Un monument sur la frontière : commémorer la guerre de 1870 à Mars-la-Tour (1871-1914)

Located in the village of Mars-la-Tour in the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, an 1870 war memorial, inaugurated in 1875, commemorates the French soldiers who fell at nearby battlefields during the fighting between 16 and 18 August 1870. It was sculpted by Bogino and erected after a national fundraising campaign launched by local inhabitants. This monument, with the later addition of a church and a local museum dedicated to the 1870 war, soon became an important landmark for the cult of the dead. It also became an attraction for memory-based tourism. Ceremonies took place there every year until 1914, attracting thousands of participants who commemorated the memory of the dead. The Mars-la-Tour monument became an authentic centre for local remembrance. One of its specificities was its location, only one kilometre from the new border separating France from Germany between 1871 and 1918. This paper has several aims: to offer a contribution to the history of border memorials; to revisit the historiography of French war commemorations; and, finally, to study the genesis of a specific monument in Lorraine, focusing on social practices as seen from below. The ambition is to avoid the top-down approach of heritage recognition processes and to pay attention to the local logics and actors at the border.