The Memory of the Wars

In November 2008, during the first armistice commemorations to be held after the death of its last surviving veteran of the First World War, a commission headed by the historian André Kaspi delivered a report to the French government concerning "the modernization of public commemorations." After several months of meetings, the commission concluded that there were too many commemorations and suggested that they should concentrate, rather, on three key dates: "November 11th, to commemorate the dead of both the past and present; May 8th, to recall the victory over Nazism and barbarism; and July 14th, to extol the values of the French revolution" (Kaspi 2008, 9). To restore a measure of meaning to commemorations and to combat forgetfulness, the commission called—in very general terms—for the development of heritage tourism, a focus on local (and no longer national) initiatives, as well as the encouragement of innovative pedagogical projects. Two different types of arguments fundamentally motivated these conclusions. The first emphasized the lack of understanding, oversaturation, and disaffection that were already characteristic of the increasing number of commemorative days. The second type of argument was worried by a communitarian and particularistic tendency to focus on the need for "repentance." It is as if, according to the commission, "France were obsessed with the crimes that had been committed in the course of its long history" and that, they added, "it aspired to nothing more than redemption and atonement for yesterday's sins, as well as those of the day before yesterday" (Kaspi 2008, 24).

Because these conclusions provoked a great deal of emotion and concern, and because the arguments upon which they are based are not self-evident, it would be wise to reconsider the place occupied by the memory of the wars within our societies. I will approach this task in three parts. First, I will interrogate the complex relationship between individual memory and collective memory. I will then undertake a more specific examination of thememory of the wars. Finally, I will reconsider the necessity, the risks, and the stakes of a politics of memory.

I.

First, it is necessary to emphasize that individual memory does not exist outside of a collective framework. Far from being a matter of our own interiority, there is a double collective dimension to what we remember and how we remember it. For on the one hand, our remembrances link us to the people associated with them, and who are, therefore, likely to share those same memories. They necessarily bind us to a given community, if not to several communities. And, if it is true that our memory is a constitutive part of ourselves—that we live with our past, as the saying goes, and invent our own singularity in the remembrance we maintain of that past—then it is also true that the past at stake in that memory is never simply an individual one. It does not belong to us and us alone. Our lives with others (past and present) have made (and continue to make) the decision for us about what we can and should remember. Nothing could be more illusory than to think of ourselves as the sovereign masters of our own memory. The fact that something is remembered implies that a certain amount of attention was directed toward the event, and in same way, our memory continues to be oriented by the people with whom we lived our lives in the past just as much as by those with whom we live our lives today. By contrast, our remembrances are not independent of the various means of support by which we sustain them (books, letters, journals, photos, recordings, images). We depend upon their technology, their capacity to retain, conserve, and organize as well as upon their continued availability as they accompany us through life. In this sense, the remembrances that we think belong to ourselves alone, or to those who transmitted them to us, are always in one way or another caught up in the complex network of these technological supports.1

The most revealing aspect of memory's double collective...