Pierre Nora

Recent history and the new dangers of politicization

The positivist tradition of nineteenth century history, dominated by the idea of thenation and based on the archive, began in the 1970s to give way to a concern withrecent history, in which the historical witness became paramount. With the pastceasing to be a body of knowledge and becoming a public issue, a new form ofpolitical influence has exerted itself upon historians. In the French case, the subjectof colonialism is particularly controversial. Now more than ever it is crucial historiansretain critical distance.

Until recently −− roughly the second half of the nineteenth century −− historywas always a thoroughly political activity in the widest sense of the word. Itdealt in myths about origins, pronouncements about foundation and claims tolegitimacy, glorious genealogies, models for living and lessons in how thegreat should behave. It was only history's desire to become a science thatturned it into a pursuit for its own sake, that was professional, based onmethodical and critical analysis of documents and closely bound up withteaching. And the first duty of teaching was, as all the world knows, to instilunderstanding and love of one's homeland. In other words, it was to write thecelebrated "story of a nation" −− an approach that I am flatteringly creditedwith having invented or popularized and which is in serious danger offoundering.

Over the last thirty years, a profound change has occurred that needs to beemphasized. Insidiously but radically, a process has taken place that hasresulted in what could be called a very different kind of general politicizationof history.

This term should not be taken to mean a ferocious politicization of historiansthemselves but as the inevitable process of transforming what they produceinto an ideology, of transforming the world in which historians work and withwhich they have to deal into an ideological system, just as once they had todeal with the discovery of their own historical authenticity.

Recent history and the rise of the witness

This profound change is due to the fact that, today, the most recent history hastaken centre stage. This is a very new phenomenon, dating from the end of the1970s. It is difficult to imagine that, before then, universities did not allowtheses to be written on post−1918 topics. Nowadays the reverse is the case.The major confrontations and upheavals of the last century call for a kind ofhistorical perspective on and explanation of what we have seen or experienced,of what we or those close to us participated in directly. These upheavals werein one area related to totalitarian regimes, in another to the independence of

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former colonies and, everywhere, to the runaway transformation in generalliving conditions. And, to take only the case of France, to the weakening of thetraditional reference points of the state and the nation, a process that has beencontinuous since the collapse of 1940. How could the war, Vichy, theHolocaust, the Cold War, the confrontation between Nazism and Communism,Gaullism and all the rest fail to awaken the interest of historians, and howcould they interest only historians? All of history has become a sensitive area−− sensitive for everyone.

It may be that we have not fully grasped the implications of this downwardtrend in a traditional kind of history based on a break with the past. A famous"Report to the Minister", Victor Duruy, on historical studies in 1868, signallingthe beginnings of critical and scientific history, began with these proud words:"The province of history is the past; the present belongs to politics and thefuture to God."

In fact, it is the present that has, essentially, become the province of historyand it is the present that has even extended its methods to interpretation of thedistant past. It is a present that is being written by and beneath the gaze ofthose involved in it: the living, witnesses, or victims. It is a kind of historywhich, by the same token, is reawakening the age−old rivalry between memoryand history.

To take just one example from the area of such encounters: the Algerian war,with which I began my own life as an historian. At that time, Charles−AndréJulien and André Nouschi were about the only established historians to peerbeneath the leaden veil of colonial history. But, in twenty years, Algeria hasbecome the very essence of what Benjamin Stora has called "the war ofmemories". From 1962 to 1982, a period of twenty years, he was able to count2500 pieces of testimony (!), mostly from soldiers, from those who werenostalgic for an Algeria that was no more, from pieds−noirs who felthard−done−by: the recollections of those who were beaten, who were victims.In the 1980s we witnessed a reversal of this trend at the instigation of Frenchhistorians who, during the war, were committed to independence: "suitcasecarriers"1 and militants of various kinds. One can find them in the anthologyLa Guerre d'Algérie, published in 1982 under the editorship of Henri Alleg,who was himself very committed.

