ABSTRACT
Memory has been treated variously as an individual psychological faculty,3 a private act,4 a public event,5 a form of collective knowledge,6
and a social discourse.7 In the p articular historical moment of the Revolutionary aftermath, memory was given certain social, cultural, and political uses in order to address an important and prolonged crisis in Briain. These uses of memory were, however, part of a longer history of memory as a social and cultural institution in what is now called modernization.8 Modernization in this sense may be described as the displacement of historic, ‘traditional’, apparently unchanging customary culture, social and economic relations, and political practices by practices of a self-conscious modernity, including apparently unlimited rational critique, social and cultural relativity, enlightened self-interest, the market, commercialized consumption, capitalism, civil society, meritocracy, philosophical sexism and racism, and the modern state, internalized in the individual subject.
