Pierre Nora in Reasons for the current upsurge in memory in Eurozine says that the explosion of minority memories of this kind has profoundly altered the respective status and the reciprocal nature of history and memory - or, to be more precise, has enhanced the very notion of "collective memory", hitherto little used.

Nora says that n a world in which you had collective history and individual memories, the historian exercised exclusive control, so to speak, over the past. This privilege had even been greatly consolidated over the last hundred years by what is sometimes referred to as "scientific" history.

History... was always founded on memory, as a discipline that aspired to scientific status had traditionally been built up in opposition to memory, thought to be idiosyncratic and misleading, nothing more that private testimony. History was the sphere of the collective; memory that of the individual. History was one; memory, by definition, plural (since by nature individual). The idea that memory can be collective, emancipatory and sacred turns the meaning of the term inside out. Individuals had memories, collectivities had histories. The idea that collectivities have a memory implies a far-reaching transformation of the status of individuals within society and of their relationship to the community at large. Therein lies the secret of that other mysterious shift which has occurred, and on which a little light needs to be thrown: the shift in our understanding of identity, without which it is impossible to understand this upsurge in memory.

This double movement burst forth in the crucial decade of the 1970s with the result that the past has ceased to have a single meaning. The present is overlaid with an awareness of its own history and this necessarily allows for several possible versions of the past. Today the Left defends minority cultures while the Right stands guard over national culture.