Memory Battles over Mai 68: Interpretative Struggles as a Cultural Re-Play of Social Movements

Abstract

Memory as a sociological object has claimed the attention of social scientists since the groundbreaking research of Halbwachs (1994, 2008). The contribution of historians is central here (Connerton 1989; Gillis 1994), especially Les Lieux de mémoire, the 5,000-page work in French edited by Nora (1997). Let’s borrow a definition from him:

[M]emory is life, always carried by living groups, it is thus constantly changing, open to the dialectics of remembrance and amnesia, unconscious of its successive distortions, vulnerable to all uses and manipulations, capable of long sleeps and sudden regenerations. History is the reconstruction of what no longer exists, always incomplete and questionable [… ] Memory embeds remembrance into the sacred, history flushes it out. History always makes things mundane. Memory rises from the group that it fuses together, which means, as Halbwachs has highlighted, that there are as many memories as groups… (Nora 1997, I:24–25)

He who controls the present, controls the past.

He who controls the past, controls the future.

George Orwell (1984)