ABSTRACT
The question of the relation between history and memory has become a major historiographical and epistemological concern for French historians since the late 1970s (Lavabre 2000). Starting with the publication of Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire in 1984,1 much of the historiographical-and even scientific-debate on this subject (Todorov 1995; Rémond 2006; Terray 2006) has consisted of opposing memory and history with, on the one hand, subjective, emotional, and specific memory and, on the other, objective and scientific history. Even those who offer a more nuanced vision of memory still analyze this relation in terms of how to go beyond it (Dosse 1998, 2008) or by recalling the historian’s autonomy vis-à-vis commemorative demands (Noiriel 2009).
