The multiple meanings of a “national funeral”: Republican Funeral Honors in France from 1877 to 2008

By Pierre-Yves Baudot

Abstract Since the beginning of the Third Republic (1877) in France, granting the deceased a “national funeral” or “a funeral at the expense of the State” or “official funerals” has not referred to any precise juridical or ceremonial award. Consequently, the protocol officers in charge of organizing such ceremonies have to deal with uncertain categories. The urgency of having to bury the deceased within a few days may pose certain problems. Although those formulae pertaining to the funeral ritual are still in use, they remain quite labile and even have fallen into disuse. The persistent vagueness surrounding the organization of the ritual may be explained by the political stakes at play in each ceremony based on the biography of the deceased or the context of his or her death. However, two other hypotheses must also be envisaged: first of all, those formulae, the correct meaning of which was never clearly defined, allowed each institution involved in the organization of the ceremony (family, church, state, political parties) to individually partake in the chorus of praise for the deceased; secondly, the uncertain definition of each formula may broaden the mobilization of participants involved in the act of paying a final tribute to the deceased. Therefore, this ceremony is far from representing either a unanimous celebration of the virtues of the deceased or an occasion for collective communion.

Keywords; National funerals, Rituals, French Presidents, Republican Ceremonies, Social Values

Introduction

Although it was first announced in the Journal Officiel that “the national funeral of Marshal Canrobert is to be held on Sunday, February the third”, the specific phrasing was altered no later than the very next day. Without any particular change being brought to the organization of the ceremony, the text now stated that “the solemn funeral of Marshal Canrobert is to be held on Sunday, February the third”1. In fact, the expressions usually employed to proclaim the augustness of mourning do not actually refer to any specific form of ceremony at all. Consequently, how do such conditions enable us to investigate the variations encoded by the different categories of funeral honors? There are three ways of proceeding. One consists in drawing a list of the events that fall under the denomination of “national funeral”. However, by adopting such official taxonomies, one becomes totally reliant upon them and their political implications (Bloch 1997: 42). Indeed, in order to know if an event can be considered a “national funeral” or not, the presence or absence of specific material elements proves insufficient to distinguish an “official funeral” from a “funeral given at the expense of the State” or a “national funeral”. Therefore, the only solution consists in referring to the denomination – although it may sometimes vary – published in the Journal Officiel. Avner Ben Amos uses the criterion of a ceremony’s “modesty” to determine whether the ceremony is “national”, “solemn” or “given at the expense of the State” (Ben Amos 2000: 168). Yet, such a criterion is equally difficult to appreciate, notwithstanding that, in terms of protocol – and all the more so in the case of presidential protocol – modesty already is an important rhetorical and political device (Mariot 1999: 95-102).

A second possible method of enquiry consists in analyzing the aforementioned list based on official appellations, and defining the exact number of military men, politicians, artists, men of letters, women, and so forth, in order to determine certain properties of the current political regime (Prochasson 1999: 215-216). June Hargrove even goes to the extent of inferring from the

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composition of such a list the motivations of popular support for the Republican idea (Hargrove, 1986: 246). However, this process puts emphasis on the political meaning of funeral honors, instead of revealing the meaning of the different categories in themselves, the durability of which remains thereby unexplained.

The third way of proceeding consists in studying the categories as objects of our scrutiny. It no longer concerns drawing a list and determining which events were “state funerals” – according to the category defined by Avner Ben Amos – or even analyzing the list’s contents. Rather it consists in showing under what circumstances these categories may have played a part in the rendering of funeral honors. This can be done from two perspectives: one deals with highlighting the social construction of the value of an expression, namely that of “national funeral”. An expression that bears no direct reference to anything specific might very quickly fall into disuse losing all credibility and ending up by being used and abused by politicians. Considering the weakness of this formula, it is surprising to see this category still in use today. The other angle is the examination of the conditions of the durability of those formulae, despite, or rather because of their porosity. Is it not precisely due to an absolutely minimal capacity of aggregation that these expressions (“national funerals”, “official funerals”, “funerals at the expense of the State”) owe their strength, efficiency and success? (Boltanski 1982: 481). Observing why they fell into disuse at General de Gaulle’s funeral in 1970 could probably help us define the conditions thanks to which these expressions are used. But this porosity is not inherently efficient: it draws all of its efficiency from the tribute it strikes among distinct institutions (family, church, political parties, State).

