| Abstract | Attempts to show how the commemoration of the war dead of 1914-18 in selected frontier areas of France provides insight into constructions of local collective memory through combinations of visual iconography and textual inscription, and how these constructions are often required to effect a compromise between problematically divergent local identities or antithetical socio-cultural preoccupations and aspirations. Identification of factors which have led to the emergence of alternative memory communities in the post-Second World War era; Analysis of commemorative practice in historically problematic French frontier territories after 1918; Impact of immigration and exile on the conditions for the emergence of new communities whose claims to a duty of memory have shaped commemorative agendas in the last three decades.
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