La difficile mémoire des lieux d'internement en France

Résumé 0

The author demonstrates how memory of internment sites in France (over 200 camps on French soil between 1938-1946) was established in spite of numerous obstacles. The unglorious past, deeply rooted in the history of the French Republic, burst open (how is it possible to pay tribute in one and the same speech to anti-Facist Germans, to Spanish Republicans and to Jews?) and is frequently concealed by the tragedy of the deportation – which for Jews is synonymous to an almost instantaneous putting to death. Beginning in the 1980s, Jewish remembrance is mobilized in order to avoid sliding towards collective amnesia. In its wake, the Jewish remembrance contributes to the unvailing of the horror of internment. It lays the foundations for a true political approach concerning Remembrance Sites, fated to become Memorial sites, as explains Lalieu, in charge of memorial sites at the Holocaust Memorial in Paris.