78

On January 18, 2001, the French Parliament enacted a law in which?France publicly recognizes the 1915 Armenian genocide?. It took more than two and a half years to get this parliamentary bill, erected in the name of the “duty of memory”, through. During the intense debates that this bill provoked, basic questions on morality, the meaning and content of the law, the role of Parliament in diplomacy and concerning history were raised. While this case showed that the reestablishment of a right of resolution could bring an answer to Parliament’s limits in terms of expression, it didn’t, generally speaking, do away with the doubts either of most of the constitutionalists or of the historians concerning the possibilities of the law to qualify history. Whereas this particular legislative production is developing, the question also goes back to the risk that a progressive establishment of a “legal history” poses.