Between Memory and History

Marie Noelle Bourguet, Lucette Valensi, Nathan Wachtel, Marie Noelle Bourguet, Lucette Valensi, Nathan Wachtel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317293552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

The recent wave of interest in oral history and return to the active subject as a topic in historical practice raises a number of questions about the status and function of scholarly history in our societies. This articles in this volume, originally pubished in 1990, and which originally appeared in History and Anthropology, Volume 2, Part 2, discuss what contributions, meanings and consequences emerge from scholarly history turning to living memory, and what the relationships are between history and memory.

In search of working-class memory:

Some questions and a tentative assessment

MARIANNE DEBOUZY
University de Paris-VIII

This article analyzes the circumstances under which the concept of mémoire ouvriére has emerged in France and its relation to a change in the conception of history as well as the status of the historian. It presents the debate that centered on the meaning and function of the research into workers' memory and the specificity of its object. Its approach is comparative: though focusing on research done in France it refers to Great Britain, Italy and the U.S. Differences in workers' memories according to trades, traditions and national experiences are analyzed. And so is the relationship between workers' memory and labor organizations: it is seen to be deeply political but not one-sided as is often claimed. La Mémoire ouvriére cannot be dissociated from workers' consciousness, class identity and from the purposefulness of memory. Finally, the article stresses the ambiguities and contradictions faced by the attempt to recapture workers' memory in an academic research context.

Introduction

IT HAS BEEN said that "history is the daughter of memory"¹; given that, in recent years, historians have been wondering what the mother was like. Memory has become a central topic in social history and an increasing number of labor historians have become interested in the way workers remember their past rather than simply in the events that are part of it. What is the meaning of this shift of focus and what are its implications?

This article will attempt to give an overview of research into what is called in France "la memoire ouvriere". It will occasionally refer to research on the same topic in Great Britain, Italy and the United States, in the hope that the comparative approach will enable us to understand better when the concept of "memoire ouvriere" appeared and why, what its content is, what debates it started among historians and what is at stake in these debates.

The Emergence of the Concept of “Memoire Ouvriere”

The concept of "mémoire ouvrière" is recent. It emerged in the late 1970's at the convergence of several trends in historical research and as a by-product of oral history.

Oral history, as it developed in the 1960's, was deeply marked by the social movements of the time, notably in the United States, and was closely linked to history' "from the bottom up", the history of "inarticulate" and forgotten people.² It implied a double shift of focus from labor organizations to workers, working-class life and culture, and from objective forces to subjective experience. Simultaneously, the use of oral history revealed a change of attitude among many labor historians. They no longer regarded ordinary people as only an object of history but they sought to express their way of thinking, their vision of history. The idea — some would later say, the illusion —that enabling ordinary people to remember and speak about their past meant that they became their own historians was widespread (in Great Britain and in Italy). So was the idea that through oral history professional historians left their ivory tower, mingled with the people and democratized the practice of their trade.

There was another side to this change: it concerned the very conception of history and the status of the historian. "In the past, the professional historian created and legitimized collective memory through the narrative of an exemplary social genesis and he did this from a viewpoint that was supposed to be above history. Today this privileged historiographical position has ceased to exist... The fragmentation of perspectives no longer allows one and only one explanatory discourse to be held. There is instead a multitude of discourses whose spontaneity and abundance surprises everyone. The system built on a single frame of reference is replaced by a world of interference whose every element has its raison d'être in the diversity of its relations. The memory of the people, whose many testimonies have been published, is one of the main aspects of this emergence".³

Originally oral history aimed at enabling people whose voices had not been heard in history to speak up, at locating material concerning groups that did not have access to writing. Autobiographical material was searched for elements concerning working-class life and culture, for facts that could not be obtained through other methods, for specific information about oppressed or dominated groups. In comparison with the United States, Great Britain and Italy, France was late in using oral history as a means of investigating past working-class life. Paradoxically, it was quick to de ive from it the notion of mémoire ouvriière", for which there is no exact equivalent in English. The idea that "the priority (Fintérêt prioritaire) in oral history is representation, memory"⁴ became widely accepted.

Was this typically French? Not quite, since English and Italian oral historians were coming to the same conclusion. The fact that French historians were the first to shift their focus to workers' memory meant they were conscious of the limits of oral history per se.⁵ Their advance may also have been rooted in the specific situation of the French working class: its traditional sectors have been modernized slowly and unevenly. They still survived in the 1960's but were on the verge of disappearing as a consequences of restructuring and technological changes. When modernization got under way, its effects both fascinated and frightened people. Philippe Joutard stresses the vigorous "come back" of the word "memory" in cultural life and in research. He claims that this interest in memory was unthinkable twenty years ago because attachment to the past was considered an obstacle to the modernization of the country. He sees this return to the past as a product of the questioning of the idea of progress. He also interprets it as a reaction against the rapid change which uniformized life and destroyed old ties, communities and ways of life.⁶

This return to memory may also have found support in a tradition of intellectual inquiry, which had produced important books on time and memory in France, such works as Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres Sociaux de la Memoire (1925), Pierre Janet, Evolution de la Memoire et de la Notion de Temps (1928), Maurice Halbwachs, La Memoire Collective (1950) and Georges Gurvitch, La Multiplicite des Temps Sociaux (1958).

