Regimes of Historicity: presentism and experiences of time

“FRANCE MUST COMPOSE ITS ANNALS AFRESH, TO MAKE them conform to the progress of reason.” This maxim from Chateaubriand, which we referred to in the last chapter, comes from the preface to his Historical Studies, in which he was adopting the pose of the historian overtaken by history: “I was writing ancient history, while modern history was knocking at my door.”¹ History, speeding ahead posthaste, was once again leaving him behind. As he observed in his Memoirs, ideally one would “write history in a calèche.” Lorenz von Stein, a German theorist of history, noted similarly in 1843 that “it is as though historical writing is no longer in a position to keep up with history.”² Of course for Chateaubriand this was partly posturing, since he had made his own anachronism into the driving force and ultimate source of his writing. As for composing the annals afresh to make them conform to the progress of reason—that is, to bring them into line with the modern regime of historicity—that task would ultimately not be for him; it would devolve upon the younger generation of liberal historians, above all Augustin Thierry.

And indeed, Chateaubriand’s maxim could have served as an epigraph for any number of books written throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or at least for the most ambitious among them, certainly up to Ernest Lavisse, and maybe even up to Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire. French historians’ great love affair with writing the history of the nation would last many a long year. Their contexts are obviously not comparable, but both Chateaubriand in 1830 and Nora in the early 1980s set out to take stock of the present and to draw conclusions from this. For Chateaubriand, this meant reconstructing history “according to a new plan,” while for Nora the question was firstly what “compose afresh” could possibly mean: can one still, Nora asked, write a history of France? How? And why?3

The volumes of Lieux de mémoire (1984–1993) spanned the critical year of 1989: they were conceived and in part published before that date, but only completed afterward. In France at the time, the spotlight was on the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and people were busy rehearsing the spats between rival camps, with their predictable cast of characters.⁴ But no one had foreseen the fall of the Berlin Wall. It took everyone by surprise. By contrast, the Lieux de mémoire were borne on the tide of interest in memory that had been sweeping over France since the mid-1970s. The work registered it, reflected it like a mirror, and also reflected upon it.

One could cite, among the many signs of this increasing preoccupation with memory, Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, whose release was delayed until 1971, and the publication in the following year of Robert Paxton’s meticulously researched indictment of the Pétain regime, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, but also, in a different vein, the memoirs of “a Breton from the Bigouden” in Pierre-Jakez Hélias’s The Horse of Pride (1975), which recreated the local Breton-speaking world of the author, born in 1914. The book had soon sold more than one million copies. Then came Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in 1985, Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s Assassins of Memory in 1987, denouncing and exposing the logic of Holocaust denial, and, in the same year, Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Rousso’s work on Vichy was prompted by the discovery that “what the case called for was a doctor qualified to treat the living, not the dead—perhaps even a psychoanalyst.” Numerous other works could be cited, including Paul Ricoeur’s last book, published for the millennium in 2000, Memory, History, Forgetting. Other, more visible and tangible markers included the energetic renovation, or museification, of historic city centers, the multiplication of ecomuseums and folk and crafts museums, and the extension of the idea of Heritage.5

Returning to the schematic parallel I made between Chateaubriand and Nora above, what is immediately striking are their different relations to time. The “new plan” required by the “progress” of reason implied a vision of time as a process of improvement and progress, which ushered in freedom “offspring of manners,” as discovered in America. The Historical Essay’s many revisions show this clearly. Yet Chateaubriand could not ignore that the way liberal historians worked, taking this new world as “a revised scale by which to measure the old one,” was poles apart from his own way of writing, constantly crisscrossing, and crossing out, from one world to the other.⁶ By contrast, when Nora set out on what was to become the Lieux de mémoire, not only was there no question of a progressive time, but he remained entirely within the circle of the present. He aimed at a kind of inventory prior to a death foretold: “The rapid disappearance of our national memory seemed to me to call for an inventory of the sites where it had chosen to manifest itself.”⁷

Further back, Fernand Braudel was still bold enough to embark upon a long solo voyage, a history of France similar in ambition to Michelet’s. But whereas the latter devoted forty years of his life to it, Braudel started out on his Identity of France later in his career, and the book, in which singularity and permanence were brought together, remained unfinished.⁸ Braudel was not interested in memory, but in the history that emerged from the very depths of the longue durée, that “immense surface of almost stagnant water” which imperceptibly but irresistibly “draws everything onto itself.”⁹ As for the Lieux de mémoire, the texts Nora contributed to each volume ensured that the whole enterprise, despite its exceptionally wide-ranging team of contributors, resonated with his own particular interpretation, almost in a musical sense, of the history of France: his own particular tone.

My guiding thread, as I have said, is the order of time. I shall examine the Lieux de mémoire, taken above all as an intellectual enterprise, in this respect. What does the privileged place of memory in the project tell us about how past, present, and future were articulated? They were obviously not organized in the same way as in the modern regime of historicity. And Lieux de mémoire will also help shed light on the temporalities mobilized in national history as a genre, in the course of its history. But first, let us take a step back again and practice another type of viewing from afar.

There are cogent arguments for situating the modern regime of historicity between the two symbolic dates of 1789 and 1989. I would suggest, at least provisionally, that the two dates mark the entrance and the exit of this regime on the stage of History. At the very least, one can suggest that they constitute two caesuras, or breaks, in the order of time.¹⁰ 11 September 2001 poses no serious challenge to this outline, unless the American government has decided to make it into a new beginning of world history, a new present and one alone, that of the war on terror. That said, with 9/11 the contemporary event reached its logical limit. Under the glare of the TV cameras, the event exhibited itself in the making, undergoing a real-time transformation into history that was simultaneously, and already, a (self-) commemoration.¹¹ In this sense, the structure of the event had become absolutely presentist.

The French Revolution, for those actually involved in it, as for those who tried to explain it immediately afterward, was interpreted predominantly as a conflict between two regimes of historicity. The past, Rome, Plutarch, all were summoned to the cause, while at the same time the event was declared to be without precedent and imitation was to be proscribed. Napoleon’s own trajectory takes on a different meaning in this light. He was inspired by the new order of time, which always drove him onward, ahead of himself—as Chateaubriand said, “he travelled so quickly he barely had time to take breath wherever he passed”—yet he remained fascinated by Plutarch’s heroes, to the extent of entering his future backwards, as Paul Valéry put it, by fabricating for himself a pseudo-lineage.¹² He too was caught between two regimes of historicity, attempting to embody his destiny as a hero, and ultimately a tragic one.

Koselleck’s by-now classic analyses, which we mentioned earlier, summarize the modern regime as the passage from the German plural die Geschichten to the singular die Geschichte, History. “Beyond histories,” he says, “there is History,” History in itself. In Droysen’s words, as cited by Koselleck, History must become “knowledge of itself.”13 More importantly, it is conceived as a process, with the idea that events do not simply occur in time but also through time, with time itself as an agent, and even the agent. Since, today, the past no longer makes the future comprehensible, history’s lessons have become obsolete, and what is required are, rather, predictions. Historians are no longer in search of the exemplary, but of the unique. The topics of historia magistra had allowed the past to connect with the future through the exemplary model to be imitated: in looking back at famous men, I could also find them in front or ahead of me.

The modern regime replaced the exemplary with the nonrepeatable. The past was, a priori or due to its position (which amounts to the same), outdated. Someday, later, when the time was ripe, historians would be able to formulate laws, as in the natural sciences, or, in the words of late nineteenth-century science-history, the glorious day of synthesis would eventually dawn. But in the meantime historians were like diligent craftsmen who must apply themselves to the daily grind of analysis. The time was not yet ripe. The future, or rather the view from the future, prevailed: “History has become an injunction addressed by the Future to the Contemporary.”

One could add to this axiom of Julien Gracq’s that it included the past in its scope, and was a powerful influence on those nineteenth-century historians who conceived and structured their discipline as a science of the past. The future illuminating the past and giving it meaning constituted a telos or vantage point called, by turns, “the Nation,” “the People,” “the Republic,” “Society,” or “the Proletariat,” each time dressed in the garb of science. If history still dispensed a lesson, it came from the future, not the past. It resided in a future that was to be realized as a rupture with the past, or at least as a differentiation from it, unlike historia magistra, which was based on the idea that the future might not repeat the past exactly, but it would certainly never surpass it. And the reason for this was simply that everything took place within the same circle (notwithstanding Chateaubriand’s daring image of concentric circles), was governed by the same Providence and the same laws, and, in any case, involved human beings who had the same nature.

Why do I suggest these two breaks, 1789 and 1989? Certainly not in order to discourage further thought, and go off ruminating on the end of everything and of history in particular, on the grounds that liberal democracy has won the day. On the contrary, the idea is to catalyze questions by unsettling the self-evidence of the present. If we read Lieux de mémoire in a broader perspective and within the longue durée of relations to time, we understand it as a way of responding to and working with that break (which cannot be reduced to the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989), and also working on it, suggesting how it may be broached, and what its history might be. Such caesuras can be called gaps in time, after Hannah Arendt, intervals which are entirely determined by things which are no longer and things which are yet to come.14 Time seems to have come to a halt, to have lost its bearings. This recalls Chateaubriand’s conclusion to his Memoirs, that the world of 1840 is lodged between two impossibilities: the impossible past, and an impossible future.¹⁵ I shall come back to this in my conclusion.

However, I do not wish to suggest that the modern regime was uncontested before 1989, nor that the order of time experienced no other crises. On the contrary, that was precisely where I started out.¹⁶ Besides, a regime of historicity has never been a universally applicable metaphysical entity sent from heaven. It expresses only a dominant order of time. Since it is woven together from different regimes of temporality, it is ultimately a way of expressing and organizing experiences of time—that is, ways of articulating the past, the present, and the future—and investing them with sense. In this respect, Augustine’s phenomenological description of the three times still remains essential for apprehending and expressing these experiences. How many regimes are there? I do not know, but the example of the Polynesian heroic regime proves at the very least that the inventory is incomplete and that it is not simply derived from Europe’s reflection on its own past. No sooner does a regime of historicity become dominant than it is challenged, and in fact it can never (except in an ideal world) be entirely secured. It establishes itself slowly and lasts a long time.

