French Historians 1900-2000: New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France

New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France FRENCH HISTORIANS 1900–2000 Edited by PHILIP DAILEADER and PHILIP ...

Author: Philip Daileader | Philip Whalen

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New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France

FRENCH HISTORIANS 1900–2000 Edited by

PHILIP DAILEADER and PHILIP WHALEN

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

FRENCH HISTORIANS 1900–2000

This project was supported by a generous grant from the Florence Gould Foundation

New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France

FRENCH HISTORIANS 1900–2000 Edited by

PHILIP DAILEADER and PHILIP WHALEN

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www. wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data French Historians 1900–2000: new historical writing in twentieth-century France / edited by Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-9867-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Historiography–France–History–20th century. 2. Historians–France–Biography. I. Daileader, Philip. II. Whalen, Philip, 1959– D13.5.F8N49 2010 907.2′02–dc22 2009042569 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13pt Dante by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Malaysia I 2010

Contents

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction

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1 Maurice Agulhon (1926– ) Peter McPhee

1

2 Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) Patrick H. Hutton

11

3 Jacques Berque (1910–1995) James Whidden

23

4 Marc Bloch (1886–1944) Francine Michaud

38

5 Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) Eric R. Dursteler

62

6 Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) Willem Frijhoff

77

7 Roger Chartier (1945– ) Laura Mason

93

8 Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009) David Stewart

105

9 Louis Chevalier (1911–2001) Barrie M. Ratcliffe

112

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Contents

10 Alain Corbin (1936– ) Peter McPhee

136

11 Jean Delumeau (1923– ) Thomas Worcester

144

12 Jacques Droz (1909–1998) Joseph Tendler

164

13 Georges Duby (1919–1996) Leah Shopkow

180

14 Bernard Faÿ (1893–1978) John L. Harvey

202

15 Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) Wallace Kirsop

218

16 Marc Ferro (1924– ) Kevin J. Callahan

239

17 Michel Foucault (1926–1984) James A. Winders

252

18 François Furet (1927–1997) Marvin R. Cox

271

19 Etienne Gilson (1884–1978) Philip Daileader

285

20 Jacques Godechot (1907–1989) Emmet Kennedy

306

21 Pierre Goubert (1915– ) James B. Collins

317

22 Elie Halévy (1870–1937) Philip Daileader

328

23 Paul Hazard (1878–1944) Leonore Loft

344

24 Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988) Mark Potter

360

25 Jacques Le Goff (1924– ) Joëlle Rollo-Koster

371

26 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929– ) Jeffrey A. Bowman

394

Contents

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27 Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) Lawrence Harvard Davis

417

28 Albert Mathiez (1874–1932) James Friguglietti

428

29 Roland Mousnier (1907–1993) Sharon Kettering

437

30 Pierre Nora (1931– ) Richard C. Holbrook

444

31 Mona Ozouf (1931– ) Harvey Chisick

461

32 Michelle Perrot (1928– ) Denise Z. Davidson

475

33 Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) Walter Prevenier

486

34 René Rémond (1918–2007) Samuel Kalman

501

35 Daniel Roche (1935– ) Harvey Chisick

513

36 Gaston Roupnel (1871–1946) Philip Whalen

527

37 Henry Rousso (1954– ) Hugo Frey and Christopher Flood

545

38 Pierre de Saint Jacob (1905–1960) James B. Collins

556

39 Henri Sée (1864–1936) Mark Potter

564

40 François Simiand (1873–1935) Philip Whalen

573

41 Albert Soboul (1914–1982) Peter McPhee

589

42 Michel Vovelle (1933– ) Peter McPhee

599


Jeffrey A. Bowman is Associate Professor of History at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He has published articles on law, society, and sanctity in Spain and Mediterranean France during the High Middle Ages in the Catholic Historical Review, Early Medieval Europe, and Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in the Middle Ages (2003). He is the author of Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (2004), which received the American Historical Association’s Premio del Rey book prize. Kevin J. Callahan is Associate Professor of History at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut. His publications include articles in the International Review of Social History (2000) and Peace and Change (2004). He is also co-editor of the book Views from the Margins: Creating Identities in Modern France (2008), and is currently completing an interdisciplinary manuscript titled Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914. Harvey Chisick received his BA from the University of British Columbia and his doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Robert Forster. He is the author of a number of books and articles on the social and intellectual history of the eighteenth century, including The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes to the Education of the Lower Classes in France, 1762–1789 (1981), L’Education élémentaire dans un contexte urbain sous l’Ancien Régime: Amiens au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1982), The Production, Distribution and Readership of a Conservative Journal of the Early French Revolution (1992), and the Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment (2005). He teaches history at the University of Haifa, and is currently working on a study of beneficence in the eighteenth century, and a


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long-term comparative project on two periodicals, the Année littéraire and Journal encyclopédique. James B. Collins is Professor of History at Georgetown University. He has published extensively on early modern French history and is currently finishing Slaying the Hydra of Anarchy: The Death of the Res Publica in Early Modern France. The second edition of his The State in Early Modern France (2009) offers a significantly changed perspective from the 1995 original. Marvin R. Cox is Associate Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. A contributor to the Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution 1789–1799 (1985), he is also the author of The Place of the French Revolution in History (1997). Philip Daileader is presently Department Chair and Associate Professor at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His research interests are the social, religious, and cultural history of Mediterranean Europe, especially southern France and Spain, during the Middle Ages. He is the author of True Citizens: Violence, Memory, and Identity in the Medieval Community of Perpignan, 1162–1397 (2000; French translation 2004) along with articles in the Journal of Medieval History, Speculum, the Annales du Midi, and Archivum historiae pontificiae. He is currently working on a study of Saint Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419). He launched the French Historians, 1900–2000: Writing History in Twentieth-century France project in 2000. Denise Z. Davidson is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her publications include “Making society ‘legible’: people-watching in Paris after the Revolution,” in French Historical Studies (2005), and France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order (2007). Her current book projects include a study of conjugal relations during and after the French Revolution (in collaboration with Anne Verjus), and a history of bourgeois familial correspondence and network-building strategies, 1780–1830. Lawrence Harvard Davis is Associate Professor of History at North Shore Community College in Danvers, Massachusetts. He earned his doctorate from the University of Connecticut. His dissertation, “Georges Lefebvre: historian and public intellectual, 1928–1959,” reflects his research interest in the historiography of the French Revolution and the role of the public intellectual in twentiethcentury France. He has published articles and book reviews in French and European intellectual history in the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850 Selected Papers, Labour/Le Travail, and the Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire. He was recognized by the University of Texas for excellence in community college teaching in 2007.

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Eric R. Dursteler is Associate Professor in the History Department of Brigham Young University. He earned his PhD from Brown University in 2000. He is a former Fulbright fellow, NEH fellow, and in 2006–7 was a fellow of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. His publications include Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2006) and Renegade Women: Conversion and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2010). Christopher Flood is Professor of European Studies at the University of Surrey, where he is Academic Director of the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism. He has authored books on the theory of political myth, and on the political thought of Paul Claudel, and has edited works on multiculturalism in Britain, French ideologies, and contemporary French intellectual history. He was co-editor of the “European Horizons” series with the University of Nebraska Press. His current work includes co-writing a monograph entitled Islam, Security and Television News, and co-editing a book on Nationalism, Ethnicity, Citizenship. Hugo Frey is Head of History at the University of Chichester. He has worked extensively on French collective memory of the Vichy period and the wars of decolonization. His publications include a monograph on Louis Malle (2004), as well as contributions to Yale French Studies, the Journal of European Studies, and Modern and Contemporary France. He is currently writing a history of French national identity and the cinema. James Friguglietti is a specialist in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic era. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1965. He is the co-translator of Georges Lefebvre’s two-volume The French Revolution (1964–5), co-editor of The Shaping of Modern France: Writings on French History since 1715 (1969), and author of Albert Mathiez, historien révolutionnaire (1874–1932) (1974). He has also contributed to the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, and the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History. He is currently preparing a biography of the historian Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928). Willem Frijhoff is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the VUUniversity, Amsterdam (Netherlands) and currently chairs the Dutch national research program “Cultural Dynamics and Cultural Heritage.” He was previously a research fellow in religious anthropology at the EHESS in Paris (1971–81) and Professor of Cultural History and History of Mentalities at Erasmus University Rotterdam (1983–97). His research interests are the history of education, culture and religion in early modern Europe (in particular the Low Countries and France), and early modern Dutch America (the present-day New York area and surrounding states). He has written ten books, edited twenty-five collections of essays, and hundreds of articles.


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John L. Harvey is Associate Professor of Modern European History at St. Cloud State University, a comprehensive teaching university in central Minnesota. His research interests are in comparative historiography and transnational intellectual history during the twentieth century. Among his works are studies on the international origins of the French Annales, the transatlanticism of German conservative historiography between the world wars, the relationship of social theory and modern Western historiography, and the development of European historical writing in American universities. He is the author of The Common Adventure of Mankind: Academic Historians and an Atlantic Identity in the Twentieth Century (2010). Richard C. Holbrook received his PhD on early modern France from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has translated numerous articles for the English edition of Pierre Nora’s Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire volumes. Formerly Assistant Dean of the School of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Illinois Medical School; Associate Director of the Office of Technology Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Director of the Technology Innovation Center at Northwestern University, he now teaches courses in contemporary events at a community center. His current research interests include religion and political governance during the period of Cardinal Mazarin and Louis XIV as well as France’s entry into World War I. Patrick H. Hutton is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Vermont. He is editor-in-chief of Historical Dictionary of the Third French Republic, 1870–1940 (1986). His books include The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864–1893 (1981), History as an Art of Memory (1993), and Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History (2004). Though he retired in 2003, he continues to teach part-time for the Honors College and the Integrated Humanities Program. During spring semester 2007, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University. Samuel Kalman is Associate Professor of European History at St. Francis Xavier University. He is the author of The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu (2008), and has published articles in French History, European History Quarterly, and Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, among other periodicals. His current projects include a manuscript on fascism in interwar French colonial Algeria and editing an issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques on “Colonial Violence.” Emmet Kennedy is Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of “Ideology” (1978), A Cultural History of the French Revolution (1989), and Secularism and its Opponents from Augustine to Solzhenitsyn (2006), and co-author of Theatre, Opera and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (1996) and coeditor of The Shaping of Modern France: Writings on French History since 1715 (1969).

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He has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Philosophical Society, the French Embassy, and the Earhart Foundation. His current research addresses the origins of deaf education in the French Revolution as well as the refugee problem in the Pyrenees during World War II. Sharon Kettering is a retired history professor from Montgomery College in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. She is the author of five books and twentythree articles on early modern France. Her most recent book is Power and Reputation at the Court of Louis XIII: The Career of Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes (1578–1621) (2008). Her most recent articles include a study of the court ballets of Louis XIII (Canadian Journal of History, winter 2008), and an article on the household clients of royal favorites at Louis XIII’s court (French Historical Studies, spring 2010). Her future work includes a study of early modern French legal history. Wallace Kirsop taught French at Monash University from 1962 to 1998. He holds an honorary appointment in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. From 1999 to 2009 he was Director of the Centre for the Book in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies. He served as editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies from 1968 to 2002. The author and editor of books on physical bibliography, the history of reading, and the book trade – the most recent being The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison (2007) – his current projects include a descriptive bibliography of seventeenth-century editions of the plays of Jean de Rotrou (1609–1650) and a study of cultural life in Hobart, Tasmania in the 1840s. Leonore Loft is Professor of French at the State University of New York, Fredonia. Her area of expertise is the intellectual history of eighteenth-century France. In addition to a number of articles on Jacques-Pierre Brissot, she has also published Passion, Politics, and Philosophie: Rediscovering J.-P. Brissot (2002). Other articles include work on children’s literature. She is currently working on a volume that examines the changing attitudes toward animals during the years preceding the French Revolution, a study involving the history of science, political and educational changes, economic forces, and the transformation of religious ideas. The working title for this study is Political Animals during the French Enlightenment. Peter McPhee is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and was its Provost 2007–9. He has published widely on the history of modern France, including The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside 1846–1852 (1992), Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres 1780–1830 (1999), A Social History of France 1789–1914 (2004), and Living the French Revolution 1789–1799 (2006). He is currently writing a biography of Maximilien Robespierre and researching Basque and Catalan nationalism.


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Laura Mason is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia. She specializes in French and cultural history, as well as history and film. She is the author of Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (1996), co-editor of The French Revolution: A Document Collection (1998), and she is currently completing The Conspiracy of Equals and the End of the French Revolution, which examines the trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the collapse of constitutionalism after Thermidor. Francine Michaud is Associate Professor of History at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her research addresses the economy and society in late medieval Provence, especially concerning labor relations; the status and conditions of peasants; lay piety, family, work and apprenticeship; and notarial culture. She is the author of Un signe des temps: accroissement des crises familiales autour du patrimoine à Marseille à la fin du XIIIe siècle (1994), and co-editor of the forthcoming L’Enquête de Lepopardo da Foligno en Haute Provence centrale, 1332–1333. She has also contributed articles to Revue historique, Le Moyen Age: Revue de philologie et d’histoire, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, Provence historique, and Pecia: Ressources en médiévistique. Mark Potter is currently Director of the Center for Faculty Development at Metropolitan State College of Denver; he was formerly Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Wyoming. His publications include Corps and Clienteles: Public Finance and Political Change in France, 1688–1715 (2003) and “Political coalitions and local politics in seventeenth-century France,” French Historical Studies (2008). Walter Prevenier received his PhD from the State University of Ghent in 1962 and did postgraduate work on canon law at the Ecole nationale des chartes and the Law School of the Sorbonne at Paris. He was Professor of History at the University of Ghent and the University of Brussels from 1965 to 1999, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Utrecht, the University of California at Berkeley, Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, College of William and Mary, Princeton University, and the University of California at Los Angeles, from 1968 to 2008. He specializes in the social and cultural history of the Burgundian Netherlands (fourteenth–sixteenth century), in historiography and the methodology of history and the social sciences, and in paleography and diplomatics. Barrie M. Ratcliffe has occupied university posts in Canada, France, Great Britain, and the United States. His latest book is Vivre la ville: les classes populaires à Paris (1ère moitié du XIXe siècle) (2007). He is currently finishing a study of the bodies of the Parisian popular classes; its purpose is to use physical appearance to gain a better understanding of everyday living at a time when popular classes left scarce written witness to their lives.

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Joëlle Rollo-Koster is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Rhode Island. She has published extensively on the late medieval papacy and on the cultural and social history of papal Avignon. She is the author of a score of articles and two monographs: Raiding Saint Peter: Empty Sees, Violence, and the Initiation of the Great Western Schism, 1378 (2008), and The People of Curial Avignon: A Critical Edition of the Liber Divisionis and the Matriculae of Notre Dame La Majour (2009). She is also the editor of Medieval and Early Modern Rituals: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan (2002), and, with Thomas Izbicki, A Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378–1417) (2009). Leah Shopkow is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University at Bloomington. Her disciplinary research is in medieval historiography. The author of History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1997) and Lambert of Ardres: The History of the Counts of Buines and Lords of Ardres (2001), she is currently completing a critical edition and translation of the Chronicle of Ardres and writing an article on the silent impact of the crusades on that monastery. In addition, she is the principal investigator and a founding member and director, with Arlene Díaz, David Pace, and Joan Middendorf, of the History Learning Project at Indiana University. She has also co-authored “The History Learning Project: A department ‘decodes’ its students” in the Journal of American History, which won the McGraw Hill-Magna Publications Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award in 2009. David Stewart is Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale College. His research and teaching focuses on early modern France and Catalonia, especially during the eighteenth century. The author of Assimilation and Acculturation in Early Modern Europe: France and Roussillon, 1659–1715 (1997) and several articles on FrancoSpanish relations, he is currently working on two book manuscripts: one on Catalonia during the War of the Succession, and another on Warwick (England) during the first half of the eighteenth century. Joseph Tendler is a PhD student and Teaching Assistant at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He is currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Annales school, for which he has undertaken extensive archival research in scholars’ personal archives in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States in order to show how Annales has been the subject of public and private debate. Besides conference contributions, his teaching and research interests encompass the historiography and intellectual history of the period after 1500, and historical theory including knowledge, method, and understanding. Philip Whalen is Associate Professor of History at Coastal Carolina University. His research interests are in tourism, gastronomy, and popular festivals as vectors of identity formation in French regional history. He is the author of Gaston Roupnel:


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âme paysanne et sciences humaines (2001); two edited collections: Vins, vignes et gastronomie bourguignonne selon Gaston Roupnel (2007) and Dijon et la Bourgogne selon Gaston Roupnel (2009); as well as articles in Contemporary European History, Annales de Bourgogne, Cultural Analysis, Ruralia, the Journal of Folklore Research, Social Identities, and Cahier d’histoire de la vigne et du vin. He is currently working on an historical ecology of the Clos de Bèze vineyards in Burgundy. James Whidden is Associate Professor of History at Acadia University. His PhD was completed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he studied Egypt and North Africa. He has published articles in the Journal of North African Studies, the Encyclopedia of African History, the Encyclopedia of Terrorism, the Oxford History of the British Empire, and the collection, Re-envisioning Egypt 1919–1952. His research primarily deals with colonialism in Egypt. Booklength works on the social and cultural history of the British community and an analysis of the political generation of 1919 in Egypt are forthcoming. James A. Winders is a cultural and intellectual historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. He has written books and articles on a wide range of topics. His books include Gender, Theory, and the Canon (1991), European Culture since 1848: From Modern to Postmodern and Beyond (2001), and Paris Africain: Rhythms of the African Diaspora (2006). He is Professor of History Emeritus at Appalachian State University, and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he serves as co-director of the Triangle Area French Cultural Studies Seminar. Thomas Worcester earned his PhD at Cambridge University; he is an Associate Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross, in Massachusetts, and a specialist in the religious and cultural history of early modern France and Italy. He is the author of Seventeenth-century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus (1997), and he has published articles in journals such as Seventeenthcentury French Studies, Sixteenth Century Journal, and French Colonial History. Coeditor of three books published between 2002 and 2007, he is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (2008).

Introduction The Professionalization of the French Historical Profession

The process of professionalization, more than anything else, sets the historians of twentieth-century France apart from their predecessors. For much of the nineteenth century, France’s most famous historians often had no academic affiliations, and they did not rely on writing history books or teaching for their livelihoods. Nineteenth-century historians were often clergy, independently wealthy nobles who needed no employment, journalists, politicians, or men of letters who wrote works in many different genres. Jules Michelet, often hailed as the greatest historian of nineteenth-century France, did teach at the Collège de France, but he simultaneously held a job in France’s Archives nationales and, late in life, supported himself through royalties earned not just from his history books, but also from books that he wrote on insects, the sea, and nature more generally. In contrast, the historians examined in this volume earned their livelihoods by teaching and writing history, usually while employed by institutions of higher education. The consequences of history’s professionalization, which occurred in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries, extended far beyond the issue of remuneration. Professionalization entailed new ways of conceptualizing and writing history. The amateur historians of the nineteenth century were not indifferent to matters of truth and falsity, and they knew of the need to use source documents when reconstructing the past. Nonetheless, nineteenth-century amateur historians concerned themselves more with style than with method. They wrote prose that was self-consciously literary. Designed to meet the highest aesthetic standards, their writings strove to sweep the reader into the past itself. Amateur historians made ample use of their own imaginations to fill in gaps in the historical record and to lend excitement to their

Introduction

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books, a practice most evident in their free use of direct speech and dialogue issuing from the mouths of people dead for centuries. Such dialogue conjures a sense of immediacy – readers feel as though they are lurking in the shadows, eavesdropping on and witnessing history – but inevitably the historian has concocted the words. A paucity of dates complements the surfeit of dialogue. Amateur historians favored a narrative mode of presentation in which they discussed events in the order in which those events occurred, but these historians tended to omit precise dates from their writings because they did not want numbers interrupting the flow of their prose and marring the physical beauty of their texts. Amateur historians were often vague about which sources, if any, they had or had not consulted during the writing of their books, and only infrequently did they divulge to the reader the physical location of those sources. The amateur historians of the nineteenth century also differed from their twentieth-century successors as regards specialization. Aside from local historians writing about their native villages, towns, or regions, amateur historians did not specialize or view specialization as a virtue. They preferred to write enormous, multi-volume books that covered huge swaths of time and space. Their expansive histories had an explicitly didactic purpose. Working in the humanist tradition, amateur historians believed that history should be a source of moral instruction to readers, providing them with profitable examples of good behavior, bad behavior, and their consequences. Thus written, history constituted an enduring monument that illuminated the great men of the past, giving them the gift of immortality. Happily, constructing such a monument would also illuminate the greatness of the historian, who would be rendered equally immortal. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German scholars transformed the practice of history, moving it away from the humanities and toward the sciences. Historiographers have applied the labels of “positivist historians” and “scientific historians” to these German historians and their followers. Positivist historians demanded that history model itself after the increasingly prestigious natural sciences. The historian must be an impartial searcher after facts, employing a method common to all historians. This method, the historical method, required historians to arrange their sources according to those sources’ chronological and geographical relationships to the events that they purported to describe. More often than not, historians ascribed the greatest reliability to those documents most closely related in time and space to an event. However, in order to determine which documents were the most reliable, one had to determine whether the documents were, in fact, what they claimed to be. Authors might have misidentified themselves, written at times and places other than what they stated, or interpolated false material into otherwise honest accounts. To guard against the possibility of deception, positivist historians incorporated the techniques of philology into the historical method. Philologists studied how the use of words and formulae changed over time; historians could use this knowledge to identify exactly when, where, and by whom a document was

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produced. Indeed, since the seventeenth century, religious scholars such as the Benedictine Maurists and their most famous representative, Jean Mabillon, as well as the Bollandists, who were often Jesuits, had been using philological techniques to determine the authenticity and reliability of historical documents. Maurists and Bollandists worked to distinguish between authentic and spurious lives of saints, and in order to achieve this goal, they raised the field of diplomatics to a very high level, developing various techniques for assessing the authenticity and reliability of hagiographical documents. Positivist historians applied these techniques to other sorts of documents as well, especially governmental records kept in public archives. In order to train positivist historians in these skills, German scholars introduced the research seminar as the vehicle for professional training. Writing history “as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen) is the phrase most often associated with late nineteenth-century German historians, and the figure hailed by contemporaries as the personification of scientific history was Leopold von Ranke. (In truth, there was also a Romantic, metaphysical side to Ranke’s thinking that boosters of scientific history chose to ignore.) Positivist historians focused much of their attention on the history of nation-states and kingdoms, using the historical method and archival documents to reconstruct national political and military narratives. Their work emphasized the importance of specific events, individual leaders, and institutions. Because of their factualism, positivist historians tended to eschew theorizing and teleological grand narratives that depicted all of human history moving toward a specific goal (such as, say, the growth of human freedom or the triumph of reason over irrationality). Yet positivist historians were not wholly neutral. They usually viewed the growth of powerful nation-states as good, which is not surprising, because those nationstates and the archives they maintained provided these historians with their sources and, frequently, their jobs. France developed an historical profession, trained in research seminars to use positivist methods, as a response to developments in Germany. Political and military events, as well as economic developments, fostered professionalization. The French defeat during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 stunned French historians. This defeat, and the realization that a newly unified and rapidly industrializing Germany was transforming the balance of power in Europe, led to much soulsearching in French intellectual circles as thinkers tried to find ways to meet the new German challenge. Influential French historians such as Ernest Lavisse, Gabriel Monod, and Charles Seignobos demanded that France imitate German methods by studying history as the Germans studied it. (Indeed, they advocated a transformation of the entire French system of higher education, calling for a system that was as well staffed, as devoted to research, and as professional as the German system.) Once in place, French scientific history could serve a domestic as well as an international function: in addition to fostering a revival of French power, it could contribute to a greater appreciation of republican ideals. Such an appreciation seemed necessary, given the shaky beginnings of the Third Republic

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following the Franco-Prussian War and the earlier collapses of the First and Second Republics. To a large extent, French reformers succeeded in creating an historical profession that defined itself through its training and its methods. French historians could even claim that history was no longer ancillary to philosophy and literature, disciplines that the reformers, in their bolder moments, dismissed as inferior to history because of their lack of a scientific methodology. World War I weakened the foundations of French scientific history. It was possible for French historians to look to Germany for models following the Franco-Prussian war, which was an embarrassing defeat but not a civilizational catastrophe. The carnage of World War I, the unprecedented demolition of northeastern France, and the maiming or death of so many friends and sons, made it emotionally difficult for many French historians to practice a type of history with such strong Teutonic associations. On an even broader level, Europe’s “lost generation” rebelled intellectually against a prewar Europe that now disgusted those who had lived in the trenches. Some historians expressed their revulsion by hailing nineteenth-century amateur historians, such as Jules Michelet, and calling for a return to their approach to history. Ultimately, however, the weakening of scientific history led not to revival but to innovation. Other approaches gained strength or emerged for the first time between the two world wars. Marxist influences became considerably stronger, especially in certain crucial fields such as the study of the French Revolution. At the Sorbonne, three successive historians sympathetic to socialism (Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul) held that institution’s chair in the History of the French Revolution from 1928 onward. Many French historians, proud of their country’s own revolutionary tradition, identified with the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Soviet Union’s isolation from the global collapse of capitalism in the 1930s made Marxism even more attractive to French intellectuals. After World War II, Marxism grew more influential still in French historical circles thanks to the opposition of socialism and communism to fascism during the 1930s and 1940s. Although French Marxist historians could and often did clash, they played variations on the central themes of the Marxist approach to history. Marxists shared with the positivists an emphasis on historical narrative, and like the positivists they devoted a great deal of attention to political history. However, Marxist historians tended to be suspicious of positivist history, which glorified a state that was the protector of bourgeois property. Marxist historians, as historical materialists, saw impersonal economic forces as more important than any individual’s personality in determining the course of events, and Marxist historians embraced a teleological master narrative that gave meaning and direction to the course of human history. For Marxist historians, class struggle, as a secondary effect of the development of productive capacities and defined through their different relationships to the means of production, was the motor driving that history. As humanity accumulated surplus wealth and developed its productive capacities through the use

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of technology, some individuals gained control of the means of production (a water mill, say, or a factory) and forced others who did not own the means of production to work for them as slaves, serfs, or wage laborers, thereby enriching themselves still more. The owners of the means of production justified the existing situation through the elaboration of an ideology that strove to depict the status quo as the only possible form of social organization. Political institutions, religion, literature, all should be regarded as part of this ideological superstructure, whose purpose was to justify and to perpetuate indefinitely extant relations of production, which formed the base of society. However, the superstructure was always doomed to fail because it was inherently deceptive, striving to give the illusion of permanence to that which was bound to change. Humanity continually increased its productivity through the development of technology, and such new technologies demanded a reordering of social relations and the elaboration of a new ideology to justify those relations. The beneficiaries of the old order would never willingly abandon their privileged positions, however, and so they had to be overthrown by those who stood to benefit the most from these new means of production. During each epoch (the ancient, the feudal, and the modern), a previously oppressed class overthrew its masters, who then faded from history. The French Revolution, for example, was born of the conflict between the bourgeoisie, whose commercial activity and ownership of factories made it increasingly powerful, and the nobility, whose wealth came from landownership. The revolts would end only with the revolt of the propertyless proletariat, for there was no one below it whom it could oppress in turn. The process by which one class overthrew another class could not be stopped. At most, an individual might accelerate or retard the process by informing or misleading people about their proper role in history. France developed a distinguished tradition of Marxist history. However, French Marxist historians never achieved a position of international leadership akin to that of, say, German positivist historians, if only because other countries, too, could boast of equally influential Marxist historians. Another area in which French historians also began to make considerable contributions during this period, which – with the exception of that of Jacques Berque – are not addressed in this volume, is the study of the European colonial realms and those nations “other” than the developed Western nations. Such a project would certainly address the contributions of Jacques Soustelle, an important Aztecologist, Robert Delavignette (director of the French Colonial School in Paris) on French Equatorial Africa, Paul Mus on Vietnam, Jean Chesneaux on China, André Raymond on Arabic cities, Claude Cahen on Ottoman Turkey and early-modern Islam, and Charles-André Julien on the Maghreb, among others. To these historians one could add an equally important number of human geographers, all disciples of Paul Vidal de la Blache’s neoKantian brand of geography which Lucien Febvre called “possibilism.” In addition to Georges Duby, Lucien Febvre, and Gaston Roupnel (treated in this volume to

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illustrate how methodological innovation and recalcitrance might coexist), we would include Jean Brunhes, George Hardy, Jules Sion, Camille Vallaux, André Allix, Albert Demangeron, Roger Dion, Paul Claval, and Jean-Robert Pitte to address developments across time and space through comparative, synthetic, and/ or regional monographs. They participated in many of the same vectors of professionalization as concern the historians treated in this volume. Still, during the period between the two world wars, French historians began to earn a reputation for unsurpassed innovation and accomplishment; indeed, according to Pim den Boer, “After the Second World War French historiography gained unchallenged worldwide supremacy, taking the place of its nineteenthcentury German predecessor.” The reason for this worldwide supremacy was the Annales movement, which takes it name from the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, whose first issue appeared in January 1929. (The journal has since undergone several name changes. From 1946 to 1993 it was called Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, and since 1994 it has been called Annales: histoire, sciences sociales.) Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the two founding fathers of the Annales movement, were the journal’s first co-editors. Their work was carried on by historians such as Fernand Braudel, who effectively took over the journal after Febvre died in 1956, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whom Braudel brought on board the journal in the late 1960s. The term “Annales school” has been popular with those outside the school and unpopular with those whom outsiders considered to be its members. The Annalistes themselves have preferred to emphasize their own differences. For that reason, some historians have employed the term “Annales movement,” for it suggests a somewhat looser affiliation among members. That having been said, Annaliste historians shared common concerns, methods, and assumptions. Like Marxist historians, Annalistes maintained that human beings were constrained by structural forces rooted in material conditions that were largely beyond their control. Like Marxist historians, Annaliste historians saw ideas as dependent on a material base. However, for Annaliste historians, those material conditions were not simply social and economic, they were also, at an even deeper level, geographic and demographic. The physical milieu in which people lived and the weight of humanity’s numbers determined what people could and could not do in the past. Social and economic structures added another series of constraints to those of geography and demography. Because geography changed rarely, if at all, and demography tended to change very slowly, Annaliste historians concerned themselves with historical changes stretched out across a large expanse of time – an Annaliste would call it the longue durée. Annaliste determinism was less teleological than Marxist determinism – for Marxists, history was advancing toward a classless society and a better world – but Annaliste history did not envision, much less promise, an inevitable and happy ending for human history. For the Marxist historian, ideas formed ideologies that either propped up or undermined existing class relations and economic systems, but for the Annaliste historian, ideas tended to be more

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inert, “mentalities” (mentalités) that constituted something like a collective subconscious, reflecting the world but not justifying or subverting it. In many respects, the Annaliste movement broke far more decisively with positivist history than did Marxist history. While Marxist historians saw politics as an expression of something more profound, namely, class struggle, they nonetheless attached a certain importance to political history and to narratives of events. Annaliste history eschewed political history and showed little interest in traditional narratives. The range of documents that a Marxist historian consulted might be wider than the range of documents consulted by a positivist historian, but Marxist historians were just as text-based as the positivists. Annaliste historians were methodologically inventive, using many different sources ignored by other historians and borrowing concepts and methods from other disciplines such as economics, sociology, and eventually anthropology as well. Annaliste historians have studied or called upon others to study aerial photographs of field patterns, the chemical composition of swords, glacier movements, and pollen trapped in peat bogs. They have used social scientific quantitative methods and worked in teams. Using these new methods, some Annaliste historians have even striven to write “total history” (histoire totale), which would recapture the whole of past societies in all their complexity. It is true that the global prestige of French Annaliste historians was unmatched in the decades following World War II. Today, one can visit the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, located in Binghamton, New York (where the climate is wholly unlike that of Braudel’s beloved Mediterranean). It is also true that historians outside France praised the Annales more often than they imitated the Annales, whose influence has been uneven. While many historiographical trends (social history, environmental history) owe something to the Annales, its influence has been greater in Spain, Italy, and the countries of Latin and South America – in other words, in Romancespeaking countries – than elsewhere. German history, deeply hurt by the emigration of scholars during the 1930s, remained substantially focused on political history. English Marxist historians were on good terms with Annalistes because of their shared dislike for traditional positivist history, but they did not adopt Annaliste methods very widely. United States historians, living in a young country with a relatively brief past, felt uneasy with an historical paradigm that emphasized the longue durée. Third World historians engaged in colonial and postcolonial struggles gravitated toward Marxist history, which could account for and foment revolution. In one sense, French historians reached their apogee during the period 1975–90. Playing on the popular notion of the “trente glorieuses,” or the “thirty glorious years” of postwar French economic prosperity, some have referred to this period as the “quinze glorieuses” (fifteen glorious years) of the French history book. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324, published in 1975, quickly sold more than one hundred thousand copies in France and became

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a best seller. Historians became frequent contributors of articles and editorials to France’s most important newspapers, commenting on the leading issues of the day. A number of historians became celebrities, familiar public figures who, unlike their North American colleagues, appeared on television frequently and during normal waking hours. Yet even as French historians reached the pinnacle of their international influence and national fame, the foundations for this prestige began to crumble. Marxist history and Annaliste history had always had their critics, but during the 1970s, these critics became more forceful and more influential. Some authors have even spoken of the fall of the Annales paradigm during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and much the same could be said of the Marxist paradigm. Although both came under increasing scrutiny and even attack, Marxist and Annaliste history faced different problems. Critics attacked Marxist history for being too doctrinaire and too rigid. The Marxist account of the French Revolution became so pat that critics referred to it as the “revolutionary catechism,” an orthodoxy accepted on faith rather than on empirical grounds. As Europe moved into a postindustrial, service-dominated economy, the likelihood of a proletarian revolution became increasingly remote; Marx’s apparent failure to predict accurately the future course of European history caused some to question the usefulness of a Marxist approach for analyzing the past. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union undermined the confidence of Marxist historians and emboldened their critics still more. For Annaliste historians, the problem was not too much rigidity, but rather too much flexibility. For the first two generations of Annaliste historians, mentalités were of less interest and importance than geography, demography, and social structure. But by the 1970s, Annaliste historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie were focusing much of their attention on mentalités and paying relatively little attention to material environment. Even more seriously, by embracing the use of all sorts of methodologies and the study of all sorts of topics, Annaliste history became diffuse. If it was the history of everything, was it the history of anything? Critics pointed out that Annaliste history was, in a sense, “history without people,” or at least history without recognizable individuals. French Annaliste historians discussed people as members of various collectivities: birth cohorts, social classes, and so on. But rarely did flesh-and-blood individuals figure prominently in their pages. Especially absent from Annaliste histories were prominent thinkers such as, say, Plato or Thomas Aquinas. Marxist histories included such people as defenders or critics of class ideology, but the Annaliste conception of mentalité seemed to leave no room for high culture. Marxist analyses could be and were applied to the history of every time and place, and they could account both for change and for continuity. Annaliste history was much more comfortable with continuity than with change and with premodern Europe than with modern Europe. One of the sharpest criticisms of Annaliste history focused on an apparent paradox. Annaliste historians stressed the importance of long-term continuity and

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impersonal demographic forces in history. Yet the movement itself took root in a Europe convulsed by the ideologies and personalities of men such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. If Annaliste historians wanted evidence that individuals were important, if not essential, in determining history, they needed only to look out their windows and gaze at the conflagration enveloping Europe during the horrendous decades of the 1930s and 1940s, a conflagration that affected the Annalistes personally. Nazi Germany held Braudel as a prisoner of war for five years; the Gestapo tortured and executed Bloch, who had joined the French Resistance during the war. Indeed, the Annaliste emphasis on long-term continuities and denigration of events might well represent a reaction against the traumatic experience of the first half of the twentieth century – Braudel himself suggested as much. To critics, Annaliste history was just as escapist as Marxist history: the latter taking refuge in visions of a classless future, the former in visions of an enduring and unchanging past. Critics have detected a nostalgic element in the Annales (notably in Braudel’s later works), linking its birth and popularity in France to that country’s delayed shift (when compared to England, Germany, and the United States) from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban nation following the end of World War I. As Marxist history and Annaliste history lost some of their dominance within the French historical profession from the 1970s onward, external influences became more powerful. Anglo-American scholarship helped to foster the field of gender history. German scholarship influenced the field of Alltagsgeschichte, or the “history of everyday life.” Italian scholarship inspired work in microhistory, which attempted to provide exhaustive accounts of individuals or very specific places during short periods of time, using such individuals or places to get at broader social structures and cultural values. But the history that excited the greatest amount of debate and controversy was a type of cultural and intellectual history with a very strong textual and linguistic orientation, focusing on the history of discourses. This history took its inspiration not from the social sciences but from literary theory and cultural studies, especially from thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Jacques Derrida. The process by which historians began to employ the methods and assumptions of literary theory is often described as taking the “linguistic turn” (tournant linguistique). For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to the practitioners of this type of history as postmodern historians. Curiously enough, although the literary theorists whose works have inspired this development were often French, those theorists have been even more influential within the North American historical profession than within the French historical profession. French historians and commentators, with reason, have regarded the linguistic turn as a United States import. Discourse is a difficult concept to pin down, and different historians have understood the term differently. Some historians, notes John Toews, have defined discourses as “archeologically recoverable, objectively desirable ‘systems of statements’ related according to rules and procedures that rigorously determine

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what can be said and how it can be said … forming structures of domination or systems of power.” Other historians, while accepting the notion that discourses consist of sets of idioms and linguistic conventions employed by people in the past to define supposedly extralinguistic objects, emphasize the multiplicity of discourses and the conflicts among them. At any given historical moment, competing discourses have circulated about any issue of importance (the correct form of government, for example). Those who created and employed discourses were not merely trying to convey meaning through their language; they were performing and committing speech acts, whereby they articulated claims about the nature of the world around them and sought to exercise power over others. Non-textual events such as the festivals held during the French Revolution also formed part of these discourses, and as such, they, too, could be “read” for “meaning” by historians. Linguistic and philological virtuosity had been one of the hallmarks of positivist historians working in the German tradition. However, positivists scrutinized words and language in order to determine the authenticity of documents that would allow them to recapture and reconstruct the historical reality reflected in the sources. Postmodern historians scrutinized words, but they have regarded documents not as sources but as texts; that is to say, documents do not reflect what actually happened, but constitute an attempt to shape and to create rather than to describe reality. The objects studied by positivist historians (man, the state, the working class), and even by their successors, have no independent existence outside the discourses that claim to describe but actually constitute them. They are cultural and mental constructs, and, as such, they are by their very nature indeterminate. Postmodernism poses serious epistemological, intellectual, and methodological challenges to prevailing practices and conventions. Some critics find the postmodern argument that “the past” and “history” are different, with the former beyond recovery and the latter all that is left to us, to be epistemologically misguided. Critics fault postmodernism for dehumanizing history even more than the Annales school did, raising disembodied discourses to the level of historical agents. Violent discourses did not guillotine people, violent people guillotined people. Critics have also assailed postmodern historians for their writing style. Postmodern historians have often employed a dense and challenging writing style, as well as a technical vocabulary relying on terms whose meanings are not readily apparent, even to the best-educated readers. Some critics have argued that postmodern historical writing is so obscure and poor as to be incomprehensible to anyone who is not a postmodern historian (and even, critics suspect, to postmodern historians themselves). For critics, the purpose of this writing style is to bully potential critics into a baffled silence, or to disguise the fact that postmodern historians do not themselves know what they are trying to say. For postmodern historians, difficult concepts require difficult words, and new ways of doing history require new, initially unfamiliar ways of writing about history.

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What the long-term consequences of postmodern history will be for the French historical profession remains to be seen. “This remains an ongoing effort,” notes Jacques Revel (in “The Annales school”), “the consequences of which it is still too early to assess.” At least one major development in recent French historical studies, however, seems closely related both to the linguistic turn and to the lived experience of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As skepticism about the ability to recapture the past has grown, French historians (and others) have flocked to the issue of historical memory. To take one example, Henry Rousso has studied Vichy France not as a form of government that existed during World War II, but as a group of memories constructed during the postwar period by those who lived under Vichy and by subsequent generations, memories that different groups of people put to different uses. It would not be surprising if future generations linked this interest in historical memory to twentieth-century technological developments in travel and communication, which have created for each generation a world radically unlike that of the previous generation, thereby placing memory of the past in jeopardy by making it, some would argue, irrelevant and unnecessary. This is not to say, by any means, that new developments should be overlooked or dismissed out of hand. Rather, it is important to remember, as de Certeau has argued, that historiographical – as much as psychoanalytic – strategies that redistribute the time and space coordinates of memory easily and frequently imbricate the past and the present. While the poststructuralist and deconstructionist influences may have contributed to a loss of unifying paradigms, an impatience with dyadic and/or reductive models of interpretation, the rejection of positivist assumptions about immutable and universal laws (especially as they relate to conceptions of space, time, identity, causality, culture, society, and truth), or challenge the profession’s ontology of clear disciplinary boundaries, such developments in French history can neither be overlooked nor dismissed out of hand. The introduction of ambivalence, instability, indeterminacy, and the undecidability of meaning in historical analysis has made it possible to (1) move beyond the observation that knowledge is produced by the observer rather than the object or system of analysis; and (2) to begin to explore to what extent the production of knowledge results from the different operations of power, be they ontological, phenomenological, epistemological, or interpretive. The French historical profession continues to produce sensitive, nuanced, and theoretically informed approaches to existing problems and new subjects. Among these developments figures an explosion of works in the subfield of cultural history. The social history of culture has evolved into the cultural history of social phenomena. Culture, as Laura Mason reminds us in her chapter on Roger Chartier, is no longer seen as “merely epiphenomenal but a structuring feature of the lived world.” Indeed, the analysis of representational strategies, be they poetic, rhetorical, narratological, or tropological, has contributed new and fruitful avenues of inquiry collectively known as the “cultural turn.” These practices have influenced numerous fields to varying degrees: science, medicine and the body, historiogra-

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phy, historical geography, historical sociology, colonial history, urban history, le(s) patrimoine(s), gender history, the history of the senses, art history, gastronomy, tourism, poverty, immigration, memory, spectacles and festivals, and religious history, among others. While one might worry about the explosion of scholarship addressing so many previously unimagined subjects (such as the cultural significance of suntanning) and/or employing complex methodologies (such as a renewed interest in phenomenology), the legacy of twentieth-century French history and historiography is still unfolding. To fully appreciate the etiology and richness of this tradition, one must turn from this bare outline of major trends to the lives and works of those individuals who brought France to the forefront of historical scholarship. Selecting the individuals to be included in this volume was not an easy task. Many individuals deserved entries of their own but did not get them – we suspect that many readers will react initially to this volume by grinding their teeth in anger at such exclusions. In deciding whom to include, we strove to achieve a balance between two competing principles. First, we wanted to do justice to fields that have played an especially important role in French historiographical developments, such as the French Revolution, the early modern period, and the medieval period. Second, we wanted to give readers some sense of just how wide-ranging, chronologically and geographically, twentieth-century French historical scholarship has been. Innovative and important work has been done in ancient history and in modern history, in Western and in non-Western history. As a result, not every important twentieth-century French historian has been included. The availability of authors to write chapters for this collection was a constraint that could not be allowed to delay the overall project. We would have liked to have included essays on historians Robert Muchembled, Arlette Farge, Benoit Garnot, Anne-Marie Sohn, Bernard Lepetit, Robert Mandrou, Annik PardailhéGalabrun, Jean-Louis Flandrin, Françoise Thébaud, Marie-Madeleine Compère, Dominique Julia, Philippe Burrin, Pierre Milza, Serge Berstein, André Chédeville, Jean Bart, and Geneviève Fraisse, among many others. Francophone historians, such as Richard Cobb, were also excluded. We did, however, slip a Belgian historian into the book. This was not because we regard Belgium as “France,” but because of Henri Pirenne’s pivotal role in the historiographical developments discussed and because of his close connections to several of the historians treated within the volume. A few historians selected were admittedly less influential in the long run, but serve to remind readers that the discipline was never monolithic. Furthermore, readers of the early twenty-first century will no doubt be struck by the undeniable focus on male historians in this volume. This reflects the overwhelming “maleness” of the French historical profession during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. The Académie française, it is worth noting, only elected its first woman member, Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1980. This pattern has, at long last, started to abate, and historians such as Mona Ozouf and Michelle Perrot, for example, are every bit as influential as their counterparts. We expect

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that, when it comes time for historians of the early twenty-second century to look back upon their most influential predecessors of the previous century, they will come up with a list more gender balanced. Another principle of selection relates to chronology. Many historians straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, producing important work in each. We have excluded any historian who spent more time alive in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth century and some – such as Pascal Ory, Christophe Prochasson, Christiane Klapisch, Jean-François Sirinelli, Catherine Bertho Lavenir, Lucien Bély, Michel Delon, Dominique Godineau, and Philippe Poirrier, among others – who, we hope, will spend more time in the twenty-first century and therefore deserve a more comprehensive treatment at a later date. Ultimately, we hope to have included a sufficient variety of historians to enable the reader to appreciate the richness and complexity of French historical scholarship during the twentieth century.

References and Further Reading Aymard, Maurice, “The ‘Annales’ and French historiography,” Journal of European Economic History, 1 (1972): 491–511. Banner, Lois W., “Biography as history,” American Historical Review, 114 (3) (2009): 579–86. Bédarida, François, et al., L’Histoire et le métier d’historien en France, 1945–1995 (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995). Bentley, Michael (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997). Bentley, Michael, Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999). den Boer, Pim, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Bonnaud, Robert, Histoire et historiens de 1900 à nos jours: l’histoire nouvelle: au-delà de l’histoire (Paris: Editions Kimé, 2001). Bonnaud, Robert, Histoire et historiens depuis 68: le triomphe et les impasses (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1997). Bourdé, Guy and Martin, Hervé, Les Ecoles historiques, 2nd edn. (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1997). Breisach, Ernst, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Burguière, André, The Annales School: An Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Burguière, André, “The fate of the history of ‘mentalités’ in the ‘Annales,’ ” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24 (1982): 424–37. Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Burke, Peter, “Introduction to the third edition,” Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).

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Burke, Peter (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). Carbonell, Charles-Olivier and Livet, Georges, Au berceau des Annales: le milieu strasbourgeois en France au début du XXe siècle: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 11–13 octobre 1979 (Toulouse: Presses de l’Institute d’études politiques de Toulouse, 1983). Carrard, Philippe, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Castelli Gattinara, Enrico, Les Inquietudes de la raison: épistémologie et histoire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: J. Vrin, 1998). Chartier, Roger, Au bord de la falaise: l’histoire entre certitudes et inquietudes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998). Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Clark, Stuart, The Annales School: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 1999). Clark, Terry, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). Comité français des sciences historiques, La Recherche historique en France de 1940 à 1965 (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1965). Comité français des sciences historiques, La Recherche historique en France depuis 1965 (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1980). Coutau-Bégaire, Hervé, Le Phénomène “nouvelle histoire”: grandeur et décadence de l’Ecole d’Annales, 2nd edn. (Paris: Economica, 1989). Delacroix, Christian, Dosse, François, and Garcia, Patrick, Les Courants historiques en France: 19e–20e siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999). Dewald, Johnathan, Lost Worlds: The Emergence of French Social History, 1815–1970 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Digeon, Claude, La Crise allemande de la pensée française, 1870–1914, 2nd edn. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992). Dosse, François, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, translated by Peter V. Conroy, Jr. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Forster, Robert, “Achievements of the ‘Annales’ school,” Journal of Economic History, 38 (1978): 58–76. Forster, Robert and Ranum, Orest (eds.), Selections from the Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 7 vols. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975–82). Gunn, Simon, History and Cultural Theory (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006). Harsgor, Michael, “Total history? The Annales school,” Journal of Contemporary History, 13 (1978): 1–13. Ho Tai, Hue-Tam, “Remembered realms: Pierre Nora and French national memory,” Americal Historical Review, 106 (3) (2001): 906–22. Hunt, Lynn, “French history in the last twenty years: the rise and fall of the Annales paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986): 209–24. Huppert, George, “The Annales experiment,” in Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 873–88. Iggers, Georg, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).

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Iggers, Georg, New Directions in European Historiography, rev. edn. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984). Keylor, William R., Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Kurzweil, Edith, The Age of Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss to Foucault (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Livingstone, David, The Geographical Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Margadant, Jo Bur, “Introduction: constructing selves in historical perspectives,” in The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). Munslow, Alan, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (London: Routledge, 2000). Noiriel, Gérard, Sur la “crise” de l’histoire (Paris: Belin, 1996). Paligot, Carole Reynaud, “Les Annales de Lucien Febvre à Fernand Braudel: entre épopée coloniale et opposition Orient/Occident,” French Historical Studies, 32 (1) (2009): 121–44. Poirrier, Philippe, Les Enjeux de l’histoire culturelle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004). Poirrier, Philippe, L’Etat et la culture en France au XXe siècle (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2006). Popkin, Jeremy, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Preziosi, Donald and Farago, Claire (eds.), “Creating historical effects,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 13–21. Prost, Antoine, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996). Revel, Jacques, “The Annales school,” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 9–15. Revel, Jacques and Hunt, Lynn Avery, Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York: The New Press, 1995). Ricoeur, Paul, The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Ringer, Fritz, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890– 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Ruano-Borbalan, Jean–Claude, L’Histoire aujourd’hui: nouveaux objets de recherche, courants et débats, le métier d’historien (Auxerre: Sciences humaines, 1999). Schechter, Ronald (ed.), The French Revolution: The Essential Readings (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). Solé, Jacques, Questions of the French Revolution: An Overview, translated by Shelley Temchin (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Spiegel, Gabrielle M., “The task of the historian,” American Historical Review, 114 (1) (2009): 1–15. Stoianovich, Trajan, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). Thuillier, Guy and Tulard, Jean, Les Ecoles historiques, 2nd edn. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). Toews, John, “Intellectual history after the linguistic turn: the autonomy of meaning and the irreducibility of experience,” American Historical Review, 92 (1987): 879–907. Weisz, George, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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Maurice Agulhon (1926– ) Peter McPhee

The reconstruction of the French academy in the aftermath of World War II was propitious for the careers of brilliant, young, left-wing men and for an approach to history that sought to bridge the gap between the traditional political narratives produced under the Third Republic and the quantitative social and economic history pioneered by the Annalistes before the war. As one of this new generation, Maurice Agulhon received the training in quantitative socioeconomic history typical of his postwar generation, but his own historical work has borne the mark of its influence rather than replicating it. His doctoral study of the department of the Var from the end of the Ancien Régime to the mid-nineteenth century, while conceived initially by him and others within the familiar parameters of French social history, in fact marked a significant transition in two ways. First, Agulhon used the familiar methodologies of social history, in particular quantification, to illuminate specific aspects of his subject rather than as the statistical bedrock on which to understand Provençal society. Hence, his quantitative analysis of the geographical origins of the dockworkers of Toulon or the geographical incidence of chambrées (people’s clubs) in the Var countryside were to specific ends. Second, rather than analyze and interpret the explanations contemporaries gave for the precocious democratic life of the Var, Agulhon asked his own questions, for example, about the nature of Provençal “sociability.” In this way, he was both influenced by and contributed to the study of southern society, culture, and mentalités being undertaken at the University of Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere by Georges Duby and Michel Vovelle. Agulhon was born in 1926 in Uzès (Gard), the son of school teachers: his father was a Protestant from the Cévennes, his mother a Catholic from Villeneuvelès-Avignon in the southern Rhône valley. His was a model Third Republic

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upbringing: secular (despite his family background), hardworking, and imbued with republican values of education, meritocracy, and progress. Like many other historians of his generation, Agulhon’s family history had been one of social ascension: his father’s parents had left the Cévennes to work as a railway worker and a laundrywoman. Agulhon has recalled an upbringing unusual for his parents’ pacifist views and acceptance of the equality of the sexes. He was a pupil in his parents’ village school in Pujaut (Gard); then, from 1936, he attended secondary school in Avignon (at the school where Frédéric Mistral had studied). His love of history was first awakened while a student at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon (1943–6) by Joseph Hours, who had known Marc Bloch in the Resistance and taught students about the Annales. The head teacher Debidou encouraged Agulhon to go to the Ecole normale at the rue d’Ulm in 1946. Agulhon’s upbringing and influences had predisposed him to be on the left, but it was the particular circumstances of postwar France that led him to join the Parti communiste français (PCF) in the same year. Like so many other serious, idealistic people of his generation, the PCF appealed as both the backbone of the Resistance (it was only later that Agulhon came to appreciate the role of other groups within it) and also as the “purest” and most uncompromising of the left-wing parties, in comparison with the socialist Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO). On enrolling at the Sorbonne, Agulhon came under the direct influence of Ernest Labrousse, professor of economic and social history, and, indirectly, of Pierre Renouvin, professor of international relations. It was Labrousse, above all, who met the desire of the postwar generation for a history that was Marxist, social, and about “movements,” and who encouraged Agulhon to embrace Labrousse’s own fascination, influenced by André Siegfried, with questions of why certain regions had developed particular political traditions. Agulhon resolved to apply himself to such a study wherever he was posted as a teacher; his preference was for a southern industrial city and, as top of his class, he was free to choose. He chose Toulon, but as much for his political activities as for his interest in its history. Despite his southern origins, Agulhon has insisted that his choice was not influenced by a sense of Occitan identity; indeed, although his work has always been sensitive to the strength of regional cultures, he has never been attracted by the autonomist perspective that would be so strong in a subsequent generation of historians. In the early 1950s, he was a communist activist as well as a teacher in Toulon (1950–2) and Marseille (1952–4), and it was only in 1954 that he finally decided to undertake doctoral studies, on the Var in the period 1789–1851, in part because others had already commenced theses on other periods and departments, and despite the dismissive response of Fernand Braudel that it was far too narrow a topic. Agulhon’s career was again advanced by Labrousse, who made him his research assistant for three years at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) so that he could commence his research, then by Pierre Guiral, who

Maurice Agulhon (1926– )

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appointed him an “assistant” at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence in 1957 (from 1969 the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I). Agulhon’s interest in the origins of Provençal sociability led him to submit a “thèse complémentaire” in 1966, La Sociabilité méridionale: confréries et associations dans la vie collective en Provence orientale à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Southern Sociability: Brotherhoods and Associations in the Collective Life of Eastern Provence in the Late Eighteenth Century). Published only as a few hundred roneo-typed copies, the thesis nevertheless attracted the attention of André Latreille in Le Monde, and was republished as Pénitents et francs-maçons (Penitents and Freemasons, 1968) in a series then directed by François Furet and Denis Richet. Agulhon completed his doctoral thesis in 1969. Despite the training he had received from Labrousse, and his personal indebtedness to him, the thesis demonstrated that Agulhon would not be primarily a quantifying social historian. The massive doctoral thesis, of 1,500 pages, was at its richest in the use he made of police, court, and local government records. The archives so extensively used by social historians of other regions – land surveys, civil registers, economic statistics – were used sparingly by him, and only where they would illuminate group behavior. The thesis was finally published as three separate books with different publishers. Even though La République au village: les populations du Var de la Révolution à la Seconde République (1970; translated as The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic, 1982) was the one of the three that was a commercial success, and in effect made his reputation, Agulhon in fact always preferred Une ville ouvrière au temps du socialisme utopique: Toulon de 1815 à 1851 (A Working-class City in the Age of Utopian Socialism: Toulon from 1815 to 1851, 1970) as more innovative in its uncovering of original aspects of Toulon’s history. The central issues that Agulhon addressed in his thesis were why specific communities and regions made particular political choices, how changes in levels of political awareness occurred, and what was the substance of political choice – the why, how, and what of rural politics. A previous generation had approached these questions from an understanding of political behavior as a reflection of socioeconomic structures (for example, Philippe Vigier, La Seconde République dans la région alpine: étude politique et sociale, 2 vols. [Paris, 1963]; Georges Dupeux, Aspects de l’histoire sociale et politique du Loir-et-Cher, 1848–1914 [Paris, 1962]; André Armengaud, Les Populations de l’Est-Aquitain au début de l’époque contemporaine: recherches sur une région moins développée (vers 1845 – vers 1871) [Paris, 1962]; Christiane Marcilhacy, Le Diocèse d’Orléans sous l’épiscopat de Mgr Dupanloup, 1849–1878: sociologie religieuse et mentalités collectives [Paris, 1962] and Le Diocèse d’Orléans au milieu du XIXe siècle: les hommes et leurs mentalités [Paris, 1964].) In contrast, Agulhon’s approach drew its impetus from a realization that, indispensable and revealing though descriptions of socioeconomic structures might be, they cannot by themselves account for particular forms of collective behavior or for why apparently similar experiences of economic crisis generate different political responses. Like Alain Corbin (Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle, 1845–1880, 2 vols. [Paris, 1975]),

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Agulhon found in the patterns of social interaction and “cultural diffusion” an explanation for why those regions where economic change was very gradual displayed a capacity for genuine political volatility and choice. Agulhon’s incisive and wide-ranging study of the Var, which was quickly regarded as a classic of French historiography, is of particular importance. Basic to his explanation of the receptivity of the people of eastern Provence to démoc-soc (democratic socialist) ideology was his notion of social and cultural interaction between local bourgeois “culture-brokers” and the masses, often with the petite bourgeoisie of the bourgs as the intermediaries (la classe-relais). Agulhon charts a series of trends, such as increasing knowledge of French, changing literary tastes, and evolving forms of leisure (male clubs known as cercles and chambrées), which were transmitted or imitated. It was as if, to follow Agulhon’s conceptualization, démoc-soc voters were able to break away from the “vertical influence” of those who exercised disproportionate economic and social power and were instead integrating themselves into “horizontal organizational” structures. In his words, “it looks as though there was a progression from right to left, that is from a structure of patronage, which was conservative, to an egalitarian structure which was democratic, and that this passed through an intermediary phase of democratic patronage.” Agulhon’s work has the great merit of illuminating the “ecology” that enabled peasants and artisans to challenge the power of local bourgeois, nobles, and priests. The culmination of Agulhon’s thesis – as of the Second Republic itself – was the large-scale resistance of Provençal republicans – professional men, artisans, peasants – to Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851. In contrast to historians who had pointed to what they saw as the archaic violence and political naïveté of the last great jacquerie, Agulhon insists on the insurrection’s place in the history of democracy. Within this republican tradition, the commitment to which was both smothered and yet more deeply implanted by the coup and the repression, the question of insurrection remained contentious. Agulhon and other historians writing from within the republican and parliamentary tradition have seen the démoc-soc movement as above all electoral and constitutional, and thus have presented the insurrection of 1851 as essentially a peaceful defense of the constitution accompanied by a final, anachronistic resort to violence. These years were a turning point in commitment to, and participation in, national politics. In 1973, Agulhon published an overview of the Second Republic, 1848 ou l’apprentissage de la République, 1848–1852 (translated as The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852, 1983), a synthesis of the recent flourishing research into the period. Here he describes the Second Republic, in line with his apt title, as a time of a mass “apprenticeship” in republicanism and, in particular regions, of democratic socialism. The book is a masterpiece of succinct, lucid historical description and analysis, characterized by Agulhon’s distinctive prose style, at once elegant and delicate. This book has been Agulhon’s greatest commercial success, regularly reprinted over the past thirty years.


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Like others (among them Corbin, Vovelle, and Vigier) who undertook their doctoral research within a departmental cadre, Agulhon was keen not to be seen only as the historian of “his” Var or, as in Frédéric Dard’s witticism, of “Cher-etTendre.” Like them, he was to move from a doctoral thesis involving a deep familiarity with a specific department or region to both a “national” position in a Parisian university and a national perspective as an historian of France. He had, in fact, already co-authored a two-volume history of twentieth-century France with André Nouschi. He was therefore delighted to be appointed in 1972 as professor of political history of contemporary France at the Université de Paris I (“Panthéon-Sorbonne”) to succeed Louis Girard, who had moved to Paris IV. One important consequence of Agulhon’s underlining of the cultural diversity of ethnic and linguistic minorities was a greater awareness of the range of “political cultures” in nineteenth-century France. The stark contrast between the world of the local elites, or grands notables, and of the mass of the rural population had often been restated in social history as a dichotomy between “elite” and “popular” culture. Such an argument has an implicitly pejorative tone; given the nature of rural social relations and the process by which cultural practices were reproduced and transformed, it is also unhelpful. As Agulhon demonstrated, “popular” attitudes and practices were neither discrete nor a vulgarized variant of “elite” culture; rather, rural cultures were a multilayered and dynamic interplay of both, varying along class, regional, and gender lines. Agulhon continued to write extensively on the history of the Var and on the French nineteenth century, including a superb short history of the Second Republic and a series of brilliant chapters in volume 3 of Histoire de la France rurale (edited by Georges Duby and Armand Wallon, 1976), the outstanding history of the French countryside from the Revolution to World War I. Increasingly, however, his attention was being drawn to the cultural history of associational forms about which he had written earlier, describing them then as vehicles for the expression of Provençal politics, but which he now saw as cultural expressions rich in meanings across France as a whole. One of his early masterpieces was Le Cercle dans la France bourgeoise, 1810–1848: étude d’une mutation de sociabilité (The “Cercle” in French Middle-class Society, 1810–1848: A Study of a Shift in Sociability, 1977) an innovative study of a neglected forum of middle-class sociability. While working on his doctoral thesis, Agulhon’s attention had been drawn to the frequency with which republican municipalities in the 1880s marked what seemed the definitive victory of the Republic with ornate statues of Marianne, the female allegory of the French Republic. In an important article published in the journal Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations in 1973 and called “Esquisse pour une archéologie de la République: l’allégorie civique féminine,” Agulhon sketched an outline history of an iconographic archaeology of the Republic. He subsequently embarked on a project which was to absorb him until 2001, a study of the history of Marianne as the image – positive and negative – of the Republic from 1789 until the present. The three volumes were distinguished by the attributes

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that marked his doctoral thesis: a capacity to find significance in apparently minor details, an extraordinary erudition, a deftness of touch, and a lack of pretentiousness which makes his history a pleasure to read. The range of sources utilized was extraordinary: from written texts to posters, coins, stamps, caricatures, monuments, and more. Dedicated to Joseph Hours, his history teacher in Lyon during World War II, Marianne au combat: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (1979; translated as Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789– 1880, 1981) traces a violent, disputed symbolic landscape over which the Republic itself ruled for only twenty-five of the ninety years surveyed. In contrast, Marianne au pouvoir: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1880 à 1914 (Marianne in Power: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1880–1914, 1989) studies a serene, even majestic Marianne in power: still an object of fear for royalists, but also an object of scorn for the revolutionary left. The third volume, Les Métamorphoses de Marianne: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1914 à nos jours (The Metamorphoses of Marianne: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France from 1914 to the Present, 2001) traces the way in which Marianne – like other republican symbols – became accepted as legitimate across most of the political spectrum, despite the hiatus of the Vichy years. It is imbued with a certain tone of regret that the price to pay for Marianne’s triumph has been the fading of the meanings she carried before the 1970s as an allegory of civic virtue, electoral democracy, and equality. Instead, she has commonly been used in the popular media as the personification of la France moyenne (typical France), and stylized to resemble in turn Brigitte Bardot, Mireille Mathieu, Catherine Deneuve, or Laetitia Casta. This popular, familiar Marianne is now found most commonly in village halls: her disappearance from coinage with the adoption of the Euro marks her general displacement from official representation. In that sense, Agulhon has mapped an historical cycle that is coming to a close after two centuries. The trilogy was accompanied by two volumes of imagery co-authored with Pierre Bonte. In 1986, Agulhon was appointed to the Collège de France (he retired in 1997), and since then has played a significant role as an adviser and contributor in more official capacities. His project has been, as he put it, to advance “the twin project of historical study and commemoration … these different things are also connected. Commemoration is often the occasion for a call for further historical study, and thus to advance knowledge; and knowledge helps us to cultivate and maintain memory.” In 1989, he played a prominent role in overseeing a major exhibition of iconography for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, under the leadership of Michel Vovelle. This undertaking was followed in 1998 by a key role in the official and academic celebration of the sesquicentenary of the Revolution of 1848. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Haut Comité des célébrations nationales, and he contributes to official websites of the Republic, including an excellent article in 2001 on “La République française et ses symboles” for the website of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, tracing the changing official


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symbolic weight of Marianne, the tricolor, and the Marseillaise. His contributions have been recognized by the awards of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (1989), Officier des Palmes académiques (1994), Officier des Arts et Lettres (1995), and Officier de la Légion d’honneur (1998). In 1997, Agulhon published Coup d’état et République (Coup d’état and Republic), and in 2000, De Gaulle: histoire, symbole, mythe (De Gaulle: History, Symbol, Myth) in which, while admitting that de Gaulle had never fascinated him personally, he attempts to come to terms with someone who has come to have mythical status, much as Napoleon or Jeanne d’Arc. Indeed, it was the direct election of de Gaulle as President of the Republic in 1962 – the first since that of Louis-Napoleon in 1848 and only the second in French history – that was to prove a turning point in the replacement of Marianne as the embodiment of the Republic by a series of male incumbents. While Agulhon came to a different appreciation of de Gaulle’s place in the history of French republicanism, however, he has never wavered in his conviction that the insurgents of 1851 must also be remembered among those who have built and defended the republican values that Agulhon has nourished. In Agulhon’s words, “I’ve tended to revise the image of de Gaulle and the Republic because I am one of those best-placed to know the difference between the terrorist aftermath of the real Coup of 2 December and the easygoing aftermath of the ‘Coup’ of 13 May” (personal communication). Shortly after completing his doctoral thesis, Agulhon was heavily involved in the “movements” of 1968 as an organizer of the higher education section within the national education union, as much from opposition to Gaullism as from commitment to university reform. He had broken with the PCF (French Communist Party) in 1960, finding it too rigid, its approach to history too narrow, and its politics unjustified by the repressive history of non-capitalist societies. While Agulhon’s own politics departed from those of his youth, however, he later made a spirited defense of Albert Soboul, so often seen as the personification of a Jacobin-Leninist schema of the French Revolution that smacked to its critics of both rigidity and communist orthodoxy. In his 1982 obituary of Soboul in Le Monde, he criticized the anti-communist motivations of those who had attacked Soboul on the grounds that his work amounted to a justification of communist dictatorship (see “L’historien des sans-culottes,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 249 [1982]). In Agulhon’s autobiographical contribution (“Vu des coulisses”) to Essais d’égohistoire, edited by Pierre Nora and published in 1987, he describes himself as a moderate member of the Parti socialiste, or a social democrat, increasingly interested in national history and the history of symbolism. Agulhon’s self-reflection has many of the characteristics of his historical writing: a remarkable lucidity and readability, modesty, an eye for the telling detail, and intellectual honesty. Certainly, he has been one of the most significant and talented historians of his generation. Since the completion of his magisterial study of the Var in 1970, his work has been characterized by two broad and connected concerns. The first has

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been a major project to survey and interpret the role of the symbolic in popular as well as official representations of political regimes and values. As a corollary, the second has been to assume a responsibility or, in some sense, a civic duty, as an official historian of the French Republic. Agulhon has himself described his decision to join the PCF in 1946 as the result of his conviction that it represented the “purest” values of the republic and patriotic obligations. By the 1960s he no longer held this conviction, but his passionate commitment to the civic value of a healthy polity has endured.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Maurice Agulhon Histoire de la Provence, by Maurice Agulhon, Raoul Busquet, and V. L. Bourilly (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). La Sociabilité méridionale: confréries et associations dans la vie collective en Provence orientale à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: La Pensée Universitaire, 1966); republished as Pénitents et francs-maçons de l’ancienne Provence: essai sur la sociabilité méridionale (Paris: Fayard, 1968). La République au village: les populations du Var de la Révolution à la Seconde République (Paris: Plon, 1970); translated by Janet Lloyd as The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). La Vie sociale en Provence intérieure au lendemain de la Révolution (Paris: Société des études Robespierristes, 1970). Une ville ouvrière au temps du socialisme utopique: Toulon de 1815 à 1851 (Paris: Mouton, 1970). CRS à Marseille: la police au service du peuple (1944–1947), by Maurice Agulhon and Fernand Barrat (Paris: A. Colin, 1971). La France de 1914 à 1940, by Maurice Agulhon and André Nouschi (Paris: Nathan, 1971). La France de 1940 à nos jours, by Maurice Agulhon and André Nouschi (Paris: Nathan, 1972). 1848 ou l’apprentissage de la République, 1848–1852 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973); translated by Janet Lloyd as The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Apogée et crise de la civilisation paysanne, 1789–1914 by Maurice Agulhon, Gabriel Désert, and Robert Specklin, vol. 3 of Histoire de la France rurale, edited by Georges Duby and Armand Wallon, 4 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1976). Le Cercle dans la France bourgeoise, 1810–1848: étude d’une mutation de sociabilité (Paris: A. Colin, 1977). Marianne au combat: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); translated by Janet Lloyd as Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Les Associations au village, by Maurice Agulhon and Maryvonne Bodiguel (Le Garadou: Actes Sud, 1981). Histoire vagabonde, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988–96).


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Marianne au pouvoir: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1880 à 1914 (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). La République: de Jules Ferry à François Mitterrand, 1880 à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990); translated by Antonia Nevill as The French Republic 1879–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Coup d’état et République (Paris: Presses des Sciences Po, 1997). De Gaulle: histoire, symbole, mythe (Paris: Plon, 2000). Marianne dans la cité, by Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Bonte (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 2001). Les Métamorphoses de Marianne: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1914 à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). Histoire et politique à gauche: réflexions et témoignages (Paris: Perrin, 2005). La République en représentations: autour de l’oeuvre de Maurice Agulhon, by Maurice Agulhon, Annette Becker, Evelyne Cohen, et al. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006). Les Mots de la République, with the assistance of de Patrick Cabanel, Georges Mailhos, and Rémy Pech (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2007).

Edited Works Les Quarante-huitards, edited by Maurice Agulhon (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1975). Histoire de Toulon, edited by Maurice Agulhon (Toulouse: Privat, 1980). L’Impossible prison: recherches sur le système pénitentiaire au XIXe siècle, edited by Maurice Agulhon, Michelle Perrot, and Michel Foucault (Paris: Seuil, 1980). La Ville de l’âge industriel, edited by Maurice Agulhon, vol. 4 of Histoire de la France urbaine, edited by Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1983). Les Maires en France, du Consulat à nos jours, edited by Maurice Agulhon, L. Girard, M. Robert, and W. Serman (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1986). L’Election du Chef de l’Etat en France de Hugues Capet à nos jours: entretiens d’Auxerre 1987, edited by Maurice Agulhon, Léo Hamon, and Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1988). La Révolution vécue par la province: mentalités et expressions populaires en Occitanie: actes du colloque réuni à Puylaurens les 15 et 16 avril 1989, edited by Maurice Agulhon (Béziers: Centre international de documentation occitane, 1990). Le XIXe siècle et la Révolution française, edited by Maurice Agulhon (Paris: Créaphis, 1992). Marianne: les visages de la République, edited by Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Bonte (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Nation, patrie, patriotisme, edited by Maurice Agulhon and Philippe Oulmont (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1993). Flora Tristan, George Sand, Pauline Roland: les femmes et l’invention d’une nouvelle morale, 1830–1848, edited by Maurice Agulhon (Paris: Créaphis, 1994). La Terre et la cité: mélanges offerts à Philippe Vigier, edited by Maurice Agulhon, Alain Faure, Alain Plessis, and Jean-Claude Farcy (Paris: Créaphis, 1994). Cultures et folklores républicains, edited by Maurice Agulhon (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1995). Les Révolutions de 1848 et l’Europe des images, edited by Maurice Agulhon, 2 vols. (Paris: Edition de l’Assemblée nationale, 1998).

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La France d’un siècle à l’autre 1914–2000: dictionnaire critique, edited by Maurice Agulhon, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1999).

References Agulhon, Maurice, “Histoire contemporaine et engagements politiques,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 34 (2004): 273–91. Agulhon, Maurice, “Vu des coulisses,” in Essais d’égo-histoire, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 20–3. Charle, Christophe, et al. (eds.), La France démocratique: combats, mentalités, symboles: mélanges offerts à Maurice Agulhon (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998). Popkin, Jeremy D., “Ego-histoire and beyond: contemporary French historianautobiographers,” French Historical Studies, 19 (1996): 1139–67.

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Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) Patrick H. Hutton

Philippe Ariès must be counted among the most original French historians of the twentieth century. Building on his early work in historical demography, he became a pioneering scholar in the new cultural history, a focus of historians’ interest from the 1960s to the 1980s. Dubbed the “history of mentalities,” this field dealt with the attitudes of ordinary people toward their everyday lives rather than with the philosophical and literary interests of high culture. Ariès first gained widespread scholarly attention for his L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960; translated as Centuries of Childhood, 1962), a study of the changing relationship between parents and their children from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century. But his overall contribution to cultural history, and one might say to the cultural understanding of the late twentieth century, was to place the topic of family within a broad historical narrative that traced the emergence of a distinction between public and private life over the course of the modern era. A prolific author, he published several books and numerous essays on such topics as the traditions of old France, regional variations in French population patterns, the development of French historical writing, changing attitudes toward marriage and human sexuality, the evolution of attitudes toward death and bereavement, and, more generally, the changing relationship between public and private life. A Catholic, a traditionalist, and a royalist, he held fast to old-fashioned values, and in his scholarship sought to show their enduring meaning in the contemporary age. Among the pre-eminent French historians of the late twentieth century, he stands nearly alone in his conservative political convictions. Beyond his historical scholarship, Ariès engaged in a variety of related intellectual activities. He was an editorial reader for a major publishing house and a journalist for right-wing newspapers and periodicals on topics of contemporary

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political and cultural concern. Never a part of the academic establishment, he pursued his vocation as an historian independently until late in life. He taught only briefly, once during the war years at a Vichy-sponsored training college, and late in life as an instructor at a French graduate college in the social sciences. Though history was his greatest love, he carried on his scholarly endeavor as a sideline to his career as a professional documentalist in international commerce in tropical fruit and agriculture. Ariès was born in Blois in the Loire valley on the eve of World War I, though he was raised and lived most of his life in Paris. He hailed from a well-to-do bourgeois family, with ancestral roots in the French West Indies and extensive kin ties in southwestern France. The family had sentimental attachments to France’s royalist heritage, which meant not only reverence for its kings but also for the traditional culture that held sway before the French Revolution. Despite his growing intellectual maturity and his exposure to a wider, more diverse world in his life and work, Ariès always understood himself to be rooted in the traditions of this family heritage. Its mores inspired his interests as an historian, even as he gained a critical perspective on them. As a child, Ariès was educated in parochial schools before attending the Lycée Janson de Sailly near his home in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement. Though intellectually precocious, he rebelled as an adolescent against his father’s plan that he follow in his footsteps into a career in engineering or technology. An electrical engineer, his father sent him to work for a year as an apprentice accountant in an electrical company in Les Andelys, a provincial town in Normandy. In time, the father acceded to his son’s wishes, and permitted him to indulge his passion for history, first at the University of Grenoble for a year, then at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned his licence in history and geography. In 1936, he was awarded his diplôme d’études supérieures for a thesis on one of the judicial corps of Paris in the sixteenth century. Surrounded by friends who shared his intellectual and political convictions, taught by professors whom he admired, active in the politics of the student wing of the royalist Action française, he thrived in the intellectual milieu of the Left Bank in the late 1930s. His articles for L’Etudiant français, the student newspaper of this royalist organization, are interesting for the themes he addresses: a critique of republican politics in light of its Jacobin origins in the French Revolution, an analysis of the shortcomings of Marxist philosophy, commentary on state relations in central Europe in light of Hitler’s aggression, an indictment of the teaching of history in French higher education, and praise for the intellectual leadership of his royalist mentor, Charles Maurras. Ariès anticipated a career in university teaching, though he stumbled at the hurdles he was expected to leap. He failed his qualifying exam (agrégation) in 1939 and the war with Germany disrupted his plan to try again. He spent nearly a year in officer candidate training without seeing combat. Demobilized with the armistice of June 1940, he returned to Paris, where he spent a year of solitary study at the Bibliothèque nationale in preparation for a second try at his qualifying exam.

Philippe Ariès (1914–1984)

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That scholarly refuge, he later remarked, was crucial in his intellectual formation, for there he discovered the new scholarship in social history by the Annales historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and the sociology of the Durkheim school, reading ignored in the right-wing intellectual circles in which he had moved as a student during the 1930s. He failed his exam for the second time in 1941, perhaps because, as one close friend suggested, his ideas did not conform to the expected responses to the questions asked. At loose ends, he signed on as an instructor at the Vichy sponsored Ecole nationale des cadres supérieurs at La Chapelle-enServal, north of Paris. This school trained leaders and teachers for the youth camps (chantiers de la jeunesse) through which Vichy’s educational authorities hoped to promote the physical, moral, and civic rehabilitation of French adolescents and young adults. This experience, too, was crucial in his intellectual development. Sympathetic to the proposal of Philippe Pétain, Vichy’s head of state, for a return to the ways of a more traditional French society, Ariès composed Les Traditions sociales dans les pays de France (Social Traditions in the Regions of France, 1943), a long essay dealing with regional variations in the popular traditions of old France, as a basis for thinking about a federalist alternative to the centralized republic. Initially enthusiastic about the educational experiment at La Chapelle, Ariès in time grew disillusioned with its collaborationist leaders, who openly advocated solidarity with Germany in the remaking of Europe and considerable sympathy for National Socialism. The directors of its faculty, like Vichy’s educational spokesmen at large, contended that France’s humiliating military defeat could be attributed to the moral and physical degeneration of its youth, and proposed as a remedy a policy to build large families. As an instructor, Ariès was expected to advance these ideas. But his conversations with the young men who were his students, mostly from the working-class suburbs of Paris, led him to question that official viewpoint. They told anxious tales of problems in their love lives – of straying into illicit relationships, of unintentionally impregnating their lovers, and of stealthy visits to the “angel makers” who performed illegal abortions through painful and dangerous procedures of curettage. Their personal crises, Ariès concluded, betrayed an ignorance of the basic facts and responsibilities of sexual behavior, whose remedy was not moral reinforcement but sexual enlightenment. He was struck, too, by his students’ ignorance of their own ancestry, in contrast with his own intense interest in and intimate knowledge of his own. He recognized that this existential realm of the love lives of adolescents and young adults – the love affairs through which children, wanted and unwanted, were engendered – was enshrouded in a veil of secrecy, and far more complicated than Vichyite pieties would allow. Such discussions set him thinking about ways to lift the veil from this hidden history of the adventures and misadventures of the young: their ways of courting, conceiving, and childbearing in the making of families. His curiosity marked the point of departure for his inquiry into this unknown sphere of cultural history that he would investigate for the rest of his life.

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Leaving the Ecole nationale des cadres at La Chapelle, in disarray anyway by the summer of 1942, Ariès was fortunate to find a position as an archivist in the Institut des fruits et agrumes coloniaux, a documentation center in Paris for commerce in tropical fruit and agriculture in France’s overseas empire. Given that such commerce had virtually ceased in the midst of the war, he found his work less than taxing, and so used his free time to begin his research in historical demography as a systematic way to approach the problems of licit and illicit love with which his students at La Chapelle had acquainted him. While he may initially have seen his job as a temporary expedient, he stayed with this professional work after the war, as the organization grew and was gradually transformed into a quasipublic institution for the oversight of international trade in agricultural produce, with connections to similar organizations in other countries and to agencies of the United Nations. Over the course of his thirty-seven-year career with this organization through its various transformations, he became an innovator in the development of data banks cataloging global information in tropical fruit and agriculture. Ironically, he had ended up in a technical profession not unlike that of his father. The traditionalist scholar of old France in his private life, he doubled in his public life as a pioneer in the implementation of the new electronic technologies for expanding and consolidating statistical data useful for tracking commerce in this sphere. He traveled around the world for his work, and he held several important executive positions in the professional associations in this field. During the last years of the war and its immediate aftermath, Ariès quietly carried on his research into the demographic issues raised in the debates under Vichy about the declining French population during the modern era. The plan of Vichy’s leaders to promote large families survived the regime to become the social policy of the Fourth Republic, still based on the assumption that a rising birth rate would improve the health and quality of the nation’s biological stock. In his research during these years of transition between regimes, however, Ariès arrived at the more practical, neo-Malthusian conclusion that the diminishing size of the French family over the course of the modern era owed as much to psychological as to biological factors. From the seventeenth century, he contended, married couples, initially among the well-born but eventually among the humble as well, made conscious decisions to practice birth control as a means of lessening the burdens of unwanted children. From this perspective, a diminishing birth rate signaled a hidden cultural revolution in attitudes extending into modern times through which spouses agreed in the privacy of their conjugal relations to assume greater control over their own future through family planning. A secret compact, this hidden revolution in sexual practices implied a larger cultural revolution in sentiment, distinctly modern in its commitment not only to the mastery of techniques for managing childbearing, but also to the quest for personal fulfillment for themselves in their conjugal relations. This rising imperative for the “pursuit of happiness” in married life prepared the way for the emergence of the affectionate family, which over time came to value the love of spouses for one another


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and of parents for their children over a fatalistic acceptance of procreation as a mysterious expression of fortunes beyond human control. Ariès’s research in historical demography attracted the interest of researchers at the Institut national d’études démographiques, a public research organization founded under Vichy by the eugenicist Alexis Carrel, but reconstituted after the war by Alfred Sauvy and a new team of professional demographers. Here, Ariès built his first professional associations in this newly emerging field of study. He published three articles in Population, the learned journal of the Institut, and he wove the strands of his research together into a book, Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie depuis le XVIIIe siècle (History of French Populations and their Attitudes toward Life since the Eighteenth Century, 1948). Therein he staked out a long-range research agenda for investigating the “techniques of life and of death” practiced in French society across the ages. The book, particularly in its conclusions, pointed toward his broader interest in a cultural history of “mentalities,” a term that came into common usage among historians about 1960. During the immediate postwar years, Ariès also wrote a series of essays on French historiography, published in 1954 as Le Temps de l’histoire. Leading with an autobiographical essay describing his own childhood path to an interest in the past, he reconstructed the incipient historiographical traditions that developed out of the local, regional, and religious chronicles of the Middle Ages, eventually revised and fitted into a unified narrative of France’s national history during the seventeenth-century age of absolutism. He then explicated the ideological and scholarly variations with which French historiography had been pursued from the French Revolution into the modern era. For his own times of the mid-twentieth century, he was much taken with the historical significance of World War II for revealing the global scope of the forces shaping history in and beyond French frontiers. As for contemporary scholarship, he noted the methodological innovations in the new social history practiced by the Annales school of historical writing, while reiterating his adversarial position to Marxist historical scholarship. At the time, Le Temps de l’histoire did not receive much critical attention, though it did win the admiration of a few eminent scholars for its bold sketch of historiographical trends and its reflections on changing conceptions of historical time. Some of its appeal, one critic noted, lay in the charm of the autobiographical references with which he introduced the subject, a style he carried into his late-life writings on historiography. Recently, the merits of this book have been rediscovered, and it was reissued in a slightly revised posthumous edition by Ariès’s friend and younger colleague, Roger Chartier, in 1986. In sorting out the historical and ideological contexts of the varied traditions of French historical scholarship, Ariès’s Le Temps de l’histoire presaged the theoretical interest of the late twentieth century in the rhetorical modes of historical writing. Encouraged by his old friends from the prewar Action française, Ariès returned to political journalism after the war. He helped edit two right-wing newspapers,

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Paroles françaises (1945–6) and La Nation française (1955–66), for which he wrote on social and cultural topics of contemporary interest, among them articles dealing with the contemporary family, material culture in the affluent postwar society, and the trend toward large organizations in business and government. During the early 1960s, he was reluctantly drawn into the heated debate over President Charles de Gaulle’s decision to grant the overseas territory of Algeria its independence. Ariès was fatalistic about its cession, and in his newspaper articles tried to find a mediating position by criticizing the French army’s brutal reprisals against French resisters rather than de Gaulle’s decision itself. His stance pleased no one. He ran afoul of the government’s censors anyway, and his old friends from student days in the Action française, intransigent in their insistence that Algeria remain a French territory, quarreled with him bitterly over the issue. The Algerian crisis seems to have resurrected troubled memories of their unresolved quarrels dating from the war years over whether they should have supported the Vichy regime. Falling out with his friends for a time over this unhappy episode, Ariès decided to retire from active political journalism in 1966. All the while, Ariès had been deepening his involvement in serious historical scholarship, and by the mid-1960s he was gaining scholarly recognition. His demographic findings about changing patterns of fertility had led him into the study of a broader history of the culture of family life, with particular attention to the parent/child relationship. This research, pursued through the 1950s, became the basis of the book for which he was to become most famous, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960). The book aroused much interest in France, and perhaps more in the United States over the course of the 1960s, not only among historians but also among sociologists, psychologists, and practitioners in the helping professions generally. Its appearance coincided with much publicized popular concern about a contemporary crisis in the identity of the family, which, in growing smaller over the course of a century, seemed to some social critics to have become overly permissive toward its children and vulnerable to the influence of social and cultural forces beyond its control. The problem of wayward adolescents loomed large in public anxieties. By tracing the transformation of the family over some five hundred years, Ariès placed such worries in historical perspective. He showed how the family was a dynamic institution that had changed with the times, and that its long-term evolution had been away from a loosely connected clan vaunting the prestige and power of its family name in local politics toward a smaller and more intimate unit in a private sphere apart from public life. This emerging family was one of deepening personal affection – of spouses for one another and of parents for children. In its newfound solicitude for its children, the family had become a modernizing institution, embodying humankind’s growing confidence in its ability to shape its own destiny. It is worth noting that the appearance of Ariès’s book also coincided with a more open discussion about family planning and abortion rights spurred by the demand of militant feminists for


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reproductive freedom. Though Ariès traces private discussion about the use of contraceptive practices back to the seventeenth century, the sale of contraceptive devices was not legalized in France until 1967 (Neuwirth law). Abortion became legal in 1974 (Veil law). Few readers of L’Enfant et la vie familiale, whether professional or lay, were aware of its groundwork in Ariès’s earlier demographic research into changing attitudes toward sexuality and spousal relations. They were startled rather by his proposition that the idea of childhood is a comparatively recent invention. In the extended kin networks of traditional society, Ariès explained, children resided on the margins of family life and their upbringing was often subject to benign neglect. In the Middle Ages, there was as yet little sense of childhood as a special estate in life, with its particular mindset and needs. Children, therefore, were shown no particular attention in family life for being children. Only gradually over the centuries of the early modern era did the personal development of the child come to be consciously nurtured and only then did the child become the center of the family’s attention. Critics questioned whether so basic a bond as the parent/child relationship could have changed much over the ages. Ariès conceded that the love bond of parents for their children is as old as the species. But in a point he might have articulated more clearly, he distinguished the perennial love of parents for their children in the immediacy of their present lives from an historically emerging devotion to their future well-being, a notion of care intimately tied to the modern idea of life as a developmental process. The idea of personal development implied self-mastery, fitting into the constellation of attitudes that identified modernity with humankind’s aspiration for enlightened control over its own future. His viewpoint was close to that of the psychologist Erik Erikson, who about the same time proposed a psychogenetic model of life-long psychological growth. Ariès’s complement to Erikson’s ego-psychology was to explain the historical context in which this conception had been elaborated over several centuries, as new stages of development were added over time to an ontogenetic model of growing complexity. If childhood was the discovery of the early modern era, “youth” as a stage of life was identified during the late eighteenth century, “adolescence” during the late nineteenth century, and “middle age” during the mid-twentieth. Thus Ariès, sometimes perceived to be a mere sentimentalist for the vanishing family of traditional kin networks, was in fact the historian who traced the route traveled by the emerging modern family, reconceived as a nuclear unit of affection. In its reception by readers, L’Enfant et la vie familiale has had a long and varied life of its own. It has been criticized for its focus on well-born families, for its sweeping hypotheses about long-range trends, and, most recently, for its presupposition about a hidden revolution in sentiment in the early modern era that permitted a new conception of family relations. Such criticisms notwithstanding, the book at the turn of the twenty-first century remained the point of departure

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for the burgeoning scholarship on family and childhood. Whereas there was surprisingly little historical attention to the topic before the appearance of Ariès’s book, research on it has since become a mainstay of cultural history. In his research during the 1960s, Ariès moved to the other side of the agenda he had staked out in his early work in historical demography – the cultural attitudes attending declining death rates during the modern era. An American scholar, Orest Ranum, invited him to give a series of lectures on the subject at The Johns Hopkins University in 1973, and these became the basis of his pilot study, Western Attitudes toward Death (1974). Thanks to a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC in 1976, he was able to elaborate on his thesis in greater detail in L’Homme devant la mort (1977). As in his earlier work on the stages of attitudes toward the life-cycle, he identified corresponding stages in attitudes about death, though each successive stage pointed toward deepening distress about coming to terms with its reality. His overriding point was that attitudes toward death, sad but accepted with resignation within the social rituals of the Middle Ages, became in modern times burdened with more emotional apprehension, evinced in the nineteenth century by the introduction of more intense and prolonged rituals of grieving over departed loved ones and more elaborate grave statuary with which to commemorate them. As for his own twentieth century, he noted the difficulties of mourning at all. Labeling this most recent stage in the evolution of such attitudes “forbidden death,” he contended that the inability to mourn in the present age signified a denial of death’s reality, in part because of rising expectations of earthy satisfactions, in part because of the weakening of consoling traditions and family solidarities. Ariès’s interpretation of this topic was sharpened by his running dialogue with a friendly adversary, the historian Michel Vovelle, over the course of the 1970s. A student of the French Revolutionary tradition with left-wing political sympathies, Vovelle, too, had gravitated to the new history of mentalities and more particularly to the topic of death and mourning. Their debate led them into the larger issue of the meaning of endings, or, to put it more philosophically, of the finitude of life as a precondition for any attempt to explain human destiny. Though they disagreed about the meaning of long-range trends in mourning practices, they agreed upon the diminished expectations of death as a life passage in the present age, the denouement of a long-range descent from the medieval faith in the prospect of otherworldly transcendence. By the mid-1970s, Ariès had become an intellectual celebrity. He participated frequently on radio and television panels to discuss recent research in cultural history and so became well known to a public beyond academic circles. He lectured widely in North America and Europe. While French scholars of his own age had until then largely ignored his work, a younger generation of historians affiliated with the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales was taken with the fresh interpretations he brought to scholarship in cultural history. In 1978, he was elected to the faculty of that institution, renowned for its close identification with


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Annales historiography and for its role as a forum for interchange with visiting scholars from around the world. In this setting, Ariès for the first time engaged in collaborative research projects. He contributed essays on historiography to handbooks and anthologies on historical method. As an instructor there until 1982, he offered a seminar on the history of attitudes toward sexuality, and edited an anthology on the subject, including contributions from Paul Veyne and Michel Foucault. He also had a close working relationship with the social historian Arlette Farge, who shared his interest in the history of everyday life in urban environments. Occasionally, Ariès wrote articles on the contemporary family, with particular attention to the “dethroning” of the child from the regal place it had held in the affections of the nineteenth-century family, and to the blurring of the line between cohabitation and marriage. Ariès also used his network of colleagues in Europe and America to launch an ambitious project on the history of private life. He was invited to study at the Wissenschaftskolleg in West Berlin, and took up residence there during the spring semester of 1983 to prepare a Franco-German colloquium on the new cultural history that he was scheduled to direct in June. But Primerose, his wife of thirtyfive years, was terminally ill, and he had physical ailments of his own with which to deal. They were obliged to cut short their sojourn, though Philippe returned to preside over the proceedings of the colloquium itself. The previous year, the Ariès had moved from their home in the suburbs of Paris to an apartment in Toulouse, Primerose’s hometown, to which she wanted to return to die. They suffered physically and, close friends allow, spiritually during this last year of their lives. Primerose died in the summer of 1983. Philippe followed six months later in February 1984. Ariès’s unfinished editorial work on the five-volume Histoire de la vie privée (1985–9) was carried to completion by his colleagues Georges Duby, Roger Chartier, and Paul Veyne, and was published in both French and American editions beginning in 1985. Chartier also edited a revised edition of Ariès’s Le Temps de l’histoire (1986) and a mélange of Ariès’s essays from across his life as Essais de mémoire (1993). Jeannine Verdès-Leroux prepared a critical edition of his newspaper articles in La Nation française as Le Présent quotidien (1997). Ariès’s legacy was to bequeath to French historical scholarship a varied body of work that was to have a stimulating effect on research in cultural history both in France and abroad during the late twentieth century. In an intellectual milieu dominated by historians with liberal and socialist convictions, he offered an intelligent conservative counterpoint. Social history at mid-century in France had been strongly oriented toward problems of social stratification and class conflict. Reading Ariès’s work reveals his pivotal role in directing the cultural history written from the 1960s to the 1980s toward issues that had been prominent in right-wing thought during the 1930s: popular culture, tradition, regionalism, and especially the family. In this sense, Ariès acted as a mediator between the royalist tradition from which he hailed and the cosmopolitan intellectual community in

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which he wrote and taught during his mature years by putting the ideas and attitudes – one might say the collective mentality – of that tradition in historical perspective. With bold strokes, he offered a new historical perspective on a royalist tradition, which, despite its association with Vichy’s tarnished politics, contained what he believed to be authentic in the popular culture of old France. Ariès is of interest not only as an original historian but also as a leading intellectual in late twentieth-century France. In his life style and intellectual accomplishments, he is closer to the model of the nineteenth-century man of letters than he is to the twentieth-century university professor. In some ways, he emulated the genteel and old-fashioned essayist and amateur historian Daniel Halévy, with whom he became acquainted during the Vichy years and to whom he looked as an older friend and mentor over the following decades. In this respect, Ariès’s autobiographical writings, given in lengthy interviews, provide insight into his self-conception, particularly the one with Michel Winock, published in 1980 as Un historien du dimanche. Profoundly loyal to his family, the friends of his youth, and, more broadly, to his old-fashioned heritage, he was nonetheless keenly attuned to the changing realities of the present age and eager to put them into historical perspective. His perception of the interplay between past and present was the basis of the intuition that led him into unexplored realms of historical research. He preferred to approach history from a present-minded perspective. To understand the present historically, he argued, one must descend into the past with an eye to its differences from the present. In such a conception of historical time, he challenged the underlying assumption of a good deal of left-wing historical scholarship, which tacitly privileged expectations of the future and looked to the past to identify events and trends that augured their fulfillment. As an intellectual dedicated to formulating a critical perspective on his own times, Ariès might be compared to the nineteenth-century English political philosopher John Stuart Mill. Both were conspicuous for their restless, incessant, intellectual activity. Both were dedicated professionals in practical affairs with only their spare time to devote to intellectual inquiry. Both wrote serious journalistic commentary on the political issues of the day, while remaining for the most part on the margins of political life. Both sought to learn from their times, but conceded the limits of historical understanding set by that very context. Upon the death of Ariès, the historian Raoul Girardet, his friend since university days, commented on the integrity of Ariès’s lifelong pursuit of his vision of history, through which he grew into the intellectual stature to which he aspired despite the many obstacles that stood in his way.

References and Further Reading Papers of Philippe Ariès Archives Ariès, Archives de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.


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Selected Books by Philippe Ariès Les Traditions sociales dans les pays de France (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle France, 1943). Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie depuis le XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions du Self, 1948; rev. edn., Paris: Seuil, 1979). Le Temps de l’histoire (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1954); re-edited by Roger Chartier (Paris: Seuil, 1986). L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon, 1960; rev. edn., Paris: Seuil, 1973); translated by Robert Baldick as Centuries of Childhood (New York: Random House, 1962). Western Attitudes toward Death, translated by Patricia Ranum (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); revised and enlarged as Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1975). L’Homme devant la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1977); translated by Helen Weaver as The Hour of our Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Les Jeux à la Renaissance, edited by Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982). Sexualités occidentales, edited by Philippe Ariès and André Béjin (Paris: Seuil, 1982); translated by Anthony Forster as Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). Images de l’homme devant la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1983); translated by Janet Lloyd as Images of Man and Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Histoire de la vie privée, edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1985–9); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as A History of Private Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–9). Essais de mémoire, edited by Roger Chartier (Paris: Seuil, 1993). Le Présent quotidien, 1955–1966, edited by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

Interviews Anon., “Confessions d’un anarchiste de droite,” Contrepoint, 16 (1974): 87–99; reprinted in La Droite aujourd’hui, edited by Jean-Pierre Apparu (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979), pp. 107–14. Ariès, Philippe, Un historien du dimanche, edited by Michel Winock (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Burguière, André, “La singulière histoire de Philippe Ariès,” Le Nouvel Observateur, February 20, 1978.

References Chartier, Roger, “L’amitié de l’histoire,” preface to Le Temps de l’histoire by Philippe Ariès (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 9–30. Gros, Guillaume, Philippe Ariès, un traditionaliste non-conformiste (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008).

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Hutton, Patrick H., Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Somalvico, Bruno, “Bibliographie de Philippe Ariès,” in Essais de mémoire by Philippe Ariès, edited by Roger Chartier (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 363–72. Verdès-Leroux, Jeannine, “La ‘fidélité inventive’ de Philippe Ariès,” preface to Le Présent quotidien by Philippe Ariès, edited by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux (Paris: Seuil, 1997), pp. 7–38.

