But I had no idea what I was getting into. So many of these tributes attest to Chuck’s extraordinary work ethic, output of scholarly work, willingness to test new ideas, allergy to dogmatism, openness to constructive criticism, and dedication as a teacher and as a mentor. Having been the beneficiary of all of these, I second them heartily. Chuck’s marvelous talent was in modeling this behavior, so that it could spread. And yet, knowing that all of these were meant to be emulated meant a certain amount of pressure. There was nothing more difficult for me than telling Chuck that I had missed a deadline.

What really stands out for me in my interactions with Chuck at Columbia, however, is the concern he showed for setting up an intellectual community. This is no small thing. Columbia’s sociology department could be, at times, a model of anomie. When I arrived, there was no space for students to interact or work. For his part, Chuck argued that advanced graduate students needed at least some office space to work, and that a faculty office (which were large at Columbia) should be allocated to students and configured for sharing. Thus began a steady improvement in the conditions for dissertation writers and with it, a concurrent improvement in their (our) productivity. Some of the most lasting friendships I made at Columbia were with fellow students with whom I shared the office next door to Chuck’s, with its bookshelves stuffed with back issues of Chuck’s journals.

The place that epitomized Chuck’s concern for mutual development of ideas and research was his Workshop on Contentious Politics, which ran, in some form and forum or another for forty years. At Columbia, the Workshop had its ups and downs, additions and subtractions, but there was always a core of people who kept coming back, and who formed intellectual and affective bonds. The Workshop became my intellectual home during my six years at Columbia, and for the six years after that. When I haven’t been able to make it to the workshop, I have felt homesick. When I work on an article, the first place I think of bringing it is the Workshop. The Workshop was special because it was an institution fully infused with Chuck’s ethos of basic generosity and democracy. Everyone is supposed to have done his or her homework, and to have read the paper beforehand. Graduate students are prioritized in the speaker/question queue so that they may join the conversation as colleagues. Criticism is expected to be constructive and to be offered in that spirit. The author is expected to take criticism seriously and not to be defensive or dismissive of critics. When any of these norms is broken, it’s palpable, and Chuck, or someone else, would work to mend the situation. There are not too many forums like this, and where they exist, have often been founded by Chuck’s students or colleagues.

Thus, when I think about Chuck, I will always remember the moments when his own intellectual abilities were on display, such as the time when, in a seminar, he offered trenchant comments and bibliographic references to two students, one of whom wrote on 16th Century Dutch maritime policy, and the other of whom wrote on criminal code reforms in late 19th Century Brazil. And I will think about his many books and articles that I find—and will continue to find—enormously instructive. But even when I don’t think about Chuck directly, but think about my friends and colleagues from graduate school, or how I run a seminar, or comment on student work, Chuck is inevitably involved, too. That the wisest observer of contentious politics was also the ablest facilitator of cooperative scholarship is simply astounding. And for this, in my own less astounding ways, I am bound to try to pass this on, to, in Chuck’s words, “adopt the norm.”

John Krinsky
City College of New York

After the great sadness that overcame me with the news of the death of Chuck Tilly, I can now compose a few considerations which in a very limited way express, in addition to the other tributes, my contribution to how Charles Tilly made the world a better place to be in.

Now it is commonplace to say that Charles Tilly was one of the outstanding intellectuals of the second half of the 20th Century. Just as important is to note that “Chuck” Tilly, in his half century career, projected and defended a model of intellectual mentorship and collaboration often described as ‘generosity’ though it went beyond just an individual desire on his part to give. I believe that what many have called his generosity was in fact Chuck Tilly’s philosophy of a manner of doing social science that he understood as a collective undertaking in which collaboration could only be done in good spirited discussions and debates. Thus his and Louise Tilly’s “Think and then Drink” seminars at the New School or the earlier version on Sunday evenings at their University of Michigan home, always accompanied with wine, cheese and bread to make intellectual exchange congenial, friendly and non-competitive. In short: a brother/sisterhood of scholars. This is what was truly unique in the Chuck Tilly approach to scholarship.

In advising students and colleagues, Chuck always gave freely of his ideas and in presenting his hard reasoned argumentation, he did so in a gentile, often jovial way which is unusual considering his intellectual stature and the behavioral mores of modern academia. Chuck was a formidable challenger of positions, his and others, capable of arguing both sides so as to provoke a more profound reformulation and/or to help in consolidating a good proposition which in his view of science should be defended elsewhere in those customary forums where academics exercise their profession. Thus Chuck was not only an adviser but also a devil’s advocate because he knew that his students must leave the fold and brave the currents of academic life.

