ABSTRACT
The historical study of ideology, and notably of the ideological avatars of the nation-state, has in new year’s taken a markedly cultural turn. Stanley Hoffmann’s Republican nationalism, an ideology devised around the values of civic morality to unify a fractious polity, bears a close resemblance to Prosts patriotism. The arrival on the scene of a new, large, and influential interest group, the veterans, further complicated the efforts at local self-definition that invariably accompany commemoration. In France, to paraphrase Peres, the nation begins in the commune, the patrie in the pays. In Lorient, Emmanuel Svob and his supporters insisted that to alter the decision of an official competition Jury would gravely infringe on the creative process. The mutilation of the monument in Levallois-Perret was obviously itself a symbolic ad, not least in its futility. The monument in Levallois-Perret went up essentially unaltered; those in Ligny and Lorient went up in locations far from the veterans’ own choosing.