Construction of the social value of an expression

A nationalised funeral and state-controlled protocol

In what respect may a funeral be termed “national”? The denomination is misleading: it would be easy to consider the homage as involving the “Nation” as a whole and therefore being a source of grandeur. The history of the notion of “national” funerals goes back to the funeral of Casimir-Périer senior, held in 1832, during which the denomination was used for the first time since the French Revolution. Its aim was to signify that the self-proclaimed grandeur of the deceased was neither of a royal nor imperial kind, but rather the token of a national order, a notion that had just been appropriated by the monarchical regime. The Nation as symbolic construction thus appeared as an order of greatness coexisting with other orders of political legitimacy. As a revolutionary construction resulting in the diverse modes of legitimization of the political order (Hobsbawm 1990), the “Nation” became the Republicans’ main reference, although it also stood in their way as far as their defending a certain conception of individual liberty was concerned. Thus they could never pay homage to an individual for the sole fact that he belonged to the Nation, but had to take into account the multiple identities the latter had bestowed upon himself, whether familial, religious or partisan (Déloye 1994), all of which his identity as a citizen was meant to overshadow within the public sphere. The death of a President of the Republic was not only that of a citizen; it was above all that of an individual whose freedom of choice at the moment of his death was acknowledged by the Republicans (Baudot 2007).

The fact of claiming the national order as a principle of greatness for the deceased concretely can be traced back to the process of bureaucratization of the State as well2. As is shown by E. Fureix, this history is also that of how public funerals came to be administered. Shrunk as it was by the Revolution of 1830, the King’s House was no longer able to bring back to life such an obsolete tradition. Since the 1830s, funerals were organized by the public administration (Ministry of the Interior, Fine-Arts and Public Works), as well as by non-state entities: the Paris funeral services and the clergy (Fureix 2009: 275). Those actors were

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confronted with a question the answer to which ceaselessly varied throughout the 20th century: how can the specific grandeur of the political fiction which the Nation represents ever be expressed?

The problem was of a double nature. The main idea was to create new ties of allegiance that, while steering clear of all religious connotations, could nonetheless strategically take up the forms and processes inspired by religion and establish a new type of national bond. The role of emotion in Republican ideology and practices is a crucial issue to which recent studies have brought a number of important answers (Ihl 1996; Ihl and Déloye 2000; Honohan and Jennings 2005; Wydra 2009; Cossart 2010). I have chosen to focus on another, less studied, aspect of the question: which specific form could a Republican ceremonial take – not a civil ceremonial, that is, but one respecting the freedom of individual beliefs no less than the specific definition of the role of the State leader under the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics? In order to comprehend the difficulty presented by the orchestration of these various constraints, it is useful to first focus our attention on the views of the people in charge of organizing the ceremonial.

A textless ritual

Announcing a “national funeral” means nothing in itself: this is what the Secretary of Education Mario Roustan publicly regretted while addressing the Senate in March 1932, in reply to an interjection from Senator François Labrousse, who felt disappointed by the organization of his friend Aristide Briand’s “national funeral”. The orator pointed out the absence of military honors, the insufficient number of speeches, a certain lack in the field of scenography – no singing, no music – and the meagre use that was made of monumental works of art. The answer the Secretary gave was puzzling: “Indeed, I wish I could draw a proper dividing line between national funerals and those performed at the expense of the State. This isn’t very convenient and I have to admit that, in spite of my thorough investigation methods, (…) among the texts I examined, I have not found any that might have established such a difference”3.