A case in point is the great classical archetype of historia magistra (whose uniformity or scope should not be overstated either).17 It was adopted by the Church and by medieval scholars when their role became that of writing history. The Christian regime and the regime of historia magistra were compatible because both were turned toward the past, toward an already, even if the already of the ancients was nothing like that of Christianity (which opened onto a not yet). This regime of historicity was of course challenged over its long history. In the second half of the sixteenth century in France, for example, there were Montaigne’s Essays (1580), which destabilize the classical exemplum, in a world in perpetual flux; the exemplum was transformed into a “singularity.”¹⁸ Having set out to be a new Plutarch, Montaigne ended up writing the Essays, declaring “It is myself I paint” (“Address to the Reader”). In the following century, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (1687) also marked a major crisis of time. Perrault argued that the moderns were superior to the ancients and that there had been progress and improvement in almost all fields. But the future was still not the source of illumination. Then, in the ensuing century, perfection was almost achieved: after all, how could one possibly venture to think beyond an absolute monarch?¹⁹

Lastly, the passage from one regime to another involves periods of overlap. Interferences occur, with often-tragic consequences. The French Revolution was one such moment. Chateaubriand, whom we situated between Volney and Tocqueville, guided us through one of these in-between times. He was forever observing and commenting on it, and also on himself enmeshed in and constituted by this in-between time. From a similar perspective, the course of Napoleon’s life takes on new meaning.

But the Futurist Manifesto also showed how one could move from futurism to presentism, or how futurism was also (already) a presentism. When Marinetti declared: “Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in a world of the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed,” the present became “futurized,” or, equally, there was already nothing but the present. Speed transformed the present into eternity and Marinetti, at the wheel of his racing car, could imagine himself to be God.

The catastrophe of the First World War, with the crises it provoked, followed by that of the Second World War, weakened and even discredited futurism. However, a whole series of factors—often taken up in slogans—gave fresh impetus to the paeans to progress. Not only was the modern regime of historicity kept alive, but it was even cast as the one and only temporal perspective. This new futurism, shedding its lyricism, was successful despite the nuclear threat and the need to find responses to it. In Europe, it took the form of the drive to reconstruct, to modernize, and to implement central economic planning, while on a global level economic competition became the rule, against the background of the Cold War and the accelerating arms race. The socialists’ “Radiant Future,” the German “Miracle,” and the postwar boom years in France, the trente glorieuses, named after the book by Jean Fourastié,²² were some of the watchwords of the time. Gradually, however, the present began replacing the future and encroaching further and further until, in recent years, it has seemed to take over entirely. The viewpoint of the present—the perspective of presentism—has established its dominion.

This present, which is apparently so self-assured and powerful, did not appear overnight (in the last third of the twentieth century), but it is not radically new either. In some sense, every group and society, today as in the past, can only build on its present. There may be strategies to privilege or minimize it, in varying and changing degrees, depending on the situation. One can entrench oneself in it or, at the other extreme, attempt to escape it at all speed. The linguist Émile Benveniste noted that the etymology of praesens is “what is ahead of me,” hence something which is “imminent, urgent,” and “will not permit delay,” in the sense of the Latin preposition prae.23 The present is imminent: it is the runner’s body tensed forward at the very moment he or she leaves the starting blocks.

In Epicureanism and Stoicism the present was conceived as the only time on which it was possible to have purchase. In Horace’s words, “Treat every new day as the last you’re going to have, then welcome the next as unexpectedly granted.”²⁴ And for Marcus Aurelius,

If you separate from yourself, namely from your mind…all that you yourself did or said, all that troubles you in the future, all that…attaches to you without your will, if you separate [from yourself ] what of time is hereafter or has gone by and practice only to live the life you are living, that is the present, then you will have it in your power at least to live out the time that is left until you die, untroubled and with kindness and reconciled with your own good Spirit.²⁵

In the revealed religions, by contrast, the present is at once devalued (nothing which happens has any real importance), extended (in some sense there is nothing but the present), and made more precious, since it is a present which anticipates the eschaton, a present in which the Messiah can come at any moment. Rosenzweig made a distinction between the “today which is only a footbridge to tomorrow” and “the other today which is a springboard to eternity.”27 In Christian dogma, the time inaugurated by the Incarnation is of the order of the present, and history has been, is, and will be the history of salvation, until the Second Coming (even if God the Father alone knows when the final hour will come). Hence Pascal’s solemn reminder, returning to the sources of the New Testament and the eschatological dimension of the present: “The present is never our aim, and while it and the past are our means, the future alone is our end. Thus we never live, but are always hoping to live, and, constantly preparing ourselves to be happy, it is beyond doubt that we never shall be happy.”²⁸ These, then, are the two major forms of presentism, the religious and the philosophical forms, with bridges between them, as in the case of Montaigne and Pascal.

Certain modern expressions of presentism, inspired by vitalist trends, have led to a denigration of the past. The past is challenged by the present in the name of life and art. Eric Michaud has drawn attention to the value of the present—what I would call presentist claims—in artistic avant-gardes between 1905 and 1925, right down to the titles of their manifestos: alongside Marinetti’s presentist Futurism, which we described above, there were Simultaneism, Praesentism, Nunism (from nun, “now” in Greek), PREsentismus, and Instantaneism.²⁹ Literature was not standing on the sidelines either, if only because writers were also involved in a number of these manifestos—one need only think of Apollinaire. One could mention the inspirational role played by Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (1874) and Gide’s The Immoralist (1902), in which the hero Michel, after experiencing a near-fatal illness, finds that his scholarly study no longer interests him: “I discovered that something had, if not destroyed, at least altered, its savor for me; it was the sense of the present.”³⁰ A similar vision can be found in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and in Paul Valéry’s meditations in the 1920s on, or rather against, history, which we cited earlier.³¹

This current was so strong that historians who wanted to challenge the accusations of the “bankruptcy of history” (which had become blatant with the First World War), had first to prove that the past was not synonymous with death and a desire to stifle life. Although the model of historia magistra had lapsed more than a century previously, a way of relating past and present had yet to be conceived in which the past did not presume to lay down the law for the present, but was not simply consigned to inexistence either. Marc Bloch’s and Lucien Febvre’s insistence in the first Annales on the need to be concerned with the present should be read in the light of this intellectual context.³² Slightly later they would construe the historian's task as a double movement, from the past to the present and from the present to the past. This justified the practice of history, as well as being the source of its heuristic potential.

Sartre’s Nausea, published in 1938, can also be read as a presentist tale. The narrator, Roquentin, is writing a history book, a biography of the marquis de Rollebon (who bears some resemblance to Talleyrand). But one day he suddenly finds himself unable to continue, since something has struck him as blindingly obvious: there has never been anything but “the present, nothing but the present.” The present is “what exists and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts.” With the result that “M. de Rollebon had just died for the second time.” He had been “my associate…he needed me in order to exist, and I needed him so as not to feel my existence.” But now “I exist.” And “things are entirely what they appear to be—behind them…there is nothing.” So the past is nothing.33

But the future, or more precisely the perspective from the future, is nothing either. Sartre, this time in his “Editorial” in the first issue of the Temps Modernes, in 1945, was adamant: “We write for our contemporaries; we want to behold our world not with future eyes—which would be the surest means of killing it—but with our eyes of flesh, our real, perishable eyes. We don’t want to win our case on appeal, and we will have nothing to do with any posthumous rehabilitation. Right here in our own lifetime is when and where our cases will be won or lost.”³⁴ For existentialism, salvation lay only in a total commitment to action. “As a militant, I wanted to save myself by works.”³⁵ Revolution thus took over “the role which once was played by eternal life”; it “saves those that make it,” Malraux remarked.³⁶ Existentialism was a presentism.

Criticizing progress does not automatically imply advocating the present, but it does cast doubt on the supposedly positive character of striding toward the future. This was a topos that was certainly not new, but it was given a new slant when revived by Lévi-Strauss in the mid-1950s in his Tristes tropiques, which met with immediate success. In the context of decolonization, Lévi-Strauss was proposing a new version of the noble savage. Clearly Chateaubriand’s night in the forests of the New World was not so far in the past! Lévi-Strauss’s passionate defense of Rousseau and his critique of the narrow conception of progress in modern societies ended on a meditation on this world which “began without the human race and…will end without it,” and in which humankind has never done anything but “precipitate[s] a powerfully organized Matter towards a condition of inertia which grows ever greater and will one day prove definitive.” Hence ultimately, he says, “Entropology, not anthropology, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.”37 With this vision of the final cooling of hot societies, Lévi-Strauss was taking a really very distant view: something like a view from the heavenly spheres.

In a period when time itself was undergoing a severe crisis, when its old order was collapsing and the new had not yet found expression, Chateaubriand had had a brief taste of a utopian wilderness, outside of time. More than a century later, in the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss, as we saw earlier, challenged the modern regime founded on the apparent self-evidence of progress. He argued that history is only occasionally cumulative and, moreover, that we only recognize as cumulative what resembles our own development: forms of civilization and universal history had yet to discover their Einstein.³⁸ Then, in the 1960s, the “savage” became fashionable again. “Savage thought” was put to all sorts of untutored uses, and “mythic thought” became all the rage. The savage was held in higher esteem than civilization or the state, even if the direction was sometimes reversed,³⁹ before the great movements of “return to.”

Perhaps the clearest sign of the radical exclusion of anything but the present in the Swinging Sixties was the slogan “forget the future.” Revolutionary utopias were nothing if not progressivist and futurist, even if they were also backward-looking and retrospective (the revolutionary barricades and the Resistance). But henceforth they had to adapt to the narrow circle of the present. The slogans covering the walls of Paris in May 1968 were “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“Beneath the pavings, the beach”) or “Tout, tout de suite” (“All, all at once, now”). But they were followed shortly by “No future,” in other words, no revolutionary present. The 1970s brought with them disillusionment, or the end to an illusion. The revolutionary ideal disintegrated, the 1974 oil crisis struck, mass unemployment kept rising, and the Welfare State, which had been based on solidarity and on the idea that tomorrow would be better than today, began to run out of steam. All the remedies proposed, whether desperate or cynical, pinned their hopes on the present, and nothing but the present. There was nothing beyond. This was not an Epicurean or a Stoic present, and neither was it one of Messianic expectation.

