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Lieux de mémoire, monuments et monumentalisme : la portée symbolique de l'architecture et de l'archive dans l'Austerlitz de W.G.Sebald

This article adopts a culturally comparative approach, contrasting the opposing historiographies of Pierre Nora and W.G. Sebald through their representation of the relationship between monuments, memory and the workings of history. It analyses Nora’s celebrated 1980s project “Les Lieux de Mémoire” in which monuments have the status of collectively relevant, post-revolutionary icons of nationhood. This approach is contrasted with Sebald’s profoundly sceptical attitude to the vainglory of monumentalism, portrayed in Austerlitz as the harbingers of oppression and death. For Sebald, monuments are the inevitable consequence of colonialism leading to the mass-destruction of the second World War.