Abstract
Memorials, like texts, escape the intentions of those who create them. Designed to recall past events or personalities, memorials are sometimes radically reinterpreted as a consequence of later political or military conflicts, acquiring new layers of meaning as a result and engendering different, often unanticipated memories. The chapter examines this process with reference to a specific, deeply contested lieu de mémoire: the U.S. Naval Memorial in the French city of Brest. This imposing tower has a complex history that reveals both the creative and the destructive impacts of twentieth-century warfare on European urban environments and underlines the uneasy relationship between the United States and its European allies. Originally constructed in the early 1930s to commemorate the achievements of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, the memorial was destroyed during the German occupation in World War II, only to be rebuilt in the late 1950s. Using published official histories, unpublished archival materials in France and the United States, and the oral testimonies of some of the city’s residents, this chapter examines the politics behind the surprisingly varied interpretations of the memorial’s construction, destruction, and reconstruction.
Il pleut sans cesse sur Brest
Comme il pleuvait avant
Mais ce n’est plus pareil et tout est abîmé
C’est une pluie de deuil terrible et désolée
Ce n’est même plus l’orage
De fer d’acier de sang
Tout simplement des nuages
Qui crèvent comme des chiens
Des chiens qui disparaissent
Au fil de l’eau sur Brest
Et vont pourrir au loin
Au loin très loin de Brest
Dont il ne reste rien.1
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
ABMC. (1926). Annual report of the American Battle Monuments Commission to the President of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
ABMC. (1938). Annual report of the American Battle Monuments Commission to the President of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
ABMC. (1960). Annual report of the American Battle Monuments Commission to the President of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
ABMC. (1995a). American armies and battlefields in Europe. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
ABMC. (1995b). American memorials and overseas military cemeteries. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
ABMC. (1995c). Fact sheet and newsletter: Vol. 1. Organization and functions manual, 1/1/1995. Washington, DC. Unpublished report, no pagination
Aron, R., & Dandieu, A. (1931a). Le cancer américain [The American cancer]. Paris: Éditions Rieder.
Aron, R., & Dandieu, A. (1931b). Décadence de la nation française [Decadence of the French Nation]. Paris: Éditions Rieder.
Baal, G. (1973). Victor Pengam et l’évolution du syndicalisme révolutionnaire à Brest (1904–1914) [Victor Pengam and the evolution of revolutionary syndicalism in Brest (1904–1914)]. Le Mouvement Social, 82, 55–82.
Barcellini, S., & Wieviorka, A. (1995). Passant, souviens-toi! Les lieux de souvenir de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale en France [Passerby, remember! World War II places of remembrance in France]. Paris: Plon.
Barnouw, D. (2005). The war in the empty air: Victims, perpetrators, and postwar Germans. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bedford, S. M. (1998). John Russell Pope: Architect of empire. New York: Rizzoli.
Berry, D. (2002). A history of the French anarchist movement, 1917–1945. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Bevan, R. (2006). The destruction of memory: Architecture at war. London: Reaktion.
Biddle, T. D. (2002). Rhetoric and reality in air warfare: The evolution of British and American ideas about strategic bombing, 1914–1954. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Blight, D. W. (2001). Race and reunion: The Civil War in American memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Blight, D. W. (2002). Beyond the battlefield: Race, memory, and the American Civil War. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Bodnar, J. (1992). Remaking America: Public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bougeard, C. (1992). Histoire de la Résistance en Bretagne [History of the Resistance in Brittany]. Paris: Éditions Jean-Paul Gisserot.
Bougeard, C. (2005). Occupation, Résistance et libération en Bretagne en 30 questions [Occupation, Resistance, and liberation in Brittany in 30 questions]. La Crèche: Geste Éditions.
Bristow, N. (1996). Making men moral: Social engineering during the Great War. New York: New York University Press.
Brubaker, R. (1996). Nationalism reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Budreau, L. (2010). Bodies of war: World War I and the politics of commemoration in America, 1919–1933. New York: New York University Press.
Calder, A. (1992). The myth of the Blitz. London: Pimlico.
Clout, H. (2000). Place annihilation and urban reconstruction: The experience of four towns in Brittany, 1940 to 1960. Geografiska Annaler, 82B, 165–180.
Coward, M. (2009). Urbicide: The politics of urban destruction. London: Routledge.
