36

This essay is about the memory of the Great War in Great Britain since the 1960’s, and studies some vectors of transmission of a history in which family history and national history are linked, through television, this major tool of communication. The article also focuses on some other cultural, economic, and political determinants. The author suggests that one of the media of this “memory boom” could be the externalisation, or the expression in the public sphere, of the internalized language of psycho-analysis. Another medium is the industry of memory. It allowed ordinary people to contest the narratives which were presented to them as the nation’s “heritage”. Here the emergence of oral history as the people’s repository of narratives about the past, was of significance as well. In particular, oral historians made it possible for women’s voices to be heard alongside the masculine narratives of war which have been so central to the memory boom.