. 22, 30, 5. Auguste Luneau, L’histoire du salut chez les Pères de l’Église (Paris: Beauchesne, 1964), 285–331.
44 Koselleck, Futures Past, 259–263.
45 Paul Valéry, Reflections on the World Today, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1951), 18.
46 Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Dalloz, 1933).
47 Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Long Duration [La longue durée],” trans. Morton Kroll and Florence Kroll, American Behavioral Scientist 3.3 (1960): 4.
48 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952).
53 Pomian, L’ordre du temps, 151.
54 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), xi and 70. Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx includes an extensive critique of Fukuyama’s thesis (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 1994]).
55 Robert Bonnaud, who certainly did not wait for 1989 to place—or renew—his faith in a universal history, also believes that such a history is not over! Despite this, and due to our contemporary interest in time, his work has received a lot of attention from the media and the public. From an early age he had been fascinated by temporal patterns, and tried to find what he called “global historical turning-points” by documenting synchronicities (for example, 221 b.c., which is significant for the Mediterranean world and for China). In 1989 he published Le système de l’histoire (Paris: Fayard) and has gone on refining and perfecting his analyses ever since, convinced that history “does not suffer from an excess of dates, but from a lack of reasoned chronology” (Tournants et périodes [Paris: Kimé, 2000], 13). His research, which claims to be predictive, should enable one to define a series of “planetary curves.” See, lastly, Jean Baechler’s Esquisse d’une histoire universelle (Paris: Fayard, 2002).
56 On the notion of experience, see Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner, Kerstin Behnke, and Jobst Welge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 45–48.
57 In “Language and the Human Experience,” Émile Benveniste distinguishes between “linguistic time” and “chronic time.” The former is “the time of language” [“le temps de la langue”] through which “the human experience of time is expressed,” and the latter is “a necessary condition of the life of societies” (Émile Benveniste, “Language and the Human Experience,” trans. Nora McKeon, Diogenes 13 [51] [Sept. 1965]: 1–12). The notion of regime of historicity is relevant to both. See also Elias’s remarks on the notions of “past,” “present,” and “future”: “The concepts of past, present, and future include in their meaning the relationship of an experiencing person (or persons) to a sequence of changes. It is in relation to someone who experiences it that one moment of a continuous flow assumes the character of a present vis-à-vis others with that of a present or a future. As symbols of experienced time-units, these three terms represent not only—like ‘year’ or ‘cause and effect’—a succession, but also the simultaneous presence of the three time-units in people’s experience. One might say that past, present, and future, although three different words, form a single concept” (Time: An Essay, 77; see chap. 2, 41–42).
58 Koselleck, Futures Past, 258.
1. Making History
1 Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 72. The lecture was first given in December 1982 to the American Anthropological Association. Sartre’s question can be found in the preface to Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Knopf, 1963), xxxiv.
3 Marshall Sahlins, “The Apotheosis of Captain Cook,” Between Belief and Transgression, ed. Michael Izard and Pierre Smith, trans. John Leavitt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 73–102.
4 Sahlins, Islands of History, xiii: “With some confidence, one can even offer a structural solution to the long-standing mystery of who done it?: the identity of Cook’s assailant is deducible, in Holmesian fashion, from the elementary categories.” See 104–135, and, more generally, the whole book. Also note 3.
5 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
6 If a conjuncture is “a situation resulting from a combination of circumstances” then the structure of a conjuncture is “the practical realization of the cultural categories in a specific historical context” (Sahlins, Islands of History, xiv).
7 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 7.2 (1966): 121. Georges Charbonnier, ed., Conversations with Lévi-Strauss, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1969), 32–42.
8 Charbonnier, Conversations with Lévi-Strauss, 39.
9 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Histoire et ethnologie,” Annales 6 (1983): 1218 (italics in the original).
10 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Retours en arrière,” Les temps modernes 598 (1998): 66–69. The sentence explaining the cooling-down of contemporary societies is a citation from another of Lévi-Strauss's articles, published in L’Homme 126–128 (1983): 9–10.
11 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction,” Structural Anthropology 1, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 18. This text first appeared in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 3–4 (1949), under the title “History and Ethnology.”
13 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 24–25.
15 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology 2, trans. Monique Layton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 14. The social facts studied by anthropology “are manifested in societies, each of which is a total, concrete, and cohesive entity.”
16 Claude Lefort, Les formes de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 46–77. The article first appeared in the Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 12 (1952): 3–25. It so happens that the first article in this issue was a text by Lévi-Strauss called “The Concept of Archaism in Anthropology,” included in Structural Anthropology 1, chap. 6.
19 Histoire et structure, special issue, Annales 3–4 (1971).
20 Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Sahlins, Islands of History, 33–34.
21 François Hartog, L’Histoire d’Homère à Augustin (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 17–19.
22 Sahlins, Islands of History, 35–36.
26 Plutarch, Vies parallèles, ed. François Hartog (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 16–17.
27 Sahlins, Islands of History, 44–45, 47, 49.
29 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Steven Lattimore (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 1.21; François Hartog, “L’oeil de Thucydide et l’histoire ‘véritable,’” Poétique 49 (1982): 22–30.
30 Sahlins, Islands of History, 55.
31 François Furet, “Quantitative History,” trans. Barbara Bray, Daedalus 100.1 (1971): 151–167.
32 Sahlins, Islands of History, 58.
35 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 3.
36 Sahlins, “Apotheosis of Captain Cook,” 92. Nicholas Thomas objects that, in Sahlins’s historical structuralism, “the indigenous system is only historicized in its dealings with Europeans; there is no basis in this historical structuralism for theories of indigenous change or of the major transformations which made Hawaiian, Tahitian, and western Polynesian societies into systems which look quite different” (Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996], 7, 120). Even were this to be the case, which I am unable to judge, the analysis of the moment at which the two systems interfere retains its full heuristic value. See pp. 27–28.
37 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 237–238.
38 Sahlins, Islands of History, 60–61.
40 Sahlins, “Apotheosis of Captain Cook,” 89.
42 Georges Duby, The Legend of Bouvines, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 6.
43 See Koselleck’s remarks on event and structure, and how the two intersect, but also the hiatus between them, in his analysis of the Battle of Leuthen, from which Frederick the Great emerged victorious: Koselleck, Futures Past, 113.
44 Koselleck, Futures Past, 26–42; and pp. 53–54.
45 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Colombia University Press, 1983), 145.
46 Marc Abélès, “Avec le temps…,” Critique 620–621 (Jan.–Feb. 1999): 42–60; “Overcoming the great divide, in other words refusing to consign alterity to a universe indexed on tradition, bound to the past, and immobilized by its origins: that is the goal of critical anthropology. But it provides us with few tools with which to think the contemporary world beyond the simple opposition of modernity and tradition. And above all, it seems indifferent to the question which is essential to any reflection on postmodernism, that of the regime of temporality of our present” (55).
47 Time: Histories and Ethnologies, ed. D. Owen Hughes and T. R. Trautmann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 12.
48 Thomas, Out of Time, 7, 120.
50 Although the fields of inquiry, the references, and the analytic instruments used are not the same, there is nevertheless a certain similarity between Sahlins’s approach, as he takes apart the opposition between event and structure, and that of Pierre Nora, in his endeavor to show that the historian of the present should move back “from the evidence of the event to the evaluation of the system” (“The Return of the Event,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Histories: French Constructions of the Past [New York: New Press, 1995], 435).
2. From Odysseus’s Tears to Augustine’s Meditations
1 François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 15–39.
2 Marcel Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 54.
3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 7, 17.
4 Auerbach, Mimesis, 12, 17–18.
5 “The difference between legend and history is in most cases easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader” (ibid., 19).
