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Journal of European Studies

Memory gaps
Maurice Halbwachs, memory and the Great War*
ANNETTE BECKER
Universit de Paris X-Nanterre

When one reads Maurice Halbwachss Les Cadres sociaux de la

mmoire, it is noticeable that the sociologist-philosopher has almost
completely obliterated from his thoughts the war he has just lived
through. At the very time when an arsenal of unprecedented memories
born of the consequences of the Great War was being put into place, here
was a man theorizing the notion of collective memory while
simultaneously forgetting, in the numerous examples punctuating his
work on the subject, to think about the weight of the recent past including
his own personal past. This article aims to understand these gaps.
Keywords: forgetting, Great War, Halbwachs, memory, suicide

In the final chapter of his novel Le Feu, which first appeared in

serialized form in 1915, Henri Barbusse raises some dramatic questions.

The poilus (French servicemen) depicted in the novel wonder if anyone
will believe them when they recount their war experiences and even
whether they in the first place and then their contemporaries will
remember those experiences:
It wont matter what you say, I dunno, people wont believe you. Not
cause theyre stubborn or want to mess you about but cause they
cant believe it.
Its true what e says . . . When I wuz on leave I realized Id forgot
a lot about my life before the war. And strangely enough I also
forgot what Id been suffering during the war. Seems like were built
to forget . . .

Journal of European Studies 35(1): 102113 Copyright SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com [200503] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244105051153

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Ah, if we could remember! . . .

If we could remember, the war wouldnt be as useless.
Then suddenly a survivor dragged himself to his knees, shook his
mud-covered arms . . . and, like a huge black bat struggling in the mud,
cried out feebly:
There must never be another war after this one.
(Barbusse cited in Dugas, 1917: 34951)

When one reads Maurice Halbwachss Les Cadres sociaux de la

mmoire,1 written and published in the early 1920s, it is noticeable that
the sociologist-philosopher has indeed, as Barbusse feared, almost
completely obliterated from his thoughts the war he has just lived
through. Those same 1920s were, among all the former belligerents, a
time in which collective and individual memories of the conflict were
being built (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2000). At the very time
when an arsenal of unprecedented memories born of the consequences
of the Great War was being put into place, here was a man theorizing
the notion of collective memory while simultaneously forgetting, in
the numerous examples punctuating his work on the subject, to think
about the weight of the recent past including his own personal past.
Halbwachs had experienced the agony of separation; although he
was not himself a combatant, he had seen battlefields a few days after
attacks; he had experienced the shelling of Nancy and seen the bodies
of civilians trapped under the ruins. His brother Georges, a
professional soldier, had been seriously wounded and then taken
prisoner. Halbwachs himself had worked on the home front as a
sociologist on the staff of Albert Thomas, the Socialist Armaments
Minister in Frances wartime coalition government. Halbwachs had
thus experienced in an intense way both major aspects of the war
the individual suffering which it brought and the tragic overall
nature of the conflict but decided to make no reference to them in
his work despite the fact that they seemed to be inextricably linked
with his subject matter, namely memory and death (Becker, 2003).
Feelings of guilt experienced as a non-combatant during the war
probably developed into a fake survivors complex in the years
following the conflict. For ex-combatants themselves it was hard
enough not being among the lost members of the lost generation.
In this connection, Walter Benjamin put forward an interesting
hypothesis in a study entitled Le Conteur (The Story-Teller):
The art of story-telling is in the process of being lost. It is more and
more unusual to come across people who know how to tell a story
One reason for this is obvious: the value put on experience has fallen.

