Memory of the Holocaust versus the fight for human rights
The Memorial Site of the Camp des Milles is a private foundation and a nonprofit organization recognized as being of public interest. This is not insignificant. Jewish community associations and associations of former resistance fighters or former deportees, spent 30 years campaigning for the establishment of the Memorial Site. These associations have had to face political resistance: it was not easy to promote a history entirely under French authority that eventually led to the deportation of 2,000 Jews. The foundation is now supported by four ministries and several territorial councils, a situation that allows it to assume a position built on exceptional and impartial scientific and pedagogical bases. Let us be clear: the multidisciplinary and multi-genocidal approach, now recognized at the national and international level, would probably not have been possible under the aegis of a single official authority.
For 30 years, there has been a division of labor between the structures that support and implement national and European public policy and the associations that oppose and challenge them, while receiving public subsidies.
The Fondation du Camp des Milles holds a special institutional place among structures on which the State relies for its increasingly broad mission for promoting the values of the Republic and militant associations engaged explicitly in the political battle against extremism and in awareness campaigns about laws and practices that are likely to generate anti-democratic consequences. Above all, the Foundation’s position reflects an ethic between defending the singular memory of the Holocaust and comparing the emergence of genocides. Its importance can be measured by the periodic attacks on its activities from two angles: certain parts of the Jewish community associations that have difficulty understanding how one can link the Holocaust to other forms of genocide and suspect the Memorial Site wants ‘to drown the genocide of Jews’ in a collection of incomparable mass massacres; and others who do not understand why the museography does not cover other crimes against humanity such as slavery, the Gulag, or genocides in the Balkans, Cambodia, Indians in Latin America, or anti-Revolutionary Vendeans in 1793-1796! A good number of Holocaust memorial sites in France and in Europe seek to fill the huge chasm between a culturalist approach that allows for recognition of a minority in the historical and political discourse, at the risk of exacerbating competition of memories, and a universalist approach, at the risk of creating scientific superficiality and a lack of differentiation between various forms of suffering.
A seminar in Amsterdam in 2011, organized by the Anne Frank House and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and sponsored by the European Commission, brought together the major Holocaust memorial sites (Auschwitz Center, Mauthausen Museum, Kazerne Dossin in Belgium, Camp des Milles in France, etc.) on the theme of ‘Holocaust and Human
Rights Education.’ A magnificent final mind mapping summarized the dense and wide-ranging discussions involving some 40 people and revealed the need for patient liaison work between Holocaust and human rights (‘step by step...we must show the bridge’). From this mental map irrigated by the notion of discrimination, the words ‘Jew’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ were unbelievably absent.
The strength of the Camp des Milles’ position lies on its dual scientific and ethical approach to the principle of ‘convergence of memories.' This is based on the hypothesis that the genocide of the Holocaust was certainly unique but exemplary, and followed a process which can itself become universal. There are not only common elements in twentieth century genocides, including causal recurrences and regularities (‘constant antecedents’ to use Raymond Aron’s phrase), but also similar human mechanisms, whether individual or collective. This hypothesis can be validated by a scientific convergence of three genocidal contexts which can be modelized into a recurrent processual layout that is both abstract and observable: using the epistemological approach, as a law, from the human sciences perspective, that is probable and contingent; ‘a resistible process,’ that leaves opportunities for free will, in terms of action; and that must call for resistance, in defense of values.
The Holocaust remains both unique and exemplary; as Georges Bensous-san (2013) has said ‘the more we compare, the more we distinguish.’ Today’s memorial sites are taking the same path. The Holocaust Memorial in France has recently changed its program to reflect this approach. The Auschwitz Museum, in a strong partnership with the Camp des Milles, is going to develop a reflective section, while many other memorial institutions, such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Kigali Museum in Rwanda, the Museum in Erevan in Armenia, the Sarajevo Museum in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in particular, have entered into discussions with the Foundation for collaborative projects on the ‘Learning lessons from a violent past for a peaceful future.’2
The scientific principle of convergence of memories contains an effective pedagogical aspect. Young people, during school visits, and sometimes adults in training, who prefer not to be told about the Holocaust and the suffering of Jews again, discover an approach which talks about and understands their own sufferings, the prejudices they have suffered, and have sometimes been the protagonists of, and can understand just how far such behavior can influence an entire country.
The Ministry of National Education takes the same approach with its publication of La Mission Qenocides (Duclert 2019), a report inspired, if somewhat timidly, by this didactic multi-disciplinary and multi-genocidal model.