Consumer society’s rapid expansion undoubtedly led to this increasingly distended and bloated “now.” It took over gradually, imposing its rule in ever more constraining ways, pitching both people and things into an obsolescence reached ever faster due to technological innovation and the search for increasingly rapid returns. Productivity, flexibility, mobility: these were the watchwords of the new managers.40 There is nothing new about time being conceived as a commodity, but what characterizes contemporary modes of consumption is the value placed on the ephemeral. The media, which have expanded exponentially, try to keep pace with this movement (which quite literally justifies their existence), and they take their cue from it. They scramble for the live soundbite, and produce, consume, and recycle an increasing number of images and words in an ever shorter time. Time is reduced and compressed: one subject, one and a half minutes, thirty years of history.⁴¹ Tourism is also a powerful agent of presentism: the world is on one’s doorstep in a fraction of a second and in three dimensions.

This presentism also coincides with a period of mass unemployment in our European societies. An unemployed person takes one day at a time, without being able to plan ahead, inhabiting a time which has no future. If “time seems to be annihilated” for these “men without a future,” as Pierre Bourdieu called them, this is because “employment is the support, if not the source, of most interests, expectations, demands, hopes and investments in the present, and also in the future or the past that it implies.”⁴² Unemployment is a key factor in this imprisonment within the present and within a presentism experienced henceforth as oppressive and without hope.

So futurism has sunk below the horizon and presentism has taken its place.43 We cannot see beyond it. Since it has neither a past nor a future, this present daily fabricates the past and future it requires, while privileging the immediate. There are countless signs of this relation to time. For example, the present's expansionism increasingly eclipses death, as the poet T.S. Eliot noted already in the 1940s: “In our age…there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which…the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares.”⁴⁴ The dead no longer have a place, or even, as Philippe Ariès declared in his historical study of the phenomenon, “In towns, everything goes on as if nobody died anymore.”⁴⁵ The disavowal of aging (symbolized by the immediately popular figure of the Californian jogger) is another sign, alongside the premium placed on youth as such in Western societies, whose populations are aging. More recently, a wealth of technological innovations designed to abolish time have been developed, using the information superhighways, and “real time” seems to be universally endorsed, up to and including war in real time. Each of us could add to this list any number of daily gestures that betray our obsession with time, and our attempts to control it ever more finely, and more and more of it, or else to abolish it altogether. Would it not be true to say that any self-respecting person today owes it to him- or herself to have no time for anything?⁴⁶ After all, what is an overworked manager if not someone who basically suffers from a chronic lack of time?⁴⁷ These patterns of behavior characterize our present and express an experience of it which is widely shared. As such, they delineate one of its regimes of temporality.

In this economy of the present, we anxiously consume forecasts—treated as though they were predictions—and must constantly consult specialists. Historians have been appointed on several occasions as “memory experts,” and have been enlisted to serve in the witness box.⁴⁹ Opinion polls supposedly hold the key to our world, although such projections into the future are used and abused without moving an inch from the present. The snapshot image taken today is simply transferred three weeks or six months hence, imperceptibly becoming the actual image of the situation three weeks or six months later. What you vote today is the true image of what you will vote tomorrow, so in some sense you have already voted. The only way time can be reintroduced into this structure is by a whole series of polls, to show a trend. But that is already a matter for the analyst, in other words for the expert. And obviously the polls can and do get it wrong. The future remains beyond our control, and so we go on yearning for an a priori form of history, in which time would precisely be abolished. In reaction to this situation, Mitterand’s formula of the mid-1980s, “Give time to time,” could precisely meet with immense success. He too was looking to the longue durée for France’s identity, while he must in fact—but in secret—have been taking one day at a time, in the present dictated by his cancer.

Another fault line appeared in this present in the mid-1970s, as environmental protection, and preservation (of monuments, objects, ways of life, landscapes, and animal species), became major concerns. The unquestioned imperative to modernize began gradually—despite its brutal self-confidence—to be replaced by conservation and rehabilitation programs in town-planning policy, as though the idea were to preserve or actually reconstitute a past that had already disappeared, or was on the point of disappearing irrevocably.50 The already palpable ill ease of this present was further compounded by the search for roots and identity, and the concern for memory and genealogy.

Coinciding with this movement of return to roots, a new public keen to consult archives developed. Regional funding was increased for county archives, and many medium-sized towns set up archival departments. Soon more than half the archives’ visitors were amateur genealogists. French archives expanded enormously in this period: they were five times bigger than they had been in 1945 and measured 3,000 linear kilometers if laid out end to end.⁵¹ In 1979 a law on archives was passed, the first since the Revolution, which stated the following: “Archives are the totality of the documents, whatever their date, form or medium, which have been produced or received by any physical or legal person, and by any public or private department or organisation, in the exercise of its activity.” Ultimately, according to this broad definition, everything can be archived, and archives “constitute the memory of the nation and are an essential part of its historic heritage.” The key terms are clearly “memory,” “heritage,” “history,” and “nation,” indicating that the heritage years had well and truly arrived. Archival institutions were certainly part of this trend, even if archivists in France had the feeling, which was not entirely unjustified, that they were less well endowed by the public authorities during this period than museums and libraries. This is one of the causes of the current crisis in archives.

Although archives were promoted as the memory, history, and heritage of the nation, they were also, foreseeably, overtaken by the present. This generated the other, more visible and more keenly contested, ingredient of the crisis in archives: the charge that documents were released too slowly and exemptions granted too rarely.52 It was as though archives and the issues they raised could be reduced to contemporary archives alone (on collaboration during the Second World War, for example, or, more recently, on the Algerian War). Reports were commissioned, a new law (which was finally abandoned) was promised, support was rallied for a new “City of Archives,” and the prime minister issued two notable circulars. The first one, dated 3 October 1997 (a few days before Maurice Papon’s trial opened and shortly after the Church of France’s Declaration of Repentance), relaxed the rules concerning consultation of documents from the period 1940–1945. It recalled “the duty of the Republic to perpetuate the memory of the events which took place in our country between 1940 and 1945,” and encouraged further exemptions, for which “the personality or the motivation of the persons who are requesting an exemption” should be ignored. This was basically how the civil service interpreted the “duty to remember.” The second circular, of 5 May 1999, stated that “in the name of transparency and out of respect for victims and their families, the government has decided to facilitate historical research into the demonstration organized by the FLN [Algerian National Liberation Front] on 17 October 1961.”

Maurice Papon, who, in his capacity as former chief of police in Paris, had just lost his libel suit against Jean-Luc Einaudi concerning the victims during the October 1961 demonstration, once again brought the past into the present. The Papon case taken as a whole is a telling example of the changing attitudes to time. It was only in 1998 that Papon, the former secretary-general (administrative head) of the département of the Gironde, was sentenced in Bordeaux for complicity in crimes against humanity; that is, fifty-five years after the offenses had been committed, and after a ninety-five-day trial.⁵³ Before him, in 1994, there had been the case of the former chief of the Vichy Milice in Lyon, Paul Touvier. He had first been pardoned, in 1972, by the President Pompidou, who wanted to “draw a veil” over this period when the French “did not like each other.” Then, twenty-two years later, he was convicted of crimes against humanity. Yet it was the very same man, Touvier. Time had worked backwards: far from ushering in forgetting, it had revived, reconstructed, and imposed memory. And with the new unique temporality of crimes against humanity, time really did not go by: the criminal would remain forever contemporary with his crimes.⁵⁴

Urban development projects in Paris are another—glaringly visible—area through which the order of time, and challenges to it, can be apprehended. Let us recall a few scenes from these royal dramas, or pas de deux, of politics with redevelopment. The first phase still came under the sway of futurism, and was in tune with the modern regime of historicity. It featured Georges Pompidou, the modernizing president who wanted to “adapt Paris to the automobile,” to make it expand faster, and also to make it internationally attractive again by creating a major contemporary art museum. The development of the area of the Halles, which took a full twenty years, shows clearly the transformations taking place. The government had decided to transfer the Halles to Rungis outside Paris in 1959, and for the following ten years, the local authorities examined different architectural projects, which all gave pride of place to skyscrapers: “high-rises, high-rises, nothing but high-rises.”55 Modernization and high profits seemed to be the only considerations.

Despite protests—May ’68 had left its mark—Baltard’s pavilions were finally destroyed in 1971, not dismantled and moved elsewhere, but actually smashed up. For an unbelievable length of time this central site was simply a hole, the “Halles hole,” which was not filled in until 1980 and even then after many twists and turns of the plot in which Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris at the time, could give the full measure of his talents as a town planner. Had all this occurred a year or two later, the Halles would quite definitely have been preserved as exceptional nineteenth-century “heritage.” Their destruction even marked the turning of the tide: the moment when the modern (and modernizing) regime ceased to be self-evidently persuasive. Shortly afterwards, Orsay station, which had also been earmarked for demolition, was saved, and Michel Guy, the secretary of state for culture under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, newly elected, began to promote contemporary heritage—from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As for the museum project, finally called the Georges Pompidou Center, it was initially conceived, interestingly, as an “experimental” museum, in the sense of “a museum whose goal was not to preserve works of art but to allow all aspects of contemporary artistic creation to be freely expressed.”⁵⁶ The glass-fronted building, with its multipurpose spaces and movable structures, was meant to unite a rigorously functionalist architecture with the idea of something playful and ephemeral. The Pompidou Center was to exhibit contemporary rather than modern art, and not only put it on show but show it in the making. Its mission thus combined a futurist element (inherent to any museum project) with a strongly presentist one: the museum would shun museification and instead display art of the present, as well as the process of its creation. However, in the course of various alterations and renovations, the art laboratory gradually gave way to the conservation center. Correspondingly, the space allotted to contemporary experimentation and production diminished, while the museum spaces increased,⁵⁷ as though the present had shifted from a playful and narcissistic presentist position to a much less self-assured one, and acknowledged its own self-doubt.

