Bodnar, 2000: Pierre Nora, National Memory, and Democracy: A Review
"Nora shows the connection between the rise of democracy and the problem of making a national past"
"creating a nation of citizens with equal rights instead of the anti-democratic and authoritarian government of the Catholic Church and the monarchy"
After the revolution, religious buildings were dismissed as a symbol of the Ancien Regime but between 1870-1918 they became part of the national memory as "national patrimony. Therefore lieux de memoir were hybrid places bringing democratic and conservative worldviews together under the mythical nation. However, at the end of both world wars, the optimistic and progressive ideals of the national myth were substituted with "cult of the war dead" and "expressions of nationalistic aggression", which "directed cultural attention toward the state".
In the case of USA, the early post-revolutionary national memory rested on national consensus emphasizing hierarchy and order. Between 1870-1915, a new memory was based on the Lost Cause of the Confederacy after the civil war and at the end of this period national memory became more patriotic in order to reconcile the South and the North emphasizing a common sacrifice for the nation while rendering the fight for equal rights invisible. From 1915 to 1945 the national memory was divided again between traditionalists commemorating a nostalgic elitist past and modernists who commemorate common people and regional cultures. After WWII, the conflict between tradition and democracy was dissipated and memory was replaced by heritage.
According to Bodnar (2000) the project of national memory, which is a progressive synthesis of the traditional and the modern, was interrupted because the world wars associated the nation-state with "the production of victims, rather than the making of citizens". Patriotism and Christianity were better instruments to compensate for mass destruction and murder. Or in other words, to justify the necropolitics of the state.
"creating a nation of citizens with equal rights instead of the anti-democratic and authoritarian government of the Catholic Church and the monarchy"
After the revolution, religious buildings were dismissed as a symbol of the Ancien Regime but between 1870-1918 they became part of the national memory as "national patrimony. Therefore lieux de memoir were hybrid places bringing democratic and conservative worldviews together under the mythical nation. However, at the end of both world wars, the optimistic and progressive ideals of the national myth were substituted with "cult of the war dead" and "expressions of nationalistic aggression", which "directed cultural attention toward the state".
In the case of USA, the early post-revolutionary national memory rested on national consensus emphasizing hierarchy and order. Between 1870-1915, a new memory was based on the Lost Cause of the Confederacy after the civil war and at the end of this period national memory became more patriotic in order to reconcile the South and the North emphasizing a common sacrifice for the nation while rendering the fight for equal rights invisible. From 1915 to 1945 the national memory was divided again between traditionalists commemorating a nostalgic elitist past and modernists who commemorate common people and regional cultures. After WWII, the conflict between tradition and democracy was dissipated and memory was replaced by heritage.
According to Bodnar (2000) the project of national memory, which is a progressive synthesis of the traditional and the modern, was interrupted because the world wars associated the nation-state with "the production of victims, rather than the making of citizens". Patriotism and Christianity were better instruments to compensate for mass destruction and murder. Or in other words, to justify the necropolitics of the state.
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