Abstract
The history of the present time is a recent field of historiography but today finds itself in a key position in the public conversations of many countries. From this foundation, the historian Henry Rousso retraces in his book The Latest Catastrophe a genealogy of writing about this history from antiquity to today in order to better identify the unique characteristics of this field, which has its origins in the catastrophes of the twentieth century, first among them the Holocaust, deemed “the latest catastrophe.” These reflections on the writing of history and contemporaneity are an opportunity for us to question the presence of the Second World War in today's societies. Instead of a reading of this presence focused on the catastrophe's long effects, we propose the hypothesis of the “becoming of the event” reformulated by the social changes that have intervened since 1960 in Western societies. By postulating the past first as an “absent thing” (Ricoeur) that historical narratives refigure, we insist on the role of a discontinuous and heterogeneous present in the narrative mediations that reconstitute historical facts and the meanings they offer. Starting from this interactive approach between the past and present, a reading is possible about the future of the Second World War that is interwoven with the social changes of the last third of the twentieth century. This period is characterized by the intervention of new actors and new technical, institutional, and judicial structures, broadly cultural, in the memorialization of this past. Its reconstitution by the media into a new reality is another important fact. Moreover, a compassionate link to the past is now retold publicly, a change that is helped by the emergence of victimhood as a new social category that engenders action for the rights to reparations for endured prejudices that rewrote traditional national narratives. Finally, an evolution of memorial politics founded on a preventive understanding of the past, witness of a new historicity, is more significantly inscribed in the consciousness of internal threats to societies (nuclear, environmental) and consequently in the expansion of the politics of risk-prevention.