But it was François Mitterand who staged the total triumph of museums and heritage, when he inaugurated the Grand Louvre late in 1993, with its touch of postmodernism in the form of the glass pyramid surrounded by smaller ones with their little fountains. This was the new entrance to forty centuries of history down below. After the last trace of the Louvre’s regal past had disappeared, with the Ministry of Finance’s departure from the premises, the Grand Louvre became a vast museum space. It was the largest museum (no less befits a prince) and it ranked as France’s top universal heritage site (not forgetting the basement vestibule connecting to a shopping mall).

Hence this “distended,” self-contained, and self-assured present, which seemed to have unquestioned and exclusive dominance, revealed its fault lines. It discovered that it could not fulfill its desire to be both subject and object of its own vision—not even in the transparency of the great open-plan floors of the Pompidou Center. Having stretched to breaking point the gap between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, this self-enclosed present suddenly found that the gap could not be sealed over again, and that the ground was receding beneath its feet. Magritte would have painted this admirably. Three keywords summarized and stabilized these shifting sands: memory, more precisely a voluntary, solicited memory (oral history), as well as a reconstructed memory (which amounted to a history, but with a view to narrating one’s own history for oneself); heritage, with 1980 being declared Heritage Year, although the success of the word and the theme (the defense, enhancement, and promotion of heritage) coincided with a crisis in the notion of “national heritage”; and lastly, commemoration, given that the last twenty years could well be entitled “from one commemoration to the next.” These three terms were all orientated toward a fourth one, positioned at a virtual point of convergence: identity.58

In the ensuing years, commemorations multiplied. But while France was busy adjusting to this new state of affairs, the major commemoration was fast approaching—the bicentenary of the French Revolution; this made it necessary to discuss and question the very fact of commemorating, that “strange activity which oscillates between presence and absence.”59 One polemical moment among many in these debates was a Capetian millennium celebrated in 1987 and finally ratified by a solemn mass in the presence of the president of the Republic: France’s longue durée was alive and kicking. This first burst of commemorative fireworks was followed immediately afterward by a hail of quick-fire commemorations of the fifty years since the outbreak of the Second World War.

Far from being an exclusively French phenomenon, commemorations flourished more or less everywhere from the 1980s onward. Germany went about it with similar if not greater fervor, due to the rivalry between the two Germanys at the time. There was Luther in 1983 (the 500th anniversary of his birth), the foundation of Berlin in 1985 (its 750th anniversary), the transfer of Frederick the Great’s ashes to Potsdam in 1991, and the inauguration of the “New Guard” (Neue Wache) in Berlin in 1993, which the chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had wanted as the Federal Republic of Germany’s central memorial. At the same time, several histories of Germany were published by major publishing houses and a little later work began on the collective volume, German Sites of Memory.⁶⁰

The three volumes of Constructing the Past, edited by Jacques le Goff and Pierre Nora, were published in 1974. The work sought “to illustrate and to promote a ‘new type of history,’” one that could respond to the “provocations” of the other human sciences, in particular anthropology.61 Its contents, ranging from a history of mentalities to historical anthropology, reflected an awareness and an understanding of the gap that had opened up in our self-relation, understood as a distance in time and space. Neither memory nor heritage were yet included among the new objects or approaches. Although historians have always had to deal with memory, they have always regarded it with suspicion. Thucydides branded memory as unreliable due to its omissions and deformations, and the almost-irresistible temptation to please the listener. The power of the eye, the persuasiveness of the autopsy, must take precedence over the ear, without which history could not be a search for the truth.⁶² Nineteenth-century science-history was enthralled by Thucydides. Its first gesture was to draw a clean line between past and present, which is why Michelet, who crossed the river of the dead in both directions many a time, could only be regarded as a transgressive figure. History should begin where memory stopped, that is, with written archives.

Four years later, the dictionary New History, edited jointly by Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel, reserved a place for memory, with the entry “Collective memory.” This notion, coined by Maurice Halbwachs, was adopted by Pierre Nora and defended on the condition that historians used it correctly. He argued that the discontinuities characterizing modernity had led to a proliferation of collective memories, and these put pressure on how history itself was written. This was true even of the subjects and orientations of “scientific” history. Hence Nora wanted to “have collective memory play the same role for contemporary history as what is called the history of mentalities played for modern history.” From this was born what would later become the Lieux de mémoire. It was a history of memorials, starting from the places—topographical, monumental, symbolic, or functional—to which a society knowingly consigns its memories. The aim was unambiguous: “Analyzing collective memory can and must be the spearhead of any history claiming to call itself contemporary.”⁶³

Maurice Halbwachs had devoted more than twenty years of his life, from the 1920s to his death in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, to developing a sociology of collective memory. This persistent focus can be read in part as an aftereffect of the First World War. Today his writings have themselves become a site of memory, particularly for work on memory. After a long period of neglect, they were taken up and quoted with increasing frequency, and were finally republished. They are thus both a tool for working on the subject of memory and a sign of our present. It should be added that Halbwachs, in opening up the field of memory to sociology, was writing both with and against Bergson: with him, because he adopted Bergson’s analyses of duration; against him, because he was concerned to highlight the social (and above all familial) dimension of memory, its “social frameworks.” He concluded that social thought is essentially a memory composed of collective memories, but only those memories survive which societies, working within their present-day frameworks, can reconstruct.64 The stress was unambiguously on the present.

In The Collective Memory, an unfinished work, Halbwachs made a clear separation between history and memory, and came out in favor of the latter. He politely dismissed the historian, whom he sent back to his archives and his external viewpoint. History is unitary, he argued, whereas there are as many collective memories as there are groups, each of which has its own sense of duration.⁶⁵ In common with other figures I have mentioned, Halbwachs identified acceleration as a key factor: with the increasing speed at which society lives, there are more and more collective memories. Collective memory is “a current of continuous thought” (it retains from the past only what is still living), whereas the historian “can truly achieve his task only by deliberately placing himself outside the time lived by those groups that participated in the events concerned, which have more or less direct contact with these events and can recall them.”⁶⁶ History, which “extracts changes from duration,” forges “an artificial duration having no reality for the groups from which these events are borrowed.”⁶⁷ The bird of history can thus spread its wings only when night has fallen entirely, that is, when the present is absolutely dead. A critical survey of historical scholarship in France, published in 1867, ended on the following forceful conclusions: “History is born for an epoch only once it has died away entirely. The field of history is thus the past. The present is the time of politics and the future belongs to God.”⁶⁸ The author, J. Thiénot, described himself to the minister receiving this report as a “meticulous clerk.”

However, if the historian who is thus excluded from the field of memory does not recognize himself in this portrait, then the rigid opposition between history and memory ceases to hold, whereupon the historian’s “hunting ground” may include collective memory or, better still, collective memory may feed into contemporary history. Nora always rejected the idea of a break between the past and the present, which he considered artificial and illusory. Unlike the authors of the report to the minister, Nora argued that it is for “the historian of the present” to make “the past consciously emerge into the present (instead of making the present unconsciously emerge in the past).” Nora’s reflections on the event additionally suggest a relation between the new status of the event in a consumer society and the perception of time: “Does our treatment of the event not transform time itself into something to be consumed, in which we invest analogous affects?”69 This idea points to another aspect of presentism: time itself, Nora suggests, is trapped in the time of consumption, and itself becomes a consumer product.

The underlying premise of Lieux de mémoire is that the very mode of existence of the past is that it wells up into the present—under the watchful eye of the historian. The work’s first volume was published in 1984, and the long opening text, entitled “Between Memory and History,” was a kind of manifesto and overview of the problematics of the project as a whole.⁷⁰ What was important was the between: to be between history and memory, not to oppose or confuse them, but to use them both. Memory could revitalize and enlarge the field of contemporary history (and collective memory could thus play for contemporary history the same role the history of mentalities had played for modern history). It followed that a new field was being mapped, that of the history of memory. Moreover, Nora argued, when a history reached the stage of critical self-reflection, concerned to re-examine its methods and tradition, it was able to identify the course of the interactions between memory and history, particularly in the long tradition of national histories which, from Froissart to Seignobos, via Michelet and Lavisse, had taken the form of “memory-histories.”

The whole of “Between Memory and History” is concerned with the idea of acceleration. It even opens with the words “The acceleration of history.” This phrase itself has a history, at least since Daniel Halévy’s Essay on the Acceleration of History, published in 1948, and right up to Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Does History Go Faster? in 2001.71 But already much earlier, Chateaubriand had viewed the phenomenon of acceleration as the irrefutable sign of the destruction of the old order of time, and Musil even invented the term “accelerism.” Halévy’s book opens with a quotation from Michelet and ends on the repercussions of Hiroshima. Michelet had observed that “one of the most serious, but least noticed facts is that the pace of time has completely changed. It has speeded up in a most strange manner. Two revolutions (territorial and industrial) in a single life-span.” This increased pace is characteristic of the modern order of time⁷² (although acknowledging this fact does not oblige one to take seriously all the modern world’s declarations on acceleration).⁷³

For Nora, acceleration had the effect not only of “multiplying” collective memories to such an extent that they become “impossible to unify,” as in Halbwachs’s version, but also bringing about a break with the past, with the field of experience. Globalization, democratization, massification, and the media boom all contributed to the demise of what Nora called “memory-based societies” and ultimately to that of memory itself. “Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists,” Nora stated. In other words, it is precisely because there are “no longer milieux de mémoire,” environments of memory, that “sites” find themselves invested with residual feelings of continuity.

Are we living a paradox? Could it be that we are all the more obsessed with memory because it is disappearing? But first we need to agree on what we understand by the term. Nora noted that today’s “memory” is not the same as the “memory” that regulated “memory-based societies.” The same term covers widely different forms and practices. The older form of memory was in a sense “without a past,” a memory that “eternally recycles a heritage.” “Our” memory, by contrast, has been touched by history and transformed by it. Even if this vision of earlier, memory-based, societies is somewhat simplified or mythified, what counts above all is the contrast with today.

