Memories Divided and Reconciled: World Wars I and II in France Today

FAIN: FV-50378-13

Texas A & M University, College Station (College Station, TX 77843-0001)
Richard J. Golsan (Project Director: March 2013 to December 2014)

A four-week seminar for sixteen school teachers on the commemoration of the two World Wars in France.

This seminar will be located in Paris and in Caen (Normandy) in order to examine the respective memories of World War One and World War Two in France in the summer of 2014, which will mark not only the 70th anniversaries of the D-Day Landing and the Liberation of Paris, but also the centennial of World War I. Studying recently-created museums and historiographical assessments as well as literary and cinematic representations of the two World Wars, we will focus in particular on the factors that have been making the memories of these events more closely interrelated. This present-day importance of memory will be particulary visible in new emphasis on its European and global dimensions in France, where the legacies of these wars are frequently invoked as one of the foundations for the construction of a durably peaceful and prosperous European Union.