Abstract
The relationship between memory and history, which has preoccupied historiography and the philosophy of history since the middle of the nineteenth century, took a particular course in France at the end of the millennium. The forms this relationship took in this particular context have been the subject of heated debate around whether the reconstruction of the past should bear the sign of a moral imperative or, on the contrary, it should be kept away from any moral conditioning. To address this question and underline its particular relevance to the present, I will revisit a significant debate, based around Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation of the duty of memory developed in his book Memory, History, Forgetting. I will do this by means of a three-step approach. First, a short introduction will provide several guidelines for understanding the issues at stake in the debate in which Ricoeur was caught and explanations regarding the significance of the main notions around which the discussions took place, i.e., the duty and work of memory. Second, I will identify how historical debates, political decisions and civic concerns about the past gradually coagulated into two different “camps” in France during the 1980s and 1990s, i.e., the advocates of memory against those of history, foreshadowing the emergence of a historiographical crisis, the stakes of which I will analyse in detail. Finally, I will show how Ricoeur’s solution to this debate, i.e., an incomplete dialectic between the duty and the work of memory, developed on the horizon of justice, continues to have relevance for the present, being an innovative form of “defatalizing” the past.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French are my own.
In the interviews that Ricoeur will give to the press after this conference, we can find some important statements elucidating the topic we are analyzing, such as his assertion about “the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere” (the exact words are reproduced in his “Preface” to MHF). He also insists that a society cannot be “indefinitely in conflict with itself,” hence the idea that “a situation where new intimidation from the immensity of the event (the Holocaust) and its procession of complaints come to paralyze the reflection on the historiographical operation should be avoided” (see Laignel-Lavastine 2008).
In this sense, the French historian Henry Rousso defended his refusal to appear in the Maurice Papon’s trial for crimes against humanity by declaring that the historian is on the side of the truth and not on the side of a good cause (Rousso 1998a). For a quick overview of the Papon trial for English-speaking readers, see Wood (1999).
The list of critics taking a stance on Ricoeur’s position surely does not end here; the political scientist Raphael Drai (2000) questions whether we can really speak of a net opposition, a conflict between the duty and the work of memory, and sanctions Ricoeur’s calling the duty of memory a “trap”. The historian of philosophy Pierre Bouretz identifies a “theological backdrop” that would justify Ricoeur’s preference for the work of memory, which is a path towards a reconciled memory, the only foundation for the universal community announced in the New Testament (Bouretz 2000: 23). Moreover, the historian Laignel-Lavastine places Ricoeur among French intellectuals irritated by the “obsessive remanence” of the Holocaust and irritated by the ubiquity of this type of memory (Laignel-Lavastine 2002: 35f.).
An important dossier in this regard was published in 2002 in Le Débat journal, in which Ricoeur responds to the objections formulated by leading voices in history and the philosophy of history, including Roger Chartier, Pierre Nora and Krzysztof Pomian. Equally important are the studies published under the coordination of Ferenczi (2002), Müller (2005), Abel et al. (2006) and Dosse and Goldenstein (2013). Right from the titles, these volumes clearly show that reflecting on the relationship between duty and the work of memory—as it too establishes several other difficult relationships with the authenticity of testimonies, the status of collective memory, the truth of historic representations, the imprescriptible forgetting and forgiveness etc. and, at the same time, is deeply echoed in the political, social and legal fields—is an unfinished task, allowing for constant returns.
Although I am not a Hegelian, I can’t help referring to the famous quote from Hegel about reading the newspaper in the morning as a kind of realistic morning prayer, a practice aiming to orient one’s attitude toward what the world really is.
In the opening speech of the Sorbonne conference, it is Ricoeur himself who confirms the existence of the two fronts of the debate when he cautiously argues that in an era of commemorations, he will avoid being on either the side of memory’s advocates or that of history’s: “If I plead here for the anteriority of the question of mnemonic representation over that of the representation of the past in history, it is not because I would, for reasons of circumstance in the age of commemoration, place myself on the side of the advocates of memory against those of history—this is completely foreign to me […]” (Ricoeur, 2000a: 731).
