Nora, Pierre.

Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire (1989)

Translated by: Marc Roudebush

[…]

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental

opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in

permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of

its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to

being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the

reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a

perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a

representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only

accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that maybe out of focus or

telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic--responsive to each avenue of

conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it

is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. Memory installs

remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is

blind to all but the group it binds--which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that

there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and

yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to

everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority. Memory takes root in

the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to

temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is

absolute, while history can only conceive the relative.

History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and

destroy it. At the horizon of historical societies, at the limits of the completely

historicized world, there would occur a permanent secularization. History's goal and

ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place. A generalized

critical history would no doubt preserve some museums, some medallions and

monuments--that is to say, the materials necessary for its work--but it would empty them

of what, to us, would make them lieux de memoire. In the end, a society living wholly

under the sign of history could not, any more than could a traditional society, conceive

such sites for anchoring its memory.

[…]

The study of lieux de memoires, then, lies at the intersection of two developments that in

France today give it meaning: one a purely historiographical movement, the reflexive

turning of history upon itself, the other a movement that is, properly speaking, historical:

the end of a tradition of memory. The moment of lieux de memoire occurs at the same

time that an immense and intimate fund of memory disappears, surviving only as a

reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history. This period sees, on the one

hand, the decisive deepening of historical study and, on the other hand, a heritage

consolidated. The critical principle follows an internal dynamic: our intellectual,

political, historical frameworks are exhausted but remain powerful enough not to leave us

indifferent; whatever vitality they retain impresses us only in their most spectacular

symbols. Combined, these two movements send us at once to history's most elementary

tools and to the most symbolic objects of our memory: to the archives as well as to the
tricolor; to the libraries, dictionaries, and museums as well as to commemorations,

celebrations, the Pantheon, and the Arc de Triomphe; to the Dictionnaire Larousse as

well as to the Wall of the Federes, where the last defenders of the Paris commune were

massacred in 1870.

These lieux de memoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a

memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for

memory because it has abandoned it. They make their appearance by virtue of the

deritualization of our world--producing, manifesting, establishing, constructing,

decreeing, and maintaining by artifice and by will a society deeply absorbed in its own

transformation and renewal, one that inherently values the new over the ancient, the

young over the old, the future over the past. Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals,

anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, fraternal orders--these are

the boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity. It is the nostalgic dimension of

these devotional institutions that makes them seem beleaguered and cold--they mark the

rituals of a society without ritual; integral particularities in a society that levels

particularity; signs of distinction and of group membership in a society that tends to

recognize individuals only as identical and equal.

Lieux de memoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we

must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations,

pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally.

The defense, by certain minorities, of a privileged memory that has retreated to jealously

protected enclaves in this sense intensely illuminates the truth of lieux de memoire—that

without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away. We buttress
our identities upon such bastions, but if what they defended were not threatened, there

would be no need to build them. Conversely, if the memories that they enclosed were to

be set free they would be useless; if history did not besiege memory, deforming and

transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de memoire.

Indeed, it is this very push and pull that produces lieux de memoire—moments of history

torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet

death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.

Memory Seized by History

What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already history. What we take

to be flare-ups of memory are in fact its final consumption in the flames of history. The

quest for memory is the search for one's history.

Of course, we still cannot do without the word, but we should be aware of the difference

between true memory, which has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed

down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes

and ingrained memories, and memory transformed by its passage through history, which

is nearly the opposite: voluntary and deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer

spontaneous; psychological, individual, and subjective; but never social, collective, or all

encompassing. How did we move from the first memory, which is immediate, to the

second, which is indirect? We may approach the question of this contemporary

metamorphosis from the perspective of its outcome.

Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace,

the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends
as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the

more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs--hence the

obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete

conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past…

[…]

The imperative of our epoch is not only to keep everything, to preserve every indicator of

memory--even when we are not sure which memory is being indicated--but also to

produce archives. The French Social Security archives are a troubling example: an

unparalleled quantity of documents, they represent today three hundred linear kilometers.

