| Notes | '{78-83} The Ultimate Opposition between Collective Memory and History\n \n\nThe collective memory is not the same as formal history, and \"historical memory\" is a rather unfortunate expression because it connects two terms opposed in more than one aspect. Our preceding analysis suggests these conclusions. Undoubtedly, history is a collection of the most notable facts in the memory of man. But past events read about in books and taught and learned in schools are selected, combined, and evaluated in accord with necessities and rules not imposed on the groups that had through time guarded them as a living trust. General history starts only when tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up. So long as a remembrance continues to exist, it is useless to set it down in writing or otherwise fix it in memory. Likewise the need to write the history of a period, a society, or even a person is only aroused when the subject is already too distant in the past to allow for the testimony of those who [79] preserve some remembrance of it.\n....\nOf course, one purpose of history might just be to bridge the gap between past and present, restoring this ruptured continuity. But how can currents of collective thought whose impetus lies in the past be re-created, when we can grasp only the present?\n \n....\n \nHistory wanting to keep very close to factual details must become [80] erudite, and erudition is the affair of only a very small minority. By contrast, if history is restricted to preserving the image of the past still having a place in the contemporary collective memory, then it retains only what remains of interest to present-day society - that is, very little.\n'
'\n{64-65} History is neither the whole nor even all that remains of the past. In addition to written history, there is a living history that perpetuates and renews itself through time and permits the recovery of many old currents that have seemingly disappeared. If this were not so, what right would we have to speak of a \"collective memory\"? What service could possibly be rendered by frameworks that have endured only as so many dessicated and impersonal historical conceptions?\n'
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