The opening of the military archives in 1992 (they have since been closedagain) enabled the arrival of a new generation of researchers: the firstgeneration not to have been personally involved in the Algerian war. Theyinclude Raphaëlle Branche, with her thesis on La Torture et l'Armée ("Tortureand the Army")2 and Sylvie Thénault, who researched military justice.3 Thesehistorians triggered off a whole spate of new viewpoints from high−rankingmilitary figures such as General Massu and General Aussaresses.

This is no more than a sketch of the events for which Raphaëlle Brancheherself produced a systematic inventory, just as Jay Winter and Antoine Prostdid for the 1914−18 war, Henry Rousso for Vichy and Laurent Douzou for theResistance. It appears that, on the morning after the battle, the historian iscalled upon to be a witness for the witnesses.

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In a few short years,the proliferation ofwitness statementsand memoirs has, inall areas, had amultiplying effect,even, if I may put itlike this, an explosiveeffect, one equivalent

to that which, in the last third of the nineteenth century, recourse to archiveshad on positivist history. A different kind of history has been brought intobeing, but it is history that is fragmented, torn, defensive, affirmative oraccusatory. It is a history that calls for a periodic, often collective, process oforchestration, involving professional historians. An example, still on thesubject of Algeria, would be La Guerre d'Algérie et les Français, published in1988 under the editorship of Jean−Pierre Rioux, or the survey published in2004 by Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, two first−rate professionalhistorians though not ones whom one could claim were devoid of personalcommitments or a political past.

It is historians' own relationship with the object of their study and theircommitment to it that is changing completely. Staying within the enormouscorpus of work on Algeria, it is striking that all those historians who havededicated their efforts to it have, almost without exception, felt the need,usually in a preface, to pour out their "ego−history", to "come out", to examinetheir conscience in order to explain, confess or brush aside the specificcharacter of their commitment to the subject. How they do this depends upontheir political and ideological connections, their sense of identity and feelingsof ethnic or religious affiliation, or their personal or family sense of belonging."Writing on a topic of this kind necessarily implies taking up a politicalstance", writes Guy Pervillé, one of those to have done most to free himselffrom any such stance. Even Charles−Robert Ageron, who is regarded as anhistoriographical sage amidst the commotion and who, although a majorspecialist on colonial Algeria, refused for a long time to venture into the fieldof the war itself, admits that he only dedicated himself to the study of Algeriabecause he had spent time there himself.

This downwards shift in history's centre of gravity has prompted what theGerman philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called "public use of history", andwhat Jacques Revel and François Hartog have frankly translated as "politicaluse of history". It has meant an intensification of the quarrels betweenhistorians, for example the particularly painful spectacle provided by the roundtable discussion organized by Libération in May 1997 about the arrest of JeanMoulin at Caluire. It has taken the form of increasingly frequent interactionswith the judicial system, with historians finding themselves summoned asexperts, as in the Papon trial. Some, such as Jean−Noël Jeanneney, haveconsidered it to be their duty as citizens to become involved while others, suchas Henry Rousso, have felt that it was their duty as historians to refuse tocomply. This shift has also taken the form of an increase in the number ofchannels providing access to an experience of history: a proliferation ofmuseums, huge developments in cultural−historical tourism, the use and theabuse of television documentaries. Which did most to discredit the "Resistancenarrative" of the war that De Gaulle had managed to impose: Le Chagrin et lapitié (1969), the Touvier affair (1971) or the American historian RobertPaxton's Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940−44 (1973)?