Such a statement is very surprising, and all the more so to researchers. Research that uses protocol and formalities as historical sources gathers its clues and information from the analysis of the actual differences between the way the text describes a specific type of planning for a given ceremony and the way the latter is effectively carried out. The text’s status may vary: it might be a “text” in a culturalistic sense, namely a narrative which researchers need to piece together again, to “read” and decipher according to the way the rite is sequenced. Such is the viewpoint defined by Clifford Geertz and subsequently adopted by Ralph E. Giesey, although with a few formal reservations, in the description of the funeral rites given to French kings (Geertz 1986; Giesey 1986). This point of reference may also be an official text: “The protocol is first and foremost a set of juridical texts regulating (…) the ritualized staging of political power” (Deloye 1997: 48). If one accepts this definition, then all research turns out to be pointless, as it was the case for Mario Roustan. There is no actual statutory text defining the different categories of funeral honors.

This absence is even acknowledged in the case of military honors allowed to a President of the Republic: according to Eugène Pierre, “there is no text that regulates either the characteristics or length of mourning when a President of the Republic dies” (Pierre 1902: 1296). From the end of the nineteenth century, article 310 of the decree bearing on “the regulations of October 4, 1891 concerning military service in fortresses and open cities”4 was cited to organize the funerals of the Heads of State, in a spirit of improvisation typical of first occurrences. But this article also “specified” the following: “The funeral honors which the President of the Republic is allowed are submitted to special arrangements determined by the government”. This uncertainty has never been cleared up. The reform of the 1989 Protocol changed nothing, no more so than its subsequent amendments in 19955 and 20046. In 1989, it was noted that “military flags and banners are flown at half-staff in mourning, and flags on all warships are flown at half-

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mast. Every army corps is invited to attend the funeral. Military honors are rendered by the entire garrison”, but “all other arrangements concerning the funeral of the President of the Republic, along with the length of mourning, are determined by the Government”7.

This absence of a text specifying the rules of the ceremony comes as much of a surprise to researchers as it did to the Secretary and his audience. Mario Roustan explained to his audience that nobody really knew the exact meaning of the posthumous distinctions voted by the Nation’s representatives. Two questions now arise: why was it a problem for this categorization to seem ineffective? And why was the Secretary forced into such a confession? I shall examine each in turn.

An ineffective kind of categorization

It is perfectly conceivable that the proclamation of national honors should be purely “performative” (Austin 1962). It would then consist in a “positive sanction” among others, an award, according to Erving Goffman, for an “exemplary conformity” to the principles that regulate a given social order: “Their meaning isn’t supposed to lie within an intrinsic and material value, but in what they proclaim as to the actor’s moral status” (Goffman 1973: 101). In such a case, funeral honors become similar to any of the medals and ribbons, in the handing out of which the State has, much to its own benefit, become a specialist – namely an emulation-based government technique, appearing as a reversed image of disciplinary technologies (Caille 1997; Ihl 2002; Dumons & Pollet 2009). As a device of public management, they represent a means of gathering support, negotiating allegiances, building up a sense of hierarchy and virtue within the administration (Ihl 2000). This can be traced back to the notion of Republican citizenship, which recalls a “familiar figure” – that of the “awarded citizen” (Ihl 2004: 16), who is also the “ideal citizen” (Dumons & Pollet 1995). It also recalls the contradictions which the government, through the practice of “primal emulation” (Caille 2000: 87), brought about with regard to the egalitarian ideals supposedly animating and defining the French political regime. Funeral honors may thus be considered as an edification process, with an indispensable educational dimension allowing the Republic to take root in France before World War I. This solemn public declaration may perfectly well prove to be self-sufficient: in such a case, the procedure by which a proclamation stating the universal grandeur of one individual or another is successfully adopted is the only thing that matters.

Nevertheless, there remains the problem of the numerous attempts at establishing an automatic link between the proclamation of grandeur and the ceremony’s formal aspects, and that of getting this link inscribed within the law. The impossible institution of “positive sanction” reveals the context in which the organizers of the ceremony operate, halfway between taking personal requests into account and maintaining political control over these events.

