ABSTRACT
As a sociologist of popular culture and former professional musician, I’m struck by the recent exponential rise of interest in rock history from various stakeholders. In France, this has seen increased engagement from public authorities, museums and scholars. Naturally, scholarly attention to this history has a notable lineage. Nevertheless, French scholarship specifically addressing rock heritagisation and its challenges is almost nonexistent, with the exception of the important work of Marc Touché (1998; 2007). How might we explain this turn to what Andreas Huyssen (2011)—in the contrasting context of post-Nazi Germany—described as heritagisation obsession? How should we contextualise this phenomenon, which strongly resembles a sudden interest in the history and heritagisation of this music? Are we witnessing the emergence and establishment of a market for memory? Or, following the critical sociology advanced by Bourdieu, who are the stakeholders and what are the interests involved in this subfield of rock heritagisation? Finally, does this relationship to memory and heritage correspond to an idiosyncratically French form? I will analyse these questions by describing a few telling configurations: the recent interest in rock culture and its past in local politics; the history of rock seen from the point of view of a southern French city; and an emblematic exhibition on rock in a provincial town.
