Heinzen, A Negotiated Truce.pdf
Jasper Heinzenvisibility
…
description
37 pages
link
1 file
The article examines the commemoration of Waterloo (1815) since the Second World War by placing the battle's polyvalent image in the context of European integration. To this end it traces the cultural significance of Waterloo in regional, national, transnational and international perspective to elucidate the longevity of the event as a lieu de mémoire, and then argues that even now the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars remain in some respects an unmastered past because of uncertainty in European public memory about how to commemorate these conflicts.
Related papers
A Negotiated Truce: The Battle of Waterloo in European Memory since the Second World War
History and Memory, 2014
The article examines the commemoration of Waterloo (1815) since the Second World War by placing the battle's polyvalent image in the context of European integration. To this end it traces the cultural significance of Waterloo in regional, national, transnational and international perspective to elucidate the longevity of the event as a lieu de mémoire, and then argues that even now the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars remain in some respects an unmastered past because of uncertainty in European public memory about how to commemorate these conflicts.
‘The Netherlands, the whole of Europe will soon unite’: National and European identites in the Waterloo literature of the Low Countries, 1815-1915
2017
The Battle of Waterloo rocked Europe to its foundations and it was by far the largest battle ever fought in the Low Countries. In two of the victorious nations, Great Britain and what we now call Germany, the literary commemoration of Waterloo immediately developed a homogeneous heroic perspective, built around the central figures of the Duke of Wellington (in Britain) and Marshal Blucher (in Prussia). These two figures became national heroes who were used to construct and preserve the national identities Britain and Germany. Nevertheless, Waterloo literature of the Netherlands could not unambiguously represent a sense of national consciousness. Indeed, the fragmented history of the Low Countries and their importance for the political stability of Western Europe presented an ideal environment in which European selfimages could be expressed. Therefore, this article investigates the relationship between national and European identities in the Waterloo literature of the Low Countries u...
From Ypres to Brussels? Europe, Peace, and the Commemoration of WWI
Coming from Passendaele along the N332, one enters the Belgian town of Ypres by passing under the Menin Gate. Towering over the moat of the 17 th Century Vauban ramparts, the gate is located at the eastern exit of the town, marking one of the points where Allied soldiers of the First World War started out their burdensome marches to the shell-cratered front lines. The gate epitomises how Britain and the British Commonwealth commemorate their soldiers who died in the Great War. In its quiet imperial grandeur, the Menin Gate honours the memory of the soldiers who did not come back from the fighting. Under the gate, on white stone panels, are listed the names of 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient but whose bodies were never identified or found. Thus the memorial gate exemplifies the intention of the British Empire to commemorate all those who died in individual manner. While soldiers whose remains were found and identified were buried under uniform but individual headstones on military cemeteries, the names of unidentified fallen soldiers were listed on memorials such as the Menin Gate and Tyne Cot Memorial. Bereaved families thus were offered sites where they could mourn their fallen relatives. At the same time, memorials such as the Menin Gate projected a more overarching meaning onto the massive-scale death caused by the war. The gate's architectural design and inscriptions such as "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam" and "Pro Patria, pro Rege" indicate how British remembrance culture invoked elements of a religious and imperial idiom, linking the death of soldiers to themes of patriotic sacrifice for freedom. This symbolism has not disappeared from British memorial culture. In Ypres it is quite palpable, for instance on Remembrance Day in November, when formal ceremonies are held and a Poppy Parade marches through the town. Given the importance of the Ypres Salient in the British Empire's war effort and the central place of the Flanders Fields trope in Commonwealth memorial culture, it should not surprise that British remembrance practices today are the most visible in Ypres and its surroundings (in Belgium known as the southern Westhoek). Traces of other national remembrance traditions are, of course, also present in and around the town, but they remain less conspicuous than the British. The French Army, not as active in the Westhoek as the British forces, left a number ofmostly patrioticmementos, such as the memorial overlooking the gentle slopes of the Kemmelberg. Having lost the war, German presence in the memorial landscape of Flanders Fields is more complex. Not only have the many smaller German war cemeteries been concentrated into four larger ones, Germany's military graveyards are more sombre and dark in their outlook than the British sites. Tourists, nonetheless, easily find their way to these German cemeteries, not in the least to the one in Vladslo, where Käthe Kollwitz' statues of mourning parents overlook the many silent graves.
‘No troops but the British’: British national identity and the Battle for Waterloo
2000
In the 'long eighteenth-century' British national identity was superimposed over pre-existing identities in Britain in order to bring together the somewhat disparate, often warring, states. This identity centred on war with France; the French were conceptualised as the 'other', being seen by the British as both different and inferior. For many historians this identity, built in reaction and opposition to France, dissipated following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, as Britain gradually introduced changes that allowed broader sections of the population to engage in the political process. A new militaristic identity did not reappear in Britain until the 1850s, following the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. This identity did not fixate on France, but rather saw all foreign nations as different and, consequently, inferior. An additional change was the increasing public interest in the army and war, more generally. War became viewed as a 'pleasurable endeavour' in which Britons had an innate skill and the army became seen as representative of that fact, rather than an outlet to dispose British National Identity and the Battle for Waterloo Kyle van Beurden v Publications during candidature Conference Proceedings 'Flight of the Panic-Stricken': British historians and the Dutch-Belgian troops at Waterloo,
Reframing Waterloo: Memory, Mediation, Experience
The Varieties of Historical Experience, 2019
This essay was written for a collection called "Varieties of Historical Experience", edited by S. Palmié and Charles Stewart. It uses W.G. Sebald's account of a trip to the battlefield of Waterloo to offer a critique of the notion of 'historical experience', showing how that experience is constituted by cultural memory and can be transformed by aesthetic interventions.
A Small Truce in a Big War The Historial de la Grande Guerre and the Interplay of History and Memory
Four Surveillance Technologies Creating Challenges for Education
Springer eBooks, 2022
$1HJRWLDWHG7UXFH 7KH%DWWOHRI:DWHUORRLQ(XURSHDQ0HPRU\VLQFHWKH6HFRQG
:RUOG:DU
-DVSHU+HLQ]HQ
+LVWRU\ 0HPRU\9ROXPH1XPEHU6SULQJ6XPPHUSS
$UWLFOH
3XEOLVKHGE\,QGLDQD8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
)RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH
KWWSV PXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH
Access provided by University of York (26 Oct 2016 15:43 GMT)
A Negotiated Truce
The Battle of Waterloo in European Memory
since the Second World War
JASPER HEINZEN
The article examines the commemoration of Waterloo (1815) since the Second
World War by placing the battle’s polyvalent image in the context of European
integration. To this end it traces the cultural significance of Waterloo in regional,
national, transnational and international perspective to elucidate the longevity of
the event as a lieu de mémoire, and then argues that even now the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars remain in some respects an unmastered past because of uncertainty in European public memory about how to commemorate these conflicts.
Europe is haunted by the past. The hantise du passé, to borrow Henry
Rousso’s term, comprises multifarious memories that reflect the continent’s
warlike history.1 For centuries military conflicts delineated political and
cultural fissures in Europe, but in so doing they created one of the most
enduring constants in what characterizes the historical relationship of most
European countries, namely the shared experience of war.2 Prolonged warring entailed not only the death of untold millions and the proliferation of
nationalist ideologies but also facilitated the encounter of people and ideas
in a transnational environment. The ambivalence of this legacy remains
evident in Europe’s fascination with military anniversaries. Although the
upcoming centenary of the First World War looms ever larger in the media,
there has been no shortage of well-publicized Napoleonic anniversaries in
recent years, including the festivities for Trafalgar in Britain (2005) and
the double battle of Jena-Auerstädt in Germany (2006).3 In 2012, Spain
celebrated the promulgation of its first constitution two hundred years ago
39
Jasper Heinzen
(an act originally aimed at rallying popular support against French rule),
while the Russian state, not to be outdone, has invested €70 million in a
new museum, a specially appointed historical commission and medals to
remember Russia’s victory in the Patriotic War of 1812.4
The arguably most important Napoleonic jubilee, the bicentenary
of Waterloo (fought on June 18, 1815), is yet to come. Scores of poets,
historians, veterans and battlefield tourists—not to mention the Swedish
pop-group ABBA—have immortalized the great battle to an extent that
is rivaled by only few other historical events. Surveying the literature in
1920, the distinguished British military historian Sir John Fortescue found
already then that Waterloo “has been made the subject of whole libraries of books in all languages, and has been subjected to examination so
microscopic as to be without parallel in military history.”5 Since the beginning of the twentieth century many more publications have been added
to this impressive bibliography. A quick keyword search for Waterloo on
WorldCat returns over 115,000 hits—most of them for books, articles,
theses and films produced since 1945. The site of Napoleon’s final defeat
has gained such a hold on the collective imagination not only, perhaps
not even primarily, because of its military significance. Rather, the name
Waterloo remains salient due to its embedding in popular culture as a
byword for the triumph of nationalism, the defeat of tyranny, the downfall
of great men and the drama of war.6
The broad range of connotations throws into relief the contested
meanings to which the battle has given rise in the last two hundred years.