The problem raised by the relationship between history and memory, expressed in terms of dependence versus autonomy, did not, of course, only appear in the final decades of the twentieth century. It is just an echo of a previous confrontation between the positivist and the romantic approach to history.
The work was published in several volumes from 1984 to 1992 and covers three major topics: the Republic, the Nation and “Les Frances”.
We find a definition of this term (along with a careful analysis of the phenomenon) in Michel, referring to a “set of interventions by public actors aiming to produce and impose an official public memory on society through the monopoly of instruments of public action” (2010a: 16).
Johann Michel’s book Le devoir de mémoire differs in some essential points from Sebastien Ledoux’s approach, first of all at the level of their assumed objectives: if Ledoux prefers to focus on the polysemy and historicity of the use of the concept (Ledoux 2012: 177), Michel identifies instead the political, epistemological, and ethical stakes raised by the concept itself. Another difference appears at the level of the hermeneutic approach developed by the two authors: for Ledoux, the problem of the duty of memory begins with the first occurrences of this term—more precisely, in the early 1980s, in the article by the neoliberal philosopher Philippe Némo (1980). For Michel, however, the question of the duty of memory is not strictly related to the invention of the concept as such, because in history there have also been other forms of injunctions to remember the past, forms that must also be taken into account.
To give just one devastating example, see Serge Klarsfeld’s book, Le Mémorial des enfants juifs, documenting the deportation from France of 11,000 Jewish children, sent to die in the concentration camps of Beaune-la-Rolande, Drancy and Auschwitz (Klarsfeld 1994).
This psychoanalytic reference to the work of mourning will also play an important role in Ricoeur’s attempt to avoid the “sacralization” of the duty of memory and to open it toward a dialectical articulation with the work of memory. However, Ricoeur departs from Todorov when he claims that by clarifying a truth about the past, historical practice can work in support of justice (see Dosse 2014: 63f.).
From the wide panoply of historians who questioned, in the 1990s, how memorial policies aligned themselves under the imperative of the duty of memory, we could also mention Antoine Prost and his book Douze lecons sur l’histoire [Twelve lessons on history] (1996).
Not even in the volume History and Truth, published in 1952, is Ricoeur paying much attention to the theme of memory. Here, the perspective is more neo-Kantian, showing a particular interest in the limits of historical knowledge and the interpenetration of objectivity and subjectivity in historical research.
Also see a beautiful interpretation of this last form of forgetting proposed by Askani (2006), in which he draws the fundamental forgetting described by Ricoeur close to the way Rosenzweig understands creation.
In the same sense, see Ricoeur’s statement from the opening of the conference “La mémoire saisie par l’histoire [The memory seized by history]: “[…] I propose a reconstruction of the whole course in a way that is no longer linear, but circular, where memories envelop one another, then ultimately producing, like a terminal enigma, the duty of memory” (2003: 15).
See also Ricoeur’s article with the very title “La vulnerabilité de la mémoire” (Ricoeur 1998c).
Some preparatory sketches of this semantic reconfiguration of the notion of the duty of memory can be found in what we might call MHF “proto-forms” such as Ricoeur (1998b: 43) (“a meditation on the theme of justice [standing] at the root of the injunction not to forget: there is a fair measure in the use of memory and in the use of forgetting”) and Ricoeur: “The danger then is to mobilize this ‘duty of memory’ in the service of the abuse of memory […]. Against this use, namely the perverse use of the duty of memory, it may be necessary to make room for a certain use of the duty of forgetting” (1998c: 30).
In addition, we recall the statement Ricoeur made in a prototext of MHF titled “La marque du passé”: the meaning of duty of memory is closely linked to, if not conditioned by, the recognition of a debt towards the past that can solely “open the memory towards the future” (1998a: 29f.). Starting with Time and Narrative, the debt towards the historical past receives a double articulation. On the one hand, emphasis is placed on loss and mourning; the distance separating the living from the dead (this meaning being borrowed from Michel de Certeau and his L’Ecriture de l’histoire). On the other hand, this debt binds us to the possible and positive form of a life that has been, and, as Raymond Aron would say, it is the main impetus to “defatalize the past”.
