Tony Judt Quote
Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France’s once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether.The anxiety of loss had two effects. One was an increase in the range of the official patrimoine, the publicly espoused body of monuments and artifacts stamped ‘heritage’ by the authority of the state. In 1988, at the behest of Mitterrand’s Culture Minister Jack Lang, the list of officially protected items in the patrimoine culturel of France—previously restricted to UNESCO-style heirlooms such as the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes—was dramatically enlarged.It is revealing of the approach taken by Lang and his successors that among France’s new ‘heritage sites’ was the crumbling façade of the Hôtel du Nord on Paris’s Quai de Jemappes: an avowedly nostalgic homage to Marcel Carné’s 1938 film classic of that name. But Carné shot that movie entirely in a studio. So the preservation of a building (or the façade of a building) which never even appeared in the film could be seen—according to taste—either as a subtle French exercise in post-modern irony, or else as symptomatic of the unavoidably bogus nature of any memory when subjected thus to official taxidermy.
Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France’s once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether.The anxiety of loss had two effects. One was an increase in the range of the official patrimoine, the publicly espoused body of monuments and artifacts stamped ‘heritage’ by the authority of the state. In 1988, at the behest of Mitterrand’s Culture Minister Jack Lang, the list of officially protected items in the patrimoine culturel of France—previously restricted to UNESCO-style heirlooms such as the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes—was dramatically enlarged.It is revealing of the approach taken by Lang and his successors that among France’s new ‘heritage sites’ was the crumbling façade of the Hôtel du Nord on Paris’s Quai de Jemappes: an avowedly nostalgic homage to Marcel Carné’s 1938 film classic of that name. But Carné shot that movie entirely in a studio. So the preservation of a building (or the façade of a building) which never even appeared in the film could be seen—according to taste—either as a subtle French exercise in post-modern irony, or else as symptomatic of the unavoidably bogus nature of any memory when subjected thus to official taxidermy.
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