The implicit hope was that commerce could tame Europe's turbulent nations. The perennial problem of politics -- mankind's susceptibility to storms of passions -- could perhaps be solved, or at least substantially ameliorated, by getting Europe's peoples to sublimate their energies in economic activities. The quest for improved material well-being would drain away energies hitherto tapped and channeled by demagogues.
Reminders of Europe's problematic past were recently found a few miles from St. Laurent. Workers preparing a foundation for a new house overlooking Omaha Beach came upon parts of the bodies of two German soldiers. There was scant media attention to this because such discoveries have not been rare.
Also near here, 21,160 German soldiers are buried at the La Cambe Cemetery. Thirty percent -- more than 6,000 -- were never identified, so some German parents conducted "assumed burials." They placed metal markers bearing the names of their missing sons near the graves of unknown soldiers who were known to have died near where the parents' sons were last known to be fighting.
Such heartbreaking stories are written into Normandy's lovely landscape. At the American Cemetery overlooking this beach, amid the many rows of white marble gravestones, are two, side by side, marking the burial places of Ollie Reed and Ollie Reed Jr., a father and his son. The son, an Army first lieutenant, died in Italy on July 6. His father, an Army colonel, was killed July 30 in Normandy. Two telegrams notified the father's wife, the son's mother. The telegrams arrived in Manhattan, Kan., 45 minutes apart.
The 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan, from a Brittany town on the English Channel, defined a nation as a community of shared memory -- and shared forgetting. Europe's emotional equipoise, and the transformation of "Europe" from a geographical to a political expression, has required both remembering and forgetting. Americans who make pilgrimages to this haunting place are reminded of their role, and their stake, in that transformation.