For more than forty years now, the French state has produced, legitimized, and supported local identities through national policies of historic preservation and public discourses about heritage. Rather than simply replaying the old, anxious, and nostalgic tune of national identity, the advent of heritage in France marked a singular moment of cultural transformation and rupture. The national past became articulated, in public speech and political practice, with the cultures and identities of local and regional territories. Given France's centralist tradition, and its political culture that is often cast as the archetype of “an ideology concerned with boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity” (Handler Reference Handler1988: 6), this historical transformation presents a puzzle, to which this paper provides answers through historical and theoretical inquiry.
What has come to be named patrimoine, or heritage, is a complex institution made up of discourses about cultural property, symbolic and commercial transactions, and concrete practices and policies of historic preservation. Borrowing Rogers Brubaker's concept, I call this institution an “idiom of nationhood” (1992) to stress its double dimensions, both symbolic and practical. Through an analysis of the political genesis and morphology of the official idiom of heritage in France, I show that it constitutes a new grammar of belonging that, at a symbolic level, articulates local and national identities in dialectical and complementary ways, and at a practical level produces new cultural and political territories for a national polity restructured by global transformations. More particularly, I explain how the repertoire of French nationhood was transformed through an ongoing process of state decentralization.
The large literature that has developed since the 1980s on the subject of heritage/patrimoine has repeatedly stressed the intensification of national memory production that characterizes the heritage age, eloquently qualified by some as a form of “monumental abuse” (Debray Reference Debray1999) or “patrimonial inflation” (Heinich Reference Heinich2009). I argue here that the heritage phenomenon does not simply represent a quantitative increase in the number of “realms” and places of memory, but is also one through which memory, including official memory, is produced in significantly different ways that are dependent on changing political contexts and state structures. In France, this change translated into a relative atomization of national memory. A number of macro-historical studies or theories of the “rise and rise of heritage” (McCrone, Morris, and Kiely Reference McCrone, Morris and Kiely1995) in contemporary culture have drawn attention to the roles played by national states in “inventing traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983), by capital flows in creating commercial niches for a commodified past (Harvey Reference Harvey1992), and by middle-class anxieties in fostering diffuse forms of nostalgia across mainstream culture (Loewenthal 1999; Hewison Reference Hewison1987). As important as these now classic contributions have been, they have neglected crucial nuances, modalities, and mechanisms of identity production in the age of heritage.
The present analysis draws inspiration from an ongoing effort in contemporary social theory to reconceptualize both nation and state as social relations rather than as fixed, trans-historical structures or “things” (Jessop Reference Jessop2007; Brubaker and Cooper Reference Brubaker and Cooper2000; Adams, Clemens, and Orloff Reference Adams, Clemens and Orloff2005). Nations and states are variable social forms rooted in changing communities of discourse (Calhoun Reference Calhoun1997; Brubaker Reference Brubaker1992; Goswami Reference Goswami2002), and their morphologies reflect changing material conditions and power relations within and across their borders (Goswami Reference Goswami2002; Brenner Reference Brenner2004; Cooper Reference Cooper2005). This general theoretical reconceptualization is echoed (though not made fully explicit) in the heritage literature by scholars’ increasing attention to conservation as political process and to the dialogical uses of the heritage discourse (Phelps, Ashworth, and Johansson Reference Phelps, Ashworth and Johansson2002; Olick Reference Olick2003; Smith Reference Smith2004; Cowell Reference Cowell2008; Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld2010). Some historically minded and relational theorists of the state have referred to the multiple and embedded spatialities of contemporary state power as a process of geographical “rescaling” (Brenner Reference Brenner, Glick-Schiller and Çağlar2011). I show here that the restructuring of nationhood through French policies of patrimoine is a process of symbolic rescaling that is both constitutive of and constituted by state rescaling, and is defined by the coexistence of multiple territorial referents within one concept and experience of the nation.
In the first part of the article I retrace the political genesis of patrimoine in the context of state restructuring in post-war Europe and France. In the second, I analyze the new morphology of French nationhood in detail, elaborating Brubaker's notion of “idiom of nationhood.” My morphological analysis relies also on a systematic comparison of the idiom of patrimoine with another national idiom that resembles it and about which there is a rich historical scholarship: the idiom of petites patries in Third Republic France.
“HERITAGE” AS A SIGNIFIER OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY
Public policies of historic preservation, like discourses about the national past, can be traced to the dawn of Western political modernity in the eighteenth century (Chastel Reference Chastel and Nora1986; Poulot Reference Poulot2006). The first laws regulating the ownership of ancient property and objects were instituted between the 1880s and 1905 in England (Deckha Reference Deckha2004), France (Choay Reference Choay2001), the United States (Mackintosh Reference Mackintosh1991), and most other Western countries (Brown Reference Brown1905). The metaphor of inheritance (“heritage” in English, patrimoine in French, patrimonio in Italian or Spanish) has also been used throughout modernity to refer to cultural objects of public interest.Footnote 1
Usage changed significantly in the mid-1970s, however. Heritage/patrimoine became a political category as well as an idiomatic, commonsense notion.Footnote 2 Early usage mentioned “artistic” or “historic” or “national heritage,” but that of the 1970s began to dispense with qualifiers, talking simply of heritage/patrimoine. A self-justifying and self-referential notion, heritage meant a generic type of symbolic legacy collectively held by an imagined community, whether national or otherwise. The public issue of “historic monuments” was transformed into a more general and encompassing issue of collective “memory” (Nora Reference Nora and Nora1986; Lamy Reference Lamy1993) with unspecified objects or contents, ancient or not so ancient, material or not (McCrone, Morris, and Kiely Reference McCrone, Morris and Kiely1995; Voisenat, Bensa, and Fabre Reference Voisenat, Bensa and Fabre2001). In other words, heritage began to function as an empty signifier connoting belonging, identity, and symbolic value in general.
