Whenever newspapers turn up, it is wise to bear in mind that not everything they say is true. The same principle applies to memories. To illustrate this point, consider a relatively recent version of the photographic metaphor that is called ‘flashbulb memory.’ According to Roger Brown and James Kulik, who coined that phrase, some life experiences are so important that the brain takes a sort of indelible flash photo of the scene.fn2 Their best example – very plausible to Americans of my generation – was the moment in 1963 when one first learned that President Kennedy had been shot. In a study undertaken twelve years after the event, almost everyone in the sample still recalled that ghastly moment. At least, that’s how Brown and Kulik described their results. But of course the actual finding was only that everyone still claimed to recall it, which is not at all the same thing. How can we tell whether such claims are justified?

  My suspicions on this point were aroused by a flashbulb memory of my own. I long remembered how I had heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 – the day before my thirteenth birthday. I was listening to a baseball game on the radio, in the living room of the house where we lived that year. The announcer interrupted the game to report the attack, and I ran upstairs to tell my mother. A perfectly good flashbulb memory, one would think. I thought so myself for twenty or thirty years, until one day it occurred to me that no one plays baseball in December!

  After I described this mistake in my 1982 book Memory Observed,fn3 several readers noted that a professional football game between two teams called the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers had in fact been broadcast on that day. So my memory was perhaps only wrong about the sport, an error that would make perfect sense for a baseball fan like me. I listened to baseball broadcasts all through my adolescence and still do so today; for me, baseball is the true American sport. So the real fact of the matter (listening to a football game) had yielded to my beliefs about myself, and the ‘flashbulb memory’ had changed accordingly.fn4

  Many years later, I had an opportunity to study such memories more systematically. The occasion was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on January 26, 1986. Like John Kennedy’s death, the Challenger disaster was a stunning tragedy for which America was quite unprepared. It seemed likely, then, that the moment of first hearing about it might become a ‘flashbulb memory’ for many people. To study those memories effectively, I would need accurate records of what had actually happened. With this in mind I distributed a short questionnaire to a class at Emory University (where I was teaching at the time) on the morning after the explosion. The students were asked to describe how they had first learned about the disaster: where they were, what they were doing, who told them, who else was present, what time it was. Given that the event had occurred less than 24 hours before, it seemed likely that these accounts would be accurate.

  The completed questionnaires were put away until the freshmen of 1986 had become seniors in 1989. I then enlisted the aid of a graduate student, Nicole Harsch, and we contacted 44 original participants who were still on campus. They filled out a questionnaire just like the one they had completed three years earlier, and rated their confidence in each aspect of their memory. Their responses were then scored against their earlier reports on an eight-point scale: zero meant that nothing was remembered correctly, seven that every aspect of the report was right.

  Here’s an example. In 1989, subject RT gave this account of hearing the news:

  When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked. I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents.

  This was a very clear and definite memory, and RT’s confidence ratings hit the top of the scale. Consider, however, what she had written on the morning after the event:

  I was in my Religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that.

  Comparison of these accounts shows that RT’s confident flashbulb memory was wrong on every point. She was not unique in this: eleven of our 44 subjects scored zero, and five of the zeros nevertheless gave very high confidence ratings. These results surprised even me. I had expected to find small errors – football games turned into baseball games, perhaps – but not highly confident memories that were completely wrong.

  To explore this finding further, Harsch interviewed the participants individually a few months later (in the spring of 1990). All of them repeated their 1989 stories – including the fabrications – even when she hinted that other possibilities should be considered. Finally, as a sort of ultimate hint, Harsch showed each subject his or her original 1986 questionnaire. We had expected that many of them would change their stories in response to this irrefutable evidence – that they would say ‘Oh yes, now I remember. That’s how it was.’ To my surprise, no one did this. Many of the low-accuracy, high-confidence subjects were shaken and disturbed, but they did not back down. Instead they said things like ‘This is my handwriting, so it must be right, but no matter – I still remember everything just the way I told you!’ A few even argued that they must have been wrong the first time (on the day after the event) because they were surely right now!fn5

  The Challenger study was an early example of what has become a standard paradigm: asking people to describe their personal experience of some public event on two separate occasions, once just after it happened and again some time later. Further research in this paradigm has clarified a number of issues. One might wonder, for example, whether such memories grow weaker with the passage of time. Brown and Kulik thought not: they described their JFK flashbulbs as permanent, ‘unchanging as the slumbering Rhinegold.’fn6 A finding by Schmolck et al.,fn7 who studied college students’ memories of how they had heard the news of the 1995 O.J. Simpson verdict, shows that this is not the case. Schmolck and his collaborators obtained one set of responses within three days of the event and a second set after a delay that was 15 months for some subjects and 32 months for others. The 15-month group committed few serious errors, but the 32-month group (a delay comparable to our Challenger study) produced a substantial number of them.

