Le Mémorial de Sighet, entre "devoir de mémoire" et contraintes de l’histoire: Analyse sociologique d’une réussite improbable

Abstract

The Civic Academy Foundation and its Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance emerged in the mid 1990s as one of the most prominent actors of the memorialization and decommunization discourse in Romania after 1989. Considering the political context that was then dominated by the National Salvation Front, a party known for its political reluctance to dealing with the communist past, the Foundation’s success is astonishing. Contrariwise to the studies that focus on the discourses of the actors who made it, the purpose of our article is to analyze this endeavor from a sociological perspective. Through paying attention to the biographical trajectories of the main groups involved in the creation of the Civic Academy, the aim of this study is to bring to light their specific interests when addressing the communist crimes after 1989. Furthermore, this article establishes the connections between the social and professional positions of the intellectuals who launched the Memorial and a specific decommunization discourse that conquered the Romanian political life from 1996 onwards.