For “our form of memory” is “nothing but history, a matter of sifting and sorting.” We have become obsessive archivists, transforming everything into memory, in furtherance of the present’s immediate self-historicization, which we mentioned above. Memory has become a private affair, entirely psychologized, introducing a new economy of the “self’s identity.” “An order is given to remember, but the responsibility is mine and it is I who must remember.” Hence “to be Jewish is to remember that one is such; but once this incontestable memory has been interiorized, it eventually demands full recognition. What is being remembered? In a sense, it is memory itself.” Lastly, “our” memory is based on a relation to the past in which discontinuity predominates. The past is no longer “solid and steady.” Hence we have moved “from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history.” Today’s form of memory “is no longer what must be retrieved from the past in order to prepare the future one wants; it is what makes the present present to itself.”74 It is an instrument of presentism.

This change in the regime of memory could not but have an impact on the “milieu de mémoire,” the long-standing framework in which collective memory had predominantly developed, namely the history of the nation. How to write such a history today? How should we regard the series of “memory-histories,” up to and including Lavisse’s, which were “at the intersection between critical history and Republican memory”? That was, for Nora, where historiography came into play. The Lieux de mémoire were predicated on a twofold awareness: our regime of memory is no longer the same, and, second, history has entered the era of historiography. What could link these two changes? The “site of memory.”

“On 14 July 1790,” Lavisse wrote, “monarchic unity was succeeded by national unity, which has proved indestructible.” The Revolution could be identified with the Nation, the Nation with the Republic, and the Republic with a “regime one can consider definitive.” This was Lavisse’s historiographical move. As for the remaining twenty-seven volumes, they were simply a continuous narrative, including references to sources, divided into predictable chronological sections, which brought nothing new. Two important moments emerge from the whole, however. First, the opening, with its Tableau de la géographie de la France by Vidal de la Blache, and the Louis XIV episode, written by the head of operations himself. Here, Lavisse noted the singularity of French national history, namely that because the Revolution had cut France off from its past, reconstituting this past was a “question of erudition,” of history therefore, not of memory. Such a position legitimated the role of history as a pedagogy of the nation: the pietas erga patriam (to borrow the motto of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica) presupposed knowledge of the nation, which could only be acquired through learning its history. The historian’s function or, better, the historian’s mission could not be clearer.

Not only did Lavisse undoubtedly play a role in Nora’s intellectual itinerary,75 but more importantly, his History was a kind of testing ground for the Lieux de mémoire. The volume of the Lieux devoted to The Republic came out of a critical reading of Lavisse, a Lavisse seen from the wings. Nora exposed as Republican memory what was precisely presented as national history, and showed how the latter was produced. It was effectively a trial run for the notion of site of memory. In order to gain purchase on what was happening in 1980 between memory and history, and the ideas feeding into the new demands for commemoration, Nora’s first move was to go a century back, to Lavisse and a time when memory was not an issue. The year 1980 had a good look at 1880, and 1880, in turn, shed light on 1980. Bringing together these two moments was itself illuminating: it revealed that Lavisse’s “history” was, essentially, (Republican) memory elevated to the rank of history.

As for the preliminary definition of a “site” (un lieu), understood as something at once material, functional, and symbolic (an object en abyme, through which the past is redeployed in the present), one could almost have taken the most obvious “commonplaces” (lieux communs) of the Republic—the Tricolor, the 14 Juillet, the Panthéon, and so forth—and analyzed them as such. Except that, as Nora points out, we have only very tenuous links with these symbolic sites today; they are “like shells left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.” They are still there, but the only active relation we can have to them is a relation at one remove, created by reactivating the events of which they recount the history. This is precisely the relation sketched in the Lieux de mémoire. The first volume had a certain air to it of “the purple shroud within the folds of which slumber the Gods that are dead,”⁷⁶ in the sense that by the end of it the Republic was shown to be already a site of memory for itself, its own site of memory. The following two volumes fleshed out the notion of “site of memory,” turning it into a more active principle, so that with it one could go still further toward the type of history—symbolic history, or history at one remove—that Nora advocated and practiced.⁷⁷

The expression “site of memory” comes from the arts of memory, and before that from the Classical art of oratory,78 long before Nora’s use of it in his exploration of contemporary memory. Cicero’s definition has become canonical: the site (locus) is the location—the rooms of a house, for example, or a colonnade—where the orator, in preparing his speech, may line up the images of the things he wants to remember. He is advised to choose active images (imagines agentes). One can see from this that the Lieux de mémoire used a rhetorical conception of place and memory. Just as the site of the orator is always an artifact, so the site (of memory), for Nora, is never simply a given: it is constructed and must even be constantly reconstructed. The historian of sites of memory must thus find Cicero’s active sites, the imagines agentes, but unlike the orator, who memorizes his speech by means of the sites, the historian works in the opposite direction, starting from the sites in order to examine the “speeches” they underpin. Sites of memory are characterized by the fact that in them different paths of memory have crossed; the only sites to be still active (agentes) are those to which people have returned, which they have recast, reorganized, and reworked. An abandoned site of memory is at best a mere recollection of a site, like “the Gauls” or “the Franks” after 1914.

LES LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE WAS AN EXPLORATION OF NATIONAL history through the prism of memory. It showed the existence of periodic “flare-ups” of memory, with several peaks. There was 1830 (epitomized by Guizot’s work), 1880 (when the Republic’s rituals and history were finalized), and 1980 (when Nora’s investigation started, and its endpoint also). Another date could be added, in my view a vital one: 1914 (or thereabouts). It remained less visible (including in Nora’s work) because it did not leave behind any major institutions relating to history nor any great national histories, retrieved or recast. But it did lead to contestations of official history, a privileging of memory over against history—already then—and, in some cases, explorations of a different history, of other historical temporalities, which could produce new periodizations. Halbwachs’s work on memory was part of this moment of crisis in the order of time and its associated challenges to the modern regime of historicity.

The architecture of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is a profoundly resonant sign of this crisis of time. Toward the end of the novel, in the prince de Guermantes’s library, the idea of Time impresses itself forcefully upon the narrator, and he comes to the realization that his real artistic work is a book yet to be written, one which will deliver up time itself, “the form of Time.” The idea of a site of memory is adumbrated here. Proust himself talks in terms of a “distant place” (lieu lointain) and a “present place” (lieu actuel), and of how memory, as the eruption of the past into the present, transfers the sensation of those former times from one “place” to the other, in a kind of resurrection. Madame de Saint-Loup appears to the narrator as a sort of site of memory: “Was she not…like one of those star-shaped crossroads in a forest where roads converge that have come, in the forest as in our lives, from the most diverse quarters?” Those which ended in her were “the two great ‘ways’ themselves, where on my many walks I had dreamed so many dreams.”79 The book ends on the towering physical presence of time, in all its verticality. Man, who is endowed “with the length not of his body but of his years,” is perched on the living stilts of time, which can “sometimes…become taller than church steeples,” as suggested by the elderly duc de Guermantes, wavering unsteadily on his legs. It is no coincidence that the last words of In Search of Lost Time should be “in Time.”

Proust leads us to Bergson and his analyses of duration.⁸⁰ Charles Péguy should also be mentioned here. He was openly and fiercely opposed to the history practiced at the Sorbonne, as embodied in the great figures of Lavisse, Langlois, and Seignobos. He came down resolutely on the side of memory and, against history and the sacrosanct historical method, championed Hugo and Michelet. In Clio, he set “essentially longitudinal” history against “essentially vertical” memory. History “goes lengthwise,” that is, it remains “on the side and on the sidelines,” whereas “memory, since it is within the event, primarily involves not going outside of it, remaining within it and going back over it from the inside.”⁸¹ Péguy was of course constantly thinking of the Dreyfus Affair: “I kept talking about, discussing, evoking and transmitting a certain Dreyfus Affair, the real Dreyfus Affair, in which we were all steeped, we of that generation.”⁸² For Péguy, then, history was “inscription,” whereas memory was “recollection.” The modern regime of historicity was clearly under fire.

Bergson focused exclusively on individual duration, while Péguy ventured to explore the “time of the world”:

A little later, Walter Benjamin made recollection (Eingedenken) into one of the central concepts of his collection of theses called On the Concept of History.⁸⁴ As an alternative to “historicism,” an ideology that in his view embodied the bankruptcy of modern history and historical civilization, and in opposition to his “homogeneous and empty” epoch, he had been working, right up to his death by suicide on the Spanish frontier in 1940, on a new concept of history, which drew both on Marxism and on Jewish messianic thought. Through the notion of Jetztzeit (“the presence of the now”), which he coined, he sought to define historical time as that which was only really generated when “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a new constellation.”⁸⁵ In Hannah Arendt’s words, Benjamin knew that “the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past.” These involved “settl[ing] down, piecemeal, in the present” and “like a pearl diver…delv[ing] into the depths of the past.”⁸⁶ Recollection is not the sudden involuntary emergence of the past in the present, but an active orientation that, by aiming at a particular moment in the past, transforms it. Benjamin was a man of the gap in time, and undoubtedly a man of the present, but absolutely not of presentism. His aura has continued to grow ever since the challenges to the modern regime emerged. He developed a theory of revolution, while never advocating a tabula rasa of the past.

How did historians respond to these condemnations and questions at the time? The answer is “not at all,” or at least “not directly.” Lavisse was already ill, hurrying to publish the next part of his History, The History of Contemporary France. The last volume, published in 1922 and devoted to the 1914 war, ended on a “General Conclusion” written by Lavisse himself. In it he acknowledged that “the present is bleak,” but he tried to summon reasons for having “confidence in the future.” These reasons included an “indestructible” national unity, a mode of government “which can be considered definitive,” and above all the conviction that progress would once again win out, after “feverishly marking time,” and that “nations will set out again on a new stage. We have the right to hope and believe that in the vanguard will be France.”87

The real, albeit indirect, response came from those historians who abandoned national historiography and began to examine economic and social phenomena whose temporalities were dictated by rhythms other than the simple linear succession of political events. Historical research, in its aspiration to the status of a social science such as the one vigorously advocated—and closely guarded—by the Durkheimians and, in France, particularly by François Simiand, sought to contribute, in its own field, to the production of society’s knowledge about itself. This shift from Nation to Society went together with a new relation to time: “Once society had supplanted the nation, legitimation by the past, hence by history, gave way to legitimation by the future.”⁸⁸ That was certainly the case, although one should add that the historiographical stance of the future illuminating the past had already emerged earlier, as from the moment when the Revolution became the point around which the whole past history of France came to be organized and the previous temporal perspective was reversed. We saw this already in Volney’s Ruins.

