Local Memories in a Nationalizing and Globalizing World

M. Beyen, B. Deseure, M. Beyen, B. Deseure

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137469373
• eBook ISBN: 9781137469380
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

In historical studies, 'collective memory' is most often viewed as the product of nationalizing strategies carried out by political élites in the hope to create homogeneous nation-states. In contrast, this book asserts that collective memories develop out of a never-ending, triangular negotiation between local, national and transnational actors.

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Introduction: Local, National, Transnational Memories: A Triangular Relationship

Marnix Beyen

This book is about the local articulation of collective memories – and therefore about places. Appropriately, it starts in a very concrete place: we begin our journey in a recent past and on a busy and somewhat messy square in the very centre of the small Belgian university town of Leuven (Louvain). For tourists the square had very little to offer, but for the population of Leuven it was more or less the pulsing heart of the town. On this square they stepped on or off the bus when going to school or to the market. It was also on this square that youngsters dated or spent their first money on fast food or a pack of cigarettes. The name of the place was ‘Marshall Foch Square’, abbreviated by the inhabitants of Leuven to ‘Fochplein’ (in Dutch), ‘Place Foch’ (in French), or simply ‘Foch’. Obviously, the name referred to the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied military forces during the last months of the First World War. It had been given this name in 1920, at a moment when all over Europe streets and squares were renamed after heroes of the Great War. As such, this war both quickened and transformed the memory politics which state and local authorities had been pursuing since the end of the nineteenth century. In many towns, traditional names, often referring to local economic or religious practices, had been replaced by names of heroes or episodes playing a central role in the national master narrative.¹ Since wars were both eminently nationalist moments and transnational events, they tended to contribute both to a nationalization and an internationalization of street-naming. All the streets and squares in Paris named after the more or less exotic places where Napoleon had won his battles bear witness to this tendency.

Place Foch in Leuven did so in a very different, even opposite way: whereas the Napoleonic battlefields are far-off places where an eminently national hero has fought and won, the Place Foch celebrates a foreign hero whose actions were deemed to have been crucial for the liberation of the nation and, more specifically, of the city. In fact, the impact of the First World War on Leuven had been particularly severe. A considerable part of the town had been burnt down, and the destruction of its library had become an international symbol of ‘German atrocities’.² Hence, a square named Foch in this town had both an international resonance and a local and national significance. It was a site of memory in which the local, the national and the transnational were inherently intertwined.

Today, the Place Foch has acquired a new function, a new outlook and a new name. Indeed, the refurbishment of the square occasioned the mayor of Leuven, Louis Tobback, to call for its renaming. As a socialist, deeply entrenched in the tradition of pacifism, he could hardly live with the idea that the central square of ‘his’ town was named after a member of that military élite which he deemed responsible for the loss of thousands of innocent lives. He therefore declared, in February 2009, his wish that the square be given the name of someone associated with European values.³

Within Leuven civil society some groups were eager to respond positively to Tobback’s call. The Leuven section of the Green Party proposed to name the square after the German female resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, whose fame had grown due to the German movie which had been dedicated to her in 2005, and which had been shortlisted for the Oscar for best Foreign Language Movie.⁴ Another group of concerned citizens wanted to dedicate the square to the memory of Karl von Drais, the alleged inventor of the bicycle. As such, they obviously wanted to express their concern for the environment in the context of global climate change. The fact that both Scholl and Drais were Germans could in itself be read as a statement against the anti-German feelings which had accompanied the worship of Marshal Foch, and therefore as a statement of pacifism. More important in the context of this volume is the fact that neither of them referred in any way – not even in an indirect way, as in the case of Foch – to a local or even national context. They represented global values, and therefore appeared to herald a further globalization of memory. The advocates of both Drais and Scholl hoped to replace a hero of the epoch of patriotism and militarism with one of the ‘postnational’ and pacifist era.

Moreover, they both mobilized support using a global means of communication: Facebook. Within a little more than a month, Scholl’s case was supported by 273 users of Facebook, while the Drais group was joined by 64 Facebook members.⁵ These numbers are far from overwhelming – and as such they indicate the boundaries of the globalization of memory. This is all the more true if we compare them with the more than 2,500 members signing up during the same period for the group that wanted to maintain the status quo.⁶ Of course, these numbers should not lure us into easy conclusions. The users of Facebook are not necessarily representative of the population of Leuven. Nonetheless, it does seem true that the alternative, politically correct names were and are only supported by a small intellectual élite. Moreover, a group of citizens pleading for participative democracy succeeded in gaining more than 1,000 signatures for a petition against the name-change, and was therefore permitted to plead its case at a meeting of the city council.⁷

The comments posted on the forum of the anti-change group showed that loyalty to the name Foch was neither inspired by an ongoing gratitude to the great French commander, nor by the patriotic sentiments inherent to recollections of the First World War. The Facebook members first and foremost expressed loyalty to the square as they had always known it. ‘Come on, Foch is Foch’, one of the members wrote, ‘and no one is bothered who it refers to’. Or, to quote another one: ‘Foch may have been a Frenchman who drove people to death, but he had no other choice. But this does not matter, for at hearing the name Foch Square, I do not immediately think about Marshal Foch, but about a crowded bus stop and about the statue of Fonske [a small statue representing Leuven’s archetypal student].’ Tobback’s proposal and the alternative solutions were rejected as symptoms of the paternalism of the political and intellectual élite. ‘But what are these people fussing about?’, one of these Facebook authors wrote. ‘The only thing they can do is burden the life of the people of Leuven, nothing more.’