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Jacques Berque (1910–1995) James Whidden

In twentieth-century France, Jacques Augustin Berque was a peerless expert on Arab society, language, and culture. His histories included important works on the Arab world through the classical and medieval periods, as well as some very influential works on the issues of colonization and decolonization in the modern period. His histories were translated into several languages, including English, and they had a profound impact on historical scholarship in Europe and America, as well as in the Middle East and North Africa. The trend in French scholarship during the first half of the twentieth century had been to either justify French colonization as a necessary “civilizing mission” or decry the destructive impact of colonization upon the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa. In this type of scholarship, Arabs were either viewed as a less advanced people or else as helpless victims of a triumphant France. Berque, however, emphasized the strengths and richness of the Arab cultural heritage at a time when opinion on that heritage was sharply divided in France and elsewhere. Moreover, Berque immersed himself in that heritage through an understanding of the terrain, society, and culture of the Arabs. As a result, he gained the reputation of being a sympathetic observer of Arab and Muslim society. In his works, Berque argued that Islam was central to any understanding of the history and culture of the Middle East and North Africa. In particular, Berque described how Islamic culture responded to modern change during the colonial era, not by rejecting modernity, but by transforming and renewing itself. Berque was born on June 4, 1910 in Molière, Algeria, which was then a colony of France. In his memoirs, Mémoires des deux rives (Memories of Two Shores), published in 1989, Berque recalled that colonial Algeria was French in name only because the so-called French society was a multinational community wherein

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Arabic, French, and Spanish were spoken interchangeably. Berque’s father, Augustin Berque, was a second-generation colon (settler), who had attained a high position in the French imperial service. His mother, Florentine (Migon) Berque, was of Spanish descent, belonging to one of the petit blancs (“little” or poor whites) who had settled and farmed rural Algeria in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although Augustin Berque was the director of a “mixed commune” (a colonial district composed of an Algerian majority and a French minority), he was not a typical colon. The colons, mostly French, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese nationals, showed little regard or respect for the majority of the indigenous Muslim population of Algeria. Augustin Berque was an exception insofar as he developed an expertise in Islamic law, as well as some knowledge of Arabic. Some of Berque’s earliest memories were of distinguished Muslim legal authorities discussing legal issues with his father at the headquarters of the mixed commune, which was located in the town of Frenda where Berque grew up. At the same time, Berque easily mixed with local Algerian children and developed a fluency in the local Arab dialect and culture. In addition, his father supervised his son’s education to ensure that he was formally educated in classical Arabic at a local Qur’ānic school. As a result, Berque was exposed to Islamic teachings at a young age. Berque thus lived a dual life as a youth in colonial Algeria. While attuned to the culture of Algerian society, he was nevertheless a colon, a member of an elite, French class within Algeria’s colonial society. Alongside his training in Arabic, he received a classical education in the humanities through secondary schooling in Oran and Algiers. Berque recalled in his memoirs that, in contrast to Frenda, the prejudices and inequities of colonial society were much more blatant in Algiers. As an example, although the Algerians composed the vast majority of the population, they represented only a tiny fraction of Berque’s cohort at the University of Algiers. Berque recalled in his memoirs that embarking for France at the age of twenty meant leaving the brightness of the Mediterranean’s southern shore and the diversity of colonial society for the comparatively dismal and austere Paris. Although he had already gained distinction as a scholar in national competitions, Berque was unhappy at the Sorbonne. He abruptly quit his studies after a year and a half and returned to Algeria. The decision was characteristic of Berque, who empathized with Arab and Muslim culture against his French, academic upbringing. Although his father objected to his son’s decision, Berque was in fact following his father’s example when, shortly afterward, he chose a career in the colonial administration. Indeed, Augustin Berque arranged for his son to be sent to a remote military post in Algeria, where Berque lived in a tent and traversed the high plateau of Hodna by horseback. Observing North African tribal culture firsthand, Berque began to gather material for his first published article, “Aspect du contrat pastoral à Sidi-Aïssa” (Aspects of pastoral contracts at Sidi-Aissa), which appeared four years later in the prestigious academic journal, Revue africaine (African Review). The observations Berque made in this article established a fundamental principle of Berque’s analysis of North African society: “C’est toujours

Jacques Berque (1910–1995)

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une famille … L’isole n’est ici qu’un aberrannt, être fragmentaire” (“There is always a family … The isolated individual is here only an aberration, a fragmentary being”). In 1934, Berque entered the administration of the French Protectorate in Morocco as an officier des affaires indigène (officer of indigenous affairs), supervising the work of the Moroccan legal system. This position enabled him to begin a study of customary law, which was the subject of a book published in 1936, Les Pactes pastoraux Beni-Meskine: contribution à l’étude des contrats nord-africains (Pastoral Law of the Beni-Meskine: A Contribution to the Study of North African Contractual Law). In 1937, Berque was appointed to the municipal administration of Fez and turned his attention to urban society. Alongside a sociological study of the Qarawiyin mosque in Fez, Berque published “Deux ans d’action artisanale à Fès” (Two years of artisan life in Fez) in 1939. In this article, Berque identified a second principle of North African society: the order of social groups. “Vivre, c’est apparaître comme ensemble. Sur cette vie de Fès, faite de circuits fermés, cercles de négoce, de la famille, du travail, etc.” (“Everyday life takes shape as an entirety. The life of Fez is composed of cliques, circuits of business, of family, of work, etc.”). By employing anthropological observation alongside examination of legal documents, Berque established a method that enabled him to express his deep empathy with Arab society and culture according to the conventions of his classical, academic training. In 1939, Berque enlisted in the French army, only to resume administrative duties in Morocco after the fall of France. He served in rural Morocco between 1940 and 1943 before attaining a position in Rabat as director of education. In this position Berque formed lasting relations with young Moroccan students, who became important members of Morocco’s political establishment after independence in 1956. However, Berque’s relations with the colonial administration rapidly deteriorated between 1943 and 1953. In 1944, Berque submitted a major plan for agrarian reform to the Protectorate. Designed to safeguard the landholdings and improve the legal status of the rural peasantry, the plan was bitterly opposed by the French colonists, who lobbied against and ultimately suppressed the reform. As a result of this, rather than his writings on rural society and economy, Berque was appointed to a remote region of the High Atlas, Imi-n-Tanoute, occupied by the Seksawa tribe. The remainder of Berque’s career as a colonial administrator was spent in the High Atlas where he grew increasingly alienated and critical of the Protectorate’s policy of suppressing Morocco’s national movement for independence. In August 1953, the Protectorate exiled the Moroccan head of state, Sultan Muhammad V, who had thrown his support behind the nationalists. In protest, Berque resigned his position. Yet, it was only later that his disillusion with the French imperial service converted into political support for Moroccan national independence. After leaving Morocco, Berque took employment with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Egypt. As an expert on agrarian reform, he lived in the Egyptian village of Sirs al-Layyan to observe rural life. Egypt was in the midst of revolutionary change, directed by

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Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had come to power in a military coup in 1952. Nasser initiated major reforms in Egpyt, as well as launching a “Third World” alliance of newly independent nations free of Western and Soviet influence. This movement had an impact upon Berque, who was clearly disillusioned with Western policies in Africa and Asia. As Berque said, “Moi, je me tiers-mondisais” (“Me, I became a Third Worldist”). While stationed in the High Atlas, Berque had perfected his method of anthropological and sociological research. The result was his first important book, Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas (Social Structures of the High Atlas), which appeared in 1955. It won him academic recognition, a doctorate, and appointment as professor of the social history of contemporary Islam at the Collège de France in 1956. Berque’s analysis of Morocco’s rural society in this book was comparable to other works of colonial sociology and history. For instance, Robert Montagne’s Les Berberes et le Makhzen au sud du Maroc (The Berbers and the Government in Southern Morocco) was well known as a practical guide to tribal politics in Morocco. However, Berque was critical of the methods and conclusions of Montagne, as well as other prominent French experts on North African society and history. In an article published in 1956, “Cent-vingt-cinq ans de sociologie maghrébine” (One hundred and twenty-five years of North African sociology), Berque showed that Montagne’s emphasis upon tribal forces in North African history meant that he denied North Africa any meaningful contribution to civilization. Likewise, Berque showed that the conclusions of E.-F. Gautier in his Les Siècles obscurs du Maghreb (The Obscure Centuries of the Maghreb) cast blame upon Arab and Islamic invaders for disrupting the pre-Islamic Berber agricultural populations. Gautier contrasted the tribal and nomadic society of the Arabs with the sedentary, village society of the pre-Islamic Berbers. In each case, North Africa compared unfavorably with the West, as represented by France, which, Gautier suggested, had brought about the restoration of a productive agricultural society in the modern period. The writing of history in the colonial context was highly controversial. Colonial historians were concerned with changes occurring in North African society as a result of colonization; namely, to what degree French colonization helped or harmed the North Africans. Given the development of nationalist oppositions to French rule, the historical study of the impact of colonization upon North Africa was a pressing political issue in twentieth-century France. Berque’s writings belonged to a school of thought that was critical of colonial “tribal policy,” as well as the methods of some of his contemporaries, particularly those whose work seemed to be designed to both justify and instruct French policy. In this regard, Berque followed the lead of his father, whose writings had shown that colonization brought fundamental changes to Algerian society. For instance, in his writings, Augustin Berque had shown that land reforms and expropriations, alongside a cash economy, eroded the status of tribal heads and the tribal organization of society. Following a similar analysis, Jacques Berque’s interpretation of the tribe


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in “Cent-vingt-cinq ans de sociologie maghrébine” showed that the tribe did not provide a sure base for French colonial rule because the tribe itself was a much more complex historical phenomenon than previously thought. He argued that the tribe did not have a permanent historical identity based on ancestry and family ties, but that individuals and families forged tribal links only under specific historical circumstances. Consequently, the tribe was an important feature of North Africa’s history, but not a permanent one. Tribes traced their origins to founding fathers, either Arab or Berber, but these genealogical links were often fictitious, invented to give the tribe a sense of permanence that it did not have. In fact, tribes were coalitions formed for practical purposes. Whereas French colonial policies (sometimes referred to as divide-and-rule policies) were based upon the idea that tribes existed in a constant state of hostility, Berque argued that warfare was in practice only one means to negotiate conflicts. Tribal conflicts were driven by practical considerations, such as access to pasturage and water. Thus, external factors such as the environment, rather than ancestral lineage, defined the structure of the tribe. Because the tribe was a response to historical circumstances, the tribe itself was not a permanent social structure, but changed under new historical circumstances, including colonial occupation. Berque made a similar point in his Histoire sociale d’un village égyptien au XXe siècle (The Social History of a Twentieth-century Egyptian Village), published in 1957. As a member of the UNESCO team in Egypt, Berque lived in the Egyptian village of Sirs al-Layyan, where he made firsthand observations on village life and custom. His history of the village demonstrated the importance of the family and the larger social order. Historically, two established families had dominated the village by controlling village quarters, which had a sectarian or communal character. The social hierarchy was reflected in the landscape and architecture of the village; for instance, the grand edifices of the leading families dominated the central boulevard of the village. Examining this social hierarchy as it was reflected in rituals, Berque demonstrated that religious identity in the village quarters solidified ties between upper- and lower-class families. Combining anthropological observation and historical interpretation, Berque thus illustrated a process of modern change. As he said, the Egyptian village was no longer what it was. Although contests between the leading families persisted into the modern era, changes in village life echoed changes at the national level. Architecturally, the village retained its symbolic structures, religious and social, but the periphery of the village expanded into a less-structured zone easily adapted to modern social and economic change. Also, the pressure of overpopulation upon resources and the inroads of modern education altered ritual and custom. Berque’s analysis of the family, social order, and religious ritual indicated that these structures were transformed by the formation of a modern nation-state. Berque’s anthropological method and interpretation had a remarkable impact upon other scholars; for instance, his book Al-Yousî, problèmes de la culture marocaine au XVIIe siècle (Al-Yousi: Problems of Moroccan Culture in the Seventeenth

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Century, 1958) was an important theoretical base for Clifford Geertz’s influential book, Islam Observed (1968). But as a social historian holding one of the most influential posts in Arab and Islamic studies in France, Berque broadened the scope of his historical research in the late 1950s. In an interpretive history, Les Arabes (The Arabs) published in 1959, Berque drew parallels between specific Arab communities that he had observed from an anthropological perspective and the larger trends of Arab and Islamic history. Les Arabes compared the society and architecture of the Egyptian village of Sirs al-Layyan to the ancient Arabian city of Medina, thus indicating enduring patterns in Arab urban culture. From the origins of the Islamic city in Arabia, its focal point had been the mosque or the shrine, which defined the identity of the city or urban quarter. Likewise, as Berque had observed in Fez, urban life was shaped by the important occupational groupings of artisans, merchants, and the religious scholars. Berque’s history of the Arabs thus echoed themes introduced in his earlier writings on North African and Egyptian society. Returning to the theme of the tribe, Berque compared the tribal structures of Yemen to those of Morocco, situating the tribe in a dynamic process that involved both tribal and urban social forces. Berque claimed that the course of Arab history was shaped by the countervailing forces of trade and productivity in the cities against the pastoral tribal societies of the desert and steppe. After the great conquests of the Arabs, the classical, urban civilizations of the Mediterranean world were brought to a new level of brilliance by the Arab caliphate at Baghdad. However, following the argument of the great medieval North African historian Ibn Khaldun, Berque claimed that tribal forces were partly responsible for the collapse of the great Islamic urban civilizations in the medieval period. Les Arabes begins with the sentence, “L’arabisme est une manière d’être” (“Arabism is a state of being”). The line establishes Berque as an historian of the Arab mentality. For him, the nobility of the desert Beduin and the grandeur of the Islamic city symbolized the Arab mentality. Berque, however, argued that tribal and urban forces were reconfigured in the modern era, with Arab culture driven back toward a tribal or ethnic identity against the overwhelming power of the triumphant industrial society of Europe. Berque meant to say that the Arabs had taken refuge in Arab nationalism against a modern industrial society that had taken the form of colonial occupation. Modernity thus created a contradiction within Arab society between the uncompromising nationalists, who rejected the culture of modern Europe, and the reformers, who sought to transform their own societies along modern lines. In this way, Les Arabes was an essay on Arab history and modern change. The essence of Berque’s thought (“Berquisme”) was the interplay between cultural symbols and historical change. This is apparent in one of his most important works, Le Maghreb entre deux guerres (translated as French North Africa: The Maghrib between Two World Wars in 1967), which was published in 1962 just as the French empire in North Africa was coming to a traumatic end. At this historical juncture, Berque considered some of the most important questions confronted by


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the historian of colonialism. What was the character of French colonization? Could the French and North African communities in North Africa ever have been reconciled? If so, when was that opportunity lost? Berque’s assessment took into consideration the perceptions of the colonists as well as the native Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians. Berque divided the book into an introductory assessment of the situation after World War I, juxtaposing the perceptions of the North Africans and the French colonists and thereby evoking, in an impressionistic manner, the mood of the interwar era. Berque also described the colonial economies of North Africa, providing examples of the expansion of colonial commercial farming and the dislocation of rural North African society. He argued that a process of concentrating land and wealth in the hands of big business, which was complete by 1930, resulted in fundamental changes in the structure of North African society. In part, this argument followed a Marxist analysis, with modern economic change transforming North Africa’s pastoral and agrarian society into a proletarian-type of industrial working class. Changes in the structure of society had an impact upon politics and culture: the tribe gave way to the political party as the important political grouping among the North Africans. So, Berque could argue that while the colonial system triumphed on the material level – appropriating the land and resources – it failed to triumph on the spiritual level. Indeed, Berque’s fundamental point was that North African culture responded to the challenge of a modern urban society, while France clung to the structures of the past. Just as the tribe gave way to the modern political party, Islam was transformed from a moral refuge to a more aggressive and assertive political and cultural force. Berque referred to this as the transition “from Islam as refuge to Islam as revolution.” Like the Jacobins of revolutionary France, the Islamic reformers of the early twentieth century developed a political ideology that had meaning for the lower classes, dispossessed of their land and their customary religious and social groupings. In this remarkable narrative, Berque combined analysis of political developments from rival perspectives with a sociological analysis of tribes and villages, as well as the cities of Fez, Tunis, and Algiers. Le Maghreb entre deux guerres thus combined all the elements of Berque’s scholarship, as well as answering the signal historical questions of the day. In sum, Berque suggested that the French failed to confront the social and political realities created by the colonial system in North Africa. Colonialism was wed to a tribal policy, whereas the tribe was no longer the most important social or political institution. Colonialism was committed to a policy of populating the rural countryside with French settlers, whereas the settlers had long since abandoned the rural sector to big business. In political negotiations, France failed to meet the opportunities offered by North African nationalists. As a result, cities across North Africa erupted in political protests and violence. The protests were partly inspired by nationalist calls for political reform, but the violence was also the result of an economic and social crisis created by the colonial system. In these sections of the narrative, Berque used the language of the French

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Revolution, pitting la rue (the street) against a government incapable of meeting the historic challenge. The year 1934 was pivotal, marking the collapse of a proposal for political reform in Algeria, while economic recovery failed to stem the tide of popular protests and violence in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Evocative in its attention to mood and detail, the book also seemed to provide sound answers to the most important historical questions. As a result, the book won resounding praise. Berque followed this book with another influential work, Dépossession du monde (The Dispossession of the World), which pursued themes introduced in Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, but on a global scale. In this book, Berque considered the interrelationship between the West and Islam and between the industrial and the non-industrial world. While the industrial societies of Europe defined the world by the concept of civilization, industrial Europe also controlled large parts of the globe for power and profit. The expansion of European industry and civilization around the globe dispossessed other cultures and peoples of their resources: land. But the Western claim to represent “advanced” civilization in opposition to the “backwardness” of other civilizations also meant that European expansion dispossessed other cultures of their identity. Berque had already described this process and the results in North Africa, but in this book he argued that elsewhere the results were the same. The industrial societies forced the nonindustrial societies to redefine themselves, partly in terms of Western civilization, but also through a rediscovery of their own cultural roots (racines). Berque’s theory was that the revival of ethnic and religious roots, such as the Islamic revival in the Middle East and North Africa, would force the Western industrial societies to redefine themselves also. This theory was developed in another work, published in 1970, L’Orient second (The Second Orient). In each book, Berque emphasized the importance of historical cultural identities; for instance, the continuing vitality of Islam as a source of identity. Yet that did not mean that Muslims rejected the modern world for some sort of return to the past. Rather, Berque argued that cultural identities were remolded in a context created by industrial society, such as the revolutionary Islam described in Le Maghreb entre deux guerres. According to Berque, industrial society was not a stable or permanent condition, but was undergoing a rapid change brought about by the contradictions inherent in its own structure. For Berque, these contradictions were most apparent in the colonial or Third World societies where industrial development had created a dispossessed majority driven from their pre-industrial social groupings. According to Berque, industrial society failed to provide an alternative identity for these dispossessed peoples, and as a result revolutions erupted against the colonial powers behind the banner of nationalism. In this way, Berque believed that the condition of the colonized and Third World peoples represented a universal condition of alienation brought upon individuals by industrial development. Ultimately, his critique of industrial society was that it had failed to achieve its grand “civilizing mission” to enlighten the world. Just as in Le Maghreb entre deux guerres Berque had argued that France failed


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to represent the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity in North Africa, in these later works he claimed that European industrial society contradicted its own principles, largely for the sake of profit and power. The decolonization of the world through revolutionary struggles was, according to Berque, the first step in the making of a new epoch when both Western and non-Western cultures would recover their true underlining meaning in terms of human liberty and equality. Between the publication of Dépossession du monde and L’Orient second, Berque published one of his most ambitious histories, L’Egypte: impérialisme et révolution (Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution). This was a study of Egypt from the French expedition of 1798, through the British occupation of 1882, to the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Berque asked his readers at what point and under what circumstances did liberation from colonial rule come about? To answer the question, Berque applied the theory elaborated in Dépossession du monde, while following the familiar sociological approach to an historical question. Berque investigated the mentalities of divergent groups, such as the “cosmopolitan bourgeoisie” (Europeans involved in commerce and industry) and the “nationalist bourgeoisie” (Egyptian business people), the fellahin (peasants), and the labor unions, as well as the militant nationalists and the religious scholars. In Berque’s scheme, the “cosmopolitan bourgeoisie” represented a nineteenth-century form of imperialism, dependent upon finance and technology, while ideologically oriented toward the idea of progress or civilization. The Egyptian or “nationalist bourgeoisie” enthusiastically embraced the European idea of advancement and progress, resulting in a reinterpretation of Egypt’s cultural identity as essentially European and Mediterranean, rather than Islamic or Arab. While the transformation of Egypt’s upper classes by absorption of European culture established the idea of a new or modern Egypt, the idea was suspect among the majority of the population. According to Berque, therefore, the new Egypt of high finance and Western fashions found its adversary in the culture of an Egyptian peasantry opposed in every respect to modern Europe. Only the religious scholars retained their integrity by shunning contact with Europeans and the outward signs of European modernity. For Berque, the integrity of the religious scholars was symbolically represented by the great mosque and Islamic university of al-Azhar, which served as a “refuge against all the various forms of zulm (persecution), including that of modernity.” Berque likewise identified a host of Egyptians dislocated by the traumatic shock of modern economic and social change, who found a place neither in the bastion of Islamic tradition or the vanguard of European modernity. He illustrated these social groups through a portrait of Cairo: on the eastside of the city the minarets of alAzhar crowned the ancient medina, while to the west, along the banks of the Nile, the modern city of cosmopolitan enterprise was populated by Europeans and Europeanized Egyptians. On the periphery of each were the dwellings of peasant migrants, vagrants, and industrial workers. The first section of the book demonstrated that by the end of the nineteenth century the peasants were suffering “proletarian alienation” because much of the

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cultivable land had been converted into large commercial sugar and cotton plantations. More importantly, the peasants and the urban lower classes were alienated from the Europeanized culture of Egypt’s upper classes. Berque argued that this trend accelerated through the first half of the twentieth century, in spite of the formation of a nationalist Egyptian government after revolts against the British occupation in 1919. By the 1930s, the working class was an important factor in Egyptian politics, particularly in the cities of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and Mahalla al-Kubra. His argument was not strictly Marxist because in Berque’s estimation the working classes were mostly peasants. Berque’s thesis pointed instead to the importance of cultural change. He argued that the revolution of 1952 was less the result of class inequality, although this was a factor, than it was a result of cultural differences between the upper classes and the lower classes. In a scheme reminiscent of the Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, Berque identified 1936 as a moment of historical significance. In that year the nationalist bourgeoisie of the Wafd (Delegation) negotiated a treaty with the British, which, in Berque’s opinion, signaled the alliance of Egypt’s upper classes with European imperialism. The treaty embittered Egypt’s working-class organizations and the impoverished intelligentsia of the cities. As a result, the uncontrollable forces of youth, intelligentsia, and the urban masses besieged successive Egyptian governments in the years between 1936 and 1952. In L’Egypte: impérialisme et révolution, Berque asserted that changes in Egypt’s social structure followed a pattern typical of worldwide developments, so that he could speak of an Egyptian bourgeoisie and those groups that opposed its dominant position, the intelligentsia and the workers. Berque, however, argued that by articulating its opposition to the upper classes and imperialism in the language of Islam, the intelligentsia restored to Egyptian society a sense of collective identity. Some prominent critics faulted Berque for failing to appreciate the importance of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Muslim charitable society that evolved into the most popular political organization in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. However, Berque’s argument had been that Islamic renewal stressed the social and political role of religion and thus fed into the gathering social forces for revolutionary change. In Berque’s narrative, the Muslim Brotherhood was simply one manifestation of a much broader process. According to Berque, Islam articulated a process of social and cultural change that was a first step in the transformation of industrial society, as he had already argued in Dépossession du monde. Critics concluded that Berque had a romantic attachment to Islam as the adversary of imperialism, and that he had an almost mystical faith in the renewal of the Islamic and Arab heritage. In other words, Berque’s Third Worldism distorted his perception of historical events and compromised his scholarship. Such criticisms also indicated that Berque was identified with a school of academic thought that castigated Western imperialism and identified with Marxist or communist historical analysis and politics. Likewise, his sympathetic account of the development of Islamic renewal meant that he was associated with popular theoreticians of the


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Third World, such as Frantz Fanon, whose theories justified political violence during the Algerian war of independence between 1954 and 1962. Critics noted that Berque’s writings seemed to describe violent political action as a necessary stage in the emancipation of colonized or oppressed people. Berque courted such criticism by engaging in the political debates of the era as a sympathetic observer of Arab and Islamic politics and culture, as, for instance, in his contribution to Les Palestiniens et la crise israélo-arabe (The Palestinians and the Israeli-Arab Crisis), which was published in 1974. His writings in this and other works demonstrated that Berque consistently argued that European imperialism was the fundamental cause of political disturbances in the region. Also in 1974, Berque published Langages arabes du présent (translated as Cultural Expression in Arab Society Today in 1978), which was a study of the development of a modern Arab cultural identity, including analysis of the modern Arab press, novels, and poetry. The work contains impressions of the newly independent Arab societies, as well as Berque’s recollections of his encounters with prominent Arab nationalists, such as the leader of the Egyptian revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Frantz Fanon, and the Moroccan nationalist leaders, Allal al-Fasi and Ben Barka. Many of Berque’s works contained such portraits of extraordinary, as well as ordinary, individuals, as, for instance, in his portrayal of Moroccan society in Nomades et vagabonds (Nomads and Vagabonds), which was published in 1975. Berque produced two more substantial works of history before his retirement from the Collège de France in 1982: L’Intérieur du Maghreb (The Interior of the Maghreb) and Ulémas, fondateurs, insurgés du Maghreb, XVIIe siècle (Ulema, Fundamentalists, and Insurgents of the Seventeenth-century Maghreb). Published in 1978, L’Intérieur du Maghreb was an ambitious appraisal of the history of North Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Berque emphasized that Islam was the key to understanding the history of North Africa in this period, rather than the dynastic type of history typical of earlier accounts. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Berque showed that Islamic holy men organized the primary defense against the Portuguese and Spanish crusaders, who had begun to occupy the coastal regions of North Africa. The marabouts or holy men were responsible for declaring a popular jihad (holy war) against the Christians, which, according to Berque, united the population together and began a process of state formation in Morocco, notably with the emergence of the Sa’idi dynasty. This emphasis upon the interrelationship between religious and political history was a departure from previous histories. Colonial era French historians had either focused on the tribe as the only important factor in the absence of the state or had interpreted the marabouts as a source of spiritual refuge for a society that lacked effective government. As an assessment of the pre-colonial history of North Africa, L’Intérieur du Maghreb returned to an important question raised by the colonial and postcolonial historians of North Africa. Why was it that the societies of North Africa were relatively weak and therefore easily subjected to European colonization in the

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nineteenth century? The societies described by Berque were ones in which the marabouts controlled the interior, while the Ottoman corsairs established political control over the coastal periphery of North Africa, particularly in the maritime city-states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. The maraboutic holy men centered the faith on shrines and a magical interpretation of Islam; in politics, the marabouts acted as intermediaries between the cities and the countryside. Berque contrasted the dynamism of marabouts, sharifs (those who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad), and the mystical (Sufi) brotherhoods with the static social and political hierarchy that reigned in the cities. The ulema (Muslim religious scholars) of the cities legitimized the Ottoman political leadership while maintaining a strictly scriptural interpretation of Islam. However, their political role was purely symbolic; Berque claimed that, as a result, the ulema were easily assimilated into the colonial administration after French occupation began in the nineteenth century. The marabouts, on the other hand, led a prolonged and popular resistance to the French occupiers from their rural bases. The rigidity of the ulema on the eve of the colonial conquest answered the question as to why North Africa was susceptible to Western imperialism. This interpretation also supported Berque’s now familiar thesis of the necessary renewal of Islamic doctrine in the twentieth century. In other words, Berque’s interpretation fitted the theory that Islam was the foundation of the region’s cultural identity, both as a necessary refuge to maintain that identity through a period of political collapse and as the source of political revival during the push for national liberation. Berque’s theory was suggestive, rather than definitive, and he was criticized for making the historical evidence fit his own theoretical design. His last major work of historical significance, Mémoires des deux rives, was published in 1989. It was acclaimed as a remarkable account of a remarkable life; indeed, it was one of Berque’s most significant contributions to the historical record. The memoirs included a firsthand account of French colonial society, as well as of the activities of prominent Arab academics and politicians through the latter half of the twentieth century. The memoirs indicate that Berque associated with some of the most famous activists and theorists of Third Worldism, including Nasser and Fanon. Perhaps for this reason, the memoirs provoked some hostile reviews. At the end of a long and distinguished career as an historian of the Middle East, Elie Kedourie reviewed Berque’s memoirs in the pages of an American journal, Commentary. Kedourie claimed that Berque’s political interests compromised his scholarship, citing the memoirs as evidence that Berque had developed an irrational, passionate attachment to Arab and Islamic culture as a young man. According to Kedourie, Berque was more concerned to promote his vision of a revived and glorious Arab and Islamic civilization than he was with the transmission of historical knowledge. While Kedourie’s criticisms do not represent a consensus of opinion, it is certainly true that some commentators on Berque’s work felt that his theoretical preconceptions influenced his interpretation of historical data. It is therefore noteworthy that Berque’s memoirs also contemplated the


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signal failures of the revolutionary movements that he had previously praised as the first step in the remaking of humanity. Remarking on the attitudes of the Arab nationalists at the time of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Berque observed that an archaic form of Arab nationalism had compromised the cause of the Palestinians. Certainly, Berque’s reputation was the subject of intense academic debates during his lifetime. Whereas Kedourie viewed Berque as one of those academics compromised by his political interests, Edward Saïd claimed that Berque was exceptional because of his nonpolitical scholarship. Saïd’s views were published in his book Orientalism (1978), which rocked the academic community with its scathing indictment of Western scholarship, as well as popular representations, of Muslims and Arabs. Berque was one of the few contemporary scholars of the Arab world whom Saïd viewed in a favorable light. The contrary views of Saïd and Kedourie indicate the central place that Berque’s works had taken in the ongoing debates on the issues of imperialism and nationalism, Islam and the West. That Berque had become central to these debates in the English language literature serves as a testament to his stature.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Jacques Berque Les Pactes pastoraux Beni-Meskine: contribution à l’étude des contrats nord-africains (Algiers: Imprimerie la Typo-litho et J. Carbonel, 1936). Etudes d’histoire rurale maghrébine (Tangiers: Editions Internationales, 1938). Les Nawâzil al-Muzâra‘a du Mi‘yâr d’al-Wazzani (Rabat: Moncho, 1940). Recueil de la loi musulmane de Zaîd ben Ali, by Jacques Berque and G. H. Bousquet (Algiers: La Maison des Livres, 1941). Essai sur la méthode juridique maghrébine (Rabat: M. Leforestier, 1944). Al-Ma‘dânî, Tadmîn aç-Cunnâ‘: de la responsibilité civile de l’artisan (Algiers: Carbonel, 1949). Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas (Paris: Bibliothèque de sociologie contemporaine, Presses Universitaires de France, 1955). Histoire sociale d’un village égyptien au XXe siècle (The Hague: Mouton, 1957). Al-Yousî: problèmes de la culture marocaine au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1958). Les Arabes (Paris: Delpire, 1959); translated by Quintin Hoare as Arab Rebirth: Pain and Ecstasy (London: al-Saqi, 1983). Les Arabes d’hier à demain (Paris: Seuil, 1960); translated by Jean Stewart as The Arabs: Their History and Future (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). Le Maghreb entre deux guerres (Paris: Seuil, 1962); translated by Jean Stewart as French North Africa: The Maghrib between Two World Wars (New York: Praeger, 1967). Réforme agraire au Maghreb: colloque sur les conditions d’une véritable réforme agraire au Maroc, by Jacques Berque, J. Dresch, and R. Dumont (Paris: Maspero, 1963). Dépossession du monde (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964). Normes et valeurs dans l’Islam contemporain, by Jacques Berque and J. P. Charnay (Paris: Payot, 1966).

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L’Ambivalence dans la culture arabe, by Jacques Berque and J. P. Charnay (Paris: Anthropos, 1967). L’Egypte: impérialisme et révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); translated by Jean Stewart as Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution (London: Faber, 1972). Endurance de la pensée: pour saluer Jean Beaufret (Paris: Plon, 1968). Perspectives de la sociologie contemporaine: hommage à Georges Gurvitch (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). L’Orient second (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Langages arabes du présent (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); translated by Robert W. Stookey as Cultural Expression in Arab Society Today (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978). Les Palestiniens et la crise israélo-arabe, by Jacques Berque, J. Coutland, J. L. Duclos, et al. (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1974). Nous partons au Maroc, by Jacques Berque and J. Couleau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977). De l’Euphrate à l’Atlas, 2 vols. (Paris: Sindbad, 1978). L’Intérieur du Maghreb, XVe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). L’Islam au défi (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Andalousie (Paris: Sindbad, 1982). Bibliographie de la culture arabe contemporaine (Paris: Sindbad, 1982). Ulémas, fondateurs, insurgés du Maghreb, XVIIe siècle (Paris: Sindbad, 1982). Recherche en coopération avec le Tiers-Monde (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1983). L’Islam au temps du monde (Paris: Sindbad, 1984). L’Immigration à l’école de la République (Paris: Documentation Française, Centre national de documentation pédagogique, 1985). Le Coran: essai de traduction de l’arabe annoté et suivi d’une étude exégétique (Paris: Sindbad, 1989). Mémoires des deux rives (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989).

Edited Works Opera minora, 3 vols., edited by Jacques Berque; presentation and notes by Alain Mahé, Gianni Albergoni, and François Pouillon (Paris: Editions Bouchène, 2001): vol. 1: Anthropologie juridique du Maghreb; vol. 2: Histoire et anthropologie du Maghreb; vol. 3: Sciences sociales et décolonisation.

Articles by Jacques Berque “Aspect du contrat pastoral à Sidi-Aïssa,” Revue africaine, 368 (1936) in Opera minora, vol. I, pp. 1–13. “Deux ans d’action artisanale à Fès,” Questions nord-africaines, 15 (1939) in Opera minora, vol. III, pp. 7–24. “Cent-vingt-cinq ans de sociologie maghrébine,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 11 (1956): 296–324. “Mise en valeur et milieu naturel,” in De l’impérialisme à la décolonisation, by Jacques Berque, G. Ardent, K. Axelos, et al. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1965), pp. 163–74. “Crisis and role of decolonization,” in Reflections on the Middle Eastern Crisis, edited by Herbert Mason (Paris: Mouton, 1970), pp. 205–13.


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“Entrée dans le bureau arabe,” in Nomades et vagabonds, by Jacques Berque et al. (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975), pp. 113–39. “Islam and innovation,” in Islam, Philosophy, and Science (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1981), pp. 69–98.

References Brett, Michael, “Jacques Berque and the history of the Maghreb,” The Maghreb Review, 4 (1979): 140–8. Demeerseman, André, “Berquisme ou approche du réel,” in Rivages et Déserts: Hommage à Jacques Berque (Paris: Sindbad, 1988), pp. 249–57. Eickelman, Dale, “Jacques Berque (1910–1995),” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 29 (1995): 149–51. Gellner, Ernest, “Obituary of Jacques Berque,” Guardian, July 11, 1995 (available at http:// members.tripod.com/GellnerPage/Berque.html). Hourani, Albert, “In search of the New Andalusia: Jacques Berque and the Arabs,” in Islam in European Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 129–35. Johnson, Douglas, “Algeria: some problems of modern history,” Journal of African History, 5 (1964): 221–42. Kedourie, Elie, “Politics and the Academy,” Commentary, 94 (1992): 50–5. Saïd, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Routledge, 1978).

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Marc Bloch (1886–1944) Francine Michaud

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch, historian and man of action, was the forerunner of the French school known as the Annales. Multilingual, equally at ease with ancient and modern languages, he impressed his contemporaries by the breadth of his erudition. His subtle, clear, and rigorous prose left an indelible mark on the discipline of history, as did his methodologies directed to formulate historical problems in social terms. He dreamed of an academic world without borders where geographical, chronological, and disciplinary boundaries could be broken down and human history approached from a global perspective. Born July 6, 1886, Marc was the second son of Gustave Bloch, a gifted historian of ancient Rome who was then lecturing at the Faculté des lettres of the University of Lyon, and Sarah Ebstein, a native of Lyon with Alsatian ancestry. Although he was raised in the privileged life of Parisian intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century, Marc Bloch’s academic destiny proved to be closely tied to his family roots. Gustave grew up in Strasbourg where his father was the first director of the Israelite School. Thanks to his teaching success at Lyon, and less than two years after Marc’s birth, Gustave Bloch obtained the rank of professor at the Ecole normale supérieure, his former school in the French capital, a prestigious academic institution which would be affiliated to the University of Paris in 1904. In that year, Gustave was offered the chair of ancient history at the Sorbonne. Four years upon his retirement in 1919, Gustave Bloch died of heart disease at his country home in Marlotte, southeast of Paris. One year earlier, his oldest son Louis, an accomplished medical doctor, had succumbed to cancer. In his preface to Les Rois thaumaturges, published in 1924 (translated as The Royal Touch in 1973), a pioneer work on medieval mentalities where Marc Bloch’s mastery of multidisciplinary sources, approaches, and methodologies (including medicine) uniquely

Marc Bloch (1886–1944)

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converged into what Georges Duby has termed “the foundation of historical anthropology,” Marc Bloch expressed his heartfelt indebtedness to both his father’s and his brother’s intellectual influence and complicity: “Je n’aurais sans doute jamais eu l’idée de ces recherches, sans l’étroite communauté intellectuelle où de longue date, j’ai vécu avec mon frère;… J’ai dû à mon père le meilleur de ma formation d’historien” (“I would never have undertaken this research without the close intellectual relationship I had with my brother; … I owe to my father the best of my historical training”). There is very little doubt that Gustave Bloch played an enormous role in Marc’s life, particularly with respect to his approach to history. Gustave was a close follower of Fustel de Coulanges, who believed that history had to be framed into investigative questions. Gustave allied erudition, discipline, and imagination, while advocating the comparative use of diverse sources to exact an almost complete reconstitution of the past. A secular Jew who espoused the fervent patriotic values of the Third Republic, Gustave was committed to academic and civic improvement: he became a member of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, a political organization aimed at the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer falsely accused of espionage (1894–1906), and later, during World War I, joined the Ligue civique. The Dreyfus Affair aroused in the young Marc Bloch a keen awareness that the objective search for factual information could lead to misinformation and distortion, to fausses nouvelles (false news). During World War I, as censorship undermined the validity of written information, Bloch seized this unique historical opportunity to use regressive method to analyze the process of falsification of oral communication among soldiers (which led to an article, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” Revue historique, 1921). He was convinced that historians could only apprehend the past through the present. In Les Rois thaumaturges, Bloch systematically deconstructed another fausse nouvelle: the nation’s long-held belief, in both medieval and early modern France and England, in the healing power of its kings. He distanced himself from French positivism (a “scientific” fact-gathering approach that emphasized event history, politics, individuals, and chronology, which had profoundly influenced the discipline of history since its academic birth in the late nineteenth century), and moved away from the teaching of his masters at the Sorbonne, positivists Charles Seignobos and CharlesVictor Langlois. He now leaned toward Emile Durkheim’s sociological methods and the stimulating contributions that issued from his journal, L’Année sociologique. As early as 1914, when he was first teaching at the Lycée de Montpellier, Bloch was determined to instill in his own students the necessity of approaching all historical sources with a critical eye to the varying credibility of documentary witnesses; in particular, he stressed the importance of distinguishing between normative and descriptive texts. But he also believed that, although history was, unlike science, essentially a discipline left to the subjective interpretation of its practitioners, historians should use appropriate approaches and methodologies

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and not discount the validity of general laws, especially in economic history. Indeed, the study of man in relation to the material world became one of Bloch’s central preoccupations. In this quest, he followed the example of Paul Vidal de la Blache, an innovative French human geographer, who wholeheartedly advocated an interdisciplinary approach to understand the interaction between mankind and the environment in order to dispel the tenets of geographical determinism. Using the methods of the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, geography, linguistics, psychology), Bloch set out, as early as graduate school, to examine the foundations of economic phenomena, which he saw as being inextricably linked to human psychology. Bloch followed in his father’s footsteps from his school days onward. The Principal of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one of the great Parisian secondary schools, recognized in Marc “un élève de premier ordre, d’une fermeté de jugement, d’une distinction et d’une curiosité d’esprit vraiment remarquable” (“a first-rate student, blessed with a solid judgment, distinction, and a remarkable curiosity of mind”). After obtaining his baccalauréat in letters and philosophy with mention très bien in 1903, he won a scholarship that granted him entrance to the select Ecole normale supérieure at Saint-Cloud (now affiliated to the Sorbonne) where he trained in medieval history for four years, under the auspices of leading figures such as Ferdinand Lot and economic historian and mentor, Christian Pfister. His early academic success owed much to his privileged upbringing and schooling: his father was not only a member of the professorial corps at the Ecole, but also his teacher. In 1908, he ranked second in the rigorous national examination of the agrégation, a centralized teacher selective process that secured to the most successful candidates the best lycée (terminal cycle of secondary education) and university positions. Bloch was appointed to the Lycée de Montpellier, although only in 1912. In the intervening years, he successively enjoyed two highly competitive scholarships. In 1908–9, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sponsored his studies at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, where he thoroughly familiarized himself with the best of the German historical tradition and acquainted himself with German ethnology, comparative legal studies, and economics. He paid especially close attention to the systematic approaches of Karl Büchner, a Leipzig professor, proponent of the “great medieval revolution” whereby the urban market economy had a catalytic effect on peasant freedom. Bloch, however, wary of using definite theoretical qualifiers to describe the changing dynamics of social groups, would distance himself from the master’s overarching class model because it could not be so rigidly applied to the medieval reality. His intuitive reluctance to accept theoretical constructs derived from historical explanation kept him from embracing Marxism, even though he admired Marx’s social analysis. In the course of his German training, Bloch welcomed this unique opportunity to be exposed to new “thinkers” of history, most notably Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) who had introduced the notion of “total history.” Lamprecht proved to have a decisive influence on Bloch’s future mentor and friend, Henri Pirenne, the eminent Belgian


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medievalist who was also a resolute advocate of comparative history. Later in life, during his tenure at the University of Strasbourg, Bloch would serve eagerly as a liaison with foreign scholars to engage them to participate in collaborative works, especially with German historians, as he endeavored to bring together the fruit of German historicism and French historical tradition. Upon his return to Paris, Bloch was admitted to the Fondation Thiers (1909–12) where he undertook his doctoral dissertation on the disappearance of serfdom in Isle-de-France, the region around Paris, in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The first series of results was published in 1913 as L’Isle-de-France: les pays autour de Paris (translated as The Isle-de-France: The Country around Paris, 1971). His painstaking comparative analysis of France, Germany, and England explored, in time and space, the transformation of the rural economy around Paris and its effects on the nature and forms of serfdom. L’Isle-de-France, Bloch’s first major contribution to medieval history, laid the foundations of his doctoral thesis, Rois et serfs: un chapitre d’histoire capétienne: by rigorous textual analysis of legal, political, and fiscal documents, Bloch approached his subject from a social, economic, and psychological perspective to reverse historiographical tradition that held that the last Capetian kings, Louis X and his brother Philippe V (early fourteenth century), had emancipated all serfs within the Royal Domain. Bloch revealed that the emancipation acts, largely motivated by fiscal expediency to finance feudal war, were not without precedent. Furthermore, these legal provisions were restricted to two administrative districts – Vermandois and Senlis – and were severely limited in application. Bloch’s doctoral thesis, however, was not defended and published until 1920 because World War I abruptly interrupted his studies. His teaching appointment at the lycée of Amiens in 1913, which followed on his teaching year at the Lycée de Montpellier in 1912, was cut short by the Great War. Bloch, who completed his military service at Fontainebleau in 1905–6, obtained the rank of sergeant at Amiens and served as a reservist in the 272nd Regiment, then joined the front in Argonne in the fall of 1914 and later acted as an intelligence officer. He received distinguished honors (he was made Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and was decorated with the Croix de guerre) and was eventually promoted captain in 1918. In 1915, while he was stricken by typhoid fever, he promptly consigned his experience of the war in Souvenirs de guerre (translated as Memoirs of War, 1914–1915, 1980) as he was acutely aware of the failings of the human memory in recounting historical events. In his memoirs, at the age of 29, he reflected on the individual and collective psychology of both officers and soldiers, while praising the heroic courage of the latter. He insisted that on mettait beaucoup trop de monde en première ligne … Les combats de la Gruerie, en 1914, insignifiants par leur portée stratégique, ont été parmi les plus sanglants de la guerre. Le général commandant le 2e corps dont nous dépendions a fait massacrer des hommes, inutilement … Il a fallu improviser plus au sud des communications par camion avec Verdun: alors

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Francine Michaud qu’on eût dû et pu prévoir depuis longtemps le coup! Une des grosses erreurs de Joffre et de son Etat Major!

too many men were positioned on the front line … The 1914 Gruerie battles, although insignificant from a strategic perspective, were among the bloodiest of the war. The general who commanded the 2nd Corps upon which we depended had an unnecessary number of men massacred … We had to improvise southwards liaisons by trucks with Verdun, while we could have and should have been able to anticipate the maneuver a long time ahead! One of the worst mistakes committed by Joffre and his Major Command! Marc Bloch’s experience in the trenches of La Gruerie left him with rheumatoid arthritis that affected the articulation of his hands to the point of recurring paralysis, a debilitating condition that was to plague him for the rest of his life. After his demobilization in 1919, he was made maître de conférences at the newly born French University of Strasbourg where, along with Pfister, his former master from the Ecole normale, he anchored the medieval history section; two years later, after the defense of his thesis, Rois et serfs, he became professor, and in 1927, he officially obtained the chair of medieval history. Only in 1936, would he finally be elected to the more prestigious position of chair of economic and social history at the Sorbonne. Nevertheless, it was at Strasbourg, a thriving learning center developing in the vicinity of a uniquely well-endowed library – the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg – that Marc Bloch emerged as a leading international figure in medieval history. At the age of thirty-three, he was offered the direction of the new Institut d’histoire du Moyen Age. This early achievement was made possible partly by the stimulating company of an impressive number of like-minded scholars. In the aftermath of the Great War, Strasbourg had succeeded in recruiting some of the most talented humanists and social scientists of the time, who were determined to surpass their German colleagues in their respective fields, and who would exercise a lasting influence on Bloch’s contribution to history: church and legal historian Gabriel Le Bras, sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, philologist Ernest Hoepffner, psychologist and physician Charles Blondel, geographer Henri Baulig, historian of antiquity André Piganiol, medievalist CharlesEdmond Perrin, French Revolution specialist Georges Lefebvre, and others. The Faculty of Letters encouraged its members in national and international collaboration, subsidizing their travel to international conferences such as the widely attended International Congress of Historical Sciences, in existence since 1898, which was held in the 1920s in Brussels (1923) and Oslo (1928) – where Bloch presented his work – and in the 1930s in Warsaw (1933) and Zurich (1938). It was also at the University of Strasbourg that Marc Bloch would meet a senior colleague, early modernist Lucien Febvre, with whom he would forge a brilliant partnership that lasted until his death. While Marc Bloch spent the most productive years of his career in AlsaceLorraine, his life companion, Simone Vidal, played a crucial, albeit discreet role


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in this achievement. The well-educated daughter of a successful civil engineer, she became Marc’s wife in the same year that he took up his academic position in Strasbourg. According to their eldest son, Étienne, she was not only an indefatigable assistant to his work, but also its most sober critic. Between 1920 and 1930, the couple had six children. Bloch’s heavy family responsibilities, punctuated by births and deaths and additional family dependants, did not alter his scholarly energy during the postwar years. Although Bloch took a genuine interest in the upbringing of his children, Étienne has portrayed his father as distant and cold, much too absorbed by his work. His formal, intimidating demeanor (with a hint of irony) was not limited to the domestic sphere: self-disciplined, rigorous, devoted, and demanding in every way, Bloch both commanded respect and, to some degree, instilled a measure of discomfort among his new students who would not dare to approach him, even during office hours. As one of his disciples, Henri Brunschwig, admitted, “tout, en Marc Bloch, (dont la perfection était glacée) intimidait le débutant” (“with his icy perfection, everything in Marc Bloch intimidated the beginner”). Later in life, reminiscing about their early training in the profession, Marc Bloch’s students, such as Robert Boutruche and Pierre Goubert (now themselves distinguished historians), unanimously celebrated their master for the solidity, sobriety, clarity, and, especially, the humanity of his teaching. A master of critical thought, Marc Bloch was soon recognized by the academic establishment, in France and abroad, as one of the leading figures in his field. In the interwar period, he was frequently solicited to serve as a jury member on national and international examination and grant competitions. In the early 1920s, he was made jury member of the agrégation nationale. In 1927, at the age of 41, he was the second youngest scholar and the only historian from the “Province” (outside Paris) to be recruited to the French section of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the American granting foundation that supported the work of the most gifted researchers in the humanities and the social sciences. For Bloch, the training of young minds to the new historical methods reached its logical conclusion with his plan to write a treatise on the art of investigating history. As early as 1930, he planned to publish a collection of his own writings on historical methods under the title, Historiens à l’atelier (Historians in their Workshop), which he submitted to the Gallimard editions. Although this particular project failed, the idea persisted. Bloch’s premature death in 1944 forestalled the completion of his manuscript on historical methodology, but a rough draft of the work was discovered at Fougères, where he had been writing at the end of his life, despite the ransacking of his villa after his death. In 1949, his friend and collaborator Lucien Febvre undertook the posthumous publication of the unfinished manuscript under the author’s own, evocative title, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien (translated as The Historian’s Craft in 1953). This was a work of necessity as much as of conviction that the author, on his own account, found the most daunting to finalize. A year before his death, Bloch admitted to Lucien Febvre that “Métier d’historien avance cahin-caha et continue à m’amuser. Je voudrais ne pas avoir le temps de le finir!” (“Métier d’historien is hardly taking shape although

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it still amuses me. I would like not to have the time to finish it!”). Writing during World War II, when he had left behind his research papers and rich library (over a thousand titles) in his Parisian apartment which had been confiscated by the Nazis in 1942, Bloch worked from memory at his retreat in Fougères, using only the few books and note files at his disposal. Some among the next generation of successful historians, such as Duby, could not conceal their disappointment with Métier d’historien, which seemed antiquated in form and even in substance “engoncé dans une épaisseur désuète de traditions et d’habitudes” (“buried in the thickness of old traditions and habits”), with its references to the false problem of causality and to the historical value of ideological discourses permeating narrative sources. Others, such as Jacques Le Goff and Massimo Mastrogregori, have pointed out that Bloch’s working methods always rested on a laborious editing and rewriting process before publication, and, therefore, Métier has to be seen for what it is: a work in progress. Yet, despite its imperfections – some of which derive from Lucien Febvre’s own editing – the work met with immeasurable success, and has been reissued several times in many translations. Today, most scholars agree that Métier d’historien, an empirical reflection on the practice of history, contributes to teaching future historians not only how to define the nature and the finality of history, but also, and primarily, how to approach it by favoring differences over discontinuity, an intellectual focus that allows the analytical observer to understand the essence of original experiences of the human past. Most of all, it presents the historical profession in light of its social function: the practice of history serves to organize, frame, and critically revisit collective memories. Admiration for Bloch’s work spilled over national frontiers and disciplinary boundaries from very early in his career. Two seminal works appeared during the Strasbourgeois period (1919–36) in the midst of hundreds of other publications, articles, book reviews, research notices, and so on (for an exhaustive publication list, see Mélanges historiques): Les Rois thaumaturges (1924) and Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931). Both studies underscore Marc Bloch’s fundamental contribution to twentieth and early twenty-first century historiography. Les Rois thaumaturges earmarked Bloch’s original treatment of time and space by extending the study of royal rituals over a very long chronological period, breaking away from traditional periodization, and by pushing comparative analysis beyond national borders. He opened unexplored avenues of investigation by shedding a novel light on old narratives and incorporating non-documentary sources into the body of evidence in order to capture the hidden, mental attitudes. More than any medievalist before him, Marc Bloch stressed the importance of human psychology in the study of history, rather than limiting it to the conventional framework of institutional history. Marc Bloch, a fervent republican and patriotic Jew like his father, paradoxically expressed a keen interest in the history of the French royalty and its ritual ceremonies at the onset of his academic career. Arguably, his conviction that it is the nation that creates the legitimate foundation of the state, and not the other way


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around (a rebuke against German political scientists), led him to argue that the French nation, with its origins in the intermingling of various ethnic groups over time (Lugurians, Celts, Romans, Burgundians, Francs, Normans, Jews, and so on), slowly appeared in the course of the tenth century as it developed its loyalty toward the monarchy. Indeed, later in Les Caractères, Bloch clarified what he had famously termed “l’idole des origines” (“the idol of ethnic origins”): “c’est bien plus haut, jusqu’aux populations anonymes de la préhistoire, créatrices de nos terroirs, qu’il faudrait pouvoir remonter. Mais ne parlons ni de race, ni de peuple; rien de plus obscur que la notion d’unité ethnographique” (“one would need to go further back, to the anonymous populations of prehistory which tilled our land. Let’s not talk about race or people for nothing is more obscure than the notion of ethnographic unity”). One of the most powerful means used by kings to establish legitimacy and ascendancy in competition with feudal and ecclesiastical powers was to appeal to popular mystique, and thereby create the myth that the anointed royal person had the sacred ability to heal scrofula, an inflammation of the lymphatic glands associated with tuberculosis. To achieve his goal, Bloch undertook the comparative exploration of sacred ceremonies at the courts of France and England, where the “royal touch” was embraced as a means to consolidate political power. Although he had been inspired by Marcel Granet and Louis Gernet, two of his colleagues at the Foundation Thiers, who had respectively published influential studies on Chinese and Hellenistic rituals and myths, Bloch’s application of political anthropology to European medieval history was utterly novel. The subject allowed him to achieve two of his key goals in the practice of history: the study of a phenomenon in its entirety and over the longue durée (a significant period of time that affords the study of change) because belief in the royal power to heal lasted in France from the tenth to the nineteenth century (the coronation of Charles X in 1825), and in England, from the eleventh to the eighteenth century. Admittedly, Les Rois thaumaturges did not reach a vast audience as its circulation remained largely limited to a circle of experts, among whom were a noticeable number of colleagues and friends (Lucien Febvre, Henri Pirenne, Henri Sée, Ernest Hoepffner). However, the academic reaction was on the whole favorable. Most, like Henri Pirenne and Lucien Febvre, enthusiastically praised the work’s centrality. Even conservative minds expressed their admiration for this unusual piece of scholarship: J. de Croy, a Catholic traditionalist and monarchist historian who could hardly conceal his anti-Semitic feelings toward Bloch, reluctantly recognized the author’s unmatched erudition in the conservative Revue des questions historiques. Skeptical of a subject that had at first seemed to him quite limited in scope, Charles Guignebert, chair of the religious history section at the Sorbonne, revised his judgment when he fully realized the importance of this interdisciplinary undertaking, not only because of the larger perspectives that the topic yielded, but also because of the exceptional clarity with which Bloch described the interwoven issues pertaining to the medieval belief in the king’s miraculous agency

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and the significance of the coronation rite. P.-F. Fournier, scholar at the Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes, the nation’s venerable archival school, celebrated the vast number and variety of sources that Bloch had unearthed for his study. Fournier noted, as foremost, the shrewdness of the analysis derived from the ingenuity of the methodology and the originality of the approach. Henri Sée emphasized Bloch’s unparalleled inroads into uncharted territory by opening the sphere of political ideas to popular mentalities: “Sans doute, il ne faudrait pas se contenter de la ‘philosophie sociale’ des écrivains, mais il n’est pas aisé, vous le savez, de pénétrer les sentiments des masses populaires. Vous aurez orienté en ce sens les historiens des idées politiques” (“While, undoubtedly, one should not be limited to the ‘social philosophy’ of writers, it is not easy, as you well know, to penetrate the feelings of the popular masses. In this sense, you showed the way to the historians of political ideas”). Historians abroad equally took notice of The Royal Touch: English medievalist E. F. Jacob, in particular, spoke highly of Bloch’s comparative approach and his ability to shed light for the first time on contemporary representations relating to the nature and character of royal power in England as well as in France. Yet, not all scholars so enthusiastically received Les Rois thaumaturges. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, Marc Bloch’s colleague at Strasbourg, took exception to the work’s chronology, suggesting that it was too preoccupied with the origins in time and space of a phenomenon that should have been replaced in a larger social context. A few other readers were left unconvinced of the “utility” of this rather odd topic, such as legal historian Ernest Perrot and medievalists François-Louis Ganshof and, most notably, Robert Fawtier, who doubted Bloch’s ability to penetrate the medieval psyche when it came to the veneration of royal power: Fawtier opined that Bloch would have been better advised to leave the study to sociologists. Negative critics pointed to some glaring absences in the bibliography: while Bloch had referred to the works of anthropologists Sir James Frazer and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on the early history of magic and kingship and primitive mentality, he had inexplicably missed the works of two distinguished scholars, Marcel Mauss, a Durkheim follower, on the theory of magic and religious rites, and Arnold Van Gennep, on rites of passage. These reservations, nonetheless, witness the profound originality of the subject, and Bloch’s treatment of it, when Les Rois thaumaturges appeared in 1924. Seven years later, Bloch published another authoritative study simultaneously in Paris and Oslo, where he had presented the first outlines at the Institute for the Comparative Study of Civilizations in 1929. Titled, Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (translated as French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, 1966), this work outlined the forms of peasants’ bondage as key to the understanding of the French agrarian systems in their various applications. Les Caractères was, in a way, the substitution for two previous book projects on economic history – on the French agrarian systems and on the seigniorial and urban economy – that Bloch had hoped to produce, but never did, for Henri Berr’s collection, L’Evolution de l’humanité. As a direct extension of Rois et serfs, Les Caractères


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incorporated the institution of serfdom into the framework of the French agricultural field system. It remains somewhat paradoxical that the book received a far more mixed response from the academic community, especially from historians, than did Les Rois thaumaturges, given that Bloch’s extensive study was the culmination of more than twenty years of research on the economic and social transformation of French rural history in the Middle Ages. Misunderstanding of his work was due in part to inattention to land systems and reforms in the French historical tradition, which led Bloch to rely heavily on German and English historiography. Significantly, the reaction of geographers, such as Roger Dion, was much more positive, in spite of Bloch’s disregard for the impact of natural phenomena and rejection of geographical determinism in the history of human settlements. For him, social classes and family structures imprinted the developing forms of the habitat, not the physical environment. “Ce serait une erreur de parler du paysan avec un grand P. En fait, la société paysanne comporte des classes sociales très distinctes” (“It would be erroneous to consider the peasant with a capital P. In effect, peasant society comprised very distinct social classes”). This uncompromising sociohistorical approach to geographical conditions provoked criticism from the specialists in the field. Yet, as Albert Demangeon readily admitted, geographers would benefit greatly from Les Caractères as its strength resided in the “alliage des riches notions que l’histoire agraire peut puiser dans la science anglaise et allemande avec les observations locales et régionales faites en France” (“alloy of rich notions that agricultural history can derive from German and English scholarship, combined with local and regional observations made in France”). In the opening pages of his book, Bloch revealed the primary methodological condition of his approach to studying history: acquiring an exhaustive bibliography on the rural history of foreign nations for “sans les comparaisons qu’ils [ces travaux] permettent, les suggestions de recherche qu’on doit y puiser, la présente étude à vrai dire, eut été impossible” (“without the comparisons they [these national historiographies] allow and the research directions they inspire, the present study would have not been undertaken”). The more solidly established English school (Frederic Seebohm, Frederic W. Maitland, Paul Vinogradoff, and Richard H. Tawney) and German school (Georg Hanssen, Georg F. Knapp, Robert Gradmann, and August Meitzen) on rural history guided Bloch in writing a synthetic, in-depth account of the French experience in the European context, embracing both agricultural technique and seigniorial regime, and breaking away from conventionally narrow periods of history and from traditional regionalism – often too limited to the seigniorial records. He strongly argued that a regional approach could only have intellectual merit insofar as it concerned itself with comparative analysis, for the chief goal of the historian was to recapture the uniqueness of the human experience in the past through the study of differences. Although profoundly bourgeois by birth, personality, and interest, Bloch was nonetheless ill disposed toward the sedentary historian. He had always been drawn to the raw experience of hommes du terroir (men of the land) with whom he had had the opportunity to

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grow closer during the Great War, and again, in 1930, at Fougères, his newly acquired rural residence in the Creuse (central region of Limousin), where long hours in the company of local farmers heightened his understanding of their lives and concerns. He was convinced that “pour interpréter le passé, c’est vers le présent, ou du moins, vers un passé tout voisin du présent qu’il sied, d’abord, de regarder” (“to interpret the past, one needs first to look toward the present, or at least, toward the recent past”). He would therefore attempt to combine the skills of the professional historian – erudition, perspective, and conceptualization – with the ability to observe his subject in the context of its own concrete reality (from plowing to rural mentality), allowing him to enliven a topic that was traditionally void of consideration for human agency. In this respect, he divorced himself from the legacy of Fustel de Coulanges, who had ignored the existence of the French open field system, likely because “[il] n’avait sans doute jamais porté des regards bien attentifs sur les labours, aux dessins si réguliers, qui, dans tout le Nord et l’Est de la France, évoquent impérieusement le souvenir de l’open field anglais” (“he probably never looked closely at the plowed fields in the north and the east of France, whose regular shape prominently evokes the memory of the English open field”). Bloch was determined to depart from the legal and institutional frame in which medievalists had long enclosed rural history. Marc Bloch’s design was thus to offer the first broad study on the French rural landscape (including the history of technology) as it was before the eighteenth century brought a tardy and incomplete “agrarian revolution” to France, as opposed to England and Germany. In order to understand the historical forces behind the originality of the French agrarian system in relation to those of neighboring nations, he explored an array of sources, methods, and approaches stemming from disciplines with which he was already well acquainted (law, sociology, geography, cartography, archaeology, linguistics, topography, and rural economy). When a generous government grant in 1928 allowed him to visit a number of provincial archives, he tracked down a series of nineteenth-century and pre-revolutionary plans parcellaires (land maps) which, in his view, were key for deciphering the patterns of land ownership in the remote past, in as much as a regressive method was adequately applied to the sources. Bloch also recognized, remarkably early, the importance of aerial photography for the study of land settlement and feudalism. However, he essentially focused on the medieval and early modern periods, from the land clearance movement of the eleventh to twelfth century – instrumental in the decline of serfdom – to the French Revolution. Although he acknowledged the permanence of some features of the French rural landscape well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably the contrast between large and small landholdings, Bloch insisted that, more than the science of the past, “l’histoire est avant tout la science d’un changement” (“history is first and foremost the science of change”). Henceforth it was imperative to focus on France’s distinctively complex character, through the diversity of the seigniorial system and its transformation under a set of historical conditions. Refuting


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Meitzen’s geographical determinism, which supported racial theories, Bloch believed that a host of climatic, technological, economic, social, legal, and mental conditions had led to the development of three distinct field systems in French territory. Differential geographies, languages, and legal cultures distinguished these three systems: the North, with its rich open-field soils, heavy plow, and triannual rotation crop that encouraged communal work and property laws; the South, with its arid land, the use of the light plow, and bi-annual crop rotation which did not require collective use of the means of production; and, finally, the central plateau and its wooded areas with poorer but enclosed lands (bocages) supporting more individual ownership. The author also underscored the deep-seated interrelation between technology and social organization, as exemplified by the use of the wheeled plow introduced on the heavier, wet soils – “the grandes steppes limoneuses” – of the Northern Alps and north of the Loire, which could not be operated without the collective effort and means of the peasant communities. This magisterial exposition of Bloch’s intimate knowledge of French archives, longstanding experience with the topic, and mastery of European scholarship on related questions, was the first comprehensive history of its kind. Supported by numerous explicative map reproductions, it was, nonetheless, in the author’s own words, “une synthèse largement provisoire” (“mostly a preliminary study”). Yet, the vast majority of foreign historians, from F. M. Powicke and R. H. Tawney to Alphons Dopsch, Carl Brinkmann, and Gino Luzzatto, vigorously hailed Bloch’s achievement as a novel and vital work for French rural history. At home in France, however, medievalists pointed to some limitations (his neglect of rural industry and demography), insufficiencies (a selective knowledge of the Midi), overstatements (an insistence on monoculture and absence of ecological considerations), and lack of causal relations that he might have purposely, if cautiously, ignored (cause and extent of communal behavior and the impact of the development of economic individualism). Overall, in its broad outlines, Les Caractères originaux is in the opinion of most scholars the finest contribution of Marc Bloch to the discipline: in the words of Pierre Toubert, it is a “synthèse irremplaçée” (“unequalled synthesis”). Toward the end of his life, Bloch freely admitted that this was the masterpiece of all his contributions to the field, even though he aimed to correct and update Les Caractères throughout the numerous articles he wrote for the Annales before World War II. Co-founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch at Strasbourg in 1929, the Annales remains one of the most challenging and provocative journals in the history of scholarly periodicals. Intended as a platform to advance the new historical school, it galvanized the interest of intellectuals around the world. Its main, overarching goal was to eradicate the traditional boundaries that previously existed between social sciences while granting a central role to history. The Faculté des lettres of the University of Strasbourg, situated at a comfortable distance from the Parisian intellectual establishment, housed a community of gifted scholars who were enthusiastic proponents of interdisciplinary approaches. Together, bringing

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expertise from various disciplines of the human and social sciences, they had created an informal venue to debate issues of common interest: their regular seminars became famously known as les réunions du Samedi (Saturday discussion meetings). This informal forum provided the impetus for the creation of the Annales. The composition of the journal’s first editorial board was designed to bridge the various disciplines of the “human sciences” (history, sociology, geography, economics, political and archival sciences) and to unite seasoned French scholars from Strasbourg (M. Halbwachs, André Piganiol) and Paris (Albert Demangeon, Charles Rist, André Siegfried, Georges Espinas, Henri Hauser). The only national “outsider” to join the board was Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne. Aimed as a vehicle to promote the “new history,” a movement that sought symbiotic exchanges with the social sciences that had emerged in the late nineteenth-century academies of Europe, the Annales was initially inspired by innovative, turn-of-thecentury journals: Emile Durkheim’s interdisciplinary Année sociologique; the Revue de synthèse historique, launched in 1900 by philosopher Henri Berr, with the avowed objective of unifying all human knowledge; Vidal de la Blache’s Annales de géographie; and the international economic history review, Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozialund Wirtschaftsgeschichte (VSWG), an Austro-German journal founded in 1903, which advocated a broad and interdisciplinary scope for history, unconstrained by national borders. It has been suggested that the Annales project was formed partly in response to the perceived anti-French sentiment of the VSWG’s editorial board, whose membership was strictly limited to Austrian, German, and Swiss scholars. Even before the Great War, the board noticeably tended to exclude French contributors and French topics from the journal; the trend only worsened after 1918. In the economic context of the interwar years, however, mere competition for a restricted academic readership seems to have played a role in Bloch and Febvre’s defensive position vis-à-vis the VSWG. While the primary motivation behind this Annales adventure is open to speculation, it is now believed that a complex web of institutional and personal influences led to the creation of a French academic journal with international ambitions to lay the foundations of a new historical school. Although his followers in successive generations contended that Bloch’s guiding light was the concept of a “minor intellectual revolution,” historiographers have in recent years proposed that the Annales’ co-founders initially intended to configure a tool to advance the “professionalization of critical discourse” rather than to revolutionize existing historiography. All the same, they wanted to make a clean departure from traditional forms of history, still dominant in most European universities after World War I, which favored political and legal topics, as well as biographies. In this sense, Bloch and Febvre engaged in what they termed “le combat pour l’histoire” (“the battle for history”). But founding the Annales proved to be a long and arduous undertaking. Between 1920 and 1926, the pair had tried to launch an international journal of comparative economic and social history, a project of vast cosmopolitan range that would solicit the participation of leading


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scholars beyond national schools and encourage reciprocal exchange of scholarship in order to champion new methods. Looking for an editor with an impeccable record of academic achievement, Bloch and Febvre first turned to Henri Pirenne in 1921. Pirenne not only shared his younger colleagues’ “new vision of history,” but also commanded unparalleled authority in international academic circles and, thus, had invaluable connections to important, international sources of funding. It was through Pirenne’s contacts that, in 1925, Bloch and Febvre approached the American Historical Association, hoping to secure sponsorship for the project from the philanthropic Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Although the idea at first appealed to American scholars who supported the “new history” movement in their own country, the proposal failed, mostly because of overriding national interests on both sides, but also because of Bloch and Febvre’s reluctance to allow a German scholar on the editorial board of the review, in glaring contradiction with its intended international character. Despite their failure to create an alternative French-based international journal, Marc Bloch convinced a dispirited Lucien Febvre to carry their common dream in a different direction. They agreed to ally their vision of history to revitalize and expand on the field by creating instead a new national periodical open to foreign subjects and scholars. In 1929, the Annales was born. Through several changes of name (Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (1929–38); Annales d’histoire sociale (1939); Mélanges d’histoire sociale (1942); Annales d’histoire sociale (1944); Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations (1946–94); and, finally, Annales: histoire, sciences sociales (since 1994), the journal would survive and achieve international recognition by scholars from both the humanities and the social sciences. From its inception to World War II, the Annales distinguished itself by strongly emphasizing economic history and, at the same time, maintaining significant interest on contemporary studies: these intellectual preoccupations reflected its co-founders’ belief in the close relationship between history, no matter how distant, and present-day concerns. Within the conventional apparatus of a standard academic journal, the Annales provided a forum for dissemination and criticism of fundamental research based on primary source analysis through the publication of scientific articles, essay book reviews, and shorter book reviews. To be sure, the journal was innovative in its attempts to provide a learned readership with the most complete tour d’horizon of academic interests: current and active debates, directions of research, useful information for scholars and educated readers (archives, libraries, museums, expositions, research centers, institutes, congresses), and exposition of epistemological concepts, such as l’histoire-problème (problem-oriented history). Most of all, it was an arena for both co-directors who actively contributed to the review from the start: they envisioned it as an arme de combat (combat weapon) with which to defend their new school of thought. It would be an exaggeration, however, to hold that they were “fighting from the fringes” for they had become along the years central figures in the French academic establishment.

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While Marc Bloch devoted much energy and attention to the Annales at the turn of the 1930s, he also spent a considerable amount of time seeking an academic appointment within Parisian circles. From 1928 onward, he invested unrelenting efforts in securing a position at the Collège de France, one of the most prestigious national institutions and, thus, one where he would enjoy greater curriculum freedom and more research time than his current position at Strasbourg allowed. But Bloch was not the only one who was determined to compete for this privileged position: Febvre had thrown his own candidacy into the race in 1928, without success, and again in 1932. This competition, predictably, strained relations between the two Annales’ directors and cast a shadow over their personal friendship but, it seems, did not compromise their intellectual concord; this is perhaps why this development remained largely undetected by the public eye. Both men sought to move to the capital where intellectual resources and power converged, and also where their children would have better educational prospects. The attraction of Paris became irresistible when the birth of the Annales provided an exceptional and timely window of opportunity for its co-founders’ academic ambitions. In the end, Febvre’s experience, his more solidly established contacts in Paris, and his careful pacing, earned him the chair of modern history at the Collège in 1933. From his newly acquired position, Febvre could and did support his younger colleague unreservedly when another opening became available at the end of 1933. Both Febvre and Etienne Gilson, the medieval philosopher and former “Strasbourgeois” faculty member who was also a member of the Collège, lobbied on Bloch’s behalf, but their joint efforts were not rewarded: in 1935, Bloch faced a crushing and final defeat. A number of factors had contributed to his repeated failure to win a place at the Collège de France. Scholar of indisputable authority he may have been, but Marc Bloch was not without enemies. His intellectual intransigence, which sometimes bordered on insolence, combined with an overweening self-awareness of his own worth and of the privileges that should accompany it, made him unpopular across academic ranks, especially in the close-knit community of French scholars during the interwar years. Another obstacle to his nomination was his unbending determination to reject the chronological boundaries that traditionally defined his specialty but conflicted directly with his conception of history. He wanted to be seen as a European historian, and not as a medievalist; against his friends’ and colleagues’ advice, he maintained his philosophical position: “c’est comme historien de la structure sociale que je me présente au Collège de France” (“it is as an historian of social structures that I present my candidacy to the Collège de France”). His resolute vision of how his profession ought to be defined ran directly against the Collège’s longstanding predilection for chronological specialties. Finally, there is little doubt that Marc Bloch’s Jewish origins also impeded his access to the coveted chair at the Collège, as the institution had not been impermeable to growing anti-Semitic sentiment in France during the interwar period.


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Bewildered and shaken by the outcome of his candidacy in 1935, Bloch then turned his attention toward a more promising position at the Sorbonne. He finally secured this position, replacing the late Henri Hauser, in 1936. Upon Bloch’s departure for the Sorbonne, even though his academic pursuits in the capital had distracted him from his teaching responsibilities in Strasbourg, the University of Strasbourg regretted the loss of a brilliant teacher and internationally renowned researcher who had devoted seventeen years of his life to the Alsatian institution. In his farewell speech, the Dean of the Faculté des lettres, keenly aware of Bloch’s contribution to the heightened reputation of his faculty, expressed – with unusual emotion – his reluctance to lose a man of Bloch’s stature. At the Sorbonne, Bloch took over France’s only existing chair in economic history. The Sorbonne appointment accentuated Marc Bloch’s propensity for pursuing economic topics. He had long nurtured the dream of writing a vast study on the economic history of Europe; a stream of articles, book reviews, and, later, publications of wider scope bear witness to his foundational research in this area. His interest in detailed aspects of economic development roamed widely, from the use and circulation of money to technological history: for instance, Esquisse d’une histoire monétaire de l’Europe, which was posthumously published in 1954, is just one segment of the overarching project that Bloch envisioned. During his Sorbonne years, in 1938, with a fellow faculty member, sociologist Maurice Halbachs, he co-founded and directed the Institut d’histoire économique et sociale, a novel learning center whose purpose was to promote the study of economic factors in history, in conjunction with the history of ideas and social structures. As World War II broke out, Bloch published a study that incorporated the economic and material conditions leading to the birth of feudalism into a structural analysis of medieval society. La Société féodale (translated as Feudal Society in 1961) appeared in two volumes in 1939–40. It was Bloch’s last published book during his lifetime. Arguably the most enduring study of his career, it had immense impact on the field, in France and abroad, among medievalists, historians and non-historians. Although Marc Bloch had earlier signaled his desire to produce a comprehensive study on medieval economic history for his friend Henri Berr, in 1933 he proposed instead to take over a book on the dissolution of the Carolingian empire and the rise of feudalism that Ferdinand Lot had originally agreed to write. After Lot withdrew from the project for fear of not honoring the prescribed deadline, Berr accepted Bloch’s offer, confident that the Sorbonne professor would acquit himself within a year, even though he had over-committed himself to write books for Berr’s collection several times in the past. Ironically, La Société féodale, a magisterial study at the crossroads of economic and structural history, took a little more than five years to complete. From its inception, the piece was intended to be part of Berr’s collection, L’Evolution de l’humanité, a series that was aimed at an audience of both scholars and educated readers. Editorial criteria suited for such a large readership may have constrained the traditional scientific apparatus

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that Bloch usually provided in his publications, a limitation that did not escape some reviewers. Nevertheless, equipped with impressive linguistic skills, a vast erudition, an uncommon ease with the tools borrowed from auxiliary social sciences, and seasoned experience solidified by years of comparative analysis, Bloch boldly embraced Europe as his working field: “en outre, j’ai dans le cadre européen, tâché de faire jouer les expériences multiples que la méthode comparative nous permet de saisir” (“among other things, I tried to take advantage of the multifaceted experiences that the comparative approach allows one to grasp”). The first volume focused on the creation of feudal bonds based on personal dependence that led to the formation of manorialism; the second volume traced the evolutionary stages of the forms of government that defined the feudal regime through class structures. Bloch’s most original contribution was to explain the birth of feudalism in Western Europe from an anthropological perspective. He removed the focus from legal institutions, such as the association between vassalage and benefice, and, instead, placed the central impetus in the development of feudal institutions on the personal and mutual relationship of dependence, le lien vassalique (the vassal bond) between men bound by blood, kinship, and clientele relations. He argued that the legal institutions spawned from “le démontage d’une structure sociale” (“the dismantling of a type of social structure”), developing from real justice to personal justice, and, finally, into the final stage, seigniorial justice. “Si mon travail possède quelque originalité valable, c’est dans ces deux préoccupations – analyse structurelle, usage des expériences comparées – que, je crois, elle réside” (“if my work has any valuable originality, I believe it is to be found in these two preoccupations: structural analysis and recourse to comparative experience”). He saw the birth of feudalism as the consequence of a rapid process of transformation that coalesced with the last wave of invasions in Latin Christendom: Norman, Magyar, and Saracen. Two ages of feudalism succeeded one another: the first age commenced at the dawn of the turbulent tenth century, while the second spread from the middle of the eleventh century to the mid-thirteenth century as the effects of the growing market economy progressively eroded feudal ties. La Société féodale initially generated a vast array of reactions among historians and social scientists alike, and still does to this day. Upon its publication, and while wartime slowed the process of scholarly reviews, the work drew favorable opinions. Particularly, Bloch appeared most convincing when describing and analyzing the purpose and the role of feudalism and its intricate relations with social structures, especially within the territorial parameters of the Carolingian empire. As François-Louis Ganshof outlined in Revue d’histoire belge, Bloch should be commended for his ability to reconstitute the mental attitudes of the “feudal man.” Even though the Belgian medievalist did not fully endorse Bloch’s treatment of feudal institutions, he nonetheless praised the scope of the enterprise: it pointed to new avenues for research, such as morals, lineages, family relations, and marriage. But Bloch’s study also invited severe criticism. Cited among the most


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glaring limitations of the work were the confusing definition of feudalism, which in turn cast doubt on the “originality” of its European type; the imbalance of its geographical mapping; the insufficient treatment given to juridical institutions; the near absence of two influential groups in society, namely the clergy and the merchant classes; and its over schematization of medieval “civilization.” Lucien Febvre himself offered a stern reading of the first volume of La Société féodale: significantly, his reaction revealed the essential differences between the Annales’ co-founders in their conceptual approaches to history. Febvre’s main criticism was of Bloch’s disincarnate view of the Middle Ages, his utter lack of sensitivity toward the humanity of the medieval man; moreover, he regretted his colleague’s tendency to intellectualize and abstract the peasant experience by giving too much weight to structuralism. Echoing Ganshof ’s reservations, legal historian Paul Ourliac firmly believed in the centrality of the fief in the definition of feudalism, and openly criticized La Société féodale for its complete disregard for the institutional and juridical nature of feudalism. In a forty-seven-page review article published in Le Journal des savants, Ferdinand Lot refuted Bloch’s contention that the first feudal age began with the tenth century. Lot found the author’s bold periodization rather arbitrary, “un point de départ fâcheux puisqu’il représente une évolution déjà très avancée de ce qu’on appelle féodalité” (“an unfortunate departure point for it represents an already advanced evolution of what is known as feudalism”). But he equally questioned Bloch’s ambiguous causal explanation for the emergence of feudal society in Western Europe: was it the result of anarchy or Carolingian order? Recent economic studies tend to corroborate Lot’s intuition that feudalism emerged from economic vitality that was present quite some time before the millennium. Abroad, especially among Anglo-American medievalists, La Société féodale fell short of its claim to global history. In the American Historical Review, William Morris argued in 1940 that the study, albeit a massive sum of erudition, leaned too far toward the continental evidence, especially to the French form of feudalism. In his view, Bloch should have looked more closely at the originality of the English experience and at the body of evidence on which its historiography rests, such as the Domesday Book and the light it sheds on landholding before and after the Norman Conquest; finally, he should have acknowledged that “feudality” did not penetrate other territories, such as Scandinavia, Frisia, or Scotland. When medievalist Bryce Lyon reviewed La Société féodale in 1963, twenty-three years after its original publication in France, but only two years after it appeared in its English translation, he saw it through the eyes of a new generation of scholars who had been amply exposed to the wave of “new history.” Lyon was quick to point out that Bloch’s study, quite significantly, was hugely praised by nonmedievalists and especially by non-historians, that is, members of the very social sciences from which he derived his methods: economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and philology. Lyon took exception to the fact that, by his time, La Société féodale had become the paragon of comparative history. He opined that, in

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stark contrast to Bloch’s brilliant Caractères originaux, La Société paid scant attention to the varied application of feudalism across the French territory, except for the Carolingian cluster contained between the Loire and the Rhine rivers. In other words, the American reviewer would have liked to see Bloch follow in this study the wide-ranging, comparative methods that he had uniquely and cleverly used in previous work, the methods that had established his international reputation. But medievalists continued to be divided over the value of Bloch’s last book. In his foreword to the English translation of Société féodale in 1961, English medievalist M. M. Postan hailed the work as the “standard international treatise on feudalism”; however, Postan recognized that Société féodale was “only part of a serial,” just one installment, as Les Caractères originaux had been, of a larger study yet to come on the “entire range of medieval culture and society.” In 1986, Polish medievalist Bronislaw Geremek, in his paper presented at a conference organized for Marc Bloch’s centenary, underscored the fact that the author of the Société féodale was fully aware of the risk of pursuing un projet total (a global history project) that would remain incomplete. For Geremek, the work itself justified the pursuit: it constitutes a masterful demonstration of a global, cohesive society, whose understanding rests on human behavior and social psychology. By the time both volumes of La Société féodale were published, Marc Bloch had left behind his academic life in Paris forever; in 1941, even his name had temporarily disappeared from the cover of the Annales at the request of Lucien Febvre, out of wartime political expediency. A week before Germany invaded Poland, September 1, 1939, Bloch was, for the second time in his life, at the age of 56, mobilized for military duty after he had arranged for his family to leave the capital and seek refuge in Guéret, a small town in the Creuse, a few kilometers from their country home. After a short stay in Alsace, where he took part in the evacuation of the civilian population, he was eventually transferred to the Major Command of Northern France in Picardy, thanks to auspicious connections. There, he supervised the fuel supply for the most motorized unit of the French army, as the winter months set in and the phony war continued until hostilities broke out in the open on May 10, 1940. Few days after the capitulation of the Belgian king, Leopold III (May 29), Bloch found himself among hundreds of thousands of French and British soldiers who debarked from Dunkirk to the safe shores of England, but shortly afterwards he traveled back to France, not long before the German invasion of the capital. With the armistice of June 22, Bloch returned to civilian life in the Creuse: there, in Guéret, he proceeded to write hurriedly L’Etrange défaite (translated as Strange Defeat in 1949). He was determined to leave, through the lens of his own experience, as he did with Mémoires de guerre in 1918, his political and military account of the humiliating defeat his country had just suffered. Posthumously published in 1946, L’Etrange défaite is heralded as one of the most lucid testimonials of the early debacle in France. The book’s undercurrent theme evokes the recriminations contained in Mémoires de guerre: the main culprit was “l’incapacité du commandement” (“the incompetence of the commanding


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authorities”) and, especially, their inability to adapt, unlike the Germans, to the new technological and changing political realities since World War I: “ce furent deux adversaires appartenant chacun à un âge différent de l’humanité qui se heurtèrent sur nos champs de bataille … Mais c’est nous, cette fois, qui jouions les primitifs” (“these two opponents who faced each other on the battlefield belonged to different ages of humanity … But this time, it is we who played the primitive role”). Written in the heat of the moment, and given the introspective mindset of its author, the book cannot be considered as a classical historical analysis of the causes of World War II. Rather, it is an indictment of human failings, from the high military command to the middle classes, including the intellectual elite to which Bloch belonged: he blamed professional thinkers like himself for shying away from their educational responsibilities to instruct and remind the French population of its civic duties to protect the values of the Republic. It is difficult to know if Marc Bloch’s harsh examination of his own conscience during the first months of the war motivated his active participation in the French Resistance, for he was an ardent patriot whose actions were dictated by the gravity of historical circumstances. He was also a family man of Jewish ancestry. In the context of Vichy France, Marc Bloch’s first responsibility was the safety of his wife, children, and aging mother. He had first planned to seek asylum in the United States where he had been offered an appointment at the New School for Social Research in New York. But he found himself unable to secure the departure of his oldest sons because a law enacted in April 1941 forbade males aged between eighteen and forty to leave the country. In early October 1940, the Vichy Government issued the Statut des Juifs, a series of racial laws stripping French Jews of their civil rights. Using highly ranked connections, Bloch successfully escaped the full effect of the law thanks to Article 8, a provision that granted exemption to a limited number of “meritorious” Jews who had rendered exceptional services to the state in the sciences, the arts, and the military. He was thus able to resume teaching during the academic year 1940–1 at Clermont-Ferrand, where the Faculté des lettres of Strasbourg had been relocated. In the following year, however, he sought and obtained a transfer to Montpellier, where the Mediterranean climate was deemed more suitable for his wife’s declining health: she would die from cancer two years later, a few days only after his own death. But when the Germans occupied the free zone in November 1942, he had little choice but to retreat to Fougères with his family. This episode signaled the end of his teaching career. In the spiritual testament that he had written in March 1941, Bloch wished to be remembered as a man “dilexit veritatem” (“who loves truth”) and as a man who wanted to die “en bon français” (“as a good Frenchman”), that is, in the fire of action. His decision to join the Resistance was no doubt motivated by patriotism, but he also saw the movement as an opportunity to contribute directly to the reconstruction of postwar French society, if he should survive the war. Indeed, he dreamed of leading educational reform and even outlined a number

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of proposals that were published in the Resistance journal, Les Cahiers politiques. Typically, though, he distanced himself from party politics and ideology when, by late 1942 or early 1943, he actively joined the Resistance, under the name of Narbonne. By then, he had settled his wife and his four youngest children at Fougères; he had also made arrangements for his eldest sons to reach the Spanish border safely. He then moved to Lyon, his birthplace and the country’s underground press center, where Bloch felt that his intellectual skills and editorial experience could be best put to use. Under the pseudonym Mr. Blanchard, Bloch contributed to the Franc Tireur, and to various activities in support of the region’s liberation. It was also at that time, however, that the Nazis occupied Lyon. Under the direction of SS Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo arrested Bloch on March 8, 1944, and imprisoned him at Montluc where he was tortured for three months. Ten days after the Allies had landed in Normandy, on the morning of June 16, 1944, Marc Bloch was executed along with twenty-nine other Resistance members in a meadow outside Lyon. Marc Bloch’s commitment to the Resistance did not hamper his efforts to keep his historical work alive. Even after he lost access to his notes and personal library, he continued to produce a substantial number of extended and short book reviews for the Annales. But the journal he had co-founded was renamed the same year Mélanges, a strategy devised by Lucien Febvre to circumvent Nazi censorship of academic periodicals, and his contributions now appeared under the name Fougères. It was in his provincial exile, however, that he wrote The Historian’s Craft, this timely epistemological and philosophical reflection of the historian’s profession that proved to be one of the most enduring historiographical epitaphs of modern times. At the end of his life, Bloch reflected on his own experience. The work is today considered a pioneer summation by one of the first advocates of the “new history” movement in France, a man who redefined the role of historians in society and the methods they should, henceforth, be using. The “new history” that Bloch championed throughout his adult life rests on the intertwined notions of histoire vivante and histoire problème (living history, problem-oriented history), a conceptual mindset that ought to engage the historian in the incessant dialogue between present-day issues and the past. In his view, one could not be understood without the other: for Bloch, the French generals of World War II had failed the nation precisely because they were unable to reflect on the causes and the consequences of World War I. Conversely, he believed that beyond the signs of change that transformed its configuration, the present intelligibly informed the past: hence, the reading of modern France’s rural landscape was key to deciphering its medieval formation. From very early in his career, Bloch had consciously abandoned political and institutional history to emphasize the agency of human groupings. Socioeconomic history became the lens through which he studied the past with one major objective in mind: the completeness of historical reconstitution, in a broader and deeper fashion than traditional methods allowed. The parameters of time and space were


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expanded accordingly, moving from national to European history, from the Middle Ages to early modern times. The themes he engaged in, whether labeled economic, socio-anthropological, institutional, or politico-religious, all afforded a multifaceted analysis. But because he believed also in the importance of the unique, the particular in history, Bloch was reluctant to subscribe to theoretical models, a position that drew him criticism for purposely neglecting to provide clear conceptual definitions in his work. In Marc Bloch’s view, however, three complementary conditions would determine the success of global history. First was the rigor of the historian’s research. In this respect, his proclivity for collecting massive amounts of information reveals the powerful influence of the positivist movement upon him, despite his strenuous efforts to reject this insinuation. But for Bloch, the process of fact gathering was futile without the proper methodological apparatus. Hence arose his second condition for the “new history”: a solid acquaintance with methods borrowed from the social sciences. The originality of his break from past practices to delve into other fields of investigation not only made him known to social scientists, but drew unprecedented attention to history as a central academic discipline. Finally, Bloch’s uncommon linguistic skills allowed him to familiarize himself with the European national historiographies, laying the foundation for the third condition for global history: an effective mastery of comparative history, for only through comparison could the historian underscore what was new and different in past human experiences. A number of leading historians in France and abroad have professed their indebtedness to Bloch since his death: Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Bronislaw Geremek, and others. Without denying the limitations of his works, notably in the light of postmodern developments (he has been criticized for his rationalism and his faith in progress, as well as for his lack of “universalism”), historians today celebrate the breadth of his historical vision. Recognized among his peers and colleagues in the social sciences as a pioneer of interdisciplinary studies, and as a virtuoso of historical methodology, Marc Bloch’s contribution to his field as a medievalist, as an historian, and as the co-founder of the Annales that grew into the French historical school with international influence after World War II, has undeniably left one of the most enduring legacies to the intellectual development of the twentieth century.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Marc Bloch L’Isle-de-France: les pays autour de Paris (Paris: 1913); translated by J. E. Anderson as The Isle-de-France: The Country around Paris (Ithaca, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). Rois et serfs: un chapitre d’histoire capétienne (Paris: Champion, 1920).

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Les Rois thaumaturges: étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strasbourg: Publications de la Faculté des lettres de Strasbourg, 1924); translated by J. E. Anderson as The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (Oslo and Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1931); translated by Janet Sondheimer as French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966). La Société féodale, vol. 1: La Formation des liens de dépendance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1939); vol. 2: Les Classes et le gouvernement des hommes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1940); translated by L. A. Manyon as Feudal Society, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). L’Etrange défaite (Paris: Société des Editions “Le Franc-tireur,” 1946); translated by Gerard Hopkins as Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1949). Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949); critical edition by Étienne Bloch (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993); translated by Peter Putnam as The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 1953). Esquisse d’une histoire monétaire de l’Europe (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954). La France sous les derniers capétiens, 1223–1328 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964). Souvenirs de guerre (1914–1915) (Paris: A. Colin, 1969); translated by Carole Fink as Memoirs of War, 1914–1915 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980).

Other Works by Marc Bloch “The rise of dependent cultivation and seignorial institutions” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, ch. 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941). Mélanges historiques, 2 vols. (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963); selected papers were translated by J. E. Anderson as Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); and by William Beer as Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975). Marc Bloch – Lucien Febvre: Correspondance, 3 vols., edited by Bertrand Müller (Paris: Fayard, 1994–2003). Histoire et historiens, edited by Étienne Bloch (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995). Écrits de guerre, 1914–1918, edited by Étienne Bloch (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997).

References Bloch, Étienne, with Cruz-Ramirez, Alfredo, Marc Bloch (1886–1944): une biographie impossible (Limoges: Culture et Patrimoine en Limousin, 1997). Burquière, André, L’Ecole des Annales: une histoire intellectuelle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006); translated by Jane Marie Todd as The Annales School: An Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Dumoulin, Olivier, Marc Bloch (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2000).


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Fink, Carole, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Friedman, Susan W., Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Geremek, Bronislaw, “Marc Bloch, historien et résistant,” Annales: économies, sociétés et civilisations, 41 (1986): 1091–105. Harvey, John L., “An American Annales? The AHA and the Revue internationale d’histoire économique of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch,” Journal of Modern History, 76 (2004): 578–621. Mastrogregori, Massimo, “Le manuscrit interrompu: métier d’historien de Marc Bloch,” Annales: économies, sociétés et civilisations, 44 (1989): 147–59. Raulff, Ulrich, Ein Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert: Marc Bloch (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1995).

5

Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) Eric R. Dursteler

In surveying the historical landscape of the twentieth century, most scholars now will agree that no group of historians had a more profound impact on the discipline than the one associated with the famed French historical journal, the Annales. Their catholic approach to history as an interdisciplinary dialogue; their expansion of both the sources and the questions with which historians engage the past; their rejection of the narrative, political, and biographical emphasis of history; their quest to write all-encompassing, total history; these and many other innovations transformed the historical profession and fundamentally altered both how and what historians study. At the core of this historical revolution is the trinity of the Annales founding fathers: Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and Fernand Braudel. If the first two led the initial uprising, Braudel represents its culmination and the most complete expression of the revolution, surpassing in the minds of some even his intellectual forefathers, Febvre and Bloch. There is certainly no question that it was through Braudel’s overarching influence that the Annales style of history came to conquer and colonize the international historical community. Probably no historian of the past century has had a more profound and lasting influence on the historical discipline than Fernand Braudel. Braudel was born in 1902 in Luméville, a small village of fewer than two hundred peasants in the Meuse region of northeastern France. His father was a secondary school teacher in Paris, but the young boy had poor health and spent his childhood years in the country, raised by his paternal grandmother, Emilie Braudel-Cornot, whom he described as “the passion of my childhood and youth.” Braudel rarely spoke of his family situation, but it seems that his father was authoritarian and firm, his mother somewhat distant. Braudel’s formal education began in 1909 when he moved to Mériel, on the outskirts of Paris, to live with his

Fernand Braudel (1902–1985)

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parents. His teacher, he later recollected, was “a man who was intelligent, considerate, authoritarian, and who recited the history of France as though he were celebrating Mass.” Braudel spent the war years as a student at the Lycée Voltaire in Paris (1913–20). He studied Greek and Latin, “adored history” and wrote “too much poetry,” but in the end received a solid education. After his father discouraged his aspirations to become a physician, Braudel entered the Sorbonne in 1920 where he focused on his youthful love of history. By his own assessment, his university days were uneventful: “I graduated without difficulty, but also without much enjoyment. I had the feeling I was frittering away my life, having chosen the easy way out. My vocation as an historian did not come to me until later.” One professor did make an impression on the young man, Henri Hauser, who eschewed political in favor of social and economic history. Following the completion of his degree at the Sorbonne, Braudel obtained a position teaching history in Algeria. He taught in secondary schools in this French colony for nine years, until 1932, when he returned to France to teach in Paris. In 1935, he was invited to Brazil to join the faculty at a newly organized university in São Paulo, where he spent two years teaching a course on the history of civilization, before returning to an appointment in the Fourth Section of the Ecole pratique des hautes études at the end of 1937. Of this time, Braudel later commented, “it was in Brazil that I became intelligent.” His experiences outside the mainstream of French academia proved critical in Braudel’s intellectual growth and in the evolution of his historical views. Within the French educational system of the early twentieth century, the thesis was a required step to qualify to teach at the university. Influenced by his Algerian setting, Braudel chose as his thesis subject “Philip II, Spain, and the Mediterranean in the Sixteenth Century,” which was duly accepted at the Sorbonne. From 1927 on, then, he began devoting all his free time, particularly summer vacations, to research. His interest in Philip II led him to the great Spanish archive of Simancas where he spent many fruitful summers. Because of his evolving interest in a history that transcended strict national boundaries, he did not limit his research to Spain, but worked in several archives in Italy as well as in Dubrovnik, where he found a treasure trove of documents on shipping, insurance, trade, and other matters that would greatly influence the direction of his thesis. During this research stage, Braudel stumbled fortuitously upon a tool that helped him to gather and to parse the voluminous documentation that he collected during the more than a decade he devoted to research. He purchased a used movie camera in Algiers, which he used to photograph many documents (on some days, thousands of them) that he came upon in the archives. This precursor to modern microfilming technologies allowed him to amass an unprecedented documentary base. After spending his holidays gathering documentation, Braudel and his wife Paule, whom he met while she was his student in Algiers, worked closely during the academic year to process these archival films. While one read from the

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filmed documents, the other took notes; working in tandem, they were able to process large quantities of data. His time in North Africa and Brazil proved particularly fertile for the genesis and development of what would be Braudel’s masterpiece. Seeing the Mediterranean “from the opposite shore, upside down,” shaped significantly the way in which he conceived of the region, and his Brazilian sojourn additionally expanded his vision and fed directly his desire to examine the past in as universal a fashion as possible. Instead of approaching history from the narrowly nationalistic angle then common among historians, he envisioned a study with much broader horizons. The enormous documentary base Braudel accumulated, combined with his experiences outside France, led him to abandon his original topic of Philip II, which he had never loved, in favor of a much larger project, the Mediterranean itself. This decision was inspired in part by the reaction of his adviser and eventually close friend and patron, Lucien Febvre, to his original research proposal: “Philip II and the Mediterranean is a fine subject. But why not the Mediterranean and Philip II? Isn’t that an equally fine but different subject? For between the two protagonists, Philip and the interior ocean, the match is not equal.” During the early years of his research, Braudel published his first important work, “Les Espagnols et l’Afrique du Nord, 1492–1577,” in the Revue africaine (1928). This was a long, significant study that critiqued previous works on the topic, which had emphasized politics and great men at the expense of a more indepth analysis. Braudel looked at the everyday experience of soldiers in Spain’s North African garrisons and argued for the close interplay between African and European history. The writing of Braudel’s epic work on the early modern Mediterranean has become one of the great tales (some might say myths) of twentieth-century historiography. After years of research, when friends and colleagues despaired of him ever finishing what he admitted was his “overly ambitious work,” in the summer of 1939 Braudel finally sat down in Febvre’s summer home to begin writing. Very quickly, however, larger events would intrude. As Europe rushed toward another war, Braudel, who had previously served in the military, was called back to active service. During the period between the outbreak of the war and the German invasion of France, the so-called period of the drôle de guerre, Braudel was assigned as an artillery lieutenant on the eastern front, on the Maginot Line. He saw limited action in the brief but violent battles of spring 1940, and then, like so many other French soldiers, he was made a prisoner of war and shipped to Germany. Braudel maintained throughout his life that this was an illegal imprisonment because he had surrendered a week after the formal armistice ending hostilities between France and Germany with the promise that he would be released. Legal or not, he now found himself in a German prisoner camp where he spent the remainder of the war. It was in this most unlikely of settings that Braudel returned to his thesis. While he had begun to work before the outbreak of the war, much of the writing and


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significant revisions were carried out in detention. In describing this seemingly impossible task, his wife Paule explained that, just prior to the outbreak of war, Braudel went carefully through all his notes collected over the past fifteen years, and that he then wrote the book “essentially from memory.” This was possible because “his memory was abnormal, extravagant because it was automatic. An elephant’s memory, as he himself said.” His memory was supplemented, it must be said, by access to the library of the university in the town of Mainz where he was first imprisoned, a privilege he received because of the historical courses and lectures he offered fellow prisoners. This came to an end in the spring of 1942 when, because of his “Lorrainer’s rebelliousness” and his Gaullist and therefore anti-Vichy attitudes, Braudel was denounced by other French officers and transferred to a much more restrictive, disciplinary camp at Lübeck. Despite the reduction in his privileges, later in life Braudel claimed only “good memories” of this time. Additionally, he found the atmosphere of the camps conducive to his writing which rendered his mind “more lucid,” and permitted him the time for “lengthy meditation on the subject.” While some have doubted this almost unfathomable feat, it seems quite clear that Braudel composed the majority of his thesis while in Germany. He sent several different versions of the work, written in numerous small notebooks, by way of the Swiss embassy to Lucien Febvre, which were received with increasingly glowing compliments. In 1941 Febvre wrote “it is very good, it is in fact excellent, original, vigorous, and lively.” In response to the significantly altered 1942 version, Febvre wrote he was “stupefied and delighted.” His assessment of the final, 1944 draft was his most effusive: “you are not a simple, good historian, but a truly great historian, rich, lucid, broad.” The draft Febvre read in 1944 was significantly revised following Braudel’s release from prison in 1945. He and his wife spent the next two years checking the text against the voluminous research notes that he had preserved in a metal container in the basement of their Parisian home during the war. Following the 1947 thesis defense, the manuscript underwent additional editing before its final publication in 1949. To say that La Méditerranée emerged from Braudel’s head like Athena from Zeus’, therefore, is to ignore the more than three additional years of careful work that he put into the manuscript following his release from prison. Still, this qualification should not detract from what was a truly astonishing intellectual accomplishment under the most trying of circumstances. The result of over two decades of work was published in 1949 as La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1972, 1973). It was a massive work of over 600,000 words rooted in two decades of research in archives throughout the Mediterranean. Though it was not without its critics, La Méditerranée was instantly recognized as one of the most innovative and significant works of twentieth-century historiography. The book’s protagonist is the Mediterranean itself: it is the story “of man in his relationship to the environment.” Braudel divides his analysis into three layers,

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each of which approaches the early modern Mediterranean at a different level and builds on the preceding section. As Braudel describes it, “my book is organized on several different temporal scales, moving from the unchanging to the fleeting occurrence. For me … these are the lines that delimit and give form to every historical landscape.” He begins with la longue durée or structure, the nearly unvarying forces of geography and climate; these are followed by la moyenne durée or conjuncture, which treats social and economic structures and forces that change only very slowly over time. He concludes with la courte durée or événement, which is devoted to the political and diplomatic history of Philip II’s reign. The book progresses logically and methodically, from geology and geography, to social and economic structure, to political narrative. The book is built on a foundational study of geography and climate. Braudel describes this level, which exists beneath social structure and political events, as “a history whose passage is almost imperceptible … a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.” This history is geo-history: it is the tale of islands, mountains, deserts, land and sea routes, and climatic patterns. Braudel insists that these features, long studied by other social and physical scientists, cannot be divorced from or ignored in historical explanation; indeed, they are at its very foundation. The second section of the book is entitled “Collective destinies and general trends.” It focuses on the somewhat less static history of the Mediterranean’s social groups and structures, which were shaped and controlled by the “obstinate physical matrix” of the deep geographical underpinnings treated in part one. In the often loosely connected mini-essays of this central section, Braudel discusses a fascinating range of topics. These include the demographic character and transformations of the Mediterranean and the movement of its peoples; transportation, travel, and communication; economic phenomena including wages, prices, the circulation of precious metals, the wheat and spice trades; environmental changes associated with deforestation; social structures and phenomena such as banditry and poverty; the character and spread of Mediterranean civilization; and modes of warfare. One of the most significant contributions of La Méditerranée is Braudel’s insistence on seeing the Mediterranean as a whole, rather than broken into what he perceives as artificial divisions. In this vein, he argues that societal trends within the Spanish west and the Ottoman east in many ways mirrored each other: in both areas the nobility consolidated its wealth and power, urban centers grew at the expense of the countryside, wealth became concentrated in fewer hands and banditry and piracy arose as responses. If the Mediterranean was rent in the military confrontation between the Spanish and Ottoman empires, there existed a deeper social and geographical unity that transcended these political events. The most conventional of the three sections is the last, what Annaliste historians would describe as histoire événementielle, which deals with the “events, politics and peoples” in the Mediterranean of the second half of the sixteenth century. This section is in many ways the project that Braudel had initially set out to do, and


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which his Sorbonne advisors (save Febvre) expected of him. Based on his extensive archival research, it provides a fairly traditional narrative of politics, diplomacy, and biography; it is a “drum and trumpet” history of Spain’s rivalry with the Ottoman Empire from 1550 to Philip II’s death in 1598. Despite its seemingly familiar focus, however, this final section of La Méditerranée is not a canonical political history. While tracing the narrative, Braudel repeatedly emphasizes that these actors on the political stage of the Mediterranean are in most ways limited in their ability to act and control events. They are at the mercy of, and their actions are determined in many ways by, the much deeper and more immovable geographical and social structures described at length in the book’s first two sections. In one of the book’s most memorable images, Braudel describes the wars, decisions, heroes, as but “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” This image does not imply that political history has no importance; rather, Braudel wants to show that these forces have been emphasized at the expense of the equally real, and ultimately more important, structural forces that molded and controlled the individuals and events of the early modern Mediterranean. Braudel also uses this final section to try to break down the traditional nationalist boundaries of the history of his day – what he characterized as the “walled gardens” of history – as he places the events of the late sixteenth century in a much wider, even global context. This global vision would become even more accentuated in the second edition of the book, published in 1966, in which Braudel significantly reworked, reorganized, and updated his original work in preparation for its translation into English. Following the publication of the first edition in 1949, La Méditerranée elicited both praise and criticism, but was acknowledged by all as an important work that could not be ignored. The responses varied among individual scholars, but also, interestingly, broke down according to national and cultural background. In France, the reception of La Méditerranée was generally favorable, and it was recognized as an important, if unconventional work of history. In 1947, after the defense of his thesis, Braudel was passed over for a position as professor of history at the Sorbonne; his rival was a more conservative historian who was more acceptable to the traditionalists who dominated the faculty. This rejection troubled Braudel throughout his life, and it became part of the mythology of the Annales scholars as heretical, anti-establishment revolutionaries. The reality, of course, was more complex. At Braudel’s thesis defense, the committee was unanimous in its praise of both the “amplitude of the research” and the historical depth and sophistication of his interpretations. The committee found the work “new and grandiose” and was certain it would “be a milestone in universal historiography.” Many felt it to be the best thesis that they had ever read. Febvre wrote an effusive review of the book in 1950 in the most important French historical journal, the Revue historique. And though Braudel liked to play up his outsider status, in 1948, on the strength of his thesis and book, he was made secretary of the Sixth Section

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of the Ecole pratique des hautes études, and in 1949 he became professor of history at the Collège de France. In the same year, he was appointed to the powerful position of president of the national panel that oversaw the qualifying examination for all French lycée teachers. Throughout his career, Braudel would see himself paradoxically as an outsider in the French historical and university establishment, and yet at the same time he was the consummate power broker who created his own parallel empire of institutions and acolytes. Braudel’s work was initially less well received in the English-speaking world. One of the earliest negative assessments of Braudel in the United States was a 1951 review by Harvard’s Bernard Bailyn, who found La Méditerranée incoherent because its three separate sections existed in isolation from each other and there was little interaction between the parts of the whole. Bailyn wrote, “Braudel has mistaken a poetic response to the past for an historical problem.” The book also came under criticism from British historians who took exception to Braudel’s marginalization of politics. J. H. Plumb, in an extended review of the English translation of The Mediterranean in The New York Times, both praised Braudel’s accomplishment and attacked him and other Annales historians for ignoring the fact that to be significant, history must focus on the impact of great men and events: “pace Braudel, history without events is not history at all.” This criticism is, of course, a misrepresentation of Braudel, who devotes an entire section to political history in his Mediterranean. What is true is that Braudel, like his fellow Annalistes, no longer recognized political history’s place of privilege at the table of history. While this notion may not appear terribly radical today, at the time the book first appeared, in Britain, and indeed in France, Braudel’s demotion of politics was revolutionary and shocking. Another criticism of The Mediterranean focused on Braudel’s structuralist/determinist vision of the past. Critics were concerned that Braudel’s views created “a history without humans,” a vision that limited the agency of individual actors on the stage of the past, diminishing them even to the level of “human insects.” This critique, to be sure, does not represent an absolute misunderstanding of Braudel’s fundamental views. He wrote, “when I think of the individual I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand.” Another common criticism warned that by emphasizing the long term, the immobility of history, in a sense time and history become static and therefore ahistorical. Scholars also took Braudel to task for his failure, in attempting to construct a total history, to consider attitudes, ideas, fears, and the beliefs of the people of the Mediterranean basin, despite the fondness of the Annales historians for the study of mentalities. Religion especially makes almost no appearance in Braudel’s book, which is quite shocking in the context of the great religious passions and rivalries of the time. With the passage of time, while the critiques of Braudel remain and indeed have expanded, a consensus has emerged that whatever its shortcomings, The Mediterranean is a true historical classic. This changing view took hold follow-


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ing the publication of the second edition of the book in 1966. Evidence of this recognition is the translation of the revised edition into numerous languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Hungarian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. When the first English translation of The Mediterranean was published quite belatedly in 1972, it received widespread attention; indeed, the Journal of Modern History devoted an entire number to the importance of Braudel’s work. The Mediterranean was lauded variously as a “majestic monument,” “without rival,” and even “the most remarkable historical work” of the twentieth century. In the decade following the publication of the first edition of The Mediterranean, Braudel continued his historical research and writing as his professional reputation grew in France and abroad. A man of seemingly boundless energy and ideas, his stature was greatly expanded because of the leading role he took in a number of key French historical institutions. Braudel’s influence was institutionalized in the 1950s through his domination of two entities: the Sixth Section of the Ecole pratique des hautes études (which became the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1975), a research center located in Paris, over which he presided from 1956 to 1972; and his editorship of the historical journal Annales from 1956 to 1968. Also important from 1963 onward was Braudel’s association with the interdisciplinary Maison des sciences de l’homme, for which he was instrumental in obtaining funding from French but also various American philanthropic institutions. From this institutional base, Braudel was able to both patronize and disseminate his view of the past and to strengthen the position of history vis-à-vis the other social sciences. During his years at the Ecole pratique, Braudel had a significant influence on many young French historians who would form the third wave of the Annales movement; indeed, this period came to be known as “The Age of Braudel.” Historians such as Georges Duby, Pierre Goubert, Jacques Le Goff, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie became influential international historical figures, and all were encouraged and influenced by Braudel in the formative stages of their careers. Braudel’s conviction of the need for interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-pollination attracted a diverse body of influential non-historians to the Sixth Section as well, including philosophers Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, psychologist Jacques Lacan, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss. Braudel was also an active evangelist for his historiographical vision and the Annales method. He traveled widely, collaborated on projects with scholars from outside France, and used his institutional influence to bring young scholars from abroad to imbibe the French way of doing history in Paris. As Marc Ferro stated, Braudel “ran [these institutions] like a lord, a head of state,” and his influence and power were almost unchallenged in the years up to 1968. And yet, in the end, no one was really capable of, or perhaps interested in, writing history on the scale or in the same style as the master. Indeed, Braudel in his later years broke with the Annales and was disappointed in the direction many historians chose to

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take his discipline. As he famously said to Le Roy Ladurie upon the publication of the latter’s great work Montaillou, “we brought history into the dining room; you are taking it into the bedroom.” While Braudel was often consumed by his numerous professional responsibilities in the decade following the publication of The Mediterranean, he remained active in writing and publishing. In 1951, he published a small study, Navires et marchandises à l’entrée du port de Livourne (1547–1611) with Ruggiero Romano, which adhered to the Braudelian view “that there is no such thing as purely local history,” and thus attempted to place the trade of the Italian city of Leghorn in a broad political, economic, and geographical context. In this period, Braudel also produced a series of important articles that clarified his historiographical and methodological vision and provided an impassioned defense of the primacy and centrality of history among the social sciences. These include his 1958 article “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée,” which developed more fully his idea of the longue durée in response to the challenge of Lévi-Strauss’s influential ideas on the primacy of anthropology among the social sciences. He also wrote on the “new history” of the Annales and considered the influence of its founders, Bloch and Febvre. These seminal articles were eventually gathered and published in the 1969 volume Ecrits sur l’histoire (translated as On History, 1980). The accomplishment of The Mediterranean, achieved as it was at a comparatively late age (Braudel was forty-seven when the work was published), would be sufficient to warrant its author’s inclusion among the pantheon of great historians of the twentieth century. The second act of Braudel’s life was, however, possibly even more productive both in terms of scholarship and his professional activities. In 1963, Braudel published a textbook for secondary school students entitled Le monde actuel, histoire et civilisations with Suzanne Baille and Robert Philippe (translated as A History of Civilizations, 1993). This book grew directly out of his interest in establishing standards for secondary teachers, and was part of a broader attempt to reform the teaching of history in public schools initiated in the 1950s by Gaston Berger, the director of all French higher education. Under Braudel’s influence, and more generally that of the Annales school, the lycée curriculum was reformulated and moved away from a strictly national and narrative focus, and instead was given a broader, more interdisciplinary and global historical emphasis. As part of this change, the final year of lycée was devoted to a study of world civilizations. Prepared specifically to complement this new curriculum, the co-authored text examined six diverse regions: Africa, the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Islamic World, the Soviet Union, and the West. Braudel’s attempt to break the hold of the nation and the Western civilization model in the historical curriculum, as well as his rejection of a traditional narrative dominated by events and individuals, ultimately proved too radical and the text was decisively rejected by French teachers. Braudel’s growing interest in history on a global scale evidenced in A History of Civilizations reached its most complete expression in his next great project, the


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three-volume series Civilization and Capitalism. Its roots run back to the years immediately following the publication of The Mediterranean when Lucien Febvre invited his protégé to contribute a volume on the economy to a series on the premodern world. This project remained in embryo at Febvre’s death, and would occupy the next quarter century of Braudel’s life before it was finally completed. Initially, Braudel did not envision another multi-volume work; in 1967, he published Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (translated as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, 1973), which was the product of the research he had done for the unfinished Febvre series. In the course of preparing this book, however, Braudel came to see this as only the first part of a much more ambitious project, a study of the early modern world economy in a global context. Over the next decade, he expanded this work and it became the first volume in his second masterpiece, published in 1979 as Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (translated as Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, 1981–4). In many ways, Civilization and Capitalism represents an expansion of the historical philosophy and central themes and questions of The Mediterranean – particularly its second section – to the rest of the world in the centuries before the industrial revolution. Braudel’s approach is once again tripartite: he describes the early modern economy as “a three-storey house.” The ground floor is what he calls material civilization, “the informal other half of economic activity, the world of self sufficiency and barter of goods and services within a very small radius.” It comprises “repeated actions, empirical processes, old methods and solutions handed down from time immemorial.” Here is the level of the longue durée in which “inflexibility and inertia” reign over change. The middle floor of the house comprises the somewhat broader economy of rural markets, fairs, and banks, which arose as elements of local material civilization became linked over a wider geographical area through direct trade. The final level of the structure is capitalism, a new form of high-level economic activity based on long-distance trade that grew out of the material structure and market economy of Braudel’s three-storey house. The initial stirring of this transformation occurred in late medieval Italy, but really became an economic force in the early modern era in important centers such as Amsterdam and London, where seemingly local decisions and actions had global impact. It is the interrelationship of these three levels of economic activity, Braudel argues, that characterized the early modern era and gave rise to the modern world economy. In the first volume, The Structures of Everyday Life, Braudel’s study of material civilization covers a wide range of topics, including demography, agriculture and food production, diet, clothing and fashion, the development and spread of technologies, and urbanization. He attempts to describe how production, distribution, and consumption varied in diverse regions of the world, but also how these shaped the quotidian experience of early modern societies. In the second volume, entitled The Wheels of Commerce, Braudel turns his attention to fairs and markets, trade

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routes and merchant networks, and transportation. He is particularly interested in the question of capitalism and its relationship to social and political structures and civilization in general. The final volume, The Perspective of the World, treats in a chronological fashion the economic history of the early modern era, and particularly the rise of capitalism, on what Braudel sees as its “only valid scale – that of the world.” To accomplish this goal, he focuses on city and regional economies in Venice, Amsterdam, Europe, as well as in the Americas, Africa, Turkey, and Asia. He shows the interaction and relationship of small-scale economies with larger world economies, as well as the interrelationship of world economies, all with an eye to the question of how Europe came to be the dominant world economic power. This three-volume work is the most complete expression, then, of Braudel’s vision of total history, a history unencumbered by frontiers, not only national, cultural and geographical, but also disciplinary. He is explicitly critical of studies of the development of pre-industrial Europe that ignore “the rest of the world, as if [it] did not exist.” One of the central arguments of Civilization and Capitalism is that change in the pre-industrial era cannot be understood except in global terms. The critical response to Civilization and Capitalism varied, and it was informed by the status that The Mediterranean and its author had achieved. Reviewers expressed a “sense of awe” once again at the sheer expanse of Braudel’s effort, his erudition, and the felicity and detail of his prose. His attempt to synthesize the history of daily life, which had often been marginalized as an antiquarian pursuit (especially when compared to the more accepted history of large-scale economic activity), was acknowledged as a significant contribution. Most noteworthy was the breadth of Braudel’s vision and his audacity in tackling such a significant question over such a broad geographical area. The work was lauded at publication as an exhilarating and audacious attempt to create a truly global study of an extended period of world history, and it continues to be acknowledged as one of the most compelling attempts at global history to date. The series was not without its critics, of course. Criticisms focused on the perceived weakness of the theoretical structure, and the imprecise use of terms and concepts, particularly in relation to Braudel’s discussion of capitalism. A number of reviewers criticized the eurocentricity of the work, which, despite its aspirations to a global history, in the end is limited by Braudel’s more restricted knowledge of non-Western peoples and his reliance solely on European sources. Other critics, while impressed by Braudel’s broad erudition, argued that the very size and tremendous detail of the work worked against the development of a coherent argument and masked a convoluted theoretical structure and an unclear depiction of the forces behind the developments of these pre-industrial centuries. As one reviewer observed, “by choosing to compile everything rather than to investigate selectively, Braudel is condemned continually to resort to illustration more than analysis, to exhibits more than to critical interpretation.” The work was, in the minds of some, “encyclopedic, though less original” than The Mediterranean.


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Despite its critics, Civilization and Capitalism solidified Braudel’s reputation, and, somewhat surprisingly, made him in his late seventies an international figure. The series was broadly discussed among scholars, but also in the popular media. Indeed, almost unbelievably for a massive three-volume work by a French historian, the books sold well, and in the United States it even became a Book of the Month Club selection. In the final decade of his life, Braudel’s status as the premiere historian of his age was widely recognized. He became a fixture in newspapers and on television, he was sought out by political luminaries, and he was the recipient of numerous international honors. He received honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Chicago, and many other institutions around the world. In 1976, the State University of New York in Binghamton established the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. In 1985, a month before his death, a three-day conference at Châteauvallon, attended by an international audience of historians, economists, and journalists, was devoted to a discussion of Braudel’s work and influence. His greatest recognition came in 1984 when he was elected (quite belatedly, it must be said) to the prestigious Académie française. Braudel died on November 28, 1985; however, in death he became even more productive than he had been in life. His widow and close collaborator, Paule, devoted herself assiduously to managing her husband’s legacy. This included bringing to press a number of Braudel’s unpublished or less well-known works. A second collection of his historiographical writings, Ecrits sur l’histoire, II (1990), meant to complement the 1969 publication of the same name, was issued, as were several other collections of diverse bits and pieces written by Braudel over his long career. Another posthumous work, Les Mémoires de la Méditerranée: préhistoire et antiquité (1998; translated as The Mediterranean in the Ancient World, 2001), had been completed in 1969 as part of an illustrated series on the Mediterranean that was cancelled on the death of the project’s Swiss publisher, Albert Skira. Its discussion of the classical Mediterranean against a longue durée backdrop starting in the paleolithic era, and its insistence on seeing the classical Mediterranean in a global context that embraced the near east, Germany, Russia, and the Sahara, are all evidence of Braudel’s wide-angle approach to the past. Another book that appeared following his death was actually written while Braudel was working on Civilization and Capitalism. In 1974, Braudel contributed an extended essay as the conclusion to the second volume of Einaudi’s Storia d’Italia. Entitled “L’Italia fuori d’Italia,” this work was published in 1989 in France in a beautifully illustrated edition entitled Le Modèle italien (translated as Out of Italy, 1991). The essay examines the history of Italy in the pivotal years between 1450 and 1650, and expands the traditionally narrow, purely Italian focus of many studies of the Renaissance into a broader, Mediterranean context. The essay is also intriguing because it contains Braudel’s only extended discussion of questions of high culture (art, architecture, and literature), although, to be sure, this discussion

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was solidly situated within the context of a structural study of the economic decline of Italy in the early modern era. The most substantial of Braudel’s posthumous works grew out of the project that occupied his final years, a history of France. Two volumes of what was projected to be a four-volume series were nearly complete at his death, and these were published in 1986 as L’Identité de la France: espace et histoire and L’Identité de la France: les hommes et les choses (translated as The Identity of France: History and Environment, 1988, and The Identity of France: People and Production, 1990). At first glance, these volumes and their subject matter seem to represent a surprising shift, given Braudel’s life-long championship of history in its broadest, global context. Upon closer analysis, however, The Identity of France clearly fits into a solidly Braudelian historiographical paradigm; while his geographical focus has narrowed, the books represent his attempt at constructing the total history of a nation and situating it within much broader European and global, as well as geohistorical and longue durée, contexts. Even within the more confined world of France, Braudel remained convinced that we are “crushed … [by] the enormous weight of distant origins.” The Braudelian stamp is evident in the book’s tripartite division and its vision of time, its universalism, and its emphasis on the impact of structural factors on the evolution of French civilization and culture. He begins by studying the geography, the soil, the environment, language, and transportation, before shifting to an examination of population, rural and urban centers, and finally commerce. Because The Identity of France was unfinished at his death, it is difficult to guess where Braudel planned to take the final two volumes. Unpublished fragments of its final sections, however, suggest that he intended in them to respond to critics who had criticized his failure to consider mentalities and culture sufficiently in his previous work by showing that France’s distinctive cultural superstructure was a product of the deep foundation of its physical and socioeconomic structures. As with all of Braudel’s works, reviewers of The Identity of France emphasized the mastery of detail, the numerous brilliant insights and asides that enriched the text. As had been the case with Civilization and Capitalism, criticism also focused on this very detail, which in its richness and depth sometimes distracted from rather than contributed to the development of a coherent argument. Some reviewers also took Braudel to task for having embraced an “essentialist reading of Frenchness” rather than challenging its various historical facades and constructions. When he passed away in 1985, headlines in France hailed Braudel as “a prince of history,” “the first of historians,” “the man who reinvented history.” The editors of the Annales published a tribute that hailed his role as the publication’s long-time editor. Scholars and historical publications around the world marked his passing with encomia and tributes to his importance for history in the twentieth century; numerous biographical and historiographical articles soon appeared that assessed Braudel’s life and impact on history. Since his death, Braudel has continued to attract scholarly attention and has been the subject of numerous conferences,


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articles, and books. With the passage of time, his status as one of the most innovative and important historians of the twentieth century has been established. Few would argue with William H. McNeill’s assessment: “when he died in 1985, Fernand Braudel was undoubtedly the world’s most influential academic historian.”