Déniel, A. (1976). Le mouvement breton de 1919 à 1945 [The Breton movement from 1919 to 1945]. Paris: Maspéro.
Dieudonné, P. (1994). Villes reconstruites du dessin au destin [Towns rebuilt from design to destiny] (2 vols.). Paris: L’Harmattan.
Dodd, L., & Knapp, A. (2008). “How many Frenchmen did you kill?”: British bombing policy towards France (1940–1945). French History, 22, 469–498.
Duhamel, G. (1930). Scènes de la vie future [Scenes of future life]. Paris: Mercure de France.
Ellis, M. (2001). Race, war, and surveillance: African Americans and the United States government during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Eltin, R. A. (1994). Symbolic space: French Enlightenment architecture and its legacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Farmer, S. (1999). Martyred village: Commemorating the 1944 massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Farwell, B. (1999). Over there: The United States and the Great War, 1917–1918. New York: W. W. Norton.
Ferlinghetti, L. (1958). Selections from “Paroles.” San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
Ford, C. (1993). Creating the nation in provincial France: Religion and popular identity in Brittany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Frackman, N. (1986). John Storrs. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
Freeman, K. (2009). Bronze to bullets: Vichy and the destruction of French public statuary, 1941–1944. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Freeman, K. (2010). “Filling the void”: Absence, memory and politics in Place Clichy. Modern and Contemporary France, 18, 51–65.
Galliou, P. (2007). Histoire de Brest [History of Brest]. Paris: Éditions Jean-Paul Gisserot.
Gallo, Y. (Ed.). (1992). Brest alias Brest: trois siècles d’urbanisme [Brest alias Brest: Three centuries of urbanism]. Liège: Mardaga.
Gawne, J. (2002). Americans in Brittany, 1944: The battle for Brest. Paris: Histoires et Collections.
Gemie, S. (2007). Brittany, 1750–1950: The invisible nation. Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press.
Genet, J. (1953). Querelle de Brest [The Querelle de Brest]. Paris: Gallimard.
Gibson, G. (1946). Enemy coast ahead. London: Michael Joseph.
Gildea, R. (1994). The past in French history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gildea, R. (2002). Marianne in chains: In search of the German occupation, 1940–1945. London: Macmillan.
Glass, C. (2009). Americans in Paris: Life and death under Nazi occupation. London: Harper Press.
Glassberg, D., & Moore, J. M. (1996). Patriotism in Orange: The memory of World War I in a Massachusetts town. In J. Bodnar (Ed.), Bonds of affection: Americans define their patriotism (pp. 160–190). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Grayling, A. C. (2006). Among the dead cities: The history and moral legacy of the WWII bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan. London: Bloomsbury.
Greene, V. A. (1998). The architecture of Howard Van Doren Shaw. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Grossman, E. G. (1984). Architecture for a public client: The monuments and chapels of the American Battle Monuments Commission. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 43, 119–143.
Grossman, E. G. (1996). The civic architecture of Paul Cret. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Halbwachs, M. (1980). The collective memory (F. J. Didder Jr. & V. Yazdi Ditter, Trans., with an introduction by M. Douglas). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1950)
Heffernan, M. (1995). For ever England: The Western Front and the politics of remembrance in Britain. Ecumene, 2, 293–324.
Hewitt, K. (1983). Place annihilation: Area bombing and the fate of urban places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73, 257–284.
Huyssen, A. (2003). Present pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jackson, J. (1985). The politics of depression in France, 1932–1936. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, J. (1988). The Popular Front in France: Defending democracy, 1934–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, J. (2001). France: The dark years 1940–1944. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Keene, J. D. (2001). Doughboys, the Great War, and the remaking of America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kennedy, D. M. (1980). Over here: The First World War and American society. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Knapp, A. (2007). The destruction and liberation of Le Havre in modern memory. War in History, 14, 476–498.
Kohler, S. (1996). The commission of fine arts: A brief history, 1910–1995. Washington, DC: Commission of Fine Arts.
Konvitz, J. (1989). Répresentations urbaines et bombardements stratégiques, 1914–1945 [Urban representations and strategic bombing, 1914–1945]. Annales. Économies. Sociétés. Civilisations. 44, 823–847.
Konvitz, J. (1992). Bombs, cities and submarines: Allied bombing of the French ports, 1942–1943. International History Review, 14, 28–36.
