L’histoire publique comme histoire du temps présent

Abstract

The conception of historical time has been deeply debated and rethought since the end of the 20th century especially because of the fall of Soviet communism and what Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history with the triumph of liberal democracies and capitalism and the advent of a perpetual present and a liberal economic order. More recently, other authors have rethought the epistemological consequences of presentism on the study of the past and critically discussed the contemporary culture historicity regimes. In this paper, we do not claim to summarize this multidisciplinary debate on presentism revived in France by François Hartog around twenty years ago but only to comment on how Public History positions itself about the different temporalities of the past and to collective memories.