Pastoureau, Michel.

The Colours of Our Memories (Les Couleurs de nos

souvenirs, 2010), translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA,
Polity. 2012. 186 pages; ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5571-0. US$ 25.00, hbk.

Michel Pastoureau, medieval historian, expert on heraldry and the

cultural history of colors, is professor, Directeur d'études, and Chaire
d'histoire de la symbolique occidentale at the École Pratique des Hautes
Etudes (EPHE) in Paris. In a scholarly approach that combines the Annales
school of history with concepts of structural semiotics, his most recent book
adds to an already impressive body of work on the phenomenon of color in
European cultural history. In 2000 (2001 in English) Pastoureau published a
beautifully illustrated volume on Blue: the History of a Color; in 2008 (2009
in English) the companion volume on Black: the History of a Color appeared.
It was followed in 2010 by the massive photo tome, without text, Couleurs
(Editions du Chêne), of whose almost 500 pages 350 are large images
dominated by one of Pastoureau’s six primary colors: white, black, red, blue,
green, and yellow.
As a specialist in heraldry and symbolic meaning, Pastoureau is also an
expert on textiles and clothing whose colors, shapes, and social meanings
are at the center of another book, The Devil’s Cloth (L’étoffe du diable, 1991
in French; 2001 in English). It is about stripes on clothes and coats of arms,
and marked the beginning of the author’s scholarly output on colors. Like all
of Pastoureau’s books, it is written in an engaging, essayistic style and
although deeply learned and researched, it aims at curious readers beyond
the academic world. Pastoureau writes with esprit – provocatively,
informatively, elegantly and always just as interested in the symbolic and
rhetorical as the practical and material aspect of is topics.1 For people in

1
Vera Rule wrote a wonderful review of the book in The Guardian, poking
gentle fun at the relentless French cultural semiotic charm. Vera Rule,
“Vertical or horizontal, ma’am?” Web 2001.

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fashion today, The Devil’s Cloth provides a piece of deep archeology,
reaching back into times when fashion was not a venue of individual self-
expression but a carefully observed statement of social status and rank.
Nevertheless, scandal might arise in both contexts!
The Colours of Our Memories is a lovely book. Clearly the work of a
poeta doctus, it neither preaches nor drones on but lightly lives up to the
classical desideratum for great writing, namely prodesse et delectare.
Following Pierre Nora’s concept of the “lieu de mémoire,” Pastoureau makes
colors and his memory of them into exactly such a “memory site.” Thanks to
his impeccable sense of time, place, and the social imaginary, he is able to
turn his own encounters with colors into a picture that imaginatively and
emotionally includes the reader in the color schemes of France and Europe in
the second part of the twentieth century.
The Colours of Our Memories has over seventy narrowly focused
chapters, most of them starting from a personal memory. It is introduced by
what amounts to a warning about the two main axes that Pastoureau
pursues: the difficulty to define colors and the frailty of memory. The last
chapter returns to this difficulty and illustrates it with references to the many
people for whom colors have played a role throughout history: the pigment
makers, the painters, the clothiers, dressmakers, fashion designers, the
linguists, the neuroscientists, and not least the historians who only recently
have begun to pay more attention to the physicality of their worlds, the
embodiment of their actors, the sensory surroundings in which human
development always and necessarily occurs. The bibliography, organized
broadly thematically, is short and highly selective; it is followed by a brief

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/15/historybooks.highereducati
on2> (August 2013).

2
chronology of life events and scholarly output of the author. The book
concludes with an index.
The Colours of Our Memories is thus history, memoir, semiotics, a
study of material culture and perceptual change – all wrapped into an
engagingly jargon-free, accessible narrative full of intriguing topics that few
people ever think about unprodded but will find invariably interesting, even
fascinating, once they have been pointed out to them. And prodding and
pointing out is what Pastoureau does so well. Born in 1947, he is just
beginning to be justified in historicizing his biography. Each chapter starts
from a personal recollection and segues into a historical excursion on color
and things associated with it – always interesting, often surprising, and
generally unthought-about. This writing strategy revealingly melds the three
time levels of the author’s France of his childhood and early years with the
critical-analytical perspective of the seasoned scholar of our present and the
depth of western history, at times as far back as classical Greece.
Pastoureau’s mid-twentieth century France itself often appears as a place
already deeply buried in history, where, as he shows in the case of a young
class mate of his, color photography, certainly for a passport picture, “was
still regarded as something suspect and inaccurate” (32). In this distant
France, but even beyond it, Pastoureau claims, red cars were fast; or rather,
fast cars were red; or even more accurately, revealing the socio-cultural
assumptions around colors: if a car was red, it had to be fast (37). Later,
among many other color phenomena, a “Mitterrand beige” emerged, “a
nasty beige at once out of date yet too new” (22). And at the same time, in
another country, he observes a color so supremely ugly that he cannot even
give it a name, “[d]isagreeable to the eye and wounding to the soul, it was
as ugly as could be and, on top of everything, there was something brutal
and uncivilized about it that appeared to stem from the most uncouth codes

