Contenu du sommaire : Cimetières et politique

Public management of religious quarters of cemeteries in Paris: the case of Islam (1857-1957)This article analyzes how Muslims succeeded in obtaining specific religious quarters in the municipal cemeteries of Paris, in conformity with the ritual requirements of their faith and in accordance with the demographic evolution of their religious group. It traces the Parisian history of denominational quarters in publicly-owned cemeteries from the Muslim quarter in the Père-Lachaise (1857) to the Muslim cemetery of Bobigny (1937) and the Muslim divisions of the extra-muros Parisian cemetery of Thiais, the most recent and largest of all funeral grounds in the French capital. Juliette Nunez shows in particular the main obstacles faced by Parisian Muslims to bury their dead according to their own rites, in the context of a secular State and of the specific challenges of the management of urban cemeteries in the 20th century.

The moral economy of death in the 19th century. A comparative study of France and England
This article examines how, in the nineteenth century, the issue of burials became, in France as in England, the subject of a political discussion which prompts a major transformation in the economy of death. First, this study describes its emergence as a “public concern”, leading to the invention of new institutional forms concerning funerals and cemeteries. Closely attentive to the debate's arguments and principles of legitimacy, the analysis takes into account the way in which this institutional construction is moved in both countries by similar considerations: the question of the relationship between public powers and the Churches in the treatment of death, the invention of political and social systems to engage with the social issue of poverty, the construction of the legitimacy of private industry as a committed actor in the funeral economy. The article shows that the distance between French and English conceptions, which could hastily be reduced to a feature of the binary polarisation of public monopoly and free market, in fact reveals a much subtler differentiation, reflecting distinctive forms of co-regulation between public authorities, Churches, entrepreneurs and civil society in the implementation of a moral economy around funerals.

Representations of martyrs in village cemeteries in South Lebanon
This paper focuses on the political uses of the “martyrs” group in present-day Lebanon. It is based on a semiotic analysis of cemeteries of the Shiite South of the country. Cemeteries as forming “lieux de mémoire” are regarded, in this paper, as a privileged site of observation to understand the processes of group construction. The article shows the work of homogenization orchestrated by political parties in permanent parallel with local forms of resistance.

In the bosom of lay saints
This paper is a comparative analysis of militants' graves that were congregated alongside the Communards'Wall at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument in Waldheim Cemetery, Chicago and Karl Marx's tomb in Highgate Cemetery, London. Those constructions were built throughout the century on the initiative of individual militants as well as left-wing political organizations. They express their common desire to transcend death. Being buried close to the gaves of martyrs and heroes of labour movements is a way to take part in a past sanctified by their blood, as well as in a common march towards a better future. For freethinkers of all creeds, History on the move thus asserted itself as a kind of transcendence and a new form of eternity.

The Friedrichsfelde cemetery in Berlin: the construction of a socialist space (from the 1880's to the 1970's)The construction of the Friedrichsfelde cemetery, which was decided in 1879, was part of a local policy of urban development: the cemetery was designed both as a leisure park and as a place of burial for all categories of citizens. It therefore welcomed a vast number of underprivileged citizens and was rapidly assimilated to a “cemetery for the poor”. The funeral of Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1900 and the following funerals of members of the Spartacist group in 1919 earned it the qualification of “socialist cemetery”. In spite of this lasting stamping, this place has been crystallizing numerous customs, which have taken different forms depending on the space-time scale: funeral ceremonies and political commemorations, popular funerals and rituals organized by the parties' machinery. Based upon the analysis of these collective practices, which succeeded one another in Friedrichsfelde, this article intends to decode the phenomena behind the construction of a space as a vector of memory.

A century of German political history: commemorating Liebknecht and Luxemburg at the Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde in BerlinRosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's funerals in 1919 were the starting point of a long series of commemorative mobilisations which cross different German historical and political periods. This commemoration, which is centered around the Friedrichsfelde cemetery, has difficulties existing during the Weimarer Republic ; it is then narrowed to individual and isolated actions during the Third Reich, and totally appropriated by the GDR government, before citizens reclaim it for themselves after the unification of Germany. This annual event both shows a great regularity in terms of date and location of the ceremony, and in the choice of Liebknecht and Luxemburg (as well as Lenin) as key actors in the action.

The Great War military cemeteries (1914-1940)The Great War prompted the construction of military cemeteries which anyone immediately identifies as such. These cemeteries were very new, for giving privates individual graves resulted from the triumph of democratic principles. However, British, American, French, Italian and German cemeteries were built according to different patterns. Several reasons explain these differences. First, unidentified remains did not always share a common fate nor did naming the missing have the same importance everywhere. Secondly, the authorities responsible for the building of cemeteries, and the way in which they built them differed widely. But above all the architectural, political and ideological projects which inspired the building of these cemeteries gave each of them a distinct national character.

« Argentine soldier known unto God »: the Darwin cemetery and the conflictual accounts of the Falklands WarAt the end of the Falklands War (April-June of 1982), the British Authorities, when they recovered sovereignty on the Southern Atlantic Islands, counted 237 bodies of Argentinian fighters which were gathered in a little cemetery. The cemetery was totally renovated in the 2000s under the impulse of an association of families of war dead. The new cemetery stands as a heroic record of the war which adopts a certain conception of the Argentinian nation, regarded as homogeneous and Catholic. However this record is contested, amongst others, by veterans who suggest that the internal fractures of the Argentinian society, at the time under the bloodiest military dictatorship of its history, were translated into the battlefield. Through the history of the cemetery, the article shows on the one hand the strategic role of the war record in the attempted rehabilitation of the Argentinian military. On the other hand it investigates the conditions in which the cemetery was reconstructed, showing how the organization that carried it out adapted itself to the withdrawal of State from monumental projects during the 1990s. Finally the text considers the protest version of the war record trying to find its place in the national memory of the event.