Because of the awe-inspiring scale of the fighting, which left no fewer than
54,000 soldiers dead or wounded on the battlefield, and the momentous
historical ramifications that ended an era of political experimentation and
twenty-three years of almost uninterrupted military campaigning in Europe,
survivors quickly began to invest their experiences with transcendental
significance.7 A characteristic trait of this process was a dichotomization
of peace- and conflict-enhancing interpretations. While the great powers
found enough common ground in their opposition to Revolutionary and
Napoleonic France to switch from a “competitive and conflictual balance
of power” to a more peaceful “nineteenth-century concert and equilibrium,” as diplomatic historian Paul W. Schroeder has argued, Waterloo
also caused British and Prussian military historians to cross swords over
who deserved ultimate credit for Europe’s liberation from the yoke of
40
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
Napoleonic tyranny.8 Apologists of the Dutch, Belgian and Nassau forces
in the Duke of Wellington’s army weighed in on the duel of words to save
their compatriots from disparagement by Anglo-Prussian historiography,
which they rejected for its marginalization of Dutch-Belgian enterprise.9
Being made the foil for the national mythologies of the allied winners,
French society in turn countered with narratives that emphasized the
self-sacrifice of the Grande Armée, Napoleon’s martyrdom at the hands
of his enemies and the indomitable spirit of France. One would need to
look no further than Victor Hugo’s memorable poem L’Expiation (1853)
and his masterpiece, Les Misérables (1862), or the various monuments
erected by French patriots on the battlefield at the turn of the twentieth
century, to comprehend the emotive potency of these tropes.10 Although
the rise of the Anglo-German antagonism in the late nineteenth century
led to a reversal of diplomatic alliances that dampened official enthusiasm
for the commemoration of Waterloo, the British media and left-wing
republicans in France very much believed in historical continuity insofar
as it concerned the mission to finish the fight for liberty against military
tyranny begun on the plains of Flanders.11 The ambivalent evocations of
Waterloo in European memory up to 1945 offer positive proof, then, for
Katherine Verdery’s contention that a good political symbol has legitimating effects, not “because everyone agrees on its meaning but because it
compels interest despite (because of?) divergent views of what it means.”12
Such a definition of political symbols leaves unclear, however, whether
competing claims over history are an end state perpetuated by the existence of semantic tension or whether conflicts of meaning can eventually
be resolved by mutual consent. This query forms a useful starting point
for an investigation of Waterloo commemorations in Europe since the
Second World War. Belligerent memories have been progressively losing
their political usefulness, but the staying power of Waterloo in popular
consciousness creates hitherto underappreciated opportunities to interrogate contemporary Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the coming to terms with
Europe’s violent past.13 In the concluding chapter of a recently published
collection of essays on war memories, which marks the culmination of a
highly productive Anglo-German collaborative research project on Napoleonic war experiences, the French scholar Étienne François notes that
“Today, with few exceptions, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and
the figure of Napoleon himself are no longer problematic parts of Europe’s
41
Jasper Heinzen
historical past” because the topic that preoccupies public opinion is the
genocidal legacy of the twentieth century.14
The present article, by contrast, contends that an accurate assessment
of the so-called French Wars as a living historical memory requires a shift
of perspective which treats the different parts of modern European history
not in isolation but as vertically connected and entangled. General Charles
de Gaulle’s iconic “Appel du 18 Juin” in 1940 and Winston Churchill’s
“This was their finest hour” speech before the British House of Commons
on the same day can only be understood in relation to perceived historical parallels of national strength in the face of defeat and the success of
international solidarity against another dictator 125 years earlier.15 The
multiple symbolic associations of June 18 therefore make it, like November
9 in German history, a multilayered day of remembrance that summons
diverse but interrelated historical references.16
The French Wars and the Second World War differ of course in one
critical respect. The Holocaust has become a “negative foundation myth”
through which European integration defines itself by repudiating the past,
while the public memory of 1789–1815 is tied to positive achievements
that are deemed worthy of praise, even conservation, today.17 They include
the far-reaching reformatory impulses emanating from France as well as the
tenacity of her opponents. Some theorists of nationalism have pointed out
that the inhabitants of Britain, Germany, Russia, Spain and other countries
only developed a real sense of nationhood while fighting Napoleon.18 It
can therefore be argued that the French Wars will remain implicated in
European Vergangenheitsbewältigung for as long as discourses that stress
a cognitive distance from the bellicose realities of the early nineteenth
century and ones that seek to preserve inherited traditions of collective
belonging keep striving for balance.
Waterloo is emblematic of the enduring bifurcation in European
memory, though the silences speak louder than the historiographical record.
Neither Pierre Nora’s massive compilation of French lieux de mémoire nor
its German counterpart edited by Étienne François and Hagen Schulze,
nor the new three-volume Europäische Erinnerungsorte (European places
of memory) published under the editorship of Pim den Boer et al. contains
entries on Waterloo—unlike the Battle of Leipzig (1813), which claims two
separate entries in the two latter publications.19 It is tempting to attribute
the exclusion of Waterloo to the indeterminate national “ownership” of the
42
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
battle in European historical consciousness, defying as it does the nationfocused paradigm within which lieux de mémoire have traditionally been
interpreted. This methodological problem is felt even in publications that
deal explicitly with Waterloo’s function as a European lieu de mémoire.
Two Belgian essay collections edited by Marcel Watelet and Pierre Couvreur in 2000 and 2003 confirm Waterloo’s continuing importance as a
“perdurable, generation-transcending focal point of collective memories
and identity” for the whole of Europe (to paraphrase Nora’s definition
of a lieu de mémoire),20 yet the national case-studies presented therein
have on the whole little to say about transnational entanglements outside
their respective borders.21 The state of research on Waterloo validates the
observation made by Kirstin Buchinger, Claire Gantet and Jakob Vogel
that the search for European lieux de mémoire has in many ways tended to
reinforce rather than challenge national boundaries because of its primary
concern with the “cataloguing [Sammlung] of national perspectives so
as to arrive at a ‘normalized’ pan-European collective memory.”22 The
privileging of national epistemologies has consequently disadvantaged
alternative correlations between regional and transnational memory cultures, and a willfulness is evident in the workings of remembrance which
cannot be reduced to the activities of entrepreneurs de mémoire so central
to the immense literature inspired by Nora.23
Recent studies have nevertheless discovered promising methods to
bypass the national compartmentalization of memory by exploring the
fluidity of spatial concepts and the constraining influence of mnemonic
socialization on international relations.24 The present article builds on
these advances to chart more comprehensively than hitherto the intersection of regional, national, transnational and international remembrance in
the political and cultural utilization of Waterloo. To clarify these loaded
terms, “international” is understood as the realm of European politics,
whereas “transnational” denotes social spaces that revolve around sites,
artefacts and practices sustaining face-to-face contact between inhabitants
of different nation-states. “Regional” refers to communities bounded by
history or ethnicity which exist at subnational level.25 The first section of
the article opens by examining why governments and citizens still cared
about the history and the battlefield of Waterloo after the Second World
War, before turning to the sesquicentennial of Waterloo in 1965 to showcase the symbolic value of the Napoleonic heritage for cultural diplomacy
43
Jasper Heinzen
in the emerging European Economic Community. The second section
discusses changes in public memory and identifies blind spots in European
Vergangenheitsbewältigung that have become apparent in the lead-up to
the bicentenary of the battle in 2015. Due to its very polyvalence, the
symbolism of Waterloo eludes modern standards of political correctness
and thus complicates the ambition to make the battle a mastered past.
MEMORIES OF WAR AND EMPIRE
Shortly after the Suez Crisis of 1956 the French satirical weekly Le Canard
enchaîné printed a cartoon by Pol Ferjac which depicted an old cockerel
and a disheveled-looking lion in a cage. While an animal trainer with
the facial features of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower looked on, the
cockerel whispered to the lion “Do you remember Waterloo?” which
elicited the wistful reply “Those were the good old days!”26 The two
bedraggled animals, contemporary viewers knew, represented Britain and
France. Their relegation to second-rank status in international politics had
just been confirmed by the failed emancipation of their Middle Eastern
foreign policy from American hegemony. That the artist chose Waterloo
to benchmark the decline of Britain and France’s national prestige was
at the same time an ironic comment on the importance of nostalgia in
Cold War politics. Ferjac’s use of Waterloo to parody British and French
traditionalism worked because it played on an ontological paradox in
collective remembering that the German historian Reinhart Koselleck
has attributed to the irregularity of time perception: societies experience
historical continuity not chronologically but are often caught in between
simultaneous, overlapping “time layers” (Zeitschichten). “History,” Koselleck
posited, “contains a multitude of different layers that change at different
speeds” to create a contemporaneity of non-contemporaneous historical
phenomena.27
Indeed, just as the notion of “civilization” survived its appropriation
by nineteenth-century proponents of empire to become one of the ideological building blocks of West European reconciliation in the 1950s and
1960s, so, too, Britain’s military and political leaders cherished memories
of dashing heroism instead of seeing them consigned to irrelevance by the
horrors of total warfare.28 The annual regimental dinners, and especially
44
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
the national celebration of the Waterloo sesquicentennial, shed interesting
light on the endurance of certain timeless beliefs about national honor
irrespective of the political situation. To glorify Britain’s part in the allied
victory at Waterloo, the Ministry of Defence hosted a sumptuous dinner
for several hundred distinguished guests at Whitehall’s Banqueting House
in 1965, among them the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the nation’s social elite, while foreign dignitaries
remained conspicuous by their absence.29 A second banquet held by the
Corporation of London at the Guildhall a few days later and a military
review on Horse Guards Parade of the regiments present at Waterloo served
to further underline the British character of the celebrations, though the
fact that most of the units had been amalgamated since 1815 probably
did little to dispel British fears of imperial decline.30
The affirmation of martial patriotism expressed itself most clearly
in a special exhibition held at London’s Wellington Barracks between
May 21 and July 7, 1965. Giving proof of the army’s long institutional
memory, the organizers prefaced the project with the explanation that the
Waterloo sesquicentennial deserved to be commemorated on a grand scale
to make up for the muted centenary of 1915 when Britain’s forces had
been “engaged with the enemy on the Western Front or elsewhere.” The
exhibition featured military memorabilia of Waterloo like captured French
eagles and regimental colours in order to substantiate the “dominant
and decisive” part of British soldiers in this “epic victory.” Albeit based
in London, the exhibition was conceived as a show of national unanimity
since the historic items were loaned from museums and individuals in all
parts of the United Kingdom. 31
Jeremy Black, the most recent chronicler of the Waterloo saga,
hypothesizes that the abiding popularity of the battle in postwar Britain
stemmed from the lack of disruption to national heritage comparable to
the defeats and revolutions that haunted the Continent between 1917
and 1945.32 This proposition, however, does not account for the general
resurgence of battlefield tourism and the particular interest shown in
Waterloo after the Second World War. Once Europe had overcome the
immediate problems of economic recovery, which temporarily prompted
plans to sell the Wellington Museum to American buyers for lack of funds,
the number of annual visitors to the battlefield of Waterloo and its various
attractions climbed back to 200,000 in the 1960s.33 David W. Lloyd puts
45
Jasper Heinzen
forward the plausible explanation that the growth of battlefield tourism
was not so much the corollary of a devaluation of Europe’s heritage but
rather indexed a long-term continuity in mnemonic practices. Whether
visitors came to Waterloo to pay homage to the war dead or merely to
see the remains of human tragedy, they followed in the footsteps of the
prewar traveler (someone who journeyed with a moral purpose like the
religious pilgrim) and the tourist (the mere holidaymaker seeking entertainment). That battlefields attracted such very different types of visitor
stemmed from the timeless allure of the past, which was often fueled by
regret for lives, traditions and empires lost, as seen above, but equally by
a feeling of uncanny excitement upon confrontation with the aftermath
of mass death.34
The contrariwise pull of the two responses goes a long way towards
explaining why not only Britons but also the governments, media and
citizens of other European countries, most eminently France, embraced
their Napoleonic heritage during the Waterloo sesquicentennial. The
French secretary of defense, Pierre Messmer, opened an exhibition at
the Parisian Hotel des Invalides in May 1965 with the programmatic
title “Napoléon, grands souvenirs.” Exhibitions in cities like Fréjus and
Grenoble, academic conferences, newspaper features and TV programs
followed suit with their own contributions to the historic occasion.35
These initiatives did not mean to flog the Napoleonic Empire back to
life; rather, they were an attempt to make sense of the intellectual and
emotional ambiguities attached to the emperor’s legacy. General de Gaulle,
the French president at the time, understood the national dilemma that
was Napoleon. The emperor’s reign comprised an endless cycle of battles,
he admitted, but despite all the attendant pain and suffering de Gaulle
felt compelled to pose a rhetorical question: “Should the extraordinary
prestige with which [Napoleon] has surrounded our army, the knowledge
he has forever imparted to the nation of its incredible military capabilities,
the reputation of power that the fatherland has built up and whose echo
still reverberates, count for nothing?”36
Public opinion in the other three states with historical ties to Waterloo
had similar reasons to be conflicted about this turning point in European
history because it brought up unresolved grievances and posed delicate
questions for national identity. For one Dutch popular historian his countrymen remained “heroes without glory” because of their unrecognized part
46
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
in the 1815 campaign.37 The Dutch public at large, however, remembered
Waterloo above all as the second founding of the Orange monarchy after
the return of King Willem I from exile two years previously. The political
connection between the two events was a close one because the crown
prince had personally led his troops to victory at Waterloo.38 As proponents of peaceful coexistence in Europe, the organizers of the monarchy’s
sesquicentennial in 1963 struggled to acknowledge the constitutional
achievements of the modern Dutch state without calling undue attention
to their martial origins. That not everyone was prepared to disentangle the
two issues became clear when the prominent theater director Carel Briels
decided to mark the jubilee by staging a mass reenactment of Waterloo
with a thousand horses in Nijmegen’s Goffert Stadium. The members of
the national anniversary committee, which was headed by Crown Princess
Beatrix, objected to this old-style salute to martial nationalism, whereupon
the horse show was quickly renamed “Garden of Europe” to play up the
theme of pan-European reconciliation. The rebranding of the show failed
to quite live up to the high-minded ambitions of the committee because
Briels’s alienated supporters still ended up brawling with the police after
the last session.39
While heated altercations over politically correct representations
of Napoleonic history remained the exception in the Netherlands, the
situation was altogether different in Belgium. There Waterloo became
a symbol in the twentieth century for everything that divided the two
dominant ethnic/language communities, the Walloons and Flemings.
