The Presents of the Pasts Europe and the Europeans are looking for a common identity. The last and hard debates about the Constitutional Treaty have reflected this reality. In this context of the building of Europe and of the extending of it toward the East the program titled The Presents of the Pasts proposes to study complex and often difficult relationships between history, memory, heritage and societies in Europe by focusing at the history museums which are more and more numerous.At one and the same time,museums are history and collective memory places in which visitors certainly face to scientific knowlegdes but also receive representations of identities and ideological messages. This project will concentrate on the XXth century wars history museums (to which we add naval museums, armies and military units museums, see below) which have transformed the War as an heritage. In a few countries, Second World War is the heart of this heritage movement.In others,the WWII is only one stage in a more complex and longer history, or is involved in history from WWI to colonial wars, from the WWII to the cold war (communism memory). Antagonistic memories, or potentially antagonistic memories,seem to produce broken museums; on the contrary, unified memories produce polymorphistic unities. One of our aims will be to locate these facts, these ways of building a discourse; this one stands between the building of a continuous historical discourse,or on the contrary, the building of a discontinuous historical discourse in order to statisfy different publics of visitors,and different ideologies;by these ways of placing side by side in one public place broken historical discourse, memorial reasons often assume the former role in place of historical reason. The chosen approach is a comparatist and an ambitious one as our project will extend on a national and international scale.In fact,it seems to us that only a compared analysis of european memories or memories in Europe will give us the possibility to understand memorial phenomena we can observe in different places we want to study as inserted and linked places. Today indeed, memorial places are extremely permeable; each of these places discuss with the others, answer to the others.Memories migrate from one society to an other; the comparatist approach give us the possibility to study the increasing internationalization of some memorial phenomena too (for example, about the Holocaust or the Red Cross). By taking this large inventory, we want also to locate the memorial cleavages in Europe (recently,one author talk about a 'west-east cleavage' and use the expression 'memorial iron curtain'),and beyond, the memorial fractures which are separating Europe and its margins or its former overseas territories, with which Europe shares a long(but antagonistic) and common history. As we explain in the description of our project, searchers have determined the first targets they want to study; we are a team;we want to do a collective investigation and most of our searchers will work on different spaces. But we can sum up our project as it follows: * Antagonistic pasts in France and in Europe museums 1. Local and national memories of the two world wars in France and in Europe; 2. Transnational european memories about two major events of the XXth century: stalinism and jewish genocide. *Memorial face to face of Europe and its former overseas territories We want to analyse the European imperial memories (naval and navy museums); colonial wars memories (armies and military units museums);here, we will particularly deal with three memorial couples (France-Algeria; France-Vietnam;Greece-Turkey) To conclude, it is clear that the building and recent extending to east of Europe context give to these museums a very decisive role in constructing the identities and the representations of the other, the neigbours, and the former enemies. On an other hand, the reality and the sharpness of deep memorial fractures which divide Europe and some of its former colonies (Algeria), which separate Europe and some of its margins (Turkey);the question of turkish entrance in EU is on the table. This project is backed on an already rich international historiographical movement on the uses of pasts and the management of the pasts.We have the chance to gather together a few of the best searchers and specialists of memorial questions and of antangonistic pasts management. Moreover, it is important to underline that our team is able to reach its aims (searchs, analysis) because a lot of languages are spoken in this group, and many disciplines are represented (history, sociology, didactic, political sciences, linguitic) at last, as we have began a collaboration with the International Historical Museum Association (affiliated to the ICOM),we have got for our project an additional possibility of success and international connections.