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And it seems to be going on falling indefinitely . . . This trend began

during the World War and has continued ever since. For never have lived
experiences been more radically undermined than the experience of
strategy by the war for position, economic experience by inflation,
corporeal experience by battles of military technology and moral
experience by political maneuvering. A generation that went to war in
horse-drawn tramcars found itself stranded in a landscape where nothing
was recognizable except for the clouds above and, in the center, amidst a
field of forces traversed by destructive charges and explosions, tiny,
fragile human bodies. (Benjamin, 2000: 11516)

If the most common experience, that of combatants, was becoming

incommunicable though the narratives published in the 1920s and
1930s partially contradict Benjamin on this point then what of the
experiences of non-combatants? A feeling of being unbearably
different from most men of their generation may well have muted
them. In Halbwachss case this silence must also be linked to the
perception of his role as an intellectual. After the Great War he
remained interested, as before, in the working class, living standards
and consumption patterns but in his view his most important
publications between 1925 and 1930 were those on memory and
suicide. Although he was a member of the Ligue des droits de
lhomme (Human Rights League) and a Socialist, he now separated
his commitment as an individual citizen from his university work,
destined for publication and for the scrutiny of his peers, omitting
from it any personal reference that was not strictly required by his
argument. The examples which punctuate his publications reflect this
very clearly, for they are taken from as far away as possible from his
present experience, both temporally and spatially.
I will show here how far he was led to that position by the events
of the war. He never stated this consciously but it seems obvious
when one reads his work. After having put his experience as a
sociologist to work as part of the war effort, it was now as if he
decided not to draw on his experience of the war in his work as a
sociologist. Was trauma to blame? Events are not necessarily traumatic
because of their intrinsic horror but because individuals are unable to
handle them and incorporate them in their vision of the world. They
either bury the events in silence a silence that speaks through the
noise of absence or re-live them constantly. Either way, for the
traumatized subject, as for those who seek to understand him or her,
trauma bars the way to understanding. How can a narrative structure
be found historical, sociological or psychological commensurate
with the complexities of such events (Crocq, 1999)?

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Halbwachs tries to erase and censure the trauma of the war, as if

determined to leave no trace that might become memory, choosing
instead to construct a shroud of silence and emptiness. How are we to
explain these memory gaps? Why did Halbwachs omit the war from
this thinking on memory? Beyond psychological repression, is not the
way he conceived sociology at the end of the war also responsible? It
does indeed seem reasonable to ask whether Halbwachs, following in
the footsteps of his mentor Durkheim, did not fall victim to his/their
conception of history and psychology when he omitted any reference
to the war in Les Cadres sociaux.
The disembodying of memory
Whether the choice be to remember or to forget, in both cases a
selection is made and it is that process of selection that we need to
understand. All the signs are that Halbwachs handled the memory of
the war in the same way that most of his contemporaries handled the
violence of the war: by trying to push it away from themselves, from
those they were close to and from their nation as a whole. Soldiers
would sometimes say I killed but more commonly they would say
they killed me, for it was only as victims of violence that they could
comprehend this phenomenon. Violence, sent from the exterior, was
thus supposed to have disappeared with the victory of the forces of
good and by the same token the forces of peace over the bellicose
and destructive forces of evil. Violence comes from others sums up
this line of thinking with perfect succinctness: violence always takes
place somewhere else, other than where one has been oneself, or at
some other time. In researching memory Halbwachs finds it in social
groups but, as a kind of structuralist avant la lettre, those social groups
are perceived as standing outside the flow of time as if disembodied
from any here and now; in this way, memory is elsewhere.
Halbwachs shows that individual memories always crystallize in a
social framework and that public events leave a deep imprint on
those who live through them, especially young people who are in the
process of constructing adult identities. Any form of social thinking
involves memory, and no individual memory is intelligible outside a
social framework; it is therefore necessary to identify everything
social in individual memories (Halbwachs, 1994: 199). Memories are
individual and private but at the same time, in contrast with dreams,
they can be shared and defined collectively. Personal memory
retains elements which are unique to each individual and
which at the same time are linked to shared and collective memories.

