History and Popular Memory by Cohen Paul A

Author:Cohen, Paul A
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

THE DIMMING OF POPULAR MEMORY: JOAN OF ARC AFTER THE WAR

Joan of Arc is visually omnipresent in today’s France. “A high percentage of churches,” according to one observer, “have a statue or effigy of Joan somewhere; schools, colleges, streets and squares are named after her, as are religious groups, associations, clubs, cafés, hotels, restaurants, sweetshops and even an on-line dating service.”91 Although the image of Joan was actively exploited in the early postwar years, and in the 1980s the French Right, in the guise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Front, again took possession of her (mimicking its precursor, the Action française, in the 1920s and 1930s), Joan has seemingly retreated as a compelling figure in French life. In a poll taken not long after the war—in 1948—only 11 percent of those polled included her in a list of famous French men and women; by 1980, the number had dropped to 2 percent, and by 1989 to zero percent. It speaks worlds that, as one writer commented in 2006, “Marie Curie, a physicist who won two Nobel prizes and was an atheist, is now regarded as a more inspiring figure from the past.”92

The most convincing explanation for this drop-off in interest is that Joan’s star has tended to rise when France has been under mortal threat, when war has clouded the horizon and the country has been in need of a powerful emotional lift—a patriotic savior who can succeed against steep odds. But such concerns have been absent from French life for close to seventy years at this point, replaced by other French worries: the incorporation of Muslims into the population; provision of pensions for an aging population; working out a satisfactory relationship with Germany; the preservation of French culture, the French language, and French cuisine in a world in which American popular culture has become dominant; and the like—all topics to which the story of Joan of Arc has little or nothing to say.93

I began this chapter with an improbable comparison between the Joan of Arc story and the King Goujian story of ancient China. I end it in the same way. It will be recalled that once the political–military crises to which the Goujian story spoke were resolved and the collective national concerns that had previously dominated China’s twentieth-century history were replaced after the 1980s by a dramatic expansion in the realm of private interests and worries, the aspects of the story that Chinese looked to for inspiration and psychological support in their daily lives also changed. A comparable shift seems to have taken place in regard to the Joan of Arc story—comparable but different. Although Joan’s place in French popular culture—and indeed, with the occasional exception, in French politics—has faded,94 she remains a topic of serious scholarly study in France and elsewhere. A great many leading Joan scholars have in recent decades been women—a fact that, although seeming natural enough to us, would have been a source of some surprise to Joan, in whose day few women were even literate.

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