The "Memorial Laws"

Résumé du document

In the first part of this paper, I give an account of a recent controversy that arose in France and 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. In a second part, I give an analysis of the controversy. My first idea 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. Of course, my developments bear the trace of my original intent. I am therefore especially interested by the symptomatic character of the passing of the memorial laws and the debates that arouse last year. Still, these analyses are integrated in the content of a reasoning that will ultimately lead me to reject all the positions that I read. I will first try to draw some distinctions between the "package" called "the memorial laws" and to reject some of the distinctions that seem irrelevant to me. Then, the basis of my analyses will be a cost/benefit assessment of the memorial laws, operated at both a theoretical and a practical level, that will lead me after two detours to the conclusion that, maybe, the last three memorial laws should be regarded as too costly compared to the social benefits that they bring. Surprisingly, though, this potential cost will appear to be more significant for the memorial groups who called for these laws than for the historians who demanded their abrogation.

Extraits

[...] In that perspective, the passing of the memorial laws constitutes an evolution toward a second crisis of politics. Here, governments are not even able to adapt the boat to the tumultuous sea. Indeed, the social groups like the Harkis or the West Indies people are disadvantaged segments of the French population who seek to connect their present difficulties to past injustices. But rather than remedying these social problems in the present, allocating resources, providing jobs to these categories of the population, the government only recognized the fact that the past injustice existed. [...]

[...] For Noiriel as we can see, the first three memorial laws constitute the legitimate implementation of a public policy that does not restrict the liberty of the historians. In addition, historians should not ask for their abrogation because of the harmful consequences it will entail for the autonomy of their discipline. It should be mentioned that in the last week of December, a group of philosophers led by the director of the review Paul Thibaud published a petition defense of freedom of debate”, in which they explicitly supported and demanded the abrogation of the memorial laws. They make some interesting comments. [...]

[...] The fact that Taubira went hand in hand with a revival of the debate over the independence of the West Indies illustrates how such laws can contribute to the affirmations of groups and make the national bond become more fragile. Yet one can offer arguments in favor of these groups of “victims”. As Elie Wiesel said, the torturer always kills twice. First he kills his victim. Then he kills the memory of the killing. From this perspective there is no denying that the syllabus of the Republican School has tended to overshadow the history of slavery and slave trades. The Republican School was seeking to build the national identity on the basis of a national pride. [...]

[...] Instead of showing ambiguities and nuances, the law delivers the broad moralizing judgments that Levi feared. Here, the classical distinction evoked by Ricoeur between neme, which refers to memory as affect and pathos, and anamnesis which refers to memory as a voluntary activity can be plugged in. One could indeed interpret this distinction as evoking a distinction between two faces of the so called “duty of memory”: on the one hand there would be a duty deriving from neme and affecting the individual as a misfortune closed to the confrontation with history. [...]

[...] In the case of the law recognizing the Armenian genocide, one should note that the denial of the Armenian genocide is not part of an anti-Armenian propaganda campaign inside France. The main source of denial is in Turkey and the denial is made by Turkish professors. As a result, it is logical to find in the report of the Parliamentary debates two reasons justifying the passing of the Armenian law. First, this law is described as a foreign policy act intending to show France support for Armenia. Secondly, this law is aimed at giving satisfaction to the significant Armenian Diaspora in France. [...]