Sarah Griswold, "Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Nov 3, 2025

Dr. Sarah Griswold is a European historian specializing in modern France and cultural politics. She discusses how the French heritage mandate in the Levant emerged post-World War I, highlighting France’s dual ambitions of promoting identity and gaining geopolitical advantages. Griswold dives into the allure of Crusader castles and their significance in heritage politics, and how Damascus became a central stage for cultural diplomacy. She also reveals the complex dynamics of control over archaeological sites and the surprising agency of local actors in shaping narratives.

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INSIGHT

Heritage As State Strategy

France used cultural heritage as a central tool to address post‑WWI crises about its international status and identity.
The Levant mandate became a field site where heritage politics tried to remake France's future through contested pasts.

ANECDOTE

The 'Syrianists' Lobby in Paris

A vocal Parisian lobby, called the 'Syrianists,' pushed from 1914 for French control of the Holy Land based on Catholic protector claims.
Their mix of clergy, diplomats, and businessmen drove early wartime rhetoric though much was projection until 1918.

INSIGHT

Pivot From Palestine To Monuments

After San Remo (1920) France pivoted from claiming Palestine to maximizing heritage in territories it controlled.
Officials favored spectacular Crusader castles and monumental sites as broadly appealing symbols of French legacy.

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In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. 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 Dr. 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."

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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