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There has been an increase, too, in the number of "customers" for history:those who distribute, produce and consume it. Journalists were the first into thefield, journalists whom Camus called "the historians of the present" whilehistorians were "journalists of the past". But there were also the witnesses,especially the victims, who bore this history in their flesh and blood, in theirmemories and who felt −− this is the crucial point −− that the immediacy ofexperience provides a truth that can never be accessed by long−distancejudgments or stale documents. This is precisely the category of witnesses thathas become more numerous. It ranges from individual protagonists to thosewho form part of some group, all the previously marginalized minorities −−sexual or social, religious, provincial or, nowadays, colonial −− whoseemancipation is achieved through the recovery of their own history and theaffirmation of their historical identity, by keeping alive their "memory", thenew, all−purpose word for the past. The "age of the witness" proclaimed byAnnette Wieviorka has become what I call "the age of commemoration".

With the traditional kind of history, based on exploration of the past andexclusion of the present, the historian had a monopoly on the past. The weightof contemporary witness has robbed him of that mastery. And by the sametoken, the past has ceased to be a body of knowledge and has become an issue.

Positivist history and the idea of the nation

This hidden, insidious and widely disseminated politicization of historyrepresents a break with the system that had become the rule throughoutnineteenth−century Europe, a system involving an official national history,supported by the state, based on the authority of science. National history andscientific history used to march in step, each supporting and reinforcing theother in a form of symbiosis that was secure and apparently indivisible.

This is the paradox of that kind of history that is called positivist, critical andmethodical. It combined a method that had finally succeeded in becomingscientific with parameters for the discipline that still apply today. The nationaland political ideology that appeared to be part of its essence was, in reality,very much of its time, the growth of nationalities, assertions of nationalidentity and upsurges of nationalism. The positivists believed that they wereavoiding the dangers of politics and the power of contemporary passions bybasing history on a past that could be studied with detachment and"objectivity". The truth was that they were constructing the past as an endlessgenesis of a present that was, if not actually directly dominated by politicalagitation, then at least by national imperatives. Hence there was, at the heart ofthis type of history, that "demon of origins" to which Marc Bloch objected.4

Thus the scientific approach to history that became established in France underthe Third Republic was affected by two powerful politico−historical needs thatframed and determined it. The first was the "republican" need to reconcile theold and the new France in order to complete the Revolution and to strengthenthose things that had been gained. This meant that it was essential to identifywhat had been good within the Ancien Régime and had led to the Republic, andwhat had been bad: a story under which a line could have been finally andemphatically drawn. Then there was another need, this time of a national kind,after the defeat of 1870 and in a spirit of revenge: to catch up with Germany,since it was the latter's scientific superiority that was supposed to have ensuredPrussian victories at Sadowá5 and Sedan. By achieving this, France woulddefine its very identity as being the opposite of the German type of nation.

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These two components, the scientific and the civic and political became, inmany respects inseparable. Very often both became caricatures, with thescientific being transformed into a sterile recitation of dates and anentanglement of political−military−diplomatic negotiations, whilst the nationaldimension recruited history to the cause of patriotic propaganda, as duringWorld War I. Even though we may have got over them to a large extent, bothdimensions are surely still present at the heart of the activities of historianstoday.

If we wish to locate the core of this type of history, the focal point wherehistory and politics, science and the nation are bound together, the place tolook will be the archives, in the vast network of stored documents which wasbuilt up across the whole of nineteenth−century Europe. Having been thearsenal of public authority, the instrument of political authority, they have beentransformed into a laboratory of national history. State archives have, by virtueof the ways in which they were constructed and accumulated, predisposedhistory to become for a long time the history of the state and statesmen. In1876, Gabriel Monod, one of the founders, if not the founder, of the scientificand positivist school, and one of the first historians to become involved in theDreyfus Affair in the name of justice and truth, wrote his famous editorial inthe first issue of the Revue historique. Entitled "Concerning progress inhistorical studies", one may discern in it the founding charter of this new kindof history, namely its exhumation of the tradition of erudition andrecord−keeping that ranged from sixteenth−century precursors such as NicolasVignier or Claude Fauchet to the Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres,6

