Confirming since 1996 the idea of a renewed perspective upon the relationship between heritage and society, or heritage and identity, as well as drawing conclusions from the campaign on the "common heritage" in 2001, the Ministers brought together by the Council of Europe constantly insisted on the social functions of the heritage of the past. In addition, for the past few years, the persons in charge of heritage sites have regularly insisted on the cult of the monument and "monumental abuse", even patrimonial "hysteria" or "religion", thus underlining the domination of exchange and commercial value over cultural value and the appearance of new forms of identity appropriation.

discourses

The Heritage is mediatised. The Heritage is a medium. And for this reason it is the subject of multiple discourses, but also more recently of commercial recovery by the societies that have the means of digitalisation and information networks. Discourses appear in guides, tourist booklets, internet sites and multimedia products. The Institute, working within the framework of the Campaign "Europe, a Common Heritage", became aware that the framework of the cultural routes made it possible to infuse into some of the topics a reflection on these discourses. In other words, it called and prepared meetings, based on requests from States or operators, meant to ask a practical question: how does one interpret cultural heritage in European terms? And this by taking into account two considerations: the multicultural dimension of heritage and the plural dimension of its visiting (if it is a monument) or of its practice (if it is a tradition, know-how, or a festival).

quotations

We retained, by way of introduction, some of the remarks of the speakers at some of the meetings for which we have been responsible these past years.

"Was the Berlin Wall before its demolition a heritage or was it not? Demolished, it is now without any doubt a founding heritage." (Zoe Petre)

"When Raphaël, Rembrandt, Rubens or Gainsborough painted, when Chopin, Mussorgski or Rameau wrote their music, they were contemporary artists. We certainly have a duty to preserve what past generations left us. We have a duty to transmit this heritage to future generations. But we still have a more pressing duty, namely to enrich it with the message of our time." (Michel Krieger)

"It is thus only at the time when the present is recognised as different from the past that history starts and that one can ask the question that worries us here: how to safeguard, or restore as such, a past other than our present." (Sorin Alexandrescu).

"A whole dimension of the approach to heritage is constituted by sensible experience. The play of light among the columns of the large mosque in Cordoba perhaps says more to the visitor about the religious experience of Islam and Christianity in these places than printed pages can do." (Catherine Bertho-Lavenir)

By thus taking into account distinct situations - the fate of the heritage of totalitarianism, the forgotten place of work and "workers" in its constitution, the relationship with the past that goes through mourning and reassignment of usage, or tourist experience - these quotations underline the urgency of a practical counterpart applied to the cultural routes, to the ensemble of reflections carried out within the Council of Europe, UNESCO, as well as within ICOMOS, ICCROM or ICOM.