Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema (review)

Abstract

In 1989, while participating in a seminar on the bicentennial of the French Revolution at the University of Nantes, our group visited the Vendée. Towards the end of the tour, we stopped at a small rural chapel in a quiet clearing. We had spent several class hours considering the Vendean uprisings, under the tutelage of historian Jean-Clément Martin; none of us, however, was prepared for what awaited us within. We were greeted with an overpowering floral scent, from literally hundreds of bouquets and wreaths, so densely packed that not a square inch of the altar, nor the aisle in front of it was visible. Local residents had thus commemorated those lost in massacres almost two centuries earlier, in a ritual, according to Martin, repeated in many other communities across the Vendée as an ancestral duty not to forget that stretched back to the events themselves.