Whereas Flemish activists like Joris van Severen of the 1930s para-fascist
party Verdinaso organized protest marches to the Dutch-built Waterloo
Lion to promote union with the Netherlands, Walloon militants drew
closer to France by staging annual pilgrimages to the battlefield monument of L’Aigle blessé.40 Walloon identification with France’s defeat derived
from a way of historical thinking that was premised on geography; more
precisely the circumstance that two of the best-known battle sites of the
Revolutionary Wars, Jemappes (1792) and Fleurus (1794), happened to
be in close proximity to Waterloo. It became thus possible to imagine
Napoleon’s downfall not so much as a tragedy for francophiles but rather
as an intermediary stage between the birth of the French Republic and the
recuperation of lost power in the present and future. Waterloo lent itself
to such isomorphic reasoning because of its multiple historical points of
47
Jasper Heinzen
reference. As the Walloon writer Marcel Thiry put it in 1960: “That June
18, 1940 [the date of de Gaulle’s Appeal and the official founding of La
mouvement Wallonie libre], returned an echo and issued a resounding
rejoinder to June 18, 1815, that the glory of this appeal for historical
redress has superimposed itself on the tragedy of the defeat, these are
signs which today appear richer to us in meaning than ever before.”41
The Belgian government wisely chose not to get involved in the quarrel
between Flemings and Walloons, staying well clear also of the touchy
question whether the Allied victory over Nazism vindicated the outcome
of Waterloo. The Royal Library in Brussels was at pains to demonstrate
conspicuous neutrality when it hosted two exhibitions about “Belgium
under the Consulate and Empire” and Waterloo for the sesquicentennial.
Merely the categorical use of the name Belgium for a state that did not exist
in Napoleon’s time, and descriptions of Prussian Field Marshal Blücher as
a “rude fellow” who, like the German armed forces in the First and Second
World Wars, maltreated the populations of occupied territories, exposed
a political bias on something most Belgians could agree.42
In the Federal Republic of Germany, too, Waterloo laid bare political
tensions and historical loyalties that shaped how citizens responded to the
call for remembrance in 1965. The trauma of the Second World War being
still fresh, critics charged that the official commemoration of a military
victory would impede the fledgling progress of European integration.43
Supporters of remembrance countered by accusing the federal government of pandering to French over-sensitiveness about Waterloo. As they
saw it, honoring the German contingents in Wellington’s army was more
about saving an important part of their regional heritage from oblivion
than inciting francophobia or national chauvinism. In emphasizing the
regional roots of the Waterloo cult in Germany, however, advocates of
commemoration proved that the history of the Napoleonic Wars separated
them from each other just as much as from other nations. Proposals submitted for the refurbishment of German memorials at Waterloo during
the sesquicentennial make for telling reading. Lower Saxon battlefield
visitors wrote in to the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic and other
state agencies because they suspected that “their” Hanoverian Monument
was being allowed to fall into disrepair.44 Although the cultural attaché
of the West German embassy at Brussels, a diplomat of old Prussian
aristocratic stock, politely assured one complainant that the monument
48
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
was well looked after, he caused further outrage with the comment that
the only truly authentic German monument at Waterloo was Prussia’s
near Plancenoit.45 To preempt Lower Saxon reprisals, the Foreign Office
quickly commissioned repairs of the Hanoverian Monument, but no sooner
had it done so than a new letter arrived from a Bad Nauheim resident in
Hessen to draw Bonn’s attention to the alleged neglect of the Prussian
memorial next to the cenotaphs of other nations. Among the “foreign”
edifices held up for comparison by the letter writer was the Hanoverian
Monument, which the complainant mistakenly identified as a British
tribute to Hanoverian valor.46
Seen in a larger context, the preoccupation of citizens with the
restoration of Napoleonic monuments was indicative of changes in the
way German society related to heritage in the 1960s. In contrast to the
indifference to historic structures in the immediate postwar years, the
Economic Miracle generated the financial means to invest in preservation,
making Sanierung (restoration) the catchword of the new sensibility.47 By
way of illustration: between 1963 and 1975 German cities’ spending on
cultural projects increased more than threefold. Meanwhile opinion polls
revealed a decreasing willingness among citizens to sacrifice their lives
for the nation in war, so that military lieux de mémoire lost ever more of
their original function as inspiration for martial heroism.48 The German
public faced a moral predicament, for while only few still dared speak of
glory, many wished to maintain Napoleonic memorials, if for no other
reason than to show respect to the dead. The conversion of these sites
into places of mourning fed into a discourse of suffering that identified
Germans in the East and West as “victims of a war that Hitler [had]
started but everyone lost.”49 The pain of groups excluded from the racial
Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich—Jews, so-called “asocials,” Sinti and
Roma, the mentally handicapped, homosexuals and foreign slave workers—nevertheless remained marginal to the public narrative of victimhood
for a long time. Until well into the 1980s politicians, local notables, and
veterans in Brunswick congregated around the monument of the antiNapoleonic Freikorps commander Ferdinand von Schill on the national
Day of Mourning to affix commemorative plaques for fallen soldiers of
the Second World War, yet they never saw any reason to acknowledge the
former Nazi concentration camp for forced laborers nearby.50
49
Jasper Heinzen
Waterloo supplied an extra layer of complexity to this brand of Vergangenheitsbewältigung because, unlike the legend of Schill, the battle
was not attached to some monument or standardized version of history
that possessed the authority to speak for the whole nation. The resultant
ideological non-fixity enabled representatives of the Heimat movement
in Lower Saxony to impose their own meaning on Waterloo. Heimat
encompassed a catalogue of concepts in the Federal Republic that treated
the autonomy of local culture as an untainted alternative to the totalitarian
Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich.51 Dr. Heinrich Schmidt of the Lower
Saxon Main State Archive in Hannover utilized this juxtaposition of Heimat
and state-led nationalism by lecturing readers of the Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung that although wars cast a dark shadow on humanity, whose
terror could never be fully captured by monuments and other “abstract”
media, Lower Saxons had a right to take pride in the courage of their
Hanoverian forebears at Waterloo.52 Schmidt’s commentary set the tone
for the official sesquicentennial two weeks later. A fellow historian from
the Main State Archive gave a presentation in Hannover’s Künstlerhaus
to raise popular awareness of Waterloo’s far-reaching repercussions for the
subsequent history of the region. Rather more eye-catching was a public
wreath-laying ceremony at the city’s Waterloo Column, where Prince Ernst
August of Hanover met with the chairmen of the Lower Saxon Heimat
Confederation and the Lower Saxon Historical Association to pay tribute
to the Anglo-Hanoverian soldiers of the King’s German Legion.53 As at
Brunswick, references to the dead of other nations, or for that matter their
own nation, remained conspicuous by their absence.
What may have been a veiled desire to deflect national guilt about
the Second World War through the confinement of Waterloo to a regional
memory tradition in fact played nicely into the hands of British foreign
policy makers. Despite the intra- and international tensions conjured by
the name of Waterloo, the latter was also a potential asset for cultural
diplomacy, and nowhere more so than in Anglo-German relations. Some
of Wellington’s best troops had hailed from the kingdom of Hanover, a
British dependency for 123 years between 1714 and 1837. Moreover, the
outcome of the 1815 campaign owed a great deal to the winning teamwork of Wellington and the Prussian commander, Prince Blücher. Queen
Elizabeth II specially referred to this fact in a speech during her celebrated
state visit to the Federal Republic in May 1965. She would have deposited
50
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
a wreath at the Waterloo Column in Hannover as well had Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer not declined lest French public opinion be offended.54
To compensate for the omission, the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR)
dispatched 600 bandsmen to the square surrounding the Column shortly
after the Queen’s departure from Germany. This gesture sent a signal to
the 50,000 spectators and invited Bundeswehr representatives in attendance
that “Germany was now welcomed back as an ally and comrade in arms
on an equal footing,” its war crimes forgiven.55
The term “invented traditions” has become so ubiquitous that its
explanatory power is in danger of overextension, yet the appropriation of
Waterloo to further Anglo-German fraternization fits neatly the premise
of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s thesis that historical precedents
can be artificially fabricated to detract from actual but politically inexpedient discontinuities.56 The military tattoo in Hannover created the
impression that the old Anglo-German partnership had been resurrected,
though in reality the two countries’ commonalities stayed subordinate to
the Franco-German rapprochement, which left Britain, rather than the
Federal Republic, the odd one out in European affairs. De Gaulle’s ability
to veto the accession of the United Kingdom to the EEC on two separate
occasions gave an accurate indication of where power lay in the 1960s,
even if the Franco-German honeymoon had quickly cooled off after the
signing of the Elysée Treaty in 1963.57 The British Foreign Office realized that the key to overturning the status quo was to secure the backing
of West Germany and the Benelux countries for EEC membership. The
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Waterloo therefore presented a welcome
opportunity to generate the necessary soft power by “remember[ing] what
unites us” to forge a “new and better relationship for the future,” as the
Queen poignantly described her government’s mission.58
Paralleling the cultural diplomacy of BAOR in Lower Saxony, Ambassador Sir Roderick Barclay in Brussels approached Belgian officials with
plans for a parade at Waterloo involving 2,000 British troops. Needless to
say, France’s president treated the goings-on in Belgium with suspicion.