The first institutional uses of “heritage” suggest that the concept was crafted by political organizations in order specifically to refer to a community's unity in the context of and despite substantive cultural differences among its members. Two such early uses attest to this meaning. One arose in early European institutions, the other at UNESCO. In 1969, German, French, and British experts and state officials called for the organization of a symbolic event, the “Year of European Heritage.” The goal was to give some experiential and emotional reality to the abstract concept of “Europe.” The event was organized by the Council of Europe in 1975, and led to the signing of a Convention on Architectural Heritage under which member states committed to develop extensive preservationist laws and policies and assert them at the national level, while also drawing their citizens’ attention to their neighbors’ national cultures. Thus both “heritage” and “Europe” were constructed, at once in the singular and the plural, as diverse objects of a single desire: for a bond that included yet transcended cultural diversity.
From early on, the makers of “Europe” struggled with the issue of the continent's cultural non-existence. Linguistic and cultural diversity stood in the way of polity and market. The European Cultural Convention of 1954 faced this challenge by encouraging member states to promote “the study of the languages, history and civilization of the others and of the civilization which is common to them all.” Policy makers have since tended to frame the issue of “European culture” in two ways: as shared European civilization (Wagner Reference Wagner and Therond2001), but also as a singular capital of diverse cultures. Although the latter is a much less remarked upon aspect of the construction of European identity, it is as defining as the former which it conditions, and with which it forms an expressive, dialectical antinomy.
Another early international initiative—UNESCO's 1972 “Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage”—established heritage as a dialectical discourse about social solidarity between culturally bounded territories. Since the creation of the United Nations in 1946, the notion of heritage had been central to UNESCO's founding mission. Like the emerging European Community, and for similar reasons, the United Nations grounded its legitimacy in a concept of unity in and through diversity. The 1972 Convention established a World Heritage Fund and a list of natural and historic sites cast as a diverse human capital to be protected, the very diversity of which defined its universality (Kowalski Reference Kowalski, Bandelj and Wherry2011).
Chronology suggests that during the early 1970s civil society organizations and the media often preceded national governments in popularizing a nationalist and nostalgic notion of heritage (McCrone, Morris, and Kiely Reference McCrone, Morris and Kiely1995; Barthel Reference Barthel1998; Lumley Reference Lumley1988; Glevarec and Saez Reference Glevarec and Saez2002), but it also shows that international politics introduced heritage into public discourse before the heritage movements or the tourist boom of the late 1970s did. This was done, not out of nostalgia or as a way to “invent (any specific) tradition,” but rather as a way to produce a unity of purpose (communication through policies of historic preservation) out of diverse contents (national or local cultures) in contexts of political restructuring and emergent political forms. Heritage was a conceptual and policy means to this civic end.
The meaning and function of “heritage” in international relations was soon extended to public cultural institutions at the national level. Several European governments replaced the words “monuments,” “historic buildings,” and “antiquities” in the names of their preservation agencies with the less precise and more encompassing patrimonial notion of “heritage.” Italian policy makers opted for a rather technical version of heritage as a set of “cultural goods” (beni culturali), a concept that coexists today with that of patrimonio in administrative language. In France, a Directorate of Heritage (Direction du patrimoine) was created in 1978 as a department of the Ministry of Culture, which annexed the century-old and formerly autonomous Service des Monuments Historiques. In the United Kingdom, “English Heritage” replaced the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments in 1980. The Spanish government established its Cosejo del Patrimonio Historico in 1984. These are examples of a terminological change that occurred across Europe within just a few years.
The terminological shift was not only symbolic; it translated into different legal and normative approaches to historical preservation, with real consequences for the organization of social space. Landmark-designation agencies shifted their focus away from the grand vestiges of national histories toward more modest traces of everyday life (McCrone, Morris, and Kiely Reference McCrone, Morris and Kiely1995).Footnote 3 As the Convention on Architectural Heritage of October 1975 put it, “The European architectural heritage consists not only of our most important monuments: it also includes the groups of lesser buildings in our old towns and our characteristic villages in their natural or man-made settings.” Vernacular architecture, which had always been relegated to private care, at best, now began a symbolic career in public policy, in France under the telling name of petit patrimoine, or “small heritage.” Over the decades that followed, this was progressively institutionalized through French conservation programs. The traditionalist Service des Monuments Historiques launched a survey of farmhouses in 1973, and a Bureau for Ethnographic Research was created in 1979 (Rogers Reference Rogers2001; Lebovics Reference Lebovics2004). Surveys and research of “industrial heritage,” “maritime heritage,” and later “rural heritage” started in the early 1980s and were integrated into preservation programs in the 1990s.
The categorical shift from “great” monuments to “small” heritage brought about another change—in units of policy analysis. Entire historic areas, not just individual “landmarks,” came to be more systematically targeted for preservation and land planning (Phelps, Ashworth, and Johansson Reference Phelps, Ashworth and Johansson2002). Through the designation of historic zones, local history became more deeply inscribed in place. In France, traditional policies had tended to conserve discrete and de-contextualized architectural items (“monuments”) of national relevance as illustrations of an otherwise abstract civic identity (Bercé Reference Bercé2000). The new treatment of similar items under the heading of “heritage” dealt with extant segments of local social space made of groups of monuments and provided for them an organic context and a location (“natural or man-made settings”).