Ideally, the computerized evaluation of this mass of raw memory would provide a

reading of the sum total of the normal and the pathological in society, from diets to

lifestyles, by region and by profession; yet even its preservation and plausible

implementation call for drastic and impossible choices. Record as much as you can,

something will remain. This is, to take another telling example, the conclusion implied

by the proliferation of oral histories. There are currently in France more than three

hundred teams employed in gathering "the voices that come to us from the past" (Philippe

Joutard). But these are not ordinary archives, if we consider that to produce them requires

thirty-six hours for each hour of recording time and that they can never be used

piecemeal, because they only have meaning when heard in their entirety. Whose will to

remember do they ultimately reflect, that of the interviewer or that of the interviewed?

No longer living memory's more or less intended remainder, the archive has become the

deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life—itself often a function

of its own recording--a secondary memory, a prosthesis-memory. The indiscriminate

of the terrorism of historicized memory.

[…]

Les Lieux de Memoire: Another History

Lieux de memoire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately

available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration.

Indeed, they are lieux in three senses of the word—material, symbolic, and functional.

Even an apparently purely material site, like an archive, becomes a lieu de memoire only

if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura. A purely functional site, like a

classroom manual, a testament, or a veterans' reunion belongs to the category only

inasmuch as it is also the object of a ritual. And the observance of a commemorative

minute of silence, an extreme example of a strictly symbolic action, serves as a

concentrated appeal to memory by literally breaking a temporal continuity. Moreover,

the three aspects always coexist. Take, for example, the notion of a historical generation:

it is material by its demographic content and supposedly functional--since memories are

crystallized and transmitted from one generation to the next--but it is also symbolic, since

it characterizes, by referring to events or experiences shared by a small minority, a larger

group that may not have participated in them.

Lieux de memoire are created by a play of memory and history, an interaction of two

factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination. To begin with, there must be a

will to remember. If we were to abandon this criterion, we would quickly drift into

admitting virtually everything as worthy of remembrance. One is reminded of the

sources," intentionally produced by society with a view to their future reproduction--a

law or a work of art, for example--and the indiscriminate mass of "indirect sources,"

comprising all the testimony an epoch inadvertently leaves to historians. Without the

intention to remember, lieux de memoire would be indistinguishable from lieux d'histoire.

On the other hand, it is clear that without the intervention of history, time, and change,

we would content ourselves with simply a schematic outline of the objects of memory.

The lieux we speak of, then, are mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and

death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Mobius strip of the collective and the

individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile. For if we accept

that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop time, to block the

work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the

immaterial--just as if gold were the only memory of money--all of this in order to capture

a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs, it is also clear that lieux de memoire only

exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning

and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.

Let us take two very different examples. First, the Revolutionary calendar, which was

very much a lieu de memoire since, as a calendar, it was designed to provide the a priori

frame of reference for all possible memory while, as a revolutionary document, through

its nomenclature and symbolism, it was supposed to "open a new book to history,” as its

principal author ambitiously put it, or to "return Frenchmen entirely to themselves,"

according to another of its advocates. The function of the calendar, it was thought, would

be to halt history at the hour of the Revolution by indexing future months, days,
centuries, and years to the Revolutionary epic. Yet, to our eyes, what further qualifies the

revolutionary calendar as a lieu de memoire is its apparently inevitable failure to have

become what its founders hoped. If we still lived today according to its rhythm, it would

have become as familiar to us as the Gregorian calendar and would consequently have

lost its interest as a lieu de memoire. It would have melted into our memorial landscape,

serving only to date everyother conceivable memorial site. As it turns out, its failure has

not been complete; key dates still emerge from it to which it will always remain attached:

Vendemiaire, Thermidor, Brumaire. Just so, the lieu de memoire turns in on itself--an

arabesque in the deforming mirror that is its truth.

[…]

It is this principle of double identity that enables us to map, within the indefinite

multiplicity of sites, a hierarchy, a set of limits, a repertoire of ranges. This principle is

crucial because, if one keeps in mind the broad categories of the genre-anything

pertaining to the cult of the dead, anything relating to the patrimony, anything

administering the presence of the past within the present--it is clear that some seemingly

improbable objects can be legitimately considered lieux de memoire while, conversely,

many that seem to fit by definition should in fact be excluded. What makes certain

prehistoric, geographical, archaeological locations important as sites is often precisely

what ought to exclude them from being lieux de memoire: the absolute absence of a will

to remember and, by way of compensation, the crushing weight imposed on them by

time, science, and the dreams of men. On the other hand, not every border marking has

the credentials of the Rhine or the Finistere, that "Land's End" at the tip of Brittany

ennobled in the pages of Michelet. Every constitution, every diplomatic treaty is a lieu
de memoire, although the constitution of 1793 lays a different claim than that of 1791,

given the foundational status of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; and the peace of

Nimwegen has a different status than, at both ends of the history of Europe, the Verdun

compromise and the Yalta conference.

