The (French) art of remembering: Representations of World War I from the Contemporary to the Contemporaneous

At the centenary of World War I, questions of how to commemorate this global historical moment opened up issues of appropriate representation of the conflict and the memory thereof. The study of artefacts across World War I’s afterlife, with a particular focus on their use as representation of the conflict at the centenary, allows us to trace an evolution of approaches to the conflict itself as well as its developing memoryscape. This chapter will examine these developments in relation to the progression of history and memory in collective consciousness and individual memory-identity constructs, from a theoretical framework of cultural memory and verbo-visual culture. The chapter dedicates itself to the Francophone example.