Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire
Pierre Nora
Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory. (Spring, 1989), pp. 7-24.
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P I E R R E N O R A
Between Memory and History:
Les Lieux de Memoire
THEA C C E L E R A T I O N O F H I S T O R Y : let us try to gauge the significance,
beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An increasingly rapid slippage of the
present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that
anythingand everything may disappear-these indicate a rupture of equilibrium.
The remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence
of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under the pressure
of a fundamentally historical sensibility. Self-consciousness emerges under
the sign of that which has already happened, as the fulfillment of something
always already begun. We speak so much of memory because there is so little of
it left.
Our interest in lieux de me'moire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself
has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness
of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been
torn-but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of
memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are
lieux de mkmoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de me'moire,
real environments of memory.
Consider, for example, the irrevocable break marked by the disappearance
of peasant culture, that quintessential repository of collective memory whose
recent vogue as an object of historical study coincided with the apogee of industrial
growth. Such a fundamental collapse of memory is but one familiar example
of a movement toward democratization and mass culture on a global scale.
Among the new nations, independence has swept into history societies newly
awakened from their ethnological slumbers by colonial violation. Similarly, a
process of interior decolonization has affected ethnic minorities, families, and
groups that until now have possessed reserves of memory but little or no historical
capital. We have seen the end of societies that had long assured the transmission
and conservation of collectively remembered values, whether through
churches or schools, the family or the state; the end too of ideologies that prepared
a smooth passage from the past to the future or that had indicated what
the future should keep from the past-whether for reaction, progress, or even
revolution. Indeed, we have seen the tremendous dilation of our very mode of
historical perception, which, with the help of the media, has substituted for a
REPRESENTATIONS26 Spring 1989 O THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage the ephemeral film of
current events.
The "acceleration of history," then, confronts us with the brutal realization
of the difference between real memory-social and unviolated, exemplified in
but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies-and
history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by
change, organize the past. On the one hand, we find an integrated, dictatorial
memory-unself-conscious, commanding, all-powerful, spontaneously actualizing,
a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the
history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and mythand
on the other hand, our memory, nothing more in fact than sifted and sorted
historical traces. The gulf between the two has deepened in modern times with
the growing belief in a right, a capacity, and even a duty to change. Today, this
distance has been stretched to its convulsive limit.
This conquest and eradication of memory by history has had the effect of a
revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity had been broken and something had
ended that we had experienced as self-evident-the equation of memory and
history. The fact that only one word exists in French to designate both lived history
and the intellectual operation that renders it intelligible (distinguished in
German by Geschichte and Historie) is a weakness of the language that has often
been remarked; still, it delivers a profound truth: the process that is carrying us
forward and our representation of that process are of the same kind. If we were
able to live within memory, we would not have needed to consecrate lieux de mimoire
in its name. Each gesture, down to the most everyday, would be experienced
as the ritual repetition of a timeless practice in a primordial identification of act
and meaning. With the appearance of the trace, of mediation, of distance,we are
not in the realm of true memory but of history. We can think, for an example, of
the Jews of the diaspora, bound in daily devotion to the rituals of tradition, who
as "peoples of memory" found little use for historians until their forced exposure
to the modern world.
Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental
opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its
name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering
and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation
and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically
revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and
incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a
bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.
Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that
suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or
detached, particular or symbolic-responsive to each avenue of conveyance or
phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an
intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. Memory
installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again.
Memory is blind to all but the group it binds-which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs
has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory
is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History,
on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to
universal authority. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures,
images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions
and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can
only conceive the relative.
At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous
memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to
suppress and destroy it. At the horizon of historical societies, at the limits of the
completely historicized world, there would occur a permanent secularization.
History's goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality
taken place. A generalized critical history would no doubt preserve some
museums, some medallions and monuments-that is to say, the materials necessary
for its work-but it would empty them of what, to us, would make them lieux
de me'moire. In the end, a society living wholly under the sign of history could not,
any more than could a traditional society, conceive such sites for anchoring its
memory.
Perhaps the most tangible sign of the split between history and memory has
been the emergence of a history of history, the awakening, quite recent in France,
of a historiographical consciousness. History, especially the history of national
development, has constituted the oldest of our collective traditions: our quintessential
milieu de mimoire. From the chroniclers of the Middle Ages to today's practitioners
of "total" history, the entire tradition has developed as the controlled
exercise and automatic deepening of memory, the reconstitution of a past without
lacunae or faults. No doubt, none of the great historians, since Froissart, had the
sense that he was representing only a particular memory. Commynes did not
think he was fashioning a merely dynastic memory, La Popeliniere merely a
French memory, Bossuet a Christian and monarchical memory, Voltaire the
memory of the progress of humankind, Michelet exclusively the "people's"
memory, and Lavisse solely the memory of the nation. On the contrary, each
historian was convinced that his task consisted in establishing a more positive, allencompassing,
and explicative memory. History's procurement, in the last century,
of scientific methodology has only intensified the effort to establish critically
a "true" memory. Every great historical revision has sought to enlarge the basis
for collective memory.
