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last set of chapters to intimate notions of cooperation and resolution between Indianand non-Indian actors. This facet of his rhetorical structure—positioning his narrativeto provide present-day policy suggestions—is not as compelling as the more basic pointof illustrating a constant element of dispossession in the history of the National Parks.

On the whole, Spence’s weakness, if there is one, is his unbalanced presentation ofthe three cases. He might have promised more than he delivered in his introduction—stating that he could weave together the threads of politics, society, ethics, and economicsin all cases—but at least he started down that road, showing that the geography of theparkland in the West entailed and still entails social and cultural dimensions indiscerniblefrom the moral judgements the US government imposed on native Indian tribes. Withthe case of the Glacier Blackfeet, Spence hit his stride and offered a full perspective onnot just how Indians and non-Indians defined the land differently, but on how moralityand justice were as variously construed as usufruct rights. And in any case, theweaknesses I pointed out were minimal and easily trumped by his enjoyable andcompelling writing style. Mark Spence offers a fine example of contemporary scholarship,telling an interesting story, making a clear point, and doing so in under 150 pages oftext.

B R. C

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W K, Les Monuments aux Morts Mosellans de 1870 a nos jours (Metz: EditionsSerpenoise, 1999. Pp. 172. 160 Francs paperback); D J. S, The Constructionof Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 414.£28.50 hardback).

Issues of identity, representation, meaning and memory figure large in the ‘new’ historicalgeography on both sides of the Channel and the Atlantic. Such matters energize twocomplementary books, which appeared within a few months of each other. Both focuson the creation of war memorials in France and incorporate detailed site surveys andnumerous photographs, as well as important archival work. The Construction of Memoryappears from a major American university press, is spaciously designed and is printedon rich paper. It adopts a conceptually ambitious approach to memorialization in thenation as a whole and offers detailed scrutiny of four departements (Loir-et-Cher,Meuse, Morbihan, Var). Les Monuments aux Morts is the product of a local publisherin north-eastern France, is more cramped in appearance, and focuses on a singledepartement. Arguably, it tackles a more challenging theme which is explored over awider time span, since this part of northern Lorraine passed into German hands forhalf a century before the Great War and again for the duration of World War II.Notions of nationhood, friend and foes, loyalty, treachery and collaboration were evenmore contested notions in the Moselle (and also in neighbouring Alsace) than in otherparts of the Hexagon. Interestingly, neither Kidd nor Sherman refers to the other’sprevious articles and chapters on this theme.

In his introductory pages, Sherman offers a valuable discussion of notions of‘memory’, ranging from individual human experience (recalled with varying degrees ofaccuracy through the passage of time) to collective representation as an outcome ofsocial and political processes fuelled by distinctive objectives and ambitions. He beginsby exploring issues of experience and memory through a close reading of contemporarynovels, battlefield tourist guides (Michelin, Hachette) and newsstand magazines, notably

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L’Illustration. Widows and orphans in their bereavement needed to identify final resting-places and attach names to bodies. Bishops supported national projects to constructgreat ossuaries at Douaumont and Notre-Dame de Lorette to house fragments ofbodies, which could not be reassembled, named or given a decent individual burial.Schoolboys from Tourcoing visited the killing fields of Verdun to assist in recoveringhuman remains! Local committees throughout France raised funds for various charitableends, often associated with memorialization as well as relief for the bereaved. A 1915poster from Orne in north-western France which shows a peasant woman in traditionaldress and clogs leading her soldier husband, blinded in the war, is particularly meaningful;this is all the more so since the woman’s begging bowl is for charitable works not forfamily survival. Once some money was raised, local mayors and towns councils countedtheir francs and approached artists to design fitting memorials or, if funds were tight,simply ordered a mass-produced model (usually a standing soldier) from a catalogue.Over 36 000 communes erected some kind of memorial to the fallen, so the visualoutcomes were varied. Individual standing stones, solitary soldiers and allegoricalfigures proved to be popular. For me, Paul Landowski’s design, entitled Les fantomes(1923) is particularly striking, with its seven military types and one unclothed maleevoking the cruel waste of war. Memorials were placed in various locations, notablyclose to cemeteries, outside churches, adjacent to town halls, or in public squares orother communal spaces. Religion and Republican values were sometimes reconciledthrough design, location and inauguration, but in many instances these moral issuespolarized around either Church or State. This beautifully illustrated work, enrichedwith engravings, reproductions of posters from the Hoover Institution Archives andnumerous photographs from the author’s own camera, concludes with a critique ofwar museums, contrasting the object-crammed Memorial de Verdun (which dates fromthe 1960s but has a much older feel) with the spacious, sanitised display space of theHistorial at Peronne (in the Somme) opened in the 1990s. There are 72 pages offootnotes but not a single map.

