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Shared Memories, Private Recollections
Habent sua fata libelli: The destiny of books (and of human beings) always makes sense, retrospectively. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) had a real impact only after its author, Maurice Halbwachs, had died at Auschwitz in 1944.(1) As has been frequently noted, since the 1980s a reassessment of national identities both within and outside Europe, on the one hand, and the disappearance of the generation of survivors from the Shoah, on the other, have brought the social dimension of memory to the attention not only of scholars but of a broader audience as well. Halbwachs's book directly inspired Pierre Nora's successful series on Les Lieux de mémoire, as well as many enterprises focusing on social memory in a broad sense.(2) The complex relationship between history and memory has also been the unifying theme of Saul Friedländer's multifaceted and highly original work.
Today, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire strikes us less for being Francocentric than for taking its Francocentricity for granted. This is not immediately evident from its table of contents. The book's approach appears highly theoretical; there is only one allusion to a specific historical phenomenon, i.e. Christianity; France is never mentioned. But if, for instance, we shift from one of the headings in the table -- "In which part of the social body class traditions are transmitted" -- to the corresponding section in the book, we find the following comment:
And so it is the case that, while a society may be broken down into a number of groups of people serving a variety of functions, we can also find in it a narrower society whose role, it may be said, is to preserve and maintain the living force of tradition. Whether that society is directed toward the past or toward what is a continuation of the past in the present, it participates in present-day functions only to the extent that it is important to adapt these functions to traditions and to ensure the continuity of social life through their transformations.(3)
This "narrower society" within the society at large is, of course, the nobility, and Halbwachs's passage introduces a discussion on the relationship between the French noblesse d'epée and noblesse de robe, with references to the Parliament...