6 Homer, The Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924) and Perseus Digital Library, 19.65–70. On thumos as breath, associating emotion and breathing, see Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 49–56.
8 Ibid., 22.386–391: Achilles declares that he will never forget Patroclus, not even when he is in Hades.
10 Ibid., 1.68–72. Marcel Detienne, Apollon le couteau à la main (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).
11 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919) and Perseus Digital Library, 10.492–495, 11.100–137.
12 Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914) and Perseus Digital Library, 32 and 38.
13 Homer, Odyssey 8.79: according to Apollo’s oracle, Achilles and Odysseus are “the best of the Achaeans.”
15 Jean-Pierre Vernant, L’individu, la mort, l’amour (Paris:Gallimard, 1989), 285.
16 Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H. L. Havell (London: Macmillan, 1890) and Project Gutenberg, 9, 12: the Odyssey is presented as the poem of Homer’s declining years (whereas the Iliad was the poem of his youth). In it he at last lets his heroes cry, as though in repayment of a debt that is long overdue. The Odyssey would be an epilogos to the Iliad, a tale coming afterward, just like historical narrative. For years now, Homer experts have tried to put a figure on the interval between the two poems: One hundred years? Fifty years?
17 Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21.
18 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Steven Lattimore (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998): “The Hellenes, then, as they increasingly came to be called…accomplished nothing together before the Trojan War” (5).
19 Homer, Odyssey 1.342–344: Penelope is weighed down by a loss she cannot forget (penthos alaston); consumed by the pain of absence (potheô), she ceaselessly recalls (memnêmenê aiei) the hero whose fame was great over all Greece and the Argolid. On pothos, funeral rites, and the epic, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Figures, idoles, masques (Paris: Julliard, 1990), 41–50.
20 Homer, Odyssey 4.93–94 and 98–107.
22 Ibid., 8.73–93. On this otherwise unknown quarrel and its “relation” to “The Quarrel” (between Agamemnon and Achilles), see Nagy, Best of the Achaeans, 42–58.
23 Homer, Odyssey 8.266–366.
24 Ibid., 8.83–95 and 521–534.
26 Ibid., 8.573–587. See David Bouvier, Le sceptre et la lyre: L’Iliade ou les héros de la mémoire (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2002), 39–40.
27 Ibid., 8.487–492 (translation slightly modified).
28 Likewise, the sign of the veracity of the episode of the wooden horse is Demodocus’s ability to sing it in its entirety (katalegein) and down to the last detail (kata moiran). Odysseus in this case promises to declare to all humanity that the bard must have received a divine gift of song (Odyssey 8.496–499). On kata kosmon in this passage, see George B. Walsh’s remarks (with which I am only partially in agreement), The Varieties of Enchantment: Early Greek Views of the Nature and Function of Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 8–9. Similarly, at Aeolus’s request, Odysseus recounts the capture of Troy, at length and in detail (Odyssey 10.16). The first sentence of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen states that the kosmos of discourse is “truth.”
29 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 45.
30 Homer, Odyssey 8.84–93 and 521–522. On these tears and the scene as a whole, see Walsh, Varieties of Enchantment, 3–13.
31 See p. 34–35. Ibid., 8.581–587. Alcinous talks of his lamentation (achos, 8.541); achos is also what the wife witnessing her husband’s death feels (8.523), and it is also what Menelaus says he suffers from, a sorrow never to be forgotten (achos alaston, 4.108). We are certainly in the register of mourning and of pothos.
32 Ibid., 8.523–533. Book 23 mentions that when Odysseus and Penelope are at last reunited, “from his neck she could in no wise let her white arms go” (vv. 241–242).
33 Nagy (Best of the Achaeans, 101) comments on the strong resemblance to Hector, and that the situation resulting from the comparison is strikingly similar to that of Andromache at the end of the Iliou Persis (as represented in Proclus’s summary). Pietro Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 221–223.
34 Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos, 236–245.
35 Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 21.
36 Homer, Odyssey 9.19 and 12–13.
38 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 99–102.
39 Homer, Odyssey 11.42–50.
40 The “small miracle of recognition,” as Ricoeur calls it, is not for him, consisting as it does of “coating with presence the otherness of that which is over and gone” (Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 39).
41 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3:246. “Without the recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antimony with no solution.…This dilemma disappears if we substitute for identity understood in the sense of being the same (idem), identity understood in the sense of oneself as self-same. The difference between idem and ipse is nothing more than the difference between a substantial or formal identity and a narrative identity. Self-sameness, ‘self-constancy,’ can escape the dilemma of the Same and the Other to the extent that its identity rests on a temporal structure that conforms to the model of dynamic identity arising from the poetic composition of a narrative text.”
42 Homer, Odyssey 13.1–2.
43 Vernant, L’individu, la mort, l’amour, 145–146; Pietro Pucci, “The Song of the Sirens,” The Song of the Sirens: Essays on Homer (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 1–9; Charles Segal, “Kleos and Its Ironies,” Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 85–109.
44 Homer, Odyssey 12.189–191.
45 On “men yet to be born,” see Bouvier, Le sceptre et la lyre, 54 and 93–97.
46 Homer, Odyssey 12.183–184; see Homer, Iliad 9.673; Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos, 209–213.
47 On the funerary function of the Muses and the bards, see Marcello Carastro, La cité des mages: Penser la magie en Grèce ancienne (Bernin: Jérôme Million, 2006).
48 Charles Segal notes that the Sirens speak the language of knowledge, but never of remembrance or memory (“Kleos and Its Ironies,” 100–101). See also Laurence Kahn, “Ulysse ou, La ruse et la mort,” Critique 393 (Feb. 1980): 121–134.
49 On the Iliad’s representation of the past as an inventory of exemplary deeds, see Bouvier, Le sceptre et la lyre, 351–352.
50 Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, trans. G. C. Macaulay (London: Macmillan, 1890) and Project Gutenberg, 1, 5.
51 Homer, Iliad 16.31; see Bouvier, Le sceptre et la lyre, 426–427, on Achilles, who puts himself “outside of human time,” before he finally agrees to “reintegrate a history which passes from fathers to sons.”
52 Homer, Odyssey 1.326–327: Phemios sings of “the woeful return from Troy which Pallas Athena laid upon them.”
53 Saint Augustine, Confessions 11.14.17, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Penguin, 1991).
56 Homer, Odyssey 5.157–158 and 219–220.
57 Aimé Solignac, “Notes,” in Oeuvres de saint Augustin 14: Les Confessions (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1996), 590.
58 Ricoeur comments: “The entire province of narrative is laid out here in its potentiality, from the simple poem, to the story of an entire life, to universal history. It is with these extrapolations, which are simply suggested here, that the present work is concerned” (Time and Narrative, 1:22). Ricoeur could equally have begun with Odysseus.
59 Saint Augustine, Confessions 11.29.39.
60 Epistle of Paul to the Philippians (King James Version), 3:12–14.
61 Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, ed. Philip Schaff (New York:Cosimo, 2007), 1.
62 Epistle of Paul to the Philippians 3:16 and 20.
64 Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 20–21. Catherine Chalier, L’histoire promise (Paris: Cerf, 1992), 48–60.
66 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington, 1982), 15 and 24.
67 Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 7, 12.
68 Matthew 24:34, 36, 42, and 44.
69 Oscar Cullman, Salvation in History, trans. Sidney G. Sowers (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 172.
73 Saint Augustine, City of God 22.30.5.
74 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 125.
76 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 47. See chap. 5, p. 134. Not to forget the theme of disenchantment introduced by Max Weber: see Pierre Bouretz, Les promesses du monde: Philosophie de Max Weber (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
3. Chateaubriand
1 See chap. 4 and chap. 5, pp. 104–107 and 162–170.
2 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 76.