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Fernand Braudel La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1949; rev. and expanded edn., 1966); translated by Siân Reynolds as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972, 1973). Navires et marchandises à l’entrée du port de Livourne (1547–1611), by Fernand Braudel and Ruggiero Romano (Paris: Colin, 1951). Le Monde actuel, histoire et civilisations, by Fernand Braudel, S. Baille, and R. Philippe (Paris: Eugène Balin, 1963); translated by Richard Mayne as A History of Civilizations (New York: A. Lane/Penguin, 1993). Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1967); translated by Miriam Kochan as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (London: Fontana, 1973). Ecrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969); translated by Sarah Matthews as On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, translated by Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme: XVe–XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1979); translated by Siân Reynolds as Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (New York: Harper and Row 1981–4): vol. 1, Les Structures du quotidien: le possible et l’impossible; translated by Siân Reynolds as The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper and Row, 1981); vol. 2, Jeux de l’échange; translated by Siân Reynolds as The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); vol. 3, Les Temps du monde; translated by Siân Reynolds as The Perspective of the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). L’Identité de la France, 2 vols. (Paris: Arthaud-Flammarion, 1986): vol. 1, Espace et histoire; translated by Siân Reynolds as The Identity of France: History and Environment (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); vol. 2, Les Hommes et les choses, translated by Siân Reynolds as The Identity of France: People and Production (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). Le Modèle italien (Paris: Editions Arthaud, 1989); translated by Siân Reynolds as Out of Italy, 1450–1650 (Paris: Flammarion, 1991). Ecrits sur l’histoire, II (Paris: Arthaud, 1990). Les Ecrits de Fernand Braudel, 3 vols. (Paris: Fallois, 1996–2001). Les Mémoires de la Méditerranée: préhistoire et antiquité (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1998); translated by Siân Reynolds as The Mediterranean in the Ancient World (London: Allen Lane, 2001).

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Selected Articles by Fernand Braudel “Les Espagnols et l’Afrique du Nord, 1492–1577,” Revue africaine, 69 (1928): 184–233, 351–410. “Présence de Lucien Febvre,” in Hommage à Lucien Febvre: eventail de l’histoire vivante (Paris: Colin, 1953), pp. 1–16 . “Lucien Febvre et l’histoire,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 22 (1957): 15–20. “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 17 (1958): 723–53. “La démographie et les dimensions des sciences de l’homme,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 19 (1960): 493–532. “Histoire et sociologie,” in Traité de sociologie, edited by Georges Gurvitch, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), pp. 33–98. “Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750,” by Fernand Braudel and Frank Spooner in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 378–486. “Personal testimony,” Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972): 448–67.

References Aymard, Maurice, “La storia inquieta di Fernand Braudel,” Passato e presente, 12 (1986): 127–38. Braudel, Paule, “Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel: un témoignage,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 47 (1992): 237–44. Burke, Peter, “Fernand Braudel,” in The Historian at Work, edited by John Cannon (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), pp. 188–201. Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Daix, Pierre, Braudel (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). Dosse, François, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Gemelli, Giuliana, Fernand Braudel e l’Europa universale (Venice: Marsilio, 1990). Hunt, Lynn, “French history in the last twenty years: the rise and fall of the Annales paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986): 209–24. Kinser, Samuel, “Capitalism enshrined: Braudel’s triptych of modern economic history,” Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981): 673–82. McNeill, William H., “Fernand Braudel, historian,” Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001): 133–46. Marino, John, “The exile and his kingdom: the reception of Braudel’s Mediterranean,” Journal of Modern History 76 (2004): 622–52. Revel, Jacques, Fernand Braudel et l’histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1999). Trevor-Roper, H. R., “Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean,” Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972): 468–79. Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Braudel on capitalism, or everything upside down,” Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991): 354–61.

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Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) Willem Frijhoff

Paradigms have their disadvantages. People who fall outside their scope, and especially those who cannot be captured by just one paradigm, tend to be overlooked. A prime example of a figure that eludes such classification is the multitalented Michel de Certeau. This independent-minded Jesuit, philosopher of history, cultural historian, psychoanalyst, hermeneutist, semiotician, ethnologist, and scholar of religion wrote groundbreaking studies about such seemingly divergent topics as cultural dynamics in contemporary society, historiography as intellectual practice, the act of faith, and early modern mysticism. More than twenty years after his untimely death, readers on both sides of the Atlantic – including the new generation – continue to find his work as captivating as during his lifetime. In contrast to the waning interest in the great ideologists of the preceding generation, such as Sartre and Althusser, the fascination with Certeau is undiminished, as it is with Jacques Derrida, and his intellectual antipode Michel Foucault, whom Certeau held in high esteem. Every year brings a new volume of discussions or analyses of his work, an anthology or a translation, a handbook or a biography, to say nothing of the articles that appear at an ever-increasing rate. Remarkably enough, his reputation is growing more rapidly in English- and German-speaking countries and the Mediterranean world than in his native France, where a broad stream of articles and personal testimonies appeared in the decade following his death. Internationally, the tone was set by the accessible and empathetic survey of Jeremy Ahearne (Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other, 1995), who also edited a report on Certeau’s efforts on behalf of French cultural policy (Between Cultural Theory and Policy, 2004). François Dosse’s synthesis on Certeau (Michel de Certeau: le marcheur blessé, 2002), based on hundreds of interviews, is especially useful for information about his

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milieu, network, and influence; the index of names alone contains more than 1,300 entries. However, with the exception of a few basic texts (La Prise de parole, 1968; La Possession de Loudun, 1970; Arts de faire, 1980), Certeau’s work has hardly found its way to a broader public. This in itself is not surprising. Rightly or not, Certeau is considered a “difficult,” rather inaccessible author. The style of his writing is highly personal. Also, the status that French enjoyed as a cultural world language at the beginning of his career in the 1960s has gradually ebbed away. The degree of abstraction that characterizes much of Certeau’s work requires considerable perseverance on the part of non-French-speaking readers. It makes translation difficult, although parts of his enormous production have by now been translated into a dozen languages. A good many studies devoted to Certeau suffer from the same problem, which again hampers the breakthrough and dissemination of his work. His historical practice, pre-eminently analytical and deeply imprinted by the “linguistic turn” (an emphasis on the linguistic dimension of our perception of science, scholarship, and reality), cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, is diametrically opposed to classical forms of historiography and requires of the reader a clear intellectual commitment to cultural studies. Moreover, it can at times be difficult to separate his person from his work, particularly when dealing with his theories of historiography, religious belief, and mysticism. Viewed from this perspective, Certeau was perhaps the most original historian of twentiethcentury France. Worldwide, he is considered one of the leading theorists of cultural dynamics and of both historical and actual practice in many diverse domains of culture. For those who knew him personally or who now immerse themselves in his work, he remains an inspiring mentor, who even after his death is able to create a personal bond with his reader. Most striking is that he does not attempt to close scholarly debates with the dictum of an historian but instead opens them up as forms of everyday practice. Michel-Jean-Emmanuel de La Barge de Certeau (he used only the last part of his family name), born in Chambéry (Savoy) on May 17, 1925 into a family of landed gentry, was the son of an engineer and the oldest of four children. The strict, traditionalistic Catholic atmosphere in which he was raised might have smothered his intelligence if he had not from the start sought out cracks and crevices in the system where he could shape a livable space for himself, though always in his characteristic ascetic fashion. This habitus left a permanent stamp not only on his life but on his scholarly interests as well. What comes to mind here in particular is the tension between discourse and practice, the theme of his Arts de faire; also topics like otherness (l’alterité) as the core of self-realization; the creative impulses generated by the irruption of the unexpected event; the decisive significance of marginal practices for ascribing meaning in culture and society; the creative potential of culture from bottom up, as it is made in practice; the need for a personal appropriation (and thus a transformation) of what is compellingly

Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)

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offered in communication; and, finally, lived religious faith as a formalization of practices that culminate in the phenomenon “church.” From 1944 to 1950 Certeau studied classics and philosophy in Grenoble, Paris, and Lyon. Through numerous encounters, among others with the great theologian and later cardinal Henri de Lubac, he came to admire the special character of the Jesuit order; he particularly appreciated its blend of action and contemplation, of agency and spirituality, as well as it openness for modernity. Consequently, in 1950 Certeau joined the Society of Jesus, and in 1953 took his vows. On July 31, 1956, he was ordained to the priesthood. Initially, he had wanted to write a doctoral dissertation on the influence of St. Augustine’s writings, but a new research program of his order obliged him to reorient himself to the major devotional writings of the first generations of Jesuits. Certeau therefore received his doctorate in religious studies from the Sorbonne in 1960, under the historian of spirituality Jean Orcibal. The subject of his dissertation was the spiritual diary of his fellow Savoy native, Pierre Favre (Petrus Faber, 1506–1546), one of the first companions of Ignatius Loyola as founder of the Jesuit order and the most active disseminator of his spirituality. However willfully Certeau at times maneuvered himself into the intellectual margin of the Society, he always remained loyal to his order, even though it was difficult for him as a Jesuit to obtain a permanent position in the public university system of France, with its distinct laical coloring and corporatist workings. The network of the order, particularly in North and South America, was in fact partly responsible for his international interests and activities. He initially taught at various schools of his order and at the autonomous Institut Catholique de Paris; he also actively contributed to, and subsequently edited, Jesuit journals such as Christus and Etudes, which brought a renewal of Catholic spirituality among a broad intellectual public and elucidated the relation between faith and society. In addition, he served on the staff of two scholarly journals, Revue d’ascétique et de mystique and Recherches de science religieuse, in which he published some of his most important articles about the historical analysis of the act of faith and religious practice. Like many young Catholic intellectuals in the 1960s, Certeau was for a time gripped by the spiritualistic anthropology of his fellow Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), the geologist and paleontologist who attempted to reconcile faith and science in a grand evolutionistic vision. Certeau published some of his letters and texts and stimulated research into his work. Certeau’s breakthrough as a public intellectual and cultural critic came after the events of May 1968. His book La Prise de parole appeared in October of that year, with its inspiring critical analysis of the student revolt. Drawing a clear parallel to the Prise de la Bastille of 1789, Certeau interpreted the recent event as the moment when those who felt they were not represented in the official institutions had spoken out themselves and made their own world. This placed him squarely in the vanguard of the political and cultural debate and made him the spokesman

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of a new vision of culture, Christianity, and historicity. He soon elaborated on those views in a long series of articles, which after a short time were published as collections: L’Etranger, ou l’union dans la différence (1969), L’Absent de l’histoire (1973), La Culture au pluriel (1974), and L’Ecriture de l’histoire (1975). They established his reputation as a cultural critic and at the same time made him the most important theorist of the Nouvelle histoire, the successor of the classical phase of the Annales. For the three-part programmatic volume that this group of historians produced in 1974 he wrote that thematic opening article, “L’opération historique.” In 1968, immediately after the publication of La Prise de parole, Certeau was appointed professor of psychoanalysis and history at the new experimental University of Paris VIII–Vincennes, and in 1971 to a chair of cultural (and historical) anthropology at the University of Paris VII–Jussieu. From 1978 to 1984 he was professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California in San Diego, and only in 1984 was he chosen for the prestigious function of directeur d’études (research professor) at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the mecca of the Annales school and its successors. From that group, he kept a suitable intellectual distance as he did to all schools, committed as he was to intellectual freedom, the trademark of his historical practice. His research program, entitled “Historical anthropology of religious practices, 16th– 18th century,” unfortunately remained unfinished, for on January 9, 1986 he died of the pancreatic cancer that had been discovered in July 1985. Marc Augé, president of the EHESS, commemorated him with the following words: “C’était une intelligence sans peur, sans fatique et sans orgueil” (“His was an intellect which knew no fear, no lassitude, no pride.”) Although internationally known mainly as a cultural theorist, Certeau invariably called himself a “historian of spirituality.” That was not only his original place in the historical enterprise; it also constituted the core of his method. His erudition was buttressed by untiring research into both published and unpublished texts, and he experienced his work as a “voyage dans les textes” (“a voyage of exploration through texts”), particularly those of mysticism. He analyzed those texts as a repeated breach with the existing idiom and consequently with the existing order, whereby things that were supposed to remain hidden in the official culture were brought to light. For him, spirituality and religious belief were his true disciplinary niche, from which he drew endless theoretical inspiration – as in La Fable mystique, XVIe–XVIIe siècle (1982). His role in bringing about new religious insights and new approaches to the historical development of religion and the church in France can hardly be overestimated. In the French literature on Certeau this is also the aspect of his life that generally receives most attention. It was thanks to the research program of the order that Certeau, after finishing his dissertation on Favre, reoriented himself to the devotional work and public activities of the Jesuit and religious writer Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–1665), follower of the well-known mystic, St. John of the Cross (1542–1591). Surin, who would


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remain Certeau’s lifelong traveling companion, was a sensation in his time. In 1634, he was sent to Loudun to exorcise the demons there: this was the famous episode involving Mother Jeanne des Anges, on which Aldous Huxley based a novel, both Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Ken Russell a film, and Krzysztof Penderecki an opera. Certeau wrote a groundbreaking analysis of the event in La Possession de Loudun, one of the few full-length monographs by this writer, who was more given to short essays. It is very likely the first historical work published in France in which psychoanalytic interpretation is made fully operational. Surin’s life and activities in fact formed the stimulus for Certeau’s immersion in psychoanalysis. After the Loudun episode, Surin became convinced that he was himself in the grip of demons. For a few decades he lived in spiritual darkness, bordering on psychological disintegration. In analogy to the case of Francesco Spira in Protestant exemplum literature, discussed by such great theologians as John Calvin and Gisbertus Voetius, Surin believed he was eternally damned until a cure interpreted as miraculous finally freed him of this idea, allowing him to sink away into heavenly messages. But Surin did not feel equipped to give adequate expression to his experiences, and his Catéchisme spirituel (1654) was placed on the Index. Certeau remained captivated by Surin, the religious wanderer and spiritual seeker who – despite his loyalty to the Society of Jesus, the religious institution that offered him a framework for action – always followed his own course in dealing with faith and the world, exploiting the margins of the institutions without ever breaking with them. This fascination led Certeau to both broaden and deepen his own sphere of interest, which ranged from the social sciences and semiotics to psychoanalysis. From its beginnings in 1964, Certeau was active in the illustrious Ecole freudienne de Paris under the direction of Jacques Lacan, and remained so until it closed in 1980. Certeau’s lasting fascination with Surin is not difficult to understand. We can see in it a continual mirroring of an alter ego: the same charisma in personal contact; the same drive for study; the same masterful ability to formulate the foundations of spirituality and mysticism; the same fragile position at the fringe of the church as institution, with respect for its formal authority but without forfeiting a highly personal view of religious faith; the same sense of being continually en route to something different and slipping past all the beacons of various forms of establishment, like a concerned passer-by who is only marginally involved. Research into forms of mysticism and into the cultural and philosophical conditions necessary for faith certainly continued to inspire Certeau. For the rest of his life, he published on the foundations and history of both subjects. Along with the Possession de Loudun his first volume of articles, La Fable mystique, formed the apex of his production. The second planned volume he was unable to complete owing to his death, but the republication of fourteen articles edited by Luce Giard in 2005 under the title Le Lieu de l’autre: histoire religieuse et mystique is a logical sequel. La Fable mystique concludes with an analysis of “Labadie le nomade,” which gives valuable insight into Certeau’s method of thinking and working. The subject here

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is the rebellious, spiritualistic, and finally millennialist French mystic, Jean de Labadie (1610–1674). This priest, initially a Jesuit, who after leaving the order became a canon of Amiens and confessor for groups of religious in various places, was driven by the desire to found a “quiet community of simple souls.” Subsequently a wandering Jansenist and momentary friend of Pascal and PortRoyal, he converted to Calvinism in 1650 and was appointed professor at the Calvinist academy of Montauban. He fled first to Orange (still in the possession of the Nassaus), then to Geneva, where in the course of seven years he made himself impossible with his independent spirit. He served briefly as a French Calvinist preacher in Middelburg (Dutch Republic) and finally founded a “community of saints” in Amsterdam, which was soon forced to move to Altona near Hamburg. This group of highly gifted men and women whom he inspired (among them the famously erudite Anna Maria van Schurman and Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate) wanted to return to the earliest form of Christian community, in which Spirit and love would take the place of Word and rule. In this empathetically written article, Certeau’s constant struggle with the limitations of language betrays a strong, restrained emotion. But we also find in it all the qualities, passions, and interests of Certeau himself, such as the hermeneutic approach to text and life; the fascination, expressed in poetic terms, for the rather erratic, adventurous, and inspiring life story of this unusual wanderer, driven by a powerful sense of commitment and a refusal to let anyone tie him down; the focus on the self-chosen intellectual autonomy of the subject and the seductive power of the well-spoken word; the contrast between the free Spirit and the fixed place, which creates space for the community of faith; the événement (disruptive event) that overcomes a person, plucks him from his place in the social establishment, and frees his body; the omnipresence of the physical in spiritual experience, which tends to flourish when the body is broken; and, finally, the personal conversion that presupposes a unique truth to which the convert believes he is returning by changing his institutional place, while in reality he is making an ethical decision that challenges the traditional meaning offered by religion and brings him across the divide. Few French intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century have seen the influence of their work fan out into such a wide variety of disciplines as Certeau. Although his following was smaller than the host of those loyal to more famous icons from the same Paris milieu, such as the literary scholar Roland Barthes, the philosopher Michel Foucault, or the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Certeau’s friends and readers seem to have had a more personal bond with him and enjoyed closer relationships amongst themselves as well. A fascinating survey of these interactions is found in François Dosse’s 650-page Michel de Certeau: le marcheur blessé. This richly documented study– a thèse d’habilitation defended at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris in December 2001– shows Certeau’s life and work, contacts and networks, role and influence as thoroughly interwoven. It is no coincidence, then, that Dosse’s title does not refer to Certeau’s scholarly


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work but to his person. Both remain closely intertwined, even after Certeau’s death, for as younger readers discover his work they apparently cannot resist the impulse to seek out the source of his inspiration. Certeau’s life, we can conclude, was from the beginning nurtured and steered by the experiences in his network and in the institutions to which he gave his allegiance: the Jesuit order, the academic world, public culture. Without that network, it is difficult to place his work. It also explains why there are several forms of Certeau reception, for each network of colleagues, friends, readers, and scholars places different emphases. Each appropriates Certeau in a particular way, consciously or unconsciously in terms of the discussions within that network. Just as the “European” Foucault, primarily the philosopher of science and cultural historian, stands alongside or in some cases even in opposition to the “American” Foucault, who is viewed principally as a cultural theorist with a political message, there is also a “European” Certeau, the philosopher of history and historian of faith and mysticism, alongside an “American” Certeau, the theorist of the alternative cultural discourse. In the United States, Certeau at first became known mainly through his inspiring ethnology of everyday culture, its workings and significance, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), a translation of Part I (Arts de faire) of the two-volume collection, L’Invention du quotidien (1980), and through the essays on culture that continued those discussions in The Capture of Speech, and Other Political Writings and Culture in the Plural, both published in translation in 1997. When The Practice of Everyday Life appeared in America in 1984, it hit the academic world like a bombshell. Thirty thousand copies were sold, and Certeau acquired cult status as a guru of cultural studies. Some passages from the text – like the theoretical and poetic “Walking in the city,” which bases the creation of urban space on the practice of city-dwellers and their process of appropriation – are now recognized internationally as classic texts in urban studies. The reception of his work in the United States, colored as it is by cultural politics, tends to view Certeau primarily as a theorist of popular culture, or, as in the case of Foucault, of everyday resistance to structures of power. Certeau’s work can therefore easily become the flagship of what is now known as “subaltern” or “postcolonial” studies. In his European work, however, Certeau focused on other issues. He did not go in search of forms of counterculture like those that became fashionable in Europe after May 1968; he wanted instead to try out an approach to culture different from that of the prevailing cultural analysis with its political and elite conformism and its insensitivity to the undercurrent at the base, but without immediately opting for the reality of countercultures. With his new approach, Certeau laid the foundation for the discovery and re-evaluation of everyday life as a legitimate historical and social object of research. This coincided with the rise of the Mediterranean microstoria (the cultural history that can fan out broadly from a microscopic bottom-up perspective, for which Carlo Ginzburg served as theorist) and the primarily German Alltagsgeschichte (which takes everyday life as the source and starting-point of the dynamic of history). But Certeau’s theory is richer than

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that of the Germans, and he gives it less of an explicitly political charge than Ginzburg and his fellow-heirs of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Not the conscious but the unconscious dimensions of everyday life are the most significant for Certeau. The repetitive routines of our life and work that we largely take for granted – such as walking and sauntering, eating and consuming, getting dressed and going out, greeting, touching, playing, remembering, telling, and chatting – are for Certeau clues as to how individual people shape culture. They testify to the tactics they employ in order to appropriate a personal or group-related living space and invest it with their own meaning. This takes place in an environment offered to them as a strategic “concept” from above or from the outside by the institutions that wield power, such as the state, the community, the business world, or any number of other intermediary corporations. People accept those institutions as conditions and frameworks for their action, but – in what Certeau calls the “symbolism of the unconscious” – they then follow their own course, at times in direct opposition to what is offered by the official, “utopian” programming. They “poach” on the territory of others in order to realize their own culture. Their social practices therefore stand in a complex and self-willed relation to the official, strategic discourse of government, leading intellectuals, or the social elite. That discourse does play a role, but more as an offer than as a steering agent. In Certeau’s view, the “city” as a physical form and social structure has a wide variety of instruments on offer, such as built-up space, organizational forms, amenities, and patterns of meaning. City-dwellers – those who are established there, as well as newcomers and visitors – all make use of these in their own way. This explains why the “real” lived-in city looks so different from the planned “utopian” city – even though the actual discrepancy may not be as great as posited here. Each person in the city builds on his own urban culture, and all of them together determine the lived identity of the city as a whole, concretely making Paris into Paname and New York into Gotham or the Big Apple. To take another example: the individual reading and reception of a book seldom corresponds to what the author or publisher imagined. All the readers or users taken together give the book a meaning that is at times far removed from the intention of the maker. We can think here of all the forms of reception and, at times, contradictory interpretations evoked by works of great writers. In such debates, no one is in principle completely right or wrong because “reading, that’s poaching” (Lire: un braconnage), in the now well-known words of Certeau. The reader creates his or her own reality, which is no less valid than that imposed on him or her by others. The fascination that Certeau exerts even on the younger generation can perhaps be explained by the tension between discourse and practice, between thought and reality – the thematic thread in his work that vividly illustrates the fragility of the ideological thought which, until recently, enjoyed such acclaim. Certeau stood close to Michel Foucault in his thinking, but worked differently because he was


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at heart not a philosopher like Foucault but an historian. For him, Foucault’s genealogically tinged concept of scientific development was overly systematic in view of the heterogeneity of human experience, and insufficiently embedded in the patterns of meaning that we employ in practice. Although Certeau was not a structuralist, he was constantly searching for the concrete network of relations between discourse and practice. Although not a cultural politician and the opposite of a holist, he was concerned about the cultural cohesion of society as a whole, including those who do not or cannot make their voice heard. This is why at a certain point he was prepared to place his knowledge and abilities at the service of the public authorities (see Ahearne, Between Cultural Theory and Policy). Although not a historicist either, he continually emerges as heart and soul an historian, who translates his process-oriented view of present and past reality into terms of spatial strategies and individual or local tactics of appropriation. As Eric Maigret (in “Les trois héritages de Michel de Certeau”) has pointed out, Certeau has actually left a triple intellectual legacy. First, there is the concept of altérité; that is to say, the recognition of the other and of otherness as the basis for historiography, thus for the construction (fabricage) of the past – an approach at odds with the essentialist ideas of identity prevalent in many countries, but also with the universalistic pretensions of global history. It was no mere whim that led the French Nouvelle histoire to title their manifesto of 1974 Faire de l’histoire, a phrase expressly borrowed from a 1970 article by Certeau that was already famous at the time. In that piece, he argues against the dominant empiricism, maintaining that historiography is not possible without a simultaneous philosophy of history. He opened the first part of the manifesto himself with a fundamental contribution on “L’opération historique.” There, he characterizes historiography as a subjective, but socially situated, discursive practice in which historians create their position and thus their possibilities with regard to their historical object by analyzing the deviations (les écarts, the special, the exceptional, the other, the difference, or that which offers resistance) from normalcy. The search for the other runs through all of Certeau’s work and led him to coin the term heterology – the science of, or discourse about, the other. In an equally important article, in 1980, on the eighteenth-century proto-anthropologist and Jesuit Lafitau, Certeau analyzed the spurious objectivity of his bourgeois and rationalistic model of science, which would later form the basis of the emerging field of anthropology. Such criticism of normalcy and the role that established disciplines play in setting norms permeates all of Certeau’s writings. One consequence of this is that both his position as an historian and the historical objects he constructs are widely viewed as irrevocably marginal – for Certeau himself, proof that he had touched on the heart of the scholarly enterprise. Certeau’s second legacy, according to Maigret, is the historical nature of the act of faith. Believing is not something a person does outside the temporal order or social structures; it is rather the formalized result of a series of practices (actions, pronouncements, convictions) that are rooted in a specific situation. Certeau calls

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this the formalité des pratiques. A seminal article on this subject was “Une pratique sociale de la différence: croire,” where the title already indicates how closely his approach to the act of faith is related to that of “L’opération historique.” The third legacy consists in forms of appropriation (or, in the order of prohibition, braconnage, poaching) of everyday life as the foundation of culture in the broad sense. Our cultural practices are arts de faire – or, again, in the order of the incomplete and marginal, faire avec, making do. Like one of his teachers, Alphonse Dupront, Certeau was a master at formulating the arresting concept and the suggestive word, the points in his scholarly work that speak most clearly of his personal involvement. This, too, contributed to his lasting influence. Besides an inspiring historian and cultural scholar, Certeau was above all a broadly interested intellectual. His rigorous and demanding mode of thought grew out of a personal sense of autonomy that reacted with extreme alertness to all forms of incorporation by groups, trends, ideologies, and dogmas, whether established schools or counter-movements, and triggered the reflex of critical distance. Yet the abiding theme of his over-full life was social concern and a personal engagement that found ways to give the greatest possible depth to every relationship. The secret of the intellectual is that his or her writings and public appearances alone are not enough; it is their personality that inspires, through their network and individual contacts. Intellectuals therefore exert a different fascination after their death from that during their lifetime, and the nature of their influence changes. They can no longer react to current events, personal contacts are lost, and the network becomes dysfunctional. Yet there remains nostalgia for the inspiration derived from their presence. This is also true of Michel de Certeau. No book, article, or media program about Certeau and his thought appears without a powerful, often emotional testimony about an encounter or personal relationship with the writer, which is interpreted as having had a decisive impact on their development. In Dosse’s summa on Certeau’s network this is palpable on almost every page. What sets Certeau’s approach apart is that he tries to leave behind the welltrodden paths and fixed boundaries of scholarly disciplines (academic sociology, psychology, cultural studies, communication science, and so on) in order to arrive experimentally, by means of everyday events and practices, at the heart of the fundamental historicity of the world. For Certeau, there are no essences; everything is becoming, history, agency, including the discursive. His work abounds with disruptive events and with the many diverse ways in which people deal with them: the social and cultural practices involved and the ways in which they are invested with meaning. The reality we know is the result of the relations between those practices and our discursive productions. Certeau differs from other cultural philosophers, however, in pointing out the fragmented and individualized character of those practices. The logically coherent historical narrative and the established cultural discourse – whether the views of history as espoused by politicians and intellectuals or the scholarly discussions of the academic world – are, in his


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view, of limited value. According to Certeau, those who have no clear voice or representation in our society, structured as it is with official institutions and formal networks, make themselves heard through unofficial channels. Some call this a form of alternative historiography, but for Certeau this is precisely what history is about. The problem faced by the cultural critic is to understand how social practices and cultural discourses are related at all levels, from the highest to the lowest, and mutually shape each other. His or her task is then to articulate the cohesion of the whole, as a society that is meaningful for everyone. Certeau’s core message here is one of hope and faith in the world: even viewed from the bottom up it is knowable and shapeable, and can thus acquire meaning as a habitable world. This message is closely related to the other focus of his work, namely the act of faith, the church community, and mysticism. Certeau’s writings on culture owe their success not only to the way in which they elucidate the increasing individualization of cultural practices, with a clear emphasis on practical reality. Equally important is his optimism that the world is shapeable and accessible, a view that at certain points stands in stark contrast to Foucault’s illusionless, if not pessimistic stance toward the development of society. Why do all the studies devoted to Certeau place so much emphasis on his personal development? His life as it unfolded reveals the diversity of his personality and explains why, for him, authentic scholarship in the humanities and cultural studies does not come about in a clinical academic atmosphere but in a symbiosis of scholarly habitus with a great openness for social engagement, and in an unflagging quest for the language that will articulate this most adequately. The coordinates of a person’s life thus help to shape the concrete themes and approaches of his or her work. Michel de Certeau was a provincial from the margins of the elite, a believer from a traditional milieu, and a Jesuit who continually explored the outer limits of his loyalties – not simply to be obstructive, but out of a fundamental need for self-realization. The Christian faith was for him a particular historical configuration of the faith in humankind that should be cherished by everyone who does not want to lose his humanity through absolute cynicism. As historical practice, that faith is determined by the space and time in which it emerges and by the future-oriented strategies and tactics – including ways of embedding it in Christianity – for continually renewing its form. Furthermore, as a physical and discursive practice, it finds its ultimate expression in mysticism. Certeau’s faith was for him a kind of “existential imperative” on both fronts: as a believer and, as some have characterized him, as a mystic. He stood at a far remove from the rationalism of the God-deniers – for Certeau, a chimerical struggle without an object – but also from the Christianity of emotions, from the sacral claims of the established churches, and from their legalistic, politicized, or moralistic behavior. As an institution, the church, in Certeau’s view, is a practical framework for action and a discursive utopia, but also a community that must continually reinvent itself in new forms of loyalty; it is a community of concrete believers who forge their own world of faith.

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Certeau lived his life and shaped his scholarship out of everyday experience, in the conviction that life, and therefore history as well, is essentially a practice, an art de faire realized in the act of appropriation by the subject. His definition of culture was therefore an active one, based on agency, and he chose as his research object the cultural practices available, in whatever form, from mystical expressions to reading habits to everyday actions of the most banal sort. In that sense, Certeau is himself a braconnier de l’histoire (an historical poacher). Practice, practical-mindedness in the broadest sense of the word, is essentially the ability to distinguish between what does and does not work, what is or is not possible, conceivable, credible, or imaginable, and what does or does not bring satisfaction. The need to make such distinctions (différences, or better, in the terminology of Certeau, écarts: differences, distances) requires of the scholar that he or she assume the position of the other in order to get to know them and define their identity or self. This obliges the scholar to make a temporary break with his or her own identity. It is the painful experience of broken identity that makes it possible to recognize the other. And it is there that Certeau locates the existential blessure (wound), the other key term for his experience of life.

Acknowledgments This chapter was translated from the Dutch by Myra Heerspink Scholz. The translation was funded by the foundation Vertaalfonds KNAW/Stichting Reprorecht.

References and Further Reading Bibliographies of Michel de Certeau “Bibliographie complète de Michel de Certeau,” in Luce Giard, et al., Le Voyage mystique: Michel de Certeau (Paris: Recherches de Science Religieuse / Ed. du Cerf, 1988), pp. 191–243 (listing 422 books and articles by Certeau). Füssel, Marian, “Michel de Certeau: Eine Bibliographie” (available at www.certeau.de/ biblio.htm; an extensive listing of journal articles on Certeau and his work).

Selected Books by Michel de Certeau Bienheureux Pierre Favre: Mémorial, translated and edited by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960). Jean-Joseph Surin: Guide spirituel pour la perfection, edited by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1963). Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Lettres à Léontine Zanta, edited by Michel de Certeau, with an introduction by Robert Garric and Henri de Lubac (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965).


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Jean-Joseph Surin: Correspondance, edited by Michel de Certeau, with a preface by Julien Green (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966). La Solitude: une vérité oubliée de la communication, with François Roustang, et al. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967). La Prise de parole: pour une nouvelle culture (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1968); new edn. edited by Luce Giard, La Prise de parole, et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994); translated by Tom Conley as The Capture of Speech, and Other Political Writings (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; Catalan trans., 1970, Spanish trans., 1971, 1995). L’Etranger ou l’union dans la différence (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1969; new edn. Paris: Le Seuil, 1991, 2005). La Possession de Loudun (Paris: Julliard, 1970, 1980, 1990; rev. edn. Paris: Gallimard, 2005); translated by Michael B. Smith, with a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, as The Possession at Loudun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). L’Absent de l’histoire ([Paris]: Mâme, 1973). Le Christianisme éclaté, with Jean-Marie Domenach (Paris: Le Seuil, 1974; Spanish trans., 1976). La Culture au pluriel (Paris: UGE, 1974; 2nd edn. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1980; rev. edn. by Luce Giard: Paris: Le Seuil, 1993); translated by Tom Conley as Culture in the Plural, edited by Luce Giard (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; Spanish trans., 1999). L’Ecriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 1978, 1984; new edn. 2002); translated with an introduction by Tom Conley as The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Italian trans., 1977; Spanish trans., 1985, 2005; Portuguese trans., 1982). Politica e mistica: questione di storia religiosa, translated by Adriana Loaldi (Milan: Jaca Books, 1975). Une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois: l’enquête de Grégoire, with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard, 1975; rev. edn. 2002). L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire; vol. 2: Habiter, cuisiner, with Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol (2 vols., Paris: UGE, 1980; new edn. Paris: Gallimard 1990–4); part 1 translated by Steven Rendall as The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984; Japanese trans., 1987; Spanish trans., 1996–9). La Fable mystique, XVIe–XVIIe siècle (= vol. 1; vol. 2 remains unpublished; Paris: Gallimard, 1982, 1987); translated by Michael B. Smith as The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; paperback edn., 1995; Italian trans., 1987; Spanish trans., 1993). L’Ordinaire de la communication, with Luce Giard et al. (Paris: Dalloz, 1983). Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian Massumi, with a foreword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). La Faiblesse de croire, edited by Luce Giard (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987; new edn. 2003). Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (Paris: Gallimard, 1987; rev. edn. by Luce Giard, 2002; Spanish trans., 2003). Jean-Joseph Surin, SJ: Triomphe de l’amour divin sur les puissances de l’enfer […] 1653–1660, including “Les aventures de Jean-Joseph Surin” by Michel de Certeau (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990; text from 1963).

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Soeur Jeanne des Anges: Autobiographie, including “Jeanne des Anges” by Michel de Certeau (Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 1990; text from 1966). The Certeau Reader, edited by Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Le Lieu de l’autre: histoire religieuse et mystique, edited by Luce Giard (Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2005).

Selected Articles by Michel de Certeau “Mystique,” in Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. XI (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1971), pp. 521–6; translated by Marsanne Brammer in Diacritics, 22 (2) (1992): 11–25. “L’opération historique,” in Faire de l’histoire, vol. I: Nouveaux problèmes, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), pp. 3–41 (Italian trans., L’operazione storica, introduction and translation by Luigi Blandini [Urbino: Argalia, 1974]; Danish trans., 1975; Portuguese trans., 1979). “La longue marche indienne,” postscript in Le Réveil indien en Amérique latine, edited by Yves Materne (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1977), pp. 121–35; translated as “The long Indian march,” in The Indian Awakening in Latin America (New York: Friendship Press, 1980), pp. 113–27 (available at www.nativeweb.org/papers/statements/materne). “Histoire et psychanalyse,” in La Nouvelle histoire, edited by Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel (Paris: Retz, 1978), pp. 477–87; translated by Brian Massumi as “Psychoanalysis and its history” in Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). “Writing versus time: history and anthropology in the works of Lafitau,” in Rethinking History: Time, Myth, and Writing, edited by M. R. Logan and J. F. Logan (Yale French Studies, 59; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 37–64. “Une pratique sociale de la différence: croire,” in Faire croire: modalités de la diffusion et de la réception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe siècle (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1981), pp. 363–83. “Travel narratives of the French to Brazil: sixteenth to eighteenth centuries,” Representations, 33 (1) (1991): 221–6.

References Ahearne, Jeremy, Between Cultural Theory and Policy: The Cultural Policy Thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Régis Debray (University of Warwick: Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, Research Papers, No. 7, 2004). Ahearne, Jeremy, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Ahearne, Jeremy, Luce Giard, et al., “Feux persistants: entretien sur Michel de Certeau,” Esprit, 20 (3) (1996): 131–54. Bavidge, Jenny, Theorists of the City: Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau (New York: Routledge, 2009). Bogner, Daniel, Gebrochene Gegenwart: Mystik und Politik bei Michel de Certeau (Mainz: Grünewald, 2002). Buchanan, Ian, Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000). Buchanan, Ian, “Writing the wrongs of history: de Certeau and post-colonialism,” Span, 33 (1992): 39–46.


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Büttgen, Philippe and Jouhaud, Christian (eds.), Lire Michel de Certeau: la formalité des pratiques / Michel de Certeau lesen: die Förmlichkeit der Praktiken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2008). Chartier, Roger, Escribir las prácticas: Foucault, de Certeau, Marin (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 1996). Davis, Natalie Zemon, “The quest of Michel de Certeau,” The New York Review of Books, 55 (8) (May 15, 2008). Delacroix, Christian, François Dosse, Patrick Garcia, et al. (eds.), Michel de Certeau: chemins d’histoire (Paris: Ed. Complexe, 1992). Dosse, François, Michel de Certeau: le marcheur blessé (Paris: Ed. La Découverte, 2002; Spanish trans., 2003). Dosse, François, Paul Ricoeur et Michel de Certeau – L’histoire: entre le dire et le faire (Paris: L’Herne, 2006). Frijhoff, Willem, “Foucault reformed by Certeau: historical strategies of discipline and everyday tactics of appropriation,” in Cultural History after Foucault, edited by John Neubauer (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1999), pp. 83–99. Frow, John, “Michel de Certeau and the practice of representation,” Cultural Studies, 5 (1) (1991): 52–60. Füssel, Marian (ed.), Michel de Certeau: Geschichte – Kultur – Religion (Konstanz: UVK, 2007). Geffré, Claude (ed.), Michel de Certeau, ou la différence chrétienne (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1991). Geldof, Koenraad and Laermans, Rudi (eds.), Sluipwegen van het denken: Over Michel de Certeau (Nijmegen: SUN, 1996). Giard, Luce, “Epilogue: Michel de Certeau’s heterology and the New World,” Representations, 33 (1) (1991): 212–21. Giard, Luce (ed.), Michel de Certeau (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987; with four unpublished texts). Giard, Luce, “Michel de Certeau’s biography,” (available at www.jesuites.com/histoire/ certeau.htm). Giard, Luce, et al. (ed.), Le Voyage mystique: Michel de Certeau (Paris: Recherches de Science Religieuse / Ed. du Cerf, 1988). Giard, Luce, Hervé Martin, and Jacques Revel (eds.), Histoire, mystique et politique: Michel de Certeau (Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 1991). Greenblatt, Stephen (ed.), New World Encounters (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993; volume dedicated to the memory of Certeau). Highmore, Ben, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London: Continuum, 2006). Julia, Dominique and Rabant, Claude, “Michel de Certeau 1925–1986,” in Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris, 1987), pp. 536–8 (available at www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/ UN87003/CERTEAU_M_de.htm). Maigret, Eric, “Les trois héritages de Michel de Certeau: un projet éclaté d’analyse de la modernité,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 55 (3) (2000): 511–49. Seigel, Jerrold, “Mysticism and epistemology: the historical and cultural theory of Michel de Certeau,” History and Theory, 43 (3) (2004): 400–9. Valentin, Joachim (ed.), Eigene Wege: Michel de Certeau und die Sprache der Subjektiven. Geschichte – Kultur – Religion (available at www.certeau.de/berlin.htm). Wikipedia, “Michel de Certeau” and “The Practice of Everyday Life” (available at en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Certeau and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_ of_Everyday_Life).

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Journal Issues Devoted to Michel de Certeau “Michel de Certeau,” edited by Tom Conley and Richard Terdiman, Diacritics, 22 (2) (1992). “Michel de Certeau, historien,” Le Débat, 49 (1988). “Michel de Certeau: histoire/psychanalyse – mises à l’épreuve,” EspacesTemps, 80/81 (1992). Michel de Certeau: In the Plural, edited by Ian Buchanan, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100 (2) (2001) (separate publication: Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). “Michel de Certeau, S.J.,” New Blackfriars, 77: 909 (November 1996).

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Roger Chartier (1945– ) Laura Mason

Often characterized as a leading historian of the book, Roger Chartier has stretched that term to its breaking point. A prolific author and tireless editor, he transformed the field by challenging the privileged place accorded to books, restoring them to the larger universe of print from which they were extracted and considering how readers consume and appropriate texts. Examining with ever-finer nuance the intersection of authorial intent with physical format and readers’ capacities, Chartier now applies a broadly defined history of print culture and reading practices to a growing number of themes: the relationship between learned and popular culture, the historiography of the French Revolution, and the “linguistic turn” in cultural history. Nimbly critiquing, adjusting, and appropriating, he produces a body of work that is neither polemical nor sectarian. Generously affirming others’ contributions to a project he defines with ever-greater scope, his intellectual challenges stand as a reminder of how great the difficulty of representing the complexity of lived experience. Born in Lyon in 1945, Roger Chartier studied history in Paris at the Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud and the Sorbonne (1964–9). Through Alphonse Dupront’s courses at the Sorbonne, he became associated with Dominique Julia and Daniel Roche, historians whose own work maps the early modern culture that is of such import to Chartier. After completing his memoire de maîtrise on the Academy of Lyon in the eighteenth century, and distinguishing himself with a first in the history agrégation of 1969, Chartier became an assistant professor in modern European history at the Sorbonne (1970–5). He joined the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1975, the year it became an independent institution, and advanced quickly from maître assistant to maître de conférences (1978) and, finally, director of studies (1984). In 2007, he was honored

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with election to a chair in Writing and Culture in Modern Europe at the Collège de France. If this spare biography is little more than a sketch of professional achievements, that is because of Chartier’s reserve about his own life. Despite the popularity of the ego-histoire among mentors and colleagues, the otherwise voluble Chartier turns aside questions about personal experience with the argument that such information does not shed light on his work. Describing himself in the same terms he applies to early moderns – as shaped by social and cultural networks that simultaneously offer possibility and define constraint – he argues that personal details are significant only insofar as they shed light on the collectives to which the individual belongs. Represented as a member of a collective, it is Chartier’s status as an Annaliste historian and member of Alphonse Dupront’s Sorbonne seminar that best explain the roots of his early work. When he began his studies in the mid-1960s, the third generation of the Annales was coming into its own. Renewing the first generation’s interest in culture, they applied to it quantitative methods that the second generation had developed for the study of social and economic phenomena. Using vast data sets, the third generation searched for the historical occurrence of particular objects, ideas, and practices amongst different social groups. So, for example, they counted signatures on marriage contracts to establish rates and patterns of literacy, and used records of book sales and ownership to determine the diffusion of particular books and, by implication, the ideas they carried. An advocate of quantification, Alphonse Dupront encouraged his students to use its methods and even wrote an afterword to the two-volume Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, a classic of third-generation historiography. In his own work on religion and spirituality, however, Dupront focused less on the signs than the content of belief and its relationship to collective psychology. These emphases spoke to Chartier, who was himself more interested in the nature of texts than the appearance of their titles in book inventories. Hence, he sought methodologies that promised greater insight into the production and apprehension of print. The work of sociologist Norbert Elias and Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau would prove of greatest use, defining the intellectual poles between which Chartier moves even today. As Elias emphasizes constraint, with his accounts of dense networks of social interaction that shape members’ behavior and even their psyches, de Certeau stresses independence, examining how men and women surpass the stereotype of the passive consumer by appropriating cultural objects and symbols to meet private needs and desires. Chartier’s histories explore the tensions between Elias’s circumscription and de Certeau’s inventiveness, analyzing how early moderns navigated cultures both bequeathed and perpetually remade. Chartier details the broad aims of his work in the 1989 Annales article, “Le monde comme représentation” (translated as “The world as representation,”

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1995) which challenges static conceptions of society and culture. Rejecting historians’ traditional use of a priori social categories to define cultural activity – their tendency to assume that material conditions govern what cultural objects a given group has access to and how it makes use of them – he envisions a more dynamic process whereby influence flows in both directions between society and culture. In other words, if material conditions shape access to cultural resources, so also does representation shape the apprehension of material conditions. Culture is not merely epiphenomenal but a structuring feature of the lived world, defining status and influencing social relations. Scholars who abandoned an excessively rigid distinction between objective structures and subjective representations, Chartier concludes, have proposed new means to understand the past. No longer imagining social identity to be the narrow product of distinct material conditions, they describe it as the outcome of struggles over representation amongst subjects with unequal power to “classify and name.” This perspective permits the historian to “cast … a fresh eye on the social itself by focusing on the symbolic strategies that determine positions and relations and construct for each class, group, or milieu a perceived-being constitutive of its identity.” It also permits the historian to cast new light on cultural objects and practices, considering how their diffusion and use illuminate processes of social differentiation. Chartier first began to work out the methods of a more mobile cultural history in his early work on print culture and reading, his most visible association with which dates from co-editorship with Henri-Jean Martin of the magnificent Histoire de l’édition française (1982–6). Composed of four beautifully illustrated folio volumes, that collection defined the state of the field, gathering essays by leading intellectual and cultural historians worldwide to trace the history of print from Gutenberg’s invention to the middle of the twentieth century. Chartier’s essays for the collection sketch his own expanding conception of early modern print culture. “Les pratiques urbaines de l’imprimé” (1984; translated as “Urban reading practices, 1660–1780,” 1987) co-authored with Daniel Roche, focuses on readers. The very shape of the article reflects his transition to new methods by beginning with a survey of quantitative studies, which demonstrate the expansion of book ownership over the course of the eighteenth century, only to shift midway to more discrete and qualitative kinds of evidence that include letters, novels, and memoirs, as well as paintings and engravings. Reminding us that neither rates of ownership nor total numbers of books published can exhaust the myriad ways in which early modern city-dwellers encountered and consumed print, Chartier and Roche describe an eighteenth-century France rich with opportunities to read. If it was principally the learned – religious and secular alike – who won access to the vast libraries maintained by collèges, religious institutions, and a few private collectors, more middling sorts could borrow books from shelves that housed fiction, philosophy, travel writing, and periodicals by paying annual fees to cabinets and chambres de lecture. Readers with

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less disposable income rented popular novels by the hour from booksellers, while even the poorest and illiterate might – for the equivalent of a few pennies – hear newspapers read aloud at a bookseller’s stand or in front of his shop. If access to print was heterogeneous, so was print itself. Books in the early modern period were far outnumbered by occasional texts, single sheets whose woodcuts and accompanying captions detailed miracles and catastrophes, commemorated political events, celebrated saints and pious acts, or simply marked the days, seasons, and holidays of the year. Sold by booksellers and peddlers, or distributed by confraternities to their members, posters were passed from hand to hand when not safeguarded to adorn a home or workshop wall. Such texts, like the rough pages that bore song lyrics and hand-lettered placards that appeared in times of discontent, offer “unanimous proof of [the] intimate acquaintance with print that was reading, and also something more than reading.” Affirming the complexity of all dimensions of print culture, Chartier and Roche conclude that the act of reading itself fluctuated: it was not necessarily silent or solitary, nor founded on a particular threshold of literacy. Heterogeneous reading practices were embedded in social relationships that encompassed and compensated for different levels of competence. Many texts were shared through the intermediary of the voice as works were read aloud in family gatherings (elite and popular alike), shared by members of religious communities, or shouted out to the informal political assemblies summoned into existence by a complaint posted in a public square. With “Livres bleus et lectures populaires” (1984; translated as “The bibliothèque bleue and popular reading,” 1987), also written for Histoire de l’édition française, Chartier shifts attention from reader to book. If he would later make a broad argument in L’Ordre des livres (1992; translated as The Order of Books, 1994) that a text cannot be abstracted from its physical form, which shapes readers’ expectations of content, he developed the empirical case here. Using the corpus of the bibliothèque bleue, cheap books popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he once more proceeds from a statistical survey of the occurrence of particular titles and genres to more qualitative analysis, here examining how printers and publishers altered texts to bring new audiences into being. The bibliothèque bleue, a publishing enterprise so called because of its books’ distinctive blue paper covers, violates historians’ expectations of what constituted “popular literature” by retailing texts composed for learned readers that savvy publishers adapted to make more accessible. Choosing texts likely to appeal to a broad audience – religious manuals that affirmed common pious practices, for example, or fictions whose episodic narratives and stock characters permitted less attentive reading – publishers made physical changes to market them more widely. They broke up dense page formats with new paragraph and chapter breaks to facilitate reading in “fits and starts” and assist readers whose limited competency demanded multiple signposts. They streamlined narrative by cutting character descriptions, which slowed the pace of action, pruning sentences of descriptive


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terms, and modernizing archaic turns of phrase. And they placed illustrations strategically to facilitate understanding. Chartier summed up the broader implications of such publishing strategies almost a decade later in “L’ordre des livres” (1992; translated as “Communities of readers,” 1994). The bibliothèque bleue, like the pliegos de cordel published in Spain in the same period and the chapbooks of England, challenge historians’ longstanding assumption that particular texts possessed single meanings and targeted only learned or popular readers. Rather, publishers forged multiple audiences for, and elicited new uses of, texts with creative editorial strategies and new publication formats. Their success in attracting new readers suggests that social distinctions between audiences were not static but the outcome of dynamic processes. Illuminating how great is the range of reading practices and textual formats, Chartier suggests the vast implications of the study of print culture. He has explored the possibilities of print as a writer and an editor, supervising and contributing to collections on the uses of religious and political texts in the early modern period (Les Usages de l’imprimé (XVe–XIXe siècle), 1987; translated as The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, 1989), the norms and practices of letter-writing (La Correspondance: les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle, 1991; partially translated as Correspondence: Models of Letter-writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, 1997), popular reading practices and the multiform texts sold by peddlers (Colportage et lecture populaire: imprimés de large circulation en Europe, XVIe–XIXe siècles, 1996), and changing conceptions of the figure of the author (Identités d’auteur dans l’Antiquité et la tradition européenne, 2004). As an Annaliste who understands what a long-term perspective may contribute to current practices, he has also attended to the massive project of digitizing texts that is changing modern access to knowledge and our conception of the “book.” “Representations of the written word” (1995) characterizes the shift to reading on the computer screen as a technological revolution more vast than Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Celebrating the new possibilities that electronic media offer readers, who may henceforth annotate, edit, and reassemble texts in ways never before possible, Chartier evokes the new legal notions (of literary property and copyright, among others) and library practices (cataloguing, bibliographical description) that they call into being. At the same time, he warns against losing our sense of history: for even as it promises a utopian library that contains all the world’s knowledge, the computer threatens to make the disembodied text ubiquitous. Librarians and historians must preserve old forms because without the books, pamphlets, newspapers, and posters through which our forebears encountered print, we will lose sight of how they apprehended it. Chartier has also reflected explicitly on the theoretical issue that stands at the heart of his histories of print and reading: the relationship between learned and popular cultures. “Popular appropriations: the readers and their books” (1995) challenges older definitions of popular culture as a “coherent symbolic system”

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whose logic was distinct from but dependent on learned culture. According to that definition, an isolated popular culture emerged when a golden age of shared and original production was defeated by elites’ retreat and imposition of rigid external norms. Chartier develops a multifaceted critique of this perspective. He challenges chronology by noting that historians have identified supposedly novel social ruptures in the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the nineteenth century, as if elites were always decisively abandoning shared objects and practices. Better, he suggests, to replace linear accounts organized around isolated moments of rupture with less teleological histories that consider how relations between elite and popular fluctuated over time. More broadly, Chartier denies that cultural objects and practices are ever “socially pure.” Whether books or religious devotions, they are shared between different social groups, “at the same time acculturated and acculturating.” Following Michel de Certeau, he shifts the accent from an object to its use. Consumers appropriate cultural signs and products, negotiating meaning and challenging norms that dominant social groups or institutions try to impose. But subordinate group activity is always more than the simple acceptance or rejection of dominant group norms: readers may, for example, dismember and reassemble texts to impart meanings “far removed from those originally intended.” “Civilité” (1986; translated as “From texts to manners. A concept and its books: civilité between aristocratic distinction and popular appropriation,” 1987) broadens the case by demonstrating that competition over representation is not always restricted to mass resistance to elite norms. Here, Chartier’s analysis of early modern etiquette manuals demonstrates that elites repeatedly abandoned behaviors once believed to perform elevated status when those behaviors were advertised by books and broadly accepted as normative. For how to signal social distinction, if not with unique practices? In the early 1990s, Chartier moved further afield to tackle a classic historiographical problem: the causes of the French Revolution. However, if Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française (1990; translated as The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, 1991) seemed a departure, Chartier brought to it the problems and methods he had been elaborating for more than a decade. Here, he takes on a claim dating from the event itself: that the roots of the French Revolution lie in the radical new ideas produced by Enlightenment philosophes. Focusing on three thinkers who integrated that claim into their histories of the eighteenth century – Alexis de Tocqueville, Hyppolite Taine, and Daniel Mornet – Chartier makes the problem distinctively his own by questioning whether ideas, in and of themselves, can generate upheaval on the scale of the French Revolution. He finds it more productive to treat the ideas of the Enlightenment as he treated stories of the bibliothèque bleue: not as coherent, transhistorical abstractions, but as enunciations embedded in a larger corpus of beliefs and practices. “[T]he diffusion of ideas cannot be held to be a simple imposition. Reception always involves


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appropriation, which transforms, reformulates, and exceeds what it receives … The circulation of thoughts … is always a dynamic and creative process.” Summarizing the immensely rich body of scholarship on eighteenth-century France that was produced in the generation before the 1989 bicentenary, Chartier considers its implications. He describes a pre-revolutionary world undergoing a far-reaching transformation of practices and modes of thinking. As a growing marketplace for literature increased book circulation, changing reading practices penetrated daily life to encourage critical opinions of text and lived experience alike. Shifting attitudes toward church and crown loosened subordination to formal religious doctrine and debased the idea of the king as a sacred figure. Peasants felt themselves freer of subjection to noble power, laborers became more accustomed to collective action, and elites frequenting salons and Masonic lodges were less respectful of traditional social boundaries. The outcome of such change was a new political culture, in which a broadly conceived public considered itself authorized to exercise “critical judgement unconstrained by limits on its empire or by obligatory subjection to instituted authority.” And, yet, Chartier refuses narrow causality. The new political culture did not mechanically produce the French Revolution; it made the Revolution possible by making it “conceivable.” Nor, he concludes, ought we to neglect the internal dynamic of the Revolution itself, which marked a sharp break from all that preceded it to become an autonomous event. Better to conceive of Enlightenment and Revolution as “inscribed together in a long-term process that both included and extended beyond them … sharing, in different ways, the same ends and similar expectations.” The book was very well received, thanks to its conceptual ambitions and synthetic achievements, but one admiring reviewer nonetheless criticized Chartier for taking too lightly the work of the philosophes themselves. Undeniably, he radically relativizes the significance of Enlightenment ideas, but it may be more accurate to describe The Cultural Origins as keeping those ideas in the wings the better to dress the stage upon which they will appear. With a better understanding of the world in which the philosophes were read and the conditions that shaped their appropriation, we may better appreciate how eighteenth-century readers interpreted ideas that moderns believe themselves fully to understand. In his most ambitious book yet, Au bord de la falaise (1998; translated as On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, 1997), Chartier temporarily sets aside historical research to reflect on the foundations of cultural history. He does so through essays that explicate and analyze the contributions of seminal modern thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Hayden White, and Norbert Elias, among others. The essays on bibliographer Donald McKenzie and philosopher and art historian Louis Marin extend Chartier’s longstanding critique of classic approaches to intellectual history and the history of mentalités. For if ideas lack transhistorical content and cannot be attached to social groups

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defined a priori by material criteria, McKenzie and Marin suggest how to restore them to their historical context and tease out meanings forged within larger ideological systems. McKenzie does so by detaching texts from their longstanding association with the book, as Chartier has done, to underscore the physical heterogeneity of pamphlets and posters, maps, musical scores and landscapes and, in the modern world, computer data and digitized documents. Taking the bibliographer’s formal task to analyze a book’s material aspect, McKenzie turns it to the service of history by demonstrating how a text’s changing forms changed its meanings. Louis Marin applied similar methods to early modern paintings, images, and ceremony. Pairing seventeenth-century theories with genuine acts of representation, he explored how individuals and groups engaged the larger social world by classifying reality in particular ways, institutionalizing the “practices and signs” through which they expressed status and rank. Marin’s work, Chartier concludes, “permits us to understand how confrontations based on brute force or pure violence changed into symbolic struggles” among different social groups just as they did between ruler and ruled. The three chapters on Norbert Elias that follow not only shift emphasis from objects to audiences, but allow Chartier to return to a body of scholarship that has been of singular import to his own work. Chartier first summarized the essentials of Elias’s work in his 1985 preface to La Société de cour (translated as “Social figuration and habitus: reading Elias,” 1988). There he explored the sociologist’s historical account of “the civilizing process,” whereby the state came to monopolize violence as royal protocol imposed growing restraint on courtiers’ bodies and emotions. The essays in On the Edge of the Cliff shift emphasis from history to sociology as they elaborate Elias’s theory of society. Elias, Chartier explains, rejected a classical opposition that pitted the individual against a society always exterior to and independent of the individual. He insisted that the individual and society are inseparable: humans operate within networks of social relations that determine how they engage one another and shape their very personalities. Without such webs, we would be like the famous wild child of Aveyron; with it, we are like courtly dancers: The steps and bows, gestures and movements made by the individual dancer are … synchronized with those of other dancers. If any of the dancing individuals were contemplated in isolation, the functions of his or her movements could not be understood. The way the individual behaves in this situation is determined by the relations of the dancers to each other. (Chartier quoting Elias)

If Chartier’s essays, written as forewords to new French editions of Elias’s work, make clear the latter’s distinctive contribution to sociocultural history, they do not establish any critical distance from that contribution. It is an odd silence, given how much Chartier’s empirical work tempers Elias’s social determinism with


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examples of the private inventiveness and small forms of resistance that Michel de Certeau celebrated. But because de Certeau plays a different role in this volume, acting as an interlocutor in the debate over historical epistemology, it is difficult to know whether Chartier simply occulted this theoretical discussion or has himself taken a more deterministic view of social constraint in recent years. Much of the rest of On the Edge of the Cliff takes up the debate over the “linguistic turn” in American cultural history and has, accordingly, drawn most comment in the United States. For, although Chartier long ago rejected quantification, he insists that history remains a social science in methods and aims. The cultures that historians study include gestures, conflicts, and habits that remain inflexibly extralinguistic; hence, they cannot be interpreted according to the same rational logics we apply to words. And written history, he insists, remains distinct from fiction despite its predilection for narrative, thanks to its “strategies of accreditation (the document standing for the real)” and unique methods of articulation. The book excited lively and productive debate among American cultural historians. William Sewell, who is sympathetic to Chartier’s critique and appreciates the irony of a French intellectual chastising Americans for taking linguistic analysis too far, champions a middle ground which he believes Chartier is already staking out. Rather than partitioning language from practice, Sewell situates both on a broad field of articulations to which scholars apply a range of interpretive tools as necessary, including “linguistic paradigms as coequal members of the broad semiotic family.” Chartier has acknowledged that he and Sewell share a common aim to study cultural practices in conjunction with “their social conditions of possibility,” even if he insists that they have not yet formulated an adequate methodology. Keenly attuned to the myriad means by which knowledge is produced, transmitted, and acquired, Roger Chartier reaches tirelessly toward the larger world. His seminar at the Ecole des hautes études long served as a modern salon in which he worked out his ideas, while offering a platform from which French and foreign scholars at every stage of their careers could share their work. Reaching beyond his seminar, he piloted the Centre Alexandre Koyré, a pioneering institution for the history and theory of science, through the first decade of its existence, and played an important advisory role in the creation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Chartier’s books and essays have been translated into at least seven languages, and he has traveled widely beyond Paris, serving as visiting faculty and giving lectures at more than two dozen institutions on three continents over fifteen years’ work. Chartier escaped the confines of academic publishing for almost two decades with regular book reviews in Le Monde. Those essays, gathered in Le Jeu de la règle: Lectures (2000), introduced his readers to French translations of some of the most important books in contemporary cultural history. Whether describing the methods and aims of Italian microhistory via reviews of books by Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, exploring how essay collections edited by Natalie Davis and

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Arlette Farge, and Danielle Haase-Dubosc and Eliane Viennot, broaden our understanding of the roles women played in the early modern world, or explaining how Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump casts fresh light on the scientific revolution and the history of science itself, Chartier forged new audiences for new ideas just as early modern publishers once did, translating them to, and celebrating them before, a wider public.

References and Further Reading Roger Chartier’s extraordinary record of publications makes it impossible to list all his books and articles here. Among books, I include only English-language titles and a few French or Spanish titles not translated into English. Of his almost four hundred journal articles, essays for collections, and forewords, I cite only those discussed in this chapter. For a complete bibliography, see his webpage at the Collège de France (www.college-defrance.fr/default/EN/all/eur_mod/travaux_bibliographie.htm).

Selected Books by Roger Chartier L’Education en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, by Roger Chartier, Dominique Julia, and Marie-Madeleine Compère (Paris: SEDES, 1976). La Nouvelle Histoire, edited by Roger Chartier, Jacques Le Goff, and Jacques Revel (Paris: Retz, 1978). Figures de la gueuserie (Paris, Montalba: Bibliothèque bleue, 1982). Histoire de l’édition française, 4 vols., edited by Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier (Paris: Promodis, 1982–6). Représentation et vouloir politique: autour des Etats Généraux de 1614, edited by Roger Chartier and Denis Richet (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1982). Pratiques de la lecture, edited by Roger Chartier (Marseille: Rivages, 1985). Les Universités européennes du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle: histoire sociale des populations étudiantes, vol. I, edited by Roger Chartier, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1986). The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, 15th–19th Centuries, edited by Roger Chartier, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). A History of Private Life, vol. III: Passions of the Renaissance, edited by Roger Chartier, Philippe Ariès, and Georges Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989). The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). La Correspondance: les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle, edited by Roger Chartier (Paris: Fayard, 1991); partial English translation as Correspondence: Models of Letter-writing


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from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, translated by Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Histoires de la lecture: un bilan des recherches, edited by Roger Chartier (Paris: IMEC Editions and Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995). Colportage et lecture populaire: imprimés de large circulation en Europe, XVIe–XIXe siècles, edited by Roger Chartier and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Paris: IMEC Editions and Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1996). Sciences et langues en Europe, edited by Roger Chartier and Pietro Corsi (Paris: Centre Alexandre Koyré, CID, 1996). Le Livre en revolutions: entretiens avec Jean Lebrun (Paris: Editions Textuel, 1997). On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). A History of Reading in the West, edited by Roger Chartier and Guglielmo Cavallo, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe: The Panizzi Lectures 1998 (London: The British Library, 1999). Entre poder y placer: cultura escrita y literatura en la Edad moderna, translated by Maribel García Sánchez, Alejandro Pescador, Horacio Pons and María Condor (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2000). Le Jeu de la règle: Lectures (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000). Las Revoluciones de la cultura escrita: diálogo e intervenciones, translated by Alberto Luis Bixio (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2000). Identités d’auteur dans l’Antiquité et la tradition européenne, edited by Roger Chartier and Claude Calame (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2004). Europa, América y el Mundo: tiempos históricos, edited by Roger Chartier and Antonio Feros (Madrid: Fundación Rafael del Pino / Marcial Pons, 2006). ¿Qué es un libro?, edited by Roger Chartier (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2006). Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Selected Articles by Roger Chartier “The bibliothèque bleue and popular reading,” in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); originally published in H.-J. Martin and Roger Chartier (eds.), Histoire de l’édition française, vol. II: Le Livre triomphant (Paris: Promodis, 1984). “Urban reading practices, 1660–1780,” with Daniel Roche, in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); originally published in H.-J. Martin and Roger Chartier (eds.), Histoire de l’édition française, vol. II: Le Livre triomphant (Paris: Promodis, 1984). “From texts to manners. A concept and its books: civilité between aristocratic distinction and popular appropriation,” in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France,

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translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); originally published in Rolf Reichardt and E. Schmitt (eds.), Handbücher politischsozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986). “Social figuration and habitus: reading Elias,” in Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); originally published as the preface to La Société de cour (Paris: Flammarion, 1985). “Communities of readers,” in The Order of Books, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). “Popular appropriations: the readers and their books,” translated by Daniel Thorburn and David Hall in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audience from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). “Representations of the written word,” translated by Laura Mason and Milad Doueihi in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audience from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). “The world as representation,” in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, edited by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: New Press, 1995); originally published as “Le monde comme représentation,” Annales 44 (1989): 1505–20.

Selected Interviews “Dialogue à propos de l’histoire culturelle,” with Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Darnton in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 59 (1985): 86–3. “Gens à histoires, gens sans histoires,” with Pierre Bourdieu, Politix, 6 (1989): 53–60. “Dialogue sur l’espace public,” with Keith Michael Baker, Politix, 26 (1994): 5–22. “L’histoire culturelle aujourd’hui: entretien avec Roger Chartier,” by Gérard Noiriel, Genèses, 15 (1) (1994): 115–29. “Reading literature/culture: a translation of ‘Reading as a cultural practice,’ ” a dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu, by Todd W. Reeser and Steven D. Spalding, Style, 36 (4) (2002): 659–76. “Le livre: son passé, son avenir. Un entretien avec Roger Chartier,” by Ivan Jablonka (available at www.laviedesidees.fr/Le-livre-son-passe-son-avenir.html; September 29, 2008).

References Censer, Jack, “Review of The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 97 (4) (1992): 1225–6. Poirrier, Philippe, “L’histoire culturelle en France. Retour sur trois itinéraires: Alain Corbin, Roger Chartier et Jean-François Sirinelli,” Cahiers d’histoire, 26 (2) (2007): 49–59. Smith, Bonnie G., Dewald, Jonathan, Sewell, William, et al., “Critical pragmatism, language, and cultural history: on Roger Chartier’s On the Edge of the Cliff,” French Historical Studies, 21 (2) (1998): 213–64.

8

Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009) David Stewart

Pierre Chaunu was one of France’s most prominent and influential twentiethcentury conservative historians. In a long career that included, in addition to his seminal works on Latin American, religious, and demographic history, considerable activity as a political and social commentator, Chaunu was active in France’s national debates about education, abortion, immigration, and the legacy of the French Revolution. Pierre Chaunu was born to a railway worker and his wife in the small town of Belleville in the Lorraine region of France on August 17, 1923, on the edge of the Verdun battlefield. His early memories centered around various manifestations of death and, by his own admission, these memories shaped the man he became. His mother died when Chaunu was an infant, and he was raised by his maternal aunt and her husband, who died during Chaunu’s youth. Moreover, the region of Lorraine, where he lived until his was fifteen years old, was suffused with memories of death from World War I, which had ravaged the region less than a decade before. By the time he entered high school, Chaunu knew he must choose between studying medicine and history, both of which interests grew from his childhood experiences with death. Studying at the Sorbonne during the German occupation of France, Chaunu came under the tutelage of Fernand Braudel, one of the pre-eminent French historians then living. Although Braudel had great influence on Chaunu, the young scholar was also shaped by the noted historian Ernest Labrousse. After earning his diplôme d’études supérieures, in 1947 Chaunu returned to the Department of the Meuse, where for two years he taught high school in the town of Bar-le-Duc. During these two years of teaching, he decided that he wanted to become an historical researcher, but was uncertain on which historical period he should

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focus. While at Bar-le-Duc, Chaunu published his first book, Eugène Sue et la seconde République (Eugene Sue and the Second Republic, 1948). This study of a nineteenth-century writer was conventional in both topic and methodology. Chaunu’s next work, however, Histoire de l’Amérique latine (History of Latin America, 1949), marked a significant new direction for Chaunu, one which rejected conventional topics and approaches in favor of what was at that time the little-studied topic of Latin American history. At about the same time, at the urging and direction of Fernand Braudel and Lucien Febvre, the Sixth Section of the Ecole pratique des hautes études was created at the Sorbonne, giving an institutional home to the group of historians calling themselves Annalistes. This historical school of thought asks broad questions about human society, examines change and continuity over vast periods of time, and seeks to make interdisciplinary inquiries, drawing on geography, economics, and statistics as it answers historical questions. Chaunu and his wife, Huguette Catella Chaunu, briefly returned to Paris to assist Braudel however they might. Shortly after their return to Paris, in 1948, the Chaunus moved to Spain and began researching in Madrid and Seville, where they labored until 1951. Upon their return to France, Pierre Chaunu taught high school at Michelet de Vanves in Paris for five more years while he and his wife compiled their data and wrote the masterwork. The fruit of their research, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650) (Seville and the Atlantic, 1504–1650), was published in twelve volumes from 1955 to 1960. This voluminous work attempts to provide a comprehensive record of all bullion entering Spain from the Spanish colonies over a century and a half, reflecting the Annaliste emphases on vast spaces, great periods of time, and quantitative data. The study includes a one-volume examination of the geography of Iberia, Atlantic and Caribbean islands, and Spanish continental America, two volumes of statistical interpretation, and eight volumes of tabular data. Chaunu’s central theses in this work are that the carrying trade was a natural, not artificial creation, that no towns except Cadiz and Seville could have undertaken such a volume of trade with the New World, and that the Portuguese played a more important role in the Spanish carrying trade than had been recognized. Hailed at its publication as highly innovative, this work also served as Chaunu’s dissertation, and he earned his doctorate in 1960. Over the following decades, scholars of Spain and America have extended the data set past 1650, have attempted to determine the amount of contraband Spanish bullion entering Europe, and have produced a number of studies examining the role of particular commodities in the Atlantic economy. Through all these studies, Chaunu’s central thesis has not been rejected, and his multi-volume thesis remains a classic of early modern Spanish historiography. In 1956, Chaunu accepted a position at France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where he remained until 1959. In that year, he also took a job at the University of Caen, where he taught until 1971. During this period, Chaunu was prolific, publishing ten more books and contributing to another five. Most of these

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focused on facets of Spain’s colonial empire, including works on the colonial Philippines, European colonial expansion, and early modern Spain. His work clearly and firmly established Chaunu as one of the leading historians of early modern Spanish colonialism, and as one of the leading lights of the Annaliste school of history. In 1966, Chaunu published La Civilisation de l’Europe classique (The Civilization of Classical Europe), which brought the author attention well beyond scholars of Spanish America. This publication also marked the beginning of a reorientation of his research interests. In addition to the broad economic and geographic questions with which he had approached his American topics, Chaunu added demography as an important element to his investigation. La Civilisation de l’Europe classique is considered a major work for its synthesis of economics, geography, and demographics, and because it was the first synthetic general history from the Annales school. Chaunu had converted to Protestant Christianity in 1954, and the events of May 1968 impelled him to become an active political conservative. He thus began a career as public commentator, paralleling his role as historian, becoming a radio personality and penning weekly articles for the prominent French newspaper Le Figaro. As an outgrowth of his research interests, Chaunu in 1966 founded Le Centre de recherches d’histoire quantitative at the University of Caen. As a result of his growing prominence as an author and researcher, Chaunu was elected to a professorship of modern history at the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne in 1970, where he taught until his retirement. As he matured, Chaunu increasingly rejected attempts to locate his history within one school of historical thought. In combining emerging methods of social science with traditional history, he tied hypothetical models to rigorous empirical research. This was reflected in his 1974 work, Histoire, science sociale (History, Social Science), a methodological reflection on history written for his students. In this work, he sketched his vision of the recent evolution of the historical discipline. First, economic history posed problems of method, which were addressed by quantification, and permitted investigations into places over time. Next, historical demography offered a method to measure actions and behaviors of people over time. Finally, Chaunu called for a new history to emerge. The marriage of economic and demographic quantification, he argued, would permit historians to arrive at a history of mentalités, examining how and why the thoughts and behaviors of groups change over time. Throughout his career, Chaunu remained interested in the theory of history, publishing seven other works addressing questions of historical method and practice. Chaunu was one of the first scholars to recognize the decrease in fecundity in Western Europe, and pointed out problems this decrease might bring for Western civilization. The legalization of abortion in France galvanized Chaunu into studying contemporary, as well as historical, demographics, and he joined his findings

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to political debates in France and Europe. In Le Refus de la vie (Refusal of Life, 1975) and Le Pest blanche (The White Plague, 1976), he argued that to persist over time, civilization must be transmitted, which requires both receptors and emitters. Continually decreasing birth rates, however, disrupt the cycle of cultural transmission and will lead to a collapse of civilization. Demographic studies led Chaunu to undertake a study of death and dying. La Mort à Paris (Death in Paris, 1978), based on a reading of an immense number of Parisian wills, offers a sweeping reflection on the cultural history of death, demonstrating both Chaunu’s interest in cultural transmission and how his ideas on history could be put into practice. From this work, Chaunu extended his inquiries into how societies perceive and transmit the sacred, published as La Mémoire et le sacré (Memory and the Sacred, 1978). Throughout his career, both at the University of Caen and at the Sorbonne, Chaunu was a vocal advocate of improving the quality of university instruction in France. As a consequence of this interest, he served on national committees organized to address the quality of French university education, including the Conseil supérieur des corps universitaires and the Comité national des universities. In 1983, he was elected into the history and geography section of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Much of Chaunu’s work from the 1980s centered on religion – both historical and historiographical. Histoire et foi (History and Faith, 1980) examines the relationship of history to religion, and Chaunu argued that the connection is both necessary and good; that is, Christianity has made possible the modern historical discipline. Moreover, the status of women as fully human in the Western world derives clearly and directly from the Bible’s moral and ethical categories. In nonChristian cultures, women are regarded primarily as progenitors, and it is only the cultural influence of Christianity that has altered that perception. Histoire et décadence (History and Decadence, 1981), a study of the processes of history, asserts that the very idea of cultural decadence is modern, and is indissolubly connected to the idea of progress. Eglise, culture et société: essais sur Réforme et Contre-Réforme, 1517–1620 (Church, Culture, and Society: Reform and Counter-Reform, 1517–1620, 1981) and Le Temps des Réformes (The Age of Reform, 1984) both examine the Reformation as an historical phenomenon. Chaunu concluded that the Reformation as a period is better understood not as a single movement, but as consisting of four interconnected movements: reforming impulses within the Catholic Church from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries; the “magisterial” reformation of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli; the Anabaptists’ more radical responses; and the Catholic reaction culminating in the Council of Trent. As France prepared to celebrate the bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989, Chaunu began writing about the Revolution. He published many shorter articles, most commonly in Le Figaro, before the publication of Le Grand Déclassement (The Great Dismantling, 1989). This highly controversial work quickly led to Chaunu’s


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branding as counter-revolutionary and anti-modern by many professional historians. Chaunu argued that the Revolution had a profoundly negative impact on French demography, economy, and politics, retarding the country in ways felt into the twentieth century. Moreover, the political patterns introduced by the Revolution established precedents for French political institutions and discourse through the present day. More controversially, Chaunu also demonstrated that revolutionary ideology was derived from eighteenth-century conspiratorial movements, notably the Freemasons, and asserted that the Terror of 1793 was the natural culmination of revolutionary ideas, not an aberration. Finally, he called the activities of the French government in the Vendée a “genocide,” which labeling provoked a huge controversy among historians of the Revolution.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Pierre Chaunu Eugène Sue et la seconde République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). Histoire de l’Amérique latine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), 12 vols., by Pierre Chaunu, Huguette Chaunu, and Guy Arbellot (Paris: Colin, 1955–60). Dynamique conjoncturelle et histoire sérielle: point de vue d’historien (Brussels: Fédération des industries belges, 1960). Une histoire hispano-américaniste pilote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960). Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques, XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles, by Pierre Chaunu, Jacques Bertin, and Serge Bonin (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960). Veracruz en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI y primera del XVII (Mexico City: n.p., 1960). Manille et Macao: face à la conjoncture des XVI et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Colin, 1962). L’Amérique et les Amériques (Paris: Colin, 1964). Las Grandes líneas de la producción histórica en America Latina, 1950–1962 (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venenzuela, 1964). La Civilisation de l’Europe classique (Paris: Arthaud, 1966). Conquête et exploitation des nouveaux mondes (XVIe siècle) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969). L’Expansion européenne du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969); translated by Katharine Betram as European Expansion in the Later Middle Ages (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1979). La Civilisation de l’Europe des lumières (Paris: Arthaud, 1971). L’Espagne de Charles Quint (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1973). Histoire, science sociale: la durée, l’espace et l’homme à l’époque moderne (Paris: SEDES, 1974). L’Europe en péril: histoire et démographie (Paris: Centre d’études politiques et civiques, 1975). De l’histoire à la prospective: la méditation du futur, c’est la connaissance du present (Paris: Laffont, 1975). La Mémoire de l’éternité (Paris: Laffont, 1975). Le Refus de la vie: analyse historique du présent (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1975).

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Le Temps des Réformes: histoire religieuse et système de civilization. La Crise de la chrétienté: l’éclatement, 1250–1550 (Paris: Fayard, 1975). Les Amériques, 16e, 17e, 18e siècles (Paris: Colin, 1976). La Peste blanche: comment éviter le suicide de l’Occident, by Pierre Chaunu and Georges Suffert (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Lettre aux églises, by Pierre Chaunu and François Bluche (Paris: Fayard, 1977). L’Ouverture du monde: XIVe–XVIe siècles, by Pierre Chaunu and Bartolomé Bennassar (Paris: Colin, 1977). Séville et l’Amérique aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, by Pierre Chaunu and Huguette Chaunu (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). Histoire quantitative, histoire sérielle (Paris: A. Colin, 1978). La Mémoire et le sacré (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1978). La Mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978). La Violence de Dieu (Paris: R. Laffont, 1978). Le Défi démographique (Paris: Club de l’Horloge, 1979). Un futur sans avenir: histoire et population, by Pierre Chaunu and Jean Legrand (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1979). Le Sursis: l’ardeur et la modération (Paris: R. Laffont, 1979). Fin du monde, ou, fin d’un monde, by Pierre Chaunu and Eric Laurent (Paris: Tallandier, 1980). Histoire et foi: deux mille ans de plaidoyer pour la foi (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1980). Histoire et imagination: la transition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980). Eglise, culture et société: essais sur Réforme et Contre-Réforme, 1517–1620 (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1981). Histoire et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1981). Ce que je crois (Paris: B. Grasset, 1982). La France: histoire de la sensibilité des Français à la France (Paris: Laffont, 1982). Le Chemin des mages: entretiens avec Gérard Kuntz (Lausanne: Presses Bibliques Universitaires, 1983). Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Maurice Baumont, 1892–1981 (Paris: Palais de l’institut, 1983). L’Historien dans tous ses états (Paris: Perrin, 1984). Pour l’histoire (Paris: Perrin, 1984). L’Historien en cet instant (Paris: Hachette, 1985). Rétrohistoire: racines et jalons, portraits et galerie (Paris: Economica, 1985). Une autre voie, by Pierre Chaunu and Eric Roussel (Paris: Stock, 1986). L’Aventure de la Réforme: le monde de Jean Calvin (Paris: Hermé, 1986); translated as The Reformation, by V. Acland et al. (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1986). Au cœur religieux de l’histoire (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1986). Du big bang à l’enfant: dialogues avec Charles Chauvin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1987). La Liberté (Paris: Fayard, 1987). L’Apologie par l’histoire (Paris: Téqui, 1988). L’Obscure Mémoire de la France: de la première pierre à l’an mille (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1988). Le Grand Déclassement: à propos d’une commémoration (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989). Dieu: apologie, by Pierre Chaunu and Charles Chauvin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1990). Reflets et miroir de l’histoire (Paris: Economica, 1990).


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Trois millions d’années, quatre-vingts milliards de destines (Paris: R. Laffont, 1990). Colère contre colère (Paris: Seghers, 1991). Brève histoire de Dieu: le cœur du problème (Paris: R. Laffont, 1992). Discours (Paris: Palais de l’Institut, 1993). L’Axe du temps (Paris: Julliard, 1994). L’Instant Eclaté: entretiens by Pierre Chaunu and François Dosse (Paris: Aubier, 1994). Le Temps des Réformes: histoire religieuse et système de civilization. La Réforme protestante (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1994). L’Héritage: au risque de la haine (Paris: Aubier, 1995). Baptême de Clovis, baptême de la France: de la religion d’Etat à la laïcité d’Etat, by Pierre Chaunu and Eric Mension-Rigau (Paris: Balland, 1996). Le Basculement religieux de Paris au XVIIIe siècle: essai d’histoire politique et religieuse, by Pierre Chaunu, Madeleine Foisil, and Françoise de Noirfontaine (Paris: Fayard, 1998). Danse avec l’histoire, by Pierre Chaunu and Eric Mension-Rigau (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1998). Charles Quint by Pierre Chaunu and Michèle Escamilla (Paris: Fayard, 2000). La Femme et Dieu: réflexions d’un chrétien sur la transmission de la vie by Pierre Chaunu and Jacques Reynard (Paris: Fayard, 2001). Essai de prospective démographique, by Pierre Chaunu, Huguette Chaunu, and J. P. Reynard (Paris: Fayard, 2003).

References Bardet, Jean-Pierre and Foisil, Madeleine (eds.), La Vie, la mort, la foi, le temps: mélanges offerts á Pierre Chaunu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). Chaunu, Pierre, “Le fils de la morte,” in Essais d’ego-histoire, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 61–107. Mitjaville, Bernard and Brown, Sheryl J., “An interview with Pierre Chaunu,” The World and I, 9 (1987): 663–71. Winock, Michel, “Pierre Chaunu, un réactionnaire progressiste? Entrentien avec Michel Winock,” Histoire, 44 (1982): 85–90.

9

Louis Chevalier (1911–2001) Barrie M. Ratcliffe

Born in the village of Aiguillon-sur-mer on the Vendée coast, Louis Chevalier had a long life, dying in Paris at the age of ninety. He also enjoyed an exceptional academic career that spanned half a century. He was trained at the highly selective Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), an elite university institution, which he entered in 1932 and where, four years later, he passed his agrégation, the qualifying examination for an academic career. His first teaching post was at the lycée at Reims. Called up in 1938, he served in the Navy at Toulon, where, on the spurious grounds that he had earlier written an article on Nazi propaganda, he was given responsibility for the surveillance of the activities of German and Italian spies on the French Riviera. In later years, Chevalier was uncharacteristically silent about what he did during the Occupation, though he did claim to have drawn up a map of the German defenses on the Vendée coast for the Resistance. We do know, however, that he did research for the Vichy government and that in 1941 he began university teaching when he was made a tutor at the ENS and gave his first course on twentieth-century history at another elite institution, the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, which in 1946 would become the Institut d’études politiques, familiarly known as Sciences-Po. Because of the war, Chevalier only completed his doctoral research in 1950, defending his principal and complementary theses on nineteenth-century Paris, which he had completed under the direction of Charles H. Pouthas, a leading Sorbonne modernist. To critical acclaim, he published his complementary thesis in the same year. Two years later, when he was still only forty-one years old, his career had been so successful that he was not only a professor at Sciences-Po, where he had been given a chair in 1946, but was elected to a chair in Parisian history at the Collège de France, whose teaching loads were light and prestige

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was high, and where competition for election to chairs particularly severe. He would remain in these posts until his retirement and continue his already impressive publishing career. Altogether in his lifetime he wrote fourteen books, chiefly on the history of Paris but also in other fields, while yet another work would be issued after he died. In 1958, Chevalier was awarded the Légion d’honneur, France’s most prestigious distinction, when he was made a chevalier. He was promoted to officier in 1967 and to commandeur in 1977. For the body of his work, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques conferred on him its Grand Prix in 1987. How are the contributions Chevalier made as a historian to be determined and assessed? Perhaps with more difficulty than might be imagined. All professional scholars make some contribution to our understanding of the past, but they do not do so in the same ways. Some of these are harder to evaluate than others. Teaching, for instance, often leaves only traces in memory and myth. Chevalier himself founded no school and did not train doctoral candidates, mainly because the nature of the institutions where he taught did not permit him to do so. However, we do have his unpublished class notes (in the Chevalier Papers held at the Bibliothèque administrative de la Ville de Paris) and he often first rehearsed his books in courses. We also know that his lectures were well appreciated and well attended. Coming out of one of the very first classes he gave, he overheard two students confiding to each other: “Chevalier shouldn’t be at Sciences-Po but at the Comédie-Française [a national theater in Paris],” to which the other retorted, “Not at the Comédie-Française, at the Opera;” this story is told in Chevalier’s Splendeurs et misères du fait divers (Splendors and Miseries of the Short News Item, 2003). A scholar’s role in professional organizations is also often overlooked. In the first part of his career, Chevalier played a significant role in research teams set up by the Vichy government and, from 1945 to 1952, in the institute newly established to carry out wide-ranging research on population problems. In 1962, he was a leading founder of the professional organization of French historical demographers. It is, though, the printed word that leaves the most obvious traces. No historian can control how what he writes will be read, and there is, of course, no agreement among readers as to what criteria will be adopted to do so. These might include the importance of the problems analyzed: Chevalier was primarily concerned with the history of migrations, Paris, and everyday life. They might involve the success with which the past is recreated and the cogency of the arguments developed: Chevalier wrote with verve, passion, and talent. They might also be the sources interrogated and the methods used to do so: Chevalier innovated in his questioning of serial sources, use of literary witness, and recourse to informants, and to his own direct observation in order to understand the recent past. However, how we assess a contribution depends, above all perhaps, on whether we treat it as timeless or time-bound. Chevalier, exceptionally brilliant and seemingly highly individualistic, was also and inevitably a man of his times.

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In Chevalier’s career, these circumstances were that he came to intellectual maturity in the tension-filled 1930s and the traumas of defeat, Occupation, Vichy, and Liberation. However, he also had the advantage of coming to maturity as a historian in the years immediately following the end of World War II when France was undergoing institutional renewal and accelerating change. One of these changes was in historical culture: the empirical approach of traditional political history was now successfully challenged and a self-consciously different kind of history emerged that nourished wider ambitions, was more aligned to the social sciences, and adopted new objects of study. Though this challenge was less monolithic than it has subsequently appeared, the renewal of historical method may well have been, as Pierre Nora has observed, France’s “only major intellectual export.” Although from the 1960s Chevalier would not only stand apart from socalled social-science history but also criticize its methods, his earlier research and his calls for a different way of looking at the past were very much a part of these developments. On a more personal level, Chevalier also owed much to those who were his principal intellectual influences when he was starting out, and whose backing helped launch his academic career, as he did to the friendships he early made and informal networks he established and kept throughout his life. The person whose influence he readily acknowledged to have been considerable, and whom he quoted on several occasions, was Emile Chartier, better known as Alain, his philosophy teacher at the Lycée Henri IV, where he prepared for the entrance examinations for the ENS. Alain’s teaching style and his healthy skepticism – “to think is to say no” – was a powerful influence on several generations of students at the Lycée Henri IV, many of whom would go on to distinguished careers. Pouthas, his thesis director, earned his respect, and Chevalier would later contribute to the festschrift that was published for him in 1973, but, significantly, he made no public acknowledgment of intellectual debt to him. Such was not the case for the wideranging political geographer, André Siegfried, who also sat on Chevalier’s thesis committee. Siegfried influenced his thinking on the long-standing identities of countries, cities, and even smaller localities, was responsible for obtaining a first university post for him in 1941, and was an ardent supporter of his candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France, where he himself was already a professor. Chevalier also admitted a debt to the French school of regional geography founded by Vidal de la Blache and best represented at the ENS by Roger Dion, who would become a colleague and friend. Similarly, personal friendships helped mold his thinking and career. Jean Stoetzel, who would become a leading sociologist and social psychologist, was admitted to the ENS at the same time as Chevalier, while Georges Pompidou was a year ahead. Both remained friends. Stoetzel, in particular, came to share Chevalier’s belief that demographic forces underpinned society and would influence his comrade through his path-breaking work on measuring public opinion. In 1947, Chevalier met the already seventy-five-year-old littérateur Daniel Halévy.


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They found that they had much in common, not least a love for exploring Paris on foot, and Halévy’s autobiographical Les Parisiens (1932) would influence Chevalier’s own book of the same name (Les Parisiens, 1967). It was at his apartment on the Île de la Cité, where a select group of the like-minded regularly gathered, that Chevalier met fellow historian Philippe Ariès who by this time believed, as did Chevalier, that he had found in population history “underground forces more powerful than wars and states.” Ariès, who stood outside academe, would later say of the discussions he regularly had with Chevalier, Siegfried, and others at Halévy’s home: “that’s where I was really trained.” He was also a political animal and Ariès shared with others there a conservative outlook. Chevalier was not an activist, though as a student he had participated in the violent rightwing demonstrations in Paris on February 6, 1934. At various junctures in his writings, however, he would express his conservative views of, say, Existentialism and Marxism, even when such opinions were not germane, and he was especially vituperative about students in the Latin Quarter in May 1968. To make this observation, of course, is not cleverly to unmask some hidden agenda in his work, but it does help us understand some of the choices he made and positions he took in his career. His work as a historian should be divided into two periods. The first runs from his first publications in 1944 and 1945 down to the early 1960s. The second covers the rest of his career. Each of these appears very different but we should not exaggerate the break and overlook inevitable continuities between them. In the first period, Chevalier came to believe that as yet little analyzed demographic forces were the key to understanding social history, and that historians who studied population movements could also make a contribution to solving present-day problems. Though the titles of his numerous works on current problems before he completed his doctoral theses and published his first book on Paris in 1950 seem to indicate otherwise, all of them had an historical component, just as they addressed contemporary issues in France immediately before and after Liberation and the defeat of Germany. Directly or indirectly, all of them involved demographic problems. Two things should be borne in mind about his interest in demographic forces. One is that, though his first published research on population issues dates from the last months of the Vichy regime, his concern for them dated from the 1930s. The other is that we should remember the excitement that he and others felt at their discovery of the wider significance of these forces. Philippe Ariès, for instance, described the impact on him as “a thunderbolt.” Both he and Chevalier were receptive to the idea of demographic forces as the hidden heart of the past – and present – because from 1929 onward the founders of the Annales school had been inviting fellow historians to go beneath the surface of the short term and the political and many scholars were now searching for the “sense of history.” Besides, it is likely that the notion that the basic forces in society were demographic, rather than, say, economic as Marxists claimed, also had political appeal for them. It is

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certainly the case, though, that Chevalier had been influenced by the flourishing genre of regional studies by geographers in which population movements were emphasized, as he was by the sociologist Durkheim and by Maurice Halbwachs, his principal heir. For the latter, indeed, population forces were “the biological substructure of all social life.” Chevalier would make this idea his own, and it underlay his best-known work, published in 1958. In Démographie générale, the substantial demography textbook he published in 1951, Chevalier correctly pointed out that population problems are posed and solved as a result of a collective fear, and that such a fear can result either from a population that is too large or from one that is too small. In France’s case at this time, it was the exceptional persistence of a low and declining birthrate and, consequently, the aging of its population that had long been a concern and which many even blamed for France’s humiliating defeat in 1940. This preoccupation was one reason why the young discipline of demography came of age in France in the 1930s and 1940s. It also led to the creation of two government-funded institutes charged with researching population-related problems: in November 1941, Vichy set up the Fondation Carrel, and when it was dismantled along with the regime at the end of the war, the new government established the Institut d’études démographiques (INED). There was a degree of continuity between the two because Alfred Sauvy, the director of the INED, hired a number of young researchers from the Fondation to work there. Sauvy believed in the interdependence of social phenomena and in the necessity of researching demography in a wide context. He therefore brought in statisticians, sociologists (such as Jean Stoetzel), biologists (like Jean Sutter, another close friend of Chevalier), and a historian. That historian was Louis Chevalier. Though a proposal he had made to the Fondation in the summer of 1942 to research the possibility of redrawing administrative boundaries so they better corresponded to the identities and economies of individual localities had not been accepted, Chevalier had already carried out research on population-related issues. He would be employed part-time as a researcher at the INED until 1952. Chevalier’s first publications, then, stemmed from his involvement in government research projects. These all resulted from a desire to measure the possible impact of policies that were in the forefront of discussions at the time and dovetailed with the ideological orientations of the Vichy regime, as well as from a concern to pave the way for rebuilding the country after the war. From January 1943 he carried out research on the possible consequences of industrial decentralization. It was believed that this policy might effectively counter what many believed to be the unchecked growth of large cities with their social problems, disorder, and low birthrates, and promote rural France through the implantation in country areas of small factories that would neither strain labor supply nor adversely affect the higher birthrates there. Chevalier chose to determine how, despite the Oise department’s proximity to the capital, labor there had long managed to resist the attraction of migrating to the capital. He also examined


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industries in the modestly sized city of Reims and workers in the Parisian chemical industries. He published the results in four contributions to the nine-volume Rapports et travaux sur la décongestion des centres industriels that the government issued in 1944 and 1945. His conclusions, like those of others involved in the project, were prudent. Data available on birthrates in town and country were not detailed enough to be really useful, while the possible consequences of decentralization were complex. The belief was, though, that it would be beneficial and would lead to an increase in birthrates. The first book that Chevalier wrote also reflected this concern to protect and promote rural society and French birthrates. This was Les Paysans: étude d’histoire et d’économie rurales (The Peasants: A Study of Rural History and Economy), which he wrote in 1944 but only published in 1947. His study attracted little attention and has subsequently been largely forgotten because the baby boom that was already becoming obvious, along with the rapid economic growth that lasted for three decades, would make the book’s thesis less relevant. The argument he put forward, though, is not without interest for it reveals his and others’ thinking at the time about the past and present of rural society. France, he argued, had never had a consistent agricultural policy in the way it had, say, a commercial policy, and too little research had been done on peasants and rural society. However, given the importance of their high birthrates relative to those in the cities and the moral values that peasants had retained, their economy and culture ought to be promoted. Though he warned that the excesses of Vichy’s discourse on rural France had to be avoided, the ideological orientation of his stance remains obvious. His second book, Le Problème démographique nord-africain (The North African Demographic Problem, 1947) received more attention, and the research and findings it presented were more original. These were based on the INED-sponsored field research he had carried out the previous year in France’s three North African colonies. Once again, Chevalier’s thinking reflected widely shared beliefs: France was underpopulated, had low birthrates, and postwar reconstruction made bringing in labor from outside a necessity. In the interwar period there had been no coordinated immigration policy; one that instituted more effective health controls on entry and selected those to be admitted not just on the basis of labor needs but also on the likelihood of their integrating into society was now urgently needed. What was most original in his 1947 study, however, were his interrogation of sources in North Africa itself and his analysis of the nature, causes, and likely consequences of population growth there. He was therefore one of the first to uncover the galloping demography in what later became known as developing countries. He concluded that this population growth resulted, above all, from the efficacy of preventive medicine that lowered mortality, whilst high birthrates remained unaffected. There were few prospects, his research found, that the local economy would be able to absorb this population increase, and emigration was not only inevitable but could not be fully controlled, especially because across the Mediterranean in France there was a pressing need for immigrants. To answer

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the question as to their chances of assimilating, which others (though not Sauvy) had answered negatively, putting North Africans at the very bottom of their hierarchies of desirability, Chevalier concluded that they came from impoverished and culturally very different societies, a background that already had made, and would continue to make, integration more difficult for them than for other groups. However, he also realized that they did not come to France to settle permanently and that most only stayed for short periods. While Chevalier did not end his study with precise policy proposals, he did recommend, as had others before him, that tighter health controls be imposed at entry points. Because we now know his later thinking about the presence of large numbers of North African immigrants in Paris, it is quite possible, though, of course, he did not say so, that at bottom such controls were discriminatory in intent and a way of getting round the fact that in September 1947 the Algerians would be given full French citizenship and thereby acquire the right to move freely to France. As a result of the expertise he had acquired, Chevalier was named a member of a research team that in 1950 was sent to the colony of Madagascar. The scene three years earlier of a bloody popular uprising, the colony still had only low population densities but was undergoing rapid demographic growth for the same reasons as North Africa. His report, Madagascar: populations et ressources (Madagascar: Population and Resources), published in 1952, concluded that Madagascar needed social overhead capital and modernized indigenous and European agricultural sectors. Chevalier’s most important contribution here, though, was how he was able to circumvent the lack of accurate population data and estimate growth rates, which, he argued, would threaten living standards unless development policies were instituted. By the time this study came out, Chevalier had already completed his doctoral work in history: in 1950, his principal and complementary theses had been enthusiastically accepted. His complementary thesis also addressed migration issues. This time it was the impact on Paris, as on newcomers themselves, of migration flows to the capital, whose size and composition changed across the nineteenth century. The research he did on these problems was significant in a number of ways. First, immigrants made up an exceptionally large proportion of the Parisian population (two-thirds) but their fate in, and their impact on, the city had never been properly examined. Second, he used serial data (population statistics, electoral lists, bankruptcy records, industrial censuses, and – less successfully – municipal tax records) that had either not previously been examined or not interrogated in the same manner. Third, the questions he asked and the methods he adopted enabled him to uncover truths not only about migrants in the city but about wider processes in Parisian history. Fourth, he recognized the complexity of the problems he studied and, perhaps almost as importantly, because the destination of any research is never quite what is hoped for at the outset, admitted the limits to what he had been able to do even with the new documentation he had consulted, and then suggested other avenues that further research might take.


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This acknowledgment was particularly true of his long principal thesis, “Les fondements économiques et sociaux de la région parisienne: 1848–1870” (“The social and economic foundations of the Parisian region, 1848–1870”), which was supposed to examine what impact economic change and immigration had on voting patterns in the Ile-de-France outside the Seine department at a time of full manhood suffrage during the Second Republic and Second Empire but actually only managed to cover the period between 1848 and 1852. Chevalier would claim in the following months that he intended to complete and publish his study. He never did so. Similarly, his complementary thesis, published as La formation de la population parisienne au XIXe siècle (The Formation of the Population of Paris in the Nineteenth Century, 1950), only succeeded in analyzing popular classes rather than immigrants as a whole. He also admitted that the purpose of all his research was not merely finding answers to his questions but demonstrating the importance of demographic phenomena and the value of using quantitative sources. In La Formation, he announced that his readers might be dismayed to find only analyses of statistical data in his study but went on to say that such an approach was deliberate: “we do not believe that a historian has the right to meditate on the ruins when the essential archives have never been consulted. This study has chosen unpleasantness in order to do penance for the excess of pleasures in other works.” This approach was not one that he would long adopt. The first book-length study that Chevalier wrote after taking up his chair at the Collège de France appeared in 1958: Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (translated as Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, 1973). Rightly or wrongly, it remains his best-known and most cited work, mined for its rich lode of telling quotations revealing contemporary fears of popular classes in the capital, appreciated both for its compelling style and for its discussion of what Chevalier claimed was proof of rising rates of crime and social deviance, topics in urban studies that have continued to attract researchers and readers. It marks both the culmination of its author’s pioneering work on demographic forces in past and present and, as we shall see, a turning point in his itinerary as an historian: in subsequent years, he would cease altogether either to advocate a new kind of history or to carry out research on demographic forces. In the decade preceding the appearance of Classes laborieuses, Chevalier had championed the alliance of demography and history. And he practiced what he preached. At the same time as he taught the history of the twentieth century at Sciences-Po, he also offered a course on demography and was one of the very first in France to do so. He published a textbook on demography and, more than did others who were only then beginning to introduce the subject as a university discipline, Chevalier always inserted population questions into wider and longer contexts and insisted on the importance of qualitative factors that could not be measured. At the Collège de France, he forcefully pressed for the establishment of a chair in demography for Alfred Sauvy, which the latter finally obtained in

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1959. Above all, though, Chevalier proclaimed the superiority of a more scientific history that would have demography at its core: “History was long only political and administrative. It has become more and more economic and social. It will finally understand the why and how of the past when it adds demography.” At the same time, he asserted in “Du rôle de l’histoire dans l’étude contemporaine de Paris” (“On the role of history in the contemporary study of Paris,” 1957) that this new history was more closely linked to the present than was the old. On the one hand, present-day documentation is much richer than the scant traces we inherit from the past and can suggest the existence of problems that are not to be found in archival documents and that historians would otherwise have missed. On the other hand, because the factors behind demographic change are complex, and change itself is uneven and often slow moving, historians of these processes can help in understanding current problems. Between 1956 and 1958, indeed, Chevalier acted as an adviser to the Prefect of Paris, proposing that new kinds of data, especially on how Parisians felt and what they wanted, be elaborated that would better reflect the methods of demography and help authorities determine needs and policies. It was therefore only to be expected that Classes laborieuses was as much a manifesto as a research monograph: it was intended to show how an understanding of demographic forces and their impact on patterns of behavior and mentalities could lead to a radically new understanding of social history. The thesis Chevalier presented was that, because of a transformation in its “biological substructure,” Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century fell into what he termed a pathological state. He asserted, first, that the capital was the victim of the unprecedented size and composition of in-migration that had a twofold impact. It doubled the city’s population and, because flows were predominantly male and a majority of immigrants young and single adults, it skewed and overwhelmed demographic structures. It also put unprecedented strains on the urban habitat and on services that proved unable to adjust, as well as on the labor market, because Chevalier believed migration flows were to a large extent independent of fluctuations in demand for labor. He argued, second, that the city therefore ceased to be a human artifact and instead became a natural phenomenon beyond human control. The result was urban ataxia and massive social deterioration. The clearest indicators of this downward spiral were a differential mortality that afflicted the poorest residents, rising rates of crime, suicide, illegitimacy and child abandonment, and consensual unions, which together revealed the existence of “dangerous classes” that were a threat to order. That Chevalier should advance such a dark thesis is surprising. There had been no hint of it in any of his previous books. In Les Paysans and in Démographie générale he had argued that the most significant changes in migration to the capital came at the end of the nineteenth century rather than in the first half. In La Formation he had insisted that immigrants successfully entered both Parisian space and economy. It is possible, though, to date the first public airing of his new view of the Paris of the earlier part of the nineteenth century. In a paper he delivered in


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New York in January 1954, he put forward the thesis and an outline of the argument. All that was different from what he published four years later were the dates he ascribed to the crisis: here, they extended from around 1830 down to the 1870s. He also claimed he discerned a second period of excessive and unbalanced migration to the capital that generated a similar crisis in the last two decades of the century (“Urban communities and the social evolution of nations,” 1955). Where, then, did the thesis come from? It came from his reading of the statistics produced and the literary witness written in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, it also stemmed from the world in which he lived. The difficult conditions in the fast-growing and ill-prepared cities in the developing world were now becoming more obvious, and in his teaching in the mid-1950s Chevalier included a discussion of this anarchic growth. At the same time, Paris itself was undergoing accelerating in-migration that put strains on its old housing stock and urban services. Chevalier may also have taken the notion, crucial to his argument, that migration flows enjoyed a large degree of autonomy, rather than being a response to pull factors in Paris, both from contemporary thinking about internal and international migration and from his own earlier research on North Africa. Chevalier based his argument on two related types of proof. One was the statistical series constructed in the first part of the nineteenth century, a period he rightly called “the golden age” of statistics. These data, he believed, revealed phenomena whose existence otherwise could only have been suspected but which were now brought to light. These were unequal life chances for the most disadvantaged inhabitants, as shown in differential mortality in normal times and especially in exceptional periods of epidemics (as he again argued in his contributions to Le Choléra: la première épidémie du XIXe siècle, published the same year). They were also exceptionally high rates of crime and social deviance that signaled the presence of “dangerous classes.” The other, which we should note he believed to be even more important and which he used in an even more original manner, was the literary witness of realist novels. Two reasons explain his faith in this qualitative source. The first is that the early nineteenth-century press gave wide publicity to the statistics being produced, which consequently fed the work of novelists and thereby gave greater credibility to the works of Balzac (whom Chevalier always believed to be an unrivalled observer of the capital), Hugo, and Sue. The second is that this literary witness was also based on first-person observation in the city that was not recorded in other kinds of sources. Chevalier believed in the value of the opinion polls that his friend Jean Stoetzel had done so much to introduce in France, including, incidentally, several studies of attitudes toward immigration. Chevalier regarded literary witness as a way for historians to make up for the absence of such polls in the past. It is all too easy, half a century later, to show that his argument about Paris was seriously flawed. His argument was postulated on the existence of an exceptional in-migration: we now know that similarly large numbers and types of immigrants were coming to Paris both before the Revolution and after

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mid-century, while research on migration flows suggests that these were always sensitive to pull factors from the city. There has also been a paradigm change in thinking about migrants in the city who, it is now thought, were better able to adopt coping strategies and find support networks that enabled them to adapt to urban living with greater – if not complete – success than Chevalier and others in his time and before had believed. Most of all, he confused elite representations of the “other” with reality. We have subsequently learned that we should not accept such representations at face value. It may well be that texts which Chevalier supposed to mirror reality in Paris more faithfully reflected anxieties about change and fears of insurrection by lower classes. Those texts thereby served the function of reinforcing elite identity by ascribing to the “other” values and behavior that were different from, and opposed to, those of the elites themselves. In any case, such anxieties were not peculiar to this period or to Paris at the time: witness, for example, longstanding concerns in France and elsewhere with the threat that “vagabonds” supposedly represented. Nor has the statistical base of Chevalier’s argument fared any better. One example is evidence of rising crime, which Chevalier claimed was so patent as not even to need demonstrating (in itself a questionable assertion because no one had ever analyzed the data on criminal prosecutions in every department that the government began publishing in the 1820s). We now realize that crime statistics are constructed and reflect the crimes that those in power wanted and were able to prosecute rather than the actual incidence of law-breaking. The ease with which Chevalier’s argument can be criticized, though, should not lead us to overlook the originality of his approach and contribution. He pointed to major issues: the dynamics and composition of immigration into large cities and the fate of newcomers there. Above all, he examined literary witness in new ways and succeeded superbly in capturing representations among at least a significant proportion of Parisian elites. Sometime after the appearance of Classes laborieuses, Chevalier moved from being a self-proclaimed apologist and pioneer of a new kind of social and urban history to being a self-confessed “ancient” combating the “moderns” in history (these are terms he used in his article, “A reactionary view of urban history,” published in 1966). Looking back on his career in Splendeurs et misères du fait divers, he would later confess: at first, what counted for me was the new relationship between history and demography, which was the theme of my inaugural lecture [at the Collège de France]: the umbilical cord with demography still had not been severed. Afterwards, what mattered was the evolution of the city: the last years of the city of cities, the “assassination of Paris,” that is the disappearance of a city I loved, and recalling the splendors of the lost city.

