Les guerres de mémoires : un objet d’étude ?

• Main Authors: Pascal Blanchard, Isabelle Veyrat-Masson
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2009-11-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: conflicts; history; media; memory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/4319

History is a major issue, a battlefield where people fight for recognition, using all sorts of media and formats to pursue their aims. It seems that the changes which have affected the media have also deeply altered the struggles around memory, especially over the last twenty years. This relationship between memory and the means of communication is shaped by the specificities of each memory struggle. Indeed, “new” communication processes have emerged over the last few years. As a consequence, the twentieth century appears to have consisted, generation after generation, in a long series of memory struggles, as if these were the “best reflections” of each key moment in our history. Can we assume that the French “memory wars” have been a way of bringing the past back into the central, political, social and cultural issues of today ?