Under the heading of “heritage,” the legitimate referents of identities diversified, a phenomenon remarked upon by Diane Barthel in the American context: “Whereas preservation in the United States once had a definite ‘Daughters of the American Revolution’ cast, today it is not hard to find counter examples, all designed to promote and to celebrate America's diverse cultural and ethnic heritage” (1998: 23). While the notion of “historic monument” still signified “national heritage,” heritage tout court began to signify non-monumental “realms of memory” that were not necessarily national or even material (Nora Reference Nora and Nora1986). In the field of policy, the heritage turn transformed historic preservation into a tool of space management and local “identity building” available to both private and governmental actors.
This turn was taken in France as early as 1962, when a major law was adoptedFootnote 4 that made it possible to landmark neighborhoods or villages. This law was transformative: by creating new constraints on urban planning, it gave “ancient centers” and “historic towns” a specific symbolic and market value that continues to model projects of urban renewal and tourism development today. By granting tax cuts to owners of historic property who carry out often-costly restorations, the law made history a key category of urban landscapes and planning. It was adopted while a reform of the country's regions was being discussed by the parliament, prompted by concerns about economic development. In 1964 the reform was passed and regions were created. Although regional cultural administrations were not established until 1974, land and urban planning had been at the core of the political agenda since the early 1960s due to the regionalization of the central state. The law of 1962 reflected these concerns in the field of cultural policy.
As the phraseology of public discourse in the above citations suggests, the new use of historic preservation as a tool of space production transformed the national cult of monuments into a means of population management through the production of local identities. In France, the policy issue came to be framed as one of fostering “local consciousness.” This concern, too, can be traced back to the early 1960s and the origins of administrative regionalization, which contributed to the creation of the Inventaire Général, another landmark event in the emergence of the heritage discourse.Footnote 5
The goal of this national survey of historic buildings and objects was to constitute an extensive “artistic archive of France” to “record, study, and teach about” modest and local vestiges of the past (Ministère des Affaires Culturelles 1964: 3). In the report that advocated for the Inventory project in the parliament, the historian André Chastel wrote, “One can hope this enterprise will help create a local ‘artistic consciousness,’ which would be the best ally of the Ministry [in the promotion of a preservationist agenda] as well as a possible mode to insure access of the masses to culture.” The original version of this report mentioned the need to “create a small ‘artistic consciousness’” at the local level because “anything that serves to awaken and enlighten the public opinion is good. The interest taken by small town dwellers in their buildings is essential to this task” (Chastel and Grodecki Reference Chastel and Louis1962).Footnote 6 Local consciousness was clearly instrumentalized in the completion of a national venture, but the national project was nonetheless supposed to support the formation of “small nations.” The mention of the “small artistic consciousness” notably revived an old nationalist script, which, under the Third Republic, conceived of French “provinces” as a series of petites patries, or “small fatherlands.” This old motif made other appearances; Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux in his speech at the inauguration of the Inventory's National Commission mentioned “the local nationalisms which this enterprise is meant to foster” (Ministère des Affaires Culturelles 1964: 1). In an era better known for centralism and nationalism than for the promotion of regional identities, the reference to “local nationalism,” as rhetorical as it may have been in the context of a public speech, invites us to further reflect on its meaning.
The idea of cultivating “small artistic consciousness” was in some instances given a most regionalist connotation. The first two regions chosen to implement the Inventory were Brittany and Alsace. The minutes of the first meeting of the National Commission attribute to Malraux the following remarks: “The proposition submitted by the Commission to establish the first local branches of the Inventory in Alsace and Brittany seems particularly appropriate. In this way the Inventory will be engaged in strongly characterized territories, the specificity of which can play a first-ground role in defining the methods of investigation that will later be applied to other locations.” Malraux continued, “It seems highly commendable to start a third operation as soon as possible in the south of the country, either in Provence or in Languedoc, so that the regions with the richest artistic heritage and animated by the most intense national feeling can constitute the core of the enterprise. This national sentiment will be the lever that will make the Inventory possible.”Footnote 7 An idiom of territorial pluralism was thus very much present in 1960s national discourse and preservation policies, “idiom” here indicating a meaning-producing practice, in an institutional sense of having both discursive and practical dimensions.
This new focus on local space expressed through the 1962 law and the Inventory prepared the ground for the “heritage” turn, which was made official when the Ministry of Culture celebrated 1980 as a “year of heritage.” But even before that, the theme of local “consciousness” became a central motif of official discourses. Starting in 1974, the government became more active in developing regional administrations and economies through tourism and urban renewal, an approach dubbed the “decentralization of culture.”Footnote 8 In 1976, the first of about thirty “cultural charters” was jointly signed by the French government, the municipality of Strasbourg, and the departments and the region of Alsace. The domains in which the agreement was to be applied included “the traditional aspects [of culture] that facilitate the affirmation of regional identity.” The Ministry justified the Charter as follows: “France has multiple faces which deserve respect and attention” (Bulletin d'Information, 15 July 1976).
In the years that followed, the forms, numbers, and names of temporary, flexible contracts between central and local governments proliferated: Conventions de développement culturel and Villes d'Art et d'Histoire after 1982, Villes et Pays d'Art et d'histoire after 1995, and Protocoles de décentralization culturelle after 2001. Through these partnerships—prompted by a general need for political decentralization in a socio-economic context of urbanization, tertiary sector expansion, and tourist boom—the central government committed itself to promoting local identities. Political discourses were eager to make this commitment public, and various formulations delineated the goals of generating local specificity and economic activity through funding systems that would distribute costs across political tiers. These would enable “better knowledge and more effective preservation of heritage in the regions in order to reinforce their identity while serving a cultural, economic, and social purpose,” and promote forms of local decision-making so that “the people living in a town, a department, or a region may appropriate for themselves the heritage of their community” (Bady Reference Bady2002: 3). They would reveal “the cultural and material identity of a region”Footnote 9 and provide “a sort of ‘state of the art,’ an identity card of the territory,” and allow “the location, identification, and qualification of the totality of objects and buildings that give shape to an urban or rural territory.”Footnote 10 Further, they would put “at the disposition of the people living in the département information that allows them to better acknowledge their environment and its evolution to help them form a collective identity.”Footnote 11 These formulations also advertised the central state's role in a process of localization that was presented as a form of democratization.