Because Chevalier did not publish anything in the five years following Classes laborieuses, we can gain only an approximate indication from his publications as


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to when this change occurred. These suggest, though, that by the early 1960s he had abandoned his earlier concerns. After 1964, he never again published in Population, the INED’s journal, to which he had regularly contributed since its inception. In the same year, he asserted in “ ‘La Comédie humaine’: document d’histoire?” (“ ‘La Comédie humaine’: an historical document?”) that, among other things, eroticism and sexual drives in the city, which he believed so important, could not be captured by the methods then being adopted in urban history: “there is no need at all to be a statistician or sociologist; it is even better not to be; it is enough to observe, or read one’s newspaper.” He had helped found the professional organization of historical demographers in 1962; by 1965 his name had disappeared from the list of its officers. Thus, by the time his next book, Les Parisiens, appeared in 1967, demographic factors were no longer at the forefront of his argument and never would be again; at the same time, he abstained from using statistics and would continue to do so in all his subsequent work. His change of heart seems particularly paradoxical because, at precisely this moment, the alignment of so-called social-science history on quantification and sister disciplines became closer, and, for the next two decades at least, was the dominant mode of understanding the past. This was true for econometric history, for the study of cities, and what came to be known as demographic history. In the latter instance, the contradiction seems even more glaring. In the very year that Classes laborieuses came out, Pierre Goubert defended his thesis on Beauvais and the Beauvaisis in the seventeenth century, and Louis Henry, an erstwhile colleague of Chevalier’s at the INED, presented a study of the population of a Norman village in the early modern period. These works, based wholly or partly on research in parish registers, marked the launching of what would be a massive research effort in France, as elsewhere, to determine demographic behavior through painstaking analysis of parish registers and the use of Henry’s family reconstitution method. The findings that resulted would revolutionize our understanding of the demography of early modern Europe and firmly establish historical demography as a subdiscipline. It cannot be regarded as a failure that in his previous studies Chevalier had not used and had not grasped the potential of this type of source: no parish records had survived for Paris in the pre-1800 period, while the high population turnover in the capital meant that the registers available for the nineteenth century could not have been interrogated in the way that historical demographers were now able do for less mobile and smaller communities. Still, Chevalier had never used statistics in the manner that they would henceforth be used to structure analyses. He had generally used data that had already been aggregated. Even when he had consulted raw data in series – such as the ten thousand bankruptcy dossiers in the capital he claimed to have examined in La Formation – that might have been subjected to quantification, he had argued that the likely results did not justify the effort that would have been required and abstained from doing so. It may well be, then, that his methods lost out, and they did so just at the moment when he lost his post as adviser to the Prefect of Paris, and that herein

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lies the explanation not only for his change of direction but also for the vituperation that he would later lavish on the “moderns.” However, we should bear in mind that many of the criticisms that he would now make of quantification and sociology, as the preferred instruments for understanding the urban past, he had already been making in the previous decade. Indeed, though the ecology thesis that living conditions in the city were responsible for social deviance (a strand in the thinking of many of the Chicago sociologists) had been a subsidiary element in Classes laborieuses, Chevalier had never subscribed to the then dominant Chicago school of urban sociology. This non-acceptance was certainly not because he was unfamiliar with its contribution. Chevalier visited the University of Chicago in 1955; the following year in “La statistique et la description sociale de Paris” (“Quantification and the social description of Paris”), he called Chicago “that capital of urban sociology,” and he cited the school’s major contributions in a chapter he contributed to a 1958 sociology textbook. Chevalier did not believe, though, that the quantifying methods and socio-spatial theories developed for major American cities like Chicago could be imported into the study of their European counterparts and early began developing his critique of attempts to do so. He objected to the ponderous language adopted, to using the word “problematic” as a noun, for instance. He did not appreciate its deliberate and arrogant exclusion of other approaches because there were too many crucial facets of urban living – customs, beliefs, everyday exchanges, lives – that he believed quantitative methods were not able to capture. Above all, as he had argued in his 1957 paper to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, he did not think that the histories of great cities followed the same trajectories: “[i]n each case, similarities are often differences misinterpreted out of ignorance of the history of cities and people.” American cities had only short histories, were extensive, and had developed segregated quarters, while those across the Atlantic were older, denser, and had not developed ghettos. They could not be understood, then, using theories elaborated in the United States. As the years passed, Chevalier’s critique became more acerbic. In 1974, for example, he called what he asserted was the invasion of culture by numbers the “entry of the barbarians.” He even came to criticize triumphant historical demography for abandoning the wider cultural approach of the kind of population history he had earlier advocated, later ridiculing in the preface to the 1978 edition of Classes laborieuses the labor-intensive studies of parish registers that now were revealing that “during the Ancien Régime, fertility in Poked-around-the-Geese was not very different, give or take a chicken, from that in Poked-around-theDucks, and so on in all the neighborhood henhouses.” To be fair to Chevalier here, it ought to be added that this comment was made at a time when diminishing returns had already set in for such studies and similar, if less colorful, criticisms were being made by others. If his criticisms of new methodologies were longstanding but became more acerbic as time passed and, in fact, were similar to those more traditional scholars


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would also make of social-science history, there were other causes for his change of direction. One of these, as we shall see, was the radical changes that Paris was undergoing. Another was the critical reception colleagues accorded to Classes laborieuses, which could only have been disappointing for the author of a work that was a manifesto for, and a demonstration of the value of, the sort of history he believed in. His friends Halévy and Ariès certainly praised it but they were not in academe and did not do so in leading journals. Otherwise, reviews were tepid at best, more restrained and descriptive than analytical and laudatory. Fernand Braudel, then the leading figure in the Annales movement, who, incidentally, also held a chair at the Collège de France, wrote a highly critical review. There is certainly a subtext to his criticism: he was engaged in building an institutional empire and making history a core discipline in the social sciences, and it is likely that Braudel saw the demographers around Sauvy at the INED, and possibly Chevalier himself, as possible rivals. Braudel announced at the outset that he would not assess Chevalier’s thesis and then went on to try to do so. Amongst other, and not always valid, criticisms, Braudel complained in his review, “La démographie et les dimensions des sciences de l’homme” (“Demography and the dimensions of the human sciences,” 1960), about Chevalier’s writing style, his overly frequent references to the “biological substructure,” and the complexity of the argument presented. Braudel ended with the assertion that “any monocausal explanation seems to me to be detestable and, these days, given the magnitude of the task, rather futile.” The impact these comments had on Chevalier may be gauged from the tenor of comments he would make two decades later in the preface to the 1978 edition of Classes laborieuses: “the great historians [read: Braudel] condemned me, in spite of the statistics with which I filled out my arguments. In truth, they condemned a great deal, constantly speaking ex cathedra, and fulminating against everything.” Chevalier never again examined population questions. From the 1960s onward, therefore, Chevalier’s research took new directions. There were four of these. First of all, in studies issued in 1967 and 1974, he examined questions of identity: what it meant to be a Parisian or to be French. He argued that in both instances the characteristics of both had a long history. Second, in an angry book published in 1977, he made a critical analysis of the recent history of urban planning in the capital. Third, he attempted to recapture lived reality in Paris in the years preceding these changes, which he believed had irreparably damaged what made the city Paris, and he did so in three studies that came out in 1980, 1982, and 1985. Fourth, he left the city altogether to recreate everyday life from just before World War I until the end of World War II in his birthplace in the Vendée (1983) and then, seven years later, to recreate the difficult lives of impoverished farm laborers in a village in Andalusia in the 1950s and 1960s. The eclecticism and the novelty of these studies, as well as the methods used in them, and the change they therefore represented in his work, should not be exaggerated. He continued to try to understand ordinary people and would retain his fascination with particular facets of daily life. Sexual drives, for instance, had been a

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central element in his Classes laborieuses. He went on believing that the significance of these had been underresearched and had remained “hidden beneath ‘the cloak of the night’ (Balzac) and also beneath the cloak of history.” He gave two courses on the subject at the Collège de France in 1973 and 1975 and planned, but did not publish, a history of sexuality. Drives, sensuality, and places of pleasure, then, continued to occupy a prominent place in his examination of quotidian lives. Chevalier naturally adapted his research methods – and his writing style, where his authorial presence became even more pronounced – to these objects and objectives. When studying Parisians in the 1950s and 1960s, whose attitudes and behavior he believed to be little different from those who came before them, what was the use, he rhetorically asked in Les Parisiens, of “citing figures, worrying about statistics or calling on the pedantries of sociologists?” There was also too much that was not recorded in documents found in archives. Consequently, he now only adopted qualitative methods, many of which, in truth, he had already begun to use before the 1960s. Thus, he used personal observation, walking the streets of Paris and other places, jotting down snatches of conversation and observations in notebooks, attempting to find what Balzac had called “the significant detail,” that is, what has always been but which on occasion finds a way to be so in a surprising manner that merits being noted, what is more true than nature, what might suddenly be the extraordinary in the ordinary, the unexpected in the habitual, the infinitely rare in the banal, the precious in the run-of-the-mill, and, finally, the young in what appears to be old.

This practice was consciously modeled not only on Balzac, who had wandered Paris streets, but also on Louis Sébastien Mercier, who claimed that he had written his well-known analyses of Parisian life in his Tableau de Paris (1788) “with his legs,” rather than through what he called “indeterminate and vague speculation.” Second, he used students enrolled in his seminars at Sciences-Po as assistants, holding classes in cafés in quarters he was studying, some students meeting workers at the town hall in Aubervilliers or even taking night jobs in the Central Markets area and noting their experiences. Third, Chevalier did extensive research on short news items (faits divers) in newspapers, again searching for “the significant detail.” In fact, even when he examined crime and prostitution in his two studies on Montmartre, he refrained from looking at judicial archives or analyses of urban crime, asserting that “in the story of a crime, a well-chosen short news item, is worth more than all criminal sociology.” Fourth, he used informants for the recent past, invariably ordinary people he knew, met, or befriended. Finally, and especially for periods beyond living memory, Chevalier continued to rely on literary witness to capture “that collective conscience, which is fugitive but so important in an urban milieu.” The trouble with this methodology, of course, is one of control: how is the reader to determine whether a short news item, an


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observation, or an informer’s testimony, is truly representative or chosen by the historian for its effect? Chevalier liked to do some of his writing at tables in the backs of cafés at times of the day when there were few customers. When he was doing so on one occasion someone came up to him and suggested he must be writing a novel. Recounting the episode, he noted, tongue in cheek, “my readers, I suppose, will think that this impression was not entirely false.” Chevalier, no doubt influenced both by Siegfried, who had always insisted that peoples and countries had permanent identities, and by Ariès, whose first publication in 1943 had argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, local communities in France had retained solidarities and identities, early insisted that France was made up of a mosaic of localities, each with its own character. In 1967, he set out to establish that Parisians had an identity that quantitative and comparative sociology, mired in general theories about great cities in the present, was incapable of uncovering. He did so by trying to show that these characteristics were longstanding. He did so, too, by arguing that social cleavages and the diverse provenance of the large numbers of immigrants in the city had not prevented the existence of a shared identity. They did not because Paris had never had quarters that were exclusively bourgeois, popular, or ethnic (except, that is, for the Goutte d’Or quarter, which had recently become predominantly North African, though not because its residents had been relegated there but because they had chosen to be with fellow immigrants), or the kind of ghettos found in large United States cities. The traditional urban cadre, high population densities, and the absence of freeways that would have broken up neighborhoods and hindered exchanges, made for intense interaction among residents. Even newcomers found integration all the easier because they had deliberately chosen to live in the capital and knew what to expect, and were young and adaptable. The presence of so many immigrants, indeed, helped explain some of the characteristics of residents. Parisian culture had always been youth-oriented, as evidenced in attention to physical appearance, while sensuality and the search for pleasure had long been behavior traits among immigrants. Living in a great city and profiting from the high mental caliber of these newcomers, Parisians had spirit and wit, resourcefulness and problem-solving skills, all of which in nature or degree set them apart from the inhabitants of other great cities. In the same vein and stemming from his research for Les Parisiens, Chevalier would publish his Histoire anachronique des Français (Anachronistic History of France, 1974). He was prompted to write this essay, he claimed, by what he regarded as the denial of the French cultural tradition by students in Paris in May 1968 (his preface has memorable – and revealing – purple passages on his reading of student demonstrations). But he also had other objectives: he wanted to tackle an unfashionable topic using qualitative sources in order to show the limitations of the analyses of vulgar Marxists mechanically applying formulae that dissolved differences between societies and, even more, those of American quantitative sociology, which subsumed difference under statistics and theory. His method, then, was to use qualitative sources and to show the

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permanence of the French national character, seeking proof in writings across the centuries from within and outside France, beginning with ancient Romans on the Gauls. He concluded that the French had always enjoyed a sense of the comic, a marked capacity for emulation, and an inclination to understand and tolerate drives and passions. Although as early as 1963 he had begun working on L’Assassinat de Paris (translated as The Assassination of Paris), his controversial book on the recent history of urban planning in Paris, it only appeared in 1977 and in an English translation in 1994. It is an angry work, written, he later confessed, in “an utterly dark mood.” Its critique of city planning might be seen as just part of the growing reaction throughout the West against the unchecked growth of large cities, the impact of the automobile, and the destructive consequences for city centers of the actions of planners, modernist architects, and developers. It may also have owed something to the fact that, as he admitted more than once in his text, he had had a privileged vantage point at city hall when some of the first decisions were taken but he himself had failed to comprehend what was happening. In 1964, for example, recognizing that in the preceding decade the city had been going through accelerating change, he had not believed that its consequences would be as serious as they had been at other times: “It is better to get worked up at a red traffic light than to die of cholera.” By 1985 he came to believe, however, that growth and redevelopment were “altogether, a break with the past like no other I know in the history of Paris.” His dismay was especially acute because he now considered radical planning to have irreparably damaged the city he loved. This damage was a matter of appearance: the city had been given the kind of bland mask that was the American notion of feminine beauty: “a clear skin, no superfluous facial hair, capped teeth, wide-eyed, forbidden to smile for fear of causing wrinkles, forbidden to kiss, assuming one even felt the urge to do so.” For similar reasons, he likened the new high rises that loomed over the skyline, and particularly the emblematic Montparnasse Tower that he despised, to the monsters in Japanese movies that rear up, terrorize, and destroy cities. It was much more than appearance, however, because he also believed Paris to have lost its identity as popular quarters were destroyed in the process of “redevelopment” and the less well-off moved to the suburbs. No aspect of urban planning had more deleterious results, he asserted, than closing the Central Markets that directly and indirectly had employed over half a million people and that he regarded as the beating heart of the city: “With les Halles gone, Paris is gone.” Many at the time found the tone and conclusions of his scathing analysis of planning in the later 1950s and 1960s to be excessive. Chevalier, for his part, never moderated his views, which would critically affect what he would study in the following years; he even gave himself the principal mission of capturing essentially oral memories of what had been in different quarters and what it had meant to be Parisian before these were permanently erased.


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In the early 1980s he published three volumes that aimed to record some of these rapidly disappearing memories, and in particular memories of Parisian nightlife, which he believed to be doomed to disappear. These were Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Montmartre, Pleasure and Crime, 1980), Histoires de la nuit parisienne: 1940–1960 (Stories of the Parisian Night: 1940–1960, 1982), and Les Ruines de Subure: Montmartre de 1939 aux années 80 (The Ruins of Subure: Montmartre from 1939 to the 1980s, 1985). The last two of these were to have been part of a larger study that he had tentatively, and significantly, entitled “The Last Years of the Marvelous City, 1945 to the 1970s.” Altogether, they constituted the result of his most sustained research effort since the early 1960s. He believed that its principal vocation conferred a collective existence on Montmartre. However, his volumes on Montmartre were not histories of the quarter, and the nearest he came to doing archival research for them was to study some of Zola’s preparatory notes for his novels and short news items in the press. Instead, they were descriptions of the rise, the heyday from the 1880s, as well as the decline in more recent years of Montmartre as a mecca for nightlife. He focused, then, on pleasure: the crowds, lights, cabarets, and their accompaniment of prostitution, crime, and the underworld. To do so, he adopted his familiar tools of analysis. He used the lifelong habit of wandering the streets of the area he had begun as a teenager, when he had spent his holidays staying with cousins but roaming Montmartre with his friend Gino, the son of the concierge of a neighboring building. Gino would later become a pimp and in the fall of 1939 would be guillotined for killing a rival. Later, Chevalier also took up riding the number thirty bus, listening to conversations and watching, for this “providential bus” proceeded only slowly, impeded by crowds on the sidewalks and traffic on the streets. Most of all, he used an array of well-placed informants: a road sweeper, a cinema usherette, a nurse, a hairdresser from the Vendée, an ex-dancer, a head-waiter and barowners. By the 1970s, Montmartre, as Chevalier had known it, was in rapid decline. Pleasure-seeking assumed different forms, the population of the city center declined and its composition changed, and the quarter’s traditional clientele were now obliged to return home “to a boring suburb, condemned to the joys of family life and neighborhood relationships, with television their sole escape.” His second volume has a moving closure, as, amid all the disappearances and erasures, including Damia, his long-time favorite cabaret singer, who died in 1979, and the baker’s shop that sold the Rochechouart pastries he had loved as a youth, which closed its doors in 1984, an aging Chevalier sadly searches for the last remnants of the old Montmartre on side-streets and goes to the sparsely attended funeral of an old friend and informant, adding, significantly, that the mosque on a nearby street overflows with the faithful. The third study of nightlife, Histoires de la nuit parisienne: 1940–1960, was issued in 1982, but some of the research and even the writing had been done over two decades earlier. In it Chevalier argued, provocatively but typically, that he adopted

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the term “stories” rather than “history” in his title because the raw material for the book consisted, above all, of stories that occurred in the years following the end of World War II. These “are richer in history than history itself ever will be. And this is because history is not capable of bringing them to life by its usual means and analyses.” He added that night-time was a better moment to study the city for this was when Paris was more relaxed and genuine. “If the sociology of Paris is so poor and so far removed from reality,” he continued playfully, “it is because it is practiced in the day-time. Day is the world of appearances, night that of realities.” The night life – cafés, bordellos, crime – he describes is in the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis and Porte Saint-Martin areas, but over half of his text is devoted to the Central Markets quarter. In the early 1950s he had held some of his seminar classes for Sciences-Po students at a table at the back of the Café Mozart there in the early evening when the working day was just beginning. The method he adopted for this study, as for his other studies in this period, was what he playfully called “on-the-job sociology”: his own observations, those of his students, short news items in the press. Above all, however, he used stories remembered by witnesses that revealed the specific character of night-time in the three different quarters. These stories were less coherent narratives than glimpses seen or snatches heard that were often incomplete, ambiguous, and even contradictory. They did not usually find their way into the press or history. He recounts, for instance, the story of a love-struck young butcher in les Halles, who killed a rival and then secretly buried his body somewhere, and neither crime nor corpse was ever discovered. If one day perchance the remains are ever found, he mischievously adds, “historians will talk about the Commune and publish scholarly notices in specialist journals that will attract attention.” His empathy for ordinary people and his narrative ability are best illustrated in the two studies he published in 1983 and 1990 respectively on daily life in two dissimilar villages. Both of these are evocations of lives and relationships. The first, Les Relais de mer (Foreshores), is a rich and affectionate evocation of life among the smallholders, fishermen, and sailors in his native village of Aiguillon-sur-mer. Although it is his presence – only episodic in the latter two decades – in the village from the years immediately preceding World War I to the end of World War II that determines the chronology, and though his personal observation and recollections are obviously a crucial source, his study is not autobiographical: “What I am or am not is of no importance.” With the notable exception of his relationship with another villager, Mimi Dagondeau, who seems to have been the great love of his youth but who died suddenly in February 1939, Chevalier appears only as an observer rather than as a participant. To his own recollections, he added those of other, usually anonymous, informants in the village, building from the bottom up, recounting episodes and individual trajectories. What he refrained from doing was using either any archival documents (claiming there were none) or statistics, despite the fact that he had actually carried out research on the Vendée in the 1930s. As a result, the reader does not learn how many people lived there or


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anything about its economy, social structure, or politics. On the other hand, the reader does come to know everyday life in Aiguillon-sur-mer as Chevalier resurrects what would not generally find its way into records: beliefs, complex relationships, passions, and what he termed “the amorous civilization of the locality.” In subject matter and method, Juanito: Andalousie de boue et de sang ( Juanito: Andalusia of Mud and Blood, 1990), the last book published in his lifetime, is not as far from Chevalier’s other work as its title suggests. It emerged out of his interest in national character, and, in particular, out of a seminar he offered at SciencesPo in 1967 on Spanish identity. One of his students brought to a class on bullfighting Emilio Luque ( Juanito), a young man from Andalusia, who had been hurt in a novillada, a bullfight for novices, and who, along with others from his native village, had recently migrated to Paris. Basing his narrative on the notebooks in which he had encouraged Juanito to write down everything he could remember about the first two decades of his life, supplemented by Chevalier’s own interviews with friends, relations, and other informants, visits to Juanito’s (unnamed) home village, thirty kilometers outside Cordoba, as well as his stays in the Andalusian capital itself, Chevalier used his considerable powers to evoke childhood, passions, ambitions, and sociabilities in a village of impoverished and still largely illiterate landless agricultural laborers in Franco’s Spain in the 1950s and 1960s. For the young, the only chance of escaping from material poverty was emigration or taking up the career of a torero. It was taking up this latter option that Juanito dreamed about. Bullfighting, though, was a fickle world, controlled by impresarios, where the careers of the few who broke in were often cut short by the horns of a bull or the rejection of spectators. Juanito’s was ended by horns. Describing the ambition and the failure, Chevalier also attempted to determine both the cultural and, inevitably, the sensual meaning of bullfighting. Splendeurs et misères du fait divers, published posthumously by an ex-student in 2003, originated as Chevalier’s last lecture course at the Collège de France before his retirement. At the time, he had planned to turn his notes into a book, but in the last years of his life he never reworked them. Its subject matter, short news items in the press, what he referred to as “the flea market of history,” had long been one of the tools he had used to understand the past. While at the time he wrote there had been little reflection on the short news item, it has received considerable scholarly attention in the past quarter of a century. By the time it appeared, then, his brief analysis was already dated. On the other hand, his style and the personal recollections that are scattered through his text have retained their value. Chevalier’s work as an historian is “good to think” partly because of the breadth of the problems he addressed: toward the end of his career he would bitterly and legitimately lament that Laboring Classes overshadowed his other contributions, saying “it eclipses everything I have written since … It will be the only book I ever wrote. Disheartening impression: I have come to believe that it will bury me.” His work is also memorable, though, because he bequeathed us more than the

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research findings and analyses he presented in his publications. He was one of those historians who believe that their primary task is, as Lucien Febvre liked to say, to sniff out human flesh, to seek out and describe everyday lives, passions, and sociabilities. He was always attracted to studying facets of the human experience that had been either beyond the purview of traditional history or whose significance had been overlooked. He therefore set out to understand not only demographic forces, the migration experience, and what it meant for the French capital, but also sensuality and spectacle in Parisian public and semi-public space, and the life experiences of ordinary inhabitants of a village in the Vendée and of another in Andalusia. And he adapted his methods to be able to do so. He should also be remembered for his search for the “sense of history,” for an understanding of the deeper forces in the past and present, and his role in fostering the emergence of a different kind of history. The fact that his vision of what these forces were and how to seize them differed from those of others at the time is a reminder that the renewal of the discipline in France was more fissured than we have come to believe. He was certainly correct to assert that so much of everyday life is not recorded in archival documents. He attempted to make up for this silence for the recent past by direct observation and informant testimony. For the more distant past, he continued to believe in the value of literature. Toward the end of his career, indeed, he was still asserting that, “despite all the application and merit of historians, I do not really believe in the possibility of resurrecting times one has not lived unless literature gives a proper helping hand by bringing what is absent from documents: feelings, passions, life.” There was a long moment when Chevalier’s change of direction and criticism of social-science history, a term he liked to ridicule for its pretentiousness, appeared to be mere Quixotic – and cantankerous – tilting at the windmills of progress. At this moment, when the “moderns” are under heavy fire from the “postmoderns,” he seems more prescient and, amongst other things, even his belief in the value of literary witness is finding support in unexpected places (see Pierre Lassave, Sciences sociales et literature, 2002). In his writing, he increasingly showed disdain for texts where, as part of their strategy to convince readers of the impartiality and accuracy of their recreations of the past, historians attempt to hide their presence behind the impersonal cover of objectivity. He moved his authorial voice to the forefront of his texts, refusing to hide behind the mask of neutrality, discussing his own involvement in the process of research and writing, and using irony, sarcasm, and even ridicule to castigate the dominant and powerful in his profession. More recently, other historians have been both forefronting and experimenting with authorial voice in their writing. As Chevalier wrote in the foreword to his Histoire anachronique, “There are hardly any light touches in writing in our time: they are terribly serious or, what is not the least intolerable of their defects, believe themselves to be.” In this way and others, then, Chevalier’s work is not only good to read, it is good to think, for it invites historians to reflect not merely on the past but on history as a discipline.


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References and Further Reading Papers of Louis Chevalier Papiers Louis Chevalier (MSS 1926–2179), Bibliothèque administrative de la Ville de Paris; Louis Chevalier Papers (MS 1122, 1–20), Yale University Archives. The author is grateful to Emilio Luque for granting him permission to consult the Chevalier archive.

Selected Books by Louis Chevalier Les Paysans: étude d’histoire et d’économie rurales (Paris: Denoël, 1947). Le Problème démographique nord-africain (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947). Histoire du XXe siècle (Paris: Les Cours de droit, Université de Paris, Institut d’études politiques, various editions, 1948–71). La Formation de la population parisienne au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). Démographie générale (Paris: Dalloz, 1951). Leçon inaugurale: faite le 28 avril 1952, Collège de France, Chaire d’histoire et de structures sociales de Paris et de la région parisienne (Paris: Collège de France, 1952). Madagascar: populations et ressources (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952). Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958; enlarged edn., Paris: Livre de poche, 1978); translated by Frank Jellinek as Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York: H. Fertig, 1973). Les Parisiens (Paris: Hachette, 1967; enlarged edn., 1985). Histoire anachronique des Français (Paris: Plon, 1974). L’Assassinat de Paris (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977); translated by David P. Jordan as The Assassination of Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Paris: R. Laffont, 1980). Histoires de la nuit parisienne: 1940–1960 (Paris: Fayard, 1982). Les Relais de mer (Paris: Fayard, 1983). Les Ruines de Subure: Montmartre de 1939 aux années 80 (Paris: R. Laffont, 1985). Juanito: Andalousie de boue et de sang (Paris: Stock, 1990). Splendeurs et misères du fait divers (Paris: Perrin, 2003).

Selected Articles by Louis Chevalier “Localisation industrielle et peuplement,” Population, 2 (1946): 21–34. “Pour une histoire de la population,” Population, 3 (1946): 538–41. “L’émigration française au XIXe siècle,” Etudes d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 1 (1947): 127–71. “Bilan d’une immigration,” Population, 5 (1950): 129–40. “La statistique et la description sociale de Paris,” Population, 4 (1956): 761–2. “Du rôle de l’histoire dans l’étude contemporaine de Paris,” Revue des travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques, 110 (1957): 1–8.

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“Le quartier du Marais,” Conjoncture économique dans le département de la Seine, 3 (1959): 5–21. “ ‘La Comédie humaine’: document d’histoire?” Revue historique, 232 (1) (1964): 27–48. “Préambule démographique aux projets d’aménagement de Paris,” Population, 2 (1964): 335–48. “A reactionary view of urban history,” Times Literary Review, September 8 (1966): 796–7.

Other Works “La main-d’oeuvre industrielle dans la région parisienne: les industries chimiques;” “Le groupe d’étude pour l’aménagement de Reims et de sa région;” “Aspects généraux de l’évolution de la main-d’oeuvre industrielle de l’Oise depuis le début du XIXe siècle;” “Schéma d’études régionales,” Rapports et travaux sur la décongestion des centres industriels (Paris: Délégation générale à l’équipement national, etc., 1944 and 1945), 10 vols. “Principaux aspects du problème de l’immigration,” in Documents sur l’immigration, by Louis Chevalier, Robert Gessain, G. de Longevialle, and Jean Sutter (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Cahiers de l’INED, no. 2, 1947), pp. 11–23. “Anthropologie et démographie: époque contemporaine, rapport de M. Louis Chevalier,” Comité international des sciences historiques, IXe Congrès des sciences historiques (Paris: Armand Colin, 1950), I, pp. 98–109. Preface by Louis Chevalier to L’Emigration bretonne, où vont les Bretons émigrants, leurs conditions de vie, by Abbé Élie Gautier (Paris: Bulletin de l’entr’aide bretonne de la région parisienne, 1953). “Urban communities and the social evolution of nations,” in The Metropolis in Modern Life, edited by Robert Moore Fisher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 18–40. Le Choléra: la première épidémie du XIXe siècle, étude collective, edited by Louis Chevalier (La Roche-sur-Yon: Société d’histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 1958). “Le problème de la sociologie des villes,” in Traité de sociologie, edited by Georges Gurvitch (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), pp. 293–314. “L’évolution du peuplement parisien,” in Paris 1960 (Paris: Imprimerie municipale, 1961). Preface by Louis Chevalier to Du ghetto à l’occident: deux générations yiddiches en France, by Charlotte Roland (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1962). Preface by Louis Chevalier to Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest sous la Troisième République, by André Siegfried (Monaco: A. Sauret, 1972). “La littérature et l’existence collective à Paris,” in La France au XIXe siècle: études historiques. Mélanges offerts à Charles Hippolyte Pouthas (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1973). “The history of quality in European cities,” in The Quality of Life in European Cities, edited by Robert C. Fried and Paul M. Hohenberg (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1974). Preface by Louis Chevalier to Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris, 1482 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Preface by Louis Chevalier to Honoré de Balzac: Les paysans (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) Introduction by Louis Chevalier to La Goutte d’Or: faubourg de Paris, by Marc Breitman and Maurice Culot (Paris: Archives d’architecture moderne, 1988).


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“Sous la dictée de Paris,” in La Bibliothèque imaginaire du Collège de France (Paris: Le Monde Editions, 1990). Preface by Louis Chevalier to Des Halles au Balajo, by Robert Lageat with the collaboration of Claude Dubois (Paris: Les Editions de Paris, 1993).

References Annuaire du Collège de France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1953–80). Archives du Collège de France: dossier Louis Chevalier. Braudel, Fernand, “La démographie et les dimensions des sciences de l’homme,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 15 (3) (1960): 493–523. Cohen, Evelyne, “Le Parisien construit par Louis Chevalier,” Paris et Ile-de-France: mémoires, 55 (2004): 97–107. Dubois, Claude, “C’est loin, Montmartre? Entretien avec Louis Chevalier,” Le Monde, September 22–23 (1985): xi–xii. Lassave, Pierre, Sciences sociales et littérature (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). Ratcliffe, Barrie M. and Piette, Christine, Vivre la ville: les classes populaires à Paris (Ière moitié du XIXe siècle) (Paris: La Boutique de l’histoire, 2007), pp. 53–86. Rosental, Paul-André and Couzon, Isabelle, “Le Paris dangereux de Louis Chevalier: un projet d’histoire utile. Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses (1958),” in La Ville des sciences sociales, edited by Bernard Lepetit and Christian Topalov (Paris: Belin, 2001), pp. 191–226.

10

Alain Corbin (1936– ) Peter McPhee

Alain Corbin’s distinctive contribution to French historiography since 1980 has stemmed from his ability to go beyond the temporal and explanatory confines of the classic French social history thesis in its regional or departmental cadre and from his realization that, if nineteenth-century history was to remain a fertile field of historical research, then old sources needed to be used to new ends. Since his exemplary social history of the Limousin in the nineteenth century, Corbin has been concerned with two connected projects: the history of daily life and its social practices, and the history of the emotions and sensory experience. The sources he has used are not new to historians of the nineteenth century; few historians had, however, ever thought of using them to construct a history of perceptions of odor, horror, or sound. Corbin was born in 1936, in Courtomer (Orne), the son of a doctor from Guadeloupe and a Norman mother. He was educated in a Catholic school and the Université de Caen and, on passing his agrégation, was appointed a lycée teacher in Limoges (Haute-Vienne) in 1959. Shortly afterward, however, he was conscripted into the French army in Algeria; after two years he returned to the Lycée Guy Lussac in Limoges, and began his doctoral thesis. He completed a thèse de troisième cycle, “Prélude au Front Populaire” (“Prelude to the Popular Front”), a study of public opinion in the Haute-Vienne from 1934 to 1936, at the Université de Poitiers in 1968, a thesis distinguished by an extensive and at that time unusual reliance on interviews. He was appointed a maître-assistant at the Université de Tours in 1969 and continued his doctoral studies in Clermont-Ferrand. His doctoral thesis, “Limousins migrants, Limousins sédentaires: contribution à l’histoire de la region limousine au XIXe siècle” (“Migrant Limousins, sedentary Limousins: contribution to the history of the Limousin region in the nineteenth century”)

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was completed in 1973 and published as Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle, 1845–1880 (Archaism and Modernity in the Nineteenth-century Limousin, 1845–1880) in two volumes in 1975. Corbin here demonstrated his mastery of the approach and methodology of classic French social history: that is, an exhaustive examination of the extant sources (economic, political, judicial, demographic) for the history of a region across an extended period. In his case, the region was the Limousin (départements of the Corrèze, Creuse, and Haute-Vienne) on the western reaches of the Massif Central in central France. The concentration on the revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic was typical of the great regional theses of the time (by Agulhon, Marcilhacy, Vigier, and others); what was unusual was the range of sources Corbin utilized in his attempts to uncover the archaïsme of certain elements of Limousin culture. Politically, the Limousin was marked in the nineteenth century by volatility: for example, in the Creuse and Haute-Vienne, where Louis-Napoleon had won 86 percent and 90 percent respectively of the votes in the presidential elections of December 1848, thirty-nine of the fifty-six rural cantons then gave the left-wing démoc-socs (democratic socialists) a majority in the legislative elections just five months later, in seventeen of them as much as 70–80 percent. Historians have long seen one reason for this volatility as the impact of returning seasonal or temporary migrants, for example, the stonemasons of the Creuse who spent years in the Paris building trades. In the mid-nineteenth century, there were as many as 60,000 annual migrants from the Limousin. In contrast, Corbin noted that the left, in fact, did best in Occitan-speaking areas with low literacy in French. Nor was the role of activists pivotal: in Corbin’s words, “those factors susceptible of explaining in depth the success of the left lie for the moment more in the presence of a democratic spirit connected with egalitarian social structures than in the diffusion of democratic ideology.” Corbin was also skeptical about the depth of apparently political expressions; instead, his thesis emphasized the continuities of daily life in this impoverished land of cattle-raising and polyculture. Most of the Limousin was characterized by poor communications and scattered habitat, but here, in the absence of an active, wealthy, and resident rural elite, hamlet dwellers had created a peculiarly intense and “democratic” form of sociability. Although those who lived in the Limousin shared with the bocage dwellers of western France a mistrust of towns, bourgeois liberalism, and capitalism, “to the white legend of the Vendée corresponds, in the Limousin, a red legend.” The completion of his thesis enabled Corbin to turn his attention to very different concerns, first awakened in him by knowledge of the encounters of nineteenth-century Creusois migrants with prostitutes in Paris. Despite the rapid increase in the urban population, the number of registered prostitutes nationwide declined from 16,239 in 1851 to 15,047 in 1878; in Paris, the number of brothels fell from 240 in 1840 to 140 in 1880. Corbin’s study of this prostitution, Les Filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution: 19e et 20e siècles (translated as Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, 1990), published in 1978, was a

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brilliant success, both commercially and intellectually. Increasingly, Corbin found, brothels catered to more specialized, expensive “tastes”; some houses charged 100 francs, providing tableaux vivants of lesbian love-making, sado-masochism, and so on. Working-class prostitution, in contrast, usually involved independent women using streets or cafés to meet clients who were charged as little as 50 centimes. To Corbin, such changes were the result of the profound “sexual misery” of bourgeois men and of workers’ hostility to regulation, which smacked of the Second Empire’s policing role in the workplace. The links suggested by Corbin between demographic sources and the cultural practices hidden in such quantitative sources were to prove a major turning point in the way historians of France would write social history. With hindsight, it is clear also that Corbin’s attention to male behaviors and attitudes toward prostitutes were a breakthrough in the transition from the history of women to the history of genders. His interest in charting changes in articulated attitudes toward social practices attracted him to the mentalités of the social reformers of the early nineteenth century, in particular that of the social “hygienists” such as Parent-Duchâtelet. In 1981, he published an annotated version of A.-J.-B. Parent-Duchâtelet’s account of Parisian prostitution as La Prostitution à Paris au XIXème siècle d’Alexandre ParentDuchâtelet (Prostitution in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, by Alexandre ParentDuchâtelet). It was through this awareness of the “moralizing” impulses of many nineteenth-century social reformers that Corbin extended the work of historians and sociologists, such as Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977); Philippe Ariès (Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, 1974), and Norbert Elias (The Civilizing Process, 1939), who had charted the expression in nineteenth-century Europe of l’âme sensible, a distinctive middle-class sensibility of a horror of public suffering and violent death. This sensibility was manifested in France in greater controls over prostitution, in laws against judicial torture and cruelty to animals, and in the removal of asylums, prisons, and executions to the periphery of towns. The more confident claims of the professions of medicine, psychology, and law to a monopoly of knowledge about human nature and its deviations were similarly part of a wider bourgeois discourse on the moral and gendered characteristics of a perfectly ordered society. It has been Corbin’s original contribution to apply such broad theses to a nuanced understanding of the historical specificity of behaviors, even of sensory meanings. The success of Les Filles de noce as a new type of social and cultural history encouraged Corbin to take his analyses further, into a remarkably wide-ranging history of the senses. The changing attitudes toward sexual practices in the nineteenth century were part of a wider discourse of the senses, a “perceptual revolution” in Corbin’s words. The next stage in his project was to study across the nineteenth century the creation of an “odorless” environment by the cleansing from cities of the smells of animals, refuse, and humans – the result was Le Miasme et la jonquille: l’odorat et l’imaginaire social XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (1982; translated as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, 1986). Unlike other


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historians studying culturally conditioned perceptions, however, Corbin has always been aware of the political context informing them. For example, after the republican political triumph of 1877, peasants were increasingly seen as the sturdy personification of republican virtues: at the same time, Corbin suggests, there was a shift in bourgeois perceptions of agreeable smells. A more prosperous countryside, which was seen as the stable base of republican regimes and which was now easily accessible by train, seemed less the home of the offensive smells of manureheap and sweat and more a flowered, simple haven of nature. In contrast, Corbin also discerned a heightened bourgeois conviction that workers – like peasants, prostitutes, and even Jews and homosexuals – carried overpowering, unhealthy smells with them; the bidet and the vase became essential items of domestic propriety. Corbin’s researches into the practices of daily life had their synthetic expression in a brilliant, book-length contribution to volume 4 of Histoire de la vie privée (1985–7; translated as A History of Private Life, 1987–91), edited by Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès, entitled “Coulisses” and subsequently translated as “Backstage.” Although criticized by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (L’Express, June 3, 1988) as having been rather too rooted in psychoanalysis, Corbin’s contribution was widely praised for its capacity to recapture lost worlds of intimate behavior without being either condescending or prurient. His contribution was also as close as Corbin has come to attempting a synthetic overview of the nineteenth century. In Le Territoire du vide: l’Occident et le désir du rivage, 1750–1840 (1988; translated as The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840, 1994), Corbin next explored changing attitudes toward the sea and its coasts, and the behaviors practiced by visitors, in the century after 1750. As with other historians who had examined attitudes to mountains and forests, Corbin found that the sea was a focus of both fascination and horror. The battle with the elements conducted daily by fishing populations far removed from an elite world of propriety terrified those who wrote of the seas: the ocean was for the latter a scene of uncivilized behaviors in a frightening natural element. The eighteenth-century cult of nature rarely extended to the sea in elite sensibilities: like mountains, the sea was alien and dangerous. Such attitudes were to change in the nineteenth century when, as Corbin revealed, new medical certainties about the curative properties of cold seawater drew middle-class visitors to growing beach resorts from Brighton to Dover, and from Deauville to Arcachon. Underpinning all of Corbin’s research had been a subtle understanding of time, both as a perceptual construct of those he studied and as a prism for historical study. In contrast to the earlier stress in French social history on the moyenne durée (medium term in years) and which treated behavior as the reflection of socioeconomic structures, Corbin has been prepared, like some other historians, to take as a starting-point the drama of the historical moment. Far from relegating such incidents to the realm of ripples on a long-term structural transition, he has applied a “point-of-entry” methodology, using well-chosen case studies to illuminate wider social contexts. This strategy was not a revival of narrative history so much

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as a recognition that it is in the conjunctures of the historical moment that the most elusive goal of the historian – the interconnectedness of the elements of past societies – may be revealed and evoked. It was by using such an approach that Corbin achieved his greatest success. The drama of Le Village des cannibales (1990; translated as The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, 1992) erupted on August 16, 1870, when several hundred peasants from around the tiny village of Hautefaye, near Nontron in southwestern France, systematically battered a young nobleman for two hours, and then, as he was about to expire, burned him to death. In his startling examination of the murder, Corbin teased out the reasons why, for the noble, Hautefaye was the wrong place to be. Part of his explanation was a web of historical factors. Here, in the north of the Dordogne, popular ideology was distinguished by a longstanding hatred of nobles (evident in the Great Fear of 1789), mistrust of priests (manifest in a wave of rioting after rumors of a plot to reimpose the tithe in 1868), and resentment of urban republicans (the June Days had caused a panic in the area in 1848, and the 45-centime surtax was often violently opposed). This distinctive ideology, combined with unprecedented prosperity under the Second Empire, had generated a fervent Bonapartism. The news of the imperial army’s reverses during the Franco-Prussian war in August 1870 reached the drought-afflicted countryside at the same time as the anxious villagers from around Hautefaye were attending a fair and celebrating Napoleon III’s national holiday (August 15).The young noble, unknown to most of his assailants, was accused of shouting “Long live the Republic!” and dubbed a “Prussian.” He became a doomed symbol of accumulated hatreds and fears. Toward the conclusion of his wide-ranging search for an explanation of this horrifying murder, Corbin comments that: The work of historians tends to make of the last century a history which empties events of their violence and harshness … Carnage is pasteurized; the blood of revolutions carefully washed away, so that only the diaphanous halo of political martyrs is left … This prim and proper history, obsessed with the desire to distinguish carefully the good from the wicked … blocks the search for the truth about horror and the actual practice of cruelty.

Corbin’s challenge to historians, to go beyond an understanding of collective violence as an expression of anger and instead to seek to make sense of its practice, was to influence the ways in which historians have subsequently approached it. The incident at Hautefaye in 1870 shocked and deeply embarrassed the liberal republicans who came to power a few weeks later and who had assumed the rural masses to have shared in the linear progress of enlightenment. For the murder occurred eighty years after the French Revolution and the presumed triumph of a new political culture based on citizenship, equality before the law, tolerance, and popular sovereignty. Corbin therefore focused on the incident at Hautefaye


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not only to probe the meanings of collective violence but also to problematize the relationship between the rise of liberal democracy and the violence of the rural masses. Corbin here uses the insights of cultural anthropology to properly insist on the distance of time, space, and perception between ourselves and the rural inhabitants of nineteenth-century France. This book has been Corbin’s greatest success, although it left him open to the charge leveled at other cultural historians, that the attraction of a spectacular episode with its rich archival sources may exaggerate the violence of past societies, as if highly unusual behavior was in some sense “typical.” For, carried to an extreme, such an approach may create an impression of a “modern present” sharply distinct from an “archaic past” by magnifying the exceptional example of splenetic action into “the way things really were.” While Corbin’s doctoral work had demonstrated the skills of the best social historians of his generation, the extraordinary range of his writing since 1980 has manifested his desire to probe a sensory world long since disappeared. The central weakness of the social history methodology in which Corbin had been trained was that it used techniques, particularly of quantification, to analyze regional histories in ways that make sense according to late twentieth-century categories. Instead, Corbin has sought to bridge the divide between this social history and a cultural history of perceptions and senses. This undertaking has necessarily involved a re-examination of extant sources to examine aspects of nineteenthcentury life hitherto of little interest to social historians or assumed to be beyond their grasp. Nowhere was this search for cultural meanings executed more brilliantly than in Les Cloches de la terre: paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (1994; translated as Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-century French Countryside, 1998), a remarkable investigation of the “auditory landscape” of the countryside. Here Corbin reads his sources “against the grain” – that is, for meanings other than those the scribe intended to convey – in order to portray a rural world of distinctive sounds, radically different from our own. Church bells, for example, had multiple meanings, from marking religious moments or the hours of the day to serving as a tocsin signaling danger. Bells, marking both religious and secular time, were necessarily an object of both local pride and civil conflict, most obviously because the wars of the French Revolution had led to some 60,000 bells of 100,000 being melted down for munitions. Their replacement in the nineteenth century was neither automatic nor uncontested. Corbin has also sought to take social history to its limits. Formed by a profession which understood social history to be that of communities and social groups, Corbin has asked whether, in fact, social history may be so all-encompassing as to include all under its umbrella. Could one inverse the usual methodologies of social history to place an individual rather than groups at its center? He did this by posing the question as to whether one could reconstruct the life of a “nonentity,” someone who was chosen more or less at random from an unremarkable community. His choice finally fell on Louis-François Pinagot, a forest worker and

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clog-maker who lived out his life (1798–1876) in the village of Origny-le-Butin (department of the Orne). Of course, Corbin was well aware that there is no “typical” person or community: his chosen subject was unique in that sense. His biography of him was, nevertheless, a brilliant example of what a skilled historian could recover about an “unknown” on the basis of fragmentary archives and an imaginative use of wider contexts. The book can also be read as offering Corbin the opportunity to return to the study of his own rural background in the Orne. In 1987, Corbin was appointed to the Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and in 1992 he was elected to the Institut universitaire de France. He was now able to take a more prominent role in initiating and participating in national conferences and debates. In particular, he has been an important stimulus for a series of innovative edited collections from conferences on themes ranging from popular festivals and leisure to women in politics and the history of the barricade. Few other French historians have been as influential beyond France, especially in the anglophone world, as has Corbin. His imaginative and subtle exploration of the realm of emotions and the senses has coincided with the expansion of new approaches to cultural history, and explains the speed and frequency with which his books have been translated. Despite wider responsibilities, he has continued to explore the realm of the senses, of the particularities of a recent past which historians had made too familiar. No historian of nineteenth-century France has been as eclectic as has Corbin in the range of his interests, from the history of bed linen to that of collective rage and murder. He has never abandoned his search to understand behaviors which both illuminate our understanding of the recent past and yet unsettle our certainties about its outlines. He has been unusually open to the insights of scholars from other disciplines and from other cultures. His references to the work of other historians have been generous and open-minded. While he has been reluctant to articulate a distinctive methodology and perspective – to mark out a territory – his particular approach to cultural and social history has been to put into practice the underlying promise of early social history, that no field of human thought and behavior was irrelevant. His history, even when at its most inventive or speculative, has never lost sight of the necessity of understanding behavior as specific to time, place, and social milieu. The fertility of his historical imagination has been matched by both his scholarly rigor and a deft, attractive prose style.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Alain Corbin Prélude au Front Populaire: contribution à l’histoire de l’opinion publique dans le département de la Haute-Vienne (1934–1936) (Limoges: Méry, 1968). Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle, 1845–1880, 2 vols. (Paris: M. Rivière, 1975).


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Les Filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution: 19e et 20e siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978); translated by Alan Sheridan as Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Le Miasme et la jonquille: l’odorat et l’imaginaire social XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982); translated by Miriam Kochan, Roy Porter, and Christopher Prendergast as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Le Territoire du vide: l’Occident et le désir du rivage, 1750–1840 (Paris: Aubier, 1988); translated by Jocelyn Phelps as The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Le Village des cannibales (Paris: Aubier, 1990); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Le Temps, le désir et l’horreur: essais sur le dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1991); translated by Jean Birrell as Time, Desire, and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Les Cloches de la terre: paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris: A. Michel, 1994); translated by Martin Thom as Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Le Monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot: sur les traces d’un inconnu, 1798–1876 (Paris: Flammarion, 1998); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Le Ciel et la mer (Paris: Bayard, 2005). L’Harmonie des plaisirs: les manières de jouir du siècle des Lumières à l’avènement de la sexologie (Paris: Perrin, 2007).

Edited Works Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris: la prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle, edited by Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 1981). “Coulisses,” by Alain Corbin, in Histoire de la vie privée, edited by Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès, vol. 4 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985–7), pp. 389–519. Les Usages politiques des fêtes aux XIXe–XXe siecles, edited by Alain Corbin, Noelle Gérône, and Danielle Tartakowsky (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994). L’Avènement des loisirs, 1850–1960, edited by Alain Corbin et al. (Paris: Aubier, 1995). La Barricade, edited by Alain Corbin and Jean-Marie Mayeur (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997). Femmes dans la cité, 1815–1871, edited by Alain Corbin, Jacqueline Lalouette, and Michèle Riot-Sarcey (Paris: Créaphis, 1997).

References Corbin, Alain, Historien du sensible: entretiens avec Gilles Heuzé (Paris: Découverte, 2000). Demartini, Anne-Emmanuelle and Kalifa, Dominique (eds.), Imaginaire et sensibilités au XIXe siècle: études pour Alain Corbin (Paris: Editions Créaphis, 2005). Gerson, Stéphane (ed.), Alain Corbin and the Writing of History, special issue of French Politics, Culture and Society, 22 (2) (2004).

11

Jean Delumeau (1923– ) Thomas Worcester

Jean Delumeau is well known as a historian of the religious mentality of early modern Europe, especially of France and Italy. Prolific in his publications, Delumeau has published many books that elucidate both the fears and the hopes of average Christians in the era between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. He has played an important role in shifting the focus of research in the history of Christianity from what was prescribed or mandated by clerical elites to what was experienced and lived by the masses. Delumeau is not only an historian but also a Catholic layman committed to a renewal and updating of Catholicism in a secularized world. In many of his works, he compares and contrasts the religious experience of Christians in earlier centuries with that of Christians in Europe today. Born in Nantes, Delumeau received his early education in Catholic schools in western France. The last years of his secondary education he spent in a state-run lycée. He then pursued university-level studies and research in Paris and Rome, and he gained his first teaching experiences in Bourges and Rennes. Part of World War II he spent in Paris as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure. By 1947, he had earned his agrégation as an historian and began to teach history at a lycée in Bourges. From 1948 to 1950 he was a member of the Ecole française de Rome, while he pursued research on Rome. From 1950 to 1954 he taught at a lycée in Rennes, and he spent the following academic year attached to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). This affiliation permitted him to complete his thesis, which treated economic and social life in late sixteenth-century Rome; he received a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1955. From 1955 to 1970 Delumeau taught at the University of Rennes as well as the University of Rennes II–Haute Bretagne. In 1962, he received a silver medal from

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the CNRS. From 1963 to 1978 he was also a director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. During these years in Rennes he published his thesis on economic and social life in Rome: a first volume in 1957, and a second in 1959. In a preface, Delumeau acknowledges his intellectual debts to, among others, Gaston Zeller (his dissertation director) and to Albert Grenier and Fernand Braudel. In this thesis of some thousand published pages, Delumeau examines in great detail topics such as grain prices, papal finances, postal systems, migration, tourists and pilgrims, roads and transportation, drinking water, public and private building projects, hospitals and the poor, the wealthy and dowries for their daughters, taxes, bankers, and inflation. He also published, in 1962, his second thesis, on alum in Rome from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. A sulfate used to harden metals, as well as a medicine used in astringents, alum was mined at Tolfa and shipped all over Italy, and from the port of Civitavecchia to various parts of Europe. Delumeau examines how this industry developed from the fifteenth century onward, how the popes sought to create and preserve a monopoly in alum trade, and how the trade prospered and declined. During his years in Rennes, Delumeau also gave considerable attention to the regional history of Rennes itself and of Brittany. His edited volume, Histoire de la Bretagne (History of Brittany), appeared in 1969. In 1979, he published another edited work, on the history of the diocese of Rennes. Essays in this volume treat not only the institutional history of the diocese – its episcopate, religious orders, and the like – from the origins of the diocese to the present, but also such questions as the gap between religion as prescribed by the clergy and as lived by the people. In fact, from the mid-1960s on, Delumeau began to turn his attention more and more to religious history – Breton, French, and international. The Second Vatican Council met from 1962 to 1965 and issued decrees on many aspects of Catholic practice and belief. Religious liberty and religious tolerance were strongly affirmed; no longer were other Christians and Jews to be scorned or denigrated. The tone of the conciliar decrees was positive and in many ways optimistic; there were no anathemata or condemnations of “heresies” and errors. While the bishops highlighted the importance of the episcopate, they also promoted the role of the laity. All the baptized, not merely clergy and members of religious orders, were to play an active, central role in Christian life. Delumeau’s publication, in 1965, of Naissance et affirmation de la Réforme (Birth and Affirmation of the Reformation), a work on Protestant reform, reflected the Council’s conciliatory view of Protestants. It also signaled what would be the first of many works by Delumeau, a Catholic layman enthusiastic about the reforms of Vatican II, on religious topics. While his work up to that time had dealt principally with economic history, religious history would henceforth occupy a growing place in his research and writing. In 1966, he would publish Le Mouvement du port de Saint-Malo, 1681–1720 (Traffic in the Port of Saint-Malo, 1681–1720), a work of statistical history on economic activity at an important harbor in Brittany. While Naissance et affirmation de la Réforme anticipates some of the themes that

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would occupy Delumeau over the next four decades, Le Mouvement du port de Saint-Malo is one of the last of his major works on economic history. Delumeau’s 1974 work, L’Italie de Botticelli à Bonaparte (Italy from Botticelli to Bonaparte), offered an overview of the history of early modern Italy. Questions such as fluctuation in the price of wheat still receive significant consideration, but the author’s attention moves also to cultural history, to the history of mentalities and of Baroque Catholicism. In the 1965 book on the Reformation, Delumeau first summarizes, in a magisterial and respectful manner, the life and works of the principal reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. Then he turns to conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and among Protestants. In the last section, Delumeau examines debates among historians on the course of the Reformation. Here he takes positions critical of Marxist and other economic interpretations of the Reformations, Protestant or Catholic. He also emphasizes not the differences between early modern reformers, but especially their similarities. Two years later, Delumeau published La Civilisation de la Renaissance (The Civilization of the Renaissance), a work that won for him the Grand Prize Gobert of the French Academy in 1968. Lavishly illustrated with more than two hundred images, this book covers an extraordinarily wide range of topics from the Black Death to Gothic and classical architecture, from European exploration of Asia and the Americas to Leonardo’s design of a tank for warfare, from popular piety and a “sentiment of culpability” to inflation in sixteenth-century Rome, from accounting and banking practices in Lyons to Renaissance “dreams” such as Thomas More’s Utopia, and from Copernican astronomy to the fear of witchcraft. This book on Renaissance civilization offers a detailed overview of that topic, as well as an indication of the breadth of themes that had been central to Delumeau’s research up to the mid-1960s or that would become central to it in the decades following. With publication of Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (translated as Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, 1977) Delumeau provided both an overview of early modern Catholicism, especially as it was experienced by ordinary lay people, and a presentation of questions for further research. First published in 1971, then in later French editions and in a 1977 English translation, this book gave Delumeau an ever bigger and broader audience, and one that was increasingly international. It also served to present in a succinct fashion what have been central questions in his abundant research and writing ever since. In the first half of Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire, Delumeau presents the fruits of research done by other historians, on topics such as the Council of Trent and its reception, on new religious orders and saints and sanctity in the Catholic Reformation, and on Catholicism’s progress (or lack of it) as a worldwide religion in the wake of European colonization of large parts of the Americas and Asia. The main focus in this part of the book is on bishops and other clergy, and on their efforts to reform and enlarge the church from the top down.


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It is the book’s second part, entitled “Historians’ disputes and directions of research,” that takes up the question of lay response and lay initiative – in many ways, Delumeau’s primary interest in religious history. In a chapter on Jansenism, Delumeau examines not only Jansenist theology and ecclesiology, but also Jansenism as a “mentality” of opposition to both church and state authorities. In other chapters, Delumeau takes further the concept of religious mentalities and their history; he discusses at length how historians may gain access to that history. Citing especially the work of Gabriel Le Bras on the sociology of religion, Delumeau explores how it is possible to know something about the “collective psychology” of the past. Documents such as records of episcopal visitations of parishes, records of confraternities and their activities, parish registers on sacramental practice, and data on the material upkeep of churches he presents as offering clues to the mentality and psychology of average Christians of the past. Delumeau challenges what he terms the “legend” of the Christian Middle Ages, and argues that it was in the era between Luther and Voltaire, not earlier, that the maximum effort was made to Christianize not only the cities but also the countryside. Increasingly, Catholic priests were trained in seminaries, and there they learned to be separate from the laity, to strive to be worthy of their vocation, and to cultivate the distinctiveness of the clerical state. Priests were relentlessly exhorted to practice chastity and discipline. In various efforts to teach doctrine and morals to those who were perceived as ignorant and immoral peasants, Delumeau posits far more similarity than difference between Catholic and Protestant clergy: both sought to stamp out what they considered to be paganism. Schools were founded and catechisms published. Yet how successful this effort was Delumeau poses as a question for further research. How Christianized were average people by the eighteenth century? What was the Christianity they were taught? To what extent did people resist and reject conformity to the catechism that they were taught? To what extent were France and Europe de-Christianized before 1789 and the start of the French Revolution? In the 1970s, then, Delumeau increasingly left behind the economic focus of his earlier work, and he concentrated henceforth on religion, specifically religious mentalities, especially those of average, lay Catholics in the early modern period. That decade also saw him move from Rennes to Paris, and into the highest circles of French academic life. From 1970 to 1975 he was a professor at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). Among his graduate students in these years were many who did research on “collective behavior” in the Renaissance and early modern periods. In 1976, Delumeau published an edited volume of some fifteen master’s theses he had directed: La Mort des pays de Cocagne: comportements collectifs de la Renaissance à l’âge classique (The Death of Lands of Plenty: Collective Behaviors from the Renaissance to the Classical Age). In 1974, Delumeau was elected to a chair at the Collège de France. On February 13, 1975, he gave his inaugural lecture (published as Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France) as professor of the history of religious mentalities in the early modern

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West. Entitled “Le prescrit et le vécu” (“The prescribed and the lived”), the lecture renders homage to Emile Durkheim, Gabriel Le Bras, and others who paved the way for work on the history of Christianity as lived experience, seen from below rather than from the perspective of theologians and doctrines. Delumeau praises the work of historians such as Philippe Ariès, François Lebrun, and Michel Vovelle on attitudes toward death. Citing Fernand Braudel as his mentor, Delumeau explains that changes in religious attitudes or mentalities occur only over a long period (la longue durée). The long period with which Delumeau will be concerned is the West between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period in which elites sought to change the beliefs and practices of the people. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Delumeau also set forth an agenda for his research. Arguing that de-Christianization has frequently been said to have begun at the French Revolution, he states that such assertions are troubling given the lack of study of a presumably prior Christianization. Delumeau asserts that, beginning in the thirteenth century with the founding of the mendicant orders, and even more so after 1500, among both Protestant and Catholic voices calling for reform, there was a “gigantic effort” at religious acculturation. Elites engaged in warfare against what they perceived to be paganism, superstition, and idolatry. In the mentality of urban elites, the religious ignorance of the illiterate rural masses was an urgent problem, one to solve through a relentless program of preaching and teaching. On this point, Martin Luther, Vincent de Paul, John Calvin, and Charles Borromeo reasoned in “identical” fashion. Conversion of the “ignorant” masses was promoted by eliciting fear of damnation. Such fear was propagated by insistence on the reality of original sin, the constant menace of hell, and the need for daily and scrupulous examination of conscience. Reformers – Protestant and Catholic – sought to make the daily life of average Christians correspond to prescribed ideals, but a large gap remained. While a certain conformity was obtained in some places, the response of many people was not one of genuine piety but one of indifference or of hostility. De-Christianization may have been above all the rejection of a religion of fear, of rejection of a certain model of Christianity. Did another model replace it? In his lectures and seminars at the Collège de France, from 1975 to his retirement in 1994, and in his many publications of the past thirty-five years, Delumeau has sought to elucidate further the questions he treated in his inaugural lecture. In particular, he has explored at length how a religion of fear was propagated, but also how it was paralleled by a sentiment of religious security. Fear of hellfire often went hand in hand, at least in Catholic regions, with trust in intercessory saints and in certain rites and practices. While keeping his research focused principally on the early modern period, Delumeau has also brought his attention up to the present, and even to speculation about the future. One of the most fundamental questions he has asked constituted the title of his 1977 book, Le Christianisme va-t-il mourir? (Is Christianity Going to Die?), a work for which he won the Grand Prize of Catholic Writers (1977). In that work, he argues that there


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is a possible future for Christianity: one in which Christians are a minority in a secular society rather than a majority allied with the state; one in which fear has been replaced by hope; and one in which divisions between Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants have given way to reunion. In 1978, with publication of La Peur en Occident XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: une cité assiégée (Fear in the West, 14th–18th Centuries: A City under Siege), Delumeau turned his attention to the prevalence and variety of fears that informed Western culture from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In a preface, Delumeau alludes to his own intense fear of death, as a ten-year-old child, when he learned of the death of a young pharmacist. Delumeau explains that his fear of death, as a youth, was also encouraged by the education he received in a Salesian school. At the age of twelve, he was frequently exhorted to imagine himself on his deathbed. This autobiographical passage serves to suggest that the gap between early modern culture and that of the twentieth century may not be as great as one might suppose. In the first part of La Peur en Occident, Delumeau focuses on fears found among the “greater” number of people – across lines of division between elites and the common people. Delumeau offers a “typology of collective behavior in time of plague,” and explains that plague played a particularly important role in stoking fear of death and, at times, in leading to a fear-driven search for those responsible for the contagion. Plague promoted a “sentiment of insecurity” that affected everyone, while some fears, such as that of famine, were more common among the masses than among the more prosperous. The second part of La Peur en Occident focuses on fears common among the elite classes of society. In the late Middle Ages and in the Reformation era, Delumeau finds eschatological fears to have reached a fever pitch. Fear of a vengeful God and fear of an impending end of the world abounded. Fear of blasphemy and fear of heresy prospered in an age of religious reform. Fear of Satan and of demons, and of what were imagined to be the agents of Satan was rampant. Those thought to be such agents included pagan idolators, Muslims, Jews, and recent converts from Islam or Judaism to Christianity. Feared even more than these groups were witches, especially female ones. Delumeau examines how, in the popular imagination, witches had been considered to exercise a magic often related to questions of fertility. By approximately 1500, however, judicial procedures for dealing with witches were increasingly severe and presumed that the witch was consorting with demons if not with Satan himself. The “great repression” of witchcraft that spread in the sixteenth century was thus stoked less by popular fears than by those prevalent among a judicial and clerical elite. With Un chemin d’histoire: Chrétienté et christianisation (A Path of History: Christianity and Christianization), published in 1981, Delumeau turned his attention to interaction between elite and popular religion. He suggests that “lived resistance” to official religion was more pervasive than has often been thought, and he argues that historians should do more research on the topic. Christianization

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as promoted by both Protestant and Catholic elites may have been less successful than we tend to think. The year 1983 was the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. Delumeau marked the occasion with publication of his Le Cas Luther (The Case of Luther). Here, he argues that Luther’s central doctrine – that of justification by faith alone – “reassured” some pious Christians of their eternal salvation, even as it produced other, more negative consequences. The doctrine elicited “anguish” among more scrupulous persons, and these questioned themselves endlessly on their faith and on whether or not they would be saved. While praising Luther’s focus on scripture, his promotion of the “freedom” of a Christian, and his love for his wife and children, Delumeau deplores the “violent” tone of Luther’s discourses from the mid-1520s on. In Luther’s critique of Erasmus, in his condemnations of the peasants seeking freedom in this world, and in his denunciations of the Jews, Delumeau finds an utterly unattractive Luther. Appealing for Christian unity, Delumeau concludes this overview and assessment of Luther with a call for Catholics to rethink the authority of the hierarchy, and for Protestants to revisit the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and to renounce its doctrinal corollary: a terrible God who, having condemned humanity to death and hell following original sin, rescues only a minority of “elect” persons from damnation. The history of sin, specifically the history of how Western Christians imagined sin from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is the subject of Delumeau’s massive tome, Le Péché et la peur: la culpabilisation en Occident XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles. Translated into English and published in 1990 as Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th–18th Centuries, the first French edition was published in 1983, the same year as Le Cas Luther. In Sin and Fear, Delumeau cites extensively from sermons, catechisms, manuals for confessors, and theological treatises. He also draws on the evidence of the arts and painting (the cover of the original French edition reproduces an image by Giovanni di Paolo showing Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise by God and his angels). In Sin and Fear, Delumeau finds few differences between Catholics and Protestants in their relentless promotion of guilt and of fear of a God imagined as omnipotent, omniscient, and very angry with sinful humanity. In Sin and Fear, Delumeau shows the Renaissance period to be one in which constant awareness of approaching death was praised as an excellent way of living one’s life. A certain “pessimism” about the world characterized the religious mentality not only of monks and mystics but of other Christians as well. Plagues and wars, sorrow and violence, calamities and tribulations were interpreted as chastisements sent by God. Preachers urged repentance and reform as they brandished the possibility not only of imminent death but of the end of the world and of final judgment. Human beings were considered to be weak, wicked, and fragile. Even a thinker such as Michel de Montaigne, a late sixteenth-century layman and a writer often cited by historians as a pre-eminent embodiment of Renaissance


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ideals, affirmed that human beings are calamitous creatures, given to pain and sorrow, and ruled by avarice, envy, and deceit. The doctrine of original sin, as formulated by Saint Augustine and as handed on over centuries through the Renaissance and Reformation eras, Delumeau identifies as at the heart of a theology and mentality of guilt and fear. Human beings were said to inherit a collective and sinful human nature from their parents, and this lineage of sin was believed to go back to Adam and Eve, the first parents. To an inherited sinful nature and inclination to sin, individuals were viewed as adding their own “actual” sins – sins committed in thought and/or in deed. Adam and Eve were said to be justly expelled from paradise for their sin, and all humanity deserved the eternal fires of hell for its sinfulness. In theory, at least, Christianity offered remedies for sin, remedies that might open the way to salvation. Delumeau asks, however, whether there was not a kind of “failure” in the conveyance of a message of redemption. One remedy for sin offered by the Catholic Church was the sacrament of penance; indeed, by the thirteenth century, annual confession was considered obligatory. Making a close and extensive examination of manuals used by confessors, and of penitential literature read by penitents preparing for confession, Delumeau finds little that would have been consoling. Authors imbued with the mania for divisions and distinctions that abounded in scholastic theology discoursed at length on the variety of sins, and on the difference between “mortal” and “venial” sins. Penitents were warned of the grave danger of “sacrilegious” confessions, that is, those that were incomplete or insincere. At the same time, penitents were reminded of the prospect of punishment in the afterlife – of eternal torment in hell, or of temporary torment in purgatory. In Sin and Fear, Delumeau gives most of his attention to Catholic religious culture; he does, however, also compare Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward sin and the possibility of redemption. He finds that both Catholics and Protestants were relentlessly exhorted to constant awareness of approaching death. Asking whether Protestant emphasis on predestination and on salvation through grace alone may have offered relief from fear of a wrathful God, Delumeau suggests that fear of reprobation – of being predestined to hell – was no small matter. While some Protestants may have taken comfort in the doctrine of predestination, others found it terrifying. Delumeau’s own religious beliefs formed the subject of his 1985 book Ce que je crois (What I Believe). Part of a series of books, all published under that title by Parisian publisher Bernard Grasset, Delumeau’s contribution joined those of prominent French intellectuals, such as historian Pierre Chaunu and writers François Mauriac and André Maurois. Dedicating the book to his granddaughters Isabelle, Florence, and Muriel, Delumeau begins the work by recounting an interchange with them in which they asked him about the meaning of death and the meaning of paradise. In this book, he gives a kind of extended response to their fundamental questions.

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In Ce que je crois, Delumeau emphasizes not fear but hope and confidence. He speaks warmly of his wife, Jeanny, and of the beauty of nature. He recounts the joy and happiness he has felt in interrupting his research and writing in order to help a granddaughter play with rose-colored stones. He explains that he finds the “divine signature” in nature’s beauty, and that, for him, a harmonious countryside is an invitation to prayer and to meditation on the beatific vision. That vision, he affirms, is one of God even “more beautiful than Greek islands, more beautiful than a snow-covered summit gleaming in the sunlight, more beautiful than red maples in Indian summer, more beautiful than the most moving symphony, more beautiful than the most ravishing young girl.” Pointing out that modern science was founded by convinced Christians such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, Delumeau insists that there is no “fundamental” conflict between science and Christianity. For Delumeau, “God is an artist,” and the more science is able to explain the universe, the more we understand God’s artistic creation. In reading the Bible, Delumeau also finds God. He offers his own understanding of various passages, including those dealing with sin and evil. Delumeau believes that the power of evil is enormous, but the God of the Bible promises to humanity final victory over it. God is for us, not against us. At the end of time, love will triumph over hate; sin and death will be “swallowed up” in the victory of God. Citing as a positive model the work of Brother Roger at Taizé, Delumeau insists that promotion of pardon and reconciliation among peoples is the proper work of Christians, and that the authority Christ gave to his church is an authority to pardon. Well aware of the existence of a reactionary French Catholicism that rejects the Second Vatican Council and longs for restoration of a more authoritarian and world-hating hierarchical church, Delumeau vigorously defends a contemporary Catholicism in which “liberation” of oppressed peoples has a central place. Delumeau approvingly cites Vatican II on the church as the people of God; he suggests that the laity should have a major voice in the articulation of teaching on such topics as contraception and artificial insemination. In Ce que je crois, Delumeau responds to those who blame Vatican II for growing secularization and a crisis of faith; writing as an historian, he points out ways in which de-Christianization began two centuries earlier. For Delumeau, historian and Catholic believer, Vatican II was a healthy response to a crisis of faith, not the cause of one. Faith, fear, and a sentiment of security were central themes in two collections of essays edited by Delumeau and published in 1987. In Les Malheurs des temps: histoire des fléaux et des calamités en France (Misfortunes through the Ages: A History of Scourges and Calamities in France), Delumeau and his co-editor Yves Lequin brought together twenty-four essays, covering a broad period ranging from the fifth century to the first half of the twentieth. The essays treat topics such as famine, plague, cholera, war, popular violence, floods, fires, and infant mortality. The focus is on how French society dealt with these calamities: how people feared God and/or sought help from him, and how from the time of Louis XIV onward


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more and more help was expected from the king and the state. In La Première Communion: quatre siècles d’histoire (First Communion: Four Centuries of History), Delumeau assembled a collection of essays on the celebration of a child’s first reception of the Eucharist, from the era of the Catholic Reformation to the twentieth century. This volume suggests that first communion often functioned as both a rite of passage (at times from childhood to adolescence) and a reassuring experience of family, God, church, and of sacraments as life-affirming. In 1988, Delumeau was elected to permanent membership of one of the academies that make up the Institut de France: the Académie des inscriptions et belleslettres. Delumeau was chosen to fill the chair vacated by the death of Georges Dumézil. In Rassurer et protéger: le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois (Reassure and Protect: The Sentiment of Security in the West in Earlier Times), published in 1989, Delumeau explores at length how people in the Renaissance and early modern periods found or achieved a “sentiment” of security. With his focus less on the experience of clerical or lay elites, and more on what average Christians found reassuring in the face of suffering in this world and the possibility of eternal damnation in the next, Delumeau recounts practices that were believed to offer protection. Blessings with holy water or with candles were often thought to be particularly efficacious in warding off evil; not only people were blessed, but also animals, crops, and houses. The wearing of scapulars was considered a prudent measure. The ringing of church bells was thought to chase away storms and demons. Delumeau explains that priests were often reluctant to engage in actions they considered bordering on the superstitious, but people wanted the benefits of the clergy’s supernatural powers. In two lengthy chapters on processions, Delumeau argues that they created, for many people, a time and a space of security. More often at the initiative of the laity than of the clergy, processions were public, collective efforts to enlist the help of God and the saints against a variety of ills. Processions in time of plague were often penitential and sought to convince God to turn away from wrath. Statues and relics of saints were often carried in procession, and on a very precise itinerary designed to mark off a protective space of healing and hope. Especially on the feast of Corpus Christi, the Eucharist was carried in procession: hope was placed in the consecrated host believed to be the body of Christ. His body, believed to have risen from the dead and to live eternally, was considered especially useful in curing bodily ills in this life and in easing the passage of the faithful Christian to life with Christ in heaven. The cult of the saints Delumeau finds to have been at the heart of the ways in which Catholics found security. Saints were imagined as sympathetic, heavenly advocates who pleaded with God for the material and spiritual needs of people on earth. Many saints were considered specialists for certain types of ills, such as Roch and Sebastian in periods of plague. Delumeau explains that people prayed to some saints, such as St. Joseph, in order to ask for the grace of a “good” or “happy” death – a death for which one had time to prepare through confession

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of one’s sins and reception of the sacraments of Extreme Unction and of the Eucharist. The Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, was the most popular saint of all, invoked in every need. Turning to visual rather than written sources, Delumeau highlights the late medieval iconography of Mary wearing a large cloak which she protectively spreads over people praying to her. Such images, he states, were most common in Italy, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; they often showed Mary’s cloak protecting her devotees from the wrath of God, imagined as arrows – signifying plague and other calamities sent as divine punishment for sin. Most histories of the Reformation era treat indulgences solely in connection with financial abuses and with Luther’s Ninety-Five theses of 1517. In Rassurer et protéger, Delumeau shows how post-Reformation Catholics continued to obtain indulgences for themselves and for their loved ones thought to be suffering in purgatory. Delumeau calls the period 1650–1750 the “golden age” of purgatory, in the Catholic world. Protestants in that era, he argues, found reassurance and hope not so much in sermons or in Reformation doctrines, but in hymns and canticles. In singing and hearing songs about God’s mercy and compassion, Protestants found an alternative to fear and insecurity. Delumeau characterizes the eighteenth century as one in which fear and insecurity receded, both among Enlightenment intellectuals and among the common people: health improved somewhat and population growth reflected this. A more positive experience of life in this world was reflected in changing ideas about God and the afterlife. Fear of hell declined and a more beneficent image of God tended to replace images of a wrathful deity. By the 1990s, Delumeau’s international reputation was growing rapidly. While some reviewers criticized what they saw as an overemphasis on fear and guilt in the history of Western religious mentalities, others appreciated how Delumeau balanced his examination of those themes with attention to reassurance and security. Peter Burke, in his historiographical book The French Historical Revolution (1990), situates Delumeau’s work in relation to that of Lucien Febvre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and a French tradition emphasizing collective psychological history. Robert Bireley, in a review essay in the Catholic Historical Review ( January 1991), praises Delumeau for a “wealth of insight” and for an “often fascinating” treatment of the history of Catholic piety. J. K. Powis, in a review article in the Journal of Modern History ( June 1992), is more critical of Delumeau, questioning especially his lack of attention to political history. Yet even a reviewer as critical as Powis concludes that Delumeau’s theses on fear and security compel “attention both for the mass of material he deploys and for the clarity with which he sustains his arguments.” Alain Cabantous wrote the preface for a massive festschrift published in 1996 in honor of Delumeau. Cabantous explains that it includes eightyeight essays that celebrate and demonstrate the influence of Delumeau on the discipline of religious history. Most of the essays are by French scholars, with a few by others. How penitents experienced God through the sacrament of penance – as a merciful and forgiving God or as a severe and punishing one – is the principal question


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in Delumeau’s L’Aveu et le pardon: les difficultés de la confession XIIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Confession and Pardon: Problems with the Sacrament of Penance 13th–18th Centuries), published in 1990. This book traces the history of this sacrament from the 1215 decree of the Fourth Lateran Council requiring annual confession to the efforts of Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787) to form confessors respectful of human liberty and individual conscience. Acknowledging that the confidential nature of the encounter between priest and penitent means that few records exist of what really happened in confession, Delumeau focuses principally on what clergy were instructed to do as confessors. In L’Aveu et le pardon, Delumeau shows that such instructions varied a great deal, and that therefore the image of God conveyed to penitents also varied much. The more severe approach insisted on having confessors question the penitent at some length in order to insure a complete confession of sins. Such questioning could be helpful to the penitent, but it could also be a terrifying experience. Some theologians argued that the only adequate repentance for sins was contrition (sorrow for sin based solely on love for God), while other theologians defended the sufficiency of attrition (sorrow for sin based on fear of punishment). Thus, some confessors scrutinized carefully the motivation of their penitents, while others accepted the mere fact that they came to confession as adequate evidence of repentance. Some, but not all, authors of manuals for confessors stressed the frequent need to delay absolution until there was solid evidence of contrition and of works of satisfaction for sin. Confessors were told that they were to act as judges, fathers, and as spiritual physicians in their dealings with penitents. Some confessors put their emphasis on just judgment, while others put forward compassionate healing. Delumeau devotes several chapters of L’Aveu et le pardon to the history of probabilism. Probabilists allowed that where there was doubt about the moral or immoral nature of an act, a person could do that thing without sin. This theory allowed confessors not only to absolve penitents of their sins, but to function as spiritual directors, at times helping their penitents to see that what they thought might be sinful need not always be so. While members of the Order of Preachers had developed the theory of probabilism in the fifteenth century, by the seventeenth century the Society of Jesus was its principal advocate. Jesuit advocacy of probabilism was one of the reasons why Jansenists such as Blaise Pascal lambasted the Society of Jesus as soft on sin. Delumeau shows how Liguori succeeded in restoring probabilism to a place among the resources available to confessors seeking to console rather than dishearten their penitents. By 1990, Delumeau began to include questions of gender in his work on the history of the religious mentality of the West. In L’Aveu et le pardon, he suggests that manuals for confessors may be an important source for examining shifts in attitudes toward the concept of fathers and fatherhood. He argues that early modern development of the cult of St. Joseph is also important in this regard, offering evidence of growing attachment to a model of fathers as affectionate and loving. With co-editor Daniel Roche, Delumeau edited Histoire des pères et de la

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paternité (History of Fathers and Fatherhood), a collection published in 1990. Two years later, Delumeau published another edited volume, this one on the history of the role of women in the handing on of Christian faith from one generation to the next: La Religion de ma mère: les femmes et la transmission de la foi (The Religion of my Mother: Women and the Transmission of Faith). Most of Delumeau’s research and writing in the 1990s was devoted to a threevolume series on the history of paradise in the Western imagination. The first volume, Une histoire du paradis: le jardin des délices was published in 1992; an English translation entitled History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition was published in 1995. The focus of this volume is on nostalgia for the earthly paradise lost through the sin of Adam and Eve. Yet Delumeau’s focus is not on how that sin was imagined or explained, but rather on how the lost paradise was central to religious mentalities. Though the English translation does not include them, several full-color reproductions of works of art from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, showing Adam and Eve in the garden, illustrate the original French edition. Delumeau first provides an overview of Greek, Jewish, and Christian traditions regarding paradise or something like it, such as a golden age or Elysian Fields. He identifies reconstituting and recounting the dreams and desires of peoples in the past for unlimited happiness as the challenge before him. Such dreams often focused on a beautiful garden or a fertile earth where milk and honey flowed in abundance, where every sort of fruit grew, where flowers covered the fields, and roses had no thorns. In such a place, springtime was perpetual, all smells were like perfume. For some interpreters of the book of Genesis, the paradise lost still existed in some part of the world, albeit normally inaccessible. For others, the only paradise extant after the fall of Adam and Eve was in heaven, not on earth. How a great many Christians through the medieval and early modern periods remained fascinated with the possibility of an elusive but extant earthly paradise is the dominant question in this first of Delumeau’s three volumes on paradise. He shows how, for many centuries, there were Christians who imagined earthly paradise to exist in Palestine, in Armenia, in Mesopotamia, or somewhere in Africa or Asia. With Christopher Columbus, and with growing European consciousness of the Americas after 1500, what was considered the possible geographical location of paradise grew wider. Paradise was often imagined as well irrigated by rivers; efforts to localize paradise near the Tigris and the Euphrates now had to compete with possible places in Brazil along the Amazon and other waterways. Delumeau cites Amerigo Vespucci and other European travelers whose description of a “new” world echoed Ovid’s writings on a golden age. The discovery in the Americas of fruits such as the pineapple – previously unknown in Europe – nourished European imagination of a transatlantic paradise. At least some observers of the “natives” wrote of them as having preserved a state of innocence and as having life spans that surpassed a hundred years. In seventeenth-century North


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America, religious dissidents arriving from England described their “New England” as a new Eden where partridges were so fat they could not fly and turkeys were as big as lambs. Delumeau also points out that one early modern author, sixteenthcentury French humanist Guillaume Postel, situated an earthly paradise at the North Pole. In the era of the Enlightenment, Delumeau finds a considerable shift in how paradise was imagined. Nostalgia for the paradise of Adam and Eve before their sin, and the search for some remnant or similitude of that golden age, were undermined by skeptical views of biblical history and chronology. By the mid-1700s, critics of the traditional doctrine of original sin challenged the justice and reasonableness of a God who would condemn all humanity for such a slight fault committed by the first parents. As the notion of history as progress rather than as decline gained more and more adherents, an earthly paradise seemed to many people more a future possibility than a past reality. On February 9, 1994, Delumeau gave his final lecture at the Collège de France. In this leçon terminale he presents a summary of the principal themes of the work he did during the twenty years that he held a chair there. Responding to critics who focus only on his works on fear, Delumeau asserts that his books should be read not in isolation from one another but as part of a logical, balanced body of work in which both the history of fear and the history of a sentiment of security are treated. He identifies his L’Aveu et le pardon as a work that shows how fear and reassurance were related: they both accompanied confession of sin, a central component of Catholic sacramental practice. On this question of the history of confession, Delumeau adds his own judgment on those theologians and confessors who showed little or no sympathy for penitents. Blaise Pascal and other rigorists failed to take into account the “attenuating circumstances” of actions they summarily judged as always sinful; they showed too little sensitivity to real-life situations. Yet Delumeau also declares that many penitents did find in the confession of their sins a relief, and in reception of the pardon granted through sacramental absolution an experience of joy and liberty. Finding the need for security and reassurance at the very heart of human experience, Delumeau offers a “correction” of Freud. Not the libido but the need for security is the “greatest urge” of the human being. In the light of this central place of the sentiment of security in human experience and history, Delumeau concludes his final lecture at the Collège de France with an overview of where people found security, from the late Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. The second volume in Delumeau’s trilogy on the history of paradise, Mille ans de bonheur: une histoire du paradis (A Thousand Years of Happiness: A History of Paradise), was published in 1995. In this work, Delumeau examines not the history of nostalgia for a lost paradise, but hope for, and expectations of a thousand-year age of happiness. Beginning with examination of biblical texts that speak of such a millennium, especially Revelation 20: 1–15, Delumeau shows how millennialism has often been marginalized only to reappear in a new form. While the official,

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institutional church tended to downplay expectations of a millennial earthly paradise, those expectations often proved resilient, finding various voices to shape and reshape them. Emphasizing the influence of the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Fiore, Delumeau shows how Joachim’s trinitarian theology of history elicited expectations of the culmination of time in an age of the spirit. In the thirteenth century, some Franciscans combined Joachite eschatology with their own ideals of poverty and humility and with hopes for church reform led not by wealthy clerics but by “spiritual” friars or monks. By the 1260s, groups of flagellants, made up largely of zealous laity, proliferated and sought to imitate Jesus in his passion, as they waited for the millennium. In the late Middle Ages, such practices persisted and at times were joined by hope for an “angelic” pope or monarch who would usher in the millennium. In the Reformation era, Delumeau highlights Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–5, and efforts in the mid-1530s to turn the city of Münster into an Anabaptist New Zion. These examples of violent millenarianism show how impatient expectation of an earthly paradise could lead to armed attempts to hasten its advent. At Münster, Jan Matthys urged the “righteous” to take up the sword in order to exterminate the impious and initiate the reign of Christ on earth. Adult baptism, polygamy, and community of goods were decreed, and the death penalty imposed on dissenters. By the summer of 1535, the city had been retaken by the Catholic bishop and a combined army of Catholics and Lutherans. Delumeau notes that Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists would long cite events at Münster in order to justify severe persecution of Anabaptists, even pacifist ones such as Mennonites. The extremism and violence at Münster were not necessarily typical of millenarian movements in the early modern period. Delumeau does cite the English Civil War as another example of violence inspired, at least in part, by millennialism. But he also cites many examples of millennial hopes among relatively peaceful Christian groups and individuals. One is the seventeenth-century Puritans migrating to New England – where these Calvinists thought a New Eden had been found. Another is the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira (1608–1697). Vieira, born in Brazil, also spent much time in Portugal where he gained attention as a preacher announcing a messianic role for the king. Through the pope in Rome and the monarch in Lisbon, Christ would reign gloriously over a regenerated world; sin would disappear and the infidels would convert to Christianity. Delumeau points out that Portugal’s colonial rival, Spain, did not lack analogous voices. Among Vieira’s contemporaries was Spanish Franciscan Gonzalo Tenorio, born in Peru. Tenorio expected that the Spanish monarchy would establish peace among all Christian princes, reconquer the Holy Land, assure the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and promote the preaching of the gospel throughout the world. Meanwhile, thought Tenorio, the pope should move his see to Peru!


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From eighteenth-century expectations of imminent “progress” to late twentieth-century beliefs in a New Age, Delumeau finds a “secularization” of millennialism. He shows, for example, how socialist belief in the transformation of this world into a workers’ paradise displaced Christian discourse on the millennium. Yet some who have claimed to be ushering in a millennium have turned out to be horrific tyrants, Hitler and his “thousand-year” empire most prominently. Meanwhile, belief in human progress has lost much of its luster, and “deconstruction” has tended to replace confidence in progress. To those who deny any meaning to human experience or history, Delumeau responds and affirms that the human being has a specific dignity, and that the meaning of human life comes from a transcendent Source. To what extent religious convictions influence the work of those historians who are Christian believers, and to what extent their knowledge of religious history influences their views as believers: these are the questions pursued in the edited volume, L’Historien et la foi (The Historian and Faith), that Delumeau published in 1996. The volume includes essays by historians such as Pierre Chaunu, Marc Lienhard, René Rémond, and Nicole Lemaitre. Delumeau’s own essay in this collection offers a kind of intellectual and religious autobiography, explaining both the choices he made in his career path and in his journey of faith. He emphasizes how strongly he has wanted to promote reconciliation among Christians, and reconciliation of Christianity with the contemporary world. Pointing to his various works on the history of secularization, Delumeau also highlights a paradox. The gospels insist that what we do for the least of our brothers we do for Christ, but it is in recent times, not in the supposedly Christian Middle Ages, that Western society has taken relatively good care of the poor. In the late 1990s, Delumeau devoted considerable time to collaborative projects. In 1998, with Umberto Eco, Stephen Jay Gould, and Jean-Claude Carrière, he published Entretiens sur la fin des temps. Published in English, in 1999, as Conversations about the End of Time, the book is one in which each author presents his views on both the history of the question of a conclusion to human history, and how one might think about such a question at the beginning of a new millennium. The year 1998 also marked four hundred years since the Edict of Nantes, the decree of King Henry IV that gave at least limited toleration to Protestants in France. Many conferences and symposia marked the anniversary. One was held in Paris on December 16–17, 1998; its papers were edited and published by Delumeau in 2000 as L’Acceptation de l’autre: de l’édit de Nantes à nos jours (Acceptance of the Other: From the Edict of Nantes to Today). At the turn of the century/millennium, Delumeau gained further recognition of his accomplishments; sadly, he also became a widower. In 2000, Delumeau was honored with promotion to the rank of Commander in the Legion of Honor. His work had earlier been recognized by the rank of Officer in the Legion of Honor, and by that of Commander of Palmes académiques, and as Commander of the Order of Letters and Arts, and Officer of the Order of Merit. In the 1980s and 1990s, he

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had been awarded several honorary doctorates from universities outside France: Porto (Portugal), Sherbrooke (Canada), Liège (Belgium), and Deusto (Spain). Delumeau’s beloved wife, Jeanny, died in 1999. Their three children have followed the career path of one or the other parent: the elder son is a medieval historian, while a daughter and the younger son followed their mother’s example and became physicians. Delumeau dedicated to Jeanny the final volume in his trilogy on paradise, Que reste-t-il du paradis? (What Remains of Paradise?), published in 2000. Delumeau explores in this volume the history of the hope of eternal joy, and draws on sources such as mystical texts and liturgical hymns, as well as the themes of various feast days in the Catholic liturgical year: Easter, the Ascension of Christ, the Assumption of Mary, All Saints. Paradise was often said to be a beatific vision, and Delumeau shows how central the visual was to thinking about matters heavenly. Perhaps more than in most other works, Delumeau relies here on visual sources: on paintings and other representations of what was imagined to be paradise or heaven. A full-color frontispiece folds out to show an early fifteenthcentury Flemish altarpiece depicting Christ and the saints in heaven. Delumeau examines how churches were often constructed and decorated as figures of paradise, with an abundance of angels shown linking heaven and earth, and with light from above literally illuminating the faithful at prayer. Delumeau shows how paradise was imagined as like an earthly garden and yet as eternal and as located in the heavens. He traces how the medieval spatial imagination of heaven, hell, and earth was shaken in the early modern period by Copernican theories and by growing awareness of the vast distances in the universe. Yet the same era saw Baroque art triumphantly celebrate the joys of paradise, often focusing on angelic musicians, on a crowd of the saved received into paradise, and on clouds paving an easy path between heaven and earth. Even as the Inquisition demanded that Galileo revise his heliocentric teaching, a kind of spiritual heliocentrism prospered. It imagined God as like the sun, and it imagined grace as sunlight. A certain optimism about reaching paradise seemed to accompany the very era troubled by astronomical uncertainties. Delumeau explains that theologians did become more sober and abstract in their descriptions of paradise; they tended to leave aside visual description, but still assured the faithful that the saved would understand hitherto inscrutable mysteries. In the conclusion to this volume on the history of hope for eternity in paradise, Delumeau asks what remains of such a hope today. He states that while visual representations of heaven no longer have currency, Christians continue to hope that, through the resurrection of Christ, they may one day be reunited with their deceased loved ones and live forever with them in happiness. Yet Delumeau explored further the history of visual representation of heaven in his book entitled simply Le Paradis (Paradise), published in 2001, researched and written in collaboration with Sabine Melchior-Bonnet. A volume of high-quality reproductions of paintings, mosaics, and tapestries on the theme of paradise, each


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accompanied by a paragraph or two of explanation, this book not only surveys most of the two thousand years of the Christian imagination, but also includes at least some examples of how other religious traditions have imagined paradise. Among them are a sixteenth-century Muslim image of Muhammad carried to heaven by angels, an eighteenth-century Buddhist painting showing the Buddha descend from the heavens, and a nineteenth-century Jewish tapestry depicting Adam and Eve. In 2003, Delumeau published Guetter l’aurore: un christianisme pour demain (Waiting for Dawn: A Christianity for Tomorrow). A kind of updated version of his 1985 Ce que je crois, this book offers Delumeau’s reflections on the state of Christianity in a seemingly ever-more secularized world. It also offers Delumeau’s articulation of his own faith, and of his belief in the enduring significance and transforming power of Christian faith, hope, and love. Henri Madelin, in a review in Etudes ( January 2004), praised Delumeau’s commitment to making Christianity “credible” in a secular society. Madelin also highlighted Delumeau’s challenge to religious leaders to definitively let go of “old regime” models of authority, and to embrace an ecumenical Christianity open to dialogue with various faiths, and able to “inculturate” itself in contemporary scientific and technological contexts. As an historian, Delumeau argues that the history of Christianity is the history of such transformations and adaptations, beginning with the Apostles and their openness to the gentile world. In 2008, Delumeau returned to the early modern period with publication of Le Mystère Campanella (Campanella the Mystery), a book that explores the complex career of Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), philosopher and imprisoned heretic, supporter of Galileo, astrologer for Pope Urban VIII. Openness to the complexity of the past as well as of the world of his own time and place has grounded the work of Jean Delumeau as an historian. Along with a personal commitment to helping Catholicism adapt to the world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Delumeau has been extraordinarily prolific in his publication of works on the history of early modern Catholicism and its tensions and adaptations to its world. Focusing on the history of fear and the sentiment of security, Delumeau has made the religious experience of average Christians in the past an indispensable part of our knowledge of history.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Jean Delumeau Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Boccard, 1957, 1959). L’Alun de Rome XVe–XIXe siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1962). Naissance et affirmation de la Réforme, Nouvelle Clio, no. 30 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). Le Mouvement du port de Saint-Malo, 1681–1720 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1966).

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La Civilisation de la Renaissance (Paris: Arthaud, 1967). Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire, Nouvelle Clio, no. 30bis (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971); translated by Jeremy Moiser as Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (London: Burnes and Oates, 1977). L’Italie de Botticelli à Bonaparte (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974). Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France (Paris: Collège de France, 1975). Le Christianisme va-t-il mourir? (Paris: Hachette, 1977). La Peur en Occident XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: une cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978). Un chemin d’histoire: Chrétienté et christianisation (Paris: Fayard, 1981). Le Cas Luther (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1983). Le Péché et la peur: la culpabilisation en Occident XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1983); translated by Eric Nicholson as Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th–18th Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990). Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1985). Rassurer et protéger: le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois (Paris: Fayard, 1989). L’Aveu et le pardon: les difficultés de la confession XIIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990). Une histoire du paradis: le jardin des délices (Paris: Fayard, 1992); translated by Matthew O’Connell as History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition (New York: Continuum, 1995). Leçon terminale (Paris: Collège de France, 1994). Mille ans de bonheur: une histoire du paradis (Paris: Fayard, 1995). Entretiens sur la fin des temps, by Umberto Eco, Stephen Jay Gould, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Jean Delumeau (Paris: Fayard, 1998); translated by Ian Maclean and Roger Pearson as Conversations about the End of Time (London: Allen Lane, 1999). Que reste-t-il du paradis? (Paris: Fayard, 2000). Le Paradis, by Jean Delumeau and Sabine Melchior-Bonnet (Paris: Fayard and Editions de la Martinière, 2001). Guetter l’aurore: un christianisme pour demain (Paris: Grasset, 2003). Le Mystère Campanella (Paris: Fayard, 2008).

Edited Works Histoire de la Bretagne, edited by Jean Delumeau (Toulouse: Privat, 1969). La Mort des pays de Cocagne: comportements collectifs de la Renaissance à l’âge classique, edited by Jean Delumeau (Paris: Sorbonne, 1976). Le Diocèse de Rennes (Histoire des diocèses de France, no. 10), edited by Jean Delumeau (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979). Les Malheurs des temps: histoire des fléaux et des calamités en France, edited by Jean Delumeau and Yves Lequin (Paris: Larousse, 1987). La Première Communion: quatre siècles d’histoire, edited by Jean Delumeau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1987). Histoire des pères et de la paternité, edited by Jean Delumeau and Daniel Roche (Paris: Larousse, 1990). La Religion de ma mère: les femmes et la transmission de la foi, edited by Jean Delumeau (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1992). L’Historien et la foi, edited by Jean Delumeau (Paris: Fayard, 1996).


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L’Acceptation de l’autre: de l’édit de Nantes à nos jours, edited by Jean Delumeau (Paris: Fayard, 2000).

References Bireley, Robert, “Two works by Jean Delumeau,” Catholic Historical Review, 77 (1991): 78–88. Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Homo Religiosus autour de Jean Delumeau (Paris: Fayard, 1996). Powis, J. K., “Repression and autonomy: Christians and Christianity in the historical work of Jean Delumeau,” Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992): 366–74.

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Jacques Droz (1909–1998) Joseph Tendler

The considerable presence of Jacques Droz at the heart of French higher education is now preserved almost exclusively by the oral testimony of colleagues and former students who knew him. The scarcity of traces bequeathed by him is in stark contrast with the magnitude of his professional activities. Whether as a teacher or as an active historian interested in fields as diverse as German history, political doctrines, diplomatic history, and anti-fascism, he was an important historian living and working in twentieth-century France. His oeuvre betrays a commitment to history that abided by certain conventions of scholarship: courtesy of argument in dealing with the work of other scholars; creating provisional syntheses of archival and other materials, studied and collated in order to show how the “maze of events” in a particular past period unfolded; and providing for the reader – very often students, the interested public, and professors alike – a clear and accessible overview of the subject. This was distinct from the work of some of his now more prominent contemporaries on the international stage who were associated in some way with l’école des Annales. Droz’s energies were directed at different methodological innovations, inaugurating the study of areas previously untouched and encouraging Franco-German educational cooperation. Use of comparative perspectives in his work on workers’ movements and in his histories of Germany made him something of a comparative historian avant la lettre. Later work on anti-fascism caught an international interest that confirmed his originality. It was in the later part of Droz’s life that some of his most lasting achievements in the promotion of Franco-German relations were undertaken by introducing to the French public German controversies centering on the origins of World War I. Underpinning all of this remained his strong, if understated commitment to a

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version of freedom-loving social democracy infused with humanistic ideals of scholarship. Jacques Droz was born on March 3, 1909. His formative years were marked by a prestigious education amidst the unsettled climate heralded by the first general strike by members of the public administration in France that year. Details do not abound. He undertook his studies for the baccalauréat at the Lycée Louis le Grand in the heart of the quartier latin that still hosts some of France’s oldest educational institutions. During his preparations for the agrégation histoire et géographie in which he received a second class in 1932, he was taught by Emile-Auguste Chartier, known by his pen name, Alain. Philosopher and journalist as well as professor, Alain taught other notable men and women of Droz’s generation: Raymond Aron the celebrated political scientist, and philosophers Georges Canguilhem and Simone Weil among others. Amidst the increasingly heightened ideological battles of the 1920s and the advent of the Front populaire in the 1930s, Alain’s philosophy had the appeal of articulating the principal stimulus of political action: “l’exigence de la liberté face à tous les pouvoirs” (“the requirement of freedom in the face of all forms of power”). If we were to follow Napoleon’s line of questioning and accept that the way to know a man lies in understanding the world he inhabited when he was twenty-one years old, then the world of 1930 would provide interesting insight. Hermann Müller’s Social Democratic government collapsed in Germany, short-circuited by political fragmentation; the Italian Socialist party met in exile in Paris, unable to convene in their own country because of Mussolini’s regime; international American investment by the larger banks stopped in the first quarter of the year; and the British ruminated on whether or not to decommission warships. The future was as uncertain as ever. To this can be added the heritage of the masters Droz cited in his earliest works: Edmond Vermeil (1878–1964), Pierre Renouvin (1893–1974), and Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959). All three were formidable personalities within the academy, both in and outside Paris. The Vermeil connection in particular helps to place Droz not simply as an historian but as a germaniste. This domain, itself the subject of Michel Espagne and Michael Werner’s 1994 Histoire des études germaniques en France (1900– 1970) (History of German Studies in France 1900–1970), is not one in which historians have or had a monopoly. It amounts to the study of all forms of German-speaking cultural, political, and economic productions, and is by implication a label that does not respect disciplinary boundaries. One of its most tantalizing features is that the images generated through such studies betray as much about France as they do about Germany. Within a particularly lively field in France after the shocks of World War I, Edmond Vermeil, along with JeanEdouard Spenlé (1873–1951), was part of a younger generation of scholars who took on the conceptual mantle of their forebears in the subject and chose to investigate how Germany, a country with such a rich cultural heritage, had by 1918 become responsible for some of the most violent behavior inscribed in the course of human history. His particular interests drew him to conservative German

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politicians, including Walther Rathenau, who had pursued a conservative reaction against the proliferation of socialist thought after 1918, but had himself fallen victim to assassins from the nationalist, extreme right. The two historians Droz singled out in his early dedications suggest no less the task of the historian as an engagement in contemporary public life. Renouvin, a luminous scholar in this period, who began his career in the history of international relations in monographs on forms of war government and was elected to the Sorbonne in 1931, provided the Europe-wide view that Droz would always draw into his apparently specific studies, whether of Austrian history or of diplomatic history. Incorporated within this network of associations was Georges Lefebvre who had made enough money to have his thesis printed by, of all things, helping Charles Petit-Dutaillis (1868–1947) to translate William Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England (3 vols., 1873–8). Encouraged and nurtured by an array of historians of all persuasions but without the republican fire of Revolutionary scholar-forebears and contemporaries, Lefebvre drew on an array of the available styles of historical writing and engaged with Marc Bloch in particular after his appointment to Strasbourg University in 1927. Underpinning all of this was his distinctive sense that historical work was a civic duty and what better forum to undertake it than in a debate that continues to haunt French historiography: the French Revolution. No stranger then to public duty, Droz’s first publication appeared in the year he completed l’agrégation. Equivalent to what would now be considered a master’s thesis, his mémoire, written for the Diplôme d’études supérieures in the Faculté des lettres at the Sorbonne, was printed in the journal Rheinische Archiv for 1932 under its original title: “L’opinion publique dans la Province Rhénane au cours du conflit austro-prussien 1864–1866” (“Public opinion in the Rhineland during the AustroPrussian War 1864–1866”). Friedrich Steinach’s “Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers” (“editor’s preliminary remarks”) made clear that he published this piece for the importance and originality of the contribution it made to the subject. In light of significant and extensive research in German and French archives, Droz argued, unlike previous French scholars, that the Rhineland had not been a decisively pro-French area between 1864 and 1866 but that the situation was “more complicated.” Liberal politics prevailed in the period, albeit incarnate in newer parties than the Alte Liberale party that had supported Bismarck. Overall, the liberals envisaged a future alongside a united Germany, and for historians his whole chapter on Heinrich von Sybel is no surprise: Sybel unashamedly used his historical seminar at the University of Bonn to promote the idea of German unity amongst his students. Religion intervened, however, as Catholics amongst the liberals leaned to support the idea of German unity because it preserved the long-term, religion-inspired, political objective of German unity (including Catholic Austria) despite the short-term sacrifice of living under Prussian government which, he argued, was almost universally viewed as undesirable. Following a typically short introduction, Droz immersed the reader in the period.


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Settling on a life of teaching and research, Droz began his teaching career at the Lycée de Colmar in 1933 in the heart of Alsace which interested germanistes by virtue of being neither French nor German. Two years later, he undertook an extended research trip to Cologne in preparation for his two doctoral theses. Here, in 1930s’ Cologne, he could see for himself what Vermeil was becoming increasingly vocal about: Germany was preparing for something under the guidance of a regime that threatened European peace. Directed by Renouvin, his thesis, Le Libéralisme rhénan 1815–1848 (Rhineland Liberalism 1815–1848), and his complementary second thesis, La Pensée politique et morale des Cisrhénans (Political and Moral thought of the French Rhinelanders), appeared only in 1940. By this time, Droz had been mobilized, captured by German troops in 1939 but had managed to escape. So, he resumed his teaching activities in 1940 at the Lycée Pasteur de Neuilly-sur-Seine in the northwestern Paris suburb of that name and then in central Paris in 1942 at the Lycée Chaptal. Returning to Alsace near Colmar in 1944, he continued to teach at the Lycée Fustel de Coulanges in Strasbourg and, following the Libération in 1945, he was nominated to the Institut d’études politiques de Strasbourg and finally had the opportunity to defend his thesis. His principal thesis was the first French attempt to work out the place of German liberal thought on the level of German political thought in general. Restricting his contribution to the role of Rhineland liberalism, Droz built on his published article of 1932 and used a similar approach. He responded to the proliferation of political doctrine that he thought emanated from various milieus of intellectuals and scholars, politicians, and religious groups, which determined the course of events by directing the action of all levels of society from the mass to the elite against social, legal, and economic backgrounds. In 1848, he argued, Rhineland liberals would have been able to reconcile Germany to post-revolutionary France and England had the circumstances been otherwise. By 1848, when Friedrich-Wilhelm I refused the crown offered to him by the Frankfurt parliament, the Rhineland liberals felt betrayed and became radically disinterested in politics yet held on to the hope of a unified Germany incorporating Catholic Austria. His complementary thesis developed the same point from the angle of moral doctrine in conjunction with political thought. He found a distinctive moral autonomy in the Rhineland on the French side of the Rhine and intellectuals and politicians, nourished by Kant, judged the French Revolution. They concluded that citizens had a responsibility to assume their public obligation to strive for personal liberty and that the state must itself respect moral laws. They were rationalist individualists who hardly ever referred to similar English doctrines of this sort, instead sharing German skepticism of them. Appointed maître de conferences (assistant professor) at Dijon in 1946 and then professor at Clermont-Ferrand in 1948, Droz embarked on the first phase of his university career. Three textbooks appeared during this transformation from lycée teacher to universitaire on the history of Germany (1945), Austria (1946), and the history of political doctrines (1948). Student audiences became a substantial

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determinant in his writing from this point on, and in the third of this series of manuals produced for the “Que sais-je?” series, Droz made clear to his studentreaders a problematic he had learnt in his own educational career and that he took up in his later work on socialism: If we knew to substitute “community” and “person” for the terms “state” and “individual,” if the citizen managed to understand that it is in the active participation in and subject of public matters that the unique guarantee of their liberty resides, if the sense of responsibility were in this way restored then perhaps the problem posed by political science would be resolved. Only within this frame will the state be able to be restored to its true role that is to protect the weak against the stranglehold of the strong, to destroy financial oligarchies and the stifling influence of economic groups: designing and saving the general and permanent interests of the nation by its intervention, but leaving the execution of this to bodies qualified by their ability: to family and professional constellations at the heart of which the human being can attain its highest degree of fulfillment.