One of the diverse material arrangements devised to make the announcement of a national funeral official is Pantheonisation. The death of Victor Hugo (1885) was an opportunity for certain Republicans to bring about yet another disaffection regarding the Pantheon (Ben Amos, 1984). The decree issued on this occasion was based upon that of 1830, which had already restored the building’s “original and legal vocation”. The second article specified that the burial of the remains of great men at the Pantheon “only applied to citizens who had been given a national funeral by virtue of law”. Finally, it stipulated that “a decree issued by the President of the Republic would order their mortal remains to be transferred to the Pantheon”8. It is thus by taking into account the laws which accorded “national funerals” to Victor Hugo and Sadi Carnot that the President of the Republic issues the decrees authorizing a transfer to the Pantheon9. This procedure involves both the executive and legislative powers. Pantheonisation is ordered by decree, “by fiat”, but, as an expression of “the People’s will” (Chanet 1998: 269), it was authorised, in 1885, only by decision of the national representation. The only five people buried

at the Panthéon immediately after their death (Victor Hugo, Sadi Carnot, Sophie and Marcellin

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Berthelot in 1907, Paul Painlevé in 1933) had been granted “national funerals”. We should not hastily conclude that the declaration of national funerals was a necessary condition to be buried at the Panthéon. As early as 1889, none of the four personalities who were “Pantheonized” for the Centennial of the French Revolution – Marceau, La Tour d’Auvergne, Lazare Carnot (three revolutionaries) and Baudin10 – were accorded “national funerals”. The case of Ernest Renan – who was denied a “national funeral” – was used to justify several aborted reappraisal attempts – in 1892, 1902 and 1923 – of the Pantheonization process. Léon Bourgeois suggested that, for every citizen who was denied a “national funeral”, “a special law”11 might decide his or her Pantheonisation. Conversely, both Emile Zola and Jean Jaurès – in 1908 and 1924, respectively – were granted the honors of the Pantheon upon government decision, although neither of them had been given any “national funeral” (Ben Amos, 1990; Condette 2000). Indeed, the decision decision to bury a dead person at the Panthéon heavily relies upon certain political imperatives.

Two main obstacles block the way for the institutionalisation of impersonal rules regarding funeral honors: one is the respect of personal requests, death being a question pertaining to the private sphere of the individual (Baudot 2007); the other is the preservation of political control over the virtues that are being celebrated. Thus is delineated the frame within which the death and funeral of a person may be made public without running the risk of being discredited – a person whose greatness certain institutions, whether State, Church or family, have sought to underscore. Goffman would describe this as the “modelization” of a primary event (Goffman 1991: 67). Because those diverse institutions have to cooperate and find some common ground of negotiation, depoliticizing the implications of the event makes their collaboration possible. However, it also obliges them to limit the range of their behaviour within the event so as to avoid any hostility coming from the rival institutions. Any politicization of the event is therefore deemed indecent: because it threatens the public dimension of the tribute and contests the acknowledged greatness of the deceased, it might constitute a deliberate personal attack on the latter, and might lead to, above all, the modification of the frame within which those different institutions may cooperate.

Acting with uncertain categories

Such a framing of the public funeral event causes a problem for the organizers, because it obliges them to personalize the form of the ceremony without having the possibility of resorting to a tradition. In its quest for “precedents”, the Beaux-Arts administration cannot but observe the absence of a codification of practices. The specific organisation of the Protocol service and the widespread habit of resorting to archives nonetheless provide emergency solutions to the lack of savoir-faire (Baudot 2008), along with periodic attempts at formalisation.12

Minister of Beaux-Arts Mario Roustan’s confession before the Senate in 1932, mentioned earlier, gave birth, in his administration, to an attempt at defining a criterion that would determine the form of the ceremony in accordance with its denomination. Mario Roustan wished to introduce “sufficient flexibility to these rules so that, in the future, it would be easier to reconcile the families’ requests, those of the deceased and those of the people as well, who are associated with these public occurrences, and confer upon them (…) their solemnity and magnificence”13. Mario Roustan’s speech defining such funeral categories was pronounced while an important change in personnel was taking place in the Beaux-Arts administration. Paul Léon, who was the Director since 1919, was replaced by Emile Bollaert in 1933 (Genet-Delacroix 1992: 181). The historical context was also marked by the setback occasioned by Paul Doumer’s funeral, celebrated on May 12, 1932. It was originally meant to bear resemblance to the glorious event of Sadi Carnot’s funeral in 1894, but instead only succeeded in gathering the political – right wing – allies of the deceased. All of this led the Beaux-Arts administration to consider the renewal of ceremonial forms. On June 8, 1933, the Secretary of Education sent a note to the director of the Beaux-Arts, which specified the definition of those different categories. “Official

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funerals” supposed a minimum level of interference from the State institution, a level regarding which gradual degrees of investment on the part of the State could be distinguished: “Regulations should from now on bear reference to all three categories: official funerals, national funerals, and funerals given at the expense of the State – considering that official funerals imply taking charge of order, inviting the Church, sending invitations to all State officials, taking care of speeches and government representation”.

