“Collective memory, the duty of memory, the work of memory, the abuses of memory, and so on. In the end, one speaks of nothing else, one writes of nothing but this subject. When it is not directly a question of memory, it is commemoration that comes to the forefront of current events — heritage, the Journées du patrimoine (Heritage Days), every form of musealization of the past,” observes the writer and historian Régine Robin. Indeed, since the 1980s, and at a rhythm that has intensified at the end of the millennium, one witnesses in Europe — and more particularly in France — a profusion of commemorative acts that takes on the appearance of a “new cult.” Yet, even as historians and philosophers show themselves critical of this excess of memory, voices make themselves heard to denounce its partiality: there would be a memorial hypertrophy of the Shoah, an under-memory of the crimes committed in the countries formerly dominated by the communist regimes, and an unthought of colonial crimes and violence that would resurface today like a return of the repressed. Memories thereby become rivals: the victims of some are not considered victims by others; quantitative and qualitative comparisons take place; concepts are used out of context, creating conflations that leave one perplexed. Instead of being a tool of warning and of justice, memories become instruments of war. Everything happens as though the memory and the suffering lived through by some excluded those of others; as though the claims of memory were a pretext for prestige and for the appropriation of a collective good of which others would be all the more impoverished. The conflicts arising around these questions could be an analyzer of the violence that erupted recently in our banlieues. They are revealing of the tensions that accompany the structuring of minority groups within the French Republic; they question, finally, the rhythm and the mode according to which the national historical narrative is built.
To emerge from the memorial wars and to define a politics of just memory, the philosopher Paul Ricœur, in his work La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Memory, History, Forgetting), drew up a typology of the obstacles to memory: impeded memory (because traumatized), manipulated memory (because a source of political and intellectual abuses of ideology), and obligated memory (whence the critique of the “duty of memory,” which the philosopher wished to see replaced by the “work of memory,” the only one capable of allowing History to be written). He tried to think through the conflictuality and the necessary articulation between the historical dimension aiming at truth and the memorial dimension aiming at fidelity. The social tensions in which we move make necessary both the articulation of this double dimension and the elucidation of the identity-related, civic, and political stakes underlying the memorial conflicts evoked.
Identity stakes, stakes of recognition
Well before the explosion of violence in the urban banlieues in November 2005, researchers had carried out studies whose conclusions foreshadowed the events. Two schools confront each other here: some insist on the socio-economic dimension (the importance of unemployment, the absence of any prospect of mobility) and the environmental one (relegation to the “quartiers”); the problem is then that of the entire working class in the postindustrial world, without distinction of origin. The others inscribe the violence that seems to characterize these young people within an identity-related negativity: a lived experience of segregation, the feeling of being defined by a deficit of civilization, confinement within an image imposed by the “others” with which they identify. A continuity exists between the gaze the stigmatized person turns upon himself and the one that society turns upon him. The sociologist Didier Lapeyronnie speaks of an “unreal” identity that is accompanied by a derealization of the lived world, experienced as a stage on which each plays his role — a faked relation to their bodies, a disconnection from the common language. There is a feeling of geographical and temporal impasse, no projection of the self conceivable in time. This confusion is anchored, too, in a disaffiliation and a confused relation to the country of origin of their parents, whose identity they cannot appropriate.
A study conducted in Toulouse among 100 young people underscored their ignorance of their own history: ignorance of the history of their parents’ country of origin, ignorance of the history of immigration. The silence of the school textbooks that accompanied their schooling is all the more glaring for it. Family memories, which might compensate for these gaps, pass over the traumas in silence, do not transmit the history. Only the memory of the Algerian War and of the violence that accompanied its end has been handed down, thereby reducing France, in their imaginations, to nothing but the abuses committed in that period. There would thus be a conjunction of a lived experience of discrimination, a negative identity, and an ignorance of concrete realities. From the standpoint of this school, it is on the basis of this lived experience that the urgency of the reincorporation of memories and of history would make itself felt; it alone would make it possible to attain recognition and to restore the self-esteem whose deficit secretes ressentiment and violence toward other populations judged to be privileged.
Two associative currents are born out of these realities:
In a certain number of associations one observes an instrumentalization of memory by minority groups within the populations issued from immigration. One then observes a drift of memories that become communitarian. Memories are reconstructed, mythified, and do not tolerate confrontation with historical truths. The polemics around slavery and the slave trade are exemplary of this. Identities become ethnicized, assigning each person to his essentialized biological origin. The concern to identify with the dominant model disappears in favor of a claim to singularity. The shame of being a victim is transformed into the glory of being one. The claim to victim status reproduces a cleavage between some, supposed to be dominant, and others, who would be dominated — some executioners, others victims. This identity-related partition in fact induces a rivalry between these groups and others, the Jews most particularly. To drape oneself in the status of absolute victim confers the feeling of an inexpungeable debt and absolves one of all that might be imputed to oneself. It is thus paradoxical to see young adults whose parents are issued from the former French colonies gather around the “Sons and Daughters of African Deportees,” the “Indigènes de la République” (Natives of the Republic). Jewish memory seems to provoke a sort of mimetic rivalry.