It would be easy to reject this general attitude pessimistically as a symptom of the conservatism, the anti-political stance or the lack of historical consciousness of the youth of today. I believe it is more fruitful to consider it as a sign of the resilience and the specificity of local memories. It shows that national and transnational memories cannot simply be forced upon the people, but that, on the contrary, people appropriate and adapt these memories in very original ways. In this process of adaptation, cultural memories can be turned into communicative memories, to use the words of Jan Assmann.⁸ Foch is no longer remembered as the heroic victor over the Germans, but as the square where one experienced one’s first kiss, stepped off the bus a thousand times or simply hung around for countless hours.

Ultimately, the Leuven city council opted for an intermediate solution. The square was renamed after Pieter De Somer, the first rector of the new, Dutch-speaking, university which was founded in Leuven during the early 1970s after its Francophone wing had been forced to leave the town and create its own university in a new town called Louvain-la-Neuve. Unlike Scholl and Von Drais, therefore, De Somer was intrinsically linked to Leuven, but at the same time he had a national and even international stature. In national history, his name was closely linked to the struggle for more Flemish autonomy within the Belgian state; internationally, he had gained some popularity not only as an outstanding scientist, but also as an advocate of a progressive brand of Catholicism, particularly after having made a critical speech during the visit of Pope John Paul II to Leuven in 1985.⁹ Moreover, he also actively pleaded against nuclear weapons. As such, Louis Tobback could undoubtedly consider him to be the European and pacifist antipode of Foch that he sought for, and at the same time intimately link his square to the history of Leuven. Whether he succeeded in convincing the inhabitants of Leuven of the appropriateness of the name seems doubtful at the moment. In any case, a new Facebook group has been started with the ironic title ‘In mijnen tijd heette het Pieter de Somer Plein nog het Fochplein’ (‘When I was young, Pieter De Somer Square was still called Foch Square’). Started in November 2011, by the beginning of 2014 it had been liked 3,237 times.¹⁰

The formal structure of memories

However idiosyncratic the case of Leuven may be at first sight, it has a much broader relevance for anyone interested in the workings of collective memory. First of all, it reminds us that these collective memories always are the result of a dynamic interaction in which an absent object of remembrance (in this case Foch and De Somer) is re-presented by means of more or less material and therefore more or less localized bearers (in this case signposts indicating the name of a square) by a more or less powerful initiator of memory (in this case the city council) to a more or less extended and diverse audience (in this case the inhabitants of and visitors to Leuven). Insofar as the interplay between each of these elements (object, bearer, initiator, audience) determines the direction of the commemorative process, they can all be considered ‘vectors of memory’. Doing this, we extend the meaning Nancy Wood has given to that term in her seminal book carrying that very title.¹¹ The ‘vectors’ that Wood deals with (historiography, novels, films, war crimes trials) would in this book rather fall under the category of ‘bearers of memory’.

Each of those vectors, the example further suggests, plays an active part in the process of meaning-giving of which memory consists. In other words, vectors of memory are, simultaneously, agents of memory. The objects of memory are not merely invented by powerful political stakeholders, since their historical reality admits only a certain range of interpretations (thus, Foch could not be turned overnight into a pacifist). Moreover, the material bearers and places of memory determine to a large degree the practices and meanings that can actually be attached to those objects by diverse and changing audiences. The story of Foch Square might have been a different one if, for example, the city council had decided in 1920 to endow it with a statue of the marshal. In that case, the square might have become the place of commemorative practices – thus rendering less probable the transformation of the name of a military leader into that of a mere square. Tobback’s proposal might have met more active resistance from a milieu de mémoire engendered by the statue, but it might equally have been the case that the commemoration of Foch would have been contested at an earlier stage, by a broader societal group, and in more radical forms. It is, indeed, not hard to imagine groups of protesting students at the end of the 1960s or in the early 1970s tearing down a statue of Foch statue, or at least covering it with graffiti.

The story would most certainly have been a different one if Louis Tobback had announced his proposal in, say, the 1950s (when patriotic memory was more predominant¹²), or if he had been the mayor of a Francophone or a French town. Indeed, in French and Walloon cities, references to Foch are still omnipresent in an unproblematic way. In Flanders, on the contrary, the reference to Foch was atypical anyway. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that a combination of pacifist and anti-French sentiments has been deeply entrenched in Flemish public opinion since at least the inter-war period. In order to use William Sewell’s terminology, which also provides the foundation of Michael Wert’s contribution to this volume,¹³ the mental ‘schema’ was lacking in Flanders that would enable memorial ‘resources’ such as the name of a square to maintain a ‘structure of memory’ axized upon Marshal Foch.

By stressing the agency of place, of material objects, and of practices and mindsets of the audience, we should, of course, not entirely disregard the power of political initiators of memory. Again, the case of Foch Square is illuminating in this respect. It is very likely indeed that the polemics would not have taken place if someone o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Local, National, Transnational Memories: A Triangular Relationship
• Part I The Politics of Urban Memory
• Part II Places and Practices of Subaltern Memory
• Index