The Past: Instructions for Use
Memory policy as political tool
Description
In 2005, the French parliament passed a law asking schools to teach the "positive role" of the colonial presence overseas, especially in North Africa. The reaction was immediate and furious. Historians signed petitions, an association was founded to defend the freedom of research, and within a year the offending clause was struck out. But the episode left something behind: the sense that the state had walked, uninvited, into a room that used to belong to scholars — the room where a society decides what its past means. France had already made denying the Armenian genocide punishable; it would keep legislating memory for years. And it was far from alone.
Enzo Traverso, an Italian historian who has spent his career working on the wreckage of the twentieth century, watched this and asked an uncomfortable question. Why, at the very moment when the great political projects seemed exhausted, did the past become so loud? Commemorations multiplied, museums of memory opened everywhere, apologies for old crimes became routine diplomacy, and "duty to remember" turned into a phrase nobody could argue with. His book, The Past: Instructions for Use, treats this appetite not as piety but as a symptom — of what a society does with time once it stops believing in the future.
The subtitle he chose, borrowing from Georges Perec, is a little ironic. There is no neat manual for handling the past. But there are ways of using it, and those uses are political whether we admit it or not. A commemoration is a choice. A memory law is an act of power. Even the most sincere act of remembrance carries an agenda it rarely names.
The question we’re asking : What happens to a society's relationship with its own history once remembering becomes a public duty and a legal obligation?What we’ll see : How the twentieth century's ruins turned memory into a battleground, and where that leaves the people whose job is to make sense of it.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The century that would not close
Traverso starts from a paradox. The twentieth century was, by most measures, an era of enormous political imagination — revolutions, utopias, competing blueprints for how human life might be organized. It ended in a strange quiet. By the 1990s, with the Soviet collapse and the sense of an ideological endpoint in the air, the horizon of the future seemed to shut. And precisely then, the past began to swell. Countries that had spent decades looking forward turned around and started counting their dead.
He borrows a distinction from the French historian François Hartog to describe this. For most of the modern era, the West lived under what Hartog called a regime of historicity oriented toward the future: the present was a step toward something better, and history was the story of that march. What replaced it, roughly from the 1980s, was a regime obsessed with the present and the past — a culture that no longer trusted tomorrow and so kept returning to yesterday for meaning, for warning, for identity.
02Chapter 2 — When memory replaced history
The heart of the book is a distinction that sounds academic but cuts deep: memory and history are not the same thing, and confusing them has consequences. Traverso leans here on the French historian Pierre Nora, who argued that memory is lived, plural, emotional, always attached to a group that remembers — while history is the critical, reconstructive work of scholars who stand at a distance and can be wrong about the very things a community feels most certain of. Memory says "we were there." History asks "what actually happened, and how do we know?"
For most of the modern period, history held the upper hand. The professional historian was a figure of authority, the one who separated legend from evidence. What Traverso describes is a reversal. In the memory age, the witness becomes the ultimate voice — the survivor whose testimony cannot be questioned without seeming to insult the suffering it recounts. This gives memory enormous moral force. It also makes it hard to argue with, and a past that cannot be argued with is a past that has stopped being history and become something closer to sacred narrative.
03Chapter 3 — The victim as the new subject of the past
If the future was once populated by heroes — the worker, the revolutionary, the citizen marching toward emancipation — the past is now populated by victims. Traverso tracks this shift carefully, because it changes the whole emotional and political shape of how we relate to history. The exemplary figure of the twentieth century used to be the fighter who acted; increasingly it is the person to whom something was done. Suffering, not agency, becomes the badge of moral standing.
He is careful not to sneer at this. The recognition of victims was a genuine advance. Whole categories of the murdered and the humiliated — Jews, colonized peoples, the enslaved, the deported — spent decades in official silence, their pain unacknowledged and their names unspoken. The turn toward the victim gave that silence a voice, and that is not nothing. Traverso's worry is what happens next, when victimhood becomes a currency and every group learns that recognition flows to those who can present the most compelling ledger of harm.
04Chapter 4 — Between the judge and the mourner
So where does this leave the historian — the person whose whole vocation is the past, now that the past has become everyone's contested property? This is the question the book circles back to, and Traverso refuses an easy answer. The historian, he argues, is caught in a genuine tension that cannot be dissolved, only inhabited. On one side stands the duty of memory, the pull toward remembrance and solidarity with the victims. On the other stands the discipline's oldest requirement: critical distance, the willingness to complicate, contextualize, and sometimes wound the comforting stories a community tells itself.
Traverso rejects two tempting escapes. One is the posture of pure objectivity — the historian as neutral technician who merely establishes facts and takes no side. He does not believe in it; every choice of subject, every framing, is already a commitment. The other escape is total surrender to memory, the historian as caretaker of collective grief who ratifies whatever the survivors feel. That way lies the abandonment of the craft, because a memory nobody may question is no longer knowable, only venerated.
05Conclusion
The French colonial-history law that opened this story was, in the end, repealed — a small victory for the historians who had objected that a legislature has no business ruling on the past. But the appetite it expressed did not go away. Governments across the world keep reaching for memory, because a shared story about who suffered and who is owed is one of the few things that still binds a political community once the future has gone quiet. Traverso does not pretend this can be reversed. We live in the age of memory, and we will not simply argue our way out of it.
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