Représentations du régime de Vichy ou « se souvenir de ne pas oublier »

• Main Author: Jean Viaud
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ADR Temporalités 2005-06-01
• Series: Temporalités
• Subjects: collective memory; logics of knowledge; social representations; survey; memory; social memory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/temporalites/400

There are several ways to conceive collective memory. Among them, it can be seen as a re-presentation of the past or as a social representation of History (Viaud, 2003). These conceptions can help apprehend common sense representations concerning the past by making the underlying logics of knowledge evident (Moscovici, 1976; Bourdieu, 1997). Two studies by questionnaire on the Vichy period have been carried out with different samples, including word associations, exercises measuring historical knowledge and various opinion scales on the “duty of memory”. The results show that representations are made of: 1) a relative paucity of historical knowledge, 2) a focus on some historical persons, places and events, 3) a content organized on a topos opposing two ideas of France, and 4) a moral imperative to remember. These results allow us to think that this principle is moreover articulated on axiological references pitting good against evil. As a result, the representations of the period are restricted to a deontic form of memory: “remembering not to forget”. Lastly, the exemplary value of this representation will be interrogated as constituting an effective protection against the repetition which it is supposed to prevent. What is finally being connected to the transmission of memory is the issue of fidelity to the past.