3 François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs, trans. A. S. Kline, 2005–2007, “Testamentary Preface of 1st December 1833,” section 4 [translation of Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (posthumous, 1848) (Paris:Gallimard, 1951), vol. II].
4 Chateaubriand, Memoirs, book 6, chap. 1, section 1.
5 Chateaubriand, An Historical, Political, and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and Modern (1797) (London: Henry Colburn, 1815), chap. 49, 355 (henceforth Historical Essay). [Translator’s note (henceforth TN): this is a partial translation of Chateaubriand, Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la Révolution française (1797; 1826) (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). The 1815 English translation of the Essai is an abridged (and unauthorized) version of the original 1797 text, as Chateaubriand complains in the foreword to his 1826 (French) edition. It contains none of the extensive notes added for this later edition. Where an English translation exists, it will be given (as Historical Essay), otherwise reference in the notes will be to the French 1826 edition (as Essai). The English translation of chapter 57 of Chateaubriand’s Essai, “Nuit chez les sauvages de l’Amérique,” translated as “A Night Among the Savages of America,” is published in his Recollections of Italy, England, and America, with Essays on Various Subjects, in Morals and Literature (Philadelphia:Carey, 1816), 138–145.]
6 Chateaubriand, Travels in America and Italy (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 2:146. [TN: Travels in America and Italy, in two volumes, is the translation of Chateaubriand, Voyage en Amérique (1827), in Oeuvres romanesques et voyages (Paris:Gallimard, 1978), vol. 1.]
7 Chateaubriand, Essai, 224: “From a literary point of view, the Essay touches on everything, takes on every subject, raises a multitude of questions, stirs up a whole world of ideas, and is a mixture of all styles. I do not know if my name will come down to future generations; I do not know if posterity will hear of my works; but were my Essay to escape oblivion, especially in its present state, with the Critical Notes, it would be one of the most singular monuments of my life.” On Chateaubriand’s tendency to multiply beginnings (as he does here), see Claude Reichler, “Raison et déraison des commencements,” Revue des sciences humaines 247 (July 1997): 175–176.
8 Chateaubriand, Voyage en Amérique, ed. Richard Switzer (Paris: Didier, 1964) 1:lxix.
9 François Hartog, “Confronto con gli Antichi,” in I Greci, vol. I, Noi e I Greci, ed. Salvatore Settis (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 3–37; La querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, ed. Anne-Marie Lecoq (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Levent Yilmaz, Le temps moderne: Variations sur les Anciens et les contemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “XIII: History of Lacedaemonia,” Political Fragments: The Collected Writings of Rousseau 4, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 64. On Rousseau and antiquity, see Yves Touchefeu, L’antiquité et le christianisme dans la pensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Oxford:Voltaire Foundation, 1999).
11 Chateaubriand, Essai, 440.
12 “For my own part I have saved myself in solitude, far from the ocean of the world. I sometimes observe the storms with which it is agitated, like a man cast alone on a desert island, who experiences a secret pleasing melancholy, while he contemplates the waves breaking at a distance on the coast where he was wrecked” (Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 47, 314).
13 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), n. X, 111–112.
14 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, “Introduction,” 1–2.
15 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology 2, 33.
16 François Hartog, “Entre les anciens et les modernes, les sauvages,” Gradhiva 11 (1992): 23–30.
17 Chateaubriand, Essai, “Introduction,” 40. On the “Record of a journey from Paris to Jerusalem,” see Jean-Claude Berchet, “Un voyage vers soi,” Poétique 14 (1983): 91–108; Pierre Macherey, “L’Essai sur les révolutions, ou le laboratoire d’un style,” Europe 775 (1993): 29–45; Philippe Antoine, Les récits de voyage de Chateaubriand: Contribution à l’étude d’un genre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997).
18 Chateaubriand, Essai, 37.
19 Recollections of Italy, England, and America, 138.
20 Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger, in Greece (London: printed by J. D. Denwick for Vernor and Hood, Lackington, Allen and Co., Otridge and Son, T. Hurst, and T. Boosey, 1800), 2.
21 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 34, 157–158, n. 2.
22 François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
23 On Anacharsis the Elder, see François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 108–115.
24 Abbé Charles Rollin, The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians, vol. 2 (New York: George Long, 1830), 20–21.
25 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 35, 163.
28 Ibid., chap. 35, 168, 157 n. 2.
29 Chateaubriand, Essai, 193.
30 Cicero coined the canonical phrase in De oratore (2.9.36), but the idea of historia magistra actually dates from earlier: see Hartog, L’Histoire d’Homère à Augustin, 185–186.
31 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 13, 55.
32 Koselleck, Futures Past, 9–25.
34 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 1, 9.
35 Homer, Odyssey 4.385–393.
36 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 1, 9–10.
40 Ibid., “Recapitulation,” 394.
41 Chateaubriand, Essai, “Préface” (1826), 15.
44 François Hartog, “The Concept of Liberty in Antiquity and Modern Times: The French Revolution and Antiquity,” in Greeks and Romans in the Modern World, ed. Roger-Pol Droit (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1998), 97.
45 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 42, 255.
46 Ibid., chap. 42, 254–255.
47 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 3rd ed., trans. Daniel de Leon (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1913), 9–10.
48 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 42, 255. [TN: Translation slightly modified.]
49 Chateaubriand, Essai, 268 and 270.
50 Chateaubriand, Historical Essay, chap. 42, “Recapitulation,” 397 and 398; Essai, 438.
51 Chateaubriand, Essai, 268.
52 “It is a feeling, natural on the part of the unfortunate, to aim at the illusions of happiness by the recollection of past pleasures” (Chateaubriand, Recollections of Italy, England, and America, 138; the chapter opens on these words).
53 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 1:98, 100. At the time, parallels with antiquity did not yet appear compromised.
55 Letter from Washington to the marquis de la Rouërie, who had written a letter of introduction for Chateaubriand. Quoted by Richard Switzer in Voyage en Amérique, 1:xxxvi.
56 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 1:98, 108.
57 Ibid., 2:35; 1:201; 2:32; 1:233–234; 2:81.
59 Chateaubriand, Atala, trans. James Spence Harr (New York: Cassell & Co., 1884), vii.
60 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 1:145–153.
61 Chateaubriand, Recollections of Italy, England, and America, 196–197.
63 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 2:143.
65 Chateaubriand, Essai, 37.
66 Ibid., 42. Jean-Claude Bonnet, “Le nageur entre deux rives: La traversée comme expérience révolutionnaire,” Bulletin de la Société Chateaubriand 32 (1989): 55–60.
67 P. Macherey, “L’Essai sur les révolutions, ou le laboratoire d’un style,” 33.
68 Chateaubriand, Essai, 15.
69 Chateaubriand, Études ou discours historiques, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Ladvocat, 1831), 1.
70 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 1:195. In actual fact, as scholars have shown, the text was largely based on book summaries.
71 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, “Advertisement,” 1:113.
73 Michel Butor, “Chateaubriand and Early America,” in Inventory: Essays, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 59–99.
74 Chateaubriand, Recollections of Italy, England, and America, 138: “When I travelled among the Indian tribes of Canada—when I quitted the habitations of Europeans, and found myself, for the first time, alone amid boundless forests…”
75 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 1:112–113.
83 Ibid., 2:104 and 101 [TN: Translation slightly modified.]
84 Chateaubriand’s depiction of Tahiti in the preface to the Travels already has a very “Segalenian” flavor to it: the island’s customs of singing, dancing, and sensuality have all been replaced by the activity of printing bibles.
85 Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 2:109.
90 Hartog, “The Concept of Liberty in Antiquity and Modern Times,” 105–108; Nicole Loraux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “The Formation of Bourgeois Athens,” Politics, Ancient and Modern, trans. Janet Lloyd, ed. Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1995), 82–140.
