Nations are born and grow with a kind of forgetting. Nations are born and endure with a store of memories.

Ernest Rnan, in a public lecture he gave in Paris in 1882, concluded that "forgetting...is an essential factor in the creation of a nation." People of different origins, who perhaps even killed each other in the past, shed those memories; the strength of the desire to come together as one drives them to forget.

"Every French citizen," Rnan said, "i