Composing a national past: Texts, monuments, and the political use of history in nineteenth-century France

This dissertation entitled “Composing a National Past: Texts, Monuments and the Political Use of History in Nineteenth-Century France,” examines what happened when the leading historians of July Monarchy France (1830–1848) revised historical monuments in Paris and Versailles. Scholars have typically assumed that the government used monuments such as the Arch of Triumph, the Bastille column, and the museum at Versailles, to effectively impose its interpretation of history over the alternative versions propounded by other political parties. Indeed, a cohort of liberal historians had risen to positions of authority in this period. These historians intended the monuments to cast their triumph as the climax of a history of middle class victories over royalists and republicans, and over rival interpretations of the French revolution. Yet this study shows that we can only truly understand the impact of monuments when we include the reactions which they inspired. I analyze a range of texts, monuments, museums, and ceremonies staged at the sites. I also interpret a breadth of public responses, from published reviews to songs sung in the streets. According to my analysis, while audiences internalized the images and inscriptions, they often rejected the messages. This study argues that crowds were astonishingly adept at using the regime's own rhetoric to revise the official histories on display.;Perhaps most significantly, this study reconsiders the politics of memory as seen through conflicting official and public uses of historic spaces in nineteenth-century Paris. It argues that the major Paris monuments, and the ceremonies designed to use them, were neither entirely accepted nor even simply ignored. Instead, the monuments asserted a set of images, dates, and themes which regimes dramatized and crowds appropriated. The historians of the July Monarchy invited large audiences, but could not anticipate that the public was more than able to reclaim the themes of “liberty” and “triumph” for its own counter-histories. In this way this study shows that the official displays and the public responses were modified nearly simultaneously, so that both historians and crowds were responsible for constructing collective memories of modern France.