In a lecture titled ‘What is a Nation?’, delivered in the late 19th century, the ideologue of the French Empire Ernest Renan laid out a survey of the bonds that weld a people together. Among the more im¬portant of these, he said, was the bond of shared memory. Equally important, Renan underlined, was shared forgetting. ‘All indi¬viduals’ in a nation, he said, ‘have many things in common and they have also for¬gotten many things’. For instance, every French citizen was obliged to have ‘forgot¬ten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacre that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century’.
July 2015, volume 39, No 7