|
|
|
REVIEWS
| The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. By Stéphane Gerson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii plus 324 pp.).
|
| Gustave Flaubert held in horror the suffocating conventionalism of provincial life, its buttoned-up formality and pretentious-cum-comic erudition á la Bouvard and Pécuchet. Stéphane Gerson, however, takes the matter of provincialism to heart, mapping the extensive and varied efforts of nineteenth-century Frenchmen to cultivate sentiments of loyalty and affection to hometown and pays. |
1
|
|
Gerson's point of entry into the subject is local associational life. He takes the department of the Nord as his principal base of operations but wanders afield from there, drawing on examples from all over France. An arresting picture emerges in the process. From the 1830s, there was a proliferation of societies, academies, institutes—associations of all kinds—which made a cult of local memory. They inventoried archaeological treasures and place names; they organized pageants and parades; they erected monuments and memorials to regional luminaries. However much learning went into it, this was amateur work. And who were the amateurs so taken up with nurturing pride of place? Gerson characterizes them as "middling bourgeoisie": civil servants, litterateurs, and liberal professionals in the main, joined by a smattering of clergy and businessmen. The promotion of local knowledge might be an end in itself, a form of friendly sociability which brought local notables together, but there was a public face to such activity as well, a desire to instruct the community as a whole in the past virtues and present accomplishments of the pays. The past celebrated, at least in the case of the Nord, tended to be distant, evoking the communes of the middle ages or the counts of Flanders. There were political connotations in such choices, but this was politics at a remove. When it came to touting recent accomplishments, however, it was not so easy to keep partisanship at arm's length. The good burghers of Montargis (located just south of Paris) set aside a room in the town hall to memorialize local greats, and the pantheon they assembled is revelatory, running from the admiral turned Protestant martyr Coligny through the revolutionary orator Mirabeau to the Romantic painter Girodet. Each in his way embodied a value: Coligny religious toleration, Mirabeau a love of liberty, Girodet a devotion to art as civic-minded uplift (he was student of David's). Toleration, liberty, uplift, it's not hard to put a political label to this package. |
. . . |
There are about 801 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
