Volume 302, Issue 2 -

In 2005 a French historian was accused of denying a crime against humanity; the charge was based on the ‚Lex Taubira‘, a memorial law. This article outlines the intellectual context by examining the colliding discourses: 1. It underscores the essential difference between scientifically operating history (histoire) and commemorative politics (mémoire); 2. It sums up the main features of the ‚reparations discourse‘, centered on the notion of ‚historical justice‘, and sheds light on the semantics of that discourse, which uses slogans devoid of any analytical value but highly suggestive and effective in cultivating a consciousness of victimhood; 3. It analyzes the juridical and methodological dilemmata caused by the notion of ‚historical justice‘, according to the fundamental study of Michael Schefczyk. The article than shows what allowed for using a memorial law against the scholarly undisputed results of an historical research. It focalizes three remaining questions: 1. How does the claim of victimhood and the reference on ‚historical justice‘ justify denials that are candidly admitted to be denials? 2. Why is an overarching conception of ‚historical justice‘ logically inconsistent and self-contradictory? 3. Which are the implications of shaping the past according to a specifical philosophy of history, and why have these implications the effect to abolish history (histoire) as a scientific discipline? In conclusion the article invites historians, firstly to overcome the respect for discourses which pretend moral authority by resorting to an invented or instrumentalized past, secondly to face this topic in order to avoid adopting – without reflection – notions propagated by commemorative politics, thirdly to give answers to this challenge by reconsidering the theoretical basis which has been founding the autonomy of historical research.

In the Early Middle and Central Middle Ages rumours of a sovereign's death are frequently reported in historical sources. Due to this unauthenticated message, uprisings were carried out until the alleged dead suddenly reappeared. By taking a comparative look at this recurrent motif, the author of this paper analyses these rumours and their narrative function. In most cases, authors related to a presumed dead sovereign report on these rumors as the only reason for the upcoming of a revolt. Regularly, vexatious rivals were made the rumour's malicious creator. According to the tenor, a revolt would have been inconceivable without their machination. Case-by-case examination as well as general considerations of communication in the Early Middle and Central Middle Ages reveal that authors frequently invented the sovereign's death ex post in order to explain the inexplicable rebellion against him.

Current debates call for a different analyse of the State-building process. That is to mean an analyse that does not depend on one-sided outlines, typical for the modernization theory, which presents a „normal way“ and sorts departures from it as „particular ways“. The Spanish case could have methodological interest, in order to understand the nations and State-building properly, a process that occurred nowhere in a linear manner. Before the Sattelzeit the Spanish world-monarchy meant an important pillar within the global order, whose European inheritance has been viewed as a vacuum or a „failure in the State-building“ process. This article tries to go beyond the usual opposite ideas – e.g. empires versus national States or traditional political ideas versus modern politics-, in order to explore the national State's rising on the former mainland Spain within the framework of the European general developments and to reevaluate it in a new way.