Even when they are founded on the most noble of sentiments or the highest democratic aspirations, a question of combating the denial of the darkest pages of the past century, do memorial legal acts for all that assure civil peace?  We might have some doubts about that, explain Jérôme Jamin and Geoffrey Grandjean. Challenged as to their effectiveness, they are also accused of shackling the liberty of research. It has thus been useful to gather together in the same work the analyses of several researchers working on this question.

A plethora of memories

The sociologist Régine Robin (Associate Professor at the Sociology department at the University of Quebec in Montreal) tackles the subject of memorial competition within a French framework. After analysing the polemics around communitarianism and the wearing of the headscarf at school, she observes that ‘France from the 1960s onwards seems to have lost the grand narrative of its origins, under the attacks of modernity, the fallout of the Algerian War and the entrance of the human sciences into school questions and interrogations.’ According to her, this country has had to face up to a fragmentation of its memory through the emergence of other memories, within the context of a permanent debate around the increasing presence on its territory of immigrant populations.

France, she insists, has genuinely gone through an epoch change, over the course of the last half century. The ancient glorious past has often become ‘a pitiful past in which no historical event can any longer be worthy of being commemorated without controversy.’ Without mentioning the chapters for a long time neglected or marginalised in official history: the role of Vichy in the deportation of Jews in France, the scale of the collaboration in 1940-45, the rifts of the war in Algeria or that of Indochina, etc.

This recent past troubles and divides. From it there today emerges a whole series of competing memories which in their turn demand their place in the recesses of ‘the national novel.’ A national novel which the French authorities, with the President of the Republic at the forefront, would now like to ‘revivify’ to counter the plural France which is affirming itself. And that in an atmosphere which Régine Robin does not hesitate to term ‘stifling’: ‘you cannot both give ‘pride’ to the French in glorifying the Church and the France of the old bell towers, in acting as if the French revolution was just a bloody incident, that the Vichy regime had not existed, and at the same time advocate cultural cross-fertilisation and the France of diversity. One cannot both talk about the Age of Enlightenment and secularism whilst calling them into question at every turn,’ she writes.

Beware of simplifying visions!

From a theoretical point of view, memory competition often involves the complex and sometimes painful competition between social groups (between themselves or vis-à-vis an authority) to defend and promote the memory of certain historical facts. It is in particular manifested at the level of the use of the word ‘genocide’, a term which has for a few decades been undergoing a ‘bloated inflation.’

The totally ideological and principle based character of the extermination of the Jews by the Hitler regime means that it is generally considered as ‘an unprecedented genocide, paradigmatic and absolute’ (Joël Kotek, a lecturer at the Université Libre de Bruxelles). The Shoah (the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis) is one of the foundations of post-war European culture. Its singularity has painfully fashioned the identity of the Europeans in their relation to history and memory. It is the very meaning of the beginnings of European construction.

As is stressed by the historian Philippe Raxhon, a professor at the University of Liège, the transmission of the memory of the Shoah was painful and thus slow, the consequence of a never before experienced event in history, in counterpoint to a historiography on the subject which was itself progressively developed  in the post-war decades and above all from the end of the 1970s. We must thus talk, as far as it is concerned, of an awakening of memory, an awakening no doubt stimulated by the revival of extreme right populisms coupled with anti-Semitism and denial, themselves reactivated by a certain perception  of problems in the Near and Middle East.