Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, Volume 4: Histories and Memories
504
Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, Volume 4: Histories and Memories
504Hardcover(1)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226591353 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2010 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 504 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.90(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.30(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Rethinking France
By Pierre Nora
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-59135-3
Chapter One
Chanceries and MONASTERIESBERNARD GUENÉE
The year was 788. Charles, king of the Franks, was not yet the great Charlemagne, Roman emperor. Yet in 774 he had already forced King Desiderius to capitulate at Pavia, and had proclaimed himself king of the Lombards. In 785, after years of implacable warfare, Widukind had been obliged to lay down arms—all of Saxony as far as the Elbe was annexed to Charles's kingdom. No longer threatened from the north, Charles's armies began the conquest of what would become the marches of Spain in that same year of 785. Then, in 787, the duke of Benevento in southern Italy was forced to submit. And finally, in 788, Tassilo III, the last duke of an independent Bavaria, was toppled, so that all of Germany was henceforth Frankish. Meanwhile, even as he was accomplishing these prodigious victories, the king had spent nearly a decade establishing an institutional network, based on a solid State and an obedient Church, that would link his vast territories. In 788, then, Charles—who had just turned forty—could feel secure about the future of his kingdom. In order to secure its past, he decided to have that past inscribed in the collective memory.
The Royal Chapel
The Frankish king had the scholarly tools needed to implement this political decision right at his own court, for he had already populated his palace school with teachers recruited from everywhere, especially from Italy and England. By 774, Peter of Pisa was teaching grammar there, as was Paulinus by 776, prior to concentrating on philosophy and later becoming archbishop of Aquileia. In 782, Paul Warnefried, generally known as Paul the Deacon, came to teach grammar, although the deacon was also a fine poet and an excellent historian. Finally, in 786, Alcuin, master of the school at York, was summoned to Charles's palace, where he began to teach the literary liberal arts—that is to say, grammar, rhetoric, and logic—so brilliantly that Charles and his entourage came to consider Alcuin the greatest master of all. Via the court, Alcuin became praeceptor Galliae, the tutor to all of Gaul. Scholars who studied at the palace school populated the kingdom's entire administration. Many also ended up in the palace chapel. The term "chapel" originally meant the king's private oratory; although it was later applied to various places of worship throughout the realm, in 788 "chapel" referred only to the palace oratory. The term had recently begun, however, to encompass the group of priests who conducted liturgical services there. Indeed, under Pippin the Short and during the early years of Charles's reign, the chapel organized itself into a body, which therefore required a head. The number of "chaplains" grew as these increasingly learned men were asked to perform increasingly onerous tasks. They were no long expected simply to chant and pray. They had to copy all the books necessary for church services and, above all, they had to draw up all the documents required for the administration of the kingdom—certain chaplains were also clerks in the still- young chancery. Inevitably, books and documents gravitated toward the chapel in order to fulfill scholarly needs and accomplish administrative tasks. Archives, library, scholars: in 788, Charles had to hand, in his own palace chapel, everything required to commit the desired history of his kingdom to the collective memory.
Up till that point, neither the Franks in general nor Frankish kings in particular had been concerned with history. No Merovingian king, apparently, had prompted the writing of a single historical work. Even in that barren landscape, however, one wonderful flower had blossomed—Bishop Gregory of Tours wrote a great deal in the second half of the sixth century. By 591 he had completed, among other works, a ten-book History that began with the creation of the world and quickly arrived at the Franks, whose story occupied the greater part of Gregory's account, from their origins up to his own day. Later, in the mid seventh century, one or several Burgundian chroniclers, now collectively known as "Fredegar," wrote a new history of the world in which a summary of Gregory's History of the Franks was followed by an account of events up to the year 642. Then, in the early eighth century, a Neustrian historian—who probably lived in or near what is now Normandy and was ignorant of the work of Fredegar—also drafted a summary of Gregory's book, to which he added an account of events known to him up to 727. This book became known as the Liber historiae Francorum (Book of the history of the Franks). Finally, close relatives of Charles Martel and his son Pippin the Short later suggested to historians that they might update either the Liber historiae Francorum or Fredegar's chronicle with an account that, it goes without saying, would show the father and grandfather of the future King Charles in a favorable light. Thus little by little, successive continuations—arising from various initiatives and differing motives—came to constitute a kind of corpus of Frankish history from its origins to the death of Pippin in 768. This corpus was rendered even more complex, disordered, and diverse by the fact that the elements constituting it varied from one manuscript to another. As imperfect as it may have been, however, the corpus at least existed. Yet in 788 King Charles and his advisers chose to ignore it. They were not aiming to revise and extend a grand history of the Franks since their origins.
