What are the places of memory?

It is a collective memory, from the most concrete object to the most abstract idea. As Pierre Nora points out, a place of memory is “a significant material or ideal unit that has been made, by the will of men or work of time, representative symbol of any community “.The identity dimension is therefore essential, but the French historian adds that these places are not “what we remember, but where the memory works, not the tradition itself, but its laboratory.” What matters is more what one makes of the place of memory than the place of memory itself. Concretely Pierre Nora adds: »Places of memory are first and foremost remains. The extreme form where a commemorative consciousness subsists in a history who calls because its ignored.  (…) Museums, archives, cemeteries and collections, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, trials, monuments, shrines, associations, these are the gathered witnesses of another age, illusions of eternity. (…)” He also says “a place of memory in every sense of the word goes from the most material and concrete object, possibly geographically located, to the most abstract and intellectually constructed object”.  It can be a monument, an important person, a museum, an archive, as well as a symbol, a motto, an event or an institution.

Therefore it will be important to ask questions about memory construction at a European level, and to understand that memory also has a history and do it in the current context of overinvestment, at least at the level of discourse, from national memories to the identity folds. So we want to be artisans of the construction of a European consciousness, a necessary step to build a European identity.