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Competing memories

2/28/12

Should particular categories of people in society – the Jews, the Armenians, the descendants of African slaves, etc. – be given protected status in certain special circumstances by each being granted the satisfaction of a legal memorial act which they might well have good reasons to demand? Should it be up to political authorities to define historical verities concerning certain traumatic events of the past in order to preserve, through the threat of criminal sanctions, the collective memory? Is there not a risk that in so doing conflicts of memories will be stirred up? These are some of the crucial, and very contemporary, questions tackled by La concurrence mémorielle (Memorial Competitions) (1), a collective work edited by Geoffrey Grandjean and Jérôme Jamin.

RememberIn Paris on December 22, 2011, the National Assembly adopted on its first reading a Bill, sponsored by the Member of Parliament Valérie Boyer (UMP), which aimed at cracking down on the ‘contestation of genocides established by the law.’ The Senate did the same on January 23, but the Constitutional court invalidated the text on february 28, 2012. In France two genocides are now legally recognised: the Shoah – whose denial was already punishable through the Gayssot Act (July 13, 1990), as well as the genocide of the Armenians (Act of January 29, 2001) which led to the deaths of one and a half million people between 1915 and 1917.

Contesting or minimising the latter will thus be also punishable in France: up to one year in prison and 45,000 Euros in fines. This text has already sparked of its share of irate reactions. With, at the forefront, threats of economic reprisals on the part of Turkey and cyber attacks by Turkish hackers against numerous French websites (notably those of the National Assembly, the Senate and the UMP).

In France the community of people of Armenian origin is estimated to be around 400,000, against a quasi comparable population of Turkish origins. As the two communities – need it be spelled out – do not at all deploy the same collective memory, this has given rise to forms of competition, and even conflict, which have become more and more high pitched.

In voting in this new memorial act, the French elected representatives have in any case set up a ‘dangerous trap’ (2). For if France recognises two genocides, the United Nations recognises a further two: that perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (between 1975 and 1979), and that of the Tutsis, committed in Rwanda in 1994. If France were to simply recognise these two other massacres it would automatically mean that the Act applies to them. This would open the path to explosive disputes, particularly in the Rwandan case, in which the role of the French state has yet to be clarified.

Belgium has already legislated, let us remember, as far as the genocide of the Jews is concerned. The Act of March 23, 1995, cracks down on any denial, minimisation, justification and approval of it. On the other hand the Bills aiming to punish the negation of the Armenian genocide have not been brought to a conclusion up until now. Only a single resolution has been adopted by the Belgian senators, on March 17, 1998, inviting ‘the Turkish government to acknowledge the genocide perpetrated in 1915 by the last government of the Ottoman Empire.’

Here in Belgium, 150,000 people claim Turkish descent whilst the Armenian community hardly exceeds 10,000 (3). Let us add that in Belgium the right to vote in local elections was granted in 2004 to non-European foreigners, and that controversies over memory are thus no longer exempt from electoral concerns.

The political debate over criminal sanctions concerning denial is far from being closed. It even risks being exacerbated, in France as in Belgium, and all the more so when it bears on events which have not taken place on its territory, as is the case of the Armenian genocide.

A book whose publication is timely

The book in question here, La concurrence mémorielle, is thus published at exactly the right time. It shows that intellectuals also want to take part in the debate, by re-contextualising it first of all and then reminding us – very opportunely – that ‘history must not be the slave of contemporary politics, nor must it be written under the dictates of competing memories’ (1). And finally in offering several pathways to lead out of the crisis which is developing between history and memory.

In Belgium, as in France, many historians are concerned about these so-called memorial Acts becoming more widespread, and even disapprove of it. Pierre Nora, who presides over the Liberté pour l'Histoire association (‘Liberty for History’), even sharply criticises this purely French legislative sport which opens the path to ‘every form of a questioning of historical and academic research by the memorial demands of particular groups because the associations are even authorised by the new act (Boyer Act) to file civil suits’ (2). ‘Need we be reminded,’ he concludes, ‘that it is history which must be protected first of all, because it is that which brings people together when memory divides?’

Certain protective barriers have been erected against simplistic readings of the past. The appeal of the historians of the Public Use of History Vigilance Committee is one such dyke. It is addressed as much to the legislator as to the media. ‘We have had enough of being constantly summonsed to draw up balance sheets of the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ aspects of history,’ we can read within it. ‘These discourses take into account neither the complexity of historical processes, nor the real role of the actors or the power issues of the time [...]. The mission of historians is to develop [...] and transmit rigorous knowledge of the past.’

It is moreover within the same spirit that Georges Bensoussan (3) situates himself straightaway in the preface to the book La concurrence mémorielle.  For him, memory is deceptive and is not subject to the concerns of the historian. ‘The image we make of the past is not the past,’ he adds. ‘Not even what remains of  it, but only a trace which changes day to day, a reconstruction which is not the fruit of chance but links together small islets of memory lingering on amongst a general forgetting.’

COVER Jamin-GrandjeanThe two mainsprings behind the work, Jérôme Jamin and Geoffrey Grandjean, together think over these questions at the University of Liège’s Department of Political Science, where the former is a lecturer and the latter a FNRS Research Fellow. Jérôme Jamin’s research looks into populism, nationalism and the extreme right in Europe and the United States, whilst Geoffrey Grandjean is for his part devoting his doctoral thesis to the consequences of genocide knowledge on the forms of political socialisation.

