History teaching today in Europe: between preventive education, transitional model and renationalization

Abstract

The teaching of history in schools is historically linked to a triple process that developed from the end of the 18^th century: the construction of modern nations and, in parallel, their imaginaries, the schooling of young people by States, and the place of History as the driving force of a new regime of temporality. This teaching was centered around the nation in a heroic and finalist narrative projecting children into a national community turned towards irreversible Progress.

This article discusses the transformations in history teaching that emerged in Europe at the end of the 20th century. It provides the context for this transformation with a new approach to the past focused on the victims of crimes (genocides, repression, civil war). This approach establishes a new narrative contract for societies: memorializing crimes and victims to strengthen social cohesion rather than forgetting them, and preventing the repetition of these crimes by educating younger generations as tolerant citizens through the transmission of the history of these crimes. It is in this new moral injunction and prevention that the teaching of history introduces crimes such as the genocide of the Jews into its curricula and sees the development of new large-scale pedagogical practices: the visit to the sites of massacres perceived as a performative education in human rights. The text presents different cases of European countries that are experiencing this evolution.

 At the same time, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the integration of these countries into the European Union in the 2000s led to a change in the teaching of history integrated into a transitional model. This model advocated by the EU mobilizes supranational actors (institutions, NGOs). This time, history teaching serves an education for Europe and democracy by taking into account national minorities.

The third part of the article addresses a movement of renationalization of history teaching that has been underway since the 2000s through the presentation of several European cases.

In conclusion, the teaching of history thus always remains at the crossroads of politics and culture, under the prism of narrative issues of societies evolving in a globalized world now marked by an uncertain temporal horizon.

Key words: Europe; transitionel model; crimes; prevention; renationalization