Media, Memory and Nostalgia in Contemporary France: Between Commemoration, Memorialisation, Reflection and Restoration

Following the launch of a series of conferences in 2013 by the ASMCF-affiliated French Media Research Group, this special issue aims to provide a survey of the range of representations of nostalgia and memory in France and the Francophone world, focusing on a range of media and themes of investigation. The collection builds on existing studies of cultural memory within French/Francophone contexts, which have concentrated on turbulent or traumatic episodes in French history, notably the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Algerian War and decolonisation more generally, the ‘events’ of May 1968,1 as well as official forms of remembrance and commemoration:2 state funerals,3 monuments, statues, street names, anniversaries, educational practice and legislation (the ‘memory laws’).4 It also contributes towards the growing field of French/Francophone nostalgia studies, following, for example, Phil Powrie's 1997 book French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity, Barbara Lebrun's work on chanson néo-réaliste, which rose to prominence during the 1990s e.g. Pigalle, Négresses Vertes and Têtes Raides (e.g. in Protest Music in France: Production, Identity and Audiences, 2009) and Chris Tinker's French Cultural Studies article on popular-music-related nostalgia broadcast on French television during the last decade (Tinker 2012).

The study of nostalgia is now a well-established area of intellectual enquiry. The authors in this current collection who consider the question of nostalgia within the context of their individual analyses do so in different ways, but here we offer a brief overview, as a way of approaching our subject. Nostalgia may be defined broadly as ‘a sentimental longing for one's past’ (Sedikides et al. 2008a, 305), and is now widely regarded as a ‘common’ ‘emotion’ or ‘experience’ (Wildschut et al. 2006, 980, 981; 2010, 582). As Constantine Sedikides et al. observe, nostalgia was ‘regarded throughout centuries as a psychological ailment’ (2008a, 307), most notably ‘equated with homesickness’ (304). Several commentators have also viewed nostalgia in ambivalent terms as ‘bittersweet’ (Hirsch 1992; Baker and Kennedy 1994; Madrigal and Boerstler 2007). More positively however, Sedikides et al. also observe that nostalgia is now ‘emerging as a fundamental human strength’ and is recognised as fulfilling several ‘psychological functions’ (2008a, 307).

Several categories or divisions of nostalgia have been highlighted in academic accounts of the phenomenon. Fred Davis (1979) identifies three orders of nostalgia: simple, reflexive and interpreted. As Davis comments, first-order or simple nostalgia ‘harbors the largely unexamined belief that things were better (more beautiful) (healthier) (happier) (more civilised) (more exciting) then than now’ (1979, 18). In second-order or reflexive nostalgia, the individual raises ‘questions concerning the truth, accuracy, completeness or representativeness of the nostalgic claim’ (21). Third-order or interpreted nostalgia ‘moves beyond issues of the historical accuracy or felicity of the nostalgic claim on the past and, even as the reaction unfolds, questions and, potentially at least, renders problematic the very reaction itself’ (24). Svetlana Boym (2001) distinguishes between two forms of nostalgia. The first, restorative nostalgia, ‘stresses nostos (home) and attempts a trans-historical reconstruction of the lost home’, ‘does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition’ and ‘is at the core of recent national and religious revivals’. The second form, reflective nostalgia, ‘thrives on algia (the longing itself) and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately’, ‘dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity’ and ‘calls [the truth] into doubt’ (2001, xviii). Further distinctions have been drawn between nostalgia which is experienced first-hand (‘real’ nostalgia) and that which is experienced second-hand via the recollections and reminiscences of other individuals (Stern 1992; Baker and Kennedy 1994; Goulding 2002).

