But shared history does not mean common history report

Saturday 6 June at the American cemetery of Coleville-sur-Mer, overlooking Omaha Beach, Presidents Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy have celebrated with emotion for a common page in the history. But shared history does not mean common history report. Is the difference between the two countries only of quantitative The founding fathers of the American Republic are contemporaries of Louis XVI and the French Revolution. What is rare is expensive, and do not have a lot of past conduit to celebrate and to rely on it constantly. He would come to the idea, in France, to ask what would think Voltaire, Rousseau and Robespierre of the present situation. When we visit the château de Versailles, we admire the grandeur of our past and we are not seeking answers to our present. The French have until the recent past to ask what General de Gaulle would have done in any particular circumstance. But the Americans wonder even today, more than two centuries after his death, on George Washington, the father of the nation in the sense of the term "Roman", would have done in Iraq, or on what would have been the position of Thomas Jefferson on the "positive discrimination". In the fascination with the founding fathers, there is certainly the nostalgia of a time when the policies were "honest men", who could collectively give the best of themselves despite their respective individual weaknesses.

But the "days of America" would be both shorter and longer than that of the France For historians of the school of the annals in France, should distinguish between the time of the economic and social history of the short time in political history; thinking that reflects the multiplicity of the Constitutions in France. This is not the case in the United States, a country that has the same Constitution since the end of the 18th century. The original texts of the Declaration of independence and the Constitution of the United States have the almost sacred character of secular icons. A photograph dating from 1953 shows the arrival of these accompanied by texts of military honours in their current residence, the National Archives in Washington.

In the same way, it seems to me that the Americans and the French have a different look at their respective fields of battle. Certainly Manassas in Virginia is not Verdun; thousands of men only fell in Virginia in what was the first battle of the American civil war. Verdun has become a monument to the absurdity of the war, a symbol of the absolute dehumanisation of men. Manassas, this is not a whole continent who commit suicide, but a nation born in pain and the sensitivities of the South and North are still well present the so-called States United, as is still, despite the election of Obama, the irreparable injury of slavery.

To understand this absolute of a past respect, short and long both in its continuity, it should probably be take into account the fact that the United States are the first nation to see the day at a time specific, to be a political invention which is not bound to a religious and ethnic group or language, or even a territory, but which is constituted around the rallying to shared political values. These intangible values are expressed specifically in the Constitution of the United States. America is not the France, a country or State creates the nation; It is not the Germany, a nation with a State around Prussia. If the French identity today is inseparable from the Republic, it is the Constitution that created the American identity. Interpret the thinking of the founding fathers is not an intellectual exercise, it is a political act of a large and permanent news between two camps, conservatives attached to the letter of the text, and the progressives who prefer "the spirit of the Constitution." Its Constitution and its authors, America has created a "civic religion" that has no precedent in history.