Former Minister for European Affairs, MEP from 1999 to 2019, Alain Lamassoure chairs the Observatory of History Teaching in Europe. Created in November 2020 as part of the Council of Europe, this nascent body aims to improve the quality of education, in order to reinforce common European values. This project joins the recent declarations of Emmanuel Macron who, during the French presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), wishes to launch “a great work on the history of Europe” to fight against “revisionisms”, and “forging a history and a historiography of our Europe”.
The temptation of historical revisionism for political purposes burst into the French presidential campaign with Eric Zemmour’s remarks on Vichy France or the Dreyfus affair. How do you explain it?
It is a clearly ultranationalist posture, which does not surprise me. This speech which, let us remember, arouses massive rejection in public opinion, has been held for months. It was made possible because Eric Zemmour had in front of him political adversaries who did not bring him contradiction, for lack of historical knowledge; as for the historians, they took time to mobilize because they did not have in front of them one of theirs. Emmanuel Macron, for his part, pleads for an improvement in the teaching of history in all the countries of the European Union, to prevent revisionism facilitated by ignorance.
You defend the idea that the teaching of history is essential to prevent the instrumentalization of the past. How?
When the discussions opened on the accession of the countries of the ex-communist zone to the European Union, it seemed to me that one of the reasons for the re-emergence of the populist and nationalist movements was due to the poor quality of the history teaching. It must be remembered that the idea of teaching history to children everywhere was born at the same time as the idea of a nation. It was then a question of recounting or inventing a national novel through legendary facts to consolidate the feeling of national identity.
The challenge today is to bring these nations, which very often were born of war and for war, to teach the past and the reasons to be proud of it. Leaders are therefore faced with a dilemma: how to consolidate national feeling, while ensuring that the values of peace and reconciliation are transmitted? Europe has been generally at peace for more than seventy years. This can only last if there is a transmission of these values, because peace is not only the absence of war, it is also reconciliation.
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