Nostalgia has also been viewed as individually and/or collectively experienced, or, to use Jose van Dijck's terms ‘individually embodied’ and ‘culturally embedded’ (2006, 359). When nostalgia is experienced individually, concerning ‘personally relevant events’ (Sedikides, Wildschut, and Baden 2004, 205), the emotion has been regarded effectively as a ‘cushion’ (Bose Godbole, Shehryar, and Hunt 2006, 630)—one that ‘buffers existential threat’ (Juhl et al. 2010) or offers a ‘self-protection mechanism against death-related concerns’ (Routledge et al. 2008, 137). For certain commentators, nostalgia is also experienced particularly during times of disruption, discontinuity (Davis 1979, 34–35) or instability, particularly when ‘societies’ are ‘in turmoil … experiencing troubles, turbulence and transformation’ (Brown 1999, 368). Nostalgia is identified as a response to the ‘uncertainties’ (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 920) or ‘challenges and threats’ of the ‘present’ (Vess et al. 2011, 9), and, more specifically, to modernity (as well as late modernity) with ‘its relentless social uprooting and erosion of time-honoured stabilities’ (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 922; see also 938). More positively, studies have shown that ‘nostalgic reverie is a crucial vehicle for maintaining and fostering self-continuity over time and in the face of change’ (Sedikides et al. 2008b, 230), countering loneliness and increasing social connectedness and support (Zhou et al. 2008; Wildschut et al. 2010, 582).

The binaries of simple/complex, individual/collective and bittersweet have certainly informed French discourses of nostalgia, a concept which questions time and space and their relationship in memory. The uses of the past can be political and ‘national’, in the sense that peoples, nations and states may mobilise memories and memory in an ongoing definition and renegotiation of collective identities, or these uses (and abuses?) may be essentially personal, regarding the definition of self and individual identities against the backdrop of wider social, cultural and political developments. The articles brought together in this special number reflect these differing appropriations and negotiations. What we might term the ‘macro’ dimensions of nostalgia are exemplified by de Tocqueville's famous declaration in the concluding pages of De la démocratie en Amérique (first published in 1840): ‘Le passé n'éclairant plus l'avenir, l'esprit marche dans les ténèbres’ (de Tocqueville 1866, 541). Although this quotation, often cited, refers more specifically to the novelty of what he understood to be happening in America, and the absence of historical precedents for its analysis, it serves also as a reminder of how society, politics and culture are generally infused with tradition, and, therefore, by a kind of nostalgia. Looking at the ‘new’ polity of the United States, de Tocqueville identified in its possibilities and novelties a society in some way inherently enfranchised from memory and remembering.

How different is this from the perspective of that other grand figure of nineteenth-century French political science and historical studies, Ernest Renan, and his analysis—conceived in 1882—of what constitutes a nation, above and beyond the contingencies of dynasty, of ethnicity, of language, of religion, of geography or of war? Renan's conclusion as to the definition of a nation is—it could be argued—an intrinsically nostalgic one, basing the current cohesion of the polity on a shared relationship to the past. The most famous phrase of Renan's definition (Renan 1992, 54) identifies nationhood in ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’: ‘Une nation est une âme, un principe spirituel.’ The sentences that immediately follow this are less widely known, but point us usefully in the direction of the past and memory. For Renan, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ are interlinked:

Deux choses qui, à vrai dire, n'en font qu'une, constituent cette âme, ce principe spirituel. L'une est dans le passé, l'autre dans le présent. L'une est la possession en commun d'un riche legs de souvenirs; l'autre est le consentement actuel, le désir de vivre ensemble, la volonté de continuer à faire valoir l'héritage qu'on a reçu indivis. L'homme … ne s'improvise pas. La nation, comme l'individu, est l'aboutissant d'un long passé d'efforts, de sacrifices et de dévouements. Le culte des ancêtres est de tous le plus légitime; les ancêtres nous ont faits ce que nous sommes. (Renan 1992, 54)

