Mémoire
| Résumé : | This work is organised around the representation of the Second World War in Belgian museums and more particularly in the Bastogne War Museum, the Mons Memorial Museum and the Royal Museum of Armed Force and Military History of Brussels. It focuses on the messages conveyed about this particular event by these cultural institutions to the visitors who frequent them. In order to carry out this research, visits were made to the three museums studied. These visits made it possible to study the route taken by visitors and to discover the objects placed in front of them, as well as the explanatory texts offered to them. A comparative study between the three museums is thus conducted in order to highlight their similarities and differences. The classic theories of representation of the war phenomenon, namely the glorification of warfare and the heroization of the men who fought it, the total rejection of an event considered absurd and leading only to desolation and destruction, and the sanitisation focusing solely on the technological advances represented by the war weaponry, have also been studied in order to become imbued with these major approaches guiding the construction and scenography of exhibitions dedicated to the different wars and not only to the Second World War. This study showed that none of the three approaches is explicitly favoured by the Bastogne War Museum, the Mons Memorial Museum and the Royal Museum of Armed Force and Military History of Brussels which prefer to combine them. |
