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Bezeten van vroeger. Erfgoed, identiteit en musealisering
and Descartes to Proust and Pétain, centralized state to département, Jeanne d’Arc to the Gallic cock. They counterpoise Chauvin and Verdun to Breton and Occitan separatisms, interleave the national archives with the Louvre and the French language. Uniquely French in its structure and rhetoric, Lieux de mémoire is also prototypically European in its merging of memory and history, text and tradition, sayings and sites. Yet it remains a venture other Europeans have been reluctant to embrace. History lends French memorial symbols a resonance lacking in Britain, whose ‘places of memory’ look back mainly to monarchs and men of letters, gardens and games. Self-scrutiny appeals little to Germans deprived by National Socialism of prideful national continuity, or to Italians who have learned to be cynical about their Risorgimento, and whose historiographical legacies are hostile to Halbwachsian con24 cepts of collective memory. Overweening French pride in their own history – epitomized, during the years of Nora’s collective enterprise, in Mitterrand’s presidency – was a further obstacle to emulation. Yet it is not unimaginable that the Mitterrandian sense of history – the high, romantic, even tragic sense – can, in time, make 25 French history the history of Europe. As ‘the pilot of the vessel of humanity,’ the historian Michelet promised in 1831, 26 France would remake the world in its image. The mission civilisatrice echoes yet: ‘To 27 be ambitious for France,’ Chirac recently declared, ‘is to be ambitious for Europe’. French awareness of being an old country, whose viewpoints and values are alike the envy and the annoyance of the rest of the world, is now increasingly shared by most of Europe. A nation, it is said, is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours. Europeans have traditionally vied for priority in mutual antagonism. The only countries that used to summon up the name of Europe, Bismarck reputedly remarked, were those too weak or timorous to use their own name. However cynical national rhetoric continues to be, that is no longer the case. Today it is the strongest and largest states – France, Germany – that most confidently evoke the name European. If the Euro is weak, the status of Europe is now so enviable that aspirants for eu membership embody an ever-growing range of land and cultures. No longer a continent of ‘euphoric arrogance,’ in Régis Debray’s phrase, ‘Europe has learned modesty’ enough so that it ‘no longer takes its civilization for civilization 28 itself.’ Notwithstanding the Chirac deputy who insisted (against Turkey’s admission to the European Union) on its ‘Christian’ identity, Europe is today the world’s least religious, most secular and culturally tolerant continent. And for all the dismissiveness of others – ’Asian values are universal values. European values are European values [...] While Europeans were still living in caves, concepts of human rights and justice were already articulated in [...] major Eastern philosophies and tradi29 30 tions’ – more global migrants head for Europe than anywhere else. Acceptance of ethnic and cultural diversity may enable Europe to overcome the jealous possessiveness long the hallmark of its national and regional identities. Des-