In a country such as France the history of history cannot be an innocent operBetween
Memory and History 9
ation; it amounts to the internal subversion of memory-history by critical history.
Every history is by nature critical, and all historians have sought to denounce the
hypocritical mythologies of their predecessors. But something fundamentally
unsettling happens when history begins to write its own history. A historiographical
anxiety arises when history assigns itself the task of tracing alien impulses
within itself and discovers that it is the victim of memories which it has sought to
master. Where history has not taken on the strong formative and didactic role
that it has assumed in France, the history of history is less laden with polemical
content. In the United States, for example, a country of plural memories and
diverse traditions, historiography is more pragmatic. Different interpretations of
the Revolution or of the Civil War do not threaten the American tradition
because, in some sense, no such thing exists-or if it does, it is not primarily a
historical construction. In France, on the other hand, historiography is iconoclastic
and irreverent. It seizes upon the most clearly defined objects of tradition-a
key battle, like Bouvines; a canonical manual, like the Petit Lavisse-in
order to dismantle their mechanisms and analyze the conditions of their development.
It operates primarily by introducing doubt,by running a knife between
the tree of memory and the bark of history. That we study the historiography of
the French Revolution, that we reconstitute its myths and interpretations,implies
that we no longer unquestioningly identify with its heritage. To interrogate a
tradition, venerable though it may be, is no longer to pass it on intact. Moreover,
the history of history does not restrict itself to addressing the most sacred objects
of our national tradition. By questioning its own traditional structure, its own
conceptual and material resources, its operating procedures and social means of
distribution, the entire discipline of history has entered its historiographical age,
consummating its dissociation from memory-which in turn has become a possible
object of history.
It once seemed as though a tradition of memory, through the concepts of
history and the nation, had crystallized in the synthesis of the Third Republic.
Adopting a broad chronology, between Augustin Thierry's Lettres sur l'histoire de
France (1827)and Charles Seignobos's Histoire sinckre de la nationfran~aise(1933),
the relationships between history, memory, and the nation were characterized as
more than natural currency: they were shown to involve a reciprocal circularity,
a symbiosis at every level-scientific and pedagogical, theoretical and practical.
This 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 a general reevaluation of the
monarchical past, and it was weakened further by the defeat of 1870, which
rendered only more urgent, in the belated competition with German science
and pedagogy-the real victors at Sadowa-the development of a severe documentary
erudition for the scholarly transmission of memory. The tone of
national responsibility assigned to the historian-half preacher, half soldier-is
unequalled, for example, in the first editorial of the Revue historique (1876) in
which Gabriel Monod foresaw a "slow scientific, methodical, and collective investigation"
conducted in a "secret and secure manner for the greatness of the
fatherland as well as for mankind." Reading this text, and a hundred others like
it, one wonders how the notion that positivist history was not cumulative could
ever have gained credibility. On the contrary, in the teleological perspective of
the nation the political, the military, the biographical, and the diplomatic all were
to be considered pillars of continuity. The defeat of Agincourt, the dagger of
Ravaillac, the day of the Dupes, the additional clauses of the treaty of Westphalia-each
required scrupulous accounting. The most incisive erudition thus
served to add or take away some detail from the monumental edifice that was the
nation. The nation's memory was held to be powerfully unified; no more discontinuity
existed between our Greco-Roman cradle and the colonies of the Third
Republic than between the high erudition that annexed new territories to the
nation's heritage and the schoolbooks that professed its dogma. The holy nation
thus acquired a holy history; through the nation our memory continued to rest
upon a sacred foundation.
To see how this particular synthesis came apart under the pressure of a new
secularizing force would be to show how, during the crisisof the 1930sin France,
the coupling of state and nation was gradually replaced by the coupling of state
and society-and how, at the same time and for the same reasons, history was
transformed, spectacularly, from the tradition of memory it had become into the
self-knowledge of society. As such, history was able to highlight many kinds of
memory, even turn itself into a laboratory of past mentalities; but in disclaiming
its national identity, it also abandoned its claim to bearing coherent meaning and
consequently lost its pedagogical authority to transmit values. The definition
of the nation was no longer the issue, and peace, prosperity, and the reduction of
its power have since accomplished the rest. With the advent of society in place of
the nation, legitimation by the past and therefore by history yields to legitimation
by the future. One can only acknowledge and venerate the past and serve the
nation; the future, however, can be prepared for: thus the three terms regain
their autonomy. No longer a cause, the nation has become a given; history is now
a social science, memory a purely private phenomenon. The memory-nation was
thus the last incarnation of the unification of memory and history.