3
of social life, a kind of Urfarbe” (39) – the color dominating the public spaces
of the old communist Eastern Europe.
Relying on this device of personal recollections arching back into
history, Pastoureau finds answers to simple questions about colors he
seemingly has only just stumbled upon. He raises issues that people live
with but rarely think about outside a few specific situations, such a – for
women, surely – putting together a wardrobe (that’s both cloth and color!),
choosing the color of a new car, distinguishing the metro lines on a chart,
making sure a traffic light is green and not red. Pastoureau does not mind
that his readers often pay no heed to colors. After all, we take many things
for granted as we go through our busy lives. Yet, just why is it that the
leader of the Tour de France wears a yellow shirt? that traffic lights are red
and green? that we drink white wine (although it is not white) and red,
which really comes in many shades, stretching the very concept of red?
Pastoureau does not assume that people know how colors change their
meaning throughout history, for instance, black from the color of the devil,
death, and sin to one of “humility and temperance” by the late thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries (119) and of authority and elegance later on. Or
that green rather than black is the color most associated with superstitions,
despite the common fear of the black cat (108); or that vexillology (116) is
the science of flags, and “flying one’s colors” says exactly what it means. Or
that research has shown that children do not like purple (139ff). Or that in
the West the preference ranking of blue, green, red, white and black, with
yellow last, has been stable for 140 years of poll taking. Neither geography
nor culture or climate seem to have had an influence.
Yet this does not mean that there exist color universals because the
European ranking does not apply to Black Africa or Central Asia: color may
not even be perceived as a single unified phenomenon in non-Western
cultures but as part of a more complex sensory experience, a synesthesia

4
including wetness/dryness or roughness/smoothness as factors (145/146).
Color, Pastoureau said in an interview in 2012, is an idea!2
Who would have thought that designers and art historians for ages
“paid no attention at all to problems of colour” (46)? Or how customers
made their color choices from early mail-order catalogs full of black and
white line drawings? Or that the phenomenon of sun-tanning yields
interesting social and class implications via shades of skin color, with
preferences by the upper classes shifting from the desirable sporty bronze in
the 1950s back to whiteness after the 1960s – a development that started
long before it was supported by medical arguments rather than class and
social status (127).
Despite its brevity, The Colours of Our Memories is a book rich in
information that it offers to the reader lightly and entertainingly for broad
consideration via diverse roads of approach – experiential, of course,
emotional, personal as well as social, historical, or scientific. In the end,
Pastoureau emphasizes the humanities’ role above all for the understanding
of color and their decoding on the basis of experience, memory, knowledge,
and imagination (170). Colors are pigment, it is true, mineral, vegetal,
synthetic; they do have “tactile” qualities of surfaces, shine, hue, saturation
and come in myriads of shades, industrially produced. But, as Pastoureau
maintains in a final linguistic observation, behind the proliferation of fancy
color terms, “borrowed from animals, vegetables and minerals” (166) that
are designed to be “more vague but more enticing” (166) than our standard
lexicon entries, the basic set of colors has “remained simple and accessible”
(166) – essentially the six primary colors white, black, red, blue, green
yellow. A recent legal case serves to confirm both trends, the simple and the
fanciful: in 2008 Apple Inc. settled a lawsuit filed by two “California
professional photographers […], saying they were duped into buying
2
Le Point.fr <http://www.lepoint.fr/grands-entretiens/michel-pastoureau-la-
couleur-est-une-idee-30-10-2012-1523049_326.php> (August 2013).

5
MacBook Pro notebooks by Apple's claim that the[y] could display millions of
colors. ‘The displays are only capable of displaying the illusion of millions of
colors through the use of a software technique referred to as dithering,’ the
lawsuit said.” The plaintiffs’ lawyer conceded that his clients didn't pursue
their complaint as a class-action case because “it was difficult to find other
people who were wronged because they had bought Macs solely based on
the ‘millions of colors’ claim.” Many commentators saw “the case as frivolous
or point[ed] out that they could not perceive much, if any, difference
between millions of colors and hundreds of thousands of colors.”3
In light of this state of affairs, Pastoureau’s last chapter title, “What is
Colour?”, is both a bit of a joke and an ongoing challenge. He just told us all
about colors but also revealed just how mysterious the phenomenon of color
remains, despite – or because – it comes in hundreds of thousands – or
even millions – of variations.

Hans J. Rindisbacher
Pomona College
Claremont, CA, USA
E-mail: hjr04747@pomona.edu

3
Eric Gwinn, “Apple settles ‘millions of colors’ lawsuit.” Web, 2008.
<http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/eric2_0/2008/03/apple-settles-
m.html> (June, 2013).