Local-national contracts support local cultural policy not only financially but also symbolically, through standardized labels that earmark cities, areas, and regions with historical coherence and interest (Pays d'art et d'histoire, or Ville d'Art). Local governments, tourist offices, and private organizations use these labels in advertising campaigns, brochures, road signs, and so forth. Particularly notable is the reemergence over the past decade of local identity in national discourse through these national markers of excellence. As one official put it, this system of controlled appellations “rests on a notion of a federated territory—a territory that federates through the shared identities and memories that constitute it.”Footnote 12 Uttered by a representative of this traditionally centralist Republic, the political notion of “federation” makes for a strong statement about the willful and ongoing cultural fragmentation of the French territory, which most people still think of as unitary and centralized. But just as significant is his use of the word “territory.”
(Les) territoire(s), often emphatically used in the plural, became a buzzword of official discourses between 1999 and 2004, a time when a major constitutional reform was being prepared by the government that ultimately redistributed important state capacities to local governments. The notions of “cultural decentralization” and “cultural development” that had surfaced in the mid-1970s now returned with different meanings. In the 1970s, policies of “cultural decentralization” had a heritage component but focused primarily on contemporary art and public collections. After 1999, “cultural decentralization” came to mean first and foremost “preservation of local heritage.” The notion of “territories” means in this context “regional or local entities with historical and cultural coherence” as much as “integral parts of the national territory.” Territories signify one nation's cultural diversity. The “earthy” connotation of territoire (from terre, or soil) comes out strongly in the current usage, making it a very physical concept and fleshing out its original abstract, technical sense of “a piece of land enclosed in borders.” The roots of humans and trees grow from this soil, territoire says. It is critical to note that the state's voice echoes here that of French farmers and wine producers when they defend national (commercial) boundaries in the name of terroir, or cultural “localhood” (Barthel and Clough Reference Barthel and Clough2005; Bodnar Reference Bodnar2003). The transformations of the contemporary world, whether they are called “globalization” or “commodification of culture” or “decentralization,” tend to ground national sentiments in a robust imagination of local “diversity.” This motif conjures up a pre-national time, a time before the modern nation consecrated “la fin des terroirs.”Footnote 13
In addition to flexible state-local contracts, stable legal and administrative frameworks were crafted that routinized the production, cultivation, and beautification of the “multiple faces” of French heritage. In the wake of legal reforms that decentralized the French state's territorial organization and capacities in 1982 and 1992, preservation law was amended in 1983 and 1998 to allow local officials and experts to participate in the designation of secondary types of national landmarks through mixed, national-local commissions.Footnote 14 More importantly and less symbolically, the constitutional reform in 2004 transferred some of the state's functions in land and urban development to municipalities, departments, and regions, with provisions for the creation of historic zones in which real estate development was regulated.Footnote 15
Through the 2004 legal reform, the central state handed over to regions the ability to assemble formal requests that places be recorded as national landmarks and to manage national budgets allocated to certain monuments, and gave them control over the entire national budget allocated to petit patrimoine. Regional administrations also were given charge of the staff, operations, and coordination of the Inventaire Général. In addition, the central state offered to turn over a selection of its historic properties with “local interest” to municipalities, departments, or regions that would commit to their custody. The law made explicit the distinction between “national” and “local heritage.” This confirmed a hierarchy of monuments and institutionalized the division of labor and financial responsibilities between central and local governments that already existed in practice, and also strengthened the basis for their collaboration in promoting local places of memory. Through the Paris office of the Inventory and the regional offices of the Service des Monuments Historiques, the central state retained control of informational and technological resources, particularly databases and catalogues of national landmarks, including the terms of their taxonomies. Through the Institut National du Patrimoine, a professional school created in 1990 and reformed in 2001, the central state remained the main source of symbolic credentials for all governmental cultural administrators and experts, including those specifically trained to be employed by local government agencies.
The language of heritage has now been in use for about four decades. At the turn of the 1980s, heritage became the centerpiece of a new national idiom that gave prominence to local memory, which was written into law in 2004. This long period of development supports the recent claim of constructivists that heritage, despite being a political discourse, is not an ideological superstructure with a purely expressive or instrumental function (Olick Reference Olick2003). It is a set of meaningful practices that both reveal and contribute to establishing new political relations through cultural policy. As suggested by Herman Lebovics (Reference Lebovics2004), the emergence of state-sponsored regionalism in France was partly prompted by the radicalization of regionalist movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but the process of institutionalization of heritage cannot be reduced to a reactive or defensive choice of policy-makers. It was also very much a state project with roots in the autonomous process of regionalization launched in the early 1960s and pursued after 1982 under the rubric of decentralization. The structure of the relation expressed by the institution of heritage is that of a decentralizing national state, a state that is being “rescaled” across new political and economic tiers (Brenner Reference Brenner2004).
Cultural policies and identities are, along the same lines as the capitalist states that produce them, rescaled. The contemporary state exists in and through a network of multiple political and economic centers, both supra- and infra-national, which it helps to create. In a similar way, nationhood in the age of heritage exists in and through multiple scales. These scales should be conceived as both political-economic tiers at which preservation policy is implemented and as distinct territorial referents that the heritage discourse produces symbolically.
