ABSTRACT
Lieux de memoire ["sites of memory"] originate 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.... We buttress our identities upon such bastions ... if history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de memoire... 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.
