| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Method/Theory

Daniel J. Sherman. The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. Pp. 414.

Daniel J. Sherman's elegant and critically argued new tome examines the meanings of World War I in France as part of a larger project on the constitution of a "culture of memory." Sherman, an expert on museums and memorializing, here moves largely outside of the museum but does not surrender his fascination with space, place, and institutions of art and politics as he looks at the Great War through monuments, tourism, texts, plans, and (a few) museums as places of memory and historical identification. 1

Much of the work is a scholarly tour de France, an engaging peregrination with the author through cities, towns, and villages in search of local war monuments and their stories (smartly illustrated by dozens of Sherman's photographs). The Great War is one of the most studied areas in modern scholarship, and over the last decade historians have broadened the study of "memory" issues by critically reappraising the conflict in terms of its constructions in literature and narratives, ossuaries, statuary, and ceremonies. Following this line, Sherman deliberately works against drawing out any "real experience" of the war, seeking rather the meanings of representation, commemoration, and historical reconstitution. Along with nods to specialists like Antoine Prost and Jean-Jacques Becker, Sherman invokes Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau at regular intervals to structure meditations on the meanings of memory, substitution, displacement, personification, and transference. . . .

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