The engaged historian, mindful of his encounters in the 1930s, was concerned not only to teach history but to guide his students through its quandaries. This particular textbook was representative of similar publications in the frequency of its republication in 1956, 1963, 1969, 1975, and 1983. In 1952, his other influential textbook appeared: Histoire diplomatique de 1648 à 1919 (Diplomatic History from 1648 to 1919). This took a particular stance that increasingly stood outside French historians’ efforts: it was histoire événementielle (event-centered history) which wanted to guide students through “le dédale des événements” (“the maze of events”). In this aim it resembled the diplomatic history of Emile Bourgeois (1857–1934) but sought a much wider audience since it was written for students. It was not an attempt, such as that by Renouvin, to relate diplomatic history to deeper causes, which he sought in public opinion amongst other spheres, since Droz maintained that political actors always played the decisive role, albeit against national background pressures from the economy, social movements, and religious communities, amongst others. This national focus went against the grain and not only in France. Lynn M. Case, reviewing the book for the Journal of Modern History in 1953, thought that the role of the Industrial Revolution and the state system disappeared in this national treatment. But Droz continued with the same approach in his volume for the Clio series, L’Epoque contemporaine (The Contemporary Epoch, 1953), which encouraged students to engage with primary sources. This attracted international praise from Wilhelm Mommsen, in his 1956 review, as the best available literature given its grasp on the archives, while Louis Girard, reviewing it for the Revue historique, thought it a bit touffu (dense) like the rest of the series, but regarded it as excellent for professors as well as their students. Through his textbooks, Droz disseminated his teaching for much of the second half of the twentieth century. The period at Clermont-Ferrand until his election to the Sorbonne in 1963 was one of uninterrupted professional formation. First as professor, then Doyen (Dean)


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of the Faculté des lettres after 1957, Droz acquired one lasting nickname: le Doyen Droz. In this latter capacity, he not only raised this previously provincial university to an energy-center that welcomed formidable but young intellectuals, including historians Pierre Vilar (1906–2003), Albert Soboul (1914–1982), and René Rémond (1918–2007), as well as philosophers Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and Michel Serres (1930– ), but he also helped found in 1948 the Institut f ür Europaische Geschichte (Institute for European History) in Mainz, which opened in 1950. Simultaneously, his lifelong habit of frequent research trips, especially to Vienna to use the university library there, allowed him to take his students, including Pierre Ayçoberry, and share his detailed knowledge of Viennese architecture and culture. It was also a period of uninterrupted intellectual formation. Two articles and a book preface put into print for the first time extended treatments of Droz’s views on history. The first article of 1954, “Hauptprobleme der französischen Forschungen zur neueren Geschichte” (“Central issues in French research on modern history”) appeared in Die Welt als Geschichte. In this, Droz went over the main theses of Lucien Febvre’s attack on the work of Charles Seignobos (1854–1942), extending the brief summary he had written in 1952 in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht. He focused on Febvre’s animosity to Seignobos’ claim that chance exerted such a powerful influence on the course of past events and the disdain for history written by individual historians working in isolation. Droz, however, did not accept Febvre’s argument that economic and social explanations could provide insight into events that reduced to virtually nil the place of chance. He suggested that Seignobos had already taken into account society and economy and agreed with him that ultimately ruling elites made crucial decisions and that these could not be explained by economic or any other schematic. This argument was made with explicit reference to Renouvin’s allegations printed in 1951 that economic competition generated mistrust on the eve of war in 1914; Droz characteristically objected that men and women took decisions that led to the killing of people on battlefields, that the mastery of events was theirs. In this caution regarding Annalespublished historical method, he shared significant concerns with Gerhard Ritter (1888–1967), who criticized Annales in his review of national historiographies in Europe and North America at the International Congress of Historical Science in Rome in 1955. Droz had interests in other innovators in the discipline and thought that Wahlsoziologie (electoral sociology), pioneered by Seignobos’ student André Siegfried, and electoral geography were the most useful tools developed by historians in recent years. It is no surprise, in light of these encounters, that, looking back from 1968, Klaus Schule identified Droz as single-handedly leading the French opponents of Annales. Droz developed the theme of Franco-German historiographical concerns more explicitly. In a published text of a paper delivered in Mainz at the institute he helped to found, Droz set out, as Ritter also did in the 1950s, the importance of cooperation between the historians’ guilds of the two countries in order to produce history acceptable to both and keep alive the dialogue on textbook history that

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had begun in the 1930s. Despite their differences, he realized, along with contemporary specialist in German history, Henri Brunschwig (1904–1989), that Germany provided French historians with their largest audience. Ruminating on the role of Lutheranism in Germany’s role in the world wars, the responsibility of Prussia, and the extent to which Pan-Germanist ideology informed German thought more generally, Droz’s “Zur Revision des deutsch-französischen Geschichtsbildes” (“By way of revising Franco-German historical conceptions,” 1956) is a still little-known statement of the crucial points of interaction between the two countries’ professions in the 1950s. Droz was no stranger to the history of German historiography either. In his preface to Heinz-Otto Sieburg’s Deutschland und Frankreich in der Geschichtsschreibung des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (France and Germany in Nineteenth-century Historiography, 1954), he praised the efforts of Sieburg – effectively studying France in Germany in the same way that Droz studied Germany in France – in trying to create new Franco-German mutual understanding after the two world wars. He outlined the roots of the German conception of France in German historian Leopold von Ranke’s Französische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (1852–61; French History, Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries). But he was also sensitive to the ironic remark of Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce (1866– 1952) that Ranke had tried to write the history of France without mentioning French people. Three monographs also appeared in this period though not all of them convinced for the originality of their contributions. They cemented none the less the association of Droz with German and central European history. L’Allemagne et la Révolution française (Germany and the French Revolution, 1949) sought to extend work done on the French Revolution for his Cisrhénans thesis to show that the eventual rejection of the French Revolution in Germany went hand in hand with a divorce of politics from intelligence which contributed to the mass of the German population failing to assume their active role in politics. The book attracted favorable reviews in Germany’s premier historical periodical, Historische Zeitschrift, where they recalled his article of 1932 with admiration. By contrast, Henri Bruschwig thought it solid but unoriginal. More critical still, Eugene N. Anderson in the American Historical Review thought it an “honest and thoughtful book” which helped to clear up the confusion about German history that was rife, but expressed skepticism at Droz’s determination to pursue the subject by tracing the proliferation of ideas generated by elites whose history he, and other reviewers later, would identify as dated Ideengeschichte. This was a charge leveled by another historian working in America, Enno H. Kraehe regarding Droz’s L’Europe Centrale: évolution historique de l’idée de “Mitteleuropa” (Central Europe: Historical Evolution of the Idea of “Mitteleuropa,” 1960) in which Droz, as in L’Allemagne et la Révolution française, acknowledged the inspiration and assistance of Max Braubach (1899– 1975), a notable Bonn historian of early modern political and diplomatic history. Kraehe thought Droz’s book did much the same as American Henry Cord Meyer’s


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Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945 (1955) but left nothing more to be said: “what it lacks in originality it makes up for in wisdom” and this was largely because of the now, he supposed, dated methods of Ideengeschichte. Paul Schroeder in America, and W. E. Mosse in the English Historical Review, even implied that Droz had rehabilitated the early Habsburgs too far, wondering if he in fact lamented the end of the cosmopolitan empire. The remaining book of this period, Les Révolutions allemandes de 1848, d’après un manuscrit et des notes de E. Tonnelat (The German Revolutions of 1848, according to a Manuscript and the Marginalia of E. Tonnelat, 1957), attracted more universal critical acclaim and in itself made a notable contribution to French historiography. At the invitation of his executors, taking up where death had interrupted this germaniste, Ernst Tonnelat’s (1877–1948) work, Droz completed the book to fill a gap in French literature on the subject. Going further and extending the educational and historiographical concerns he had already broached, Droz claimed for the first time that the subject of 1848 required a comparative Franco-German study if it was to be understood properly. In the future, this could incorporate other countries in which revolution had erupted in 1848. Now all too familiar, the idea of comparative history for national-level political events was then in its infancy. Aside from this, and under review by Wilhelm Mommsen again, Mommsen remarked on the originality of Droz’s findings based on archival research even though he thought that the democratic ideals of the Germans were overstated and that Droz had taken too far his initial claim that German historians neglected social and economic history. Bruschwig thought it his best book so far. John Hawgood, working in Birmingham, UK, but writing in the American Historical Review in 1960, thought that it could benefit from responding to Lewis Namier’s 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1946) because Droz had neglected certain crucial scholars such as Carl Wittke. The general impression was that Droz had provided a full account by incorporating the role of religion in the revolutions, analyzing the composition of revolutionary and manual labor groups, inspecting Marx’s personal role, and demonstrating that the class struggle had made significant progress by then. His return to Paris to the Sorbonne in 1963 was marked by continuity in Droz’s projects but change in the circles in which he moved. He succeeded the very grand Maurice Baumont (1892–1981) in his capacity as professor of contemporary history with a focus on German history, and assumed a more prominent public role than previously. His resonant voice could be heard on a series produced for Radio France 3 on German civilization and a program on the German dimensions of French culture in 1961 and 1962, as well as on France Culture in a series of programs on Western civilization more generally in 1964 and 1965, and in 1967 a special program on European nationalist doctrines. He continued to participate in Franco-German textbook collaboration under the auspices of the Association des professeurs d’histoire et de géographie (Association of Professors of History and Geography), acting as a cultural ambassador, which was well received in

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Germany. In the 1960s, specifically it was also his responsibility, once Marc Bloch’s, to write the “Bulletins” for the Revue historique on recent German publications. This was also the decade in which he began a string of contributions to a review nominally the responsibility of the University of Paris I–Panthéon-Sorbonne, Le Mouvement social, founded in 1960 by Jean Maitron (1910–1987), specialist in le mouvement ouvrier. Concerned with a subject difficult to define, it corresponded to an anglophone equivalent of something like a very broad version of working-class history. On top of all of this, Droz acted as president of the jury des concours de l’agrégation between 1967 and 1976 and thus became intellectually and organizationally responsible for university training in history. The period at the Sorbonne, unlike that at Clermont-Ferrand, was marked by a serious interruption in Droz’s career between 1969 and 1970. Opened on January 13, 1969, the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes (Vincennes Experimental University Center) was a reaction to the minister of education, Edgar Faure’s, loi d’orientation of November 1969 that took heed of student demands made on the streets of Paris in 1968: every person involved in higher education could contribute to managing the education process and interdisciplinarity should became de rigeur. Droz’s short stay as president of the Center was marred by the atmosphere of anarchy that was all too manifest to him in the form of personal insults and occasional violence. That Droz returned to the Sorbonne so quickly, and wisely according to some of his former colleagues, suggests the intractability of the problems of the institution that is now Université Paris 8. He was never to leave the Sorbonne in his professional life again until he retired in 1979. Droz’s work in this period falls into three categories reflected in the courses he delivered to his students: the history of Germany, the history of political doctrines and movements including socialism, and international relations with a particular emphasis on the origins of the World War I debate in Germany. Hence he delivered courses on German nationalism between 1871 and 1939 (1963), German socialism from 1863 to 1918 (1964), the International Workers’ Movement from 1864 to 1920 (1964), Franco-German intellectual relations between 1871 and 1914 (1966), political parties in the Weimar Republic (1967), National Socialism (1968), socialism and syndicalism from 1914 to 1939 (1972), and diplomatic history. His work on German history reached its highest fulfillment in this period. Le Romantisme allemande et l’État: résistance et collaboration dans l’Allemagne napoléonienne (German Romanticism and the State: Resistance and Collaboration in Napoleonic Germany, 1966) made a more general argument about periodization in identifying how conservative political doctrine became enshrined in German politics without being monopolized by any single party. The project had seen the light of day in an article in the Revue historique in 1961 entitled “La légende du complot illuministe et les origines du romantisme politique en Allemagne” (“The Legend of the Illuminati Plot and the Origins of Political Romanticism in


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Germany”). In the broader, book-length treatment, he argued that intellectual life in Germany during the French Revolution was not captured by the movement from an Age of Reason to an era of Romantic thought, but that after 1750 rationalism began to be variously infused with preference for the occult, a sensitivity to nature, and self-reflexive critique of rationality itself. This was an issue he outlined crisply in a review of Klaus Epstein’s The Genesis of German Conservatism in the journal Central European History in 1969 in a classic statement of the history of political doctrine at the hands of Droz: The conservative idea developed in the circles of high civil, military, and religious officials, among the heads of guilds, among those who lived on the liberality of princes and their entourages, and more in the small principalities than in the larger states. It first made an appeal to the respect for traditional religious values: the enlightened were accused of spreading contempt for authority and of encouraging the conflict among social hierarchies. Whence as opposed to “Illuminati,” the formation of other secret societies, such as the Rosicrucians, who assigned themselves the mission of defending the traditional faith. Whence, the appeal to mystical and sentimental values, along with the reconciliation and alliance of the diverse religious forces against a common peril. Thus, from 1770 and throughout Germany, were constituted the groups that directed their attacks against the ideas of Lessing, against the influence of Josephism in Catholic areas, against the practice of religious tolerance. These groups little by little transferred their attacks from the religious plane to the social plane (defence of serfdom and of the guild system), to the political plane (defence of the imperial institutions and of the ecclesiastical states), indeed to the racial plane (arguments against the emancipation of the Jews).

The life of ideas began in a broadly defined political realm and spread from there outward. Drawing this and his previous work on Germany together, there appeared in three volumes in 1970 his general history with parts written by Jacques Bariéty and Pierre Guillen. This was an attempt to show the course of events as they unfolded, and not to stipulate and explain a particular German mindset or mentalité as had Edmond Vermeil in his L’Allemagne: essai d’explication (Germany: An Attempt at Explanation, 1940). Favorably reviewed internationally – in Germany, France, England, and the USA – it was felt that the three volumes hung together well because of the significant portion Droz had written. Hans Herzfeld was especially delighted that, although he thought the economic aspects of German history were underdeveloped, the argument that there was no German mentality meant that Germany could not have always been inclined to cause an international incident as it did between 1914 and 1918 as proponents of the Sonderweg (special path) were beginning to argue in Germany at this time. Droz’s conception of German history can also be found throughout the series of prefaces and articles that he wrote on it in this period. Droz reaffirmed his association with historians who followed Seignobos in avoiding economic sche-

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matics in the heart-felt words he wrote in the preface to a commemorative volume on German historian Martin Göhring (1903–1968). Further prefatory remarks, to Joseph Billig’s Les Camps de concentration dans l’économie du Reich hitlérien (Concentration Camps in the Economy of the Third Reich, 1973) and Jean Laloum’s La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix (Darquier de Pellepoix’s AntiSemitic France, 1979), brought into sharp relief the underpinnings of the horrors of 1930s’ and 1940s’ German domination in books that respectively considered the economic significance of concentration camps and the dimensions of French antiSemitism in the 1930s at the hands of politicians like Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. Ever sensitive to the dimension of radical political thought, Droz’s review of Hermann Weber’s Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus (The Transformation of German Communism, 1969) for Le Mouvement social in 1975 brought to French attention a book that complemented O. K. Flechtheim’s Le Parti communiste allemande (The German Communisty Party) which had appeared under this title in 1972. In the domain of political doctrines more generally, this was not only the period in which Droz published his large work on socialism, but also one in which he published a considerable amount on social-democratic thought. Articulated in a book on the history of Internationals aimed at students, Le Socialisme démocratique, 1864–1960 (Democratic Socialism, 1864–1960, 1966), an article on the “Einfluß der deutschen Sozialdemokratie auf den französischen Sozialismus (1871–1914)” (“Influence of German Social Democracy on French Socialism,” 1973), a review of the historiography of a century of German social democracy in Le Mouvement social in 1976, and the preface to Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin’s La Socialdémocratie, ou Le compromis (Social Democracy, or the Compromise, 1979), it became clear that Droz saw that the point of contact between German socialdemocratic thought and French political thought in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Socialist Party of France. Socialism and its parties in France and abroad were an important preoccupation at the beginning of the 1970s when Droz led a collaboration of scholars intended to provide the most comprehensive review of the subject possible and to overcome the limits of G. D. H. Cole’s Socialist Thought (1953), which, in seven volumes, remained indispensable but limited to the Anglo-French world. The four volumes Droz directed, by contrast, encompassed the broad sweep of socialist thought from its ancient origins with Plato, through Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella until the time of the book’s publication. Droz noted in his general conclusions to the last volume that the book came at a decisive time of pessimism about socialism’s future after the advent of international protests by the disenchanted in Europe and America in 1968 and 1969. Like the colloquium held in London and published in 1968 under the title Avec ou sans l’État? (With or Without the State?), the methodology of comparison was taken up again, and frequently drew intellectual sustenance from anthropological or linguistic concepts to compare phenomena and in tackling the difficulties of maintaining a strict “hygiène du langage”


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because words did not translate well: for example, classe ouvrière was not the same as working class. Keeping up publications on diplomatic history, Droz was one of the most prominent French historians to bring the controversy centering on Germany’s role in the origins of World War I to the attention of French students, professors, and the general public. Droz’s preface to the French translation of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (Grab for World Power: Political War Aims of Imperial Germany 1914/18, 1961) put the controversy in context for French readers by casting it not merely as a cause célèbre in Germany, but as being of the same magnitude as the Affaire Dreyfus. Fischer alleged that Germany had actively sought war as an occasion on which it could assert itself as a world power, and Droz lamented in his preface that the responses this had evoked had sometimes descended from scholarly courtesy and objectivity. Nevertheless, in his own work on the origins of World War I in 1973, he not only carefully assessed the debate in Germany but drew his own conclusions at the crux of which was a simple view: yes, he argued, historical studies could show some of the continuities in German history, but could not explain the evil realities of the Third Reich toward which past events can in no way be seen to have ineluctably led. Before his sight failed in his last years in the run up to the death of his wife Jacqueline in 1997, Droz continued to open up new areas of the history of political doctrines, class, and German history. He maintained his presence in the subject of the impact of the French Revolution on Germany in a preface to Klaus Deinet’s book on Konrad Engelbert Oelsner in 1981. More significantly, in 1985, his Histoire l’antifascisme en Europe achieved significant critical acclaim, principally in France, now preserved in the slim archival deposits pertaining to Droz in the archives of publisher La Découverte. Running in parallel with the formidable task of editing the French volume of the Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier international (Biographical Dictionary of the International Workers’ Movement), which appeared in 1990, Droz undertook with his wife and the then rising star of the German historians’ guild, Jürgen Kocka, a systematic study of the German middle classes since the term acquired its modern definition around 1800 in a series of articles published in Le Mouvement social in 1986. He also published one of his few articles in an anglophone periodical, the Journal of Modern History, in 1983, entitled “In search of Prussia,” in which he insisted on a point he had always argued: that there was a persistent but malleable Prussian-German identity that lingered as long as German society was dominated in its governance by the “nobility,” the “upper bourgeoisie” and the “civil servant class” right into the middle of the twentieth century. One of Droz’s four children has followed in his footsteps as an educator and historian: Bernard Droz, editor of Outre mers: revue d’histoire and author most recently of, amongst others, Histoire de la décolonisation au XXe siècle (History of Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, 2006).

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References and Further Reading Papers La Découverte MSS, papers of Editions la Découverte, Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, St. Germain-de-la-Blanche-Herbe. Rivière MSS, papers of Editions Marcel Rivière (1912–1986), Internationaal Instituut vor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. Seuil MSS, papers of Editions de Seuil, Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, St. Germain-de-la-Blanche-Herbe.

Selected Books by Jacques Droz L’Opinion publique dans la Province Rhénane au cours du conflit austro-prussien 1864–1866 (Bonn: Rheinische Archiv, 1932). Le Libéralisme rhénan 1815–1848 (Paris: F. Sorlot, 1940). La Pensée politique et morale des Cisrhénans (Paris: F. Sorlot, 1940). Histoire de l’Allemagne (Paris: PUF, 1945). Histoire de l’Autriche (Paris: PUF, 1946). Histoire des doctrines politiques en France (Paris: PUF, 1948). L’Allemagne et la Révolution française (Paris: PUF, 1949). Histoire diplomatique de 1648 à 1919 (Paris: Dalloz, 1952). L’Epoque contemporaine, vol. I: Restaurations et révolutions 1895–1975, with Louis Grenet and Jean Vidalenc (Paris: PUF, 1953). Les Révolutions allemandes de 1848, d’après un manuscrit et des notes de E. Tonnelat (Paris: PUF, 1957). L’Europe Centrale: évolution historique de l’idée de “Mitteleuropa” (Paris: Payot, 1960). Le Romantisme allemand et l’Etat: résistance et collaboration dans l’Allemagne napoléonienne (Paris: Payot, 1966). Le Socialisme démocratique, 1864–1960 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966). Europe between the Revolutions 1815–1848, translated by Robert Baldick (London: Collins, 1967). Histoire des doctrines politiques en Allemagne (Paris: PUF, 1968). De la Restauration à la Révolution (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970). Histoire de l’Allemagne, 3 vols., edited by Jacques Droz (Paris: Hatier, 1970): vol. 1, La Formation de l’Unité allemande 1789–1871; vol. 2, with Pierre Guillen, L’Empire allemand 1871–1918; vol. 3, with Jacques Bariéty, République de Weimar et Régime hitlérien 1918–1945. Histoire générale du socialisme, 4 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1972–9): vol. 1, Des origines à 1875 (1972); vol. 2, De 1875 à 1918 (1974); vol. 3, De 1918 à 1945 (1977); vol. 4, 1945 à nos jours (1978). Les Causes de la première guerre mondiale: essai d’historiographie (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Histoire de l’antifascisme en Europe (Paris: La Découverte: Paris, 1985). Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier international (Paris: Les Editions ouvrières, 1990).


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Selected Articles by Jacques Droz “Gegenwärtige Strömungen in der neueren französischen Geschichtschreibung,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 3 (1952): 177–81. “Hauptprobleme der französischen Forschungen zur neueren Geschichte,” Die Welt als Geschichte, 14 (1954): 109–18. “Les historiens français devant l’histoire allemande,” Europa: Erbe und Aufgabe (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1956), pp. 249–57, original: “Zur Revision des deutsch-französischen Geschichtsbildes,” Deutschland-Frankreich Ludwigsburger Beiträge zum Problem der deutsch-französischen Beziehungen, 2 (1954): 89–101. “Les tendances actuelles de l’historiographie allemande,” Revue historique, 215 (1956): 1–23. “Bulletin historique: histoire de l’Allemagne de 1789 à 1914,” Revue historique, 226 (1961): 171–200. “La légende du complot illuministe et les origines du romantisme politique en Allemagne,” Revue historique, 226 (1961): 313–38. Review: “1863–1963: Hindert [sic] Jahre deutsche Sozialdemokratie. Bilder und Dokumente by Georg Echert,” Le Mouvement social, 46 ( Jan.–Mar., 1964): 138–9. “Bulletin historique: histoire de l’Allemagne du milieu du XVIIIe siècle à la première guerre mondiale,” Revue historique, 235 (1966): 427–54. “Avec ou sans l’Etat? Le mouvement ouvrier français et anglais au tournant du siècle: colloque tenu à Londres à Pâques 1966,” Le Mouvement social, 65 (Oct.–Dec., 1968): 163–6. “Bulletin historique: histoire de l’Allemagne (1789–1914),” Revue historique, 242 (1969): 141–72. Review: “The Genesis of German Conservatism by Klaus Epstein,” Central European History, 2 (2) (1969): 177–80. “Der Nationalismus der Linken und der Nationalismus der Rechten in Frankreich (1871– 1914),” Historische Zeitschrift, 210 (1970): 1–13. “Einfluß der deutschen Sozialdemokratie auf den französischen Sozialismus (1871–1914),” Rheinische-Westf älische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 188 (1973): 1–28. Review: “Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus: Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik by Hermann Weber,” Le Mouvement social, 92 ( Jul.–Sept., 1975): 128–30. “Historiographie d’un siècle de social-démocratie allemande,” Le Mouvement social, 95 (Apr.–Jun., 1976): 3–23. Review: “Lassalle by Schlomo Na’aman,” Le Mouvement social, 96 ( Jul.–Sept., 1976): 125–8. “In search of Prussia,” Journal of Modern History, 55 (1) (1983): 71–7. “La bourgeoisie allemande en débat,” Le Mouvement social, 136 ( Jul.–Sept., 1986): 3–4. “La bourgeoisie dans l’histoire moderne et contemporaine de l’Allemagne: recherches et débats récents,” with Jürgen Kocka and Jacqueline Droz, Le Mouvement social, 136 ( Jul.–Sept., 1986): 5–27. “Libéralisme et bourgeoisie dans le ‘Vormärz’ (1830–1848),” Le Mouvement social, 136 ( Jul.–Sept. 1986): 29–52. “Postface,” Le Mouvement social, 136 ( Jul.–Sept., 1986): 125–35.

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Other Works by Jacques Droz Preface to Deutschland und Frankreich in der Geschichtsschreibung des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, by Heinz-Otto Sieburg (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1954). Preface to Gedenkschrift Martin Göhring: Studien zur europäischen Geschichte, edited by Ernst Schulin (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1968). Preface to Les Buts de guerre de l’Allemagne impériale 1914–1918, by Fritz Fischer, translated by Geneviève Migeon et Henri Thiès (Paris: Éditions de Trévise, 1970). Preface to Les Camps de concentration dans l’économie du Reich hitlérien, by Joseph Billig (Paris: PUF, 1973). Preface to La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix, by Jean Laloum (Paris: Syros, 1979). Preface to La Social-démocratie, ou Le compromis, by Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin (Paris, PUF, 1979). Preface to Konrad Engelbert Oelsner und die Französische Revolution: Geschichtserfahrung und Geschichtsdeutung eines deutschen Girondisten, by Klaus Deinet (Munich: R. Oldenburg, 1981).

Printed Courses Delivered at the Sorbonne Le Nationalisme allemand de 1871 à 1939 (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1963). L’Internationale ouvrière de 1864 à 1920 (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1964). Le Socialisme allemande de 1863 à 1918 (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1964). Les Relations franco-allemandes intellectuelles de 1871 à 1914 (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1966). Les Forces politiques dans la République de Weimar de 1919 à 1933 (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1967). Le National-socialisme (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1968). Socialisme et syndicalisme: de 1914 à 1939 (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1972).

References Allain, Jean-Claude and Tison, Hubert, “Jacques Droz (1908–1998),” Historiens et géographes, 370 (2000): 10. Ayçoberry, Pierre, “Jacques Droz,” Bulletin de l’Association des historiens contemporanéistes de l’enseignement supérieure, (2000): 121–6. Ayçoberry, Pierre, “Matériaux pour une biographie intellectuelle de Jacques Droz,” Historiens et géographes, 370 (2000): 11–12. Bariéty, Jacques, “Nekrolog: Jacques Droz: 1909–1998,” Historische Zeitschrift, 267 (1998): 826–9. Catinchi, Philippe-Jean, “Un universitaire de grande tradition: spécialiste de l’Allemagne,” Le Monde (March 8–9, 1998): 19. Espagne, Michel and Werner, Michael (eds.), Histoire des études germaniques en France 1900–1970 (Paris: CNRS, 1994).


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Möller, Horst, “Nekrologe: Jacques Droz (1909–1998),” Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, 28 (3) (2001): 195–8. Peyrot, Jean, “Un des artisans du rapprochement Franco-Allemand,” Historiens et géographes, 370 (2000): 10–11. Prost, Antoine, “Droz, Jacques (Paris, 1909 – Paris, 1998),” in Dictionnaire biographique des historiens français et francophones: de Grégoire de Tours à Georges Duby, edited by Christian Amalvi (Paris: Boutique de l’histoire, 2004), pp. 84–5. Prost, Antoine, “Jacques Droz,” Le Mouvement social, 184 ( Jul.–Sept. 1998): 113–16. Renouvin, Pierre, “La politique des emprunts étrangers aux Etats-Unis de 1914 à 1917,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 6 (3) (1951): 203–307. Ritter, Gerhard, “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 1 (1950): 81–96. Ritter, Gerhard, “Vereinbarung der deutschen und französischen Historiker,” Die Welt als Geschichte, 12 (1) (1952): 145–8. Schüle, Klaus, “Die Tendenzen der neueren französischen Historiographie und ihre Bedeutung,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 19 (1968): 229–33.

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Georges Duby (1919–1996) Leah Shopkow

Georges Duby was probably the most influential French medievalist of the second half of the twentieth century. His work opened out new lines of inquiry both in Europe and in the United States. In Europe, he revivified the regional study, showing through his work on the Mâconnais region of France that scholarship deeply rooted in local conditions could nonetheless address the most significant historical issues, while at the same time demonstrating the importance of local variation in determining historical structures. He returned throughout his scholarly life to the sources originating in this region of France, from which he himself, in a sense, had sprung, and the meaning he derived from them. As a result, he became one of the most important scholarly authorities on the rural economy, based in part on the understanding of that subject he achieved though his study of the Mâconnais. Duby’s contributions, however, extended beyond the fields of economic and rural history. Under the influence of structuralist anthropologists, he explored the rise of the medieval nobility, the position of women in noble society, and the relationship between society and its arts. He was a founding editor of the journal Etudes rurales (Rural Studies), as well as the editor for a significant number of prestigious academic series, such as L’Histoire de la vie privée (A History of Private Life), which he edited with Philippe Ariès. His scholarly reputation in his lifetime can be measured by the large number of scholarly gatherings all over Europe to which he was invited to contribute, such as the Settimane di studio (Weeks of Research) sponsored by the Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo (Italian Center for the Study of the Middle Ages) at Spoleto, and by the named lectures he delivered, such as the 1982–3 Zaharoff Lecture of the Taylor Institute at Oxford University. His stature was such that he was asked to write scores of prefaces to

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the works of other scholars. Duby wrote many general histories intended for a non-academic audience, some of which came to be used as textbooks for college teaching, and most of which were translated into other European languages. While his reputation in France during his lifetime rested on his scholarly writing and works for the general audience, as it did elsewhere, he was also well known in his home country as a public intellectual. He wrote newspaper articles and gave many interviews for popular history magazines, newspapers, and the electronic media. He composed the text for art exhibitions. He began to work in television in 1972 and appeared, among other places, in the television adaptation of one of his books, Le Temps des cathédrales (1976; translated as The Age of the Cathedrals, 1981). He was even appointed the honorary president of the Société d’édition et programmation de television (Society for Programming and Production for Television, a German-French cultural consortium, now no longer in existence) in 1986. His visibility was so great that Daniel Bermond, in his obituary of Duby for Sciences humaines (Humane Disciplines), commented that, with Duby’s death, “it is a little as though the Middle Ages were in mourning.” Duby was born in Paris, the only child of parents from the artisan class, to which he attributed his life-long appreciation of good craftsmanship and people who worked with their hands. His mother’s family came from eastern France, but his father’s family came from the south, and he spent some summers with his paternal grandmother in Bourg-en-Bresse, which lay in the region he was later to study. When he was thirteen his father retired there and placed his son at secondary school in Mâcon, where young, highly trained, and enthusiastic teachers encouraged in Duby what was already a deeply bookish character. Although a strong student, his school prize was for drawing, anticipating the role the history of art was to play in his scholarship and his more popular writing. Duby originally planned a career as a secondary-school teacher and pursued three certifications: one in history, one in geography, and one in classical literary studies. While at the University of Lyon, which he entered in 1937, he encountered two figures who were to have a significant influence on his career, the geographer André Allix and the historian Jean Déniau. Both Allix and Déniau were associated with the Annales school, the group of historians and social scientists grouped around the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (later to become Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations) founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The Annalistes were interested in history driven by broad processes of change over the “long duration” (longue durée) and in “mentalities” or modes of thought (a term popularized by Febvre), and not in the history focused on politics or famous people and driven by events. They sought to write “total history” in which the boundaries between scholarly disciplines were dissolved. Allix was part of an intellectual movement that strove to turn geography from the study of land and resources toward economic and social questions. Déniau had taught at Strasbourg with Marc Bloch and then moved to Lyon, where he introduced his students to this new view of history, to which Duby took with enthusiasm. As

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Duby commented in his 1991 autobiography, L’Histoire continue (translated as History Continues, 1994), he was introduced by these men to “another conception of history. The history of the ordinary person, the person in society, appeared much more physical, tasty and, above all, useful than the superficial type concerning exceptional people, princes, generals, bishops or financiers.” While many men were called up in 1939 when World War II broke out, Duby and other students at the university were not drafted until June 9, 1940. After the armistice was signed on June 22, Duby was conscripted into a chantier de jeunesse (workshop for youth), a paramilitary national service brigade for young men of twenty. These chantiers were established by the Vichy regime to enhance military preparedness and required six months of service, which meant that Duby did not return to Lyon until the following year. Back in the university, where he had already completed the work for his ordinary teaching license, Duby began to prepare for the agrégation (a competitive exam for teachers) which guaranteed successful candidates teaching positions, higher pay, and entitled them to teach at university level; success in the agrégation could also be the first step toward a doctoral degree. Duby took the exam in the summer of 1942 and was ranked ninth in a competition for eight awards. The chief examiner, Charles-Edmond Perrin, impressed with Duby, arranged for a ninth award to be created. Now that Duby was an agregé, he was guaranteed a teaching job and was able to marry his wife André, whom he had met on his return to Lyon (they would eventually have three children). Duby spent the next two years teaching, somewhat unhappily, in a secondary school. When the liberation came in 1944, Duby returned to the university, where Allix, whose wartime Resistance credentials were impeccable, had been appointed rector of the university. As Duby planned to seek a doctorate, Allix created a position for Duby as an assistant to Déniau, so that Duby could focus on his dissertation and forgo teaching secondary school. Déniau graciously asked Perrin to supervise Duby’s dissertation at the Sorbonne, as a Paris degree would open doors for Duby that a degree from Lyon would not. When Duby’s six-year assistantship at Lyon ran out in 1950, he received an appointment at Besançon through the intervention of another influential medievalist, Louis Halphen. Then, in the Fall of 1951, Duby was appointed, once again through the intervention of his patron Perrin, as an assistant at the University of Aix (now the University of Provence – Aix–Marseille I), with the expectation that Duby would be promoted, upon completion of his dissertation, to the new position for a medieval historian that had just been created. In 1952, Duby completed what had grown to be a 1,600page dissertation, which was published the next year, and he was duly promoted to professorial rank in 1953. The city of Aix remained Duby’s home for the rest of his life. Duby’s dissertation supervisor, Perrin, had been trained in the painstaking manner of the Ecole des chartes (the School of Charters, which trains archivists and conservators, as well as scholars, in the study, analysis, and preservation of


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manuscripts). Perrin suggested, therefore, that Duby begin his research in a collection of documents, the charters of the monastery of Cluny, not far from Mâcon, partly, one suspects, because Duby was from the region, but also because of the unparalleled richness of the collection. Duby’s reading of the cartulary was the cornerstone of his dissertation, which became his first book, La Société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Society in the Mâconnais Region in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, 1953). In addition to using the Cluny charters, Duby drew on other published collections of charters, as well as on unpublished manuscripts that he had to teach himself how to read. Part of Duby’s originality lay in the way in which he used these records to study lay society rather than the religious institutions that had produced the charters. He reconstructed noble families and their property holdings, considered the evidence concerning the freedom and serfdom of the peasantry, treated land use and agricultural patterns in the region, and examined changes in the structures of power from the end of the tenth century to the middle of the thirteenth, when the county of Mâcon became part of the royal demesne. But in addition to putting forward considerable information about conditions in the Mâconnais region over time, Duby also advanced a larger argument. Duby suggested that toward the end of the tenth century, as the Carolingian dynasty first lost much of its political power and was then replaced by the Capetians, the counts of Mâcon, who had ruled the county as public officials of the realm, lost their authority as well. At that point, power devolved upon the castellans of the region, who became virtually independent and who privatized public authority for their own benefit. Also benefiting from the process was a new class of fighting men, the knights, originally not noble in origin, but in the course of the eleventh century increasingly regarded as noble, who rose through their military support for the castellans. At the beginning of the twelfth century, however, this process began to reverse itself. The castellans impoverished themselves through division of their patrimonies and excess consumption, and were increasingly unable to compete in a revived money economy. This weakness permitted first the authority of the count to re-emerge and then the Capetian kings to bring the nobility of the Mâconnais to heel under the newly centralizing authority. Thus, the years around the turn of the millennium became a crucial turning point of French history, the point at which a “feudal revolution” or “feudal mutation” occurred. Duby’s book was warmly received by scholars in both Europe and the United States, both because of its exhaustive and creative use of the available resources and also because of the power of Duby’s writing. From the start, he adopted a clear and engaging style with much of the verve of the novelist, which made the individuals and families whose lands and power he studied come to life on the page. Duby’s theory of the development of “feudalism,” although not initially influential, was widely adopted. It is still orthodoxy for many continental scholars, although in the last two decades of the twentieth century it was increasingly criticized on several different scores by the occasional French scholar and by English

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and American ones. Some scholars have questioned whether the Cluny charters and other charters from the region actually do show the weakening of the authority of the counts of Mâcon or the total disappearance of public authority, or whether the changes in language that Duby found in the charters around the turn of the millennium merely result from changes in scribal conventions; that is, institutions did not change so much as the way in which scribes wrote about them. Other scholars, who have accepted that centralized authority did collapse in the Maconnais, have argued instead that this development was peculiar to this region and was not necessarily true even for other regions of France, let alone the rest of Europe. Alone among Duby’s major works, his book on the Mâconnais has not been translated into English (it has been translated only into Italian). Nonetheless, his mode of working and the concerns displayed in his future work were already in evidence in that book. First, throughout his career, Duby preferred to work with a primary source or sources, advancing arguments and theories based on his reading of them rather than bringing to the sources an already established theoretical framework. Even when he was writing on different sorts of topics, for instance, the medieval ideology that saw all of society as divided into three parts – those who fought, those who worked, and those who prayed – his inquiry began in a few specific sources. Second, Duby was nearly always concerned with power relationships. In the book on the Mâconnais, he primarily concerned himself with the relationships between, and relative positions of, peasants and nobles, castellans and counts, milites (knights) and those above and below them, and nobles and kings. In his earliest work, Duby stressed the economic and political dimension of these relationships, although he never saw economic relationships as selfexplanatory or sufficient subjects. Duby then branched out into the study of the ideologies of the medieval nobility and the nature of the noble family. As families were formed by marriage, and marriage was, at least to some extent, rooted in economic considerations, he became interested in the struggle between the nobility and the clergy to define and regulate marriage. Although property was often controlled by men, marriage brought noble women under his gaze. These interests were organically related and overlapped, and they would define to an extent the trajectory of Duby’s scholarly career. Duby had published a few articles of modest length before completing his dissertation, including an article in Annales in 1952 on the budget of the abbey of Cluny (later collected in Hommes et structures du Moyen Age, 1973). In 1953, the year his book was published, Duby also published an edition of the cartulary of La Ferté-sur-Grosne, a Cistercian abbey from the same region, whose charters had been previously unedited. He had already begun to be offered journeyman’s projects, general histories designed for students or non-academic readers that began to emerge after his book on the Mâconnais. He also worked on a collective project, the medieval volume in the series Histoire générale des civilisations (General History of Civilizations), which brought together material on the Middle Ages in Asia, North Africa, and Europe; it appeared in 1955.


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The next of these general projects reflected Duby’s connection to the Annaliste intellectual framework. Duby had met Lucien Febvre in 1944 (Duby never met Marc Bloch, who had been killed by the Nazis during the war). In 1954, he contributed an article on the history of serfdom in Burgundy to a volume in honor of Lucien Febvre (this article, too, was later collected in Hommes et structures). Duby had begun teaching a seminar in 1955 at Aix on the history of kinship, marriage, and death. This seminar permitted Duby to focus on mental realities rather than just on material ones, which was part of the Annaliste program. Annaliste influence is also evident in Duby’s foundation of the Centre d’études des sociétés méditerranéennes (Center for the Study of Mediterranean Societies) at Aix; the Mediterranean region was an interest of many Annalistes as well. When Duby was asked to revise an earlier history of France for the publisher Armand Colin, which he agreed to do if he could have an associate, he approached Febvre, who suggested his protegé Robert Mandrou. In the Histoire de la civilisation française (translated as A History of French Civilization, 1964), published in 1958, the two scholars incorporated ethnography and mentalities in their account of French history. In the same year, Duby published an article in Annales (collected in Hommes et structures) on feudalism as a medieval mentality. Now established as a scholar concerned with mentality, he was asked to write the chapter on this subject for a volume edited by Charles Samaran, L’Histoire et ses méthodes (History and its Methods), which appeared in 1961. As Duby noted himself in his autobiography, this invitation was a recognition that the “new history” had to be acknowledged, even though Samaran detested Febvre and the type of history associated with Annales. However, it was also a recognition that, as a scholar, Duby was an intermediary figure, deeply grounded, like more conservative historians, in the close analysis of documents, while sympathetic to new techniques and approaches as well. Now well established as both a major historian and a specialist in rural history, Duby was one of the founders (with Isac Chiva and Daniel Faucher) of a new journal, Etudes rurales, in 1961. In the next year, he accepted another commission, this time from the Byzantinist Paul Lemerle. Lemerle was in charge of creating a series of manuals for university teaching that were to include a synthetic text, documents, and bibliography; he asked Duby to do a volume on medieval rural history. Duby was given free rein in how to proceed, and he produced a work that markedly surpassed the expectations for the original commission. L’Economie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval (1962; translated as Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, 1968) filled a wide assortment of scholarly needs. It provided a wide-ranging synthetic treatment of the economy of the countryside, a neglected topic, across a wide expanse of time, included an extensive and up-to-date bibliography, and suggested new directions for research. In this book, Duby further developed his ideas about the development of European society, this time treating both the Carolingian period and the later Middle Ages more extensively. In Duby’s interpretation, the relatively stagnant rural society of the Carolingian period gave way around the year 1000 to a period

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of rapid expansion out of which a new economy, with a ruthless exploitation of peasants and control of resources by the military elite, developed. Duby restated some of the theories he had advanced in his book on the Mâconnais; namely, that after the Carolingian period there followed a period of devolution of public authority, during which castellans became more or less autonomous authorities. These men, through their pursuit of their economic interests, came to exercise a mixture of what had been public power alongside control over other people deriving from personal relationships of dependence and ownership of land. The relative importance of lordship based on dependence and that based on land varied from situation to situation. Allodial property (that is, land for which the owner was constrained only by public obligations such as service in the royal army) gradually dwindled; eventually, nearly all land was held either as fiefs granted to military men or as dependent tenures held by peasants. The result was the creation of the feudal economy of the High Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, this economy was itself stagnating, to be torn apart and reformed by the demographic catastrophes of the fourteenth century. Throughout the book, Duby is as attentive to the human implications of these economic changes – the experience of peasants and nobles – as he is to the process by which land and goods and then, later on, money changed hands. The nearly two hundred translated documents and numerous tables that accompany the text illustrate every aspect of the economic developments that Duby treats, while the notes refer the reader to the pertinent documents at each point in the text, rooting Duby’s more general remarks in the sources that gave rise to them. L’Economie rurale appeared to highly complimentary reviews by some of the most respected economic historians of the Middle Ages. While most noted a few flaws, such as a tendency to overestimate the misery of the Carolingian economy and the geographical limitations of the book (it is far more descriptive of England and France than of the other regions it aimed to treat, although documentation is much less sparse in these two areas than elsewhere), it was hailed as a masterpiece. Although in his preface to the French edition, Duby comments (as reprinted in Postan’s English translation) that “if it is soon replaced by those who use it, it will have achieved its aim,” the book has not yet been replaced as a systematic introduction to the economic history of rural Europe and is still in print more than forty years later. By the early 1960s, the ideas explored by Duby’s seminar at Aix on family and marriage had also begun to appear in his publications. Although much of his most important scholarship in this area came later in his career, he published a number of articles that indicated this new direction and the new kinds of sources he was using. Particularly influential among scholars was an article Duby published in 1964 in Annales, “Au XIIe siècle: les ‘jeunes’ dans la société aristocratique dans la France du nord-ouest” (later reprinted in Hommes et structures du Moyen Age and translated as “Youth in Aristocratic Society: Northwestern France in the Twelfth Century,” in The Chivalrous Society, 1977). Here Duby argues that the term “youth”


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in the Middle Ages described not an age but a social status, the period between biological adulthood, on the one hand, and marriage and parenthood, on the other. As a youth, one was not a fully enfranchised member of society. As men often married quite late, and many never married at all, the large numbers of “youths” in the elite shaped the whole culture. Youths flocked to tournaments to display their skills, sought adventures that might bring in the resources to permit marriage, joined rebellions plotted by heirs whose fathers were not quick enough to die off, and patronized courtly literature, in which youths were depicted as successfully competing with their married and settled brethren. For his article on “youth,” Duby drew on genealogical histories composed in northern France in the twelfth century – indeed, Duby devoted several articles to the genealogies themselves (most have been collected in Hommes et structures du Moyen Age and The Chivalrous Society). Duby saw the genealogies as indicative not so much of biological families as of conceptual families, those whom the composers of these genealogies considered part of the kin group. Men appear much more frequently than women in these genealogies, and Duby argued that this imbalance existed because the noble conception of family tended to include only those people who passed on parts of the family patrimony; as inheritance was increasingly restricted to the male line, women were less important. In the mid-1960s, Duby added a new dimension to his scholarship with the first of his works on medieval art and society. Duby loved art, had many artists for friends, and was himself a painter all his life; it was perhaps this qualification that inspired Albert Skira to approach him to write the text of what became three books, published in 1965 and 1966, L’Europe des cathédrales (1140–1280) (translated as The Europe of the Cathedrals, 1966), Fondements d’un nouvel humanisme (1280–1440) (translated as Foundations of a New Humanism, 1966), and Adolescence de la chrétienté occidentale (980–1140) (The Adolescence of Western Christianity). The first two of these quarto-sized, lavishly illustrated books were simultaneously published in several European languages. Even though these books were not works aimed primarily at scholars, Duby develops an argument across the three of them; namely, that medieval art can be understood as the interaction between the intellectual world and the artists who produced the work. For example, monastic ideals and then the intellectual world of the universities were reflected in Romanesque and Gothic art respectively. As the culture of the universities stagnated in the later thirteenth century, art, too, became less innovative, only to be revitalized in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first by new ideas in the universities and then by secular patrons. At the end of the Middle Ages, art was beginning to shift away from the expression of chivalric values; freed of the ideologies of the patrons, it now rested in the hands of the artists themselves. The relationship between art and ideas described by Duby was not entirely original and drew on the work of other art historians. For instance, Emile Mâle had described medieval architecture as a kind of theater, while Erwin Panofsky

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had posited a connection between the content and methods of scholastic theology, on the one hand, and the form of Gothic architecture, on the other. Still, Duby did present a broad-reaching synthesis that guided readers through the art itself. The books were well received by continental scholars and rather less warmly by English and American scholars, who tended to see them as popular books. Shortly thereafter, Duby published another collection of documents, L’An mil (The Year 1000). The book was both more and less than its title suggests. In his preface, Duby rapidly places the common belief that medieval people had been terrorized by the approach of the year 1000 in its own historical context; this notion arose in the Renaissance and reflected Renaissance and Enlightenment attitudes toward what humanists and philosophes saw as medieval stupidity. Duby translated extracts from a small number of writers from the period – Ademar of Chabannes, Radulph Glaber, Richer of Reims, and Helgaud of Fleury are the most important – that reflect eight aspects of the medieval mentality of this period, only one of which is millenarianism per se. Instead, Duby situates thinking about the millennium in the context of a period of rapid economic change, with its accompanying social and political displacements (in other words, the changes that he had already written about in his earlier books.) What is notable here is the juxtaposition of these changes with mentalities. While Duby had already begun exploring mentalities, he had hitherto not integrated them to such a degree with material phenomena. By the end of the 1960s, Duby had become so significant an historian that he was elected to a chair in the history of medieval societies at the Collège de France in 1970 (a position he held until his retirement in 1992). The Collège de France does not award degrees, although its scholars teach courses free and open to the public in the areas in which they are pursuing their research. The intention of the institution is to produce and disseminate research simultaneously, a dialectical process that Duby found much to his taste. Duby’s courses there focused on, among other things, his increasingly strong interest in gender and sexuality. As the courses occupied a limited amount of time each year, Duby was able to live primarily in Aix and write there; he was also free to travel and give lectures at many institutions. There is no question that Duby’s position at the Collège had a dramatic fertilizing effect on his work. Duby’s inaugural address at the Collège de France in 1970 (reprinted in Hommes et structures du Moyen Age and in translation in The Chivalrous Society) outlined both the direction from which his research had come and where it was to go. He still spoke as an historian of economics and economic relationships, but now he was an historian for whom economic history was a subset of social history, which, in turn, was simply one component of total history. In his address, Duby strove to create a new place for a social history “where the history of material civilization and the history of collective attitudes will converge.” It would not suffice to consider only texts and ideas, important as these were, for historians who worked only with texts and ideas tended to become removed from the most important


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aspect of history, the study of human beings in society. Similarly, one could not focus only on modes of production and economic relationships; the true subject of history was the interaction of these and all other forces that gave shape to society as a whole. This manifesto found expression in Duby’s next two pieces of work. The first, an account of the Battle of Bouvines ( July 27, 1214), was published in 1973; the book had been commissioned for a series of books on “Thirty Days that Made France.” Gently undermining the premises of the series, Duby showed decisively that even in the thirteenth century, medieval writers did not see the battle as particularly significant; the battle became one of those “thirty days” only in the nineteenth century. Rather, in a series of sometimes independent essays, Duby approaches the battle as a mirror in which the “mentalities” and realities of early thirteenth-century culture were reflected. One part of the book is a translation of the Old French translation of the Latin account of William le Breton, an “official” historian of the crown and eyewitness. In another part, Duby explores what contemporary views of the battle said about nationalism, conceptions of society, and the growth of French royal ideology. Duby also explores the event itself and its historical context from various perspectives: the composition of the armies, what tactics were available to them, tournaments, and a host of other issues. This thematic interplay also appears in Duby’s last major work on the medieval economy, published in 1974, Guerriers et paysans, VIIe–XIIe siècles: premier essor de l’économie européenne. The book won the Paul Valéry Prize awarded by the Fondation de France and was immediately picked up and published in translation as The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (1974) in the series “World Economic History,” edited by Charles Wilson. In this work, Duby somewhat modifies his earlier positions. The period of a purely subsistence economy is pushed back into the seventh and eighth centuries. In this early economy, goods were kept circulating by the Germanic warrior mentality that stressed “necessary generosity,” which entailed giving at all levels of the social scale, an idea that continued to influence European society for centuries. This economy grew in the later eighth century through Carolingian military expansion, only to reach a temporary limit imposed by population pressure and the end of the Carolingian conquests in the ninth. While the powerful in this period attempted to amass as much property as possible, creating an early manorial system, they were prevented from pursuing utterly ruthless forms of economic exploitation by Carolingian royal authority. With the invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, the powerful were set free from that control. The result was a reordering of social relationships into the “feudal” pattern and a second, but this time sustained, take-off of the European economy. New ideas, such as the tripartite division of society into those who fight, those who work, and those who pray, emerged as attempts to make sense of the new social order (a series of Duby’s seminars in the early 1970s had explored this topic). By the twelfth century, the military elite was being gradually displaced from its position of economic

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dominance by people in the now growing cities, who were not motivated by the demands of “necessary generosity” or the desire to consume, but by the need to make a profit. In this work, Duby firmly connects economic trends to mentalities and ideologies, marking his shift to new issues and concerns. In the same year, Duby was elected as a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. This institution, closely associated with research institutions such as the Ecole des chartes and the Ecole française de Rome, awards prestigious prizes. Members are chosen through nomination and election by the current members, and membership is intended to reward outstanding lifetime achievement. The election was thus further recognition of the significance of Duby’s scholarly importance in France. Many of his books were reprinted at that time, and his early books on art, published in the 1960s by Skira, were repackaged in one volume with a slightly revised text and many fewer illustrations as Le Temps des cathédrales: l’art et la société, 980–1420 (translated as The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420, 1981). Although Duby, serving as editor, published the four-volume Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France) in 1975–6, he continued to move away from economic and rural history. The signs of this shift appeared in his articles. In “Histoire, société, imaginaire” (“History, society, the imaginary”), published in Dialectiques in 1975, Duby discusses the notion of “the imaginary” (l’imaginaire), the term he came to prefer over “mentality” when referring to the structural, ideational images that societies create. In this period, Duby wrote a number of other articles on historical theory as well, culminating in a book-length collection of taped conversations about history with the philosopher Guy Lardreau in 1980, Dialogues. Meanwhile, Duby continued to explore the ternary conception of medieval society that he had already introduced in Dimanche de Bouvines and Guerriers et paysans, a subject he finally treated at length in 1978 in Les Trois Ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (translated as The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, 1980). The idea that society had three component parts, one noble, one common, and one clerical, had been enshrined in the composition of the Estates General of the Ancien Régime, but Duby was interested in how it had come to play such a role in French society. Once again, Duby began with texts, this time a poem by the eleventh-century bishop Adalbero of Laon and a biography of his near-contemporary, Gerard of Cambrai, where the idea that society was divided into workers, warriors, and clerics was first introduced. Earlier medieval conceptions of society had generally divided it into two groups: the laity and clergy. When earlier writers had posited a tripartite division, they divided the clergy into the monks and the secular clergy. Adalbero and Gerard’s biographer used the new division, Duby argued, to justify the new social order that grew up around the millennium and to justify the place of the church (particularly the bishops) within it. After this brief appearance of the schema, it disappeared for more than a century, to re-emerge and to be adopted in the twelfth century by aristocrats seeking to justify their own


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privileged position in society. Once taken over by aristocrats, the model was further adapted to the ideological uses of the French state. Duby’s argument was accepted without question in the French scholarly world. Among English and American scholars it attracted both praise and criticism, praise for its broad reach and magisterial ideas, criticism for faulty readings of the texts presenting the notion of ternarity; for Duby’s use of unrepresentative texts as exemplars of what was widely thought; for an unconvincing argument for connections between iterations of the notion of ternarity; and, finally, for Duby’s failure to deal with competing ideological models for society. The vivid historical imagination that some scholars have found to be the best and most exciting aspect of Duby’s work, others have seen as a dangerous weakness, one that caused Duby to overreach himself on occasion. Nonetheless, since Duby published this book scholars have found it impossible to describe high medieval society without reference to this tripartite structure and to Duby’s exploration of it. This book was Duby’s last work to be concerned with large ideological processes independent of the questions of family and gender. Duby’s interest in family had grown directly out of his work on the Mâconnais, as he had had to reconstruct families in order to study their management and transfers of property. He had begun to publish in the early 1960s on noble family lineages using narrative sources. Moreover, kinship had been the subject of some of his earliest seminars, both at Aix and also at the Collège de France. For instance, his 1974 seminar at the Collège was held concurrently with a conference that resulted in the publication of the papers in Famille et parenté dans l’Occident medieval (Family and Kinship in the Medieval West, 1977). Now he returned to the subject of both genealogical histories and the history of the family in his James S. Schouler lectures at The Johns Hopkins University, delivered in 1977 and published in 1978 as Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-century France. In these lectures, Duby explores the implications of an “aristocratic model” of marriage, which entailed marriage among relatively closely related individuals, easy divorce, and parental control of the selection of marriage partners; under the pressure of the economic changes of the eleventh century, it also meant restriction of marriage to only a few children and the exclusion of women and younger sons from inheritance. To this, Duby contrasted an “ecclesiastical model” of marriage, promulgated by the church, which required the consent of the marrying couple, who were to be bound by affective ties. Such marriages were to be indissoluble, and relatively close kin were not to marry. These two models came into conflict in the twelfth century, a period in which the nobility was no longer economically predominant but was still economically important. Duby was less interested in how the formal requirements of canon law were worked out during the course of the twelfth century than in the competition of the models as revealed in actual practice – he was also interested in how that competition led to compromises and changes in both models. In the third lecture, Duby used a genealogical history, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, to explore this process.

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Very shortly after he published Medieval Marriage, Duby gave the matter a fuller treatment in Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre: le mariage dans la France féodale (translated as The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, 1983), published in 1981. This book takes essentially the same line as Medieval Marriage, but fleshes out the argument, reflecting the difference between a book of published lectures and a fuller scholarly treatment. Duby draws on more texts than the history of Guines (for example, Guibert of Nogent’s autobiography, lives of saints, and the history of the lords of Amboise), and he delves more deeply into texts and cases that he had referred to in the lectures (such as the writings of Yvo, bishop of Chartres, and the marriage difficulties of Philip I of France). The essential argument, however, remains the same as in Medieval Marriage. When these two works on marriage came out, they were generally praised by the scholarly community, which complimented particularly Duby’s treatment of aristocratic, dynastic marriage and his lively discussions of individual cases. Scholars (primarily English and American scholars) were more critical of Duby’s treatment of the “ecclesiastical” model. They argued that Duby failed to discuss canon law extensively or well, and that Duby dealt with “the church” as a monolithic unit rather than as a complex institution with many competing constituencies and agendas, and hence varying ideas of marriage. More recently, some scholars have even come to disagree with Duby’s reading of the texts upon which he based his idea of aristocratic marriage, and they have identified outright errors in Duby’s account of the contents of these texts. Duby, whose earliest work had dealt with legal texts and charters that included information about the conveyance of land, tended to treat narrative texts as transparent accounts of events and failed to follow the procedures of critical source analysis when discussing them. As a result, he seldom discussed the circumstances under which a narrative text was produced, the person who produced it, the end for which it was produced, or the readership of the text. In other words, he was not always clear on whose point of view was represented in a text and to what end. (This failure was ironic, given how Duby’s investigations tended to begin with a specific source rather than with a theoretical framework.) Moreover, Duby’s contention that aristocratic women were essentially powerless and silenced by medieval culture has led numerous scholars to show all the points where this position cannot be maintained. Many of the issues Duby had explored in his work on medieval aristocracy, youth, and marriage emerged in his next book, Guillaume le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (1984; translated as William Marshal, the Flower of Chivalry, 1985). Like so much of Duby’s scholarly work, it was based on a specific source, in this case the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman biography of the twelfth-century knight who, through his military prowess at tournaments, joined the royal English circle, managed to marry an heiress, and eventually became the regent for the young king Henry III of England. The Marshal represented a type for whom Duby in all his works exhibits a particular fondness, the youth as successful adventurer. The biographical poem was not, nor did Duby treat it as, a reliable factual history.


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Instead, Duby explores it as a cultural artifact of a particular age. Duby wrote this book with a general audience in mind. In his autobiography, L’Histoire continue, Duby explained that, as French presses discovered the existence of a popular audience for history in addition to the (much less lucrative) academic audience, French scholars began to write with this popular audience in mind, dropping or minimizing the footnotes and references that the scholarly audience expected. Because Duby was by this time so important an historian, Guillaume le Maréchal was read by scholars as well as general readers. In the first responses to this book, the more popular style was not much remarked on, and the book was warmly received. When the English translation was published, however, responses were less enthusiastic, and sometimes the same readers who had initially welcomed the book now voiced their reservations. What critics had at first found fresh, they now found to be a naïve discussion of the poem. The poem, commissioned by the Marshal’s son, was only one of a number of “family romances” written in this period for other families, and Duby had put the poem neither in this context nor in the context of the historical and political circumstances of the Marshal’s life. Still, the book stimulated new interest in William the Marshal as a figure, as well as in the poem itself. While Duby continued to publish articles on various topics, from the mid-1980s on he was more influential as one of the editors of a series of important collective works. The first of these was the Histoire de la vie privée (translated as The History of Private Life), which Duby supervised with the distinguished historian Philippe Ariès. It was published in five volumes between 1985 and 1987. These books were again designed to be accessible to a general audience (although the contributors were all distinguished scholars) and consequently had few notes. Duby himself edited the second volume of Histoire de la vie privée, independently titled De l’Europe féodale à la Renaissance (translated as Revelations of the Medieval World), as well as contributing liberally to it. As a consequence, this volume shows many of Duby’s preoccupations, although it was the product of a team of six scholars. It followed the map for medieval change that Duby espoused in all his work: the transformation of the medieval world brought about by the feudal mutation around the year 1000 and a second transformation beginning with the demographic changes of the early fourteenth century. Before the turn of the millennium, Duby argued, the sources are too scanty to speak of private life, except by extrapolation from what came after. Around 1000, as power was privatized through the feudal mutation, public and private aspects of life, which in earlier centuries had been distinct, also blurred together as government came to look like a household and wealthy households came to resemble governments. As states and public functions were re-established, private and public life became more distinct. In the early fourteenth century, when the documentation (and particularly artistic representations of life) became more extensive and as society secularized, notions of intimacy and privacy became more fully developed. The growth of individualism through the period helped create the ultimate private space, the

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internal self. This argument was presented in a series of essays: two “case studies” of the world of the high medieval northern French aristocracy and Tuscan families on the eve of the Renaissance (representing the feudal and the late medieval phases of these changes), a literary study, two essays on the history of the private space, and two essays on individualism. While these essays touch on different aspects of private life, they cannot be called (nor did Duby claim that they were) a systematic treatment. In his introduction, Duby even addressed the question of whether a notion, “privacy,” created in the nineteenth century, could be applied to the Middle Ages, concluding that it can provided that one recognizes that it is not a term used that way in the Middle Ages. Indeed, much of the volume, including Duby’s contributions to it (on French aristocratic households, of which the monastic household was a species, and solitude), stresses that medieval “private” life was communal to a degree striking to modern eyes. The “private” world was not a realm of solitude, but a place where power was exercised by a head of household instead of a government official. The areas explored by the book, the fortress, hearth and palace, the courtyard and even the text, were places where people, until the end of the Middle Ages, presented themselves to others. Nearly all scholars have praised the presentation of the book, with its many fine illustrations. With respect to the contents, as with many of Duby’s later works, critics have been divided. They have either applauded the broad sweep of the imagination and the many disparate issues woven together in the book or they have deplored the lack of footnotes and scholarly precision. Those less taken with the book have argued that the book brings together notions (privacy, intimacy, solitude) by implication as though they are the same thing, without fully exploring the ways in which they might be different. Finally, they have stressed that northern France represents Europe for the high Middle Ages; other parts of Europe are discussed primarily only for the period at the dawn of the Renaissance. In the same year that the last volume of Histoire de la vie privée came out in France, Duby received what is a crowning honor in France, election to the twentysixth seat as one of the “Immortals” of the Académie française. In the wake of Duby’s election, many of his books were reprinted. A second collection of his essays, Mâle Moyen Age: de l’amour et autres essais (1988; translated as Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, 1994) was issued. He was asked to contribute prefaces to many works of others, which he did. In the last ten years of his life he was very active in the popular media, writing articles for the Roman paper La Repubblica and for the French press as well, and giving many interviews per year for most of his remaining years. He undertook a variety of popular books on different topics: on chivalry, on women, on millennial fears. He also embarked on the second major editorial project of his later career, Storia delle donne in Occidente (1990; translated as A History of Women in the West, 1992–4), a project that he directed with Michelle Perrot. In this case, Duby chose not to edit the medieval volume, confiding it instead to Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Once again, the books were well


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received on the continent, while English and American scholars were divided between those who thought that the individual essays were valuable and those who found the whole relatively incoherent. Most of the individual contributors were continental scholars, and so the books did not draw heavily on the work being done in gender history in other parts of the world. It was clear by this time that Duby’s career was slowly coming to an end. In 1991, Duby published his autobiography, L’Histoire continue (History Continues), which joined an earlier biographical essay, “Le plaisir de l’historien.” In contrast to the earlier essay, which offered much specific biographical detail and some sharp opinions, Duby organized his book as an account of his intellectual passage. It begins with his decision to pursue an advanced degree, goes on to create in five chapters one of the finest accounts of the process of writing a dissertation in print, and continues through the major themes of Duby’s career (the other scholars he met, his writing on mentalities and on art, the effect of his travels on his scholarship), all told with verve, charm, clarity, and with little rancor toward rivals or settling of scores. While the final chapter of the book was entitled “Projets” (“Projects”), the overall tone is valedictory, the summation of a career. Duby retired the same year. In fact, Duby had only one more original project in him, the three volumes of his Dames du XIIe siècle (1995–6; translated as Women of the Twelfth Century, 1997–8). The first volume, Héloise, Aliénor, Iseut et quelques autres (translated as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Six Others), provided a series of portraits of twelfth-century women, some to be expected (like Eleanor herself ), others much less well known (like Juette of Huy). The second, Le Souvenir des aïeules (translated as Remembering the Dead), treats the role of women as family remembrancers, particularly with regard to the luster their birth families brought to their marital families. The French title of the last volume, Eve et les prêtres (Eve and the Priests), is perhaps more evocative of the contents of that work than the title in English translation, Eve and the Church, as it concerns the way in which members of the clergy attempted to harness and control the fearsome power of women and enforce male dominance. These short books, presented without notes or index, were generally seen as weak, but criticism of the author, who died before the publication of the English translations, was muted. Duby’s death in 1996 was followed by the publication of a few last projects, mostly editorial, and many reissues of his work. Nearly all of Georges Duby’s many books are still in print and they are widely used both by scholars and for classroom instruction, giving pleasure to new generations of readers through their vivid writing. For scholars, it is practically impossible to write about high medieval political and social development, the medieval aristocracy, gender in the Middle Ages, or medieval ideologies without making reference to Duby’s work, if only to refute it. His legacy is still relatively secure among continental European scholars, who challenge his ideas only very respectfully, and who see the errors in his work as inevitable for a scholar of such breadth of interest. Among English and American scholars, Duby’s work has been subject

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to more vigorous criticism and is under challenge on many points, such as whether, in fact, a “feudal mutation” occurred (a point also challenged by the French scholar Dominique Barthélemy, whose work has covered some of the same ground as Duby’s early work) or whether noble women were silenced and disempowered by their society. These scholars see the errors as characteristic misreadings that vitiate Duby’s large theses.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Georges Duby Recueil des pancartes de l’abbaye de la Ferté-sur-Grosne (Gap: Ophrys, 1953), pp. 1113–79. La Société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953; rev. edn., Paris: SEVPEN, 1971); translated into Italian as Una società francese nel Medioevo: la regione di Mâcon nei secoli XI e XII (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985). Le Moyen age: l’expansion de l’Orient et la naissance de la civilisation occidentale, by Georges Duby, Edouard Perroy, Jeannine Auboyer, et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de la France, 1955). Histoire de la civilisation française, by Georges Duby and Robert Mandrou, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1958); translated by James Blakely Atkinson as A History of French Civilization (New York: Random House, 1964). L’Economie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval: France, Angleterre, Empire, IXe–XVe siècles. Essai de synthèse et perspectives de recherches, 2 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1962); translated by Cynthia Postan as Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968). L’Europe des cathédrales (1140–1280) (Geneva: Skira, 1966); translated by Stuart Gilbert as The Europe of the Cathedrals, 1140–1280 (Geneva: Skira, 1966). Fondements d’un nouvel humanisme (1280–1440) (Geneva: Skira, 1966); translated by Peter Price as Foundations of a New Humanism, 1280–1440 (Geneva: Skira, 1966). Adolescence de la chrétienté occidentale (980–1140) (Geneva: Skira, 1967). L’An mil (Paris: Julliard, 1967). Le Dimanche de Bouvines (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); translated by Catherine Tihanyi as The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Guerriers et paysans, VIIe–XIIe siècles: premier essor de l’économie européenne (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); translated by Howard B. Clarke as The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). Les Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, by Georges Duby and Andrée Duby (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Saint Bernard: l’art cistercien (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1976). Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-century France, translated by Elborg Forster (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Les Trois Ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). L’Europe au moyen âge: art roman, art gothique (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1979).


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Dialogues, by Georges Duby and Guy Lardreau (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre: le mariage dans la France féodale (Paris: Hachette, 1981); translated by Barbara Bray as The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). De l’amour au XIIe siècle: séance publique annuelle des cinq Académies, lundi 26 octobre 1981 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1981). Que sait-on de l’amour en France au XIIe siècle? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Guillaume le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: Fayard, 1984); translated by Richard Howard as William Marshal, the Flower of Chivalry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). Le Moyen Age: de Hugues Capet à Jeanne d’Arc, 987–1460 (Paris: Hachette, 1987); translated by Juliet Vale as France in the Middle Ages, 987–1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Discours de réception de Georges Duby à l’Académie française et réponse d’Alain Peyrefitte: suivis des allocutions prononcées à l’occasion de la remise de l’épée (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). L’Art cistercien (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). L’Europe au moyen âge: art roman, art gothique (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). L’Histoire continue (Paris: O. Jacob, 1991); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as History Continues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Saint Louis à Chypre (Nicosia: Fondation Anastasios G. Leventis, 1991). La Chevalerie (Paris: Perrin, 1993). Dames du XIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995–6); translated by Jean Birrell as Women of the Twelfth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997–8). L’Art et société au moyen âge (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997); translated by Jean Birrell as Art and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

Collections Hommes et structures du Moyen Age (Paris: Mouton, 1973); some articles translated by Cynthia Postan as The Chivalrous Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). Le Temps des cathédrales: l’art et la société, 980–1420 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) (contains slightly revised and retranslated texts of L’Europe des cathédrales, Fondements d’un nouvel humanisme, and Adolescence de la chrétienté occidentale); translated by Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson as The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Mâle Moyen Age: de l’amour et autres essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); translated by Jane Dunnett as Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). An 1000, an 2000: sur les traces de nos peurs (Paris: Textual, 1995). L’Art et la société: moyen âge, XXe siècle, edited by Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) (contains Saint Bernard: l’art cistercien; Saint Bernard et les arts; Le Temps des cathédrales; and articles and prefaces related to art).

Edited Works Atlas historique: Provence, Comtat Venaissin, Principauté d’Organe, Comté de Nice, Principauté de Monaco, edited by Georges Duby, Edouard Baratier, and Ernest Hildesheimer (Paris: A. Colin, 1969).

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Histoire de la France, edited by Georges Duby, 3 vols. (Paris: Larousse, 1970–1). Histoire de la France rurale, 4 vols., edited by Georges Duby and Armand Wallon (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975–6). Famille et parenté dans l’Occident médiéval. Actes du Colloque de Paris, 6–8 juin 1974, edited by Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1977). Atlas historique Larousse (Paris: Larousse, 1978). Histoire de la France urbaine, edited by Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980–5). L’Eurasie: XIe-XIIIe siècles, edited by Georges Duby and Robert Mantran (Paris: Presses Universitaires du France, 1982). Histoire de la vie privée, edited by Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès, 5 vols. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985–7); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as A History of Private Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–91). Civilisation latine: des temps anciens aux temps modernes (Paris: O. Orban, 1986). Histoire d’un art, la sculpture. Le grand art du Moyen Ages, du Ve au XVe siècle, edited by Georges Duby, Xavier Barral i Altet, and Sophie Guillot de Suduiraut (Geneva: Skira, 1989). Storia delle donne in Occidente, 5 vols., edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Rome: Laterza, 1990); translated into French as Histoire des femmes en occident (Paris: Plon, 1991–2); translated into English as A History of Women in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992–4). Images de femmes, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Paris: Plon, 1992); translated as Power and Beauty: Images of Women in Art (London: Tauris Parke Books, 1992). Femmes et histoire: Colloque, La Sorbonne, 13–14 novembre 1992, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Paris: Plon, 1993). Marie: le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale, edited by Georges Duby, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Eric Palazzo, and Daniel Russo (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996).

Articles by Georges Duby “Dangers d’une réussite,” in Saint Bernard, homme d’Eglise (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1953), pp. 67–75. “La révolution agricole médiévale,” Revue de géographie de Lyon, 29 (1954): 361–8. “Le Port de Marseille et la civilisation provençale au Moyen Age. Leçon inaugurale de rentrée de l’Université d’Aix–Marseille,” Revue de la Chambre de commerce de Marseille, 42 (1955): 127–31. “La structure d’une grande seigneurie flamande à la fin du XIIIe siècle: a propos d’un inventaire récent,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des chartes, 114 (1956): 181–6. “Sur les voies ouvertes part Marc Bloch: esclavage et servage au moyen âge,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 12 (1957): 123–6. “Notes sur les corvées dans les Alpes du Sud en 1338,” in Etudes d’histoire du droit privé offertes à Pierre Pétot (Paris: Librairie Dalloz-Sirey, 1959), pp. 141–6. “Les campagnes anglaises du Moyen Age d’après les comptes seigneuriaux, les enquêtes et la photographie aérienne,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 15 (1960): 549–50.


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“Société et civilisation dans le pays niçois à la fin du Moyen Age,” Annales du Centre universitaire méditerranéen, 13 (1960): 49–61. “L’histoire des mentalités,” in L’Histoire et ses méthodes, edited by Charles Samarin (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 937–66. “Une sythèse: le vignoble français,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 16 (1961): 122–6. “Les campagnes françaises à la fin du XIIe siècle: esquisse d’historie économique,” Bollettino dell’Istituto italiano per il medio evo, 74 (1962): 161–73. “Lavore e terra nei secoli IX–X,” Economia e storia, 9 (1962): 356–83. “Sur l’histoire agraire de l’Italie,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 18 (1963): 352–62. “Les recherches en histoire médiévale,” Revue historique, 232 (1964): 427–30. “Recherches historiques sur les campagnes médiévales,” Etudes rurales, 13–14 (1964): 71–8. “Le gouvernement royal aux premiers temps capétiens,” Le moyen âge, 72 (1966): 531–44. “Les pauvres des campagnes dans l’Occident médiévale jusqu’au XIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, 52 (1966): 25–32. “La vie rurale en Europe au XVe siècle (France, Allemagne, Angleterre, Italie, Péninsule Ibérique),” Historiens et géographes, 2 (1966): 251–4. “The agrarian life of the Middle Ages,” Economic History Review, 21 (1968): 1159–65. “The diffusion of cultural patterns in feudal society,” Past and Present, 39 (1968): 1–8. “The French countryside at the end of the XIIIth century,” in Essays in French Economic History, edited by Rondo E. Cameron (Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin for the American Economic Society, 1970), 33–41. “Le monachisme et l’économie rurale,” in Università Catholica del Sacro Cuore, Il Monachesimo e la riforma ecclesiastica (1049–1122) (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1971), pp. 336–50, 381–95. “The great estate in France at the end of the Middle Ages,” in The Recovery of France in the Fifteenth Century, edited by P[eter] S[hervey] Lewis (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 312–23. “L’image du prince en France au XIe siècle,” Cahiers d’histoire, 17 (1972): 211–16. “Medieval agriculture, 900–1500,” in The Fontana Economic History of Europe, edited by Carlo Cipolla, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 175–220. “Les structures médiévales,” in La France et les français, edited by François Michel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 7–30. “Guerre et société dans l’Europe féodale. Ordonnancement de la paix. La guerre et l’argent. La morale des guerriers,” in Concetto, storia, miti e immagini nell’Medioevo. Atti del XIVe Congresso Internazionale d’Alta Cultura, edited by Vittore Branca (Florence: Sansoni, 1973), pp. 449–82. “Aux origines d’un système de classification sociale,” in Méthodologie de l’histoire et des sciences humaines. Mèlanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Privat, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 183–8. “L’urbanisation dans l’histoire,” Etudes rurales, 49–50 (1973): 10–13. “Histoire sociale et idéologies des sociétés,” in Faire de l’histoire, edited by Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), vol. 3, pp. 147–68; translated by David Denby as “Ideologies in social history,” in Constructing the Past:

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Essays in Historical Methodology, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). “Pour une histoire anthropologique: la notion de réciprocité. Débat,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 29 (1974): 1366–7. “Histoire, société, imaginaire,” Dialectiques, 10–11 (1975): 111–23. “La diffusion du titre chevaleresque sur le versant méditerranéen de la chrétienté latine,” in La Noblesse au Moyen Age, XIe–XVe siècles. Essais à la mémoire de Robert Boutruche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976), pp. 39–70. “Présentation de l’enquête sur ‘Famille et sexualité au Moyen Age,’ ” in Famille et parenté dans l’Occident médiéval. Actes du Colloque de Paris, 6–8 juin 1974, edited by Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1977), pp. 9–11. “L’héritage,” in La Méditerranée: les hommes et l’héritage, edited by Fernand Braudel (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1978), pp. 189–237. “France rurale, France urbaine: une confrontation,” in Histoire de la France urbaine, edited by Georges Duby (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 9–35. “Memories with no historian,” Yale French Studies, 59 (1980): 7–16. “Les femmes et la révolution feodale,” La pensée, 238 (1984), 5–15. “Avertissement,” “Pouvoir privé, pouvoir public,” “Convivialité,” “Situation de la solitude XIe–XVe siècle,” in Histoire de la vie privée, vol. 2: De l’Europe féodale à la Renaissance, edited by Georges Duby (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985), pp. 19–44, 49– 95, 503–26. “Uber einige Grundtendenzen der modernen französischen Geschichtswissenschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift, 241 (1985): 543–54. “Le lignage. Xe–XIIIe siècles,” in Les lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 31–56. “Le plaisir de l’historien,” Essais d’égo-histoire, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 109–38. “Les sermons faits aux femmes aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in La Femme au moyen âge (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1992), pp. 11–20. “Mémoire paysanne,” in Società, istituzioni, spiritualità: studi in onore di Cinzio Violante, 2 vols. (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 271–5. “La position de la femme dans l’Europe médiévale,” Historia, 595 (1996): 24–8.

References Bermond, Daniel, “Georges Duby: historien esthète du Moyen Age,” Sciences humaines, 27 (March, 1997), reprinted by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs (Ministère des Affaires étrangères) in Label France (available at www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/ fr/france_829/label-france_5343/les-themes_5497/sciences-humaines_13695/ histoire-science-politique-relations-internationales_14467/georges-duby-historienesthete-du-moyen-age-no-27-1997_38009.html; accessed November 9, 2009). Cheyette, Frederic L., “Georges Duby’s Mâconnais after fifty years: reading it then and now,” Journal of Medieval History, 28 (2002): 291–317. Duby, Georges, L’Ecriture de l’histoire, edited by Chaldie Duhamel-Amado and Guy Lobrichon (Brussels: DeBoeck-Wesmael, 1996), see pp. 467–87 for Duby’s bibliography to 1993.


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Evergates, Theodore, “The feudal imaginary of Georges Duby,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (3) (1997): 641–60. Medioevo e oltre: Georges Duby e la storiografia del nostro tempo, edited by Daniela Romagnoli (Bologna: CLUEB, 1999), see pp. 215–43 for Duby’s bibliography to 1997. Toubert, Pierre, “Hommage à Georges Duby” (available at www.college-de-france.fr/ media/ins_dis/UPL53272_homDUBY.pdf; accessed August 3, 2004); see also the biographical outline (at www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/ins_dis/georges_ duby.htm; accessed November 9, 2009); and the biographical account on the website of the Académie française (available at www.academie-francaise.fr/Immortels/base/ academiciens/fiche.asp?param=674; accessed November 9, 2009).

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Bernard Faÿ (1893–1978) John L. Harvey

Readers may be curious about an entry on the American specialist Bernard Faÿ in a compendium devoted to such intellectual giants as Marc Bloch and Michel Foucault. Yet Faÿ merits attention in modern historiography due to the significance of his entwinement of two seemingly incompatible aspects of the Enlightenment heritage. The first strand was his prominence in transatlantic historiography. Faÿ was the first European scholar to hold a major chair in American history, which he had at the Collège de France from 1932 until his arrest in 1944 upon the allied liberation of Paris. From World War I to the 1940s, he was arguably the leading international ambassador of the French humanities in the United States, particularly in the areas of history and the modernist movement in literature and the fine arts. This testament to cosmopolitanism, however, was balanced by the fact that Faÿ was an equally important member of the Catholic authoritarian right in historical writing. His ideological journey ultimately led him to become one of the most virulent agents of oppression under the Vichy regime. Faÿ is an especially illuminating figure today because his conservatism and internationalism were mutually reinforcing. His transatlantic career stood out by its appropriation of “modern” ideas from French and especially American debates about historiography and the arts, best revealed by his close association with Gertrude Stein and her circle of modernists between the wars. He sought to destroy the intellectual underpinnings of democratic thought in France from within, by basing his academic accomplishments on international exchange and a critique of positivism in the research on modern culture. A brief biography underscores the iconoclastic life of Bernard Marie Louis Emmanuel Faÿ. Born into a practicing Catholic family of the Parisian upper establishment on April 3, 1893, he passed his agrégation in history and literature at the

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start of the Great War. While serving with the Red Cross at Verdun, his encounter with American officials sparked an interest in the United States. A postwar fellowship brought him to Harvard, where he matriculated with a masters in history and literature in 1920. Returning to Paris, he completed a thèse d’état at the Sorbonne which examined a transatlantic “revolutionary spirit” among the publics of France and America from the mid-eighteenth century to the reign of Napoleon. His university career began with a professorship in modern literature at ClermontFerrand, followed less than five years later with his promotion, at the age of thirty-eight, to the Chair of American Civilization at the Collège de France. During these years, Faÿ produced over a dozen works related to American history or its contemporary affairs. He was his country’s most frequent academic visitor to the United States, and he was regarded as particularly close to the American colony in France of American literary modernists affiliated with Stein and her partner, Alice Toklas. Once he was secure in Paris, Faÿ’s conservatism degenerated into an increasingly reactionary outlook, even as he actually intensified his exchange professorships and his prolific writing on America. By 1936, he was the principal academic commentator on the United States for the pro-fascist weekly Je suis partout, even as he became a periodic columnist for The New York Times, as well as the Parisian secretary for the new France-American Review based at Yale University. Following the defeat of 1940, Marshal Pétain appointed him to direct the Bibliothèque nationale as part of a campaign to gather records for the persecution of Masonic lodges and other “secret societies.” Faÿ’s tenacity culminated in the arrest of some 60,000 Freemasons and the deportation of over a thousand prisoners to Germany, where several hundred died in captivity. A postwar trial led to life imprisonment with hard labor. His incarceration proved shockingly temporary, however, as efforts by Alice Toklas secured an incredible “breakout” from a prison hospital in 1951. Finding refuge in western Switzerland, Faÿ rekindled his career as an historian at a parochial school in Lausanne, followed by a lectureship at the University of Fribourg. Acting as Justice Minister in 1958, François Mitterrand pardoned Faÿ and allowed his return to France, where he devoted the next fifteen years of his life to the publication of his memoirs, biographies of French royalty, and stinging critiques of the ideals of popular sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Eduard Laboulaye had written about the American political experiment. But any institutionalization of advanced research on America was non-existent, aside from occasional courses in comparative law or political economy offered at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques. To the extent that they existed, historical studies were limited to the francophone colonial empire. With the startling growth of American global influence after 1900, however, French authorities began to support transatlantic intellectual missions as a promotion of national culture. Their efforts were often to dampen overseas sympathy for the celebrated traditions of central European learning. Exchange professorships blossomed before World War I, as

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linguists, administrators, scientists, and social theorists returned to Paris filled with admiration for the achievement of American institutions. These scholars translated their role as credible professionals through the celebration of positivist science which formed much of the intellectual backbone of the elites who led the Third Republic. Even as transatlantic internationalism was increasing, nevertheless, the actual study of American history and civilization in Paris remained marginal. Educators were more dedicated to the foreign promotion of a French ideal than to the creation of new chairs or libraries within a competitive research community. The emergence of American studies as a sponsored specialization required an intensified attention to the influence of the United States within the domestic affairs of France, which was transformed by World War I. The demands of American material and political support considerably broadened academic internationalism, even as it deepened the germanophobia of French officials who strove to universalize their legacies of republicanism and the Enlightenment. Liberal-minded university historians in Paris now empathized with American history and culture as a testament to their own democratic mores. In 1917, a temporary lecture course was initiated at the Sorbonne on American culture and government for French students and Americans posted in the region. Upon the end of hostilities, this program was strengthened into a lectureship that supported a new certificat de littérature et civilisation américaines for Americans students. The lectureship languished as a part-time commitment until 1927, when it was expanded into a full chair through the sponsorship of an American shipping magnate. The professor of the chair, Charles Cestre, directed a dozen state theses, including that of Faÿ. But he exerted little impact on developments in the field. These factors were important for the early success of Bernard Faÿ because they facilitated the attraction of American studies from the French academic and intellectual right. This confluence grew partly from the prewar nationalist trends, best reflected in the Comité France-Amérique, established in 1909 under the historianpolitician Gabriel Hanotaux to promote an agenda of French nationalist interests. The secretary of the association, Gabriel Louis-Jaray, would edit the speeches of Marshal Pétain and use his Institut to assist the diplomacy of the Vichy foreign ministry. Firmin Roz, who edited the association’s review, France-Amérique, became a member of the wider Maurrassien groups who embraced Pétain’s cultural program. Some of the most prestigious French scholars with regular ties to America shared such attitudes with varied intensity. Paul Hazard, the eminent scholar of intellectual history at the Collège de France, most personified these ambiguities. Active in prewar circles of Catholic conservatism, he departed his visiting professorship at Columbia in 1941 to accept the rectorship of the University of Paris. Although it was scuttled by German authorities, he associated with key Catholic collaborators until his death in 1944. By this manner, French conservatives considered internationalism fully compatible with the Republic’s foreign


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interests, even as they projected fears that democracy would rob European civilization of its stable order of individualist identity and classical learning. The place of Faÿ in the history of transatlantic exchange reflected this wider combination of critiques of mass democracy with a commitment to open internationalism. Casting his conservatism through the transatlantic recognition of his fellow professionals, Faÿ rose from obscurity to bring American history to the forefront of higher education in Paris. He nurtured sympathy from Americans by portraying himself as a balanced foreign counterweight to populist voices in matters of international affairs. At the same time, he promoted the diminishment of transatlantic differences in order to serve the long-term national interests of France. He first won acceptance in left-leaning academia by crafting his credentials on American topics before influential Parisian associations such as the Société d’histoire moderne. He contributed regularly to mainstream publications ranging from Les Nouvelles littéraires to Le Figaro and the Catholic review Le Correspondant. Before each audience, he contrasted informed understanding against polemics by his “amateur” countrymen about American society or its international policies, which he warned would only isolate France from a powerful transatlantic partner. Positive receptions throughout the United States strengthened his reputation further by emphasizing the degree to which he represented the “authority of experts” so prized by the formal academy. He limited potential political suspicion at home as he stressed that economic or strategic crises could be met only through international cooperation. To be sure, Faÿ also tapped into anti-communist sentiment in America by praising that country’s hostility to European models of socialism. He also echoed previous cultural missions by promoting the character of French civics through the refinements of social elites and Catholic-inspired accomplishments in the classical arts. By expressing his ideological principles through American studies and a defense of national interests abroad, Faÿ was remarkably successful in minimizing attacks in the 1920s from defenders of the Third Republic’s democratic heritage. More than a score of his interwar articles offered a “realist” assessment of American election politics and the nature of tariff, immigration, or banking policies that French commentators needed to address both at home and abroad. State prerogatives were not explicitly pronounced, but he clearly supported the national propaganda effort to counteract transatlantic germanophile interests, particularly where it influenced politics in the American Midwest and/or the educated opinion of university figures. As with his more nationalist counterparts, Faÿ’s hope in strategic cooperation with former wartime allies was tarnished by mistrust of British national interests and the culture of English-speaking Protestantism. As late as 1940, he warned idealists about the strength of anti-interventionist sentiment in America, while stressing that an Atlantic partnership needed to renounce any Wilsonian proselytizing of social egalitarianism, devoid of concrete material commitment.

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Despite a heavy travel and teaching schedule, after publishing his thesis Faÿ produced, from 1926 to 1933, a survey of comparative literature, a study of American contemporary culture, and four full biographies on George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, and the Franklin family. His thesis on the rise and fall of a “revolutionary spirit” in eighteenth-century France and the United States brought him immediate transatlantic prominence. Although the book was careful to avoid an open critique of democratic governance, it developed a concept from the conservative historian Augustin Cochin that linked the destabilizing ideals of modern belief systems to the propagandistic role of a small number of “learned societies” arising from the Enlightenment. At first, the fascination with revolutionary ideals from the halls of Philadelphia and the estates of Virginia seemed only to compliment the cosmopolitan outlook of the Ancien Régime’s “Latin and Catholic” civilization. The thesis then indirectly suggested, along with his succeeding book on Benjamin Franklin, that democratic thought in early American history only precipitated the internal decline of the French nation once it crossed the Atlantic. Faÿ presented Franklin as the modern embodiment of a new “political “religion,” founded upon a politically confident middle class, which transmitted its ideas through a vast network of international Freemasonry. The Pennsylvania polymath became an emblem of “Masonic culture” that slowly corroded the legitimacy of aristocratic leadership and Catholic institutions in prerevolutionary France. And while its nobility had been little influenced by the rather introverted discourse of English political life, as Faÿ’s thesis concluded, the fame of American revolutionary idealists soon established a new “church” of constitutionalism among younger aristocrats in France, such as Marquis de La Fayette and Count Mirabeau. The “spiritual union” of sister revolutions flowered during the heady days after 1789. But democratic idealism and a “deist morality” proved insufficient to weather national dissonance between the young American state and the turbulent environment of France throughout the 1790s. Faÿ employed historical research to justify cultural elites as the bearers of “civilization” who could limit the antagonisms generated by the unsettled masses in domestic and foreign affairs. His domestic role model was Count Arthur Gobineau, whose faith in Church, monarchy, and family served as an important guide for French social norms. For Faÿ, Gobineau was a true “straight arrow” who accepted individual distinction and theological authority over consumerist economies and Darwinist-inspired social progress. Turning to America, he found the perfect hero of aristocratic bearing in the life of George Washington – which also became his principal vehicle for an historical defense of Franco-American friendship. In his popular biography of the first president, Faÿ proposed that the United States owed its success to a cultural elite, represented best by General Washington as both an archetypical “republican aristocrat” and an emblem of Franco-American unity. Washington’s greatness was less his personal character or specific commitment to revolutionary freedoms, than his achievement in a representative government that preserved the essential hierarchical nature of colonial society. His distrust of


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parties, the “military dictatorship” he enjoyed as commanding general, and his commitment to the “feudal” values of his land-owning class all bespoke of “passions” that were admirably “conservative and creative.” Thus the American Revolution, under the pen of Faÿ, became a conservative defense of the independence of a colonial landed aristocracy against the repressive centralizing tendencies of the British parliament. The stable communal structures protected by American federalism would check the “arithmetic logic” of universal suffrage that “reduces all problems to … matters of computation.” Idealizing the corporate state that the Virginian so strongly valued was considered thus to be an alternative to French revolutionary traditions or the present-day “assaults of Bolshevism and socialism.” The heritage of Washington yet endured through the universities that “refined the senses” to mold an “aristocratic type in the midst of a democratic world.” Given his reactionary ideology, how did Faÿ wield a supportive network of academic historians and general publishers in the United States? In general, his American peers warmly embraced most of his interwar works which honored common transatlantic intellectuals interests, sprinkled with a wariness of German economic rivalry. Until the 1930s, American scholars may have found it difficult to decipher his more provocative ideas within studies that, if not entirely original, were measured statements of conservatism. Celebrities such as Gertrude Stein boosted his reputation as a foreign favorite among literary modernists. Responses were most positive among American scholars who saw colonial-era social hierarchies as a nostalgic alternative to uncertainties in modern culture. But Faÿ also disagreed with more strident Parisian observers who reduced America only to a threat of mass consumerism. His view of the United States was mixed, but he rejected assertions of a single cultural or intellectual center. Customs were regional, education was local, and, to the degree their citizens had a “soul,” it remained an abiding faith in individualism, community, and religion that was distrustful of European trends or a powerful secular state. Faÿ also may have benefited from his relative silence about racial-biological theories that seemed to contradict the universality of traditional Catholicism. His disinterest (until 1940) helped to explain his close ties to American Jews, such as Gertrude Stein, and his coolness to National Socialism, even as anti-Semitism existed in the far-right associations that he developed throughout the 1930s. To the degree that his interwar writings expressed anti-Semitism, it occurred only in a few stereotypes of American “Israelites” in control of banking, as acting as government advisers, or as drawn to communism (for activists and newly arrived émigrés). Identification with elitism could even lend sympathies to Jews exiled in the United States as potential allies, who had fled from Nazi racism and were now the potential victims of an American “Red Scare.” This careful academic strategy all came to fruition in his appointment to the Collège de France as the youngest historian to enter that institution in the twentieth century. In March 1930, the Ministry of Public Instruction, under the second cabinet of André Tardieu, directed the Collège de France to establish a new chair

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exclusively for the “social, moral, and political history of the United States.” It would recognize the “immense influence of the economic development in the contemporary world” and its repercussions on “our diplomatic orientation and financial situation” with the United States. Tardieu shared with Faÿ several of the conservative principles, especially a desire to supplant European parliamentary systems with a form of centralized presidential power. Although resistance to the intrusion of American studies into the most esteemed site of research in the humanities seemed to emanate from some of the influential in the faculty, the search proceeded with little competition to Faÿ. He easily won the chair in November 1930, although budgetary delays kept the position unfunded for near two years. As the recognized national leader of American history, by 1932 Faÿ offered nearly the only courses in France on the current socioeconomic crises of civilisation américaine, as well as “the role played by political groups, secret societies, the press and the clergy” in its colonial and revolutionary history. When his attention turned to contemporary American politics, Faÿ posed an American model for French renewal, this time through the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He widely praised the Roosevelt administration as an effective, almost “neo-Bonapartist” example of executive-branch dominance over a pliant Congress, a defeated opposition, and a judiciary isolated from the trappings of mass opinion. Roosevelt was a popular “dictator” who acted decisively to address the psychological crisis caused by the collapse of laissez-faire individualism and the “twilight” of parliamentary-style government. This modern aristocrat prevailed over a stultifying banter of public media and the “political parade” of popular campaigns fed on “trail babble” that reduced a candidate (in a term offered famously by Cochin) to a mere “talking machine.” French interests would certainly receive the best possible ear from Roosevelt himself, “our great resource” of stability and hope, especially during the crisis years preceding 1939. Given this potential, Faÿ urged a reinvigorated propaganda effort to minimize the francophobe aspects of American isolationism and transatlantic machinations of British or German interests. The decade of the 1930s witnessed Faÿ’s intensified interest in the historical “threats” of international Freemasonry and popular sovereignty. As noted, his earlier biographies had alleged the relative significance of Masonic organizations in the rise of American democracy. In 1935, Faÿ produced a major book – his seventh to appear in both French and English – on the connection of international Freemasonry to the origins of the French Revolution. Although lodges were fruitful hosts of “Anglo-Saxon” political inspiration, as their ideas rippled through Masonic networks across the English Channel, they became a contagion fatal to Catholic-Bourbon France. Faÿ affirmed that Masonic organizations in mainland Europe functioned as seductive “societies of thought” that lacked any “higher spirit” to preserve a healthy organic society. Freemasonry became the principal bourgeois institution to tempt the nobility with a “naïve utilitarianism” that led to an “aristocratic suicide” of new social beliefs. Influenced again by the theories


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of Cochin, Faÿ concluded that the lodges manifested a toxic “anti-religion” of atheistic individualism and secular democracy that in recent decades had weakened the “timeless” character of French public life, just as the nation faced German resurgence and domestic political division. Its impersonal “primacy of the mechanism” remained detached from the “soul” of the French character, which Faÿ considered to be rooted in value judgments and an aesthetic imagination. By 1940, he would celebrate the end of a desiccated “rational intelligence” that had robbed the French people of their instinctive capacity to “think, act, and exist” beyond an altar of “le nombre et le calcul” (“quantification and calculation”). Aside from American history and contemporary politics, a third key element to Faÿ’s transatlantic intellectualism was his interest in modernist literature and the visual arts as a protest against the Republic’s own culture of positivist reason. Faÿ supported artistic experimentation, particularly in poetry, American fiction, and French publications such as the Nouvelle revue française. He felt that their emphasis on self-reflection and the individual instinctive spirit would augur the greatest potential for cultural renewal in a society rendered careworn by world war and growing commercialization. An elite of the upper bourgeoisie, whose wealth would immunize their tastes from the pressures of everyday materialism, would foster a coterie of creative genius that knew no national boundaries. They could afford an independence from the modern state, free from its co-option of national servants, defined by a benign and loyal mediocrity. Lacking such genius, a bland, utilitarian empire of “scientific” writing in the humanities functioned more as an official national “prose of the masses … irresistible to the mind and seductive to the flesh.” Faÿ was more concerned in these criticisms with his estimation of the spiritual vitality of prose, rather than an abstract political ideology. Thus he loved Victor Hugo and Dadaism, but despised authors such as Anatole France who conceived of the human subject as a social being, rather than an ethical (Catholic) individual. He was particularly close to Americans such as Stein or Sherwood Anderson, who challenged conventions, and he made continued efforts to expose their works before the French public through essays, translations, and social networking in Paris. Faÿ thus argued, with other right-wing intellectuals, that the purpose of history and literature was to renew a higher national culture disheartened by the decay of French vitality in the interwar era. He was unique, however, in that his campaign was based on the appropriation of American intellectual trends such as the “New History” movement, even if they were considered progressive in the United States. The very youth of the American experience meant that its formal history promised the best grounds for meaningful engagement with the public because its past was recent enough to translate easily into relevant debate about the present. Faÿ borrowed from the interdisciplinary experimentation of scholars such as Frederick J. Turner to critique the celebration of scholarship as narrow record of material empiricism. Influenced especially by the American debate about objectivity in historical study during the 1920s, Faÿ believed that scholarship was an art

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form, shaped by the writer’s imagination and a sensibility for the intangibles of humanistic thought. This “living history” demanded presentist topics of importance to the contemporary public. Instead, French historians were preoccupied with a “scientific history” of the state or society that focused on dry constitutional records and the quantification of life in price history or demography. Driven with this perspective, Faÿ launched a sharp debate in the journal The Romanic Review with Daniel Mornet, the renowned historian of French Enlightenment-era literature at the Sorbonne. Mornet was considered a primary advocate of the “scientific” history of literature that had become equally robust in the universities of English-speaking countries. Mornet had entered into his own short dispute with an American critic over a recent thesis from the Sorbonne, in which he had emphasized the importance of empirical research to the study of comparative literature, in order to yield verifiable results. Faÿ joined the exchange by equating Mornet and his students to mere collectors of “facts,” who used alleged scientism in order to justify the Enlightenment origins of the Third Republic, based on positivist data that their works had managed to gather and to sort. They had sacrificed the irrational elements of societies, to the neglect of individual aesthetic tastes and an “instinct littéraire” that rested in an empathetic sense of value. In a wider sense, Faÿ was reducing “scientific” methodologies to the Enlightenment inheritance of secular reason and the forces of sociopolitical leveling in modern European culture. This liberal ideal had proved insufficient to the needs of the twentieth century, defined by the world war, economic depression, and the radicalization of political factions within the country. Only energies released from instinctive, yet traditional transcendent energies could establish ideals to lead France anew. In all of these interpretations, Faÿ attempted to portray contemporary and historical America in a relatively positive light. As political crises began to dominate French national life, however, his conservatism became clearly more radical. He became a regular contributor to Je suis partout, and his articles appeared in comparable reviews such as La Revue du siècle, Courrier royal, and the Revue universelle. He became an active member in the anti-Masonic Cercle Augustin Cochin and he attended réunions led by Colonel de la Rocque of the Croix de Feu. In 1935, he helped to form Penser pour agir, a covert literary cabal that comprised notables such as Abel Bonnard and General Weygand, to campaign against Freemasonry, Jews, and democratic reforms as encapsulated by the Popular Front. During the Spanish Civil War, as president of the Solidarité d’Occident, he supported Franco in defense of a “western Christian spirit.” By the outbreak of war with Germany, Faÿ had become a leading organizer of the Catholic right’s intellectual assault on the French tradition of revolutionary civics. He participated in a history series, “L’Ame de la Révolution,” which was launched by Cardinal Baudrillart at the Catholic Institute of Paris in response to the republic’s sesquicentennial celebration of the French Revolution in 1939. Faÿ’s first volume, L’Homme: mesure de l’histoire (Man, the Measure of History, 1939), condemned the “new” social and


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economic history posed by such principal democrats as Georges Lefebvre. Returning to his critique of inductive science, Faÿ asserted that scholarship needed to forsake “bloodless” data for a sense of an individualistic past, as illustrated in its most glorious forms of the Ancien Régime. On transatlantic matters, Faÿ was confident enough to explain to the American public that European constitutionalism was an “old machine … not well adapted to French civilization,” and only nurtured political parties that were unable to meet modern-day crises. More strident criticism of American culture emerged more fully in the final months of European peace, when Faÿ used his last transatlantic book, Civilisation américaine, to critique Amerincan culture as the manifestation of capitalist greed and commercial materialism. Curiously, this fuller association with proto-fascist figures in France had relatively little real effect on Faÿ’s relationship with American centers of learning. With the publication of his book on Freemasonry, encomium from some quarters faded among other observers who grew wary of such superficial commentary as “American feudalism.” However, in general, Faÿ remained active in leading centers of public opinion up to the war. His book reviews appeared in leading American journals. Prominent Catholic reviewers welcomed his interpretation of Freemasonry, and long essays in The New York Times continued to call for a revitalized entente between the French and English-speaking people that would contain potential German threats. As late as 1939, Faÿ would receive a new American publication contract for a biography of Lafayette, who he had portrayed in The New York Times as a bygone reminder of liberalism’s blighted tradition in nineteenth-century Europe. Nothing underscored the trust of Faÿ among American scholars more that his position from 1936 as co-secretary of the first journal to be edited between historians of the two countries, the now-forgotten Franco-American Review. Based at Yale and Paris under an international editorial board, the review was founded by cosmopolitan francophiles in America who wanted to promote general research on France. Faÿ likely held the Parisian secretariat as a continuation of his strategy to act as a respected “intellectual ambassador.” He contributed full-length articles and wrote each issue’s “chronique politique.” More revealingly, he enjoyed the notable assistance of such important scholars of the classic liberal-democratic spirit as Philippe Sagnac, who held the Sorbonne history chair on the French Revolution for most of the interwar period. Again, the support crossed a seemingly unbridgeable ideological divide due to the mutual national commitment of a transatlantic rayonnement, especially under the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, before the Munich crisis the Franco-American Review foundered on an insufficient audience, limited to a core of American specialists and French establishment dignitaries. World War II brought about a fundamental change to Faÿ’s career, as he seized on the Débâcle and the “National Revolution” of Pétain to finally execute his ideas about authoritarian rule and Masonic conspiracies. Suspicions of alien subversion that had guided his historiography would now direct his persecution of enemies

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opposed to the “National Revolution.” Appointed administrateur general of the Bibliothèque nationale, he “coordinated” the library staff with expulsions of Jews and socialists, even as he used his influence to attack liberal colleagues in the Collège. Armed with access to state archives, he oversaw the collection of national records on “secret societies” that were then used to expel Freemasons from the civil service. Faÿ became a central coordinator of conferences, publications, and exhibitions devoted to the identification of Freemasonry as the national cause of “moral abasement.” As Head of the Secret Societies Department of the Vichy Intelligence, which included both a library and a museum, Faÿ organized the Documents maçonniques as an evidentiary basis for his campaign against Freemasons throughout the occupied regions. Rotary Clubs were targeted as conduits for the spread of Masonic subversion. Such conspiracies were legitimized to the public through the film Forces occultes and an Exposition maçonnique which he helped to coordinate. Further documentary exchanges with German authorities and other fascist counterparts became an extension of his ideological and personal vendettas. Faÿ eagerly wrote for extremist periodicals such as La Gerbe, despite other tasks that included his collaboration on the regime’s official text for lycée-level history, as well as a study on the grace merited to past monarchs who fell to the fury of popular revolution. Appointed to direct Vichy’s censorship board, the Conseil du livre, he participated closely in anti-Semitic propaganda or exhibitions that could unite international Jewry with Masonic conspiracy and Bolshevist intrigues. Setting aside his earlier ambivalence to anti-Semitism, Faÿ participated in the infamous exposition La Juif et la France, and he was only blocked from becoming education minister in 1942 by a likely German preference for Abel Bonnard. His reputation satisfied German authorities enough for them to support him (unsuccessfully) as “worthy of their confidence” to direct the Vichy General Office for Jewish Affairs established under Admiral Darlan. Without any attempt to minimize his collaborative ideology, the position of Faÿ after 1940 in certain ways remained comparable to his previous ambiguities as a transatlantic historian. As much as he acted as a leader of the Catholic academic right, he carefully avoided sustained criticism of the United States. Aside from his prewar essay on Civilisation américaine, he avoided programmatic statements during Vichy that explicitly opposed the American consumer economy and the state’s international political goals. He continued his close association with modernist avant-gardes, and he protected Gertrude Stein and her “degenerate” modern artwork from German authorities as she remained in the Vichy occupation area. Such inconsistencies were perhaps a key reason for his tumultuous campaigns against competitors, such as Marcel Déat, which he waged through denunciations of links to Masonic orders. Following the end of hostilities, Faÿ’s record compelled a revision of his overseas reputation among American historians, who quickly disclaimed associations from prewar days. Within the Collège, the chair only survived due to the efforts of Lucien Febvre, who was able to preserve the position for his student Marcel


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Giraud by demanding that future transatlantic research must be guided solely within a “scientifically authentic” view of history (an act that was truly ironic for Faÿ). The rise of a younger generation of specialists in American studies during the Fourth Republic would lead to a slow recovery of transatlantic research. Although Faÿ began writing again at a productive pace again by the end of the 1950s, his visibility had vanished to all but the most ardent conservatives in French-speaking corners of Europe. A series of memoirs served up little more than selective nostalgia for the relationships once held with cultural celebrities such as Stein or André Gide. He ignored American history, preferring instead to lionize national figures such as Louis XVI who offered a truer image of an eternal Catholic France. His last statements on contemporary culture, which appeared in the latter half of the 1960s, seemed little more than a dried husk of antiquated reaction. A treatise on public opinion traced the “birth of a monster” as an outcome of modern-day secularism. His former hero, Franklin Roosevelt, was now reduced to a madman who, with Hitler and Stalin, had brought the destruction of Europe’s greatness through crusading ideologies (fascism, communism, and democratic liberalism) that defined their unbound global ambitions. We could conclude that Faÿ is a fascinating figure precisely because his conservatism garnered support from both American benefactors and the institutions of the Third Republic that he fought to destroy. Writing for a relatively marginal field, he projected his critique of modernity through his foreign commentary until his institutional security allowed him to radicalize his positions on history and contemporary affairs. His success as an agent of “higher culture” rested on a positive reception in the United States, which he secured due to strains of general sympathy among American counterparts who were also fearful of modern mass society. Essentially, Faÿ exemplified the well-known observation that the origins of Vichy and German collaboration rested within the center of the Third Republic itself. Aside from demonstrating how this was accomplished within American studies, his case also indicates how this caustic aspect of French intellectual history was equally evident in the construction of transatlantic intellectual bridges, at least until the 1950s. Internationalism could be both politically regressive and embrace disciplinary innovation, independent of any commitment to social progress. These paradoxes were not perhaps unique to Bernard Faÿ. But his career reminds us that the study of historical practice even within modern democracies must be viewed in a transnational context, one which questions uncomfortable elements of our field’s own genealogy.

References and Further Reading Papers Acte de décès, no. 2.349, Dec. 31, 1978, Bernard Marie Louis Emmanuel Fay, le Maire, Tours. Archives nationales, F17 13368, Bibliothèque nationale-Vichy.

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Bernard Faÿ, “On my activities from September 1939 to 1944” (5 pages, 1945), Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University. Papers of André Tardieu, 324/AP/131, Archives nationales, Paris. Papers of the Chair in American Civilization, Carton B-II, “Américanisme,” Archives de Collège de France, Paris. Papers of the Cour de justice du département de la Seine, Z6, dossiers 289 and 290, Archives nationales, Paris. Papers of the Franco-American Review, Sterling Library, Yale University Archives. Papers of Gertrude Stein, Boxes 106 and 136, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Papers of John L. Brown, Part II, Box 2 and 3, Correspondence, Archives and Special Collections, Georgetown University. Papers of Virgil Thomson, Series 29, Folder 29/39/13, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University. Papers of Waldo G. Leland, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Selected Books by Bernard Faÿ Bibliographie critique des ouvrages français relatifs aux Etats-Unis (1770–1800) (Paris: Librairie Edouard Champion, 1925). L’Esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Edouard Champion, 1925); translated as The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927; reprinted 1955, 1966). Panorama de la littérature contemporaine (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1925); reprinted as Littérature française contemporaine (Paris: Kra, 1929); translated as Since Victor Hugo: French Literature of Today (New York: Little, Brown, 1927); and into Japanese as Gendai no Furansu bungaku (Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 1930). Faites vos jeux (Paris: B. Grasset, 1927). Notes on the American Press and the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: The Grolier Club, 1927). The American Experiment (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929). Benjamin Franklin: bourgeois d’Amérique (Paris: 1929); translated as Benjamin Franklin: The Apostle of Modern Times (New York: Little, Brown, 1929). George Washington, gentilhomme (Paris: G. Grasset, 1931); translated as George Washington: Republican Aristocrat (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931). Roosevelt et son Amérique (Paris: Editions Plon, 1933); translated as Roosevelt and his America (New York: Little, Brown, 1933); and into Italian as Roosevelt e la sua America (Rome: Apollon, 1945). The Two Franklins: Fathers of American Democracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933). La Franc-maçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions de Cluny, 1935; reprinted 1942; new edn. 1961, reprinted 1985); translated as Revolution and Freemasonry, 1680–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935). Les Forces de l’Espagne: voyage à Salamanque (Paris: SGIE, 1937). George Washington Exposition (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1937). Civilization américaine (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1939). L’Homme: mesure de l’histoire (Paris: Labergerie, 1939); part of the series “L’Ame de la Révolution”, edited by Cardinal Alfred-Henri Baudrillart, Louis Madelin, Octave Aubry, et al.


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Histoire de France: des origines a nos jours, pt. 1: Des origines à 1610, by Bernard Faÿ, Blanche Maurel, and Jean Equy (Paris: J. de Gigord, 1942). L’Agonie de l’empereur: récit historique (Paris: Sorlot, 1943). Histoire de France: des origines a nos jours, pt. 2: De 1610 à nos jours, by Bernard Faÿ, Blanche Maurel, and Jean Equy (Paris: J. de Gigord, 1943). Notre chemin: “Les plus beaux mots humains sur la vie humaine” (Paris: Editions Balzac, 1943). De la prison de ce monde: journal, prères et pensées 1944–1952 (Bulle, Switzerland: Editions du Sapin vert, 1952; reissued in 1974 by Plon). Louis XVI ou la fin d’un monde (Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1955); translated as Louis XVI, or the End of a World (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967) and Ludwig XVI, oder das Ende einer Welt (Munich: Callwey Verlag, 1956). La Grande Révolution (Paris: Le Livre contemporain, 1959); translated as Die große Revolution in Frankreich, 1715–1815 (Munich: Callwey Verlag, 1960) and La revolución francesa (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veinte, 1967). L’Ecole de l’imprécation ou Les Prophètes catholiques du dernier siècle (1850–1950) (Lyon: Editions Emmanuel Vitte, 1961). L’Aventure coloniale (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1962). Naissance d’un monster: l’opinion publique (Paris: Perrin, 1965). Les Précieux (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1966). La Guerre des trois fous: Hitler, Staline, Roosevelt (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1969); translated as Van Hitler tot Stalin (Kalmthout-Antwerpen: W. Beckers, 1973). L’Eglise de Judas? (Paris: Plon, 1970). Beaumarchais ou les fredaines de Figaro (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1971). Jean-Jacques Rousseau ou le rêve de la vie (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1974). Rivarol et la Révolution (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1978).

Edited Works Gertrude Stein, Autobiographie d’Alice Toklas and Américains d’Amérique: histoire d’une famille américaine, translated with a preface by Bernard Faÿ (Paris: Gallimard, 1933, 1934). Le Général La Lafayette: catalogue de l’exposition, edited with a preface by Bernard Faÿ (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1934), pp. v–xi. Documents maçonniques, edited by Bernard Faÿ and Jean Marques-Rivière (Oct. 1941 – June 1944). Poëmes de Edgar Allen Poe, translated with a preface by Bernard Faÿ (Paris: Mercure de France, 1942).

Articles by Bernard Faÿ Over twenty essays for Je suis partout from 1935 to 1939. Essayist for Les Nouvelles littéraires from 1921 to 1924. Several dozen essays as a columnist on America for Le Figaro from 1927 to 1934. Essays for The New York Times from 1932 to 1938. “D’une doctrine sociale à Harvard,” Le Correspondant, 278 (1920): 128–40. “De l’esprit classique et des Etats-Unis,” Le Correspondant, 281 (1920): 3–25. “On the intellectual situation in France, September, 1920,” The Historical Outlook, 11 (1920): 331–3.