I sense that this Chuck Tilly style of doing scholarship was not always appreciated by some of his outstanding colleagues, but like a social scientist that he was, he found confirmation of the effectiveness of this “inclusive and congenial” approach of doing social science in the works of his students and collaborators.

I have lived this Chuck Tilly philosophy since he advised my doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan. Because I moved to Brazil and made my academic life in São Paulo, my contacts with Chuck Tilly were irregular, largely restricted to e-mails and occasional trips to New York when Chuck was never to busy to have lunch or dinner as a pretext to discuss what I was doing and what he was researching. Never did I leave these meetings empty handed, carrying away copies of his papers, books and/or reprints, as well as helpful suggestions of other relevant works. In this sense, these visits to New York were always marked by the prospects of seeing Chuck and an occasion for returning, if only briefly, to his seminar. He never failed to extend his invitation to participate in the New School or Columbia seminars, providing copies of the papers under discussion and, once there, introducing me to those present, maybe as a distant intellectual friend. Of course, I shall also keep the memories of the cheerful company of fellow seminar participants at the after-seminar dinners held either at the Indian or Chinese restaurants down the street. For a foreign visitor who came to the city once a year Chuck contributed his share in making the visit more like a homecoming.

In this sense, Chuck had the capacity of converting his place of work into an intellectual home for visitors and friends, whether it was the University of Michigan Perry Building, the Center for Study of Social Change or his office at Columbia University. A home, I mean, in the sense of Robert Frost’s definition of home: “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. Now with Chuck Tilly gone and Louise Tilly no longer in the City, I will always feel a certain emptiness whenever I go to City. Because going to see Chuck Tilly and attending his seminars were not mere coincidences as it might appear, but rather, as Jorge Luis Borges once said: “coincidence is not a coincidence but an appointment in destiny”. If this were the case, then truly the passing of Chuck Tilly has altered destiny.

I will not only no longer find the customary Tilly greeting when I get to his office, but I also can’t expect and look forward anymore to the latest Chuck Tilly article, book or paper: who is Chuck debating, taking issue with or what is he analyzing. This, too, will be another void for me. As an analogy, I am reminded of the death of Tom Jobim, the genius of the Bossa Nova. I remember how his passing marked the end of that expectation of another song or album from the composer of the “Girl from Impanema.” Similarly, the passing of dear Chuck Tilly means the finalization of an expectation of reading yet another work by the author who gave us such a poetic title like “Democracy is a Lake”. I will miss Chuck Tilly.

Salvador A. M. Sandoval
Pontificia Universidade Catolica de São Paulo
Universidade Estadual de Campinas

John K. Glenn
German Marshall Fund of the United States

At first I thought that Chuck’s remark was undue modesty. However, as the years have gone by I have realized the truth in the statement. Chuck’s intellectual agenda was in some senses nothing short of analyzing the dynamic politics of modernity. Over the years I’ve come to more fully understand the extraordinary breadth and complexity of this project, and have developed a much deeper appreciation of Chuck’s remarkable achievements.

For us graduate students Chuck’s capacious agenda mixed with his generosity were remarkable blessings. His peripatetic mind and the scope of his project provided plenty of room for all of us, regardless of our particular interests. When I arrived at Michigan he was deep in the throes of what we at Perry called the “Great Britain Industry,” his pioneering project to analyze the transformation of contentious politics in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I was interested in the cultural dynamics of class conflict, not the focus of the project. However, Chuck readily included me in the project and guided me through several phases of what would ultimately become an analysis of the discourses of class conflict. While his study was national in dimension, I focused on a few towns. While he was honing his theories of large-scale political processes, I was working the small spaces of contentious rhetoric. Nonetheless he openly welcomed me to his research agenda, and enthusiastically provided advice, support and assistance, even from afar when he moved to New York.

My story, of course, is nothing unusual. All graduate students who worked with Chuck can quickly harmonize in a chorus of such reflections. The Perry school was abuzz with the intellectual energy and exuberance that he generated. Many of us who sought Chucks advise recall that his responses often were tripartite. In closing, and recalling his work let me offer my final thought on Chuck Tilly—Big Heart, Large Benefactor, No Comparisons.