In times of crisis, nostalgia tends to be popular, as recent discussions around the issue of ‘golden ages’ have seemed to indicate. To what extent is ‘nostalgia’ something that is susceptible of any ultimately satisfactory definition, beyond the slippery limits of the etymology of a confected word? In her souvenirs of artistic and political life in the postwar decades, published first in 1975, just as the Trente Glorieuses—which form the backdrop to a number of the articles in this number—came to their end, Simone Signoret borrowed the witticism of an unknown New York graffiti artist found on a wall in 1959, as title and leitmotif of her memories: La N ostalgie n ’ est plus ce qu ’ elle était. As she writes:

Je ne saurai jamais de qui, de quoi, de quel endroit précis le faiseur de graffiti new-yorkais avait la nostalgie. Il avait eu besoin d’écrire sur un mur qu'elle n’était plus ce qu’elle avait été. Peut-être que ça voulait dire qu’il était content de s’en être enfn débarrassée... Ou bien triste de ne plus rien retrouver autour de lui qui la suscite. Pour faire cette plongée dans le temps, il m’a fallu de la mémoire. Je n’ai aucun mérite: j'ai de la mémoire. Je n'ai pas de nostalgie. (Signoret 1976, 373)

Signoret’s memoir deals with nostalgia on a more ‘micro’ level than what we can see in the approaches of de Tocqueville or Renan. Signoret is arguably interested in how memory and nostalgia interact in the making of personal ‘histories’. Signoret's final conclusion negotiates the imbrication between memory and nostalgia, claiming a non-exclusive creation of narrative meaning:

Avec une certaine hypocrisie, j'ai joué sur les mots ‘mémoire’ et ‘nostalgie’. Je ne peux pas jurer que j'aie été d’une sincérité totale en affirmant que je n'ai pas de nostalgie. J'ai peut-être la nostalgie de la mémoire non partagée... La mémoire n'est jamais complètement partagée. Quand on la met à l'épreuve d'une confrontation, elle est souvent aussi désespérante qu'un témoignage à décharge, fait de bonne foi, qui affirme que la robe était bleue alors qu’elle était verte. … Quand on raconte, on usurpe la mémoire des autres. Du seul fait qu’ils étaient là, on leur vole leur mémoire, leurs souvenirs, leur nostalgie, leurs vérités. Quand j’ai dit ‘nous’, j'ai pris possession. Mais c’était pour le récit. Ma mémoire ou ma nostalgie m'ont fait tisser des fils. Pas forger des chaînes. (Signoret 1976, 378)

More recently—it was published in 2013—a brief study by the philosopher Barbara Cassin was indicative of the ever-growing interest in French academic circles in the concept of nostalgia and its related notions and applications (Cassin 2013a). As indicated by its title—La Nostalgie. Quand donc est-on chez soi?—this analysis foregrounds an approach to nostalgia based on ‘belonging’, investigating the relationships between home, exile and (mother-tongue) language. Basing her discussion around her own apparently paradoxical nostalgic attachment to Corsica, analysis of Homer's Odyssey and of Virgil's Aeneid, as well as a study of Hannah Arendt's relationship to her own mother tongue while in physical and intellectual exile from Germany, Cassin interrogates people’s sense of roots and belonging. Speaking of herself, Cassin explains the contradictions of belonging and non-belonging vehicled and mediated by nostalgia:

Je partirai d'une expérience personnelle, en l'occurrence la nostalgie irrépressible que j'éprouve chaque fois que je suis de ‘retour’ en Corse. Un sentiment fort, étrange en cela que je n'ai pas mes ancêtres dans cette île, je n'y suis pas née et n'y ai pas vécu mon enfance ni ma jeunesse. Et pourtant je suis chez moi. C'est là sur une terrasse dominant la mer que mon mari est enterré, que j'y ai ma tombe, dans une terre qui ne m'appartient pas, qui est à moi-pas à moi. (Cassin 2013a, 1)