Le Goïc, P. (2001). Brest en reconstruction: antimémoires d’une ville [Brest under reconstruction: Countermemories of a city]. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Leach, D. (2008). Bezen Perrot: The Breton nationalist unit in the SS, 1943–5. E-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies, 4, 1–38.
Lorcin, P. (Ed.). (2009). France and its spaces of war: Experience, memory, image. London: Palgrave.
May, H. F. (1960). The end of American innocence: A study of the first years of our own time, 1912–1917. London: Jonathan Cape.
Morand, P. (1930). Champions du monde [Champions of the world]. Paris: B. Grasset.
Musil, R. (1987). Posthumous papers of a living author. New York: Marsilio. (Original work published 1932)
Namer, G. (1987). La commémoration en France de 1945 à nos jours [Commemoration in France from 1945 to the present]. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Nora, P. (1974). Le retour de l’événement [The return of the event]. In J. Legoff & P. Nora (Eds.), Faire de l’histoire: Vol. 1. Nouveaux problèmes (pp. 285–308). Paris: Gallimard.
Nora, P. (Ed.). (1984–1992). Les lieux de mémoire [Realms of memory] (7 vols.). Paris: Gallimard.
O’Brien, T. (1990). Chasing after danger: A combat pilot’s war over Europe and the Far East, 1939–42. London: Arrow Books.
O’Leary, C. E. (1999). To die for: The paradox of American patriotism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pershing, J. (1934). Our national war memorials in Europe. National Geographic Magazine, 65, 1–36.
Pomaret, C. (1931). L’Amérique à la conquête de l’Europe [America and the conquest of Europe]. Paris: Armand Colin.
Prévert, J. (1949). Paroles. Paris: Gallimard. (Original work published 1946 by Les Éditions du Point du Jour)
Reece, J. E. (1977). The Bretons against France: Ethnic minority nationalism in twentieth-century Brittany. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Robin, R. (1992). Enclaves of America: The rhetoric of American political architecture abroad, 1900–1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Roger, P. (2005). The American enemy: The history of French anti-Americanism (S. Bowman, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rousso, H. (1991). The Vichy syndrome: History and memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rousso, H., & Conan, E. (1998). Vichy: An ever present past. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
Sahlins, M. (2000). Culture in practice: Selected essays. New York: Zone Books.
Sandage, S. (1993). “A marble house divided”: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights movement, and the politics of memory, 1939–1963. Journal of American History, 80, 135–167.
Savage, K. (1997). Standing soldiers, kneeling slaves: Race, war, and monument in nineteenth-century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schaffer, R. (1991). America in the Great War: The rise of the war welfare state. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Sebald, W. G. (2003). On the natural history of destruction (A. Bell, Trans.). London: Hamish Hamilton. (Original work published in German 1999)
Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Slotkin, R. (2005). Lost battalions: The Great War and the crisis of American nationality. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Virilio, P. (2000). A landscape of events. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Virilio, P. (2007). The original accident. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Weber, E. (1995). The hollow years: France in the 1930s. London: Sinclair Stevenson.
White, E. (1994). Genet. London: Picador.
Wieviorka, O. (2009). Orphans of the Republic: The nation’s legislators in Vichy France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winter, J. M. (1988). The experience of World War I. London: Guild Publications.
Winter, J. M. (1995). Sites of memory, sites of mourning: The Great War and the European cultural heritage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Wynn, N. A. (1986). From progressivism to prosperity: World War I and American society. New York: Holmes and Meier.
Young, J. (1993). The texture of memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Young, P. (2002). La vieille France as object of bourgeois desire: The Touring Club de France and the French regions. In R. Koshar (Ed.), Histories of leisure (pp. 169–191). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Young, P. (2007). Of pardons, loss and longing: The tourist’s pursuit of originality in Brittany, 1890–1935. French Historical Studies, 30, 269–304.
Young, P. (2009). Fashioning heritage: Regional costume and tourism in Brittany, 1890–1937. Journal of Social History, 42, 631–656.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Heffernan, M. (2011). History/Archive/Memory: A Historical Geography of the US Naval Memorial in Brest, France. In: Meusburger, P., Heffernan, M., Wunder, E. (eds) Cultural Memories. Knowledge and Space, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8945-8_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8945-8_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-8944-1
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-8945-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)