Beyond Memory. Can we really learn from the past?

Sarah Gensburger, Sandrine Lefranc

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES
Series Editors: A
 ndrew Hoskins · John Sutton PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
MEMORY STUDIES
This book provides a fresh perspective on the familiar belief that memory policies
are successful in building peaceful societies. Whether in a stable democracy or in
the wake of a violent political conflict, this book argues that memory policies are

Beyond Memory
Sarah Gensburger · Sandrine Lefranc
largely unhelpful in preventing hate, genocide, and mass crimes. Since the 1990s,
transmitting the memory of violent pasts has been used in attempts to foster
tolerance and fight racism, hate and antisemitism. However, countries that
invested in memory policies have overseen the rise of hate crimes and populisms
instead of growing social cohesion. Breaking with the usual moralistic position,
this book takes stock of this situation. Where do these memory policies come
from? Whom do they serve? Can we make them more effective? In other words,
can we really learn from the past? At a time when memory studies is blooming,
this book questions the normative belief in the effects of memory.

Sarah Gensburger is a Senior Researcher in Social Sciences at the French

National Center for Scientific Research, France. Her work focuses on public
policies of memory and social appropriations of the past in Western democracies.
Sandrine Lefranc is a Senior Researcher in Social Sciences at the French National
Center for Scientific Research, France. Her work focuses on postconflict societies
and transitional justice.

Beyond Memory
Can We Really Learn
From the Past?
Sarah Gensburger
Sandrine Lefranc
ISBN 978-3-030-34201-2

9 783030 342012
To Noah, Tristan, Norah, Esther and Jacob,
members of the “future generations”
Introduction

“Forgetting the past means being condemned to repeat it”. This motto has been the inspiration
for the widespread development of memory policies since the late 1990s in North America,
Europe, and throughout the world. These globalized policies aim to articulate both the good
and the bad, and speak them to everyone, in order to enable citizens to learn “the lessons of
the past” and to build peaceful societies. They express a belief that memory can help us to
build the future. Yet, after more than twenty year of these memory policies, the development
of terrorism, populism, and discriminations in contemporary societies forces us to conclude
that they have well and truly failed. Instead of the quiet social cohesion and tolerance they
hoped for, the countries that invested in these programs have seen the rise of populisms of all
kinds. Evaluating the impact of these memory policies is no easy task. Those who attempt it
generally end up moralistic or towing a party line.

Up until now, two mains criticisms have been levelled at these memory policies. A large
proportion of the existing literature, particularly by historians, condemns some of these
policies for taking the wrong direction, and for using and abusing the past (Macmillan, 2009).
A more recent approach from a moral perspective, denounces the very principle of these
policies and emphasizes the importance of forgetting (Rieff, 2016 and 2011). This book goes
beyond both of these criticisms and the opposition between historians and moralists. It does
not seek to evaluate the good and bad uses of history. Instead, it focuses on demonstrating
how this debate is framed in the wrong terms and calls for a renewed understanding of what
memory can and cannot do.

The field of memory studies is attracting so much attention that the number of books in this
area has become inordinately large and diverse, spreading from the subfield of transitional
justice and human rights to that of museum studies. This book intends to break with a large
portion of the existing literature. It takes a critical perspective on the normative belief in the
effects of memory, which is at the heart of so many of the studies dedicated to the presence of
the past in contemporary societies. This critical approach is all the more innovative in that it
does not begin from a normative standpoint, but rather from a close knowledge of the
numerous empirical studies – which are themselves responding to the effects of memory and
these policies – emerging around the world.
This book takes a step back to ask– where do these memory policies come from? What do
they actually do? Whom do they serve? Can we make them more effective? And, in light of
all this, what lies beyond memory?

Contemporary society is imbued with the presence of memory. This “memory boom” has
given rise to myriad scientific studies and numerous public debates, in western democracies
as well as in authoritarian regimes and countries emerging from conflict. Yet the various
participants in these debates, even when they are involved in violent controversies, do not
challenge the fact that remembering the past is liable to have an impact on social behavior,
both now and in the future.

The development of memory policy has raised many questions. Are we commemorating the
“right” past? Should we limit ourselves to condemning perpetrators? Should we prevent
victims from taking advantage of their new recognition? Should we defend “subaltern”
memories over “dominant” ones and thus remember those “forgotten by history”, such as the
legitimate victims of colonial conflicts? Should we prioritize history or memory? Should we
welcome a certain degree of “forgetting” rather than encouraging an excessive presence of the
past?

Although these political and moral questions are interesting, they do not provide insight into
what we would actually do if we had to make a firm decision one way or the other. This book
breaks with the existing literature in that it pursues a genuine understanding of what is
actually at work in these contemporary reminders of the violent past. We therefore set out to
consider the ways in which memory policy could be more effective in reaching the goals that
are ordinarily assigned to it, or how its objectives could be re-conceptualized.

To do so, the following pages bring together studies conducted in a wide variety of disciplines
– from social psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, political science and economics.
Although the French context and the canonical case of the memory of the Holocaust will be
given particular attention, this discussion relies on a integrative approach to memory policies
in different part of the worlds, in western democracies, such as the United States and France,
as well as in countries emerging from conflict in South America, the Great Lakes region of
Africa, and the former Eastern Bloc.
This book therefore provides an unusual perspective on the widely shared belief that memory
policy are effective tools in building peaceful societies, whether in stable democracies or in
the wake of violent political conflicts. Citizens are not always fooled by this consensus -
whether they are political figures, administrative personnel, professionals working in the
culture sector, teachers and other educators, academics, or the general public; they are not
necessarily uncritical, far from it. Yet, despite this, they have good reason to continue to
believe (or pretend to believe) that these policies have the power to prevent the return of
violence and to help build better societies. A better understanding of what these politics
actually constitute and what they do, will enable us – perhaps – to envisage reforming them,
and to explore new ways of thinking about what can prevent collective violence, if that is
indeed possible.

Let’s start with an observation: our lives are peppered with reminders of the past. This is
nothing new – states are very good at shaping memory. All those in positions of political
power have forged traditions that combine “official histories”, glorification of great deeds,
invention of legends, and ostracism of the vanquished. However, the First World War marked
a break from this, leading to the democratization of state references to the past. Policy was
progressively negotiated more explicitly, firstly with veterans and their families, and local
government. Then, from the 1970s onward, minorities and victims’ representatives began to
challenge the official narratives and have their versions of events heard. This was the time of
“negative” memory (Rousso, 2016), which exhumed the wrongdoing of the nation in the
name of human rights. But although the perpetrators of these crimes are brought to light, they
are rarely punished. Governments today rarely impose sanctions for historic crimes, and when
they do, it is seldom with the ferocity of the “victor’s justice”. Criminal justice seems to be
less a concern here than the denunciation of “hate speech” or the encouragement of “citizens’
vigilance”. The state is no longer interventionist, yet it paradoxically increases the number of
initiatives in this area, sometimes inspired by other countries. Although there is a global
“crusade” against “forgetting” that pushes reluctant states to account for the violence of their
pasts, policies tend to focus on the victims. It is they who must be distinguished from the
guilty, named, honored, compensated, and appeased. The goal is to help citizens identify with
their suffering.

But although the ways of talking about this have changed, one key conviction remains
constant. Memorial programs prescribe representations and therefore attitudes, be they
“patriotic” or “humanist”. This is true whether the state is a triumphal transmitter of national
identity or whether it is tangled in a throng of contested identity projects, whether crowds
gather around monuments or shun them, whether citizens demand their removal or their
protection. The mention of violent pasts always takes the form of an enlightened narrative that
encourages each individual to learn the lessons of the past and change their behavior. Such
narratives once advocated the model of the loyal soldier; today they promote tolerant citizens,
or – when the past is used by political extremes – encourage exclusion.

Why should memory be promoted and transmitted at school, through museums, on television,
through monuments, commemoratives ceremonies, “memory” trials, or even during truth
commissions1? So that members of the public know the facts, understand the issues of the
present, and adapt their behavior accordingly, now and in the future. Few would doubt that
contemporary memory policies help build social cohesion, as well as tolerance among
individuals. Memory policies today are the corollary of past policies to incite hatred, which
were often used by bellicose authorities that also mobilized (and sometimes continue to
mobilize) reminders of the past in a very different way (for hate propaganda, calls for
vengeance, or references to a supposedly humiliating defeat). What memory has done in the
past it has the potential to undo.

Who should memory policies be targeted at? At individuals and groups that are considered
intolerant? So that they might be persuaded, and overcome their prejudice? Or should it be
directed at the victims of past political violence, to “give them back their dignity”? Or at those
who are already tolerant and benevolent, to strengthen their dispositions? Or perhaps those
who remain indifferent? Should memory policies focus on “what should be done” or “what
should not be done”? The answer from policy makers is often vague – they should talk about
“good” and “evil” and do so with and for everyone.

1.
Truth commissions are temporary institutions that charge apolitical people who have "good reputations"
(academics, church figures, doctors, et cetera), with writing the history of civil war or oppression, based in
particular on testimonies from witnesses. Since the 1980s, approximately 40 such commissions have been set
up. Truth commissions are now subject to UN guidelines and have become a model in Europe. See the 2008
resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
https://www.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?sourcedoc=/Documents/Publications/RuleoflawTruthCom
missionsen.pdf&action=default&DefaultItemOpen=1 (accessed 12 September 2019) and the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe, “Use of experience of the “truth commissions””, resolution 1613 of May 29
2008, http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-EN.asp?fileid=17647&lang=en (accessed 12
September 2019).
As parents of young children, we also profess our belief that it is possible to shape better
citizens through memory, first among them the “future generations” whom we teach and
raise. Others, who have political beliefs that differ from ours, believe that recalling the past
can provoke hatred and intolerance that they are looking for in their conquest of power.

The idea that it is possible to use memory and “lessons from the past” to arm today’s citizens
against future violence is a welcome band-aid for our insecurities; it protects the individual
who subscribes to it from doubts they may have about their own moral convictions. This
belief in the effects of memory has been institutionalized in the form of public policies and
through the increasing number of specialized institutions, both of which have been
transformed by dedicated professionals convinced of how useful they are. For some
observers, this may provide the only moral norm compatible with a globalized world
(Alexander, 2002; Levy and Sznaider, 2010). Describing this belief and the concrete way in
which it is implemented constitutes the first chapter of this book.

One thing is clear however. The development of memory policy has not been associated with
the development of a more tolerant or peaceful society. We may speculate about what touches
people’s hearts – from the grand narratives of states to the intimate stories of victims – but
this is not easy to demonstrate. Researchers have shown that just because we applaud a
president who evokes the glorious past or orders citizens to be tolerant, that does not mean
that we listen, that we internalize the discourse, or that we alter our behavior (Mariot, 2011).
In this case, like at a commemorative event, attendance does not mean support. We may act in
a particular way (applauding, yelling, yawning, quietly commemorating) because the event
encourages us to do so. We might actually be silently trying to remember a shopping list, as
we listen to the official list of those who died for the homeland. Positive national memory or
negative disparate memories may only have the power we give them.

There is a great temptation to try and measure the effectiveness of memory policy. However,
evaluating the impact of public policy on hearts and minds is difficult, even impossible.
Academics who attempt it often stumble into a political debate. They are caught between
deploring the weakening of national identity and defending the recognition of victims’
identities, between the condemnation of exclusive reminders of the past, and demands for the
promotion of inclusive memory. We can see this in the debates that followed the events in
Charlottesville in September 2017 and the related discussions about the social status and
effects of monuments.

However, the social sciences enable us to put the question differently. Memory policies, both
in relatively peaceful democracies and in post-conflict situations, bring ordinary social beings
in contact with each other. These individuals live parallel, evolving lives in various worlds
(familial, social, professional, gendered, local, etc.). The public is never directly exposed to
memorial content, whether at school, in museums, in courtrooms during the hearings of
victims or trials, or before monuments. The strength or weakness of calls for tolerance and
instructions to “refuse discrimination” and to “never kill or consent to murder” all depend on
exchanges between individuals, as well as their attitudes toward groups and institutions. If we
assume that we learn from the past, it is because we imagine the transmission of past violence
(at school, through museums or institutions dedicated to rewriting history) as the encounter
between an attentive, receptive student and a teacher who has decided to provide in-depth
civic education. In so doing, we put the social world on hold. We overlook the complexity of
the implementation of any policy, the misunderstandings that unavoidably arise from their re-
appropriation, the decisive importance of the social status of their defendants, the multitude of
reasons actors may decide to act, their moods at the time, and so forth.

The second chapter of the book will focus on the study of these very ordinary social facts:
memory policies as they are implemented. We will then observe the limits of these policies
and their possible negative side effects. Injunctions to remember draw their strength, and their
weakness, from interactions and depend on the social situation of individuals. More simply
put, our individual personalities and how open and generous we are, count. We try to be
coherent with our understanding of ourselves, with what we believe ourselves to be, but we
answer “yes” or “no” to a demand (to kill, to save, to not insult, to help) according to how it is
put, the context, and the way others may judge us. An individual is not tolerant simply
because he or she is open-minded, well-educated, and warm-hearted, but also because of the
political context, our situation and our state of mind at the time, the expectations of our peers,
or the smile of the “other”.

The third and final chapter will seek to understand why memory policies continue to flourish
in spite of this. Their indirect, relational effects are clearly visible here. Our hypothesis is that
the impact and efficacy of these policies can be felt in the way they reverberate through a
multitude of situations in different social spheres (some of which include memory
professionals), and that this is what gives memory policies their strength. Calls for
remembrance, and for the past to never be repeated, are only effective if they have similar
echoes in different social spheres, if they exist within a network of powers. This is
particularly true in states that do not have the means (in the wake of civil war for example) or
the desire (in democracy) to be overly interventionist. Governments are all the more
vociferous and loquacious when they are no longer able to prescribe political persuasions or
identities, at times when their ability to guide the political economy seems fragile. We have to
shift our gaze from the solitary individual, directly targeted by the lessons of the past, to the
indirect ways in which these policies may be effective. We should look not at the historical
content that these policies are intended to transmit (Macmillan, 2009), but rather at the range
of social relations that they actually produce. This book therefore seeks to shed new light on
the very consensual belief in the efficiency of memory policies in constructing peaceful
societies, whether in stable democracies, or in post-conflict situations, in France or elsewhere.
Individuals – whether politicians, public servants, cultural professionals, teachers and other
educators, academics, or the broader interested public, but also victims – are not always taken
in by this, far from it. Yet they have good reasons to keep believing (or to pretend) that these
policies are able to prevent the return of extreme violence, and to contribute to building better
societies more generally. Here we again seek to subject both these reflections and the memory
policies that inspire them, to sociological analysis. By knowing what these policies really are
and what they really do, we may be able to attempt to reform them and find new ways of
thinking about how to prevent collective violence – if that is indeed possible.

There are many different terms to evoke the political aspect of the contemporary presence of
the past (Olick et al., 2011): “uses of the past” (whether their authors label them as “social” or
“political”), “policies of the past”, or “memory policies”. This book is not the appropriate
place for a discussion of these terms because this debate, although fundamental, has already
been conducted in other places. However, because we must name these phenomena and
condense them into an analytic object that can only partially describe the social world, we will
use the term “memory policy”. We define the latter as actions that mobilize references to the
past in order to impact on society and its members and transform them. In the remainder of
the book we will focus more broadly on all arrangements that mobilize references to the
violent past, particularly in order to prevent violence and intolerance. Because nothing allows
us to assume that there is a difference in nature between similar arrangements mobilized in
established democracies or post-conflict situations (which happen to be our two areas of
expertise), we will use comparative analysis to examine the broadest possible palette of
memory policies. Although the latter can be defined by their objective to modify or preserve
the memory of violent events from the past (whether glorious or shameful) with the goal of
influencing contemporary society, there is no justification for limiting our analysis to
examples we are familiar with. These places of memory may be specialist museums,
classrooms, courtrooms, or even football fields – for example when an international ONG
organizes a game between mixed teams in a country where civil war has separated ethnic or
religious groups in the past.

Bibliography

Alexander, J. C. (2002). On the social construction of moral universals: The “Holocaust”

from war crime to trauma drama. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(1), 5-85.
Levy, D. & Sznaider, N. (2010). Human Rights and Memory, Penn State University Press.
MacMillan, M. (2009). The uses and abuses of history. Penguin.
Mariot, N. (2011). Does acclamation equal agreement? Rethinking collective effervesence
through the case of the presidential “Tour de France” during the 20th century. Theory &
Society, mars 40(2), 191-221.
Olick J.K. & al. (2011). The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rieff, D. (2016). In Praise of Forgetting. Historical memory and its ironies, New Haven:Yale
University Press.
Rieff, D. (2011). Against Remembrance, Melbroune University Press.
Rousso, H. (2016). Face au passé: Essais sur la mémoire contemporaine. Paris: Belin.
Chapter 1. The making of memory policies

All public policy has a social function – reducing inequalities, fighting unemployment, or
boosting economic growth – and draws its legitimacy from this. But memory policies are
even more ambitious. They hope to have a direct impact on the way all individuals behave,
and interact. They are seen as having the power to shape minds, touch hearts, and build social
connections; and in so doing, to increase tolerance within democratic societies, and make
coexistence between enemies possible in post-war contexts. The development of these
policies is also based on the constant repetition of what seems to be a deep-held belief: that
knowing the tragedies of the past means being able to build peaceful and tolerant societies in
the present – and prevent the return of hatred and violence. Today this belief is the object of a
broad consensus within contemporary societies, from governing elites to ordinary citizens,
from the state to local municipalities. It has led to the implementation of memorial tools of
various kinds as part of policies that are based on an instrumental and functional approach.
Memory policies cannot be limited to simply expressing things; they must be effective. In
other words, they must have an impact on the individuals and on the societies they are
targeted at.

Remembrance as a way to open minds and hearts

Memory policies are first and foremost policies of knowledge. This explains why so many
historians are involved in museums, exhibitions, or memory commissions. They collect
evidence, whether from archives or eyewitness accounts, from which they build knowledge
and document events. These memorial institutions are considered spaces of “truth”, although
curators are often careful to identify multiple, subjective, social, or expert truths. In fact, this
is now the name of one of the most common institutions of these memory policies today: truth
commissions. In this context, memory work must prevent victims carrying out acts of
vengeance, enable the stabilization of political regimes, and establish lasting peace in
societies.

The leitmotiv of memory policies

By revisiting painful or conflict-laden pasts, memory policies are supposed to settle debts,
cleanse wounds, and appease trauma – all expressions that reflect the importance of
transposing individual psychological mechanisms onto the social level. All the actors
involved share the belief that the past has “lessons” to teach us, that only truth (knowledge as
opposed to forgetting) can prevent the return of violence, because when the past is forgotten
we are destined to repeat it – a familiar leitmotiv. And if a conflict is periodically reignited
through reminders of the past, instead of being appeased, this only encourages people to move
beyond it. The unique testimonies of the victims are collected and put in the spotlight, to
make them into a shared heritage.

From this point of view, memory policies are one of the rare moments in which societies
collectively test, (re)define, repeat, and clarify their shared values. Ultimately, they are
designed to serve civil harmony and thus lasting peace. By giving individuals who come
together in public shared history and values, memory policies serve to harmonize “hearts” and
“minds.” During the inauguration of the memorial at the Camp of Rivesaltes,2 on October 16,
2015, the then French Prime Minister Manuel Valls illustrated this perfectly, saying “We have
come together so that the memory of yesterday’s contempt reminds us of our duty today, and
prevents the repetition of such horror tomorrow […] All the sites of memory are our forward
outposts in this reconquering of hearts and minds that we must wage in the name of the
Republic and all those who identify with it […]. Among all these sites of memory, schools –
because it is above all at school that it all happens – have solid tools for transmitting values,
for training citizens” (our emphasis). This discourse resonates with other echelons of the
French state. Several departments3 now conduct “memorial actions” that are supposed to
protect human rights through the mediation of lessons from history.4

This rhetoric, which is at the foundation of memory policies, exists in much the same way
outside France. If we stay at the level of heads of state, we only need to cross the Atlantic to
find an example. In June 2015, in a ceremony honoring Clementa Pinckney, the African

2
The Camp of Rivesaltes is situated in the south of France, near the Spanish border, and was used by the French
state to detain families of Spanish refugees during the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War, it was
one of the main holding camps for foreign Jews deported to Auschwitz outside the zone occupied by the
Germans. From 1962, following the Algerian war, it was used to detain Harkis, Algerian soldiers who fought for
the French.
3
Departments are an intermediary administrative division in France, between regions and towns. There are
ninety-six in metropolitan France.
4
https://www.isere.fr/Deliberations/Delibs/2012/D0ITT.pdf (Consulted July 17, 2017).
American pastor killed in Charlottesville, President Barack Obama used the exact same image
of hearts and minds, so essential in memory policies. He paid homage to the victim, who he
said had understood that “history can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against
progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to
break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an
open mind. But more importantly, an open heart.”5 In April 2012, President Obama spoke
outside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, saying: “We must tell
our children. But more than that, we must teach them. Because remembrance without resolve
is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing. In this sense, "never again" is
a challenge to us all – to pause and to look within. "Never again" is a challenge to reject
hatred in all of its forms – including anti-Semitism, which has no place in a civilized world.
And today, just steps from where he gave his life protecting this place, we honor the memory
of Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, whose family joins us today. "Never again" is a challenge to
societies. We’re joined today by communities who’ve made it your mission to prevent mass
atrocities in our time. This museum’s Committee of Conscience, NGOs, faith groups, college
students, you’ve harnessed the tools of the digital age – online maps and satellites and a video
and social media campaign seen by millions. You understand that change comes from the
bottom up, from the grassroots. You understand – to quote the task force convened by this
museum – "preventing genocide is an achievable goal." It is an achievable goal. It is one that
does not start from the top; it starts from the bottom up.”6
Indeed, this observation can be made at other levels of society than that of heads of state. At
all political levels, from the very local to the international, activists, international
organizations, the media, cinema, literature, tourism, culture, or even advertising7 all share the
same conviction.

Since 1995, when it recommended establishing a day to commemorate the Holocaust, the
European Parliament has linked commemoration, education, and the prevention of racist
violence. The Resolution states: “having regard to the upsurge of racism, anti-Semitism and
xenophobia facing the international community, whereas Europe must respond firmly and

5
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/26/transcript-obama-delivers-eulogy-for-
charleston-pastor-the-rev-clementa-pinckney/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c34240d7af41 (Accessed July 9,
2019)
6
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/23/remarks-president-united-states-
holocaust-memorial-museum (Accessed July 9, 2019).
7
Memory sites are sometimes even used as backdrops, for example for fashion photography, as was the case at
the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (Holocaust-Mahnmal, MWF).
clearly to these threats, insisting that the peace in Western Europe since 1945 will not
continue if the totalitarian and racist ideologies of the Nazis which led to the Holocaust of the
Jews, the genocide of the gypsies, the mass murder of millions of others and to the Second
World War are not prevented from spreading their pernicious influence, having regard to the
fundamental importance of education in preserving and passing on memories, particularly
with regard to the Second World War, having regard to the emergence of revisionist theses
concerning the genocide which took place during the Second World War, […] [the
Parliament] calls for an annual European Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust to be
instituted in all the Member States of the Union.”8 This same conviction is also visible beyond
the European level. In November 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted
a resolution that “urges Member States to develop educational programs that will inculcate
future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of
genocide.”9 Making an explicit connection between commemoration and prevention, 27
January – the date at which the Auschwitz concentration camp was first opened – is now an
international day of commemoration of the Holocaust and for the prevention of crimes against
humanity.

Politicians and experts on post-conflict policies agree that memory policies must express, and
rewrite, history by recasting the roles of the good and the bad, appeasing feelings of injustice,
and reaffirming shared values and narratives. The figure of the Righteous, who rescued the
Jews, is lauded; the former “subversives” of the Cold War are re-baptized “victims” in many
countries of Latin America. If memory policies manage to do all this then it is certain that
they will help dispel the specter of political or racist hatred and open conflict. This belief
brings us all together. In spite of our differences, we all take on this conviction, regardless of
our age or social background.