91 This approach to the issue of freedom is obviously quite different from that adopted by Chateaubriand in his political writings. See Chateaubriand, Grands écrits politiques, ed. Jean-Paul Clément (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1993).
92 Jean Roussel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France après la Révolution, 1795–1830 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 369–380.
93 Chateaubriand, Essai, “Préface,” 23.
94 This does not settle everything, however, since the modern conception of history as progress has yet to be harmonized with the Christian viewpoint and the teachings of the Church. A sign of this concern can be found in the care Chateaubriand takes to ensure that the most recent discoveries corroborate Old Testament chronology (Chateaubriand, Essai, 57, note to the 1826 edition).
95 Chateaubriand, Memoirs, book 62, chap. 14; and see pp. 152–153.
96 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1942), trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5: “The problem is to determine what set of precautions to take and what rules to follow in order to avoid the worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven—anachronism.”
97 Chateaubriand, Memoirs, “Preface,” sec. 5.
98 See Agnès Verlet, Les vanités de Chateaubriand (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2001), particularly 328–329, which show how the concept of the “vanities” can shed light on the writing of the Memoirs.
99 Claude Reichler, “Raison et déraison des commencements,” 179.
100 Chateaubriand, Vie de Rancé, in Oeuvres romanesques et voyages, 1:989.
101 Michel de Certeau, Psychanalyse et histoire, rev.ed. (Paris:Gallimard, 2002), 78.
102 Chateaubriand, Vie de Rancé, 989.
103 Chateaubriand, “General Preface” to his Oeuvres complètes of 1826.
104 Constantin-François Volney, Volney’s Ruins; or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, trans. Count Daru (Boston: J. Mendum, 1866). See Jean Gaulmier, L’Idéologue Volney, 1757–1820: Contribution à l’histoire de l’orientalisme français (1951;Geneva: Slatkine, 1980).
105 Constantin-François Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (London: G. and J. Robinson, 1805), “Preface,” vi–vii. It is worth noting that although Volney visited Baalbek, he never actually got as far as Palmyra.
112 Volney, Lectures on History (London: Ridgeway, 1800), vi–vii.
113 Volney, View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America (London: J. Johnson, 1804), iv.
114 Chateaubriand, Études historiques, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1842), 1.
119 François Furet, preface to Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (Paris:Garnier-Flammarion, 1981), 41. The first part of the book was published in 1835, and the second in 1840.
120 François Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, trans. Beth G. Raps (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 16.
121 Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to Comte Molé, August 1835, cited in Hans J. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1963), 29.
122 Chateaubriand, unpublished letter, 11 January 1835, cited in Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 36.
123 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 6–7.
4. Memory, History, and the Present
1 See chap. 3, pp. 80–81.
2 Lorenz von Stein, cited by Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (1985; New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 61.
3 Les lieux de mémoire, III: Les France, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 1:11–32. [TN: Nora’s Lieux de mémoire comprises three parts, each of which contains one, three, and again three volumes respectively, published between 1984 and 1993. Partial—revised and abridged—translations into English have appeared as Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, eds., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998); and as Pierre Nora and David Jordan, eds., Rethinking France, 4 vols., trans. Mary Trouille (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001–2010). For clarity I shall retain the French title Lieux de mémoire in the main text while referring in the notes to the relevant English translation when available.]
4 1789: La commémoration (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) contains the articles published in the review Le Débat on the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Patrick Garcia, Le Bicentenaire de la Révolution française: Pratiques sociales d’une commémoration (Paris:CNRS, 2000).
7 Les lieux de mémoire, III.1: “Présentation.”
8 Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Fontana, 1989–1990), 2 vols.
9 Ibid., 2:667. See pp. 13–14.
10 Of the many authors who could be cited here, I choose a historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who was an actively involved observer of his century: “Very few people would deny that an epoch in world history ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union, whatever we read in the events of 1989–91. A page in history has been turned” (On History [London: Abacus, 1998], 311).
11 Carol Gluck, “11 septembre: Guerre et télévision au xxie siècle,” Annales HSS 1 (2003): 135–162. Carol Gluck presents a history-testimony of the “war on terror” launched by the United States by carrying out an “ethnography” of the media. She focuses on the immediate narrativization of the war, but does not examine the equally immediate self-commemoration constitutive of the event.
12 François Hartog, “Preface,” Plutarque, Vies parallèles (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 35–36. The phrase “entering one’s future backwards” was coined by Valéry.
13 Koselleck, Futures Past, 33.
14 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 3, 9.
15 Chateaubriand, Memoirs, book 32, chapter 14: “The Future—The difficulty of comprehending it.”
17 On the longevity of historia magistra, see Koselleck, Futures Past, 26–42.
18 François Hartog, “Preface,” Plutarque, Vies parallèles, 26–27.
19 Francois Hartog, “From Parallel to Comparison (or Life and Death of Parallel),” in Applied Classics, ed. Angelos Chaniotis, Annika Kuhn, and Christina Kuhn (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009), 15–26. See also Yilmaz, Le temps moderne.
21 Giovanni Lista, Le Futurisme (Paris:Terrail, 2001), 29, 30, and 38. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910,” Futurist Manifestos, trans. Robert Brian et al., ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1973), 24–26.
22 Jean Fourastié, Les trente glorieuses; ou, La Révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). Fourastié makes two main points: there has been progress, but most importantly it has come to an end.
23 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 115.
24 Horace, The Epistles of Horace, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001), 1.4.14–16.
25 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. A. S. L. Farquharson (New York: Random House Digital, 2009), 12.4.3.
26 Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, part II, trans. Leopold J. Bernays (London: Sampson Low and A. Bielfeld, 1839), 124. See Pierre Hadot, “‘Le présent seul est notre bonheur’: La valeur de l’instant présent chez Goethe et dans la philosophie antique,” Diogène 133 (1986): 71 and idem, “The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: The Value of the Present Instant in Goethe and in Ancient Philosophy,” The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Marc Djaballah and Michael Chase (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 217–237 [TN: This is an interview, and a discussion of the original article].
27 Franz Rosenzweig, letter of 5 February 1917, quoted in Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History, trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 60.
28 Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées; or, Thoughts on Religion, trans. Gertrude Burfurd (Mount Vernon: Peter Pauper, 1900), 17.
29 Éric Michaud, “Le présent des avant-gardes” (forthcoming in New German Critique).
30 André Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola: Dover, 1996), 32.
31 Lucien Febvre replied to Valéry’s charges on several occasions, leaving him to his lifeless history and accusing him of knowing nothing about living history (1941). See Combats pour l’histoire (Paris:Armand Colin, 1992), 24, 102, and 423.
32 “Aux lecteurs,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 1 (1929): “While historians apply their good old tried and tested methods to the documents of the past, an increasing number of people devote their time to examining contemporary societies and economies, often with passion; in principle there should be a common understanding between these two classes of workers, but in general they work side by side and know nothing of each other.”
33 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 2007), 95–96, 100.
34 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introducing Les Temps Modernes,” “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 253–254. The idea recurs in The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1964), 254: “I claim sincerely to be writing only for my time.”
35 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Vintage, 1981), 2.
36 Cited in Arendt, Between Past and Future, 8.
37 Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane [Tristes tropiques], trans. John Russell (New York: Criterion, 1961), 397.
39 Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein (New York: Zone, 1987); Jacques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomami, trans. Ernest Simon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
40 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2005).
41 Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 168–172.
42 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Mediations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 222.
43 However, in his analysis of “spectacular time” as “consumable pseudo-cyclical time,” Guy Debord maintains that “the past [in spectacular time] continues to dominate the present” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [New York: Zone, 1999], 113).