  If the passage of time creates vulnerability to error, where do the erroneous details themselves come from? Here there are many possibilities, some obvious. For example, RT’s error – switching from actually hearing about Challenger in class to ‘remembering’ that she first heard about it via TV – is not difficult to explain. She surely watched television coverage later that day (as everyone did), and may have subsequently assumed that the TV images she still remembered were her first contact with the event. A number of the Challenger subjects made this switch (i.e. toward TV as the news source), but some of their other errors are more difficult to interpret. Subject GA, who actually had first heard the news in the cafeteria (it made her so sick that she couldn’t finish her lunch) later recalled that ‘I was in my dorm room when some girl came running down the hall screaming “The space shuttle just blew up!”’ There is no reason to believe that such a screaming-girl episode ever took place; it seems more like a fantasy than a real event. Perhaps GA first imagined herself screaming through the dorm, and only later projected her emotions on to ‘some girl.’

  I do not know if this interpretation is correct, but GA would not be the only person who ever changed what began as a fantasy into what seemed like a memory. In the ‘recovered memory’ craze of the 1980s/1990s, patients in psychotherapy often experienced what seemed to be recovered memories of sexual abuse, sometimes even memories of hideous Satanic practices. At the height of the craze these patients often brought accusations against their own families, causing much disruption and grief. It is now clear that most or all of these ‘memories’ were sheer fabrications, made plausible only by then-popular theories of repression and the unconscious.

  It’s hard to predict what will become a plausible memory error; everything depends on the specifics of a given situation. Suppose, for example, that a widely viewed public event consisted of two similar sub-events in succession, the second of these being televised. One type of error that might occur in later recollections would then be to ‘remember’ seeing both sub-events, when in fact only the second was available for viewing. Exactly this sequence occurred in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 2001. Many people ‘remember’ seeing the first plane hit the first tower and then seeing the second plane hit the second tower, but this is impossible: no videotape of the first impact was shown on TV that day.

  Among those who apparently hold this false belief is President George W. Bush, who has occasionally given public accounts of how he first learned of the 9/11 attacks. On one such occasion (12/4/2001), answering a child’s question, Bush said:

  I was sitting outside the classroom [of a reading program in Florida] waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ And I said ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’ But I was whisked off there – I didn’t have much time to think about it, and Andy Card … walked in and said ‘A second plane has hit the tower, America’s under attack.’fn8

  It is always wise to take memory with a grain of salt, even when the rememberer is President of the United States.

  All the rigid-medium metaphors – film, audiotape, videotape, even computer storage – suggest levels of permanence and accuracy that memory does not really possess. But they also mislead in another way, tempting us to misinterpret the nature of memory even when it happens to be accurate. This latter point is often overlooked, so it may be worth illustrating with one more study. That study, based on a California earthquake, was originally motivated by an obvious weakness of the Brown and Kulik paradigm – namely, that the participants are not personally involved in the event. No matter how upset you may be on hearing the news of a distant assassination or disaster, it still didn’t happen to you. So when an earthquake rocked northern California on October 17, 1989, a group of us decided to study the memories of people who had actually experienced it.fn9 (Living in Atlanta at the time, how did I learn about an earthquake 3,000 miles away? From a baseball broadcast, of course: I was waiting for the World Series game scheduled for that evening in San Francisco!)

  Altogether, my colleagues and I studied three sets of subjects. A control group consisted of students at Emory University in Atlanta, interviewed not long after they had first heard the news of the earthquake. A second group – the most important – consisted of students at the University of California in Berkeley who had experienced it themselves. (The quake was distinctly felt in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, even though it did relatively little damage there.) These subjects, interviewed a couple of days after the event, were asked to describe their experiences: where they were when the earthquake hit, what they were doing at the time, etc. They also rated their emotional reactions. A third group, students in Santa Cruz where the physical impact of the quake was much greater, were initially interviewed only after a couple of weeks had passed. All the subjects were retested a year and a half later in the usual way.

  The results showed a clear effect of personal involvement. The Atlanta controls, 3,000 miles from the quake itself, behaved much like the subjects of earlier ‘flashbulb’ studies. By the time of the retest, they had begun to make serious memory errors. In contrast, both California groups got very high scores; their earthquake recalls were essentially perfect. Given this result, it is all too tempting to fall back on some hard-copy metaphor. Isn’t this just what one would expect of a ‘flashbulb memory’? The earthquake experience was evidently so emotional that it became indelible and permanent.

