‘Maurice Halbwachs founded the field of collective memory’ (Schwartz & Schuman 2005: 183). The nineteenth-century French sociologist is indeed constantly described as a ‘founding father’ of the emerging field of memory studies (Olick 2009; Lustiger Thaler 2013). However, the reference to Halbwachs remains formal in nature.
What follows aims at introducing the French author’s ‘sociological theory of memory’ (1994 [1925]: VIII). To do so, it will, firstly, stress the centrality of space in the process of remembrance, conceptualising memory dynamics as a process of localisation. Secondly, it will illustrate the empirical potentialities of Halbwachs’s views on the relation between memory and space through the case study of the memory of the internment camps in Paris during the Holocaust. In doing so, this chapter may contribute to the current epistemological reflexions on the nature of memory. It advocates the importance not to mainly consider memory as ‘a content’ but as a relational process.
The work of Maurice Halbwachs is most often cut into two independent parts. The sociologist would have first studied urban spaces and city life, based mainly on statistics (Topalov 1999, 2006; Cléro 2008; Halbwachs 1960). At some point, he would have changed his interests, deciding to focus on the understanding of memory, relying then only on personal impressions and philosophical considerations (Namer 1983). This dichotomisation reflects a huge misunderstanding of the scope and aim of his study of memory.
In Halbwachs’s mind, memory is not an issue of time but a matter of space and localisation (Jaisson 1999). As early as in the Social Frameworks of Memory, Halbwachs discusses ‘the original society that every individual, in a way, forms with himself.’ (1994 [1925]: 139). Memory does not have an origin, an initial moment. Almost 20 years later, in the Legendary Topograph, Halbwachs still writes: ‘whatever epoch is examined, attention is not directed toward the first events, or perhaps the origin of these events, but rather toward the group of believers’ (2008 [1941]: 234–235). In his view, the remembrance process is first and foremost an operation that localises. Memory is localised inter-subjectively, via mutual recognition between various individuals located in a structured space. The ‘group’ as such does not define collective memory; rather, it is the individual’s position in a complex and structured social space as the evolution of the structure of this very space which does. The localisation of memory thus results just as much from a given individual’s place in a structured ensemble of relations as from the modifications within this ensemble. By perceiving the space in which individuals are located as always relational, Halbwachs is able to conceive of both the individual and the collective: in short, to conceptualise the social. Therefore, he forges jointly the concepts of ‘social space,’ a system structured by inter-individual relations, and ‘collective memory.’
From there it is possible to understand to what extent studying urban space and memory are interlinked in Halbwachs’s analytical perspective. Studying memory was for him a way to deal with the central issue for the sociologists of his time: social morphology. In La Morphologie sociale, Halbwachs claims that,
Halbwachs’s spatial theorisation of memory is useful for thinking about contemporary issues, such as the presence and transformation of the past in multiculturalist and global society. The anthropologist Roger Bastide, who put these kinds of cultural ‘remodelings’ at the crux of his work during the 1960s, was perhaps the first one to realise how Halbwachs’s approach could be used for empirical work on memory (Lavabre 2004). Bastide studied the South American ‘Black Americas,’ born as a result of the slave trade (1996 [1967]).2 For Bastide, Halbwachs provided a key conceptual framework (1970), for his ethnological study which dealt with the conservation, transformation, and ‘gaps’ in collective memory following the slave trade from Africa to Brazil. These memory reconfigurations are, for Bastide, fundamentally linked to transformations in the structured topography of the original groups.
This ‘well-ordered interplay of reciprocal images’ takes place between ‘complementary actors’ in a structured social space. Memory will be conserved all the better since the group’s structure is preserved during the move to Brazil.
To illustrate forward the empirical potentialities of Halbwachs theorisation of memory and space, we will focus on a contemporary iconic case study related to the memory of a Holocaust related past: the existence of internment camps at the very centre of Paris between 1943 and 1944. While most of the former inmates survived the war and most of the buildings still exist, the memory of these places has long been forgotten.
The history of the Parisian camps (Gensburger 2015; Dreyfus & Gensburger 2011) is situated at the intersection of physical extermination and economic spoliation. At the beginning of 1942, the Nazi decision to implement the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ led to the installation of a new type of plundering in Western Europe: the Möbel Aktion (Operation Furniture). The Dienststelle Westen (Western Service) was quickly created in Paris to house the furniture and objects from the apartments of Jews who had fled or had already been deported. The service had few military personnel. Thus, in July 1943, it hired a Jewish workforce from Drancy, the main Sicherheitsdienst’s (Security Service’s) transit camp in France, located in a Paris suburb, where Jews were parked before the deportation to Auschwitz. The prisoners chosen for this work and the transfer to Paris belonged to one of three categories of the temporarily ‘non-deportable’ inmates: Jews who were ‘spouses of Aryans’, Mischlinge or ‘half-Jews,’ and Jewish wives of Jewish war prisoners. Occasionally, ‘ordinary’ Jews interned at Drancy succeeded in obtaining false documents which allowed them to pass as ‘spouses of Aryans’ or as ‘half-Jews,’ thereby temporarily staving off their deportation.
