Cenotaphs and cypress trees: commemorating the citizen-soldier in the Year II

Abstract

Much of the scholarship on commemoration and collective memory has identifi ed World War I as the decisive event in the making of ' modern memory ' in Western Europe. However, this article contends that many of the cultural practices that historians have singled out as specifi c to the twentieth century, the commemoration of the common soldier, the erection of monuments aux morts inscribed with the names of the dead and the honouring of unknown soldiers, had already emerged during the Revolutionary wars of the 1790s, and more particularly, during the Revolution's most ' democratic ' phase, the Terror. By examining the evolution of these commemorative practices within the Jacobin club network in 1793 and 1794, this essay explores the interaction between the Revolutionary politics of mass mobilization and the customary culture of commemoration and argues that the ' modern ' culture of memory may not be quite as modern as historians assume.