ABSTRACT
The appropriation and the resignification of these pasts have to do with the adjustment of different perceptions of time (Biblical, cyclical, mythical) to a modern perception of a linear, continuous, and secular time.6 Consequently, the homogenization of the way people perceive time constitutes a necessary precondition for the construction of national historical time. The narration of this national time implies the incorporation of temporal units into a coherent scheme. This process is particularly depicted in historiography and the philosophy of history. This incorporation of historical time does not take place uniquely or immediately, but is carried out in stages and with hesitations and contradictions. What is at stake is not simply the appropriation of a part of historical experience, but the construction, in the present, of a discourse that reproduces the past and transforms it into national time. This is a process of the production of time. According to Paul Ricoeur, history in its narrative form replaces the history which has been collectively experienced.7 In this way, the elementary myth of the nation is constructed. The rearrangement of the collective sense of time is a presupposition of the construction of the nation, and, at the same time, the nation constructs a collective and meaningful sense of time.