‘We have a very clear feeling,’ they explain, ‘that memorial competition is the starting point – and not the resolution – of many of the problems in society. Notably in school. […] The media telescoping around questions of memories can have disastrous effects on the young. We moreover think that memorial competition has become a relevant concept today since there has been media hyperinflation of this theme.’

Jérôme Jamin and Geoffrey Grandjean believe that this concept which they have forged will open up multidisciplinary perspectives in analysing the widespread use made of memory for political ends. Contrary to history-knowledge, expressed by a historian according to scientific methods, (collective) memory deals with the sharing of common historical experiences. It is a reconstruction  of part of the past, chosen in an arbitrary manner. It only exists through the outcome which is assigned to it – for example constructing a collective identity – and it is necessarily plural. In each society there are as many collective memories as there are groups and communities.

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.

Red-khmers-victims

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.

On this subject Philippe Raxhon unequivocally denounces the accusation regularly levelled at the Israeli state of instrumentalising the Shoah for its own political benefit. ‘The existence of a monstrous tension, in the main sense of the word, between on the one hand extraordinary historical work of great quality, remarkable steps forward in terms of museology and pedagogy, considerable institutional endeavours on an international scale [...]; and on the other, in contrast, a denial of various sources, media and ideological corruptions, caricatural trivialisations or anachronistic comparisons.’

The Liège historian also dwells on what he calls the ‘globalisation of memory’ over colonial pasts and slavery. All in all the site of memory of the domination of humankind by humankind is becoming the entire planet, every era included. A phenomenon which is both disturbing and alarming, he writes, without forgetting to point out that certain historians have themselves contributed to it ‘in toppling the bronze statues of the heroes of national positivism.’ The distortion between history and memory is becoming a tear, with the abandonment of the contexts and singularities of historical situations. And there is a major risk at issue: the simplifying visions of the past, so characteristic of totalitarian ideologies.

Not without having warned against the proliferation of memorial legal acts ‘which direct our model of society towards the managing of affairs by judges and not by elected representatives,’ Philippe Raxhon in the end advocates replacing the word memory by that of heritage, a ‘less heavily charged’ concept. And rediscovering in passing the path which leads to the richness and complexity of the past, in particular in the relationship between nations, human beings, social classes and societies. All in all a way to stimulate a sharing of memories...

Opening up history

Sophie Ernst (Associate Professor at the French Institute of Education) invites us to reflect on another important aspect: school. Focusing on what she terms ‘negative commemorations,’ in other words those which ‘bring nothing but pain, the awareness of irreparable tragedies,’ she suggests different pathways for reintegrating the transmission of memories into the school environment. She in effect thinks that the young should not find themselves crushed under the weight of traumatic and anxiety triggering pasts – which are sometimes the roots of conflicts which teachers find hard to manage – but instead be in a dynamic of hope and an interest in cultural otherness. In short anything but martyrology.

It would maybe be better, she suggests for example, to have children discover the marvellous Yiddish culture and klezmer music, to have them discover Gypsy culture rather than take them to Auschwitz, and that would be a form of commemoration equal to another. The Yiddish culture has been assassinated, but what survives of it deserves to be passed on; La liste de Schindlergypsy forms of music are immensely seductive and remind the world of the precarious existence of a people whose very existence is still threatened. In the same way it is worth remembering that we owe to slavery the music which has revolutionised our tastes and conquered the world...

Bearing witness as a researcher to the investment of numerous professors in inventive projects, Sophie Ernst reminds us that memory takes over history in a subjective manner and that it is this ‘subjectification, this concentration on a subject of affects, desires, wishes, etc. which makes it of value for pupils.’ That is very different to a presentation of the 1914-1918 War such as we were used to having forty years ago: the causes of the war, the political events, the battles, descriptions of the front, and the consequences of the peace treaties. We needed films of fiction, theatre plays, sometimes the rediscovery of forgotten books, before we could grasp an essential aspect: what the soldiers in the trenches experienced, what happened to a whole generation of very young men. It was by moving into subjectivity and individual stories that we were able to discover a much more consistent objectivity which the ‘seen from above’ description had obliterated.

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.’

Shoes-on-the-Danube

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.

(1) Grandjean G., Jamin J. (dir), La concurrence mémorielle, Ed. Armand Collin, Coll. Recherches, 2011
(2) Le Monde, « Lois mémorielles, la folle mécanique », Jérôme Gautheret, January 5, 2012.
(3) Figures cited by the Honorary Senator François Roelants du Vivier, in an open column of the « La Libre Belgique » newspaper, December 30, 2011, Loi pénale et négationnisme: un combat inachevé.

(1)    Extract from the appeal « Liberté  pour l’histoire » (Blois, October 2008), signed by over a thousand European historians. This appeal is headed by historians of uncontested authority such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean-Pierre Vernant.
(2)    Le Monde, 28 December 2011. Pierre Nora is the author of in particular « Présent, nation, mémoire », published by Gallimard
(3)    Historian, Editor of the Shoah Memorial.


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