Thomas Dodman did not write
Nostalgie
directly in French, but he could have.
This British historian who recently acquired French nationality speaks it perfectly.
After having published a collective work on the history of the war, his new book, the fruit of long-term work begun in 2005, revolves around a concept known to all: nostalgia.
However, the history and evolution of this emotion, which everyone uses in everyday language, is not so familiar to us.
Meeting a few steps from the Columbia University campus in Paris, where he directs the History and Literature program.
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Madame Figaro
.
– Almost fifteen years ago, you began to take an interest in nostalgia.
Why this choice ?
Thomas Dodmann.
–
At the time, I was giving a course on memory (collective memory, individual memory).
And towards the end of the course, there was a session on nostalgia.
I discovered that before nostalgia was considered a disease, and that French soldiers were even dying from it.
I immediately said to myself: “By digging a little in the military archives, I might come across something.”
I then went to Val-de-Grâce
(military hospital, Ed)
, in Paris, and, indeed, I came across a treasure: letters, reports, where it was written black on white that hundreds of soldiers were dying of nostalgia.
I started digging, like an archaeologist.
Today, we no longer die of nostalgia… If it's no longer an illness, is it a state of mind?
The evolution of nostalgia makes it possible to live with it in a healthy way.
His status changed from "medical" to "benign".
When in 1778 a young medical student forged the notion of nostalgia, he took the definitions of melancholy (which, at the time, was also seen as a disease) and copied nostalgia on top of them.
Nostalgia is then a sub-form of melancholy, with some peculiarities that distinguish it: in particular the distance from the place of birth.
Those who suffer from it are distant in space from their original environment, torn from a certain land of attachment.
It is in a way what one would call “homesickness”.
Melancholy is the prerogative of the intellectual, of the cultured being, a “noble” evil.
Nostalgia, on the other hand, is clearly from the start a disease that attacks the people
Thomas Dodman
What other distinction can be made between melancholy and nostalgia?
Melancholy is the prerogative of the intellectual, of the cultured being, a "noble" evil.
Nostalgia, on the other hand, is clearly from the beginning a disease that attacks the people (soldiers, often from peasants, migrant workers, settlers who leave to work the land elsewhere and also slaves).
These are categories torn out under duress, with this idea of a definitive or quasi-definitive cut.
The distinction is therefore made according to who the patient is.
This is what still happens today: depending on the social environment, we will speak of “burn-out” or “depression”, for example.
Singer Serge Reggiani performed a piece entitled
Madame Nostalgie
, in which he addressed her: "You are confusing, poor fool, love and geography..." Yes, that's exactly it.
In the 19th century, there were a whole host of attempts to clarify this notion.
It is believed that nostalgia is to time what homesickness is to space.
But this shift is not so easy to operate: when we are nostalgic for the country we left to go to the army, we are also nostalgic for our childhood.
But then, Baudelaire comes to confuse the tracks still more by declaring: "I have the nostalgia of
And yet, compared to its original definition, it would be a misinterpretation…
Its meaning has changed, yes.
But there is above all an element of fantasy in nostalgia.
We can distort, embellish the memory, or start from something that we have not experienced at all but of which we have heard, seen images or that we simply desired, and from there, the desire, fantasy crystallize what we have never experienced.
I could absolutely say that I have nostalgia for a New York that I have not known, because I arrived a little too late in a completely gentrified New York.
I am nostalgic for this city, because I would have loved to have been there 20 years…
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You left the UK very early, lived in several countries. Don't you think this feeling is close to you?
At the time, I did not formulate it like that.
I moved a lot, lived in suitcases.
It's not completely a coincidence: my parents are part of this generation of English people who wanted to go and teach English elsewhere, and I have a lot of nostalgia for the place where I grew up, in Tuscany.
It's where I feel most at home, the country I miss the most.
When it's been too long since I've been away from this region, from its olive oil, I feel it in my body.
Nostalgia is found in many places in our current society…
Yes, one might wonder at first what the world would look like today if whoever created the term “nostalgia” had chosen another one that was possible, such as “ philopatridomania”.
It would probably be less appropriated, and there would be much less impact on popular culture.
What is called retromania, for example.
