Remembering the First World War in France: the Historial de la Grande Guerre and Thiepval Museum

Citation

Parish N & Rowley E (2020) Remembering the First World War in France: the Historial de la Grande Guerre and Thiepval Museum. In: Demossier M, Lees D, Mondon A & Parish N (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture. Routledge International Handbooks. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 193-203. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-French-Politics-and-Culture-1st-Edition/Demossier-Lees-Mondon-Parish/p/book/9781138101753

Abstract
The centenary of the First World War constitutes a key point in the memory of the conflict as biological and family links to the event disappear. Large amounts of public funds have been pledged by French and British governments to a range of commemoration initiatives, underlining the political capital of remembering these events. The present moment of First World War commemoration enables critical examination of heritage practices, where popular and formal as well as national and transnational conceptions of the past encounter each other. In this chapter, the Historial de la Grande Guerre will be examined to understand what representations of the First World War within the museum space can tell us about how France remembers the First World War. Thiepval Museum provides a coda exploring contemporary reactions to the First World War.