With a heavy dose of sarcasm de Gaulle allegedly rejoined that he could
not come to the sesquicentennial celebrations because he had the 900th
anniversary of the Norman invasion of Britain to plan.59 Afraid to get
caught in the crossfire, the Belgian cabinet now backed away from Barclay’s proposal at the urging of Secretary of State Paul-Henri Spaak in an
51
Jasper Heinzen
effort to forestall discord between Flemings and francophile Walloons.60
Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands followed Spaak’s example, citing as
reason that her participation in the British commemorations would boost
the cause of Flemish irredentism. In the end, Barclay had little choice but
to settle for a reception at the embassy and a scaled-down British memorial service on the battlefield near Hougoumont with a small contingent
of Dutch and German guests. The choice to dedicate the ceremony to
soldiers of all nations who had given their lives at Waterloo denuded the
event of potentially anti-French connotations and so took the sting out
of British diplomacy’s original idea to recreate the past in the present.61
Still, the Foreign Office counted the elaborate ceremony at Hougoumont,
the attendance of several European royals along with many Belgian dignitaries at the embassy reception, and other social events in the name of
philanthropy a successfully executed charm offensive. Barclay’s superiors
noted that the anniversary served “as a timely reminder of the extent to
which the fate of this country [Britain] is tied up with that of the rest
of Europe.” Moreover, Whitehall would have its revenge on de Gaulle
for his “extreme ill-grace” during the sesquicentennial.62 When NATO
headquarters shifted from Paris to Brussels, following France’s withdrawal
from the military alliance in early 1966, some commentators—correctly
or not—interpreted the move to a city so close to the battlefield as a message to de Gaulle that the United States and Britain were inflicting their
own Waterloo on him.63
These taunts tell us much about the place of historical memory in
European international relations at the peak of the Cold War. On the
surface, the governments of Britain and France downplayed the powerpolitical differences that lurked behind their confrontations in Belgium
by making light of the past. Imitating de Gaulle’s biting irony, British
parliamentarians quipped that for the next major Waterloo anniversary
national delegates could meet on the playing fields of Eton, an allusion
to Wellington’s famous saying about the battle having been won by the
British public school spirit.64 Yet attempts at humor seemed to belie a
deep-seated psychological need to preserve the sacralized vestiges of a
battlefield so replete with historical meaning. In 1914 the Belgian parliament had passed a law declaring the battlefield a national heritage, and a
British subscription subsequently raised £10,000 for the express purpose
of ensuring that it would be preserved in (near-) original condition, unlike
52
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
most other Napoleonic battle sites. Even after the Second World War,
proposals to revoke Waterloo’s heritage status in order to make room for
Brussel’s urban sprawl, NATO and, most recently (1992), the European
Community’s principal governing bodies in a symbolic affirmation of
European unity came to nothing.65 The construction of the new Brussels
ring road through the battlefield in 1971 had to be scuttled because the
foreign ministries of Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands for once
collaborated like clockwork to prevent the remodeling of the landscape.
Applying collective pressure, they “bombarded” different Belgian state
agencies with counter-proposals to save their respective war memorials
from demolition.66 Intriguingly, beyond their national concerns the diplomatic community in Brussels was motivated by what one member of the
German embassy called “considerations of European political interest”:
Waterloo, after having so long been an apple of discord, was becoming
a test case for consensus building, and the embassies sensed that their
energetic willingness to act in concert on Waterloo represented a little
guarantee for European integration.67
IN SEARCH OF DIALOGUE
The amicable intervention of West European governments in 1971/72
seemed to portend a good omen for a pan-European consensus on Waterloo. The question to what extent national memory cultures have changed
since the height of the Cold War takes center stage in the last part of this
article. Historians have long recognized that human agency makes both
nations and memory intrinsically “amenable to reproduction or change.”
As a result, nation-states undergoing political transformation usually witness a reevaluation of the past, too, and sometimes even a reshuffle of the
institutions responsible for protecting the national heritage.68 Belgium
provides an especially interesting example of how constitutional reforms
can influence the politics of remembrance. Since 1970 four consecutive
revisions of the country’s constitution have established a federal state
composed of strong self-governing regions. The upshot of the transition
to federalism has been a diversification and at the same time concretization of collective responsibility for heritage sites in Belgium. The federal
state still retains possession of the Waterloo battlefield and monuments of
53
Jasper Heinzen
outstanding importance like the Butte du Lion and the Gordon Monument, but, aside from small provincial and municipal contributions, the
Walloon Region now defrays most of the cost associated with the maintenance of the large Panorama and the farm buildings at La Haye Sainte,
Hougoumont and Mont-St-Jean.69
Although the expensive upkeep of no fewer than 135 monuments
assures the continued involvement of foreign governments and private
associations like the Anglo-Belgian Waterloo Committee, recent years
have seen the Walloon rather than central government take a decisive
lead in the development of Waterloo as a tourist destination. Mindful of
the imminent bicentenary, the region’s ministry for tourism set aside €40
million in 2010 for major renovations and the opening of a high-tech
museum under the Hameau du Lion to immerse tourists in the sounds
and sights of battle. The willingness of politicians to make such investments in a time of financial austerity accentuates the commercial worth of
Waterloo. In excess of 300,000 tourists (65 percent of them foreigners)
visit the Lion annually, and the planning authorities are hoping to raise
that number to over half a million in order to put Waterloo firmly on the
map of the global sightseeing industry.70 But commercial profit is not
the only consideration for Wallonia and by extension Belgium. Philippe
Raxhon suggests convincingly that despite the country’s heterogeneity,
Waterloo underwrites a national self-image that is built on a sense of
historic uniqueness since few other parts of the globe have witnessed
so many battles. The Belgian nation-state sees itself as the receptacle of
Europe’s conflicts and, as such, specially qualified to facilitate transnational
Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The assimilation of the national memorials
at Waterloo into the corpus of Walloon patrimony has accomplished this
end, according to Raxhon, by figuratively laying the memory wars of the
past to rest in “neutral ground.”71
As commendable as the Walloon government’s motives may be, official interventions in clashes of European memory represent a prescriptive
attempt to harmonize history. That makes them an uncertain guide to the
minds of ordinary citizens, and all the more so considering the pluralized
and decentered historical discourse left in the wake of postmodernism.
Academics and politicians have grown accustomed to sharing the limelight
with lay historians and constituencies claiming special authority in the public
sphere based on subjective experiences of injustice suffered by themselves
54
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
or their ancestors, with the result that there has been a marked empowerment of civil society vis-à-vis governments in determining the outcome
of historical grievances.72 The controversy stirred up by Claude Ribbe’s
Le Crime de Napoleon in the shadow of the so-called “memory dispute”
in France (2005/6) is a pertinent case in point because it underscores
the contentiousness of Napoleonic history, perhaps today more so than
ever. In his book, Ribbe likened the French emperor to Hitler because
of his allegedly genocidal persecution of blacks in the colonies and his
racial vision for Europe. Critics quickly dismissed the author’s polemical
tone, but he nonetheless gained the endorsement of an organization set
up to defend the rights of French from the overseas territories, the Collectif des Antillais-Guyanais-Réunionnais, which insisted that the crimes
committed against their forebears under the banner of slavery had been
overlooked in Napoleonic scholarship. This accusation followed on the
heels of legislation introduced in early 2005 by the ruling conservative
party to ensure that high school teachers recall French colonialism in a
positive light. Moreover, citing a law passed in 2001 which recognized
slavery as a crime against humanity, the Collectif took out a court action
against a historian for arguing that the slave trade had no association with
the Holocaust since the ultimate goal of Napoleon’s colonial policy was
not racial extermination but maximum exploitation. Belatedly, a number
of academics banded together to protest against the muzzling of critical debate. To avoid further acrimony, French President Jacques Chirac
eventually agreed in January 2006 to repeal the offending stipulations
about the teaching of colonial history, whereupon the Collectif withdrew
its complaint one month later.73
The French “memory dispute” evinces how contemporary interpretations of the Napoleonic era intersect with other themes of European
Vergangenheitsbewältigung such as colonialism and the Holocaust. These
are also apparent in the legacy of Waterloo. British “Whig” history has
traditionally treated the defeat of Napoleon as a momentous watershed
when Britain could turn away from fighting France and concentrate
instead on building the greatest empire the world had ever seen. This
triumphalist narrative continues to inspire Eurosceptic Britons, who find
comfort in nostalgic memories of empire.74 Their postcolonial detractors, on the other hand, call for a more self-critical engagement with the
inspirational effect of Waterloo on colonial fantasies in Britain. That such
55
Jasper Heinzen
discussions about the imperialist trajectory of Waterloo and the colonial
crimes of Napoleon continue to take place testifies to the longevity of
certain popular beliefs about the Napoleonic Wars and the profound
changes wrought by this period. Only in 2011 respondents to a survey
paid for by Greenall’s Gin voted Waterloo and Trafalgar into the top ten
list of the “greatest moments in British history.”75 The salience of military
victories in British collective memory has a French counterpart in the high
regard for institutions inaugurated under the Empire—among them the
Civil Code, lycées, prefectures and the Legion of Honor, to name just the
most outstanding. Their ubiquity, a belief in some quarters that Napoleon
presaged European unification, and France’s cult of great men illustrate
the “extent to which the ‘republican’ tradition has internalized and even
absorbed key elements of the Napoleonic heritage,” according to the
informed judgment of Sudhir Hazareesingh.76
Well-connected non-governmental organizations such as the Fondation Napoléon, Association Franco-Européenne de Waterloo, Fédération
Européenne des Cités Napoléoniennes and the Waterloo Committee have
done their part since the 1970s to maintain public interest in the Napoleonic era. Their pursuits are many: the Fondation promotes research and
celebrates key events in the imperial commemorative calendar, the Waterloo
Committee and the Association Franco-Européenne de Waterloo lobby
for the protection of historic landmarks in Belgium, while the Fédération
aims to be a mini-European union of cities dedicated to protecting their
Napoleonic patrimony.77 The Fédération possesses a global equivalent in
the biannual gatherings of delegations from townships around the world
for whom their shared name, Waterloo, fashions a platform for cultural
exchange at the grassroots.78
The respective mission statements of these bodies reveal that while
sectional bonding is possible and indeed desired, historical fault lines run
deep in the mental topography of Europe. For instance, neither does Britain
have any Napoleonic cities to protect, as the emperor to his chagrin never
got that far, nor do municipalities with the right name exist in France to
join the get-togethers of Waterloo towns.79 Furthermore, the proliferation
of specialized charities in the last forty years has in some ways accelerated
rather than decreased competition between different entrepreneurs of
Napoleonic memory. In the 1980s, the Waterloo Committee drew criticism
from Walloon extremists for fastening several commemorative plaques to
56
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
historic edifices at Waterloo in English only, which added grist to the mill
of left-wing politicians demanding the abolition of the “feudal” privileges
enjoyed by the committee’s chief patron, the current Duke of Waterloo,
on Belgian land given to his ancestor.80 An Association Franco-Européenne
de Waterloo was promptly set up to counter the anglicization of Waterloo
with the mandate to “ascertain a fair representation of France and her
friends on the field of battle.”81
The competitive seizure of memory space lends credibility to semiotic readings of the battlefield landscape as a “cultural text.” Memorials,
signposts, tour guides, guide books and visitors’ preconceived expectations
act together to inscribe meaning on what would otherwise be nondescript pastoral grounds. Yet the popularization of reenactments in the last
thirty years has introduced a novel element into this “co-constructionist”
enterprise of historical socialization which has done much to soften the
nationalist impulse of signposting, namely the physical performance of
social memory through what Paul Connerton would call “bodily automatisms.”82 Reenacting is a highly eclectic activity because participants mime
a broad array of images combining formal commemoration, family history,
academic research, popular (non)fiction, television, and computer games.83
This mélange of creative self-fashioning and authenticity has managed to
develop a popular appeal that draws an ever-growing number of living
history enthusiasts and spectators to historic battle sites. In 2010, for
instance, no fewer than 3,000 reenactors, 250 horses and nearly 70,000
onlookers from eighteen different countries staged a “dress rehearsal”
for the anticipated mass spectacle of the Waterloo bicentenary.84 Unlike
conventional modes of public commemoration such as memorials and
anniversaries, reenactments are semiotically open-ended by virtue of their
performativity and are ready to be constituted anew at the next session.
