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.