via the royal historiography of Duchesne and Du Cange ("to whom Louis XIVdecided to entrust the management of a major collection produced by Frenchhistorians"). Monod's approach was then hammered out by the big names ofthe time, including naturally Lavisse, who began his major speech for the 1881course to students together for the first time at the Sorbonne with the words,"The true historian is a philologist", and put forward as a model theMonumenta Germaniae Historica, whose epigraph is Sanctus amor patriae datanimum (The sacred love of our fatherland is our inspiration). Or, in the nextgeneration, Langlois and Seignobos, the first sentence of whose 1898Introduction to Historical Studies, the bible of the new history, drives themessage home: "History is produced from documents".

I will not dwell on the question of the founding moment of what was tobecome the "national story", nowadays a controversial topic. I would simplylike to stress that, throughout the whole of Europe, in the Germany of Rankeand then Mommsen, in Namier's Britain and Croce's Italy −− everywhere, thiskind of national history became the central axis around which all the rest ofhistory was ordered. It was the universal truth of archives that served as a basisfor the legitimacy of national history, into which the history of Europe and theworld was made to fit, as the world's exploration and colonization graduallyfell into the pockets of Europe.

I would even venture to say that the traditional alliance between scientific andnational history was paradoxically confirmed in the Annales School, whichclaimed to be the movement that shattered and abolished that national historyin all its positivist narrowness and political impoverishment. The spearhead ofthe Annales School was the struggle against a form of history based on events,based on the nation. Everyone remembers, for example, the savage attackmounted by Lucien Febvre on Seignobos, who quite rightly can be seen asrepresentative of the "national historian" standing between science and politics.The Annales type of history was, in France, the embodiment of an opening up

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to the world, to social sciences, a history purged of the distractions of politicalturns of events, dedicated to exceptional individuals. Down, it cried, withnarrowly political and national history as typified by the struggle againsthistory based on events. Yet, as Krzysztof Pomian demonstrated in his articleon "L'Heure des Annales" ("The Time of the Annales") in Les Lieux demémoire, the national preoccupation never abandoned the Annales historians.When one sums it up, what one ends up with is a national history that wastotally renewed by the fact that it drew on the social sciences. The evidence isthere in the extraordinary flourishing of national histories, the abundance ofwhich in the 1980s is truly remarkable. It includes the three volumes byGeorges Duby published by Larousse, the six volumes by Jean Favierpublished by Fayard, the six volumes by Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le RoyLadurie, François Furet and Maurice Agulhon published by Hachette, the fourvolumes by Jacques Revel and André Burguière, published by Seuil, not tomention the individual Histoires de France by Pierre Chaunu, Pierre Goubertand Marc Ferro. And all of these were crowned by L'Identité de la France byFernand Braudel himself.

There is, in this enduring state of affairs, something that is peculiar to France.Traditionally stress has been laid on the diversity of France: a diversity ofregions, populations and languages. This was the other face, a face that wasvisible and perceptible, of that unity pursued with such determination in thetemporal construction of politics and history. Unity and diversity form theantithetical and complementary pair that appears to have constituted the way inwhich history has generally been understood. It was precisely through thehistorical synthesis of the Third Republic that this view was consolidated. Ithad barely come to an end before the principle of division appeared to befundamental. France, the oldest of the nation−states, is also the only one tohave constructed itself on the basis of a twofold myth about its origins: theFranks and the Gauls. In my view, the overall organic unity was establishednot on the basis of a harmonic continuity in history and territory, but rather onthe awareness of an identity that continually feeds on the rifts and radicaldivisions on which it was constructed: divisions that are political, religious andgeo−historical. The bond between history and nation was forged by thisinternal tradition of divisions. What gave France its original character in thealliance of history and politics that affected all of nineteenth−century Europewere in fact two features that only France can claim. One was the heritagerepresented by that initial form of national history that had grown up duringthe wars of religion with Henri de la Popelinière's Histoire des Français andEtienne Pasquier's Recherches de la France. The other was the brutal shock ofthe Revolution. It caused a generation born at the turn of the century and raisedunder the Empire to become historians, in order to recover the life and the tasteof a world that had been wrecked and to explain to themselves the monstrousenigma of the Revolution. This was a generation that embarked on a search forthe past in order to explain, support or justify their political opinions andaspirations. Many were to divide their careers between history and politics.Marcel Gauchet, in his great article in Lieux de mémoire on "AugustinThierry's Letters on the History of France"7 has clearly shown that it was atthat time that history, in the modern sense of the word, became historygoverned by the idea of the nation.