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“Notre situation et notre rôle aux Etats-Unis,” Le Correspondant, 283 (1921): 621–34. “L’opinion américaine et la France,” Le Correspondant, 287 (1922): 577–600. “Les Etats-Unis et leurs jugements sur l’Europe,” Le Correspondant, 294 (1924): 422–48. “Tendencies and groups in France,” Saturday Review of Literature, 1 (1925): 496. “Anatole France et la posterité,” La Nouvelle revue française, 201 (August 21, 1926). “L’empire américain et sa démocratie en 1926, pts. I, II, and III,” Le Correspondant, 303 (1926): 161–84, 351–74, 664–76. “French literature and the peasant,” The Living Age, 331 (1926): 413–16. “French Catholic literature,” The Commonweal, 5 ( Jan. 12, 1927): 264–6. “Catholic America,” The Living Age, 335 (Sept., 1928): 53–6. “Doutes et réflexions sur l’étude de la literature,” The Romanic Review, 19 (1928): 99–114. “Franklin et Mirabeau: collaborateurs,” Revue de littérature compare, 8 (1928): 5–28. “La situation morale du Christianisme aux Etats-Unis I: le Protestantisme,” Le Correspondant, 311 (1928): 481–508. “Vue cavalière de la littérature américaine contemporaine,” La Revue hebdomadaire, 37 (May, 1928): 145–71, 285–302. “The course of French-American friendship,” The Yale Review, 18 (1929): 437–55. “A lucky man,” Saturday Review of Literature, 6 (Oct. 19, 1929): 285–6. “Apologie pour l’autre monde,” Le Correspondant, 319 (1930): 923–8. “Le Comte Arthur Gobineau et la Grèce,” Mélanges d’histoire littéraire générale et comparée offerts à Fernand Baldensperger, vol. 1 (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1930), pp. 291–302. “Revolution as an art,” and “The French nation,” Saturday Review of Literature, 6 (March 22 and June 14, 1930): 850, 1121, 1125. “La situation des études historiques aux Etats-Unis,” Bulletin de la société d’histoire moderne, 6th series, 18/19 (1930): 38–43. “Les débuts de Franklin en France,” and “Le triomphe de Franklin en France,” Revue de Paris, 38 (February 1 and 15, 1931): 577–605, 872–96. “The French mind and the American,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 163 (1931): 706–13. “Le problème du haut enseignement littéraire,” Le Correspondant, 324 (1931): 429–41. “La gloire du Comte Arthur de Gobineau,” Le Correspondant, 329 (Nov. 10, 1932): 400–9. “An invitation to American historians,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 166 (1932): 20–31. “Learned societies in Europe and America in the eighteenth century,” American Historical Review, 37 (1932): 255–66. “Psychologie du peuple amérique,” Revue des deux mondes, 102 (1932): 113–26. “A rose is a rose” and “A Scotchman’s view of our democracy,” Saturday Review of Literature, 10 (Sept. 2 and Oct. 7, 1933): 77–9, 170. “Les légendes du Comte de Gobineau,” La Nouvelle revue française, 245 (1934): 169–78. “Portrait de Sherwood Anderson, Américain,” Revue de Paris, 41 (Oct. 15, 1934): 887–9. “Deux ans d’expérience Roosevelt,” Revue des deux mondes, 105 (1935): 35–56. “French freaks for English readers,” Saturday Review of Literature, 13 (December 7, 1935): 12–13. “La campagne électorale aux Etats-Unis,” Revue des deux mondes, 106 (Dec. 1, 1936): 608–35. “Early party machinery in the United States,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 60 (1936): 375–90. “French news from France,” The Commonweal, 23 ( Jan. 10, 1936): 285–7.


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“Les origins et l’esprit de la Franc-Maçonnerie,” Revue universelle, 46 (1936): 167–82. “The rise and fall of Symbolism,” Saturday Review of Literature, 13 ( Jan. 11, 1936): 3–4, 14–15. “The next peace,” The Commonweal, 28 ( June 10, 1938): 181–2. “L’amérique a vote: les élections de 1938,” Revue des deux mondes, 109 ( Jan. 15, 1939): 364–92. “Un siècle et demi de République démocratique aux Etats-Unis,” Revue universelle, 78 (1939): 257–67. “Etats-Unis devant la guerre,” Revue des deux mondes, 110 ( Jan. 1, 1940): 54–65. “Guerre et paix en amérique,” Revue des deux mondes, 110 (May 1, 1940): 35–54. “Liquidation du dix-huitième siècle,” Occident: revue internationale d’hispanisme, 1 (1940): 25–32. Preface to W. Gueydan de Roussel, A l’aube du racisme: l’homme, spectateur de l’homme (Paris, E. de Boccard, 1940), pp. 9–11. “What’s the matter with Europe?,” The New York Times Magazine (March 17, 1940): 6–7, 15. “Caractère de l’esprit français,” Nouvelle revue française, 330 (1941): 153–69. “La Bibliothèque nationale,” in La France de l’esprit, edited by Henri Massis (Paris: Sequana, 1943), pp. 92–3. “La Sirenne Russe et la jeune Amérique,” Ecrits de Paris (March, 1960).

References Burns, Edward and Dydo, Ulla E. (eds.), The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 410–14. Charle, Christophe and Telkes, Eva (eds.), “Bernard Faÿ,” in Les Professeurs du Collège de France: dictionnaire biographique (1901–1939) (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1988), pp. 68–70. Clément, Alain, “Bernard Faÿ est mort,” Le Monde ( Jan. 4, 1979): 30. Compagnon, Antoine, Le Cas Bernard Faÿ: du Collège de France à l’indignité national (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Gordon, Bertram M., Collaboration in France during the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Halls, William, The Youth of Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Imbs, Bravig, Confessions of Another Young Man (New York: Henkle-Yewdale House, 1936). Malcolm, Janet, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 96–101. Poulain, Martine, Livres pillés, lectures surveillées: les bibliothèques françaises sous l’Occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). Rossignol, Dominique, Vichy et les Francs-Maçons: la liquidation des sociétés secrètes 1940–1944 (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1981). Sabah, Lucien, Une police politique de Vichy: le Service des sociétés secrètes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996). Unattributed, “A French student on Harvard,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 22 (1920): 193–4. Vergez-Chaignon, Bénédicte, Vichy en prison: les épurés à fresnes après la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Will, Barbara, “Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the ruthless flowers of friendship,” Modernism/Modernity, 15 (2008): 647–63.

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Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) Wallace Kirsop

Although Lucien Febvre made a major contribution through his books, articles, and teaching to the study of sixteenth-century Europe, his fundamental roles in French historiography were those of an uncompromising reviewer advocating new approaches and of a tireless organizer of collaborative enterprises within a reformed profession. In particular, his work, alongside Marc Bloch, in founding the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, and then in maintaining the journal through various difficulties for more than two decades, was to have a significant impact on the writing of history in France and elsewhere till the end of the twentieth century. Lucien Paul Victor Febvre was born on July 22, 1878 in Nancy. His father, Paul René Ferdinand Febvre, had been a student – admitted in 1865 – at the elite Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Despite his Franche-Comté origins, Paul Febvre served his whole career as a professeur agrégé at the lycée in Nancy, returning to live in Besançon in his native province only after retirement. Lucien Febvre’s mother, born Edmondine Marie Elisa Arnaud, was from a family of Besançon watchmakers. This strong link to a part of eastern France that was not annexed to the kingdom till 1678 remained precious to the future historian all his life. Febvre was a primary and secondary pupil at his father’s school in Nancy, taking the baccalauréat in August 1895. Twelve months later, he had graduated licencié-ès-lettres from the Faculty of Arts in Nancy. In October 1896, he enrolled as a boarder at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris to join the class preparing for the entrance examination to the Ecole normale supérieure. After two years, he was successful in being admitted to the prestigious “Cloître de la rue d’Ulm” (in Romain Rolland’s phrase), but he decided to defer his entrance for twelve months

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in order to volunteer for military service in an infantry regiment based at Nancy. Thus, he became officially a member of the entering class of 1899. Several of the friendships made there, or previously at Louis-le-Grand, were to be influential in the direction of his ideas and of his research interests. The three years Febvre spent at the rue d’Ulm followed the normal pattern for the period, when the Ecole was still a self-contained institution and not, as happened a little later, part of a reshaped University of Paris which grouped previously autonomous faculties. In 1901, he presented a mémoire on “La Contre-Réforme en Franche-Comté: ses éléments et son histoire de 1567 à 1575” (The CounterReformation in Franche-Comté: its Elements and its History from 1567 to 1575) for the diplôme d’études supérieures in history. He became an agrégé d’histoire et de géographie, the then traditional combination of subjects, on September 3, 1902, and was appointed to teach in the following school year at the lycée in Bar-le-Duc, again in the east of the country. What Febvre absorbed during his Parisian apprentice period was doubly important. On the one hand, he was plunged into the political ferment associated with the Dreyfus case and with one of the great crises of the Third Republic. Staff and students of the Ecole normale supérieure were particularly active in the proDreyfus camp, although Febvre has to be seen as a sympathizer rather than as a participant. On the other hand, he was exposed to the spirit of innovation and even revolt characteristic of a scholarly generation that took for granted the achievements of those who, in the late 1860s and in the 1870s, had brought German research methods and philological rigor to French universities. These were the years of the growing ascendancy in sociology of Emile Durkheim and – more relevant to Febvre – of Paul Vidal de la Blache in geography. The broad spread of the curriculum for the entrance examination to the Ecole meant that students had a solid general culture and, as a consequence, the possibility of choosing various special fields. Febvre seems to have hesitated for some time about his vocation. In a lecture given in 1941 and printed in Combats pour l’histoire (Fights for History, 1953), he reports that he was so disgusted with two years of the history syllabus at Louisle-Grand that he switched to literature when he began his studies at the rue d’Ulm in 1899. He retained all his life an invincible dislike for the work and for the character of Emile Bourgeois, one of his teachers there. Yet, Gabriel Monod, the founder of the Revue historique in 1876, and Vidal de la Blache managed to win him back to history and geography. Marc Bloch’s father, Gustave, who was the lecturer in ancient history, also appears to have helped in the process of reconciliation. Art history was a tempting option, but, as Febvre said in some introductory remarks at a conference in June 1956: “c’est seulement l’insuffisance de ma vue qui m’a détourné de cette spécialisation” (“it was only the defects of my sight that turned me away from that specialization”). In this discreet way, he signaled the fact that he was color-blind. By training and by temperament he was obviously well prepared for interdisciplinary investigations.

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The stay at Bar-le-Duc, where Febvre had his Paris friend Henri Wallon, the future prominent psychologist, as colleague, was brief. During this first year of secondary teaching there was at least one opportunity for extracurricular work. A lecture on February 15, 1903 to the local branch of the Ligue française de l’enseignement on “Edgar Quinet” was published in a regional newspaper and represented effectively Febvre’s anti-clerical stance. Unlike most of his contemporaries who, if they had the ambition to enter university teaching, were obliged to labor at their dissertations in the spare time left by their school-teaching duties, Febvre was one of the privileged few to receive a residential scholarship at the Fondation Thiers in Paris. Thus, for three years from October 1903, he was free to pursue his research and to extend his contacts in scholarly and intellectual circles. A further year of leave in 1906–7 reinforced the advantage and established him as someone ready to publish regularly. It was in this long hiatus in his teaching career that Febvre met, and became a collaborator of, Henri Berr, the founder-editor of the Revue de synthèse historique, which had been launched in 1900. None of their correspondence from before 1911 survives, so it has to be surmised that Berr had somehow read about Febvre’s interest in the history of Franche-Comté and decided to invite the younger man to contribute to a series of bibliographical essays on French regions published between 1903 and 1913 by leading historians. “La Franche-Comté” duly appeared in Berr’s journal in three separate installments in 1905 before being reissued the same year as La Franche-Comté. In seventy-two pages, Febvre, in conformity with Berr’s program and with his own profound inclinations, set out what little had been accomplished and how much remained to be done to produce a satisfactory historical account of a province originally attached to the Duchy of Burgundy and therefore caught up in the tussles between the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire. The bibliographical element is extensive, but deliberately not exhaustive. What is essential is the sense of a grand research project being defined on the basis of the existing literature and of the mass of documentary sources that remain to be exploited. Due attention is given to geographical, economic, social, and religious questions as well as complex political ones, and the call for synthesis, for something other than myopic treatments of local minutiae, is clear. With the help and support of Berr, Febvre was able to formulate aims for scholarly inquiry that he would not have disavowed half a century later. The assurance, the devouring curiosity, and even the capacity for lapidary judgments that were the marks of the mature Febvre all appeared in this first monograph. In a letter to Berr of November 20, 1950, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of what had become the Revue de synthèse, Febvre referred to “ce cheval de Troie de l’Histoire nouvelle que fut la Revue de synthèse historique” (“this Trojan Horse that the Revue de synthèse historique represented for the New History”). The statement is simple and accurate. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Berr’s journal, his Centre de Synthèse, and the monograph series, chiefly “L’Evolution de l’humanité,” that he developed were the vehicle and the meeting


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place for all those who sought to widen the scope of historical studies, in particular through links to the social sciences. The adherence and the participation of a committed and energetic enthusiast like Febvre could almost be taken for granted. In the decade that followed 1905 he wrote many articles and reviews for the Revue de synthèse historique, some in his chosen field of sixteenth-century Franche-Comté and its religious situation between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, others on linguistic geography, on regional studies in general, and on the economic consequences of the Revolution of 1789. A lifelong penchant for commentary, sometimes trenchant and usually designed to encourage innovative work, was cultivated through his early, wide-ranging reviewing on Berr’s behalf. In October 1907, Febvre returned to secondary teaching, this time at the lycée in Besançon, a more congenial location and one closer to the archives and library collections he needed. That city’s Faculty of Arts also called him to some supplementary teaching of geography. In addition, he found sufficient leisure to take part in politics to a limited extent. Between March 1907 and May 1909, he wrote several articles for Le Socialiste comtois, the regional weekly of the Socialist Party. A certain devotion to Proudhon was quite prominent in his intellectual heritage, but it would be a mistake to imagine that this political choice deflected him from his main mission in the sphere of education and research. At the end of 1911 Febvre was ready to defend publicly the two theses required for the French doctorat d’Etat, the prerequisite for appointment to a chair in a university. The major work, Philippe II et la Franche-Comté: la crise de 1567, ses origines et ses conséquences, étude d’histoire politique, religieuse et sociale (1911 for the printed dissertation; 1912 for the trade version: Philip II and Franche-Comté: The 1567 Crisis, its Origins and Consequences, a Study of Political, Religious and Social History), has been often neglected by non-specialists and yet, as George Huppert shrewdly pointed out in 1997, it is the “single work of original scholarship, which embodies, more effectively than any other, the qualities venerated by those who admire the Annales kind of history.” The reasons for this assessment are worth exploring. The title, which gives primacy to the ruler and to political history, seems traditional. The dedication to his “maître” Gabriel Monod and to his friend Henri Wallon is Febvre’s only concession to the custom, strong even then, of recording acknowledgments in detail. In fact, a clear statement of the author’s sources of inspiration would have shown how much he had departed from the narrow orthodoxy of the late nineteenth century. Christian Pfister’s positive review in the Revue historique in 1912 notes objections that could be made by a devotee of purely narrative history and suggests that a more accurate title would have been “Tableau politique, social et religieux de la Franche-Comté au XVIe siècle” (A Political, Social and Religious Description of Franche-Comté in the Sixteenth Century). It is no accident that Febvre’s book begins with a forty-page chapter on the geography of his region. The school of Vidal de la Blache and its taste for massive provincial monographs, including one by Febvre’s friend Jules Sion on the peasants

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of eastern Normandy –reviewed by him in the Revue de synthèse historique in 1909 – were the critical influences. One of Pfister’s criticisms of the long section of the thesis in which the economic, social, and cultural roles of the nobility and the bourgeoisie are analyzed and contrasted concerns the comparative absence of the peasantry and of the clergy. It is obvious, however, that what is being presented, a little by stealth, is a new way of tackling historical problems. The reference in the preface to Michelet is a passing admission of Febvre’s spiritual heritage. The very long list of archival, manuscript, and printed sources is thoroughly businesslike and to the point, with few hints of the reading behind the author’s wider reflections on the discipline. Even without the later obligatory chapter on demographic factors, Febvre’s Franche-Comté offers a pattern for the regional studies that were to be produced by French historians during several decades after 1912. In line with the convention followed during much of the twentieth century, Febvre’s thèse secondaire was documentary in character. Notes et documents sur la Réforme et l’Inquisition en Franche-Comté: extraits des archives du Parlement de Dole (1911 for the printed dissertation; 1912 for the trade version: Notes and Documents on the Reformation and the Inquisition in Franche-Comté: Extracts from the Archives of the Parlement de Dole) concentrates on one corpus and on one subject, the central one of religious conflict and of its control in Franche-Comté under the Habsburgs. Curiously, it appears to have been more widely noticed in professional journals than the thèse principale itself. It certainly established Febvre’s reputation as a specialist in sixteenth-century religious history along with articles he had published in the Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français and the Revue historique between 1907 and 1911. This field was to continue to feature in his work during the next forty years. On the other hand, Febvre’s last considerable contribution on Franche-Comté came immediately after the theses. Histoire de Franche-Comté (History of FrancheComté, 1912) appeared in a series on old French provinces in which authors were allowed some latitude in writing for a wider public. Predictably, there is an emphasis on geographical themes and an open expression of Febvre’s belief in the distinctive ethnic characteristics of the inhabitants throughout their history. It is this profound nature of the population and of its heritage that must be sought, he claims, in preference to recitals of political events. A revised edition in 1922 and a reprint in 1932 kept the book alive after World War I. After the soutenance of the theses on November 22, 1911, with Monod, Pfister, and Gustave Bloch amongst others on the examining panel, and the award of a mention très honorable (magna cum laude), Febvre was ready to embark on the next phase of his career. In March 1912, he was appointed to the University of Dijon to take charge of a course on the history of Burgundy and of Burgundian art. Two years later, he became a tenured professor in the same Faculty of Arts, having lived through, as is evident from his correspondence with Berr, some of the problems of intrigues and of personal and political alignments attendant on elections to academic posts in the French system.


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Free of the burden of thesis preparation, Febvre began to extend his range. He gave open talks on his research to various audiences, published his Dijon inaugural lecture on the Valois Dukes of Burgundy, and resumed active collaboration with the Revue de synthèse historique, as well as sending copy to other historical journals. In October 1911, he had already asked Berr for books to review on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art as part of an effort to keep in touch with an area of special interest. For his part, Berr was keen to draw Febvre into his new monograph series “L’Evolution de l’humanité” then being planned. By January 1914, Febvre was at work on a geographical monograph that eventually came out eight years late in the 1920s. He was, however, already complaining about some of the dental and medical problems (respiratory-tract infections, sinusitis, even depression) that were to become something of a leitmotif in later letters. The outbreak of World War I put an end to teaching and research for four and a half years. Febvre was called up on August 5, 1914 in the general mobilization as a sergeant in an infantry regiment. He was demobilized on February 7, 1919 with the rank of captain in command of a machine-gun company, having served continuously except for several months in 1915–16 when he was recovering in hospital following an accident. Apart from French and Belgian military decorations, he was awarded the Legion of Honor for his military exploits. His sole letter from the front to Berr, dated November 5, 1917, records the inevitable difficulties of intellectual life in war, but it does recall an old dream of a history of the French bourgeoisie and predict the coming importance and relevance of social history. From the army, Febvre returned to Dijon, but, with the support of Pfister, he was called in October 1919 to the new Faculty at Strasbourg, which was French once again after a half-century of Prussian interregnum. He was to remain there till he was elected to a chair devoted to the history of modern civilization at the Collège de France in Paris in February 1933. Initially, Strasbourg, where Febvre was surrounded by lively and stimulating colleagues, notably Marc Bloch, was an agreeable change from his earlier post. Yet, as early as the end of March 1923, he was confessing to Berr that he needed to go elsewhere. In career terms, the next decade was taken up with attempts to be appointed to the Sorbonne, to the Collège de France, and to the Fourth Section – Philological and Historical Sciences – of the Ecole pratique des hautes études, founded by Victor Duruy at the end of the Second Empire to give a more German cast to French research training. The published correspondence of Febvre with Berr, and from 1928 with Marc Bloch, is full of news and gossip about academic elections and appointments. In late 1927, Febvre even envisaged, in a letter to Berr, following the example of many other professors in provincial universities and residing in Paris. Ultimately, however, he did not move till 1933. There were in any case new encumbrances and responsibilities. Febvre married on September 2, 1921 Suzanne Alice Dognon (1897–1985), who was herself a sévrienne – that is, a product of the Ecole normale supérieure de jeunes filles, then at Sèvres outside Paris – and an agrégée d’histoire. She was in Strasbourg as assistant

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to Febvre’s geographer colleague Henri Baulig and consequently well suited to be an intellectual and scholarly helpmate to her much older husband. After an autumn honeymoon in Italy, the couple settled down in an apartment near the university library and not far from Marc Bloch. Three children were born to the union: Henri in 1922, Lucile in 1924, and Paulette in 1927. Life for Febvre right up to World War II and even beyond was constrained by all the rhythms of domesticity: schooling, illnesses, holidays (essentially in Franche-Comté, but also with his wife’s family in Châteaudun). Summer escapes from Strasbourg, and even from Paris later on, were an unquestioned part of the routine of university teachers and researchers. From his position in Strasbourg Febvre was better able to participate in the international community of historians. Throughout the 1920s he went regularly to Mainz in the French-occupied Rhineland to give lectures in the Center for Germanic Studies established there by his own faculty. In 1924 and in 1929, at the invitation of Henri Pirenne, he lectured at the University of Ghent. On the second occasion, he also spoke in Brussels: six performances in as many days. These first ventures outside France were an opportunity to proselytize on behalf of his conception of a reform of historical studies. The link with Pirenne was critical in the 1920s, although it did not achieve the new international journal of economic and social history for which Febvre and Bloch hoped. Their letters were carefully preserved by the Belgian, and in their published form they give a fascinating glimpse of the problems faced in intellectual cooperation after the rift of 1914–18 and with the legacy of suspicion toward German universities accused of undue complicity with the fallen imperial regime. In the end, what is demonstrated, perhaps, is that individual effort in one country is more likely to succeed, a lesson Febvre and Bloch came to heed after some years. In the meantime, the communication with the senior historian from Ghent was fruitful in several respects, especially when the correspondents had moved from deference to uninhibited exchanges about research projects. For Febvre, projects sometimes remained unrealized dreams or, at the very least, promises for a distant future. Apart from his demanding teaching and administrative duties at Strasbourg, he undertook some public lecturing outside – for example, in Mulhouse in 1924, a series printed in the Revue des cours et conférences the following year and given some currency in both French and English in the 1960s and 1970s – and from 1925 to 1929 he was examiner in history for prospective entrants to the Ecole normale supérieure. It is hardly astonishing that archival research more or less disappeared from his timetable. A letter of September 5, 1923 to Pirenne speaks of “une véritable ‘cure’ d’archives” (a real archival “treatment”) in Lille, but the planned study of the gestation of Europe at the time of Margaret of Austria did not come to fruition. Despite delays and apparent setbacks, Febvre’s first Strasbourg decade was far from unproductive. He continued to do regular reviews for the Revue de synthèse historique, while contributing as well to the Revue historique, the Revue critique


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d’histoire et de littérature, and the Revue d’histoire moderne. In other words, his role as commentator on, and critic of, historical production was no less important. As the correspondence with Berr indicates, he was still a close confidant and very much concerned with the progress of “L’Evolution de l’humanité.” Writing to Pirenne on January 7, 1930, he asserts his strong preference for the Berr formula of volumes entrusted to single authors over the usual multi-author collaborative works that had the favor of publishers. As a result, his old and new commitments were of this kind. Teaching assignments were suggesting fresh tasks taken up in this and later decades. In 1922, the long-planned monograph La Terre et l’évolution humaine: introduction géographique à l’histoire (translated as A Geographical Introduction to History, 1925) finally appeared. A characteristically long preface by Berr and the author’s own acknowledgments recognize that the book was ten years in the making and that Lionel Bataillon, as is noted on the title-page, assisted in its preparation. Febvre’s final chapter makes it clear that his long and carefully documented essay “n’est pas un manuel, ni un tableau d’ensemble: une discussion critique simplement, c’est-à-dire une conclusion permanente” (“is not a manual or an overall description, but simply a critical discussion, i.e. an ongoing conclusion”). There may be a deftly structured argument, but the volume is meant to be open-ended, an invitation to continuing reflection and research. It is not an accident that the last word is “travailler” (work). For the first time, Febvre produced a monograph, a substantial one, that could be described as one of his own critical notices writ large. It was a vein he would go on exploiting till the end of his career. The correspondence with Berr reveals some of the ways in which La Terre et l’évolution humaine changed during the decade of its gestation. If there is one target of the argument against geographical determinism, against the notion that the environment limits and fixes human behavior, it is the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, but one has to beware of a reductionist presentation of Febvre’s readings and discussions, which range widely over geography itself, history, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. The one overt allegiance is to the human geography of Vidal de la Blache. The parallel with history as Febvre conceived of it hardly needs to be stressed. Investigations have to be pursued on many fronts. Febvre’s other monograph of the 1920s was commissioned originally by a quite different publisher. It was announced to Berr on July 31, 1925 as something small to be done quickly and for amusement, in fact as a way of clearing the ground for a big volume on sixteenth-century religious history promised to “L’Evolution de l’humanité” some time before. The seeds lay in Febvre’s teaching. In December 1922, he told Berr he was lecturing in Mainz on sixteenth-century Germany and that this had obliged him to dive into “l’océan Luther.” He added: “Quel métier, que d’enseigner toujours ce qu’on ne sait qu’à moitié” (“What a profession, to be always teaching what one only half knows.”) In the interval, he had made good some of his deficiencies, and Un destin: Martin Luther (translated as Martin Luther: A Destiny, 1929) was delivered in time for it to be issued in 1928.

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In Febvre’s lifetime, his essay on Luther, especially the earlier part of the Reformer’s career, was the only one of his works on the sixteenth century to be known to readers of English. Although the book is not slight and has some significant points to make, it is not intended for experts. The resources of Strasbourg’s university library, built up by the German state after 1871 and well maintained by the French, probably made it easier to do the necessary research on critical editions and secondary literature in the city for which Febvre’s distaste was growing than anywhere else in France. Writing as an historian, and not as a theologian, an apologist, or a detractor, the author’s purpose was to “comprendre, et … faire comprendre” (“to understand, and to promote understanding.”) So, even if his is a “travail de vulgarisation, de réflexion aussi” (“work of popularization, and also of reflection”), it seeks to be as nuanced as is possible in a small compass. Some of the earlier literature is reviewed, and sectarian criticisms are rejected where they are perceived as ahistorical or anachronistic. In short, for Febvre, his picture of Luther is an important first step on the way to understanding the religious climate of the Reformation period in all its complexity. At the age of fifty, Febvre became, after nearly a decade of hesitation and false starts, the co-editor of a journal with national and even international ambitions. It certainly did not mark the end of his other work or of his private research. In 1929, the Revue historique carried one of Febvre’s most influential articles, on the origins and causes of the Reformation, particularly in France. Notwithstanding such evidence of other activities, it is enough to consult the bibliographical record: 245 items up to the end of 1928 against 771 in the next ten years. Most of these numbers are attached to brief reviews or critical notices in the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. The labor was shared with Bloch, but Febvre’s commitment to the educative function of reviewing in a profession in need of renovation was unwavering. Unusually for an academic journal, there is a good deal of documentation on the inner workings of the editorial process. The essentials are in the correspondence with Marc Bloch from early 1928 till 1944, with notable gaps, some of which are not explained. Although the two directors lived and worked close to each other in Strasbourg, they traveled, especially during the long summer vacations, and letters – long, frank ones – became the means of communication. It is hardly surprising that publication of the exchanges was delayed till the 1990s and the death of most of the interested third parties. The private opinions of editors and of their assistants on what they prepare for printing are rarely tactful. Febvre had a low threshold of tolerance of stupidity, an intellectual attribute he defined with a certain liberality. At times he was tender neither for his collaborators, such as the long-serving Paul Leuillot, who dutifully moved from Strasbourg to Paris, nor for his direct interlocutors. Beyond clashes of temperament or of ideas, the letters are informative on a variety of topics: on negotiations with publishers sometimes inclined to interfere, on the difficulties of obtaining funding, on efforts to drum up subscriptions, on the constant search for reliable, well-informed contributors


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sympathetic to the Annales approach. The material is richest for the first decade, before the Febvre–Bloch partnership encountered a series of major difficulties. In the establishment years of the Annales it seems to have been easier to cope with interruptions. Febvre and his wife had a serious automobile accident in October 1930, but it was still possible to write to Bloch in Strasbourg from a convalescent retreat near Marseilles. Competing designs on posts in Paris do not appear to have affected cooperation in any appreciable fashion. It would be rash, however, to forget that two men with strong personalities and views were evolving in somewhat different, but partly complementary, ways and seeking preferment in the same institutions in the capital. The last project of Febvre to have an evident Strasbourg character was his collaboration with his old friend Albert Demangeon on a volume originally published to celebrate the jubilee of the Société générale alsacienne de banque in 1931. What was issued as Le Rhin: problèmes d’histoire et d’économie (The Rhine: Historical and Economic Problems) was put into a cheaper form in the 1935 Paris revised edition. Febvre was responsible for the historical part, whereas the geographer Demangeon tackled the economic aspect. The emphasis was put on dialogue between two sister disciplines and on outlining “une histoire humaine du Rhin vivant” (“a human history of the living Rhine”). Recent political problems could not be absent from the discussion in an Alsace returned to France after World War I, but a serious effort was made to achieve some serenity and to envisage a context stretching over centuries if not millennia. The result is a rich evocation of the civilizations that flourished along and around the great river from Switzerland to the Netherlands. The bibliographical references appended to the 1935 edition demonstrate once again that this writing was done drawing on libraries with solid resources in French- and German-language works. Once Febvre had arrived in Paris, three years before Bloch was elected to the Chair of Economic History at the Sorbonne in 1936, some aspects of his life and activities changed quite radically. His duties at the Collège de France until his official retirement after the 1948–9 academic year were limited to giving two lectures a week based on his current research. Thus, after having a small number of graduate students in Strasbourg, which suffered, like all provincial universities, from competition with the capital, he was more or less cut off from this form of influence on the rising generation of historians. In part, he could compensate for this lack by his prestige as editor of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale and by personal friendships such as the one he began in 1937 with the rising star Fernand Braudel. It was only after World War II that he was to manage to create other structures for the research training of modernists. Inevitably in a major Paris institution, he was more sought after for committees and public functions at a national level concerned with various facets of historical research. Invitations to lecture in foreign countries arrived more frequently: Switzerland in 1934 and 1940; Czechoslovakia and Austria in 1935; Argentina in 1937. Above all, he took advantage of his new situation to assume the role of a

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“cultural entrepreneur” in Bertrand Müller’s phrase. In other contexts, one could talk of a cultural commissar or a cultural evangelist. The Annales themselves were an important element of this program. Beyond them lay Berr’s Centre de synthèse, in which Febvre was more than ever active in the early 1930s. He was on the management committee of the reshaped Revue de synthèse and participated regularly in the Centre’s annual “weeks” devoted to designated topics. At the first, in 1930, he had contributed a substantial study, later published, of the semantic field of the word “civilization.” Overall, however, he wrote much less for the Revue de synthèse because of his other commitments. The projected volumes for “L’Evolution de l’humanité” remained unfinished. Then, as was set out in a series of letters beginning October 15, 1936, there was a crisis in his relations with Berr because he perceived the latter’s popularizing journal Science with its subtitle L’Encyclopédie annuelle as unfair competition for the Encyclopédie française, with which he was heavily involved. The apparent slight was vigorously condemned. A compromise was found, and a complete rupture was avoided, no doubt because the younger man’s brutal plain-speaking was tempered with real affection and respect. The rivalry in entrepreneurship created, nonetheless, a problem that could not be solved without superior diplomatic skills. When Febvre was first approached by the Minister of National Education, Anatole de Monzie, in late 1932 about the proposed Encyclopédie française, his reactions as expressed to Marc Bloch were ones of amused skepticism. Yet, he was soon enough thoroughly caught up in an enterprise that was quite compatible with his position in Paris. The work itself, produced on both sides of World War II, has been overshadowed by that circumstance and by the rapid changes in the modes available for the popularization of knowledge. Febvre’s work as designer, coordinator, and organizer was consistent with his views and ambitions, so that the plan and its execution are a good guide to his thinking when he was at the height of his powers in the late 1930s. Even if what he wrote from time to time in some of the volumes is of limited scope, its significance should not be underestimated. The Encyclopédie française was the keystone of his entrepreneurial structure, but it was destined to be remembered much less than the Annales. Febvre’s extra responsibilities required more material help, something that was in short supply in the decade of the Great Depression. On October 29, 1934, he had written at length to Henri Berr to complain of the lack of any amanuensis for his work at the Centre de synthèse. It was just at this time – between 1934 and 1937 – that he had recourse to the paid research assistance of the young Austrian historian Lucie Varga, the first woman to collaborate regularly with the Annales, which for decades seemed on the whole content with the rather patriarchal style of the period. The Varga experiment ended quite abruptly in the spring of 1937, at the insistence, it is claimed, of Suzanne Febvre. The surviving documents allow no more than guesses about the precise nature of the relationship between Febvre and his assistant. After her departure and at least until 1945, he was thrown back on the traditional expedients that were so often the cause of the delayed


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appearance of journal numbers and of the late delivery of manuscripts to publishers, a constant refrain in the correspondence. The effort of maintaining a journal in one’s spare time is never inconsiderable even when it is the uncontested and perfectly conventional organ of a society or of a tame profession. As soon as it is a matter of being challenging and innovative, or faithful to a program, the difficulties and the risks of fatigue increase. In 1938, Febvre and Bloch found themselves obliged to confront their different approaches, the one more adventurous and intent on ideas, the other more professional and cautious about the use of evidence. During that same year, there was a break with the original publisher, Armand Colin, and the two editors took over ownership of what was to become Annales d’histoire sociale from the beginning of 1939. However sharp their conflicts about editorial policy had been, they were as nothing compared with those expressed in private letters in the traumatic years of World War II. By the time the war broke out Febvre was sixty-one, so he was spared the depressing military experiences that were Marc Bloch’s lot. Not affected by Vichy’s racial laws as his co-editor and Henri Berr were, Febvre was able to contemplate continued publication of Annales, whose archives had been prudently shifted to the Unoccupied Zone. That this continuation involved removing all overt references to Bloch’s role was the sticking point. In the end, Febvre prevailed in the fierce argument, which modern readers can follow, but which was hidden from view at the time. With hindsight, one can blame Febvre’s acceptance of some compromise with the regime, but it is necessary to understand the ferocity of his attachment to the periodical that was the very center of his scholarly existence. As had happened after previous disputes, relatively harmonious and cordial relations continued with Bloch until the latter’s imprisonment and summary execution in 1944. Indeed, under the pseudonym “Fougères,” Bloch continued to write for the provisional Mélanges d’histoire sociale, where Febvre’s signature appeared as often as in the journal’s previous incarnations. The various disruptions due to the war did not break the cycle of Febvre’s lectures at the Collège de France. With much less to do for the Encyclopédie française and for Berr, he had a little more freedom than in his first Paris years. In 1943, he became a directeur d’études (director of studies) in the Fifth Section – Religious Sciences – of the Ecole pratique des hautes études to teach the history of the Reformation and of Protestantism. As was, and is, frequently the case in France, this new function was assumed in addition to, not instead of, his existing ones. Paradoxically, however, the major benefit derived from four troubled years was the opportunity to advance writing projects that had been hanging fire for decades. The thrust of Febvre’s doctoral research, the reviewing he had been doing since before World War I, the Luther book, the content of courses given in Strasbourg and Paris, as well as of occasional lectures, all of these concerns and activities fed into Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais (1942; translated

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as The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, 1982). The volume fulfilled an ancient promise to Berr for the “Evolution de l’humanité” series and came with a long preface by the architect of that other and older encyclopedia in monograph form. Febvre exploited to the full the freedom allowed by Berr, with the result that his study is anything but a conventional exposition of its topic. The hostility of some critics in the 1940s and the doubts of some readers since then are therefore understandable. More obviously than any of Febvre’s other book-length contributions, Le Problème de l’incroyance displays the strengths and the risk-taking strategies of his method. During the decades after the project was first mooted, its outline and shape kept changing in ways that were regularly reported to Berr. In its final redaction, it is another example of Febvre’s practice of critical reviewing on a grand scale: first the objections expressed with biting verve, then the positive suggestions based on intimate knowledge of the period and of the literature. People have to be taught to overcome anachronism and to develop understanding. It is not enough to denounce errors. Imagination has to be deployed to offer new interpretations. Febvre begins with what he sees as a misreading by Rabelais’s editor, Abel Lefranc, of the supposed atheism of the author of Pantagruel. The whole of the first part of Le Problème de l’incroyance is a demolition of the notion that Rabelais could be irreligious and a detailed discussion of that author’s complex relationship to the troubled Christianity of his age. There is analysis of key texts from the Rabelaisian canon and a broad sweep through the writings of contemporaries whose compositions in neo-Latin exhibited their patronage-seeking flatteries and their name-calling jealousies and spite, in both cases producing documents of dubious reliability. Febvre emphasizes, against polemical extracts that can easily be misunderstood, the importance of the Erasmian background of the Gargantua– Pantagruel books. Comprehension comes from attempts to see the wider picture. The second part of Febvre’s argument, “Les limites de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle” (“The limits of unbelief in the sixteenth century”), puts the case in a little more than a hundred pages for the essential otherness of the period, for the effective impossibility of unbelief. The thesis, seductively written with a wealth of concrete examples and evocations, was much debated and contradicted. To the extent that Febvre believed good history-writing meant defining problems and proposing reasoned but open-ended solutions to them, Le Problème de l’incroyance satisfied his criteria. To provoke thought and to stimulate new research, these were ambitions that were certainly realized in this most notorious of all his books. There was a context for Febvre’s concern with “mental tools” and “collective psychology” or “mentalities” that probably still requires further investigation. These themes were central in his later work, whereas Bloch moved away from them after Les Rois thaumaturges (1924; The Royal Touch, 1973). If one remembers that Febvre’s principal guides in the world of psychology were his normalien friends Henri Wallon and Charles Blondel and that he was a pre-Freudian, it is


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appropriate to look closely at the development of the subject round 1900 and to read some long-forgotten theorists. After producing a long article in the Revue du XVIe siècle of 1930 on the publication of Bonaventure des Périers’ Cymbalum mundi, and lecturing on this text at the Collège de France in 1936–7, Febvre returned to it in 1942 in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance. An extraordinarily long piece was also issued in an offprint of monograph size by the house of Eugénie Droz, then still located in Paris. As the bibliographical appendix makes clear, this little book was designed as a complement to Le Problème de l’incroyance. Given the peremptoriness of Febvre’s argument about unbelief, it was important for him to tackle a famous heterodox book of his favorite century. Apart from insisting on the dearth of solid evidence about the man and his career – a common problem for students of writers of the French Renaissance – he takes time to situate the Cymbalum mundi in the complex reforming and spiritual climate of the 1530s. The mechanical interpretations of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are cleared away in order to grasp all the ambivalence and polyvalency that are so often the nature of the literary creations of the age of Rabelais. Even in matters of religion and philosophy the unorthodox choose the same camouflaging devices and have to be read with similar precautions. Febvre emphasizes, above all, the extent to which des Périers is a precursor tantalized by the ideas of Celsus, the ones condemned or rebutted in Origen’s Contra Celsum. The Cymbalum mundi becomes, in what has to be called a Febvrian conceit, an “Introduction à la Vie libertine” (“introduction to freethinking life”). This was not the last word in analyzing Bonaventure des Périers, but in subsequent decades the debate had to take due account of some of the ground rules – on sixteenth-century disputation and spiritual quests – laid down by Febvre. The third book in the trilogy of studies of Renaissance religion was Autour de l’Heptaméron: amour sacré, amour profane (Around the Heptaméron: Sacred Love, Profane Love, 1944), published this time by the literary and trade firm of Gallimard. Febvre had spoken at the Collège de France in 1940–1 on “Les Origines morales du monde moderne: Marguerite de Navarre et les origines de l’Heptaméron” (The Moral Origins of the Modern World: Marguerite de Navarre and the Origins of the Heptaméron). The more prosaic lecture title indicates better, perhaps, what he was striving to achieve in an historical rather than literary study. The great and enigmatic literary figures he treats are presented as the historian’s witnesses. None is more mysterious, more difficult to fit into twentiethcentury simple categories than the sister of François I, the Queen of Navarre. As he wrote to Henri Hauser in June 1943, Febvre wants to “poser le problème de la double Marguerite” (“pose the problem of the double Marguerite”), reconcile the author of a book in the vein of Boccaccio’s Decameron with the writer of religious poems and the friend and confidant of mystics and reformers. Drawing on the Heptaméron and on Marguerite’s work in general, he offers his readers a subtle portrait of the complexities and of the difference of a person living in the

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sixteenth century. Correspondence about the project is sparse, although Bloch cheered it on in September 1941. It is possible that its power and persuasiveness come from the fact that it was written relatively quickly, in the way in which Febvre preferred to prepare lectures – at the last moment, to give them the fire of immediacy in their delivery. Whatever the reason, Febvre’s last completed monograph is a brilliant example – not uncriticized, to be sure – of what he brought to the study of sixteenth-century culture. By the time Autour de l’Heptaméron finished printing in November 1944 Paris had been liberated, and Febvre was already being recruited into the committees that were to bulk so large in his last decade. The reform of higher education and even the history of France during World War II were causes close to his heart or to his serious preoccupations, but they were only the beginning. From time to time, the correspondence with Berr carried lists of the tasks Febvre and his principal collaborator Braudel had to do on a weekly basis. Between courses and meetings, interviews, and editorial or administrative work, opportunities to write, or to fulfill old promises to the “Evolution de l’humanité” became harder than ever to find. Refusing or declining new invitations could apparently not be contemplated. More than once, and only half joking, Febvre suggested that his rest would come in the cemetery. Although he rejected indignantly reports that had been made to Berr that the editor of Annales wished to take over exclusively the area of work of the Centre de synthèse, there can be no doubt that he invested much time and energy in initiatives that gave him oversight over the development of research and training in history and in the social sciences more generally. The chief vehicles of Febvre’s new primacy need to be clearly identified. First there was the journal. In 1946, the new title Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations was adopted. Assisted by Braudel and Charles Morazé, not to mention the faithful Leuillot, Febvre continued to pour most of his intellectual effort into his critical reading and reviewing. In the twelve years from 1946 to 1957, the editor’s bibliography grew by just over 700 items, many of them notes written for Annales. In other words, the septuagenarian was keeping a watchful eye on national and international historical scholarship, not hesitating to apportion praise or blame, and seeking always to promote new directions in research. The build-up of material was such that publication carried on well into the year after his death. In any case, with Braudel as successor, there was no danger that Annales would abandon its magisterial role on behalf of the “new history.” On the national research-training scene, the big step forward was the launching in 1948 of the Sixth Section – Economic and Social Sciences – of the Ecole pratique des hautes études, the ancestor of the present-day Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales created in 1975. Febvre was the first President, with Braudel as Secretary, then President from 1956. Despite a basically administrative role, the founder was able to choose colleagues and shape the institution as an obvious contrast to the older Fourth and Fifth Sections. His presence, and Braudel’s, played an important part in making history the central discipline in the school and in


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foiling any intentions sociologists and economists might have had to take over. Yet, the opportunity was engineered for the social sciences, somewhat marginalized in traditional French university structures, to achieve prominence and recruit graduate students. As a member of the directorate of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and as chairman of its history committee from 1946, Febvre had a further possibility of exercising patronage, in particular through the disbursal of research funds. Even though it is evident that Febvre’s intellectual radicalism delayed his arrival in Paris earlier in the century, his later career fulfilled all the aspirations he could have as an archetypal insider. By 1948, he was in every sense a mandarin (academic establishment figure). With power came many of the trappings. Civil honors do not appear to have figured much among them. He had been promoted to the grade of Officer in the Legion of Honor as early as 1936, and was later raised to the rank of Commander. Other distinctions and marks of recognition came in the last period. Febvre was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1949. The University of Brussels awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 1953, Febvre’s seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated by a two-volume homage, Eventail de l’histoire vivante (A Range of Living History), with more than eighty contributors. The Brussels doctorate was not accidental. Febvre occupied a visiting chair there in 1947. In general, the postwar period brought more invitations to lecture abroad: in the United Kingdom, in Switzerland, in Turkey, in Italy, in Brazil. The co-founder of Annales had become an international figure. His own country pushed him into the arena beyond its borders. After being a delegate at the London conference that established UNESCO, he attended conferences of that body in 1946, 1947, 1948, and 1950 in Paris, Mexico City, Beirut, and Florence, respectively. In 1951, he accepted a mission to direct the Cahiers de l’histoire mondiale. As he wrote to Berr in 1953, if he had refused this task, it would have gone not to another Frenchman, but to an “Anglo-Saxon”: “Et je n’ai pas le droit, je ne me sens pas le droit de trahir mon pays de cette façon” (“And I do not have the right, I do not feel that I have the right to betray my country in this way.”) In this avowal is revealed the postwar tension between the English-speaking and French-speaking spheres. Febvre, whose own children came to have serious connections with the United States of America or with the United Kingdom, belonged to a generation for which France had a vocation as the center of the civilized world. For him, this belief was to bring the crushing burden of endless new organizational responsibilities and a growing list of valid excuses for not completing the manuscripts promised to Berr. Outside the Annales and various prefaces and obituaries, Febvre’s published work of his last decade was not substantial. The last separate monograph was a small and not very effectively distributed Michelet, 1798–1874 (1946) in a series called “Les Classiques de la liberté.” In 1946, his Collège de France lectures on Michelet in 1942–3 and 1943–4 were still fresh in his mind. As well, his devotion

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to the great nineteenth-century historian was such that a tribute with extracts was a natural gesture. There remained three bodies of texts or three projects. The first was what had been promised to Berr. The second was the corpus of notes for several years of courses at the Collège de France. The third was the collecting and republishing of his major articles and reviews of the previous half-century. Different means were used by Febvre or by his literary heirs to deal with all three. He himself clearly gave priority to the volumes of selections from his contributions to the Revue de synthèse historique and to the Annales. The first, so pertinently entitled Combats pour l’histoire, came out in his lifetime in a series “Economies– Sociétés–Civilisations” overtly linked to the journal. Febvre shaped carefully what he included in order to “prolonger et … étendre l’influence” (“extend and spread the influence”) of articles, speeches, and even obituaries that had a strong doctrinal character. Editorial interventions – admitted in a brief prefatory note – were made to increase the coherence and the more general relevance of the points made across a range of topics: linguistics, psychology, literature, philosophy, art, science. The historiography of all these subjects was, almost by definition, of concern to Febvre’s program. Some practitioners are praised for their enlightened efforts to take account of the wider context of their studies and to promote understanding without anachronism. Others are criticized unmercifully for their myopia and for their deficiencies. The cast of heroes and villains includes several people who were Febvre’s fellow students, a reminder that there are positive and negative influences. Combats pour l’histoire – in many ways its author’s political testament – is essential reading for anyone intent on grasping the beginnings of the Annales. The two other self-selected anthologies were printed posthumously with prefaces by Braudel. Au cœur religieux du XVIe siècle (In the Religious Heart of the Sixteenth Century) includes one previously unpublished piece – a lecture on Erasmus given in Brazil in 1949 – and otherwise brings together, neatly arranged, a series of more specialized studies linked to Febvre’s books of the 1940s. There are, nonetheless, general lessons about religious, intellectual, and scientific history aimed at readers outside a narrow scholarly circle. Five years later, in 1962, Braudel brought out the last volume in the trilogy: Pour une histoire à part entière (For a History with Full and Equal Rights). The title was not Febvre’s choice, but Braudel’s, and its reference to the debates of France’s Algerian War of the 1950s and early 1960s is now a little quaint. It does translate the author’s wish to see historical studies fully integrated into, and leading, the social sciences and the humanities. The matter is presented in four broad divisions, first on geographers and historians, then successively on questions corresponding to the subtitles of the post-1946 Annales: “Economies,” “Sociétés,” “Civilisations.” It is a much longer book than the other two, and it ranges widely in time and space. Problems of method are given prominence, and, in addition to the geographical discussions, areas like technical developments, material culture, folklore, and the history of feelings announce some of the research directions of the second half of the


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twentieth century. As seen through this volume and its predecessors, Febvre as teacher, commentator, and critic has left an ambitious and challenging legacy. Febvre’s last decade of teaching did not call for such urgent publishing arrangements, and some of his papers were mislaid for decades in the archives of the Sixth Section. During and after World War II, he came to reflect much on enduring French values and traditions, and on competing ideas of what Europe should represent. On the one hand, he turned back to his master and inspiration, Jules Michelet. On the other, he attempted to explore the evolution of certain key notions and feelings. His teaching was, therefore, a sort of reaction to painful circumstances in which he had a passive and not especially heroic role. Three books were produced in the 1990s from his lecture notes: Michelet et la Renaissance (Michelet and the Renaissance) in 1992, with a preface by Braudel’s widow; “Honneur et patrie” (Honor and Fatherland) in 1996, with a fairly extensive apparatus; and L’Europe: genèse d’une civilisation (Europe: Genesis of a Civilization) in 1999, again with a developed commentary. The texts were meant, in their surviving form, to be spoken, so that a labor of mediation was needed to prepare them for the readers of half a century later. Honor, fatherland, Europe, these are all of them contentious topics with a long history that could be prudently put before the restricted public of the Collège de France. The Michelet volume also deals with such other admired figures as Stendhal. Febvre had a certain preoccupation with establishing the genealogy of his intellectual position, and it is not without surprises. Overall, the posthumously published lectures are significant for students of Febvre himself, but they are not essential to a consideration of his impact. The same cannot be said of what was being prepared for Henri Berr. In 1953, a year before the latter’s death, Febvre took steps to secure collaborators who could carry through his plans. In the event, Robert Mandrou was not to sign anything alongside Febvre because of the opposition of Braudel. The debt of Introduction à la France moderne: essai de psychologie historique 1500–1640 (Introduction to Modern France: An Essay in Historical Psychology 1500–1640, 1961) to the master is stated without ambiguity in its introduction. By contrast, Henri-Jean Martin, who was recruited by Febvre from the distrusted milieu of graduates of the Ecole des chartes, traditional targets of Annales criticism, was given the status of co-author of L’Apparition du livre (1958; translated as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, 1976). There are brief references to this arrangement in the correspondence with Berr in 1953 and 1954. Much more detail is now available in the “Postface” Frédéric Barbier prepared for the 1999 re-edition and, quite illuminatingly, in Martin’s Les Métamorphoses du livre, the 2004 reminiscences transcribed from conversations with Jean-Marc Chatelain and Christian Jacob. Even though the bulk of the writing fell to Martin, working on a plan prepared by Febvre, the extent of the latter’s detailed surveillance is now evident. The ultimate aim – to bring book history out of a technical ghetto and out of unreflecting antiquarianism into the mainstream of economic, social, and cultural history – was for Febvre a very old project. His ambitions for it were set out

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clearly when he told Henri Pirenne on January 7, 1930 that he had taken over the commitment from Augustin Renaudet. The ideas can be seen taking shape in Febvre’s notices of relevant monographs in the Revue de synthèse historique and later in the Annales. In short, the ground had been long prepared for a fundamental contribution seen as much more than filling a gap in a publisher’s catalogue. Only a heart attack early in 1956 and his death several months later prevented Febvre from participating more in the finished product, the last of his Berr promises to be met. In his own lifetime, Febvre was an historian to whom people were rarely indifferent on the personal or scholarly level. As a consequence, divergent opinions continued into following generations. Even figures reasonably close to Febvre, such as the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, an early collaborator of the Annales, could recognize his superior talents and yet deplore an excess of amour propre and a vanity bordering on megalomania, the impetus for the formation of a coterie intent on capturing command positions in the French university system. To read Halbwachs’s private diary entry of 1944 – he died at Buchenwald the following year – is to have a prefiguration of the complaints made decades later by dissidents from the Annales imperium. Braudel’s constant claims in print that Febvre was the greatest French historian of the twentieth century need to be assessed against this background. If one is seduced by Febvre’s highly personal style – but some readers are not – he can be the most persuasive of advocates. His solid achievements are many, not only the thesis on Franche-Comté and the books on sixteenth-century religion, but also L’Apparition du livre, which stands at the beginning of the influential book-history movement. Even more than these long texts, one has to put forward the critical reviews, especially those in the Annales. Whether or not Febvre became the gatekeeper of historical writing is perhaps immaterial. The genius is in the attempt, in the intelligence, and in the imaginative effort brought to bear to reach a better understanding of some of the most obscure and complex aspects of the past.

References and Further Reading Letters The Birth of Annales History: The Letters of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921–1935), edited by Bryce Lyon and Mary Lyon (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1991). Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre et les Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale: Correspondance, edited by Bertrand Müller, 3 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1994–2003). Lucien Febvre, De la Revue de synthèse aux Annales: Lettres à Henri Berr 1911–1954, edited by Gilles Candar and Jacqueline Pluet-Despatin (Paris: Fayard, 1997).


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Bibliography Bibliographie des travaux de Lucien Febvre, by Bertrand Müller (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990).

Selected Books by Lucien Febvre La Franche-Comté (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1905). Histoire de Franche-Comté (Paris: Boivin, 1912; rev. edn., Paris: Boivin, 1922). Notes et documents sur la Réforme et l’Inquisition en Franche-Comté: extraits des archives du Parlement de Dole (Paris: Champion, 1912). Philippe II et la Franche-Comté: la crise de 1567, ses origines et ses conséquences, étude d’histoire politique, religieuse et sociale (Paris: Champion, 1912). La Terre et l’évolution humaine: introduction géographique à l’histoire (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1922); translated by E. G. Mountford and J. H. Paxton as A Geographical Introduction to History (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). Un Destin: Martin Luther (Paris: Rieder, 1928); translated by R. Tapley as Martin Luther: A Destiny (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929). Le Rhin, by Lucien Febvre and A. Demangeon (Strasbourg: Imprimerie Strasbourgeoise, 1931; rev. and extended edn. as Le Rhin: problèmes d’histoire et d’économie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1935). Origène et des Périers ou l’énigme du “Cymbalum Mundi” (Paris: Droz, 1942). Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942); translated by Beatrice Gottlieb as The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Autour de l’Heptaméron: amour sacré, amour profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1944). Michelet, 1798–1874 (Geneva: Traits, 1946). Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953). Au cœur religieux du XVIe siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1957). L’Apparition du livre, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958); translated by David Gerard as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (London: New Left Books, 1976). Pour une histoire à part entière (Paris: SEVPEN, 1962). Michelet et la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). “Honneur et patrie”: une enquête sur le sentiment d’honneur et l’attachement à la patrie (Paris: Perrin, 1996). L’Europe: genèse d’une civilisation (Paris: Perrin, 1999).

Exhibition Catalogue Lucien Febvre 1878–1956: Bibliothèque nationale, 8–22 novembre, edited by Alfred Fierro (Paris: Fondation de la Maison des sciences de l’homme/Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1978).

Translations A New Kind of History from the Writings of Febvre, edited by Peter Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

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Life in Renaissance France, edited and translated by Marian Rothstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

References Australian Journal of French Studies, 16 (5/6) (1979) “Lucien Febvre and the Annales.” Barbier, Frédéric, “Ecrire L’Apparition du livre,” in L’Apparition du livre, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), pp. 537–88. Becker, Annette, Maurice Halbwachs: un intellectuel en guerres mondiales 1914–1945 (Paris: Agnès Viénot Editions, 2003). Crouzet, Denis, “Lucien Febvre,” in Les historiens, edited by Véronique Sales (Paris: Armand Colin, 2003), pp. 58–84. Fink, Carole, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Huppert, George, “The Annales experiment,” in Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 873–88. Mann, Hans-Dieter, Lucien Febvre: la pensée vivante d’un historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971). Martin, Henri-Jean, Les Métamorphoses du livre: entretiens avec Jean-Marc Chatelain et Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004). Müller, Bertrand, Lucien Febvre: lecteur et critique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003). Noiriel, Gérard, Sur la “crise” de l’histoire (Paris: Belin, 1996). Varga, Lucie, Les Autorités invisibles: une historienne autrichienne aux Annales dans les années trente, edited by Peter Schöttler (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1991).

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Marc Ferro (1924– ) Kevin J. Callahan

In June 2001, the journalist Martine Lemalet conducted an interview with Marc Ferro about his opus Histoire de France (History of France). Histoire de France, a 1,086-page tome that first appeared in March 2001, represents a rare twentiethcentury synthetic account of France’s entire past penned by a single native French historian. Unlike recent American, German, and English historians, such as Alan Brinkley and Hagen Schulze, who have written national narrative histories, recent French historians have been reluctant – for both ideological and methodological reasons – to write national narratives. By undertaking this project, Ferro demonstrated once again his penchant to tackle the impossible and to defy the conventions of French historical scholarship, even though he has been at the center of the French historical establishment for more than three decades. Responding to Lemalet’s question “How would you situate your Histoire de France in the tradition of the Annales school?” Ferro answered, “Only the second part of this work seems to correspond to the Annales school’s conception of this country’s history. It seemed to me that [writing] a study that rests exclusively on the social sciences deprives the past and the present of our society of one of its driving forces: passion.” Applied to his own life and scholarship, Ferro’s words provide the key insight into his distinctive career: his unconventionality and his passion for the past and its meaning in the present. How did history become Marc Ferro’s passion and what has made his scholarship unconventional? Born to Jacques and Nelly Ferro on December 24, 1924 in Paris’s eighth arrondissement, Marc Ferro came of age during one of France’s most tumultuous historical periods, which included struggles over the embattled Third Republic of the 1920s and 1930s, the Great Depression, and France’s military defeat, quasi-civil war, occupation, and liberation during World War II. Ferro came from a middle-class

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Parisian family and was raised primarily by his mother, who was successful in her work in the Parisian fashion trade. His father died when he was only five in 1930; his mother, of Jewish extraction, perished in a German camp during World War II. From an early age, Ferro showed an interest in history and storytelling, aspiring to become a teacher. As a ten-year-old boy, he produced his first work of “scholarship,” his own ten-page history of France. As a result of the German occupation of northern France in 1940, Ferro heeded his friends’ advice to leave the capital city for a safer haven, and so he moved to Grenoble in 1941. At the age of eighteen, Ferro taught in a private high school in Argenton to make a living. He also studied at the University of Grenoble from 1942 to 1945, earning his teaching license and diploma. Ferro was no passive bystander during his years under France’s Vichy regime, which was led by the controversial military figure of General Pétain. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ferro would write a book about Pétain and Pétain’s relationship with the French people some forty-five years later (Pétain, 1987). While studying in Grenoble, Ferro joined the Resistance of Vercors and was active as a maquisard (underground fighter) in the summer of 1944. Ferro volunteered to become a soldier for the 6th Alpine Battalion in June, helping to liberate parts of France from June through September 1944, a liberation punctuated by the entrance into Lyon – France’s second largest metropolis – on September 2, 1944. Immediately after the war, Ferro finished his university studies and became a high-school history teacher. The year 1948 concluded one chapter of Marc Ferro’s life – growing up in the world’s cultural mecca in the 1920s and 1930s, living through the world’s greatest twentieth-century calamity, and fulfilling his childhood aspiration – and ushered in the next. In that year, Ferro married his wife Yvonne. The couple moved to the French colonial city of Oran, Algeria, where they both had the opportunity to teach at the lycée. Ferro lived in Oran for twelve years from 1948 to 1960 amid the turmoil of a France unwilling to let its colonial empire fall apart and of disparate Arab-Algerian political movements with demands ranging from greater cultural autonomy for Muslim Algerians to outright independence. He began to see himself not simply as a history teacher but as an active participant in and a student of history. Ferro was politically active as a “liberal,” which meant anyone who was trying to bring about reconciliation and understanding between Frenchman and Arab, and Christian, Jew, and Muslim. The efforts of him and like-minded people did not meet with success, as the Algerian conflict escalated, culminating from 1954 until 1962 in a full-scale, bloody war and Algerian independence. The “Algerian interlude” was of critical importance for Ferro’s future development as a professional historian. First, Ferro had not only witnessed and participated directly in a volatile period in French colonial history, he had also begun to conceive and make sense of the events before him from an historical perspective. Ferro thus developed in the 1950s an interest in the history of colonialism, even though he would not research and write on this topic extensively until the 1980s

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and 1990s. Second, Ferro was especially knowledgeable about the subject of Islam and communism in its Algerian context. In 1960, Ferro attended a lecture in Paris given by Ruth Fischer, an American and member of the Third International (1919–43). Fischer was impressed by Ferro’s ability to talk at length about Islam and communism and encouraged him to learn more about the relationship between the Tatars and Bolsheviks in Russia. As a result, Ferro decided to switch careers and become a researcher and scholar. Finally, Ferro’s Algerian experience may have played a role in securing him the position of editor of France’s prestigious historical journal Annales. Fernand Braudel, the towering figure of the “second generation” of the Annales school, wanted to rejuvenate the journal with new blood, and appointed Ferro in part because he found Ferro’s knowledge of Algerian matters relevant in light of France’s current preoccupations. Ferro began his career as a researcher in the year 1960 and thus commenced the next chapter of his life. Within a decade, Ferro occupied influential positions at the center of the French historical establishment. He first found employment with France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) from 1960 until 1964. He assumed the position of secretary of the journal Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique ( Journal of the Russian and Soviet World) in 1961 and soon thereafter became its editor (which position he retained until 1997). He formally began his doctoral studies in Russian history at the Ecole des hautes études in 1962, completing his doctoral thesis on the February Revolution of 1917 in 1967. Ferro served as editor of Annales for seven years (1963–70), and then became the journal’s codirector, along with Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in 1970, a position he continues to hold. In 1964, Ferro became the director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), the reorganized successor of Lucien Febvre’s (a co-founder of the Annales school of history) famous Sixth Section of the Ecole des hautes études founded in 1947. In 1970, Ferro received a professorship at the Ecole polytechnique, where he taught the subjects of Russian history, film, and World War II for more than a quarter of a century. Within a single decade, Ferro had experienced a significant change in career trajectory as he went from being an inconspicuous high-school teacher to being one of France’s most accomplished historians. His research exhibited an innovative approach to conventional historical topics and a pioneering spirit that would become a trademark of his scholarship. Although located in the heart of the Annales school, Ferro is best regarded as an outsider looking in, an historian who has constantly expanded the boundaries and operated at the margins of the dominant thrust of historical research. For example, he studied Russian history at a time when other Russian history students in France were avowedly communists and/or Russian exiles or recent immigrants. Likewise, Ferro’s research on the February Revolution of 1917 challenged the Annales paradigm in several ways. First, he investigated a sociopolitical topic at a specific point in history as opposed to the Annales tradition of emphasizing non-political history (primarily cultural, economic, and quantitative analyses) and the longue durée (history for the very

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long-term) perspective. Second, Ferro examined a subject in the modern period, unlike his counterparts who focused almost exclusively on the medieval and early modern periods. Third, Ferro tackled a non-French topic, another rarity for the Annales school. A father-like figure to Ferro, Braudel marveled at his courage in covering new terrain in political history, film, and biography, always ahead of his counterparts. In his focus on problem-oriented analytical history and his capacity to devise new approaches and methodologies to examine a problem, however, Ferro does fit squarely within the Annales tradition. The scholarship of Marc Ferro is varied and vast. He has written or collaborated on over thirty books and has scores of journal publications. He has presented papers and participated in academic conferences in over thirty different countries. His key works have been translated into many languages, including English, Russian, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Korean, Danish, Swedish, Turkish, and Japanese. Moreover, Ferro has been a visiting professor or has taught in some fashion on four different continents at places as varied as Austin, Chicago, Calgary, Moscow, Mozambique, San Paulo, and Trinidad and Tobago. Throughout his academic career, Marc Ferro and his scholarship have come into contact with varied and wide audiences, signaling Ferro’s passion for the past and his commitment to establish its relevance in the present. Ferro’s prodigious scholarship can be best organized according to five broad themes: the history of Russian and Soviet society, the history of France and the twentieth century, the history of film and media, the problem of historical narrative and instruction, and global history. These five themes will be discussed here in the chronological order in which Ferro first started to address them in his research. Once opening up a new vista of research, however, Ferro remained remarkably active in the other fields. For example, his books on Russian and Soviet history have appeared consistently from the late 1960s through the 1990s on topics as varied as Tsar Nicholas II and perestroika. Ferro’s reputation as a scholar is strongest in the field of Russian and Soviet history. He studied with renowned historians such as Pierre Renouvin, Roger Portal, and Alexander Bennigsen at the Ecole des hautes études. Even before finishing his thesis, Harvard historian Richard Pipes expressed interest in Ferro’s scholarship because of Ferro’s research on Russian nationalities. Ferro’s doctoral thesis La Révolution de 1917: la chute du tsarisme et les origines d’Octobre (translated as The Russian Revolution of February 1917, 1972) was completed in 1967 and appeared as a book with the same title in the same year. Ferro published the second part of his study on the Russian Revolution of 1917 nine years later, in 1976, as La Révolution de 1917: Octobre, naissance d’une société (translated as October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, 1980). Together, they constitute landmark works in the history of the Russian Revolution. Ferro was able to draw upon sources from Soviet archives that had not been previously made available to Western scholars. Ferro also offered a fresh and innovative interpretation of the year 1917 that challenged the prevailing historical orthodoxies of the day. Two


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interpretations of the year 1917 dominated scholarship: the Soviet/Marxist and the Western liberal explanation. The Soviet/Marxist perspective emphasized the revolutionary role of the disciplined Bolshevik Party and its omnipresent and infallible leader, Lenin. The liberal approach (to which Richard Pipes belongs), in contrast, portrayed the events of 1917 as chaotic and unpredictable until Lenin and a cabal of conspiring Bolsheviks carried out an illegitimate coup d’état in October 1917. While these prevailing orthodoxies were antithetical, they did similarly emphasize political leaders and their organizations. How did Ferro then explain the events of the year 1917 and what made his explanation so unconventional at the time? Employing an unconventional historical methodology (that of social history) to unearth his findings, Ferro argues that the February and October revolutions of 1917 were popular uprisings whose permutations arose from the masses, that is, peasants, workers, soldiers, and ethnic groups. Instead of focusing exclusively on political leaders and organized politics, Ferro examines the year 1917 “from below” to register the myriad interests, opinions, and sentiments of the various segments of the Russian and non-Russian population, as well as the emergence of new revolutionary organizations such as the factory committee and soldiers’ and workers’ councils. Ferro offers several nuanced and novel insights into specific aspects of the Russian revolution: the role of Kerensky, the Provisional Government, discord in the Bolshevik leadership, the origins of Stalinism, and so forth. Ferro also demonstrates that the masses were in the main more radical and more impatient for immediate reform than all political parties, including the Bolsheviks, recognized. In a clever way, Ferro turns the Soviet/Marxist orthodoxy on its head. It was not a disciplined and infallible Bolshevik Party that led the Revolution, but rather radicalized workers and soldiers who led disorganized and divisive Bolshevik Party leaders. Likewise, this shift in perspective dispels the liberal view of a conspiracy or cabal in October 1917. The October uprising was legitimate insofar as the Bolsheviks were tactically flexible enough to adopt as their own policies measures that the revolutionary masses were already implementing. Thus, the broader implications of his interpretation are profound. Ferro’s two books have been criticized on some points – a fragmented writing style, the level of class consciousness attributed to the workers, the level of intransigence attributed to the Russian bourgeoisie – but his main arguments have held up well as part of a broader revisionist historiography (with important contributions from scholars such as Alexander Rabinowitch and Sheila Fitzpatrick) that has itself become the new convention. Ferro’s study of the Russian Revolution fueled his interest in twentieth-century Europe more broadly and in film. Ferro utilized film as a source to evaluate the popular actions of the masses in the February Revolution of 1917. Moreover, in the early 1960s, Pierre Renouvin asked Ferro to serve as an adviser for a documentary film on World War I titled La Grande Guerre (The Great War), which was completed in 1964. As a result, Ferro decided to put into words his own

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understanding of World War I and likewise to pursue the study of film from an historical perspective. The results have been impressive. In 1969, Ferro’s work La Grande Guerre (translated as The Great War, 1973) appeared and soon became one of the few authoritative accounts (from an enormous historical literature) of World War I. His forays into film studies – resulting in collaboration on historical documentaries, television programs, books, and articles – were groundbreaking at a time when mainstream historians dismissed film as a serious historical source. La Grande Guerre might be Ferro’s single most impressive book. It is an innovative, concise, and masterful synthesis of World War I, widely praised by reviewers as a work of genius and a tour de force. Ferro covers the war in all of its complexity and scope, combining well his expertise in “history from below” with the more traditional “history from above” approach. In doing so, Ferro illuminates the war experience and social tensions within European society – conflicts between different generations, soldiers and civilians, soldiers and officers, factory workers and peasants – while explaining military campaigns and the actions of kings and generals. The strengths of the book are manifold. Particularly riveting is how Ferro captures the zeitgeist of pre-1914 Europe. Europe was, according to Ferro, preoccupied with the idea of war: the “imaginary” war of popular culture and military strategists; the “inevitable” war of kings and diplomats; the “war on war” of socialist parties; and the “patriotic” war of disillusioned intellectuals and alienated workers. As Ferro writes, “War had conquered men’s minds before it even broke out.” Equally impressive is how Ferro deftly handles the imponderable question of war guilt. In short, he asserts that the answer depends mainly on the perspective taken. For example, if the events of 1914 are analyzed, a compelling case can be made that Germany pursued a reckless foreign policy of brinksmanship and that England, according to Ferro, must share the blame because “her policy of conciliation [which convinced Germany that England would remain neutral] did as much to produce war as the Germans’ ‘calculated risks’.” If, however, the search for war origins is traced prior to 1914, Russia appears culpable because it championed pan-Slavism, which eventually would have destroyed Austria-Hungary. France, Russia, and England were also inflexible in accommodating the Great Power aspirations of Germany. Thus, Ferro suggests that there is no single answer to the question of war guilt because the “conclusions change if the perspective is altered.” Ferro’s book is also distinctive in how it treats seriously social and cultural forces as well as imperial rivalries, Europe’s rigid alliance system, and the degree of German responsibility for the outbreak of war, which were the focus of more traditional historiography. Ferro’s approach can be seen as a forerunner to the social and cultural historiography of World War I prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s. Other important and innovative dimensions of La Grande Guerre include Ferro’s extensive treatment of the European left, his descriptions of military campaigns across Europe (not just on the Western Front), and his penetrating insights into Europe’s “civil war,” the origins of communism and fascism, and the illusion of


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postwar normalcy. In conclusion, Ferro writes aptly “The ‘War to end War’ had ended in a Brave New World.” In venturing to study the history of film, Ferro was entering a “Brave New World,” an area of research that was a tabula rasa at the time. Ferro started first by offering his services for historical documentaries in the 1960s and 1970s on twentieth-century topics such as World War I and II, Vladimir Lenin, and the Russian Revolution. Particularly noteworthy at this time was his innovative Images de l’histoire (Images of History), a series of thirteen short, fifteen-minute accounts of historical topics – Nazism, Cuba, the revolt of the colonial peoples, Marxism, and so forth – produced from 1975 to 1977. The project was awarded the Prix de la Ville de Paris for its excellence. In the late 1970s, Ferro collaborated with J. P. Aron on the production of Une histoire de la médecine (A History of Medicine), a series in eight parts that appeared on France’s public television station FR3 in 1980. This project was produced in the spirit of the Annales school and illuminated an unconventional topic in history. While working on these various projects, Ferro engaged in his own research, first analyzing Soviet film from the 1920s through the period of Stalin, and then branching out to examine the filmography of other countries such as the United States and France. Ferro has made a compelling case that film is a distinct and important historical source. Film not only shows the external aspects of an historical moment (for example, what people looked like), but also reveals ideological trends and social attitudes and beliefs. The history of the reception of a particular film speaks to the preoccupations and ideologies of a given society. Film has also, Ferro asserts, shaped historical consciousness and the knowledge of historical events. For example, scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October have given the false impression that sailors were in reality fired upon by tsarist troops on the steps of Odessa during the 1905 revolution and that a massive crowd (not simply Bolshevik conspirators) stormed the Winter Palace on October 7, 1917 on the night of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Film has been used as an instrument of propaganda and legitimization in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Film can, however, subvert authority and bring to the fore disquieting issues, as Ferro demonstrates in his book Cinéma et histoire (1977; translated as Cinema and History, 1988). For example, Ferro illustrates how, on the surface, the 1926 Soviet film Dura Lex shows the punishment of transgressors of the law. Although the setting of the film is the Canadian frontier, the implication is that the Bolshevik state is founded on a just legal system. The judges in Dura Lex, however, are cast as denatured and dehumanized figures who conduct their trials behind closed doors. Ferro points out that, as a result, “the so-called respect for law is merely a parody that is worse than violence,” exposing the sham of Soviet justice. Ferro’s research in film is not only rich for its deconstructing of filmic techniques and ideological messages but also for its offering of new theoretical insights and modes of analysis that can be used to interpret and to classify films.

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From looking at film through an historical perspective, Ferro widened his purview to investigate broadly the nature of historical representation, historical discourse, and the teaching of history. His most acclaimed work in this area is Comment on raconte l’histoire aux enfants (1981; translated as The Use and Abuse of History, 1984). The objective of this landmark study was to survey how history is taught to children across the globe in order to ascertain and to understand the extraordinary diversity of historical consciousness. Ferro’s aim was not to provide the definitive and nuanced historical narrative for every society (he readily recognizes the inadequacies and limitations of his study in the preface) but rather to identify the “dominant element that distinguishes the collective consciousness of each society.” Ferro also sought to avoid retelling the “official” history of a given society and instead tried to capture its popular history by utilizing sources such as school textbooks, cartoons, and historical novels. The breadth of the book is as ambitious as its methodology. Ferro discusses the historical (mainly national) narrative(s) – their myths, ruptures, erasures, and taboos – of India, Poland, Armenia, China, Persia, Trinidad, South Africa, and many other regions and countries. Comment on raconte l’histoire aux enfants stems from Ferro’s own passion for history and his desire to explain the meaning of history in the present. Many reviewers have highlighted the value of the book for understanding the contemporary world. In the concluding chapter, Ferro shares his philosophy of historical writing and teaching. First and foremost, Ferro claims that universal history is a myth. There is no standard “objective” historical narrative of the world. Rather, universal history (such as the conventional narrative of Western civilization) has only existed as a mirage that serves power and a society’s sense of superiority. Ferro develops a typology of historical writing and discourse, which have taken three major forms: an official/institutional (which includes anti-institutional) form, memory, and an experimental form. In the first, a group of scholars employ a hierarchy of sources and of power to produce a self-serving narrative. That form predominates because it is sustained by an institution, a policy, a religion, or even a political party. Memories – individual or collective – are a second center of history. Finally, according to Ferro, the experimental form comes into being when historians devise approaches specific to the phenomenon under investigation and then evaluate the approach to reveal methodological strengths and weaknesses. In terms of teaching history, Ferro emphasizes the need for students to learn: a chronological sense of the past, different interpretations of the past, one’s own past as well as others’, basic problems and themes in history, how to distinguish elements of the past that are no longer present from those that have survived, and how to formulate historical questions and to practice historical methodologies. Ferro’s research and professional activities in the 1980s and early 1990s reflected his commitment to sharing the importance of history with a French and a larger European public. From 1986 to 1993, Ferro served as director of the Institut du monde soviétique et de l’Europe centrale et orientale (Institute of the Soviet


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World and of Central and Eastern Europe). In 1992, he became the president of the Association of Research at EHESS. His most important projects were the writing of two historical biographies – Pétain (1987) and Nicolas II (1990, translated as Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars, 1991) – and the production of a landmark history series for television called Histoire parallèle (Parallel History). Pétain is significant as it marks Ferro’s first attempt at biography and addresses a topic and a period that had been taboo for French historians. In fact, it was actually a non-French historian – the American, Robert Paxton – who first mustered the courage to tackle the sensitive issues associated with Pétain and his Vichy regime. Pétain is another example of Ferro’s ambition to do the unconventional and to write a book for the broader French public. Pétain is not a traditional biography that surveys the life of an individual, but rather it focuses specifically on the general’s role in the Vichy regime. Ferro asks and attempts to answer the hard and controversial questions: did Pétain sabotage the Third Republic? Did Pétain collaborate with Hitler? Was Pétain and elements of his regime fascist? The book’s excellence was recognized when it was awarded the Prix Clio in 1987. Its popularity in France is evident in its reprinting on several occasions (1993 and 1994) and its adaptation for the cinema in a film with the same title, directed by Jean Marboeuf, released in 1995. Ferro’s biography Nicolas II emphasizes Nicholas’s political life, his weakness as a ruler, and his unwavering commitment to preserving the autocracy for his heirs. While not as innovative a biography as Pétain, the book’s last chapter, a detailed investigation of the execution of the Romanov family in 1918, is indeed distinctive. Histoire parallèle is certainly Ferro’s most ingenious and successful project in sharing his enthusiasm for history and its significance with a broad audience. Histoire parallèle is an hour-long television history show (fifty-two minutes of content) that was broadcast on ARTE – a French-German television channel received in French- and German-speaking countries of Europe – for more than a decade. It was awarded the Prix de l’Initiative Européene in 1994 for its excellence. The show’s concept is simple and brilliant: to present the audience with authentic historical newsreels and archival material on key days and events of the recent past (mainly from the period 1939–49), and then to let the audience listen to Ferro (who acts as moderator) and to an invited expert as they critically analyze the topic. The newsreels and archival materials are selected from different countries and perspectives so that they illustrate distinct perspectives on the event in question. Thus, they confront the viewer with opposing viewpoints and reveal how images inform and misinform the viewer about the past. By focusing on a specific date or theme, history attains its sense of immediacy. Ferro moderated about 630 different Histoire parallèle episodes for twelve years from 1989 to 2001 devoted to a wide array of topics with prominent guests such as Henry Kissinger, Gerhard Schröder, Mikhail Gorbachev, and many others. Ferro’s most ambitious work of scholarship of the 1990s is probably Histoire des colonisations: des conquêtes aux indépendances, XIII–XXe siècle (1994; translated as

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Colonization: A Global History, 1997). The roots of his interest in global history were twofold: his “Algerian interlude” and the tradition of global history in the Annales school (particularly Braudel’s research). This book is a bold attempt on Ferro’s part to write the history of the world since the sixteenth century viewed through the prism of a single theme. The opus is conceptually strong and provocative. It represents the first comprehensive synthesis of colonialism of modern times, and Ferro sought to write the book from a global perspective so as not “to reproduce a Eurocentric view of history.” Furthermore, Ferro argues that colonialism is not uniquely a European phenomenon, and so he discusses briefly the colonial history of the Arabs and Turks, of China, and of Japan. Another conceptual novelty of the work is setting aside the conventional narrative of colonialism that entails first a history of colonization and then a history of the struggle for independence. Instead, the book is structured in chapters according to main themes such as a new race of societies (the intermingling of European and non-European peoples) with a loose sense of chronology. Finally, Ferro whets the reader’s appetite with his tantalizing questions about the connections between European imperialism abroad and within the European continent itself (for example, the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany). Unlike his other books, this one has evoked polarized reactions. By its very nature, such a project is daring and rent with pitfalls. His ambition has been praised. The book has been called an adventurous work and a strong synthesis. Consistent with Ferro’s previous research, the book’s strength lies in its treatment of the social and cultural dimensions of colonialism. Ferro explores with great insight the impact of colonialism on fields such as education and medicine, on the images of the vanquished, and on the intermingling (or lack thereof ) of races in colonial societies. Likewise, Ferro’s conclusion offers interesting points about the increasing standardization and unification of the world as a result of globalization. Weak points of the book that have been noted include its Eurocentric approach (in spite of its claim to the contrary), overemphasis on French colonies (especially Algeria), fragmented writing style, many historical inaccuracies, and, according to Ziauddin Sardar in his review in New Statesman (March 17, 1997), its whitewashing of European racism and colonialism by equating the European variant with nonEuropean forms of colonization. No such mixed reception has accompanied Ferro’s Histoire de France (History of France, 2001), a magisterial survey of the French past that is a fitting capstone to Ferro’s impressive scholarly career. Histoire de France succeeds for several reasons. First, Ferro bravely cast aside the taboo of writing a synthetic account of French history. As one of France’s most accomplished and versatile historians, Ferro was eminently qualified to undertake the challenge. Equally important, Ferro’s scholarship has never been narrowly wedded to a particular school or interpretation of history (even though he is nominally associated with the Annaliste tradition). As a result, his unconventionality is an asset. Methodologically, Histoire de France combines Ferro’s talent of providing a compelling narrative that


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emphasizes social and political history with the Annaliste tradition of longue durée and problem-oriented research. These different approaches are reflected in the book’s two major parts respectively: “The Story of the Nation” and “The Original Features of French Society.” Ferro astutely does not claim to be writing the definitive history of France. Rather, he chooses to weave into his narrative key points of contention – the origin of France (Clovis versus Vercingetorix), Joan of Arc (Catholic or Republican heroine?), and the French Revolution, for example – in France’s past. In a compelling way, Ferro illuminates the reality of the “FrancoFrench war” (which encompasses the conflicts between religion and secularism, church and state, right and left, and so forth, that have been so prominent within post-revolutionary French history) within French national identity. Similarly, he exposes the multitude of myths and legends of the French past and juxtaposes these “popular” conceptions with the often unsettling historical record. Thus, the reader learns that Charlemagne was responsible for the first great deportation of peoples of the Christian era, and that the Vichy regime instituted anti-Jewish policies before Nazi Germany pressured its leadership to do so. Finally, Ferro adopts a comparative approach, which allows him to position French history within a broader European context and to explore the degree of – and the specific characteristics of – French exceptionalism. Ferro’s discussion of French exceptionalism addresses important themes, such as France and “the other,” the problem of unity and centralization, French economic development, the “Franco-French war,” and the role of the public intellectual. In the twilight of his life and career, Marc Ferro finds himself in a state of semiretirement. He finished teaching at the Ecole polytechnique in 1996, and currently resides on the outskirts of Paris, while spending the summer months in an old town in the south of France. He enjoys his time with his wife of more than fifty years, Yvonne, his two children, and his two favorite avocations: cooking and tennis. He has not surprisingly remained faithful to his desire to share the importance of history with other people in a multitude of ways. His most recent books are provocative and topical. Les Tabous de l’histoire (The Taboos of History, 2002) is an exploratory essay on questions and topics of the past that have been repressed and evaded by society. Le Choc de l’Islam (The Shock of Islam, 2002) is a timely study Ferro felt compelled to write in order to rectify the erroneous and Eurocentric vision of Islam prevalent in France and elsewhere. In this work, Ferro sketches five major trends/reactions in the Islamic world over the past two hundred years in confronting modernity. Via the Internet, Ferro regularly engages in online discussions (www.histoire. fr/jaune/html/chat.htm) about historical topics such as the Resistance, Stalin, and politics and lying. By providing interviews or contributing articles to important newspapers such as Le Monde or Le Figaro on current events such as European unity and identity, Ferro continues to be an active participant in the dialogue of public affairs. By offering his expertise and service to important forums, such as the European Parliament, or organizations such as the Berlin-Brandenburg

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Institute for French-German Cooperation in Europe, Ferro conducts himself as an ambassador of humanity, furthering, as he has done since his activity as a “liberal” in Algeria, mutual understanding and reconciliation. The academic community and broader public have deservedly recognized Ferro’s life accomplishments with numerous distinctions and honorary positions. For example, he was awarded the doctorate honoris causa in letters from the University of Moscow in 1999. Most recently (2004), the University of Bordeaux honored him with the doctorate honoris causa in film. A fitting summary of the life and scholarship of Ferro is expressed succinctly in the title of a fifty-two-minute documentary film about his philosophy of history: Marc Ferro ou la passion de l’histoire (Marc Ferro or the Passion of History).

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Marc Ferro La Révolution de 1917: la chute du tsarisme et les origines d’Octobre (Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne, 1967); translated by J. L. Richards as The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). La Grande Guerre (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969); translated by Nicole Stone as The Great War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). La Révolution de 1917: Octobre, naissance d’une société (Paris: Aubiers-Montaigne, 1976); translated by Norman Stone as October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). Cinéma et histoire (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1977); translated by Naomi Greene as Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). Comment on raconte l’histoire aux enfants (Paris: Payot, 1981; rev. and enlarged edn., 1992); translated by Norman Stone and Andrew Brown as The Use and Abuse of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984; rev. and enlarged edn., 2003). Pétain (Paris: Fayard, 1987). Nicolas II (Paris: Payot, 1990); translated by Brian Pierce as Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars (London: Viking Press, 1991). Histoire des colonisations: des conquêtes aux indépendances, XIII–XXe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994); translated by K. D. Prithipaul as Colonization: A Global History (London: Routledge, 1997). Histoire de France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001). Le Choc de l’Islam (XVIIIe–XXIe siècle) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002; enlarged edn., 2003). Les Tabous de l’histoire (Paris: Nil Edition, 2002).

Interviews Lemalet, Martine, “Histoires traversées de l’état-nation,” Manuscrit ( June 2001; www. manuscrit.com/Edito/invites/Pages/JuinHisto_MFerro.asp; accessed May 14, 2004; link no longer operational).


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References Acton, Edward, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (New York: Edward Arnold, 1990). Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Carrard, Philippe, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

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Michel Foucault (1926–1984) James A. Winders

Michel Foucault was an enormously innovative French philosopher whose ideas proved influential in a wide range of disciplines and fields of study throughout much of the world in the late twentieth century, and whose impact has been felt especially in the areas of social and cultural history. He did not set out to become an historian, but the philosophical questions that led him increasingly toward historical research and reflection made his intellectual reputation and elevated him in 1970 to the Chair of the History of the Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, that country’s most distinguished academic institution. The work he carried out, especially from that point until his very untimely death in 1984, dealing especially with topics of penology and sexuality, continues to exert a profound influence on historians. While certainly an iconoclastic thinker, Foucault was nevertheless a representative member of a generation of French intellectuals that came of age after World War II. This generation moved from enthusiasm for Marxism through existentialism and phenomenology to a decidedly ahistorical structuralism and then, in a shift that Foucault’s influence helped to bring about, to a new kind of historical emphasis associated with poststructuralism. Foucault’s agile mind engaged each of these defining stages of French thought, and his political activism evolved out of lived encounters with decisive events in late twentieth-century French history, among the most important of which for him were the great upheaval of May 1968 in France and the ensuing specific struggles of the 1970s and 1980s involving the rights of prisoners, gays, and immigrants. Both as an author and as an engaged citizen, Foucault preoccupied himself with power, understood not according to traditionally formulated conceptions of monarch or state versus a country’s inhabitants, but as produced, refined, and

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circulated through the multiple activities of social institutions, professions, and the specific language (his term is “discourse”) whereby expert opinion and other kinds of modern authority shape and control what can be known, acknowledged, and made to serve a quest for truth. Increasingly, Foucault focused his attention on the gradual emergence through the course of Western civilization of an exaggerated emphasis on the individual human subject. The so-called “subject” has become the target of analysis of the human sciences and the center of all ethics. Power, Foucault came to argue, circulates through the various “technologies” of the subject – the sum total of all the ways we regard our selves as subjects and regulate our behavior. In often contradictory ways, the subject provides the agency of power. The first stage toward this rather sweeping view of power operating through myriad levels of social formation was Michel Foucault’s early fascination with psychology and mental illness. These were topics toward which the unhappiness of his adolescence led his interest. Paul-Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on October 15, 1926. He was the second of three children in a prosperous bourgeois family. His father was a successful physician and surgeon. A bright, sensitive child, his early years were haunted by the gathering storm of World War II, and his adolescent unhappiness was related in part to his growing awareness of his homosexuality and the social risk it entailed for him. Life under German occupation may also have been a factor in his youthful depression. Despite his obvious intelligence, his student years were not without some setbacks. Even though he moved from Poitiers to Paris in order to attend the competitive and prestigious Lycée Henri-IV, he failed his first entrance examination for admission to the Ecole normale supérieure. Located in the rue d’Ulm high atop the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, thus overlooking the Panthéon and the Sorbonne further down the steep slope of that hill, the Ecole normale has long been one of France’s grandes écoles and the leading institution for preparing future professors, as well as a portal for membership in the nation’s elite. The ENS that Foucault entered as a student in 1946 was going through a heady time of transition. It was the era of celebrating the Liberation and extolling the deeds of the Resistance, as well the era of the intellectual ascendancy of existentialism and such powerful figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus. An entire generation of students had passed through the highly influential mediation of Hegelian philosophy fashioned by Jean Hyppolite, first an instructor at the Lycée Henri-IV (where Foucault first encountered him) and later a professor at the Ecole normale supérieure. Equally important in Foucault’s intellectual life, and surprising for one who would come to be so heavily identified with opposition to Marxism, was his tutelage by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose influence shaped an entire generation of normaliens. After completing his course of study, Foucault successively achieved his agrégation, the hurdle one must clear in order to teach in a French lycée, but, as with his

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entrance examination to the ENS, only on the second attempt. Between that time (1951) and 1961, when Foucault’s published work first began to attract serious attention, he held an academic appointment in Lille in France, and occupied temporary positions in Sweden and Poland. At first, he concerned himself primarily with psychological topics, even undergoing training as a psychologist in 1952. His fascination with psychology bore fruit in his first published book, Malade mentale et personnalité (1954; translated as Mental Illness and Psychology, 1976). During this same period, Foucault developed a strong interest in the German existentialist psychotherapist Ludwig Binswanger, and eventually assisted in the publication of some of the latter’s works in French translation. Binswanger’s ideas were closely allied with those of Martin Heidegger, whose philosophy (and, in Foucault’s case, this meant especially Heidegger’s influential interpretation of Nietzsche) had a profound impact on the generation of French intellectuals that included Foucault. As he considered Binswanger and the study of mental illness, Foucault approached his topic very much as one concerned with the history of the sciences, which for him would come to mean increasingly what the French call the “human sciences,” that is, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, and literature. His thinking bore the influence of Georges Canguilhem, the historian of science whose work included a strong emphasis on the scientific impulse (especially in the life sciences) to distinguish between what is “normal” and its opposite – the “pathological.” Following Canguilhem, Foucault would go on to examine a series of modern disciplines and their concomitant institutions with a view toward describing their processes of affirmation and exclusion, in each case revealing the ways in which they make certain statements and procedures possible, while ruling others out of bounds. Initially, the stance from which Foucault proceeded was one of a philosopher of human freedom questioning the limits that modern institutions and fields of knowledge impose on it. The earliest historical approach he took toward such intellectual domains and institutions was one of discontinuity, searching for the point of rupture between the way knowledge was organized in one historical period and the way it came to be organized later. The intellectual debt for this strategy came from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard, mediated through the work of Canguilhem. Bachelard introduced the phrase coupure épistémologique (epistemological break) to refer to a decisive point separating two distinctly different historical phases of scientific perception. During the decade of the 1950s, Foucault failed to secure any permanent academic position. He briefly held one in Lille, but commuted steadily between there and Paris, refusing to become a part of the academic community in the northern city. After this disappointing experience, he eagerly accepted a position at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, where he taught until 1958, and basked in that country’s liberal sexual climate even as he endured its chill winters. In October 1958, he accepted a position in Poland – similar to the one he had held in Sweden – as director of the Centre français at the University of Warsaw. Foucault


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enjoyed the country, and his affection for Poles would later find expression in his strong support for the Solidarity movement of the 1980s. He remained in Warsaw during 1958 and 1959, then accepted an appointment as director of the Institut français in the West German port city of Hamburg. In 1960, he returned to France to begin a six-year stint at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in central France. His return also expressed a deeper commitment to his life partner, Daniel Defert, then beginning his university studies. In 1961, Foucault published Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (translated as History of Madness, 2009), which he had begun writing while in Poland. He successfully submitted and defended this work as his doctorat d’état, the second doctorate that must be completed by one who aspires to a career as a French university professor. One of the members of the examining committee was Georges Canguilhem, who found that Foucault’s views of psychiatry and the treatment of mental illness complemented his own skeptical attitude. The new book continues Foucault’s fascination with psychological topics, but signals the author’s growing concern with historical questions, to be examined with methods he would employ in a whole series of books. In addition, Histoire de la folie displays Foucault’s embrace of historical discontinuity, and the book begins with what would come to be a very characteristic stark juxtaposition of descriptions that are meant to illustrate two incommensurable mindsets that govern what can be considered or acknowledged in the ensemble of expressions or statements generated in any one historical epoch. Foucault’s term for such mindsets was épistèmes. The book opens with the striking image of the so-called “ship of fools,” as portrayed in late medieval literature by Sebastian Brandt and in fifteenth-century Flemish painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Foucault suggests that Europeans of the period before the seventeenth century were largely tolerant of the presence of “mad” people in their midst, with the voyages of ships populated by such persons constituting the means by which societies dealt with those who in a later era would be deemed “insane.” Then Foucault shifts to the period after what he called le grand renfermement – or “great confinement” – of 1689, describing the earliest examples of mental institutions and the subsequent reforms proposed by such figures as Samuel Tuke in Quaker Philadelphia and Philippe Pinel in France. Ever attentive to space as a social category, Foucault found it significant that abandoned lazar-houses (leprosaria) provided the locales of the first asylums. Foucault’s study of the origins of the asylum stands as a vivid example of his desire to expose the power agendas of modern social institutions, especially by viewing such institutions and their professional overseers as existing in order to produce, in a sense, the object of their domination and thus the basis of their professional status. As regards mental institutions, Foucault viewed “madness” not as a set of naturally occurring phenomena but as something invented by the discourse (a term he would employ with increasing insistence) of the professionals appointed to classify, supervise, and control those human beings judged to be within the category of the insane. This interpretation seemed to ally Foucault

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closely with those who in the 1960s constituted the “anti-psychiatry” movement, although later he would seek to distance himself somewhat from that camp. Foucault’s book does not so much condemn the practice of confining persons judged insane in mental institutions as “defamiliarize” the modern societies that assume the necessity of doing so. This defamiliarization is the result of Foucault’s strategy of limning an era in which the practice did not exist before describing its modern evolution. Folie et déraison garnered a number of very favorable reviews after it appeared in May 1961. Several of the welcoming reviews came from very prominent intellectual figures, including Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and the influential historian Fernand Braudel. Gaston Bachelard sent Foucault a warm personal letter and invited the latter to visit his home later that year. However, Bachelard died in October 1961. Such an embrace by established writers made Foucault a major intellectual figure almost overnight, but it was to be nearly another decade before historians began citing his work and demonstrating his influence. For the next few years, Foucault turned his attention to literary topics, a direction first hinted at in his book, which made frequent mention of writers associated with extreme mental states. These included Gérard de Nerval, Antonin Artaud, and Georges Bataille. Georges Bataille, who died in 1962, was a controversial author who dabbled in ethnography and Hegelian philosophy, but who was best known for novels marked by extremes of violence and eroticism. His renegade status did not prevent his becoming editor of the distinguished literary review La Nouvelle revue française, whose editorial board Foucault himself was invited to join not long after Bataille’s death. Foucault had much to do with securing Bataille’s posthumous reputation, urging the elite publishing house of Gallimard to publish the author’s Oeuvres complètes, and then writing an eloquent introduction to the four-volume set. Bataille’s daring, transgressive writing appealed to Foucault’s own attraction to what he would come to call “limit-experiences.” Another such writer to whom Foucault devoted one of the many critical essays he produced during the early 1960s was Pierre Klossowski, author of highly cerebral but nonetheless overtly pornographic works. Other Foucault essays extolled the achievements of Maurice Blanchot, a highly influential prose stylist whose reputation was haunted by his onetime sympathetic view of fascism, and philosopher Gilles Deleuze, author of a groundbreaking study of Nietzsche that influenced Foucault’s own growing preoccupation with that philosopher’s ideas. Deleuze and Foucault were to become good friends over the years. But the writer on whom Foucault lavished the greatest attention during this period was Raymond Roussel, a nearly forgotten author of the late nineteenth century whose books Foucault chanced upon in a Paris shop. Roussel’s dreamlike prose combined bizarre personal reflections and exotic locales, and Foucault explored the disorienting effects of this oeuvre in a book-length study published in 1963 as Raymond Roussel (translated as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, 1986).


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By now, Foucault’s reputation was beginning to grow beyond France, and he was invited on several occasions to lecture abroad. He traveled to Brazil and to the United States (to Buffalo, New York), and seriously considered an academic appointment in Tokyo. He was increasingly dissatisfied with Clermont-Ferrand (where he stayed only grudgingly with constant commuting between there and Paris), but ultimately decided to remain in France owing largely to his relationship with Daniel Defert. He also returned to his historical researches, which resulted in another book published simultaneously with Raymond Roussel, this time a study of the origins of the modern medical clinic. The book, Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (translated as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception), did for the hospital what Folie et déraison had done for the asylum. Once again adhering to a model of historical discontinuity, Foucault contrasts an older form of medical practice based on dialogue with the patient with the emergence by the late eighteenth century of the central role of observation within the confines of the clinic. As with the asylum and madness, the modern hospital becomes an institution where disease is “produced” in the sense of something to be named, classified, and used to justify the growing power and prestige of the modern medical profession. From social institutions as physical spaces for the production of knowledge and the various human sciences, Foucault next turned, in a much more ambitious undertaking, to a rigorous examination of the human sciences themselves. He applied the archaeological method of his two earlier books to the patterns and procedures common to such fields as morphology, political economy, and comparative linguistics, each of which came to prominence during the nineteenth century. The temporal context was highly appropriate: just as this century was one of acute awareness of the march of history, these various fields of knowledge concerned themselves with development in time of the phenomena they were designed to study. The results of Foucault’s research bore fruit in his 1966 book, Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1973), and it begins, as most of his books, with a rather jarring meditation. In his usual defamiliarizing way (he once referred in an interview to the necessity of “unlearning” as an approach to historical knowledge), Foucault seeks to expose the arbitrariness of the classificatory systems developed by the human sciences. Accordingly, he begins Les Mots et les choses by commenting on Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional account of an ancient Chinese encyclopedia based on an improbably absurd system of classification. Foucault argues that our response to this is laughter followed closely by the cold realization that our own modern schemes are no less arbitrary, and might appear equally ridiculous to an outside observer. Unexpectedly for a rather difficult and unabashedly academic work, Les Mots et les choses proved something of a sensation, with the initial print run quickly selling out in Paris bookstores. Its appearance enshrined Michel Foucault among the most prominent of French intellectuals, and he and his book became the subject

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of literary magazines and, indeed, much national media. A major reason for this attention was the vogue for structuralism that peaked around this time in France. While Foucault did not consider himself a structuralist, those responding to his analysis of the human sciences as discursive systems saw him as echoing the structuralist emphasis on language as a set of elaborate determining structures not dependent on human agency. And, indeed, Foucault clearly shared the so-called “anti-humanism” of the structuralists. Les Mots et les choses ends with ringing neoNietzschean passages that celebrate the death of “man” as the central focus of modern systems of knowledge. At least a part of Foucault’s agenda here was his repudiation of the existentialist humanism of Sartre, the intellectual predecessor he sought to demolish on more than one occasion. A somewhat surprising response to Les Mots et les choses came in the form of a personal note of appreciation from the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte. A few years later, Foucault responded with an essay exploring some similarities between himself and Magritte in their ideas about language and meaning exemplified by the title of the painting Foucault used for his essay: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973, translated as This is Not a Pipe, 1983). The essay was published to accompany a small collection of Magritte illustrations. A clever cartoon by Maurice Henry published in July 1967 in La Quinzaine littéraire probably did as much as anything to fix the idea in people’s minds that Foucault was a thoroughgoing structuralist. Called Le Déjeuner des structuralistes, this parody of Manet’s famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe depicted four leading French theorists seated in a circle and holding a discussion. They were portrayed as wearing grass skirts, a nod to the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the four. The others in the circle were Jacques Lacan (the psychoanalyst whose collected writings also appeared in 1966 as Ecrits), the influential critic Roland Barthes, and Foucault. Characteristically, Foucault was not to linger for long at the moveable feast that was Paris in the heyday of structuralism. That autumn he departed for Tunisia, where he was to remain for the better part of two years. His position there was made possible through the French Foreign Ministry, but he also received a lectureship at the University of Tunis. In practice, he had a great deal of time to himself and he spent it making frequent trips back to Paris (where he and Defert now had a comfortable apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement) and writing his next book, which was a real departure from his previous work. A theoretical exercise in intellectual history, L’Archéologie du savoir (translated as The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1973), published in 1969, was an exercise in taking stock of his intellectual career to date. In this self-critical essay, Foucault considers the archaeological method he had fashioned and hints at the departure he was about to inaugurate. Mindful of the commonly held assumption that he belonged in the structuralist camp, Foucault attempted to describe in some detail his own particular approach to language – the discourses – through which he sifted in the archaeological enterprise he contrasted with an outmoded “history of ideas.”


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The book also contains an impassioned plea for a writer such as he to be allowed to reinvent himself with each book, rather than to conform to some authorial stereotype. Ever eager to escape being typecast as the inventor of a philosophical system or carefully packaged method, Foucault expressed himself in an essay that also appeared in 1969 on the vexed subject of authorship. First delivered as a lecture in Paris, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (“What is an Author?” available in the collection Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard) attacks what Foucault characterizes as the “author-function,” the set of assumptions readers bring to any text bearing the name of a celebrated author. Such assumptions distort and predetermine what one gains from the reading of a canonical book. Instead, Foucault argues, we should bring different sets of questions to books that seem central to our civilization: who recommends them, who controls their circulation, who has access to them and who does not, and so forth. Foucault was still in Tunis when the singular events known to history as “May 1968” began with the student uprising at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was eager to return, but did not do so until near the end of the uprising. The upheaval produced a number of changes in French society, not the least of which was the retirement of President Charles de Gaulle from political life. The Ministry of Education proposed the creation of new universities with different kinds of institutional structures. The most celebrated of these was the new university on the far eastern edge of Paris, at Vincennes. This university was to be staffed with a number of prominent philosophers and, in a gesture that May 1968 helped to encourage, psychoanalysts. Foucault was ready to consider a new academic position and eager as well to return to France, so he joined the faculty of the new university in the fall of 1968. From the beginning, Vincennes was an almost impossible place to work, subject to frequent interruptions by student protests and frustrating internecine politics which pitted inflated academic egos against each other. As a result, Foucault began casting about for other opportunities. Early in 1969, Jean Hyppolite, already mentioned as an important intellectual influence for Foucault’s generation, died, which created a vacant chair at the Collège de France, the nation’s most august academic institution, in which a limited number of professors appointed for life are free from conventional duties such as regular courses to offer or students to tutor. Instead, professors at the elite institution in the rue des Ecoles agree either to present several public lectures per year or conduct elite research seminars. It happens that Hyppolite had mentioned Foucault’s merits as a potential member of the Collège in 1966, not long after the publication of Les Mots et les choses. After months of quiet campaigning both by Foucault and his supporters, he was welcomed as a member of the Collège de France when, in late November 1969, the faculty voted to establish a chair for him in the History of the Systems of Thought. On December 2, 1970, speaking in a soft, deliberate voice, Michel Foucault delivered his eloquent inaugural lecture as a member of the Collège de France. The lecture was published immediately thereafter as L’Ordre du discours (translated as “The Discourse on Language” as an appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge,

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1973). On this occasion, Foucault paid grateful homage to his predecessor Jean Hyppolite and played down his own importance, drawing upon an argument in modern French letters – first advanced by Marcel Proust – that the life and personality of the author is far less significant than the work produced. Quoting Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, Foucault spoke of wishing to be able to disappear “behind” his own story, his own discourse. As for the title he gave his lecture, Foucault offered as a prolegomenon to his future work a program for the historical investigation of “discourse,” defined as the body of statements and writings generated by a society at a specific stage of development that operates according to principles of affirmation, comparison, distinction, and exclusion. This definition amounts to a departure from his earlier “archaeological” approach, and it reflects the effect of his lifelong fascination with Nietzsche’s philosophy and its implications for historical thinking. The following year, in his contribution “Nietzsche, la généologie, l’histoire” (translated as “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) to a volume of essays in tribute to Hyppolite, Foucault would explore some of the nuances of a Nietzschean approach to history. The genealogical method would be one of searching for minute, detailed phenomena in order to explain specific influences and historical changes. For Foucault, it had the virtue of avoiding both the recovery of absolute points of origin and the kinds of grand historical explanation he so detested in the dialectical tendencies of Hegelian-Marxist models. Just as he preferred historical research that investigated specific topics to working on a far grander scale, in his political life Foucault tackled certain issues as they presented themselves, seeking always to avoid the prophetic role of the intellectual as the conscience of the nation. Jean-Paul Sartre (like Victor Hugo a century earlier) played this role for all it was worth, and Foucault found it irritating. French political culture in the early 1970s showed the continued influence of the May 1968 uprising. The students and workers involved were distrustful of Marxism and of any politics based on systems of thought that promised grand syntheses and interpretive mastery. Instead, they argued for local, strategic action specific to the institutional sites in which they found themselves. To this end, the May activists formed comités d’action (action committees) to address problems in piecemeal fashion. One of the most pressing issues of the time was the treatment of prisoners, many of them May 1968 revolutionaries condemned for their actions in that uprising. As they served their time, they became aware of terrible conditions in the prisons and forged bonds of solidarity with other inmates. In support of their efforts, advocacy groups outside began to emerge. One of the most prominent of these was GIP, or Groupe d’information sur les prisons, and Foucault played a very active role in it. May 1968 also generated activism in support of women’s rights and the rights of gay people. Foucault began to play a very visible role in the latter movement. He also involved himself in demonstrations on behalf of immigrants seeking relief from police harassment and more lenient procedures


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for obtaining residency in France. Often Foucault appeared with other prominent writers, including Jean Genet, Claude Mauriac, and, despite his discomfort at the idea, on occasion with Jean-Paul Sartre. The latter was at his side in a well-publicized Paris demonstration in support of North African immigrants in 1971. For the next several years, Foucault’s activism fed his research, and vice versa. At the Collège de France, he opted to lead research seminars rather than give a series of lectures. These had to be held open for the public, and sometimes the size of the audience made the seminars unwieldy and frustrating for Foucault, but he gathered around himself a core group to which he brought some of the documents on crime, penology, and incarceration that he had discovered in archives and libraries (his favorite haunts being the Bibliothèque nationale, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, the Archives nationales, and the archives of the Préfecture de police). A case from the 1830s in France, which Foucault discovered in the pages of a medico-legal journal of that era, provided the centerpiece of a collaborative research project that Foucault published as a dossier in 1973. It involved a case of parricide that broke with precedent in that the murderer was spared the death penalty because he was judged insane. The opening words of the man’s own memoir, written in 1835, provided the book’s title: Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur, et mon frère … (: un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle, 1973; translated as I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother …: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, 1975). Foucault and his colleagues were captivated by the haunting prose of Rivière’s account of his crimes, and the elaborate justification he advanced to explain what drove him to the murders. Although he was quite clearly delusional, he thoroughly confessed his deeds and urged that he be convicted and guillotined. When instead he received a life sentence, his growing unhappiness led him after five years in prison to hang himself. The memoir is followed by court documents, newspaper articles, and samples of the medical and legal opinions expressed around the case. It appears to have been the first murder trial to make extensive use of expert testimony, and for Foucault the case was rich with examples of the growing power of the professional “discourses” (for example, medical, psychiatric, criminological) to play decisive roles in legal proceedings and elsewhere in civil society. At the center of this elaborate drama was Pierre Rivière, just so much grist for all their mills. More and more, Foucault threw himself into research on the history of prisons, and he would argue later that the advantage of studying this particular social institution as a way to analyze power is that power, in the prison, “does not hide or mask itself.” The culmination of this research was the book Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (translated as Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, 1977), published by Gallimard in 1975. Many readers of Foucault have found this to be his most eloquent and powerful work. In keeping with the genealogical method, and as he had done in earlier books, Foucault asks himself how far back the historian needs to search to locate a time before the particular social space occupied

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by the modern prison emerged. Once again, in the most dramatic opening to any of his books, he juxtaposes two radically different scenarios separated by only a few decades. First comes a horrific description of the public torture and dismemberment in 1757 of the regicide Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV. Immediately thereafter comes a sober recitation of a day’s schedule in a Parisian juvenile prison in 1838. Ever the ironist, Foucault’s treatment creates the cold realization in the reader that the latter scenario may be the greater horror, for brutal domination over a body to be killed is one thing, but the modern project of multiple efforts to control behavior, emotion, and intellect is quite another. Of course, the point is not to prefer the earlier methods but to throw into sharp relief the procedures that have become all too familiar and thus somewhat immune to criticism. Many of the most disturbing passages in this rather chilling book deal with the prison as the site of the controlling gaze of prison authorities and, by extension, the members of the professions that seek to be legitimized through the prison’s existence. Foucault demonstrates that the exercise of the dominating gaze – which he deems the “eye of power” –informed the designs of many nineteenth-century prisons, wherein the prisoners were to believe themselves to be under continual surveillance. Here Foucault enters a long procession of twentieth-century French intellectuals, including Bataille, Sartre, and Lacan, who saw “the gaze,” or visual domination, as a problem to be overcome. As prisons developed, they became sites of moral instruction, concerned with issues of health and hygiene. The overall aim was the production of “docile bodies,” as Foucault puts it. The last chapters of the book especially show Foucault turning more and more to the question of the body and the interest of the modern state in regulating it by encouraging people to observe and police their own bodies. To return to the visual metaphor of the eye of power, subjects, like the hypothetical prisoners, will have internalized the controlling gaze. Especially in interviews conducted after the publication of Surveiller et punir (an immediate sensation in France, with elaborate media coverage), Foucault argued that power is able to operate because it is not merely prohibitory. The relations of power are profoundly “productive,” he insisted. Schools, factories, and prisons (which, as Foucault memorably asserted in the book, all resemble each other) all train the individual subject to feel responsible for his own conduct, and this feeling, at an everyday level, facilitates the work of power. Here Foucault’s dissection of power’s operations in such a major social institution as the prison intersects with his longstanding suspicion of the Western humanist shibboleth of “the subject,” that is, the sacrosanct notion that the individual human being is the inherent focus and locus of all crucial cultural considerations. He had long shared with the major structuralist and poststructuralist intellectuals (such as Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, and Derrida) a hostile attitude toward the concept of “man” and the uncritical humanism of much of modern Western thought, of which existentialism was a famously influential example. His


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work on the prison, as well as the Rivière case that preceded it, brought into sharper focus Foucault’s longstanding concern with the subject, his term for the individual human being conditioned to regard himself as such and thus available as the conduit of what Foucault began to call in the mid-1970s pouvoir-savoir (power/knowledge). In this formulation, power cannot be distinguished from the discourses through which it circulates. Foucault always thought in spatial terms, a tendency on dramatic display in Surveiller et punir. In that book, the space of the prison provides the metaphorical means to observe power’s operations. In Foucault’s social thought generally, worked out especially through interviews and occasional essays or lectures, the entire social field is perceived as a grid of power relations within which individual subjects are dispersed as nodal points. In such a scheme, pouvoir-savoir penetrates and flows through bodies as well as intellects. In fact, after publishing Surveiller et punir, Foucault focused much more intensely on the body and on the role bodily (and especially sexual) conduct plays in the circulation of power. Only one year after publication of his celebrated book on the prison, in 1976 Foucault published a volume on sexuality and history called La Volonté de savoir: histoire de la sexualité, volume 1 (translated as The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, 1978; the literal translation of “La Volonté de savoir” is “The Will to Knowledge”). The author intended his book as a prologue to an ambitious multivolume study of the history of sexuality, and he suggested titles for the works to follow. However, the project would undergo radical transformation before the next (and final) volumes appeared. The most important arguments Foucault advances in La Volonté de savoir are that an emphasis on sexuality allows power to intrude ever more intimately into people’s lives and that this emphasis at a personal level intensifies the ways in which people are shaped into subjects, the result being an unquestioning acceptance of this status so that power’s operations are increasingly difficult to discern. Foucault drops a polemical bombshell at the outset of his book by attacking the notion of what he calls “the oppressive hypothesis.” This phrase refers to the work of so-called sexologists, radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in particular, who tended to argue that civilization seeks to prohibit sexual expression and that the path to personal liberation is to claim one’s sexuality and assert it proudly. Foucault argues that it really does not matter whether sexuality is being affirmed or condemned in terms of power. Either way, it remains a vehicle for discourse. He scoffed at the idea that the modern age of increasing sexual liberation was preceded by a Victorian age of utter sexual repression. Foucault’s own researches had convinced him that nineteenth-century Europeans had a great deal to say about sexual matters; that is, that sexuality was no less a focus for discourse than it came to be in the later period. In one of the book’s dramatic rhetorical flourishes, Foucault writes “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power,” a clear slap at the “Whenever I make love, I make revolution” ethos of May 1968.