One could object that the future in question was not a future yet to come but a future that had already taken place—except that the nineteenth century never stopped chasing after the true end of the Revolution, and, at least until the consolidation of the Third Republic, the century oscillated between the fear that the Revolution would be confiscated and the fear that it would remain unfinished. Thereafter, this issue was supplanted by the question, which came back and back, of the nature of the Republic. The founders of the Annales School advocated moving back and forth between the present and the past, so as to bring contemporary historians and historians of the past closer together, but without forgetting that “misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.”89 This was a way of encouraging historians to get involved in the intellectual discussions and social issues of the day.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in which the idea of the Nation played such a pivotal role, the development of national histories in fact went hand in hand with discourses claiming to speak in the name of the future. In France, that future had already taken place, but it had somehow also been missed, had gone astray, or got lost—in any case, it was unfinished. 1789 was in the past, but the promise it held was still to come. Here again, we find a situation that is somewhere between the already and the not yet.

Let us start with the 1820s generation of liberals, who raised high the flag of historical reform precisely in the name of the Nation. These young thinkers ushered in a vibrantly inventive period, intellectually innovative, if naive, in which history as a science and no longer as one of the arts was first elaborated and advocated. For this generation, the Nation was at once a self-evident fact, a political weapon, a cognitive architecture, and a historical program. A self-evident fact, because the whole purpose of the Revolution was to replace the king—in whose person, as it was said, “the nation resided in its entirety”—with the nation as the “mystical receptacle of sovereignty.”⁹⁰ The sudden substitution of one absolute for another created (enduring) problems of representation, with the question of how to understand this absolute, how to serve it, and how to embody it. Throughout the century, historians grappled with trying to understand this founding moment by putting it in perspective and making sense of it in the broader context of the history of France, in the light of what came before, but also afterward. This work was really where the modern concept of history and the definition of the historian’s task (or even mission) originated. And this was also François Furet’s starting point in his project of “thinking” (penser) the French Revolution, through rereading the nineteenth-century historians.⁹¹

The nation was also a weapon. It was vital to show that “the people of the nation in their entirety” were agents of history, and in particular that, although the 1814 Charter described an essentially if not exclusively monarchic history of France, the long march of the Third Estate had begun already in the twelfth century. Another continuity was at work, it was claimed, far more charged with history and above all harboring much greater potential for the future than dynastic succession alone. In Augustin Thierry’s view, 1789 recalled the “revolutions of the Middle Ages,” and 1830 was in the process of providing an “extreme” vantage point from which Thierry believed one could see “the providential termination of the labour of the centuries which had elapsed since the twelfth.”92 July 1830 fulfilled July 1789. History became intelligible in the passage from the present—which only yesterday was the future—to a very distant past, with 1830 figuring as roughly the end of history. On this particular point a political program (the establishment of a constitutional monarchy) and a new historical methodology were in harmony, and each could henceforth corroborate the other.

In order to write this new history “still buried within the dusty chronicles” of the time—the history of citizens and subjects, in a word, of the people—original documents had to be consulted, and this rapidly brought one to the door of the Archives. The pamphleteer became a historian. Thierry redeployed the old erudition of the Bollandists and the Maurists, but with a different agenda, and also read Walter Scott and the historical novel (hence the whole debate on “local color”).⁹³ We might smile at the naivety of thinking that history writing and politics could so effortlessly join forces, on the strength of a superficial compatibility. Nevertheless, the national question really did catalyze this historiographical movement, which the July Monarchy institutionalized after 1830. Then came the events of 1848. Greeted with stupefaction, 1848 showed that history had not come to an end, was not even in the process of ending. How, then, could history be written? The Revolution was not over, and any elevated vantage point had been destroyed.

Michelet’s starting point was also the “lightning bolt” of July 1830, which tore through the night, illuminating it as a moment of grace and total intelligibility in which, as in a mystical vision, history revealed itself in its entirety, came together, and took on meaning.94 The break of 1789 could be both acknowledged and integrated, such as to mend the broken “thread of tradition.” This relation to the nation as “soul” and “person” had several important consequences. First, what was expected of the historian changed: his role became that of bringing to light what was not immediately visible, less the secrets of the great than the murmurings of the anonymous masses, and even the silences of history. But, in order to uncover these and fully immerse himself in the task, the historian must do more than simply shake the dust off old chronicles: he must “plunge” resolutely into the archives. In Michelet’s powerful words, the historian paying his visits to the dead as he passes along row upon row of archives must learn to hear “the murmurings of so many stifled souls,” of all those no longer living, to whom the present is indebted. These funeral elegies, which (also) had an epistemological import, negated the break between the past and the present that had inaugurated modern history. As head of the Historical Department at the National Archives and an avid reader of Virgil, Michelet doubtlessly saw himself as a vates, but this posture and its accompanying style were also his way of developing his theoretical reflections on history.

Furthermore, the Nation as a “person” was, for Michelet, a living entity, at once already there and constantly evolving. It contained both failures and promises, the past and the future. Above all, in terms borrowed from Vico, it was constantly “working on itself.” Hence there is no “fatality” in its history: neither “soil” nor “race,” nor any other determinism. The Nation is freedom and so its history is open-ended. In opposition to the histories deemed either “insufficiently material” or “insufficiently spiritual,” Michelet advocated a history that paid attention to “interweavings” (of powers, levels, and factors).⁹⁵ This vision and analysis of the nation as a complex organism had considerable heuristic potential. It encouraged ever finer and more complex analyses, leading to “France” itself becoming an experimental framework and a problematic. This was exactly what Fernand Braudel, taking his cue from Michelet (while also marking his distance from him), aimed at in his Identity of France. But that was a good century later, and three wars on: “I love France with the same demanding and complicated passion as did Jules Michelet.…But that passion will rarely intrude upon the pages of this book. I shall keep it carefully to one side.”⁹⁶

Prior to this, before and after 1870, the historian Fustel de Coulanges had been working on his unfinished oeuvre.97 The “Three Glorious Days” of July were already distant, and the promises of 1789 were even further back. History had not come to a halt. 1830 had been followed by 1848, the Republic by the coup d’état, with in its wake the initially “authoritarian” and later “liberal” Empire. The Battle of Sedan and the Commune would soon be at hand. Throughout his career, Fustel reflected on the French Revolution. His method involved subjecting it to a double displacement. There have always been revolutions, he argued, in antiquity just as in modern times, but revolutions are not what one thinks they are today. What is invisible in them is in reality more powerful than what is visible, and when a revolution “erupts,” it is in fact already over. The time of the event itself is of little importance.

His Ancient City (published in 1864) was already a history of political institutions, but in antiquity. In it he examined the series of revolutions that had led to the establishment of the city-state. In order to understand the latter, he argued, it was necessary to trace it back to its origins. The first human institutions, he discovered, had a religious basis: the founding belief that death was not the end of everything was what gave rise to the social bond (since the cult of the dead presupposed the existence of the family, and ancestors’ tombs represented the first form of private property). Fustel de Coulanges was still targeting the artificiality of Rousseau’s social contract here.

This hypothesis had three implications. First, the historian should “extend his researches over a vast span of time,” since without the long view, history was impossible. Second, the historian should focus above all on what Fustel called “institutions” (in the etymological sense of “that which institutes life in society”). Their establishment was “slow, gradual and regular,” and anything but “the result of a chance accident or a sudden act of force.” Hence institutions are never the handiwork “of the will of one man, and even the will of a whole nation is not sufficient to create them.” Violence contributes “hardly at all” to their foundation.⁹⁸ All things told, man plays little part in his own history. Fustel’s History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France (which he never finished and in fact abandoned) was to have been something like Braudel’s Identity of France. One could even suggest that Fustel’s longue durée, understood as a process of institutionalization, in fact found its way right into Braudel’s thinking, admittedly with significant differences, since Braudel was exploring other depths.

Lastly, as Ariès has noted, Fustel’s approach highlighted the differences between periods, and sought to make sense of them, by showing the overall lines of coherence that found final expression in institutions. He stressed, for example, the “radical” differences between ancient peoples and modern societies, between Ancient France and Modern France. Although Fustel did not endorse the modern regime of historicity and its futurism, the premise of his entire work was that the old regime of historia magistra was no longer tenable: different epochs were too dissimilar. And he precisely worked on excavating the logics underpinning different periods. There certainly were discontinuities in history, he maintained, but these are not expressed in surface accidents. Yet despite his conviction that the past could no longer shed light on the future, Fustel never took the step of writing a history of France in which the future revealed the sense of the past. And as for the present, he declared after the events of 1870 that any historian worthy of the name must start by “forgetting it.” By the time he published the first volume of his History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France in 1875, he was assigning no other finality to the work than to contribute to “the advance of historical science and the knowledge of human nature.” The only progress to which he laid claim was that of knowledge. He too found himself between two impossibilities: that of the past and that of the future.

So, with Fustel, we hear no patriotic trumpet call and no mournful sounding of the bugle. Only knowledge and erudition are at stake. We are a far cry from Maurice Barrès’s pronouncements a little later, and even from Gabriel Monod, who, in the following year, published the first issue of the Revue Historique (1876). In it he of course did not broach national history as such, but aimed to “contribute to the progress of historical study” by adopting “strictly scientific methods of exposition.” It was a question of analysis, not of synthesis, since the latter, as mentioned above, was yet to come, and would be premature at this stage. But historians clearly had a social role, as we would say nowadays, and a responsibility. They were to be the pontiffs (in French un pont is a bridge), uniting France’s past with its present. And they must understand and explain the “logical link between all the periods of development” of a country, from the past right up to the present. From this it ensued that history was of “national importance,” since it gave the country “the unity and moral strength she needs.”100 We can see at a glance how far we have come from Fustel’s (declared) withdrawal from the contemporary scene. The historian’s position has changed yet again, as has the way the “progress” of historical study is understood. One can still detect some elements of Thierry’s schema (in less triumphalist or naive form), but above all there reappears the motto of the German Monumenta, in which erudition and love of the fatherland are combined (sanctus amor patriae dat animum), even if Monod aimed to distance himself from this approach. Monod’s historian was a Republican who sought to neglect neither the past nor the future nor the present, but without privileging any of the three.

