Le centenaire de la Grande Guerre au prisme des médias : le cas des quotidiens The Guardian, Le Monde et die Süddeutsche Zeitung
This mémoire aims to show that media space, in times of commemoration, is a privileged place for historians who want to capture the dynamics of a community’s memory. Our case study is the media coverage of the centenary of the First World War through the lens of The Guardian, Le Monde and Die Süeddeutsche Zeitung. We analysed in these newspapers the press coverage from June 2014 to July 2017 in the online sections First world war, Centenaire 14-18 and Erster Weltkrieg. This study uses an operative definition of collective memory that allows us to understand the necessity, in the history of memory field, to study journalism not simply as an archive, but also as a discursive space where various complex representations of the past meet and communicate in order to redefine themselves. This discursive space has two points of junction: Practiced history and “mythistory”. The dynamics of this space have been studied for each publication in this research. First, we identify the major historical configurations of the Great War, the role of historians in the coverage, and try to see to which extent these configurations are expressed in the three newspapers studied. Finally, the commemorative intentions of the newspapers are identified and then tested through a study of news-flow and an analysis of the lexical fields of the respective media coverage.
Centenaire France Centenary Great War First World War journalism remembrance mediatic space collective memory France United Kingdom Germany