Nor were they aiming to erect a monument to the glory of the Carolingian family. Such a monument already existed, for that matter. Angilramn, bishop of Metz since 768, was summoned in 784 to head the royal chapel, where he went without abandoning his bishopric. It was probably shortly afterward that he had Paul the Deacon compose the Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, a history of the bishops of Metz based on the Liber Pontificalis, a series of brief accounts of all the bishops of Rome from Saint Peter onward. Since Saint Arnulf, an ancestor of the Carolingian line, had been bishop of Metz, Paul the Deacon's chronicle skillfully managed not only to glorify a city that was, in a way, the new dynasty's holy city, but also to tack the new ruling family's genealogy onto his list of the bishops of Metz, thereby discreetly justifying Pippin's accession to the throne.
In 788, then, Charles and his counselors were aiming neither to glorify a people nor to extol a family. Their goal was more immediate and more practical: they wanted to provide the kingdom's administrators with an accurate context for the documentation that was accumulating in archives and governing everyday operations. The need for a "collective memory" was the fruit of administrative necessity as much as political vision. All that was required were short notes that listed, year after year, the main events since 741, the year that Charles Martel died and his son Pippin came to power as mayor of the palace, prior to consolidating his accomplishments by pushing aside the last Merovingian king and becoming himself king of the Franks in 751.
The "annalistic" format was still quite recent in 788. The first requirement of Christian liturgy had been to establish in advance, for each year, the date on which Easter was to be celebrated. Thanks to learned calculations based on complex principles, an Easter calendar had been developed, which was finally adopted in the eighth century by all Western churches. One of the most precious possessions of a church or monastery was its canonical table indicating when Easter should be celebrated each year. Monasteries slowly began adopting the habit of noting, at the close of each year, one or two significant events, to serve as a record. Little by little, the annual note became an account, separate from the table itself. Thus annals were born. The first annals appeared on Easter tables in England. In the eighth century, Anglo- Saxon missionaries took Easter tables and annalistic notes to the continent where many churches and monasteries, notably in and around the Rhenish heartland of the Frankish kingdom, perpetuated and imitated these early models by commencing to keep their own brief annals. In particular, annals were kept at a monastery—the exact location of which is unclear—between Cologne and Trier, while others were composed at the Abbey of Gorze, near Metz, and still others at the Abbey of Murbach in Alsace, later continued in Swabia. Hence the chaplain to whom Charles and Angilramn assigned the task was able to collate the notes available at court with references from these easily accessible Rhenish, Moselle, and Swabian annals. That is how the court of King Charles composed the annals known to modern scholarship as the Annales du royaume des Francs (Annales regni Francorum), but which might be better called—as did ninth-century subjects of the Carolingian king—the Annales des rois or Annales royales.
Once the chaplain working under Angilramn had completed his task, the annals were regularly updated by the royal chapel itself. Every year an entry was added, summing up what had occurred in the kingdom. These Annales royales had all the advantages and drawbacks of a work written close to the seat of power—although well- informed, they were biased. Above all, the way they were composed reflected the vicissitudes of Carolingian culture and politics. Between 814 and 817, for example, following the death of Charlemagne, a complete revision of the Annales royales seemed in order, in terms of form as well as content. The scholars working for the young emperor, Louis the Pious, were no longer content with the somewhat simple and coarse Latin used by the preceding generation, and their political outlook had also changed. It was a time of great expectations. The composing of annual entries continued for some time, until tribulations and disillusion intervened—in 830, the sons of Louis rebelled against their father. The head of the chapel, henceforth called arch-chaplain, was Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis, who sided with the sons against the father. The work of chapel and chancery was therefore disrupted, and the entry for the year 829 was the last for a while. After a few eventful years, however, Louis the Pious regained his throne in 834, and work at the chancery became more regular. A chaplain who was not very skilled in Latin was instructed to continue the Annales royales. He managed to complete the years 830, 831, 832, 833, and 834, yet hardly had he begun the year 835 than the account ceased. Perhaps the arch-chaplain died, or perhaps further political difficulties arose. Whatever the case, Louis died in 840 and the empire was divided between his sons in 843 without anyone bothering to keep the Annales royales up-to-date.
The western part of the empire—the kingdom of western Francia—fell to the youngest son of Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald. Charles thought maintaining the Annales royales would help consolidate his authority and affirm Carolingian continuity. The new king therefore immediately entrusted the task to a cleric in his palace, a scholar of Spanish origin who had changed his name from Galindo to Prudentius. In return, Prudentius was made bishop of Troyes (which did not distract him from his duties at court nor his historian's task). He wrote short entries on the final, missing years of the reign of Louis the Pious, then continued to keep the Annales up-to-date until his death in 861. At that point a long chapter of history came to close, for King Charles was too besieged by daily troubles, and his chancery too overwhelmed by daily tasks, to find a cleric who had the time to record royal history. Things would later degrade even further, as the Carolingian dynasty declined and the royal chancery atrophied. After 861, the palace chapel was no longer what it had been for three- quarters of a century—the repository of the kingdom's memory.
