This article considers the power of things to affect how the past is remembered in the aftermath of mass violence, through the case of the ‘destroyed villages’ (villages détruits) of the battlefield of Verdun, theatre in 1916 of one of the most destructive battles of World War I. As well as causing mass military death, the battle also led to the ‘death’ of nine small villages, declared to have ‘died for France’ and incorporated into the post-war commemorative landscape of the battlefield. The article illustrates the 21st-century discourse and practices that surround the remains of these villages, from emplaced ruins to photographs and other documents. A century after the ‘death’ of the villages, people who identify as descendants of the original inhabitants gather at the sites and through these objects evoke their ancestors and the pre-war settlement, momentarily reconstituting a space that they can ‘inhabit’ physically, imaginatively and affectively. However, bids to restore a ‘village’ space and time are overwritten by the commemorative framework in which the sites and remains have been embedded for the past century, that identifies the ‘dead’ localities with the human Fallen and their history with the moment of their ‘death for France’. So, while the surviving traces of the former villages retain their power to affect and thus to evoke the pre-war, civilian past, their ability to produce a new memory for Verdun is limited by their incorporation into a memorial landscape dedicated to heroic military death for the nation. The physical expropriation of sites and vestiges during the post-war reconstruction of the battlefield and their preservation as tangible tokens of mass death has enduringly fixed and overdetermined their meaning, in a form of symbolic expropriation that limits their power to produce memory.

本文通过“被摧毁的村庄”（村庄détruits）的案例，来考虑事物的力量会影响大规模暴力事件后的过去记忆）是凡尔登战场的战场，这是1916年第一次世界大战最具破坏性的战役之一。这场战役不仅造成大规模的军事死亡，还导致了9个小村庄的“死亡”，这些小村庄宣称已“死于法国”，并纳入战后纪念战场。本文阐述了围绕这些村庄的遗迹的21世纪话语和实践，从废墟到照片和其他文件。在村庄“死亡”之后的一个世纪，那些被认为是原始居民后裔的人聚集在这些地点，并通过这些物体唤起了他们的祖先和战前定居点，暂时重建了一个他们可以实际“居住”的空间，富有想象力和情感上的。然而，旨在恢复“乡村”空间和时间的提议被过去一个世纪的遗址和遗迹所嵌入的纪念框架所覆盖，该框架确定了人类堕落者的“死”地方以及他们堕落之时的历史。为法国而死”。因此，虽然前村的幸存痕迹保留了影响力，并唤起了战前平民的过去，但他们为凡尔登产生新记忆的能力受到限制，因为它们被并入了专门纪念英勇军事牺牲的纪念地为国家。战后重建期间对遗址和遗迹的实际征用以及将其保存为大规模杀伤性的有形标志已经永久地固定和确定了它们的含义，