Abstract
In the first part of this paper, I give an account of a recent controversy that arose in France and in which historians played a significant role. This controversy involves a number of actors: the French government, which passed the so-called "memorial laws"; the interest groups that lobbied the Parliament to pass them; the historians who became polarized and reacted in various ways and with different justifications to these laws; the academic community as a whole, which supported the historians or else rejected their reasoning; and finally the media, which publicized the controversy. In a second part, I give an analysis of the controversy. My first idea was to try to write the immediate history of the controversy that would treat it as symptomatic and relate the main ideas and sources of disagreements that fed the debates to broader trends in the French society and in the French legal and political system. But, I changed my mind. It would indeed be too artificial for me to refrain from judging the different arguments and developing my own position as I am French, connected with the field of social science and dealing with a contemporary issue. Of course, my developments bear the trace of my original intent. I am therefore especially interested by the symptomatic character of the passing of the memorial laws and the debates that arouse last year. Still, these analyses are integrated in the content of a reasoning that will ultimately lead me to reject all the positions that I read. I will first try to draw some distinctions between the "package" called "the memorial laws" and to reject some of the distinctions that seem irrelevant to me. Then, the basis of my analyses will be a cost/benefit assessment of the memorial laws, operated at both a theoretical and a practical level, that will lead me after two detours to the conclusion that, maybe, the last three memorial laws should be regarded as too costly compared to the social benefits that they bring. Surprisingly, though, this potential cost will appear to be more significant for the memorial groups who called for these laws than for the historians who demanded their abrogation.