The study of lieux de mimoires, then, lies at the intersection of two developments
that in France today give it meaning: one a purely historiographical movement,
the reflexive turning of history upon itself, the other a movement that is,
properly speaking, historical: the end of a tradition of memory. The moment of
Between Memory and History 11
lieux de me'moire occurs at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of
memory disappears, surviving only as a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of
critical history. This period sees, on the one hand, the decisive deepening of historical
study and, on the other hand, a heritage consolidated. The critical principle
followsan internal dynamic:our intellectual, political, historical frameworks
are exhausted but remain powerful enough not to leave us indifferent; whatever
vitality they retain impresses us only in their most spectacular symbols. Combined,
these two movements send us at once to history's most elementary tools
and to the most symbolic objects of our memory: to the archives as well as to the
tricolor; to the libraries, dictionaries, and museums as well as to commemorations,
celebrations, the Pantheon, and the Arc de Triomphe; to the Dictionnaire
Larousse as well as to the Wall of the Federes, where the last defenders of the Paris
commune were massacred in 1870.
These lieux de mkmoire 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. They make their appearance by
virtue of the deritualization of our world-producing, manifesting, establishing,
constructing, decreeing, and maintaining by artifice and by will a society deeply
absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, one that inherently values the
new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past. Museums,
archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments,
sanctuaries, fraternal orders-these are the boundary stones of another age, illusions
of eternity. It is the nostalgic dimension of these devotional institutions that
makes them seem beleaguered and cold-they mark the rituals of a society
without ritual; integral particularities in a society that levels particularity; signs of
distinction and of group membership in a society that tends to recognize individuals
only as identical and equal.
Lieux de me'moireoriginate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory,
that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations,
pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer
occur naturally. The defense, by certain minorities, of a privileged memory that
has retreated tojealously protected enclaves in this sense intensely illuminates the
truth of lieux de me'moire-that without commemorative vigilance, history would
soon sweep them away. We buttress our identities upon such bastions, but if what
they defended were not threatened, there would be no need to build them. Conversely,
if the memories that they enclosed were to be set free they would be
useless; if history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating
and petrifying it, there would be no lzeux de me'moire.Indeed, it is this very
push and pull that produces lzeux de me'moire-moments of history torn away from
the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like
shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.
Memory Seized by History
What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already history.
What we take to be flare-ups of memory are in fact its final consumption in
the flames of history. The quest for memory is the search for one's history.
Of course, we still cannot do without the word, but we should be aware of
the difference between true memory, which has taken refuge in gestures and
habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent selfknowledge,
in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories, and memory transformed
by its passage through history, which is nearly the opposite: voluntary
and deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer spontaneous; psychological,
individual, and subjective; but never social, collective, or all encompassing. How
did we move from the first memory, which is immediate, to the second, which is
indirect? We may approach the question of this contemporary metamorphosis
from the perspective of its outcome.
Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of
the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibilityof the image. What began
as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced
from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding
and outward signs-hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age,
attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total
preservation of the past. Fear of a rapid and final disappearance combines with
anxiety about the meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future to
give even the most humble testimony, the most modest vestige, the potential dignity
of the memorable. Have we not sufficiently regretted and deplored the loss
or destruction, by our predecessors, of potentially informative sources to avoid
opening ourselves to the same reproach from our successors? Memory has been
wholly absorbed by its meticulous reconstitution. Its new vocation is to record;
delegating to the archive the responsibility of remembering, it sheds its signs
upon depositing them there, as a snake sheds its skin.
What we call memory is in fact the gigantic and breathtaking storehouse of a
material stock of what it would be impossible for us to remember, an unlimited
repertoire of what might need to be recalled. Leibnitz's "paper memory" has
become an autonomous institution of museums, libraries, depositories, centers of
documentation, and data banks. Specialists estimate that in the public archives
alone, in just a few decades, the quantitative revolution has multiplied the
number of records by one thousand. No society has ever produced archives as
deliberately as our own, not only by volume, not only by new technical means of
reproduction and preservation, but also by its superstitious esteem, by its veneration
of the trace. 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
Between Memory and History 13
furnish some proof to who knows what tribunal of history. The sacred is invested
in the trace that is at the same time its negation. It becomes 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. A
strange role reversal has occurred between the professional, once reproached for
an obsession with conservation, and the amateur producer of archives. Today,
private enterprise and public administration keep everything, while professional
archivists have learned that the essence of their trade is the art of controlled
destruction.
In just a few years, then, the materialization of memory has been tremendously
dilated, multiplied, decentralized, democratized. In the classical period,
the three main producers of archives were the great families, the church, and the
state. But who, today, does not feel compelled to record his feelings, to write his
memoirs-not only the most minor historical actor but also his witnesses, his
spouse, and his doctor. The less extraordinary the testimony, the more aptly it
seems to illustrate the average mentality.