NATIONAL IDIOMS OF LOCAL IDENTITY: FROM PETITES PATRIES TO PETIT PATRIMOINE
We must ask how “national memory and other memories exist in tension but without breaking” (Confino Reference Confino1997: 8). This question is begged by the official category of patrimoine as a category in which petit and grand patrimoine coexist. Heritage is not an ideology that “invents traditions” in a generic sense, but rather a complex institution that produces specific national geographies through tangible organizational forms. Therefore, the sociological problem it presents us with is not just one of explaining its emergence by reference to one or another “social factor” (e.g., culture, class, or capital); we also must understand its particular symbolic morphology in a way that elucidates its role and social origins within the specific political context that engendered it. This requires a theoretical shift away from the routines of structuralist analyses (whether culturalist, classist, or economistic) of national ideologies and cultural commodification that have dominated the sociology of nation and heritage.
Accounting for the French state's promotion of local heritage also invites skepticism about traditional depictions of French cultural politics. Historical and sociological scholarship has portrayed France as the archetype of a “state-centered and assimilationist” political-cultural system (Calhoun Reference Calhoun1997: 75). According to Brubaker, “French nationhood is centrally expressed in the striving for cultural unity. Political inclusion has entailed cultural assimilation for regional cultural minorities and immigrants alike” (1992: 1). National unity was originally achieved not only through an ideology of shared participation in the political processes, scholars insist, but also as a form of cultural imperialism that resulted in the successful acculturation of the peasantry in the provinces through public education (Weber Reference Weber1976). This scholarly narrative locates the heyday of French cultural assimilationism in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially under the Third Republic that followed France's defeat by Germany in 1871. Through public education in particular, the majority of France's population learned to speak standard French, and internalized a common version of French history and more generally a new collective identity. Although this narrative certainly captures the unitary dimension of French nationhood, it disregards another dimension that, I am arguing here, has been at times equally defining and just as legitimate: stress on the variety and wealth of the local cultures that make up the nation.
The cases of late twentieth-century heritage policy in France and, as I will show, late nineteenth-century Republican educational policy suggest that any rigorous, historical analysis of state national constructions requires an entirely different theoretical frame than theories grounded in the concept of a culturally repressive central state. This frame can be derived in part from the research of historians of nationalism who, although they did not focus on state processes and discourses, showed that European nationalisms have often had a regional and even regionalist basis (Sahlins Reference Sahlins1991; Confino Reference Confino1997; Haupt, Mueller, and Wolff Reference Haupt, Mueller and Wolff1998; Gerson Reference Gerson2003). The formation of national identity depends, in practice, on a particularistic “imaginary of place and past” which “by yielding self-understanding, moral teachings, civil participation, social cohesion, and true national unity, … [can] recompose pays and nation alike” (Gerson Reference Gerson2003: 5). In our French case, “local process[es] of appropriating the nation without abandoning local interests, a local sense of place, or a local identity” (Sahlins Reference Sahlins1991: 8–9) are mirrored by symmetrical state constructs that might be described as state processes of appropriating the provinces without abandoning the national interests, sense of heritage, or identity. It is these processes that I am referring to as “symbolic rescaling.”
Acknowledging that “local-hood” and nationhood function as a productive polarity that defines and structures the French nation discourse is only the first theoretical step toward grasping the historical morphology or structure of this discourse. The next is to elaborate a language that adequately describes the mutual constitution of nations as communities of discourse (Calhoun Reference Calhoun1997; Goswami Reference Goswami2002) and the systemic structures of state and society. This language should convey their joint transformations over time. Our conceptual framework must recognize that the symbolic and material dimensions of human practice are mutually constitutive and acknowledge the historical, processual nature of social interaction.
A good starting point for developing such a frame is Brubaker's concept of “idioms of nationhood.” By this he means variable arrangements of meaningful practices of belonging, including discursive, legal, and administrative practices that produce citizenship (1992).Footnote 16 He first applied the phrase in Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany within a theory of “identity without groups” (ibid.). Brubaker and Cooper later published a more explicit and extensive presentation of this theory, stressing its uses in the analysis of historical processes (rather than of sociological “things,” for example) (2000).
While I adhere to their conception of identity and nationhood as constituted processes, for the purposes of my analysis here I define “idiom” in a slightly more specific sense to mean a variable symbolic arrangement that articulates dialectically, in both language and practice, the contradictory realities of community and difference and, still more specifically, the discrepant scalar realities of local and national belongings. The Third Republic idiom of petites patries, which historians and anthropologists have extensively researched and richly analyzed, can help us to understand the symbolic “articulation” of geographic scales in a case of cultural policy that is historically distinct from, yet formally similar to, that of heritage. Once we are equipped with better theoretical and comparative insights into “how identities exist in tension without breaking” in the petites patries idiom, we will return to the historical analysis and explanation of heritage.
Small Fatherlands: “Expressive” Figures of Speech, and “Constitutive” Political Devices
Under the “civilizing” Third Republic, the French state consistently, if paradoxically, cultivated and promoted local culture and history (Chanet Reference Chanet1996; Thiesse Reference Thiesse1997). Patriotic discourse exalted cultural heterogeneity as the diversity of a nation rich in its differences.Footnote 17 Far from Eugen Weber's image of an army of soldiers (“a militia of the new age” in “worn, dark suits”) devoted to the cause of the nation (1976: 303), teachers were often local historians and folklorists who grew up in and never left their department (Chanet Reference Chanet1996). Republican schools were not only a locus of political and linguistic acculturation where children learned “proper” French, they were at the same time conceived and engineered as cradles of local cultural pride and nationalism, of which language was only one facet. Under the name petites patries, local cultures and territorial diversity were objects of national pride, through which France chose to differentiate itself from the German culturalist model of nationhood and to present itself at international events such as the Paris fair of 1937 (Peer Reference Peer1998).
