The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism
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On 11 October 2008, the French newspaper Le Monde published a petition entitled 'Libert pour l'histoire', signed by some twenty of France's leading historians, including most notably Pierre Nora, editor of the ambitious, multi-volume Lieux de mmoire project, among numerous other accomplishments. Consisting of a statement of principle not only of the twenty-odd signers, but also of a larger group of historians originally organized in 2005 by Ren Rmond, the 2008 petition in Le Monde protested at 'the intervention of political power in historical research and the teaching of history'. Specifically, it criticized two recent developments in French law. The first of these developments was the 1992 reform of the penal code which introduced two new categories of crimes, 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity', other than those committed by the Nazis and their collaborators as defined in the context of the Nuremberg trials. The second development, made possible by the first, was the passage since 2000 by the French legislature of several new, so-called 'memorial laws'. The Author(s) 2011.