Those ministerial instructions gave way to a second note, composed after Paul Doumer’s funeral of May 12, 1932, according to which the presence of the President of the Republic at a funeral became the criterion distinguishing a “national funeral” from a “funeral given at the expense of the State”: quite a surprising criterion indeed, if one considers that a tacit rule – always recalled but seldom applied – used to forbid Presidents of the Republic from attending funerals (Baudot 2008). From this criterion derived different modes of participation: State officials were “summoned” to “national” funerals, whereas they were only “invited” when the funerals were “given at the expense of the State”. This distinction also induced certain differences concerning the modes of financing: “In the event that the government shouldn’t agree upon paying for the ceremony, it seems we could get the family to cover the expenses without changing anything in the ceremonial of the funeral, which would nevertheless be termed “official”14.

However, the existence of this circular was not enough to settle once and for all the proceedings of a funeral ceremony. As early as 1937, the intended arrangements were no longer applied. Because he was held back in Paris by the ministerial crisis which led to the resignation of the Blum cabinet, the President of the Republic Albert Lebrun could not attend the funeral of former President Gaston Doumergue – a funeral termed “national” according to the law of June 21, 1937. This absence didn’t lead the organizers to change the ceremony’s appellation for all that. After World War II, on April 4, 1950, President Vincent Auriol delivered a funeral oration for his friend Léon Blum, even though the funeral was termed “solemn”. On the other hand, René Coty (President of the Republic from 1954 to 1959) did not personally attend Irène Joliot-Curie’s (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1935, former French minister) funeral on March 21, 1956, even though it was declared “national”. The fact of inscribing a classification principle within a text is not in itself sufficient to give categories a permanent meaning, so long as political actors have not been forced into subordinating their practices to this principle, or have not had the possibility of appreciating its resources (Monclaire 1992) and integrating it into their plans and calculations as a valid parameter.

As a consequence, the different categories denominating funeral honors do not refer to anything specific: they do not imply the automatic display of a predictable and repeatable codified ceremonial. This causes great difficulties for the people in charge of organizing those ceremonies when, with very short notice – two days or less – they have to face emergency situations and make decisions. This equally causes a problem for researchers, thereby confronted with the durability of those insignificant and counter-productive appellations, as far as administrative efficiency is concerned.

A determining indetermination

I posit that those various formulae of funeral honors do not allow us to foresee the specific organisation of the ceremonies they denominate. On the contrary, they first of all serve the purpose of casting a veil of uncertainty over the type of gratifications effectively allowed to the deceased. But this reasoning causes the durability of those formulae to depend upon the existence of political interests which would tolerate them whatever the period of time, and whoever the actors in question may be. In order to understand what the uncertainty of those expressions implies, those formulas need to be replaced within the social configurations that uphold them.

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The possibility of a misinterpretation

Promoting uncertainties may prove particularly useful when the deceased was someone who was found to be embarrassing. This was the case when Marshal Canrobert died; as it was at the death of Jules Grévy. Indeed, the latter was at once the first Republican President of the Third

Republic – he initiated a practice that his name has ever since recalled Prelot 1961: 453 – and the man who, in 1849, submitted an amendment targeted at abolishing the Presidency. He may equally be described as an 1848 Republican, a lawyer and a defender of public liberties under the July Monarchy and the Empire; but he also was the President who was forced into resignation by the antics of his son-in-law. He was a Freemason President as well, a resolute freethinker, buried by the Church at his widow’s request and under pressure from the clergy. Edmond Magnier, in L’Evénement, well expressed the general embarrassment, perceptible in the entire Republican press: “Why didn’t Mr. Grévy die five years earlier? France would have given him a funeral worthy of George Washington.”15