The imperative of our epoch is not only to keep everything, to preserve every
indicator of memory-even when we are not sure which memory is being indicated-but
also to produce archives. The French Social Security archives are a
troubling example: an unparalleled quantity of documents, they represent today
three hundred linear kilometers. Ideally, the computerized evaluation of this
mass of raw memory would provide a reading of the sum total of the normal and
the pathological in society, from diets to lifestyles, by region and by profession;
yet even its preservation and plausible implementation call for drastic and impossible
choices. Record as much as you can, something will remain. This is, to take
another telling example, the conclusion implied by the proliferation of oral histories.
There are currently in France more than three hundred teams employed
in gathering "the voices that come to us from the past" (PhilippeJoutard). But
these are not ordinary archives, if we consider that to produce them requires
thirty-six hours for each hour of recording time and that they can never be used
piecemeal, because they only have meaning when heard in their entirety. Whose
will to remember do they ultimately reflect, that of the interviewer or that of the
interviewed? No longer living memory's more or less intended remainder, the
archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It
adds to life-itself often a function of its own recording-a secondary memory,
a prosthesis-memory. The indiscriminate production of archives is the acute
effect of a new consciousness, the clearest expression of the terrorism of historicized
memory.
This form of memory comes to us from the outside; because it is no longer a
social practice, we interiorize it as an individual constraint.
The passage from memory to history has required every social group to redefine
its identity through the revitalization of its own history. The task of remembering
makes everyone his own historian. The demand for history has thus
largely overflowed the circle of professional historians. Those who have long been
marginalized in traditional history are not the only ones haunted by the need to
recover their buried pasts. Following the example of ethnic groups and social
minorities, every established group, intellectual or not, learned or not, has felt
the need to go in search of its own origins and identity. Indeed, there is hardly a
family today in which some member has not recently sought to document as accurately
as possible his or her ancestors' furtive existences. The increase in genealogical
research is a massive new phenomenon: the national archives reports that
43 percent of those doing archival research in 1982were working on genealogical
history, as compared with the 38 percent who were university researchers. It is
striking that we owe the most significant histories of biology, physics, medicine,
and music not to professional historians but to biologists, physicists, doctors, and
musicians. Educators themselves have taken charge of the history of education,
from physical education to instruction in educational philosophy. In the wake of
attacks on established domains of knowledge, each discipline has sought validation
in the retrospective perusal of its own origins. Sociology goes in search of its
founding fathers; anthropology undertakes to explore its own past, from the
sixteenth-century chroniclers to the colonial administrators. Even literary criticism
occupies itself in retracing the genesis of its categories and tradition. As for
history, positivism, long since abandoned by professional historians, has found in
this urgent need a popularity and necessity it never knew before. The decomposition
of memory-history has multiplied the number of private memories
demanding their individual histories.
An order is given to remember, but the responsibility is mine and it is I who
must remember. One of the costs of the historical metamorphosis of memory has
been a wholesale preoccupation with the individual psychology of remembering.
Indeed, the two phenomena are so intimately linked that one can hardly avoid
comparing them, down to their exact chronological coincidence. At the end of
the last century, when the decisive blow to traditional balances was felt-in particular
the disintegration of the rural world-memory appeared at the center of
philosophical thought, with Bergson; at the core of the psychological personality,
with Freud; at the heart of literary autobiography, with Proust. We owe to Freud
and to Proust those two intimate and yet universal sites of memory, the primal
scene and the celebrated petite madeleine. 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 total psychologization of contemporary memory entails a
completely new economy of the identity of the self, the mechanics of memory,
and the relevance of the past.
Between Memory and History 15
In the last analysis, it is upon the individual and upon the individual alone
that the constraint of memory weighs insistently as well as imperceptibly. 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 memoryindividuals,
as if an inner voice were to tell each Corsican "You must be Corsican"
and each Breton "You must be Breton." To understand the force and
appeal of this sense of obligation, perhaps we should think of Jewish memory,
which has recently been revived among many nonpracticing Jews. In this tradition,
which has no other history than its own memory, to beJewish is to remember
that one is such; but once this incontestable memory has been interiorized, it
eventually demands full recognition. What is being remembered? In a sense, it is
memory itself. The psychologization of memory has thus given every individual
the sense that his or her salvation ultimately depends on the repayment of an
impossible debt.
In addition to archive-memory and duty-memory, a third aspect is needed to
complete the picture of this modern metamorphosis: distance-memory.
This is because our relation to the past, at least as it reveals itself in major
historical studies,is something entirely different from what we would expect from
a memory: no longer a retrospective continuity but the illumination of discontinuity.
In the history-memory of old, accurate perceptions of the past were characterized
by the assumption that the past could be retrieved. The past could
always be resuscitated by an effort of rememoration; indeed, the present itself
became a sort of recycled, up-dated past, realized as the present through such
welding and anchoring. True, for there to be a sense of the past there had to be
a "before" and an "after," a chasm had to intervene between the present and the
past. But this was not so much a separation experienced as radical difference as
it was a lapse experienced as a filiation to be restored. Progress and decadence,
the two great themes of historical intelligibility at least since modern times, both
aptly express this cult of continuity, the confident assumption of knowing to
whom and to what we owe our existence-whence the importance of the idea of
"origins," an already profane version of the mythological narrative, but one that
contributed to giving meaning and a sense of the sacred to a society engaged in
a nationwide process of secularization. The greater the origins, the more they
magnified our greatness. Through the past we venerated above all ourselves.