The playfulness of acting permits volunteers to literally put themselves in
the shoes of other nationalities. A Frenchman is not forever doomed to
fight on the losing side, while by the same token somebody from a country
with no Waterloo affiliation can experience life in Napoleon’s army. The
distinction between winners and losers becomes further blurred as hobby
warriors move from one historic reenactment to the next. They restage
Waterloo one weekend but “move on” to Austerlitz (1805) a few weeks
later, thereby reversing the chronological order of historical events that
has always made the former battle appear singularly epic.85 That said,
57
Jasper Heinzen
reenacting is no panacea for transnational reconciliation. It conveys a
latently romantic vision of war which, deprived of proper grounding in the
historical context, can project conflicting messages, as happened in 1993
when the mayor of Boulogne-sur-Mer—though well intentioned—extolled
Napoleon’s wish to spread democracy to Europe before an audience that
had assembled to reenact the failed French invasion of Britain.86
Regardless of the setbacks, political scientists maintain that the impulse
“critically to work through the past” is what binds European civilization
together at the end of the day.87 Balancing negative lessons against the need
for role models remains trial by error because there are many reminders of
war across the continent and only few templates for the “proper” handling
of Europe’s military heritage. For example, although the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the relatively obscure battle of Minden in 2009
was innocuous enough for the British and German army to put together a
“spectacular programme of [military] pomp and pageantry” in the name
of international reconciliation, experience has shown that more contested
pre–First World War lieux de mémoire like Culloden and the battles of the
Napoleonic era continue to defy the generic memorialization of Europe’s
successful integration.88 Notably the Trafalgar and Austerlitz bicentennials
in 2005 testified to broad public interest in commemorative spectacles
but also a pervasive ambiguity in their conceptual execution. Lord Nelson’s naval victory triggered so many events and projects in Britain—over
2,000 in total—that it became quite literally difficult to see the wood for
the trees at times (one of the bicentennial initiatives saw the planting
of 33 new woods across the United Kingdom). Furthermore, while an
international fleet review in the Solent presided over by the Queen and
French President Jacques Chirac made a show of Anglo-French conciliation, the grand scale of the national celebrations suggested that Prime
Minister Tony Blair had no difficulty invoking Britain’s imperial past to
curry favor with voters. The Austerlitz bicentenary a few months later,
though on the surface diametrically different, put in evidence a similar
divergence of objectives across the Channel. Whilst tens of thousands of
reenactors and spectators converged on the Czech Republic, and students
of the military academy at Saint Cyr gathered on the Place Vendôme in
Paris to relive one of Napoleon’s greatest victories, Chirac and most of
his ministers eschewed public pronouncements on Austerlitz in order to
distance themselves from the Ribbe controversy.89 The study in contrasts
58
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
that the British and French political leadership presented to the casual
observer in 2005 therefore raises important questions about the “framing” of the Napoleonic period in modern public memory. One could go
so far as to say that the discrepancy between the wish to celebrate national
achievement and the political inappropriateness of victory parades at the
expense of enemies-turned-partners in the European Union and NATO
highlights a “breakdown of chronotopic conventions,” whereby a “conflation of disparate memory fragments stripped of their original discursive
contexts” has been taking place.90
It remains to be seen whether Britain, France and the rest of Europe
will critically address this entrenched ambiguity in 2015 or not. Current
indications are far from promising. In July 2011 the British Department for Culture, Media and Sport declared that it would refrain from
participating in the commemoration of Waterloo. As if to corroborate
the government’s emphatic non-involvement, the Ministry of Defence
announced in time for the 2012 anniversary the envisaged disbandment
of the venerable Wellington Battalion to cut costs.91 British politicians are
understandably loath to tempt the anger of their French neighbors after
the lavish festivities for Trafalgar in 2005. However, public criticism of
the government’s aloofness from the manifold monument projects, art
exhibitions, reenactments and academic conferences dedicated to Waterloo
in Britain has recently prompted the Conservatives to reconsider their
position by pledging £1 million for the restoration of Hougoumont Farm
in the 2013 Spending Review. Ironically, the very ambition to make the
new Hougoumont “the centrepiece of the 2015 celebrations” shows how
much political decision-makers are still caught in a competitive mindset
when it comes to Waterloo.92
British indecisiveness on the bicentenary has been paralleled by
reticence in the rest of Europe. At the time of writing (October 2013),
Continental governments—save for the Walloons—have yet to reveal their
plans. There is a silver lining inasmuch as proposals are being finalized for
the establishment of an international steering committee to coordinate
official commemorations in Belgium.93 If the negotiations bear fruit,
national administrations and the European Union may perhaps decide to
emulate ideas presently being implemented for the centenary of the First
World War by sponsoring worldwide partnerships of heritage organizations or project consortia to digitalize material from international library
59
Jasper Heinzen
collections with a view to recognizing commonalities and variations in
the way people from different national, social, linguistic and religious
communities experienced war between 1792 and 1815.94 Certainly, commemorations on this scale do not come cheap, but public funding should
adequately reflect the fact that the number of dead in the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars, as a proportion of the European population, rivaled
the casualty figures of 1914–18.95 The proximity of the Waterloo and First
World War anniversaries is fortuitous since it creates a chance to place the
two events in the same collective memory space and thereby to neutralize
the distinction between winners and losers which has for so long haunted
the European imagination.
*
Waterloo represents a transnational lieu de mémoire with a high “commemorative density.”96 Few battles in European history have filled so
many books and films, not to mention buses that cart tourists to the
battlefield every year. Where this fascination comes from is debatable, as
many of its springs are emotional and hence beyond rational categorization. For Romantic poets and nineteenth-century battlefield tourists the
conflicting feelings they experienced on seeing or reading about Waterloo
constituted the appeal of the battle: the drama of Napoleon’s fall produced
a longing for communion with a heroic past in defiance of the ultimate
irretrievability of history. 97 Scholarship on lieux de mémoire in general
and Waterloo in particular has been inclined to study the formation of
memory in a nationally compartmentalized analytical framework. In line
with more recent scholarship, however, the present article has made a case
for heuristic insights which emanate rather from the interstices of regional,
national, transnational and international modes of remembrance. Thus,
national patriotism dominated the organization of the Waterloo sesquicentennial in Britain in 1965 not despite but to a significant extent because
of foreign political considerations like Britain’s plans for accession to the
EEC, decolonization and American supremacy in the Western bloc. De
Gaulle’s attitude showed that this was not an exclusively British sentiment;
both governments took seriously the symbolic power of the Napoleonic
heritage when they found themselves jockeying for international influence
in the 1960s. The memory cultures of Belgium and the Federal Republic
60
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
of Germany illustrated that Waterloo also possessed regional and ethnic
meanings which could be used to challenge unstable national identities.
Developments since the sesquicentennial suggest that responsibility for
Waterloo as a lieu de mémoire has shifted away from governments to civil
society, leading in the process to what may be considered a cultural transnationalization of Waterloo’s symbolic capital.
The Vergangenheitsbewältigung of Europe’s military past nevertheless remains politically ambivalent. On the positive side, historians often
like to point out that if EEC/EU politicians can be proud of something,
it is that they have managed to delegitimize the unilateral use of force
in favor of a collectivist mindset built on the mutual assurance of each
other’s security.98 The aversion to war, to use Claus Leggewie’s evocative phrase, has become one of “seven circles of memory” alongside the
Holocaust, Soviet communism, recurrent mass expulsions, colonialism,
immigration and economic success that define Europe since 1945. That
said, Leggewie and other observers concede that the continent’s collective
memory continues to be as diverse as its nations and cultures, particularly
since the “Othering” of real or imagined adversaries has been integral to
the historical evolution of European self-images since the Middle Ages.99
The possibility of a grand narrative any time soon therefore seems remote,
notwithstanding projects like the planned opening of a EU-funded “House
of European History” in Brussels.
The Janus face of Waterloo bears witness to the elusiveness of consensus. For liberal internationalists the battle embodies a martial past that
has been overcome, a global lieu de mémoire on the way to being safely
squared away as a UNESCO world heritage site. Others still consider it an
active part of their arsenal of national myths. Flemish separatists plant flags
on the Waterloo Lion, some prominent French politicians and journalists
associate with June 18 the (self-)sacrifice of their greatest statesman and
many a Briton remembers the moment of national triumph.100 For diametrically opposite reasons recent debates about the coming to terms with
the evils of colonialism have kept up political interest in the Napoleonic
Wars because critics charge that the past has been selectively remembered
with a bias towards great men. The choice to forgo the opportunity of
engaging with these different perspectives at the forthcoming Waterloo
bicentenary means that the British government is lending weight to historians’ criticism that the “events on the sun deck of costly, large-scale
61
Jasper Heinzen
European commemoration and jubilee projects”—or in this case their
omission—often correspond little with “the work in the engine room
of European history politics.”101 Getting the two sections of the ship to
communicate can perhaps be accomplished without a sanitized historical
narrative that satisfies everybody. In fact, attempts to arrive at a homogeneous telos would be misplaced because if the reception of Waterloo
in art and literature has taught us anything, it is that popular tastes are
malleable and therefore inherently dynamic.102 What the historicization
of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars does require, however, is a
willingness to give up anachronistic master narratives of victory and defeat.
Waterloo has never been free from controversy, but it is precisely the power
to generate critical debate on the past which may yet serve Europe well
in reaching a common vision for the future.
NOTES
1. Henry Rousso, La Hantise du passé (Paris: Les Éditions Textuel, 1998).
2. See James J. Sheehan, Where have all the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation
of Modern Europe (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); Martin Aust
and Daniel Schönpflug, eds., Vom Gegner lernen: Feindschaften und Kulturtransfers
im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus,
2007); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma,
Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Henry Holt, 2003); Robert Gerwarth and
Stephan Malinowski, “Europeanization through Violence? War Experiences and
the Making of Modern Europe,” in Martin Conway and Kieran K. Patel, eds.,
Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 189–209.
3. Cf. Holger Hoock, ed., History, Commemoration, and National Preoccupation:
Trafalgar 1805–2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Cannadine,
ed., Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005); Bernd Mütter, “Jena und Auerstedt/Hassenhausen 1806–1906–2006:
Orte welcher Erinnerung?” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 67, no. 1 (2008): 1–23;
Oliver Benjamin Hemmerle, “Zwischen ‘Völkerschlachtdenkmal’ und ‘Mohyla
Míru’: Monumentalisierung und Musealisierung der Napoleonischen Zeitalters,”
in Hemmerle and Ulrike Brummert, eds., Zäsuren und Kontinuitäten im Schatten
Napoleons: Eine Annäherung an die Gebiete des heutigen Sachsen und Tschechien
zwischen 1805/6 und 1813 (Hamburg: Verlag Dr Kovač, 2010), 110–15.
