When Silence Creates Memory: Performed Communities in Nineteenth-century Spanish and French Commemorations

Abstract

Recently, the Third Phase in memory studies has challenged traditional concepts of memory that conceived it to be a concrete image or narrative set within a fixed moment and, consequently, neglect its changeable dimension and malleability. Focusing on a constructed narrative of the past, scholars have renewed the theoretical and methodological basis of this analytical field. This study adopts this new conceptualisation to analyse the intertwining of memory and silence in official commemorations during the regencies of María Cristina (1833–40) and Espartero (1840–43) in Spain and the July Monarchy (1830–48) in France. Its main contribution is to show that a deliberate omission of a narrative cannot only be linked to oblivion and can even become a space for creating memory.