44 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), 72.
45 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage, 2008), 560 [TN: translation slightly modified].
46 Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience, trans. Neville Plaice (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
47 Bourdieu, Pascalian Mediations, 226.
48 Emmanuel Kant, The Conflict of Faculties, cited in Koselleck, Futures Past,39. On the historicization of the event before it even occurs, one can refer (in another register) to Woody Allen’s film Bananas (1971), in which the viewer is the witness, live, to a president’s assassination.
49 Olivier Dumoulin, Le rôle social de l’historien: De la chaire au prétoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 27–63.
51 Jean Favier and Daniel Neirinck, “Les archives,” in L’histoire et le métier d’historien en France, 1945–1995, ed. François Bédarida (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995), 89–110. François Hartog, “Archives: La loi, la mémoire, l’histoire,” Le Débat 112 (2000): 45–48. For an overview of the issues involved, see Sophie Coeuré and Vincent Duclert, Les archives (Paris: La Découverte, 2001).
52 Standard practice is for access to documents to be immediate, but the ordinances accompanying the 1979 law set restrictions of thirty or sixty years on certain archives (namely those containing information potentially harmful to privacy, state security, or national defense). In 1995, the Braibant Report recommended reducing these time spans to twenty-five and fifty years, respectively.
53 No one could have imagined at the time that Papon would be sent home from the Santé prison in Paris on medical grounds in September 2002. But this release, justified only by the application of a new provision in the law, caused a public outcry, showing unequivocally that Papon would remain until his dying day contemporary with his crime. As would we.
54 See pp. 200–201. Henry Rousso, “The Confusion Between Memory and History,” The Haunting Past, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1–24.
55 André Fermigier, La bataille de Paris: Des Halles à la Pyramide, chroniques d’urbanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 54. The series of articles that Fermigier wrote for the Nouvel Observateur and later for Le Monde document the battle for the Halles, the defeat of the preservationists, and the gradual emergence of the theme of heritage.
57 See the set of articles “L’utopie Beaubourg dix ans après,” Esprit 123 (1987). Geneviève Gallot, “Le Centre Pompidou, une utopie épuisée,” Le Débat 98 (1998): 102.
59 Mona Ozouf, in 1789: La commémoration, 322.
60 Étienne François, “Nation retrouvée, nation à contrecoeur: L’Allemagne des commémorations,” Le Débat 78 (1994): 62–70. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, ed. E. François and H. Schulze (Munich: Beck, 2001–2002).
61 Colin Lucas, “Introduction,” Constructing the Past, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, trans. David Denby, Martin Thom, and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1 [TN: this is a partial translation of Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire (Paris:Gallimard, 1974)].
62 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 1.20–21.
63 Pierre Nora, “Mémoire collective,” in La nouvelle histoire, ed. J. Le Goff, R. Chartier, and J. Revel (Paris: Retz, 1978), 400–401.
64 See Marie-Claire Lavabre, “Maurice Halbwachs et la sociologie de la mémoire,” Raison Présente 128 (1998): 47–56.
65 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 101.
68 J. Thiénot, Rapport sur les études historiques (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1868), 356.
69 Pierre Nora, “The Return of the Event,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York: New Press, 1995).
70 Nora and Kritzman, eds., Realms of Memory, 1:1.
71 Jean-Noël Jeanneney, L’histoire va-t-elle plus vite? Variations sur un vertige (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Jeanneney maintains that acceleration is “a partial reality, a useful concept, but only if we relativize it and understand that what is really new is not our civilization’s increased mobility but rather the growing disparity between all the rhythms which fashion our future” (137). I will come back to this theme of disparity or dissonance.
72 See chap. 3, p. 73. Koselleck, Futures Past, 40–41.
73 Lothar Baier, Keine Zeit: 18 Versuche über die Beschleunigung (Munich: Antje Kunstmann, 2000).
74 Pierre Nora, “Pour une histoire au second degré,” Le Débat 122 (2002): 27.
75 Pierre Nora, “Ernest Lavisse: Son rôle dans la formation du sentiment national,” Revue Historique (July–Sept. 1962), included in Les lieux de mémoire, I:247–289.
76 Ernest Renan, “Prayer on the Acropolis,” Recollections from My Youth, 3rd ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), 61.
77 Nora, “Pour une histoire au second degré,” 30.
78 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York: Random House, 2011).
79 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, vol. 6 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. Andres Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (New York: Random House, 2003), 502, 528, 531–532.
80 Henry Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), in particular chap. 2, which analyzes the idea of duration. Péguy attended Bergson’s lectures, and the “Bergsonian revolution” was central to his thinking. Bergson said of Péguy that he understood “the essence of his thinking.”
81 Charles Péguy, Clio: Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne, in Oeuvres en prose complètes 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 1176–1178. The manuscript was written between 1912 and 1913. François Bédarida, “Histoire et mémoire chez Péguy,” Vingtième Siècle 73 (2002): 101–110.
82 Charles Péguy, “À nos amis, à nos abonnés,” in Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 2:1309.
84 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Random House, 2007), 253–264. On Benjamin and Péguy, Hella Tiedemann-Bartells, “La mémoire est toujours de la guerre: Benjamin et Péguy,” in W. Benjamin et Paris, ed. H. Wismann (Paris: Cerf, 1986), 133–145. See also the edition established by Michael Löwy, Walter Benjamin: Avertissement d’incendie. Une lecture des thèses “Sur le concept d’histoire” (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001).
85 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462.
86 Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” in Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Random House, 2007), 1–58.
87 Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France contemporaine, depuis la Révolution jusqu’à la paix de 1919 (Paris: Hachette, 1922), 511, 515, and 551.
88 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” Realms of Memory, 1:6.
89 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 36. For the importance of the interaction between past and present, see Olivier Dumoulin, Marc Bloch (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2000), 264–276.
90 Marcel Gauchet, in Les lieux de mémoire, II.1: La Nation (Paris:Gallimard, 1986), 285.
91 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997) [TN:This is the translation of Penser la Révolution française (Paris:Gallimard, 1978)].
92 Augustin Thierry, The Formation and Progress of the Tiers État, or Third Estate, in France, vol. 1, trans. Francis B. Wells (London:Thomas Bosworth, 1855), 7.
93 Carine Fluckiger, “Le Moyen Âge domestiqué: Les historiens narrativistes et la couleur locale,” Équinoxes 16 (1996): 27–37.
94 François Hartog, “L’oeil de l’historien et la voix de l’histoire,” Communications 43 (1986): 55–69.
95 Jules Michelet, “Préface de l’Histoire de France,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 4:13ff.
96 Braudel, Identity of France, 1:15.
97 François Hartog, Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire: Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (1988; Paris: Seuil, 2001).
98 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (Paris: Hachette, 1875), “Introduction,” 2.
99 Braudel, Identity of France, 2:678–679.
100 Gabriel Monod, “Preface: Revue Historique,” trans. Nora Beeson, in The Varieties of History, ed. Fritz Stern (New York: Vintage, 1973), 172–174.
101 Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire, “Foreword,” v.
102 Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, II.1:327.
103 Valéry, Reflections on the World Today, 18 and 36.
104 Lucien Febvre, “L’histoire dans le monde en ruines,” Revue de Synthèse Historique 30 (February 1920): 4.
105 Toward the end of his career, Marc Bloch had endeavored to define a certain French originality, through comparative analysis (“There is no such thing as French history, there is European history”). And Lucien Febvre, in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1945/6 and 1947, worked on delineating how a national consciousness had emerged (Honneur et patrie, ed. Thérèse Charmasson and Brigitte Mazon [Paris: Perrin, 1996]).
