ABSTRACT
The town of Cluny in France had three events commemorating the former medieval abbey between 1898 and 1949. All of them included attempts by French administrators to form a notion of the town’s collective past and shape an acceptable celebration of its role as host to a great medieval abbey. The first was modelled upon the revival of Catholic pilgrimage and the celebratory ‘jubilee’ of the late nineteenth-century French Church, bringing local ‘pilgrims’ to the town, and staging religious ceremonies at a time when the French Church was under siege. The second, held in 1910, was a very grand occasion, bringing a king, pope, emperor and all their retinues in full glory into the streets of the little town for one special day of festive re-enactment. The third was a post-Second World War reclamation of Cluny for France and regional tourism, when newspapers and radio stations broadcast the speeches of administrators and academics extolling the importance of medieval Cluny. After briefly introducing the history of Cluny, I will discuss the three events, attempting to place them within the context of their day and tracing the layering of popular collective memory that they served.
