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“History Is the Opposite of Forgetting”: The Limits of Memory and the Lessons of History in Interwar France*

One can almost hear the murmurs of surprise that filled the hall as Gaston Clemendot addressed his colleagues in the autumn of 1923, five years after the end of the First World War.1 French primary schoolteachers faced many pressing issues as they gathered for the Third Annual Congress of the national teachers’ union, the Syndicat national des instituteurs (SNI). Union rights, wage disputes, and insufficient pensions dominated the union program that year, but when Clemendot stepped to the podium he asked union members to turn their attention to what he felt was a far more urgent matter. “Comrades,” he thundered, “I come before you to demand the total suppression of the teaching of history in primary schools.”2 Though his argument was multifaceted, one assertion in particular captured his fellow teachers’ attention: Clemendot claimed that the lessons of history, as taught in schools across France, inspired hatred of foreigners, glorified the experience of battle, and laid the moral groundwork for future wars. For peace to flourish, he insisted, the discipline of history would first have to be abolished in the primary schools, where the vast majority of French citizens received their only education.3