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Memory is constructed in time and space, but always by social

groups:
If we remove ourselves from the society in which we live today, we do
so by positioning ourselves among other human beings in another
milieu, for our past is full of representations of those we have known.
In this respect, we can escape from one society only by opposing
another to it. (Halbwachs, 1994: 109)

If individuals recall each other, in the literal, biological sense of the

word, it is the social group to which they belong which determines
what is memorable. Society is an immensely powerful force, above all
through the power of constraint in the full sense that Durkheim
attached to that word.
As has been noted by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, one of the
best interpreters of Halbwachss thought, public memory is the
storage system for the social order (Douglas, 1986: 70): not all
memories of the past are recallable and recalled all the time; the
group we belong to determines what our memory brings to mind in
the present. In a word, memory is impossible outside the
frameworks which men living in society use to fix and locate their
memories (Halbwachs, 1994: 79).
Halbwachss study draws on his knowledge of earlier work such
as that of Bergson, Freud and Samuel Butler.2 But Halbwachs chooses
to reflect on texts written before the war, indeed often well before the
war. In the dialogue in which he engages with them, it is as if he is
determined that the five extraordinary years which have just been
lived through must not be allowed into his thoughts, as if the new
phenomena engendered by the war violence, death and the grief of
mourning are necessarily perceived as too personal to be described
in a scholarly work. Once the war is over it is as if the sociological
and political laboratory which it represented for the scholar has
disappeared and is closed off. His handling of combatants aphasia,
through which he chooses to reflect on the relationship between
memory and language, is remarkable: Halbwachs makes not the
slightest allusion to the context in which these men contracted their
illness, nor to any other psychological condition caused by the war
(Winter, Mosse et al., 1999; Becker, 2000). He says not a single word
on this. It is not difficult to understand why aphasics fascinate him:
Aphasics seldom forget that they are part of society. Aphasics know
full well that those who surround them with speech are men like them
. . . In a number of specific respects, communication is broken between
their minds and collective memory (Halbwachs, 1994: 7980; my

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emphases). Far from feeling excluded from the social group by their
infirmity, aphasics do everything they can to re-find their place
within it. Aphasics are a sociologists dream.
By contrast, amnesiacs are never mentioned. Without public or
private memories, without any identity, they are nothing and are
entitled to nothing. Yet the most tragic figures inherited from the war
are amnesiacs.3 Here Halbwachs comes up against one of his limits. In
forgetting amnesia, is he not also forgetting the process of forgetting
and its memory gaps which in certain circumstances are veritable
chasms? Are not amnesiacs alone in revealing the silence of forgetting
(Weinrich, 1999)? They have neither individual memory nor collective
memory nor historical memory nor sentient memory. Halbwachs has
just lived through the most murderous war ever experienced by
humankind and here he is banishing it from his memory by choosing
banal case studies that exclude any specific reference to the mourning
and trauma weighing upon the societies of the 1920s.
Forgetting forgetting?
While Halbwachs does not completely omit any reference to forgetting,
he never considers it as a phenomenon in itself, but simply as the
opposite of remembering: a group transmission gone wrong or gone
missing. He focuses on forgetting only once, when he refers to death
as the end of all social ties.4
Throughout their lives, individuals are caught up in complex webs
of sufferings, hopes and broken illusions. Halbwachss thought can
help us to conceptualize the subtle phenomena through which
memories of suffering and loss are stored away. In thinking about
those who lived through the Great War, we now see them within
communities of suffering be they on the front lines or on the home
front which became transformed into communities of mourning.
During the conflict, the bonds uniting those communities slackened
or tightened depending on the extent to which experiences were
shared, accepted or denied; the processes of memory and forgetting
then took over.
Halbwachs presents us with a fascinating paradox: how can we
account for the contradiction between the way he enables us to
understand the workings of public and collective memory in general
and his incapacity to analyse the specific cases staring him in the face?
According to Halbwachs, the images of the past held by individuals are
provisional and loosely structured, whereas they take on fuller meaning
when they are reconstructed within the structure of the social group,