William Kidd focuses sharply on the Moselle region, with its painful complexities ofannexation, divergent linguistic traditions (French and German), and varied religiousbackgrounds, embracing Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. He begins by exploring therelatively unknown territory of memorialization after the Franco-Prussian War, beforemoving to far richer material for the years following 1918. Kidd’s typology of monumentsis very similar to that proposed by Sherman, but he incorporates a fascinating discussionof inscriptions, which relate to the specificities of this highly contested part of westernEurope. Some inscriptions, especially in the north of the Moselle, appeared in bothFrench and German. Many avoided any direct reference to one nation or the other,with “Aux enfants de . . .”, “Morts pendant la guerre” or “Victimes de la GrandeGuerre” being typical. Local sculptors and acclaimed artists designed memorials,according to the available resources, but many were bought from the shelf. Inaugurationceremonies revealed harmonies between different religious groups united in grief, butalso tensions between Church and State. During World War II some ‘French’ memorialswere destroyed and others were Germanized, with the vast pieta at Metz being truncated,shorn of its ‘French’ soldiers, and inscribed in German with references to the ‘Reich’.Two powerful photographs show the same monument surrounded by French civiliansand war veterans at its inauguration in 1935, and by jackbooted German soldiers in1940. The volume ends with a review of new memorials, which were installed in theMoselle as part of urban regeneration or expansion schemes during the 1980s, and withan appendix reporting Kidd’s survey of the iconography and location of monumentsthroughout the departement. There is a single map, which would have been enhancedby including pre-1870 departement boundaries in northern Lorraine.

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Although varying in appearance, size and spatial and temporal span, these com-plementary monographs make substantial and provocative contributions to our under-standing of the multiple and contested meanings of war memorials as a subset of lieuxde memoire. As Sherman reminds us, “the postmodern age is obsessed with memory”(p. 1) and hence commemoration of war and peace continues as “people yearn toconstrue as natural the solidarities that bring structure to an increasingly fragmentedworld” (p. 331).

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D J, Architecture and Design for the Family in Britain, 1900–70 (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. ix +229. £14.99 paperback); D H,Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900–1945 (London: E. and F. N. Spon,2000. Pp. ix +305. £22.99 paperback)

David Jeremiah and Dennis Hardy have written books which are in many ways different,but both authors draw upon similar exemplars in places, and thus merit comparison.David Jeremiah’s book provides comprehensive coverage of changes in domesticarchitecture and design and the key events of the years between 1900 and 1970,containing an excellent commentary and summary of relevant publications, exhibitionsand events. The book’s remit is to critique the discourses surrounding the “importanceof an overriding agenda to provide a better life” (p. 1) in the planning of British society.His work chronologically analyses ideas about home, community and neighbourhood,but it is conceptually weak otherwise as, for example, “gender is not dealt with as aseparate issue” (p. 2); indeed issues such as gender are not theorized or reworked inany meaningful way. Furthermore, class is divided rather simplistically into a middleclass/working class dualism, with the analysis assuming a consistent desire on the partof the working class to move upwards. The information drawn upon is geographicallyquite diverse, although inevitably London and the south east of England form theprincipal focus, with Wales and Scotland included as somewhat of an afterthought andNorthern Ireland rarely mentioned at all. Jeremiah extensively uses published sourcesfrom the period, but these sources are rarely supplemented by evidence of archivalresearch. His work omits a significant literature from the realms of geography andrelated disciplines which concerns itself with work on architecture and design. Nomention is made of the work of David Matless, Deborah Ryan, Pyrs Gruffudd, JohnGold, Marion Roberts and others, and as such the work lacks a critical edge whichbecomes increasingly obvious as the text proceeds. The lack of archival research behindthe use of published sources means that the book tends to only a superficial analysisof the issues surrounding home, community and neighbourhood which Jeremiah seeksto critique. Such a surface reading penetrates none of the subjects to which the bookaddresses itself. The unpublished debates of this period are as, if not more, importantthan the polished and published works, and whilst an analysis of the rhetoric andrepresentation of debates about the home is important, any work which claims to “trackthe complex and important relationship between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘commonplace’ inthe social purpose of architecture and design intended for the family” (back cover)without an attempt to give voice to the ‘people’ implicated in these discourses is likelyto fail. Chapters on “Health, comfort and happiness”, “Reconstruction and the ideal”,“Rationalisation and new dreams”, “Emergency, economy and modernisation” and

2002 Academic Press