Consequently, the deliberate confusion concerning the official denomination of the funeral ceremony in the press is not really surprising. In its account of the decision taken during a cabinet meeting, Le Jour mentioned a “national funeral”16, whereas La Cocarde, relating news of the same event, mentioned “a funeral given at the expense of the State” in an article entitled… “A national funeral”17. This amounts to considering that there was no difference in degree between the different ceremonies, so long as they were paid for by the State. As to the decree published in the Journal Officiel, it referred to a “funeral given at the expense of the State”18. Could the journalist from Le Jour simply have made a mistake? Imputing this to a mistake is not totally satisfactory because it would suppose that everyone knew precisely what was being talked about. As we have just showed, these formulae do not designate any specific ritual. If indeed there was a mistake, it was very widely shared, including by those who had the task of organizing the ceremony. Henri Ducos, the Prefect of Jura appointed by the Home Secretary for setting up the funeral, drafted a proclamation and had it put up all around Mont-sous-Vaudrey, the former President’s hometown, inviting its inhabitants to calmly attend the “national funeral”19. As a result of the haziness of these categories, important modifications could be brought to the ceremony’s organization, however without giving the impression of minimising the funeral honors bestowed upon the deceased. Because they were not further defined, the categories could be used to apply the same denomination to events having formally very little in common with one another. The durability of those categories was secured by this vagueness. The many different practices the categories rendered possible all at once increased the range of their usefulness by making them more flexible. Denominations gained and developed a kind of authority without submitting the actors who used them to any set of prescriptions and obligations. Thus was resolved the contradiction between the necessary political control over the forms of the tribute and the apparent depoliticization of the ceremony.

The plurivocal definitions of the frame

The fact of respecting the frame defining a funeral event – which is compulsory for the different actors invested in the organisation and celebration of a public funeral ceremony – does not arise from the spontaneous submission to social conventions such as “respect for the dead”, but from a far stronger type of authority.

In the case of an event such as the death of a “Great Man”, several institutions may have a legal claim to the ceremony’s organisation, starting with the deceased himself – through his last will expressed in conventional forms – or his family, the Clergy, the State, his political party, etc. But none of them can really act all by themselves. The correct organization of the event requires the collaboration of each and every one of them.

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This interdependence is well illustrated by the type of relations that are established between the family of the deceased and the State, at the time of the “Great Man’s” death. As only the family can see to it that the public celebration is performed according to the requests of the deceased, it must inevitably take part in the decision-making. The two committees that got together to organize the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, and that of Carnot in 1894, both included representatives appointed by the families: Eugène Vacquerie, for Hugo; and Colonel Chamoin, for Carnot. Within those commissions, the family’s representatives had the task of defending the family’s interests – by pleading for a rapid burial of the deceased, for instance, or choosing the place of burial. They also certified the legitimacy of the choices made: “Colonel Chamoin reports that Mrs Carnot wishes the government to choose freely any measure of organisation it deems fit”20. There was no question of bypassing the family’s opposition. Despite the Republicans’ pleas and the letters of Victor Hugo, Léon Gambetta’s father always refused the permanent burial of his son in Paris (Ben Amos 2000: 188-196).

This interdependence between the different institutions brought together in the organization and celebration of the ceremony compels them to adjust their positions in order to make them fit the frame of the event. The institutions hark back to different traditions, partially independent of one another. Hence they must orchestrate the encounter of several different versions of a single event – a funeral ceremony – and of a single human being, whose biography may be invested in several different ways. Different institutional temporalities converge in the event, and thus contribute to forging the latter. Regarding the face to face interactions, Erving Goffman suggests that individuals have two main “figurative practices” at their disposal whenever they intend to “control themselves and one another” during an interaction: “avoidance” and “reparation” (Goffman 1974: 17). The lability of the expressions used to define the event may then constitute one of the elements that determine the possibility of this “avoidance”. “The fact of holding on to a single definition of the situation”, itself a “decisive factor” of any “structure of interaction” (Goffman 1973: 240), then depends on the frame that defines the situation and its capacity of bearing with plurivocal significations or investments. This allows the emergence, between the institutions involved, of an agreement “with a relatively fragile cognitive basis” (Contamin 2005), a basis upon which both the participation and cooperation of each and every one of them are founded. This guarantees that certain frames of interpretation will be observed in the organization of the event. These frames are in that turn redefined by the event itself.

