From military strategy to remembrance

Throughout history, the landscape has been the front-row spectator of human military conflicts. Transformed by war, it is nonetheless an element to be taken into account in drawing up military strategy. Where today visitors come to contemplate the memory of past events, a few years or decades earlier soldiers wrote history, with a landscape of war as its backcloth. From military strategy to remembrance, the landscape seems to have undergone “heritage designation” to become a place of remembrance, in other words, not only to preserve the traces of the past but also to cater to political, tourism and societal concerns. By revealing their scars, becoming home to remembrance sites and museums and the scene of commemorative ceremonies, landscapes participate in the construction of an individual and collective memory of contemporary conflicts.