Abstract
Two centuries old, national history museums have never been so vital as they are today, nor have they had so many visitors: numbers incomparable with those of best-selling history books. At the crossroads of research, the production of master narratives, popularization and public history, history museums put the past on display, often shifting between a longue durée perspective and a retour de l’événement . More often, they shift between history and memory, a process in which Mnemosyne is more involved than Clio. This paper deals with the broad context of the last two decades, but ultimately concentrates on a few European cases of recent years.