Recreating the Past

Many years ago, I visited the enormous castle called the Haut-Koenigsbourg, near the town of Orschwiller in the Lower Rhine department of Alsace. Dating from the Middle Ages, it was half-destroyed by Swedish forces in 1633 during the Thirty Years’ War, and thereafter abandoned. But in the first decade of the twentieth century, the German imperial government rebuilt it, and Kaiser Wilhelm himself reopened it to great pomp in 1908.

The restorers had as their goal to return the castle to the way it had looked in the early seventeenth century, to make it a perfect historical reconstruction, as well as a monument to German power and glory in the province conquered from France in 1871 (and ceded back after World War I). They drew on plans and drawings from the period, as well as textual descriptions. They studied other, surviving castles. They meticulously copied period furniture and decorations. They had all the formidable preparation that the German historical school of the day could give them.

And yet, when I visited, the Haut Koenigsbourg struck me as impossibly kitschy. For all the care that the restorers had put in, everything about the place screamed “re-creation” and “early twentieth century.” My memory may be faulty, but I seem to recall that various parts of the castle were painted in oddly light, even pastel colors that seemed to have seeped out of some pre-Raphaelite illustrative album. Could the restorers really have believed that they had recreated the castle of the seventeenth century in perfect detail?

But then, even the most meticulous historical recreations all too often quickly betray the era in which they were done. Around the same time that I visited the Haut Koenigsberg I saw the Kenneth Branagh film of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which reviewers at the time praised for its gritty faithfulness to the fifteenth-century setting. Watching it again today, I still think it is a great film, but find it hard not to laugh at Branagh’s perfectly layered 1989 haircut.

These thoughts were brought to mind by a recent story in Le Monde about one of the most famous speeches in French history: Charles de Gaulle’s “Appel du 18 juin,” in which, from London, over the airwaves of the BBC, immediately after the fall of France, he called on his countrymen to continue to resist. As historians have long noted, this speech, which is now seen as a crucial event in French history and celebrated annually by the French state, did not immediately appear very significant. It is unsure how many people in France actually heard it, and it initially produced few volunteers for the Free French cause. De Gaulle at the time was a largely unknown brigadier general, and it looked likely that most of the French would heed the words of the country’s new leader, the enormously popular World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain, and agree to the armistice with Germany. The speech only became important in retrospect, as De Gaulle succeeded in creating the Free French movement, gathered support from around the French Empire, joined the allies in liberating the country, and became its first postwar leader. The BBC did not even keep a recording of the speech, although it kept one when De Gaulle reiterated his appeal, in somewhat different form, four days later.

Le Monde, however, has now produced a recreation of the original speech. Using as a script a transcription from the Swiss military archives (translated into German), it hired the actor François Morel to deliver it, and then used vocal synthesis technology to turn his voice into De Gaulle’s. The result is uncanny. I know De Gaulle’s voice well from having listened to many recordings of his speeches over the years, especially the amazing oration given upon the liberation of Paris in 1944 (“Paris outragé! Paris brisé! Paris martyrisé! Mais Paris libéré!”). I’ve visited the Historial Charles de Gaulle in the Invalides, whose playful multimedia approach to telling its subject’s story would certainly have appalled him. I’ve heard the version of the speech given on June 22, 1940. The Le Monde recreation sounds authentic.

Will it still sound authentic in a few decades? Is there some detail in the recording that I, and other listeners have so far missed, but that will eventually scream out “early 2020’s”? Or is computer technology now meeting the challenge I discussed above, and making it possible to close the gap between past and present in a new way?

In one sense, the prospect is frightening. It seems likely that within a few years, it will become relatively easy, even on a home computer, to alter old films and photographs in a way that makes Stalinist airbrushing seem like child’s play, and to produce lifelike deep fakes at will. We’ll be able to see Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address in full color. More disturbingly, we can expect to find Republican party operatives “discovering” apparently authentic film clips in which Stalin and Hitler praise the Democratic party, or in which Hunter Biden reveals his father’s participation in child sex rings.

But the illusion of historical authenticity does not, of course, just depend on the sound and image. Language changes over time, as does body language, and a thousand other subtle and less-subtle aspects of human interaction. When I was a dean at Johns Hopkins, I remember having to call out the development office when they reproduced an 1876 speech by the university’s first president, and silently changed the word “men” to “people” throughout (there are better ways to demonstrate a commitment to inclusivity). Computer code can be written to correct for these various differences as well, I suppose, but each aspect of interaction will require its own particular expertise.

Of course, there is nothing new about the production of historical fakes and forgeries, and the deployment of historical expertise to detect them. This particular arms race goes back at least as far as “The Donation of Constantine” and its exposure by Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century. And while the technology is currently changing at a fast and furious pace, I don’t actually expect the fakers to pull decisively ahead of the historians, however well they can bring old photographs to life and alter old film. The treacherous detail will eventually stand out in high relief.

Of course, the Le Monde project to reproduce the “Appel du 18 juin” is in no sense a historical fake. Neither was the rebuilding of the Haut Koenigsbourg. But we should always keep in mind just how thin a line lies between recreation for the sake of instruction and inspiration, and recreation for more nefarious purposes.