The Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux – a simulacrum of the 1914–1918 war?

Abstract

ABSTRACTOn 11 November 2011, 93 years after the armistice that ended World War I, President Nicolas Sarkozy officially helped open the Musée de la Grande Guerre in Meaux, near the bloody Marne River battle sites of 1914 and 1918, as well as near Disneyland Paris. The new museum included a reconstituted battlefield with a ‘no man's land’ plus three-dimensional projections to ‘revive the hell of a trench.’ Speaking at its groundbreaking in 2010, Frédéric Mitterrand, then Minister of Culture and Communications, stated that the museum's architecture of the trenches would produce an intimate memory, conveying real flesh and blood. He added that it would also ‘reinforce the cultural and tourist appeal’ of the Marne region. A crowning recognition of Jean-Pierre Verney's amassing of some 50,000 documents and objects relating to the war, which forms the basis of its collection, the museum has welcomed more than 460,000 visitors since it opened. Philippe Dagen suggested in Le Monde in 2011 that the high quality of the exhibitions and the attention to detail might distract visitors' attention from the true horror of the war. Edward Rothstein, a New York Times reporter, wrote: ‘the real focus of the museum was not on the military or the political issues, but on the personal.’ In this essay, I maintain that the museum, with its re-created landscapes of battlefield tourism is, by its nature, a simulacrum or simulacre, defined in both English and French as an illusion, or something possessing the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities (Oxford English Dictionary and Trésor de la Langue Française). Having visited the museum in 2012, I focus on how it presents its architectural simulacra of trenches and battleground landscapes to its twenty-first-century visitors, including the many groups of school children who form an important niche tourism audience. I also argue that, despite arguments sometimes made that denigrate simulacra as somehow shallow and inauthentic, the simulacra of a museum such as that at Meaux, attempting to highlight the horrors of war, serve desirable ends and are thus to be supported. Although displaying artifacts from many nations, the Meaux museum is very much an icon of France's national heritage honoring its wartime soldiers and civilians. Its very creation there as a way to keep Verney's collection in France is a significant part of this narrative of national heritage.