ABSTRACT
The monumental seven-volume work Les Lieux de memoire is a landmark in contemporary historiography; a comprehensive scholarly study of 'places of memory' or symbols forming the basis of social memory in France today. Nora's contribution to the debate over the politics of memory is twofold. First, Les Lieux de memoire offers a structured analysis of the construction of French memory, a model method for the interpretation of historical symbols. The shift from historical to social consciousness, which displaces political authority from the professional historian to society itself, has coincided with a radical modification of the supports sustaining collective memory. Positivist historians in the nineteenth century had recourse to documentary evidence stored in archives in order to legitimate a specific reconstruction of the facts of the past worthy of social consensus or collective memory.
