Events, Proper Names and the Rise of Memory

Abstract

The ‘return of the event’ and the ‘rise of memory’ are important aspects of the development of history writing during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For several decades, from about the 1920s to the 1970s, events were exorcized from front-rank historiography. Francois Dosse in his contribution to this volume (Chapter 1) reminds us of the struggle that the leaders of the Annales School conducted against histoire evenementielle or else histoire historisante, ironic names they gave to traditional political history. The return of the event, according to Dosse, was first heralded by Pierre Nora in 1972 (see also Bensa and Fassin 2002; Dosse 2010). Nora was also one of the first scholars to initiate, a decade later, a ‘memory boom’ in historiography. His way of dealing with events foreshadowed his approach to historical memory. No doubt, by calling attention to events, he sought to challenge Fernand Braudel’s theory of the longue duree and promote contemporary history or histoire du temps present, the name under which it has become known in France. The struggle of the contemporaneistes for academic recognition was hardly possible without a rehabilitation of politics. But there was much more than that in Nora’s interest in events.