Maurice Halbwachs

(1877 - 1945)

In 1925 the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs published The Social Frameworks of Memory, which first introduced the idea of collective memory to the world. “History,” he wrote, “resembles a crowded cemetery, where room must constantly be made for new tombstones.” Halbwachs became chair in social psychology at the Collège de France in 1943, a few years after publishing his final work, on the topography of the Holy Land, and joining the French Resistance with his sons. In 1944 he and his youngest son were deported to Buchenwald, where he died the following year. The unfinished manuscript of The Collective Memory was published by his daughter five years later.