One could very well draw the list of all the circumstances displaying “avoidance” and “reparation” postures on an institutional level. But the best way of proving the validity of this hypothesis is by analysing a situation where avoidance was made impossible: General de Gaulle’s funeral in 1970, during which traditional categories were suppressed and replaced by others that were equally indeterminate. Having written in his will that he refused to be given a “national funeral”, General de Gaulle thus limited – without altogether abolishing them – the possibilities of associating the majesty of the State with a private funeral. Indeed he was not the first President of the Republic who refused such an honor: the family of Casimir-Périer, in 1907; of Deschanel, in 1922; and of Emile Loubet in 1929 had also informed the government that the deceased did not wish to have any such funeral. Government representatives had nonetheless attended all three ceremonies. An exceptional kind of honor had even been granted Paul Deschanel: the military troops were allowed to escort him in his coffin all the way to the cemetery’s gates, which meant going against prevailing regulations21. When General de Gaulle died, such a negotiation would have been equally possible, but the political rivalries between the various self-proclaimed followers of the deceased – between “historical Gaullists” and “political Gaullists” (Collovald 1999: 123) – prevented the formalisation of any agreement (Mauriac 1972: 162-183; Lefranc 1989: 382-393; Blanc 1990: 13-36; Roussel 1994: 411-416). However, neither one side nor the other could totally set the competition aside. The General’s friends and relatives scheduled the ceremony for 3 p.m. at Colombey, which deliberately prevented the guests from

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also attending the ceremony in Paris at 11 a.m. This amounted to a clear-cut distinction between the two social spaces, and confirmed the hypothesis according to which funeral ceremonies represent “an opportunity of getting together and further strengthening the network of family ties, while doing away with declining relationships” (Chamboredon 1976: 675). As to the presidential team, intent as they were upon following in General de Gaulle’s political footsteps, they could not possibly go around the General’s last requests. Consequently, his body was not present during the ceremony celebrated at Notre-Dame. This ceremonial tribute was termed “national mourning”22, an expression that was used again at the deaths of Georges Pompidou23 and François Mitterrand24, as reference, on both occasions, to the refusal which the deceased President had expressed in his will: “He informed his follower, Jacques Chirac, that he did not want to be given any national funeral”25.

The expression of “national mourning” is now used as opposed to that of “national funeral”. “National mourning, not national funeral”, points out Christine Clerc in Le Figaro, even though the distinction is not that clear-cut, being the object as it is of many confusions, so uncertain is the formal distinction upon which it is based26. Consequently, this new category cannot erase the memory of older classifications, no more than it can succeed in signifying material differences.

The decree of October 4, 1891 pertaining to “regulations regarding military service in fortresses and open cities” indicates specific mourning preparations for servicemen and civil servants. But it specifies various degrees of investment on the part of the State. In 1970, the instructions given by the Home Secretary announced that “all administrations, schools and auditoriums will be closed” on November 12, the day of the funeral27. When Georges Pompidou died, the instructions issued by Home Secretary Jacques Chirac were just as restrictive: ministries, administrations and schools were to be closed, and the public services and hospitals were considered on holiday or guard duty. All sporting and cultural events, all celebrations and balls scheduled for Saturday April 6 were cancelled and museums were closed28. But in 1996, at the death of François Mitterrand, the measures taken by the Alain Juppé government were clearly less drastic: public places were not closed, nobody was given time off, and there was “no interruption of activities in schools, administrations or during shows, in accordance with François Mitterrand’s wishes”29. Only a “moment of silence” was required on the part of civil servants30.