Marc W. Steinberg
Smith College

Although I never studied with Chuck or worked at the same university as him, I felt very close to him from the beginning of my graduate student days. My advisor, Ron Aminzade, had been Chuck’s student. Chuck was incredibly generous. I first met him in person when I travelled to Michigan in a blistering snowstorm in January 1983 to visit his Center, consult his French archive materials, and to get advice from him and Louise about my Master’s thesis research on unemployed workers in Paris in the 1860s and ’70s. Chuck guided me through the Archives Nationales the following summer, and Louise took time out to explain the intricacies of the old Bibliotheque Nationale catalogs. When I moved into German history for my PhD dissertation, Chuck’s brother Richard shared his entire dataset on contentious politics events with me.

Chuck’s defense of archivally-based historical sociology was extremely important for historical sociologists like myself coming of age in the 1980s. He virtually invented the idea that sociologists could combine historical research based on primary documents with explicit sociological theorizing. Although many people dismiss the project of creating a historical sociology, arguing that all sociology is (or should be) historical, we all know that sociologists only started using primary historical documents after Chuck introduced the practice. The explicit connections to historians that Chuck created are another important part of building historical sociology. Chuck was an excellent institution-builder, as he himself recognized in his interview with Dan Little last year. For me, Chuck’s first revolutionary institutional innovation was holding a joint appointment in the history and sociology departments at Michigan, for almost two decades. Former students like Bill Roy have commented on the way the weekly seminar at Chuck and Louise’s house blurred the boundaries between historians and sociologists. Chuck went on to create the Committee on Historical Studies at the New School. Of course, his accomplishments reach much further, but I wanted to comment specifically on these.

I last saw Chuck in October 2007 at a panel that we both participated in at Columbia Law School on the historical aspects of executive power. I was amazed at Chuck’s energy. He was as brilliant as ever, cutting analytically to the heart of the matter. And he came to dinner with the panelists afterwards. He was exactly the same as I’d always known him.
His death is a tremendous loss for his friends, and for sociologists, historians, and social theorists worldwide.

George Steinmetz
University of Michigan

We learn about credit and blame as children, though without being told that this is what is happening. From early on, parents blame their children for misdeeds, praise them for accomplishments, and take credit for their good qualities. Kids pick up the message by expecting credit when they accomplish something, but also by blaming others when they can. We grow up demanding credit, avoiding blame if possible, ourselves in turn blaming and giving credit in myriad ways. A few people receive highly visible credit or blame in the form of Nobel Prizes, Academy Awards or prison sentences. But on a smaller scale, everyone plays the game of credit and blame, and we do it virtually every day.

Assigning credit and blame involves the universal human tendency to perceive, describe and remember social experiences as stories: simplified cause-effect accounts in which A does X to B, with outcome Y. Credit- and blame-giving follow parallel logics that run backward in a few discernible steps: from some negative or positive outcome to the assignment of a value (large or small) to that outcome, to the identification of some agent that caused the outcome, to a judgment of that agent’s competence and responsibility for the action that produced the outcome. This logic awards someone who deliberately kills many people (unless they happen to be official enemies of the state) a large negative score—blame—and someone who knowingly saves many lives a large positive score—credit. The logic works as a sort of elemental justice detector.

Most of the time, we assign lesser scores for smaller derelictions and delights: Failure to meet daily obligations receives blame, while unexpected generosity receives credit. Much the same logic applies in gossip, psychological counseling, court proceedings, responses to job performance, deliberations of prize committees, online discussions, political speeches and public opinion polls. In all cases, the act of giving credit or (especially) assigning blame draws us-them boundaries: We are the worthy people, they the unworthy.

The most dramatic versions of crediting and blaming take up the responsibility for major public events, and responsible authorities naturally seek ways to evade blame. Obviously, then, assigning credit and blame is no mere game. In life, who gets credit and blame matters both retroactively and prospectively. It matters retroactively because it becomes part of the stories we tell about good and bad people (including presidents), good and bad behavior (including political behavior), and where we come from (including the fundamentals of our political tradition). It matters prospectively because it indicates whom we can trust, and whom we should mistrust.