In 2014, more than 31,000 young people aged between 16 and 29, citizens of 31 different
countries, from Germany, Ukraine, China, the United States, France, or India, were
questioned about their attitudes to memory and the future.10 Of them, 90% declared that
“knowing the history of the Second World War makes it possible to avoid the errors of the

8.
Resolution on a day to commemorate the Holocaust, Official Journal C 166 , 03/07/1995 P. 0132
9.
https://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/res607.shtml (accessed July 12, 2019).
10.
Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah and the Fondation pour l’innovation politique; results and discussion
(in French) Mémoires à venir. Enquête internationale réalisée auprès des jeunes de 16 à 29 ans dans 31 pays,
2014, http://www.fondapol.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/MEMOIREaVENIR-RESULTATS-A2-BD2.pdf, p. 100
(accessed July 17, 2017).
past, prevent it from happening again”; they also agreed with the statement that knowing this
history allowed them to “understand the history of [their] country”, “honor the memory of the
victims”, “learn to respect those who are different from us”, and “help the victims”.11 Among
the respondents, 83% said they thought concentration camps sites should be preserved. The
main reason given for this was the need to “avoid it happening again”. Conversely, they
rejected the proposition that “it is the past, we have to put it behind us and forget.” Some
years ago, American and Canadian interviewees also expressed similar opinions on the
enlightening role of reminders of the past in contemporary society to avoid the repetition of
past mistakes (Rosenzweig, 2000; Conrad et al., 2009). Comments by ordinary citizens are
concordant with this, whether they are collected from visitors to memorial museums
(Gensburger, 2017; Antichan et al., 2016 and Antichan, Gensburger and Teboul 2016), or
during interviews on attitudes towards the past conducted outside the context of interaction
with memory policies (Klein, 2013). Ultimately, we (almost) all agree that public reminders
of past collective violence repair both people and societies, lessen the attraction of calls for
discrimination, and in so doing, guard against the risk of history repeating itself.

Emotion, dialogue and individuation

Rooted in this shared belief, the implementation of these policies relies on three key
assumptions thought to ensure their efficacy: emotion, dialogue, and individuation. First and
foremost, memory policies rely on the emotional impact of the programs they implement,
which focus on innocent children and humiliated women, privileging their unique stories, and
exposing their helplessness and their tears. Sometimes more confronting images are shown, in
ways that can be brutal, when the victors are in decision-making positions. In 1945, for
example, the Allied troops that were liberating the extermination camps forced German
citizens living nearby to watch the camps being dismantled and the survivors leaving; they
were forced to watch and therefore to know (Jarausch, 2006). The belief in the strength of the
lessons from the past and the emotion they convey has, however, become more systematic
since then. It is no longer only designed to force the guilty parties to make amends. Today it
applies to everyone and must have a preventative and not curative effect. Today raw
memories are presented brutally to shake up society, as is the case in Rwanda where the
memorials are more like ossuaries open to the sky (Dumas and Korman, 2012), or the
11
Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah and Fondation pour l’innovation politique, The memory to come, raw
data available in English at: http://data.fondapol.org/jeunesse/memoires-a-venir-2014/
National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, which provides an intense and
emotionally challenging depiction of the lynchings that took place in the American South
(Sodaro, 2018). Confronting, shocking, and provoking intense emotions in viewers appears to
be an effective tool in reconquering “hearts and minds”.

Yet at the same time, past violence is today discussed in a way that is more pedagogical and
careful to avoid overly-strong stigmatization of perpetrators – because their objective is also
reconciliation and dialogue. Memory policies therefore also draw on victims’ testimonies,
whether alone or alongside perpetrators (although the latter is often more in theory than in
reality). Eyewitness accounts, as we know, have become a social tool that has been privileged
wherever possible (Wieviorka, 2006), in legal spaces and museums, but also in new
institutions. In nearly forty countries, truth commissions have provided the opportunity for
everyone to hear eyewitness accounts and to talk together about the violent past. This forum
has allowed historians, religious leaders, lawyers, and psychologists to question the
perpetrators of violent crimes committed in the United States at the time of the Civil Rights
Movement, for example, or those responsible for the human rights violations perpetrated
under South African apartheid or during almost any of the authoritarian regimes in South
America. Remembering together, building “shared” memory, is seen as being the necessary
precondition to creating tolerant citizens and moving towards the reconstruction of national
togetherness. The United Nations now strongly recommends the use of truth commissions,
and has laid out a guide for good practice that recommends public hearings for victims of past
violence, and the publication of reports on this violence, aiming to awaken previously
dormant dispositions for tolerance in each and every viewer. 12

Memory policies aim for emotional effect. They want the past to be discussed. They are also
targeted at individuals rather than groups. They prioritize the testimonies of individual
victims, giving them a face and a name, and the narratives of memory policies often follow
the stories of people with unique life experiences. Finally – and this observation is one of the
guiding themes of this book – they are first and foremost directed at individuals. It is on an
individual level that we acquire knowledge, are moved by the experience of victims, and

12.
United Nations, Security Council, “The rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies.
Report of the Secretary-General”, S/2004/616, 23 August 2004
: https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/2004%20report.pdf ; “The rule of law and transitional justice in conflict
and post-conflict societies: Report of the Secretary-General to the Security Council”, S/2011/634, 12 October
2011 : https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/S_2011_634EN.pdf ; see also
www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/RuleoflawTruthCommissionsfr.pdf (accessed June 25, 2017).
consequently modify our attitudes towards the past. And from this point, as an individual
educated by memory, each of us must be able to distinguish good from bad, anticipate the
negative effects of dynamics of exclusion, and stand against hatred, as a pacifist, or a savior.
What makes its way into an individual’s heart and mind, through civic education, visits to
museums, or viewing documentaries, must remain there and guide his or her future behavior.
That is the ultimate wager of these policies. Of course, there are certain policies that intervene
more directly in the social sphere. Some peace building programs run by international
organizations thus set out to bring about discussions between enemies, like between Hutus
and Tutsis in Rwanda, or Croats and Serbs in former Yugoslavia, for example. They intervene
in the organization of schools and early childcare to impose diversity or subsidize companies
that also favor diversity. Certain governments prohibit references to ethnic identity,
inculcating large groups of the population with a particular version of history, or organizing
the attendance of their young people at inclusive holiday camps for example. This social
engineering, which attempts to create meta-groups bringing together formerly enemy factions,
is not a feature of ordinary memory policy. Nor is it certain to succeed; the social world is
adept at accommodating policies that seek to change everything and end up changing nothing;
it finds ways to work around them or void them of any meaning.

For the most part, memory policies aim to change people on the inside, to make them more
tolerant, and to kindle solidarities from the ashes of hostility. But we do not really know how.
Calls for social cohesion have echoes that are both less positive and more easily identified. If
the reminders of Nazi genocide constitute an effective defense against anti-Semitism today, it
is because they awaken individual vigilance but also because they contribute to undermining
those who promote and incarnate anti-Semitism. Similarly, transmitting the history of slavery
and the emancipation of African Americans is meant to help combat racial prejudice and
weaken partisans of white supremacy. In this respect, it is it significant that the National
Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public in the spring of 2018, was set up
by a non-governmental organization aiming to fight against the ultra-contemporary mass
incarcerations of African Americans, and racial discrimination within the justice system.

Past and present proponents of intolerance are grouped together here as a single threat. These
policies voice condemnation of acts of political violence. They cast their judgement on
history. In 1987, the trial of Klaus Barbie, who was the head of the Gestapo in the region
around Lyon during the French occupation, marked the beginning of a series of trials against
political criminals in France. These trials, often described as “trials for memory”, are now
frequently used by legal institutions from Latin America to Rwanda, as well as by the
International criminal Court in the Hague. Along with other reminders of political crimes,
these trials are an important element in the struggle against the impunity of political leaders
who ordered repression, provoked war, or made genocide possible.

Today, governments are required to make public statements – expressing their apologies,
repentance, homages to victims, and condemnation of those guilty of violence – as well as
increasing legal and symbolic initiatives. This is all the more important because practices
have not significantly changed: amnesties remain common. When criminal justice is not an
option, other means are used. Memory policies are therefore intended to help weaken former
strongmen, particularly when they remain strong (because they have weapons, have not been
pursued, or sanctioned, or because they still have a degree of legitimacy). These policies are
designed to be dissuasive for ex-belligerents, their partisans, or their supposed heirs. They
therefore have an immediate political benefit. We should not be too hasty to see this as the
vector of a moralization of power. Memory policies are policies like any others; they are thus
concerned with the proper use of fictions and subterfuge.

In the French case, which constitutes one of the guiding examples of this book, lessons from
the past are presented by political parties on both the left and the right, as a way of fighting
against the rise of the extreme right and the French National Front (FN, now the RN,
Rassemblement National). In his genealogy of the expression “devoir de mémoire” (duty of
memory), Sébastien Ledoux shows that calls for this duty to be respected began after the
profanation of a Jewish cemetery in May 1990 (Ledoux, 2016). To cite only one example of
such calls, the then Minister for Education, Lionel Jospin, inaugurating an exhibition on the
deportation of Jews in France just a few days after the profanation, said the perpetrators had:
“wanted to wound the Jewish community in France, in the most abject way possible, but
[they] also struck humanity.” He then added “so that memory does not disappear, and to give
all young people appropriate guides, […] the school has a role to play, a mission to fulfill.
The national education system is above all one of the sites in which collective memory is
created […]. It is a fundamental duty of the school system.” He then discussed the “so-called
‘revisionist’ theories negating the existence of the death camps” and condemned “the
presence of teachers and researchers in universities who defend extreme right ideologies” and
called on the “academic community” to “fully accept its duty to be vigilant” in this respect.
Serge Klarsfeld, the president of the Association for the Sons and Daughters of Jewish
Deportees in France (l’Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France), also
affirmed on March 30, 2015, that if Marine Le Pen were to win the 2017 presidential
elections, that would represent “the destruction of the memory of the Holocaust.” 13

In the United States, an identical mechanism has meant that commemoration, or more
precisely de-commemoration has become an accepted way to fight against racism and
publicly reaffirm the principle of racial equality. Since the tragic events in Charlottesville in
2017, which followed the decision of the municipality to move the statue of General Robert
E. Lee, many towns have removed or destroyed statues and monuments commemorating
supporters of slavery (Samuels, 2019). Once again, these memory policies are described as
tools to fight against contemporary racism. In 2018, for example, and following
recommendations from an expert committee, the city of New York decided to remove the
statue of gynecologist James Marion Sims who conducted medical experiments on African
American women.14 Eventually, a statue of a black woman will take its place on the original
pedestal, which has been preserved.

These policies constitute a privileged tool in the fight against the extreme-right in France, and
against white supremacists and ongoing racial discrimination elsewhere, and they are
increasingly an arena in which political parties confront each other over the diagnosis of a
“failing” of national identity among certain social groups. In France, after the 2015 terrorist
attacks in Paris, “young people from the housing projects” were particularly targeted in this
respect. The attacks were claimed by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but because they
involved young French men, they logically provoked a revival of political expectations
around memory policy. The speech made by the French President during the national tribute
to the victims of the November 27 attacks is a good example of this. “The November 13
attacks will remain in the memory of young people today as a terrible initiation to the
harshness of the world, but also as an invitation to confront that harshness through the
invention of a new form of action. I know that this generation will hold up high the torch that
we pass to them.”15 These words provide a particularly strong illustration of the role that the
state, and behind it – or at least alongside it – much of contemporary society, attribute to

13.
www.rtl.fr/actu/societe-faits-divers/marine-le-pen-c-est-la-destruction-de-la-memoire-de-la-shoah-selon-
serge-klarsfeld-7777185956 (accessed, June 25, 2017).
14
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/monuments/downloads/pdf/mac-monuments-report.pdf (consulted June 23,
2019).
15
When he took office, President Macron immediately and intensely engaged with memory policies, drawing on
the heritage of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and defending so-called “balanced” approach to the French
government’s use of the past. See in particular: http://www.la-croix.com/France/Politique/Emmanuel-Macron-
veut-reconcilier-memoires-2017-07-17-1200863390.
memory. It is seen as the vector and producer of civic engagement and education for
tolerance, as well as being an obstacle to the manifestation of political violence. It is the
means by which to identify good citizens, but also bad ones.

Memory policy tools

“He who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it.” This belief is reflected in many concrete
elements of public policy. Obviously, there is nothing new about commemoration, and in
particular the erection of monuments (Koselleck, 1998). Associated with paying homage to
the dead (heroes and unknown soldiers), the leitmotiv “never again” was by no means
neglected before the contemporary period. It evolved alongside political organization: the
monopoly of strong state authorities gave way to competing “memorialists” (veterans, local
authorities, victims’ associations) condemning state violence. The construction of monolithic
“myths” was replaced with the uncomfortable regulation of a proliferation of narratives.
Whether the state stammers and mumbles, or speaks loud and clear, it must speak.

Public actors of memory policy everywhere, whether elected officials or civil servants, as
well as the men and women they are in contact with (leaders of associations or simple
citizens), systematically reaffirm their belief that remembering dramatic or tragic pasts events
prevents them being repeated and helps create tolerant and peaceful citizens. There are three
key elements to these policies – the emphasis on emotions, the establishment of a dialogue of
truths, and the focus on the individual leveI – and there are several tools that are used to
implement them, in addition to sporadic commemorations. We will look at three of the most
important of these tools here: museums, schools, and truth commissions.

Memory museums and civic transformation

In 1993, the United States inaugurated the first national museum dedicated to the history of
the Holocaust. The inaugural speech by then President Bill Clinton made a direct connection
between the events then unfolding in Yugoslavia, the teachings of the past, and the social role
expected of the Museum. “We've gathered here to mark the opening of this Holocaust
Museum. We do so to help ensure that the Holocaust will remain ever a sharp thorn in every
national memory, but especially in the memory of the United States, which has such unique
responsibilities at this moment in history. We do so to redeem in some small measure the
deaths of millions whom our nations did not, or would not, or could not save. We do so to
help teach new generations the dangers of antidemocratic despots, racist ideologies, and
ethnic hatreds. [...] The Holocaust Museum will stand as a stark reminder that, of the many
tasks of democracy, the most imperative perhaps, are those of fostering tolerance for ethnic
and religious and racial differences, of fostering religious freedom and individual right and
civic responsibility; each of us to take responsibility for the welfare of all of us. [...] We
know, of course, that the new Europe is not yet free of old cruelties and that contemporary
horrors like the slaughter of innocents in Bosnia have not disappeared. Indeed, one of the
eternal lessons to which this museum bears strong witness is that the struggle against darkness
will never end and the need for vigilance will never fade away.”16
One of the stated objectives of the United States Holocaust Museum Memorial is thus to
produce a “civic transformation” in visitors, to make the contemporary world more just
(Linenthal, 1995).17 In order to do so, this museum was probably one of the first to implement
the systematic individualization of each visitor’s experience, above all seen as having to
convey edifying emotions. At the entry to the museum, an individual passport was therefore
offered to each visitor, so that they could take on the identity of a character from history as it
was told in the museum, whether a deported Jewish child or a convicted criminal.

Since this in many ways pioneering museum was opened, this type of museographical
approach has become common around the world. The goal is that individuals will have an
emotional journey, and understand the experiences of a particular victim, who is also
individualized, through an often-immersive tour of the museum. These memory museums
(Williams, 2007) have developed so widely since 1993 that they now constitute a new
international administrative category. Since 2001, these memorial museums in remembrance
of the victims of public crimes (MEMO) have an ad hoc committee within the International
Council of Museums (ICM): “The aims of IC-MEMO are to foster a responsible memory of
history and to further cultural cooperation through education and through using knowledge in
the interests of peace, which is also a key goal of UNESCO. The purpose of these memorial
museums is to commemorate victims of State, socially determined and ideologically
motivated crimes. The institutions are frequently located at the original historic sites, or at

16
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/president-clinton-speech-at-the-opening-of-the-united-states-holocaust-
memorial-museum-april-1993.
17
The 2019 controversy around the relevance of the comparison between the Holocaust and contemporary
immigration policies illustrates the fact that the importance of civic transformation through historical analogies
does not say anything about the meaning of the past per se.
places chosen by survivors of such crimes for the purposes of commemoration. They seek to
convey information about historical events in a way which retains a historical perspective
while also making strong links to the present.”18

These memorial museums cover various crimes and are found in all continents, in Europe of
course, but also in North and South America, and in Asia. In May 2019, the specific
committee within the ICM brought together 40 institutions including the Museo de la
Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Chili. In 2010, the then President of the country,
Michelle Bachelet had inaugurated this Museum of Memory and Human Rights, in Santiago,
with the aim of once again “increasing knowledge of the systematic human rights violations
committed by the Chilean state between the years 1973 in 1990, so that through ethical
considerations on memory, solidarity, and the importance of human rights we can strengthen
the national will so that events that target human dignity are never repeated.” 19 The majority
of museums in IC-MEMO, however, are dedicated to different aspects of the Second World
War and primarily situated in Europe.

France has more than a thousand history museums and nine “highly significant sites of
national memory”, of which two relate to the First World War, five to the Second World War,
and two to colonial wars. Aside from the permanent institutions, numerous temporary
exhibitions are regularly inaugurated; indeed, the Mission for the Centenary of the First
World War gave its support to more than one hundred exhibitions between 2014 and 2015.20

In France a number of sites related to the memory of the Holocaust have opened recently,
which has amplified the phenomenon of memorial museums. Here we will list just a few of
these new memorial spaces related to internment practices during the Second World War. In
2001, the Musée Mémorial des enfants du Vel d’Hiv (Memorial Museum of the Children of
the Vel d’Hiv Roundup) was inaugurated in Orleans to bear witness to the memory of the
camps in the Loiret region of France. In 2012, the Memorial de la Shoah opened in its new
location, the former transit camp of Drancy, where 63,000 of the 76,000 Jews deported from
France awaited their trains. In this respect, it is both a museum and a site of memory. In the
same year, after eight years preparation, the Memorial Site of Les Milles Camp opened.

18
http://network.icom.museum/icmemo/about/aims-of-ic-memo/ (accessed in May 2019).
19
https://ww3.museodelamemoria.cl/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/discurso-presidenta.pdf,(accessed in
January 2018).
20.
This figure was calculated based on the calendar of events for 2014 and 2015 on the website of the Mission,
http://centenaire.org/fr/en-france (accessed June 25, 2017). The minutes of the meetings of the scientific board
suggest a high degree of acceptance for proposed projects.
Finally, in October 2015 the Memorial of the Camp de Rivesaltes opened its doors as a
symbol of diverse contemporary society, having interned Spanish republicans, Jews, and
harkis21 in turn.

In each instance, these institutions and their promoters strongly reaffirm the way in which the
visitors’ confrontation with the past and immersion in memory must, on the one hand bring
about a transformation in their behavior towards more tolerance and citizenship, and on the
other hand foster peaceful social relations. The speech by Manuel Valls at the inauguration of
Rivesaltes Camp, cited above, is explicit in this respect. The Memorial Site of Les Milles
Camp presents itself as a history and human sciences museum, proposing that its visitors
“understand in order to act.”

Moving away from France and into the memory of slavery, the opening of the International
Slavery Museum in Liverpool, in the United Kingdom, in 2007, was the result of the exact
same conception of the museum-memorial as a factor in social change towards tolerance.
“The International Slavery Museum is needed. It is needed, yes, to help illuminate one of the
darker, more shameful and neglected areas in our history – an era in which this city played a
pivotal role. As well as this, it is needed because the consequences of that era are all around
us in the shape of a rich and vibrant multi-national, multi-racial Atlantic world, but also in
inequality of opportunity, racial prejudice, ignorance, intolerance and hatred. And these evils
will not be overcome through denial or through wishful thinking. They have to be tackled
head on, and the most potent weapon at our disposal is education; the essence of museums,
and the essence of the International Slavery Museum. It is becoming more and more widely
accepted that museums can be powerful engines of social change, through their educational
power [...]. Our hope and expectation is that our young people will, through studying the evils
of transatlantic slavery and of other, contemporary systems of human rights abuse, come to
reject racism as an iniquitous, pernicious and bankrupt ideology.”22

Finally, the mobilization of museums as tools for memory policies conceptualized as

programs for social transformation goes beyond formal tours. It feeds into many social
practices, in law as well as tourism. It makes museum-memorials quasi-administrations of the
welfare state and the governmentality of contemporary societies. Since 2016, for example, in

21
Harkis were Algerian soldiers who fought for France during the Algerian War of Independence, some of whom
were detained in camps when they sought resettlement in France after the war.
22
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/resources/opening_speech.aspx (accessed June 20, 2019).
France, the Memorial of the Shoah has organized “citizenship training” for people convicted
of racist or anti-Semitic offences in partnership with a number of regional appeals courts. 23 In
this context, confrontation with the past must convert those who, by their behavior, flout the
rules of the Republic. These new museums have also become tourist attractions in several
towns and regions. This “memory tourism”, which has developed on an international level,
has now become an important economic and administrative area in its own right, given that
recent reforms in France have meant regions are increasingly in competition with each other.
In 2010, for France alone the network of museums and memorials commemorating
contemporary conflicts had 84 members, and the sites associated with the history of these
events attracted more than six million people and generated nearly €45 million in revenue. 24

Memory education in schools

In addition to museums, the belief that remembering the past is a way to both prevent it being
repeated and successfully influence individual behavior often inspires public policy tools in
the school system. All around the world, school students are frequently the number one
category of visitors targeted by the memorial museums discussed above.
Young people, future generations, and future citizens indeed constitute the main intended
audience of memory policies. The Standing Committee of Ministers of Education within the
Council of Europe has continually repeated that history and memory are central elements of
the “development of democratic citizenship” and that “teaching history at school can and
should provide a significant contribution to the general training and education of citizens”
(Gensburger, 2008; Sierp, 2014).
This issue recently intensified in France; the year 2015 was marked on several occasions by
calls for memory. First there was the centennial of the First World War, then the seventieth
anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the anniversary of the Armenian genocide,
and finally the terrorist attacks in Paris. At a large conference on the Armenian genocide, the
then Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem reiterated that memory and republican
values are intended to be transmitted together:
“Because Republican citizenship is based on knowledge, a refusal of
fatalism, school has a central role to play in this transmission. It is the
school that can bring to fruition the promise the republic has made to its

23.
http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/le-memorial/les-stages-de-citoyennete-au-memorial-de-la-shoah.html
(accessed April 15 2019).
24.
www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr
 children, that they can grow up in equality and tolerance. It is the school
that can sow the seeds of shared memory. I want to pay homage here to
all the history and geography teachers in France who contribute to this
every day. The Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire, which is
part of the memory we share together, is studied by all students during
their compulsory schooling […]. At school, we transmit the awakenings
of citizenship, a culture of debate and ideas, and the fight against
prejudice and all forms of persecution. We learn the difference between
controversy, dialogue – which is at the heart of knowledge itself – and
manipulation or falsification.
To take another example, from the other side of the Channel, British Prime Minister David
Cameron, launched the commemoration of the Centenary for the First World War saying that
“our children must learn the lessons of the First World War.”25

In many places, including Europe, the school system’s use of the past to train citizens not only
to be patriots but also to be enlightened and tolerant, is not a recent phenomenon. It can be
traced back to the immediate postwar period (Eckmann and Heimberg, 2011; Legris, 2014).
In 1945, UNESCO was created to oversee educational and cultural policies of member states
and encourage intellectual and moral solidarity among humanity. This organization
emphasizes the importance of working on and from the past to fight against racism and
prejudice. Its slogan – “building peace in the minds of men and women” – is a good
illustration of the principal of conquering individuals discussed above.

However, the use of memory to educate citizens has become more dynamic in recent years,
being both systematized and institutionalized. In 2012, in France, the Minister of Education
created “memory and citizenship advisor” positions within the education system, in order to
better mobilize memory: “School has an essential role to play in the transmission of memory
to children and young people. It must also prepare each student for their life as a citizen
through an education to human rights and the rights of the child.”26 In keeping with this, in
2016, the Minister of Education and the Minister for overseas territories together launched a
competition entitled “The Flame of Equality” which “aims to increase knowledge of the

25.
David Cameron, “Why our Children must Learn the Lessons of the First World War”, Telegraph,
18 December 2013.
26.
http://eduscol.education.fr/cid73791/les-referents-academiques-memoire-et-citoyennete.html (accessed
June 25, 2017).
history of slavery, the slave trade, and their abolition, their legacy, as well as their current day
effects and heritage. This contributes to citizenship and education to Republican values. It
participates in the construction of collective memory around shared values in order to
encourage a feeling of shared belonging.”27 Once again, and like in the case of memory
museums, the pedagogy used here relies partly on exemplary individual histories that are
selected to facilitate a form of identification with students, who are themselves primarily
considered as individuals (Antichan et al., 2016).
Teachers are regularly encouraged to use ad hoc pedagogy for the aspects of the curriculum
related to the “painful past” (using films, inviting witnesses to speak to the class, visiting
memorial sites, and so forth). More than half of teachers in related disciplines (history,
French, philosophy) have used these techniques in secondary and senior school, in both
general and vocational streams. They see themselves as working towards civic education and
making students more vigilant. This civic history has gaps of course; the Holocaust is
mentioned systematically, but the violence committed by the French State during and after its
colonial period much less so. Nor is much said about the passivity of the French government
during the genocide of the Tutsis, in a Rwanda where a large number of French military
personnel were stationed; justice and history have each begun to clarify the involvement of
these soldiers alongside the murderous government. Yet this silence also reflects the same
belief in the behavioral effects of memory education.

Other countries have different ways of mobilizing memory in the school system to transform
society. In states that have experienced internal violent conflict, memorial tools can make the
school the opportunity for learning conflict resolution techniques to help create peaceful
societies. This is the case, for example, in programs inspired by “contact theory” developed
by social psychologists, in which young people from antagonistic backgrounds (Israeli Arabs
and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis, but
also young people in North America from different ethnic, racial, or religious groups) come
together in local schools or holiday programs overseas. This contact, which is more or less
short-term, exposes young people to others and their history – whether in the classroom, in
football matches, in dormitories, or in dialogue sessions about past controversies (Lefranc,
2011). Once again, these programs are not radically new, but they are now widespread. The

27
www.education.gouv.fr/pid285/bulletin_officiel.html?cid_bo=101533 (accessed June 25, 2017). The
inspiration for the national competition for resistance and deportation is clear, as President François Hollande
reiterated in his speech at the national day in remembrance of the slave trade, slavery and their abolition, on
May 10, 2016.
Franco-German Youth Office has organized similar experiences for young people from both
countries since the 1960s (Delori, 2008). The government and non-government institutions
that promote this kind of contact hope that it will undermine prejudice and lead to lasting
friendships between groups. The encouragement of tolerance and re-examination of memories
of conflict is thought to then spread among children and adolescents in other spaces, whether
in the family, in peer groups, with social acquaintances and so forth. Although these
experiments are all met with enthusiastic support, it remains fairly clear that the isolated
convictions and any rare lasting friendships formed here are not much of a match for the
consensual forgetting and imperious orders of political authorities.

Memory in courts and truth commissions

This same pedagogical and edifying power of public exhibitions of the past is attributed to the
trials responsible for judging political crimes. Indeed, the observation of the judicial
framework and the courts led Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider to forecast the emergence of
a global culture of human rights through memory (2004 and 2010).
These trials, which are described as being “for memory” are partly beyond of the constraints
of ordinary law. They break temporal restrictions through the non-applicability of statutory
limitations for crimes against humanity, they cross national borders through universal
jurisdiction, and they go beyond national institutions with ad hoc tribunals. Back in 1962, the
Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gourion justified putting Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS
officer responsible for organizing the extermination of the Jews, on trial, in terms of the
lessons that would be drawn from the court proceedings: “Our young people need to
remember what happened to the Jewish people” (Marrus, 2000, p. 39). Most of the trials
related to Nazi crimes gave rise to a similar reading: “conducted as exercises in collective
pedagogy, they [aim] not only to shed light on historical events but also to identify clear
morals in these events and shape the limits of collective memory” (Douglas, 2000, p. 213).
The number of class visits to these trials is testimony to this. In 1998, in Bordeaux, France,
10,000 senior school students followed the trial of Maurice Papon, a senior police official for
the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France. In 2014, in Paris, large numbers
of high school and university students attended the trial of Pascal Simbikangwa, a Rwandan
accused of genocide. Sometimes they even made up most of the audience at the hearing.28

28.
One of the authors was able to observe this trial in its entirety for the purposes of scientific analysis. All these
trials are generally filmed, to be used later in classrooms.
By establishing legal truth, these memory trials give each reasonably attentive citizen,
attracted by the media buzz, an “anti-denial vaccine” (Bertrand Poirot-Delpech in Jean and
Salas, 2002, p. 36). These hearings “are invested with the power to end the intergenerational
transmission of trauma” (Salas, 2002, p. 28) and may also have the ability to heal victims,
who are often responsible for instigating them. They might even have the power to purge
nations through catharsis similar to that expected of truth commissions (Osiel, 2006).
Criminal sanctions are therefore another element in the arsenal of tools for civic training and
reform.
International organizations have also become invested in the ways in which the histories of
past political violence have been documented. Truth commissions (reconciliation is
sometimes added to the title, as a clear indication of the social objectives pursued through the
public discussion of memories of violence) are the key institution of this transitional justice
that presents itself as a form of practical science of peace building after political or civil
conflict. These commissions have developed significantly since the 1980s, and even more
since the 1990s. Some forty commissions have been set up in the wake of dictatorial
repression, civil war, or genocide, by national governments who have given them the mandate
of a few months to establish the “truth” about past acts of violence and to lay out a policy
program for compensation (financial and symbolic) for victims.29 The most famous among
them were held in Chile, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, South Africa, East Timor, El Salvador,
and Morocco. Some have broader mandate, such as the South Africa, Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, which is responsible for providing amnesty to political criminals
who accept to disclose their actions. The truth commission protocol is now overseen by UN
guidelines and held up as a model in Europe. It was even used in the town of Greensboro, in
North Carolina, where community associations managed to reopen a debate – long closed in
the legal arena – on the 1979 massacre of civil rights activists by members of the Ku Klux
Klan and the American Nazi party (Ghoshal, 2015; Androff, 2012).

In a context in which criminal convictions for perpetrators of violence are rare (and amnesties
frequent) these truth commissions encourage a compromise between former enemies, as well
as the recognition of victims. The place for victims within these commissions means they are
seen as “benevolent” towards those who have suffered trauma, and able to rekindle dialogue
between victims and perpetrators, and even lead them to forgiveness. The philosopher Paul

29.
www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-digital-collection (accessed June 25, 2017).
Ricoeur said that such “a public exercise of political reconciliation" is a sort of forgiveness
(2004, p. 627-629).
Public hearings for victims are at the heart of this protocol. They become witnesses to the
past; they narrate the violence they were subject to, or the suffering born of lost loved ones.
Their memories also feed both work by historians and the commission’s reports. These
“tribunals of tears” (Lefranc, 2014) are often covered intensely by the media and encourage
the display of emotion. They are intended to both “heal” traumatized victims and re-construct
nations in mourning. Both drawing on and focused on memory, the goal here is “nothing less
than conceiving the modalities for a global transformation of a traumatized society, and laying
down the foundations for a new social contract” (Andrieu, 2012, p. 27), or “new national
mythologies” (Hazan, 2007, p. 12-13). Those who promote memorial policies thus aim to
prevent the return of hatred and war.

“Never again”: the effectiveness of memory policy

The mobilization of memory therefore has transversal characteristics, whether in the context
of schools, museums, truth commissions, or tribunals. First, these programs are targeted at
individuals seen as independent of their social groups: it is their minds, their hearts, and their
individual consciences that must be reached. Second, provoking an emotional engagement
from these individuals is seen as a way of allowing memory policies to achieve their goals.
Citizens who are emotionally affected react better to the lessons of the past – the emotional
burden will allow them to draw on this in subsequent situations. Finally, telling the story of
characters or judging one or several individuals enables both an identification with heroes,
“saviors,” and “righteous”, as well as the condemnation of the guilty. This identification is in
turn supposed to make these policies more efficient. When transmitted individually and
emotionally, the past can serve as an example for individual behavior in the present. The use
of memory – embodied and emotionally moving – has thus become standard practice. It has
become our means to fight against intolerance and encourage peaceful citizenship. So has the
spread of memory policy, which we have seen here through various kinds of indicators,
achieved all its desired objectives?

Our goal is not to say that as ordinary people we have no “historic memory”. Quantitative
surveys and studies prove the opposite. When asked, most of the population can refer to at
least some historical events: the two world wars firstly, and then in order of importance,
depending on the social characteristics of respondents, the fall of the Berlin wall, the 09/11
attacks, the 1973 oil crisis, decolonization, May 1968, the creation of the euro, and so forth. 30
Nor do we seek to deny that these reminders of the past have social power. The mention of a
war, and of the need to not forget it, generally provoke a desire among many social groups to
adapt to what the speaker is saying, whether in the form of acquiescence or concern (we
cannot say how deep). But can evoking the past make an impact on the individual, who we
assume would then act accordingly? This awareness of the painful past, or of historical crises,
does not necessarily have the strength – nor above all the impact– that it is assumed to have,
at least not directly.

Memory policies have not evacuated intolerance

So-called “negative” memory policies (Wahnich, 2011), which criticize excessive state
violence, are most often considered the reverse of the hate propaganda of violent authoritarian
regimes. The ability of the latter to provoke hate is seen as an implicit sign of the former’s
potential ability to restore tolerance. But in fact, there is nothing to confirm that the power of
one leads to that of the other. On the one hand, this is because we know that the exclusion of
an ethnic or religious group, for example, is only one of the elements enabling its
extermination. Other conditions have to be met for the groups armed by the state to be able to
kill. Those who carry out atrocities – whether they are peasants, soldiers, or army reserves –
are never primarily, or even essentially motivated by hatred for those vilified by propaganda.
On the other hand, the persuasive power of pro-genocide propaganda is largely, and above all,
the result of the state’s ability to convince, terrorize, and manipulate indifference in a specific
social, economic, and political context. It is not so much the content of this propaganda as the
(state) power that is behind it – and the way it resonates in key social groups – that influence
people and push them to act. Memory policies focused on guilt, and policies stigmatizing a
designated scapegoat are therefore not two sides of the same coin.

30.
Harris Interactive survey for Europanova, January 9-10, 2014; Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and
Fondation pour l’Innovation Politique, Mémoires à venir. Enquête internationale réalisée auprès des jeunes de 16
à 29 ans dans 31 pays, 2014. See also the research by the Cost network: Social psychological dynamics of
historical representations in the enlarged European Union, 2014-2018: http://costis1205.wixsite.com/home
(accessed July 17, 2017).
Memory policies undertaken by governments in the interest of restoration or preservation of
social peace are often compared with other antithetical approaches: a lack of any reminders of
the past (“let bygones be bygones”), on the one hand; or the prohibition of the past, “policies
of forgetting” (Loraux, 2002) or praise of forgetting (Rieff, 2016), on the other hand. At the
level of families or individuals, silence, secrecy, or denigration give rise to feelings of guilt,
resentment, and trauma, and even the repetition of violent acts. Transposed to the level of
society, this psychological observation guarantees that at the very least memory policies
prevent violence born out of a failure to speak, and thus they protect us against the worst. But
things that are repressed, even at a strictly individual level, are not systematically dangerous.
Above all, what is true for an individual or a small group is rarely true for a larger group. In
fact, the idea that secrecy is necessarily harmful is debatable; we know that resilience, the
ability of individuals to bounce back after a dramatic event, does not always involve extensive
discussions about what happened (Cyrulnik, 2002) and can in fact rely on a “refusal to testify”
(Klüger, 2001). Moreover, the hypothesis that “forgetting means being condemned to repeat”
is more a political argument than a psychological principle. The sociologist Ian Hacking has
shown that the idea that an abused child is destined to become an abuser was initially
formulated not because it was empirically founded, but because it had a great potential to
stigmatize and scare, and in so doing, be useful in fighting against child abuse (Hacking,
1991; Rechtman, 2013). The inevitable harm in “family secrets”, the unavoidability of
trauma, the danger of denial, these are all principles that psychology has yet to provide
support for, and this is even more true when society intervenes. Finally, and above all, states
do not have the same capacity as individuals or families to silence themselves, or indeed to
force themselves to speak.

Further proof of this can be found reading John Elster and Maurice Halbwachs. The first
reminds us that we cannot order somebody to forget; we can force them to stop talking, or to
repress, but it is impossible to totally to erase all representations of the past (Elster, 1986).
Genuine forgetting is a state that cannot be obtained by pure will. “It is possible to make
someone forget something, but the worst method would be to order them to do so, because
this instruction, if taken seriously, risks having the opposite effect” (Elster, 1986, p. 118).31
Maurice Halbwachs, a sociologist of memory, demonstrates that social groups and not nations
or institutions maintain memory or obtain genuine forgetting through the repeated mentioning

31
In this respect, David Rieff’s argument in favor of forgetting seems to be primarily a political and moral
position rather than an analytical one (2016 and 2011).
or omission – even allusive – of a person or event. It is in everyday social interactions that
collective memory is forged (1992; Gensburger, 2016). Although all governments are weak in
this respect, our contemporary memorialist governments are even more liable to be charged
with weakness. They are criticized on all sides – by victims’ associations as well as by
historians, accused of loquaciousness, and discussing a past that has never been so publicly
aired since it became a part of history. Even states that aspired to prescribing a national
identity, during the era of “positive” memory policy, such as that nostalgically evoked by
Pierre Nora (1996), did not manage to force people to forget. When their amnesty laws
forbade reminders of past tensions, they did not silence many; they merely prevented the
political usage of these tensions. Finally, it is worth adding that these memory policies are not
incompatible with a form of denial. Indeed, they almost always go hand-in-hand. All public
policies provide a framework for interpretation; recalling the suffering of a minority can
silence or subdue the suffering of another minority, or indeed a majority.

It is therefore difficult to consider memory policies in light of what they are not, what they
replace, or what the challenge. So how can we evaluate their ability to foster both tolerance
and to move beyond trauma? The memory of the Holocaust is, perhaps more than others,
systematically presented as a means of fighting against hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism.
And yet if recalling past violence is intended to prevent repetition and protect potential
victims, we must admit this has not been vastly successful. The development of memory
policies has not been associated with the advent of a more peaceful and tolerant society.

As we have seen, memory is often considered a tool for civic education. But young people’s
involvement with violent groups and ideas seems to be increasing (Zauberman et al., 2013).
Many Israeli and Palestinian students have participated in the “coexistence sessions”
organized by Seeds of Peace, an American charity, and have been thus encouraged to move
beyond their prejudices. And yet these two populations seem reluctant – and increasingly so –
to work towards peace. When these adolescents return to their war-torn homelands, they may
or may not maintain the friendships they formed, but they are quite simply confronted with a
political, economic, and social situation in which it is impossible to transform these personal
connections into the seeds of peace.

Records of anti-Semitic incidents, which memory policies are supposed to explicitly fight
against, are no more encouraging. Although there are difficulties with measurement and
definition, a general tendency can nevertheless be observed. In the United States, the Anti-
Defamation League (ADL) annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents recorded a total of 1,879
attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions across the country in 2018, the third-highest year
on record since ADL started tracking such data in the 1970s. In a year marked by a white
supremacist shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, which claimed 11 lives, and by a dramatic
surge in white supremacist propaganda activity nationwide, ADL’s audit identified 59 people
who were victims of anti-Semitic assaults in 2018, up from 21 in 2017.”32

In France, there were 82 anti-Semitic demonstrations in 1999, 105 in 2013, and 241 in 2014,
with a peak of 614 events recorded in 2012. The same thing is true for racism and intolerance,
although general evolutions are visible. The sociologist Vincent Tiberj and his colleagues
have developed a “longitudinal tolerance index”, designed to provide a condensed
longitudinal perspective on the evolution of prejudice towards minorities in France (the closer
the index is to 100, the more tolerance there is toward minorities). 33 This indicator has
declined since 2000, a year that marked the intensification and spread of memory policies.
Although tolerance increased steadily between 1990 and the mid-2000s, the indicator was at
58.2 in 2005, and 55.8 in 2014, thus reflecting an increase in intolerance.
If we see their target as being anti-Semitism specifically, perhaps reminders of the Holocaust
have been somewhat effective. In 2014, the tolerance index was 79.5 for Jews, 73.6 for Black
people, 62.16 for North African people, 53 for Muslims, and 28.5 for Romani people.
Although Jews still constitute a “separate group” for 28% of respondents, this proportion is
substantially lower than that declared for other groups, particularly Muslims (48%), and
Romani people (82%). The researchers also identified “the resistance of traditional
stereotypes” related to supposed wealth and privilege among Jews, which are fueled by
criticisms of a “dual allegiance” to Israel and France. They also reveal an unintended
consequence of the protection measures implemented after the terrorist attacks in particular.
This residual intolerance of Jews is an element of broader dispositions that vary according to
respondents’ social characteristics. Anti-Semitism is more pronounced among older people,
those who are less educated, those who have fewer resources, and those who have the feeling
that their economic situation is deteriorating. It also increases for those who identify with
Catholicism and right-wing politics: it is 58% among those close to the far-right FN (now the
RN), 37% among those who support the more moderate right UMP - Union pour la Majorité

32
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/anti-semitic-incidents-remained-at-near-historic-levels-in-2018-
assaults, accessed July 6, 2019.
33.
Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme, La lutte contre le racisme, l’antisémitisme et la
xénophobie. Année 2014, Paris, La Documentation française, 2015.
Présidentielle (now the LR – Les Républicains). The variations in these indexes, their
sensitivity to respondents’ social characteristics or political circumstances above all shows
that there is no direct correlation between memory policies and attitudes towards tolerance. In
this respect it is striking to note that “young people” appear to be the prime targets for
memory policies, even though these studies show that it is above all older French people who
have both better knowledge of historical events, particularly those related to the Second
World War, and yet also accept the anti-Semitic and racist stereotypes that contribute to
discrimination more than young people do.

Finally, if the expected impact of memory policy is to make us think twice about using
violence against others, we are likely to be further disappointed. Acts of intolerance, violence,
and racism have indeed increased significantly, both in number and intensity. In addition to
the terrorist attacks that have spread in several countries concerned by “memorial activism”
(Rousso, 2016; Gensburger, 2019), racist and anti-Semitic incidents – which are complicated
to measure (Ghiles-Meilhac, 2015) – are also on the rise in all countries that have been
involved in developing memory policies, whether in the European Union or the United States.
FBI statistics indicate a clear increase in anti-Semitic and racist hate crimes in 2018 in the
United States34; the situation in Europe is such that the category of hate crimes has been
developed by the European Agency for Fundamental Rights as a way to try to act on
contemporary society35 (Brudholm and Johansen, 2019). If perpetuating the memory of
violent pasts is supposed to reinforce tolerance and the rejection of discrimination, as well as
provoke behavior in keeping with these values – as politicians, experts, and citizens all agree
they must – the effects are limited. At the very least, the norms which impose demonstrations
of tolerance clearly do not apply to everyone.

In France, the “duty of memory,” which is regularly put forward in eponymous policies has
been an important tool for mainstream political parties against the electoral progression of the
far right (Ledoux, 2016) – but in vain. Indeed, the success of the extreme-right Front National
(FN) in the French political sphere seems like an ironic disavowal of memory policies. Far
from declining, the FN has been increasingly successful with French voters since the early
2000. In 2012, after more than 10 years of active policies around memory, partly for the
benefit of combatting the FN, two extreme right MPs were voted into the lower house for the
first time since two-round majority voting was introduced in 1988. Similarly, the FN score in

34
https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics (accessed July 3, 2019)
35
https://fra.europa.eu/en/theme/hate-crime (accessed June 15, 2019).
presidential elections has continued to progress steadily since 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen
(then president of the FN) was voted into the second round of these elections. In 2017, Marine
Le Pen, like her father before her, made it to the second round of the presidential election and
scored a record number of votes. In the last decade, the increase in number of events related
to memory has developed alongside an increase in the number of people voting for the FN.

This observation is of course not a correlation. It is not meant to imply that memory policy
fosters extremism and hate crimes, nor to reduce the progression of far-right parties to a
memorial issue. Other political parties have chosen to present this worrying political
competitor as the incarnation of racist ideologies, or even as the heir to the violent practices of
the Second World War. Other readings may be more appropriate – but perhaps it is simpler to
fight a party that incarnates hatred rather than one that reflects the failure of social policy, or
which has contradictory positions. So, although there may not be a correlation between the
rise of memory policy and the strengthening of the extreme-right, there is concomitant
development. Memory policies, their tools, and their sites of memory, have not prevented the
consolidation of this extreme right party. Furthermore, an identical observation can be made
for the rise of white supremacists in the United States, and for certain countries in former
Eastern Europe, for which the European Union implemented a memorial arsenal so extensive
that some authors have described it as a “memorial pillar”, upon which membership to the
union is implicitly dependent. However, the European Union’s involvement in the
development of inclusive memory policies in Poland has not prevented the democratic rise to
power of an ultraconservative right, which incarnates values and convictions that are
diametrically opposed to those of these memory policies, whether related to anti-Semitism or
the persecution of LGBT minorities. These observations lead us to explicitly formulate the
question which often remains implicit: do memory policies do what we expect them to do?

(Re)framing the question of the effects of memory policy

We can no longer avoid the question of how effective memory policies are. It has already
been posed by several commentators, expressing their concern or indignation. Both
researchers and journalists have expressed queries relating to the soundness of systematic
memorial voluntarism. David Rieff, for example, took a stand in Against Remembrance
(2011), and more recently documented the ironies of memory in In Praise of Forgetting
(2016). Up until now, the doubts expressed have fallen into two categories. Some expressed
the fear that over-repeating the same warnings would make them inaudible beyond the
immediate circle of activists, victims, academics and teachers, humanist activists, and the
administrative personnel who have become memory professionals. From this perspective,
memory policies have produced strong moral guidelines, but ones that only circulate in closed
groups. Other observers criticize the manipulation of civic rituals for ideological (most often
identity-driven or nationalist) objectives, by politicians on all sides (Offenstadt, 2009) – this is
not unreasonable from our perspective, as political scientists familiar with political
instrumentalization of both major and minor causes. Like Margaret MacMillan in her
denunciation of the “uses and abuses of history” (2009), the authors who condemn these
manipulations of the past do not see politicians as being solely responsible. The victims of
political violence themselves, their descendants, and the leaders of associations who seek to
represent them, can all be considered hungry for compensation and symbolic benefits – and
all in competition with each other. Academics and novelists have used expressions like “the
Holocaust industry” to criticize the commercial use of its memory (Finkelstein, 2001; Reich,
2014), “competition” between “memory entrepreneurs” (Chaumont, 1991) or the allegedly
propensity of the latter to take on “identity” or “communitarian” claims that are seen as
potentially threatening to national cohesion (Nora, 1996; Michel, 2010). In these analyses,
memory politics are seen as extending the past hatreds they should enable us to move beyond
(Rieff, 2016). Sometimes concerns are related to “social connectedness” which appears to be
threatened by the general ambiance of “victimhood” (Garapon, 2002), or the weakening of
shared references, a crisis of transmission (Traverso, 2005), a “tribalization of politics” (Stora,
2007), or even an “anthropological breaking point” that undermines the status of truth itself
(Coquio, 2015).
In spite of their diversity, these questions about the effects of memory policies are all
formulated in terms of morality and principles. They remain largely reliant on (quite
legitimate) normative considerations: disappointment about policies that so much was
expected of, and rebellion against authority figures who do not use them as they should be
used. Here we hope to reformulate the question of the effects of these memory policies in
different terms, giving it the simplicity that it often lacks. The social sciences encourage us to
critically examine the idea that these memory policies could have this kind of effects on civic
education, or conversion for those involved in violent conflicts.
How can we identify the effects of these memory policies? This question echoes the more
general reflections on the difficulties of evaluating the “effects” or “reception” of any public
policy (Spire, 2016; Revillard, 2017). Memory policies are specific, however, in that they are
directed (at least theoretically) at all citizens, rather than a group that can be defined to
measure reception. Moreover, they rely on instruments of symbolic public action, which are
essentially intangible and non-technical, and therefore even more difficult to evaluate. In the
age of big data we must also face the obvious: no quantitative study can convincingly
establish a causal relationship between the state resources invested in memory (financial or
human) and the decline of intolerant discourses (in voting rates, or survey respondents), or the
prevention of the repetition of violence (measured in years without conflict). The increase in
the number of attempts to systematically quantify the effects of memory tools (exhibitions,
truth commissions, and so forth), leads to a single undeniable conclusion: the empirical
difficulty of this project. As part of the French state’s new budgetary approach, implemented
since 2006 (Bezes and Siné, 2011), which requires that policy objectives and indicators of
success be made explicit, memory policies are one of the rare areas in which the success and
performance of policy is considered difficult, if not impossible, to calculate. Although a
decrease in explicit intolerance, reflected in actions or declarations is an indicator of the
success of memory policies (but this is complicated to confirm), their effectiveness remains
unclear. Indeed, their relative ineffectiveness is confirmed if we look at their target audiences.
From this perspective, the content is not always appropriated as expected.
In Belgium, for example, at an exhibition commemorating the Centenary of the First World
War with the intention of promoting peaceful relations between European states, visitors were
asked to express their opinions on a certain number of criteria as they entered and left the
museum. These measures are traditionally used to quantify pacifist sentiments in social
psychology. The results demonstrate that as they left the exhibition, the visitors demonstrated
decreased support for pacifism generally and an increase in nationalistic stereotypes. The
researchers who conducted the study hypothesize that, in keeping with the current norms in
this area we have already discussed, the exhibition focused on both raw emotions and figures
of victims. Yet these two elements tend to provoke a defensive reaction and a form of desire
for vengeance against the “Other”, instead of the pacifism and peaceful coexistence intended
(Bouchat et al., 2017).
Similarly, in terms of the transmission of memory in the school environment, qualitative
research in Germany has suggested that for certain students in certain situations the
transmission of the history of Nazism can give rise to anti-Semitic jokes in the schoolyard –
far from the universal objective of preventing anti-Semitism, but not necessarily a sign that
the authors of the jokes genuinely hate Jews; sometimes a joke can be just a joke (Oeser,
2019). Finally, research at the crossroads between schools and museums show that school
visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau for young Israelis do not produce dialogue between Israelis and
Poles, or between Jews and non-Jews. In fact, these school visits may encourage the
development of a feeling of separation, an “enclave” mentality for the Israeli teens, many of
whom leave with the feeling that it is impossible to genuinely exchange with Polish people, or
indeed with the rest of the world (Feldman, 2010). In this specific case, we do not observe the
education for tolerance through memory that was hoped for, but rather the reinforcement of a
form of belonging that excludes both the Other and the rest of the world.
An even more striking example of this comes from an exhibition on the history of Jewish
children in Paris during the occupation, where certain visitors interviewed ended up
mobilizing, of their own initiative, ethnic stereotypes that are vectors of discrimination – even
after stating at the beginning of the interview that their visit to the museum was to respect the
duty of memory and fight against hatred and intolerance. One women interviewed as she
came out of the exhibition talked at length about the fact that there were relatively few
“visitors of color” and “from immigrant backgrounds” among the exhibition-goers, a sign for
her that these groups do not fully adhere to the Republic and its principles, and that they are
“not really French”: “we do not have the same history […] or the same values” (Gensburger,
2017). This brings us a full circle. Memorial practice is no longer seen as a vector of
Republican values, but as a sign that those values are shared. It encloses the group that it is
supposed to open. Stigmatizing comments such as these, diametrically opposed to the
objective of memorialization, have been observed in visitors to other historical exhibitions,
for example related to the First World War (Antichan et al., 2016). Like a mirror image of the
civic expectations of the power of memory, individuals who are not interested in
commemoration are essentially disqualified as citizens. It does not take much to form in-
groups and foster the feelings of “us” and “them” that consolidate them – social psychologists
have demonstrated this by creating solidarities, which can become competitive, and even
hostile, even when they are formed entirely randomly (Sherif et al., 1961). What is
conceptualized as a means of unlocking exclusive identities, can easily end up supporting
other identities. What should be used to open, closes. In this case, memory policies have their
“experts” and those who are ignorant, but this social and cultural divide can reflect ethnic
identities and reinforce the dynamics of exclusion that these policies are supposed to combat.
Let us therefore try to understand why memory policies have trouble reaching their target,
when they do not have the opposite effect to that intended. Responding to this question means
moving away from the (futile) focus on impact, to reveal the various reception mechanisms of
memory policies. We will look at what individuals actually do with the events and
interpretations that are proposed to them, as they interact with projects mobilizing memory.
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Chapter 2: Memory policies in action

If we want to understand the apparent inefficacy of memory policies, we must first look very
concretely at the way in which they operate. They are not doing what we expect them to do,
so we need to look at the way in which they actually function, rather than criticizing their
moral foundation or politicization as a matter of principle. What happens when students
attend a commemoration, when individuals visit a memorial, when victims testify before a
truth commission, or when criminals are judged at a tribunal for memory: all of this has
sparked little curiosity up until now, whether from political leaders, activists, or researchers.
There are some studies, however, that allow us to identify the impact of memory policies
implemented in contemporary societies. Whatever context we look at – whether schools,
museums, truth commissions, or courtrooms – two key observations can be made. First, it is
clear that memory policies are primarily targeted at an abstract public. Rather than being
specifically and clearly directed at groups considered hateful or indifferent, they most often
address a universal citizen, who is presented as morally ambivalent (both good and bad) and
assumed to be receptive to these policies. This figure is contradicted by the knowledge
sociologists have accumulated, which suggests that the actual audience is far removed from
this imagined and largely imaginary portrait. It is true that we are all exposed to fleeting
references to extremely violent past events, and it would be good to draw lessons from them:
whether from novels, the media, or the commemorations designed to reach a broad “national”
public. But the few social science studies that exist clearly demonstrate that memorial events
primarily concern two groups: first students, who are a “captive” audience, and second,
retired people and professionals, a “faithful” and “expert” audience (Davallon, 2000;
Eidelmann and Raguet-Candito, 2002). Even the supposedly most attractive incarnations of
these policies struggle to attract large numbers. Among the five most popular museums in
France there is only one memorial museum: the Caen Memorial. This museum attracts less
than 400,000 visitors a year, just 5% of what the Louvre attracts. In other places, in post-war
contexts where memory is used for pacification, “ordinary people”, as non-governmental
organizations call them (Lefranc, 2006a and 2008), are the target audience. Yet once again,
those who benefit are far from average citizens. They are often members of specific groups
and even the same circles as the professionals who implement these memory programs. Basic
sociological observations reveal that the universality of lessons of the past is more localist and
parochial than it first appeared.
The second unavoidable and overarching observation is that before they can produce lessons
of the past for the future, memory policies provoke interactions in the present. Memory is
appropriated through social interactions, rejection or support, recognition or interpretation.
Although they are indeed “faced with the past” (Rousso, 2016), both the promoters and
targets of these policies must first experience things (school textbooks, exhibitions,
memorials) or exchanges (between students and teachers, between victims and judges, and so
forth) that are meaningful in the moment, in the context (Lahire, 1996), and in the social
space in which they unfold. Memory policies do not resolve conflicts from the past, and nor
do they foretell the future behavior of their audience. Their memorial message is by nature
distorted, because it is always embedded in social relations that give it meaning today, like
any other social process.

School memories: social “noise” in the classroom

The school’s role in transmitting and constructing national identities in the nineteenth and the
first half of the twentieth centuries is now well known. Even at that time, context was
important. Studies like those of Jean-François Chanet, on local and regional identities, which
he calls “petites patries” (literally “little motherlands”) or Katharine Throssell children’s
reactions to banal nationalism show that the appropriation of this educational message – in
this case patriotic – always operates through the local, but also social or religious, context
(Chanet, 1996, Throssell, 2015). It is most likely the same for the teaching of violent pasts, in
terms of their role in civic education. The few studies that have been dedicated to this (de
Cock and Heimberg, 2014; Brown, 2014), suggest that certain negative reactions around the
teaching of the Holocaust have been documented in France, particularly among young people
from Muslim backgrounds living in disadvantaged areas, who see this reminder of the past
through the prism of contemporary issues, in particular the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
(Brenner, 2015). Several studies suggest however that, overall, incidents relating to this
teaching remain limited, both in France and elsewhere, in Sweden, Belgium, or Switzerland
for example (Bonafoux, de Cock-Pierrepont and Falaize, 2007; Grandjean, 2016; Eckmann
and Heimberg, 201136). Our objective here is not to judge the accuracy of these different
conclusions, nor to support or condemn the possible rejections of the moralistic teaching of
history and its lessons. Instead, let us look at what actually occurs when teachers – and the

36
http://www.levandehistoria.se/sites/default/files/wysiwyg_media/teachersurvey_eng_webb.pdf, for an
international study (accessed July 19, 2017).
memory professionals or eyewitnesses upon which they rely – transmit or teach violent
histories in the expectation that students will draw conclusions for their future civic behavior.
Instead of looking at the intention to provoke emotions that govern a certain understanding of
teaching and the curriculum, let us look at the emotions and other reactions that are actually
expressed in the classrooms – in all their complexity. Our goal here is not to criticize attempts
to raise awareness by challenging their use of pathos as a matter of principle, but rather to
describe them.

Reticence: fulfilling one’s role as a teacher by evoking the violent past

This shift in perspective leads to the clear observation that there is a gap between teaching
recommendations and practices. Although the “civic dimension” is emphasized by teachers,
as was clearly demonstrated for the Swiss case (Eckmann and Heimberg, 2011), and although
in France many do use the pedagogical tools proposed by the Ministry for Education during
classes dedicated to the violent past, often the factual content of the curriculum remains the
core of the class. Teachers do not always follow the imperatives of this ritual of civic
conversion through memory, and certainly do not do so systematically.37 Aside from a
theoretical acceptance of the importance of the past in building today’s society, they do not
adopt the civic function that is ascribed to them as mechanically as we might think. For
example, and although we do not have a comprehensive study on this, there is reason to
believe that the international day for the memory of the Holocaust and the prevention of
crimes against humanity, January 27, is not often taken into account by teachers (de Cock and
Heimberg, 2014). This gap between expectations and practices is not due to the teachers’ lack
of support for values of humanism and tolerance, but primarily to the social space of the
classroom.
The class is a space for interactions between a professional, the teacher, and students who also
live in other spaces of socialization. In France, training for history teachers is primarily
focused on their knowledge of their subject, rather than on pedagogy or didactics. Once they
are in the classroom, having received a kind of professional socialization, most teachers
transmit facts, in keeping with the official curriculum rather than the commemorative
calendar. In so doing they confirm that the school remains a space for knowledge. Through
their professionalism, the teacher effectively disappears behind their authoritative discourse,

37
Aggiornamiento history and geography, thoughts and propositions for a renewal of history and geography
teaching, from primary school to university (in French), http://aggiornamento.hypotheses.org/, (accessed June
25, 2017).
which is primarily directed at the exam. Moreover, they convince the students (and indeed the
parents) that a consensual reading of history is possible (Tutiaux-Guillon, 2008). Turning
away from this professional habitus to construct an articulation between history and memory
is dependent on having time, and the ability to take a certain pedagogic distance, which seems
unlikely given the organization and means available, at least within the French national
education system.

Do memory policies foster indifference instead of tolerance?

Memory policies are very unevenly implemented in the school system. In any event, they do
not have the consistency the curriculum attributes to them – which does not necessarily have a
bearing on their mobilizing force in other areas, in particular politics. For various reasons –
collective dynamics, personal experiences, local context, or institutional opportunities – some
teachers do follow the injunction to promote tolerance. But is teaching actually effective when
it takes on this civic role, or when it is perceived as such by the students? The limited
influence of citizenship education has been observed in many countries; knowledge about the
institutional and political sphere is increasing, on the basis of the shared cultural foundation
transmitted by the school system, but this does not have an impact on political attitudes or
social behavior. This produces different effects depending on the social characteristics of
students. Studies in different countries have shown that the effects may even be contradictory
to those intended, leading to increased remoteness from political activity and civic
participation (Litt, 1963; Jennings and Niemi, 1974). It seems easier to reinforce norms in
groups that are already predisposed to them than to convince people who are genuinely
intolerant or simply indifferent.38 The few studies conducted on the immediate impact of these
lessons which draw on an edifying past to promote tolerance confirm this.
For example, an increase in historical knowledge about the Holocaust does not produce a
change in attitude among students who consider themselves close to the extreme right.
Whether they are socialised by highly politicised families who value learning or are anxious
to resist the adult world by subscribing to illegitimate ideologies and flirting with the
propaganda of recruiters, these students often have extensive knowledge of the period they
glorify. Encountering lessons on the past at school does little to change their convictions.
Indeed, the few studies that exist demonstrate, from a comparative perspective, that history

38
If there are in fact people who are consistently and coherently intolerant, we will come back to this in Chapter
3.
lessons tend to reinforce their extreme opinions (Deckert-Peaceman, 2002; Eckmann and Eser
Davolio, 2002).
A similar observation can be made for post-conflict situations, for example the teaching of the
history of apartheid, which is today encouraged in South African schools. The transmission of
the segregationist past aims to enable a civic awakening and the condemnation of racism,
which the end of legal segregation in the 1990s is far from having expunged. Drawing on a
long and painstakingly detailed observation of history classes, Chana Teeger demonstrates
that these lessons produce a certain indifference about racism among students (even though
they are enrolled in racially mixed classes). And racism is persistent and visible in
contemporary South African society. In this context, teaching based on memory ultimately
produces a kind of naturalisation of the racism against which it is supposed to fight. Teeger
shows that it is in fact the form of the narrative that explains this (Teeger, 2015). Teachers
mobilise individual stories that are supposed to be edifying and easy to identify with. In
racially mixed classrooms, the teacher also tries to draw on examples of white South Africans
engaged against apartheid. Yet this pedagogical framework presents characteristics of
depoliticization that are shared by many contemporary memory policies: the refusal of the
Manichaean narratives, emphasis on individual experiences, and the importance of emotion.
These attributes explain why students end up with a belief that racism is banal and intrinsic to
society, producing a form of disengagement and depoliticization. Narratives that are similar in
form – which privilege for example exemplary characters and testimonies – can therefore
revive hostile opinions in certain cases, and in others, indifference and fatalism.

Social frameworks of memory: from school to family

Sociology is able to further enlighten us as to the lack of resonance of these civics lessons.
Even Emile Durkheim (1956), who saw teaching as having a “quasi-hypnotic power” (at the
time teachers were nicknamed the “black hussars of the Republic”, incarnating respect for
moral authority and patriotic duty), described the importance of the thousand little “noises”
that prevented complete attention and internalization of lessons. Durkheim emphasized the
role of this “unconscious and continual education” in which the unintentional transmission by
teachers counts for more than what is intentional. Moreover, the school is not a simple
interaction between student and teacher; it is just one of the social worlds the students
frequent. Among these other worlds that resonate onto the school, the family sphere is
particularly important. Several studies demonstrate that the family constitutes a clear filter for
interpreting the message of educational policies concerning memory. For example, the
importance of school textbooks and curriculum in Japan has been shown to be secondary to
the transmission of family history and the reading of the past it incarnates (Fukuoka, 2011).
The same is true in Germany.
Sociologist Alexandra Oeser’s study into how the history of Nazism is taught in four German
schools is particularly interesting in this respect (Oeser, 2019). Here we see that the
countercultural heritage of the 1968 social movements, very present among teachers, plays a
driving role in their desire to make their students tolerant citizens, and their reliance on the
transmission of the history of the Holocaust to do so. The relative uniformity of the teachers’
motivations is in striking contrast with the variety of ways in which the students receive and
appropriate this teaching. These consequences can be explained firstly by very different
family configurations. Indeed, only the family can impose its vision on the child – when there
is no competition from anywhere else. When it transmits its preferences to young children,
this is not “one of many possible worlds,” but rather “the only existent and only conceivable
world, the world tout court” (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 154-155). This family-based
learning helps construct a vision of the social and political world, its rules, its ideologies, and
its histories as an “unshakable reality” which explains why much of what is internalized in
this period goes unnoticed (Throssell, 2015, p. 104). However, that does not mean children do
not question or challenge what the family transmits; children “recycle” (Pagis and Lignier,
2017), imitate, distort and appropriate what they learn in this primary socialization. For
example, rather than well-defined party preferences, they may internalize an interest in
politics, habits of family discussions, for example, due to a family “style” that is more or less
fusional and open to the outside world.39 This ability to imitate is one of the explanations for
the difficulty in evaluating the solidity and durability of these legacies. For young people in
Québec, for example, academic knowledge and attitude towards the past do not always go
hand-in-hand; the school system says it is important to know about history, but the content of
this knowledge can come from other places, and in particular from the family (Létourneau,
2014; for a comparative approach see Lanthéaume and Létourneau, 2016). National
narratives, and with them a certain vision of history, are thus transmitted both officially
through the school system, the curriculum, and the hidden curriculum (actual classroom
practices), and unofficially through primary socialization in the family. The interactions
between these different sources of socialization, and the agency of the child in reacting to

39
Generalist studies on childhood socialization overlap with those which have focused more specifically on
socialization to the past (Maurer, 2000; Throssell 2015; Pagis and Lignier, 2017).
them, is also influenced by the emotional connections children and young people have to
these different spaces and sources, and the way the construct an idea of themselves in
relationship to these narratives (Throssell, 2015, p. 341) .
When there is a coherence between the various worlds that a person inhabits that legacy is
clearer. We are therefore not the mechanical products of a family socialization conveying
social identity, nor is there a perfect coherence between the ways people operate in the
different spaces they inhabit. We experiment with different worlds in which we acquire
dispositions that we use or put on standby elsewhere. Perfectly homogenous socialization is a
sociologist’s dream, and a historic and social exception (Lahire, 2011).

Ordinary social interactions and the appropriation of lessons of the past

The long-term power of the different social worlds we evolve in must be seen in conjunction
with their power in the moment. History teaching, or other moments when the past and its
lessons are transmitted at school, are more than just moments in which what was already
present within the individual (moral character, social identity, family heritage) resist the
teachers’ efforts to influence them. Classes are also situations, interactions in a particular
moment. A class dedicated to discussing past political violence will not be the same if an
incident occurred between the students just before they entered the classroom. It will unfold
differently if a rebellious student uses the change in the teacher’s tone, for example resulting
from the emotion provoked by discussions of the violent past, to express their hostility, or on
the contrary, to win back the benevolence of the teacher. Rejection or appropriation cannot
always be taken at face value. The desire to be good student facilitates participation in this
kind of dynamic, even more so when it reflects discussions that take place around the dinner
table.
The description of violent events is not automatically considered a truth that must be learnt
from, not because of family memory, or classroom rules, but rather because in the moment of
transmission, it is situated within a complex social interaction. A multitude of social relations
come together around the classroom, sometimes independently from other social worlds,
sometimes not: my classmate may or may not be my cousin, the son or daughter of one of my
mother’s workmates, my neighbor, and so on. Although genocide and political violence
demand an intense level of concentration on a moral level, and although their complexity
requires an equal or greater attention in terms of knowledge, our attention is also drawn and
maintained by other things. Morality is a rationale for action which does not necessarily
weigh out against the thirst for knowledge, political anger, desire (to please the teacher, to
make a good impression on one’s classmates) or lack of desire (escaping boredom by more or
less discretely texting in class). We are thus able to think of things other than those which –
some would say morally – should concern us.
These social interactions that take shape in the classroom influence the ways in which the
memorial messages which may be transmitted there are appropriated and become meaningful
for the students. Before transmitting a message of any kind, the teacher must first manage
social interactions; at best, students must be supervised and guided. Identification with
teachers is not generally strong, hostility is more frequent (Percheron, 1984). Given the
importance of emotion in the internalization of primary socialization (Berger and Luckman,
1967) this could go some way to explaining why school may not be the best place for the
transmission of effective civic messages through memory. School is perhaps not the ideal tool
to ensure the transmission of the past, particularly at a time when the devaluing of teachers’
qualifications and their unenviable average salary threaten their legitimacy even more.
With that in mind, we can understand understand why, in South Africa, teachers – including
black teachers – in good faith choose a form of pedagogy that leads to a naturalization of
racism, as mentioned above. To avoid expressions of anger that prolong the political conflicts
so central to the country’s history, and based on the idea of scientific neutrality, the teachers
have implemented a pedagogy that is no longer exclusively focused on a political system, but
rather on individuals who are victims or who fight against the system. In ensuring that this
history includes both Blacks and Whites, they also emphasize, in spite of everything, the
existence of White “victims” and Black “offenders”. Yet when we focus too much on
communication problems between individuals, we no longer see the social problems between
whole groups. Moreover, apartheid is analyzed with a view to judging the responsibilities on
both sides, ultimately overlooking their asymmetry. The students, who were interviewed after
a long period of observation in classes, thus attributed behavior to the actions of isolated
individuals, desocializing and depoliticizing their perspectives on the problems of South
African society. As understandable as it may be, this pedagogical decision – which as we will
see below is in keeping with the choices of truth commissions, another institution working
towards “reconciliation” – helps explain why these lessons from the past are not mobilized by
students to make contemporary society more egalitarian (Teeger, 2015).
Similarly, the organizational constraints that lead British teachers to individualize and
incarnate the narratives of the past – for example situating their school’s town in the history of
the First World War – prevent young people from grasping the meaning expected of them. As
it is told to them, history remains a collection of little stories about individual people in a
given neighborhood; it does not take on political meaning. This search for closeness and
connection to a period of history produces a paradoxical remoteness for students who, once
again, rarely find the foundations they need for engaging with contemporary society, as
Catriona Pennell demonstrated in her study of British school students visiting sites of the First
World War (Pennell, 2016). Although we do not have in-depth studies on this, we can
formulate the hypothesis that it is the fear of a public negative reaction toward the evocation
of the memory of the Holocaust (Bossy, 2007), for example a hostile reaction among students
of immigrant origin supportive of the Palestinian cause, that fosters these adaptations within
the classroom.
Citizenship education is therefore not simply the transmission of a lesson that consolidates the
civic dispositions of students who are attentive because their knowledgeable and impassioned
teacher makes good use of emotions and identification. This more or less factual or moral
content is indeed transmitted, but along with a host of other messages, some of which are
reactive, intentional, and significant (political rejection, emotional support, etc.), others which
have no connection to the content, nor intention, nor even a clear meaning. The school system
transmits a range of things that are not always coherent or intentional; the hidden curriculum
(Jackson, 1968, Forquin, 2008), rules of behavior, educational style, participation practices,
the valorization of knowledge, organization of ideas. It is also the space for the transmission
of non-pedagogical learning, insults, love letters, and social skills shared in the playground
(Young, 1971; Dubet and Martuccelli, 1998). History lessons take on their full meaning in
these moments where “noise”, rules, and “meaningless talk” abound. These chaotic
encounters can give them great strength, for example when a student who wants to fulfil the
expectations of the teacher (which overlap with those of his or her family environment)
identifies with an eye-witness account of history, and finds fulfilment in this role that brings
together academic, civic, and moral validation. But the proliferation of background noise can
also mean the message – in spite of its clear strength – will not be heard, or that it will
provoke hostility. For example, Sylvain Antichan and his colleagues followed several high
school classes during their visits to exhibitions related to the Centenary of the First World
War in different part of France. Each time, the students’ appropriations of the past appeared
embedded within a range of social roles, as a classmate within the peer group, as a boy or a
girl in a gendered space, as a visitor to an exhibition, and finally as a student. Each of these
roles produce their own specific postures and noise, which may be difficult to conciliate. The
student visitors were therefore less invested in the exhibition and its contents, than in its social
function and the ways it could be used (Antichan et al, 2016).40
Holiday camps or programs that bring together adolescents from groups or countries in
conflict, to help them overcome hostile memories, can be seen in the same way, taking into
account everything that occurs in the moment of interaction. It would be nice to believe that
whole societies could be won over to peace and tolerance by the magic of contact between
presumed enemies. But, alas, it is more complicated in that. These young people are not
official representatives of their national or community groups; they are also members of
social groups, possibly the recipients of their parents’ political allegiances, and above all
individuals, who take either the side of conflict or friendship in their interactions with others.
The social psychologists who justify and theorize these experiments recognize this: what is
created within a safe space is not easily transposed into a society that is deeply divided and
belligerent. Friendships constructed in conditions of relative equality are threatened by the
everyday experiences of inequality and war. Sociologists have shown that the criteria for
equality are not always satisfied; the equality found in a combined curriculum or the opulence
of a holiday camp on the East Coast of the United States frequented by politically moderate
and privileged anglophone young people, cannot be guaranteed when they return to their “real
life” in Israel and Palestine, for example (Hammack, 2009). Worse still, the contact itself
between different social groups could end up reinforcing logics of social distinction and
detachment (Oberti and Préteceille, 2016), which happens if the teacher or other authority
figure imposes a meeting between individuals belonging to unequal groups, without ensuring
that these inequalities do not determine perceptions and are not expressed with
contempt(which is not easy). The transmission of the violent past, in which victims and
culprits both feature, can reinforce the assigned community identities that it is supposed to
overcome (Falaize, 2008).

Memories in the museum: recognizing the past

Students are sometimes taken on trips outside the school to have more direct contact with the
past. They go to museums, memorials, and other sites of memory. In recent years several
studies have been conducted on the increasing number of school visits to Auschwitz,
exploring the experience of the classes at the site (Krondorfer, 1995; Kugelmass, 2010;
Feldman, 2010). The Centenary of the First World War also gave rise to studies on students’

40.
For other examples of this noise, see Bonafoux, de Cock-Pierrepont and Falaize, 2007, p. 137.
visits to battle sites (Pennell, 2016) or historical exhibitions within the collaborative context
(Antichan et al., 2016). This research teaches us that these sites lead to contradictory
interpretations in terms of civic values. And yet scientific research overall has paid scant
attention to what visitors to these memorials and memory museums see – and what they do
with what they see (Feldman and Peleikis, 2014). The results we do have encourage us to pay
attention to the largely ordinary social experiences that take place in these museums that
provide a window on the past.

Visiting and revisiting the past

The first observation to make here is, once again, the gap between declarations of principles
and practices. Although visits to memory museums and memorials are increasing, they only
concern a small percentage of the population. In 2011, for example, 10% of the French
population had visited a battlefield, memorial, or a history museum sometime during the
year.41 This figure could be an indicator of wide audience, if it corresponded to a population
that was constantly renewed. But in spite of an undeniable trend towards greater diversity, this
is not the case. For the most part, the same people go from one museum to another. Although
research suggests that these sites are visited by workers and employees more than fine arts
museums, most of the people they attract still come from social categories that are
economically, culturally, and academically privileged. Moreover, most of the visitors are
young seniors, aged between 50 and 69, rather than the future generations that the architects
of citizenship want to reach. The situation is essentially the same in other Western countries.
Outside the mediating environment of the school, only a small minority of the population has
an experience of these sites liable to transmit knowledge of the past and some of the messages
that can be drawn from it. How are these messages perceived? By comparison with the
number of studies on visitors to art or science museums, there are relatively few on visitors to
history museums. However, those that exist converge to emphasize that the representations of
the past are firstly recognized, before they are discovered (Fyfe and Ross, 1996). Through a
mechanism that is similar to the “tourist gaze” documented by John Urry (2002), the
experience of the visit is framed and structured by a pre-existing familiarity with the past.
Between 2012 and 2015, several empirical studies conducted with visitors to seven historical
exhibitions in commemorative contexts, relating to both the First World War and to a lesser
extent the Holocaust, showed that many visitors already have a base of historical knowledge

41
http://www.credoc.fr/pdf/Rapp/R281.pdf (accessed July 19 2017).
before attending these museums (Antichan, Gensburger and Teboul, 2016; Gensburger,
2017). Similarly, they reveal the ways in which the content is read in light of family history,
but also everyday experience, professional occupations, sporting practices, or leisure
activities. When faced with the past, it is not necessarily the past that the visitor sees first, or
even at all.

From the transmission of values to their reinforcement

If visitors genuinely see different things in a given site or exhibition, does that mean they take
away different civic lessons? Do they even take away any lessons? Conducting sociological
observations of class visits is useful here because students’ comments allow us to perceive
attitudes towards values that are more difficult to observe with adults, who tend to visit in
smaller groups and be more silent. In 2012, around twenty groups of upper primary school
students were observed on class visits to the exhibition on the deportation and rescue of
Jewish children in Paris (Gensburger, 2017). From the beginning of their tour, students
systematically exclaimed: “that is really racist!”, “It’s not fair, it’s discrimination!”, “That is
not fair! They should have called the police!” The children’s comments, in interaction with
the adults accompanying them, proved that values, tolerance, and indignation in the face of
discrimination – in other words civic vigilance – are already present for them. The children
arrive at the exhibition with these values already established and their moral norms are
sufficiently solid as to be able to be expressed in this space. This conclusion has been
confirmed by the observation of visits to exhibitions relating to the First World War
(Antichan et al., 2016). This confrontation with the past is more an opportunity to publicly
express, legitimize, and refresh values, than to acquire them.
This same observation has been made for adult visitors observed during their visits to Tuol
Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes in Phnom Penh. This museum documents the crimes
perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Hughes, 2008). Although the Western tourists
questioned and observed by Rachel Hughes almost systematically visit this museum, it is
rarely out of a desire for “dark” tourism. Nor is it particularly to learn about the past. Visiting
this museum is a way of demonstrating their support for contemporary humanist values and
respect for differences – somewhat like visiting a religious site to demonstrate one faith. They
certify their support for these values more than they consolidate them. The discovery of this
memory museum refreshes and expresses the range of values already in place. For a tourist
visiting Cambodia, this museum is a must.
These museums and memorials sites are therefore not so much spaces in which values drawn
from the teaching of the past are transmitted, as they are spaces in which it is possible to
publicly express one’s support for these values – although there is no certainty that this
support will be anything more than momentaneous (Lisle, 2006; Bernard-Donals, 2005). This
brings us back to Goffman’s comment: “In their capacity as performers, individuals will be
concerned with maintaining the impression that they are living up to the many standards by
which they and their products are judged. Because these standards are so numerous and so
pervasive, the individuals who are performers dwell more than we might think in a moral
world. But, qua performers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing
these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these
standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is largely concerned with moral matters, but
as performers we do not have a moral concern in these moral matters. As performers we are
merchants of morality” (Goffman, 1956, p. 162).

These mechanisms explain the possibly contradictory effects of memory policies, discussed
above. Memorial projects can have unexpected consequences when they reach people who do
not already share the values that they seek to promote. There is nothing to suggest that
attending an exhibition evoking past ethnic discrimination favors the attenuation of
stereotypes for visitors who already have beliefs and values that support discrimination. This
has been documented in Emily Satterwhite’s research on an American music festival which
was intended to pay homage to the diversity of local cultures and which in fact provoked
stigmatizing and discriminatory reactions (Satterwhite, 2005). The ethnographic observation
and questionnaires used by the researcher show how this festival of traditional music, which
organizers perceived as promoting multiculturalism and diverse local traditions, was
appropriated by a large portion of participants as a vector for the promotion and reinforcement
of “white” racial identity.

Ordinary social interactions are always present

These conclusions lead us to further reconsider the way in which memory can be used to
pursue peace (McDowell and Braniff, 2014). Visits to museums and memory sites are
embedded within an ensemble of social interactions, which predate them and which they
extend and sometimes influence. Let us return to observe the young visitors to the 2012
exhibition on Jewish children during the Holocaust in Paris (Gensburger, 2017). We will look
at them in both the school and then the family context.
In the first case, the children attend the exhibition as students, along with their classmates and
the teacher. It is worth noting that in the forty class visits observed, all the teachers were
female. This is relevant because lessons from the past are “gendered”; like the Ancient
Egyptian mourners, and the Furies of Ancient Greece, these “guardians of memory” are often
women, even today. The children who attend as students are almost exclusively interested in
documents relating to the schooling of Parisian Jewish children. They systematically turned
towards display cases containing schoolbooks and drawings. It is only in this context that the
young visitors engage closely with the materiality of the documents. They cluster around a
letter written by a deported child, firstly to admire the beautiful handwriting, and then to
check the spelling. Looking for mistakes is a common activity for these visitors in the school
context. Before the case displaying the children’s artworks, they marvel at the colors and
paper, careful folding and collage. The exhibition of memory is, for them, primarily an
activity related to school.
Thus the school provides both a frame and a filter through which the students read the
primary reason for the visit, and this is strikingly clear in comparison with children who come
with their families. In this context, the children – many of whom are the same age as those on
school visits – are instead drawn to objects related to the separation of families, particularly
photos and letters.
The importance of the social relations in which the experience of these visits are embedded,
and which provide a framework for the visitors’ engagement with the content, has been
confirmed by other studies, such as that on school visits to exhibitions relating to the
Centenary of the First World War (Antichan et al., 2016), family visits to other museums
(Jonchery and Biraud, 2016) and different heritage sites (Jones, 2010). This is also true for the
traces left by a visit to an exhibition long after the event. Several studies conducted in
America on visits to science museums show that visitors only remember their visit and the
content of the museum when these are part of an ensemble of social relations that persist
within the academic group, family group, or immediate environment. In other words, the
experience of the museum only has a lasting effect when visits are regularly discussed in
ordinary conversations, because visitors continue to see an object related to them, or the
person they visited the museum with (Falk and Dierking, 1997). As far as visits to history
museums are concerned specifically, a study with people questioned in the public space, far
from museums, suggests that they have trouble recollecting memories from these visits, which
are often confined to school or family contexts. However, respondents continue to affirm the
absolute importance of visiting history museums, especially for young children (Antichan et
al., 2016). It seems people remain convinced that what we ourselves have forgotten, everyone
(including ourselves) generally remembers.42

Truth commissions: collective healing for trauma ?

So lessons from the past do not exist per se. Even when they are transmitted with the best
intentions, they are distorted and reformulated as they are received. This is quite simply
because they are always intertwined with social interactions. They bring together people who
are more or less attentive, more or less familiar with each other, and who are all involved in
numerous different roles – which are not all favorable to the civic transformation expected.
What we see in schools, memorials, or during commemorations in more or less peaceful
democracies is ultimately not that different from what happens in post-conflict environments.
Programs put into place immediately after a violent conflict, or even when the conflict is not
yet finished, also aim to revisit the past in order to build the future.

Painful memories at the heart of truth commissions

Let us return to the example of truth commissions. For those who promote transitional justice
– the expertise that brings together various tools for managing painful pasts (or those marked
by serious human rights abuses) into a supposedly coherent whole – commissions provide a
way of “managing” the heritage of a violent conflict in a way that promotes peace, justice,
and democracy. As we have said before, they contribute to compromises between former
enemies; in this pragmatic logic the consequences of frequent amnesties are attenuated by
mechanisms for victims’ recognition. Politicians concerned about their reputations see them
as “witch hunts”. Researchers have rightly shown that these commissions facilitate collusion
between new elites and former ones, which come to agree on how to conserve and exchange
power resources (Wilson, 2001). Others reiterate that evidently institutions that are only in
place for two years cannot be expected to reconcile a country that has been torn by conflict
for decades. Yet, in the eyes of those who establish them and promote them internationally,
truth commissions constitute a memory policy that helps move toward overcoming past
prejudice and hatred. They are even seen as having the power to free people from trauma born
of political violence, through a sort of collective catharsis releasing emotions, much like in a

42
We will return to this paradox in the third chapter.
Greek tragedy. They are also seen being able to establish the foundation of a new form of
justice, “reparatory” justice, and improve democracy.
It is the place that they give to victims and the effect they are assumed to have over them that
explains why truth commissions are considered so virtuous and useful. They are the
emblematic institution of these contemporary memory policies marked by the fundamental
concern for the victims. During public hearings, the victims (who are presented as witnesses
of the past) recount the violence and suffering they or their loved ones experienced. Their
“truths” contribute, along with analysis by historians, to the reports that the commission
submits to the political authorities that implemented the commission. By allowing these
victims to release their emotions, truth commissions – like the “tribunal of tears” in South
Africa – are seen as helping heal traumatized victims and rebuild nations in mourning. They
are even seen as having the power to make perpetrators remorseful and ask for forgiveness. In
most cases, this is a mistake, because the perpetrators of violent crimes are generally reluctant
to admit their actions. For every Apartheid-era politician who made a public display of
washing the feet of his victims and other black people (as Adriaan Vlok did), how many in
South Africa chose denial? For the handful of military personnel under the Argentinian or
Chilean dictatorships who publicly recognized their actions (Adolfo Scilingo, for example),
how many have fiercely denied committing crimes, and claim that they were only defending
the motherland from subversion, even from behind bars? Political criminals often repent only
if authorities – or their significant personal relations – force them to.
Truth commissions have eyes only for the suffering that victims, who thus become witnesses,
express. The documentaries made on the truth commissions are full of moving images in
which we see people – particularly women, once again in the case of South Africa, elderly,
black women – weeping, wailing, and shaking, while those we perceive as their loved ones
but who are in reality professional psychologists (also generally women) comfort them
(Lefranc, 2014).43 This outpouring of emotion was appreciated to the point of becoming one
of the essential aspects of the protocol that is now promoted by international organizations.
Deliberations on the recent past organized after a period of violence must be thus “heated”
and cannot be delegated to “cold” historians or parliamentarians, who are seen as closed or
dismissive to victims. It is the intensity of emotions liable to facilitate catharsis, rather than

43
The archives of the documentary footage that was aired daily during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
in South Africa, are now available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTnY5SQYAro (accessed
July 21 2017).
the knowledge of the past, that is expected from these commissions. Making individual
memories public, in order to construct a memory that is hopefully shared, should heal society.
The victims’ testimonies are, of course, deeply moving. Stories of torture, murder, the loss of
loved ones, and the resulting financial hardships for families who are often poor, all provoke
empathy. The hearings, whether closed (in Argentina, or Chile) or public (in South Africa,
Peru, or Morocco), facilitate the expression of strong emotions. But how can we establish a
relationship of cause and effect between the expression of traumatic memory by victims, and
social appeasement? This expectation reflects the importance of emotions in contemporary
memory policies. By rendering knowledge more intense, emotions are seen as provoking a
change in behavior among other citizens. Truth commissions seek to unburden witnesses,
liberate them of the trauma that is assumed to have “frozen” since the crime (Fassin and
Rechtman, 2009). Pain, whether physical or emotional from losing a loved one, constitute
lasting wounds and this suffering can find an outlet in certain commissions. But should we
only focus on this suffering, and assume that this trauma from violence has become a
permanent tumor (Hamber, 2009)?
Violence can be experienced in different ways, depending on the situation of the individual –
a political leader, or his apolitical mother, for example – and the social existence of the
survivor does not stop with this experience. Individual memory,44 or more exactly an
individual’s narrative of the past, cannot be dissociated from these “social frameworks”, the
social structures which organize and thus constitute it (Halbwachs, 1992; Bastide, 1970;
Lavabre, 1994). The rare studies that focus on this confirm that victims, survivors, and
escapees can all live ordinary lives. Contrary to expectations of depression, victims may even
demonstrate greater vitality than other people, like the European Jews who arrived in the
United States after the Holocaust who got married more, divorced less, were less delinquent
and more involved in community activities than other American Jews (Helmreich, 1992).
Make no mistake, this is not to say that these individuals are “normal” on a scale of
psychological health (divorce is by no means pathological!). But it is important to emphasize
that the roles expected of different actors can vary; those who survived the Second World
War were partly forced to be dynamic and well-integrated by the social and political contexts
44
As stated in the introduction, this book does not engage with the question of the concepts used for
conceptualizing memory (Gensburger, 2016). The reader only needs to know that the expression “individual
memory” does not signify that memory can exist outside of the social. Memory is neither collective (in the sense
that it would be the memory of a group or collective) nor individual (in the sense of a recollection of something
an individual experienced, what Halbwachs called a “monade” following Leibniz). From the sociological
perspective, memory is firstly social.

.
of the time. This runs counter to the frequent representation of victims of political violence
and their trauma. It is overly simplistic (and also unjust) to reduce both victims and
perpetrators to a single life and a single emotion, when we all live and experience several,
often in parallel. There is more to victims than just their suffering.

Banality in the lives of victims who are made witnesses

If we make the mistake of perceiving victims of political violence primarily, or even solely, as
traumatized people, that is because memories, like emotions, are social. They are as much the
reflection of deep inner states – forged out of personal experience, social habitus, and
institutions – as the effects of a given situation and interactions with the institution or the
public present. Similar to the way in which students visiting a commemorative exhibition
react to the presence of the accompanying adults, victims who testify recount their suffering
because they are asked to do so, warmly but insistently, through questions but also physical
encouragements from the psychologists present (back patting, nodding, hugs and so forth).
Inversely, when they express material demands, or political anger, they are discouraged from
dwelling on this (Lefranc, 2014).
Truth commissions emphasize suffering so much because, like all memorial policies, they are
policies. By drawing attention to individual distress, they are liable to distract attention from
the complexity of the political games they facilitate. By asking victims and the public to be
aware of their language, to depoliticize it, they attempt to contain these expressions that may
“overflow”, particularly when they lead to political accusations. The truth commission as a
forum for expression is thus in keeping with policies of amnesty such as those that arose after
political crisis in ancient Rome and Athens. In this context, the authorities went so far as to
organize mourning, encouraging mothers to cry in public, or forbidding them from doing so
(Loraux, 2002). In the twenty-first century, the injunction to remember has replaced that of
forgetting, dominant in antiquity (Foucault, 1990). These very different policies (on one hand
imposing silence by forbidding public mourning, the others imposing expression by allowing
mourners to participate in the public funeral procession) share the fact that they oversee the
public expression of private grief. Authorities organize morning in such a way as it does not
spill over into the public space and spread its conflictual effects there. Although commissions
have not been charged with rubber stamping an official version of history, they have had to
deal with political constraints – often an amnesty law, and collusion with former enemies
(Wilson, 2001). They are the tools of reconciliation created “by decree” and not produced
(purely) through emotionally moving encounters. But they do not always succeed; often
politics returns to the surface. Reconciliation is more a political project (always unfinished)
than the consequence of shared memories. In some countries, such as Ivory Coast, which have
implemented commissions following the South African model, politics even comes first: the
commission was a place to park one of the President’s competitors and a means of electoral
competition (Griveaud, 2019).
Truth commissions, as specific vehicles for memory policy, encounter another limit. As we
have said, the public expression of painful memories – not so much political or historical as
therapeutic – must help heal not only the victim but society as a whole, because transitional
justice (and memory policies more generally) suppose an analogy between the individual and
the collective. What happens in the innermost part of the self affects the whole nation through
its emotional and exemplary force.
And yet this effect is variable and very rarely analyzed. Let us take the now canonical
example of South Africa. Although it seems like those who followed the debates of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa adopt attitudes that are more respectful of
equality and human rights than others (Gibson, 2004), the way in which this effect operates in
concrete social terms has not been analyzed. And it is a fact that perceptions of history and the
responsibilities of the apartheid regime and its opponents, or Afrikaners and the black
majority respectively, have also remained highly divergent, according to ethno-racial groups.
There is good reason for this; they do not live together, but in neighborhoods that are still
clearly separated. This observation overlaps with others on the consequences of including
“radicals”, proponents of exclusive identities, or peace “spoilers” within the peace process, as
well as on the effects of truth commissions regarding prejudice about groups perceived to be
different.
The study of the truth commission in Greensboro (28,000 inhabitants), in North Carolina,
launched by community associations promoting civil rights, also confirms this conclusion. In
this context, although interviewees who had heard about the commission’s work seemed to
have a degree of awareness, a clear negative impact was also recorded among the part of the
population that was the most hostile to racial equality. Prejudices were in fact reinforced
(Ghoshal, 2015, on the basis of a survey of 716 people): “conservatives” strongly reaffirmed
their refusal of any kind of compensation by the government for past injustices. Things that
were no longer discussed – such as the condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan – were once again
a subject of debate. Memorial projects can therefore convince people who are undecided
(above all if they are associated with strong prejudice – for example the negative image of the
KKK), but they may also polarize those who already have strong beliefs. Just as in the case of
schools and museums/memorials, when they are implemented in truth commissions, memory
policies are liable to have unexpected effects, which may sometimes be quite the opposite of
those intended.
Furthermore, what heals a particular individual does not necessarily heal all the other
individuals that make up a nation – there is no translation effect, no person-to-person and
cumulative transmission. Indeed, society is itself neither healthy nor sick, even when it has
experienced extreme violence. Violence itself is social (Naepels, 2017; Collins, 2011). It is
not a sickness, but rather the product of social life.
This supposed slippage from the relief of isolated victims to the pacification of democracy as
a whole overlooks the findings regarding the limits of the “inclusive efficacy of collective
gatherings” presented in particular in the work of Nicolas Mariot (2008, p.113; 2011).
Emotional gatherings – commemoration, patriotic celebrations, or painful catharsis – do not
have unparalleled inclusive force. Those who applaud or cry on these occasions do not
necessarily feel enthusiastic or sorrowful. They might be simply doing what is socially
appropriate, “playing the game”, without necessarily believing it. As Mary Douglas describes,
Catholics may be bored, or even go to sleep during church. “The case for ritual stimulating
emotions is weak. Hasn’t anyone ever been bored in church? ” (Douglas, 1986, p. 34). It is
not because truth commission hearings move distant spectators that they affect those who are
physically present. Inversely, there is no reason to assume that the emotional states of those
who are present at the hearing has any bearing on that of the broader national public. The
citizens participating in revolutionary celebrations, or commemorations, may be there by
chance, by opportunism or conformism, or because they were forced to attend; and they may
act accordingly depending on the event. Similarly, victims are engaged in complex social
relations and may have a wide range of motivations for action. When they demand material
compensation or defend political opinions, the witnesses heard by commissions are resisting
the injunction to limit themselves to the emotions considered “appropriate” for victims and
citizens.

Trials for memory: the law is the law (and politics)!

We can also analyze the cases brought against those who have committed or ordered acts of
political violence, at the national level but also under “universal” jurisdiction45. The political
crimes that are the object of memory policies are rarely subject to legal proceedings.
Amnesties are the norm, even in recent years, when we are said to have experienced a
consecration of international criminal justice. Amnesties constitute half of all transitional
justice measures adopted in all countries between 1970 and 2007 (Olsen, Payne and Reiner,
2010; Mallinder, 2007). And they seem to be increasing (Jeffery, 2014). Moreover, criminal
trials, when they are held, remain selective; they target senior figures, and the “worst” killers,
those responsible for “atrocious and outrageous” acts (according to an expression used in
post-dictatorship Argentina).46 Even the extermination of European Jews which has been the
focus of a large portion of memorial actions over the last seventy years, particularly in the
legal sphere, is far from having led to a comprehensive legal treatment.

Lessons from the past or verdicts from a trial?

Several authors have already noted the fact that these memory policies conducted through the
trials of political criminals do not have the pedagogical virtues that those who defend them
would hope.47 Not because the trials are seen as not having significant consequences; some
have probably produced upheavals in the way the violent past is perceived. The Eichmann
trial, for example, did much to position the genocide and its victims at the center of public and
historical memory, which was up until then focused on the war as an expression of aggression
against states (at the heart of the Nuremberg trials), and historic figures (Zionists in Israel,
Resistant fighters in France, soldiers in the United States). But the fact that a trial – or any
other memory policy – rattles contemporary beliefs and renews the dominant frames of
interpretation of an event does not mean it has a lasting educational impact on citizens. The
verdict cannot necessarily be generalized, nor mechanically internalized by each person, like a
golden rule.
The point here, however, is that trials do not always have the power they are assumed to have
in preventing the repetition of violent acts simply by speaking the truth. The legal “truth” is
not what appears true to historians (Thomas, 1998; Rousso and Conan, 1998). The law in
itself is not always compatible with an accurate description of crimes. This is the case when

45
Universal jurisdiction theoretically allows cases to be brought against foreigners for serious crimes committed
in foreign countries against foreigners.
46
This is also true for international trials, which only pursue "big fish".
47
This disenchantment is shared by numerous authors (Ernst, 2008; Rousso and Conan, 1998; Marrus, 2000).
the law deduces legal misconduct from the intention and moral motivation of an individual –
even though mass killings dissolve this relationship between individual will and criminal
action.48 The organization of a trial is not conducive to the production of historic truth: the
principle of contradiction, the proliferation of narratives, or the impossibility of tribunals to
base their conclusions on the significant historical evidence of hearsay (Douglas, 2000).

Even when the object of these trials is immediately contemporary, like the trials against
Holocaust deniers, legal proceedings have political side-effects: adversarial hearings may
have to deal with the legal requirement to challenge facts, and thus inadvertently provide a
soapbox for negationist ideas. In addition to the distortion of the facts inflicted by legal
descriptions, there are also political biases. According to historians, even the Holocaust still
gives rise to eclectic and disparate descriptions, each judge considering the genocide from a
particular prism (Marrus, 2000; Douglas, 2000). It is important to be clear about this; these
observations do not criticize the law, nor the trials of political criminals, but simply shed light
on the fact that they are subject to the normal functioning of the legal system. It is first and
foremost a matter of law.
Other observers do not expect these trials to provide history lessons, but rather that they grant
recognition to the victims who are today seen as being at the heart of memory policies. It is
not certain, however, that they have the power to heal victims any more than truth
commissions do. In addition to the fact that all of these institutions struggle to act on what is
deep inside people, is important to remember that victims are secondary actors in legal rituals
(although they are increasingly important, particularly before the International Criminal
Court). Criminal trials sanction the crime committed against the state, which takes the place
of the victim in the name society. The actual victims, or their representatives, are often seen
as little more than key witnesses, even though they are often the impetus for the trial.49
Criminal trials are therefore not really communions around the suffering of victims that one
might expect. They may move people, of course, but emotion is generally restrained in this
context; there is much less weeping than in the truth commissions. The court rationalizes
emotions, through its organization, its rituals, the desire of the president of the court. Indeed,
evicting emotions is even a characteristic of the trial: “Just as belief belongs in church, surely

48
See Pendas, 2000, and, for an interesting legal attempt to cover a genocide, see the indictment of the deputy
public prosecutor Aurélia Devos at the end of the trial against Pascal Simbikangwa, on March 13, 2014 :
http://www.collectifpartiescivilesrwanda.fr/requisitoire-de-madame-aurelia-devos/
49
This was the case during the trial of Maurice Papon, as well as the “Rwandan trials” that are currently being
held in France, particularly in response to pressure by victims.
history education belongs in school. When the court of law is used for history lessons, then
the risk of show trials cannot be far off’ (Buruma, 1994, p. 142).
Moreover, the relentless search for moral lessons can result in the accused being demonized
as an individual, when the object on trial is in fact systemic criminality. Like in the case of
teaching the history of apartheid, mentioned above, the principal of the individualization of
responsibility, which is at the heart of criminal justice means that the judge does not always
see that the cause of the crime lies beyond the corrupt personality of an individual. The media,
which attempt to draw moral conclusions from the trial, also have a tendency to impute
crimes to either a personalized figure (submissive or hateful), or to an impersonal state, and
thus save the public from having to confront its own past actions. The media presentation of
the Auschwitz trial as a “memorial for future generations […] teaching them to not despise
other people, and resist demagoguery” thus essentially allowed the German people to avoid
their responsibility in the genocide carried out during the Third Reich (Pendas, 2000, p. 28).
A trial’s popularity is disconnected from the public’s support for the legal truth that it
incarnates; it can be popular and still be associated with indifference, or with the perception of
an unfair justice system. It will not prevent opinions on the guilty party changing rapidly after
the trial. For example, the Nuremberg trials received very broad acceptance by the German
people, and were later challenged (Pendas, 2000). What is dissuasive – and therefore
preventative – in a justice system that tries a single man among so many others, or which
focuses on the man who gave the order rather than the one who pulled the trigger? It is
important to specify that this does nothing to detract from the other roles of the justice system,
and particularly that of sanctioning crimes.

Memory trials as ordinary trials

Finally, and this is the third characteristic of the implementation of criminal trials as tools for
memory policies, what is of interest to legal scholars, historians, or elite journalists may bore
ordinary citizens, who get tired of the slow rhythm of the legal system. Major trials can be
read in the same terms as what happens in schools and museums: a small number of
enlightened actors, often memory professionals, attempt to attract an attentive audience,
hoping to sow the seeds of future resistance. But just as teachers primarily focus on fulfilling
their principle vocation (transmitting knowledge), actors in legal proceedings also reflect their
professional communities. Anyone who takes the time to observe a trial in its entirety is
therefore struck by the importance of the professional disputes and personal confrontations
that play out here. For example, the trials of the Second World War collaborators in France
provided an opportunity for historians to think about what it means to be a professional
historian in the public sphere, and to confront each other over this, and in particular on the
inappropriateness of their role as key witnesses, rather than as experts (Rousso and Conan,
1996; Israël and Mouralis, 2000; Fleury and Walter, 2005).
During the trial of Pascal Simbikangwa, who was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for
genocide and crimes against humanity by two French appeals courts, testimony from victims
was relatively secondary.50 But the trial saw successive confrontations between different
experts, psychologists, historians, and sociologists, as well as legal professionals. In this
respect the trial was partly propelled by the institutional dynamic of a legal framework,
specialized in fighting crimes against humanity and war crimes, which was in search of its
own legitimacy. Of course, these conflicts were caught up in moral and political logics –
which were all the more salient given France’s involvement in the Rwandan genocide, which
cast a long shadow on political figures still in power.
Similarly, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda undoubtedly
incorporated the diplomatic need to protect states’ reputations into their reasoning (Maison,
2017). But these trials are above all animated by specifically professional conflicts: between
schools of thought, ways of understanding a profession, between methodologies, between
approaches to a given institutional sphere. Ultimately these trials fall within the legal system,
which is run through by dynamics of political power. Exchanges are above all oppositions
between of legal professionals, who produce a legal truth together (Thomas, 1998) as they
play out their professional roles. In spite of their particularities, these trials are ultimately
quite ordinary. Indeed, this was the adjective that Rachel Hughes (2015) used to describe the
Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia, in spite of the fact that they were specific in both their
object – the genocide – and their modalities – combining national and international law.
If trials have important effects – in addition to their ability to cause upheavals in the lives of
the victims and the accused – they occur on the border between the legal and political spheres.
Judges and lawyers provide their momentum. Governments authorize them or give them their
final impetus, often late in the day. The Israeli government in the Eichmann trial and the
French presidency during the Simbikangwa trial both acted twenty years after the events.
Political parties and activists, representatives of victims or members of human rights
organizations also often play a fundamental role. The new alternative narrative that they

50
Other Rwandan trials will allow them a greater role.
sometimes produce about violent events is also less about lessons for citizens, and more to do
with the reorganization of politically legitimate narratives through interactions between
judges, historians, victims and political leaders. They achieve both their reason for being and
their effects in the political sphere, understood not as civic participation (in keeping with
Republican theory), but as a specialized arena and the relationship between citizens and
authorities. This is also true of the international level (Lefranc and Mouralis, 2014): the
International Criminal Court is involved in a complex political game between major
international powers and the (African) countries concerned by charges.
Whatever the memory policy tools we consider, familiarity with sociological questioning
leads us to doubt the strength of voluntarist actions focused on the short-term. This might
appear self-evident, but it is rarely explained or analyzed. In the short moment of a civic
education lesson, a visit to a museum, or a court hearing – even when they are repeated –
people cannot be made to apply a principle of tolerance to all their actions, if they did not
already do so. A teacher can only awaken dispositions that society has already sown in the
child.
Through the economic and social necessity that they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous
world of the domestic economy and family relations, or more precisely, through the
specifically familial manifestations of this external necessity (forms of the division of labour
between the sexes, household objects, modes of consumption, parent-child relations, etc.), the
structures characterizing a determinate class of conditions of existence produce the structures
of the habitus, which in their turn are the basis of the perception and appreciation of all
subsequent experiences. (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 90)

We are just as unable to counter the propensity for openness toward others (or resistance to
authority) as a we are to undo the effects of a rigorous primary socialization; “sit up straight”
may in fact convey the injunction to “control your body, make a good impression, resist moral
slackness.” Habitus, these dispositions forged through socialization, guards against any
intrusion; its inertia is its best defense (sociologists sometimes call this “hysteresis”). It
facilitates non-exposure to contradictory messages, guiding the places we frequent or avoid,
the people we socialize with, or don’t; it even influences the attention we pay to what the
teacher says. Injunctions to tolerate others, to do no harm even when instructed otherwise,
may seem like a kind of symbolic violence from this perspective.
But the careful observation of the sites in which memory policies are implemented show that
there is more to this than the vain attempt to influence personalities that are already formed.
We see interactions between people with complex habitus, whose dispositions are being
continually reformed, and which are again altered in the context of a memorial moment.
Teachers bring to the classroom not only their desire for knowledge, their political
convictions, and social identity, but also their hesitations about the civic role they have been
assigned. For students, it is their grades, their teacher’s and parents’ satisfaction, their peer-
group reputation (with its different expectations), their interest and boredom, which are all at
stake. Even the victims who are called upon to testify as men and women affected by
violence, trying to overcome their trauma, sometimes don’t follow the path mapped for them.
If these personalities are all changing over the course of their interactions, how can we ensure
the lasting internalization of dispositions for peace and tolerance?

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enseignement. Paris: Institut national de recherche pédagogique.
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Sage.
Wilson, R. A. (2001). The politics of truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing
the post-Apartheid state. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Young, M. F. D. (1971). Knowledge and control: New directions for the sociology of
education. London: Collier-Macmillan.
Chapter 3: The effects of memory

So we can see that memory policies do not have the effects intended. Some of the people who
design them have arrived at the same conclusion and therefore propose to wait, to reinforce
these actions, or to modify them. They suggest using constraint, for example by legislating on
the past, or encouraging the development of emotionally moving projects to push citizens to
evolve on this issue. More rarely, architects of memory policy might rightly reiterate that an
invitation to respect others supposes a genuine equality in access to social resources,
education, employment, and housing. They raise the issue of political conditions that do not
lend support to the messages being promoted: the economic crisis, the situation and conflicts
in the Middle East, increasingly frequent terrorist attacks, and so forth. However, they rarely,
if ever, question the founding principles of these policies, and particularly the idea according
to which the repeated and systematic exposure to memorial content leads to support,
internalization, and then application of civic values.
Yet what we have seen sheds doubt on these principles themselves. Memory policies do not
expose individuals to a past that is foreign to them. Of course, they connect “ordinary” men
and women to one or several memory(ies), but that is not all. These men and women are
ordinary in the sense that they continue on with their lives at the very point at which they
become the target audience for memorial policy. They may indeed be strongly affected by the
lessons they receive: a handful of them may become activists or consider changing their
professions; they may be deeply convinced of the urgent need to be tolerant and to refuse
exclusion and repression in cases of open conflict. But this change may also not occur. If it
does, it is most often because it “resonates” with sensibilities that are already in place, or
more specifically with social positions that are already established and recognized as such by
others. In any event, people nevertheless continue to live parallel, changing lives in diverse
social worlds, in families, social groups, professional worlds, groups of acquaintances, or
political parties. These worlds follow different, possibly even contradictory rules. Sometimes
these people are caught up in a context that, with the rapid acceptance of a new exclusionary
norm, leads to the extermination of a group. To echo Samuel Moyn’s enlightening book on
the limits of human rights in changing the world (2018), we might say simply that memory is
not enough.
In the early 1970s, a social psychology experiment was conducted in the theology department
of a university on the East Coast of the United States. The subjects were students studying
theology, believers, with substantial religious culture. The experiment showed that these
students, who had just re-read the good Samaritan Bible story, with its colorful reiteration of
the importance of compassion, did not stop to help a man who was lying immobile on the
ground (like in the story) – unless they could do so and still be on time for a meeting they had
to attend for their career advancement! It was therefore not their personal goodness, nor the
lessons learned from the Bible, but the situation and the social imperative for success that
determine their behavior (Darley and Batson, 1973). One can be a paragon of virtue one day,
or even one minute, in a particular social sphere, and an ordinary coward the next day, or the
next minute, in another sector of society. It is generally futile to comfort ourselves with the
assumption that a given personality is consistent and stable in its opposition to intolerance and
violence.
It is only if we recognize the banality of memory, and the echoes that it has in our various
lives, that it is possible to identify its political, professional, and civic effects. Memory
policies do not create good citizens (tolerant people in this context, nationalist bigots in
others) ex nihilo, nor even consolidate them, because their effects are different from those
intended by the creators of these policies. They are designed to move and change individuals
directly, and through them society. But their effects are indirect. 51 This is why memorial
programs cannot be simply studied in the spaces where they are implemented, whether it be
museums or schools, truth commissions or courtrooms. All of the networks and social
relations that the increasing development of these policies has given rise to must be taken into
consideration. If we return to the French case which is central to this book, we can see that the
density and diversity of social relations and their ability to rely on credible legitimate actors
since the 1970s, explains why a large portion of French society today still do not participate in
persistent expressions of intolerance, racism or anti-Semitism.
The French support the principles of memory policy and demonstrate their belief that it is
important to talk about the past in order to build a democratic society. Thus, and in keeping
with the importance of the memory of the Holocaust as part of this discourse, in 2014, 85% of
respondents surveyed by IFOP said that Jewish people were “just like other French people”,
while only a third said the same thing in 1946. And 86% of respondents consider that

51
In this respect, an in-depth study of memory public policy is a particularly insightful case for an approach in
terms of "policy feedback", the indirect effects of public policy on the politicization and attitudes towards the
state (Gensburger and Saint-Léger, 2018).
criminalization of anti-Semitic comments is necessary, compared to only 76% in 2012. Let us
explore the foundations of these widely shared values, and specifically people’s ability to be
tolerant in their behavior. Then we will seek to identify the indirect nature of the power of
memory policies by describing the worlds, professions, and the “memorial field” that they
create and cultivate.

Can individuals really be changed?

Before revisiting the fact that memory policies have effects other than those intended, we will
first look more closely at the two key assumptions these policies make, which appear to run
counter to contemporary social sciences and go some way to explaining certain limits of these
policies.

Memory policies do not educate individuals

As we saw in the previous chapter, memory and its lessons are by no means received without
filters or distortion the moment they are transmitted. Whether at school, in museums, in truth
commissions, in courtrooms, but also in front of the TV or in the public sphere, all individuals
are citizens or future citizens, and they receive the lessons from these policies as such. But
they are also sons and daughters, parents, comrades or colleagues, peers, neighbors,
congregation members, or members of organizations, associations or political parties. These
multiple social positions all constitute filters through which the lessons they receive are read
and interpreted. The same is true of the past. Several studies have tried to invent ways to
measure this effect of the past on behavior, independently of all the memory policy programs
in place. They show certain filters that are already observed in the contexts in which
individuals interact with these memory policy programs. Gender (Schuman and Corning,
2006; Antichan et al., 2016), place of residence, particularly in the American North or South
(Griffin, 2004), or race (Schuman and Rodgers, 2004) all have an impact on what people
remember and understand about the past. In 2019, again, the huge controversy around the
historical analogies between Holocaust concentration camps and contemporary camps in the
US for immigrants showed once more how diverse the interpretation of the past could be, in
this case depending on the political orientations of the people. This political divide even took
place at the very core of the Jewish community, where some demonstrated against the
interment of migrants, with the slogan “Never again” and others said publically how offended
they were by the comparison between the current situation and the Holocaust.
Among these different worlds, which Maurice Halbwachs called the “social frameworks” of
memory (Halbwachs, 1992; Lavabre, 2000), the family plays a particularly important role.
Families may preserve and transmit contradictory “legends”, like German families who
celebrate the memory of an admirable grandfather over family lunches on one hand, eluding
his involvement with Nazism, and then strongly condemn Nazism with their friends and
colleagues on the other (Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall, 2013). Primary socialization has a
“particular solidity” to it which makes it “massively and indubitably real” and explains why
its effects are more durable over the lifecourse, particularly because they are rooted in
emotion (Berger and Luckmann, 1992, p.155). The worlds of school and work are less
emotionally charged – a colleague or a teacher are more easily replaced than a mother or
father. It is far easier to give up wearing a suit and tie for a more informal workplace where
they are not the norm, than it is to give up covering our nakedness, which our parents, and
everyone else along with them, taught us to consider shameful. The same is true for political
socialization. Although primary socialization and early learning do not determine party
preferences later in life, they nevertheless provide a reading of society, at least when the
principles provided by the various worlds in which we live converge.
The lessons of the past are therefore not univocal. They are appropriated through the multiple
and shifting social frameworks in which the individual who receives them exists. In most
cases, they do not leave lasting traces. The belief in the permanence and homogeneity of
people is at the heart of memory policies: what a student learns in civic education class or on
repeated school trips to memorial sites will help make him or her a good citizen. Yet the
studies that are genuinely interested in the social, in other words by the interactions between
people, more or less hardened in their ways and institutions, have clearly shown that although
habitus and cultures structure people, behavior is never really predictable (except in instances
of massive re-education (Shklar, 1990). People’s behavior is less the externalization of
dispositions, behavioral norms, political preferences, or moral principles contained deep
within them than it is the reaction to watching other people act – if not all others, then at least
those whose opinion matters or whom they see as models. They adjust their pre-existing
dispositions according to the way in which other people react or acquiesce, or not, to their
actions. Rare are those forms of habitus that dictate a single possible behavioral response. We
chose one attitude among many others that are in keeping with the social role we think we
play, in the different worlds we evolve in. Given this, we can understand how, in 1940s
France, politicians were able to transfer all their power to the benefit of a regime that would
then organize the collaboration with the German occupiers; behavior that may otherwise
initially seem quite irrational (Ermakoff, 2008). It also helps us understand why members of
parliament who were not revolutionaries in 1789, became so over the course of the events that
followed (Tackett, 1997). No moral character nor ideological conviction can perfectly explain
– or even mostly explain – the choices people make day after day.
The idea of psychological coherence, which is so necessary for an individual’s sense of
wellbeing, particularly in societies that are as highly individualized as ours, suffers in this.
The idea of moral personality or character is a rationalization that is reviewed during each
interaction and sometimes genuinely tested when the person moves outside their routines
(Doris, 2008). Even the most well-learned lessons can be challenged and contradicted:
[…] human beings have no difficulty in bringing together, in what they feel, think
and do, the most diverse visions and behavior, the deepest ambivalence, and the most
extreme contradictions […]. It would be a fundamental error to extrapolate the
personality of a human being from their behavior in a given situation; on the
contrary, we should identify which interpretation of the situation in question leads
them to do what they did (Welzer, 2007, p. 49).
What makes a moral injunction effective? It is humans’ social nature to think and speak blue
in one situation and red (or light blue) in another. This disposition for contradiction is, if not
human nature, then at least social nature which is further reinforced by the differentiation of
our societies, the fact that our lives now lead us to frequent a large variety of highly
autonomous social spheres. The moments in which we converge on more simple and
homogenous spheres of reference are rare and brief (Dobry, 1988). This does not mean that
there are no universalist values shared in our different milieus: our colleagues, parents, friends
almost always expect us to be courteous and respectful. Our differentiated societies – which
allow for contextual rules of behavior specific to each social world – make great use of these
universal values (which are functional because they are liable to apply to a range of individual
cases). In France these are transmitted in particular through the republican school system, and
in other places through forms of secular religions. The values within memory policies –
tolerance, empathy for victims – are part of this. They have been imposed, with differing
degrees of force, in many social spheres. Other values, such as masculine toughness and a
disdain for foreigners, are more rarely transmitted today, at least explicitly and publicly.
But should we conclude therefore that these shared values are rules that apply in all spaces
and situations? Are they even expressed with the intention of being implemented? As the
sociologist Erving Goffman (quoted above) has shown regarding morality, it is the situational
framework rather than the internalization of norms that determines behavior. Social sciences
have shown that too much concern for sincerity leads us to overlook the dynamic core of
social action. From this new reading, it is no longer assumed that people deeply adhere to
what they say, think, and do. Or, more precisely, we are no longer surprised that someone acts
in one way – with genuine or relative sincerity – in one sphere and then does the opposite in
their exchanges in another sphere. The social games (which are not always fun or playful)
produced by this human art of “playing” together, at a moment t and in multiple places, are
more important than moral character in determining behavior. This art of achieving an
alignment of behavior, rather than a coherence between actions and intentions, is what makes
public policy effective. Based on this sociological finding, we can now ponder what might be
the effectiveness of the injunction to “remember the past to avoid repeating it.”

What good are lessons from the past when someone hands you a gun?
Let us return to the second assumption of memory policies: that “lessons from the past” will
be reactivated when the situation requires. This also helps to explain the limits of these
policies. They suppose that citizens who are trained for tolerance through reminders of a
violent past will know how to protest – we hope! – against exclusion whether with friends or
in the street. They will – must! – boycott hate speech and propaganda. They will express their
disgust at seeing their neighbors depicted as rats and cockroaches like they were during the
Holocaust or the genocide in Rwanda. They will turn off the radio that incites people to kill,
like Mille Collines did when it called for the murder of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. They will
refuse to become killers, and choose, if not to be “rescuers” or “Righteous”, at the very least
to say no.
But if this is what we assume, we are largely mistaken. The American intervention in Iraq in
1991 gave rise to a series of historical analogies on the part of American citizens, for
example. Many of them “recognized” the Vietnam war in their country’s new military
involvement. But this shared analogy elicited very different behavior in relation to this
specific conflict, from radical condemnation to unconditional support (Schuman and Rieger,
1992).
What has been said about everyday lives in peacetime is no less true for situations of violence
or war. There is a need to question the clarity of the borders between war and peace, because
both challenge similar social processes and solidarities (Richards, 2005). However, even if we
hypothesize exceptional “crisis” circumstances, we cannot mechanically deduce a drastic
reduction in the choices available to the individual – becoming a killer or a savior for example
– given the range of possibilities within their multiple identities and roles, adjusted to a given
situation in more routine circumstances (Dobry, 2014). War can only be narrated in terms of
good and evil in hindsight and through the lens of morality. The tales that associate attitudes
toward violence with an acceptance or a refusal of an ideology of hatred, or with the
imperative of saving one’s own life in the face of an imperious authority, or even with
economic greed are for the most part outrageous simplifications. Even the most tyrannical
powers provide choices (Hibou, 2017). Hatred and material jealousy are neither the primary
fuel nor the only ingredients in genocide. The solidity of the lessons from the past are tested
in historic moments that are of course extraordinary, but which, like more banal situations,
lead people to act according to the perception of their peers as well as the injunctions of those
in power (Milgram, 1983).
It is therefore not possible to prevent war by ensuring that all of a country’s inhabitants are
virtuous, “good” citizens. Wars, like genocides, are the products of a series or a juxtaposition
of thousands of choices made by people, as citizens, neighbors, doctors, or bus drivers. These
choices are initially small, anodyne – appearing offended, or protesting at a racist joke, for
example – which little by little most often cast us in the role of passive witness rather than
resistant. When ordered to hate or kill, people resign themselves to do so as they act in a given
situation; this decision is never easy, it is always a choice, and therefore a responsibility. They
then find ways to rationalize their actions, to make them coherent with the aspects of their
personality they want to promote, and their social roles. Testimonies from killers are often
rich with these appreciations of work “well done”, camaraderie, patriotic devotion, and so
forth.
Harald Welzer, following on from Christopher Browning, demonstrates this in relation to the
Final Solution and the mass shootings in Eastern Europe by army reserves during the Third
Reich. It is important to remember that the Einsatzgruppen, around 3,000 men sent to the east
between July and December 1941, killed some 500,000 people, often at very short range,
most of them Jewish (Browning, 1999; Welzer, 2007; on this subject but less convincingly
see, Goldhagen, 1997, or De Swaan, 2016). Yet anti-Semitic hatred is not what led them to
kill. In fact, they may not have hated anyone. That is not to say that this anti-Semitism did not
become a widespread social norm in just a few short months through everyday minor acts of
compliance and indifference. Indeed, it was fed by elements of older moral values such as
inegalitarian aristocratic norms, the value of labor, even humanism, and the sense of
“correction.” But a single “retrodictive” verdict, considering the outcome of history as
necessary, and a succession of events as a cause and effect (Dobry, 1988), could impute Nazi
crimes to a “war culture” or generalized intolerance among the German population. In this
environment, which very rapidly shifted from a logic of exclusion to one of extermination, the
immediate situation was largely responsible for individual action. Peer relations were decisive
in this; the feeling of belonging to a group bound by experiences, alcohol, a feeling of
obligation, and rapidly also by the experience of working at organized violence, the
encouragements or constraints they shared with each other. These were ordinary men, neither
particularly ideological impassioned, nor experienced in combat, and who before the war (and
often after as well – if an amnesty allowed them to escape prison) were “good” husbands,
“good” Christians, and “good” workers.
Men and women who are called upon by a political or military power and engaged in
interacting with other people – with whom they share a reciprocal gaze – can kill with or
without hatred for their victims, who are dehumanized through this work of killing. The
victims are dehumanized in that they are deprived of interaction and communication with
their killers. The latter may kill in spite of the strength of their humanist convictions and
moral principles. Worse still, this same desire to preserve their moral self-image, both in their
own eyes and those of others, can lead someone to either kill or to remind others that “thou
shalt not kill”. For example, one man in the army reserve sent to the Eastern front to carry out
mass shootings of Jews, says he acted out of “humanism” when he shot children to prevent
them being separated from their mothers:
“I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so
happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the
mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself
that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was
supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable
to live without their mothers.” (Browning, 1992, p.73)
These ideas, which are so disturbing to us, also shed light on what happened in Rwanda
between April and July 1994: the genocide of around a million Tutsis as well as the
massacre of Hutu opponents and resistants. For a long time, the dominant explanations
emphasized the strength of ancestral ethnic hatred and political manipulation. From this
perspective, the Hutus acted spontaneously out of a feeling of vengeance and
detestation; farmers, soldiers, and activists are said to have killed out of a sense of
obedience or indoctrination. However, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have
instead demonstrated, based on scrupulous empirical investigation, that these
interpretations were false, that these ethnic identities were often much more flexible
than it appeared, and that once again hate was not such an important factor. The
genocide was a well-organized political action, passed down through a range of actors:
military personnel, activists, church personnel, and leadership candidates. But it was the
local appropriations of state policy, and various motivations ranging from material
jealousy to personal rancor and including the fear of being judged by others, and the
immediate interactions that gave it its unimaginable “efficiency” (Fujii, 2009, p. 571).
Embedded in local context, which extends and renews existing social interactions
(King, 2012), some killers do not in fact need to sincerely believe the government’s hate
propaganda (Fujii, 2009, p. 10452). All of them – both killers and those who do not kill –
retain their ability to act with an awareness of the plurality of the world. They might kill
a Tutsi one day in the belief that they are killing an enemy or an inferior, and the next
day spare another Tutsi. Others might do the same thing in full awareness that it is
neither an enemy, nor an inferior that they are killing. During the Rwandan genocide, a
given individual may have killed someone on one day when his “comrades” were
present, and then saved someone else the next day, when they were not (Fujii, 2009,
p. 177 and 594).
However, we can consider that the lessons from the past, and moral convictions more
generally, provided the foundation for the actions of saviors, those who helped Jews and
Tutsis to survive (unlike the “executioners” studied by Harald Welzer). Once again, the
situation of the individual and their social relations play a central role in the initiation of
their actions. The acts of solidarity during the Holocaust have also intrigued researchers
seeking to understand the reasons for rescue actions that provoke such spontaneous
admiration. To summarize rapidly, as they stand, these studies lead to a twofold
conclusion. Beliefs relating to Jews, whether anti-Semitic or not, do not have much
explanatory weight; there were ardent anti-Semites, who were sometimes public
activists, were also involved in large-scale rescue operations (Andrieu, Gensburger and
Sémelin, 2014). Relational and situational factors dominate. Rescuers came from all
walks of life. But they tended to share the fact that they were relatively marginal within
their primary groups of belonging (family, professional, religious, et cetera) (Tec,
1986). Moreover, in order to become “good Samaritans” these people who were
outsiders within their own sphere,s often had to be put in the position of being able to
save or rescue, in other words, somebody actually asked for their help (Varese and
Yaish, 2000).

52
Of course, there were also executioners who were ideologues (Delpla, 2011).
This same observation was made for the Rwandan case. The most consistent rescuers
were motivated more by a concern for universal, abstract values than they were by
affection – that famous emotional response that memory policies hope to revive when
needed. And yet these moral markers could only be implemented because these
individuals were in a position of relative independence in relation to other people, and
particularly those in their immediate circle. More than other people, these saviors shared
the fact that they felt authorized to refuse interaction. Their moral compasses were only
activated because of their freedom to act and interact, or to do neither (Fujii, 2009,
p. 584-587).
One of the characteristics shared by those who came to the aid of victims, both in
Rwanda and in Europe during the Second World War, is thus individualism, or the
feeling of being different, imperfect social integration, a preference for strong and
selective friendships. Sometimes, the extreme opposite was true, and their actions were
more due to their strong integration into a social environment devoted to the cause of
humanitarian assistance (Tec, 1986, p. 119; Monroe, 2004). Conversely, research has
shown that the killers were often highly sociable, more than saviors in any case
(McDoom, 2014).53 So should we raise our children to shun social integration or even to
be misanthropic? This book is not the place for a reflection on the pedagogy that would
make them autonomous enough to always preserve their humanity. Let us content
ourselves with emphasizing that these conclusions, established in the specific context of
social behavior during genocides, nevertheless shed light on an ordinary mechanism.54
Once again, lessons from the past must be heard in situation in order to be reactivated;
they must be embedded within a web of social relations.

The political power of memory policies

The limits of memory policy are therefore primarily due to the fact that the sociological
assumptions upon which they are based are false. The mechanisms of these policies cannot
directly act on social behavior, nor make people better citizens. Given this, how can we
understand that these policies are maintained? They do in fact have real effects, but of a
different order. Their power is above all political in the broadest sense of the term. They

53
Particularly in the case of “low level” Rwandan executioners.
54
Michaël Pollak (1990) was among the first to show this, with great subtlety, about women's experience in the
concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Unfortunately, this pioneering book has not been translated into
English.
create a space for resources and interest that attracts an increasing number of more and more
diverse actors who are all invested in pursuing them, and affirming the principles behind
them. In so doing, they give rise to a sense of support and give the expression “remembering
the past to avoid repeating it” social strength in different social spaces.

The objective here is not to reveal the opportunism of any particular social groups, from the
“descendants of slaves”, to “Jews”, or those involved in memory tourism or civic education.
This was recently portrayed in a biting satirical novel on the “competition” between victims
and professionals of the Holocaust, in which the son of the chairman of the Washington
Memorial is the director of a consulting firm named Holocaust Connections (Reich, 2014).
This idea was also explored by Norman Finkelstein in his essay on the Holocaust industry
(2000). These analyses seem to overlook the most ordinary functioning of all societies,
including the role played by business and capitalism. Our current approach seeks to go
beyond this moralistic perspective.

We have already emphasized the fact that no one is simple enough to have a single motivation
– nor is society today homogenous enough to accommodate such a person. Much more
simply, it is important to demonstrate that the mechanisms by which people become interested
and mobilized, which are associated with the development of these memory policies are also
ordinary social processes and, furthermore, that they are the best guarantee of these policies’
effectiveness, more so than their incontestable moral validity.

In the case of the development of the memory of the Holocaust, which is so canonical in these
debates, Peter A. Meyers had the intuition that such a mechanism was at work. While others
emphasized the driving role of the Jewish elites in the development of policies, he reiterated
that social life cannot be reduced to strategies. In his view, the proposition – here the leitmotiv
“remembering the past to avoid repeating it” – is not efficient because it is defended by a
group, but because it interests other groups. We can voice opinions without them having a
bearing on our future action. All they say is that we are engaged in an exchange, here and
now. Memory policies become “commonplaces” (Meyers, 2001, p. 163), and are sometimes
used in ways that are insincere or clumsy, but they enable encounters between people from
different worlds. In the eyes of a moralist this may appear to be a misappropriation, or even a
distortion by unauthorized groups, but this is precisely where memory policies get their
strength.
The relational effects of memory policies
A detour via another era and another space provides us with a new reading of the
contemporary period. Paul Veyne, who is a specialist in ancient history, encourages us to
examine Trajan’s Column in Rome. This 30-meter high column, situated near the Coliseum,
was inaugurated in 113 CE, and appears to tell the story, carved into the surface of the
column, of Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian wars. In reality, it does not tell the story of
much at all, because it is impossible to read from the ground. Tourists who cross Trajan’s
Forum today have to crane their heads back to have a glimpse of the top. Adept of the
memory policies that irrigate our societies today, they are convinced that what is written is
there to be read, understood, memorized, recalled and held up as a standard for action; action
which was no doubt nationalist and bellicose in the Roman period.
But Veyne, maliciously encourages us to look better at the column. This paradoxically means
giving up looking more closely to try to read something, because ultimately what is written
there is not that important. In doing this, we come to understand what the column actually
says: its height reveals the majesty of a power so great that it can build something so high that
it does not even have to worry about being readable (Veyne, 2002, p. 6; 1985, 1988 and
1990). The column was not built to be “read” nor to instruct people by recalling the dead and
commemorating the actions of a great emperor. Nor was it really built to be looked at. Like
the Parthenon and most of the great roman monuments, its very existence is an affirmation
that the empire does not need to be fêted. Its power was self-evident. Looking for
confirmation of victory by reading the column was already a sign of doubt. These monuments
incarnate what Veyne calls l’apparat: power that is “illegible” because the belief in its
legitimacy is already acquired. Propaganda is a different story however: it seeks to convince.
“Weak” regimes, those which have allowed subjects who have become citizens to distance
themselves from the state, use propaganda as a persuasive tool. But in democratic – or at least
non totalitarian – societies like ours, propaganda often fails or only has limited and temporary
validity (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948). In fact, our governments are all the more interested in
communication activities when they are not seeking to durably persuade anyone of anything.
This detour via antiquity can be used to shed light on contemporary memory policies, which
resembles propaganda according to this definition. In other words, they constitute symbols
brandished by a “weak” power that has no other choice but to be legible and transparent. A
discourse by a political power – whether it concerns the moral importance of the past, as is the
case here, or indeed the economy and budgetary austerity – has no lasting effect. Its influence
on citizens is the indirect result of the approbation of the social world, in particular the
individual social world; in other words the relatively convergent evaluation (which is always
liable to change) of the citizen’s primary social groups, for example their family, their social
hierarchy, television stations, blogs, and so forth. In this respect, memory policies are only
effective if no one is questioning their effectiveness; in other words, they are effective when
reference groups are convergent enough to confer force and obligation to an injunction that
has no strength in itself, and opposed to others that are divergent. This conclusion is banal,
but it forces us to revisit our understanding of the way in which these policies act. It is not
their ability to provoke genuine conviction that is decisive, but rather their power to make all
of us (or most of us) to say the same thing, even if we do not believe a word of it. Research in
social science has demonstrated this: politics is not about genuine efficiency, but efficient
fictions.
An injunction for commemoration may not exist to be read, understood, or learned. It may
exist to materialize, and where necessary consolidate, a pre-existing political relation. This
suggests we should focus less on the content of these policies, and more on the groups and
people that they involve. “What is important is not so much the content of the message as the
relationship established through it” (Veyne, 2002, p. 8). For the most part, memory policies
are not about content transmitted but rather about links between actors that play out in the
present (Lavabre, 2007); between policy architects and their audiences, but also between local
actors, teachers, museum staff, workers in international organizations, activists on behalf of
victims, therapists, lawyers, politicians, even activists and experts for causes that appear
unrelated to those at stake here, among many others. And these interactions make a decisive
contribution to the form that these memory policies take, the truths that they incarnate, as well
as their programs for action, and ultimately their power.

When memory policy gives rise to “victims”

The effectiveness of memory policies is primarily reliant on the redistribution of identities

and the status and functions they are associated with, to the point where Ian Hacking has
talked about the emergence of a “memoro-power” and “memoro-politics” in the United States
(Hacking, 1995, p.218 and 215). Let us take the example of the emergence of the Holocaust
as a moral norm in the 1960s (Alexander, 2002), which undoubtedly contributed to the
consolidation of the category of victims in many countries. References to the past are
articulated around contemporary issues, such as feminist mobilizations, or challenges to a
purely repressive justice system (Lefranc, 2006b). Victims, if and when they manage to speak
openly, have the right to have their story heard, to testify, to contribute to the writing of
history, before committees of historians, parliamentarians, or tribunals and commissions. The
protocols for this are transnational and transversal. They can be seen in the near identical
approaches to managing terrorist attacks (Gensburger, 2019), natural disasters (Revet and
Langumier, 2013), and asylum seekers, within the sector of emergency humanitarian
intervention, as well as in post-conflict policies that use the management of the past as a tool.
The official recognition of victims is often associated with a status that provides access to
administrative services or psychological assistance, or which involves a role in legal
processes at the national, but also international, levels and which up until recently still gave
the victim of a crime a very minor role. The category of victims also gives rise to rights and
responsibilities, which although not codified, are expressed increasingly assertively, such as
the “right to truth” (Naftali, 2013), the “duty to remember”, and also the “right to forget”.
From this perspective, the injunction to remember the violent past and learn from it has been
highly effective. It has created new titles and resources – defined by many laws and attributed
by ad hoc commissions and ordinary administrations. It has even overthrown the everyday
interactions that enable people to aspire to positions of social importance, once linked to acts
of heroism, now linked to an experience of trauma or demands for compensation. “The
discovery of the painful memory is a major anthropological phenomenon of contemporary
societies” (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009, p. 15).
Memory policies have therefore strongly participated in the crystallization of victims as a
category, among others (Chaumont, 1997; Grandjean and Jamin, 2011). In reaction to this,
some actors have emphasized the “competition between victims” and “counter-mobilizations”
(Chaumont, 1997; Grandjean and Jamin, 2011). Those “purged” from France after the Second
World War, for example, make claims that “mirror” those of communist resistants
(Baudinière, 2008). Argentine or Chilean soldiers who “fell” during “battles” (which were in
fact a matter of police repression), present their case in the same terms as those used by the
loved ones of those who “disappeared” at the hands of the military. These confrontations in
fact illustrate not so much the autonomous and decisive strategies of particular groups, but
more the power of these memory policies to create a space for resources and interests,
sometimes unbeknownst to these same groups. The public evocation of intimate memories
gives rise to similar confrontations, the creation of associations and “counter-associations”,
and even the birth of a False Memory Syndrome Foundation, studied by Ian Hacking (1995)
for example in the case of accusations of incest expressed long after the events allegedly
happened which give rise to a public scandal.
It would be wrong to suppose that these processes can be reduced to confrontations between
aspirations for recognition that only moral or political options are able to decide. Claims made
by victims are not the direct expression of trauma. They suppose the creation of a group and
the formulation of a complaint. Pursuing this path constitutes a political action which is
therefore subject to the ordinary rules of the political sphere. If the fact that victims deserve
social respect has become self-evident socially, this has not freed the victims involved from
the weight of ordinary social and political constraints (Lefranc, Mathieu and Siméant, 2008;
Célestine, 2012).
Politicians clearly have to satisfy more than just victims. Moreover, they do not satisfy them
simply to obey the demands of their moral consciences. Memory policies are like any other
policies. They have an important bearing on questions of foreign policy, which are sometimes
highly conflictual. The trials under international jurisdiction in which French authorities are
involved, for better or worse, regarding France’s role in the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis,
for example, cast a long shadow over, and ultimately threaten, the reputations and careers of
high-profile political figures (in particular former President François Mitterrand and some
former Ministers of Foreign Affairs such as Alain Juppé and Hubert Védrine). The French
law recognizing the Armenian genocide, voted on January 29, 2001, raised similar legal
disputes with Turkey. International relations are full of confrontations (whether open or
implicit) between states that are born out of or revived by memorial questions (Rosoux,
2001).
In other contexts, memorial policies and actions provide the opportunity for unexpected
rapprochements. Institutions for traditional justice, such as truth commissions, have often
facilitated reconciliation between former enemies, for example, between political parties
anxious to expel the threat of new military coups, black and white elites in South Africa
(Wilson, 2001), the monarchy and Islamic or left-wing opponents in Morocco (Vairel, 2014),
or between governments fighting against guerrillas and their historical allies on the left in
Colombia (Lecombe, 2014).
But “small-scale” politics also feeds on memorial policies; politics on the edges of the
political scene, because memorial norms are often brandished against, or by, actors who are
marginal or have limited power. The bill brought before the French parliament recognizing
the “positive role” of French colonization was not the gauntlet laid down by France against
former colonies and their residents, but the expression of the ambition of a handful of right-
wing MPs on the fringes of their parties who were anxious to stand out (Bertrand, 2006).
Similarly, attempts to redefine slavery as a crime against humanity are linked to a
convergence between communist MPs and associations from the French Antilles, beginning at
the local level (Michel, 2015). It was also local political dynamics that were responsible for
memory policies in the United States dedicated to the fate of Korean “comfort women” who
were sexually abused by Japanese occupying forces in Korea during the Second World War
(Hasunuma and McCarthy, 2019).
Sometimes – and this is the sign of the power of a label as well as of its flexibility – those
who appear to be opponents of the current obsession with memory come to sing its praises. In
France for example, Nicolas Sarkozy denounced France’s alleged taste for “repentance”
during his campaign for the presidency, only to become the author of propositions
consolidating this once he became president (de Cock, Madeline, Offenstadt and Wahnich,
2008). Similarly, Marine le Pen, as the president of the far-right National Front, which many
actors of memory policy see as a threat that needs to be challenged, also adopted the rhetoric
of memory and, in 2015 before the European Parliament, denounced “the contempt and
nonchalance regarding the duty of remembrance”, and demanding that the French public
holiday on Armistice Day, November 11 be respected, before leaving the hemicycle.55 In
2019, as we put the final touches to this book, the Polish and Hungarian governments have
continued to challenge the memory policies promoted by Europe, which are intended to be
vectors for tolerance and togetherness. They challenge these policies not in the name of
forgetting, but once again in the name of memory itself. They promote an alternative narrative
that situates the “people”, of Hungary and Poland respectively, at the center of this history
and advocates their role as victims (Agh, 2016).
The victims and their memory(ies) are thus tightly controlled on the political scene.
Notwithstanding their diversity, particularly ideological, memory policies appear to all
proclaim and defend the cause of the victims. Yet they often make this an element in
transactions and collusions that both constrain and surpass them. Conversely, but in the
academic sphere this time, when victims are encouraged to write their memoirs, the social
sciences applaud the end of the domination of the vision of the perpetrators, but are also
anxious to defend their monopoly on the writing of a History (with a capital h) that aims to be
shared and objective. These tensions are often resolved through the adoption of the figure of a
“good victim”, who accepts that her story is objectivized, or at least that allows for the
positions of others (other victims, even perpetrators), and remains reasonable in her demands

55
www.frontnational.com/videos/11-novembre-marine-le-pen-reclame-le-respect-du-devoir-de-memoire/
(accessed June 25, 2017).
as well as in her use of emotion. Many well-known historians and philosophers emphasize the
need to move from private memory to public memory, the conversion of the “noise” of
complaints into an ethical-legal language liable to break the cycle of resentment and avoid
victims becoming trapped in a closed identity. The philosopher Tzvetan Todorov thus makes
a distinction between “exemplary memory”, which is a guide for future action, and a “literal
memory,” which remains stuck in the past and in the narrative. He writes, “the cult of
memory has rarely served good causes […] It can be the expression of conservatism and an
over-valorization of identity.” There is thus “undeniable merit in moving from one’s own
misfortune, or that of one’s friends and family, to the misfortune of others, not demanding for
oneself […] exclusive recognition […]” (Todorov, 1996, p. 15). The impossibility for victims
to access this form of universality even led the essayist David Rieff to praise forgetting
(2016).
Victims cannot aspire to this status unless they satisfy the criteria of various actors, whose
requirements are primarily defined by their different spheres: victims will have to pass an
administrative evaluation (when they ask for an official status or compensation), they will be
judged by philosophers on their ability to formulate universalist discourses, and so forth.
Some people who have been victims of political violence choose to withdraw from these
conditions and instead adopt the term “survivors”, thus specifying that they do not expect
official certification and reiterating that they survived at the hands of their tormentors. In
Argentina, for example, when the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo – the mothers of activists
who disappeared at the hands of the armed forces – say that their children are not dead, but
they are not delusional; they know that they are dead. They speak as the defenders of a
political cause and opponents of a government which came to power through a compromise
with the military (Lefranc, 2002).
This presentation of the complex ways in which memory policies have helped to shape the
category of victims, which is always embedded within asymmetrical social relations, sheds
lights on some of their social effects. It is impossible to understand just what these effects are
if we adopt a functional approach, in other words if we persist in seeing these policies as
prescriptions and cultural artefacts that are born either from the state’s need for unity and
reconciliation of society, or from a social demand formulated by victims.
Contrary to what many contemporary studies of memory policies assume, these are not public
policies that act “directly on the imaginary institution of collective identities” (Michel, 2010,
p. 5) or enable a “management of memory” (Cossu, 2010). They therefore cannot be reduced
to the action – as substantial and insistent and it may be – of any particular associations,
whether “Jewish associations,” or “associations for the memory of slavery and colonization”
(Michel, 2010, p. 119); nor can they be reduced to the memory activism that has been the
object of numerous enlightening studies in recent years (Tetrault, 2014; Katriel, 2016;
Wüstenberg, 2017; Gutman, 2017a and 2017b; Rigney, 2018, Chidgey, 2018; Altinay et al.,
2019).
This ex post perspective, which emphasizes the intentions and functions of memory policy,
overlooks the practice as it happens, and its relational nature. If we adopt another point of
view, focused on the diversification of actors involved in memorial issues, this “atomization”
and “fragmentation” that seem to many to be a sign of the fragmentation of the common
good, are not another sign of the pathological nature of these policies but rather of their
foundation in social relations. This is what enables them to have social effects, not so much
because of the content they convey, as because of the web of social relations, interconnected
with power and diverse interests, that they enable. This web of relations is sometimes woven
between actors whose readings of the past may even be clearly contradictory, in different
situations, as was the case for the commemoration of the Righteous Among Nations in
France. This commemoration brought together the state of Israel as the source of the honorary
title, a French Mayor who hosted the ceremony, possibly a member of a political party
currently engaged against Israeli foreign policy, and a Righteous who was there to receive the
medal and most likely indifferent to these questions, regardless of his or her personal views
on Israel and Judaism (Gensburger 2016). Far from curbing the influence of memory policies,
memorial controversies may in fact be a sign of their power in that they mobilize, interest, and
sometimes bring together – even through conflict – an increasing number of actors.

Is memory activism special?

The people interested in memory policy are both increasingly numerous and at the same time
more and more diverse. They extend much further than the immediate circle of former victims
and perpetrators, their descendants, or those who have an imagined filial link to them. The
persistence of memory policy is the result of the imperfect cumulation of their interactions,
which creates a broader social space in which the participants can defend their (often
contradictory) positions and gain legitimacy.

The small world of memory entrepreneurs

Today there is an abundant literature on the “actors” or “agents” of memory (Gensburger,
2012). It has even given rise to a field known as memory activism (Tetrault, 2014; Katriel,
2016; Wüstenberg, 2017; Gutman, 2017a and 2017b; Rigney, 2018, Chidgey, 2018; Altinay
et al., 2019). Research on memory actors looks at the origin of the individuals who engage in
collective action to denounce people who committed acts of violence against them directly or
against their ancestors; it also looks at people who were resistant fighters, First World War
veterans, victims of deportation, slavery, or colonization. Sociologist Michael Pollak was one
of the first to study this kind of social actors. He described them as “memory entrepreneurs”
following Howard Becker’s analysis of “moral entrepreneurs.” By analogy, “memory
entrepreneurs can be divided into two categories, those who create shared references, and
those who strive to have them respected. These memory entrepreneurs are convinced they
have a sacred mission to accomplish, and believe in intransigent ethics that equates the
memory they defend with the truth” (1993:30). Other authors use similar expressions like
“memory actors” (Winter and Sivan, 1999), “memory professionals” (Rautenberg, 2003), or
“memory agents” to refer to those who “commemorate” and “control the images of the past”
(Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2002: 46).56 Those involved in memory activism, who have become the
object of numerous innovative studies, now extend well beyond the descendants of victims or
perpetrators and cover a large range of social sub-spheres. For the French case, and contrary
to what is often claimed (Michel, 2010), a close analysis of the declarations made by
associations claiming to defend memory suggests that the increasing number of this kind of
memory entrepreneurs, particularly since 2000, is a result of the implementation of memory
policies rather than their cause (Gensburger and de Saint-Léger, 2018). For example, one of
the most central associations in the valorization of the memory of immigration in France
today was set up in 1987 without any reference to the past, to history, to memory, or even to
heritage and its founding documents. At the time it was merely a question of intercultural
dialogue. It was only in 2001 – after rather than before the institutionalization of memory
policies in different areas of state action – that a new line was added to association’s statutes.
It now had the objective to “produce any work, of whatever nature, related to the memory and
the history of immigration in France and in Europe.” In France, the implementation of
memory policy therefore created a space for the legitimization of collective action. That this
space was then invested by actors who had previously been outside it, was partly a
consequence of these policies, which in return were reinforced and made more visible by the
actors.

56
For more information see the discussion of memory activism in the introduction to this book.
Although there are more and more of them, these memory entrepreneurs form independent
social worlds. For the contemporary period in France, several prefecture57 reports observe that
it is largely veterans associations that attend commemorative ceremonies for the wars, while
the associations that speak “in the name of Jewish people” attend commemorations for the
Vél d’Hiv Roundup every July 16, and the “representatives people from the French Antilles”
attend events in remembrance of the slave trade and its abolitions on May 10, and so forth. 58
Research by Jenny Wüstenberg on post-war Germany shows how the dynamics of social
proximity and acquaintances played a driving role in the mobilizations that were held in the
name of memory (2017).
It is therefore important to move beyond the observation that memory policies are the
cumulation of specific causes, in order to understand that what is affirmed in each case in
relation to the state, is the importance of talking about the past, whatever it is, and drawing
lessons for the future. In understanding the dynamic that is the heart of this book, it may not
be so important that these pasts, as well as the lessons to be learned from them, are different.
If these memory entrepreneurs are effective agents of normalization, giving strength to these
policies, it is because they are assisted by a second type of memory entrepreneur – this time in
the literal sense of the term. Indeed, there are an increasing number of professional memory
entrepreneurs in various areas. Memory policies therefore result from a “game” (in the
bourdieusien sense) of ordinary social interactions, much of which are professional. Far from
denouncing what some describe as banalization (a term which implies a certain moral
judgement), we considered that these memory entrepreneurs – who make memory a sector for
entrepreneurship – are the best artisans for the consolidation and effectiveness of memory
policies.

The memorial enterprise: job markets and social spheres

A close sociological study of the actors involved in the development of memory policies, in
France and elsewhere (Dybris and Gensburger ed., 2019) is still yet to be completed. At the
transnational level, research is underway on the women and men working to evoke the past as
part of transitional justice (Lefranc, 2009) or on museum professionals (Björkdahl and

57
Prefectures are representatives of the national government at the local level. They are responsible for the
local application of national law and central state public policies.
58.
Bernard Accoyer, Rapport de la mission d’information sur les questions mémorielles, National Assembly, 2008,
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rap-info/i1262.asp (accessed June 25, 2017), and André Kaspi, Rapport
de la commission de réflexion sur la modernisation des commémorations publiques, Paris, La Documentation
française, 2008.
Kappler, 2019); for the French case, other studies have been conducted or are underway on
the creation of associations for the promotion of memory since the 1960s (Bertheleu, 2014;
Tornatore and Barbe, 2011; Barrière, 2002; De Cock, 2018).

Memory policies primarily have the effect of stimulating, sometimes awakening, professional
spheres on these questions. In particular, education, communication, culture, and urbanism
now all have specialists working on issues related to memory. One contemporary example
provides an illustration of the mechanism that is at work here. Only two days after the
terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, an association with the object of “bringing
together the physical or moral individuals who support the erection of a statue in Paris to
commemorate the attacks” was registered at the prefecture in Paris. Its founders, in other
words its president and its secretary, were specialists in communication, a film and events
producer on one hand, and a communication manager for an architecture firm on the other. In
this case, professional practice constituted a key pillar for commemorative practice designed
to feed into the city of Paris and the French state’s memory policy.59
Of course, the academic world also has memory entrepreneurs. There are many possible
examples here, but in keeping with our reflexive (and sometimes challenging) approach in
this book, we will take the example of one of the authors. For reasons to do with pleasure,
(both intellectual and relational), prestige, genuine feelings of duty (of memory), and emotion,
as well as simple financial remuneration, Sarah Gensburger accepted to curate an exhibition
that was clearly part of the municipal memory policy. With the same engagement, she was
later able to examine the evolution of that exposition and the nature of its reception with a
critical sociological gaze (Gensburger, 2017).
Memory policies are therefore situated within broader sectorial logics that make them banal
and therefore more powerful. They take place in the continuation of social interactions that
lack the moral sharpness of the “painful” past. They gain strength not only in the sense that
they reflect “traditions” or “trends”; there are genuine interactions between memory
professionals and the sectors they belong to. We will draw on two more infrequently
discussed examples.
This time let us begin with the transnational level. International organizations – the UN, the
European Commission, but also a multitude of other non-government organizations –
promote, subsidize, and implement programs for peace-building through memory for
countries emerging from civil war. These programs, as well as the experts, academics, and

59.
www.generationbataclan.fr/page3/ (consulté le 25 juin 2017).
local actors involved in implementing them, seek to reconcile the “ordinary people” among
the belligerent groups and foster peaceful and tolerant dispositions within them. Indeed these
agreements between political and military leaders, armed interventions, or institutional
reforms are not enough to establish lasting peace. But a sociological analysis of the history of
organizations and the trajectories of professional actors demonstrates that this intention to
build peace “from the bottom up” is not the only consequence of the observation of failed
peace agreements. The programs that are implemented follow on from the efforts made by
these same people to promote various causes, in their countries of origin and in social sectors
far removed from the war that is to be laid to rest.
For example, some of the agendas of these professionals aim to reform criminal justice that
western countries consider too repressive; the management of the heritage of violent conflict
in Africa is thus used for the cause of restorative justice. For example, Mennonite groups
(Anabaptist pacifists) implement dialogue-based reintegration programs for juvenile
delinquents in North America as a replacement for traditional punitive criminal justice. They
travel and offer mediation in countries emerging from conflict. This action abroad is, among
other things, a way to support their cause at home. Memory policies are often also linked to
mobilizations in support of a renewal of forms of conflict resolution: the overflowing prisons
in western democracies, or workplace conflicts that avoid going to trial, serve as inspiration
for propositions for peace, through work on memory, elsewhere in the world. Other actors
have become “pacifiers” through memory, based on their work as psychologists or activists.
Exporting tools for peace provides the opportunity to move outside the political sphere.
Finally, there are also many who contribute their strictly professional competencies to
international peace and memory policies: from academic criticism of the dominant conception
of international relations, history, or law, to the therapeutic techniques developed in the
United States for couples in crisis or in Alcoholics Anonymous (Lefranc, 2008). These men
and women engaged in spheres other than that of the memory of political violence did not
become involved in the latter with the simple – opportunistic – objective of gaining a position
there. Not everything in the social sphere can be reduced to the pursuit of individual interests
or explicit strategies for advancement. But these actors have brought with them the echoes
and experiences of past or parallel lives and this must be taken into account in understanding
how they act and why, through them, professional spheres compete in giving their indirect
strength to memory policies.
This mechanism is identical to the economic development of another sector – diametrically
opposed to the first – that exists in many countries today: memory tourism. Since the
beginning of the 2000s, the French ministries of tourism and defense have been working
together to create this new sector, which is memorial but above all economic, particularly in
conjunction with local councils (Hertzog, 2012). Four “memory trails” have been developed,
focused on fortifications (sixteenth-twentieth centuries), the Franco-Prussian war between
1870-1871, and the First and Second World Wars.60 These “trails”, “routes”, and other
“pathways of memory” are now a tool used by cultural and tourism actors in many localities,
both urban and rural.61
Associated with armed conflicts, and particularly with the memory of the First World War
since 2014 (Crépin and Rouger, 2013), this dynamic feeds into the social fabric well beyond
these themes. Auschwitz alone attracts more than a million visitors per year, coming from all
over the world, while post-industrial Lorraine considers its working-class past a major tourist
attraction (Tornatore, 2004). The development of this specific form of tourism has led to the
transformation of historic sites into museums and the creation of sites for organized tours,
with appropriate tourist infrastructure (hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and so forth), which
are advertised using targeted marketing strategies. Local history groups and research centers
are included in these memory tourism projects, which they sometimes depend upon for their
survival. This institutionalization of a new kind of economic activity mobilizes a new
category of numerous actors, and in so doing consolidates the leitmotiv that is at the
foundation of contemporary memory policies.
This phenomenon undoubtedly involves a process of refiying of the past; in other words,
transforming it into an object for consumption, making it aestheticized, neutralized, and made
profitable, ready to be recuperated and used by the tourism and entertainment industries and
in particular by cinema. In this respect, it has been widely criticized by many actors. The term
“dark tourism” shows the extent of this reprobation (Stone ed., 2018). Tourism operators thus
offer trips to sites of past violence, South African townships for example, or current violence,
such as refugee camps in Gaza. In Rwanda it is possible to conduct a kind of pilgrimage from
one ossuary-memorial to another. Global Exchange, an American association for the defense
of human rights, offers “reality tours” in places like Afghanistan, Venezuela, or Vietnam.
These memorial tours are barely distinguishable from other forms of “reality tourism” that
visit Brazilian favelas, Bombay slums, Bangkok brothels, even the Chernobyl reactor.
Tourists can visit shipwrecks (such as the wreck of the Costa Concordia), or sites where

60.
www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr (accessed June 25, 2017).
61.
For example the Memorha network which covers spaces associated with the history of the Second World War
in the Rhône-Alpes region of France, as well as researchers in social sciences and humanities working on these
topics: www.reseaumemorha.org (accessed June 25, 2017).
murders or crimes were committed (in high-profile murder cases for example), or places
particularly affected by spectacular natural disasters. It would be easy to see this as being
purely motivated by voyeuristic pity or by search for strong emotions, and therefore take
affront at these degraded forms of interest in the painful and violent past.
However, the few ethnographic studies that exist suggest that visiting these “memorial” sites
is not so much a form of perverse voyeurism, as a desire to respect an obligation for memory
that is present in many sectors of society (Hughes, 2008). In this respect, the massive
development of this kind of tourism on an international level reflects not so much a lack of
respect for the past as the normalization of the obligation to remember so as not to repeat
history’s mistakes. These non-traditional ways of dealing with memory thus contribute to its
strength, possibly at the same time as to its fragilization due to over exploitation (Rousso,
2016) (although this is not a prognostic we are able to make).
The professionalization of memory policies can also lead, not to fragilization, but to the
transformation of the moral norms that govern them. This is the case for transitional justice
which was developed, as we have seen, to justify political transitions based on compromises
with those responsible for political violence (and thus amnesties). Subsequently, and in
keeping with the development of international criminal tribunals, it has been partially and
progressively reinvested by lawyers and legal scholars, and as a result, associated with a
demand for criminal justice. What was used to justify the impunity of political criminals can
therefore – through the involvement of professionals and activists – ultimately end in a
demand for sanctions against them. Similarly, truth commissions often serve the interests of
partisans for a compromise between former (violent) and new governing actors. But they also
potentially result in the reduction of the number of socially acceptable untruths or false
narratives. By organizing a public reminder of the past, they do not impose a single truth but
allow the comparison of truths from people on different sides of the conflict, depending on the
configuration of actors. In seeking to too rapidly condemn – whether the collusion between
political elites or the lucrative aestheticization of the past for tourism – we risk overlooking
the complexity of their effects. As a result, it is more fruitful to follow the complex and
unpredictable processes during which groups of people come together to call for the
remembrance of the violent past, than it is to take a stance for or against the content of this
remembrance. In this respect, memory policies can be considered moral propositions whose
dynamics and effects can be more accurately understood when they are not judged from a
moralist perspective.
Biography

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Conclusion
Memory is not enough: can memory policies be more effective?

In the last few years, memory has been considered one of the ways in which we can help
build better societies. Memory studies often focus on the objectives of memory policies.
Should we prevent victims from taking advantage of their status, or should we limit ourselves
to condemning perpetrators? Should we prioritize history over memory (Hutton, 1993)?
Should we accept “forgetting” rather than the overabundance of references to the past (Rieff,
2016)? Should we defend the “historical truth” or the memory of “the weak” against “the
strong” and thus remember the “forgotten to history”, such as the legitimate victims of
colonial conflicts? Although these political and moral questions are interesting, they do not
provide an answer to what we would actually do if one option were chosen over the other. In
this book, we have therefore sought to move away from the terms of the existing debates in
order to understand what is at work in these contemporary references to the violent past. As a
result, there is no “lesson” to be learned here. But this does not rule out a reconceptualization
of objectives or a reflection on the way in which memory policies could be more effective, in
light of the goals that are generally assigned to them.

Memory policies have developed extensively since the 1990s. In both North America and in
Europe, the promoters of these policies have tried to encourage open-minded and liberal
citizenship and prevent the rise of political actors associated with intolerance and
discrimination. This has occurred in almost all countries, both in societies that are peaceful
enough to question the vestiges of the violent past, as well as in those emerging from recent
civil wars and which must now build lasting peace and find the ways of “managing” the many
legacies of conflict.

In spite of the fact that they convey humanist and pacifist messages, memory policies are both
particularistic and competitive. They are used to defend a particular vision of history (rather
than a universal history at the service of humanity), and maybe even to obtain a job, or a
position of social importance. The persistent objections of moralists cannot change this. These
policies are developed because they are in the interests of particular groups, whether they may
be genuine believers (in other words people whose social life and identity are structured
around the importance of belief), people concerned with the victims and their families, but
also professionals. The causes defended become more convincing and efficient when they
appeal to people’s material interests. When they do so, they give rise to competition – over
power and resources – and conflict. Building policies that aim to be the incarnation of
universalist principles of humanity and tolerance always involves the risk of “particularizing
them”. When they still broadly controlled access to knowledge, religions actually created
closed communities and powerful institutions, through their search to define universal rules.

This observation can be applied to any public policy. Policies only “work” if they are
adopted. The increasingly complex and sophisticated art of memorial arrangements draws its
strength from those who participate. “Memorialists” and “peacemakers” from various sectors
of society – whether they are politicians, legislators, judges, teachers, artists, architects,
activists, community workers, whether they work in culture, education, or tourism, or leisure
activities – all use very similar tools. They rewrite History, illustrate it with pictures, engrave
it into stone, marble, or concrete, or teach it. They encourage us to listen to the victims and –
more rarely – pursue political criminals. All of them insist upon the pedagogical impact of
their work. They all seek to both educate and move the public, so that this affective
knowledge is lastingly inscribed in the depths of each individual. It is this arrangement, rather
than the forms of action, that give power to the policies that they promote. As sociologists, we
have also expressed our doubts as to the effectiveness of this individualization of lessons from
the past and the probability that they can be reactivated when needed. It is doubtful, on the
one hand, that the public authorities would have the power to influence individual behavior.
Authoritarian, and even totalitarian, regimes did not forbid resistance or the bending of the
rules (Hibou, 2017) – how could our democratic and liberal governments convince us to
always act as tolerant citizens? On the other hand, we are also doubtful as to the principle of
action chosen. The goal of preventing violence, which is central in the contemporary
pedagogy of memory, obscures the fact that we live in diverse societies. It is blind to the idea
that a homogenous and constant personality is partly a ruse. An individual may be tolerant of
people all their life and still take up arms to kill their neighbors when an authority says to do
so. Moreover, if there are individual lessons to be learned here, their only strength lies in their
myriad collective inter-connections. We therefore need to reformulate the objective. It is not
individuals that have to be healed or reformed, they will have time to recant later. It is social
relations that need to be constantly reoriented. Even the most extreme collective violence
results from a socially situated decision, a choice that involves the responsibility of the
individuals present, and all those whose consideration and judgement they take into account.
Teaching “never again” is not likely to help found future resistance when the possibility of
violent action arises. It is vain to expect memory policies to teach citizens to be tolerant, and
ready to rise in outrage at racial discriminations or hate speech or to refuse political violence –
whether it targets an individual or seeks the extermination of a group perceived as different
from “us”. It is futile, firstly because we claim to be able to wipe the slate clean of distinctive
logics that are at the heart of the social and the political. Women and men in groups – even in
the imaginary groups of social psychology experiments (Sherif et al., 1961) – set themselves
almost mechanically apart from other groups. In so doing they achieve a feeling of
satisfaction, they believe themselves to be better than others. And memory policies – both
propaganda for hate and appeals for tolerance – participate in this. Perhaps there are fruitful
avenues for exploration in education that is not competitive but cooperative (such as that
promoted by Maria Montessori), but for the moment these are mere dreams or – worse –
privileged academic islands accessible only to the very privileged. There is most likely
something to be gained from an equalization of social conditions. Memory is definitely “not
enough” (Moyne, 2018; Brudholm et Schepelern, 2018). This would not erase the desire for
distinction, but it may render violent mobilizations in response to the discrepancies and
lifestyles more difficult.

It is also hopeless to aim to provide decisive and definitive education for tolerance. We cannot
learn to be good in a day, and he or she who has taken a thousand days to learn it may not stay
good forever. We quite probably deceive ourselves about the ability of explicit moral
injunctions to have a lasting impact on behavior, whether they are positive – Love! Protect!
Tolerate! Remember? – or negative – Do not kill! Do not discriminate! Do not forget! Such
imperatives do not work. Each day we do thousands of things that make us good citizens and
good people; we resist hitting, we recycle, we hold a door open for somebody, and so forth.
The converging prescriptions of our reference groups have led us to this. But we only do so
when the circumstances encourage us to, whether by threats, or habituation, or modelling our
behavior on others. Moreover, we know that much of this good behavior is maintained during
the worst moments of genocidal “work”, but it is directed at peers rather than victims. The
soldiers who carried out the Third Reich’s “Holocaust by bullets” in the eastern territories
were careful to remain courteous to each other: when one felt a desire to vomit out of scruples
or because of the smell, they did so behind a bush, so as to not inconvenience their comrades,
and then resumed killing (Welzer, 2007, 156).
This observation goes well beyond the boundaries of memory policies and their effects. In
this area, like in others, we model our behavior less on the explanations provided by an
authority than by imitation of our role models, their behavior and the implicit norms that they
reveal.
The extreme visibility of the scholarly transmission of knowledge in contemporary
society often makes us unaware of the fact. But even today, most social and moral
learning (including at school) continues to be based on mimetic assimilation rather
than the explicit learning of norms and rules. […] In terms of morals, this is
particularly striking, as we can see in the pathetic ineffectiveness of civic education at
school each time it is unable to build upon on the norms of sociability already
entrenched in children or young people’s everyday behavior. The reasons for this are
hardly mysterious: like many other basic skills, social intelligence and moral limits are
learned behavior, but they are not very easily taught (Schaeffer, 2010[1999]: 327).

We cannot avoid asking the question, both unusual and familiar, what if morality cannot be
taught? Or, at least, not deliberately or directly? And most likely not by instructions or
injunctions from a less than credible source of authority? This question leads to another
remark that is almost as uncomfortable. If the prevention of collective violence, like any other
kind of behavior, is conditional on the possibility of mimicry and reciprocity, it also implies
the individual adjusting to other individuals. Yet this adjustment itself makes violence
possible. The Milgram experiment conducted in the 1960s in a social psychology lab on the
east coast of the United States, and repeated hundreds of times since, demonstrates that an
individual who is asked by a legitimate authority (white-coated experts but also even
television presenters) to inflict electric shocks upon another person (preferably at some
distance) almost always does so. More than six people out of ten will accept, after some initial
hesitation and nervous laughter, but without challenging the order (although it was given
without any physical threat).62 It is worth repeating once again that what can prevent violence
also renders it possible: the social relationship itself.

How can we escape from this paradox? Most probably through the construction of a critical
mind. The depictions of slightly misanthropic or aloof rescuers, or highly sociable and

62.
This experiment was first conducted by Milgram (Milgram, 1983). For the televised variant, in which more
than 8/10 people accepted to torture a contestant in a pseudo-reality television environment see the documentary
film by Christophe Nick, Le Jeu de la mort, 2009.
submissive killers suggest this. Teachers, who are the most sensitive to the complexity of the
social interactions that take place when they mention the violent past, know this already. It
must be taught as history, non-reified, totemized, or monumentalized, and not spread through
a relativist logic of the plurality of narratives or simply warmed by emotion. It also has to be
possible for students and teachers to pose their questions and critiques – even if they are
disturbing. Visiting schools during the “mobilization of memory” in the wake of the January
2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the Minister for national education was offended by certain
questions from students: “Even in places where there were no real incidents, there were too
many questions from the students. And we all heard the ‘Yes I support Charlie, but…’, the
‘an eye for an eye!’, ‘Why should we defend freedom of expression here and not there?’
These questions are intolerable, particularly when they are heard at school, which is
responsible for transmitting values” (Najat Vallaud-Belkacem January 14, 2015, quoted by
Cock and Heimberg, 2015, p. 125). Many teachers are happy to risk such “intolerable”
questions being asked, even though they often lack the means and elements to answer them.
Education through memory cannot be understood simply as a vector for the transmission of
values. When it is, it runs the risk of being ineffective, or even producing the opposite effects
to those intended.

Perhaps there is a fundamental paradox in wanting to “inculcate” the refusal of political

violence and the intolerant behavior it is supposed to lead to. This education aims to produce
adaptation to the system by relying on a desire for conformity which allows all societies to
function and which is particularly strong in children. The goal of socialization is to achieve
the adaptation of individual personalities to the social system. Yet the mystery of resistance to
intolerance, to exclusion and to political violence seems to lie in the imperfection, or at least
the reversibility, of this adaptation to the system.

Even the strongest socialization to pacifism and tolerance is not sufficient protection; the most
virtuous morals maybe used to serve violence. This book encourages us to recognize the
probabilistic aspect of all reflections on society. It urges a sociological perspective on the
respective proportions of causality and chance, in other words on the existence of a part of
randomness in social behavior, even in the “predictive” age of Facebook and Twitter. Maurice
Halbwachs, a key reference in social sciences of memory63, was one of the first sociologists to

63.
In the contemporary period, the status of founding father was reinforced by Halbwachs’ deportation and death
during the Second World War, as an a posteriori confirmation of the importance of his work for memorial
reintroduce a probabilistic conceptualization of social behavior in its relational aspects
(Halbwachs, 1912; Brian, 2014). The social is not deterministic but operates as a range of
possibilities of movements and potential connections between individuals. Memory, like the
actions of individuals, depends on the way in which this social matrix evolves according to
laws that are neither a matter of pure chance nor pure reproduction.

We all live in different social worlds at the same time. The behavior that we are encouraged to
adopt in a particular context may be incorrect in another space. How can any norm aim to
shape our behavior in all circumstances at all times? All those who count as important figures
– police, legislators, judges, teachers, shopkeepers, parents, friends, or lovers – would have to
defend the same discourse, preferably at the same time. And although some of them may do
so for opportunistic ends, they would still have to use the discourse in the same way. Yet such
unanimity is unimaginable in our societies, even for the universal norms of memory policy.

It is the most ordinary movements – ordinary in that they rarely target this specific objective –
of large numbers of men and women in various groups, that make and unmake moral norms.
Even the most powerful people do not impose belief in isolation. Their power is fleeting.
Voices must resonate to be heard. The power and legitimacy awarded to a group by potential
members is decisive in determining the ability of the cause to resonate in other social worlds.
In order to promote long-lasting and widespread values, memory policies must therefore rely
on many strong actors – for example on popular, well-paid, teachers or intellectuals who give
the impression they are involved in the world and are important to it. If declaring a moral
position constitutes morality (regardless of the sincerity that is involved), it is conditional on
the norm being often reiterated, firmly, by figures from significant groups. This does not
guarantee that the norm “takes root” (the uncertainties of social interactions will decide that),
but it will help. However, the power of the “never again” norm, which is still real today, runs
the risk of breaking down when its institutions and guardians are weakened, as we can see for
example in the current situation between the European Union and Poland.

Let us conclude with a paradox. By constructing a memory of violent pasts, political

authorities reveal themselves to be highly determined and durably voluntarist. Yet the less the

questions. Moreover, his deportation gave rise to misunderstandings; he was not arrested for racial reasons (he
was not Jewish), nor for his personal and active involvement in the resistance, but because one of his sons was a
member of the resistance.
government is listened to (and the more it is aware of that), the more loquacious it becomes. It
is all the more ready to police history in schools when it has less funding to allocate, all the
more decided to control the political uses of the past when it seeks to avoid debates with
opponents, and all the more concerned with paying homage to victims when it awards them
neither compensation nor justice. Memory policies are too often policies of powerlessness.
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