The Construction of Collective Memory: From Franco to Democracy

Abstract

A community's collective memory of a period or a concrete event largely consists of the representations shared by most of those, individuals or groups, who create that story. These representations are organized around a main axis giving them a meaning that allows them to function as the foundation for the community concerned. This founding condition of memory, which has already been highlighted by Maurice Halbwachs in his pioneering book La Mémoire collective, the act of rescuing the past from oblivion and setting it up as a reference point for community identity, transforms remembering into an imperative for survival, whose ethical character and collective influence make the duty to remember ‘a practice indispensable to any affirmation of belonging to a group’.