It is this relation which has been broken. Just as the future-formerly a visible,
predictable, manipulable, well-marked extension of the present-has come
to seem invisible, unpredictable, uncontrollable, so have we gone from the idea
of a visible past to an invisible one; from a solid and steady past to our fractured
past; from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the
discontinuity of history. We speak no longer of "origins" but of "births." Given to
us as radically other, the past has become a world apart. Ironically, modern
memory reveals itself most genuinely when it shows how far we have come away
from it.
We should not believe, however, that this sense of discontinuity finds only
unfocused and vague expression. Paradoxically, distance demands the rapprochement
that negates it while giving it resonance. Never have we longed in a more
physical manner to evoke the weight of the land at our feet, the hand of the devil
in the year 1000, or the stench of eighteenth-century cities. Yet only in a regime
of discontinuity are such hallucinations of the past conceivable. Our relation to
the past is now formed in a subtle play between its intractability and its disappearance,
a question of a representation-in the original sense of the wordradically
different from the old ideal of resurrecting the past. As comprehensive
as it may have wished to be, in practice such a resurrection implied a hierarchy
of memory, ordering the perspective of the past beneath the gaze of a static
present by the skillful manipulation of light and shadow. But the loss of a single
explanatory principle, while casting us into a fragmented universe, has promoted
every object-even the most humble, the most improbable, the most inaccessible-to
the dignity of a historical mystery. Since no one knows what the past will
be made of next, anxiety turns everything into a trace, a possible indication, a
hint of history that contaminates the innocence of all things.
Representation proceeds by strategic highlighting,selecting samples and multiplying
examples. Ours is an intensely retinal and powerfully televisual memory.
We can link the acclaimed "return of the narrative" evident in recent historical
writing and the omnipotence of imagery and cinema in contemporary cultureeven
if, to be sure, this narrative is very different from traditional narrative, with
its syncopated parts and formal closure. How can we not connect our scrupulous
respect for archival documents, themselves fragments put before our eyes, and
the unique frame we give to oral literature, quoting informants to render intelligible
their voices-are they not clearly connected to the sense of directness that
we have become accustomed to elsewhere? How can we but see in our taste for
everyday life in the past a resort to the only remaining means for restoring the
flavor of things, the slow rhythms of past times-and in the anonymous biographies
of ordinary people the understanding that the masses do not allow themselves
to be measured as a mass? How can we fail to read, in the shards of the past
delivered to us by so many microhistories, the will to make the history we are
reconstructing equal to the history we have lived? We could speak of mirrormemory
if all mirrors did not reflect the same-for it is difference that we are
seeking, and in the image of this difference, the ephemeral spectacle of an unreBetween
Memory and History
coverable identity. It is no longer genesis that we seek but instead the decipherment
of what we are in the light of what we are no longer.
Strangely, this alchemy of essentials contributes to making the practice of
history-from which the relentless drive toward the future ought to have excused
us-a repository for the secrets of the present. This thaumaturgical operation is
accomplished more by the historian than by history. The historian's is a strange
fate; his role and place in society were once simple and clearly defined: to be the
spokesman of the past and the herald of the future. In this capacity his person
counted less than his services; his role was that of an erudite transparency, a
vehicle of transmission, a bridge stretched as lightly as possible between the raw
materiality of the document and its inscription in memory-ultimately, an
absence obsessed with objectivity.But with the disintegration of history-memory,
a new type of historian emerges who, unlike his precursors, is ready to confess
the intimate relation he maintains to his subject. Better still, he is ready to proclaim
it, deepen it, make of it not the obstacle but the means of his understanding.
Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable
of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it
would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory
machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself. By contrast,
our society-torn from its memory by the scale of its transformations but all the
more obsessed with understanding itself historically-is forced to give an increasingly
central role to the operations that take place within the historian. The historian
is one who prevents history from becoming merely history.
In the same way that we owe our historical overview to a panoramic distance,
and our artificial hyper-realization 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. Returning across the threshold of one's natal home, one
finds oneself in the old abode, now uninhabited and practically unrecognizablewith
the same family heirlooms, but under another light; before the same atelier,
but for another task; in the same rooms, but with another role. As historiography
has entered its epistemological age, with memory ineluctably engulfed by history,
the historian has become no longer a memory-individual but, in himself, a lieu de
me'moire.
