ICFFS-Cultural Memory Program

Avignon’s experience as European Cultural Capital in the year 2000 was an important moment for the promotion of the city as a center of European culture and as a desirable destination for tourists and businesses. The European aspects of the Cultural Capital campaign involved artistic exchanges and communication and cooperation among citizens of all nine Cultural Capitals. Such projects reveal a key irony in European Union efforts to encourage European integration at the local level. While “Europe” is often valued as an innovative means of transcending historical divisions, EU cultural policy has often focused on achieving this through celebration of the past. This involves recasting a site such as Avignon’s Palace of the Popes, for example, as a pluralist European symbol, rather than a purely religious or specifically Catholic one. In its municipal cultural policy, the mayor’s office has promoted an image of the city as unified both in the past and in the present. In addition to associating Avignon with a new Europe, this portrayal of the city has reinforced the authority of the mayor. Since the 2000 campaign, the vision of harmony promoted by the mayor’s office has been challenged by alternative voices contesting the facile elision of past differences within a new city-centered (and sometimes Europeanist) discourse. These debates about local civic identity highlight the varied reception and implementation of European Union cultural policy, and the importance of cultural memory in this process. This paper considers the local “vectors” of memory (Rousso) concerning Avignon’s civic identity, and the ways diverse local voices have drawn on the past to both support and contest the vision of civic unity promoted by municipal authorities.




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