For Cassin, whereas Ulysses and the Odyssey can be seen as founding representations of nostalgia, the Iliad and Aeneas's founding of Rome are a core source for understandings of exile. In the twentieth century, Arendt’s own exile from Germany, and her (and Adorno’s) status as displaced and dislocated individuals, obliged them to negotiate their identities between languages, people and nation. Discussing her book with the women’s magazine Elle—proof if it were needed of the breadth of interest in nostalgia that currently exists—and explaining why the contemporary period is so easily tempted by nostalgia, Cassin suggested that current nostalgia for past times is a kind of regret for broken confidence in the idea of progress itself:

On aime les vêtements vintage, mais a-t-on envie de se passer de frigo ou d'être à nouveau en guerre? La mode rétro est un luxe qui permet de doubler notre époque d'une autre, sans en vivre les inconvénients. Ce n'est pas parce qu'on s'habille avec les vêtements de sa grand-mère qu'on regrette son époque. En revanche, on regrette le temps où le progrès n'était pas une croyance, mais une certitude. (Cassin 2013b)

Such a perspective is explored and echoed in a number of the articles in this number, particularly those by Fantin (on advertising and the Trente Glorieuses) and Le Hégarat (on representations of heritage on French television during and since the Trente Glorieuses), so here it seems sensible to explain a little how things are organised. The articles brought together here all deal with nostalgia and memory in the present, of the recent past. Closest in terms of historical and memorial reach is that of Tinker, who looks at how current French and British cultures relate to memories of the 1980s. Furthest in its ultimate points of reference is the analysis of Frith, whose study locates current discourses in the 2000s on slavery within the frameworks of memory and nostalgia. Belot and Barclay look at the memory of the Algerian War, and how French and Algerian society and culture have negotiated this troubled past over the decades since the conflict and independence. In many ways, all the analyses share the historical context of the Trente Glorieuses (most foregrounded by Fantin and Le Hégarat), and it for this reason that we commence with Fantin, then Tinker, whose study of the 1980s (part of the ‘Vingt Rugueuses’) forms a counterpoint to the representations of growth and optimism of 1945–1975, before returning to Le Hégarat, then Barclay, Frith and Belot.

In ‘Mémoire et nostalgie des Trente Glorieuses dans la publicité française’, Emmanuelle Fantin considers nostalgic and anti-nostalgic representations of the Trente Glorieuses in recent French advertising, highlighting pastiche, self-reference, absences, contradictions and ambiguity, and ‘Anglosaxonisation’ as well as the creation of ‘un véritable ailleurs spatio-temporel’ rather than simply a return to the ‘terre natale’. Fantin demonstrates how French advertising creates a standardised fantasy vision of the Trente Glorieuses, anchored particularly in an extreme aestheticisation of representations of the period. Through concentrating on a number of key ‘nodal’ points, advertising invents its own understanding, its own memory and its own imaginary of the Trente Glorieuses in a kind of ‘industrie du souvenir’ which proposes, ultimately, the collective illusion of a nostalgic ‘présente absente’ (Jankélévitch 1974). One key nodal point of advertising discourse on the Trente Glorieuses is that of revolt in Mai ’68, whose memory is represented in terms of a ‘valorisation utopique’ which operates, in essence, a ‘détournement’ of the events and imaginaries of the events of Mai ’68. Fantin concludes that advertising, as its relationship to memory and nostalgia is revealed in a study of its contemporary uses of French culture and society from 1945 to 1975, can be a special analytical tool for the study of the relations between the past and modernity: ‘Entre mémoire et nostalgie, la publicité n’a … pas d'ambition historique’. Like nostalgia itself, advertising, for Fantin, following Svetlana Boym, aims to replace history with mythology, and, in the context of France and its recent history, tries to make us nostalgic for a period which, on the contrary, was itself turned resolutely towards a future full of promise.