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which refashions them to give them meaning in relation to the present

moment. Memories of the war were certainly being restructured in this
way while Halbwachs was engaged in his work. But he never talks
about this, preferring instead to draw examples from primitive
societies or the ancient Greeks. But he does eventually come to the
central question: why are some events remembered and not others?
Here he touches in an interesting way on the pathology of mourning,
which he sees as the refusal to forget people one has known personally
when they are dead, which he contrasts with the workings of society,
which is incapable of remembering for the same amount of time. His
lack of interest in individual psychology is palpable here. Freuds
Mourning and Melancholia would have greatly helped him in that
respect. But he feels no intellectual need for this, so driven is he by the
conviction that the well-oiled mechanism of the social group explains
everything, including the process of forgetting. Yet those who have just
died en masse are not old people, as in the examples he cites from a
conventional demographic perspective, but his contemporaries, people
still young in years, of his own generation. And it is his parents and
theirs who in the 1920s are learning to mourn their children through
endless commemorations and constant references to the dead, running
exactly contrary to his social theory of forgetting. Their refusal to forget
death and the particular form of death experienced by their particular
society is cried aloud with every inauguration of a war memorial, every
pilgrimage to a parish or military cemetery, every living room turned
into a family shrine bedecked with photographs of the dead and
battlefield relics. Yet it is this society, the one in which Halbwachs lives,
that he says nothing about. Aware of the fact that one can forget only
that which one knows and not that which one has never known, he
chooses to forget, and to be sure of forgetting he almost completely
forgets the process of forgetting itself.
From La Mmoire collective to Les Causes du suicide
Halbwachss conclusions caused a certain amount of irritation, even
among his friends. Criticisms arose in two disciplines: in history they
were voiced by Marc Bloch and in psychology by Charles Blondel. Later
in life, therefore, Halbwachs returned to these theories, partly in
response to these criticisms. For Blondel, dates are essential in fixing
memories, and as an example he takes the dates of the Great War, for he
is aware of the enormous consequences of the war for him and for his
contemporaries. He defines the Great War as the pivotal moment in
which individual and collective thinking fuse through what he calls

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contemporary political events (Blondel, 1928: 125). In attempting to

firmly tie the memories of each individual to the collective past, Blondel
points to what seems to him to be the most obvious way of proving his
point, namely the Great War. Like Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, in
contrast with Halbwachs, Blondel had fought during the war. While the
distinction between combatants and non-combatants cannot explain
everything, it does seem to mark a significant intellectual divide. The
war experiences of a professor cum ministerial technocrat could not
decently be accorded the same resonance as those of a soldier.
This did not prevent Marc Bloch from heaping praise upon Les
Cadres sociaux de la mmoire while reproaching its author for certain
errors or gaps. His most pertinent comments concern the difficulties
involved in distinguishing individuals amid the group, and above all
weaknesses in the way the transmission of memory is understood:
For a social group to be able to remember, it is not enough for the
various members who belong to it at a given moment to preserve in
their minds representations of the groups past; the older members
must also transmit those representations to the younger ones. We may
speak of collective memory but it is important not to forget that at
least part of the phenomena embraced within that term are simply acts
of communication between individuals. (Bloch, 1925: 79)

Bloch goes on to cite the case of grandparents in traditional rural

societies. Thus, while following Halbwachs in his conception of the
construction of memory, Bloch calls for more attention to be given to
the means of that construction as well as its transmission and
evolution over time.
Halbwachs was very concerned by the criticisms of his friends. His
replies to them are contained in La Mmoire collective, published after his
death in Buchenwald. The books title was chosen by his sister, Jeanne
Alexandre, who also re-organized the manuscript in her own way.
Halbwachs had not himself decided on Mmoire collective as a title,
though paradoxically this has since become emblematic of his entire
oeuvre.5
Halbwachs could see that he now needed to concentrate on aspects
relating to the individual. How could this be done? By pursuing the
hypothesis that each individual reconstructs his or her past out of the
different elements offered by the various groups to which he or she
belongs or is connected with in the present. Memory is always an
effort: an effort of construction and reconstruction involving the play
of interactions. In a certain way it resembles historical construction:
The muse of history is no doubt Polyhymnia. History may be seen as

