Jay Winter

One scholar, adopting a Foucaultian framework, has interpreted war memorials as exercises in biopolitics' . His argument takes this form. In the construction of war memorials, death is deconstructed: its horror, its undeniable individuality, its trauma, and the ignominy often associated with it, are buried. Then it is reinvested with meaning, as an abstraction, a collective sacrifice remote from individual extinction. 'A nos morts' is a disembodied message - there is no one speaking. Similarly, the dead are no longer individual people. They appear solely as names, inscribed on the war memorial. Their sacrifice thereby takes on the form of an expression of a general will, a collective spirit embodied in the state. In these memorials, the state affirms its right to call on its citizens to kill and to die. The only way to see their force is to place them in the context of

'une veritable economie de pouvoir'.71

Some English communities carried on the old Puritan war against graven images, preferring obelisks to crosses.

First in Paris in 1830, then in La Salette in the Isere in 1846, at Lourdes in the Pyrenees in 1858 and at the northern town of Pontmain in 1871, women and especially children brought the supernatural into everyday life; and the everyday into the supernatural. For surrounding these incidents there arose a vast pilgrimage movement, active to this day.