Lavisse, Nora’s sparring partner, came on the scene a few years later, between two wars (the one France had lost and the one for which it was preparing). Febvre mocked his refusal of a history “told by those who tasted defeat in 1870,” its “wavering cautiousness,” and “its almost exclusive penchant for diplomatic history.”¹⁰¹ Of course, France’s history after the establishment of the Republic became that of “the nation fulfilled”: 1889 replaced 1830 as the vantage point from which to contemplate, deploy, and teach this history. In terms, once again, of the overarching rhythm of the already and the not yet, the already (figured by the Revolution) and the not yet (the Republic’s definitive consolidation) came together and were united in 1889. Even if much remained to be done, the torments of anticipation were over. National history understandably won out, a current that became synonymous with its foremost advocate, Lavisse (and with the Lavisse textbooks on the history of France).

The synthesis achieved by Lavisse played a major political and pedagogical role, but it was intellectually weak. Its triumph was also a swan song. Once the nation had been embodied, all that remained was to “write it up.”102 Basically, the idea was to abolish the historical frontier that split France’s past in two (before and after the Revolution), so that France could rally united to the defense of another frontier—a geographical one this time—with a view to ultimately pushing it back (beyond the “blue line of the Vosges”). That was the general drift, and it already had the feel of mobilization orders about it. When war finally broke out, the youngest of that generation’s historians were indeed mobilized, and most of the others considered themselves to be “mobilized in the rear services,” as the historian Charles Petit-Dutaillis put it.

Then, as an aftereffect of the 1914–1918 war, a fault line appeared in the order of time, something like a rift. The bloody carnage of nations at war produced, in the 1920s, a historiography that either turned away from the nation toward social issues or precisely glorified it. These were two very different strategies for linking the past to the future. Valéry, who “despair[ed] of history” for its failure to foresee anything, denounced the dangerous substance that makes “nations bitter, proud, insufferable and vain.”¹⁰³ It was as though there were no history other than national and empirical facts-based history [l’histoire historisante], on which Febvre would shortly pour scorn.

However, when Febvre took up his professorship at the University of Strasbourg in 1919, his inaugural lecture began by stating that “any history which is of service” is “a servile history. Professors of the French University of Strasbourg, we are not missionaries marching to the orders of some national bible.”¹⁰⁴ It was due to this refusal to “serve” that he could ultimately reply in the affirmative to the key question he asked at the outset: “Do I have the right”—that is, still have the right—to do history “in a world in ruins”? And it was this refusal, again, that legitimated his continued practice as a historian, “picking up the thread again,” and enabling a space of work and inquiry to be sketched for a (new) science-history in search of other rhythms, other depths, and other objects—in short, other temporalities. Some years later (after 1929) this history would give birth to the Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale. However, the retreat or even eclipse of national history did not mean that it was forgotten or abandoned. Later, both Bloch and Febvre planned to write a History of France, which finally neither of them completed.¹⁰⁵

At the opposite extreme, Jacques Bainville, who was also affected by the 1914 war and its aftermath, took refuge in a national history. His History of France, published in 1924, was a real popular success, unlike academic history of the time. It was based on a simple idea, formulated in the foreword, that “the men of the past resembled those of today and their actions had the same motivation as ours.” It was primarily an exercise in reactivating the model of historia magistra, using the standard devices of repetition and analogy. In 1916 he noted in his Journal, “Ignorance and lack of understanding of our past are killing us, and all due to the stupid democratic prejudice which says that time marches on.” History still had lessons to dispense. And history must be “the memory of statesmen.” The idea was to neutralize the feared future by expelling time from history. To counter stupid democratic prejudice, Bainville’s History was obliged to prove that the modern regime of historicity was false, and that no, decidedly, time does not “march on.”

Ariès, whom we have already mentioned for his work on death, was an avid reader and admirer of Bainville in his youth. However, he did not turn to national history after the “rupture” of the Second World War—what he called “the rifts of 1940”—but on the contrary, he carefully avoided it. He began with The History of the French Population and Its Attitudes to Life Since the Eighteenth Century (1948), was thrust into the limelight with The Hour of Our Death (1977), and later co-edited with Duby a multivolume History of Private Life (1985). In 1958, Georges Duby and Robert Mandrou published not a History of France but A History of French Civilization, whose foreword ended on the following words: “This book will have fulfilled its task if it arouses curiosity, if it inspires its readers to consult other, more scholarly and complete, books, and if it enables them better to grasp, oriented by ten centuries of history, the unique characteristics [traits originaux] of that ‘person’—contemporary France.”106 This was a double reference, so discreet as to be almost for the happy few alone, to Michelet (the “person”) and to Marc Bloch’s Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (translated as French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics).

History, just like other disciplines, was affected by these changes. It was only an element in the total picture (which we sketched in our opening pages) and certainly not its instigator. However, the introduction of the historian into history, as practiced and professed by Febvre, and also advocated by Marrou and Aron in opposition to the positivist school, had paved the way for this movement. Henceforth, the historian seemed to want to “join the ranks of history,” as Péguy put it: “They [the historians] do not want to write the history of historians. They want to exploit to the full the indefiniteness of historical detail. But they do not want to include themselves within the historical detail’s lack of clearly defined limits. They do not want to join the ranks of history. They behave like a doctor who does not want to be ill and die.”107 The historian’s claim to extraterritoriality and a commanding viewpoint was no longer tenable.

All these factors contributed to the emergence of a history of history, which was one of the sources, as we have seen, of Nora’s reflections leading to Les lieux de mémoire. A reflexive and historiographical stance was obviously not the prerogative of just one type of history nor, of course, of history alone.¹⁰⁸ After all, to what was it responding if not, at least in part, to this new context, in which the hitherto paradigmatic temporality of the modern regime of historicity was being challenged? The light beaming in from the future was beginning to wane, what was ahead seemed increasingly unpredictable, the category of the present prevailed, and the recent past—which to everyone’s surprise wouldn’t move on or, on the contrary, passed with worrying speed—had to be constantly and compulsively revisited. As a result, history could no longer be written from the perspective or in the name of the future (or of any of its various hypostases). This directly affected the writing of contemporary history, but gradually affected other history as well.

Now it was precisely in these same years, the 1980s, and not only in France, that the question of the nation reemerged, generating intellectual and political interest, and a whole swathe of publications. There was arguably something highly paradoxical in the combination of a dominant presentism with the production of national histories. Given that “the Nation” and “Progress” had been so powerfully welded together in the nineteenth century, how could the idea of the Nation return when that of Progress was no longer sustainable? What was left of the Nation? It was often figured as a Nation without prospect(s), a retrospective and nostalgic entity, basically a refuge, linked to a form of history enthralled once again to the charms of historia magistra. Maybe, however, the return of the Nation was a relatively explicit and voluntaristic response to the issues of identity raised by the rising tide of memory. Yet could historians ever again become the instructors and institutors of the Nation (like Lavisse) or of a new Republic (like Claude Nicolet), even using the medium of television? Should they not simply remain its memorialists, better informed than others maybe, but one of many?

In his later years, Braudel was called upon to take a leading role in this debate between history and memory. He had just, to the delighted astonishment of historians, published the first part of his Identity of France. His France was of course not assimilated to a person but constructed as a historical object. And his goal was not to uncover an essence, whether located in the past or to be realized in the future. Identity was precisely given in the longue durée—in the longue durée only or only as the longue durée. “It is precisely that tide and the deep-flowing currents of France’s past that I am seeking to detect, to trace, to better judge how they flow into the present, as rivers flow into the sea.”109 Thus toward the end of Braudel’s career as a historian, marked by brilliant and acclaimed analyses ever since 1949, the history most antithetical to these, the short-winded and superficial genre of national history, was suddenly also admitted to the longue durée, through which it even revealed its truest and most expressive aspects. Although Braudel’s Identity of France was published only in 1986, the seeds for it were sown by Braudel’s experience as a prisoner of war in 1940:

In another History of France, the editors André Burguière and Jacques Revel deliberately replaced the “classic narrative of the nation from its origins to the present” with a “thematic and logical approach.” The book aimed not to “recount” France yet again, but to break with the official version and use the present as a prism through which to investigate the nation, “in order to discover the original characteristics of the national totality, through their emergence and transformations.”¹¹¹ The approach was anything but teleological, retrospectively teleological, but instead it could be called regressive: the only perspective was that of the present, which was both the starting point and the endpoint of the inquiry.

More generally, the historiographical approach, in its concern to identify presuppositions and to examine the tools and categories mobilized, contributed significantly to how the theme of the nation was treated.¹¹² I mentioned above that the Lieux de mémoire went furthest in this direction in its integration of historiographical reflections on the work’s methods as each new volume rolled off the press, such as to extend progressively the sense of the term “site.” At all events, these different ways of approaching the nation as a problem broke with all the national memory-histories written from the viewpoint of the future. At the opposite extreme from the historical school called the école méthodique, which never talked of the present but always had it on its mind, the present had now explicitly become the dominant (and sufficient?) category.

So we commemorate “Bastille Day,” in which 1880, 1789, and 1790 prefigure and echo each other.113 Péguy, in his Clio, had striking terms for this: “The storming of the Bastille was a genuine feast-day, it was the first celebration, the first commemoration and in a sense the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.…The Fête de la Fédération, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, was not its first commemoration. It was the storming of the Bastille itself which was the first Fête de la Fédération, a Federation avant la lettre.”¹¹⁴ Today, this phenomenon has become the norm, with every event already incorporating its own commemoration. This was the case in May 1968, and it was true again, in extreme form, for 11 September 2001, with all the television cameras trying to catch on film the moment when the second plane would crash into the World Trade Center’s second tower.