In ‘The RFM Party 80 and Here and Now Tours: 1980s Pop Nostalgia in the French and British Press’, Chris Tinker examines how recent music revival tours on both sides of the Channel help us understand both the remembering of popular music and nostalgia itself. Fundamentally, the French and British written media represent the nostalgia for popular music as emotion, as social experience and as a cultural value, and the discursive strategies adopted in these representations express predominantly straightforward views of nostalgia, in which the music and fashion of the 1980s is presented in positive terms of joy and ‘kitsch’. More rarely, and particularly in the French media however, nostalgia is represented less as a ‘simple’ nostalgia referring to a past which was straightforwardly ‘better than the present’, and more complicatedly as ‘reflexive’ and ‘interpreted’ nostalgia in which the assumption of a golden age is questioned and nuanced. In the French context in particular, the cultural construction of nostalgia around and through music revival tours demonstrates the importance of emotional engagement, generational cohesion and nationalism. Contrasting with what is an essentially ‘commercial’ or business-related representation of music tours in the British press, in which nostalgia is constructed as a lucrative industry dealing in the popular music of a positively interpreted recent past, the French experience seems in some senses more politically charged. Thus, as Tinker demonstrates, the nostalgic nostalgia tour also contributes to the promotion and defence of popular culture, resistance to the perceived dominance of centralised ‘Parisian’ cultural activity, the development of charitable ventures and, indeed, the promotion of creativity and popular music production.

In ‘La nostalgie dans les émissions de télévision sur le patrimoine’, Thibault Le Hégarat discusses how French television from the 1960s to the 1990s has variously represented built heritage and natural heritage in programmes specifically dedicated to the discussion of ‘patrimoine’. The analysis locates the rise of interest in such programmes and the development of discourses around ‘heritage’ against the context of the modernisation of France brought by the Trente Glorieuses, and particularly evident from the 1960s, when modernising industrialisation and urbanisation replaced postwar ‘reconstruction’ as the dominant trend in France’s socio-economic development. It was in 1964 that the iconic programme Chefs d’œuvre en péril was launched, reflecting the rising concern in some quarters over the loss of elements of France’s heritage, and the concomitant rise of discourses on heritage and its loss and preservation. Chefs d’œuvre en péril ran on Antenne 2 until 1992, spanning a period from the birth of heritage-related concerns on television to more modern times where heritage is an established element of programming and editorial choices. Although ‘nostalgia’ is in fact not an inescapable dimension of heritage programming, the concept itself can be explored through the discourses presented in carefully selected programmes: Le Hégarat’s corpus thus investigates both heritage programmes themselves, and the pertinence of ‘nostalgia’ as a structuring element within documentaries, magazine programmes and reports as well as a key to evolving discourses around heritage on television in general. What close study of nostalgic evocations of heritage on television reveals is firstly that nostalgia in this context is an idealisation of a past assumed to be disappearing; secondly, the stereotypical representations of France’s past suggest an essentialist approach to the past in which nostalgia creates a narrative of a ‘golden age’ (here, the Trente Glorieuses); finally, nostalgia responds to television’s need for emotion and feelings in the creation of attractive viewing.

In ‘Reporting on 1962: The Evolution of Pied-Noir Identity Across 50 Years of Print Media’, Fiona Barclay reviews print media coverage of the European population in Algeria, from the end of Algerian War and perceptions of ‘les Français d'Algérie’ as ‘foreign’, ‘to commemorations of the 50th anniversary in 2012 and from representations in France of a more integrated view of les pieds-noirs, as part of a ‘broader memorial mosaic’ of the war, emphasising the importance of the media and its use of archive material, the role of the pied-noir lobby, successive anniversaries of 1962 and the ‘guerre de mémoires’. The analysis demonstrates how the media shape and organise memories of the past in relation to their own priorities, interests and operational requirements, thereby often entering into conflict with the objectives and memories of sub-groups within society with particular collective memories. Exemplifying this tension, as a site of conflict, is the Algerian War, and the subsequent representations of the European population in Algeria as its memory has become a focus of lobbying and contestation. Particularly crucial in the process of construction of memory and identity for the ‘Français d’Algérie’ as they became pieds-noirs in France were 1962 itself and 2012, the intervening 50 years being marked by a silence that was only partially broken in the 1990s. As Barclay points out, by 2012, France was fully involved in what has been described as an era of commemoration (Nora 1992), whose apogee was reached during the Sarkozy presidency, and the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence was thus intensely problematic both for politics, society and politicians, and for the media. Fundamentally, for Barclay, the analysis of pied-noir identity reveals the central role of the media as a mnemonic agent mediating how the past is narrated and shaped.

