Commemoration and Contestation: the memory of conflict and the conflict over memory in Revolutionary France
Referent/in: Joseph Clarke (Dublin)Abstract:
This paper charts the political conflicts that commemoration engendered in France in the aftermath of the Terror. By tracing French Republicanism’s different attempts to confront the legacy of the Terror and to come to terms with the memory of its victims, this paper explores the central role the memory of the recent past played in debates over the Republic’s future between 1795 and 1799. Whether French Republicans opted to confront the Terror directly through a sequence of highly selective commemorations or sought to shroud the Republic’s recent past in silence, the conflict between remembering and forgetting played a critical role in French political debate throughout the years. As diverse political groups attempted to monopolise the meaning of the past, this conflict was played out at a national level in parliamentary debates, the press and pamphlet literature and its conduct did much to define the ideological contours and symbolic content of French Republicanism after the experience of Terror. However, this highly politicised conflict also resonated on an intensely emotional level in the attempts of ordinary French men and women to memorialise, or to mourn, those who had died during the Terror. In examining this interaction between the political and the private, this paper charts how memory and the right to speak of, and for, the past became one of the most bitterly contested resources in Revolutionary politics after the Terror.