World history and the colonial question

Over the last ten years or so, the colonial question has brought about a suddenincrease in the tensions between history and politics. History's internalpoliticization has been placed centre stage. This has been intensified by the fact

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that, at around the same time, colonial history received impetus from thearrival on the scene of world history.

Two old disputes have acquired renewed political intensity. One was promptedby the reality of financial and economic globalization. The other was triggeredby the criminalization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the 2001 (theTaubira Law) and the publication in 2003 of the Livre noir du colonialisme("Black Book of Colonialism"),8 edited by Marc Ferro. Then came the battleover the law on "the positive presence of France overseas" passed in 2005, andin particular its Article 4 requiring teachers and course books to support thisviewpoint, which was, in the end, withdrawn.

In a sense, the colonial question is only the most recent explosion ofremembering that has occurred since the 1980s in connection with all theminorities, brought about primarily by African and West Indian immigration.What it appears to be demanding is of the same order as previous explosions,be they on behalf of Jews, workers, feminists, Corsicans, etc. CatherineCoquery−Vidrovitch spelled it out clearly at the beginning of her book, LesEnjeux politiques de l'histoire coloniale ("Political Issues in ColonialHistory"):9 "Must our national history include the history of colonization andof French colonial slavery as part of our common historical and culturalheritage or not?" When you put it like that, the question leaves scarcely anyroom for discussion.

In reality the question goes much further, because it sets off against each otherthose who think that the colonial aspect of our history has had little effect onthe constants of national identity and those who consider it necessary to rethinkthe whole of national identity in post−colonial terms, since they feel thatnational identity is close to revealing its true nature in colonial oppression andits denial. They argue that what is needed is not just to include colonization inthe grand chronicle of our national history, but to rewrite that national historyin the light of colonization. Bonaparte reinstated slavery in Haiti in 1802. Yetbecause slavery has been declared a crime against humanity, Bonaparte is to beseen as guilty of a crime against humanity. Since he is no longer here toanswer the charge, historians must do so in his stead.

Of course, world history and colonial studies belong to different fields,although the same questions must be asked about how they are to be writtenabout and what approach should be taken to them. If the subject of theserendez−vous, the Orient, nevertheless allows these two to be brought together,that is because world history (or whatever you choose to call it: "global","comparative", "connected") leads directly to putting eurocentrism on trial, justas colonial history leads to doing the same with national history. It is alsobecause, in both cases, an intrinsic link is established between nation andhistory as it is between Europe or the West and history.

This process of questioning is made up of a very wide spectrum of currents ofthought which, taking my inspiration from Krzysztof Pomian's study ofrelationships between "world history" and universal history, I will try, for thesake of pedagogical clarity, to identify in a simple fashion. They involve:

− Stating that the rise of western modernity was achieved through theexploitation of the rest of the world: the basic argument of Marxism andneo−Marxism. − Establishing a parallel between scientific development anddomination, between knowledge and the illusory creation of forms ofexoticism and imperialism. This is the theme of Edward Saïd in his celebrated

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Orientalism (1978), the work that served as the pioneer for anti−occidentalistcriticism and which, according to the author in an important afterword writtenin 2003, the Arab world wrongly saw as a systematic advocacy and vindicationof Islam and the Arabs.