In July 1943, 180 internees left Drancy for the Lévitan furniture store in the 10th arrondissement. In November, the second satellite camp, called ‘Austerlitz,’ opened in the 13th arrondissement and it received a group of nearly 200 prisoners. In both locations, the internees were subjected to forced labour. All day long, they sorted, cleaned, and repaired objects and furniture pillaged from Jewish apartments. In March 1944, a third, smaller camp opened in an Aryanised private mansion at 2 rue de Bassano in the 16th arrondissement. There, a luxury fashion house catering to Nazi dignitaries was established. In all three locations, the prisoners participated in every step of Operation Furniture, which emptied 38,000 Parisian homes.
In principle, this work detail in the capital signified, above all, eluding the fatal deportation to the East. The prisoners, however, remained dependent upon the main camp. A hallmark of the Nazi administrative operation, arbitrariness was permanent. In several cases of attempted escape and insubordination, internees were taken back to the main camp to be deported. Nearly 800 people worked in the three camps between July 1943 and August 1944; 166 were deported to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. The remaining 80% – or 600 internees – from the three camps stayed in Paris and survived the war.
Until recently, the very existence of these forced labour camps was almost ignored. A large majority of the potential witnesses remained mute, both privately within their families and publicly. For a long time, only fragments of the past lingered.
The Austerlitz camp was located in an industrial zone of Magasins et Entrepôts Généraux de Paris (Paris general stores and warehouses company). Among the buildings still standing in the early 1990s was a refrigerated warehouse that had been occupied by artists for 20 years. In the middle of the 1990s, an urban renewal plan threatened their presence. A rumour persisted that the building had been a camp during the war. Hoping to defend their building from destruction, several artists decided in 1997 to ascertain whether a ‘Jewish camp’ had indeed been on the premises.3 They put out a call for ‘witnesses’ and published in the national press a notice for former internees. Some individuals responded to the notice and ‘Amicale Austerlitz-Lévitan-Bassano,’ a non-profit organisation gathering former inmates, family, and friends was created. Its mission was to ‘retrace the history of Parisian internment, work and transit camps and to preserve their memory.’4 Consequently, a group of individuals decided to recount, publicly, the history of these camps. Understanding how certain individuals remember, here publicly, illuminates how others long guarded and continue to guard their silence. In other words, it enables us to grasp how memory works.
On 1 October 2001, at the peak of its mobilisation,5 this ‘Amicale Austerlitz-Lévitan-Bassano’ counted 29 members, who were either former internees, the child or grandchild of an internee, or individuals interested in history. Yet, during the association’s internal discussions, the relationships between the Jewish ‘collective milieu,’ according to Maurice Halbwachs’s formula, and the non-Jewish collective milieu very clearly structured the space of memory’s expression. Those who recounted their past and spoke publicly hold singular positions in the social space. The parallel between the social morphology of the organisation and the original one of the Parisian camps during the war is striking. While people ‘fully’ Jewish accounted for no more than 15% of the Parisian camps internees, and are over-represented among the people finally deported to Auschwitz with the highest death rates, they, nevertheless, constitute 65% of the association’s members. Conversely, constituting 85% of the original population of the Parisian camps, internees having matrimonial or genealogical connections with non-Jews constitute only 35% of the organisation members. The observation of the organisation’s general meetings confirmed the peripheral position of people situated at the margins of Jewish milieus. Yet the large majority within the Parisian camps barely spoke during the organisation’s meetings. This was left to members situated clearly within a Jewish collective milieu.
Only a ‘change’ in the ‘relationships with the diverse collective milieus’ solicits the expression of memory and its transmission to others. The remarks of the girl of a first marriage of a former Parisian camps internee, interned as ‘spouse of an Aryan,’ revealed the difficulties of remembering with others while one is socially isolated, situated on ‘an island.’ Questioned about post-war family conversations, this woman explains:
In this case, the silence appears to be directly linked to the isolation, to the absence of relationships with ‘deportees,’ implicitly ‘Jews,’ or, in other terms, those of Halbwachs with ‘collective milieus’ in which the past may be likely to be meaningful and shared. Conversely, the concomitance between the ‘connection’ with others – the organisation’s secretary-general a common contact – and the decision of remembering belong together. Memory, a social phenomenon, only forms through complementary links between members of a group, carriers of a common past.