62
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
4. “Cadiz Plans Year-Long Celebration of Spain’s 1812 Constitution,” Latin
American Herald Tribune, May 23, 2012; “Keine Datscha in Borodino: Zwischen
Napoleonkult und Nationalstolz feiert Russland das denkwürdige Jahr 1812,” Die
Zeit, August 16, 2012.
5. John Fortescue, The Campaign of Waterloo (1920; London: Greenhill Books,
1987), 197.
6. See, for instance, the Waterloo dossier of UNESCO’s World Heritage Center
at http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5362/ (accessed September 6, 2012).
7. Christoph Schenk, “Das Ergebnis von Waterloo in politischer, militärischer
und menschlicher Hinsicht,” in Josef J. Schmid, ed., Waterloo—18. Juni 1815:
Vorgeschichte, Verlauf und Folgen einer europäischen Schlacht (Bonn: Nova and
Vetera, 2007), 272.
8. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), v. For an overview of the debate, see
Peter Hofschröer, 1815: The Waterloo Campaign (London: Greenhill Books,
1999), 321–35; Mark Adkin, The Waterloo Companion (London: Aurum Press,
2001), 409–10; Franz Uhle-Wettler, “Belle Alliance-Waterloo und das preußische
Heer des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Uhle-Wettler, Höhe- und Wendepunkte
deutscher Militärgeschichte (Hamburg: Mittler, 2000), 96. Despite the mutual
antagonization of nineteenth-century British and Prussian historiography, it is
sometimes forgotten that the distinction between British and German perspectives on Waterloo was never clear-cut since the majority of the troops under the
Duke of Wellington’s command hailed from German-speaking states. See Jasper
Heinzen, “Transnational Affinities and Invented Traditions: The Napoleonic Wars
in British and Hanoverian Memory, 1815–1915,” English Historical Review 127
(December 2012): 1404–34.
9. William Siborne, History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815, 2 vols.
(London: T. and W. Boone, 1844); W. J. Knoop, Krijgsgeschiedkundige geschriften:
Beschouwingen over Sibornes geschiedenis van den Oorlog van 1815 in Frankrijk en de
Nederlanden (Breda: n.p., 1846); B. J. Renard, Réponse aux allégations anglaises sur
la conduite des troupes Belges en 1815 (Brussels: Muquardt, 1855); A. M. Eenens,
Dissertation sur la participation des troupes des Pays-Bas à la campagne de 1815
en Belgique (Ghent: Vanderhaeghen, 1879); Louis Navez, Les Belges à Waterloo
(Brussels: Lebègue 1914); Joachim Rudersdorf, “Prinz Wilhelm von Oranien,
Wellington und die Nassauer bei Quatre-Bras und Waterloo: Der Tagesbericht von
Jean-Victor de Constant Rebecque,” Nassauische Annalen 120 (2009): 279–320;
Jacques Logie, Waterloo: La campagne de 1815 (Brussels: Editions Racine, 2003),
211–13.
10. Maurice Descotes, Victor Hugo et Waterloo (Paris: Minard, 1984); Isabelle
Leroy, Le Panorama de la bataille de Waterloo: Témoin exceptionnel de la saga des
63
Jasper Heinzen
panoramas (Liège: Editions Luc Pire, 2009), 83; Bernard Coppens, Waterloo: Les
mensonges (Brussels: Jourdan Éditeur, 2009); Claude-Michel Cluny, Waterloo: Une
bataille pour l’Europe (Paris: La Différence, 2012).
11. Cf. Lilian Rowland-Brown, “Waterloo in Romance,” The Nineteenth Century and After 78 (1915): 103–16; Lord Raglan, “Waterloo,” United Service
Magazine, June 1915, 237–44; “Waterloo Day: A Century of Peace with France,”
Times, June 18, 1915; “An Unnoticed Anniversary,” Times, June 19, 1940; “18
juin 1815–1915,” Le Petit Journal, June 18, 1915.
12. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 31 (emphasis in
the original).
13. Anglophone academia reserves the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung for the
aftermath of the Holocaust and the general trauma of the Second World War in
contemporary German/Austrian society, whereas German scholars have applied
the concept quite successfully to other nations and periods. It is in the latter
sense that Vergangenheitsbewältigung is used here to denote the transnational
interdependence in the way Europeans have come to relate to the past since the
Second World War. On the two different usages of the word, see Matthew Berg,
“Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Contextualising Austria’s
Gedenkjahr 2005,” German History 26, no. 1 (2008): 47–71; Joyce M. Mushaben,
“Memory and the Holocaust: Processing the Past through a Gendered Lense,”
History of the Human Sciences 17, nos. 2–3 (2004): 147–85; Carlo Moos, “Die
‘guten’ Italiener und die Zeitgeschichte: Zum Problem der Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Italien,” Historische Zeitschrift 259 (1994): 671–94; Klaus Bachmann,
Repression, Protest, Toleranz: Wertewandel und Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Polen
nach 1956 (Wrocław: Neisse, 2010).
14. Étienne François, “Conclusion: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as
a Shared and Entangled lieu de mémoire,” in Alan Forrest, Étienne François and
Karen Hagemann, eds., War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
in Modern European Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 400.
15. Winston S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963,
ed. Robert Rhodes James, 8 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1974), 6:6231–38;
Charles de Gaulle, Les Français parlent aux Français: 18 juin 1940–18 juin 1941,
ed. Jacques Pessis (Paris: Omnibus, 2010), 8–9.
16. Gilbert Merlio, “9. November: Ein schwieriger Erinnerungstag,” in Étienne
François and Uwe Puschner, eds., Erinnerungstage: Wendepunkte der Geschichte
von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2010), 219–38; Elisabeth
Domansky, “‘Kristallnacht’, the Holocaust and German Unity: The Meaning of
9 November as an Anniversary in German History,” History & Memory 4, no. 1
(1992): 60–94.
64
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
17. Jan-Werner Müller, “On European Memory: Some Conceptual and Normative Remarks,” in Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, eds., A European Memory?
Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn, 2010),
36; Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third
Reich (London: Routledge, 2002), 215; Birgit Schwelling, “Auf dem Weg zu
europäischen Erinnerungsorten? Gemeinsame und trennende Erinnerungen in
Europa,” in Benoît Majerus, Sonja Kmec, Michel Margue and Pit Péporté, eds.,
Dépasser le cadre national des “lieux de mémoire” (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009),
181–84.
18. For an excellent summary of this scholarship, see Christopher A. Bayly,
The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 199–212. For an overview of recent scholarship that
tends to relativize the nationalizing impetus of the French Wars, see Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds., War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 (New York:
Cambridge University Press 2010); Ute Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg:
Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden. Alltag—Wahrnehmung—Deutung,
1792–1841 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007); Philip G. Dwyer, ed., Napoleon and
Europe (Harlow: Longman, 2001).
19. Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92);
Étienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols.
(Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011); Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and
Wolfgang Schmale, eds., Europäische Erinnerungsorte: Das Haus Europa, 3 vols.
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012).
20. Pierre Nora cited in Étienne François, “Pierre Nora und die ‘Lieux de
mémoire,’” in Pierre Nora, ed., Erinnerungsorte Frankreichs (Munich: C.H. Beck,
2005), 9. See also Nancy Wood, “Memory’s Remains: Les lieux de mémoire,” History & Memory 6, no. 1 (1994): 123–49.
21. Marcel Watelet and Pierre Couvreur, eds., Waterloo: Lieu de mémoire
européenne (1815–2000). Histoire et controverses (Louvain-la-Neuve: AcademiaBruylant, 2000); Marcel Watelet, Pierre Couvreur, and Philippe de Villelongue,
eds., Waterloo: Monuments et représentations de mémoires européennes (1792–2001)
(Louvain-la-Neuve, Academia-Bruylant, 2003). Some excellent, more histoire
croisée-oriented articles on European Waterloo commemorations have appeared,
but they concentrate for the most part on the nineteenth century. Cf. Tim Blanning, “18. Juni 1815: Waterloo,” in François and Puschner, eds., Erinnerungstage,
163–85. See also Erich Pelzer, “Waterloo (18. Juni 1815): Schlachtenmythos und
Erinnerungssymbolik,” in Gerd Krumeich and Susanne Brandt, eds., Schlachtenmythen: Ereignis—Erzählung—Erinnerung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 143–64.
22. Kirstin Buchinger, Claire Gantet and Jakob Vogel, “Einleitung: Räume
europäischer Erinnerungen,” in Buchinger, Gantet and Vogel, eds., Europäische
65
Jasper Heinzen
Erinnerungsräume (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus, 2009), 11. See also
Majerus, eds., Dépasser le cadre national des “lieux de mémoire; Étienne François,
“Ist eine gesamteuropäische Erinnerungskultur vorstellbar? Eine Einleitung,” in
Bernd Henningsen, Hendriette Kliemann Geisinger and Stefan Troebst, eds.,
Transnationale Erinnerungsorte: Nord- und südeuropäische Perspektiven (Berlin:
Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009), 18; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung: Der Ansatz der Histoire Croisée und
die Herausforderung des Transnationalen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002):
615.
23. On the problem of pinpointing agency in the remembrance of war, see T. G.
Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper, “The Politics of War Memory and
Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics,” in Ashplant, Dawson and
Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge,
2000), 3–85. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, “Setting the Framework,” in Winter
and Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29.
24. See essays in Buchinger et al., eds., Europäischer Erinnerungsräume; JanWerner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence
of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002); Richard Ned Lebow,
Wulf Kantsteiner and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Telling examples of how historical memory
interfered with postwar diplomacy can also be found in Marc Trachtenberg, A
Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement 1945–1963 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999).
25. Ludger Pries, “The Approach of Transnational Social Spaces: Responding to
New Configurations of the Social and the Spatial,” in Pries, ed., New Transnational
Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early
Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2001), 16; Tilmann Robbe, Historische
Forschung und Geschichtsvermittlung: Erinnerungsorte in der deutschsprachigen
Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2009), 152–56.
26. René Girault, “Decision Makers, Decisions and French Power,” in Ennio di
Nolfo, ed., Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy and the Origins of the EEC
1952–1957 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 2:77–78; David Childs, Britain since 1945:
A Political History, 6th ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 64–67; “Freundschaft
ohne Illusionen,” Die Zeit, November 20, 1964.
27. Reinhart Koselleck, “Wie neu ist die Zeit?” Historische Zeitschrift 251 (1990):
552. Cf. Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple
Temporalities,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 151–71; Achim Landwehr,
“Von der Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen,” Historische Zeitschrift 295, no.
66
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
1 (2012): 1–34. Aleida Assmann, Zeit und Tradition: Kulturelle Strategien der
Dauer (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 7–17 and conclusion.
28. John Horne, “War and Conflict in Contemporary European History,
1914–2004,” in Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Conflicted
Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New York: Berghahn, 2011),
82; Johann P. Arnason and Natalie J. Doyle, “Introduction: European Perspectives
on Union and Division,” in Arnason and Doyle, eds., Domains and Divisions of
European History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 2–3; Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 110–14.