Most broadly, such attribution matters because the process of collectively discussing and assigning credit and blame defines the boundaries of what we believe about the nature and possibilities of social life. In the stories we hear and tell reside the imaginable totality of what we and others can and cannot do, for good or ill, in the world. Since no individual can try out all available choices and behaviors and judge their consequences, we “fill in” our understanding in a process of socialization that starts when we are young, but that in truth never really stops. When elders or leaders tell stories to others in society, essentially the same process is at work: using narrative to explain causality in terms of credit and blame—just as when adults tell stories to children, only at a different level. Some say we are what we eat, and that may be so by some physiological measure. When it comes to the social and political lives of human beings, however—lives suffused by the human capacity for creating and manipulating symbols—we are what we our culture’s stories say we are.

Our stories of credit and blame take many forms but also exhibit some commonalities. One is that the storytelling process is inherently social. Even when we tell stories as individuals and about individuals, we cannot begin to do so in the absence of a social context that makes such judgments meaningful. A second commonality is that we don’t assign credit and blame for its own sake, just to create some kind of cognitive closure. We want more than closure; we want justice. We don’t settle for clever or comprehensive explanations of the behavior that caused the outcome in question. We ask that the punishment fit the crime, that the reward recognize the accomplishment, that the parties involved get their just deserts. In other words, the stories of all human cultures say we are moral beings.

Do we believe this because it is true, or it is true because we believe it? On the one hand, standards of justice vary from one population and period to another, sometimes dramatically so, which suggests the latter. On the other hand, justice is far more universal than cultural relativists imagine, suggesting the former. Those universal properties, moreover, work across a scale ranging from arguments among friends to the creation of national commissions and tribunals for the pacification of fierce political disputes.

Just as consensus on the moral idiom of credit and blame in our narratives has the effect of binding families and workmates and small groups together, so does the construction of consensus on societal and national levels bind a people together. It is not too much to say that consensus about some narrative is what makes a nation into a nation, for a nation is by definition a group of people who believe they have enough in common to share a common destiny but who, unlike a tribe or an extended family (clan), are not necessarily blood relatives and who comprise a group so large that coming physically into contact with each person is not possible. A nation, after all, can only be symbolized, since it is too large to be perceived by our immediate senses.

One way that societies achieve consensus on a national narrative has been to combine concrete and symbols in the form of war memorials, as we have seen. This is a more complex process than is often recognized. As we approach memories of victory and defeat, we enter rough ground. Our individual memories are bad enough: selective, self-serving and sometimes invented. Collective memory complicates things further. Every collective memory emerges from a contest among advocates of competing accounts concerning what happened and why. (Think how long it took, for example, for war memorials built in the United States after April 1865 to come to some roughly common equipoise of meaning between North and South.)

Every monument to the past advances some interpretations of its meaning and suppresses others. This struggle over meaning is precisely how a society wrestles with and often (but not always) arrives at some consensus over what it all means. Thus, reaching some minimal requirement for the social glue that holds people together presupposes controlled contention. It is a process that requires some selective forgetting as well as selective remembering. The monumental statue of Armin suppresses the fact that he served for years as a Roman ally who spread the use of Latin among Germans. The white domes of Sacré Coeur make no reference to the deep divisions within France dug by the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune and the basilica’s very construction. Maybe that is not as it “has to be”, but that is how it always is, in any event. In the end we are our stories, but there is nothing simple about how those stories get written or how future generations understand them.

On the blame side, competition to win control of a symbolic narrative concerns which outcome damaged some valued activity, and by how much. It also concerns who had the competence and intention to produce the damage, and who else should share the blame if only through guilt by association. Blame took up more space than credit in French national discussions of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. Two accounts agreed on the outcome that needed explaining: the political collapse of 1870–71. But judgments of competence, responsibility and value came close to being mirror opposites. On one side, Catholic royalists lumped together the defeated empire, republicans, communards and secularists on the wrong side of the us-them boundary, accusing them of having almost destroyed France. Secular republicans blamed the remnants of a corrupt empire and their ecclesiastical hangers-on for undermining national commitments to muscular democracy.

In general, of course, collective credit and blame often interact: We take credit for saving a situation that our enemies had made toxic. In any normally complex social situation, credit for someone or some side implies blame for someone else, and vice versa. When a society as a whole can agree on who deserves credit and who deserves blame, us-them boundaries are drawn between nations. When a society cannot agree, those boundaries are drawn within a nation. Internal boundaries can lead to secession and even civil war, but they do not necessarily do so. Sometimes the very act of disagreeing, if it proceeds within a symbolic process understood and accepted by all, can itself bind a society together: People can agree to disagree without impugning the right of the other to belong to the society. Or to put the matter in more homely terms, all spouses sometimes argue, but not all marriages end in divorce.