Les Lieux de Memoire: 

Another History 

Lieux de me'moire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at
once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the
most abstract elaboration. Indeed, they are lieux in three senses of the word-
material, symbolic, and functional. Even an apparently purely material site, like
an archive, becomes a lieu de me'moire only if the imagination invests it with a symbolic
aura. A purely functional site, like a classroom manual, a testament, or a
veterans' reunion belongs to the category only inasmuch as it is also the object of
a ritual. And 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. Moreover, the three aspects always
coexist. Take, for example, the notion of a historical generation: it is material by
its demographic content and supposedly functional-since memories are crystallized
and transmitted from one generation to the next-but it is also symbolic,
since it characterizes, by referring to events or experiences shared by a small
minority, a larger group that may not have participated in them.
Lieux de me'moireare created by a play of memory and history, an interaction
of two factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination. To begin with,
there must be a will to remember. If we were to abandon this criterion, we would
quickly drift into admitting virtually everything as worthy of remembrance. One
is reminded of the prudent rules of old-fashioned historical criticism, which distinguished
between "direct sources,"intentionally produced by society with a view
to their future reproduction-a law or a work of art, for example-and the indiscriminate
mass of "indirect sources,"comprising all the testimony an epoch inadvertently
leaves to historians. Without the intention to remember, lieux de me'moire
would be indistinguishable from lieux d'histoire.
On the other hand, it is clear that without the intervention of history, time,
and change, we would content ourselves with simply a schematic outline of the
objects of memory. The lieux we speak of, then, are mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound
intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Mobius strip
of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable
and the mobile. For if we accept that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de
me'moire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of
things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial-just as if gold were
the only memory of money-all of this in order to capture a maximum of
meaning in the fewest of signs, it is also clear that lieux de mkmoire only exist
because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their
meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.
Let us take two very different examples. First, the Revolutionary calendar,
which was very much a lieu de me'moire since, as a calendar, it was designed to
provide the a priori frame of reference for all possible memory while, as a revolutionary
document, through its nomenclature and symbolism, it was supposed
to "open a new book to history," as its principal author ambitiously put it, or to
"return Frenchmen entirely to themselves," according to another of its advocates.
The function of the calendar, it was thought, would be to halt history at the hour
of the Revolution by indexing future months, days, centuries, and years to the
Between Memory and History 19
Revolutionary epic. Yet, to our eyes, what further qualifies the revolutionary calendar
as a lieu de me'moire is its apparently inevitable failure to have become what
its founders hoped. If we still lived today according to its rhythm, it would have
become as familiar to us as the Gregorian calendar and would consequently have
lost its interest as a lieu de me'moire. It would have melted into our memorial landscape,
serving only to date every other conceivable memorial site. As it turns out,
its failure has not been complete; key dates still emerge from it to which it will
always remain attached: Vendemiaire, Thermidor, Brumaire. Just so, the lieu de
me'moireturns in on itself-an arabesque in the deforming mirror that is its truth.
Let us consider too the celebrated Tour de la Fruncepar deux enfants,also incontestably
a lieu de me'moire;like the Petit Lavisse, it trained the memory of millions of
French boys and girls. Thanks to it, the Minister of Public Instruction could draw
his pocket watch at 8:05 A.M. and declare, "All of our children are crossing the
Alps." Moreover, the Tour was an inventory of what one ought to know about
France, an exercise in identification and a voyage of initiation. But here things
get more complicated: a close reading shows that as of its publication in 1877,
the Tour portrayed a France that no longer existed, and that in this year, when
May 16 saw the consolidation of the Third Republic, it drew its seductive power
from a subtle enchantment with the past. As is so often the case with books for
children, the Tour owed its initial success to the memory of adults. And later?
Thirty-five years after publication, on the eve of the war of 1914 when it was still
a sovereign text, it seemed already a nostalgic institution: despite revisions, the
older edition sold more than the new. Then the Tour became rare, employed only
in marginal areas in the remote countryside. Slipping out of collective memory,
it entered historical memory, then pedagogical memory. For its centennial, in
1977, however, just as the sales of an autobiography from the provinces, Pierre
Helias'sLe Cheval dbrgueil, reached a million copies and when an industrial France
stricken by economic crisis discovered its oral memory and peasant roots, the Tour
was reprinted, and once again entered the collective memory, a different one this
time, but still subject to being forgotten and revived in the future. What is the
essence of this quintessential lieu de me'moire-its original intention or its return in
the cycles of memory? Clearly both: all lieux de me'moire are objects mises en abtme.
It is this principle of double identity that enables us to map, within the indefinite
multiplicity of sites, a hierarchy, a set of limits, a repertoire of ranges. This
principle is crucial because, if one keeps in mind the broad categories of the
genre-anything pertaining to the cult of the dead, anything relating to the patrimony,
anything administering the presence of the past within the present-it is
clear that some seemingly improbable objects can be legitimately considered lieux
de me'moire while, conversely, many that seem to fit by definition should in fact be
excluded. What makes certain prehistoric, geographical, archaeological locations
important as sites is often precisely what ought to exclude them from being lieux
de me'moire:the absolute absence of a will to remember and, by way of compensation,
the crushing weight imposed on them by time, science, and the dreams of
men. On the other hand, not every border marking has the credentials of the
Rhine or the Finistere, that "Land's End" at the tip of Brittany ennobled in the
pages of Michelet. Every constitution, every diplomatic treaty is a lieu de me'moire,
although the constitution of 1793 lays a different claim than that of 1791, given
the foundational status of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; and the peace of
Nimwegen has a different status than, at both ends of the history of Europe, the
Verdun compromise and the Yalta conference.
