In 2005, I began a project at the university of Luxembourg, together with other colleagues, on Luxembourgish lieux de mémoire. We tried to bridge the gap between academic history and public memory by publishing a “book with footnotes” and a “book with a lot of images“. End of 2006, the project was finished and I started working on a history of psychiatry but the lieux de mémoire continued to haunt me. The topic remained extremely popular among academics and conferences continued to be organised. I drifted more and more from the Luxembourgish lieux de mémoire to a more general historiographical reflection on lieux de mémoire. My last article on this theme, entitled “The ‘lieux de mémoire’: a place of remembrance for European historians?”, tries to write a histoire au troisième degré1: how the lieux de mémoire became a lieu de mémoire for the European historiography in the last twenty years. If you want to read more, click here.
- Nora P., « Pour une histoire au second degré », Le Débat, 1 novembre 2002, n° 122, no 5, p. 24‑31. [↩]