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Resurrecting the Past
France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate
Sarah Griswold (Author)
9781501783326
Hardback, published 15 September 2025
300 pages, 20 b&w halftones, 2 maps - 20 Halftones, black and white - 2 Maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.907 kg
In Resurrecting the Past, Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in a post-1918 fight over the French past—a contingent and contradictory but always hard-charging struggle over a forgotten "heritage mandate." Many scholars, clergy, pundits, politicians, and investors perceived the moment Allied forces entered Jerusalem in December 1917 to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand French influence, evoking the vision of a new colony in the territory: a French Levant. But what transpired for the French state in the Levant after World War I, and why does that ill-conceived venture still matter today? Resurrecting the Past investigates how heritage politics led to a new form of empire – a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon – and with it a tide of regional and international critique. Against such opposition, the heritage mandate leaned heavily on spectacle and science, generating a sprawling set of sites and objects – Ottoman mansions, crusader castles, Umayyad mosques, Roman arches, buried synagogues, and Sumerian ziggurats. As Griswold traces how French heritage efforts cycled through multiple ideal pasts in the Levant from 1918 to 1946, she reveals how each one, though grounded in realities, also complicated those constructs and the work of French heritage-makers. Resurrecting the Past offers a parable of how efforts in heritage politics aimed to construct a union of ideologies and objects deemed the best past for France's uncertain future but struggled as much as they succeeded. Eventually those same heritage politics ironically helped officials justify the end of the "French Levant."
Introduction
1. Preserving France's Protectorate in the Holy Land
2. The High Commission's Quest to Restore the Crusades
3. The Mandate's Rediscovery of the Islamic Past in Damascus
4. Classical Relics as French Internationalism in Syria and Lebanon
5. The Powers of Near Eastern Archaeology for Modern France
6. The Louvre, the Levant, and the Second World War
Epilogue: Stones Cry Out