Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums

Epitomizing the obsession with the past that is characteristic of postmodern culture, the museum in the broadest sense occupies a central place in current debates about history and memory. In its own original configuration the museum displayed history as, in the words of Eugenio Donato, "an eternally present spectacle." ' In this sense it is an artifact of the age of Pierre Nora's "memory-history," in which history devoted itself to asserting the identity of a nation's memory with its character. Today, in Nora's view, "critical history," his term for the scholarly production of the last half century, seeks to destroy "true" memory by confining it to "sites" or lieux de memoire. Museums, like history, emphasize not continuity but discontinuity;