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There is an additional sense in which this new book on sexuality was a departure for Foucault. As many readers have commented, the rhetorical force of the long, almost rhythmic passages in which Foucault anatomizes the intricate workings of power in Surveiller et punir leaves one gasping for breath, despairing that some way ever could be found to escape its grip or to resist its totalizing force. However, La Volonté de savoir pulls back somewhat from such a point of no return, even as it catalogues the myriad ways that power, operating within pouvoir-savoir, inhabits so many aspects of sexuality. Foucault speaks of “tactics” and “strategies” that might be adopted to resist these tendencies, hinting at interstitial social spaces that the forces of resistance might occupy. In interviews granted during the late 1970s, he described his project as one of laying bare the discursive operations of power as a means of breaking free of them. For gay activists among others, these discussions have continued to fuel debates about the political implications of Foucault’s work. Not long after the publication of La Volonté de savoir, Foucault’s Collège de France research seminar began working with an unusual source that would help to drive home the point that the modern period has been one in which the equation between sexuality and personal identity would be firmly established. In 1978, Foucault supervised the publication of a dossier called Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B. (1978; translated as Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite, 1980). The story of Alexina B., also known as Herculine Barbin, was unearthed from an 1874 medical report. It recounted a case from the 1820s of a hermaphrodite (a phenomenon to which Foucault had hoped to devote a volume of his project on the history of sexuality) raised as a girl in a convent but examined by a doctor (after something of a scandal broke out over Herculine’s relations with a girl in the convent) at the age of twenty and declared to be a man. Upon a judge’s order, the subject thereafter was required to live as a man. It was impossible to make the adjustment, and the eventual result was suicide. The examining physician’s report made clear that both sets of genitals, partially formed, were present in Herculine Barbin. But what made the case so perfectly suited to Foucault’s purposes is the way it reveals the rigidity of the categories the medical and legal experts felt compelled to impose. The existence of a hermaphrodite calls into question the binary order of male/female and was thus intolerable to the experts of the day. It was imperative to declare this unfortunate person one or the other, even in face of evidence that challenged all stereotypes. The need to determine a “true sex” was paramount, and what interested Foucault was both the way the episode illustrated the modern preoccupation with sexuality as the index to the truth of one’s identity and the way all modern discourses serve what he called in many writings and interviews the “regime of truth.” The phrase bespeaks Foucault’s heavily Nietzschean skepticism and hostility toward truth claims. Central to Foucault’s critical analysis of all discourse was his contention that the protectors and guardians of each discourse believe themselves to be on the path of Truth (with a capital “T”).


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Despite his theoretical distrust of sexual categories and identities, Foucault was quite happy to throw his support to the increasingly visible and assertive gay rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s. On a personal level, despite his long-term commitment to Daniel Defert, he delighted in the wide-open gay subcultures of the major world cities he visited, especially San Francisco, whose atmosphere he savored while serving as a visiting professor at the nearby University of California, Berkeley in the early 1980s. Most unfortunately for him, it was probably during this period that he contracted the AIDS virus that would bring about his early death in 1984. Virtually no one learned of this diagnosis until after his death (Daniel Defert, in a 1992 interview published in June 2004 in the Paris newspaper Libération as part of a twentieth-anniversary commemoration of Foucault’s death, revealed that the doctors initially had ruled out AIDS as a diagnosis because Foucault did not have the lesions and skin discoloration known as Kaposi’s sarcoma, which at that time was believed to accompany all cases of AIDS). Certainly, the threat of AIDS had begun to galvanize and energize the gay community, and Foucault was caught up in the climate of urgent debate and discussion among gays. In his interviews, Foucault adopted an ethical tone, one that explored questions of how a gay person should live. For him, the point was to escape stereotypes or some fixed definition of homosexuality, as if that designation described some stable set of characteristics or tendencies. In an interview with two Canadian gay activists, he spoke of the need continually to improvise and create a “gay” manner of living, borrowing the sense of “gay” that Nietzsche had celebrated in his Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science). This ethical emphasis reflected the nature of the research Foucault was doing after 1980, research that plunged him into reading the ethical and moral treatises of Western antiquity. By following his genealogical method to search for the first steps Western civilization had taken to position the individual human subject at the center of all discussions of sexuality, he was led far back before his usual historical periods to consider the writers of the Hellenistic world, such Roman figures as Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, and the early Church fathers. He discovered that the more ancient of these writers concerned themselves with the variety of ways human beings might seek to regulate their conduct, but as the early Christian era unfolded, the accent began to fall increasingly on sexual behavior. As he immersed himself in this literature, Foucault gradually abandoned his original scheme for his history of sexuality and began work on two volumes that would deal with these ancient moral and ethical concerns. An important reason for his new direction was the library where he had begun to work on a regular basis. The library in question is the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, attached to a Dominican monastery in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. By 1979, Foucault was utterly exasperated with the poor service at the Bibliothèque nationale, long his preferred spot for research. He happened to meet the librarian of the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir who, hearing of Foucault’s difficulties, offered him the use of his library. Foucault grew fond of the work environment there, and the library’s strong holdings in ancient and medieval works certainly affected his scholarship. Although a lapsed Catholic

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himself, at Foucault’s death he left a large bequest to Saulchoir, which became the main repository for his own papers. Foucault’s historical research had always adhered to an early modern or modern emphasis, but as he worked on the ancient sources, he began significantly to widen the range and trajectory of the history that he now wanted most to trace: the history of how Western people came to experience themselves as subjects faced with the continual work of self-regulation, with an increasingly relentless focus on sexuality. Even if the latter had been refined and codified anew by such modern discourses as psychoanalysis, Foucault would describe its emergence in a much earlier period. He discovered an important etymological dimension within this history, as his attention was drawn to what the words for “govern” meant to ancient writers. The Latin verb gubernare had to do with regulating oneself in a variety of senses, including managing one’s household and keeping all one’s appetites and pleasures in a kind of balance. It thus carried the sense of a kind of economy of daily living, avoiding waste or profligacy. Then, in modern times, “govern” has come to be associated more and more with the state and the citizens within it. In his last years, Foucault, in interviews and lectures, came to use the coinage “governmentality” to refer to the expanding list of areas of life into which the regulating, governing impulse of the modern state intrudes. It was a way of seeing power as a colonizing force, assisted by the countless individual agents Foucault called “subjects.” From 1979 to 1984, Foucault worked at his newly defined history of sexuality, frequently leaving Paris to travel and to give guest lectures and serve as visiting professor. The United States, especially northern California, was a favorite destination. His growing proficiency in English enabled him to address the public in that language, and he enjoyed his regular visits to the University of California, Berkeley. He also spent time at the University of Vermont, where he took part in a seminar with other faculty members. By 1983, Foucault was beginning to experience bouts of illness, evidence of the affliction that was only beginning to be recognized by the medical community as AIDS. Completing the next two volumes of L’Histoire de la sexualité became a real race against time. He completed them shortly before entering a Paris hospital for a month-long stay that culminated in his death in June 1984, and he was able to examine the first published copies in his last days. Volume 2 of the series is called L’Usage des plaisirs (translated as The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality, 1985) and volume 3 is Le Souci de soi (translated as The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of the History of Sexuality, 1986) and their publication in May 1984 was greeted with great enthusiasm by the French media and publishing world. Then, with the announcement of Foucault’s death (which took even close associates by surprise), the tributes to the man overlapped with the reactions to the books, so that Foucault was a front-page topic for a month or more. The French intellectual community, including such prominent figures as Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida (with whom


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Foucault had crossed swords bitterly in earlier years) chorused its homage, and it is especially striking that accolades came from prominent historians such as Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie because Foucault had long chafed under what he felt was a lack of appreciation by professionally trained historians. Before much additional time had elapsed, it became clear that these final books on sexuality were to have an influence at least as great as the influence of Foucault’s book on prisons. L’Usage des plaisirs explores the connection between morality and what Foucault called the “practice of self ” in Hellenistic writings, with some attention to the Hellenic foundations of Socrates and his intellectual descendants. In his 1982 Vermont lecture, Foucault had referred to the various means by which individuals regard and seek to regulate themselves as subjects as “technologies of the self.” Foucault emphasizes in the writings of these past centuries the concept of askesis, from which the word “ascetic” certainly derives, but which referred more broadly to the work performed upon the self to achieve the necessary equilibrium and economy of pleasures and personal obligations that defined the good life. Homoeroticism, especially “love of boys,” is often at the center of the ethical arguments of the Greek authors, acknowledged as an inevitable part of a man’s life but demanding to be rationed and regulated in relation to all other aspects of one’s conduct. Despite this emphasis, however, Foucault argued that the Hellenistic moral treatises were more inclined to discuss proper diet as an indicator of the quality of a life well lived than to discuss sexual gratification. Le Souci de soi moves into the writings of pagan and early Christian Rome, where erotic attraction to boys remains acknowledged but now must be considered much more in terms of conjugal love and its responsibilities, as well as in relation to the Church’s advocacy of celibacy. The emphasis begins to shift from the effort to hold one’s desires in balance to the teaching that the greatest ethical good is self-denial. Homosexual (the word, of course, is anachronistic) desire has not yet been subjected to categorical denunciation, but is increasingly difficult to justify given other moral obligations (such as sexual intercourse purely for procreative purposes). But it is the title (Care of the Self) that suggests Foucault’s main agenda in this book. The so-called “self ” is portrayed as a kind of hothouse orchid that needs elaborate care and nurturing in order to thrive, with each subject called upon to be its attentive horticulturist. More than anything else, such is the legacy of the ethical writings of this period of antiquity. Whereas earlier historical explorations by Foucault emphasized the modern discourses that brought about the obsessive focus on self, especially as discovered and experienced through sexual identity, Le Souci de soi suggests that this impulse emerged centuries earlier and that it is the central problem not just of modernity, but of the entire sweep of Western civilization. This suggestion represents an enormous departure for Michel Foucault, and his untimely death has deprived us of the opportunity to see how he would have negotiated his remapped intellectual terrain. Perhaps a radically new direction should not have been surprising for a writer who once

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remarked that he wrote books in order to be personally transformed, to leave behind his previous authorial self. This very aspect of Foucault’s career makes it difficult, and perhaps unwise, to attempt a synthesis or summing-up of his work and its significance. He was quite happily and avowedly a contradictory character, refusing to adhere to a strict formula or schema for the kind of research he might want to do or the kinds of books he might wish to write. If anything, he resembled his beloved Nietzsche in his deliberate, continual self-reinvention. This refusal must be seen also as symptomatic of his almost pathological distrust of any ambitious philosophical system, and he reserved his most withering scorn for Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. But even here one can locate contradictions. Foucault devoted an essay prepared for a 1964 colloquium to “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” treating each as the founder of an inescapable theoretical practice central to modernity. Also, in an interview published in 1975 as part of the coverage given to Surveiller et punir by the prominent monthly Magazine littéraire, Foucault compared the impossibility of an historian’s failing to acknowledge a debt to Marx to a physicist’s ignoring of Einstein. To some critics approaching Foucault from a Marxist perspective, or at least a perspective much friendlier to Marxist analysis, Foucault’s terminology of power and pouvoir-savoir has seemed to be an elaborate and suspicious attempt to avoid a Marxist lexicon of “ideology” or “hegemony” while exploring a very similar terrain. Whether this criticism is fair or even accurate, it can at times seem as if Foucault, not unlike other prominent French intellectuals of his generation, was determined to establish his unique claim as a theorist by inventing his very own terminology. As a result, at a certain level, reading Foucault is a way of being introduced to a style – both a literary style and a style of argument. Seeing “Foucault” as some kind of camp or theoretical structure one can use to inhabit or to assail is thus rather beside the point. Nevertheless, it is possible, certainly, to observe the influence of Foucault’s ideas and style of historical research on historians and others who have followed after him. His early work exerted a noticeable influence on social and cultural historians of early modern Europe such as Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis, as well as on historians of the French Revolution such as Lynn Hunt. The last two topics that Foucault explored, the prison and sexuality, have continued to generate the greatest response. The theme that bridges both of them is that of “the body,” and that, improbably or not, has become a major motif in historical research, evident in women’s history, the history of sexuality, the history of science and medicine, and anthropology, among other fields. It has also been a theme that has attracted some feminist historians, who have otherwise been suspicious of Foucault’s apparent lack of interest in historical topics involving women (an exception to this tendency being his collaboration with the French family historian Arlette Farge), The clearest stamp of Foucault’s influence can be seen in the field of the history of sexuality, which includes scholarly journals with titles directly inspired by


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Foucault’s own works. The field’s very existence cannot be imagined without his groundbreaking work. Wherever historians consider topics of gender, sexuality, or the body the debt to Foucault is easy to discern, especially when it is linked to the historically problematic category of the subject or self.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Michel Foucault Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954); translated by Alan Sheridan as Mental Illness and Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961; enlarged edn., Paris: Gallimard, 1972); translated by Jonathan Murphy as History of Madness, edited by Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2009). Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Pantheon, 1973). Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); translated by Charles Ruas as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986). Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); translated by Alan Sheridan as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1973). L’Ordre du discours: leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); translated by Rupert Swyer as “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 215–37. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); translated by Alan Sheridan as Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). La Volonté de savoir: histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); translated by Robert Hurley as The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978). L’Usage des plaisirs: histoire de la sexualité, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); translated by Robert Hurley as The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1985). Le Souci de soi: histoire de la sexualité, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); translated by Robert Hurley as The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

Collections Dits et écrits, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); selections translated as The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow, 3 vols. (New York: The New Press, 1997–2000); comprises vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow (1997); vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion (1998); vol. 3: Power, edited by James D. Faubion (2000).

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Other Works and Interviews Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur, et mon frère …: un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle, edited by Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1973); translated by Frank Jellinek as I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother …: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (New York: Pantheon, 1975). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B., introduction by Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); translated by Richard McDougall as Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Le Désordre des familles: lettres de cachet des archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe siècle, edited by Michel Foucault and Arlette Farge (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1982). Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84), edited by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989).

References Barker, Philip, Michel Foucault: Subversions of the Subject (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; rev. and enlarged edn., 1983). Eribon, Didier, Michel Foucault, 1926–1984 (Paris: Flammarion, 1989); translated by Betsy Wing as Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Gutting, Gary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Halperin, David M., Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Hoy, David Couzens (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Macey, David, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1994). Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). Mills, Sara, Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 2003). O’Leary, Timothy, Foucault: The Art of Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2002). Racevskis, Karlis (ed.), Critical Essays on Michel Foucault (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999).

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François Furet (1927–1997) Marvin R. Cox

On the occasion of François Furet’s death in 1997, Michael Mosher, writing in the American scholarly journal Political Theory, identified the aspect of his career that had become most conspicuous by its end. Furet was “a leader of the exodus of French intellectuals from Marxism.” Writing in the same vein for the English newspaper The Independent, Colin Lucas said that Furet’s message had an impact that “reached beyond the academic world … to the public mind.” Furet had become an outstanding public intellectual, a writer of great erudition who addressed a large audience of educated, non-specialist readers. His best-known work in this capacity was his last, Le Passé d’une illusion (1995; translated as The Passing of an Illusion, 1999). Technically, this book was a history of “the idea of communism in the twentieth century.” In his preface, however, Furet confesses that he has a “biographical connection” with his subject, and it was this aspect of the book that primarily attracted the attention of a reading public that had joined “the exodus from Marxism.” The “biographical connection” is most clearly on view in contexts where Furet explains the attractions of communism. One aspect of its appeal had to do with the part that the USSR had played in the defeat of Nazi Germany and with the pivotal role of French communists in the Resistance. Communism, the ideology of victory, appeared to be superior to the corrupt and ineffective “bourgeois democracy” represented by the Third and Fourth Republics. A more profound attraction, transcending postwar circumstances, emanates from what Furet calls the communist “religion of history,” the belief that mankind is moving inexorably toward a proletarian millennium and that young communists are agents of this process. By means of the biographical connection, Furet presents himself as something of a representative figure, and in an important sense he is right to do so. Furet’s

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date of birth, 1927, places him in the generation that came to maturity soon after World War II. Many thoughtful Frenchmen of that generation admired the Soviet Union (and held the defeated Third Republic in contempt), but the lure of communism was particularly strong at the time among the youth of Furet’s milieu. This milieu was privileged (Furet’s father was a bank director) and Parisian. Furet spent much of his childhood in the select sixteenth arrondissement. Young people of this milieu went to elite secondary schools and then attended various institutions of higher learning where, in the postwar years, they were exposed to the ideas of avant-garde thinkers on the left, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Furet would later indicate that his specific circumstances especially inclined him in this political direction. His forebears include republicans who defended Dreyfus, a Jewish officer wrongly accused of treason whose cause was taken up by French radicals in the late 1890s. A later forebear, Georges Monnet, was a socialist minister in the Popular Front governments of the 1930s. Almost all his immediate ancestors were anti-clerical, and Furet grew up in isolation from the Catholic influence that insulated other radical bourgeois youths from communism. When Furet joined the Communist Party in 1949, he had reason to think that he was completing a leftward progression that stretched back into the nineteenth century and, by only a slight stretch of his budding historical imagination, to the French Revolution. The representative figure of Le Passé d’une illusion is counterbalanced by the self-image projected in a published interview of 1986, “Furet, iconoclaste.” An account of his life that takes both personae into account must present him as a figure who repeatedly sets out on a well-trodden path and then diverges from it. His student years illustrate the pattern. As a late adolescent of unusual promise, he enrolled in intensive courses to prepare him for L’Ecole normale supérieure, a forcing ground for the country’s intellectual elite. He failed to win admission. Law school followed, and then the study of history. This vocation proved to be more serious. In 1954, he completed the requirements for his agrégation (roughly equivalent to a bachelor’s degree) with a thesis on “La nuit du quatre août” (The Night of August 4) under Ernest Labrousse, an eminent historian of the Ancien Régime. The thesis brought Furet to the threshold of an academic career. He did not take the next step, however, and finish his doctoral dissertation. In 1960, he found alternative academic employment as a research assistant in the Sixième Section of the Haute école des sciences humaines. This position put him outside the regular French university system, but placed him in proximity to a world-renowned school of historians associated with the journal Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations (the foremost of these historians, Fernand Braudel, obtained Furet’s position for him). In partnership with another Annaliste historian, Adeline Daumard, he published his first significant work of scholarship, Structures et relations sociales à Paris au milieu du XVIIIe siècle (Structures and Social Relations in Paris in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century, 1961).

François Furet (1927–1997)

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Even at this point, however, his career did not proceed in a straight line. Furet made his initial mark among French readers not with his first publication as an Annaliste, but, beginning in 1958, as a book reviewer and historical commentator for a prestigious journal of opinion, France observateur. He thus became known as a public intellectual before he earned a reputation as an historian. In this capacity, he also began by conforming to type. By the late 1950s, public intellectuals in France had come to be identified with the advocacy of radical causes, and over the next six years Furet frequently wrote articles dealing with decolonization and other topics of concern to the left. It is in relation to the left, however, that he diverged most sharply from the path that his student generation took. Precisely when the divergence came is not altogether clear. In Le Passé d’une illusion he suggests that it occurred soon after the Soviets suppressed the anticommunist Hungarian Revolution in 1956. His later contributions to France observateur show, on the other hand, that his sympathies with the far left outlasted this initial disenchantment. There is also uncertainty about the form that his repudiation of Marxism took. Alluding in its obituary to his best-known writings, Le Monde says that Furet’s life work amounted to “a long, a very long history, not so much of the Revolution, properly speaking,” as of “the destiny of the revolutionary passion.” This assessment suggests that his history writing was an extension of his journalism, and that he led “the exodus from Marxism” as a public intellectual. Furet in fact earned his counter-Marxist leadership credentials as a professional historian. A still radical reading public came to know him as a prime mover in the revision of the Marxist “orthodoxy”: the idea that the French Revolution consisted essentially of the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie; the concept, more simply, of a Bourgeois Revolution. As a revisionist, Furet shares honors with Alfred Cobban. This English historian is widely credited with initiating the revision, and the impression has arisen in the English-speaking world that the revision itself originated in England before passing to the Revolution’s homeland. In truth, Furet’s career as a revisionist dates back almost as far as Cobban’s. It began with La Révolution (1965, 1966; translated as The French Revolution, 1970, 1977), a lavishly illustrated, two-volume history that Furet wrote jointly with his brother-in-law, Denis Richet. This book attracted attention because it introduced the idea, called dérapage, that the Revolution initially moved in a liberal-democratic direction, and then, after being blown off course in the early 1790s, careened toward tyranny and Terror. Dérapage has to do mainly with political developments, but in chapters of the book specifically ascribed to Furet it is presented as a “social mutation” as well. His commentary on this mutation raises questions about the same aspects of the Marxist “orthodoxy” that Cobban criticized in his Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964). Furet implicitly casts doubt on the basic proposition of the “orthodoxy” that the Revolution eventuated in the ascendancy of capitalists. While conceding that the post-revolutionary ruling class bore a surface resemblance to a capitalist bourgeoisie, he says that the operations of the bankers at the

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core of the class had little in common with the normal, profit-oriented, productive methods of modern business. Entrepreneurs committed to such methods had played a leading role in 1789, but once the Revolution veered left economic power fell into the hands of men who, though technically new, actually harked back to the parasitic court capitalists of the Ancien Régime. Like their predecessors, they made money from the troubles of the treasury. Furet’s judgment on the Revolution’s place in history raises questions about another “orthodox” postulate. Georges Lefebvre, the leading Marxist historian of Furet’s student years, laid down the dictum that the Revolution removed feudal barriers to industrialization and paved the way for capitalism. Furet says that it saddled France with a stagnant agrarian economy. He associates this outcome with dérapage as well: in 1789 the French economy gave signs of moving in a capitalist direction, but “war and the Parisian mob” deflected the Revolution, and the nation, from the grand economic trajectory that “the intelligence and wealth of the eighteenth century had traced for it.” Archaic Ancien Régime conditions reappeared. Furet’s divergence from the “orthodoxy” is a clear sign of dissent from the Marxist “religion of history” and of disagreement with the intelligentsia that embraced it. His conclusions about the Revolution’s social character and economic significance reflect considerable mastery of recent research that undermined the Marxist interpretation. His verdict on its anti-climactic economic consequences is consistent with the findings of Le Mouvement du profit en France au XIXe siècle (Profit Movements in Nineteenth-century France, 1965), a study on which he collaborated with Jean Bouvier and Marcel Gillet. This book stands as a corrective to another prevailing misconception: that Furet had no background in economic history and no experience as an empirical scholar. Furet’s subsequent career explains the misconception. The Furet/Richet history represents his last significant foray into social history and socioeconomic research. His professional focus thereafter was primarily on the historiography of the French Revolution. This long chapter in his career began in 1971 with a response, called “Le catéchisme révolutionnaire” (“The Revolutionary Catechism”), to a critique of the Furet/Richet history by the Marxist historian Claude Mazauric. In 1978, Furet combined this historiographical essay with two others to form a book. This book, Penser la Révolution française (1978; translated as Interpreting the French Revolution, 1981), marks a turning point in Furet’s career and in European historiography. It carries forward the earlier revision of the “orthodoxy.” The idea of a Bourgeois Revolution, already shown to be dubious, now stands condemned as a “metaphysical monster.” The book is not primarily concerned with Marxist errors, however. It deals mainly with the hold of the Revolution itself on the minds of historians and the psyches of ordinary Frenchmen. Furet says that in France the prevailing, largely unexamined belief is that the Revolution was a watershed dividing the nation’s history into currents running backward to the Middle Ages and forward to the present – and the future. Under the spell of this conviction, contemporaries succumb to the delusion that, carried forward by the


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revolutionary current, they are still living in the Revolution and fighting its battles. A major priority of the book is to dispel this illusion. Only then can Frenchmen recognize that “the Revolution is over.” Penser la Révolution française was written for the educated public and proved to be a popular success. Furet assigns the task of rethinking, and demystifying, the Revolution to his fellow historians, however. He advances several original ideas about how the task should be approached. What he primarily advocates is a strategy of reculer pour mieux sauter: reaching back to a small number of delusion-free historians from the past who point the way to future histories anchored in what he calls “actualities.” Chief among these is Alexis de Tocqueville. To make this great thinker an instrument of historiographical transcendence, Furet takes considerable liberties with his writings. He places him wholly outside the “orthodox” tradition, yet Tocqueville subscribed to the concept of a Bourgeois Revolution. He distorts the thesis for which Tocqueville is most famous among historians. Rightly read, this thesis says that many changes attributed to the Revolution were in the making before it happened. Furet restates it to mean that the Revolution was an anticlimax, rather than the social “convulsion” that Tocqueville says it was. Furet distorts the thesis in a second sense by indicating that the continuity that Tocqueville discerned between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has to do with the persistence of archaic features of the Ancien Régime. The pre-revolutionary conditions in which Tocqueville saw the shape of things to come were, in fact, precociously modern, specifically “bourgeois and democratic.” Furet is right about Tocqueville, however, in several important particulars that were crucial for implementing his historiographical strategy. Though Tocqueville accepted several “orthodox” postulates, he did not believe, as “orthodox” historians believe, that the French Revolution brought humanity to a higher level of existence. Historians who share Tocqueville’s skepticism about the Revolutionas-“advent,” Furet says, will at last be able to “cool it off.” Furet’s account of L’Ancien régime et la Révolution, Tocqueville’s most important historical work, identifies another virtue for contemporary historians to emulate: the book is analytical as well as dispassionate. Where Jules Michelet, and most other historians of the left, wrote narrative histories in which they identified with the revolutionaries and the Revolution itself, Tocqueville removed himself from the event and thus provides a means for “taking it apart.” Tocqueville did not write a history of the Revolution, however. For a sketch of what a post-“orthodox” account of the event might be, Furet turns to the monographs of Augustin Cochin, an early twentieth-century historian who fits the mold of historiographical outsider much better than Tocqueville. Cochin’s outstanding virtue, according to Furet, is that he treats the Revolution as an age in itself, rather than as a parenthesis between the Ancien Régime and the nineteenth century, the standard practice. Cochin’s close focus on the period reveals its distinguishing feature as “strangeness.” Part of this strangeness arises from the

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revolutionaries’ sense of time: as the eighteenth-century dream of an ideal, egalitarian society appears to move closer to realization, clock-time and conventional calendar time give way to millenarian visions. The age is also strange, in comparison with the past, because it witnesses the birth of modern democratic politics. The Revolution vests sovereign power in the people. Under conditions of messianic expectation this power is perceived to be literal, rather than theoretical, as it would be in a constitutional regime. In practice it translates as the power of the mob. Concomitantly, as the sovereign mob struggles to realize its utopian program, those who stand in its way cease to be regarded as political adversaries and become diabolical enemies. In combination, popular sovereignty and the millenarian sense of time become major factors in the onset of the Terror. The decisive factor behind it, and an essential feature of modern democratic politics, is the manipulation of the people in its exalted state by a minority of fanatical ideologues. Furet believes that Cochin’s largely forgotten ideas about the mindset and political practices of the revolutionaries provide a new way of thinking about the Revolution’s place in history. To mainstream historians, “orthodox” and otherwise, its significance had always been perceived as social and economic. Historians who look beyond the mainstream to Cochin would realize that its significance is political and cultural, that it was, in a famous phrase henceforth associated with Furet, a Revolution in “political culture.” This culture is the Revolution’s primary legacy to the world. Its patterns reappear in Soviet Russia. Furet intimates that it remains a force in Red China and Khmer Rouge Cambodia. It is the common culture of totalitarian societies. Furet also thinks that revolutionary political culture had a decisive impact on its country of origin. The myth of the Revolution as “advent,” propagated by the revolutionaries themselves, is what convinces contemporary Frenchmen that they are moving forward on a revolutionary current. For nearly a century following the Revolution, the same myth prevented the French from establishing a stable democratic regime. In their violent pursuit of the thwarted utopian promise of the 1790s, Parisian radicals repeatedly drove their moderate compatriots into reaction. Furet gives Tocqueville credit for observing this pattern and for explaining it in terms of the country’s long experience of absolutism –source of the revolutionaries’ tyrannical lust for power and the reactionaries’ willing submission to dictatorship. In La Gauche et la Révolution française au milieu du XIXe siècle (The Left and the French Revolution in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, 1986), he identifies Edgar Quinet, a third historiographical outsider, as the man who spelled out the pattern’s implications. In contrast to the royalist Cochin and the pragmatic liberal Tocqueville, Quinet made his mark as a militant republican, banished by Louis Napoleon after the coup d’état of 1851. In the history of the Revolution that Quinet published from exile, he does not blame the failure of the Second Republic primarily on the man who overthrew it, but on the extremism inherent in the French revolutionary dynamic since 1789. The message of Quinet’s book is that


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to break the pattern of revolution and reaction, and to replace the Second Empire with a durable republic, French democrats must renounce their radical tradition and, in the spirit of positivism, adopt the practices of English parliamentarians and of their pragmatic American counterparts. In a book of essays that he published in 1985, Furet identifies Jules Ferry, “Founder” of the long-lived Third Republic, as the politician who brought these practical ideas to fruition in the late nineteenth century. Before Penser la Révolution française appeared, Furet, the champion of historians outside the mainstream, had been an outsider himself, scorned by the master of his field, Albert Soboul. In 1989, the bicentennial year, Le Nouvel observateur proclaimed Furet “king of the Revolution.” His position as the reigning authority of revolutionary historiography was consolidated by two books that had appeared the year before. One was a general history, La Révolution de Turgot à Jules Ferry (1988; translated as Revolutionary France: 1770–1880, 1992). In the strict chronological sense, this book figures as a distant successor to the text that launched his career as a revisionist, but Furet meant the new work to supersede the old. It is really an expansive sequel to his later historiographical reflections. True to Tocqueville, he discerns continuity beneath the two cycles of turbulence into which he divides the century that he covers: between 1789 and 1799, and again between 1815 and 1851, a Bourbon monarchy falls victim to liberal revolutionaries who are succeeded in power by republicans whose radicalism sets off a reaction that in turn leads back to absolutism. In his account of the first cycle, Furet develops themes that Cochin sketched in his monographs. Oblivious to the ongoing dynamic of state-centered tyranny that controls them, the revolutionaries repudiate the national past while claiming to inaugurate a new epoch in human history. What they foster instead is an atmosphere of millenarian expectation that generates a proto-totalitarian political culture. The idea of dérapage disappears. Furet claims that from the spring of 1789 forward the messianic fanaticism of the Revolution’s leaders stood in the way of any reasonable compromise between themselves and moderate politicians. Terror and dictatorship inevitably follow. The story of the second cycle unfolds around Quinet’s idea that the hold of collectivist utopian visions on the minds of nineteenth-century radicals prevented the establishment of viable liberal-democratic regimes in 1830 and 1848. The final section of the book points to the same moral as the introduction to Furet’s volume of essays on Ferry: the cycle of revolution and reaction that began in 1789 ended only in the late 1870s when positivist republicans managed to exorcize the demons of the revolutionary tradition and to establish a conservative democracy. Le Monde would later call Furet’s new history “le bestseller du bi-centennaire.” In the American Historical Review, Isser Woloch would say that Le Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1988; translated as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1989), the second book associated with Furet in 1989, is “the most serious and insistent reassessment of that great event to emerge from the bicentennial literature.” It is a compendium of late twentieth-century scholarship

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on the Revolution. Yet, like Furet’s best-selling history, it is also a brief for a thesis. Furet’s larger arguments emerge clearly, and predictably, from his editor’s introduction and from essays that he contributed to the volume. He traces the origins of the Terror back from the time when it became official policy in 1793 to outbursts of popular violence in 1789 so that it effectively becomes a constant, as well as a characteristic, feature of the Revolution as a whole. In his essay on “Jacobinism” he shows French radicals of the 1790s intimidating elected assemblies and manipulating the masses in the manner of twentieth-century totalitarian ideologues. Contributions by other historians that develop other aspects of Furet’s thesis show that he was now the leader of a school rather than an isolated revisionist. Writing about the short-lived calendar of the Year II, Furet’s co-editor and collaborator Mona Ozouf documents the revolutionaries’ belief that the break that they were self-consciously making with the traditional timescale would contribute to the regeneration of mankind. The spirit, if not the letter, of Furet’s thesis shows through in Marcel Gauchet’s essay on “The Rights of Man,” where the emphasis is as much on the revolutionaries’ belief in unlimited sovereignty as on the substantive rights that the celebrated document incorporates. Furet’s affiliation with the Haute école des sciences humaines continued throughout the years of his success. He served as its director (under its new name, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales) from 1977 to 1985. He was the first historian so affiliated to ascend the heights of revolutionary historiography (and one of the rare “kings of the Revolution” not to occupy the official chair in revolutionary history at the Sorbonne). The school concomitantly displaced the Sorbonne as a center for the study of the Revolution. Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations succeeded Les Annales historiques de la Révolution française (house organ of the “orthodoxy”) as the foremost journal in the field. Aspects of Furet’s writings on the Revolution reflect the influence of the journal and the school. In “De l’histoire récit à l’histoire problème” (“From narrative history to problem-oriented history,” 1975), Furet praises the Annales school for freeing historians from the tyranny of narrative, which, he says, traps them in the flow of mindless stories contrived by novelistic chroniclers. The Annaliste approach allows historians to recognize, and solve, problems that narrative raises and obscures. In Penser la Révolution française, he uses Tocqueville to illustrate the advantages of this (unacknowledged) approach. To develop the idea of revolutionary political culture, Furet, like the Annalistes, deploys ideas and methods taken from cultural anthropology and other social sciences. His explanation of “the Revolution-as-advent” hinges on “the representation of reality,” a concept unknown to traditional historians. His case for the power of revolutionary political culture rests, in the main, not on evidence drawn from documents attributed to identifiable historical figures, but on widely diffused images and phrases to which he applies Michel Foucault’s term “discourse.” Spread over a century in La Révolution de Turgot à Jules Ferry, this discourse fits into l’histoire des mentalités, one of the school’s several offspring. The book’s chronology conforms to another


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Annaliste principle: to be understood and analyzed, significant historical phenomena must be seen in long-term perspective (la longue durée) rather than forced into a brief time span such as 1789–94. Faithful to the school’s inclusive outlook, Furet moved beyond revolutionary historiography in several of his works. He edited, and contributed with other Annalistes, to Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Book and Society in Eighteenth-century France, 1965, 1970), a landmark study in the emerging field of “print culture.” In Annales itself, he published articles on methodology, “Histoire quantative et construction du fait historique” (“Quantitative history and the construction of the historical fact,” 1971); on interactions among cultures, “Trois siècles de métissage culturel” (“Three centuries of cultural cross-breeding,” 1977); and, closer to his major historiographical interests, on Tocqueville, “Naissance d’un paradigme: Tocqueville et le voyage en Amérique (1825–1831) (“Birth of a paradigm: Tocqueville and the voyage to America,” 1984). In Dans l’atelier de l’histoire (1982; translated as In the Workshop of History, 1984), his major book on historiography in general, as distinct from his revolutionary specialty, Furet sometimes casts himself as a champion of the Annales school. He gives it credit for a “rebirth” of the profession. He praises Annalistes for integrating the methods of the social sciences into the historical discipline. Yet he also distances himself from Les Annales. The school neglects political culture. The study of mentalités (to which Furet himself contributed) has proved less fruitful than expected. By the late twentieth century, Furet says, the aspirations of the school’s founders, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, to create a “total history,” encompassing all aspects of human experience, stand exposed as overly ambitious. Though more a scholar than a journalist in his prime, Furet also continued to function as a public intellectual. Penser la Révolution française brought him his largest readership to date. As a best-selling author and television commentator during the bicentennial observances, he became a national figure. On this level as on others, however, fame entailed a change of course. He now presented himself as a skeptic rather than as an advocate of radical causes. His case for reinterpreting the French Revolution is also, implicitly, an argument for abandoning the credulity that in his view had afflicted French thinkers since it had occurred. Furet’s last major work, an account of twentieth-century communism, extends his chronicle of credulity and provides other examples of public intellectuals who kept a skeptical distance from radical advocacy. He mentions Julien Benda, whose La Trahison des clercs (1924; translated as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, 1955) was the first wholesale indictment of French intellectuals who sacrifice the disinterested pursuit of truth to the imperatives of political commitment. Furet deals at greater length with André Gide who, in Le Retour de l’URSS (1936; translated as Return from the USSR, 1937), exposed the failings of Stalinism to Frenchmen caught up in the delusional politics of the Popular Front. Within this small company of skeptics the truly exemplary figure is Raymond Aron. L’Opium des intellectuels (1955; translated as The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1957), Aron’s long essay on the

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seductions of communism, stands out as a precursor to Le Passé d’une illusion. In 1985, Furet established the Institut Raymond Aron, a research center that he headed until his death. During this same period, Furet accepted a half-year teaching position at the University of Chicago. In 1997, moving still further from radical advocacy, he was elected to the Académie française. Furet broke with well-established traditions. His relationship to historiography, and to the intellectual history of his times, is more complex, however, than the lineaments of his life suggest. His attitude toward Marxism illustrates one aspect of this complexity. As a revisionist, Furet was critical of what is generally regarded as a Marxist interpretation of the Revolution. Yet, on a less conspicuous level, signs remained, even after he departed from the left, of a lingering allegiance to Marxist thinking and to Marx himself. His answer to the question he asks in “Faut-il brûler Marx?” (“Must we burn Marx?,” 1975) is that Marx had “the most extraordinary mind of the nineteenth century.” In Penser la Révolution française, he does not hold Marxism responsible for the errors of the “orthodoxy.” Historians whom Cobban recognizes as Marxist, Furet either omits from the category altogether (Georges Lefebvre), identifies as ideologically eclectic ( Jean Jaurès), or classifies as Marxist-Leninists rather than as Marxists tout court (Albert Mathiez and Albert Soboul). In the ideological current that Furet traces from Jacobinism to Leninism, Marxism per se is a minor force. In Marx et la Révolution (1983; translated as Marx and the French Revolution, 1988), Furet points out what he considers major errors in Marx’s own interpretation of the great upheaval. Chief among these is the idea, set forth in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that instability in early nineteenth-century France resulted from the inability of warring capitalist factions to consolidate their hold over the state apparatus that the Bourgeois Revolution had placed at their disposal. This error prevented Marx from seeing what Furet himself perceives: that the succession of insurrections and coups to which France fell victim after 1789 was a legacy of revolutionary political culture. Even in this critical study, however, Furet is at pains to dissociate Marx from what he and other revisionists consider the cardinal “orthodox” misconception, namely, that the Bourgeois Revolution put France on the road to capitalist development. According to Furet, Marx believed that the French Revolution is significant for the future because it demonstrated the immaturity of the French bourgeoisie and of French social development in general, and thus set the stage for the proletarian revolution that the mature German working class would bring about. This conclusion derives from Furet’s reading of Marx’s Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology. It does not take into account passages in Class Struggles in France where Marx says that the French Revolution led to industrialization and thence to “the world historical” rising of the Parisian proletariat during the June Days of 1848. Furet disagrees with both of these judgments. He agrees with the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, on the other hand, that Marx is right in one of his verdicts: in the process of removing medieval encumbrances from the vast administrative


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apparatus of the monarchy, French revolutionaries brought the modern state into existence, and in the process replaced “corporate society,” where the political and public spheres overlap, with “civil society,” where they are distinct. Here and elsewhere Furet laments the ill effects of Marxist teleology. Yet Marxist social science is largely immune to his strictures. His silence on the subject puts him at variance with Raymond Aron, who criticized both aspects of Marx’s legacy. Aron found Marxist social science especially insidious: its false premises, derived from the Marxist philosophy of history, penetrate even minds that resist the opium of communism. Aron looks to Tocqueville for alternative social concepts based upon a more genuine social science. Furet recognizes Tocqueville’s interest in social science, particularly his claim to be a social historian. Yet he judges him in this capacity to be a failure; and where Tocqueville’s social thinking diverges from Marx’s, it is Marx’s that Furet prefers. He takes Tocqueville to task for putting functionaries at the center of the victorious post-revolutionary bourgeoisie, a violation of Marx’s dictum that all modern professionals are the agents of capitalists. Furet is also closer to Marx than to Tocqueville in his ideas about economic development. In the France of the 1960s there were two competing theories on the subject. One, called “l’histoire par bonds” (“history by leaps and bounds”), derives from Walt Rostow’s then famous Stages of Economic Growth (1961). The conceptual ancestor of this “Anti-Communist Manifesto” is The Communist Manifesto itself, with its vision of epochal economic transformations, particularly the agricultural and industrial revolutions in England. The competing theory, associated with French economist François Crouzet, but close in spirit to Tocqueville’s thinking, makes a sharp distinction between the English model of development, with its cataclysmic climacterics, and the French, characterized by gradual advances. In his contribution to Le Mouvement du profit en France au XIXe siècle, Furet inclines to “l’histoire par bonds.” In the Furet/Richet history he places post-revolutionary France outside the schema of Western development because it did not experience the great industrial leap forward that Marxist historians had imagined. By leaving Marxist postulates unchallenged, and adhering to several in his writings, Furet indirectly contributed to the perpetuation of their influence. In this sense, he was an agent of continuity as well as an iconoclast. Furet also linked himself to the past by taking sides in an old historical quarrel. This quarrel has to do with conflicting explanations of the Revolution’s drift from the humane liberalism of 1789 to the Terror of 1793–4. Augustin Cochin, one of Furet’s model historians, gave titles to the rival explanations: “la thèse du complot,” according to which the process of radicalization results from the plots of fanatics inspired by the egalitarian fantasies of the Enlightenment; and “la thèse des circonstances,” which holds that contingent events, such as the outbreak of war in 1792, drove the Revolution leftward. “La thèse du complot” has a distinguished intellectual pedigree. It dates back to Edmund Burke, but reached its point of maximum influence in the late nineteenth

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century with Hippolyte Taine’s Les Origines de la France contemporaine. Cochin himself subscribed to this thesis. At the time he wrote, in the early twentieth century, the positivist republican Alphonse Aulard had brought “la thèse des circonstances” into ascendancy. The thesis reappears in the Marxist works of Albert Mathiez. Georges Lefebvre, Mathiez’s contemporary and the next reigning authority on revolutionary historiography, struck a balance between the theses. In his classic “orthodox” history of 1951, Lefebvre says that down to the beginning of the Terror it is circumstances (particularly, the war) that radicalize the Revolution. Once Terror becomes official policy, however, it acquires a momentum of its own, culminating in the sanguinary Grande Terreur of 1794, which Lefebvre explains in terms of ideological imperatives. The Furet/Richet history of 1965 strikes much the same balance: circumstances set dérapage in motion, but fanaticism accounts for the excesses of the Terror. In later writings, however, Furet opts for “la thèse du complot.” Early signs appear in Penser la Révolution française. Circumstances, which loom relatively large in the Furet/Richet history, recede from view, along with economic causation. Fanaticism, in the form of revolutionary political culture, takes center stage. Signs of the choice also appear in the Critical Dictionary, to which Furet contributed a disparaging essay on “academic” historians such as Aulard, and Mona Ozouf an admiring essay on Taine. The influence of the thesis on Furet’s thinking becomes even more apparent in the section of his bicentennial best-seller where he deals with the period from 1789 to 1794. Furet does not replicate Taine’s history. Taine was a monarchist, and Les Origines de la France contemporaine was in large part a brief against the Third Republic. Furet dismisses royalism as a lost cause that distorted visions on the right as much as millenarian collectivism clouded vision on the left. In his commentary on the Enlightenment, Furet has little to say about classicism and Cartesian rationalism, both basic to Taine’s explanation of the fantasies behind revolutionary plotting. Furet’s ideas about political culture reflect the findings of disciplines that did not exist in Taine’s time. Furet’s treatment of the drift to the left is nonetheless similar to Taine’s. It reflects a distaste for France’s radical democratic tradition. Furet, like Taine, traces this tradition back to a minority of extremists, who in 1789 stampeded the Third Estate into an egalitarian experiment wholly incompatible with the nation’s history. In his representation of this minority’s mentalité, Furet puts more emphasis than Taine on the attractions of popular sovereignty and, like Tocqueville, portrays this attraction as a legacy of absolutism. Furet believes with Taine, however, that the intellectual origin of the radicals’ taste for absolute power lies in Rousseau’s concept of the General Will. From 1789 until 9 Thermidor Furet’s revolution becomes an inexorable progression. What he writes is thus as much histoire-récit as histoire-problème. At this point, and in this sense, it moves close to traditional histories of the left as well of the right. The details of Furet’s narrative bring him closer to Taine, however, and expose important differences between the theses. Adherents of “la thèse des


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circonstances” write what the Annales school calls “histoire événementielle,” narratives in which closely linked events determine the Revolution’s course. Thus, to Aulard, the monarchy gives way to the Republic in 1792 because the king’s complicity with the country’s monarchical enemies disillusions the embattled French people. To Furet, as to Taine before him, events do not push the Revolution leftward. They reveal the power of ideology: the Republic realizes the dreams of 1789. In this schema, events lose much of their importance. Furet’s chronology, largely free of the constraints of clock and calendar, conforms to the time sense that he attributes to the revolutionaries. This irony exposes a major paradox of his career. Through his grasp of this peculiar sense of time, and other insights, Furet brought his readers close to the revolutionary mentalité. He showed how this mentalité, and its attendant delusions, were passed on to future generations. This perception enabled him to recognize the millenarian delusions of Marxist historians. His understanding of the revolutionary mindset formed the basis of a new interpretation, centered on political culture. In working out this reading of events, Furet introduced the methods and outlook of the Annales school into revolutionary historiography. But Furet also demonstrates the hold of historiographical tradition on even self-consciously innovative historians. His blurred chronology harks back to Taine, and beyond him to contemporary critics of the Revolution who, like the revolutionaries themselves, lost their temporal bearings and formulated an enduring interpretation based on the strangeness of their experience. Furet’s distinctive variant of that interpretation, the idea of a wholly political and cultural Revolution, is also grounded in the premises of Marxist historiography that social revolutions result from mutations in the means of production and that bourgeois revolutions pave the way for capitalist industry.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by François Furet Structures et relations sociales à Paris au milieu du XVIIIe siècle, by François Furet and Adeline Daumard (Paris: A. Colin, 1961). La Révolution, by François Furet and Denis Richet, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1964, 1965); translated by Stephen Hardman as The French Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1970, 1977). Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, by François Furet et al., 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1965, 1970). Le Mouvement du profit en France au XIXe siècle, by Jean Bouvier, François Furet, and Marcel Gillet (Paris: Mouton, 1965). Lire et ecrire: alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, edited by François Furet, with Jacques Ozouf (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1977); translated as Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); translated by Elborg Forster as Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Dans l’atelier de l’histoire (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982); translated by Jonathan Mandelbaum as In the Workshop of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Marx et la Révolution (Paris: Flammarion, 1983); translated by Deborah Kan as Marx and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Jules Ferry, fondateur de la République: actes du colloque organisé par l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, edited by François Furet (Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1985). La Gauche et la Révolution française au milieu du XIXe siècle: Edgar Quinet et la question du Jacobinisme, 1865–1870 (Paris: Hachette, 1986). Le Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, M: Harvard University Press, 1989). La Révolution de Turgot à Jules Ferry (Paris: Hachette, 1988); translated by Antonia Nevell as Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). The Old Regime and the Revolution, by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited with an introduction by François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, translated by Alan S. Kahan, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 2001). Le Passé d’une illusion: essai sur l’idée communiste au XXe siècle (Paris: R. Laffont, 1995); translated by Deborah Furet as The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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Etienne Gilson (1884–1978) Philip Daileader

In 1971, Etienne Gilson wrote a letter to his friend Armand Maurer in which Gilson bemoaned the difficulty that he, Gilson, was having in trying to grasp the philosopher William Ockham’s concept of substantial form. Gilson took solace in his expectation that, when he met Ockham, he could ask that philosopher directly about the concept. Coming from the pen of one of twentieth-century France’s most highly regarded historians – Gilson was elected to the Académie française in 1946, thereby becoming one of France’s “immortals” – these words are surprising for a number of reasons. By 1971, France’s leading historians were, by and large, not so interested in the history of philosophy, which was Gilson’s specialty (but not his only specialty: although Gilson thought of himself as first and foremost an historian of philosophy, he was also a philosopher in his own right). The French historical profession studied popular culture more often than high culture, and when it studied the latter, it did so in terms of its relationship to the former. Furthermore, when Gilson wrote of his expected meeting with Ockham, Ockham had been dead for more than six hundred years, and most members of the secularized French historical profession would have reckoned the likelihood of their ever meeting and conversing with Ockham as nil. In these respects, therefore, Etienne Gilson was something of an anomaly among French historians, yet he is no less deserving of attention for that. The typical twentieth-century French historian was secular, left-leaning in his or her politics, and more at home in the social sciences than in the humanities. Nevertheless, Etienne Gilson’s career serves as a reminder that some eminent historians continued to work on traditional subjects in traditional ways, all the while rooting their study of history in religious faith. Etienne Henry Gilson was born in Paris’s seventh arrondissement in 1884; the birth took place in his parents’ apartment, which was located above the family’s

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drapery shop. His father’s family had resided in Paris for several generations, perhaps since the time of the French Revolution, while his mother’s family came from Burgundy. Gilson’s maternal grandmother instilled in him a lively affection for all things Burgundian, and as an adult Gilson would purchase a second home there. Gilson’s parents never achieved more than a very modest wealth – Gilson’s father Paul was apparently unpleasant, indolent, and then sickly (he suffered an incapacitating stroke while Etienne Gilson was a boy, leaving his wife, Caroline Juliette Rainaud, with the primary responsibility for running the family store and raising her five surviving sons – a set of twins had died in childbirth). Owing to his mother’s piety, Gilson was raised in a strongly Catholic religious environment, and at the age of six, Gilson’s parents enrolled him in a Catholic Christian Brothers’ school. In 1895, Gilson commenced his secondary education at the Petit Séminaire de Notre-Dame-des-Champs, an elite school that, while technically a seminary, in fact educated boys regardless of whether they intended to become priests. In 1902, Gilson transferred to a state-operated lycée, the famous Lycée Henri-IV, in part because he had grown tired of the strict discipline at the Catholic seminary, in part because he believed that studying at a lycée would provide him with the best background for what had become his intended profession, namely, teaching at a lycée. Gilson needed only one year at the Lycée HenriIV to complete his secondary education; he received his degree in 1903, and thereupon began his year of mandatory military service. Gilson found barracks life to be tedious and hectic simultaneously, yet he managed to find the time to read works of philosophy such as Descartes’ Les Méditations métaphysiques, and after completing his military service, Gilson enrolled at the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne, where he was determined to earn his licence (diploma) and his agrégation (a certificate that would permit him to teach at the secondary and university level) in the shortest amount of time possible, which was three years. Gilson’s personal situation fueled his haste: his family lacked the money to finance a prolonged stay at the Sorbonne. Furthermore, Gilson was eager to marry his cousin, Thérèse Ravisé, but he did not wish to do so until he had first secured his degree and a job. Gilson completed his self-imposed three-year dash through the Sorbonne (and married Thérèse Ravisé in 1908), but that school’s influence on Gilson was not at all diminished by the speed with which Gilson completed his studies. While at the Lycée Henri-IV, Gilson had attended lectures at the Sorbonne on the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume offered by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and at the Sorbonne Gilson once again had the opportunity to study under Lévy-Bruhl, this time taking Lévy-Bruhl’s course on Descartes. The subject matter and the teacher so impressed Gilson that, early on in the course, Gilson decided to write his doctoral thesis on Descartes with Lévy-Bruhl as the thesis director. If any single individual is to be credited with leading Gilson to become an historian of philosophy, that individual is Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Yet Gilson encountered many eminent scholars at the Sorbonne, studying under the philosopher Henri Bergson and the sociologist

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Emile Durkheim (indeed, Gilson enrolled in every course that Durkheim offered between 1904 and 1907), despite Durkheim’s hostility to the discipline of philosophy and his suspicion of metaphysical inquiry. Durkheim preferred disciplines, such as sociology, that emphasized the collection of data and that could be more easily modeled after the natural sciences in the positivist manner. Exposure to Durkheim’s materialism did nothing to shake Gilson’s Catholicism. As a student at the Sorbonne, Gilson continued to attend mass regularly (although, as a music lover, Gilson decided which Catholic churches to attend based on the quality of their organists). Given the intensity of the struggle between Catholicism and the Third Republic over the place of Christianity in France, and especially in the French educational system – the Third Republic expelled Catholic religious orders from France in 1903 – Gilson’s adherence to Catholicism was no small matter. Upon completing his agrégation in 1907, Gilson began teaching in a series of French lycées, and, as was usual at the time, simultaneously began to write two doctoral theses, a primary one and a supplementary one. Despite the distractions posed by holding a series of positions that lasted for only one year, necessitating an annual move to another part of France, and despite the distractions posed by a growing family (Gilson’s first child, his daughter Jacqueline, was born in 1912, and his second daughter Cécile soon followed in 1913), Gilson completed his theses, defending them in January 1913. His supplementary thesis was “Index scholastico-cartésien,” which provides an index of scholastic terms employed by Descartes. Gilson’s primary thesis, “La doctrine cartésienne de la liberté et la théologie” (“The Cartesian doctrine of liberty and theology”) was published in 1913 as La Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Liberty according to Descartes and Theology). Already in his first published study of Descartes, one can see some of the hallmarks that would consistently characterize Gilson as an historian of ideas: his insistence on placing philosophy in a specific historical context, and his insistence on a strict fidelity to what the sources say (even if, during his thesis defense, Gilson was chastened when Lévy-Bruhl successfully demonstrated that on at least one occasion, Gilson had gone beyond what Descartes himself had said, and instead attributed to Descartes an idea that was, in fact, Gilson’s own). Lévy-Bruhl, upon being asked by Gilson to supervise a thesis on Descartes, had suggested that Gilson address the relationship between Descartes and medieval scholastic philosophy, both in a formal, technical, terminological sense, and in a substantive sense. Gilson later noted the slightly offbeat nature of the suggestion, coming as it did from a Jewish professor who had never read anything that Thomas Aquinas, the most famous scholastic theologian and philosopher, had written. Still, the project appealed to Gilson. Descartes was and is known for, among other things, attempting to separate physics from the Aristotelian assumptions that continued to underpin it during Descartes’ own lifetime, assumptions that were themselves largely the legacy of medieval scholastic thought. Aristotle conceived of nature in a teleological manner,

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as working purposefully toward a comprehensible goal, but Descartes maintained that this teleological conception of nature, in fact, hindered the study of physics. Descartes was personally quite familiar with scholastic thought, having studied at the Jesuit college of La Flèche from 1609 to 1612. Gilson’s theses aimed to demonstrate how, in trying to liberate physics from a scholastic Aristotelianism, Descartes himself used scholastic words and methods, in effect turning scholasticism against itself. Gilson reconstructs with great precision the academic program at La Flèche and the ubiquity of scholastic terminology in Descartes’ language, and Gilson nuances his argument by noting the ways in which Descartes sometimes altered the meanings of the scholastic terms and concepts that he employed. Gilson also examines at some length the specific criticisms that Descartes leveled at Thomas Aquinas, and this examination convinced Gilson that he needed to read more deeply in Aquinas, who would soon become a central figure in Gilson’s scholarship. During the writing of his two theses, Gilson became aware of the extent to which he would need to train himself in specific skills if he were to become a specialist in the history of medieval thought. Not long before his thesis defense, Gilson sought out an instructor to teach him how to read medieval manuscripts, which is especially difficult for historians of medieval thought: the handwriting is often very informal, and medieval scribes employed a complicated and sometimes inconsistent system for truncating words. Gilson also decided that, should the success of his theses lead to an appointment at a French university, he would offer a course on Thomas Aquinas. In the summer of 1913, Gilson was appointed as mâitre de conférences, roughly the equivalent of an assistant professor, in philosophy and in education at the University of Lille. In winning the appointment, Gilson had beaten none other than Maurice Halbwachs, who was another student of Lévy-Bruhl and would go on to become one of France’s great sociological thinkers. (Gilson’s success meant that Halbwachs was forced to spend yet another year teaching at the secondary level.) Gilson found the experience of teaching at Lille liberating; here, unlike the lycée, he could explore Thomas Aquinas in the classroom. Although Gilson had expected college administrators to oppose his attempts to teach Aquinas, in fact the school’s rector welcomed them, in part because of a public relations fiasco that predated Gilson’s arrival. After the University of Lille had hosted a Freemason meeting, there had been local protests against the school and its supposed ties to that group. Gilson’s presence and his courses on Aquinas would help to quell this local suspicion of the university. Gilson’s lectures on Aquinas were a success: the editor of the Revue des cours et conférences, which published the best lectures by French academics on a bimonthly basis and tended to focus on academics teaching at France’s most prestigious institutions (the Institut de France and the Collège de France), sought out Gilson’s lectures, despite the fact that he was affiliated with Lille. World War I, however, would soon interrupt the project to publish Gilson’s lectures.


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With the outbreak of war in 1914, Gilson’s family relocated to Burgundy, while Gilson found himself mobilized and assigned to the drilling and the instruction of recruits far behind the front lines. In his rare free moments, Gilson also read the writings of the thirteenth-century Franciscan author Bonaventure. Although Gilson had made a name for himself at Lille with his courses on Aquinas and was now free to write about whatever subject he wished, by the early winter of 1913 Gilson had decided to make Bonaventure the focus of his immediate research. Difficult as it might have been to read Bonaventure while training soldiers in Limoges, it could not have got easier when, in June 1915, Gilson was assigned to the front lines at Verdun, where he would be promoted from sergeant to second lieutenant. As an adjutant, Gilson was primarily responsible for supervising the digging of trenches and the laying of barbed wire, but, at Verdun, that job was dangerous enough, and in February 1916, German soldiers captured Gilson after an exploding artillery shell had collapsed a dugout on him. Gilson would spend the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Second Reich. As a prisoner, Gilson was at first not too badly off, both personally and professionally. He corresponded on occasion with his family, and he acquired books, including writings by Bonaventure, from booksellers with stores near the camps in which Gilson found himself housed. Gilson was able to do some writing: his German captors allowed him to send an article called “Du fondement des jugements esthétiques” (“On the basis of aesthetic judgments”) to Paris, where it was published in 1917. Nonetheless, the difficulties that his wife had in sustaining their family in her husband’s absence, as well as his mother’s fear that some or all of her five sons might lose their lives in the war, weighed heavily on Gilson, and in 1918, as the war drew to a close and Germany approached collapse, Gilson and his fellow prisoners began to experience genuine deprivation and hardship. At the end of World War I, Gilson resumed his position at the University of Lille, and then, in 1919, he received an appointment at the University of Strasbourg, where he remained until 1921. It just so happened that, at that moment, the University of Strasbourg was home to Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the two founding members of the Annales movement, which would revolutionize the writing of history both in France and globally. Bloch, slightly younger than Gilson, attended Gilson’s seminars in Strasbourg and peppered Gilson with questions about the texts that Gilson studied. The Annales movement was an attempt to broaden the discipline of history, to make it more analytical and less narrative in orientation, to make it more social scientific by drawing on the insights and methodologies of disciplines such as economics, sociology, and anthropology. Certainly, Gilson was never going to take this desire to expand the scope of history as far as Bloch did for the Middle Ages or as Febvre did for the early modern period. Nonetheless, the sea change taking place at Strasbourg did not escape Gilson’s notice, and he began to envision the creation of an institution that would train scholars in an interdisciplinary

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approach to medieval studies, an institution where barriers among various academic disciplines could be knocked down. At Strasbourg, Gilson resumed writing and publication in earnest. The publication of Gilson’s lectures on Aquinas, interrupted by World War I, continued: the complete set of lectures appeared as Le Thomisme: introduction au système de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (1919; translated as The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1924). Although this book would eventually become one of Gilson’s most widely read works – it was the first of what would prove to be six revised editions, which, in turn, resulted in three different English translations of the book’s different incarnations – Gilson later spoke of the book’s first edition as an embarrassment, rushed into print well before it was ready for publication. In his Le Thomisme, Gilson attempts to argue against those who maintain that, because Aquinas had been first and foremost a theologian, he could not be regarded as a philosopher. He also argues against those who maintain that Aquinas the philosopher can be studied separately from Aquinas the theologian, that the “philosophical” sections of Aquinas’s writings can be carved out, separated from the theological passages, and then reassembled as works of pure philosophy. Instead, Gilson argues that Aquinas was a Christian philosopher, a philosopher whose philosophy cannot be severed from its connections to the philosopher’s religious beliefs. Above all else, Gilson insists that Aquinas’s ideas be understood as Aquinas would have understood them, and that they be placed in their proper historical context. It is perhaps for that reason that Gilson begins his Le Thomisme with a consideration of how Aquinas conceived of God’s existence and nature, and then moves to the created world and subjects more obviously philosophical. In adopting this structure, Gilson was simply borrowing the structure that Aquinas had used in his Summa theologiae. At roughly the same time, Gilson published a book intended to serve as an introduction to the whole of medieval philosophy, not just the thought of Thomas Aquinas. La Philosophie au moyen âge des origines patristiques à la fin du XIVe siècle (Philosophy in the Middle Ages from its Patristic Origins to the End of the Fourteenth Century, 1922) provides a thorough and sure treatment of its subject matter, and Lucien Febvre, notorious for the slashing reviews in which he expounded his vision of history, favorably reviewed one of the subsequent editions of this book. Of greater scholarly impact was Gilson’s Etudes de philosophie médiévale (Studies on Medieval Philosophy, 1921), a collection of eight essays. Half of the essays deal with Thomas Aquinas’s predecessors and were written specifically for the collection; the other half deal with thinkers who came after Aquinas and came from Gilson’s published journal articles. The collection includes essays such as “The meaning of Christian rationalism,” wherein Gilson examines the extent to which a philosophical concept such as “rationalism” could be applied to, or found in the writings of, medieval philosophers such as John Scotus Eriugena. These essays are often regarded as among some of the best that Gilson ever wrote,


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combining an engaging style with thorough scholarship and a strict attention to the precise meaning of the texts with which Gilson was working. Like Bloch and Febvre, Gilson, too, left Strasbourg for Paris, taking up a position at the Sorbonne late in 1921, even though the move meant a temporary reduction in Gilson’s academic rank. In addition to his appointment at the Sorbonne, Gilson quickly won an appointment to the Fifth Section (dedicated to the study of religion) of the Ecole pratique des hautes études, which focused not on teaching undergraduates but on providing advanced disciplinary training to individuals who would go on to become France’s leading scholars. In this stimulating Parisian environment, Gilson continued his work on Descartes, publishing René Descartes, Discours de la méthode: texte et commentaire (René Descartes, Discourse Concerning Method: Text and Commentary, 1925), a substantial edition of, and commentary on, Descartes’ Discourse. Just as importantly, Gilson completed and published his work on Bonaventure. La Philosophie de Saint Bonaventure (1924; translated as The Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure, 1938) proved to be a controversial book that resulted in pointed disagreements between Gilson and other leading scholars of medieval philosophy. Some of the hostility toward Gilson’s work during this period arose out of Gilson’s affiliation with the Sorbonne rather than with a Catholic university. The fact that Gilson taught in a secular environment led some of his critics to regard him as an outsider to Catholicism, and as therefore being incapable of understanding the greatest Catholic thinkers, even though Gilson himself was attending mass and receiving communion daily by the middle of the 1920s. As regards those who engaged with the substance of Gilson’s arguments, some contemporary scholars, such as Maurice de Wulf, had seen the Franciscan Bonaventure and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas as forming two parts of a single “scholastic synthesis,” a single scholastic philosophy that was deeply indebted to and appreciative of Aristotle. The notion that canonized medieval thinkers might have differed on important issues was unwelcome among some Catholic scholars who, in the face of rising secularism, did not wish to acknowledge dissension within the ranks and took comfort in the notion of a unified, undifferentiated “medieval mind.” Gilson, on the other hand, argues for the differences between Bonaventure and Aquinas, seeing within Bonaventure’s writings both a willingness to use Aristotelian concepts and a deep distrust of Aristotle, whose pagan philosophy might corrupt Christian thought. Gilson also points to the relatively strong influence of Saint Augustine on Bonaventure’s writings. Certainly Gilson sees Bonaventure and Aquinas as equally orthodox in their religious beliefs, but he nonetheless insists that a historically accurate account of Bonaventure’s thought could not reduce Bonaventure to a proto-thomist. Scholars such as Pierre Mandonnet, who willingly accepted the Augustinian influence on Bonaventure, nevertheless refused to follow Gilson’s contention that Bonaventure could rightly be considered a philosopher. The question of how a “Christian philosophy” ought

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to be defined, and arguments defending its existence in the Middle Ages, would loom increasingly large in Gilson’s writings. In 1926, Gilson made his first trip to North America, and even though his initial voyage originated almost accidentally – he was asked by the rector of his school to fill in for him at a conference held in Montreal – Gilson eventually would make about forty such trips and focus more and more of his energy on his North American activities. By 1926, Gilson was growing dissatisfied with the students in France and what he took to be their relative disinterest in philosophy, and the reception that Gilson received in North America suggested that he might profitably spend even more time there. (It should be noted that Gilson’s appreciation for his North American students’ enthusiasm was tempered by his dismay at what he perceived to be their relative lack of intellectual sophistication.) Gilson followed his visit to Montreal in April 1926 with a visit to the United States in July 1926, after Harvard University requested that the Sorbonne name Gilson as an exchange professor. Gilson began his first trip to the United States with a visit to Charlottesville, Virginia. Albert Balz, a philosophy professor at the University of Virginia, had met Gilson in France in 1926 and invited the Frenchman to visit him in Charlottesville, where Gilson offered courses in philosophy as he worked to master spoken English. From September 1926 to January 1927, Gilson taught at Harvard; he would do the same during the fall semesters of 1927–8 and 1928–9. During the mid- to late 1920s, Gilson devoted much of his time and energy to the establishment of institutions whose purpose was to support historical research. In 1926, together with the Dominican Père Gabriel Théry, Gilson launched a new journal, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge (Archives of Doctrinal and Literary History during the Middle Ages). The title of the journal reflected the extent to which the rise of the Annales movement was influencing Gilson’s thinking: he hoped that the journal would bring together scholars of medieval philosophy and of medieval literature, thus promoting a more holistic, interdisciplinary approach to the Middle Ages. Yet the journal also reflected the strong positivist element in Gilson’s thinking: the tone of the journal was to be dispassionate, scientific, and objective, with no room for polemics or theoretical discussions. Some of Gilson’s own personal quirks likewise shaped the journal. Gilson maintained that, for active researchers and scholars, reviewing books was a waste of time: the effort that one needed to review work that had already been finished ought instead to be put into the production of new knowledge. Therefore, Gilson did not include a book review section in his new journal. Gilson’s most important institutional contribution, however, was the foundation of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Gilson had long been interested in founding a school that would serve as a center for the interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages, but it was not until administrators at St. Michael’s College, which was part of the University of Toronto, wrote to him while teaching at Harvard about the possibility of founding such an institute that Gilson believed his dream to be within reach. Although it seems likely that Gilson would initially have


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preferred his new institute to be affiliated with the Sorbonne or with Harvard, his conversations with officials from St. Michael’s College went so satisfactorily that they quickly won him over to the idea of Toronto hosting this new institute. When the Institute of Mediaeval Studies opened in 1929, Gilson was its director, and between 1929 and 1959, he spent most fall semesters teaching at the institute, returning to France in order to teach during the spring. Gilson’s commitment to the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto came at a heavy personal cost: his wife and family frequently failed to accompany him on his long stays in Canada, partly because of his wife’s frequently poor health, partly because his wife much preferred France to Canada. Although Gilson intended the Institute of Mediaeval Studies to be a research center rather than a degree-granting institution, others affiliated with the Institute felt otherwise, and they convinced Gilson to seek papal permission for a charter that would allow the Institute to award degrees. In 1934, Gilson and his colleagues began the active pursuit of their charter; Gilson and Jacques Maritain, a famous philosopher with ties to the Institute, met with Pope Pius XI to make their case. In 1939, their efforts finally met with success, and the Institute of Mediaeval Studies became the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Yet the Pontifical Institute always reflected Gilson’s initial vision of it – even today, there are no departmental divisions within the Pontifical Institute, the better to promote cross-disciplinary work among scholars. As the 1920s came to an end, Gilson also began to become more actively involved in contemporary political affairs and to reach out to a broader audience that consisted of more than fellow scholars. A new Catholic journal had recently been established, La Vie intellectuelle, and it was interested in publishing pieces by scholars of Gilson’s stature. In 1929, Gilson submitted the first of what would prove to be seventeen essays to La Vie intellectuelle, which welcomed works such as Gilson’s “L’idée de philosophie chrétienne chez Saint Augustin et chez Saint Thomas d’Aquin” (“The idea of Christian philosophy in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas”). Gilson also began to contribute to the journal Sept, which was lighter in tone and content than was La Vie intellectuelle. Approached by the editor of Sept to establish guidelines for the journal, Gilson did so; Sept (and, by extension, Gilson’s contributions to Sept) was to serve the purpose of bringing France’s Catholics together while simultaneously dissuading the Third Republic from pursuing its policy of secularizing education. Appropriately enough, Gilson wrote seven articles for Sept; they are collected in his Pour un ordre catholique (Toward a Catholic Order, 1934). Despite his trips to North America, Gilson continued his research. He had been studying and devoting seminars to Augustine through the 1920s, and in 1929 he published his Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustin (translated as The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, 1960.) From the outset, Gilson intended this book, like his Le Thomisme, to be the first of several attempts to come to grips with a thinker of enormous complexity and influence, and Gilson would indeed offer a substantially revised version of this book fourteen years later.

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Gilson was an indefatigable public lecturer, both in France and in North America, and although he felt that his lecturing commitments cut into his research and writing, many of his most famous books grew out of his public lectures. Such is the case with L’Esprit de la philosophie médiévale (1932; translated as The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 1936). This book is a collection of lectures that Gilson gave at the University of Aberdeen in 1931 and 1932 as part of the Gifford Lecture series, which treats natural theology. In this book, which one expert in the history of medieval thought has characterized as Gilson’s most beautiful, Gilson set forth arguments that he had been working toward for some time now: namely, that there could be such a thing as a Christian philosophy, which proceeds by reason but makes use of the assistance provided by divine revelation, and that such a Christian philosophy had existed, with several variants, in the Middle Ages. For all of his success as a lecturer and a teacher, Gilson longed for more time to write, especially once he had taken on physically draining commitments on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1930 he began to maneuver himself as a candidate for election to the Collège de France, where he signaled his desire to hold a Chair in the History of Medieval Philosophies. Membership in the Collège was coveted and not easily obtained. Those who held a chair in the college were expected to give only thirty lectures a year – the rest of their time could be devoted to scholarship. To support his candidacy, Gilson was required to submit a dossier that outlined his accomplishments to date and what he hoped to accomplish in the future; it opens a remarkable window onto Gilson’s understanding of himself as an historian. In his dossier, Gilson shrewdly emphasizes the distinctly French aspects of his work. For example, he argues that the creation of his proposed chair would allow the college to continue a long, proud tradition of French historical scholarship devoted to the history of philosophy. The chair would also allow Gilson to continue to uncover a neglected part of the French historical past, namely, French medieval philosophy. Gilson suggests that his work had already done much to deepen historians’ understanding of medieval thought, by showing how philosophers such as Bonaventure ought not to be measured solely against Thomas Aquinas, but should rather be read as the creators of original and distinctive philosophical systems of thought that, while different from Aquinas’s, were no less Christian and interesting for that. Gilson also indicates that membership of the Collège de France would allow him to continue ongoing projects and to delve more deeply into old concerns of his: the relationship between medieval philosophy and medieval literature, for example, and the relationship between the history of philosophy and the history of science (an interest especially notable in his work on Descartes). Gilson also indicates his eagerness to explore other areas of interest, such as the relationship among Christian, Jewish, and Islamic medieval philosophy. In 1932, Gilson’s efforts met with success, and he was elected to the Collège de France. He thereupon resigned his position at the Sorbonne (which he was required to do) and at the Ecole pratique des hautes études (which he might have kept if he had so desired). In late 1933, Marc Bloch wrote to Gilson and asked


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him to sponsor Bloch’s candidacy for a newly opened position at the Collège. Gilson obliged and put forth Bloch as a candidate, but after a series of mishaps (including the death of a member of the Collège during a meeting where the chair pursued by Bloch was to be decided), Bloch failed to gain entrance. From 1932 into the 1950s, the Collège de France in Paris and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto provided the institutional support for Gilson’s research and writing. At the Collège de France, Gilson was able to offer courses that directly supported his research on medieval philosophy. During the 1930s, his courses tackled subjects such as “The Cistercian school and the influence of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,” “The doctrine of Saint Anselm,” “The metaphysics of Duns Scotus,” “Theories of knowledge in the Middle Ages,” and “Saint Augustine and neo-Platonism.” In Toronto, Gilson offered some of these same seminars, but he also began to require that the students in his seminars, in addition to practicing close textual explication of the sort favored in the historical seminars of the 1930s, also learn the practical skill of editing medieval texts and preparing them for publication by collating extant manuscripts, deciding on the proper readings, creating the critical apparatus that would indicate variant readings, and so on. This emphasis on editing would soon become a hallmark of Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Gilson also faced the difficult task of assembling a faculty, which he did by picking young scholars and then sending them, almost always to Europe, for training as medieval scholars, as well as by recruiting established scholars. Among the courses that Gilson offered at the Collège de France in the mid1930s was a course on Peter Abelard and Heloise. Abelard was a twelfth-century philosopher who played a crucial role in the development of the scholastic method, which was central to medieval theology and philosophy from Abelard’s time onward; Heloise was one of Abelard’s students, and their romantic entanglement, combined with Abelard’s arrogance and abrasiveness, resulted in Abelard’s intellectual and physical humiliation (he was forced to renounce one of his own books as heretical, and he was castrated at the behest of Heloise’s relatives). The letters exchanged between Heloise and Abelard provided Gilson with the material that anchored his course, and in 1938 he published his lectures as Héloïse et Abélard (translated as Heloise and Abelard, 1960). This book became one of Gilson’s most popular, thanks in large part to the romanticism inherent to the story – the book was translated into many languages – and Gilson does well to try to dispel some of the myths that had sprung up around the couple as a result of poems such as Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” written in the early eighteenth century. As he did with philosophical texts, Gilson situates the letters of Abelard and Heloise in their medieval legal and cultural context. Yet Gilson acknowledges that he found himself emotionally involved in the story. He defends Abelard against women who believed him to have treated Heloise poorly (after his castration, Abelard demanded that Heloise become a nun, which she

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did). Gilson points out that Heloise herself would never have tolerated these female criticisms of Abelard, and would instead have defended Abelard against all challengers. The extent to which Gilson, too, felt the romantic glow surrounding Abelard and Heloise is apparent in a story that he tells in the book’s preface. Some scholars had challenged the authenticity of the letters, especially those attributed to Heloise. Gilson had spoken with a Benedictine monk about the issue, and the monk had replied that the story, and the letters that told the story, had to be true because they were so beautiful. Gilson concedes that the monk’s argument did not quite rise to the level of proof, but he signals his general agreement with the monk’s sentiment. World War II broke out in September 1939. Ever since he had become director of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Gilson had made a trip each fall to Toronto, where he remained for several months; in 1939, he did the same. His three children (two of whom were now adults) and his frequently ailing wife remained in France. Indeed, this North American trip lasted for an unusually long time – he returned to Europe only in April 1940, not even a month before the German invasion of France. During this time in North America, Gilson had expressed in his “The French view of the war” his belief that Germany was intent upon world domination, and he urged the United States not to be tardy in taking up arms against the Third Reich. Between the fall of the Third Republic in June 1940 and the end of the war, Gilson spent nearly all of his time in Paris, where he held aloof from the Vichy government, which, nonetheless, largely left Gilson alone, aside from billeting German officers and soldiers in Gilson’s Parisian home as well as in his country house at Vermenton in Burgundy. The close ties between the Vichy regime and French Catholicism genuinely distressed Gilson. On the other hand, Gilson’s daughter Cécile and son Bernard forcefully opposed the German presence in their homes and in their country; Cécile taunted the Germans and Bernard, barely an adolescent, served as a messenger for the French Resistance. His children’s open criticism of and hostility toward German soldiers made Gilson uncomfortable. As had happened to some extent during World War I, wartime relieved Gilson of his teaching and administrative duties, thereby making it possible for him to write more than would have been the case otherwise, but this time Gilson found himself not in a German prisoner-of-war camp, but in Paris with all of his books. In 1942, Gilson put out a fourth edition of his Le Thomisme. It was a substantial revision and expansion of his earlier work, but just two years later, Gilson produced a fifth edition: it corrected some errors in the fourth edition and is generally regarded as the finest of the book’s six versions. Gilson also revisited his earlier work on Saint Bonaventure, releasing a second edition of La Philosophie de Saint Bonaventure in 1943, and in the following year he published a revised version of La Philosophie au moyen âge des origines patristiques à la fin du XIVe siècle. This last book rivaled Gilson’s study of Abelard and Heloise in popularity, and it was reprinted in 1945, 1947, and 1948.


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With the end of the war, Gilson, if anything, took up with greater fervor the responsibilities of a French intellectual. With the fall of the Vichy government, France faced an important moment of self-definition, and Gilson resumed his prewar struggle against the secularization of state-supported public education, expounding his views in essays such as “Instruire ou éduquer,” published in Le Monde in 1945. Perhaps the most influential statement of his educational views can be found in “Pour une education nationale,” which Gilson published in his old favorite, La Vie intellectuelle. Gilson’s high public profile resulted in his becoming a correspondent with authors such as Albert Camus; it also resulted in his being appointed to the French delegation that attended the San Francisco conference of 1945, whose primary purpose was to draw up a charter for the soon-tobe-established United Nations. Gilson’s linguistic proficiency served him well at the San Francisco conference: he had picked up Russian from fellow prisoners of war during World War I, and by 1945 he was equally at home in French and English. Indeed, Gilson played an important role in preparing the French version of the United Nations charter. Gilson also attended a conference in London during October and November 1945 that resulted in the foundation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, better known by the acronym UNESCO. In 1947, the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), a centrist Christian Democrat political party, offered a two-year appointed seat in the French senate, or the Conseil de la République, to Gilson, and he accepted, remaining in the French senate until 1949. Gilson’s increasingly visible role in the public sphere could only have helped his cause when, in 1946, he was elected to the Académie française, although it should be noted that his election was not an easy one – three rounds of votes were needed before Gilson received the eighteen he needed. In the decade or so following the end of World War II, Gilson remained in good health and at the height of his scholarly powers. Having already grappled at length with Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, Gilson turned to yet another major medieval thinker, John Duns Scotus, a Franciscan who died in 1308. His work on Duns Scotus culminated in the publication of Jean Duns Scot: introduction à ses positions fondamentales ( John Duns Scotus: Introduction to his Basic Views, 1952). Gilson’s book on Duns Scotus, however, was arguably the author’s greatest failure. Just as Gilson’s book was in the final stages of being prepared for publication, the first modern critical editions of Duns Scotus’ writings were published, not soon enough for Gilson to rewrite his book, but just in time for Gilson to realize that his views on Scotus, which were based on Gilson’s readings of uncollated and unedited manuscripts, would need to be thoroughly reconsidered in light of what the critical editions revealed. That task seems to have proved too daunting for Gilson, who habitually revised his other major books but never revised Jean Duns Scot, which, almost alone of Gilson’s major studies, still has not been translated into English. Much more successful and better received was Gilson’s L’Etre et l’essence (Being and Essence, 1948), which examines the metaphysical thought of Greek philosophers such as Parmenides, Plato, and Plotinus,

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before moving on to medieval thinkers such as Siger of Brabant and especially Thomas Aquinas, and even tackling modern thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heiddeger. L’Etre et l’essence was more of a work of philosophy, though, than a work in the history of philosophy. Gilson’s best-known book among English-language readers is probably his History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, published in 1955. In several respects, this work differs from the sort of books with which Gilson had made his name. Gilson wrote this book in English, and he wrote it entirely while living in Toronto. The book was published by a trade press, Random House, which in fact put its publicity machine to work in support of the book by arranging for Gilson to be interviewed by Time and Newsweek magazines (which, admittedly, asked him about current events rather than about medieval philosophy). Gilson found working with the trade press difficult, but not nearly as difficult as the trade press found working with Gilson. Gilson’s French publisher, Vrin, indulged Gilson’s fondness for substantial rewriting of his text once a book had reached the stage of galley sheets, but Random House fought Gilson bitterly on this point and charged him heftily for those changes that it allowed Gilson to make. Gilson’s long experience with writing studies of individual thinkers served him well in his History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, which is, essentially, a comprehensive guide to Christian philosophers (a concept that Gilson employs in the broadest possible sense in this book) from post-Apostolic times to the Renaissance. The sheer massiveness of the scholarship in this volume continues to impress, as Gilson treats not just thinkers of whom everyone has heard, such as Thomas Aquinas, but also many thinkers whom most medieval historians would never have known about, were it not for Gilson’s book. In a typical chapter – say, part four, chapter three, “Platonism in the twelfth century” – Gilson examines his subject by treating four thinkers in succession: Gilbert of La Porrée, Thierry of Chartres, Clarenbaud of Arras, and John of Salisbury. Major figures such as Albertus Magnus get their own chapters, and such chapters are organized thematically: the four subsections in Albert Magnus’s chapter are “Albert and secular learning,” “The four co-evals,” “Man,” and “God.” This clear and foregrounded structure results in a book that reads very much like a thirteenth-century scholastic treatise. Although the density and comprehensiveness of History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages are perhaps that book’s most striking features, it is not merely a compendium of facts. As early as his Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, published in 1938, Gilson had described a trajectory traveled by philosophy in the Middle Ages, and Gilson’s History of Christian Philosophy is built around the master narrative that he had been developing and refining for several decades. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, influential Catholic scholars had argued that Catholicism needed to revive scholastic philosophy, and especially the scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Confronted with the challenges posed by rationalism and science, which were now offering alternative explanations of


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human origins and alternative visions of how the universe operated, some Catholic scholars (mostly Italian, French, and German) rallied around Thomas Aquinas, whose comfort with rational philosophical inquiry and whose measured approach seemed to make him a uniquely suitable guide for Catholics striving to harmonize their faith with modernity. This appeal to Aquinas received official approval and a boost from Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Aeterni patris, written in 1879. This letter called upon Catholics to revive their philosophical studies and ensconced Aquinas as their guiding light. The ensuing reverence for Aquinas was so great that, when Gilson published his Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustin in 1929, Gilson forestalled criticism that he had written on a subject other than Aquinas by pointing out that he had already written a book on Aquinas, and that Aquinas himself had frequently cited Augustine and built upon Augustine’s insights. Certainly there were many disagreements among the Thomists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gilson, with his insistence that Aquinas be placed squarely in a medieval context, was always suspicious of attempts to make Aquinas seem more modern than he ever could have been. Furthermore, Gilson himself argued that medieval philosophers needed to be taken on their own terms, and not always be measured with a Thomist yardstick. Nonetheless, Gilson was a Thomist, and according to Gilson, medieval intellectual history had peaked with Aquinas. Aquinas was a firm believer in the unity of truth, which guaranteed that knowledge gained through divine revelation and theological study, and knowledge gained through rational investigation and philosophical inquiry, could never ultimately come into conflict. According to Gilson, Aquinas understood uniquely well how theology and philosophy complemented one another, with philosophy confirming and deepening knowledge gained through revelation. In that sense, Aquinas personified Christian philosophy, and the second half of the thirteenth century constituted what Gilson calls the “golden age” of scholasticism. In 1277, however, Bishop Etienne Tempier of Paris had issued a condemnation of 219 theses drawn directly or indirectly from the works of Aristotle (upon whom scholastics such as Aquinas relied very heavily) that seemed contrary to beliefs that Christian theology maintained to be true. According to Gilson, this condemnation was a turning point in the history of medieval thought, and by extension, in the history of Western thought. The condemnation had a chilling effect on philosophical inquiry and on attempts to develop mutually reinforcing theologies and philosophies. By the fourteenth century, scholars such as William Ockham were severing the connection between philosophy and theology. Whereas scholars such as Aquinas had been confident about the viability of natural theology, in which investigation of the natural world could yield information about God and even prove God’s existence, Ockham emphasized the disconnection between the created world and God. Because this world is only one of an infinite number of possible worlds that God might have created, philosophical investigation of this world could not possibly tell you much about God, who might have created a world wholly the opposite of this one. For Ockham, natural theology was a dead

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end. Although Gilson was in many ways a positivist, scientific historian, he nonetheless made it known that he regarded the rift between philosophy and theology that he saw as following from the condemnation of 1277 as regrettable, indeed tragic. Gilson’s vision of medieval philosophy has clarity and power – even today, it is not possible for scholars of medieval thought to ignore it. Nonetheless, some elements of Gilson’s vision have survived better than others, as Marcia Colish has well described in her Remapping Scholasticism published in 2000 (and, appropriately enough, as part of the Etienne Gilson series). Gilson’s insistence that Aquinas be viewed as both a theologian and a philosopher, and that scholars recognize the connections between his theological and philosophical studies, has been echoed in recent scholarship, and Gilson’s willingness to devote attention to medieval thinkers who were not Thomas Aquinas is likewise prominent in recent scholarship. The notion that medieval thought reached its highest point in the life and writings of Thomas Aquinas, however, is not one that most medieval scholars (even Catholic medieval scholars, I suspect) would espouse, and the condemnation of 1277, which looms so large in Gilson’s work, does not seem to have had the far-reaching effects that Gilson attributed to it. Rather, subsequent research has cut the condemnation down to size; its significance was more Parisian (although admittedly the University of Paris had Europe’s most renowned theological faculty at the time) than European, and it was one of a number of such condemnations. Despite his successes, the postwar years were in many respects unhappy ones for Gilson. His affiliation with the centrist MRP, his acceptance of the French Republic, and his rejection of France’s monarchists (especially Charles Maurras) resulted in a series of bitter disputes with members of the French right. The most painful political episode in Gilson’s career, though, was the Gilson Affair, as it quickly came to be known. Gilson was unusually familiar with North America and genuinely fond of American cities and towns such as Charlottesville, Cambridge, and Chicago. Gilson also had little, if any, sympathy for Marxism, or for Catholics who attempted to blend their religion with a political ideology that espoused atheism. Nonetheless, upon the outbreak of the Cold War, Gilson advocated a position of strict French neutrality – he was suspicious of American intentions in Western Europe. In November and December of 1950, Gilson gave a series of lectures at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. On December 15, 1950, Waldemar Gurian, a professor at Notre Dame who edited the journal Review of Politics, published an open letter in The Commonweal in which he claimed to have heard from well-informed anonymous sources that Gilson had, during his visit to Notre Dame, attempted to convert his listeners to his own position of Cold War neutrality. According to Gurian, by defending his neutrality, Gilson had, in effect, promoted defeatism and abetted communism. Gurian also claimed that during his visit to Notre Dame, Gilson had stated that he had no intention of returning to France and that, if the Soviet army attacked France, France would not put up


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much of a fight, while the United States would do little to help France during such an event. Gurian’s accusations were picked up by the French press in January and February of 1951, and Gilson soon found himself publicly lambasted by the far right and even by the supporters of Charles de Gaulle for being a defeatist, a coward, and a traitor. Individuals who once had been among Gilson’s staunchest supporters now publicly recommended that Gilson be expelled from the Académie française. Gilson responded publicly with letters in Figaro littéraire and Le Monde, both published in February 1951; in these letters, Gilson counter-attacked by pointing out that the most forceful attacks against him were coming from fellow Catholics, and he claimed that those attacks were motivated by the misguided outrage that these Catholics felt whenever their co-religionists refused to make the waging of a holy war against communism their top priority. In truth, Gilson’s countercharges were on target, but it was not the sort of argument that might have lessened his attackers’ antagonism toward him. The Gilson Affair petered out during the course of 1951 as the press lost interest, but following this harrowing experience, Gilson greatly reduced his public profile and his involvement in politics. Compounding (and far outweighing) these political setbacks were Gilson’s mounting personal losses: his wife Thérèse died of leukemia in 1949; Gilson found himself often at odds with his son Bernard, sometimes going without contact with him for as long as two years; and Gilson’s daughters, although on good terms with their father and frequently his companions, were still unmarried in their forties, which distressed Gilson. Now getting well into his sixties, Gilson began to reduce his professional commitments: he retired from the Collège de France in 1951 under unhappy circumstances (coming as it did right in the middle of the Gilson Affair, the retirement process was a messy one, with Gilson temporarily denied the honors that a scholar retiring from the Collège de France usually enjoyed). From 1957 onward, Gilson, who had given a staggering number of public lectures during his career, began to refuse many invitations to speak in public, even when approached by his closest friends and by scholars whom he respected, although in the winter of 1968, one could still find Gilson giving public lectures about Thomas Aquinas in Berkeley, California, of all places. He delivered his last North American lectures in Toronto in 1972, at the age of eighty-six. As Gilson disengaged from his institutional commitments, he turned more and more often in his writings to subjects other than the history of medieval philosophy, or even the history of philosophy in general. In books such as Painting and Reality, which was published first in English in 1957 and then in a French variant in 1958, Gilson turned again to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, fields in which he had done some work as a prisoner of war during World War I. His interest in these fields remained strong through the 1960s, when Gilson wrote Introduction aux arts du beau (1963; translated as The Arts of the Beautiful, 1965). Gilson likewise branched out into the philosophy of language, which he treated in his Linguistique et philosophie: essai sur les constants philosophiques du langage (Linguistics and

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Philosophy: Essay on the Philosophical Constants of Language, 1969). In his Les Tribulations de Sophie (The Tribulations of Sophie, 1967), Gilson produced what amounted to his memoirs, and they reveal his disquietude, and one might even say his bitterness, as regards the changes in Catholicism after Vatican II. The many breaks with tradition made by that council, especially the breaks with liturgical tradition, pained Gilson. Yet Gilson returned to Aquinas while preparing the sixth and final edition of Le Thomisme, published in 1965, and in 1974, the year marking the nine-hundredth anniversary of Aquinas’s death and the ninetieth anniversary of Gilson’s birth, Gilson published both the foreword to, and a substantial article, “Quasi definitio substantiae,” in St. Thomas Aquinas, 1274–1974: Commemorative Essays. One scholar has commented on the speed with which Etienne Gilson went “out of fashion” during the 1960s. Among Catholics, Gilson’s admiration for Aquinas seemed out of place in a world where the mass was no longer celebrated in Latin; among historians (or, at least, among historians who did not specialize in the history of medieval philosophy), his subject matter seemed ill chosen and his methodology, which emphasized a biographical approach and the reconstruction of authorial intention, was far removed from postmodern ways of reading documents, which saw them more as texts, operating independently of whatever their author might have intended them to do or say, and less as sources reflecting authors and the worlds in which they lived. Certainly, Gilson was aware that the individuals he studied changed over time: Augustine had undergone a remarkable intellectual evolution that involved paganism, Manichaeism, neo-Platonism, and then Christianity. Yet when Gilson studied a figure such as Augustine or Bernard of Clairvaux, he looked for an unchanging core of some sort, a set of principles and ideas that could be used to anchor each thinker’s system. In his study of Saint Augustine, for example, Gilson organizes his work thematically rather than chronologically: the book’s three parts are “The search for God through understanding,” “The search for God through the will,” and “Contemplating God in his works.” The conclusion is called “Augustinism,” and Gilson explains that here he will identify the central concepts that comprise Augustinism, while dismissing those who would “reduce a man’s progress in his search for truth to the mere evolution of an intellect.” At present, it seems safe to say that most historians would approach Augustine in precisely the manner that Gilson rejects – as a man whose thought was perpetually in flux, and whose final ideas were defined as such not by his arrival at the truth, but by the arbitrary and accidental length of his lifespan. Nonetheless, the degree to which the prestige of some of Gilson’s contemporaries, such as Marc Bloch, now eclipses Gilson’s own should not obscure the fame and influence that Gilson had during much of his lifetime. Gilson himself, who in his History of Christian Philosophy devoted such care and attention to some allbut-forgotten medieval thinkers, certainly would have appreciated the need to assess individuals not just in the light of their posthumous reputations. Instead,


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historians ought to assess individuals for what they had been while alive – or, as Gilson might have put it, for what they had been before gaining eternal life.

References and Further Reading Bibliography McGrath, Margaret, Etienne Gilson: A Bibliography (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982).

Letters Lettres de M. Etienne Gilson adressées au P. Henri de Lubac et commentées par celui-ci (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986); translated by Mary Emily Hamilton as Letters of Etienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).

Selected Books by Etienne Gilson La Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1913). Le Thomisme: introduction au système de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1919; rev. and expanded edn., 1922; rev. and expanded again, 1927; rev. and expanded as Le Thomisme: introduction à la philosophie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 1942; rev. again, 1944; rev. again, 1965); 1927 edition translated by E. Bullough as The Philosophy of Saint Thomas (St. Louis: Herder, 1924; rev. and enlarged edn., 1929); 1944 edition translated by Laurence Shook as The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956); 1965 edition translated by Laurence Shook and Armand Maurer as Thomism: the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002). Etudes de philosophie médiévale (Strasbourg: Commission des publications de la Faculté des lettres, 1921). La Philosophie au moyen âge des origines patristiques à la fin du XIVe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Payot, 1922; rev. and expanded edn., 1944). La Philosophie de Saint Bonaventure (Paris: Vrin, 1924; rev. edn., 1943); translated by F. J. Sheed and Illtyd Trethowan as The Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938). Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Gabalda, 1925); translated by Leo Ward as Moral Values and the Moral Life: The Ethical Theory of St. Thomas Aquinas (St. Louis: Herder, 1931). Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1929; rev. and expanded edn., 1943); translated by L. E. M. Lynch as The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York: Random House, 1960). Etudes sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1930). L’Esprit de la philosophie médiévale, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1932; rev. edn., 1944); translated by A. H. C. Downes as The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936). Pour un ordre catholique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934).

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La Théologie mystique de Saint Bernard (Paris: Vrin, 1934); translated by A. H. C. Ward as The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (London: Sheed and Ward, 1940). Héloïse et Abélard (Paris: Vrin, 1938; rev. edn., 1948; rev. again, 1964); translated by Laurence Shook as Heloise and Abelard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1960). Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938). Dante et la philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 1939); translated by David Moore as Dante the Philosopher (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948). L’Etre et l’essence (Paris: Vrin, 1948; rev. and expanded edn., 1962). Notre démocratie (Paris: Société d’éditions républicaines populaires, 1948). Jean Duns Scot: introduction à ses positions fondamentales (Paris: Vrin, 1952). Les Métamorphoses de la cité de Dieu (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1952). History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955). Painting and Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1957). Introduction à la philosophie chrétienne (Paris: Vrin, 1960); translated by Armand Maurer as Christian Philosophy: An Introduction (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993). Le Philosophe et la théologie (Paris: Fayard, 1960); translated by Cécile Gilson as The Philosopher and Theology (New York: Random House, 1962). Introduction aux arts du beau (Paris: Vrin, 1963); translated by Salvator Attanasio as The Arts of the Beautiful (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965). La Société de masse et sa culture (Paris: Vrin, 1967). Les Tribulations de Sophie (Paris: Vrin, 1967).

Collections A Gilson Reader: Selected Writings, edited by Anton Pegis (Garden City, NY: Image, 1957).

Other Works René Descartes, Discours de la méthode: texte et commentaire, edited by Etienne Gilson (Paris: Vrin, 1925). A History of Philosophy, edited by Etienne Gilson, 4 vols. (vol. 1 never published; New York: Random House, 1962–6). “Foreword” and “Quasi definitio substantiae,” by Etienne Gilson in St. Thomas Aquinas, 1274–1974: Commemorative Essays, edited by Armand A. Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), pp. 9–10, 111–29.

Selected Articles by Etienne Gilson “Doctrine cartésienne de la liberté et la théologie,” Bulletin de la Société française de la philosophie, 14 (1914): 207–58. “L’Innéisme cartésian et la théologie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 22 (1914): 456–99. “Météores cartésiens et météores scolastiques,” Revue neo-scolastique de Louvain, 22 (1920): 358–84, and 23 (1921): 73–84. “Pourquoi Saint Thomas a critiqué Saint Augustin,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 1 (1926): 5–127.


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“Les sources gréco-arabes de l’augustinisme avicennisant,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 4 (1929): 5–149. “Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne,” La Vie intellectuelle, 12 (1931): 214–42. “Sens et nature de l’argument de Saint Anselme,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 9 (1934): 5–51. “Les seize premiers ‘Theoremata’ et la pensée de Duns Scot,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 11 (1937–8): 5–86. “Franz Brentano’s interpretation of medieval philosophy,” Mediaeval Studies, 1 (1939): 1–10. “The French view of the war,” America, 62 (1940): 452–6. “Pour une education nationale,” La Vie intellectuelle (February 1945): 18–36. “Doctrinal history and its interpretation,” Speculum, 24 (1949): 483–92. “L’existence de Dieu selon Duns Scot,” Mediaeval Studies, 11 (1949): 23–61. “Autour de Pomponazzi: problématique de l’immortalité de l’âme en Italie au début du XVIe siècle,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 28 (1961): 163–279. “Sur la problématique thomiste de la vision béatifique,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 31 (1964): 67–88. “Avicenne en occident au moyen âge,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 44 (1969): 89–121.

Biographies Shook, Laurence K., Etienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). Shook, Laurence K., “Etienne Henry Gilson, 1884–1978,” Mediaeval Studies, 41 (1979), vii–xv.

References Académie française (www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/index.html; accessed April 8, 2009). Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (www.bautz.de/bbkl/g/gilson_e_h.shtml; accessed April 8, 2009). Colish, Marcia L., Remapping Scholasticism (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2000). Ghisalberti, Alessandro, “Etienne Gilson,” in Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jaume Aurell and Francisco Coras (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 107–16. Murphy, Francesca Aran, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004). Redpath, Peter (ed.), A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Etienne Gilson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). Schmitz, Kenneth L., What Has Clio to Do with Athena? Etienne Gilson: Historian and Philosopher (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987).

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Jacques Godechot (1907–1989) Emmet Kennedy

For generations, historians had written of the French Revolution of 1789 as “the great revolution,” related to later revolutions – 1830, 1848, and 1917 – more than to contemporary ones. But would the revolution of 1789 still be the “great revolution” and the “mother revolution” of twentieth-century communist revolutions if it were placed in the context of a series of eighteenth-century revolutions, some of them relatively minor? Jacques Godechot spent much of his life studying these revolutions, which he later saw as linked in one larger “Occidental” or “Atlantic” revolution with 1789 as its hub. His contributions to their histories were evident at his death in the year of the bicentennial of 1789, when leading American and French historians paid him the highest tribute in journals such as French Historical Studies, the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (Historical Annals of the French Revolution), and the Annales du Midi (Annals of Southern France). Scholars acknowledged his remarkable productivity (thirty books, almost three hundred articles and two thousand book reviews, a score of documents, dozens of prefaces, and so forth); his work treated not only what he called “the Atlantic thesis” but also counter-revolution and espionage in revolutionary France, the history of institutions such as the modern French press, and the history of the French army. Furthermore, Godechot also developed an interest and expertise in the history of the south of France (especially Toulouse). A clear and concise writer, an engaging conversationalist, an excellent patron and colleague, generous with his correspondence to all in need of information, contacts, or advice in their research, an efficient and imaginative dean of the Faculty of Letters at Toulouse through the turbulent 1960s, Godechot left many memories and legacies behind him when he died at his summer home in Saint-Lary in the Pyrenees.

Jacques Godechot (1907–1989)

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Jacques Leon Godechot was born in Lunéville (Lorraine), the son of a real estate businessman. His mother was the daughter of a pharmacist. The family was of Jewish stock, but his mother had converted to Catholicism. One day, as the mother pushed young Jacques in a carriage through a park, they encountered a statue of the Abbé Henri Grégoire, author of a famous pre-revolutionary tract urging the emancipation of the Jews: “That is the abbé Grégoire,” she said, “to whom we owe a lot.” Godechot’s mother died soon after in 1913, but the young lad remembered the lesson. He later attributed his interest in the French Revolution to the fact that it had emancipated the Jews. After the German invasion in 1914, Godechot’s family moved below the Front from 1914 to 1918; this move included reaching Montpellier (where an uncle, Marcel Godechot, would become dean of the university’s faculty of sciences), and returning to Lorraine in 1915. The future historian thus had had a childhood experience of war, and he would later devote almost a decade of his life to reconstructing the actions of commissaries to the armies of the French Revolution, which was the subject of his doctoral thesis of 1937. Before that he studied in Nancy at the Lycée Henri Poincaré. He taught at the Lycée Kléber in Strasbourg from 1933 to 1935, where he approached the founders of the Annales school (named after the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, forerunner to Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations), Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, who were then teaching at the University of Strasbourg. The interviews, however, went poorly. Returning to the University of Nancy, young Godechot wrote a thesis on the “Surveillance committee at Nancy during the Revolution,” which was later published in La Révolution française, a work edited by the famous historian of the Revolution, Alphonse Aulard. In 1928, Godechot passed the agrégation (state competitive professor’s exam). In a “final interview” that he gave to Olivier Bétourné in 1989, Godechot painted a lucid and fascinating account of his early career. Aulard died in 1928; Albert Mathiez appealed to Godechot, who became the secretary of Mathiez’s Annales historiques de la Révolution française, which Mathiez had just founded (and which should not be confused with the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale). Soon Godechot, while a fellow at the Fondation Thiers, began an ambitious thesis under the direction of Mathiez. Godechot was also in contact with Georges Lefebvre, who left Strasbourg because of the spread of Nazism in that city. Lefebvre eventually succeeded Mathiez at the Sorbonne, taking over the direction of the Annales historiques and Godechot’s thesis. In 1935, Godechot was named to a history professorship at the Naval School at Brest. Godechot accepted the primacy of economic and social causation in history, following Mathiez and Lefebvre, but his works consisted mostly of political narrative. As he explained in his “last interview,” he never joined a political party because he wanted to keep his independence and objectivity as an historian, which he did. The only party he really became enthusiastic about was de Gaulle’s Free French Movement. Godechot was in the army in 1929–30 and then again upon the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, first at Nantes and then as a

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member of the Corps d’état major (a special officers’ corps) at Paris. Like Marc Bloch, Godechot was very critical of the French High Command and even said that, as regards France’s military collapse in 1940, he supported imitating the Terror of 1793–4: those officers abandoning the Front in June 1940 should have been executed if they failed to return to their posts. He was demobilized in Toulouse in August 1940 and excluded from his professorship at the Naval School at Brest in December on account of Nazi racial laws. The Godechots then stayed at Versailles in the home of Jacques’ wife, Arlette née Lambert, whom Godechot had married in 1933 (he proposed to her twenty-four hours after their first meeting). Godechot, who chose not to wear a yellow star, claimed that the Nazis tracked him during the war and that he personally experienced terror as a result of the German occupation. In June 1942, the Godechots passed over the demarcation line to Grenoble on bicycles, undetected amidst Le Creusot miners. When France was liberated from the Nazis, Godechot rejoined the army as a captain and successfully applied for a professorship in modern history in Toulouse, where he replaced a collaborator. The Toulouse appointment lasted thirty-five years; it included Godechot’s chairmanship of the history department from 1971 to 1980, where he trained many of the assistants who later became professors. As Dean of the Faculty of Letters from 1961 to 1971, Godechot was a key figure in the construction of the new campus of the University at Mirail in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These appointments came upon recognition of his superb organizational skills. (He usually answered letters the day he received them.) As a scholar and an administrator, Godechot was also elected president of several historical societies, such as the Société des études robespierristes and the Société d’histoire de la Révolution de 1848. Godechot’s two great works of scholarship were Les Commissaires aux armées sous le Directoire (The Commissaries of the Army under the Directory, 1937) and La Grande nation (The Great Nation, 1956). The first comprised more than a thousand pages and gained him his “doctorate in letters” when he defended it before a jury headed by Lefebvre in 1938. War had not been a favorite topic of recent French revolutionary historians. Mathiez had had a secular interest in religion, Lefebvre had specialized in peasants, and Albert Soboul, Godechot’s junior, would concentrate on urban sans culottes (shopkeepers and artisans). Social class, not the army, was the newly blazed trail. But a fresh social perspective on military history – one that later became prominent with historians such as André Corvisier and Jean Paul Bertaud – could be regarded as valid. Godechot was concerned above all by civil–military relations. How did civilians supply the army and what kind of checks did they exert over its independence? Did the army heed or reject orders from the nation’s five executive Directors regarding campaigns, tactics, and treaties? Did generals listen to orders concerning the creation, reform, taxation, and requisitioning of the six sister republics with which France had surrounded herself by 1798? How could the Directory remain in control of its generals, whose power


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was guaranteed by the very success expected of them on the battlefield? The problem was classically Caesarean. It was also teleological because one is fully aware how it all ends up: retention of the Italian republics and then Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup, the “Eighteenth of Brumaire.” This thesis is a mine of information, based on thousands of documents that are minutely and carefully annotated, and organized chronologically and by army (those of Joubert, Moreau, and Bonaparte, armed and supplied by commissaries Garrau, Saliceti, and Rapinat – the generals trying to win battles, the commissaries trying to minimize pillage, rape, and insubordination). The work lives up admirably to the standards of the doctorat d’état (state doctorate) and provided excellent material for Godechot’s La Grande nation nearly twenty years later. Stylistically, it announces all his future work by its clarity, logic, and terseness. Indeed, Jacques Godechot could have written La Grande nation in 1940 had it not been for World War II and for a new interest that he developed while at the Naval School at Brest. That interest was the problem of the Atlantic world. Godechot published his Histoire de l’Atlantique (1947) two years before Fernand Braudel published his monumental La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1949). Godechot’s book is a very short political and event-oriented history of the Atlantic Ocean from the initial Viking discoveries of North America to the Anglo-American assault on Normandy. The work is a masterful example of brief, pithy, and exciting narration, and that is the tack that Godechot would take for the rest of his career, while Braudel would focus on serial data and geographical description at the expense of events and individuals. In 1951, Godechot completed a massive work of institutional history called Les Institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (The Institutions of France under the Revolution and the Empire), an indispensable reference work. Updated in 1968, the book covers topics such as justice and education, declarations of rights, and institutional bodies such as clubs, legislatures, and the army. Of special interest is Godechot’s critical evaluation of Napoleon, whose codes, arrests, detentions, indirect taxes, and constant war “distanced him more and more from the Revolution that he pretended to continue.” His administrative institutions, while perdurable, were “the product of the class struggle,” which the bourgeoisie won. This conclusion put Godechot in solid agreement with Georges Lefebvre and the historians associated with the Annales historiques. His later volumes on Napoleon are characteristically clear and informative surveys. A preliminary study of the “problems of the Atlantic on the eve of the Revolution,” published in the Revue du nord in 1954, examined the French Revolution’s cahiers des doléances (statements of grievances) for their remarks on maritime issues such as the “privileged” monopoly by Marseille of all trade with the Orient and, more generally, on competition among various ports. “But the liberalism of the cahiers was not concerned with the Atlantic,” Godechot wrote.

