![]()
Part I
Approaches to history and memory
![]()
1 Historical scholarship and public memory in Britain
A case of oil and water?
John Tosh
What is the connection between history and public memory? At first glance the question appears to be straining at an over-worked distinction. If the role of historians is to interpret the past to the present, they can hardly be indifferent to how their work is received by the public. As for the public, how else can they ‘remember’ the past – especially the past that lies beyond their own life span – except by drawing on the resources of historical knowledge?
Yet public memory and history are more often seen to be separated by a yawning gulf. ‘Public memory’ is the creature of contemporary culture. It draws on a limited range of memorable historical material to support political values or cultural identities in the present. It becomes lodged in the public mind through a combination of elite dispositions and popular recall. It lays claim to a timeless authenticity, independent of evidential controls. The standing of academic history, on the other hand, stems from the rigour of its scholarship and from standards that have little resonance with the lay public. Historians claim to follow the internal logic of their subject, rather than subordinate it to a servicing role. Whatever topical resonance their work has is the by-product of scholarly research rather than its governing rationale. The exponents of public memory tend to turn these virtues upside down: the history that professional historians research and write is disparaged as ‘academic’ in the strict sense that it is pursued in the academy for a specialized audience of professional historians and their students. Thus while public memory is manifestly part of common culture, academic history is in danger of being dismissed as the gratification of an intellectual coterie. In Britain in the 1990s, this critique of academic history was fervently put forward by Raphael Samuel, and equally passionately rebutted by David Lowenthal (Samuel 1994; Lowenthal 1996).
Neither of these polemical positions is constructive. They foreclose on an important debate that should be taking place about the social utility of historical scholarship. At issue is how we interpret the concept of public memory itself. In its current guise as reinforcement for current cultural identities it allows little scope for the work of professional historians. This means that the light that historical scholarship can cast on topical issues of great moment is obscured. Yet logically there is no reason why the findings of such scholarship should not take their place in public memory. There are important instances of public recognition that this is so, for example in relation to the Holocaust, where popular understanding has drawn heavily on the findings of historians, mediated though the mainstream media. Another recent example of particularly immediate relevance to Britain is the study of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition in the early nineteenth century. The social utility of history is lost sight of if it is treated as antithetical to public memory. My purpose in this chapter is to consider the case for enlarging our definition of public memory, and in so doing to elaborate the role of historians as bearers of socially useful knowledge. The argument is developed with prime reference to Britain, where public memory has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years, but readers might bear in mind that France and the USA would make equally revealing studies (see bibliographical guide).
Definitions of public history and public memory
Definition is critical, because in the context of memory studies the usage of ‘public’ is imprecise and inconsistent, despite the cultural significance now routinely accorded to public memory. The term is most commonly applied to the version of the past promoted for public consumption by the public authorities: an officially promoted history, or a form of ‘civic remembrance’ (Burgoyne 2003). Public history is associated with the state, and even more with the nation, since national consciousness is largely founded on a shared view of the nation’s past (whether of victories or of steadfastness in defeat). The ideal is a consensual view of the past, enthusiastically endorsed in society at large. Public memory in this sense is one of the principal cultural supports for a stable polity. Its most visible forms are the commemorative monument and the public ceremony: for example Remembrance Day in Britain, or Bastille Day in France. The tie between public memory and the public places where it is enacted is certainly a close one (Nora 1989; Casey 2004), but public memory is also sustained by a variety of media, typically television, popular works of history and school textbooks.
Confusion is sometimes caused by eliding public memory with other related categories, particularly ‘social memory’ and ‘collective memory’. Both these terms are commonly applied to the entire range of representations of the past that inform popular consciousness. Public memory is included in that broad sweep, but it is important not to lose sight of its distinctive features: its bearing on politics, its manipulation by the state and its more formal articulation (Cubitt 2007).
This kind of high-profile public memory carries the marks of its emergence in nineteenth-century Europe, when representative national assemblies became a defining feature of the modernizing nation state. These institutions conferred legitimacy on the governing class, but potentially they also offered a window of political opportunity to groups at odds with the national project. Hence the priority given by the political authorities to entrenching prescribed versions of the past in their populations. Expanding literacy rates and universal schooling provided the means to do so (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
This might be described as the ‘monolithic’ approach to public memory. It carries the assumption that everybody thinks in the same way about the past, or ought to do so. It has certainly not disappeared from political discourse today. In Britain, educationalists on the political right from time to time espouse an ultra-prescriptive history curriculum, designed to restore a unitary public memory (Phillips 1998). Their efforts have met with little success. In Western societies since the 1960s there has been a decline in respect for the state and its claims to cultural hegemony. Public monuments are more likely to be viewed with indifference, rooted in historical ignorance. Trafalgar Square, with its parade of naval and military heroes in stone and bronze, is a case in point (Schwarz 2005). Yet it may be that what has declined is not public memory as such, but a particular rendition. Trafalgar Square is a monument to Britain’s imperial past which today is soft-pedalled in political discourse. In its place has arisen a more pluralistic public memory, reflecting the aspirations of a range of political interests.
Today public memory is better regarded as the hegemony of one take on the past among many. One measure of political maturity is the range of competing interpretations of the past which find public expression in a given polity. The state has no monopoly of public memory, because collective interpretations of the past are no less essential for other communities that demand a public presence: groups defined by ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, and so on. All of them require a public memory as a precondition for cultural cohesion and social action in the present. This is why it makes sense to identify a second category of public memory, one that expresses an alternative politics (like the labour movement) or an alternative identity (based for example on ethnicity or gender). For this reason John Bodnar distinguishes a ‘vernacular’, as opposed to an ‘official’, form of public memory (Bodnar 1994). The uneasy relationship between ‘official’ and ‘vernacular’ is what endows public memory with its dynamism and its mutability. Official memory has frequently been contested by oppositional groups and ideologies. Thus the militant suffragettes, reviled in their own day as deluded extremists, are now firmly established in the approved national story of development towards a full representative democracy.