106 Georges Duby and Robert Mandrou,A History of French Civilization, trans. James Blakely Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1964). Duby nevertheless contributed to the educational publisher Hachette’s History of France series, which focused on political history, and wrote the first volume,France in the Middle Ages, 987–1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
107 Charles Péguy, L’argent suite, in Oeuvres en prose complètes, 3:883. Henri-Irénée Marrou, “De la logique de l’Histoire à une Éthique de l’historien,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 54 (1949): 248–272.
108 François Dosse, Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
109 Braudel, Identity of France, 1:23.
111 Histoire de la France, ed. André Burguière and Jacques Revel (Paris: Seuil, 1989), “Preface,” 18 and 19. The “original characteristics” are of course a discreet allusion to Marc Bloch.
112 See for example, Passés recomposés: Champs et chantiers de l’histoire, ed. J. Boutier and D. Julia (Paris: Autrement, 1995).
113 Christian Amalvi, “Bastille Day,” in Realms of Memory, vol. 3, ed. Nora (1998), 117–159.
114 Péguy, Clio, 3:1083–1084.
115 Jean-Michel Leniaud, L’utopie française: Essai sur le patrimoine (Paris: Mengès, 1992), 115–150; see chap. 5.
116 Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, III.1:29.
117 Emmanuel Kattan, Penser le devoir de mémoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002).
118 Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, III.1.
119 P. Nora, Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris:Gallimard, 1987).
120 Henry Rousso, “L’historien, lieu de mémoire, hommage à Robert Paxton,” in Vichy: L’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 453–480, in which he shows that Paxton has become “a sort of site of memory.”
121 See chap. 5, pp. 180–181.
122 Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. George J. Irwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 222: “We understand here by contingency both the possibility of conceiving the other event and the impossibility of deducing the event from the totality of the previous situation.”
123 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3:216. Bernard Lepetit, “Le présent de l’histoire,” in Les formes de l’expérience: Une autre histoire sociale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 295–298.
124 See L’Europe entre cultures et nations, ed. Daniel Fabre (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1996), which explores how the three terms of heritage, identity, and nation operate in Europe.
125 On the relation between heritage and the present, see chap. 5, pp. 189–191.
126 Namely Beck in Germany, Blackwell in Great Britain and the USA, Critica in Spain, Laterza in Italy, and Le Seuil in France. The books were published simultaneously in the different countries. To date, nineteen titles have been published.
127 See the debate on this in several issues of Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire: Nicolas Roussellier, 38 (1993): 106–108; Jean-Pierre Rioux, “Pour une histoire de l’Europe sans adjectif,” 50 (1996): 101–110; Jean-Clément Martin, “Pour une histoire ‘principielle’ de l’Europe,” 53 (1997): 124–128; and the collection of articles Apprendre l’histoire de l’Europe [Learning Europe’s history], which were the proceedings of a conference aiming, in J.-P. Rioux’s words, to “lay down the scientific precautionary principles which should set limits on voluntarism,” 71 (2001).
128 J. Le Goff, “Editor’s Preface” to the Making of Europe series. This text figures in all the volumes of the series.
129 See the thought-provoking remarks of the medievalist Patrick J. Geary in his The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
5. Heritage and the Present
1 The new department comprised Historic Monuments, the General Inventory [l’Inventaire général], Archaeology, and a Council on Ethnological Heritage attached to an Ethnological Task Force. It was the ethnologist Isac Chiva who proposed this organization. See Daniel Fabre, “L’ethnologie devant le monument historique,” in Domestiquer l’histoire: Ethnologie des monuments historiques, ed. D. Fabre (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2000), 8–9.
2 L’abus monumental, proceedings of the Heritage Debates chaired by Régis Debray, (Paris: Fayard, 1999). See in particuliar R. Debray, “Le monument ou la transmission comme tragédie,” 11–32. A few years earlier, Tzvetan Todorov had published Les abus de la mémoire (translated as Memory as a Remedy for Evil, trans. Gila Walker [Kolkata: Seagull, 2010]).
3 According to a survey, carried out by the French Ministry of Culture at the end of the 1980 Heritage Year, concerning the public’s perception of heritage, in 1979 heritage evoked material goods in private hands, whereas after 1980 more than a third of the French public conceived it as “national, cultural, artistic and other treasures.” See Hervé Glevarec and Guy Saez, Le patrimoine saisi par les associations (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2002), 26.
4 Olivier Godard, “Environnement, modes de coordination et systèmes de légitimité:Analyse de la catégorie de patrimoine naturel,” Revue Économique 41.2 (1990): 239.
5 Jean-Pierre Babelon and André Chastel, “La notion de patrimoine,” Revue de l’Art 49 (1980): 5–32; Marc Guillaume, La politique du patrimoine (Paris: Galilée, 1980). Thereafter, the number of texts published on the subject increased dramatically. See particularly André Chastel, “La notion de patrimoine,” in Les lieux de mémoire, II.2: La Nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 405–450; Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Roland Recht, Penser le patrimoine: Mise en scène et mise en ordre (Paris: Hazan, 1998); and Jean-Michel Leniaud, Les archipels du passé: Le patrimoine et son histoire (Paris: Fayard, 2002) (and by the same author, L’utopie française).
6 Krzysztof Pomian, Sur l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 215. and particularly “The Collection: Between the Visible and the Invisible” (1978), included in his Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 7–44.
7 Jean Davallon, “Le patrimoine: Une filiation inversée,” EspacesTemps 74/75 (2000): 7–16.
8 See chap. 2, pp. 61–62.
9 Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 84–85.
10 Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 42. The Capetian king is conceived as the “heir to the crown of Christ.”
11 Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (1978; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
12 Marc Bourdier, “Le mythe et l’industrie ou la protection du patrimoine culturel au Japon,” Genèses 11 (1993): 82–110.
13 Nicolas Fiévé, “Architecture et patrimoine au Japon: Les mots du monument historique,” in L’abus monumental, 333.
14 This was the title (“Conservare o restaurare”) given by the Italian architect Camillo Boito to a text he published in 1893. In it he attempted to define an intermediary position between that of Viollet-le-Duc (“To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair it, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness that could never have existed at any given time” [The Architectural Theory of Viollet-Le-Duc, 269]), and that of Ruskin (preserving absolutely, even if the building ends up a ruin as a result). See Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 186–188.
15 Masahiro Ogino, “La logique d’actualisation: Le patrimoine au Japon,” Ethnologie Française 25 (1995): 57–63.
16 Yan Thomas notes that the terminology of ancient Roman law makes no clear distinction between persons and things. Patrimonium means “the legal status of pater,” that is, a kind of social extension of his person (“Res, chose et patrimoine,” Archives de Philosophie du Droit 25 [1980]: 422). Claudia Moatti, “La construction du patrimoine culturel à Rome aux 1er siècle av. et 1er siècle ap. J.-C.,” in Memoria e identità: La cultura romana costruisce la sua imagine, ed. Mario Citroni (Florence: Università degli Studi di Firenze, 2003), 79–96.
17 Raymond Chevallier, L’artiste, le collectionneur et le faussaire: Pour une sociologie de l’art romain (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991).
18 Christian Jacob, “Lire pour écrire: Navigations alexandrines,” in Le pouvoir des bibliothèques, ed. M. Baratin and Ch. Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 47–56.
19 Just after the papacy returned to Rome. Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, 17. On Rome and its relation to time in different periods, see Claudia Moatti, Roma (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997).
20 Roland Mortier, La poétique des ruines en France: Ses origines, ses variations de la Renaissance à Victor Hugo (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 15–16, and Alain Schnapp’s comments, “Vestiges, Monuments, and Ruins: East Faces West,” in The Art Historian, ed. Michael F. Zimmerman (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2003), 3–24.
21 Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918) and Perseus Digital Library, 9.36.5.