Disagreement is put to the greatest test in times of war. War stimulates collective attributions of credit and blame more often than any other human activity. Even revolutions, bungled natural disasters, political corruption and economic crises produce less collective fingerpointing stories of villains and heroes. Wars begin, after all, with built-in divisions between us and them. They continue with losses of life and property that some people always think unjustified. Win, loss or stalemate, wars always end with participants making collective claims about responsibility. Costly but unsuccessful wars, such as the French and American adventures in Vietnam, compound the problem of assigning credit and blame; now we have to deal not only with the military enemy, but with the question of who among our own people got us into the mess, and how.

War memorials extend the argument beyond the peace treaties. Despite most frequently and visibly awarding credit, war memorials always display the interaction of credit and blame. In their own distinctive ways, both the Hermann Monument and Sacré Coeur serve as war memorials. Behind the glorification of German warriors we detect the vilification of France. Behind the sanctification of the French faithful we detect the condemnation of secularists, republicans, radicals and German invaders. A stark us-them boundary marks the difference, though who gets defined as “us” and who as “them” is rarely a singular or simple decision.

Across the Western world, when communities and countries pool their efforts to build symbolic structures, they most often erect churches, war memorials or both at once. Valley Forge National Park, for example, commemorates George Washington’s legendary 1777 winter encampment in preparation for engagement with British forces near Philadelphia. Its Washington Memorial Chapel features carvings that represent Washington’s brigades, flags for the Army, Navy and French forces, seals from the fifty states, pews dedicated to different patriots, a window portraying periods of Washington’s life, and a tablet with the Declaration of Independence over the door. Beside the door tourists see

a statue of Washington showing ‘ . . . him bearing the burdens of war—anxiety in his face, determination in the grip of the sword, confidence and hope in the pose of the entire figure.’ The chapel is easily interpreted as a political expression of the concept of God and country. The architectural message is that the United States was the righteous result of obeying God’s will under the leadership of George Washington.

Despite enormous architectural differences, Parisian tourists who visit Valley Forge can recognize surprising similarities with the symbolism of Sacré Coeur. God defends our national cause, and the ungodly undermine it. On one side of the us-them boundary stands Washington alongside his soldiers, their allies and patriots in general. On the other side squirm America’s enemies. In 1777, those enemies included Great Britain. Enemies change, of course, but the us-them boundary remains. In many cases, the boundary becomes more abstract over time. American visitors to Valley Forge are no longer riled up against British people; they are riled up abstractly (if they are riled up at all) against tyrants and despots, or better, the concepts of tyranny and despotism.

Even when they don’t incorporate chapels or churches, war memorials breathe sacredness. Corrupt them with commercial, secular or unpatriotic themes at your peril, as the Walt Disney Company discovered when it tried to build a “history” theme park near Manassas. The controversies over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington are also a case in point.

Vietnam veterans took the initiative in pressing for a memorial. Once Congress authorized the two-acre site, however, a committee without a single veteran ran the architectural competition. Yale architecture student Maya Lin won with a v-shaped granite structure containing the names of all the military dead in order of reported death. While it eventually became one of the most visited and admired memorial sites in Washington, organized veterans initially complained bitterly about the abstract design, arguing that by failing to represent heroism directly it perpetuated the picture of the soldiers as losers. The veterans prevailed, winning a second memorial 120 feet away from the first that includes a flagpole and a sculpture of three GIs looking grimly determined.

The arguments were clearly all about assigning credit and blame, and that is also, no doubt, what most of the tens of thousands of visitors to that memorial still do. Americans still disagree about the war and about the memorial, but the process of disagreement, ironically, brings us closer together. We struggle together to find the meaning. It shows we all care. But how we deploy and manage our care, it turns out, matters a lot.

