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French historian Francois Hartog said in a speech Tuesday night that historians can no longer revise history after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Hartog delivered his lecture, titled "Time and History: Memory sites as a symptom," to an audience of 60 people in the Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences.
Hartog, a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, kicked off the first Edouard Morot-Sir Institute of French Cultural Studies.
Using specific examples, Hartog traced the evolution of historiography and how the French have dealt with their collective memory of historical events.
Two examples Hartog mentioned were the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and German occupation of France during World War II.
"During the sixties, historians forgot the future and concentrated on 'today,'" he said during his one hour lecture.