Pierre Nora: Between Memory and History

Memory Seized by History

• What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already history. The quest for memory is the search for one's history.
• Even as traditional memory disappears, we feel obliged assiduously to collect remains, testimonies, documents, images, speeches, any visible signs of what has been, as if this burgeoning dossier were to be called upon to furnish some proof to who knows what tribunal of history.
• It is impossible to predict what should be remembered-whence the disinclination to destroy anything that leads to the corresponding reinforcement of all the institutions of memory. 
• In just a few years the materialisation of memory has been tremendously dilated, multiplied, decentralised, democratised. But who today does not feel compelled to record his feelings, to write his memoirs.
• The imperative of our epoch is not only to keep everything, to preserve every indicator of memory.
• The passage from memory to history has required every social group to redefine its identity through the revitalisation of its own history. The task of remembering makes everyone his own historian.
• Following the example of ethnic groups and social minorities, every established group has felt the need to go in search of its own origins and identity.
• The decomposition of memory-history has multiplied the number of private memories demanding their individual histories.
• An order is given to remember.
• The transformation of memory implies a decisive shift from the historical to the psychological, from the social to the individual, from the objective message to its subjective reception, from repetition to rememoration.
• The atomization of a general memory into a private one has given the obligation to remember a power of internal coercion. It gives everyone the necessity to remember and to protect the trappings of identity; when memory is no longer everywhere, it will not be anywhere unless one takes the responsibility to recapture it through individual means. the less memory is experienced collectively, the more it will require individuals to undertake to become themselves memory-individuals, as if an inner voice were to tell each Corsican "you must be Corsican"
• In the same way that we owe our historical overview to a panoramic distance, and our artificial hyper-realisation of the past to a definitive estrangement, a changing mode of perception returns the historian, almost against his will, to the traditional objects from which he had turned away, the common knowledge of our national memory.
• Lieux de mémoire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration.
• the object of a ritual. e.g a classroom manual
• the observance of a commemorative minute of silence, an extreme example of a strictly symbolic action, serves as a concentrated appeal to memory by literally breaking a temporal continuity.
• memories are crystalised and transmitted from one generation to the next.