"History is always the history of the masters, and this is not just because, as is well known, they are the ones who write it, but also because this world, their world, forces us to look at it through its own eyes. The organizers of obedience have always used the past for police and propaganda purposes, but this did not keep them from knowing it. On the contrary, precisely this knowledge has allowed power to unite events in the coherence of control, sacrifice and repression. For the past to carry out its function as an argument for the current society, it is necessary, as a minimum, to know what to remove, which is to say, the most significant reasons and episodes of the struggles of the exploited -- everything that history presents merely as defeats.
The exploited, on the contrary, have rarely been able to rescue history from a dull chronology -- or a calendar vision with so many dates to celebrate -- in order to find another coherence for it, that of revolt, and so to understand the motives, the most radical moments, the limits of the latter."
