E Infle 016 0095

What is a hero?
Marc Tourret
In Inflexions Volume 16, Issue 1, 2011, pages 95 to 103
Publishers Armée de terre
ISSN 1772-3760
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MARC TOURRET
WHAT IS A HERO?
Despite our world being apparently free of illusions, there still
seem to be some fabulous characters alive and well. The heroes that
gave their names to streets, squares, metro stations and educational
establishments testify to choices made and the political and moral
battles required in the field of historical representations. The term
“hero” also crops up daily in news stories, sporting events, films and
television series. In these cases, the hero’s status is manufactured by
the media, rather than being carved in stone or painted on enamel.
Those individuals do not so much have the stuff heroes are made of, as
are given a light and ephemeral dusting of that stuff by printed paper
or pixels on a screen.
From the diversity of circumstances in which a hero is constructed,
we can see that it is difficult to draw up a Photofit. The difficulty is
increased by the closeness, or even superimposition of a heroic figure
on other models of excellence such as gods, martyrs, celebrities and,
most importantly, “great men”. Just what is the status of Charles de
Gaulle, footballer Zinedine Zidane or Harry Potter, to mention only
figures who have influenced recent imagination? It is easy for us to
see that the generic description “hero” covers people meeting very
different challenges.
Before looking at the great discontinuities in the history of Western
heroism, we need to take some methodological precautions in order
to precisely tackle the complex question of defining heroes 1.
Heroes as the product of communication

A hero may be fictional or real, but is supposed to have achieved an
extraordinary exploit serving a community. His physical commitment
has led to superhuman performance, sometimes at risk to his life. But,
in order to qualify for public esteem, it is essential for the story of his
prowess to be told. “There is no hero without an audience”, wrote
André Malraux in L’Espoir. The hero may be victorious or defeated,
but he becomes an object of veneration. His action, whether real or
imagined, is known only because it is communicated (in an epitaph,
1. To examine the points touched on in this article in greater depth, see the following works, which are backed up by an
extensive bibliography: Pierre Centlivres, Daniel Fabre & Françoise Zonabend (dir.), La Fabrique des héros (Paris,
Maison des sciences de l’homme, Ethnologie de la France. Cahiers No. 12, 1998), and Odile Faliu & Marc Tourret (dir.),
Héros, d’Achille à Zidane (Paris, bnf, 2007).
II WHAT HAVE HEROES BECOME?
epic, song, history lesson, newspaper article, photograph or film, etc.).

That is the lesson we learn from the story of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian
king of Uruk, whose legendary exploits are associated with creation of
an epic in the 3rd or 2nd millennium B.C. We should therefore distin-
guish a courageous act from a heroic act, just as we separate historical
facts from representations of them.
While heroes have not necessarily all shown real courage, it can also
be said that not all courageous people have become heroes. Heroes are
defined by the fact that they have all gone through the hero-making
process, in which the appropriate image is constructed. History
abounds with episodes showing such discrepancies in how they would
be remembered. A famous example of this process is provided by the
battle of Arcola (1796), which led to only the glory of Bonaparte being
celebrated, with the role of General Augereau quickly forgotten. As for
the reality of the battle, it was far removed from the representations
immediately prescribed by Bonaparte to the chroniclers, engravers and
painters who fashioned the intrepid and glorious posture conserved
by our memories over centuries.
The definition of a hero also changes according to the disci-
plinary field of those who use this, sometimes hackneyed, term. For
psychologists, such a person is above all a model for a child’s psychic
development, while for philosophers he is a moral incarnation of good,
and for anthropologists he is a legendary ancestor and a totemic figure.
With our love of classification, the hero in literature has become
synonymous with the main character in a work, involving a semantic
impoverishment that can be seen from the middle of the 17 century.th
In contemporary novels, the “hero” may even have none of the

original defining characteristics: service, commanding authority and
superhuman nature.
For a historian of representations, aware of the processes of
constructing mythic characters, the hero is above all someone who
reveals the nature of societies, which recognise them as exceptional
individuals. The values he defends testify to the power of some social
group at a given point in history. One of the finest examples in the
history of France is provided by the character of Joan of Arc, who
embodied ambiguous models during the 19 and 20 centuries. As
th th
a patriotic figure of the people, with obvious characteristics of the