− Playing down the West's contributions and its role in uniting the world andreconstructing history in such a way as to remove western specificity. Theproof then lies in linking all western innovations to much earlier inventionsmade outside Europe: in China, India, the Arab world, ranging from thedecimal system and the invention of zero to printing with movable type via thecompass and gunpowder. Or it can even extend to disputing the uniquenessand modernity of capitalism.

− Refusing to accept as part of historical thought all concepts originating in theWest, in particular the notion of "civilization", on which the work of Toynbeeand the theories of Huntington depend.10

− Denouncing the assertion not just of western political imperialism but alsowestern historical imperialism, of which it is guilty when it tries to show howEurope has imposed the account of its past on the rest of the world. This is, forexample, what Jack Goody aims to show in his book The Theft of History,11

about how Asia should be understood. One might measure the distance, over aperiod of fifty years, between this extremist position and the historicalrelativism of Lévi−Strauss, in his celebrated 1952 pamphlet Race et histoire("Race and history").12

− Rejecting the very concept of history in its modern sense, History with acapital H that saw itself as the standard for deciding who was or was not partof History and for measuring how far some distant group of people wassituated from History. It was an echo of this argument that provoked thenegative reaction of Africans to Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 Dakar speech, forexample. Even though it was a speech that included strong condemnations ofcolonialism, it referred to the "late stage at which Africans had become part ofHistory".

− Finally, rejecting any thought of universal history on the grounds that itamounts to self−glorification and imperialist self−justification, which actuallyinvented and defined the forms that the universal was to take.

France, which just one generation ago, in the good old days of the AnnalesSchool, shone its light across the entire world, appears in this new "situationmade to fit history" (as Péguy put it) arising from an exaggerated tensionbetween history and politics, to be withdrawing from the international stage.13

Whilst it is true that the stage in question is today dominated by the search fora "world history", it is clear that it is the Americans who are taking the lead −−perhaps because, remembering that they were the first in history to bedecolonized, they have a strong motive for identifying with the rejection ofeurocentrism. It is also clear that, if it is attachment to national history that liesbehind a delay in becoming involved in world history, then of all the countriesof Europe, France is the one that has most reasons to experience this delay.There is nothing to be gained by going over this point again.

On the other hand, I should like to conclude by pointing out the difficulty thatFrance has in accepting its colonial past without becoming apoplectic. Thepassion that drives it, the mental blocks that paralyse it, seem to me to haveless to do with resentment and a conscience that pricks than with two historical

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factors.

The first is probably to do with the fact that, unlike Britain, for example,decolonization was completed, as far as France was concerned, in the course ofa war, the Algerian War, following on from the war in Indo−China. Twodefeats against the background of defeat in 1940. The stress on Algeria ismulti−dimensional: because it was one part colony, three parts Frenchdépartement, it assumed the character of a war of secession. For metropolitanFrance it involved a change of regime and a new republic, and it was the manwho had cleansed France of the disaster of 1940 who lowered the flag inAlgeria. The consequences of the Algerian defeat are just as far from being athing of the past as are the consequences of the defeat of 1940.

The second reason is to do with the attitude of the Left. The Left is hesitantand equivocal about colonization. Any retrospective association made betweenthe Left and anti−colonialism is a cliché and a fabrication. The contrary is thecase. Not only were the parties of the Left late converts to anti−colonialism,but colonial expansion itself was carried out in the name of the Enlightenment,in the name of the revolutionary and Jacobin ideal. Here, too, the Algerian caseproves the point. By its very nature and by definition, Algerian nationalismwas doing the opposite of the French Left, which was concerned withdefending the little pieds−noirs of Bab El Oued. This was so much the casethat the slow development of the Algerian War was partly due to the slow anddifficult conversion of the Left to the idea of Algerian independence. Theintensity of the Algerian question affected the whole of the colonial question,which had become a crisis of conscience, quickly bundled out of the way andvery hard to accept.