The origins of this pluralist “idiom of nationhood” can be traced back to the provincial “academies” and “learned societies” that flourished throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and researched local history, monuments, and customs, among other subjects in the arts and sciences (Gerson Reference Gerson2003; Bercé Reference Bercé and Nora1986). The construction of the provinces as a set of foreign countries with their own geographic and cultural features reached its acme with the mid-century Romantic Movement (Lowenthal Reference Lowenthal1999). While modernization may have threatened terroirs through certain forms of cultural leveling in the second half of the nineteenth century (Weber Reference Weber1976), they were at the same time revived through self-conscious, organized action, both private and public, at both local and national levels. Regional culinary traditions were researched and codified (Csergo Reference Csergo, Flandrin and Montanari2000; Parkhurst-Ferguson Reference Parkhurst-Ferguson2004), tourism was organized (Bertho-Lavenir Reference Bertho-Lavenir1999), and folklore and local history were included in mainstream nationalist discourse and schoolbooks. In the first decades of the twentieth century, folklore became a quasi-academic discipline (Lebovics Reference Lebovics1992; Weber Reference Weber, Poirrier and Vadelorge2003).
Stylistically, the small fatherlands were, in Third Republic language, a metonym for the larger nation. Politically, they were a device of national integration. After the defeat of 1871, Germany's annexation of Alsace and Lorraine fostered French nationalism, which developed primarily in relation to its German counterpart (Brubaker Reference Brubaker1992: 12). The narcissistic wound of the loss of a territory with a Germanic culture could not be healed by claims to France's cultural rights over it. The state began purposefully to define French identity in opposition to German claims to cultural unity and what was seen as an ethnic framing of nationhood (Thiesse Reference Thiesse1997). The pluralistic cultural idiom of the petites patries has its sources partly in anti-German hostility. In addition, international tensions and the rise of nationalism across Europe made nation-building a priority, which largely explains the regime's famous focus on public education.
Schooling was an arena where local identity soon came to be seen as a cultural and emotional capital to enhance, and Republican teachers as well as policy-makers took it seriously as a practical instrument of population management (Thiesse Reference Thiesse1997; Chanet Reference Chanet1996). Nation-building thus took the form of not only cultural homogenization through the learning of a common language and history (the history of “our ancestors the Gauls”) but also of the promotion of local identity through history, geography, folklore, and even the teaching of local languages. The petite patrie (the village, and beyond that the region) was conceived as a medium and a pedagogical tool that would help citizens identify with the more abstract, ideal, and political group of the grande patrie. Citizens could experience and relate personally to an impersonal form of community by learning to relate to their historical and natural environment, by developing attachment to their local communities, and through knowledge of other regions (Ozouf and Ozouf Reference Ozouf, Ozouf and Nora1984). Learning provided the experience upon which national belonging could be grounded.
Brubaker introduced a vital nuance into the debate over the typology of national identities by showing that nations are not either “ethnic” (as in the German stereotype) or “civic” (as in the French one), but that instead ethnic and civic forms of nationhood coexist in both French and German contexts in the form of variable idioms mobilized in different contexts (1992). The pluralist cultural policy of a supposedly assimilationist and integrative state under the Third Republic compels us to introduce further, crucial nuances to Brubaker's concept and the study of idioms of nationhood. “Idioms of nationhood” should be redefined as segmenting and integrative “idioms of belonging”—that is, as discursive arrangements, or logics, that, while they produce different types of social identities (national, local, racial, gendered, sexual), also articulate them in dialectical ways that transform potential contradictions into symbolically productive antinomies (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1993).
How, then, should we describe and analyze the “small/great fatherland” arrangement as an idiom of belonging? French anthropologist Anne-Marie Thiesse provided a clue when she likened the structure of this idiom to a set of nested, wooden Russian matriochka dolls (1997). The metaphor is relevant here insofar as the “small nations” were a metonym for the “big nation,” each crafted in the image of the other as “communities of fate” fulfilling similar integrative functions at different territorial scales. However, because it suggests that small and large nations are exactly isomorphic, the matriochka metaphor distorts the nation-local relationship in the petite/grande patrie idiom. A qualitative difference was maintained between the small and the large nations that is not reducible to a difference in size. The small nation was a tangible category of experience because it overlapped with the subjects’ life-worlds; the large nation was more difficult to conceive and animate because it could only be grasped through an abstract form of internalization (through learning, in the intellectual sense).
This difference was hierarchical: it made local identity at once an indispensable step in the construction of political citizenship and an identity of lesser worth than the national one, to which it remained subordinate. The interesting aspect of this difference is that the “small/great fatherland” concept cast local belonging in a language of ethno-cultural identity, while national belonging was primarily expressed in political or civic terms. The pluralistic ethno-cultural idiom of the petites patries was subordinated to the integrative political idiom of the great fatherland.
