A new service for national commemorations, “France Mémoire”, which wants to be independent from the State and the political world, was created by the Institut de France, at a time when the memorial celebration is omnipresent and the subject of controversy.
“From 2021, the mission of national commemorations is carried out by the Institut de France.
The new service will be independent from the State (...) and will open up resolutely to historical debate, making room for a plurality of points of view, ”a statement from Quai Conti announced on Saturday.
France Mémoire will offer online content - syntheses, illustrations, radio programs for free download - for around fifty milestone anniversaries (fiftieth and centenarians), and will organize conferences, shows, exhibitions, etc.
A "way out of the crisis"
This new service replaces a mission of the Ministry of Culture which was first called "national celebrations", then, after a first controversy in 2011 around the collaborationist writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, had changed its name to the call it “national commemorations”.
A new controversy, this time around the far-right writer Charles Maurras in 2018, had caused this mission to be abandoned.
“The idea came to recreate a service in a structure independent of successive governments, and whose time would not be that of the elections.
And the Institute has proven to be the most natural solution to relaunch this body, ”explains historian Yves Bruley, vice-president of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), appointed to head this new service.
This solution follows a long research and marks a "way out of the crisis" since 2018, he welcomes.
At the Institute, which, with its five academies, represents knowledge and the arts in various forms, “memorial subjects, even if they depend on politics, can be sheltered from the vagaries of politics”, remark- he does.
But France Mémoire will not replace the State "which has its own memorial policy, to which President Emmanuel Macron attaches great importance".
With France Mémoire, explains Yves Bruley, there will no longer be as before “a list of historical commemorations which gave people the impression that the State wanted to impose an official version of history on them”.
The selected events will be fewer in number: they will be both “commemorations” for certain themes that are not controversial and “birthdays” for the characters or events that require debate.
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On the website, links will make it possible to publicize rich regional events such as the celebrations around La Fontaine in Château-Thierry or around Flaubert in Normandy.