22 Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.26.4; see François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 140–149.
23 Guizot created the post of Inspector of Historic Monuments, held first by Ludovic Vitet and then by Prosper Mérimée, from 1834 onward. The “Inspector” was the person who “listed” monuments as “historic.”
24 On Pausanias, see Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. S. Alcock, J. Cherry, and J. Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
25 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions Reader: Selected Essays, 1973–1984, ed. K. Michael Hays (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 626, 629, 624. See Daniel Fabre’s remarks on Riegl in “Ancienneté, altérité, autochtonie,” in Domestiquer l’histoire: Ethnologie des monuments historiques (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2000), 196–204. Jean-Philippe Antoine, Six rhapsodies froides sur le lieu, l’image et le souvenir (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 2002), 258–289 (on A. Riegl).
26 Caesar Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary, trans. Alison E. Cooley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 20:1–5.
27 Robert Sablayrolles, “Espace urbain et propagande politique: L’organisation du centre de Rome par Auguste (Res Gestae, 19 à 21),” Pallas 28 (1981): 61 and 68.
28 Suetonius, “Divus Vespasianus,” The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, trans. Alexander Thomson and T. Forester (Philadelphia: Gebbie, 1889) and Perseus Digital Library, 8.
29 Claudia Moatti, La raison de Rome: Naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 150–151.
30 Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris: Seuil, 1976), 643.
31 François Loyer, “Les échelles de la monumentalité,” in L’abus monumental, 187.
32 This Senatus consultum was declared in AD 44–56, as quoted by Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, trans. Ian Kinnes and Gilian Varndell (New York: Abrams, 1997), 334.
33 Yan Thomas, “Les ornements, la cité, le patrimoine,” in Images romaines (Paris: Presses de l’École normale, 2001), 263–283.
36 Schnapp, Discovery of the Past, 334.
37 Thomas, “Les ornements,” 282.
38 Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 69.
39 Babelon and Chastel, “La notion de patrimoine,” 13, and Leniaud’s remarks in Les archipels du passé, 67.
40 Louis Aubin Millin, Antiquités nationales; ou, Recueil de monuments pour servir à l’histoire générale et particulière de l’Empire français, tels que tombeaux, inscriptions, statues, vitraux, fresques…tirés des Abbayes, Monastères, Châteaux et autres lieux devenus Domaines nationaux (Paris, 1790). See Françoise Bercé, “La conservation des monuments, une mesure d’exception,” in L’abus monumental, 169.
41 Cicero, The Academics, trans. James S. Reid (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880), 1.3.9. See Moatti, La raison de Rome, 121ff.
42 Renaldo Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).
43 Mortier, La poétique des ruines en France, 30.
44 Petrarch, Lettres familières, IV–VII, trans. A. Longpré (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002), note, 473.
45 Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarium, Libri I–VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), book 6, letter 2, 294.
46 Petrarca, Rerum Familiarium, Libri I–VIII, 293. The letter invites one to take a stroll, that is, to read, but also to better oneself by dwelling on the philosophical and religious reflections that frame the description, and in which Christ appears as the “Bastion of Truth.” There is obviously no question of leaving this bastion.
47 C. R. Ligota, “From Philology to History:Ancient Historiography Between Humanism and Enlightenment,” in Ancient History and the Antiquarian (London: Warburg Institute, 1995), 108.
48 Ibid. See Francisco Rico, Le rêve de l’humanisme: De Pétrarque à Érasme, trans. J. Tellez (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002), 41.
49 Philippe Coarelli, in Poggio Bracciolini, Les ruines de Rome, De varietate fortunae, livre 1, trans. J.-Y. Boriaud (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), xlvi.
50 Poggio, Les ruines de Rome, 14, 20–25, 70.
51 Riegl, “Modern Cult of Monuments,” 626–628. Schnapp, Discovery of the Past, 122; Sabine Forero-Mendoza, Le temps des ruines: Le goût des ruines et les formes de la conscience historique à la Renaissance (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002), 68–70.
52 Choay, Invention of the Historic Monument, 32–33.
53 Schnapp, Discovery of the Past, 123, 125.
54 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1981), 8.
55 K. Pomian, “Musée et patrimoine,” in Patrimoines en folie, ed. H.-P. Jeudy (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990), 186.
56 Françoise Choay, “Foreword” to Alois Riegl, Le culte moderne des monuments, son essence et sa genèse, trans. D. Wieczorek (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 13.
57 Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (London: Reeves and Turner/New York: Scribner’s, 1902), vol. 4, chap. 9, 129.
59 The Diary of Montaigne’s Journey to Italy in 1580 and 1581, trans. E. J. Trechmann (London: Hogarth, 1929), 131–132.
60 Rico, Le rêve de l’humanisme, 19.
61 Alphonse Dupront, Genèse des temps modernes (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001), 49.
62 Dupront, Genèse des temps modernes, 51.
63 Goethe, “Rome, Dec. 3, 1786,” Goethe’s Travels in Italy, trans. Charles Nisbet (London: George Bell, 1885), 136.
64 François Hartog, “Faire le voyage d’Athènes: J. J. Winckelmann et sa réception française,” in Winckelmann et le retour à l’antique. Entretiens de la Garenne-Lemot (Nantes: 1995), 127–143. See the excellent book by Élisabeth Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Enquête sur la genèse de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000), 121–188.
65 The Gospel according to John, 1:46. These were the words of Philip to Nathanael, who at first refused to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.
66 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 351. See also the description of the Belvedere Torso of Hercules: “I deplore the way this Hercules has been irreparably altered, after his beauty had been so well captured.…But art shows us how much we can still learn from what still remains, and with what eye the artist should consider these vestiges” (quoted in Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 277).
67 R. Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (Paris: Hachette, 1910).
68 Édouard Pommier, L’art de la liberté (Paris:Gallimard, 1991), 74.
69 Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, trans. Chris Miller and David Gilks (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 94.
70 Cicero, quoted in Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda, 108.
73 On Pirro Logorio, see Schnapp, Discovery of the Past, 125–126.
74 Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda, 108.
76 H. Jansen, Winckelmann’s publisher and translator, quoted by Édouard Pommier, “Winckelmann et la vision de l’Antiquité dans la France des Lumières et de la Révolution,” Revue de l’art 83 (1989): 9. Mona Ozouf, L’homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris:Gallimard, 1989).
77 This is a chapter title in Pommier’s L’art de la liberté, 93–166.
78 Pommier, L’art de la liberté, 142 and 143.
84 Abbé Grégoire, quoted in Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 87.
85 Pommier, L’art de la liberté, 453 and 454.
86 Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art (1815) (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 48. See Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy, 179–197. Carine Fluckiger, “L’investissement affectif de l’objet historique (Winckelmann, Quatremère de Quincy et Augustin Thierry),” Dénouement des Lumières et invention romantique, ed. Giovanni Bardazzi and Alain Grosrichard (Geneva: Droz, 2003).
87 Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales, 48.
88 Dominique Poulot, “Alexandre Lenoir and the Museum of French Monuments,” trans. John Goodman, Rethinking France: Les lieux de memoire, 4: Histories and Memories, ed. Pierre Nora, trans. Mary Trouille and David Jordan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 101–136. Dominique Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine, 1789–1815 (Paris:Gallimard, 1997), 285–339.
89 Pommier, L’art de la liberté, 371–379.
90 Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine, 305.
91 Jules Michelet, “Dedication to M. Edgar Quinet,” The People, trans. G. H. Smith (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1846), 19.
92 Hartog, “Faire le voyage d’Athènes…,” 141.
93 These are François Puthod de Maisonrouge’s words, quoted in Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 85.
94 François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, trans. Charles I. White (Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1856).
