ABSTRACT
On 26 September 1996, a memorial was inaugurated in Westminster Abbey to honour Thomas Clarkson, one of the best known of the British anti-slavery abolitionists. The eulogy was delivered by no less a person than the Bishop of Ely. The inauguration of the Clarkson memorial pointed to a disjunction between academic history and public memory that was attracting scholarly attention. Some of the historians who contributed to Nora's volumes directed attention to buildings that functioned as symbolic sites of public memory. One of these was the Pantheon, to which, in Mona Ozouf's words, on a memorable occasion President Mitterand had summoned the French people to participate in 'a gathering of the national community around its great men'. The Pantheon, however, exemplified another of the conclusions to which Nora's volumes pointed: public memory is not monolithic but pluralist and 'conflictual'.