References
Abel, O., et al (eds.). (2006). La juste mémoire. Lectures autour de Paul Ricoeur. Genève: Labor et Fides.
Askani, HC., (2006). L’oubli fondamental comme don. A propos du livre de Paul Ricoeur: La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. In Abel, Olivier et al (eds.). La juste mémoire. Lectures autour de Paul Ricoeur (182–206). Genève: Labor et Fides.
Bouretz, P., (2000). La mémoire, entre fidelité et vérité. Le Monde des Débats (september).
Drai, R., (2000). Mais que veut dire Paul Ricoeur. L’Arche (511).
Dosse, F., & Goldenstein, C. (Eds.). (2013). Paul Ricoeur: Penser la mémoire. Seuil.
Dosse, F., (2008). Paul Ricoeur. Les sens d’une vie (1913–2005). Edition revue et augmentée. Paris: La Découverte.
Dosse, F. (2014). Travail et devoir de mémoire chez Paul Ricoeur. Inflexions, 25(1), 61–70.
Ferenczi, T. (Ed.). (2002). Devoir de mémoire, droit à l’oubli? Complexe.
Gadamer, H.G., (2004). Truth and method. 2nd rev. ed. Trans. J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Garcia, P., et al. (2007). Paul Ricoeur et la guerre des mémoires. In Ch. Delacroix (Ed.), Paul Ricoeur et les sciences humaines (pp. 57–76). La Découverte.
Laignel-Lavastine, A. (2002). Des intellectuels contre la memoire: Remarques sur les resorts d’une exasperation. In T. Ferenczi (Ed.), Devoir de mémoire, droit à l’oubli? (pp. 33–39). Complexe.
Laignel-Lavastine, A., (2008). La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Le Monde. Online document: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2008/08/21/la-memoire-l-histoire-l-oubli-par-alexandra-laignel-lavastine_1086258_3232.html. Accessed August 2020.
Ledoux, S. (2012). Écrire une histoire du “devoir de mémoire”. Le Débat, 3(170), 175–185.
Ledoux, Sébastien. (2014). Le temps du “devoir de memoire” des années 1970 à nos jours. Thèse de doctorat soutenue le 10 novembre 2014 à l’Université Paris 1. Online document: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01895897/document. Accessed February 2021.
Levi, Primo. (1986). I sommersi e i salvati [The drowned and the saved]. Trans. Michael F. Moore. Turin: Einaudi.
Levi, Primo. (1995). Le devoir de mémoire: Entretien avec Anna Bravo et Federico Cereja. Trans. J. Gayraud. Introduction and afterword by Federico Cereja. Paris: Mille et une nuits.
Mattéoli, Jean. (2000). Mission d’étude sur la spoliation des Juifs de France—Rapport général. Recommandations du troisieme rapport. Online document: https://www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/24212-mission-detude-sur-la-spoliation-des-juifs-de-france-rapport-general. Accessed August 2020.
Michel, J. (2010a). Gouverner les mémoires: Les politiques mémorielles en France. PUF.
Michel, J. (2010b). L’histoire comme science herméneutique: La contribution épistémologique de Paul Ricoeur. In G. Marmasse (Ed.), L’Histoire (pp. 209–230). Vrin.
Michel, Johann. (2018). Le devoir de mémoire. Paris: PUF (ebook).
Monod, J.-C. (2017). Y a-t-il une “mémoire juste”? De la phénoménologie du souvenir à la Historikerstreit. Philosophie, 132, 56–68.
Müller, B., (ed.). (2005). L’histoire entre mémoire et epistemologie. Autour de Paul Ricoeur. Lausanne: Payot.
Némo, P. (1980). Le devoir de mémoire. Commentaire, 3(11), 392–400.
Nora, P., (1984–1992). Les lieux de mémoire. La République (1984), La Nation (1986), Les Frances (1992). Paris: Gallimard.