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the universal memory of human kind. But there is no universal

memory. Every collective memory is based on a group which is
confined to a particular time and place. (Halbwachs, 1997: 137)

This passage is a direct response to Bloch and probably also a challenge

to historians in general.
Beyond these border skirmishes between disciplines there lies
without doubt the more general difficulty of conceptualizing the
relationship between memory and history, which extends far beyond
the way this issue presented itself between the wars, as Paul Ricoeur
has perceptively noted:
The obstinate recurrence of the aporias of memory at the heart of
historical knowledge cannot do away with the need for a solution to
the problem of the relationship between the knowledge and practice of
history and the experience of living memory, even if such a solution
were to retain some lingering elements of indecision; such elements can
be conquered only on a hard-fought battlefield in which thought is
taken to its limits. (Ricoeur, 2000: 168)6

Thanks to Bloch, Halbwachs can be credited with having intuitively

understood that this aporia is wrapped around the process of
transmission, both of memory and of history. Halbwachs followed in
Blochs footsteps in focusing on the central role of grandparents in
the transmission of
personal traces . . . and marks . . . For it really is true that the collective
frameworks of memory are not a matter of dates, names or formulae,
but of currents of thought and experience wherein we find our past
because they traversed it. (Halbwachs, 1997: 11213)

Here, in a fundamental intuition, the contributions of sociology and

history are at last brought together.
It is in this same line of thought that Halbwachs makes the only
reference to the war found in the whole of his work on memory. It
takes the form of an autobiographical story:
At present, twelve or fifteen years separate me from the great war, and I
suppose that for my children pre-1914 society, of which they had no
experience, recedes in a similar way into a past which seems to lie
beyond their memory. But for me, there is no lack of continuity
between the two periods. It is the same society, no doubt transformed by
new experiences . . . with adaptations to some extent, for circumstances
have changed, but it is the same one. A time will come when I look
around and find only a handful of people who lived and thought with
and like me before the war . . . And my children, with a new perspective,
will be surprised to suddenly discover how distant I am from them.

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(Halbwachs, 1997: 117; my italics; the absence of capitals in great war

was Halbwachss decision.)

Suddenly the war is mentioned here as a dividing line. There was a

before and an after, mainly a before; but there is no war except
through an ellipsis which speaks of the death of others. Four and a
half years are totally swept aside in Halbwachss thoughts on the
passage of time and his own life. Why does he resist in this way? Do
we not see revealed here his inability to speak still less think the
war? He finally speaks of it here while at the same time repressing its
reality; what he offers is his silence, his inability to return to the war.
Can it be said that his out-and-out repression runs parallel in an
inverse way to the discourse of out-and-out pacifists, such as
Halbwachss sister Jeanne, for example, concerning war and the war
on war? Can we then see the construction of a single trauma with two
faces, those of amnesia and hyperamnesia, wherein scholarship or
activism would function like the aphasia of combatants?
Halbwachss research on suicide is just as revealing: here again his
intellectual work functions by denying his own experiences. During the
war he was struck by the number of suicides, but now, with increasing
dogmatism, he shelters behind statistics of varying reliability. He
describes the war as a block: there are no significant variations between
neutrals as compared with civilians or combatants or between victors
and vanquished. Can it really be the case that no new individual or
social attitudes or complexes developed during the war? In fact suicides
went down during the war, then back up, depending on the country, in
1918 or in any case by 1919. There is thus a phenomenon of post-bellum
depression just as there is after an economic crisis, but Halbwachs does
not see it. In his conclusion he prefers instead to return to mythical,
sacrificial wars in which those who died for their country are compared
with those who died in the cause of religious faith, but relegated into
the distant times of ethnology or of ancient history. The sacrifices,
martyrdom and mourning of the soldiers of 1914 and their families are
not part of his argument.
Halbwachss memory gaps are as large in relation to suicide as
they are in relation to memory. His words are as silent as his forgetting.
Or might it be better to speak of blind spots, as in the fine novel of
that name by Alain Fleischer (2003)? This very contemporary novel
looks back on the Second World War and the Shoah. The fact that
Halbwachs died in Buchenwald gives intellectual poignancy to his
memory gaps in relation to World War I. And the public and historiographic polemics of the last fifteen years show that the Great War is

