Urban memory theory
Introduction
Maurice Halbwachs (Reims, March 11, 1877 - Buchenwald concentration camp, March 16, 1945, where he was deported) was a French psychologist and sociologist of the Durkheimian school.
Path
Halbwachs was the son of a German teacher at the Reims Lyceum. He was Attaché of Philosophy, Doctor of Law and Letters (he initially published a monograph, Leibniz). He was then appointed Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Caen and then, in 1919, Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Strasbourg. In 1935 he obtained a professorship at the Sorbonne.
Halbwachs, who traveled widely as a professional, was named president of the French Institute of Sociology" in 1938. On May 10, 1944 he was elected to the chair of collective psychology at the Collège de France; but on July 23 he was arrested by the Gestapo, a few days after his son Pierre and a few months after the murder of his father-in-law, Victor Basch, and his wife. He was interned in Fresnes") and then deported to Buchenwald, where he died.
He is the author of numerous works on sociology. His work, mostly in the wake of Durkheim, has however been marked by the influence of Bergson, of whom he was a student. He wrote a notable thesis on The working class and living standards"), and in his most famous work, La Mémoire collective, he studies the concept of collective memory, created by him.
The collective memory
The basic definition of space has two different meanings. In the literal sense it is a part of the physical space taken over by man [VSS 1996: 868]. The metaphorical sense of space represents an ideal sphere in which both different social groups and different people meet. This metaphorical sense of space is part of the book La Mémoire collective: if a social group is in some space, it transforms it according to its ideas but at the same time it submits under the material things that resist the group [Halbwachs 2009: 187].
The changes in collective memory and their consequences for the space (for example the family becomes rich or poor) Halbwachs relates to the urban environment and the countryside environment. This theory of relationships between collective memory and the countryside or city environment is followed by other authors and thanks to them we have other well-developed theoretical concepts. A clear example is the term 'non-place' by Marc Augé or the terms 'locus' and 'memorial' by Paul Connerton").