Left, who had been abandoned by the King and made a martyr by
the Church, she was given the more democratic spelling Jeanne
Darc—rather than Jeanne d’Arc—in the middle of the 19 century, by
th
historians Michelet, Quicherat and Martin. She nevertheless became

a model Catholic saint in the second half of the century, thanks to
Mgr Dupanloup, and then a nationalist heroine incarnating the
WHAT IS A HERO? III
“Gallic race” in opposition to Jews and foreigners (under the influence

of Drumont and Déroulède). She became a secondary patron saint
of France early in the 20 century, her cult being claimed by both the
th
Resistance and the Vichy authorities during the Second World War.
Her following is now in decline, and she is celebrated as a heroine
only at the local level and by the National Front. However, she could
well serve in the future as a figurehead for a feminist movement. The
Joan of Arc cult thus teaches us less about the real historical character
than about the ideological power struggle that exists in the contem-
porary era.
The hero between history and memory

As we have seen, heroes are somewhere between history and
memory. Recognition of their extraordinary actions puts them in an
immediate past, or all the more legendary for being far off. In the Iliad,
for example, Homer tells us that the men of his time were no longer
as strong as those who fought in the Trojan War. In ancient Greece,
individuals who were the subject of a heroic cult were founders of
cities, kings, ancestors with various degrees of mythical nature; some
had not necessarily achieved anything extraordinary, but they were all
dead and witnesses of a dark and bygone era.
That nostalgia for a heroic age reminds us that heroes carry out their
actions in a world of memory. Whether they come from the world of
fiction or from real history, they are reworked in our imagination.
The characters of Roland and King Arthur illustrate the extremely
permeable boundary between reality and fiction. There is only weak
evidence of their historical reality, but their legendary existence is
monumental. We are reminded of that by the journalist in The Man who
shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
John Ford’s film marvellously dissects the problem of constructing a
hero, and the use of flashbacks illustrates the complexity of its various
time sequences.
The heroic image of a cavalry charge, which fed the Western imagi-
nation for centuries, is one of the finest examples of this power
wielded by romantic fiction. The strength of the cavalry myth can be
judged from the stories of charges from Agincourt to that—legendary
but tenacious—of Polish lancers against the panzers in 1939. In between
came the Charge of the Light Brigade, in the Crimea in 1854, and what
were called the “Reichshoffen” cavalry, in the Franco-Prussian war.
Another indicator is the liberties taken in representations of historical
and geographical reality. While the traditional cavalryman became
IV WHAT HAVE HEROES BECOME?
obsolete in real battle tactics after the Renaissance, he remained a

nostalgic symbol of military heroism.
Historians provide evidence of a great ability to make and unmake
heroes. Their critical investigation of memory is leading them increas-
ingly to ask “who, how and why do we create heroes?”, rather than
“what is a hero?” Michelet “invented” Joan of Arc as the Domrémy
shepherdess, while more recently Colette Beaune demythologised the
character by putting her back into the historical context, and Gerd
Krumeich has analysed the myth. Literature is one of numerous
media that have enabled the construction of heroes in the course of
history. We will try to present a summary of their great moments, while
limiting ourselves to the Western world, and in particular France.
Heroes serving the city

In Greek antiquity, a hero came somewhere between gods and men.
While being mortal, he became the subject of a ritual cult after his
death. While his qualities or his exceptional actions distinguished him
from ordinary men, the world of heroes was incredibly heterogeneous.
There were demigods (Heracles and Theseus), warlords (Achilles),
founders of cities, former kings, ancestors, athletes and healers,
with most but not all the heroes being men, often achieving exploits
associated with war. In many cases, they made their mark through the
strength of their civilised values, in opposition to chaos and savagery.
The heroic cult that developed in Greece starting in the 8 century
th
B.C. became modified during antiquity, particularly under Roman

