La mémoire, mauvais objet de l’historien ?

Abstract

Cet article propose de repenser l’articulation entre histoire et mémoire au sein de la discipline historique. Il présente d’abord les limites du discours produit par un certain nombre d’historiens identifiant ces deux catégories comme antagoniques, notamment à l’occasion des débats sur les lois mémorielles et de la création de l’association Liberté pour l’histoire à la fin de l’année 2005. Le texte revient ensuite sur les conditions sociales et scientifiques qui ont encadré, à la fin des années 1970, la production de l’opposition entre histoire et mémoire, avant d’indiquer les apports de son dépassement dans la recherche historique aujourd’hui, permettant d’investiguer la mémoire en tant qu’objet scientifique par de multiples biais.

Collective memory and autobiographical memory: Perspectives from the humanities and cognitive sciences

“…The aim of the three volumes of Realms of Memory was to draw up an inventory of the symbols of French national memory, such as the Marseillaise , monuments like the Panthéon, or commemorative events like Bastille Day or the funeral of Victor Hugo, and then to explore how each “lieu de mémoire” developed, from its creation through to its interpretation in the present day. Nora's study took place at a moment when there was a certain sense of decline in the “national memory” in France (Ledoux, 2017), and this gave Nora's work a political slant: in writing about the nation's key lieux de mémoire , Nora and his colleagues also enhanced the status of these mnemonic objects and sites—which highlights just how far the work of the historian potentially has a normative function, allowing him or her to contribute to a certain reading of past events. The political scientist Marie‐Claire Lavabre (2000) notes that Nora's work proposes a “notion of memory, doubly connoted by the national and the political,” which over‐emphasizes the political uses of the past, and downplays how memory might also be considered an object worthy of study at different levels within a society.…”