Amid these complexities, it is memory that dictates while history writes; this
is why both history books and historical events merit special attention. As memory's
ideal historical instruments, rather than as permutations of history and
memory, they inscribe a neat border around a domain of memory. Are not every
great historical work and the historical genre itself, every great event and the
notion of event itself, in some sense by definition lieux de me'moire?The question
calls for a precise answer.
Among history books, only those founded on a revision of memory or serving
as its pedagogical breviaries are lieux de me'moire. In France, there have been
relatively few moments that have established a new historical memory. The
thirteenth-century Grandes Chroniquesde France condensed dynastic memory and
established the model for several centuries of historiography. In the sixteenth
century, during the Wars of Religion, the school of so-called "perfect history"
destroyed the legend of the monarchy's Trojan origins and restored Gaulish
antiquity: Etienne Pasquier's Recherches de la France (1599),by the very modernity
of its title (referring to "research" and "France" rather than to chronicling and
dynastic rule), is an emblematic example. The historiography of the late Restoration
abruptly introduced the modern conception of history: Thierry's Lettres
sur l'histoirede France (1820)provided the inaugural impulse, and their publication
as a volume in 1827 coincided, within a few months, with an illustrious beginner's
first book, Michelet'sPre'cisd'histoire moderneand with Guizot's first lectureson "the
history of European civilizationand of France." Next came the advent of national
positivist history, whose manifesto was the Revue historique (1876)and whose monument
is still Lavisse's twenty-seven-volume Histoire de France. One could also cite
the rise of memoirs, as well as autobiographies and diaries. Chateaubriand's Me'moires
dhutre-tombe, Stendhal's Viede Henry Brulard, and theJournal d'Amiel are lieux
de me'moire not because they are bigger or better examples but because they complicate
the simple exercise of memory with a set of questions directed to memory
itself. As much can be said for the memoirs of statesmen. From Sully to de Gaulle,
from Richelieu's Testament to the Me'morial de Sainte-He'ldne or Poincare's Journal,
the genre has its constants and specificities,independent of the uneven value of
the texts. It implies an awareness of other memoirs, a superimposition of the man
Between Memory and History 21
of letters and the man of action, the identification of individual discourse with
collective discourse, the insertion of individual rationality into raison d'e'tat: all
motifs that, in the broad perspective of national memory, compel us to think of
them as lieux de me'moire.
As for "great events," only two types are especially pertinent, and not in any
way as a function of their "greatness." On the one hand, there are those minuscule
events, barely remarked at the time, on which posterity retrospectively confers
the greatness of origins, the solemnity of inaugural ruptures. On the other hand,
there are those nonevents that are immediately charged with heavy symbolic
meaning and that, at the moment of their occurrence, seem like anticipated commemorations
of themselves; contemporary history, by means of the media, has
seen a proliferation of stillborn attempts to create such events. Thus, on one side,
the election of Hugh Capet, an unremarkable incident but one to which ten centuries
of posterity, ending on the scaffold, have given a weight it did not possess
at the start; on the other side, the wagon of Rethondes, the handshake of Montoire,
or the Liberation parade down the Champs-Elyskes. The founding event
or the spectacular event, but in neither case the event itself: indeed, it is the exclusion
of the event that defines the lieu de me'moire. Memory attaches itself to sites,
whereas history attaches itself to events.
Within the category, however, nothing prevents us from imagining every possible
distribution and necessary classification,from such natural, concretely experienced
lieux de me'moire as cemeteries, museums, and anniversaries; to the most
intellectually elaborate ones-not only notions such as generation, lineage, local
memory, but also those of the formal divisions of inherited property (partages),
on which every perception of French space is founded, or of the "landscape as a
painting" that comes to mind when one thinks of Corot or of Cezanne's Mont
Sainte-Victoire. Should we stress the lieu de me'moire's material aspects, they would
readily display themselves in a vast gradation. There are portable lieux, of which
the people of memory, theJews, have given a major example in the Tablets of the
Law; there are the topographical ones, which owe everything to the specificityof
their location and to being rooted in the ground-so, for example, the conjunction
of sites of tourism and centers of historical scholarship, the Bibliotheque
nationale on the site of the Hate1 Mazarin, the Archives nationales in the HBtel
Soubise. Then there are the monumental memory-sites, not to be confused with
architectural sites alone. Statues or monuments to the dead, for instance, owe
their meaning to their intrinsic existence; even though their location is far from
arbitrary, one couldjustify relocating them without altering their meaning. Such
is not the case with ensembles constructed over time, which draw their meaning
from the complex relations between their elements: such are mirrors of a world
or a period, like the cathedral of Chartres or the palace of Versailles.