Prost, A. (1996). Douze leçons sur l’histoire. Seuil.
Ricoeur, P. (1988). Time and narrative. Vol. 3. Trans. K. Blamey & D. Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur, P., (1998a). La marque du passé. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1 (janvier–mars), 8–31.
Ricoeur, P., (1998b). Passé, mémoire et oubli [sur les trois apories de la mémoire. Conférence au Colloque “La mémoire et l’histoire,” Grenoble 1997]. In M. Verlhac (ed.), Histoire et mémoire (Documents: Actes et rapports pour l’éducation) (pp. 29–45). Grenoble: Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique de l’Académie de Grenoble.
Ricoeur, P., (1998c). Vulnérabilité de la mémoire [Conférence aux entretiens du patrimoine, Paris, 6 janvier 1997, suivie d’un débat avec J. Le Goff et d’autres]. In J. Le Goff (ed.), Patrimoine et passions identitaires: Actes des entretiens du patrimoine (pp. 17–31, 55–68). Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine—A. Fayard.
Ricoeur, P., (2000a). L’écriture de l’histoire et la répresentation du passé. Annales: Histoire, SciencesSociales 55 (4), 731–747.
Ricoeur, P., (2000b). Aux origines de la mémoire, l’oubli de réserve. Esprit 266/267 (8/9), 32–47.
Ricoeur, P., (2000c). Les rôles respectifs du juge et de l’historien. Esprit 266/267 (8/9), 48–71.
Ricoeur, P. (2002a). Esquisse d’un parcours de l’oubli. In T. Ferenczi (Ed.), Devoir de mémoire, droit à l’oubli? (pp. 21–31). Complexe.
Ricoeur, P. (2002b). Mémoire: Approches historiennes, approche philosophique. Le Débat, 122, 41–61.
Ricoeur, P. (2003). La mémoire saisie par l’histoire. Revista de letras (Sao Paulo), 43(2), 15–25.
Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting. Trans. K. Blamey & D. Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Rochlitz, R. (2001). Mémoire et pardon, signification politique des actes symboliques. Critique, 646, 163–188.
Rousso, H. (1998a). Quel tribunal pour l’histoire? Interview de Henry Rousso par Philippe Petit. Raison Présente, 128(4), 57–65.
Rousso, H. (1998b). La hantise du passé: Entretien avec Philippe Petit. Textuel.
Rousso, H. (2017). Face au passé: Essai sur la mémoire contemporaine. Belin.
Semprún, J. (1994). L’Ecriture ou la vie. Gallimard.
Thibaut, P., (2020). Quelle transmission de mémoire 75 ans après la libération du camp d’Auschwitz?. RFI.fr. Online document: https://www.rfi.fr/fr/europe/20200126-quelle-transmission-m%C3%A9moire-75-ans-apr%C3%A8s-lib%C3%A9ration-camp-auschwitz. Accessed February 2020.
Todorov, T., (2018 [1995]). Les abus de la mémoire. Paris: Arléa.
Wieviorka, A., (2009). On-attend-trop-de-la-justice. Entretien à Ka-set, partenaire de Rue89. Online document: https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-monde/20090101.RUE7530/annette-wieviorka-au-cambodge-on-attend-trop-de-la-justice.html. Accessed August 2020.
Wood, N. (1999). Memory on trial in contemporary France: The case of Maurice Papon. History and Memory, 11(1), 41–76.
Yerushalmi, YH., (1984). Zakhor: Histoire juive et mémoire juive. Trans. Eric Vigne. Paris: La Découverte.
Yerushalmi, YH., (1988). Réflexions sur l’oubli. Trans. E. Vigne. In Yerushalmi et al. (ed.), Usages de l’oubli: Contributions au colloque de Royaumont [1987] (pp. 9–21). Paris: Seuil.
Funding
This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016–2224, within PNCDI III.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Marinescu, P. The Duty of Memory Revisited: Ricoeur’s Contribution to a Crisis in French Historiography. Hum Stud 44, 453–471 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09587-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09587-2