Controversy around memorial laws

Résumé du document

A controversy recently arose in France in which historians played a significant role. This controversy involves a number of actors: The French government, which passed the so-called "memorial laws"; the interest groups that lobbied the Parliament to pass them; the historians who became polarized and reacted in various ways and with different justifications to these laws; the academic community as a whole, which supported the historians or else rejected their reasoning; and finally the media, which publicized the controversy. After having described this controversy in a first part, this paper will then provide with an analysis of the latter. Indeed, mi first intention was to try to write the immediate history of the controversy that would treat it as symptomatic and relate the main ideas and sources of disagreements that fed the debates to broader trends in the French society and in the French legal and political system. But, I changed my mind. It would indeed be too artificial for me to refrain from judging the different arguments and developing my own position as I am French, connected with the field of social science and dealing with a contemporary issue.

Extraits

[...] Indeed, the fact that the legislator relayed through such laws the memorial claims made by particular groups is in itself interestingly symptomatic of at least two crises: the crisis of the Republican ideal, and more generally, the crisis of French politics. Competition of memories, Republican ideal and multiculturalism As we have seen, associations of victims (Jews, Harkis) or descendants of victims (slaves or Armenians) demanded that the Parliament passed these laws. According to Paul Thibaud and the philosophers who signed his petition, these claims are symptomatic of the competition between memories that is allegedly being witnessed today. [...]

[...] From this derives the significant importance given by Ricoeur to micro-history. Whereas macro-history is more bound to make the chain of events appear as determined, micro-history restores the ambiguities and the complexities of the choices made at an individual level. The main contention that I would like to make here is that the memorial laws fundamentally try to turn the past events they deal with into a “gone The memorial laws deal indeed with a past that tend to contaminate social issues and public debates in the present. [...]

[...] As a consequence, the association sued. The problem is that some historians thought that a law could be used by the judge to condemn Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau. This law was passed by the Parliament on May 21st 2001 and is commonly referred to as Taubira which said that French Republic recognizes that the transatlantic slave trade, the slave trade that occurred in the Indian Ocean, and slavery perpetrated ( ) against African, Madagascan, Amerindian and Indian populations constitute a crime against humanity. [...]

[...] But first he admits that our memories are often focused on our misfortunes. The problem, says Ricoeur, is that misfortunes are not communicable and not comparable. In one's memory, one's personal misfortune is both immediately recognizable and inescapably singular. By contrast, there can be no recognition in history. There are only reconstructions that can not be more than truthful. Moreover with the development of social history and cultural history, everything in the past potentially became a matter of interest for the historian. [...]

[...] It would require a thorough analysis of history textbooks that I cannot make here. Still in view of this long-lasting official silence, it does not seem illegitimate for the groups mentioned to push the Parliament into legislating for instance that “School syllabi and research programs in history and social science shall grant to slave trade and slavery the substantial place that they deserve”. But as the 19 historians contends, this article creates a context in which parents of schoolchildren could be inclined to sue teachers who did not grant to slave trade the substantial place that it deserves in their eyes. [...]