and then Christian influence. Inscriptions discovered on the heroa,
monuments erected in memory of heroes at strategic points in the city,
show that local characters, whether fictional or real, were more popular
than famous figures such as Homer, Hesiod, Virgil and Plutarch, who
have been communicated down the centuries to us by poetic song and
then school studies of the classics (Achilles, Hector, Heracles, Aeneas,
etc.). Rome borrowed the epic model from the Greek world, while
integrating it closely into the history of the city in Aeneas’s image:
Virgil’s transformation of the Greek hero into a model of filial and
civic piety assured Julius Caesar’s descendents, the Julian family (as a
gens), an aura that could be expected to favour Caesar’s political aims.
Starting in the first century A.D., heroism took three great paths, the
first being the political one of apotheosis (consecratio), which gave the
emperor a superior status by being made divine. At the same time, liter-
ature continued to produce numerous fictional heroes, whether epic
or tragic. Finally, in religious terms, there were exemplary figures of
WHAT IS A HERO? V
Christian martyrs (who sought suffering), and then ascetic saints, who
came to compete with heroes. The first Fathers of the Church strove
to distinguish Hercules, who had become a very popular model of the
virtuous sage at the end of antiquity, from Jesus, whose life certainly
included episodes similar to those of the son of Zeus. In addition,
Tertullian said that Christianity was wisdom combined with heroism.
The Christians rejected the pagan heroes, who moved between human
and divine characteristics, and between reality and fiction. For them,
Jesus, like the saints, fought for the coming of the celestial city by
achieving exploits rooted in historical reality and not in myth.
The marvellous hero

Saints remained the most popular exemplary figures in the Middle
Ages. Their proximity to the divine was confirmed by their accomplishing
miracles, that altarpiece predelle illustrated as a succession of exploits.
Cults associated with these relics involved fundamental political and
religious competition between parishes and even between States. While
the processes of canonisation required (as they still do) the candidate
for sainthood to have achieved heroic acts, the virtues required were
more those of humility and asceticism. In particular, one became a saint
only through the exemplary nature of all or a large part of one’s life.
That was not necessarily the case with valiant knights and heroes
of aristocratic elites, who were progressively lumped together with
knights in the latter centuries of the Middle Ages. The term “hero”
did not appear in the French language until 1370, but valiant knights
were an equivalent in the usage of court society. Roland, the knight
celebrated in the chanson de geste written in the late 9 century, is the
th
prototype, accomplishing warlike exploits in the service of God and

Charlemagne, his overlord. A little later, Chrestien de Troyes and the
authors of the Arthurian cycle put forward the model in literature of
a courtly knight: someone who both imitated and was supposed to
inspire moral behaviour in the real knights. Conferring sacred status
on the Holy Grail, and substituting Good for a woman as the object
of the quest showed that the Church was Christianising the Arthurian
myth from the 8 century onwards.
th
In the Middle Ages, there was accordingly competition between lay

and sacred figures of excellence. The king could thus stand out as a
hero by combining spiritual virtues and knightly exploits, as did Saint
Louis (1214‑70), whose image as a man of value (or “valiant man”) was
created primarily by the monks of Saint-Denis abbey. At the end of the
Middle Ages, the success of the Nine (male) Worthies theme, and then
VI WHAT HAVE HEROES BECOME?
the Nine Female Worthies, that has come down to us in the figures
on packs of cards, portrayed an idealised chivalry or knighthood that
looked to a mythical past in order to exorcise doubts that assailed its
role at a critical time of economic, social and military change.
Heroes in the classical age

The classical age saw heroism reach its peak and begin a decline. In
France, the 17 century was the heroic century par excellence, to the point
th
where the aristocratic values of courage, honour and commanding

authority became spread through a large part of society. And yet, in
representations, the absolute monarch monopolised heroic glory while
subjugating the nobility, who were the “natural” suppliers of heroes.
The contemporary exploits of the Prince of Condé, and the older ones
of Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar inspired Corneille in his creation of El Cid.
That tragic play evoked nostalgia for a feudal order that had disap-
peared, but the king is the great victor in the final act.
In the middle of the century, the term “hero” was beginning to
indicate the main character in a literary work. This freeing up of
fictional characters illustrates the desire to distinguish the imaginary
from the real, and to get rid of the medieval combination expressed
in marvellous phenomena. While cultural heroes proliferated in the
theatre, opera and popular literature, such heroes were questioned by
17 century moralists, who criticised the vain seeking for glory.
th
In the 18 century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment

th
denounced those whom Voltaire referred to as provincial plunderers,

substituting the “great man” as a model of excellence. Attacking the
aristocratic nature of the hero and his warlike violence involved
questioning an unjust social and political order, and preferring people
who were useful to a humanity that strove patiently for peace and for
whom grandeur came only from merit. Nevertheless, the French
Revolution and the political conflicts and wars that marked 19 and th
20 century France favoured the emergence of new heroes alongside

th
the still-revered figure of a “great man”.
The national hero

The Revolution brought a conception of the hero that still persists. In
opposition to an essentialist definition, which presupposed an obvious
(aristocratic) heroic nature, an existentialist view came to the fore,
giving preference to meritocratic heroes. This reversal is symbolised
WHAT IS A HERO? VII
by the example of 14-year-old Joseph Bara, killed near Cholet in 1793,

and elevated by the Convention into a republican martyr. There was
nothing about his age, his modest social origins or his junior position
in the army could have predicted an act of such bravery as claimed for
him by Robespierre, who wished to see him elevated to the ranks of
heroes. The boy is said to have shouted “Long live the Republic!” when
brigands demanded a cry of “Long live the king!” He reappeared in the
Third Republic’s “republican catechism” and could still be found in
school textbooks up to the 1960s.
Those textbooks also provide evidence of a democratisation in
the means by which heroes were made. There were engravings and
numerous illustrations in textbooks from the beginning of the
20 century, stereotypical and idealised images produced on a variety
th
of media and in famous pictures and sculptures, with the press playing
an increasing role and the development of publishing assisting the
proliferation of exemplary figures with which the French could identify
with the coming of the nation-state. They showed the golden age of
Vercingetorix, Roland, Joan of Arc, Bayard, Hoche, Kléber and the
noble La Tour d’Auvergne family. In the “great novel of the nation”,
their dazzling exploits can be seen alongside the patient achieve-
ments of “great men” such as Charlemagne, Sully, Colbert, Buffon,
Victor Hugo and Pasteur. Some went from one category to the other,
with the hero Bonaparte becoming “great man” Napoleon I (and De
Gaulle taking on that dual image in the 20 century). Together with
th
heroes on whom there was a consensus could be seen some who were
fought over (as we have seen with Joan of Arc) and characters who
were argued about. Examples are Jacques Cathelineau, a royalist
hero, and Louise Michel, the “Red Virgin”: one of the few heroines
among the mass of male heroes. These latter examples are all the
more malleable in having come from ancient families, embodying
the ideological conflicts that played out in 19 century France.
th
Heroes and victims

The two World Wars of the 20 century produced mixed conse-
th
quences for the world of heroes. “Great men” do not provide an

effective model in times of war: sparkling acts of brilliance tend to
eclipse long-drawn-out efforts, so the former were valued. However,
the horror and length of the Great War dramatically changed the way
that combatants were represented, with progressive advance in the
20 century of the figure of a victim. Certainly, the conflict produced
th
examples conforming to the traditional pattern—Guynemer, Corentin

VIII WHAT HAVE HEROES BECOME?
Carré and Pétain, etc.—but photographic reporting and war literature,

followed by commemorative sculpture (war memorials) progressively
shifted the emphasis to the idea of the sacrifice individuals had made.
Often, a hero took on the appearance of a victim. In the era of masses
rather than individuals, heroism increasingly became collective and
anonymous: the unshaven poilus of the Great War, miners and, later,
members of the Resistance. That is one of the reasons for burying the
Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe.
The scattered geographical distribution of our contemporary heroa is
a reminder of France’s Cartesian taste—paid a fair amount of respect—
for distinguishing between the “great men” buried in the Panthéon, the
military heroes in the Invalides, the kings at Saint-Denis, and collective
heroes honoured at the Arc de Triomphe. The last group encom-
passes the Revolutionary and Imperial armies, the Unknown Soldier,
and those involved in the Resistance, the “decolonisation” wars and
even—temporarily—the “Blues”, France’s peacetime combatants of the
football field, whose victory in the 1998 World Cup was commemo-
rated by giant inscriptions at the top of the arch.
The Second World War bequeathed us members of the Resistance
as the most recent great national heroes. The fact that some of the
key figures, such as Pierre Brossolette, were partly forgotten, and the
late emergence of others, such as Jean Moulin, illustrate the unpre-
dictable nature of society’s memory of heroes. Why is the remarkable
Joseph Epstein, head of the ftpf (French Volunteers and Partisans)
in the Paris region, who was shot at Mont-Valérien in 1944, still
today less famous than his successor, Colonel Rol-Tanguy, or Missak
Manouchian, who was head of ftp-moi (Volunteers and Partisans—
Immigrant Workers)? Memories of the Resistance are a privileged area
of observation in the processes of hero-making and of condemnation
to oblivion. States, political parties, local and national associa-
tions, and the media are active—and frequently competitors—in this
construction of heroes, with the subjects’ celebrity measured by how
often they appear in street names. Women and foreigners have more
recently appeared in the pantheon of Resistance heroes, following the
immediate post-war period when those valued were primarily French
male combatants. As for the recent emergence of “just” figures, that
is a symptom of the attention given to victims.
New heroes
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of heroes; they have
certainly had worldwide reputations, but it has been more ephemeral.
WHAT IS A HERO? IX
The hero-making procedures are indeed those of a media system that

