At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and history’s goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place. A generalized critical history would no doubt preserve some museums, some medallions and monuments, but it would empty them of what, to us, would make them lieux de memoire. In the end a society living wholly under the sign of history could not any more than could a traditional society, conceive such sites for anchoring its memory.