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now a past that will not pass in France. In this domain, as in many
others, Halbwachs was a pioneer.

Notes
* Translated by Alec G. Hargreaves.
1. Literally, The Social Framework of Memory; translated by Lewis A. Coser as
On Collective Memory: see Halbwachs (1992). A second book on this question, a
series of chapters written in the 1930s and 1940s published posthumously
under the original title Mmoire et socit (Halbwachs, 1949) was translated
as The Collective Memory: see Halbwachs (1980). The two English-language
versions are slightly different from the definitive French versions published in
the 1990s by Grard Namer: see Halbwachs (1994, 1997).
2. See Butler (1910). A collection of texts dating from 1872 to 1887, this is
probably the edition used by Halbwachs.
3. This is clear from numerous literary works depicting such figures. See, for
example, Giraudouxs Siegfried et le Limousin (1922), adapted for the theatre as
Siegfried (1928); Sciascias Il teatro della memoria (1984) and Pirandellos Come tu mi
vuoi (1930), which recount the case of the contested identity of supposed
amnesiac Giulo Canella/Mario Bruneri in 1926; and Anouilhs Le Voyageur
sans bagages (1936).
4. The dead slip away into the past not because of the lengthening of the
material time separating them from us but because nothing remains of the
group in which they lived (Halbwachs, 1994: 167).
5. To the extent that he had a title in mind, it was probably one he indicated when
writing to his wife: Mmoire individuelle et mmoire collective (Individual
memory and collective memory). From a series of texts written and constantly
reworked by her brother between 1925 and 1944, Jeanne wanted to make a kind
of testament, each clause of which she chose without drawing in a very scholarly
manner on Maurices manuscripts and notebooks. The authors changes of mind
and revisions are therefore not to be seen in the 1949 edition. Similarly, the
subtitles and the arrangement of the paragraphs were the work of Jeanne. But let
there be no misunderstanding: she was trying to show her devotion to her
brother and was never really aware that she was ill-serving the man who had
just died in Buchenwald; on the contrary, in carrying out all her work her aim
was to ensure that her brothers intellectual influence would live on. Thanks to
the detailed reconstitution undertaken by Grard Namer, we now know the
genesis of Halbwachss work, beginning with his response to Blondel, followed
by the response to Bloch. Above all, it is clear that the dates of composition of
different elements of the book which was not in fact a book in 1944 are of
fundamental importance and for this reason I have confined my comments to
the replies he formulated in the 1920s and 1930s. Later he further refined his
thinking in La Topographie lgendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte, tude de mmoire
collective (1942); excerpts are reproduced in Halbwachs (1980).
6. The metaphor of the battlefield is interesting here.

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Becker, Annette (2003) Maurice Halbwachs: Un intellectuel en guerres mondiales
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Blondel, Charles (1928) Introduction la psychologie collective. Paris: Armand Colin.
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Annette Becker is Professor of Modern History at the Universit de

Paris X-Nanterre. Address for correspondence: Dpartement dhistoire,
Bat. D, 200 avenue de la Rpublique, 92001 Nanterre cedex, France
[email: abecker@nordnet.fr]

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