And yet our contemporaries and the young generations in particular have cultural demands which are first and foremost attached to subjective views (which the historian precisely distrusts). There is thus every value in opening up history, by which Sophie Ernst means that we ‘should stop considering the teaching of history as the only one or the main one concerned.’ Memory as such, as a subjective story which carries with it meanings, values and questions, has its place in other disciplines, notably in the teaching of literatures and the arts. And she adds, not without a hint of perfidy, that ‘many of the contradictions experienced by history teachers arise from their ending up carrying almost all by themselves all the demands addressed to the whole of a humanist culture curriculum.’ It is one thing to have people understood how historical processes came about, how social configurations were set in place and enabled a related series of disastrous events, and it is another thing to educate children and adolescents to reject racism and anti-Semitism.

It should also be pointed out that Sophie Ernst pleads for the setting up of ‘third party educational sites’, of a ‘cinema-arts discussion’ type, for the moral and civic education of young people. She also recommends the integration into educational studies quality television programmes, adding – no doubt a little too optimistically – that ‘educational backing matters to the management groups of television channels, especially public ones.’

Case studies

Other interesting contributions enrich La concurrence mémorielle. These are the case studies. Sébastien Boussois (a postdoctoral student at the Free University of Brussels’ IEE-Pôle Bernheim) looks into the questioning, by ‘new Israeli historians,’ of the fundamentals of traditional historiography in Israel. Giulia Fabbiano (Associate Researcher at the CADIS) has analysed ‘the narrations of family past’ produced by the descendants of the harkis (in other words Algerians who served the French during the Algerian War) and immigrant Algerians born during and after this war. She draws attention to the fact that these narrations are not necessarily the sources of competition. Louis Bouza Garcia (a doctoral student at the Robert Gordon University - Aberdeen) addresses the ‘memorial escalation’ which the European public and political arena today seems to be undergoing, even if mobilisations around these issues remain relatively rare. In Europe, according to the author, the political actors have a tendency to put into practice a ‘strategy of forgetting’ in order to privilege compromise and the construction of a common memory. Geoffrey Grandjean gets down to the task of decoding the statements young people make on the subject of genocides. Hooking up with twenty-two focus groups organised together with seven secondary education schools in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, he in particularly noted that the youth of immigrant origin do not tend to relativise genocide any more than young Belgians. Nonetheless, he adds, memory competition occurs between the memory of events which took place sixty years ago (the Jewish genocide) and the memory of events which have a more immediate time scale (such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). And he concludes that that ‘can bring about a certain turning inwards in oneself or at the least on one’s community.’

Finally, Jérôme Jamin in his conclusion asks for an interrogation of the role of the media in the processes of memory competition. In effect the images telescope and jostle with each other, particularly on television. Thus the victims of an ongoing genocide which has neither ended nor yet been named as such rub shoulders with one or another commemoration of the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, whilst an appeal to remember the Japanese tsunami or the Rwandan genocide intercuts with the Libyan victims of Colonel Khadafy’s repression. The results can then be disastrous. Jérôme Jamin moreover points out that ‘what is worrying about these media is not so much the magnifying effect but the continuous and random flow of images which bring about incomprehension and resentment on all sides, each one above all thinking that they have been badly done by in comparison with the others!’ And he continues by specifying that, ‘taking into account the impact of the media on the construction of our representations, the hyper-presence, the absence and the unfortunate mix of images pose serious problems to social cohesion.’

All in all La concurrence mémorielle has the great merit of opening up a new research field within the political sciences. The book in addition offers tools for a thinking through of the more and more pronounced use of memory for political ends. It certainly brings together essentially francophone perspectives, but Jérôme Jamin and Geoffrey Grandjean are already considering exploring other memory worlds, Anglo-Saxon in particular.