Memory gaps

When one reads Maurice Halbwachs’s Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 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.