29. Copy of dinner program at Banqueting House on June 12, 1965, Soldiers
of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock (SOM), box 3, item 20.
30. “The 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo,” program of military
review on Horse Guards Parade, June 12, 1965, SOM, box 3, item 19.
31. Waterloo Anniversary Exhibition, Wellington Barracks, 21st May–7the July
1965 (Aldershot: Ministry of Defence, 1965), frontispiece; “The 150th Anniversary
of the Battle of Waterloo,” 1.
32. Jeremy Black, The Battle of Waterloo: A New History (London: Icon Books,
2010), 209.
33. Katrin Keller, “Die Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig,” in den Boer et al., eds.,
Europäische Erinnerungsorte, 2:428; “Itinéraire commenté de la visite des sites
et monuments du champ de bataille de Waterloo,” Bulletin de la Société Belge
d’Études Napoléoniennes 83 (1973): 16.
34. David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and Commemoration of the
Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998),
19. See also A. V. Seaton, “War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815–1914,” Annals
of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 (1998): 130–58; J. John Lennon and Malcolm
Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum,
2000); V. L. Smith, “War and Its Tourist Attractions,” in Abraham Pizam and Yoel
Mansfield, eds., Tourism, Crime and International Security (Chichester: Wiley,
1996), 247–64.
35. “Commémoration du cent cinquantième anniversaire de Waterloo,” Bulletin
de la Société Belge d’Études Napoléonienne 51 (1965): 11–12. The author wishes
to thank Geneviève Warland for her assistance in procuring copies of this journal.
36. Charles de Gaulle, La France et son armée (1938; Paris: Plon, 1971), 154.
37. N. Vels Heijn, Glorie zonder helden: De slag bij Waterloo, waarheid en legende
(Amsterdam: Wetenschappelijke Uitgeverij, 1974). See also L. W. de Vries, “De
Nederlandse bijdrage te Quatre-Bras en Waterloo, 1815,” Mars et Historia 27
(1993): 15–26.
67
Jasper Heinzen
38. “Rond 1813 en Waterloo,” in Voor en na Waterloo: Van jachthoorn tot
kampvuur (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1963), 11–14. Cf. Coen A. Tamse, “Die niederländische Monarchie 1813–1993,” in Horst Lademacher and Loek Geeraedts,
eds., Freiheitsstreben—Demokratie—Emanzipation: Aufsätze zur politischen Kultur
in Deutschland und in den Niederlanden (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1993), 107–11.
39. Leen Dorsman, Ed Jonker and Kees Ribbens, Het zoet en het zuur: Geschiedenis in Nederland (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek , 2000), 18–21.
40. Philippe Raxhon, “De Leeuw van Waterloo: Een trefpunt van verleden, heden
en toekomst,” in Jo Tollebeek et al., eds., België: Een parcours van herinnerung, vol.
1, Plaatsen van geschiedenis en expansie (Amsterdam: Centraal Boekhuis, 2008),
186–87; Marc Quaghebeur, “D’où vient le malaise francophone? L’exemple belge,”
in Susan Bainbridge, Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier, eds., Francographies:
Identité et altérité dans les espaces francophones européens (New York: Peter Lang,
2010), 31–32; Bruno de Wever, “Groot-Nederland als utopie en mythe,” Cahiers
d’Histoire du Temps Présent 3 (1997): 163–80. In fact, during the recent Belgian
constitutional crisis Flemish separatists emulated their forebears by planting Flemish flags and banners on the Lion bearing the slogan “The linguistic boundary is
a political boundary.” “Kabale und Lüge,” Der Spiegel, March 14, 2011, 105.
41. Thiry cited in Philippe Raxhon, “L’Aigle blessé sous l’aile du mouvement
wallon,” in Watelet, Couvreur and Villelongue, eds., Waterloo, 203. For an anthropological explanation of isomorphism as a way of creating sociopolitical difference
through spatial connections, see also Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond
‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” in Gupta and Ferguson,
eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997), 34.
42. Bibliothèque Albert I, Waterloo 1815: Estampes, documents, dessins (Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale, 1965), 66; Bibliothèque Albert I, La Belgique sous le
Consulat et l’Empire (Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale, 1965).
43. Cf. “Was ist uns Waterloo?” Die Zeit, May 28, 1965; “Die alte Schlacht,”
ibid., June 11, 1965.
44. See collected complaint letters in Niedersächsisches Haupt- Staats- Archiv,
Hannover (NHStA), Nds.100 Acc.141/97, Nr.552; Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin (PAAA), B92, Nr.530.
45. Count von Strachwitz to Carl Ohlendorf, January 18, 1966, NHStA,
Acc.141/97, Nr.552.
46. Dr. Erwin Rumpf to the Foreign Office, November 4, 1966, PAAA, B92,
Nr.530.
47. Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory
in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998),
293; Arnold Bartetzky, Nation—Staat—Stadt: Architektur, Denkmalpflege und
68
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
visuelle Geschichtskultur vom 19. bis 21. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012),
85–91.
48. Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts, 273, 293.
49. Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims? Thoughts on a Post–Cold War
History of World War II’s Legacies,” History & Memory 17, nos.1–2 (2005): 152.
50. Sam A. Mustafa, “The Politics of Memory: Rededicating Two Historical
Monuments in Postwar Germany,” Central European History 41, no. 2 (2008),
268–71. Cf. also Sam A. Mustafa, The Long Ride of Major von Schill: A Journey
through German History and Memory (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008),
279–82.
51. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits
of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 64. See
also Dietmar von Reeken, “Heimatbewusstsein, Integration und Modernisierung:
Die niedersächsische Heimatbewegung zwischen Landesgründung und ‘Grenzen
des Wachstums,’” Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 79 (2007):
297–324; Waldemar R. Röhrbein, “Der Heimatbegriff—althergebrachte sentimentale Assoziationen? Ein Versuch über den Wandel des Heimatbegriffs innerhalb
der niedersächsischen Heimatbewegung,” in Wolfgang Jüttner, Oskar Negt and
Heinz Thörmer, eds., Leitlinien politischen Handelns (Hannover: Offizin, 2005),
118–27.
52. “Vor 150 Jahren: Die Schlacht bei Waterloo,” Hildesheimer Allgemeine
Zeitung, June 5/6, 1965. The city and the state are referred to here as Hannover
and Hanover respectively for easier differentiation.
53. “Vier Kränze an der Waterloosäule,” newspaper clipping of unknown
provenance in NHStA, V.V.P.17, Nr.2035.
54. “Waterloo,” Hannoversche Presse Hameln, May 21, 1965.
55. “Hanover Remembers Waterloo,” Times, June 26, 1965.
56. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14.
57. N. Piers Ludlow, “European Integration and the Cold War,” in Melvyn P.
Leffler and Odd A. Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 187–91; Carine Germond, “A
‘Cordial Potentiality’? De Gaulle and the Franco-German Partnership, 1963–1969,”
in Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher and Garret Martin, eds., Globalizing de Gaulle:
International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958–1969 (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 43–62; Gerhard Brunn, Die Europäische Einigung
von 1945 bis heute (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), 129–59.
58. Königin Elizabeth II. in Deutschland (Bonn: Presse und Informationsamt
der Bundesregierung, 1965), 13.
69
Jasper Heinzen
59. “Namen der Woche,” Die Zeit, June 25, 1965.
60. See Barclay’s reports to the Foreign Office in The National Archives, Public
Record Office, UK (NA, PRO), FO 371/182931.
61. Jean-Marc Largeaud, Napoléon et Waterloo: La défaite glorieuse de 1815 à
nos jours (Paris: La Boutique de L’histoire, 2006), 225–29.
62. Foreign Office to Barclay, July 21, 1965, NA, PRO, FO 371/182931. The
harsh commentary was the verdict of the Foreign Office on de Gaulle’s conduct
during the sesquicentennial. Internal FO memorandum, July 7, 1965, ibid.
63. Anatoli Potapov, “Repression against France,” dispatch for the Moscow
domestic service, June 7, 1966, as cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service
(FBIS), Daily Report, USSR International Affairs, June 8, 1966.
64. “Recalling Battles Long Ago,” Times, June 16, 1965.
65. “Waterloo, capitale de l’Europe?” Le Monde, June 18, 1992.
66. Report by German embassy in Brussels to the German Foreign Office, June
22, 1972, PAAA, B.85 Nr.1.413.
67. Embassy Councillor von Ungern-Sternberg to the German Foreign Office,
November 30, 1971, PAAA, B85 Nr.1.413. Consider also that NATO armies
have a tradition of joint battlefield tours and staff rides for the tactical instruction
of their officers. Peter Caddick-Adams, “Footsteps across Time: The Evolution,
Use and Relevance of Battlefield Visits to the British Armed Forces” (PhD diss.,
Cranfield University, 2007), esp. 356–466.
68. Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 10. Cf. Alan R. H. Baker, “Introduction: On Ideology
and Landscape,” in Baker and Gideon Biger, eds., Ideology and Landscape in
Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7–8. For
an introduction to the enormous and still expanding literature on the conjoined
ontology of nationalism and memory in modern history, see Siegfried Weichlein,
“Nationalismus und Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa: Ein Forschungsüberlick,” Neue Politische Literatur, 51, no. 2/3 (2006): 265–351; Jeffrey
K. Olick, “Introduction: Memory and the Nation: Continuities, Conflicts, and
Transformations,” Social Science History, 22, no. 4 (1998): 377–88.
69. Personal communication from Yves Vander Cruysen, Alderman of Waterloo,
July 27, 2012.
70. “40 millions pour le Mémorial,” Le Soir, June 22, 2010.
71. Philippe Raxhon, “Le Lion de Waterloo, un monument controversé,” in
Watelet and Couvreur, eds., Waterloo, 155–56. See also Maarten Van Ginderachter
and Geneviève Warland, “How Regional, National, and Transnational History
Has (Not) Been Written in Belgium: Reflections within a European Perspective,”
in Matthias Middell and Lluis Roura, eds., Transnational Challenges to National
History Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 408.
70
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
72. As John R. Gillis has eloquently noted, the “new iconoclasm” of the 1960s
can even be said to have emerged in opposition to the authority of the schools,
universities and the shrines of the nation-state, “whose representations of itself
had become too impersonal, totalizing, and alienating.” John R. Gillis, “Memory
and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Gillis, ed., Commemorations:
The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),
19. See also Dieter Langewiesche, “Memory History and the Standardization of
History,” in Sylvia Paletschek, ed., Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th
Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices (Oxford: Berghahn, 2011) 121–39;
Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary
Popular Culture (London: Routledge 2009); Christoph Kühberger and Andreas
Pudlat, eds., Vergangenheitsbewirtschaftung: Public History zwischen Wirtschaft
und Wissenschaft (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2012); Wolfgang Hardtwig and
Alexander Schug, eds., History Sells! Angewandte Geschichte als Wissenschaft und
Markt (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2009).
