31 - War Memorials: A Legacy of Total War?

Summary

In French, one says “monuments to the dead.” In English, one rather says “war memorials.” This semantic distinction has guided my reflections on the memorials that were built in France after the Franco-Prussian War and in the United States after the Civil War. The French language emphasizes death, whereas the English language chooses to recall the war that not only produced deaths but also disrupted the lives of those who survived. The meaning of the English is therefore broader, implying that such monuments evoke both memories of the war and memories of the war dead. Beyond the mere words used to designate them, a study of monuments in these two countries shows that the construction of memory is itself complicated, multifaceted, and often difficult to comprehend.

The monumentalizing of memory begun during these two nineteenth century wars was ineluctably linked to the battlefield and to those who had fallen. The honor immediately bestowed upon the dead was funerary, and the battlefield became their cemetery. The first monuments were built in order to help the survivors cope with the loss of their fallen comrades, that is, they were built to commemorate the dead. By not forgetting them, their friends were also exhorted to continue the fight. The funeral monument was thus transformed into a monument to battle, and it assumed a political meaning that it continues to have. After these wars had ended-and sometimes decades later, as in the case of the war of 1870-71, for which commemorative monuments in France were still being built in the summer of 1914-the monuments, glorifying their political mission, in the etymological sense of the word, moved to the heart of the cities. In prominent public spaces, they proclaimed a message that enabled populations to accept and support the new political order that had resulted from the war.