Les discours de la mémoire en Europe. La représentation de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le discours des manuels français et polonais. Causalité et agentivité

This paper deals with the educational discourse used in French and Polish history textbooks addressed to adolescents and published in a so-called modern-day model of textbooks. The study falls under the continuity of the French discourse analysis in a contrastive dimension, the object of which is the description of different “discursive cultures” based on their verbal productions. The hypothesis developed in this study is that French and Polish textbooks diff er in their representation of causality and agentivity, which contributes, through discourse infl ections, to the construction of two different memories of the course of events. The two concepts mentioned are, indeed, organizing principles of the educational discourse analysed, since indicating explanatory causes and links between phenomena, anticipating and providing an understanding of consequences are an integral part of the educational activity supported by the popularization discourse we analyse. Our analysis is based on the principles of discourse semantics in a comparative perspective.