Other associations laying claim likewise to a memory and a history (such as the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires — Representative Council of Black Associations) have emerged in recent years. Their aim, while laying claim to a specificity, does not for all that place itself in competition with the other communities living on French soil, but militates for the recognition of a national collective unity that would take account of the plurality of memories that constitute it. These associations do not set themselves up in competition with the other collectives, nor with the Jewish associations in particular. On the contrary: there exists a solidarity among them; the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions) contributed to the formation of its Black counterpart, and it was remarkable to glimpse the latter’s banner in the Parisian demonstration that followed the murder of the young Ilan Halimi in February 2006. What is called into question there is the narcissistic and nationalist management of memories that occults the vision others have of our history; the aim would be to include within the collective narrative the narrative of all the protagonists to whom we have closed ourselves off.
The intellectual and ideological formalization
By what processes is the passage elaborated from a memorial quest — legitimate, in order to find one’s inscription within a social fabric — to the claim of an identity as colonized person, slave, native of the republic? There is an identification of the young people of the quartiers with the fate undergone by their forebears, just as there is an identification with the populations set up today as exemplary figures of the victim (the Palestinians, for example). It is a mythified victim, for they are ignorant of the concrete history and of the realities of the balances of power in the colonial era. This movement is accompanied by an essentialization of identity, reduced to its origins, and by a separatism claimed in relation to other “ethnicities.” This is the time of all the exacerbations: the time of the exaltation of singularity and of a certain Manichaeism that ignores all nuance. Relations between dominated groups — or groups that claim to be such — are defined by competition.
Parallelisms exist between the victimary identity of minority groups and the self-accusation of committed militants and historians who vigorously denounce the colonial past of the French Republic. These latter castigate a France forgetful of its past, a “postcolonial” society where they decipher the “fractures” running through it as the legacies of an occulted colonial history: intercommunal relations, the ghettoization of the banlieues, the difficulties and blockages of integration, the manipulation of memories, the conception of national history, foreign policy, the place of the Dom-Tom (overseas departments and territories) in the national imaginary, or the debates on laïcité and the Islam of France. The discourse of committed militants, the guilt of Third-Worldist intellectuals, are articulated, in a sort of play of mirrors, with the victimization of young people who are excluded or experience themselves as such.
The intellectual debate becomes ideological construction. Thus, there is a confusion of the real and imaginary registers when one states that the inhabitants of the banlieues “are” colonized people, that Napoleon conceived the gas chambers when the ships transported slaves in their holds, that slavery was a “genocide,” or that to colonize is synonymous with exterminating. One observes the taking-up and the diffusion of this ideology in the associative and teaching circles — labeled pacifist and progressive — that precisely supervise these populations. There has been talk of self-hatred, of self-incrimination, of repentance, which would be so many signs of a malaise and of an identity quest. Thirty years ago already, Pascal Bruckner denounced, in his work Le sanglot de l’homme blanc (The Tears of the White Man), the self-flagellation of a category of Third-Worldist intellectuals; he pursues this debate in his latest work La tyrannie de la pénitence (The Tyranny of Guilt). Present-day historians take up the critique, condemning those who make hasty conflations between the violence in the banlieues and the colonial situation, who do not recontextualize the events of the present-day world, who lend support to the nationalist discourses of political leaders who instrumentalize the colonial past of France. These historians castigate the occultation of State violence, the partiality of a denunciation that privileges certain victims at the expense of others. “In our societies the past has become the stake of a vindicatory discourse of forces that set themselves up as the heirs of the victims, with all the more insistence in that no utopia projects them toward the future and that they are animated by a logic of victimary competition,” observes the historian Claude Liauzu.
The political missteps
Conflicts of memory feed also on the missteps at the level of the State in its memorial policy. It falls to the State to construct the collective memory of the nation through its commemorative policy. The State holds the monopoly of legitimate memory, but not that of historical memory. The risk is always that of the instrumentalization of memory in order to occult the present or to yield to the demands of pressure groups.
Beginning with the controversy provoked by the article of the law on the positive role of colonization, and the confusion that ensued, a more general debate arose over the well-foundedness or the inadequacy of the so-called memorial laws. Historians took a stance to protest against the drifts that these laws bring about — the violence and the trials incurred by historians recalcitrant to the theses of militant associations (thus the harassment of which the historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau was the victim for having relativized and recontextualized slavery). Hence the demand for repeal, by a current of historians (Paul Thibaud, former director of the review Esprit, among others), of all the memorial laws enacted by the State — a reopening of debates, which is the sign of a democracy. The Taubira law would have been a mistake, for it constituted as a crime against humanity only slavery in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, casting a veil over the other slaveholding populations or populations victim of slavery. The Gayssot law, criminalizing the contesting of the Shoah and rendering this event sacred and untouchable, would have provoked in return the competition of memories and the victimary one-upmanship in which we now find ourselves. The fact of having been a victim of barbarity confers, according to these intellectuals, no juridical privilege. The historians then demand that researchers be independent of the politicians in place, that they work to give an account, with as little subjectivity as possible, of the past in all its complexity. Other historians are more selective, the strongest resistance being around the repeal of the Gayssot law criminalizing the contesting of the Shoah. To do so would be, they say, to open the way to a legitimation of denialism and revisionism, to make of it a school of history like any other. A tension exists between the value of recognition of a past injustice that a memorial law confers, and the risk of instrumentalization, by the State or by minority groups, of these laws, discriminating among and hierarchizing the victims.