Reconciliation typically involves some ritual encounter followed by a declaration that bygones should be bygones. Two friends blame each other for some bad outcome, then a third friend persuades them to make up. The victor treats the vanquished generously, and the two combatants go off for a ceremonial drink. In the most spectacular version, a truth and reconciliation commission brings together victims and perpetrators from a great civil conflict, perpetrators confess their crimes in response to some guarantees of immunity and absolution, before participants ritually symbolize forgiving and forgetting. If the reconciliation routine works, the parties then get on with collaboration in new collective enterprises.

Advocates of reconciliation often make three arguments for public apologies followed by mutual commitment: catharsis, justice and expediency. Public discussion of past wrongs, goes the first line of reasoning, allows aggrieved people to stop grieving and wrongdoers to assuage their guilt. The justice argument fixes blame in the style of jail sentences, punitive damages and shaming ceremonies when the perpetrator shows remorse and commitment to better behavior. The expediency principle focuses on the future: Unresolved conflicts impede cooperation. So let’s agree on what happened and why, and then get on with life.

Collective retaliation, however, depends on a strict logic of tit for tat: You did us wrong, so you should suffer as badly. Where the line between perpetrators and victims is clear, collective retaliation has two advantages: It corresponds to an individual sense of justice that cuts across cultures and historical periods; and it involves a simple calculus—you stole our cow, we take your cow. But it also has two enormous disadvantages. It allows the rasher members of one side to score hero points by acting aggressively against vulnerable members of the other side. And it escalates easily, because members of a newly victimized side regularly interpret a retaliatory attack as disproportionate to the offense, and as a threat to their side’s credibility and honor. We know about escalation from legendary feuds between the Montagues and Capulets or the Hatfields and McCoys.

Indeed, without a firm stopping rule comparable to the clock’s running out in football— which is to say, in the absence of strong governments— ritual killing could continue for years. Blood feuds once disfigured large areas of southern Europe, for example. Remember that German generals Armin and Segestes were feuding in 9 C.E. over Armin’s capture of Segestes’s daughter. But starting in the 16th and 17th centuries, European governments either suppressed feuds or channeled them into judicial proceedings from which rulers could collect significant fines or confiscate property. In the Balkans, central governments rarely achieved that kind of control, so blood feuds continued to occur there until recently. Collective retaliation often causes long-lasting damage, and this has been so not only in southern Europe but also, for many years, in much of the Middle East.

Reparations follow a modified logic of tit for tat: You did us wrong, so you should compensate us proportionately. Along the way, you should apologize for doing us wrong. Discussing books on reparations in 2006, Times Literary Supplement critic David Lowenthal deplored the practice. Forgetting that U.S. President Ronald Reagan had apologized in 1988 to Japanese Americans the government had incarcerated during World War II, Lowenthal complained that:

The Age of Apology came to a head with 1990s contrition chic: Bill Clinton apologized for slavery, Tony Blair for the Irish Famine, the Pope for the Crusades, Australia declared a ‘National Sorry Day’ for past mistreatment of Aborigines, with little to show by way of present improvement. Posthumous mea culpas dispense cheap cheer. They show how venial are our own sins by comparison with our forebears’ crimes. Past sinners are excoriated for not thinking and acting as right-minded people do today. Censorious tracts name and shame perpetrators of history’s atrocities, demanding remorse and redress for victims’ heirs.

The complications start there, on both sides of the us-them boundary: Who are the victims? Who are the perpetrators? Do today’s descendants or relatives of victims deserve compensation for the victims’ losses? Do today’s descendants or relatives of perpetrators bear responsibility for the perpetrators’ evils? What counts as adequate compensation? How to compensate 9/11 families begins to look like a simple task compared to assigning reparations for losses that occurred generations ago.

Yet in recent years, demands for collective reparations have become mainstream in the United States and elsewhere. The sociologist John Torpey cites the confluence of two main factors to explain this: compensation to Jews and the State of Israel for the Holocaust, and the generalization of the practice to include compensation paid by states to groups that have suffered wrongs in both war and peace. “The spread of reparations”, Torpey concludes in Making Whole What Has Been Smashed (2006), “thus parallels the rise of human rights thinking, the emergence of substate groups and individuals as subjects of international law, and the juridification of politics in general.” Once one group successfully presses a claim for recognition of its victimization, other groups can follow the same path. Demands for reparations typically combine the principles of catharsis, justice and expediency. Substantial payments, in this view, allow victims to move past victimization and perpetrators to purge their guilt. Categories of people who have suffered call for just compensation that requires oppressors to feel some measure of the pain that they or their predecessors inflicted. Political organizers say that reparations will promote reconciliation and future collaboration.