Conclusion: The forging of a formula

The fall into disuse of the category of “national funeral” put an end to one type of agreement practiced between the diverse institutions in charge of organizing a funeral – family, Church, State, political party – and brought about its replacement by another form of arrangement, which was not really more accurate in defining the specific degree of investment to which those institutions were entitled, or concerning the formal aspects of the ceremony the new arrangement has produced. This new kind of agreement nevertheless offered the advantage of reducing the constraints of cooperation exerted upon the various parties involved. As General de Gaulle’s funeral implicitly showed, it is necessary to harmonize the various positions held by the different institutions involved for the mortal remains of the deceased to be present during the several ceremonies, which can thus follow one another coherently: the religious ceremony preceding or succeeding a tribute from the State, both anticipating the burial itself, performed with limited publicity. On the other hand, during a “national mourning” ceremony, the division of time is very different: the various kinds of tribute – whether public, private, religious, political or partisan – take place in different locations. In the case of François Mitterrand’s funeral in 1996, the simultaneous sequence of events – directly broadcast on television – of both the private funeral at Jarnac and official tribute at Notre-Dame, might have given way to certain commentaries concerning the confusion of roles and personalization of power (Hervieu-Léger 1999). On the contrary, the analysis of institutional positionings leads us to view this ceremony

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as the result of a minimal effort of adjustment between the different institutions involved and thus highlights the growing autonomy of those institutions vis à vis one another. The expressions bestowing national honors refer to differentiated modalities of agreement between the institutions.

Within this configuration, the hazier an expression is the more efficient it becomes politically. It allows divergent and incompatible positions to strike a common chord while the event lasts, thus enabling its enactment. The parties involved hence acknowledge each other in the event, not because it effectively constitutes a significant whole – integrative and/or exclusive (Isambert 1982: 126-140; Ozouf 1989: 56-57; Ben Amos 2000: 29) – but rather because it juxtaposes more or less coherent elements. The fact of considering the ceremony as a globally significant text (Geertz 1986) – the reception of which is potentially polysemous (Hall 1994) – amounts to overlooking the political conditions that render such a juxtaposition possible, and prevents one from seeing that the event only exists thanks to the smoothness of those expressions that bring people together, itself a necessary condition for the mobilisation of differentiated social spaces.

Thus these ceremonies are far from gathering a community around their founding values, generating and strengthening social ties, as the Durkheimian perspective (Mariot 2001) would have it: on the contrary, what enables them to take place is the uncertain definition of what is going on during the event, and so of the adequate degree of investment necessary to join the latter. A ceremony is not held together by the collective dimension of the feelings that are being expressed as it proceeds, but precisely by the fact that those feelings may be different without the ceremony’s procedure being jeopardized. Researchers should not try to reconstitute the founding principles of this order, hidden in a given ceremony, nor the collective identity enacted in such a ceremony – which is nothing but a juxtaposition of social groups brought together by the same uncertainty – nor even the effect of this identity upon individual perceptions, given the fact that there are as many ceremonies as there are institutions involved in the event. What must be brought to light are the practical conditions allowing the participants to attend an event unanimously acknowledged as a “funeral” celebrating the “greatness” and “dignity” of a human being, although everyone in attendance has his own particular way of defining those terms; or, to put it differently, what allows these ceremonies to appear as a moment of collective effervescence.

1 Journal Officiel de la République Française, February 2, 1895: 633; February 3, 1895: 650. 2 Concerning the link between bureaucratization of the State and the nationalisation of consciences: Weber, 1976 3 Journal Officiel. Débats parlementaires. Sénat, March 19, 1932: 392-393. 4 Decree of April 10, 1891, Bulletin des Lois, July-september 1891, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1892: 669-797. 5 Decree 95-1037 of September 21, 1995, Journal Officiel, September 22, 1995: 13887. 6 Decree 2004-1101 of October 15, 2004, Journal Officiel, October 20, 2004: 17748. 7 Decree 89-655 of September 13, 1989, Journal Officiel, September 15, 1989: 11648-11653. 8 Journal Officiel. Lois et décrets, May 27, 1885: 2765 9 Journal Officiel. Lois et décrets, May 27, 1885: 2766; Journal Officiel. Lois et décrets, June, 30, 1894: 2978. 10 Baudin is a republican MP killed in 1852 for having protested against Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s Coup d’Etat and thus become a martyr 11 Journal Officiel. Débats parlementaires, Chambre des députés, October 23, 1892: 3258.

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