The Work of Forgetting: Commerce, Sexuality, Censorship, and Molière’s Le Festin de Pierre

Memory work designates the slow process by which citizens come together to deal collectively with the most painful episodes from their nation's past, the struggle to break down a wall of denial and to end the collective self-censorship that had kept these events outside representation. Jean Baptiste Moliere's denunciation in his plays of the work of forgetting was so pointed that he was censored, as no other writer before or since had or has been, by the very highest authorities, in essence by the French state itself.