73. Philip G. Dwyer, “Remembering and Forgetting in Contemporary France:
Napoleon, Slavery, and the French History Wars,” French Politics, Culture &
Society 26, no. 3 (2008): 110–22. See also Peter Hicks, “The Battle of Austerlitz,
Collective Amnesia, and the Non-Commemoration of Napoleon in France,” in
Hoock, ed., History, Commemoration, and National Preoccupation, 119–26.
74. Cf. J. A. R. Marriott’s popular England since Waterloo (London: Methuen,
1913) and George M. Trevelyan’s still more successful English Social History: A
Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans
Green, 1946), 553; N. Gash, “After Waterloo: British Society and the Legacy of
the Napoleonic Wars,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 28
(1978): 145–57; John Bew and Mungo Melvin, “Waterloo: Beyond the Battlefield,”
History Today 63, no. 9 (2013): n.p.; A. N. Wilson, “Why Are We Ashamed to
Celebrate Waterloo? Government Refuses to Mark Brutal Battle That Allowed Us
to Build the World’s Greatest Empire,” Daily Mail Online, July 4, 2011, http://
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2010960/Why-ashamed-celebrate-WaterlooGovernment-refuses-mark-brutal-battle-allowed-build-worlds-greatest-empire.
html. Note readers’ responses to Wilson’s blog and the manifesto of the Facebook
group “Celebrate the Bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo in 2015.” On British
Euroscepticism more generally, see also Chris Gifford, The Making of Eurosceptic
Britain: Identity and Economy in a Postimperial State (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
75. Ruki Sayid, “Winning the War Voted the Greatest Moment in British History,” Mirror Online, September 30, 2011, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/
uk-news/winning-the-war-voted-the-greatest-moment-156815.
71
Jasper Heinzen
76. Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London: Granta Books,
2004), 265. Cf. Jean Carbonnier, “Le Code civil,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux
de mémoire, vol. 2, La Nation (Paris, 1986), 293–315.
77. Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon, 264; Jean-Olivier Boudon, Les
Habits neufs de Napoléon (Paris 2009), 82–91. For more details, visit the websites of the Fondation Napoléon (http://www.napoleon.org/en/fondation/
index.asp), the Waterloo Committee (http://www.waterloocommittee.be/main.
php?zone=home&lang=en), the Association Franco-Européenne de Waterloo
(http://www.afew.be/) and the Fédération Européenne des Cités Napoléoniennes
(http://www.napoleoncities.eu/index.php?article_id=1&clang=0).
78. “Deutschlands Waterloo,” Der Tagesspiegel, June 7, 2003.
79. According to Google Maps, just two streets and one village are called
“Waterloo” and “Mont-St-Jean” (Napoleon’s choice of name for the battle)
respectively in France. The village is a medieval foundation, however, and has no
particular connection to Napoleon.
80. “Tüchtig verdient,” Der Spiegel, August 29, 1983, 141–45.
81. Jean-E. Humblet, “Introduction,” in Watelet and Couvreur, eds., Waterloo,
9.
82. Athindoros Chronis, “Coconstructing Heritage at the Gettysburg Storyscape,”
Annals of Tourism Research 32, no. 2 (2005), 386–406; Paul Connerton, How
Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5.
83. Cf. Stephen Gapps, “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment
and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History,” Rethinking
History 13, no. 3 (2009): 395–409; Iain McCalman and Paul A. Pickering, eds.,
Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (Basingstoke 2010);
Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment (London: Routledge 2011); Jerome de Groot, “Empathy and Enfranchisement: Popular Histories,” Rethinking History 10, no. 3 (2006), 391–413;
Vanessa Agnew, “What is Reenactment?” Criticism 46, no. 3 (2004): 327–39.
84. “Une reconstitution grandiose,” Le Soir, June 21, 2010.
85. Ibid.
86. Maryline Crivello, “La construction d’un espace culturel européen:
L’Évocation d’épopée napoléonienne,” in Robert Frank, Hartmut Kaelble, MarieFrançoise Lévy and Luisa Passerini, eds., Building a European Public Sphere: From
the 1950s to the Present / Un espace européen en construction: Des années 1950 à nos
jours (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), 157.
87. Müller, “On European Memory,” 30. Cf. Oriane Calligaro, “EU Action in
the Field of Heritage: A Contribution to the Discussion on the Role of Culture
in the European Integration Process,” in Marloes Beers and Jenny Raflik, eds.,
72
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
A Negotiated Truce
Cultures nationales et identité communautaire: Un défi pour l’Europe? (Brussels:
Peter Lang 2010), 94–97.
88. For details about the commemorations at Minden in 2009, visit the website
of “250 Schlacht bei Minden” at http://www.schlacht-bei-minden.com/index.
php (accessed September 16, 2012). On the contentious place of Culloden in
Scottish memory, see John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, “‘The Graves of the
Gallant Highlanders’: Memory, Interpretation and Narratives of Culloden,” History & Memory 19, no. 1 (2007): 5–38.
89. Boudon, Les habits neufs de Napoléon, 33–38, Dwyer, “Remembering and
Forgetting in Contemporary France,” 115–17.
90. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, “Introduction: Forecasting Memory,”
in Antze and Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory
(New York and London: Routledge, 1996), xviii.
91. “Duke of Wellington’s Battalion May Be Scrapped,” Telegraph, June 17,
2012. In Britain, responsibility for the coordination of the bicentenary commemorations now rests with “Waterloo 200,” a private charity that acts in consultation
with the Ministry of Defence. The organizing committee’s website can be found
at http://www.waterloo200.org.
92. Foreign Office spokesperson quoted in Joe Shute, “What Price the Battle
of Waterloo?” Telegraph, June 27, 2013. The ambivalent attitude of the Tories
towards Waterloo has even been reflected in public debates about the new school
curriculum introduced by Education Secretary Michael Gove. See Richard J.
Evans, “Michael Gove’s History Wars,” Guardian, July 13, 2013.
93. I sent enquiries to the national governments of Belgium, France, Germany
and the Netherlands about their arrangements for the Waterloo bicentenary, but
only received feedback from The Hague. Professor Ben Schoenmaker of the
Netherlands Institute for Military History was kind enough to disclose that the
Dutch government has appointed a special committee, whose task it will be to set
the bicentenary in relation to the emergence of the modern Dutch state after the
Napoleonic Wars (personal communication from Prof. Schoenmaker, July 16, 2012).
It is also worth mentioning that provincial politicians in Wallonia have joined the
private charity L’ASBL Bataille de Waterloo 1815 to assist in the coordination of
commemorative activities in 2015. “Dans les coulisses du bicentenaire,” http://
www.waterloo.be/vie-pratique/tourisme/dans-les-coulisses-du-bicentenaire-5113
(accessed June 18, 2013).
94. Consider, for example, the international First World War Partnership initiative led by the Imperial War Museum in London (http://www.1914.org/
centenary/) and the digitalization of 400,000 contemporary publications from
ten national libraries at Europeana Collections 1914–1918 under the European
73
Jasper Heinzen
Commission’s Competition and Innovation Framework Programme (http://
www.europeana-collections-1914-1918.eu/).
95. Editors’ introduction to Forrest, François and Hagemann, eds., War
Memories, 9; Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London:
Penguin, 2007), 670.
96. The term “commemorative density” is borrowed from Yael Zerubavel,
Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8.
97. Stuart Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting,
and Memory after Waterloo,” Representations, no. 69 (2000): 9–37.
98. Christof Dipper, “Geschichtspolitik im europäischen Vergleich: Eine Bilanz,”
Neue Politische Literatur 57, no. 1 (2012): 46.
99. Claus Leggewie, “Seven Circles of European Memory,” Eurozine, December
20, 2010. Cf. Gustavo Corni, “Umstrittene lieux de mémoire in Europa im 20.
Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 3 (2002): 93–100; J. G. A.
Pocock, “Some Europes in Their History,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of
Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 55–71; Hartmut Kaelble, Europäer über Europa: Die Entstehung
des europäischen Selbstverständnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a. M.:
Campus, 2001), 46–51; Paul Gifford and Tessa Hauswedell, eds., Europe and Its
Others: Essays on Interperceptions and Identity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).
100. For examples of Bonapartism in modern France, see Dominique de Villepin,
Les Cent-Jours ou l’esprit de sacrifice (Paris: Perrin 2001); Jean-Paul Kauffmann,
La Chambre noire de Longwood: Le Voyage à Sainte-Hélène (Paris: Éditions de la
Table Ronde, 1997). Boudon, Les Habits neufs de Napoléon, 115–18, 129–62.
For interesting examples of the countervailing globalization of memory, see Aleida
Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices
and Trajectories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
101. Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, “Introduction: A European Memory?”
in Pakier and Stråth, eds., A European Memory? 12.
102. Cf. Linas Eriksonas, “Toward the Genre of Popular National History:
Walter Scott after Waterloo,” in Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock,
eds., Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts (New
York: Berghahn, 2008), 117–32; Brooke S. Blades, “European Military Sites as
Ideological Landscapes,” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 3 (2003): 53.
74
History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
Related papers
Da banditi a patrioti. La Commissione regionale riconoscimento qualifica partigiani in Emilia-Romagna (1945-1947)
E-Review. Rivista degli istituti storici dell'Emilia-Romagna in rete, 2022
IMAGINARIOS DE LA NATURALEZA DESDE PARQUES URBANOS: RELEVANCIA DEL TRABAJO SOMÁTICO Y LA DIFERENCIACIÓN SOCIO ESPACIAL
Imagonautas, 2024
The Medieval Iberian Treasury in the Context of Muslim-Christian Interchange, Princeton, 19-20 May 2017
Pine invasions: climate predicts invasion success; something else predicts failure
Diversity and Distributions, 2011
Street Skateboarding and the Aesthetic Order of Public Spaces
The British Journal of Criminology, 2021
H2S and Siloxane D5 Removal from Anaerobic Digestion Gas by Adsorption
Journal of Chemical Engineering
Temperature dependence of the 1H chemical shift of tetramethylsilane in chloroform, methanol, and dimethylsulfoxide
Journal of Magnetic Resonance, 2005
Preliminary panoramic study of river calm muscle using neodymium:yttrium-aluminum-garnet (Nd: YAG) laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS)
Journal of physics, 2018
Process optimization of DBD plasma dry reforming of methane over Ni/La2O3MgAl2O4 using multiple response surface methodology
International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 2019
Stigmaeus hashtrudiensis , a new species of the genus Stigmaeus (Acari: Trombidiformes: Stigmaeidae) from Northwest Iran
persian journal of acarology, 2014
Installation of a Cosmic-Ray Trigger System to Commission the Belle II Experiment VerteX Detector with Cosmic Rays
Journal of Undergraduate Reports in Physics, 2021
Genome-wide association study of classical Hodgkin lymphoma and Epstein-Barr virus status-defined subgroups
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2012
Basal CD34(+) Cell Count Predicts Peripheral Blood Stem Cell Mobilization in Healthy Donors after Administration of Granulocyte Colony-Stimulating Factor: A Longitudinal, Prospective, Observational, Single-Center, Cohort Study
Biology of blood and marrow transplantation : journal of the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, 2017
Can tolerance of diverse groups improve the wellbeing of societies?
International Journal of Economics and Business Research, 2016
Clinical, biological presentation of six cases of functional hypothalamic amenorrhea
International Journal of Current Advanced Research