Because nostalgia sells.
Whether in fashion, music or other areas.
Same thing in politics.
The politics of nostalgia is everywhere.
Nostalgia is an emotion that establishes identity, gives a feeling of belonging and even refocuses the subject.
It has a positive function in a world losing its bearings
Thomas Dodman
When the politicians say that "it was better before", is it she whom they summon?
Yes, the policy of nostalgia has taken hold.
Some tell you, "You are worse off today than your parents were," and the easiest way to explain this is to point to "those who govern you" or "those who came and take advantage of the system.
It is a phenomenon that we find in a political discourse, both on the right and on the left, anti-capitalist and anti-immigration.
The cleavage is not hermetic.
This is a phenomenon that has been observed in many countries (France, United Kingdom, Hungary, Brazil or Turkey) since the economic crisis of 2008. The Trump effect is unthinkable without nostalgia!
who wants to restore the old coat of arms of the United States.
It is obviously with Putin.
This is even one of the reasons for the war on Ukraine.
This feeling of loss of rank, following the collapse of the USSR and the slide of Eastern Europe towards a Western bloc, which frightens Russians nostalgic for a former era of glory.
We also find this nostalgic value in the ecological discourse, in certain aspects.
Yes, through demodernization, a return to the land, to old habits of daily life that we would like to find again.
There is even a term to talk about ecological nostalgia: solastalgia.
It is a neologism created by an Australian philosopher who imposed itself at the beginning of the 21st century.
He defines a malaise linked to climate change, a psychological disorder linked to a change of place, not in space, this time, but under our own feet, in our environment, our memories of landscapes.
Initially, he wanted to make it a disease, but he realized that if defining it as a disease could have had any use in terms of raising awareness, he should have seen it as something healthy and reasonable.
It evolved from that point of view.
That we are bad at
comfort in losing a beloved landscape is normal and can lead to putting in place policies that prevent disaster.
Over time, he found that solastalgia could be used as a positive, ethical breeding ground!
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Recently, the United Kingdom – where you were born – lost its queen. The funeral of Elizabeth II was impressive, and her departure aroused absolute emotion throughout the country. Beyond the
sadness of a nation
, isn't there something nostalgic in this craze?
That's very true: we already know that the reign of Charles III cannot be as long as that of his mother.
What is striking is that his departure is a way like any other of cutting up time and seeing that a page has been turned.
We pick up the thread to see when this page opened, and we go back seventy years.
So the normal reaction is, “Help, how much the world has changed in the meantime!
“She is not just a queen, she had managed to rotate the image of the monarchy a little, to give in a little to modernity and to take on this role of grandmother of the fatherland.
The Queen of England corresponded to this benign side of nostalgia: a feeling of identity, of belonging, of a certain continuity which is now lacking.
We are already
in a nostalgic feeling, because we already know that we are going to be nostalgic.
It's a kind of anticipatory nostalgia.
You direct a cycle around literature at the American University of Columbia. For you, who is the great writer of nostalgia?
I would distinguish two phases: “the before-demedicalization of the term” and “the after-”.
In the preceding, Chateaubriand writes his
Memoirs from beyond the grave,
and all is said.
It is a project steeped in a nostalgia that existed at the time only as a medical term, but it is certain that everything he has to say about his interest in ruins, the collapse of a world shows a nostalgic posture for the era preceding the 1789 revolution. Downstream, of course,
In Search of Lost Time
imposes itself.
Proust's enterprise is fundamentally nostalgic.
What is interesting is that his father is a doctor, he is very close to Théodule Ribot, a great theoretical psychologist of affective memory, and yet he is emblematic of this moment when nostalgia is no longer a disease but just a state of mind.
Recent work in the psychology of emotions shows that it is a continuity between the past and the present, and therefore that we do not have to fear it.
Yes, according to psychologists today, nostalgia is an emotion that establishes identity, gives a sense of belonging and even refocuses the subject.
It has a positive function in a world losing its bearings.
Some studies show, for example, that it is important for American students on campuses far from home, it allows them to keep in touch with their family, with what they love.
In another context, it is also extremely important for emigrants in the creation of their identity as settled migrants.