The renewal of contacts, the connections allows one to again insert oneself in these ‘collective intellectual currents.’ This is even more improbable when the social position is situated at the group’s margin or is really complex, the result of a number of distinct affiliations that the individual cannot proceed to a minimal identification. Another example reveals the relationship between localisation and remembrance, the modification of connections to collective milieus and the formation of memory. When a veteran of the Austerlitz camp, interned as a ‘spouse of an Aryan’ woman, recounts his internment, for the first time since the end of the war, he immediately and spontaneously evokes the recent modification of his relations to collective milieus. First of all, he shared with us the recent death of his wife and went on:
This person’s total rupture with the social group with which he shares a pertinent common past – the Jews’ past before and during the Occupation – explains his long silence. Conversely, it was under the label of a recent change in his potential relationship to this milieu – the death of non-Jewish wife who did not want to speak of this past – that the man situates his testimony. If it enables him to testify, this transformation of relationships with different collective milieus remains, nonetheless, marginal. This man is not a member of the former inmates’ organisation and does not want to become one. On the phone, before accepting to meet with us, he asked us, first of all, to assure him that the association had ‘no denominational nature.’ In order to accept witnessing of one of the places of the persecution of Jews, this man preferred a framework not linked to the Jewish identity, in this case the completion of the ‘academic’ research project I was working on.
The connections between collective milieus and memory explains that, in the case of the Parisian camps, the potential witnesses have rarely expressed themselves and that their memories did not consolidate as a unified memory. Their testimony falls into a social mechanism, a morphological one, Halbwachs would say. Several former internees, like their families, do not speak of this ‘ever-present’ past (Conan & Rousso 1994) because they do not find their place(s) in relation to it. The structuration of the social space and the position that the individual occupies within it explains the expression of the memory, both ‘recognised and reconstructed.’
So, the Parisian camps have for a long time formed the centre of what, based on his study of African religions in Brazil, Roger Bastide termed as a ‘memory hole’ (1970: 95): neither forgetting nor remembrance, but the memory of a void. While researching the history of these camps, it was consequently difficult for us to find and meet with former detainees. Their silence was linked to their sense of isolation, to the absence of any relations with ‘deportees’ who would, by implication, be ‘Jews’ and so stemming, in other words – the words of Maurice Halbwachs, to be precise – from their being cut off from the ‘collective milieux’ able to sustain this memory. ‘A person remembers only by situating himself with the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents of collective thought’ (Halbwachs 1997 [1950 Posthumous]: 33).
The position occupied by most of these internees at the crossroads between two groups, ‘Jews’ and ‘non-Jews,’ has made it difficult to become a witness. Several former detainees, along with their families, have decided to say nothing about this past, not so much because it is ‘ever-present,’ traumatising them, because they themselves are unable to find their own place in relation to it.
Moreover, because most of these detainees had ended up being sheltered from the danger of deportation, living in much better conditions than those in Drancy, let alone Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz, there was a perception that many of the inmates of the Parisian camps had in this way been ‘spared.’ Following the Liberation, several detainees did in fact speak about their internment in some articles published in Parisian Resistance’s newspapers in September 1944. This public airing of their experiences ceased with the return of the surviving deportees and the dawning awareness of the reality of the extermination camps. After April 1945, nothing more would be said about the satellite camps of Drancy, whether in the public arena or in more specialised publications. Filled with a vague feeling of guilt at having escaped deportation in exchange for forced labour in the context of the looting of Jewish property, in a marginal position with respect both to their identification with Judaism and to the group formed by the deportees, the majority of the former detainees of Lévitan, Austerlitz, and Bassano could find no suitable social framework within which to express their memories. No ‘space for narration’ (Pollak 1993: 201), no place to tell their story, was then available.
It was only after 1998, when the anti-Semitic looting during the war became a public issue and led to an official reparation process, that some of the former internees began to speak out. They had found a social place from which to tell their story. At a time when French state and secular social actors started gathering around the evocation of this looting operation, a space opened for them to speak out, this time as French citizens. In doing so, they did not tell their personal experience of suffering, anxiety, cold, and hope. They told what they saw from 1943 to 1944: how the looting operation worked and the amount of the plunder. In accordance to the social frameworks which had finally led them to tell their story, they became historical witnesses rather than autobiographical ones. They testified of what they saw rather than what they experienced. Here the localisation dynamics of memory directly frames the content of what is recalled from the past.