The example of Bosnia
An initial example may serve to explain the different ways in which public memory and historical scholarship address the needs of the present. The outbreak of the First World War was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. It is well known that his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was a young Serb motivated by irredentist anger against Austrian rule. But the date of the assassination reveals an additional dimension. 28 June was the most important date in the Serbian national calendar. It commemorated the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, when the Serbs were roundly defeated and their kingdom absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. Defeat can sometimes be a more potent national symbol than victory, and so it was in Serbia. Memory of the battle celebrated the valour of the Serbs in the face of adversity, and it reminded them of the lands that had once been ruled by their king and should now be part of ‘Greater Serbia’. This was public memory in the service of an idea of the nation. The national enemy was no longer the Turks, but by invoking so clearly the memory of Kosovo Polje Princip was stoking the fires of Serb expansionism (Clark 2013).
Some 80 years later, Bosnia was once more a flash-point of conflict. The future of what had recently been Yugoslavia was being fought out in the first overt military conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Bosnia was the victim of attack by the Serbs, and their siege of Sarajevo attracted particular concern. In these circumstances the French president, François Mitterrand, made a surprise visit to the city in 1992. At some personal risk, his journey was widely taken to be a humanitarian mission. But the timing indicated another purpose. Mitterrand arrived in Sarajevo on 28 June. He was making the point that, just as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand had unleashed world war, so the current conflict in Bosnia held out the danger of a wider conflagration (Braunstein 2001). But his message proved in vain. Hardly anyone picked up the significance of the date – certainly not the press. Eric Hobsbawm summed up the episode by concluding ‘the historical memory was no longer alive’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 3). There was no longer a public understanding of how the First World War had started, or of the cautionary significance of that precedent. In pointing out that public memory had failed, Hobsbawm was referring not to a partisan or exclusive interpretation, but to the stock of validated knowledge about the past that may help people to understand their world. The argument of this chapter is that historians have a special competence and a special responsibility in the field of public memory in this second sense.
(Academic) history and memory
As the case of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination demonstrates, public memory is not just a feature of contemporary society. The term may be a recent coinage, barely present before the 1990s, but it pinpoints a phenomenon to be found in many of the past societies that historians study. Discerning whose interests were served by public memory, how and when the emphasis shifted from one set of values to another, tells historians a great deal, not so much about the remembered past, as about the political culture and the collective mentality of the society that was ordering its memory in this way (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Thus in seventeenth-century England celebrations were held every year to mark the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s accession (17 November). This expressed not only gratitude for a Protestant deliverance in the past, but an anxiety about the threat posed by Catholic powers in the present; the Gunpowder Plot (5 November) was commemorated for the same reason (Cressy 1994). In the late nineteenth century great care was taken to mould public memory in Britain according to an imperial agenda, based on an uncritical pride in colonial expansion and an inflation of heroic reputation (Mackenzie 1986; Castle 1996).
When it comes to public memories current today, the approach of historians is somewhat different. Like public memory in earlier periods, the images of the past that ordinary people today imbibe from the media provide evidence of current values and prejudices. But as ‘live’ memory such images also stand in the way of more accurate and more useful historical knowledge. Through its perspectival distortion and errors of fact, most public memory obscures the relation of past and present. For historians it is therefore a cardinal principle that public memory should not be uncritically accepted as ‘history’. As one gate-keeper of the discipline has put it: ‘history is precisely non-memory’ (Bentley 1999: 155). Indeed one of the few practical applications of their discipline on which most historians are agreed is that popular myths of the past should be dissected. Theodore Zeldin (1981) likens it to the eye-surgeon’s task in removing cataracts. Peter Burke says it is the business of historians to bring to light the skeletons in the cupboard of social memory (Burke 1989: 110). Historians approach this task with a certain relish. When in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher sought to dignify her political programme as a return to ‘Victorian values’, historians recognized the danger of public memory being reordered along highly partisan lines. In a range of publications they attacked her misrepresentation of class, wealth creation and poor relief in nineteenth-century Britain.1 By the 1990s the popular mythology surrounding Winston Churchill was considered by historians to be ripe for demolition. His inspirational leadership in 1940 remained more or less intact, but historians like John Charmly portrayed a deeply flawed individual, prone to costly errors of strategic judgement, and wedded to a completely outdated and reactionary vision of British society. These defects had been overlooked for several decades because the Churchill of legend offered some kind of consolation for the painful decline of power which Britain was experiencing at that time (Charmley 1993).
The reason that these instances of public memory can be branded as ‘myth’ lies in their governing rationale and their method. It is not difficult to understand why so many historians have argued that in both respects memory is antithetical to history. Historians, they say, are committed to representing the past in all its complexity, its contradictions and its moral ambiguities. What their studies yield is reflective understanding and critique, not ammunition for a partisan position. Public memory, on the other hand, starts from an agenda grounded in the present, and this leads to a single perspective, imposing a spurious continuity on the past (such as an undifferentiated centuries-long ‘national spirit’). For its evidence public memory draws on an incoherent assemblage of materials that may include historical fiction, journalism and visual remains, while historians submit the evidence of the past to methodical analysis. According to this charge-sheet, public history is not a tissue of fabrication: there is usually a kernel of demonstrable fact. But it is selected according to present-day requirements and detached from its context of time and place.
Historians in general do not claim that their work is free of present concerns (indeed there is a highly sophisticated debate abou...
