George Best, a European Symbol, a European Hero?

Abstract

Invented in the inter-war period by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (Halbwachs, 1925 and 1950), the notion of collective memory (mémoire collective) surmises that the act of remembering is never entirely solitary and that, instead, even personal memories are shaped by the values and norms of a collective, expressed both in what that collective has decided to remember or forget and in the ways that items are remembered (or, conversely, forgotten). The notion was soon taken up by historians. In Jacques Le Goff’s groundbreaking La Nouvelle Histoire (1978), Pierre Nora’s chapter considered the contribution that an analysis of a collective group’s memory could make to cultural history. This is the same Pierre Nora who initiated and directed a gigantic study on the cultural collective memory of a quintessentially political object France, Les lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1984–1992), published over eight years in three volumes (La République, La Nation and Les Frances) between 1984 and 1992. Though criticised by Henry Rousso for its vagueness (Rousso, 1987), the notion of lieu de mémoire can be construed as any item (material or immaterial) which has been saved from oblivion by a collective, especially local or national, and which has also been invested with values (in a broad sense) that still make sense in the contemporary context. A lieu de mémoire is the consequence of the existence of a collective memory.