No doubt these outcomes do sometimes occur. But reparations politics involves two great dangers: It provides great incentives for people, lawyers for one, to hoard rewards for themselves rather than redistribute them to genuine victims; and it reinforces us-them boundaries instead of dissolving them. When Native Americans receive compensation for past wrongs in the form of property rights, exemption from taxes and direct governmental subsidies, both scenarios come about. Lobbyists and lawyers make money as differences between Native Americans and other Americans sharpen.

Narratives of credit and blame pose difficult problems for democracy, however. All of us spend much of our lives assigning credit and blame, for justice matters to everyday personal relations as it matters to public life. Those of us who seek the proper assignment of credit and blame often turn to the courts, legislatures and other governmental institutions to back up our judgments of right and wrong. Indeed, Americans and their lawyers regularly call for courts to award not only material compensation but punitive damages.

Within limits, successful pursuit of legal redress reinforces democracy. It establishes that even relatively powerless people can get justice and that government officials care about their welfare. Beyond those limits, however, use of public power to fix credit and blame writes us-them divisions into political life. It also reinforces the operation of the same divisions in private life. The vengeance called for by the Hermann Monument helped bring on World War I and, eventually, the Nazi rise to power. The struggle over Sacré Coeur and the Catholic Church’s place in French public life promoted the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair twenty years later, fueled a crisis of state-church relations in 1905–06, and left echoes in France’s conservative revival during the 1930s and 1940s.

We should therefore be very careful when asking authorities to officially sanction our assignments of credit and blame. One day, for sure, there will be some kind of memorial for the Iraq war, and perhaps the Afghanistan war as well. We had better be very careful how we design those monuments and the stories of credit and blame they invariably will tell. We can only hope that, when all is said and done, we will build and tell stories about those monuments in a way that creates consensus instead of separation. It is not always easy or obvious how to do that.

In the 1970s, a few years after Richard and his charming Würzburg-born wife Elisabeth moved from Connecticut back to Germany, my family visited them from France. During the visit, we all went on an excursion into the thick Teutoburg Forest near Detmold. There we joined hundreds of Germans picnicking at the Hermann Monument. Two million people visit the monument each year, the most popular in all Germany.

“Hermann” is a mistranslation of Armin, a Germanic warrior and sometime Roman ally. In the very first decade of the Common Era, Armin defeated three Roman legions under Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest. Tacitus described the former Roman ally as the rival of the German leader Segestes, who remained loyal to Rome:

But Varus fell by fate and by the sword of Arminius, with whom Segestes, though dragged into war by the unanimous voice of the nation, continued to be at feud, his resentment being heightened by personal motives, as Arminius had carried off his daughter who was betrothed to another.

For “Romans”, read “French”: During the 19th century, Armin became a national symbol of resistance to the French forces that had invaded and conquered much of Germany during the Napoleonic Wars. Sculptor Ernst von Bandel began the patriotic monument in 1838, but he didn’t finish it until 1875. By then, Prussia had trounced France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Napoleon III’s Second Empire had collapsed, Prussia had taken Alsace and much of Lorraine from France as spoils of war, and Germany had united under Prussian leadership.

Including its base, Armin’s commanding statue towers 175 feet above the ground. The huge sword in Armin’s right hand bears the inscription, “Germany’s unity is my strength, my strength is Germany’s might,” and it points toward France. We tourists couldn’t see the inscription, however. Despite its hollow interior, with a steep stairway reaching to the statue’s head and arms, tourists can’t go beyond the 69 steps that lead up to the base. But we did see the monument’s cornerstone and, inscribed on it, a message calculated to chill Frenchman and Francophile alike:

An Arminius. Über den Rhein hast du einst Roms Legionen getrieben, und Germanien dankt dir, dass es heute noch ist. Schwinge ferner dein Schwert, wenn Frankreichs plündernde Horden gierig lechzend des Rheins heimische Gauen bedrohn.

[To Arminius. Thou once drove Rome's legions beyond the Rhine, and Germans now thank thee for Germany's existence. If France's plundering hordes greedily threaten the homeland's Rhenish lands, swing thy sword again.]

In these vividly vindictive words, the concepts of credit and blame join forcefully. In 1875, united Germans took credit for humiliating presumptuous France. They retaliated monumentally for decades of French scorn.