Brubaker tends to treat the French “ethno-cultural idiom of nationhood” as a dominated “counter-idiom” which has, in the dominant discourse, a symbolic function (he calls it “expressive”), while the political idiom has an instrumental function (which he calls “constitutive”) (1992: 14, 138–64). French educational policy, in contrast to the citizenship laws studied by Brubaker, suggests that the construction of French identity relied on ethno-cultural constructs that have at times been constitutive rather than merely expressive. These constitutive constructs, however, apply more to the local than to the national scale of identification. It can thus be said that the ethnic turn of nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century (Kohn Reference Kohn1944; Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1990) affected France as well as its European counterparts. The difference was that, rather than transforming the nation into an ethnic community as such, it made it into a community whose integration at the national level was insured by ethnicized forms of allegiance at the local and regional levels. Even if regional history and other subjects of local scholarship were considered to be lower forms of knowledge from a Parisian standpoint, and the local past remained symbolically subordinate to the national one, this territorial structure of symbolic power nonetheless found expression in an ambivalent modernizing discourse. That is, local knowledge and identity were not simply discounted as obstacles to be overcome (as in the Eugen Weber-inspired narrative), but rather its diversity was included in a dominant nationalist discourse about cultural difference and political citizenship.
Brubaker's approach to idioms of belonging as articulations of generic forms or repertoires (e.g., ethnic and civic), and Thiesse's identification and tentative formalization of the different scales at which these idioms apply (national and local), both provide fine analytical tools. By combining their taxonomies we can conceive of nationhood as a set of distinct symbolic-geographic scales, the relation of which is a functional product of political context. While Brubaker identifies the variation of political referents, Thiesse gives us a concept of these referents’ scalar variation and hierarchical nestedness. The symbolic grammar of the petites patries idiom suggests that the state uses it to exercise a “rule of difference”—a regime of subordination and functional dependence between two coexisting orders of identification and citizenship.Footnote 18 One, local belonging, is affective and “hot” while the other, national belonging, is more intellectual and “cold” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1993).
Grammar of Nationhood in the Idiom of Heritage
The idiom of patrimoine may be understood by comparison with the similar idiom of petites patries, as well as by contrast with the “monumental” approach that dominated the field of historic preservation until the 1960s. The cultivation of national memory through the preservation of monuments historiques tended to erase local cultural specificity. The traditional “historic monument” perspective was governed by an art-historical canon of styles and epochs (Bercé Reference Bercé2000; Choay Reference Choay2001). According to this perspective, the local was primarily an abstract location (a territory in a narrowly geographic sense) for remarkable buildings or sites representative of a style or an epoch. The cathedral of Vézelay in Burgundy and the fortified city of Carcassone, classical examples of nineteenth-century preservation policy, were restored not because they were important in the respective histories of Burgundy and the Toulouse region but because they were judged to be masterpieces of French-style medieval architecture (Sire Reference Sire1999).
The dominant “conservation” doctrine (known as doctrine du monument-type) commanded that buildings be altered in order to display their stylistic exemplariness. The defense towers in the fortified wall of Carcassone were thus adorned with round, black roofs that were never there before being “restored.” For nineteenth-century architects, they signified the modernity and rationality of the French “Gothic,” which they sought to exalt through self-conscious historical distortion. Even the “picturesque” landscapes of ruins celebrated by romantic travelers played a marginal role in the designation and care of national landmarks by the Service des Monuments Historiques. The latter subsumed local history under the nationally defined and internationally shared categories of a scripted art history.
Both historic monuments and heritage are an inheritance: they are (cultural) capital, (symbolic) wealth, and (collective) property. But the cultural wealth of the nation in the age of heritage is not solely measured, as it was in the age of monuments, by the number of rare and valuable objects found or gathered on its ground, as items “of aesthetic or historical value” independent from their particular territorial, historical, and cultural origins. The language and policies of heritage do not simply pronounce the nation one and united. They offer it to the admiration and affection of citizens and visitors as culturally plural and rich in this plurality. The cultural wealth of the nation is evaluated in terms of the diversity and number of the territories, peoples, histories, and traditions brought together on its soil. In a way that is similar to the petites patries idiom, the contemporary idiom of petit patrimoine differentiates between local and national inheritance, and articulates this difference in a language of symbolic distinction and functional interdependence.
The kinds of problems tackled under the heading of politiques du patrimoine have since the 1970s consistently included issues of local development. Heritage policy legitimated and produced territories (city, pays, region) with a local history of their own. Conversely, the grammar of heritage reasserted national interests by articulating them with local territories. This was done through several distinctions. The symbolic distinction between patrimoine and petit patrimoine was not formalized through law until the constitutional reform of 2004, but it nevertheless guided practices informally for several decades. Another, partly overlapping distinction between “national” and “local” patrimoine was implicit in the very first law (1913) protecting ancient buildings “of national interest.” It became programmatic in the mid-1990s, when the “decentralization of culture” was put again on the state's agenda, and when municipal and departmental cultural administrations effectively started to expand. The distinction was finally articulated in legal terms in 2004 when the cultural duties of the state were divided along the symbolic lines of “national” and “local” patrimoine.
Beyond their technical aspects, these distinctions evoke a hierarchy of value between small and grand, between local and national heritage, which reveals the functional dependence between them. Like the petite patrie device, the idiom of heritage subsumes diverse local identities under a national imagination that gives them a higher value and relates them to universal aspirations, while providing national imagination with a concept and a desire for territorial and cultural diversity. The form of territorial “identity politics” that is promoted through heritage policy serves “local development,” and therefore the national accumulation of symbolic and economic wealth. Speaking about the “Heritage Days” (Journées du Patrimoine), a yearly event launched in 1984 in which historical monuments open their doors to the public free of charge, a state official affirms that “it is precisely because the construction of memory may be exploited (détournées) through dubious communitarian politics (des revendications identitaires douteuses) that these questions [of local identity] should be discussed in the presence of professionals of heritage: the Heritage Week is a unique occasion to pose these questions in scientific [historic] terms and plead for a new conception of heritage that underlines the continuity between the local and the universal (Kneubuehler Reference Kneubuehler2002).
