Nations compel citizens to forget slaughters they must first be taught to remember
Evidence
The effect of this tropology is to figure episodes in the colossal religious conflicts of mediaeval and early modern Europe as reassuringly fratricidal wars between – who else? – fellow Frenchmen. Since we can be confident that, left to themselves, the overwhelming majority of Renan’s French contemporaries would never have heard of ‘la Saint-Barthélemy’ or ‘les massacres du Midi,’ we become aware of a systematic historiographical campaign, deployed by the state mainly through the state’s school system, to ‘remind’ every young Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which are now inscribed as ‘family history.’ Having to ‘have already forgotten’ tragedies of which one needs unceasingly to be ‘reminded’ turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 738
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that forgetting — ‘avoir déjà oublié’ in compulsory civic syntax — is manufactured through the very pedagogical campaign that teaches the slaughters is dense and genuinely paradigm-shifting about how national memory works.
- ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s treatment of how states and cultures recast violent founding episodes as patriotic rather than fratricidal.
- SEED: An essay angle: how every national history textbook performs this double move of reminding-and-forgetting, using France’s Saint-Barthélemy and the US Civil War as paired cases.