[…]

Within the category, however, nothing prevents us from imagining every possible

distribution and necessary classification, from such natural, concretely experienced lieux

de memoire as cemeteries, museums, and anniversaries; to the most intellectually

elaborate ones--not only notions such as generation, lineage, local memory, but also those

of the formal divisions of inherited property (partages), on which every perception of

French space is founded, or of the "landscape as a painting" that comes to mind when one

thinks of Corot or of Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire. Should we stress the lieu de

memoire’s material aspects, they would readily display themselves in a vast gradation.

There are portable lieux, of which the people of memory, the Jews, have given a major

example in the Tablets of the Law; there are the topographical ones, which owe

everything to the specificity of their location and to being rooted in the ground--so, for

example, the conjunction of sites of tourism and centers of historical scholarship, the

Bibliotheque nationale on the site of the Hotel Mazarin, the Archives nationales in the

Hotel Soubise. Then there are the monumental memory-sites, not to be confused with

architectural sites alone. Statues or monuments to the dead, for instance, owe their

meaning to their intrinsic existence; even though their location is far from arbitrary, one

could justify relocating them without altering their meaning. Such is not the case with

ensembles constructed over time, which draw their meaning from the complex relations
between their elements: such are mirrors of a world or a period, like the cathedral of

Chartres or the palace of Versailles.

If, on the other hand, we were to stress the functional element, an array of lieux de

memoire would display themselves, ranging from those dedicated to preserving an

incommunicable experience that would disappear along with those who shared it--such as

the veterans' associations--to those whose purpose is pedagogical, as the manuals,

dictionaries, testaments, and memoranda drafted by heads of families in the early modern

period for the edification of their descendants.

If, finally, we were most concerned with the symbolic element, we might oppose, for

example, dominant and dominated lieux de memoire. The first, spectacular and

triumphant, imposing and, generally, imposed--either by a national authority or by an

established interest, but always from above--characteristically have the coldness and

solemnity of official ceremonies. One attends them rather than visits them. The second

are places of refuge, sanctuaries of spontaneous devotion and silent pilgrimage, where

one finds the living heart of memory. On the one hand, the Sacre-Coeur or the national

obsequies of Paul Valery; on the other, the popular pilgrimage of Lourdes or the burial of

Jean-Paul Sartre; here de Gaulle's funeral at Notre-Dame, there the cemetery of

Colombey.

These classifications could be refined ad infinitum. One could oppose public sites of

memory and private ones; pure sites, exhaustive of their commemorative function--such

as funeral eulogies, the battlefield of Douaumont or the Wall of the Federes--and those

composite sites in which the commemorative element is only one amid many symbolic
meanings, such as the national flag, festival itineraries, pilgrimages, and so on. The value

of a first attempt at a typology would lie not in its rigor or comprehensiveness, not even

in its evocative power, but in the fact that it is possible. For the very possibility of a

history of lieux de memoire demonstrates the existence of an invisible thread linking

apparently unconnected objects. It suggests that the comparison of the cemetery of Pere-

Lachaise and the Statistique generale de la France is not the same as the surrealist

encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine. There is a differentiated network to

which all of these separate identities belong, an unconscious organization of collective

memory that it is our responsibility to bring to consciousness. The national history of

France today traverses this network.

One simple but decisive trait of lieux de memoire sets them apart from every type of

history to which we have become accustomed, ancient or modern. Every previous

historical or scientific approach to memory, whether national or social, has concerned

itself with realia, with things in themselves and in their immediate reality. Contrary to

historical objects, however, lieux de memoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they

are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs. This is not to say that they

are without content, physical presence, or history; it is to suggest that what makes them

lieux de memoire is precisely that by which they escape from history. In this sense, the

lieu de memoire is double: a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own

name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations.