Read Aloud the Text Content
This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.
Text Content or SSML code:
Les Lieux de Memoire: Another History Lieux de memoire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration. Indeed, they are lieux in three senses of the word- 1 8 REPRESENTATIONS material, symbolic, and functional. Even an apparently purely material site, like an archive, becomes a lieu de memoire only if the imagination invests it with a sym- bolic aura. A purely functional site, like a classroom manual, a testament, or a veterans' reunion belongs to the category only inasmuch as it is also the object of a ritual. And the observance of a commemorative minute of silence, an extreme example of a strictly symbolic action, serves as a concentrated appeal to memory by literally breaking a temporal continuity. Moreover, the three aspects always coexist. Take, for example, the notion of a historical generation: it is material by its demographic content and supposedly functional-since memories are crystal- lized and transmitted from one generation to the next-but it is also symbolic, since it characterizes, by referring to events or experiences shared by a small minority, a larger group that may not have participated in them. Lieux de memoire are created by a play of memory and history, an interaction of two factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination. To begin with, there must be a will to remember. If we were to abandon this criterion, we would quickly drift into admitting virtually everything as worthy of remembrance. One is reminded of the prudent rules of old-fashioned historical criticism, which dis- tinguished between "direct sources," intentionally produced by society with a view to their future reproduction-a law or a work of art, for example-and the indis- criminate mass of "indirect sources," comprising all the testimony an epoch inad- vertently leaves to historians. Without the intention to remember, lieux de memoire would be indistinguishable from lieux d'histoire. On the other hand, it is clear that without the intervention of history, time, and change, we would content ourselves with simply a schematic outline of the objects of memory. The lieux we speak of, then, are mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Mobius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile. For if we accept that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial-just as if gold were the only memory of money-all of this in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs, it is also clear that lieux de memoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications. Let us take two very different examples. First, the Revolutionary calendar, which was very much a lieu de memoire since, as a calendar, it was designed to provide the a priori frame of reference for all possible memory while, as a revo- lutionary document, through its nomenclature and symbolism, it was supposed to "open a new book to history," as its principal author ambitiously put it, or to "return Frenchmen entirely to themselves," according to another of its advocates. The function of the calendar, it was thought, would be to halt history at the hour of the Revolution by indexing future months, days, centuries, and years to the Between Memory and History 19 Revolutionary epic. Yet, to our eyes, what further qualifies the revolutionary cal- endar as a lieu de memoire is its apparently inevitable failure to have become what its founders hoped. If we still lived today according to its rhythm, it would have become as familiar to us as the Gregorian calendar and would consequently have lost its interest as a lieu de memoire. It would have melted into our memorial land- scape, serving only to date every other conceivable memorial site. As it turns out, its failure has not been complete; key dates still emerge from it to which it will always remain attached: Vendemiaire, Thermidor, Brumaire. Just so, the lieu de memoire turns in on itself-an arabesque in the deforming mirror that is its truth. Let us consider too the celebrated Tour de la France par deux enfants, also incon- testably a lieu de memoire; like the Petit Lavisse, it trained the memory of millions of French boys and girls. Thanks to it, the Minister of Public Instruction could draw his pocket watch at 8:05 A.M. and declare, "All of our children are crossing the Alps." Moreover, the Tour was an inventory of what one ought to know about France, an exercise in identification and a voyage of initiation. But here things get more complicated: a close reading shows that as of its publication in 1877, the Tour portrayed a France that no longer existed, and that in this year, when May 16 saw the consolidation of the Third Republic, it drew its seductive power from a subtle enchantment with the past. As is so often the case with books for children, the Tour owed its initial success to the memory of adults. And later? Thirty-five years after publication, on the eve of the war of 1914 when it was still a sovereign text, it seemed already a nostalgic institution: despite revisions, the older edition sold more than the new. Then the Tour became rare, employed only in marginal areas in the remote countryside. Slipping out of collective memory, it entered historical memory, then pedagogical memory. For its centennial, in 1977, however, just as the sales of an autobiography from the provinces, Pierre Helias's Le Cheval d'orgueil, reached a million copies and when an industrial France stricken by economic crisis discovered its oral memory and peasant roots, the Tour was reprinted, and once again entered the collective memory, a different one this time, but still subject to being forgotten and revived in the future. What is the essence of this quintessential lieu de memoire-its original intention or its return in the cycles of memory? Clearly both: all lieux de memoire are objects mises en abime. It is this principle of double identity that enables us to map, within the indef- inite multiplicity of sites, a hierarchy, a set of limits, a repertoire of ranges. This principle is crucial because, if one keeps in mind the broad categories of the genre-anything pertaining to the cult of the dead, anything relating to the pat- rimony, anything administering the presence of the past within the present-it is clear that some seemingly improbable objects can be legitimately considered lieux de memoire while, conversely, many that seem to fit by definition should in fact be excluded