Charlemagne and Louis the Pious not only insured that the Annales royales were written, they were also concerned with disseminating them. In fact, since the institutional ideal of those kings and their advisers was a strong State powerfully backed by an ecclesiastical hierarchy of which the pope was the uncontested head, Carolingian political constructs rested on two major historical works: the Liber Pontificalis, which recounted the history of the bishops of Rome, and the Annales royales, which recounted the history of the kingdom. Just as the Liber Pontificalis was owned and imitated by numerous Carolingian prelates, so the Annales royales were widely known throughout the empire. The limits of the annals' popularity should nevertheless be mentioned; although ninth-century laymen were not as ignorant as has long been thought—some of them were educated and had fine libraries containing a few books of history—their taste ran to works that were less austere than the Annales royales. In fact, there is no indication that a layman ever owned a copy of the annals. Instead, they were found in the libraries of churches and monasteries. Nor is it certain that they reached all regions of the empire, although they were widely known by the ninth century in Germanic areas, for example in Liège and Worms—where a copy was preserved—and at Salzburg, Lorsch, and Xanten, where they were copied and kept up-to-date.
As to Charles the Bald, early in his reign he was concerned not merely to record history; he also wanted that history disseminated. Copies of the annals kept by Prudentius were circulated. The effort was in vain, however, for not a single copy survived or was ever used. Yet there is no doubt that Charles the Bald had a copy—or perhaps the cleric's original—in his own library. And one day the king of western Francia performed an act of great import: he lent his copy to Hincmar.
Reims
Hincmar had been a monk at Saint-Denis. When Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis, became arch-chaplain, he introduced Hincmar to court. The monk was highly appreciated, and Charles the Bald made him archbishop of Reims early in the reign. The ecclesiastical province of Reims was one of the most considerable in Christendom, straddling the kingdoms of Charles and Lothar. The city of Reims, meanwhile, was one of the most important administrative centers in Charles's realm. Thus in 845 Hincmar, nearly forty years old, became head of one of the key places in the kingdom and the Carolingian world. This extraordinary position enabled Hincmar's extraordinary personality to dominate the political and religious life of the West for nearly thirty years. He dominated not only through his deeds, but also through his writing, which was nourished on endless reading. In availing himself of the necessary resources, the archbishop turned Reims into one of the major intellectual centers of the second half of the ninth century. He personally supervised the activity of the school, and he created an active scriptorium from scratch, where excellent scribes copied numerous manuscripts according to strict rules—Hincmar himself read and annotated them with great care. Since the archbishop also carefully kept a copy of any document required either by his political activity or for the administration of the province, Reims ultimately housed acquired archives and a large library, of which approximately one hundred manuscripts still survive.
Hincmar was the man to whom Charles the Bald one day lent the chronicle of Prudentius. This was an unfortunate move insofar as it is not certain that the king ever got his book back. Yet it was a felicitous move insofar as Hincmar took it upon himself to continue the work of Prudentius, adopting the annalistic format into an account that was obviously well documented yet highly personal in tone—a true diary. Hincmar kept this journal until he died in 882, aged over seventy-five.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rethinking France by Pierre Nora Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionPierre Nora (translated by Richard C. Holbrook)
1. Chanceries and Monasteries
Bernard Guenée (translated by Deke Dusinberre)
2. The Archives: From the Trésor des chartes to the CARAN
Krzysztof Pomian (translated by Christine Haynes)
3. Alexandre Lenoir and the Museum of French Monuments
Dominique Poulot (translated by John Goodman)
4. Guizot and the Institutions of Memory
Laurent Theis (translated by Daniel Hall)
5. The Historical Museum at Versailles
Thomas W. Gaehtgens (translated by Richard S. Levy)
6. Pierre Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire: The Alphabet of the Republic
Pascal Ory (translated by Gayle Levy)
7.The Grandes Chroniques de France: The Roman of Kings (1274–1518)
Bernard Guenée (translated by John Goodman)
8. Étienne Pasquier’s Les Recherches de la France: The Invention of the Gauls
Corrado Vivanti (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan)
9. Augustin Thierry’s Lettres sur l’histoire de France
Marcel Gauchet (translated by Sarah Maza)
10. Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France: Pietas erga patriam
Pierre Nora (translated by Richard C. Holbrook)
11. The Era of the Annales
Krzysztof Pomian (translated by John Goodman)