The Bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 heralded the series of commemorations by which late twentieth-century France now appears to have been increasingly characterized. In the 1990s, literature, cinema and intellectual debate all began to reflect an increasing focus on memory, a tendency also apparent in popular culture and public life. The historian Pierre Nora, inaugurating in 1984 Les Lieux de mémoire, a monumental collection of essays on key ‘sites’ of the French historical experience understood as having had an impact on national self-identity, presented the lack of shared post-war national memory as a rationale for alternative manifestations of the past. By the time his seventh and final volume appeared in 1992, Nora would comment with surprise on how this situation had changed radically, as France entered a comprehensive ‘ère de la commémoration’ [era of commemoration] (Nora, 1997, III: 4687–719) in which considerations of history were eclipsed by a near-obsession with memory (Revel, 2000).

In reflecting such an engagement with the past, the celebrations of 1989 provided an opportunity for national introspection at a time when France was facing a series of new challenges: a progressively expanding Europe; the erosion of the country's influence as a world power, and the associated steady decline of French as a global language; the increasing acknowledgement within France itself of a range of minority groups, who were seen to challenge the universalist assumptions of a supposedly all-inclusive French republican ideology.