encourages a rapid turnover of the figures offered to us, the spectators.
Even lasting fictional characters, such as James Bond, have become
rare, and need renewal of the media in which they appear and of the
actors, together with regular updating of the backgrounds to their
epics.
While heroes remain combatants, they sometimes get mixed up with
“celebrities” (notably footballers or adventurers), and their “service”
is less military than civil. The people active in humanitarian areas
(firefighters, NGO leaders and blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers)
who are eligible for the hero-making process are modern warriors
with a good conscience who fight the forces of evil (albeit sometimes
nebulous) and save innumerable victims in front of the television
cameras.
How can non-violent heroes be constructed? That is the paradoxical
challenge for contemporary Western society. Heroes’ intrinsic violence
is filtered and controlled through television and cinema screens, and
tolerated in children’s toys and adults’ video games, being kept at a
distance; whereas it has proved an indispensable function. The heroes
embody values which, without their actions, would remain abstract in
the Western world, which tries to isolate its wars as being in the past
or peripheral. The suspicion that has surrounded our heroes for half
a century reflects a decline in patriarchal and authoritarian values as
the counterpart of increased focus on virtues that are more democratic,
feminist and pacifist. The suspicion is accompanied by a change in
the heroes’ posture (which has become less dictated by religion) and
in their mission (which has become focused more on service than on
commanding authority), if we go back to the word’s original meaning.
Thus, the slow process of consecrating victims is enabling them
to acquire an identity while, in contrast, heroes are plunging into
anonymity. History textbooks, commemorative street-name plates and
official celebrations remind us that the duty of memory these days
essentially relates to victims. The heroes are becoming more humble
and discreet, and often more prone to disappear. As the subjects of
cults, they nevertheless continue to arouse passionate debate, as they
commit their bodies to defend values. Over time, however, they often
become part of the heritage of cultural heroes who, having become
the subject of a consensus, lose all their effectiveness as charismatic
models, whether political, social, civil or military.

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What is a hero?

Article available online at

Electronic distribution Cairn.info for Armée de terre.

Heroes as the product of communication

epic, song, history lesson, newspaper article, photograph or film, etc.).

In contemporary novels, the “hero” may even have none of the

a patriotic figure of the people, with obvious characteristics of the

historians Michelet, Quicherat and Martin. She nevertheless became

“Gallic race” in opposition to Jews and foreigners (under the influence

The hero between history and memory

obsolete in real battle tactics after the Renaissance, he remained a

Heroes serving the city

B.C. became modified during antiquity, particularly under Roman

The marvellous hero

prototype, accomplishing warlike exploits in the service of God and

In the Middle Ages, there was accordingly competition between lay

Heroes in the classical age

where the aristocratic values of courage, honour and commanding

In the 18 century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment

denounced those whom Voltaire referred to as provincial plunderers,

20 century France favoured the emergence of new heroes alongside

the still-revered figure of a “great man”.

The national hero

by the example of 14-year-old Joseph Bara, killed near Cholet in 1793,

Heroes and victims

quences for the world of heroes. “Great men” do not provide an

examples conforming to the traditional pattern—Guynemer, Corentin

Carré and Pétain, etc.—but photographic reporting and war literature,

The hero-making procedures are indeed those of a media system that

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