The aspect of commemoration that Nora considered to be characteristic of his time was its “patrimonial” character. Commemorations had become wide-ranging and “denationalized,” even when they sought recognition by the State (which in fact was overwhelmed by the flood of heritage-related demands).¹¹⁵ Nora went even further: the nation itself has been transformed into cultural heritage, he argued, “as though France had ceased to be a history which divides us and had become a culture which unites us.”¹¹⁶ The question remained of who this us was, who defined it, how, and around what. Nora identified the emergence of a “nation without nationalism” in this movement from the political to the cultural. Could it be that late twentieth-century France was becoming a Kultur Nation, while Germany, which had adopted that path long before as a remedy for its lack of political unity, was becoming a Nation, even “despite itself,” since it could not escape the question of nationhood? One can see in this the makings of an interesting historical chiasmus, against the background of European integration.

In summary, one could say that for France under the Third Republic and Lavisse’s tutelage, a (Republican) memory that had been transformed into history gave way to history—or, as one more readily says today, the past—lived, read, and appropriated selectively as memory (in its new sense), sometimes spurred on by the “duty to remember.”¹¹⁷ The last twenty years would thus be the time of the transition from a “historical nation” (la nation historique) to a “memory-based nation” (la nation mémorielle). The Lieux de mémoire, like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, ends on a book that is yet to be written. It would be the “true” History of France written, as we can now see, in order to analyze and take stock of a crisis of time made manifest through the theme of the nation, and constituted by the sites we have just discovered. The aim of the Lieux was thus not so much to make the Annals “conform to the progress of reason” but rather to make them conform to the crisis of progress itself.

If one can say that the Lieux inhabits a specific moment, one should add that the work also constitutes a site (lieu) of this moment, or some possible sites. As well as being a History of France for today, it is also, quite explicitly, a history of our present. As a result, the historian can no longer be represented as the intermediary between past and future in the guise of a pontiff (Monod) or a prophet (Michelet), who can read in the past the future that has already taken place or is to be brought into being, and who then proclaims it. Even less can the historian “forget,” or rather deny, the present, as Fustel did. And while the historian is indeed a go-between, this is only within the closed circle of the present, and “between the blind demand and the enlightened reply, between public pressure and the solitary patience of the laboratory, between what he senses and what he knows.”118 This is arguably a humble role, but at least the historian is henceforth fully and rightfully a historian of the present. And History, whether it is of the present or of other periods, must accept that it is history in the present.

But our contemporary present and its presentism have proved almost unsustainable. The demand for memory can be interpreted as an expression of this crisis in our relation to time as well as an attempt at providing a solution. And of course the memory claimed and proclaimed is not so much to do with transmission as with reconstruction of a forgotten and sometimes falsified past, a past that was never known. Despite this, the act of memory is conceived as reappropriating this past as totally legible. Epistemologically, the Lieux posits (and even champions) the centrality of the present, as both the origin and the destination of its exploration, but it simultaneously seeks to get round the present and escape its grasp. It does this by making the past’s selective recycling, or the passage from the past into the present (which is how memory works) into the starting point of its historiographical operations: memory becomes, not so much in its content as in its form, a mode of historical inquiry and of history writing.

Traditionally, the historian’s first move was rather to separate the two: history was to be the science of the past, a pure science, and the historian nothing but an eye deciphering documents in the silence of the Archives. The Lieux’s logic works quite differently, with the historian and the way he or she works being conceived, precisely, as a site of memory. Once again Michelet was the tutelary figure, but also Nora himself, who conceived and edited an Essais d’ego-histoire.119 Just as Chateaubriand returned repeatedly to sites of memory of himself and for himself, so historians could take themselves as such sites,¹²⁰ leading logically to an ego-historical approach. They could write the histories of themselves as historical objects (but not all historians are great historians).

The Lieux can be regarded as a symptom of our times due to the immense success of the notion of “site of memory.” It caught on rapidly, as an expression and in the real, including in law. Even places such as the Paris concert hall L’Olympia or the restaurant Fouquet’s have been listed. The “site” came to the rescue of the “historic monument,” which was oversubscribed and outdated. Although the Third Republic would have found the notion of “site” neither imaginable nor desirable, it was a quicker and simpler category to apply than the “historic monument.”121 But as a result, the “site of memory” found itself absorbed by the historical phenomenon that had led to its formulation in the first place, and which it had been invented to decipher. The cognitive instrument conceived in order better to define and understand the ubiquity of commemorative activity was itself co-opted into the latter’s show and annexed to the arsenal of presentism, this time called to the rescue of Cultural Heritage and Commemoration. It was a clear sign that Nora’s analysis was correct, but with the risk that the whole venture could be reduced to its immediate context, and would consequently be consumed by the very phenomenon it had helped to describe and understand.

The Lieux are a symptom of today’s world also in their conception of memory. If we imagine for a moment the work being written in the mid-1960s, the unconscious would doubtless have played an important role (in the form of lapsus, memory blanks, amnesia, displacement, denegation, and so forth). Since, as mentioned above, the notion of “site” in the work is rhetorical, the memory referred to in the Lieux is a memory without an unconscious, except in the metaphorical sense, or only contingently and not essentially. The historian does not attempt to uncover the unthought of a “site” but rather to reconstitute what has made it thinkable. Whence perhaps a certain difficulty within the Lieux’s framework of conceiving what a “non-site” or a “bad” site of national history or memory would be.

Then came 1989. It was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, marking the end of an ideology that had always regarded itself as the vanguard of modernity. History did not come to an end, not even in Francis Fukuyama’s sense, but a break appeared in the order of time (first in Europe, then gradually in many other parts of the world). Understandably, after 1989, new relations to time were explored, as had occurred two centuries previously when the old order of time and its associated regime of historicity disintegrated. The future was still there, as unpredictable as ever, or even, we would be tempted to say, even more so than before.

The end of the tyranny of the future also had the effect of making the past inscrutable again, and at least partly unpredictable too. This was not simply linked to the issue of contingency, which Raymond Aron highlighted in his critique of causality in Simiand.¹²² The past waiting to be rediscovered was neither linear nor unambiguous, and it was construed as a field crisscrossed by pasts that had for a time been possible futures, including those which had begun to exist and which had been prevented from doing so. Certain historians and philosophers, including Ricoeur, rightly dwelt on this.¹²³ Insofar as Les lieux de mémoire showed how certain sites crystallized, were remodeled and anamorphosed, but also how they were forgotten, it undeniably contained a whole critical inventory of France’s memory-history. And since it was alert to the whole economy of the past in the present, the work also suggested a possible way of moving between the past and the present, starting deliberately, as I have said, from the present.

1989 also placed the nation once more in the spotlight. The nation was again something of a hit—or at least something of a problem. This came as a total surprise, even to those in Western Europe who had revived the idea of the nation in the preceding years. As mentioned above, although pre-Unification Germany readily defined itself as a “post-national” State, several histories of Germany were published in the 1980s, and an increasing number of conferences were organized around German identity and around commemoration. Yet at the same time, people on both sides of the Wall were convinced that Germany would remain lastingly divided. In France, the publication of the Lieux had the effect of foregrounding the question of the nation and its profound transformations. The nation was no longer a messianic but a heritage-based entity, or even a nation as shared culture, a nation without nationalism, alive but pacified. All that remained for France to do in its semi-retirement from history was to cultivate its memory, as one tends one’s garden. This transformation of the French nation was precisely what the Lieux sought to make visible, to chart, and to describe. It was the Lieux’s critical context.

But can we be so sure? Can the shift from one model of the nation to another occur so neatly and irreversibly? What we have seen in whole areas of Europe since 1989, including in Western Europe, should prompt us at least to leave the question open.124 How does Germany experience its status as a nation, with an East Germany rebuilt from scratch? And what can Europe be, with the enlargement of 2004, navigating like a heavy ship that is less and less responsive to the helm? Are we heading toward an all-heritage Europe, united by a common Heritage List? That would be a more presentist than futurist Europe, but for which “progress” would continue to play a major role.¹²⁵

How are we to write Europe’s history and even contribute to “The Making of Europe” (Faire l’Europe), to borrow the title of a series edited by Jacques le Goff, which was first published in 1989 as a collaboration between five publishers of different languages and nationalities?126 It was certainly a voluntaristic project, and some even criticized it for reviving, this time for Europe, a teleological, nineteenth-century-style national history.¹²⁷ Le Goff stressed the “active title” of the series: writing history is also a way of making history. Did the project thus simply reactivate the modern regime of historicity, with the future once again used to explain the past? That was clearly not Le Goff’s position, since “today comes from yesterday and tomorrow emerges out of the past.” And he continued: “It is a past that should not paralyze the present but help it to be faithful to its inheritance yet different and innovative as it progresses.”¹²⁸ Le Goff was not Lavisse, and both the futurism of the modern regime of historicity and the backward-looking vision of the old regime were rejected, in order to preserve the possibility of a present that would be at once new, different, and faithful to what it had inherited. As with Monod, it was a question of articulating the past, the present, and the future around the historical object called European (rather than National) History, and approaching it through the longue durée. Moreover, as the author of Medieval Civilization, 400–1500, who advocated a long Middle Ages stretching from the third century A.D. up to the modern industrial revolutions, Le Goff felt quite at home with the project: Europe came from a long way back. If there was such a thing as a European identity, it would be in and through this longue durée that one could best try to grasp it.

Whether one situates the nation in a mythical or distant past, or in the future, or both at once, people are yet again dying in its name or on the pretext of its name.¹²⁹ Ethnic nationalisms have killed many, and savagely. These more or less enflamed “returns to,” or aspirations toward, the idea of the nation, which differ in form and intensity, can be attributed in part to a crisis of time. They are one of its components or expressions, although they cannot be reduced to or identified with it. As a reaction to this crisis, they have, alas, already proved their efficacy. But as a response to the contemporary situation, these nationalisms appear particularly out of place because the modern regime of historicity, flying its futurist or national-futurist flag, has in large part ceased to convince and mobilize.