Whatever the truth may be, there has been a proliferation of research in France, in recent years, on "la mémoire ouvrière". This work involves labor historians and sociologists, as well as industrial archaeologists and ecomuseum curators. Research is conducted by academics, based in universities located in areas where traditional industries are implanted. Though these academics sometimes work with community associations (in the Lille area, for instance) and occasionally with militant rank-and-file and union officials (in Longwy and around Nantes-Saint Nazaire), on the whole, research into workers' memory in France is in the hands of academics not connected with militant projects, and in many cases it is a reaction against a militant conception of labor history.⁷

Comparison with Oral History in Great Britain

In France, interviewing workers in order to explore their memory is meant to be a new approach to historical material, an intellectual exercise of a new type. This practice is thus quite different from that of British oral historians (some of whom are worker-historians, trade unionists, local working people).⁸ Whereas the French have interviewed people on an individual basis —although as members of a group whose collective memory they are trying to recover —, British oral historians have often attempted to do their interviewing on a collective basis, bringing the people solicited to participate in the publication of the material collected. A Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers have been set up and numerous Autonomous social history projects started. In Bristol, Hackney, Peckham, Rochdale, Southwark, Tottenham, as well as in other communities, local history projects are run in conjunction with the Workers' Education Association. Hackney is a famous example of this attempt to reactivate collective memory through collective action and to enable people to interpret their own past.⁹ One basic assumption behind this type of project is that "individual experience tells us little about the forces which shape our lives".¹⁰ Thus collective action is an essential condition for the recovery of collective memory. The People's Autobiography group of Hackney, created in 1972, has produced several pamphlets on the neighborhood, stimulating reactions and new research. The Manchester Studies project also shares its findings with the population through pamphlets, notebooks, traveling exhibitions, as does a similar group in Brighton.¹¹

There are no comparable projects in France. Historians and sociologists remain in sole control of the interviewing operations (with the exception of the Association created in Longwy). Their research on workers' memory follows two main directions: it either looks for material traces of "memoire ouvrière" in the landscape, in the urban and industrial environment (factories, machinery, tools, company towns, neighborhoods, suburbs, etc) — what sociologist Michel Verret calls the "historical past", the "dead past".¹² Or it looks for the "living past", traces of memory in autobiographical material, life stories, oral testimonies, work habits, forms of socialization and organization.

Research on Workers’ Memory in France

In the Lille and Roubaix areas, groups of scholars have explored textile workers' memories¹³ and miners' "sociabilite".¹⁴ In Lyon, Yves Lequin and his team have interviewed retired metal workers from Givors and have produced an elaborate analysis of the relationship between "memoire collective" and "memoire individuelle".¹⁵ In the East of France, where steel mills are being shut down, Serge Bonnet and Gerard Noiriel have been doing research on the history of the iron and steel industry and on the immigrant workforce.¹⁶ In that area an Association pour la Preservation et l'Etude du Patrimoine (APEP) has been created: it involves workers who are interested in keeping alive their memories and preserving industrial sites; ft also publishes a periodical, Histoires d'Ouvriers. In the Southwest, Rolande Trempe has been interviewing miners in Carmaux and with a team from the University of Toulouse has reactivated their memories of the big strike of 1948 by showing retired miners a film of the events and filming their reaction to it. In Paris, a team of historians at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales has been carrying out an investigation concerning a number of professional groups that have disappeared ("Archives oraies de la France que nous venons de quitter", 1976 1980). The Institut d'Histoire du Temps Présent, another research center, has organized several conferences on the problems of memory. Madeleine Reberi-oux and a group of students have investigated printers' traditions (ouvriers du livre)¹⁷ while sociologists Daniel and Isabelle Bertaux have studied bakers.¹⁸ Françoise Cribier and Catherine Rhein have done research on women-workers' memory.¹⁹ In Nantes, a group of labor sociologists has been collecting autobiographies of union militants active in the shipyards and naval industries of Nantes and Saint Nazaire.²⁰ In Le Creusot, a center of industrial archeology and an eco-museum have been created.²¹ It was here that a Conference on workers' memory was convened in October 1977. The debate that took place made clear both the conceptual and methodological difficulties that the search for ...