Luuk van Middelaar writes about the function of personal symbols during the last couple of centuries or so in Vom Kontinent zur Union: Gegenwart und Geschichte des vereinten Europa (2016); my translation from the German:
A pantheon is a real or symbolic place where the heroes of a nation find their final resting place. A community thus creates a collective past. Thus, shortly after the revolution of 1789, the French government decided to convert the recently completed Église Sainte-Geneviève under the name Panthéon into a mausoleum for its heroes. The French nation, the new bearer of sovereignty, needed a historical legitimacy to break the centuries-old influence of royal power on the population. Mirabeau was the first to be buried there in 1791, followed by the remains of Voltaire and Rousseau. But this was not only an homage of the "nation" to the great personalities of the country, but also an act of self-invention of this nation, which creates itself in a way on their backs. The visitors are to be filled with the emotion: this is my compatriot, my people, my country. [my emphasis]
The Panthéon in Paris (Jean-Baptiste Hilair, 1795)
Public monuments play a different social and political role than history textbooks or even museums, though those two are arguably even more important. Their presence says, this was a person who stands for something important and constitutive for this community and/or nation.
Van Middelaar also comments on the function of the name of Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536) for a popular EU international education program to symbolize common membership in the European Union: "Already in the interwar period of the 20th century, a French intellectual had declared the travelling humanist and great conciliator to be the 'perfect symbol of the European citizen'."
So it matters if there are prominent public statues celebrating Nathan Bedford Forrest or if there is a school named for Jefferson Davis. Those kinds of displays are not pure representations of History or "Heritage". They are also part of present-day narratives of collective identity and ideology. Because there are community narratives and self-definitions, that means the US has schools named after Patrick Henry, but you don't see a lot of statues to the Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold. The Saratoga National Historic Park does have a statue of Arnold's leg. And he still gets some love in public spaces in Britain. (John Hanc, The Curious London Legacy of Benedict Arnold Smithsonian Magazine 07/08/2010)
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