In ‘Saving the Republic: State Nostalgia and Slavery Reparations in Media and Political Discourses’, Nicola Frith examines how more active engagement with the legacies of France's slave past is being negotiated through media and political discourses, and investigates how nostalgia intersects with these discourses. Varying forms of both nationalistic and post-colonial nostalgia have come into existence in France in parallel with the increasing tendency of the state and civil society to address the history of slavery through a range of acts of memorialisation and commemoration. Frith shows how pressures from bodies such as the citizen-led pressure group the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires for a national debate on slavery and reparations in 2012–2013 were rejected by the French state, and misrepresented in the media by locating them in the wider context of nostalgia-inflected debate from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s and current events. Key events in this process were the 1998 sesquicentenary of the Abolition Act (1848), the first Taubira Law (2001) and the ‘memory war’ (2005–2006), in which the Taubira Law became the object of an attack on ‘counter-memory’. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates how France's ‘socio-political and memorial environment’ renders impossible the acceptance of reparations for slavery, through a nostalgic insistence on an ‘imagined wholeness’, threatened by apparently anti-Republican, divisively communautarian, ethnic minority-led pressures. Ultimately, the commemoration of France's slavery past becomes less about recognition (and reparation), and more a phenomenon of the kind of ‘restorative nostalgia’ discussed by Boym, referencing a past of togetherness and the possibility of contemporary social cohesion.

In ‘Will Movies Make Me Forget What I Saw?’, Sophie Belot considers the 1993 film Youcef by the Algerian director Mohamed Chouikh, which intertwines an evocation of the troubled Algerian society in the 1990s—torn by civil war—with memories of the end of the Algerian war of independence against France, notably through intertextual quotation from Pontecorvo’s 1966 La Bataille d’Alger. Drawing on Benjamin Stora’s seminal work starting in the 1990s on memory and the Algerian War, Belot shows how Youcef exemplifies the intersection between memory and cinematic representation in the context of post-colonial (re)construction of the experience of conflict, but, moreover, in the particular situation of Algeria, where the culture of images is arguably less dominant than elsewhere. Whereas visually mediated forms of memory—especially cinema—are generally ubiquitous, in Algeria, a traditional culture of orality combined with state control over cinema to inflect the development of Algerian collective memory in particular ways. Youcef illustrates how repressed memories can return, repetitively, despite or perhaps because of repression and the distortion in the fabrication of images of memory in state-controlled cinema and other media, and how, ultimately, the intersection between forgetting and remembering is one of trauma. Belot’s analysis shows how Ricoeur's concept of ‘forced memorisation’ and, more significantly, Derrida's theorisations of cinema as the ‘art of ghosts’ and ‘hauntology’ can inform understanding of how the retrieval of the past may be operating in cinematic memories of the Algerian War and the conflict of the civil war in the Algeria of the 1990s.

In sum, this collections aims to contribute towards emphasising and understanding further the spatial, temporal, political and emotional dimensions of mediatised memory and nostalgia in the French and Francophone world.

Notes

^[1] See, for example, Reynolds (2011) and Ross (2002).

^[2] See, for example, Blowen, Demossier, and Picard (2000), Golsan (2000a and 2000b), Kelly (2000), Aldrich (2005), Carrier (2005), House and MacMaster (2006), McCormack (2007), Varley (2008), Marsh and Frith (2011) and Barclay (2013).

^[3] See, for example, Avner Ben-Amos (2000).

^[4] See, for example, Rémond (2006), Accoyer (2009) and Michel (2010).