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

Nov 3, 2025

Sarah Griswold, a historian focused on modern France and cultural heritage, discusses her book on the French heritage mandate in the Levant. She reveals the political and cultural implications of French ambitions after World War I, emphasizing the significance of Crusader castles in shaping tourism and national identity. Griswold also addresses the biases in archaeological pursuits, revealing how local agency played a crucial role in contested heritage politics. Her insights illuminate the complex legacy of colonial influence and the ongoing impact of heritage narratives.

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INSIGHT

Heritage As France's Policy Tool

France used heritage politics as a central tool to address its post‑WWI crisis of national identity and global status.
The Levant became a testing ground where cultural claims substituted for straightforward geopolitical power.

ANECDOTE

Research Sparked by Syrian War Coverage

Sarah Griswold began this research during the Syrian civil war and noticed media focus on monuments over human suffering.
That observation shaped her questions about how heritage is politicized during conflict.

INSIGHT

Catholic Protectorate And Lobbying

French claims in the Levant blended genuine Catholic protectorate traditions with geopolitical ambition dating back centuries.
Powerful lobbyists called 'Syrianists' amplified theological and cultural motives for French presence after 1914.

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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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