par Joseph Clarke, Trinity College, Dublin
"From attending a memorial mass or commemorative parade to raising a Panthéon or
purchasing a cheap political souvenir, the Revolutionary experience of
commemoration was a remarkably diverse one, and this diversity raises a whole
range of questions, questions concerning the rôle remembrance played in
Revolutionary politics, but also questions as to the place of the dead in
eighteenth-century French culture. Some of these questions seem obvious, but
more only emerged as the sheer complexity of Revolutionary remembrance became
apparent in the archives. Nevertheless, the questions that concern me most can
be summarised simply enough. What did commemoration mean to the men and women
who attended ceremonies, raised monuments and purchased busts and souvenirs in
memory of the Revolution's dead ? What traditions did these people draw upon
when they came to remember their dead, and how did these evolve to meet the
ever-changing demands of Revolutionary politics or change according to the
social and cultural circumstances of those who did the remembering ?
In both Paris and the provinces, the variety of forms commemoration assumed was matched
only by the diversity of the men it honoured, and this diversity presents its
own problems. Honouring an individual with a national reputation like Mirabeau
or even an international standing like Voltaire was obviously a quite different
experience from attending an artisan's funeral in a Paris church or planting a
tree in memory of an undistinguished soldier in a village in the Vaucluse, but
how exactly did this difference affect the meaning of these rites? This
difference, the difference between celebrating a politician or a philosophe
renowned for their accomplishments but unknown as an individual and remembering
a local hero, perhaps even a family member or a friend, raises what is, perhaps,
the most elusive question of all. In a period when political considerations can
so easily appear to overwhelm all other concerns, what private ends did the
Revolution's rites of memory serve ? What consolation did commemoration bring
to those the dead left behind, and what conflicts did this relationship between
the public and the private dimensions of remembrance give rise to ?"
Extrait de l'introduction, disponible sur le site de l'éditeur, de l'ouvrage de Joseph Clarke, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France. Revolution and Remenbrance, 1789-1799, Cambridge University Press, 2007.