In the frame of colonial expansion wars, Western armies have at times been defeated. Beyond the event record, the memory of these battles embodied a political meaning for actors, in the past as well as nowadays. These battles were perceived differently in the societies of the protagonists, and ancient and present practices of commemoration present great differences, according to their own history, but also the contemporary geopolitical stakes of the control of places of memory. How were these events mobilized in the construction of historical memories? The research is based on the analysis of a body of bibliographic, media and digital sources. The article, after framing the theoretical approach, presents the memory building processes for six battles, then proposes a typology that emphasizes the importance but also the diversity of the power stakes on the process of memory writing for these sites of past battles.