The French took a while to reply. In 1867, as Garibaldi led the drive for Italian unification, Emperor Napoleon III’s troops defended the Pope from Garibaldi’s forces. But in 1870, war-torn France withdrew its soldiers and Italian patriots seized the Papal States. Then German troops humiliated French armies and took the French emperor prisoner. How could the French restore their national honor? Immediately after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, French Catholics proposed to wash away national sin and shame by two measures: a campaign to encourage popular devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the construction of a Parisian church dedicated to those devotions. Naturally enough, they called the church Sacré Coeur.

The plan’s originator, Alexandre Legentil, had fled Paris as Prussian armies approached. While in the provinces he had sworn that “if God saved Paris and France and delivered the sovereign pontiff, he would contribute according to his means to the construction in Paris of a sanctuary dedicated to the Sacred Heart.” In 1873, a very Catholic National Assembly authorized the church’s construction on the city’s highest hill, Montmartre—the Martyrs’ Mountain, in one disputed etymology. It took another decade to raise the funds, clear the site and lay the foundation.

Montmartre already had a religious history. Popular legend made it the site of martyrdom for the first bishop of Paris, St. Denis, at the end of the 3rd century. As for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, its veneration had originated during the 17th century under King Louis XIV. In 1864, Pope Pius IX beatified the cult’s 17th-century founder, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. By 1873, she and the site had become favorites of monarchist, anti-revolutionary Catholics. The joining of the Sacred Heart with Montmartre therefore had powerful resonance in the France of the 1870s.

Yet Montmartre also acquired anti-religious significance as the starting point of the 1871 Paris Commune. The Commune began in March of that year when the defeated government ordered troops to remove cannons from Montmartre’s heights. Parisian workers resisted the order, and the soldiers on guard refused to fire on them. Members of the crowd later seized and killed generals Lecomte and Thomas near the hill. Lecomte had ordered the troops to fire, and Thomas had commanded troops who had slaughtered workers during the Revolution of 1848. Furthermore, as national troops massacred communards in May 1871, a vengeful detachment of their ranks murdered the archbishop of Paris. On Montmartre’s heights, the secular image of the Commune confronted the religious image of the Sacred Heart. Despite fierce secular and republican opposition, the Sacred Heart project won.

The new archbishop of Paris took responsibility for the project in January 1872. He wrote to Legentil:

You have considered from their true perspectives the ills of our country. . . . The conspiracy against God and Christ has prevailed in a multitude of hearts and in punishment for an almost universal apostasy, society has been subjected to all the horrors of war with a victorious foreigner and an even more horrible war amongst the children of the same country. Having become, by our prevarication, rebels against heaven, we have fallen during our troubles into the abyss of anarchy. The land of France presents the terrifying image of a place where no order prevails, while the future offers still more terrors to come. . . . This temple, erected as a public act of contrition and reparation . . . will stand amongst us as a protest against other monuments and works of art erected for the glorification of vice and impiety.

The archbishop got his basilica, and he got it located on Paris’s highest hill.

The foundation stone for Sacré Coeur was laid in 1875, the very same year that Germans finished building the Hermann Monument. Construction of the striking white travertine building ended in 1914, just in time for a war that would end in German humiliation, not French. After Germany’s defeat, Sacré Coeur, like the Hermann Monument, became a favorite tourist destination. In case anyone should miss the church’s national significance, equestrian statues of Joan of Arc and Saint Louis recall France’s military destiny.

The great divide in the French political soul is such that Sacré Coeur inevitably became a split metaphor in an on-going contestation. While Catholics and monarchists adored the church, secularists and republicans ridiculed it. In his 1898 novel Paris, Émile Zola called Sacré Coeur a “citadel of the absurd.” Eugène Ogé drew one of the era’s best-known anticlerical posters as an advertisement for the republican newspaper La Lanterne. It showed an immense, devilish priest wrapped around Sacré Coeur and blotting out the rest of Paris. Its motto: Voilà l’ennemi (”Here is the enemy”). For believers, however, Sacré Coeur came to represent the intermingling of credit and blame in both history and religiously informed meta-history: credit for sustaining faith, blame for sins that weakened France. And Sacré Coeur did more than represent: It aimed to teach future generations of Frenchman what to believe about their past. Believers aimed to beget more believers, and on balance, they succeeded.