* * *
From the 1980s onward, an increasing number of researchers in the social sciences have become interested in the topic of ‘memory.’ Twenty years later, the interest has reached ‘boom’ status and has, as such, been critiqued variously (Confino 1997; Olick & Robbins 1998; Berliner 2005; Winter 2000). Memory studies as an integrated field should help to deal with one of the principal ‘problems plaguing contemporary research on collective memory, namely, the tendency to reify it’ (Olick 2007: 42; Klein 2000; Crane 1997). If Maurice Halbwachs’ ‘sociological theory of memory’ is often referred to as inspirational, it turns out that this new research field largely oversees the potentialities of the French sociologist’s conceptualisation of memory as a localisation process. Halbwachs’s perspective is particularly important in a time where memory has become a field of intense dialogue, and sometimes conflict, between neurobiology and social sciences. The issues of network and localisation are indeed at the core of the social turn neurobiology has underwent in the recent years. Halbwachs’s intuition opens a new direction to conceptualise memory as something other than content coming from the past, which is so often described as ‘collective memory.’ It calls for developing a spatialised, and then genuinely social, approach of memory dynamics.
Bastide, R. (1970). Mémoire collective et sociologie du bricolage. L’Année sociologique, 65–108.
Bastide, R. (1996 [1967]). Les Amériques noires. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Bastide, R. (2007 [1960]). Les religions africaines au Brésil. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Berliner, D. (2005). The abuses of memory: Reflections on the memory boom in Anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly, 78 (1): 197–211.
Cléro, J.P. (2008). Halbwachs et l’espace fictionnel de la ville. In: M. Jaisson, ed. Maurice Halbwachs: La Topographie Légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 43–72.
Conan, E., and Rousso, H. (1996 [1994]). Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas. Paris: Gallimard.
Confino, A. (1997). Collective memory and cultural history: Problems of method. American Historical Review, 105: 1386–1403.
Crane, S. (1997). Writing the individual back into collective memory. American Historical Review, 102 (5): 1372–1385.
Dreyfus, J.M., and Gensburger, S. (2011). Nazi labor camps in Paris. New York: Berghahn Books.
Gensburger, S. (2015). Witnessing the robbing of the Jews. A photographic album, Paris 1940–1944. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Halbwachs, M. (1946 [1938]). Morphologie sociale. Paris: Armand Colin.
Halbwachs, M. (1960). Population and society: Introduction to social morphology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Halbwachs, M. (1994 [1925]). Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel.
Halbwachs, M. (1997 [1950 Posthumous]). La mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel.
Halbwachs, M. (2008 [1941]). La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte. Etude de mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Jaisson, M. (1999). Temps et espace chez Maurice Halbwachs (1925–1945). Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 1: 163–178.
Klein, K. (2000). On the emergence of memory in historical discourse. Representations, 69: 127–150.
Lavabre, M.C. (2004). Roger Bastide, lecteur de Maurice Halbwachs. In: Y. Déloye and C. Haroche, eds. Maurice Halbwachs: Espaces, mémoire et psychologie collective. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, pp. 161–171.
Lustiger Thaler, H. (2013). Memory redux. Current Sociology, 61 (5–6): 906–927.
Namer, G. (1983). Batailles pour la mémoire. La commémoration en France de 1945 à nos jours. Paris: Papyrus.
Olick, J.K. (2007). Collective memory and nonpublic opinion: A historical note on a methodological controversy about a political problem. Symbolic Interaction, 30 (1): 41–55.
Olick, J.K. (2009). Between chaos and diversity: Is social memory studies a field? International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 22: 249–252.
Olick, J.K., and Robbins, J. (1998). Social memory studies: From “Collective memory” to the Historical sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 105–140.
Pollak, M. (1993). L’expérience concentrationnaire: Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale, Paris: Métailié.
Schwartz, B., and Schuman, H. (2005). Commemoration and belief: Abraham Lincoln in American memory, 1945–2001. American Sociological Review, 70 (2): 183–203.
Sebald, W.G. (2001). Austerliz. London: Penguin.
Topalov, C. (1999). “Expériences sociologiques”: Les faits et les preuves dans les thèses de Maurice Halbwachs (1909–1913). Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 1: 11–46.
Topalov, C. (2006). Maurice Halbwachs et les sociologues de Chicago. Revue française de sociologie, 47 (3): 561–590.
Winter, J. (2000). The generation of memory: Reflections on the memory boom in contemporary historical studies. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 27: 69–92.