Fixing History: Narratives of World War I in France

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their bility to recognize themselves—to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness—depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history—" la pédagogie centrale du citoyen "—the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity.
Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s—a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France—and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century—a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by SébastienJaprisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project.