As one century, not to mention one millennium, passes into the next, the past obsesses us. We are beset by fears of forgetting it or twisting it out of recognition. Polemics about what to remember and what to forget divide societies all over the world. One of the most fruitful academic perspectives on this anxiety was initiated in the 1980s with the work of the French historian Pierre Nora. Nora formulated a “fundamental opposition” between memory (“the remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral”) and the “problematic and incomplete . . . reconstruction” that is history.1. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 7–8. The essay was first published in 1984. He then launched the encyclopedic project of documenting the “memory sites” (lieux de mémoire) of French consciousness, those sites, both material and symbolic, located “between memory and history,” which had become invested with historical meaning in modern France. His original purpose had been to deconstruct such sites, in modern scholarly fashion to reveal their mythic nature, but, as the reviewer of an English translation of part of the resulting 5,600-page collective work points out, at its completion Nora conceded, that as a consequence of the speed with which even these constructed sites were passing out of popular memory, “commemoration ha[d] overtaken” his project and it had become “a sort of scholarly lieu de mémoire in its own right.”Tony Judt, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998, 54. Les Lieux de mémoire was first published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992.