Conclusion

History versus politics is today's conflict, and the word "politics" covers bothmemory and ideology.

This antagonistic pair has replaced those that have successively occupied thestage that is the discipline of history: erudition versus philosophy, scienceversus literature, structure versus event, problem versus account. However, theantagonism of history and politics goes much further than its predecessors,because it involves not only how history is carried out but the place and role ofhistory in our modern urban life.

That place and role have become problematic and are characterized by aprofound contradiction.

The very foundations of the profession of the historian have changed.Historians are no longer part of or borne by the historical continuity for whichthey used to be both agents and guarantors. They have lost their certainties andmagisterial status. On the other hand, as interpreters and experts in socialdemand, as a bulwark against political and public pressure, they are morenecessary than ever.

Their role has become more difficult. Where does the boundary lie betweenwidening the range of questions that they should ask and abandonment of theclassic criteria of their discipline that enabled them to draw up their list ofquestions in the first place? Where is the boundary between taking into accountthose who have memories −− witnesses, victims of history −− andreconstituting that history solely from the point of view of such witnesses and

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victims? What place should historians give to national history in a history ofEurope and the world? Where does the boundary lie between includingindividual identities and considering the collective, and which collectiveshould it be, anyway? These are all questions that each historian must answerin their own way, but all must ask them.

It is obviously impossible for historians to discount their own influences: tobreak all bonds with their country, class, religion and family, party or evenprofession. But never before has the situation required historians to act asethnologists and adopt such critical distance from themselves and from theirsubject in the search for a truth which is everyone's, because it belongs to noone. In pursuit of a goal that one can never attain but must always strive for, anawareness of limitations and analysis of constraints are, here as elsewhere, thenecessary condition for action and freedom.

This article is a translation of Pierre Nora's closing address to the conferenceRendez−Vous de l'Histoire in Blois, 13−16 October 2011.

1 porteurs de valises: mainly Communist supporters of Algerian independence who assistedthe Algerian FLN independence movement, often by carrying suitcases full of money,documents or propaganda. Notable "suitcase carriers" included the prominent lawyerJacques Vergès and the philosopher Francis Jeanson −− trans.

2 Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l'armée pendant la guerre d'Algérie (1954−1962), Paris,Gallimard, 2001, 474.

3 Une drôle de justice. Les Magistrats dans la Guerre d'Algérie, Paris, 2001.4 Marc Bloch, in Apologie pour l'histoire ou métier d'historien (1941) also speaks of the "Idol

of Origins".5 Also known as the battle of Königgratz. French resentment at this victory and demands for

revenge were said to be one of the causes of the Franco−Prussian war of 1870 −− trans.6 This body is one of the five constituent academies of the Institut de France. It was founded

by Colbert in 1663 and brings together persons with an interest in research in the humanities−− trans.

7 Marcel Gauchet, Les Lettres sur l'histoire de France d'Augustin Thierry in Les Lieux demémoire (ed. Pierre Nora), vol. 2, La Nation, Paris, 1986.

8 Le livre noir du colonialisme, XVIe−XXIe siècle: de l'extermination à la repentance sous ladirection de Marc Ferro, Paris 2003).

9 Catherine Coquery−Vidrovitch, Les Enjeux politiques de l'histoire coloniale, Paris, 2009.10 Arnold Toynbee, 1889−1975 wrote about the rise and fall of civilizations, whilst Samuel

Huntington's celebrated lecture of 1992 discussed the "clash of civilizations".11 Jack Goody, The Theft of History, CUP, 2006.12 Published by UNESCO.13 As Jean−François Sirinelli has forcefully argued in his recently published pamphlet,

L'histoire est−elle encore française? ("Is history still French?"), published by CNRS, 2011,in the "Débats" series.

Published 2011−11−24Original in FrenchTranslation by Mike RoutledgeFirst published in Eurozine (French and English versions)© Pierre Nora© Eurozine

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