The tools for recognition
The historians occupy a mediating position between irreconcilable memories. Between the excess of memory of the groups defeated and traumatized by colonization and the insufficiency of memory of the former metropoles, the historians can help bring forth an equitable memory, on condition of clearly marking that memory never coincides with historical facts and that the bearers of memory always feel cheated by the exigencies of the historian’s craft. It seems necessary to undertake a rereading of the national narrative that would integrate the memories of all parties. Attention has been drawn to the wound occasioned by the fact, for example, that in the compendium of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) compiled by Pierre Nora, no site relating to the French colonial past appears. If one must know how to struggle against the silences of colonial memory, it is necessary to think the contradictory memories, and for that to build footbridges in order to be able to perceive the truth of the other. The aim is to help our contemporaries assume the colonial past under the angle of responsibility and not of guilt. “The tragic experiences of the twentieth century must lead to a new humanist consciousness,” writes Edgar Morin. “What is important is not repentance but recognition. This recognition must concern all the victims: Jews, Blacks, Roma, homosexuals, Armenians, the colonized of Algeria or of Madagascar. It is necessary if one wishes to overcome European barbarity.”
Reflection on the Shoah does not cease to pursue itself. Here and there one notes a questioning of the teaching of the Shoah. The incidents that accompany it seem to us to call for being deciphered as a necessary introduction, at the level of history teaching, to the other genocides and catastrophes that marked the twentieth century. To historicize these, to show by what chaining of circumstances they were able to occur, is to strip them of any dimension of the imponderable and also of the ineluctable. One may refer here to the remarkable comparative works that have been produced in recent years: among others, Yves Ternon, comparing the Armenian genocide and the Shoah; Jacques Semelin, who undertook to understand the processes by which the aims of destruction of a population are set in place, through a study of the genocide of the Jews, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the genocides that devastated the former Yugoslavia. There exist recurrent factors that comparative analysis and the pluridisciplinary approach make it possible to grasp. Such an approach induces a desacralization of what could be held to be unique and incomparable, without for all that denying the specificity of each genocide and the authenticity of each lived suffering.
The competition of victims and the competition of memories are both articulated to symbolic stakes: recognition of the violence undergone, but also existential recognition, recognition of one’s contribution to the world. The level of (symbolic) recognition doubles that of (historical) knowledge. For what appears essential in this struggle is the establishment of respect for oneself, of self-esteem, ineluctably bound up with others. The stakes underlying the debates around the rivalry of memories refer back to the ethics of modernity: this ethics valorizes the universal, the autonomy of subjects all equal before the law, abstract individuals. Now, to recognize the plurality of histories and of memories amounts to recognizing the belonging of individuals to distinct cultural collectivities. The founding values of Europe find themselves in tension with the risks of relativism, of particularism, and of multiculturalism. The question will be to find a balance between the consolidation of a national collective identity and the critical gaze upon our history, so as to understand how we arrived at this state of tension and of ressentiment between the communities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the memorial conflicts arising around the colonial past of France are to be elucidated, in our perspective, on the basis of the articulation of three levels:
Their implicit links to conflicts of victims. The problematic of the recognition of memories shifts toward an elucidation of the process of construction of victimary identities and of the stakes underlying the recognition of this status: recognition of the violence undergone, but also struggle for recognition, esteem, respect. There is a war of memories when these moral and identity-related stakes are unrecognized. The competition of memories and the competition of victims both resist historical analysis: they are anchored in the symbolic and in the ethical.
The Shoah, because it incarnates the figure of absolute evil and of the disaster of the twentieth century, arouses a rivalry, as well as mechanisms of identification and appropriation. The claim of absolute singularity and of the incomparability of the event, the construction of a collective identity around the status of victim, induce the feeling of a devaluation of the tragedies lived through by other groups.
There is war, finally, because the surging-up of the colonial unthought is accompanied by battering blows delivered to the idea of the Republic and to its founding values, which have become mythical: universalism, egalitarianism, the spirit of the Enlightenment. What is at play beneath these polemics refers back to the ethics of modernity. The question will be to grasp, at each of these levels, why these conflicts arise today, beyond the passions and the social violence that accompany them; it will also be to know what calling-into-question, indeed what fragility, of the republican model they are revealing of.