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without oblivion, and no remembering without forgetting.21 In this book, memory is conceived as a property allowing individuals and groups to bring past experiences and events to the present. As Paul Ricoeur pointed out, as memory is mediated by narrative, it is always selective because “if one cannot recall everything, neither can one recount everything.”22 Always anachronistic, memory is built as a relation to the past that is updated in the present.
The omnipresence of memory, a subject extensively discussed by Pierre Nora in his Les lieux de mémoire, is visible in our contemporary world in the growing interest in all things related to the past. Nora clearly distinguished memory from history—he insisted that memory is alive, always carried out by living groups, and thus in permanent evolution whereas history is a representation of the past, always incomplete and complex. Whereas the vocation of history is universality, memory is multiple, plural, collective, and individual.23 Memory is political and determined by social, cultural, and religious frames.24
The growing interest about the past emerged after the end of World War II and is marked by a new relationship to time, deeply dominated by the present. The emergence of this new relationship coincides with the development of audiovisual media such as cable television and live broadcasts. It is no longer enough for the spectator to read a narrative, listen to recited testimony, or see a painting or picture of a battlefield. Feeling the sensation of living the real experiences and sharing the emotions of those who witnessed an event is now imperative. Since the 1950s, with the arrival of television, and during the 1990s, with the emergence of the Internet, the spectator is no longer distant and passive. Suddenly, one can virtually be in different geographic places at the same time and become a virtual eyewitness. Although this growing simultaneity makes any event old just a few minutes after its broadcast on television, there is an increasing need to preserve the past in more durable forms—through the conservation of historical sites and buildings, the promotion of heritage, the creation of museums, and the construction of commemorative monuments and memorials.
Hartog argued that history is marked by periods when the relation to time is questioned. Because each society has its own forms of articulating