The abstract, political “Greater Fatherland” taught about in Third Republic schools played the integrative function that is in the age of heritage fulfilled by the “scientific” ethos of historical knowledge and by the bureaucratic imperative to modernize and develop “territories.” This explains the language of “appropriation” through which local differences are promoted by the central state: local identity is not so much about emotional identification as about intellectual “appropriation.” The goals of the Heritage Week and the General Inventory, and the function of state-trained and state-approved tour-guides (guides conférenciers), is to make heritage into a cognitive experience that neutralizes “dubious” collective allegiances while fostering development and modernization.
Linear historical narratives may support primordialist ethnic claims. Historicity, however, also has the potential to relativize primordial identities by inscribing them in the temporal unfolding of contingent actions and constructions, in a way that undermines the objectivity-effect of ethnic claims. The French state, by historicizing the idiom of “localhood” through expert categories that it controls, seeks to make a diverse heritage safe for the nation. This proposition was forcefully illustrated by a prominent participant in the General Inventory who emphatically summarized for me, finger raised in the air, the institution's original mission: “The goal is to foster regional—and I mean not regionalist-scholarship.” Clearly, Third Republic confidence in promoting its petites patries contrasts sharply with the insecurity of late twentieth-century bureaucracy in this respect. The quotation's defensiveness bears the imprint of the threat of separatist regionalisms that contributed to the emergence of local history in the 1960s and 1970s (Lebovics Reference Lebovics2004). As a strategy of symbolic distinction, however, this rhetorical strategy also signals a more immediate concern on the part of legitimate, state-sanctioned cultural producers with the growing number of competitors in an ever-expanding, privatizing, and localizing field of memory production.
The relationship between ethnicity and history, or between memory and history, is empirically complex and the line between them is often thin (Nora Reference Nora and Nora1986). Brubaker's concept of “ethno-cultural” idiom conflates them, but we need to distinguish them in order to contrast the petites patries and petit patrimoine idioms. In the context of state decentralization, the heritage idiom produces belonging at both national and local levels through a “cold” cognitive process that, although “cultural,” is more civic than ethnic. This civic feature became explicit during the latter phase of state decentralization when the national political class recast their engineering of local cultural development in political terms, as a matter of “local democracy” (démocratie de proximité). Around the year 2000, an interesting constellation of buzzwords emerged in the corridors and meeting rooms of the Ministry of Culture; “democracy,” “territories,” “heritage,” and “development” formed a tight web of synonyms and metaphors. Early documents mention four possible scales of decentralization-democratization: regions, departments, towns, and neighborhoods (Commission Pierre Mauroy 2000). This work of framing did not only act as a form of symbolic “rescaling,” but also redefined the civic, national community as a set of cultural entities bound to historical territories, and redefined political participation as a sort of policy-induced cultural integration, the site of which was lived territorial units.
CONCLUSION: NATION RESCALED
“Heritage” in France may be defined as the constitutive, cultural-historical dimension of a new, two-tiered idiom of belonging that formed in times of state decentralization. In contrast with the previous grammar of national memory that prevailed in the unitary state, which stressed a single national capital of “historic monuments,” the idiom of heritage establishes a dynamic relationship between multiple local territories and national belonging. In this sense, heritage signals a considerable transformation of cultural citizenship, which has diversified and pluralized while anchoring itself ever more profoundly in the territoire/s of the nation. The analogy with the nineteenth-century petites patries idiom, however, reveals that the motif of cultural difference is a well-established and ancient one in French national discourse, which periodically resurfaces in particular historical circumstances.
Thus, while the “heritage” phenomenon illustrates the extraordinary persistence in the late twentieth century of the master narratives of nineteenth-century nationalisms based in a sense of authenticity and history, as heritage studies have demonstrated or assumed, it also embodies the paradoxical melting away of old national myths into multiple, legitimate remembrances, identities, and citizenships. The decentralized policies of historic preservation and the new discourse of heritage in France provide an example of this paradox that is striking, particularly so because the atomization of national identity was initiated and implemented by a national government with a strong centralist tradition. Understanding the paradox and solving the theoretical puzzle it represents require adequate social-theoretical resources and an interpretive approach that is sensitive to historical context and able to reflect on both similar and contrasting occurrences of distinct signifying practices.
The general case for studying nations as social forms has been convincingly made (Goswami Reference Goswami2002). The historical-morphological analysis offered here opens several roads for the pursuit of such a program. One of these takes us beyond the limits set by first-generation analyses of nations and heritage as hegemonic cultural forms, the various morphologies of which seem not to require further investigation because they are subsumed under one, generally bilateral process of subjugation (of one class by another, of a population by an elite, and so forth). The historical morphology of idioms, by contrast, invites a wealth of nuanced and realistic questions about the social systems which these idioms constitute, most notably questions about the categories of actors involved in the production of these idioms, about their strategies, motives, beliefs and practices, and relations to each other. In the case of heritage, for example, such an approach naturally leads one to ask about the roles of actors who have remained invisible in most of the heritage scholarship, even though they have been the main architects of historic preservation policies, namely knowledge producers (scientists, scholars, experts, engineers, and architects) and modernizers (developers and local politicians).
Another road opened by the morphological approach is the possibility of fine comparisons between idioms of belonging, not just across nations but also across empirically well-defined institutions and periods. This fine comparative analysis could among other things allow us to assess in precise ways the relative exclusivity of the communities these idioms constitute, and the contribution of distinct institutions or organizations to the symbolic inclusion of minorities and migrants in the cultural polity, or their exclusion from it. Such questions will pave the way for fruitful social-historical research in future.
