Mémoire et interprétation du 4 Septembre 1870 : le sens de l’oubli

• Main Author: Olivier Le Trocquer
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ADR Temporalités 2006-06-01
• Series: Temporalités
• Subjects: lapse of memory; commemoration; Blanquists; decadence; Gambetta; rite
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/temporalites/283

By inquiring into the interactions between memory and historiography, this survey analyzes on three levels the way the historiography of the 4th of September 1870, that revolutionary day in France when the Second Empire was overturned and the 3rd Republic proclaimed, is belabored by memorial effects. Following the rhythms of the interpretative processes of the event, historiography has espoused the hazards of the successive obliterations and resurgences of memory. Central to the political and also memorial stakes of the event, the decline of Empire, proclaimed by Gambetta, was for a time refused by him, then attributed to the Blanquists. The major interpretative effect is that the event has been reread as a «ritual», to the detriment of its insurrectional character. Two ideas conclude our analysis: the hesitations in the narrative memory of the 4th of September must be seen as the traces of a suppressed political and social conflict. Forgetting what has been forgotten is one of the elements having helped construe the « Republican model ».