96 Marcel Proust in a letter to Madame Strauss, quoted in Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 180.
98 Barrès, quoted in J.-M. Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 232.
99 Leniaud, Les archipels du passé, 287 and 298.
100 Willibald Sauerländer, “Erweiterung des Denkmalbegriffs?,” in Denkmal– Werte–Gesellschaft: Zur Pluralität des Denkmalbegriffs, ed. Wilfried Lipp (New York/Frankfurt: Campus, 1993), 120–149; Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry. Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).
101 Anne Cauquelin, “Un territoire-musée,” Alliage 21 (1994): 195–198.
102 Francoise Choay, “Foreword” to Alois Riegl, Le culte moderne des monuments, 9.
103 The Athens Conference was organized by the League of Nations’ International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation, together with the International Council of Museums. See p. 183.
104 Gérard Althabe, “Productions des patrimoines urbains,” in Patrimoines en folie, 270.
105 Le Monde, 4 September 2002.
106 Report for the Commission on Cultural, Family, and Social Affairs, 18 April 1996.
107 The number of protected buildings increased from 24,000 in 1960 to 44,709 in 1996.
108 Daniel Fabre, “L’histoire a changé de lieux,” in Une histoire à soi, ed. A. Bensa and D. Fabre (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2001), 32 and 33.
109 Glevarec and Saez, Le patrimoine saisi par les associations, 129–193.
111 See Isabelle Vinson, “Le concept de patrimoine international: Théorie et praxis” [“The concept of international heritage: Theory and praxis”], thesis, Paris, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2001.
112 Mouchir Bouchenaki and Laurent Lévi-Strauss, “La notion de monument dans les critères du Patrimoine de l’humanité de l’Unesco,” in L’abus monumental, 121–129.
113 Koïchiro Matsuura, “Éloge du patrimoine culturel immatériel,” Le Monde, 11 September 2002.
114 An interministerial decree of 1967 officially recognized the notion of “regional nature reserve”; see J. Davallon et al., L’environnement entre au musée (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1992), 64–66, in which Georges-Henri Rivière’s pivotal role is mentioned. A law of 21 April 1906 was still in force on the “protection of natural monuments and sites of an artistic character.”
115 The label “ecomuseum” was coined in 1971. See Octave Debary, La fin du Creusot; ou, L’Art d’accommoder les restes (Paris:CTHS, 2002).
116 Max Querrien, “Écomusées,” Milieux 13 (1983): 24–25. A year earlier, as president of the Caisse des Monuments Historiques (a public body), Querrien had submitted a report to the minister of culture entitled “Pour une nouvelle politique du Patrimoine” [“For a New Cultural Heritage Policy”].
117 André Desvallées, “L’écomusée: Musée degré zéro ou musée hors les murs,” Terrains 5 (1985): 84–85.
118 Max Querrien,Les monuments historiques demain (Paris: Direction du Patrimoine, 1987), 265 (the proceedings of a conference held in 1984). The question of what monuments should be preserved for future generations focused initially on the gap between social demand and available resources. Then Querrien observed that following a period of major transformation, during which threats of destruction had become more common and the damage more irreversible, an awareness had emerged of the importance for the future of cultural heritage, which he interpreted as “the salutary reaction of a community which wishes to construct its future lucidly by re-establishing the link between the past, the present and the future” (7).
119 For an ethnologist’s analysis, see Françoise Zonabend, La mémoire longue (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1999), 9: “In the 1970s, French society began to become aware of the incredible changes brought about by the post-War economic boom. The modernization of the countryside caused a rural exodus, and a certain way of life came to an end in both urban and rural areas: traditional solidarities, both secular and religious, were destroyed, technical and artisanal knowledge disappeared, and regional and local particularisms fell apart. The world in which we lived, which our ancestors had known, suddenly became a world we had lost.”
120 This is the title of the volume edited by Alban Bensa and Daniel Fabre, Une histoire à soi, cited in n. 108.
Our Doubly Indebted Present
1 Chateaubriand, Memoirs, book 33, chapter 9.
2 Ibid., book 42, chapter 14: “The Future—The difficulty of comprehending it.” See chap. 3, pp. 87–88.
4 Ibid., book 42, chapter 18: “A summary of the changes which have occurred around the globe in my lifetime.”
5 Charles Péguy, Note conjointe sur M. Descartes, in Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 3:1428.
7 John Gillis, “The Future of European History,” Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter 34.4 (1996): 5. The newspaper Le Monde’s front page on Wednesday 8 August 1945 bore the title “A scientific revolution: The Americans drop their first atomic bomb on Japan” [“Une révolution scientifique. Les Américains lancent leur première bombe atomique sur le Japon”].
8 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) [TN: originally published as Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1979); French translation Le principe responsabilité, trans. J. Greisch (Paris: Cerf, 1990)]. The subject generates ever more books and articles. One can usefully start with the report to the French prime minister presented by Philippe Kourilsky and Geneviève Viney, Le Principe de précaution (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000) (with bibliography), and Le Principe de précaution dans la conduite des affaires humaines, ed. Olivier Godard (Paris: MSH and INRA, 1997). See also Olivier Godard’s “De l’usage du principe de précaution en univers controversé,” Futuribles 239–240 (Feb.–March 1999): 37–60.
9 François Ewald, “The Return of Descartes’ Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution,” Embracing Risk, ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 291; Kourilsky-Viney report, 274–275.
10 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé: Quand l’impossible est certain (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 213, in which the author formulates his maxim on rational catastrophism, namely to “obtain an image of the future sufficiently catastrophic to be undesirable and yet sufficiently credible to trigger the actions which should prevent it coming about barring an accident.” See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Rational Choice Before the Apocalypse,” Anthropoetics 13, no. 3 (Fall 2007/Winter 2008).
11 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 185, 205.
12 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
13 Jonas, Imperative of Responsibility, 12.
14 Ibid., 17 [TN: translation slightly modified].
15 Ibid., Imperative of Responsibility, 11 and 81.
16 Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 29. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 12: “our imperative extrapolates into a predictable real future as the open-ended dimension of our responsibility.”
17 Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good After Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 108.
18 Jonas adds that “With this imperative we are, strictly speaking, not responsible to the future of individuals but to the idea of Man, which is such that it demands the presence of its embodiment in the world” (Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 43). It is an ontological imperative.
19 Kourilsky-Viney report, 213. Le Monde of 25 April 2003 reported that then– president Jacques Chirac had declared his support for incorporating the precautionary principle into the Environmental Charter. The charter was to have constitutional force.
21 The aim of sustainable development is to “satisfy the development needs…of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (French Environmental Code, 1995, art. 1).
22 Jean-Charles Hourcade, “Précaution et approche séquentielle de la décision face aux risques climatiques de l’effet de serre,” in Godard, Le Principe de précaution, 293.
23 François Ewald, in O. Godard, Le Principe de précaution, 99–126.
24 François Ewald, “Vers un État de précaution,” Revue de Philosophie et de Sciences Sociales 3 (2002): 221–231.
25 Ewald, “Vers un État de précaution,” 111.
27 Ricoeur, The Just, 31.
28 Yan Thomas, “La vérité, le temps, le juge et l’historien,” Le Débat 102 (1998): 27.
29 Emmanuel Kattan, Penser le devoir de mémoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), 134–136. Then–French president Chirac, in his speech of 16 July 1995 commemorating the police raid of the Vél’ d’Hiv, talked of an “everlasting debt” (“une dette imprescriptible”).
30 Henri Berestycki, “La conquête du hasard,” in À la recherche du réel (Association Droit de suite, May 2001), 22.
31 François Rachline, “Qu’arrive-t-il au présent?,” in À la recherche du réel, 18. Rachline gives a positive if not optimistic interpretation of the crisis of the present.
32 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 9. Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).