  Perhaps surprisingly, the data do not support this interpretation

  at all. The high retest scores of the California groups did not result from strong emotion: the Berkeleyites actually reported rather low arousal levels. Most had experienced earthquakes before, and they took this one in their stride. None of them was in actual danger; at first, many did not realise that this had been a ‘big one.’ Things were somewhat more stressful at Santa Cruz, but nowhere was there any correlation between reported arousal and later accuracy. Given this result, my colleagues and I prefer a different interpretation. What did happen, we think, is that people told their earthquake stories over and over again.

  Personal experience of a major earthquake is definitely worth talking about. Friends and relatives call to find out how you survived, acquaintances want to compare your story with their own. Once you realise that you have a story to tell, it’s hard to stop. After a while there were T-shirts for sale that said ‘Thank you for not sharing your earthquake experience.’ My favorite bit of data comes from the three subjects in the Berkeley sample who had not even noticed the quake as it was happening. A year and a half later, all three of them still knew just where they were and what they were doing while not noticing it!

  Here, then, is an alternative to the hard-copy metaphors. Remembering is not like playing back a tape or looking at a picture; it is more like telling a story. The consistency and accuracy of memories is therefore an achievement, not a mechanical production. Stories have lives of their own. Some memory stories do achieve a kind of stability – especially if they have been frequently repeated – but their accuracy cannot be presumed simply because they are vivid and clear. With this in mind, it’s always a good idea to take memory with a grain of salt.

  Sudhir Hazareesingh, ‘Remembering Badly and Forgetting Well: History and Memory in Modern France’

  In January 2003, the National Assembly passed a law making it a criminal offence to dishonour the two principal emblems of the French Republic: the tricolour flag and the ‘Marseillaise’. Spearheaded by the bullish Minister of the Interior [now President], Nicolas Sarkozy, and voted for even by the parliamentarians of the Left, this piece of legislation is a textbook example of French law-making at its most perverse. It was a response not to some general social disorder, but to a recent football match in Paris between France and Algeria, in which the national anthem was booed by young Algeria supporters, many of whom were French nationals. Its critics have pointed out that this law will not only be impossible to enforce, but will also prove fundamentally counterproductive, being if anything far more likely to provoke further incidents of this kind than to deter them. Indeed a petition condemning this legislation’s ‘narrow nationalism’ is already in circulation. Invoking the droit à l’outrage, its signatories are urging the French people to carry out public acts of desecration against the national emblems in question.

  Over the past year, I have been working in France’s national and departmental archives, carrying out research on Napoleon Bonaparte’s image and memory during the nineteenth century; and this story carries striking resonances of that earlier epoch. Above all, the parallel lies in the French state’s self-appointed role as the guardian of ‘national memory’. Since the Revolution of 1789, public institutions have taken the lead in articulating the meaning of French historical and cultural identity, utilising public space to surround citizens with symbols representing their collective identity and political trajectory as a nation: these emblems range from public monuments and statues of ‘great men’ to civic festivities and commemorations of political anniversaries, as well as street names (walking through Paris is a lesson in modern French political history). Symbols, in other words, have been regarded as key instruments in shaping collective consciousness, and establishing a ‘civic link’ between otherwise atomised citizens. But this frantic and somewhat obsessive concern with these emblems also reveals another aspect of French elite sentiment: its abiding sense of vulnerability. In contemporary Britain, a law to protect the Union flag would seem absurd – above all because it would appear inconceivable that such a monument of Britishness could be threatened by the activities of a few mindless vandals. In France, however, the fear is there, because in the collective political imagination the nation is a fragile entity, always tottering on the brink of disintegration; hence the need to nurture its various constituent elements. The state is not alone in performing this role of chien de garde; this defensive nationalism has wider cultural roots. It manifests itself both in the Académie Française’s puritanical control of all foreign imports into the French language, and in the widespread public support for French struggles against the ‘Americanisation’ of their culture.

  Yet, for the political and cultural historian, what is most striking about the state’s attempts to protect its national symbols is how poorly French public authorities seem to understand their own history. Throughout the nineteenth century, successive French regimes – royalist, Bonapartist, republican – sought to legitimise their power by filling public space exclusively with their own symbols, and systematically expurgating those of their opponents. Thus, until the late 1820s, the Bourbon authorities prosecuted all those who mocked or insulted the King or any member of his family; any attempt to desecrate the royalist flag was also severely punished. Despite the harshness of the sentences (up to three years in jail in some cases), the French people found all sorts of ways of expressing their political dissent – lampooning the monarchy and its various emblems by direct insults (the well-proportioned Louis XVIII was popularly known as ‘le mangeur de patates’), smashing or defacing busts of the King (a common tactic was to pour red wine over them), or writing seditious messages on the white flag (a good clean surface which almost invited such inscriptions as ‘Long live the Republic’). At the same time, the archives show that political dissent was creatively expressed through a whole range of ‘counter-symbols’.