Pierre Nora : Entre mémoire et histoire
p. 7 Accélération de l’histoire […] = un passé définitivement mort. La perception globale de toute chose comme disparue. Remnants of experience still exist in the La chaleur de la tradition dans le mutisme de la coutume. […] on ne parle tant de mémoire que parce qu’il y en a plus. […] La curiosité pour les lieux ou se refugie la mémoire. […] Il y a des lieux de mémoire parce qu’il n’y a plus de milieux (background/middle ground/environement) de mémoire.
Cette mutilisation (wound/permanent injury/damage) qui a représentée la fin des paysans, cette collectivité-mémoire par excellence dont la vogue comme objet d’histoire a coïncidé avec l’apogée (culmination) de la croissance industrielle. Cette effondrement central de notre mémoire n’est portant qu’un exemple.
This collapse of memory is an example of the movement globalisation, democratisation, massification and mediatisation (mass culture). Independence of nations has recently awoken from their ethnological slumbers by the ‘viol colonial and also the movement of ‘décolonisation interieure’ has affected ethnic minorities/families/groups that reserves of memory but little or no historical capital.
We have saw the end of societies possessing collective remembered values and the end of ideologies that allowed the passage from the past to the future or that had indicated what the future should keep from the past, for reaction/progress or revolutionary purposes. Dilation of our historical perception, with the help of the media, has created a memory ‘entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage the ephemeral film of current events’
p.8 Acceleration of history= confronts us with the brutal reality of the difference between real memory (social and unviolated, retained as the secret of primitive/archaic societies) and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past.
On one hand we have an integrated dictatorial memory – a memory without a past, constantly reinventing tradition and linking its history to times of heroes, origins and myths- and our memory, nothing more than sifted and sorted historical traces. The gulf between the two has deepened in modern times with the growing belief in the right/duty to change.
Conquest and eradication of memory by history, an effect of a revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity has been broken down and something has ended that we had experienced as self-evident, the equation of memory and history. There is only one French word to describe both the lived history and the intellectual operation that renders it intelligible, this is a weakness of the language that has often been noted.
Yet, it delivers a profound truth; the process that carries us forward and our representation of that process are of the same kind. If we could live within memory, we wouldn’t have to consecrate ‘lieux de memoire’ in its name.
Each everyday gesture would be ritual repetition. With trace, meditation and distance, we are not in the realm of memory but of history. Eg. Jews of disapora were bound in daily devotion to traditional rituals and found little use in historians until their forced exposure to modern world.
Memory and history are far from being synonymous, are in fundamental opposition.
Memory is life, borne by living societies, in permanent evolution, susceptible to remembering and forgetting, susceptible to dormant and revival, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation. It is magical, only accommodates those facts which suit it. Nourishes recollections that may be out of focus, global or detached, particular or symbolic and responsive to avenues of conveyance or phenomenal, to every censorship or projection.
p.9 History is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism.
Memory installs remembrance in the sacred and history releases it again.
It is blind to all but the group it binds: there are as many memories as groups, memory is multiple and yet specific, collective, plural and yet individual.
History belongs to everyone and no-one, universal authority.
Memory is absolute while history can only conceive the relative.
History, a critical discourse, is opposing to spontaneous memory. History is suspicious of memory and is set out to destroy it. History annihilates what has taken place. It preserves some museums, medallions etc but would empty them of what to us would make them ‘lieux de mémoire’. A society living wholly under the sign of history couldn’t anchor its memory.
The most tangible sign of the split between memory and history has been the emergence of a history, the awakening of a historiographical consciousness... especially the history of national development.
From the Middle Ages, the whole tradition has been a controlled exercise and automatic deepening of memory, the reconstruction of a past without lacunae or faults. Different historians have represented different memories, be it particular memory, French, Christian, monarchical or ‘people’s memory’. Each historian has been convinced that they are establishing a more positive, all-encompassing and explicit memory. In the last century, the effort to establish critically a ‘true’ memory has intensified.
p.10 History of history cannot be an innocent operation. Every history by nature is critical. Creating the distinction between memory and history or rather the critique established between the two. “by running a knife between the tree of memory and the bark of history” We are reconstituting its myths and interpretations, implies we no longer unquestioningly identity with its heritage.
The French Revolution : questioning a national tradition, dissociated history from memory.
The national definition of the present imperiously demanded justification through the illumination of the past. It was, however, a present that had been weakened by revolutionary trauma and the call for general re-evaluation of the monarchical past.... the development of a severe documentary learning for the scholarly transmission of memory.
History transformed from the tradition of memory it had become into the self-knowledge of society, history was able to highlight many memories, but in disclaiming national identity, it also abandoned its claim to bearing coherent meaning and consequently lost its pedagogical authority to transmit values. The memory-nation was the last incarnation of the unification of memory and history.
The study of lieux de memoires lies at the intersection of 2 developments in France : one a reflective turning of history upon itself and the other, the end of a tradition of memory.
p.12 These two movements send us at once to history’s most elementary tools and to the most symbolic object of our memory: to the archives as well as the libraries, dictionaries, museums, celebrations and monuments.
These lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.
A society that values the new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past.
Museums. Monuments, sanctuaries, festivals are the rituals of society without ritual. (beleaguered and cold). Integral particularities of society that levels particularity; signs of distinction and of group membership in a society that tends to recognize the individual only as identical and equal.
Lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries etc because such activities no longer occur naturally. Without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep away.
We buttress our identities upon such bastions, but what if defended they were not threatened, there would be no need to build them. If enclosed memory was set free, they would be useless, if history did not besiege and transform it, there would be no lieux de mémoire. Lieux de mémoire are moments of history torn away from the movement of history and returned, no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.
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