If, on the other hand, we were to stress the functional element, an array of
lieux de me'moire would display themselves, ranging from those dedicated to preserving
an incommunicable experience that would disappear along with those
who shared it-such as the veterans' associations-to those whose purpose is
pedagogical, as the manuals, dictionaries, testaments, and memoranda drafted
by heads of families in the early modern period for the edification of their
descendants.
If, finally, we were most concerned with the symbolic element, we might
oppose, for example, dominant and dominated lieux de me'moire. The first, spectacular
and triumphant, imposing and, generally, imposed-either by a national
authority or by an established interest, but always from above-characteristically
have the coldness and solemnity of official ceremonies. One attends them rather
than visits them. The second are places of refuge, sanctuaries of spontaneous
devotion and silent pilgrimage, where one finds the living heart of memory. On
the one hand, the Sacre-Coeur or the national obsequies of Paul Valery; on the
other, the popular pilgrimage of Lourdes or the burial of Jean-Paul Sartre; here
de Gaulle's funeral at Notre-Dame, there the cemetery of Colombey.
These classificationscould be refined ad infinitum. One could oppose public
sites of memory and private ones; pure sites, exhaustive of their commemorative
function-such as funeral eulogies, the battlefield of Douaumont or the Wall of
the Federes-and those composite sites in which the commemorative element is
only one amid many symbolic meanings, such as the national flag, festival itineraries,
pilgrimages, and so on. The value of a first attempt at a typology would lie
not in its rigor or comprehensiveness, not even in its evocative power, but in the
fact that it is possible. For the very possibility of a history of lieux de me'moire demonstrates
the existence of an invisible thread linking apparently unconnected
objects. It suggests that the comparison of the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise and the
Statistique generale de la France is not the same as the surrealist encounter of the
umbrella and the sewing machine. There is a differentiated network to which all
of these separate identities belong, an unconscious organization of collective
memory that it is our responsibility to bring to consciousness. The national history
of France today traverses this network.
One simple but decisive trait of lieux de me'moire sets them apart from every
type of history to which we have become accustomed, ancient or modern. Every
previous historical or scientific approach to memory, whether national or social,
has concerned itself with realia, with things in themselves and in their immediate
reality. Contrary to historical objects, however, lieux de me'moire have no referent
in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential
signs. This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence, or history;
it is to suggest that what makes them lieux de me'moire is precisely that by
Between Memory and History 23
which they escape from history. In this sense, the lieu de mimoire is double: a site
of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open
to the full range of its possible significations.
This is what makes the history of lieux de mimoire at once banal and extraordinary.
Obvious topics, classic material, sources ready at hand, the least sophisticated
methods: one would think we were returning to long outmoded historical
methods. But such is not the case. Although these objects must be grasped in
empirical detail, the issues at stake are ill suited to expression in the categories of
traditional historiography. Reflecting on lieux de mimoire transforms historical
criticism into critical history-and not only in its methods; it allows history a secondary,
purely transferential existence, even a kind of reawakening. Like war, the
history of lieux de mimoire is an art of implementation, practiced in the fragile
happiness derived from relating to rehabilitated objects and from the involvement
of the historian in his or her subject. It is a history that, in the last analysis,
rests upon what it mobilizes: an impalpable, barely expressible, self-imposed
bond; what remains of our ineradicable, carnal attachment to these faded symbols;
the reincarnation of history as it was practiced by Michelet, irresistibly putting
to mind the recovery from lost love of which Proust spoke so well-that
moment when the obsessive grasp of passion finally loosens but whose true sadness
is no longer to suffer from what one has so long suffered, henceforth to
understand only with the mind's reason, no longer with the unreason of the heart.
This is a very literary reference. Should we regret it or, on the contrary,
suggest its full justification? Once again, the answer derives from our present
historical situation. In fact, memory has never known more than two forms of
legitimacy: historical and literary. These have run parallel to each other but until
now always separately. At present the boundary between the two is blurring; following
closely upon the successivedeaths of memory-history and memory-fiction,
a new kind of history has been born, which owes its prestige and legitimacy to the
new relation it maintains to the past. History has become our replaceable imagination-hence
the last stand of faltering fiction in the renaissance of the historical
novel, the vogue for personalized documents, the literary revitalization of historical
drama, the success of the oral historical tale. Our interest in these lieux de
me'moirethat anchor, condense,and express the exhausted capital of our collective
memory derives from this new sensibility.History has become the deep reference
of a period that has been wrenched from its depths, a realistic novel in a period
in which there are no real novels. Memory has been promoted to the center of
history: such is the spectacular bereavement of literature.
-Translated by Marc Roudebush