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Across that ocean, at Princeton University, was a professor of modern history named Robert Roswell Palmer, two years younger than Godechot and known for several noteworthy books on French history, such as Twelve Who Ruled (1941). Palmer was preparing a paper on “Le problème de l’Atlantique du XVIIIe au XXe siècle” (“The problem of the Atlantic from the eighteenth to the twentieth century”), and he was in search of a French co-author for a paper to be presented at the Tenth International Congress of Historical Sciences, which was scheduled to meet in Rome in September 1955. Through Georges Lefebvre, Godechot was put in touch with Palmer, and a Fulbright travel fellowship and a Princeton Shreve research fellowship were obtained for Godechot. Leaving their three teenage sons in school in Toulouse, Professor, Mme. Godechot, and their daughter Eveline boarded at Le Havre the ocean liner the United States. At Princeton, the surprised Godechots encountered unexpected objects and practices, many of which were still little known in France: kitchen gadgets, brick houses, supermarkets, freezers, and last but not least, Thanksgiving. Godechot participated in Palmer’s seminar, finished La Grande nation, and addressed the meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies at Cornell in March 1955. The two historians also concluded their paper for the Tenth International Congress of Historical Sciences. Palmer and Godechot continued to see each other every few years thereafter at the International Congresses of Historical Sciences, and they and their families met at Mme. Godechot’s country home, Bousquet d’Orb, in 1960. Their last encounter was in 1968 at a colloquium that Godechot organized in Toulouse, whose papers were published as L’Abolition de la féodalité dans le monde occidental (Abolition of Feudalism in the West, 1971). It seems that Godechot wrote the first part of the paper, which covered the economic history of the Atlantic, and that Palmer wrote the second part, which dealt with its political history, specifically the American Revolution and the clash of constituted bodies (judicial, consultative, and elected) with sovereigns on both littorals. The report did not yet enunciate the full “Atlantic thesis”; rather, it mapped the thesis’s economic and political preconditions. Among its impressive observations were comparisons of how long it took travelers to cross the Atlantic in different periods, and considerations of how modern steam engines and telegraphs had brought its ports together, creating an “Atlantic civilization.” Equally significant was the authors’ contention that the Atlantic helped create middle classes that continued to be lacking in Eastern Europe. The Rome paper was not simply a work of economic history, for it implied that economic history produced political history in the form of revolutions. The reaction to the incipient Atlantic thesis was hostile. To the Annalistes and to historians associated with the Annales historiques such as Albert Soboul, the argument seemed to be an historical apology for the Atlantic Alliance, and even for NATO or the CIA. In his Un jury pour la Revolution (A Jury for the Revolution, 1974), Godechot would later stress the absurdity of these allegations: he was personally opposed to the NATO treaty and


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had difficulty getting an American visa to travel to the United States. Nonetheless, Godechot and Palmer would face an uphill battle when they attempted to convince American and French historians on both sides of the Atlantic that their revolutions were not wholly unique, but belonged to a larger movement. A half-century later, a McGill University French Atlantic historian observed that Jacques Godechot was “among the pioneers of Atlantic studies.” The next year, 1956, Godechot’s La Grande nation appeared. The book, organized in a topical rather than in a narrative fashion, examines the stages and means of French expansion during the French Revolution. Certainly, there were points of divergence between Godechot and Palmer, whose two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959, 1964) covers some of the same ground as Godechot’s La Grande nation. Palmer stresses the indigenous character of revolutionary movements and revolutions outside France, including those in Austria, Poland, and even Russia, while Godechot stresses that no European revolution outside France succeeded without French military intervention. Hence the logic of the title of his book, La Grande nation, whose military accent Georges Lefebvre faulted in the Annales historiques of 1957. Godechot is perhaps a little less idealistic than Palmer in recognizing that the story of eighteenth-century revolution was not one solely of “liberty,” but one of “liberty and requisitions,” for the French revolutionary armies routinely pillaged farmhouses, requisitioned municipal treasuries, and ransacked museums. Nevertheless, both men see more good than ill eventuating from revolutionary France’s invasions of neighboring states from 1796 to 1798. In each town – Milan, Bologna, Genoa, even Rome – patriots (giacobini), who had been enthusiastically following French political developments since 1789, greeted the French as “liberators” and imitated them by establishing bicameral legislatures, declarations of rights, political presses, and republican schools; by confiscating ecclesiastical property; by secularizing some of the clergy; and by emancipating Jews. Godechot believes that, despite requisitions and pillage, the men of 1789 had to fulfill the liberating “mission” attributed to them by the European revolutionary generation. La Grande nation also furthers the argument developed by Palmer and Godechot that the French and American revolutions had much in common and formed part of a broader Atlantic revolution. When Beatrice Hyslop reviewed the book for the American Historical Review in 1957, she described it as “an invaluable contribution to the history of the French Revolution as an Occidental Revolution …” However, historians associated with the Annales historiques group were skittish of its Atlantic claims. R. R. Palmer, reflecting in 1990 in French Historical Studies, explained why: “Not only Marxism but a certain French national self-image was offended. We were thought to downgrade the importance or uniqueness of the French revolution by diluting it into a vague general international disturbance.” Godechot did not abandon the notion of an “Occidental Revolution,” despite opposition. In 1963, he published a university manual explaining the

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“Palmer–Godechot thesis” entitled Les Revolutions, 1770–1799 (translated as France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799, 1965), which went through four editions and was translated into English, Spanish, and Italian. The principal “sister republics” of the “Occidental Revolution” were Italian, and Godechot devoted a good part of his career to following Italian history through to 1871. In his Histoire de l’Italie moderne, 1770–1870: le risorgimento (History of Modern Italy, 1770–1870: The Unification, 1971), he sided with those historians (mostly Marxists) who traced the Risorgimento, or the movement for Italian unification, back to the French Revolution. Although neither the Directory nor Napoleon wanted a unified republic or any other kind of unified state on French borders, there were many Italian nationalists who did. Napoleon’s 1796 Cisalpine Republic was seen by many as the first step toward such unity. Napoleon went along with those nationalists, even disobeying the Directory’s orders to treat the Cisalpine Republic as a bargaining chip to be used to acquire the left bank of the Rhine in negotiations with Austria. Instead, Napoleon used Venice as the bargaining chip, holding on to the Cisalpine. After almost losing the peninsula to the Second Coalition during his Egyptian campaign, Napoleon reasserted his control during the Consulate and eventually created a Kingdom of Italy. Godechot’s history of Italy takes the story through the Congress of Vienna to the Risorgimento proper, and it shows the very important republican links to the 1790s that Mazzini, Garibaldi, and hundreds of adherents of Young Italy forged. Like French Jacobins, most Italian democrats were anticlerical and secular, leading to an important rift with the Church after 1848. Thus, Italian nationalists confronted two main obstacles to Italian unification: the Austrian presence in Lombardy and Venetia, and the Church in central Italy. The resolution of the problems posed by these two obstacles was largely political and religious rather than economic or social. The pope was expelled three times from Rome before unification and only came to final terms with the Italian monarchy in 1929. Godechot’s History of Modern Italy is characteristic of many of his works of synthesis. Based almost exclusively on printed secondary sources, it brings to the fore the well-known issues, narrates the events very clearly, and produces a new, factual version of an old story. Additionally, it should be noted that Godechot published many specialized articles on Italian history in both French and Italian periodicals. French historians tend to produce enormous theses, or thèses d’état, and then to popularize the contents of their theses for public readership during the remainder of their careers. Some of Godechot’s books certainly fit this pattern, but he was also willing to push into new areas of historical inquiry. His La Contrerévolution: doctrine et action, 1789–1804 (The Counter-revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804, 1962) was greatly appreciated by colleagues. Launching into territory that had not been much explored by them, Godechot divided his work on resistance to the French Revolution into two sections, one examining thought and the other action. He saw the impact of counter-revolutionary action as immediate, that of doctrine being felt only after the Revolution. The former included


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the uprising of the Vendée region against the French Revolution, as well as various military conspiracies and spy rings connected with England, such as the one associated with the Comte d’Antraigues, to whom Godechot devoted one of his last books in 1986. Godechot’s equipoise and his political non-affiliation suited him well for this work on a very sensitive issue that French historians, many of whom identified with the French revolutionary tradition, had abstained from investigating. Godechot’s account of the Vendée argues that priests and nobles rather than peasants instigated the region’s revolt, which implies a rejection (popular among republican historians) of the idea that the Vendée was a broadly shared referendum against the Revolution, particularly its religious policy and military conscription. Some regard Godechot’s La Prise de la Bastille, 14 juillet 1789 (1965; translated as The Taking of the Bastille, July 14, 1789, 1970) as his best book. It carefully reconstructs the event from original sources and identifies all the participants who have left a trace in the historical record. Godechot described the crowd that took the Bastille as being “national,” that is, at least half were recent provincial immigrants hailing from throughout France (which would have been typical of the population of eighteenth-century Paris), rather than consisting of employed Parisian artisans as George Rudé had described them or of irresponsible, unemployed vagrants as Hyppolite Taine had claimed. Furthermore, the Paris insurrection sprang from the peasant uprisings of 1789 and inspired the attacks on the chateaux after the fourteenth of July as the “Great Fear” spread throughout France. Rejecting out of hand the arguments that the storming of the Bastille was a Masonic plot concocted by the Duke of Orléans, or a reaction against an aristocratic court plot to suppress the Revolution, Godechot reclaimed this iconic event as the work of the French nation. Godechot’s Les Révolutions de 1848 (The Revolutions of 1848, 1971) is a logical extension of his works on the first phase of the occidental revolutions. Again, he opened up the myopic horizons of so many French historians who, even if they recognized that those revolutions affected all of Central Europe, still insisted that the foreign revolts were sparked by Paris. “It is not so,” writes Godechot, who stresses that the revolutions of 1848 began in Italy and Switzerland, even if the Parisian February revolution had a major impact on Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, Prague, and Budapest. While many of the reforms adopted by revolutionary governments were as transitory as the governments themselves, Godechot identifies long-term consequences: “feudalism” was abolished in Eastern Europe; slavery was abolished in the French empire; universal suffrage was established in France; and these changes all would be eventually copied elsewhere. The postscript to the revolutions of 1848 was the contemporaneous abolition of serfdom and slavery respectively by the two giants, Russia and the United States. The cumulative effect of all these reforms leads Godechot to conclude: “The Revolution of 1848 is indeed the sequel and the accomplishment … of the occidental revolution, which had commenced in America in 1770. It closes a revolutionary cycle.”

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Revolutions are judgments of the regimes they overthrow. Historians are the revolutions’ judges and jurors. In Un jury pour la Revolution, published in 1974, Godechot passes judgment on fourteen “jurors” whose lives and careers as historians spanned three generations, including Heinrich von Sybel, Jules Michelet, Hippolyte Taine, Alphonse Aulard, Jean Jaurès, Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre. Looking back on the development of revolutionary historiography, Godechot reached a conclusion that was quite an avowal for one who insisted on non-partisanship: there is no scientific or wholly objective history. Each history is the product of the historian’s age, environment, and personal background. There is no getting around the dictum that “every history is contemporary history,” and attempts to achieve historical objectivity by means of serial or quantitative history result in the leaving out of the important part of history: men and events. Progress had been made, however. Most historians now consulted sources other than memoirs when writing history; archives had been opened up and their contents subjected to an increasingly rigorous and scientific examination. But one is always prisoner of the first book one reads, Godechot claims, for it colors everything that one reads thereafter. Godechot looked askance at François Furet’s critique of what he termed the Marxist “Revolutionary catechism,” that is, the dominant interpretive orthodoxy of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française. Godechot objected that Furet did not have a doctorat d’état and that he was not a trained historian of the Revolution. Indeed, there was no generation of professional specialists of the Revolution after his own, Godechot observed to me in 1973. In a sense, Godechot was right. Furet’s works passed beyond the document and the archive into metahistory. It was now a matter of “penser la Révolution,” or “conceiving” of the Revolution in a new way. Such an approach certainly did not deny the French Revolution’s historical centrality, but it did postulate that historians needed to adopt a new conceptual mentality if ever they were to be able to rise above the Revolution’s own verdict of itself. Godechot continued to study and to write about the French Revolution in his final decades; his last books were La Révolution française dans le Midi toulousain (The French Revolution in the Region of Toulouse, 1986) and La Révolution française: chronologie commentée, 1787–1799 (The French Revolution: A Commentated Chronology, 1988). By the time of the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution, however, Godechot understood that Furet’s critique of previous generations of historians was in the ascendant. When I saw him at his home in 17, rue Antonin Mercié in Toulouse on July 1, 1989, Godechot was suffering from an advanced stage of leukemia. But he was as alert as ever. Looking at me he said: “They say that François Furet is the greatest living historian of the French Revolution.” That bicentennial reputation was another fact he acknowledged dispassionately. Godechot will be remembered as a reliable, lucid, concise, and insightful political historian of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He will also be regarded as one of the few French historians who internationalized the French historical profession by expanding its horizons and questioning French exception-


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ality. His Atlantic histories – for there are many – saw the French Revolution as part of a pattern, and he urged his students not to be shortsighted and provincial, but to stretch their imaginations, their reading, and their traveling abroad. He could be an ideal historian, if not of NATO, then of the European Union and more, for he wanted to include in the “Occidental Revolutions” South America – a continent that has not yet found its rightful place in that history. Although he de-emphasized ideas, never really coming to grips with the importance of revolutionary de-Christianization in or outside France, whenever he did treat the subject, he did so with dispassion and accuracy. Godechot will be remembered in Toulouse for his able administration as Dean of the Faculty of Letters, as the principal administrator responsible for the creation of the 1968 suburban campus of Toulouse-le-Mirail, and as a friend of the United States who rescued an American flag from burning by students in a university courtyard in 1968. Americans and the British helped to liberate France in 1944, and Godechot acknowledged the debt in many ways. He appointed a number of American PhD candidates to an instructorship at the University of Toulouse to enable them to complete their theses. In France and around the world, he will also be remembered as a most prolific and patriotic historian of the French Revolution and of the occidental revolutions.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Jacques Godechot La Propagande royaliste aux armées sous le Directoire (Paris: Melottée, 1933). Les Commissaires aux armées sous le Directoire: contribution à l’étude des rapports entre les pouvoirs civils et militaires (Paris: Fustier, 1937). Histoire de l’Atlantique, 2 vols. (Paris: Bordas, 1947). Les Institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951; rev. edn., 1968). Histoire de Malte (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952; rev. edn., 1970). La Grande nation: l’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris: Aubier, 1956; rev. edn., 1983). Babeuf [et] Buonarroti: pour le deuxième centennaire de leur naissance, by Jacques Godechot et al. (Nancy: Thomas, 1961). La Contre-révolution: doctrine et action, 1789–1804 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961); translated by Salvator Attanasio as The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action (New York: Fertig, 1971; rev. edn., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Les Révolutions, 1770–1799 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963; rev. and enlarged edn., 1965; rev. again, 1970; rev. again, 1986); translated by Herbert H. Rowen as France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (New York: Free Press, 1965). Démographie et subsistances en Languedoc (du XVIII au début du XIX siècle), by Jacques Godechot and Suzanne Moncassin (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1965). La Prise de la Bastille, 14 juillet 1789 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965); translated by Jean Stewart as The Taking of the Bastille, July 14, 1789 (New York: Scribner, 1970).

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L’Europe et l’Amérique à l’époque napoléonienne, 1800–1815 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1967); translated by Beatrice Hyslop and David Dowd as The Napoleonic Era in Europe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). L’Epoca delle rivoluzioni (Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1969). Histoire générale de la presse française, by Jacques Godechot et al., 5 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969–76). Napoléon (Paris: A. Michel, 1969). Histoire de l’Italie moderne, 1770–1870: le risorgimento (Paris: Hachette, 1971). Les Révolutions de 1848 (Paris: A. Michel, 1971). Histoire de Toulouse, by Jacques Godechot et al. (Toulouse: Privat, 1974). Un jury pour la Révolution (Paris: R. Laffont, 1974). La Vie quotidienne sous le Directoire (Paris: Hachette, 1977). Regards sur l’époque révolutionnaire (Toulouse: Privat, 1980). Le Comte d’Antraigues (Paris: Fayard, 1986). La Révolution française dans le Midi toulousain (Toulouse: Privat, 1986). La Révolution française: chronologie commentée, 1787–1799 (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1988).

Works Edited by Jacques Godechot Fragments des mémoires de C. A. Alexandre sur sa mission aux armées du Nord et de Sambre-etMeuse (Paris: Fustier, 1937). La Révolution de 1848 à Toulouse et dans la Haute Garonne (Toulouse: Préfecture de la Haute Garonne, 1949). La Pensée révolutionnaire en France et en Europe, 1780–1799 (Paris: A. Colin, 1969). Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970). L’Abolition de la féodalité dans le monde occidental: Toulouse, 12–16 novembre 1968, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971). Madame de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française (Paris: Tallandier, 1983).

References Bétourné, Olivier, “Le dernier entretien du doyen Godechot,” Bulletin de la Commission d’histoire de la Révolution française (1992–3): 77–98. Bonnassie, Pierre, Estèbe, Jean, Fournier, Georges, et al., “Nécrologie: Jacques Godechot (1907–1989),” Annales du Midi, 101 (1989): 489–95. Forster, Robert, Palmer, R. R., Friguglietti, James, et al., “American historians remember Jacques Godechot,” French Historical Studies, 16 (1990): 879–92. Godechot, Thierry, Godechot, Eveline, and Godechot, Didier, Unpublished family memoirs (Paris, Versailles). Risoluti, Livia, “Jacques Godechot, un profilo bio-bibliographico,” unpublished dissertation, University of Rome “La Sapienza,” 2001. Roux, Jean Pierre, “Un grand historien de la Révolution,” Le Monde, September 7, 1989. Vovelle, Michel, Petitfrère, Claude, Fournier, Georges, et al., “In memoriam: Jacques Godechot,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 61 (275) (1989); 62 (279) (1990).

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Pierre Goubert (1915– ) James B. Collins

Pierre Goubert, at the beginning of his autobiographical Un parcours d’historien (An Historian’s Journey, 1995), writes movingly of his long love affair with history: One will find here also several living people, as well as the diverse aspects and diverse places, sometimes far off, where I have encountered that slightly mythic personage, Clio. Beside the beauty of the name, and the charm of the nine sisters, Clio, more than the term of “historian”, so bandied about, has the merit of enveloping, of covering or magnifying ideas, beliefs, humans, books, outcomes sometimes miserable, sometimes horrible, sometimes exalting. It is thus under the sails, under the aegis or the invocation of Clio that I will place what I know of the history and of the historians of the 20th century – well, not all, so heavy are the weight of forgetting and social conventions.

This simple book, so distant in some ways from his weighty monograph on the Beauvais, or the great works of synthesis on the Ancien Régime, reveals much about Goubert. The final chapters focus on his travels once famous: they reveal little details about encounters far and wide – his delight at listening to Natalie Zemon Davis (a famous American specialist of sixteenth-century France) speak in tongues at a Toronto ethnic market, his wonder at African or Japanese traditions of history – but speak little of his development as an historian. One gets mainly a sense of his constant wonder that the little boy from la Grande Rue in Saumur, the street of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, now travels the world as an honored guest, teaching at famous universities like Princeton, a bastion of elite culture in which this son of modest working parents taught the children of privilege. They drown in laughter as he explains that his mother’s family took three

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hundred years to move the ten miles from their village to Saumur, step by cautious step. This little story gets to the heart of Goubert’s approach to history. He drew from his knowledge of the “immobility” of his mother’s family his understanding of peasant life. Earlier, he has told of his father’s family, which seems to have migrated from Normandy to the Loire valley wine villages, thence to Saumur, perhaps in the revolutionary period for the last step. When a later school colleague, Paul Goubert, SJ, insists the two of them are cousins, Pierre demurs, suggesting that the name “Goubert” is fairly common. The good Jesuit, who hailed from the wine-growing village of Gigondas, hundreds of kilometers away in the Rhône valley, tells him that his family “came from Anjou during the Revolution, because they were ‘whites’ and the rest of the family ‘blues.’ It’s a lovely story, but why pursue it?” (“Whites”, against the Revolution; “blues” for it.) Why, indeed, if one sets out to prove that Ancien Régime France was a “stable, sedentary society”, a phrase he first used in The Ancien Régime: French Society, 1600–1750 (French 1969; English translation, 1973). Goubert, like so many of the great French historians of his generation, came from the provinces, from a family of modest means. His father and mother both attended primary school, although only his mother, Anne-Marie Roulleau, got her sainted “certificate.” His father attended school only from All Saints’ Day through Easter, and just from 1880 to 1884 (aged 5 to 9), always proud of having been first in the class: in parenthesis, Goubert adds, “in fact, he read and wrote very well.” The father seemed the embodiment of what Claude Lévi-Strauss called the life of bricolage so ubiquitous in the human condition in most of time and space. (The term bricoleur is similar to the American term “handyman.” To bricoler sa vie meant to do many different jobs, rather than one, because no single job would support a family.) In his case, it meant working at an agricultural products manufactory in the winter, gardening outside in the warmer months, and tending a private patch that did much to feed the family. Goubert’s mother ran a small grocery, as well as a family. Given the enormous respect he expresses for his mother’s efforts, and abilities, one is struck all the more by how much the culture of the time overwhelms even the best of historians: Goubert’s work, like that of the other early Annalistes, gives far too little credit to women as economic actors. Little wonder that he had such affinity for early modern peasants, who invariably had to bricoler their lives. He had little use for (unnamed) ethnographers and sociologists who suddenly decided to work on peasant life, yet were “incapable of telling wheat from barley” (“Preface” to The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century: French 1982; English translation 1986). One gets a profound sense of his emphasis on the lived reality of peasants in his review of Abel Poitrineau’s book on the eighteenth-century Auvergne. “Effusively” praising Poitrineau, he offers his highest compliment: “Since the death of Pierre de Saint Jacob, very few have understood the people of the fields, the vineyards, the pastures like this adopted Clermentois” (region near the city of Clermont, in the Auvergne).

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Goubert freely admits that he enjoyed eating the beans he harvested as a boy more than the harvest work itself, which he claims he tried often to shirk, but he had an intimate knowledge of country life, both from work in the family garden, and helping his father, and from summers with vigneron (wine-maker) relatives. Above all, he understood the precariousness of rural life: in his famous metaphor, early modern peasants were like people standing in a pond, with the water up to their chins. When a storm blew up a strong wind, the waves might drown them all. Goubert traces a life affected by broadly defined lieux de mémoire (literally, places of memory, but going beyond simple geographic location): his grandparents’ village; la Grande Rue of Saumur; World War I; a great teacher at his normal school at Angers; classes with Marc Bloch at St.-Cloud. His father, aged 40 when drafted in 1915, survived the war as a bicycle messenger at the front lines; Goubert makes careful note that only one member of the Goubert clan – two dozen of whom fought in the trenches – died in the war, a fact at which he duly (and rightfully) marvels. Unlike so many little French boys of his age, he did not lose a father or an uncle in the great massacre of the innocents in the fields of Champagne and Picardy. Deeply marked by the history of France, by the legacy of the Third Republic, in his final book, Mazarin (1990), we see Goubert choose an interesting adjective, réunis, to describe Cardinal Mazarin “reattaching” places like Alsace and the Cerdagne to France at the treaties of 1648 and 1659: of course, neither Alsace nor the Cerdagne had ever been part of the kingdom of France. The verb réunir carries the secondary meaning of to unite for the first time (and Emile Littré, in his 1870s’ Dictionnaire de la langue française, provided, as his example of usage, precisely the case of Lorraine réuni to the kingdom of France under Louis XV). The word’s ambiguity did not exist in the seventeenth century, according to dictionaries of the time: the 1694 Académie française dictionary defined it this way: “Rejoin that which has been disunited, dismembered,” and added an example of usage – “Réunir a great fief to the Crown.” In a sense, the later meaning was a kind of linguistic cover-up for the spurious claims of the seventeenth-century monarchy to non-French areas it seized in 1648, 1659, and 1678. That Goubert would fall into the trap, using the term long favored by republican historians (such as Ernest Lavisse), shows again the iron grip of cultural traditions even on those free in so many ways from them. The wine-growing villages that ring Saumur gave Goubert his appreciation for rural life, just as the thriving, bustling world of the small shops along the Grande Rue, filled with “vitality and energy,” taught him about provincial urban life. He would go on to write his great monograph on such a town, Beauvais, and its surrounding villages, bringing to that task a unique appreciation for the symbiotic relationship of the small city and its pays. He was a rare historian to work both on a town and its countryside. We hear, too, Goubert’s wistful and disapproving voice when he looks at the Grande Rue in the 1990s: “Of all that, in this end of

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the 20th century, very little remains: the promoters have eviscerated it, crudely repaired [rafistolé] it, re-gilded and ennobled in their fashion the former Grande Rue, from which all the people have been chased.” The “people,” that is, the small shopkeepers, the artisans: Goubert would devote his life to their history. For that, above all, is what he took from his own young life. His encounter with Marc Bloch – and he was the only one of his generation to take a course with Bloch – gave him the encouragement to follow the path of the historian of the everyday. He writes of his years at St.-Cloud, that he had read: several articles in Annales d’histoire économique et sociale [journal founded by Bloch and Febvre in 1929; from 1945 to 1993, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations; since 1994, Annales: histoire, science sociales] where history came alive and expanded in space as in the themes explored; there one saw real peasants … It is certain that this journal and this man, both of them exceptional, gave me, at a stroke, the desire to become an historian, to practice at least a history that was no longer limited to great monarchs, great generals, great ministers and men of genius. The realization of this evident and sudden vocation could only come later, but it was born there.

Years later, in his memorial for Jean Meuvret (1972), his “master in the former sense of the word,” Goubert would offer this tribute: “One can never say enough of what was, for those who sought their way in the smothering atmosphere of the 1930s, the shining, demanding, impertinent, solid, and blossoming journal of Bloch and Febvre.” On what period would Goubert focus? Here the answer had come from earlier studies and from childhood readings. Like many a seventeenth-century specialist, I am sure, he encountered the France of Richelieu and Louis XIV first through Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers and other works (Goubert makes reference to childhood fascination with d’Artagnan and his friends in the preface to his biography of Mazarin). In secondary school, he thrilled to Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, which, Goubert says, opened a new and gripping world for him. Not so the Enlightenment: “The 18th century passioned me less: Candide [Voltaire] annoyed me, the Solitary Promeneur [Rousseau] always bored me, but I tasted the admirable language of Montesquieu.” The combination of a humble social background, a predilection for the seventeenth century, and the desire to write history from the bottom up produced Pierre Goubert, historian. Goubert trained primarily with two of the greatest historians of the 1950s: Ernest Labrousse, his thesis adviser, and the remarkable Meuvret, whose seminar Goubert attended for three years. He amply credits them both for their fundamental influence on his work. Goubert’s great thesis, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (Beauvais and the Beauvaisis from 1600 to 1730, 1960), stands, with Le Roy Ladurie’s Paysans de Languedoc (The Peasants of Languedoc), as one of the two defining Annales theses of the 1960s (defining in the sense that these two theses, and their authors, quickly became the most widely known). The French historian Pierre Chaunu, in Annales de Normandie, called Beauvais: “The most


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important work of the French historical school on the seventeenth century in a long time … Its place is forever reserved in the first rank of the greatest works of French history.” In 1963, Fernard Braudel, in Annales itself, offered a much more critical view of the book: he argued that it was too small in scope, even accusing Goubert of not knowing the broader French and European contexts (an unfair charge, let it be noted, because Goubert had been trained by Meuvret, who always insisted his students know the broader European context), and yet too large in scope, too big a selection of villages for genuine local history. He further criticized it for not dealing with the problem of “civilization” and for failing to bring together conjuncture and deeper structures: “The house is not finished, without an upper storey, without a roof.” Like Le Roy Ladurie, Goubert published in two volumes: one of text, the other of tables and charts. We witness in their work – and that of René Baehrel on Provence (1961) – the spread of the statistical techniques of Labrousse (Goubert’s adviser) into the broad range of historical writing on early modern France: Baehrel even used the subtitle, “essay on historical, statistical economy.” Goubert credits his access to such statistical information to good fortune: “These unexpected discoveries [in the archives of Beauvais] … called into question certain received ideas and certain gratuitous interpretations … such as the misery of country priests, the ‘marvelous’ [mirifiques, a word used generally in an ironic sense, perhaps best known – and certainly known to Goubert – from the title of a fantasy novel of Jules Verne, Les Aventures mirifiques de Maître Antifer (1894)] ordinances of Colbert, not applied here or frankly ignored.” Goubert here offers a worthwhile lesson to all young historians: he was first told that the archives had been destroyed during World War II [partly true], that they were being restored, that not much was there. His persistence paid off with, among other treasures, the records of the bishopric and other ecclesiastic foundations. He found in these records – civil registers, tax roles, hospital archives – the traces of ordinary lives. The silent curves of burials speak loudly about the hunger winter of 1693–4, when millions of French people died of starvation or, weakened by hunger, of disease. Yet Goubert’s work shows, too, the resiliency of that society: few married in 1693 or 1694; few parents had children in that grim season; in 1695 and after, however, Beauvaisin couples flocked to the aisle, and soon had children to replace those taken in the Grim Reaper’s harvest of 1694. His Beauvais has often been criticized for presenting too negative a view of early modern French society, based on a region that fared poorly in the fifty years on either side of 1680, yet his evidence does illustrate beautifully the resilience of French society. We do not see, however, the stunning economic success of the rich plowmen in the nearby pays of France (region east of Paris, near the village of Roissy-en-France). The meticulous work of a generation of scholars, applying the methods of demographer Louis Henry, enabled us to see the extent of the disasters of 1693–4

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and 1709, but also to understand that their long-term effect on the population of France was far less than we had believed. Their patient reconstruction, parish by parish, gave us finally a far more accurate estimate of that most basic of statistics, the population of France, and on such fundamental matters as its age distribution, birth rate, death rate, and other demographic indicators. Goubert, the first of these great demographic historians, in fact reached methods similar to those developed by Henry on his own: he had largely finished his demographic research, and published key elements of it in Annales (1952, 1954) when Henry’s book appeared (1956). Goubert the demographic historian, the descendant of the young acolyte of “human geography,” always underlay the work of Goubert the social and economic historian. We learn of the haricotiers (green bean growers) of the Beauvaisis, the market gardeners whose specialization pointed the way to the future. (In private, Braudel always referred to Goubert as l’haricotier.) Close to the “great market,” they readily found outlets for their produce, allowing them to specialize in ways that those in more remote regions could not. They did not get wealthy, far from it, but they attained a degree of independence and self-sufficiency available to few middling peasants outside of the wine-growing regions. In the short version of his thesis, produced for the larger public as Cent milles provinciaux au XVIIe siècle (A Hundred Thousand Provincials in the Seventeenth Century, 1968), Goubert revealed a core element of his broader thinking. Introducing the section on the economic conjuncture (middle-term movement) of the seventeenth century, he wrote: After the description of the essential, of the practically immobile, of deep structures, the second part of the thesis which was the first form of this book took up the great economic, social and demographic fluctuations that one can discern between 1600 and 1730, using an arsenal of figures. As it is a question of history, and not of theory, the study of these great fluctuations derives solely from the abundance and above all the quality of the sources that permit us to establish them.

Again we see that key word, “immobile”, that lay at the heart of Goubert’s understanding of rural life: the deep structures were immobile – peasants could not escape, could not take risks, for fear of the ripples in the pond. We also see his distrust of “theory”; Goubert always disliked large theoretical categories. In Les Français et l’ancien régime (The French and the Old Regime, 1984), he famously ridiculed the conflicting theories of a “society of orders” (associated with Roland Mousnier and his school) and a “society of classes” (set out by the Russian historian, Boris Porshnev, in his famous book on popular rebellions in early seventeenth-century France) as the “two Scholasticisms” bedeviling early modern history writing. For him, such theories negated the greatest of all liberties, that of the mind. Goubert’s primary principle was simple: writing of Poitrineau’s


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book on the Auvergne, he tells us, “He starts with his disquiets, because the first duty of the historian is to doubt.” What made Goubert into an instantly recognizable name were the steps he took next: explaining the world of his peasants to broader audiences. He contributed to the monumental Histoire économique et sociale de la France (Economic and Social History of France) volume covering the years 1660–1790. Because of its early publication (1970), it could take only limited documentation from the rural theses then in progress (like Jean Jacquart on the Hurepoix). Four great theses therefore dominate its documentary foundation: those of Goubert, Le Roy Ladurie, Pierre de Saint Jacob (Burgundy, published 1961), and Abel Poitrineau (Lower Auvergne, 1965). The examples taken from these four monographs – happily each from a vastly different area of France – thus became the Holy Writ of early modern social and economic history of the French countryside. With Saint Jacob dead and Le Roy Ladurie heading off soon in the direction that would take him to Montaillou and Romans, Goubert became the godfather of French early modern rural history, a role he would share over the next generation with Jacquart (who co-wrote the early modern section of the Histoire de la France rurale [History of Rural France] – in 1975, and directed the thesis of today’s pre-eminent specialist of the countryside, Jean-Marc Moriceau). In 1968, reviewing Poitrineau’s book for Annales, he “resigned” himself to the fact that: “The knowledge of the ‘Frances’ of the Ancien Régime advances slowly. Under pain of falling into verbiage, it can only be regional … The real problem of the former France, that abstraction, is the region. That does not mean we have to cut the old kingdom into forty pieces, which we will then officially assign to forty young people in search of a thesis subject.” Branching off on his own, Goubert shifted to two fundamental works of synthesis: Louis XIV et vingt millions de français (1966; translated as Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, 1970) and L’Ancien régime (1969, 1971). The first of these works went off like a bomb in the broader French community interested in history: indeed, in his February 1996 review of Goubert’s Un parcours d’historien, published in the French news magazine L’Express, Chenoune Farid wrote of Goubert, “celebrated above all for his Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen”. (If nothing else, Farid shows in this phrase the enormous gap between the world of the professional historian and the larger, even highly educated literate public.) The glorious century of Louis XIV got an entirely new perspective: that of the twenty million French people who lived under his rule. The work went through three editions and was translated into English: it became a staple of American university curricula. L’Ancien régime, too, quickly appeared in English, and became the Bible of early modern French social history. The English subtitle catches one of Goubert’s typical subtle gestures: “French Society, 1600–1750.” Goubert here makes a radical point about periodization: for him, the Ancien Régime, as a social and economic construct, ended in 1750, not in 1789. Nearly forty years after publication of the

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book, that point has still not resonated as it should have. The book developed into a fascinating second edition, jointly authored with Daniel Roche, which took the title Les Français et l’ancien régime (1984). Volume 1 is an updated version of Goubert’s 1969 text; volume 2 is almost entirely the work of Roche. Here we see, in a single publication, the dramatic shift in the Annales school in the 1970s. Where Goubert’s segment deals with basic structures, especially in the countryside (like the seigneury or the peasant farm), and with the classic Annales fundamentals (like demography and socioeconomic history), Roche shows the work of the next generation: a heavy emphasis on culture, especially on “popular culture,” and a return to politics. Goubert had the social historian’s suspicion of some elements of this new history, of the linguistic turn in particular: in the preface to his last major book, Mazarin, he writes about “the modes that govern Clio having changed, and language having sometimes replaced work,” by which I take him to mean work in the archives, and work in the sense of accumulating the sort of knowledge of the Ancien Régime and its institutions that he had spent a lifetime studying. (For Goubert, what made someone like Roche such a great cultural historian is that he had done the work.) Roche, a historian of Paris, also takes us far more into the world of the large cities, those harbingers of a France still to come. A generation later, the work remains a classic of its kind, a startingpoint for anyone wanting to learn the fundamentals of early modern France. For an historian who initially rejected “great ministers” and monarchs, it is perhaps ironic that Goubert’s last major book was precisely a biography of one of the greatest of seventeenth-century ministers, Cardinal Mazarin. Goubert had never ignored the upper strata of society – his first book studied two merchant families of Beauvais under the Ancien Régime – but writing a biography of Mazarin was a leap into the void for an historian whose entire life had been devoted to those ruled, or oppressed, by the Cardinal and his ilk. Ah, but Goubert was no ordinary biographer. We begin in Rome, city of Giuseppi Mazarini, but pass quickly to a long second chapter, “Portrait of a kingdom,” which takes us into the world of ordinary French people in 1643. How many biographies of someone like Mazarin include a table with wheat and rye prices (for Paris in the 1640s and 1650s)? For Goubert, the Fronde was the end of a world; Mazarin’s victory due to his intelligence, to access to funds, and to the loyalty of Swiss troops. Goubert is perhaps a bit kind to Mazarin – who, in a kingdom starved of cash, left his heirs 8.7 million livres in cash and another 6 million livres in royal paper. Yet Goubert, in his chapter on the great fortune (the largest private one in seventeenth-century Europe), reminds us: “The historian is neither a moralist nor a judge, and has not to become one.” He does admit that some of the malevolent accusations against Mazarin surely had to be true, and one senses a twinkle in his eye. For one comes back to Goubert the man, always with a twinkle in his eyes. Even Braudel admitted as much: “Pierre Goubert has the sense of life … he seduces us by reason of the evident talent of the author, with his humanism of sound alloy, with his art of seeing, and of making seen.” Goubert describes (in Un


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parcours d’historien) his visit to the annual meeting of the Society of French Historical Studies, at the University of Virginia, in 1987, and his honor at speaking there. As one of those present at the meeting, I remember Goubert announcing himself to the group not at his plenary talk, but by rising from the audience after listening to a paper by the young sixteenth-century specialist, Mack Holt (in his maiden conference paper, no less). We turned to the back of the room to hear this somewhat bearish figure begin, “my name is Pierre Goubert.” He treated us to a ten-minute view of three centuries of French history, and of the role of taxation of the peasants in the evolution of the monarchy. All present remember his witty turns of phrase, so evident, too, in his writing: in that mirifique attached to Colbert’s edicts, or that rastifolé applied to urban renewers at Saumur. Little did we know that young Pierre had dreamed of being a specialist in literature, but lacking classical languages, stuck with history. Literature, in the person of Paul Verlaine, saved him for us: “Verlaine, the unforgettable Verlaine, whose poetry, commented upon and celebrated, permitted me, without doubt, to escape from the calling of high school teacher.” All historians of early modern France – indeed, any historian who looks at the world from the “bottom up” anywhere – remain eternally in Verlaine’s debt.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for a research professorship in the spring of 2009 which provided me with the time to write my contributions to this volume.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Pierre Goubert Familles marchandes sous l’ancien régime: les Danse et les Motte, de Beauvais (Paris: EHESS, 1959). Beauvais et le Beauvaisis du 1600 à 1730: contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960; multiple editions); short edition published as Cent mille provinciaux au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1968). L’Avènement du Roi-Soleil (Paris: Julliard, 1961). 1789: les Français ont la parole, by Pierrre Goubert and Michel Denis (Paris: Julliard, 1965). Louis XIV et vingt millions de Français (Paris: Fayard, 1966, 1982, 1992); translated by Anne Carter as Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (New York: Random House, 1970). L’Ancien régime, 2 vols.: vol. 1: La Société; vol. 2: Les Pouvoirs (Paris: Armand Colin, 1969, 1971); vol. 1 translated by Steve Cox as The Ancien Régime: French Society, 1600–1750 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); revised and republished as Les Français et l’ancien régime, 2 vols., co-authored with D. Roche (Paris: Armand Colin, 1984).

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La Vie quotidienne des campagnes françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1982); translated by Ian Paterson as The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Initiation à l’histoire de France (Paris: Fayard-Taillandier, 1984); translated by Maarten Utlee as The Course of French History (New York: F. Watts, 1988). Mazarin (Paris: Fayard, 1990). Un parcours d’historien (Paris: Fayard, 1995).

Collections Clio parmi les hommes: recueil d’articles (Paris: Mouton, 1976). Le Siècle de Louis XIV: recueil d’articles (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1996).

Selected Articles by Pierre Goubert “En Beauvaisis: problèmes démographiques du XVIIe siècle,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 7 (4) (1952): 453–68. “Une richesse historique en cours d’exploitation: les registres paroissiaux,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 9 (1) (1954): 83–93. “In memoriam: Jean Meuvret (1901–1971),” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 27 (1) (1972): 281–4.

References Abad, Reynaud, Le Grand Marché: l’approvisionnement alimentaire de Paris sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Fayard, 2002). Baehrel, René, Une croissance: la Basse-Provence rurale de la fin du seizième siècle à 1789: essai d’économie historique statistique (Paris: SEVPEN, 1961; reissued 1988). Braudel, Fernand, “Beauvais et le Beauvaisis au XVIIe siècle,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 18 (4) (1963): 767–78. Chaunu, Pierre, “Beauvais et le Beauvaisis au XVIIe siècle,” Annales de Normandie, 10 (1960): 337–65. Deyon, Pierre, Amiens, capitale provinciale: étude sur la société urbaine au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1967). Farid, Chenoune, “Pierre Goubert: maître et élève,” L’Express, February 29, 1996 (available online at www.lexpress.fr/informations/goubert-maitre-et-eleve_612750.html). Harding, Robert, “Pierre Goubert’s Beauvais et le Beauvaisis: an historian parmi les hommes,” History and Theory, 22 (2) (1983): 178–98. Henry, Louis, Manuel de dépouillement et d’exploitation de l’état civil ancien (Paris: INED, 1956). Jacquart, Jean, La Crise rurale en Ile-de-France, 1550–1670 (Paris: A. Colin, 1974). Labrousse, Ernest (ed.), Histoire économique et sociale de la France, vol. 2: 1660–1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Les Paysans de Languedoc (Paris: EHESS, 1966; later reissues).


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Meuvret, Jean, Le Problème des subsistances à l’époque de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: EHESS, 1988). Moriceau, Jean-Marc, Les Fermiers de l’Ile-de-France: l’ascension d’un patronat agricole, XVe– XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1994). Moriceau, Jean-Marc, Terres mouvantes: les campagnes françaises du féodalisme à la mondialisation, 1150–1850 (Paris: Fayard, 2002). Neveux, Hugues, Jacquart, Jean, and Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Histoire de la France rurale, vol. 2: L’Age classique des paysans, 1340–1789 (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Poitrineau, Abel, La Vie rurale en Basse-Auvergne au XVIIIe siècle, 1726–1789, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). Saint Jacob, Pierre de, Les Paysans de la Bourgogne du nord au dernier siècle de l’ancien régime (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960; reissued 1995).

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Elie Halévy (1870–1937) Philip Daileader

“Elie Halévy had no predecessor and would have no successor. During his lifetime, just as after his death, no one in France knew where and how to classify the person and the work of Halévy. He did not resemble anyone.” That is how François Furet, the great historian of the French Revolution, recently described Elie Halévy in his preface to Halévy’s correspondence, and certainly Elie Halévy was unusual in most respects. He was a French historian who never wrote (directly, at least) about France. Instead, he devoted himself to one of two subjects: nineteenth-century British history, about which Halévy wrote fully realized works published during his own lifetime; and European socialism, about which Halévy published fairly little during his own lifetime, instead leaving behind lecture notes that had to be pieced together for posthumous publication. Halévy’s reputation came to be just as bifurcated as his subject matter; he was better known in England, where he was famous as an historian of Britain, than in his own country, where he was known mostly for his writings on socialism. Yet, however seemingly disparate his interests, Halévy brought to all of his writings a distinctive methodology, rooted in his early training as a philosopher; a distinctive style that teased analysis and argument out of the narrative of events; and a fascination with what the French call histoire problème, which is to say, history that is written specifically in response to important questions. For Halévy, the question that most needed to be answered during his lifetime was: how might France and Europe be both liberal, enjoying democratic government and the maximum amount of personal liberty, and stable at the same time? Elie Halévy was born in Normandy at Etretat in 1870, but the Halévys were Parisian rather than Norman: his mother had fled from Paris to Normandy in 1870 in order to escape the advancing German army that had beaten the French at the

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Battle of Sedan earlier that year and brought an end to France’s Second Empire. The family was religiously mixed: Jewish and Catholic on the father’s side and Protestant on the mother’s. In the Halévy family, children were raised in the religion of their mother, which explains how it was that Elie Halévy and his mother, Louise Breguet, were nominally Protestant, while Elie Halévy’s father, Ludovic Halévy, was Catholic, and his paternal grandfather, Léon Halévy, was Jewish. (In truth, Elie Halévy was thoroughly secular.) Politically, the Halévy family was Orleanist in its sensibility, which is to say, it generally favored the moderate liberalism that characterized King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, who ruled in France between 1830 and 1848 – and, like other Orleanists, the Halévy family held England, the most liberal state in nineteenth-century Europe, in high regard. Elie Halévy’s family was wealthy and highly accomplished in the arts, in science, and in commerce. Ludovic Halévy was a librettist who worked with composers such as Jacques Offenbach and Georges Bizet (indeed, Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac wrote the libretto for Bizet’s opera Carmen), but it was as an author of novels that Ludovic Halévy earned his fortune and the reputation that got him elected to the Académie française in 1884. Elie Halévy’s grandfather, Léon Halévy, was a successful author who worked in a variety of genres, especially poetry; he became a close associate of the proto-socialist thinker Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, known to posterity simply as Saint-Simon. Elie Halévy’s great-uncle Jacques Fromental Halévy was a distinguished composer and the first Jew to be elected to the Academy of Beaux Arts. If the arts were the domain of his father’s family, business and science were the domains of his mother’s. Louise Breguet came from a Calvinist family that originally hailed from Switzerland but had moved to France around the time of the French Revolution; clock and watch manufacturing were the basis of that family’s success. Elie Halévy’s uncle on his mother’s side, Marcellin Berthelot, was a world-renowned chemist who also served in the French cabinet as Minister of Education during the 1880s and as Minister of Foreign Affairs during the 1890s. Like Ludovic Halévy, Marcellin Berthelot, too, was elected to the Académie française, in 1900. In 1871, while Elie Halévy was still an infant, the Halévy family returned to Paris (specifically Montmartre), and there the family maintained close contact with some of the period’s most distinguished artists, thinkers, and historians. The painters Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet visited the Halévy home and became well known to Elie and to his younger brother Daniel, who would himself go on to become an important author. Also frequently present in the Halévy house were the authors Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine, both of whom wrote on historical subjects to great acclaim. Given Halévy’s background, it is not at all surprising that he attended one of Paris’s most elite secondary schools, the Lycée Condorcet, where his philosophy teacher, Alphonse Darlu, became his mentor. After graduating from the Lycée Condorect with a stellar academic record – Halévy won the first prize in philosophy in a competition involving students drawn from every lycée in Paris – Halévy

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then attended the equally prestigious Ecole normale supérieure, from which Halévy graduated ranked second in his class. In 1892, Halévy earned his agrégation in philosophy, writing his thesis on Plato’s theory of the sciences; the thesis was published as a book in 1896 under the title of La Théorie platonicienne des sciences (The Platonic Theory of the Sciences, 1896.) Ordinarily, once one was an agrégé, one would have begun teaching at the secondary level in a lycée; if one aspired to teach at the university level, one would also have started writing a dissertation while fulfilling those teaching duties. In 1901, Halévy earned his doctorate, but aside from a brief teaching stint in late 1893 at the Ecole communale de JeanBaptiste Say at Passy, Halévy did not teach in the years immediately following his agrégation. Thanks to his family’s wealth, Halévy did not need to teach for a living. Instead, Halévy traveled in Europe, making his first visit to England in October 1892. Halévy and his fellow students at the Ecole normale supérieure were concerned with what they took to be France’s intellectual and moral decline, and this sense of decline was hardly confined to Halévy and his friends in the decades following the German defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. For Halévy, the most suitable instrument for achieving the moral regeneration of France was the study of philosophy, and for that reason, in 1893, he and several friends founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Review of Metaphysics and Morality). The goal of the journal’s founders was to offer “a rationalist alternative to both positivism and to religiosity.” In other words, Halévy hoped to promote a rational and secular search for moral principles that could serve as the basis for a rejuvenated French society. The establishment of these moral principles would save France, on the one hand, from the perils of religious irrationality. On the other hand, it would also save France from a science that saw the accumulation of data as sufficient for meeting the needs of humanity, and that induced moral paralysis by highlighting the slow and unavoidable nature of evolutionary development. (Nonetheless, Halévy recognized that his own secularism placed him much closer to the positivists than to religious believers.) The Revue de métaphysique was a success and arguably became France’s most important organ for philosophical debate for decades to come. In 1901, Halévy became one of the first officers of the Société française de philosophie, which brought together and encouraged debate among some of the day’s most important French intellectuals. In proclaiming rationalist philosophy to be the key to French recovery, Halévy entered into contemporary debates over the French educational system, and especially over the extent to which French education should be modeled after German education. Halévy himself traveled to Germany in the spring of 1895 to observe firsthand German pedagogical methods, including German seminars, but he came away from this visit more convinced than ever that German schools, with their emphasis on research and the practical application of that research, were perhaps suitable for a materialistic and authoritarian Germany, but not for liberal and republican France.


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The Dreyfus Affair, which divided France so sharply during the 1890s, served to reinforce Halévy’s belief that France was in the throes of a moral crisis. In 1894, a document discovered in the trashcan of a German official indicated that someone in the French army was passing secrets to Germany, and army investigators soon accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, of being the French officer responsible for the betrayal. Dreyfus proclaimed his innocence, but a secret military court declared Dreyfus to be guilty, stripped him of his rank, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Two years later, a French military officer named Georges Picquart was appointed as chief of army intelligence, and he re-examined the evidence that had been used to convict Dreyfus. On the basis of his re-examination – French military papers were still being passed to the Germans, and it seemed unlikely that Dreyfus could be passing those papers from his cell on Devil’s Island off the coast of South America – Picquart, although open in his dislike of Jews, concluded that Dreyfus was innocent, and that a different officer, Walsin Esterhazy, was guilty. Picquart received little cooperation from military officials and was transferred to a relatively dangerous position in Tunisia, while a military tribunal acquitted Esterhazy. On January 13, 1898, two days after the acquittal of Esterhazy, the novelist Emile Zola published his famous open letter J’accuse! (I Accuse!) in which he accused the French military of unjustly convicting Dreyfus and then covering up its mistakes. With the publication of Zola’s letter, the Dreyfus Affair exploded across France in full force. Catholics and conservatives, often employing anti-Semitic language, accused the supporters of Dreyfus, or Dreyfusards, of slandering the French army and thereby showing their lack of patriotism; even if Dreyfus was indeed innocent, his conviction should stand, because to reverse the decision of a military tribunal would be an insult to France. For Dreyfusards, the explosive reaction that Zola’s letter set off and their willingness to condone a miscarriage of justice were evidence of the danger that the Catholic Church, the army, and French conservatism posed to the existence of the Republic. The Dreyfus Affair did not provoke a sharp break in Halévy’s thinking: despite his family’s Orleanist inclinations, it had always accepted and supported the Third Republic, and unlike some contemporaries, Halévy did not shift from republicanism to socialism as a result of the Dreyfus Affair. (Toward the end of his life, Halévy himself suggested that, if he had been a few years younger at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and not so set in his views, then he might well have become a socialist.) Neither did Halévy share in the loathing for the military that some felt as a result of the Dreyfus Affair. Nonetheless, the Affair reinforced and strengthened those beliefs that Halévy already held, and it energized him. Even before Zola had published J’accuse!, Halévy had become convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, and he and his brother Daniel organized a petition to be signed by France’s leading intellectuals and artists calling for a reopening of the case. According to Halévy himself, his involvement in the Dreyfus case arose not from Halévy’s own Jewish ancestry, but from his republicanism and liberalism – Dreyfus had unjustly

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been deprived of his liberty, and France was morally obliged to admit its mistake and free Dreyfus, no matter how embarrassing that admission might be to those who had convicted Dreyfus in the first place. Halévy also rejected, largely on liberal grounds, the widespread anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Affair. Liberalism favored individualism and the judging of each person on the basis of personal merits, while anti-Semitism judged individuals on the basis of descent and without any consideration of individual personal qualities. That so many of his fellow French citizens felt otherwise reinforced Halévy’s belief that republican and secular values needed to be bolstered in France. Halévy’s editorship of the Revue de métaphysique continued until his death in 1937, and, if anything, his editorial responsibilities grew heavier, not lighter, over time. Yet, by 1896 he had decided that he would not become a professional philosopher because such an occupation would not afford him sufficient opportunity for action and intervention. For Halévy, to be a true philosopher, one had to live a public philosophical life and not just think philosophical thoughts; he feared that as a professional philosopher, he would only be allowed to do the latter. Given Halévy’s early work on Plato, one can well understand how Halévy early on came to regard Socrates as a model to be emulated – indeed, Halévy toyed with the idea of writing a life of Socrates that would serve the same function for secular individuals that Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus served for Catholics. Having abandoned philosophy, at least as a profession, Halévy elected to become an historian. Nevertheless, his historical writing, with its emphasis on broad political questions concerning the nature and functioning of the state and society, and on identifying the principles that underpinned human actions, always bore the imprint of his philosophical training. Although Halévy still had no need of a teaching position to support himself and his family, he nonetheless sought out a position that would allow him to be unusually “active” in the sense of shaping the thinking of France’s future leaders. Halévy contacted Emile Boutmy, the director of the Ecole libre des sciences politiques and a specialist in the study of England, about the possibility of Halévy’s taking a position at Boutmy’s school. The Ecole libre des sciences politiques, established after the Franco-Prussian War, was designed to provide a thorough and professional training to individuals who would then serve as officials in the French government. Its curriculum focused on practical policy more than on abstract theory, and for Halévy, who believed in the unity of thought and action, this emphasis was attractive. Boutmy also wanted his school to teach French students how to draw upon what was best in the traditions and thought of other countries, especially England, whose political system seemed quite stable when compared to the French one. Between 1789 and 1871, France had been governed by, in turn, an absolutist monarchy, a constitutional monarchy, the First Republic, the Directory, Emperor Napoleon I, the Restoration monarchy, the Orleanist or July monarchy, the Second Republic, Emperor Napoleon III (the Second Empire), and then the Third Republic. Some contemporaries saw a connection between


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this tangled political history and France’s economic and military decline vis-à-vis Germany; in addition to stabilizing France internally, the Ecole libre des sciences politiques could help France to avoid defeat at the hands of its neighbors. Boutmy was reforming the teaching of political economy when Halévy contacted him, and in 1901 Boutmy offered Halévy a post in the field of English political thought. That Boutmy would have offered such a position to someone who had written a thesis on Plato might seem surprising, but by 1896 Halévy had already begun his project on British thought in the early nineteenth century, and Halévy’s superb academic record and illustrious family could only bring more prestige to the still young school. Halévy found the Ecole libre des sciences politiques a congenial place to work, twice (once in 1905, once in 1907) turning down permanent positions at the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne, in order to remain there. In the same year that Halévy joined the faculty of the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, he married Florence Noufflard, and he remained married to her until his death. As was often the case with historians at the time, Halévy benefited from his wife’s active collaboration on his projects – the staggering publication rate achieved by historians of Halévy’s generation (and a generation or two beyond that) was often possible only because well-educated wives, without any prospect of achieving the professional status of their husbands, assisted in their husbands’ work while taking care of domestic duties as well. Together with his wife, Halévy spent as much time as possible in his family’s country house at Sucy-en-Brie, in the Department of Seine-et-Oise; he traveled to Paris only when professional duties required him to do so. At the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, Halévy offered two courses: “The evolution of political thought in nineteenth-century England” and “European socialism in the nineteenth century.” The subject matter of these two courses also constituted the primary subject matter of Halévy’s historical research and writing throughout his career, and Halévy brought to these subjects a distinctive methodology that was already apparent in his first major historical publication, his three-volume La Formation du radicalisme philosophique (1901, 1904; translated as The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, 1928). This methodology set Halévy apart from contemporary positivist historians such as Charles Seignobos, Charles Langlois, Gabriel Monod, and Ernest Lavisse, whose prestige was at its height at that moment. (Halévy and Seignobos became involved in a sharp exchange over historical method at a 1907 meeting of the Société française de philosophie. Afterward, the Société thought it best henceforth to limit itself to strictly philosophical issues.) In La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, which was based on his dissertation, Halévy studied British Utilitarianism, especially as it figured in the thought of Jeremy Bentham. The book’s three volumes each deal with a segment of Bentham’s life: volume one is “The Youth of Bentham,” volume two is “The Evolution of Utilitarian Doctrine from 1789 to 1815,” and volume three, “Philosophical Radicalism,” treats Bentham as a mature thinker and as the head

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of a coherent and recognizable philosophical school of thought. In examining Utilitarianism, Halévy frames his work around what he identifies as a contradiction at the heart of Utilitarianism, a contradiction between the assumptions underpinning its political theory, on the one hand, and the assumptions underpinning its economic theory, on the other hand. As regards politics, Utilitarianism maintained that there was no natural harmony between the self-interest of the individual and the good of the human community. The purpose of government was to force the self-interest of the individual and the good of the community to fuse, however unnaturally, by rewarding actions that worked to the common good and punishing actions that did not. Economically, however, Utilitarians maintained that there was no conflict, or even real distinction, between individual self-interest and the common good. Those who worked to enrich themselves inevitably raised everybody’s standard of living. For Halévy, this apparent contradiction was not merely of theoretical interest – it guided English history during Bentham’s lifetime, inspiring political reform, legal reform, and the explosive development of the British industrial economy. Halévy’s method of studying history, based on the identification and exploration of contradictions, owes a great deal to his early work on Plato, where Halévy had identified this dialectical approach as constituting the heart of Plato’s method. Plato tried to resolve difficult issues by reducing them to a single apparent contradiction, but Plato (and Halévy) were hardly nihilists who believed such contradictions to be insurmountable. When thoroughly explored, the single, fundamental contradiction would itself yield a positive result by revealing an essential truth, a critically important value. Although methodologically rooted in philosophy, Halévy was also a tireless archival researcher – Halévy’s spadework in London was every bit as impressive as that of the most positivist historians of the day, and he plunged into the huge written record left by Bentham more deeply than anyone had done before him. La Formation du radicalisme philosophique offers a complex assessment of Bentham and Utilitarianism. On the one hand, the book offers a defense of the Utilitarians, whom Halévy esteemed more highly than did other French intellectuals, who regarded Bentham as inferior to his French contemporary, Saint-Simon. French scholars criticized the Utilitarians for thinking too ahistorically and for failing to recognize that societies emerge slowly as the result of historical forces, following laws of development that were difficult to recognize; societies could not be conjured out of nothing and brought into being instantly. French scholars also criticized the Utilitarians for lacking a sufficient understanding of human psychology and for ignoring, or too easily dismissing, the challenges posed by class division. Against these Gallic complaints, Halévy claimed that Utilitarian thought should be given the credit for beneficial change in nineteenth-century England. On the other hand, the liberal Halévy could himself be critical of Bentham. Not only were the Utilitarians unaware of the basic contradiction within their own doctrines, they also had a relatively weak attachment to the value of individual liberty,


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which, after all, might not be as conducive to the achievement of the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people as a strong and centralized government. In the end, though, Halévy estimated the Utilitarians to have brought about more good than harm. His work was received well both in France and in England, which bolstered his confidence and emboldened him to attempt an even larger project that he had been contemplating since 1896, and for which he had done some preliminary research as early as 1901. With publication of the third and final volume of La Formation du radicalisme philosophique in 1904, Halévy threw himself into a multi-volume examination of the history of England between 1815 and, as it eventually turned out, 1914. The result was the six-volume Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle (1912–46; translated as History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 1924–51), generally regarded as Halévy’s masterpiece (especially the first volume). Despite its massiveness, Halévy’s book is far more than an encyclopedic narrative of a century of British history, although the range of topics that Halévy addresses within each volume is wide; it would be hard to think of a subject that escapes Halévy’s attention. Rather, the book attempts to answer a specific question. England, with its precocious industrial development, its unpopular royal family, and its archaic, inefficient government (whose weaknesses Halévy probably overstates), might have been thought especially ripe for revolution. Yet, in an age of revolution, England had been almost uniquely successful in maintaining political stability, instead, experiencing change in the guise of reform. How had England done it? In his earlier work on the Utilitarians, Halévy had this same question in the back of his mind, and his six-volume history of England built upon the ideas that he had already advanced about the Utilitarians. The result came to be known as the “Halévy thesis,” which first appeared in Halévy’s article “La naissance du Méthodisme en Angleterre” (The Birth of Methodism in England), published in 1906, but which received its fullest and most nuanced exposition in the multivolume history of England. (Halévy had temporarily cut short his studies on Methodism in 1905 after learning that two other scholars were working on the subject.) According to Halévy, English liberalism differed from its continental counterpart in one crucial respect: English liberalism had not severed its connections with religion, and, indeed, it strongly bore the imprint of evangelical Protestantism, especially (but not exclusively) in its Methodist form. On the face of it, the Utilitarians were seemingly thoroughly secular in their writings, yet Halévy argues that they possessed a sensibility, or what Halévy calls a “moral temperament,” similar to the moral temperament of English Puritan non-conformists. The ideas of the English Utilitarians might have made them into hedonists seeking nothing but their own gratification – after all, Utilitarians maintained that all human activity arose from the desire to experience and to maximize pleasure while avoiding pain. Yet, in their personal behavior, the Utilitarians were as modest and austere as a model evangelical believer, which helped evangelicals and Utilitarians to find

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common ground in their opposition to slavery, for example, as well as in their support for prison reform and for factory legislation. As a result of evangelical influence, which made English society keenly aware of its moral duties and cast it in a mold of stoical, restrained dignity, English individualism remained always a moderate individualism, and that, in turn, generated political moderation. Halévy was not the first author to suggest that England’s Protestantism, and the specific forms that its Protestantism took, were crucial for understanding why English history and continental history did not move in lockstep. In the eighteenth century, French authors such as Montesquieu and Voltaire had seen Protestantism as crucial for understanding England, and one of Halévy’s predecessors, the historian Hippolyte Taine, had already postulated that the evangelical religious revival of the eighteenth century explained why England had not experienced a revolution akin to the French Revolution. Taine and Halévy, however, understood the role of evangelicalism in different ways. For Taine, Methodism allowed England to avert revolution because it turned the English aristocracy and the English working masses away from worldly concerns and toward spiritual ones. For Halévy, however, it was also the influence of evangelical Protestantism upon the middle class and its foremost thinkers that explained why England avoided revolution. Halévy’s history of nineteenth-century England is noteworthy, too, for the author’s method of exposition. Historians tend to frame their work in one of two ways. One is the analytical mode, treating different topics in succession; such an approach generally promotes conceptual clarity but leaves history seeming more static than dynamic. The other is the narrative mode, which conveys change over time well but is more effective at describing what happened than at explaining why it happened. Commentators have hailed Halévy for blending narrative and analysis together almost seamlessly; as one of them has stated, “Halévy’s narrative has the quality of continuously analyzing the causation of the events which it simultaneously depicts. Where necessary, he weaves in the requisite background (much, it might be noted, as a responsible politician would have to bring himself up to date on an unfamiliar subject which suddenly becomes a pressing issue).” This distinctive style – proceeding through the chronology of events, bringing in contextual material as unexpected developments materialize, and offering explanations along the way – very effectively helps the reader to see and to think as the people whom Halévy studies saw and thought. To put it another way, Halévy’s reader comes about as close as is possible to living through history by entering into the minds of the people who, all ignorant of the future, were shaping a still unfinished story and shaping it not in time units of decades to be summed up in a single chapter but month by month, year by year, and election by election, seldom ever certain that a given episode was finished.

Halévy published the first volume of his history of nineteenth-century England just two years before the outbreak of World War I. During and after the war, he


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worked on volumes two and three, which were published in 1923 and brought his history up to 1841. At that point, however, Halévy decided to postpone work on the fourth volume, which was to be devoted to the Victorian age, and instead he moved on to volumes five and six, which Halévy regarded as an epilogue to his broader work. Volume five, Les Impérialistes au pouvoir (1895–1905) (The Imperialists in Power [1895–1905]), was published in 1926; volume six, Vers la démocratie sociale et vers la guerre (1905–1914) (Toward Social Democracy and War [1905–1914]), was published in 1932. In fact, although Halévy resumed work on the fourth volume in 1932, he never completed it – it was edited and published posthumously. The reason for Halévy’s decision in 1923 to write the final volumes of his collection before writing the fourth one was the experience of World War I itself, which made that war’s origins, its implications, and contemporary history more generally Halévy’s primary concerns. Halévy, who was nearly forty-four when World War I erupted, never saw front-line service, yet the war thoroughly disrupted his professional life. The Ecole libre des sciences politiques suspended all teaching, which did not resume until the final few months of the war. Halévy found himself performing his war duty as medical support staff outside Paris, first in the Departement of Indre-et-Loire (specifically in the village of Rochecorbon), before ultimately being assigned as an orderly to a hospital at Albertville in Savoy. Halévy, from the outset, regarded World War I as a disaster in the making: he was one of the few individuals who overestimated, rather than underestimated, the war’s duration. To a large extent, Halévy withdrew from his prewar life; his contacts with his friends diminished, and he even refused to read Parisian newspapers more than occasionally, instead getting his news from Swiss newspapers. So disturbed was Halévy by the war’s outbreak that he made its interruption of his professional activity more complete than it had to be. Halévy refused to do any historical writing or research between 1914 and 1918. The one exception to Halévy’s professional disengagement was the Revue de métaphysique, in which Halévy still maintained a deep interest. He hoped that the journal might preserve something of civilization and culture in the face of barbarity and brutality. Upon returning to Paris and resuming his position at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, Halévy returned to his research and writing with his customary dedication, but also with a newfound sense of the future’s bleakness. He finished volumes two and three of his history of nineteenth-century England, freely admitting that the experience of World War I had caused him to think and to write about nineteenth-century England somewhat differently from the way he had before. After the war, he found himself sympathetic to some nineteenth-century British politicians whom he had previously disliked, and hostile to some nineteenthcentury politicians whom he had once admired. In the postwar years, Halévy self-consciously made himself into an unofficial ambassador from France to England and vice versa. Owing to his familiarity with both countries and their histories, Halévy was well positioned to explain the French point of view to the English and the English point of view to the French. (Such a task did not come

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naturally to Halévy, who much preferred work to social functions, which he avoided with great success.) To this end, Halévy gave public talks and courses in England, and he established and maintained contacts with British thinkers and leaders of various political affiliations. In France, Halévy wrote more and more frequently for periodicals such as the Revue de Paris, which was not a scholarly journal but rather a magazine for educated readers. Halévy’s role as a mediator between England and France, and the respect that his scholarship received in England, are reflected in the honorary doctorate that Halévy received in 1926 from the University of Oxford, which invited Halévy back in 1929 to deliver the Rhodes Memorial Lectures for that year. (The lectures were published in 1930 as The World Crisis of 1914–1918.) Still, explaining English positions to the French and French positions to the English was a grueling and thankless task, given the national prejudices that existed within both groups and given the different strategies that the British and French governments had for dealing with defeated Germany. When, in 1928, the French government asked Halévy to join a team of scholars tasked with gathering French archival documents relating to the origins of the war, Halévy accepted the job, probably from a sense of national obligation rather than any enthusiasm for the project itself. There were limits to Halévy’s willingness to shoulder these new postwar responsibilities, though – he turned down a position in the Secretariat of the newly established League of Nations. Halévy never produced a single, all-encompassing account of his theory concerning the origins of World War I; instead, he produced at least nine substantial essays on the subject, and he treated it as well in the final two volumes of his Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle. These works showcase once again Halévy’s preferred methods of writing about history: allowing his themes and arguments to emerge gradually from a narrative of events, and identifying contradictions that could, in turn, reveal deeper truths. In his analysis of the war’s origins, Halévy stresses the contingency of historical developments. After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, it was not inevitable that France and Germany would go to war again – whatever desire for revenge existed in France was secondary in importance to domestic concerns, such as the Dreyfus Affair, anticlericalism, and the adoption of an income tax. There was nothing foreordained about the alliance of Britain with France either; Britain might just have easily allied with Germany in the years leading up to World War I, were it not for anti-English public opinion in Germany. To the extent that Halévy ever singled out a cause for World War I, that cause was public opinion, which he saw as pushing politicians toward positions that they might never have adopted otherwise. In stressing contingency and public opinion, Halévy consciously distanced himself from Marxist attempts to see World War I as the outcome of imperialist rivalries that were themselves the result of capitalist development. Even as he analyzed the causes of World War I, Halévy devoted more and more attention to the history of socialism in Europe. When one remembers that the issues of liberty and stability were at the heart of Halévy’s intellectual life, his


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interest in socialism makes a great deal of sense – just as he studied Methodism insofar as it smothered revolution, so, too, he studied socialism insofar as it fueled revolution. Writing to a friend in October 1913, Halévy proclaimed that “so far as I am concerned, I realize clearly that socialism contains the secret of the future. But I do not decipher that secret and I am far from ready to declare whether socialism is leading us to a universal version of the Swiss Republic or to European caesarism.” Halévy had dabbled in the history of socialism while doing the research for his study of the English Utilitarians, and this dabbling had resulted in a handful of essays on Saint-Simon and in a book, Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869), published in 1903, which examines a political economist who is not widely known today, but whose work was cited by Karl Marx. More important was the edition of SaintSimon’s writings that Halévy and Célestin Bouglé published, La Doctrine de SaintSimon. Exposition: première année (The Doctrine of Saint-Simon. Exposition: First Year, 1924). Halévy’s single most influential treatment of socialism was his Histoire du socialisme européen (History of European Socialism), published in 1948, more than a decade after Halévy’s death, having been cobbled together by the author’s friends and students from the lecture notes that Halévy used at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques. Halévy’s conception of socialism was a broad and somewhat idiosyncratic one: for Halévy, socialism was, as one commentator has put it, “simply and broadly state activity in the economy and in the economic life of its citizens.” Under the terms of this definition, a seemingly odd assortment of individuals, from Karl Marx to Otto von Bismarck, were treated under the rubric of socialism. Halévy saw Karl Marx as crucial to the development of European socialism, so much so that Halévy treated the history of socialism after Marx not in terms of the development of ideas and doctrines, but strictly in terms of political organization; for Halévy, socialist thought underwent relatively little noteworthy development after Marx’s death. Halévy was also concerned, though, with reducing Marx to what he regarded as Marx’s proper historical stature. For Halévy, Marx’s originality had been overemphasized, and the socialist thinkers who preceded Marx had fallen into undeserved obscurity, eclipsed by Marx’s shadow – hence Halévy’s interest in Thomas Hodgskin, Saint-Simon, and Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, who was the subject of Halévy’s book Sismondi, published in 1933. In addressing socialism, Halévy again focused his work on what he took to be contradictions inherent in his subject; as regards socialism, the contradiction was between socialism’s claim to be a force for human liberation, on the one hand, and the authoritarian statism inherent in socialism’s drive for economic equality, on the other. Halévy sympathized with the former but not the latter, and he wrote about those early socialist thinkers who, in his estimation, best represented the democratic and libertarian strain of socialism. After World War I, Halévy more and more doubted that the triumph of socialism would lead to liberation and the triumph of democracy.

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During the final years of Halévy’s life, the liberal’s prognosis for Europe’s future became even bleaker still. His most important statement about the state of contemporary Europe is his essay “L’ère des tyrannies” (“The age of tyrannies”), published in 1936, during the final year of Halévy’s life, in the Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie. (A collection of Halévy’s essays was published in 1938, the year after his death; it bears the same title.) In using the word “tyranny,” Halévy hearkens back, one final time, to ancient Greece. According to Halévy, the “age of tyranny” had started in 1914. World War I upset the balance between the emancipating and the centralizing components of socialism, to the benefit of the latter and the detriment of the former. Furthermore, the war resulted in a massive growth of state power over the economic and the intellectual lives of each warring nation. Halévy points out that, in that sense, World War I, which socialists generally did not want, had done more to bring about socialism than all of the previous century’s socialist agitation and political action. Fascist governments in Italy and Germany were ideologically committed to stopping the spread of socialism, but they were actually very similar to the Soviet government in their acceptance of an all-enveloping state. For Halévy (who had traveled frequently to Italy, where his mother-in-law lived, even after Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power there), fascism and communism were equally rooted in socialism. That communists predicted the withering away of their state in the fullness of time, while fascists saw their state as enduring, was, to Halévy, an unimportant theoretical distinction. His argument that fascism and communism had much in common was controversial, especially among socialists (fascists seemingly ignored it). As fascists, liberals, and communists prepared for a war that Halévy was not destined to see, arguments that muddied the warring parties’ identities received predictably frosty receptions. Halévy himself considered the outbreak of war again to be likely; he predicted that such a war would result in the collapse of parliamentary democracy in those countries where it had managed to survive, and in the triumph of the “tyrannical principle” in Europe. One wonders what Halévy would have made of the fact that his prediction was only half right: the war did come, but parliamentary liberalism survived. By the end of his life, Elie Halévy had himself become something of an historical anachronism. Large, multi-volume, national histories written by a single, independently wealthy author were far more typical of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth. Halévy’s insistence on the autonomous power of ideas to cause change in history set him apart from many of his contemporaries, whether Marxist historians or members of the newly emerging Annales movement – Halévy obliquely critiqued the former in his work, and seems not to have been aware of the latter. As Halévy put it straightforwardly in his Rhodes Memorial Lectures of 1929, “The basis of history is idealistic, not materialistic.” Yet, there is a sense in which Halévy could not possibly have been more modern and relevant to his own day and age. Having begun his studies with Plato and Socrates, Halévy


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ended up as an historian of contemporary Europe, grappling with what was arguably the most pressing issue of the day: how to preserve liberty and democracy against tyranny.

References and Further Reading Letters Alain, Correspondance avec Elie et Florence Halévy (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). Correspondance (1891–1397), edited by Henriette Guy-Loë (Paris: Fallois, 1996).

Bibliography Richter, Melvin, “A bibliography of signed works by Elie Halévy,” History and Theory, 7 (1967): 47–71.

Selected Books by Elie Halévy La Théorie platonicienne des sciences (Paris: Alcan, 1896). De Concatenatione quae inter affectiones mentis propter similitudinem fieri dicitur (Paris: Alcan, 1901). La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, 3 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1901, 1904): vol. 1, La Jeunesse de Bentham (1901); vol. 2, L’Evolution de la doctrine utilitaire de 1789 à 1815 (1901); vol. 3, Le Radicalisme philosophique (1904); translated by Mary Morris as The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Faber and Faber, 1928). Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) (Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1903); translated by A. J. P. Taylor as Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) (London: Ernest Benn, 1956). L’Angleterre et son empire (Paris: Alcan, 1905). Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle, 6 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1912–1946): vol. 1, L’Angleterre en 1815 (1912; rev. edn., 1913; rev. again, 1924); vol. 2, Du lendemain de Waterloo à la veille du Reform Bill (1815–1830) (1923); vol. 3, De la crise du Reform Bill à l’avènement de Sir Robert Peel (1830–1841) (1923); vol. 4, Le Milieu du siècle (1841–1852), edited by P. Vaucher (1946); vol. 5, Epilogue, 1895–1914, I: Les Impérialistes au pouvoir (1895–1905) (1926); vol. 6, Epilogue, 1895–1914, II: Vers la démocratie sociale et vers la guerre (1905– 1914) (1932); translated by E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker as History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1924–1951). La Part de la France: lettre ouverte d’un soldat français aux soldats américains, anonymous (Paris: Attinger Frères, 1917). The World Crisis of 1914–1918: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). Sismondi (Paris: Alcan, 1933). L’Ere des tyrannies: études sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1938); translated by R. K. Webb as The Era of Tyrannies (New York: Doubleday, 1965). Histoire du socialisme européen (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).

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Other Works La Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition: première année, edited by Elie Halévy and Célestin Bouglé (Paris: Rivière, 1924). “Conditions of life in Europe: reaction and readjustment to changed conditions in all the nations party to the Napoleonic Wars,” in Universal History of the World, edited by J. A. Hammerton (London: Amalgamated Press, 1927), vol. 7, pp. 4279–95. “Before 1835,” in A Century of Municipal Progress, edited by H. J. Laski, W. I. Jennings, and W. A. Robson (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935), pp. 15–36. “English public opinion and the French revolutions of the nineteenth century,” in Studies in Anglo-French History during the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries, edited by A. Colville and H. Temperley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), pp. 51–80. “L’Angleterre: grandeur, decadence et persistence du liberalisme en Angleterre,” in Inventaires: la crise sociale et les idéologies nationales (Paris: Alcan, 1936), pp. 5–23.

Selected Articles by Elie Halévy “Quelques remarques sur l’irréversibilité des phénomènes psychologiques,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 4 (1896): 756–77. “La naissance du Méthodisme en Angleterre,” Revue de Paris, 13 (1906): 519–59, 841–67. “Les principes de la distribution des richesses,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 14 (1906): 545–95. “La doctrine économique de Saint-Simon,” La Revue du mois, 4 (1907): 641–76; 6 (1907): 39–75. “Le droit de dissolution en Angleterre,” Correspondance de l’Union pour la verité, 20 (1912): 656–64. “La politique de paix sociale en Angleterre: les ‘Whitley Councils’,” Revue d’économie politique, 33 (1919): 385–431. “Le problème des elections anglaises,” Revue politique et parliamentaire, 98 (1919): 227–46. “Chartism,” Quarterly Review, 468 (1921): 62–73. “Les origines de la discorde anglo-allemande,” Revue de Paris, 28 (1921): 563–83. “Etat present de la question sociale en Angleterre,” Revue politique et parliamentaire, 112 (1922): 5–29. “Franco-German relations since 1870,” History, 9 (1924): 18–29. “Les origines de l’Entente (1902–1903),” Revue de Paris, 31 (1924): 293–318. “Documents anglais sur les origines de la guerre,” Revue de Paris, 34 (1927): 776–95. “Documents diplomatiques françaises,” Revue de Paris, 36 (1929): 45–63. “L’Angleterre sur le seuil de la guerre (août 1913–août 1914),” Revue de Paris, 38 (1931): 14–44. “La réforme de la marine anglaise et la politique navale britannique (1902–1907),” Revue des sciences politiques, 55 (1932): 5–36. “Socialism and the problem of democratic parliamentarianism,” International Affairs, 13 (1934): 490–507. “L’ère des tyrannies,” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 36 (1936): 181–253.


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References Brebner, J. Bartlett, “Elie Halévy (1870–1937),” in Some Modern Historians of Britain, edited by Herman Ausubel, J. Bartlett Brebner, and Erling M. Hunt (New York: Dryden Press, 1951), pp. 235–54. Chase, Myrna, Elie Halévy: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Gillispie, Charles, “The work of Elie Halévy: a critical appreciation,” Journal of Modern History, 22 (1950): 232–49. Smith, Catherine Haugh, “Elie Halévy (1870–1937),” in Some Historians of Modern Europe, edited by Bernadotte E. Schmitt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 152–67. Walsh, J. D., “Elie Halévy and the birth of Methodism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 25 (1975): 1–20.

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Paul Hazard (1878–1944) Leonore Loft

Mentor, professor, writer, editor, university administrator, literary scholar, intellectual historian, Paul Hazard was one of the founders of the field of comparative literature and the first comparatist to be elected to the Académie française. As an educator and scholar, he traveled to southern Europe, England, South America, and the United States, teaching, writing, publishing, establishing and running journals, and inspiring students and instructors throughout the intellectual world community. His view of the ideological forces shaping early modern Europe, particularly France, forms to some extent the core and basis of every subsequent discussion in this regard. Scholars have either developed and expanded aspects of his thought, or reacted against it. In either case, Paul Hazard’s imprint remains. Hazard was born in 1878 in the village of Nordpéene in the Département du Nord, surrounded by the somber plains of Flanders. His father was a school teacher in the Third Republic, and young Hazard was a bright student, studying at the Collège d’Armentières, then at the Lycée de Lille, and finally at the Lycée Lakanal. Completing his military service in 1900, he began his studies at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Three years later, he achieved his agrégation des lettres (university-level teaching credentials) from this renowned institution where poet and polemicist Charles Péguy had studied and playwright Jean Giraudoux soon followed. Like many raised in the north, he longed to discover the joys of Mediterranean life, its people, and, above all, Italy’s vibrant culture. A scholarship allowed him to spend two years in Italy collecting materials for his two doctoral theses. When his scholarship expired, he returned to France; he taught students in the lycées of Saint Quentin, Reims, and Louis le Grand, instructing them in Latin, Greek, and French, while preparing his primary dissertation: La Révolution française et les lettres italiennes (The French Revolution and Italian Literature). He

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presented this work in 1910 to the Faculty of Letters at Lyon. His research proved, he believed, that the French Revolution had encouraged in other countries an interest in their own literature, that France led Italy, for example, to discover a new self-worth, and that this French influence in Europe was liberating rather than dominating. This work, comprised of almost six hundred pages, is perhaps his greatest accomplishment; the research for his thesis defined and transformed him into a comparatist and a student of the history of ideas. The second work for his diploma was an edition of Le Journal de Ginguené, 1807–1808, published in 1910. This work, a model of elegantly written scholarly criticism, won Hazard an award from the Académie française. His success brought him an appointment to the chair of comparative literature in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lyon. From the outset of his career in the field (he was now thirty-two years of age), he brought to comparative literary studies an original talent, enriched by a profound knowledge of Mediterranean literature. In 1912, the Académie awarded him its first prize for eloquence for his Discours sur la langue française (Discourse on the French Language), which was published in the following year along with his subsequent work, Giacomo Leopardi, a critical examination of the Italian philosophical poet. A year later, in two issues of the Revue universitaire, he published “Les récents travaux en littérature comparée: essai de classification” (“Recent work in comparative literature: an essay on classification”). In this work, he defines the object of the study of comparative literature, setting down the lines of demarcation for the various areas of this sizable field. A focus might include how various literary materials can transmit, more likely than not through a deforming lens, to one country the physiognomy of another, or the way in which the role of those subjugated to a given influence counts as much as the influencing agent. In 1914, in collaboration with the renowned medievalist Joseph Bédier and fellow comparative literature specialist, Fernand Baldensperger, Hazard produced the three-volume Bibliothèque de littérature comparée (Library of Comparative Literature). In 1921, Hazard and Baldensperger went on to establish and direct the Revue de littérature comparée, published three times yearly. These men hoped to honor works of the human spirit and in so doing to negate to some degree the cruelty and suffering they had witnessed during World War I. For Hazard, his work abroad was not intended to provide proof of French preeminence. Rather, it allowed him to learn from what he saw in the streets, observing people and absorbing their varied opinions. We are all obliged, he explained, to be on our guard against cultural pride and the tyranny of narrow-mindedness. In the vast mixed chorus of nations, no single voice has the right to smother any other. Nonetheless, a chauvinistic view is still in evidence in his approach. Despite his tolerance, cultural inquisitiveness, and sensitivity, he remains convinced that there is one voice respected above all others – that of France. The ideas she proclaims are universal; the words she utters are nobler and possess greater clarity than those of any other nation. Hazard’s conviction is found in his defense of the

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French language as an integral aspect of French spirit, a spirit that must be defended throughout the world. Without service to country, he believes, existence becomes fruitless. Service to the French language is an essential part of true French patriotism. In his Discours sur la langue française, he expresses his devotion in both content and example: “Forte de sa valeur propre, des nécessités nouvelles qui la réclament impérieusement, de tous les faits qui montrent son extension et sa vitalité, notre langue a le droit de se dire encore universelle. A nous de remplir les conditions nécessaires pour qu’elle n’aille pas déchoir d’un si haut rang.” (“Drawing strength from its own value, from the demands constantly being made on it, from all achievements that illustrate its scope and vitality, our language has the right to see itself as still universal. It is our responsibility to make sure that it does not fall from such an elevated height.”) In 1914, Columbia University appointed Paul Hazard Visiting Professor in the Department of French. The outbreak of World War I, however, prevented him from traveling to the United States. During the years following the war, he taught at other American institutions as well as Columbia, and in 1932 he began spending a semester every other year at the Morningside Heights Campus. Indeed, North America became his second home. As had happened with other French scholars, he was drawn by the vitality and enthusiasm of American students, and Hazard had the highest esteem for the potential of American erudition. His hope was to help establish, by way of example and creative energy, a school of American comparatists. In Hazard’s view, the United States was the ideal setting for the study of comparative literature: first, because of the complexity of its ethnic makeup; second, because of the variety of languages read and spoken in the country’s various national and ethnic groupings; and, finally, because its university system was relatively free of the chains of tradition. Following the end of World War I in 1919, Hazard was appointed to the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne. The Sorbonne’s choice was influenced by the postwar belief that university professors should be more modern, more in contact with the literature of the time. The Sorbonne had been considered backward in the area of contemporary letters. Hazard was known as a reader of current authors and therefore as one able to establish and maintain ties between the university and contemporary literature, between academics and the more general reading public. Thus began an eight-year period of teaching French literature. He did not lean heavily on abstract methodology. Rather, what counted for him was conscience, a taste for good work, and talent. Joseph Bédier understood Hazard’s affinity for the science of research and the extent of his influence on literature students. For this reason, he invited Hazard to collaborate with him on the direction of their Histoire de la littérature française illustrée (Illustrated History of French Literature). This work, published in two volumes in 1923 and 1924, became a trusted companion for tertiary and graduatelevel students throughout a major portion of the twentieth century. In the second


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volume of the Histoire, Hazard was specifically responsible for entries dealing with the nineteenth century. Italy still fascinated Hazard. In 1923, he published L’Italie vivante (Living Italy) in which he plumbs the depths of Italy in all her splendid variety. He describes the vibrancy of Italy’s colors, the southern cuisine and wines. What he most admires in this deeply Latin culture is the powerful and generous nature of its population. He recognizes also the tragedies of her centuries-long battles among villages, groups, and families, and yet he continues to insist upon the heroic beauty of these struggles, believing that humanity here develops with more strength than in any other environment. As the title of this work suggests, what he saw in Italy is a past that continues to live; even in Mussolini’s profile he can trace, he believes, the mask of an ancient leader. Critics of the time seem inclined to excuse Hazard’s lack of political perspicacity regarding nascent fascism. Instead, they praise his highly penetrating psychological analysis of the Italian people and his portrayals of the Italian countryside, giving the audience a sense of experiencing these surroundings; critics also assert that he soon gained an awareness of the possible dangers inherent in this new totalitarianism. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Hazard’s activities included organizational, pedagogical, and administrative work that influenced both teachers and students of French language and literature. He collaborated in establishing the Association des études françaises, which was chartered on October 8, 1924. In 1928, publication began of Les Textes français (French Texts) as part of the Collection des Universités de France, published under the direction of l’Association Guillaume Budé. Hazard was a member of both the supervisory and publication committees responsible for the series. Meanwhile, he continued to work on studies touching French, Italian, and Spanish literary topics. In 1926, he edited Chateaubriand’s Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage (The Adventures of the Last Abencerage Tribe) with Marie-Jeanne Durry, also a prolific author and academic. The following year the Circolo di Roma published Pour un centenaire: Les “Promessi Sposi” relus par un français (For the Centenary of “The Betrothed” reread by a Frenchman), while La Vie de Stendhal (The Life of Stendhal) was published in the Gallimard series “Vies des hommes illustres” (“Lives of famous men”). In 1929, Hazard produced with his American students Etudes critiques sur “Manon Lescaut” (Critical Studies on “Manon Lescaut”). In 1931, southern Europe was again the focus in “Don Quichotte” de Cervantès, étude et analyse (Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Study and Analysis), one of the works that he most admired among all those he produced. In 1934, he also worked with Henri Bédarida, scholar of Italian literature, on publishing L’Influence française en Italie au XVIIIe siècle (The French Influence in Italy during the Eighteenth Century). During the same era, following a number of articles on children and reading, he published Les Livres, les enfants et les hommes (1932; translated as Books, Children, and Men, 1944). At the same time, Hazard’s international reputation increased. He began amassing honorary degrees

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from the universities of Turin and Camerino, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico, Harvard, and Sofia. He also became a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and of the Boston Academy, and from 1932 to 1935 he served as an honorary vice-president of the American Association of Teachers of French. Nonetheless, he remained relatively unknown to the great majority of the French. Hazard’s magnum opus, La Crise de la conscience européenne (1680–1715) (translated as The European Mind: 1680–1715, 1952) was published in 1935. Here he examines France in her full glory, while seeking out those still scarcely perceptible fissures that had begun to undermine the delicate balance of Classicism. During the thirty-five years that are his focus, Hazard sees a dramatic intellectual transformation in progress. This period, so often misjudged, should be considered in all its grandeur and vibrancy, and Hazard is admirable here, above all else, for his esteem for ideas. He follows them, tracing their evolution, the way they form, disintegrate and reform, depending upon the various laws and influences that are brought to bear on them. Hazard firmly believes that intellectual and moral forces, not material forces, direct and propel life. Of the ideological transformation that was occurring he writes: “la majorité des Français pensaient comme Bossuet, tout d’un coup ils pensent comme Voltaire” (“The majority of French had thought like Bossuet, suddenly they were thinking like Voltaire.”) It was a revolution. The reference here is to the transformation from Classical orthodoxy and the religious politics of Louis XIV to eighteenth-century critical Deism and relative flexibility in matters of faith. The process might at first seem to be a destructive one, but what emerges is a creative, new culture that proved to be more flexible and more vibrant than its predecessor. While some might question whether Hazard’s own religious bias influenced his scholarly views, those who worked with him defended his open-mindedness. He was, they explain, more removed from Deism than from traditional faiths, although he himself adhered to none specifically. Indeed, he was respectful of all denominations while not a believer himself. Hazard’s general thesis in La Crise is that the great changes in ideas that culminated in the Revolution of 1789 were actually realized before the close of the seventeenth century. In his preface, Hazard explains that at the time the rational was vying with the religious for supremacy. The ultimate prize was the soul of human kind, and witnessing the struggle was all of thinking Europe. The old structures, incapable of safeguarding humanity, had to be destroyed. Once the demolition took place, reconstruction could begin. Hazard explains that the ideas which appeared so revolutionary in 1789, and even in 1760, had already found their full expression in the 1680s because a crisis had been occurring in the European mind from the time of the Renaissance, which, in turn, was a catalyst for the Revolution. In Hazard’s view, there was no more important change in the history of European thought. The Enlightenment thinkers, or philosophes, seized upon a civilization founded on the concept of duty: duty before God, duty to the monarch.


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They attempted to replace that civilization with one founded on the concept of rights: the right to conscience, the right to examine and critique, the right of reason, the rights of man and the citizen. Hazard identifies and traces three stages in this transformation, beginning with the time of the Renaissance when there existed a desire for invention, a passion for discovery, and a demand for critical analysis. In the following phase of the Classical period, dating roughly from the middle of the seventeenth century, there existed a desire for balance among opposing forces. Hazard believes that by 1680, Classicism had exhausted itself and new tendencies had emerged; the result was a swift and profound crisis that gave rise to two currents that traversed the whole of the next century, one rationalist and the other sentimental. Hazard is convinced, therefore, that almost every aspect of the mindset leading to the French Revolution had already taken full shape before the end of Louis XIV’s reign. The concepts of the social contract, the division of powers, a subject’s right to revolt against the prince – all are openly discussed and well established in the European consciousness by the middle of the eighteenth century. Hazard’s view of the eighteenth century also emphasizes the crucial role of science in all its many and varied forms, along with the rationalism that accompanied its ascendance. Travel, too, contributes to this intellectual change: it is becoming more accessible to more people and, as a consequence, the concept of relative values takes the place of the absolute, so familiar to French Classical critics whose aesthetic values were intricately bound up with the landscape and horizon well known to them. The philosophe becomes the sworn enemy of the traditional. Imagination, emotions, dreams, and desires are not so much abolished as pushed aside, Hazard claims. Yet, perhaps in contradiction to this view of the Enlightenment as lacking in poetic creativity, Hazard also discusses the highly significant contribution made by the abbé Dubos in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting), which energetically condemns the academy’s approach to artistic judgment and instead bases all aesthetics and aesthetic values on sentiment. Hazard accepts this dualism. Universal rationalism is not yet the declared winner. For a certain period of time, a balance of sorts is maintained. This curious double voyage of science and sentiment will persist throughout the developing century. Hazard’s La Crise has been criticized on several points. Thirty-five years is a very brief period of time. How, in so few years, could such a major shift in ideas occur? Hazard does not deal with the economic, the social, or the political repercussions of the changes that he describes, and he neglects sources of motivation such as human passions and individual interest. There is also an element of French chauvinism in Hazard’s work. This age boasts countless French thinkers who set the stage for future intellectual developments; even if the ideas they propound are not French, it is the French endorsement that establishes their value for the rest of humanity. Hazard adopts and supports this point of view when he claims that, although there were significant upheavals and changes in England during the

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seventeenth century, they remained purely English, having lasting influence only within the British kingdom. The French Revolution, on the other hand, had a lasting and dramatic impact on the rest of the world by virtue of the fact that it was French. Contemporary and modern criticism of Hazard’s work has raised issues of fundamental importance to the field of intellectual history, especially as regards its methods and objects. For Hazard, ideas exist (for the most part) autonomously, and they are the primary force that directs human events; first conceived by a few great thinkers, ideas then flow downward through society, and their existence, acceptance, or rejection cannot be reduced to a simple reflection of material interests. Some critics have faulted Hazard specifically for not offering a sociological explanation for the transformation in European consciousness, and they have asked whether there is any validity in attributing ideas to anyone other than the author writing about those ideas. Nonetheless, in the final analysis, Hazard’s masterpiece continues to offer a wealth of material, information, and topics for intense discussion and consideration. In 1939, in recognition of this accomplishment in literary history, the Académie française elected Paul Hazard to be one of its members. In 1935, the year that La Crise de la conscience européenne was published, Hazard’s co-director and co-editor of the Revue de littérature comparée, Fernand Baldesperger, left France permanently for the United States. A year following his departure, the journal’s directors announced that Jean-Marie Carré, a specialist in German literature and in the poetry of Jean Arthur Rimbaud, had joined Paul Hazard as codirector of the Revue. Its first volume under the new board of directors was dated January–March 1936. The “Bibliothèque de la Revue de littérature comparé” was then given the title “Etudes de littérature étrangère et comparée” (“Studies in Foreign and Comparative Literature”). Shortly thereafter, Paul Hazard became founder and director of a new collection, established in 1939 specifically for students of the Faculty of Letters: “Le Livre de l’étudiant” (“The Student’s Handbook”). Two series made up the collection, one containing critical studies and the other reprints of texts. Hazard continued the research and writing begun in La Crise de la conscience européenne, but he did not publish the material during his lifetime. La Pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle de Montesquieu à Lessing (translated as European Thought in the Eighteenth Century from Montesquieu to Lessing, 1954), was published in three volumes in 1946, two years after Hazard’s death. In the preface, Hazard explains the work’s focus and importance. While our civilization feels the weight and impact of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, we are above all direct descendants of the eighteenth century. His goal is to capture not what should have been or what could have been, but rather what did in fact take place. The eighteenth century, he explains, writing as if the century had been a living, thinking being, was not satisfied with reform. It wanted to overturn the Cross, to destroy


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the religious way of life. It aimed to erase the idea of God’s communication with man and of Revelation. The first part of volume I, called “Le procès du Christianisme” (“Christianity on trial”), examines these efforts. In the second part, “La cité des hommes” (“The city of man”), he follows the work of those daring pioneers, the philosophes, and their projects for the construction of their ideal society, and in a subsequent section, “Désagrégation” (“Disintegration”), Hazard examines how contradictions within their thought allowed time to work on it in corrosive ways as imperfections crept into their ideal. His examination of the philosophes traces their quest for answers to the perennial questions – What is truth? What is justice? What is life? Hazard explains that in order to complete the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, we must consider the birth and development of the man of sentiment and follow him to the French Revolution. At the very heart of this contentious age, there lies a universal approach to criticism that applies to all domains. In no other period have critics been so illustrious, Hazard believes, no other when their approach has been more widely applied. Their pervasive criticism has two motivations: one based on anger and the other on hope. Therein lies the duality fundamental to the century. From anger came the strength to undo; from hope came the power to go forward. When discussing issues of law and justice, Hazard offers his readers a dynamic example of how he views the power of ideas. Although he allows that no specifics drawn from the work of Grotius, Pufendorf, or Montesquieu have ever resulted in the reformation of French or English law, nevertheless, the fermentation of the ideas they espoused continued to work beneath the surface of human events. A superficial examination might suggest that their ideas changed nothing, but eventually they led to the emergence of a deeper desire for better forms of justice, which, in turn, had tangible results. For example, following the publication of Beccaria’s Treatise on Crimes and Punishments, torture was not immediately abolished, yet it disappeared slowly from various codes of criminal justice. There was not a line in Beccaria’s work, he claims, that did not influence legislators and the legal system itself. During the late 1930s, while Hazard continued to work on La Pensée européenne, he also maintained his teaching obligations as Visiting Professor in Columbia University’s Department of French. Clearly, he hoped that, despite ominous signs of conflict in Western Europe, close ties could be maintained with North America. This hope is suggested in an article he published in L’Illustration (November 21, 1936), “A New York, la nuit de l’élection” (“In New York on the night of the election”). Here he describes the United States during FDR’s second campaign and the mood of New Yorkers gathered in Times Square as the votes were being counted. He contrasts the respective views of Roosevelt with Landon, an isolationist and Roosevelt’s opponent. He considers unreasonable Landon’s position that Americans should not cross the Atlantic Ocean either for their own pleasure

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or for cultural pursuits, and that they should not travel to London, Paris, or Rome because wicked Europeans would immediately transform the money they bring into military weapons. On the other hand, Hazard believes that the Democratic contender for the presidency possesses a real sense of Europe and a commitment to humanity. For Hazard, a truly cosmopolitan individual, an isolationist position is incomprehensible. Hazard may have hoped for continuing unity between France and the United States, but once France had surrendered to Germany, he decided to leave New York City and return home. His final public appearance was at the meeting in 1940 of the American Association of Teachers of French. The speech he gave was later published in the 1941 edition of The French Review. In it, he asks his audience to think of the French Revolution as he attempts to define the role of the teacher of French during those days of crisis. He requests that they remember with him the simple words of the revolutionary hymn that the French repeated to themselves when their country was in danger: “C’est ma mère, je la défends” (“She is my mother, I must defend her.”) It is difficult to piece together the puzzle surrounding Hazard’s decision to return to France after the armistice. Although there is a tendency among his colleagues to make excuses and overrate his grasp of the situation, it seems clear that, in general, he was somewhat politically naïve. In The French Review of April 1956, Angeline Lograsso quotes Professor Jean-Albert Bédé, a colleague of Hazard at Columbia University: “Our entreaties were of no avail. He had thought the matter over in his conscience and reached the decision.” The editors of The Romanic Review printed a homage to Paul Hazard in October 1944. In this memorial, they explain that Hazard knew only too well to what ordeal he was condemning himself when he left New York for France in January 1941. “But only a high and sobering sense of duty could have impelled him to expose not only himself but his devoted wife to all the perils of an enemy-occupied homeland.” Indeed, as Bédé indicates, his friends had many times attempted to persuade him not to return, explaining that as a Frenchman representing his own culture in its highest accomplishments he could achieve infinite good were he to remain in North America. Nevertheless, he believed that in this time of greatest need, he must be with his own people. In her article on Hazard written immediately following news of his death, Durry relates what he encountered in France upon his return. For months, the Germans refused to grant him permission to enter occupied France. Perhaps, she suggests, in America he had not understood what Vichy France meant and would mean. The Germans knew that here was a Frenchman whom they did not wish to be rector of the University of Paris. During this imposed hiatus, he assumed his former position in the Faculty of Lyon, working with students throughout the winter and following spring. Then, more pointedly describing him as a conservative and as a traditionalist, Durry writes that in his apartment he opened his arms to Freemasons, Jews, the first members of the Resistance, and the underground


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organizers. Ultimately, he was allowed to resume his teaching at the Collège de France. What can be said of Paul Hazard’s politics and his decision to return to France? Perhaps the only way to view this issue is to look at what he wrote at the time. During the final years of his life, most of his work consisted of short pieces related to scholarly questions in his various disciplines, personal reflections, and the fulfillment of his professional obligations. In the December 1944 issue of The Romanic Review, the lead article was Hazard’s “Pour que vive l’âme de la France” (“That the soul of France may live”). This piece is a reprint of one he had written just before his death and which was published shortly after in a clandestine review, France de demain. It was then re-issued a few days following the liberation of Paris in Résistance (a review under the same editorship as France de demain) on September 4, 1944. In this article, Paul Hazard writes that France is threatened from within by deception and treason. He tells his readers that were France to disappear from the map of the world, leaving only an area populated by slaves, certain fundamental values would disappear with her. What we must try to save, Hazard explains, are essential emotions and beliefs that are inextricably bound to France and inseparable from her very notion of being. The people of France must replace their self-interests, self-concerns, and individual needs with the spirit of sacrifice. They must ask themselves each morning what they can do for France and each evening what they have done for her. He reaches out to his readers, extending to each of them an invitation to join in this crusade to defend the most sanctified of places, la patrie (the homeland). Perhaps, in retrospect, this piece can be read as Resistance material. Perhaps it was written with such intentions. Nevertheless, the references are veiled, subdued, and nonspecific. In any case, at the time when this article was written, there was very little doubt that Paris would soon be liberated and that the Axis powers would lose. Ultimately, it should be acknowledged that Paul Hazard was not a political activist, nor an impassioned member of the Resistance. Paul Hazard, in addition to being an academic and a scholar, was a beloved teacher. In 1945, in Le Divan, Durry expresses reverence and affection for this man who was indeed an intellectual pioneer, and who was always open to his students because he maintained a spiritual youthfulness. Hazard never behaved in an imperious manner. Rather than disappointing, Durry claims, he always gave more than expected, and students surrounded him constantly; from the opening words of his lectures to the end, his auditors followed him with pleasure. In “Le Professeur Paul Hazard de l’Académie française,” published in the Revue des cours et conférences in February 1940, Gabrielle Cabrini finds in Paul Hazard’s first article as a member of the Forty Immortals of the Académie française an expression of his deep commitment to students. Paul Hazard died of natural causes in Paris on April 12, 1944. Decades after his last lecture and his final words, his living presence is still felt on North American campuses. Hazard’s legacy endures.

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References and Further Reading Bibliography Saintville, Georges, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Paul Hazard (Paris: s.n., 1947).

Selected Books by Paul Hazard Etude sur la latinité de Pétrarque d’après le livre 24 des “Epistolae familiares” (Rome: Imprimerie de la paix de Philippe Cuggiani, 1904). Les Milieux littéraires en Italie de 1796 à 1799 (Rome: Imprimerie de la paix de Philippe Cuggiani, 1905). Le Spectateur du Nord: étude sur les relations intellectuelles entre la France et l’Allemagne (1797– 1802) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1906). Le Journal de Ginguené, 1807–1808 (Paris: Hachette, 1910). La Révolution française et les lettres italiennes: 1789–1815 (Paris: Hachette, 1910). Discours sur la langue française (Paris: Hachette, 1913). Giacomo Leopardi (Paris: Bloud, 1913). Un examen de conscience de l’Allemagne: d’après les papiers de prisonniers de guerre allemands (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1915). La Ville envahie, as Paul de Saint-Maurice (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1916). Maman, Roman, as Paul Darmentière; comprises Maman, Roman; Histoire d’un qui ne voit pas (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1918). L’Italie vivante (Paris: Librairie académique Plon, 1923). Lamartine (Paris: Plon, 1926). Pour un centenaire: Les “Promessi Sposi” relus par un français (Rome: Circolo di Roma, 1927). La Vie de Stendhal (Paris: Gallimard, 1927); translated by Eleanor Hard as Stendhal (Henri Bayle) (New York: Coward and McCann, 1929). Etudes critiques sur “Manon Lescaut,” by Paul Hazard and his American Students (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). Les Français en 1930 (Paris: Champion, 1930). Avec Victor Hugo en exil (Paris: Société d’édition, 1931). “Don Quichotte” de Cervantès: étude et analyse (Paris: Mellotté, 1931). Les Livres, les enfants et les hommes (Paris: Flammarion, 1932); translated by Marguerite MacKellar Mitchell as Books, Children, and Men (Boston: Horn Book, 1944). Michelet, Quinet, Mickiewicz et la vie intérieure du Collège de France de 1838 à 1852 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1932). L’Influence française en Italie au XVIIIe siècle, by Paul Hazard and Henri Bédarida (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1934). Napoléon 1934, by Paul Hazard and Maria dell’Isola (Paris: R. Helleu, 1934). La Crise de la conscience européenne (1680–1715), 2 vols. (Paris: Boivin, 1935); translated by J. Lewis May as The European Mind: 1680–1715 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952). Un romantique de 1730: l’abbé Prévost (Paris: Boivin, 1936). Ce que nous devons défendre (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1939).


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Quatre études: Baudelaire. Romantiques. Sur un cycle poétique. L’homme de sentiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). L’Opéra fabuleux: poèmes, by Paul Hazard, Emmanuel Hooten, and René De Graeve (Abbeville: F. Paillart, 1946). La Pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle de Montesquieu à Lessing, 3 vols. (Paris: Boivin, 1946); translated by J. Lewis May as European Thought in the Eighteenth Century from Montesquieu to Lessing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954).

Other Works Bibliothèque de littérature comparée, edited by Paul Hazard, Joseph Bédier, Fernand Baldensperger, and L. Cazamin, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Rieder, 1914). Preface to Catalogue du livre français: Littérature. Première partie: Littérature française (XIXe et XXe siècles), edited by Jean Vic (Paris: Office pour la propagation du livre français, 1921). “Les ciseaux de Stendhal,” in Mélanges offerts par ses amis et ses élèves à M. Gustave Lanson, edited by Elie Carcassonne and Madeleine Jougland (Paris: Hachette, 1922), pp. 407–18. Histoire de la littérature française illustrée, 2 vols., edited by Paul Hazard and Joseph Bédier (Paris: Larousse, 1923–4; rev. and enlarged edn. as Littérature française, 1948). “Stendhal corrige la ‘Chartreuse de Parme’,” in Mélanges de Bertaux: recueil de travaux dédié à la mémoire d’Emile Bertaux, edited by Emile Bertaux, Jean Alazard, and Charles Diehl (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1924), pp. 147–55. Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage, by François-René de Chateaubriand, edited by Paul Hazard and Marie-Jeanne Durry (Paris: Champion, 1926). Les Fleurs du mal, by Charles Baudelaire, edited by Paul Hazard and Edouard Maynial (Paris: Editions Fernand Roches, 1929). Introduction to Le Prince, by Machiavelli, translation by Colonna d’Istria (Paris: Alcan, 1929). Preface to Atala; René; Le dernier des Abencérages; Voyage en Amérique, by François-René de Chateaubriand (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1929). Preface to Panorama de la littérature russe contemporaine, edited by Vladimir Pozner (Paris: KRA, 1929). Preface to Bijoux antiques, bijoux modernes; richesses du passé, jeunesses du present (Paris: Chez A. Bertrand, 1930). Introduction to Le Rouge et le noir, by Stendhal, edited by Louis Landré (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931). Preface to Poèmes lettons, translated by Elsa Steiste (Riga: Section de la Presse au Ministère des Affaires Etrangères de Lettonie, 1931). Preface to Stendhal raconté par ceux qui l’ont vu, edited by Pierre Jourda (Paris: Stock, 1931). Introduction to Pour la science: discours prononcé à l’occasion du quatrième centenaire du Collège de France, by Joseph Bédier (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1932). Petits poëmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris), by Charles Baudelaire, edited by Paul Hazard and Henri Daniel-Rops (Paris: Société les Belles Lettres, 1934). Textes choisis pour la culture générale et l’enseignement du français, edited by Paul Hazard and Lucien Texier (Paris: F. Aubier, 1934).

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Preface to Rossignol des neiges, by Marie Colmont (Paris: Editions Bourrelier, 1935). Contribution to Harvard et la France: recueil d’études pour la célébration du troisième centenaire de l’Université Harvard (Paris: Editions de la “Revue d’histoire moderne,” 1936), pp. 215–26. Preface to Textes choisis pour l’apprentissage de la langue et de la composition françaises, 1re année. Ecrivains français des XIXe et XXe siècles, edited by Lucien Texier and Léonce Peyrègne, 2nd edn. (Paris: Aubier, 1936). Textes choisis. 3e année. Histoire des idées et histoire littéraire par les écrivains français des XIXe et XXe siècles, edited by Paul Hazard and Lucien Texier (Paris: Aubier, 1936). Preface to Le Visage de l’enfance, by Dr. Lesage and J. Huber, 2 vols. (Paris: Horizons de France, 1937). Textes choisis pour la culture générale et l’enseignement du français. 2e année. Ecrivains français jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, edited by Paul Hazard and Lucien Texier (Paris: Aubier, 1937). Textes choisis pour la culture générale. 4e année. Les grands courants de la pensée contemporaine: écrivains étrangers, edited by Paul Hazard and Lucien Texier (Paris: Aubier, 1938). Preface to Figures et aventures du XVIIIe siècle: voyages et découvertes de l’abbé Prévost, by Claire-Eliane Engel (Paris: Editions “Je sers,” 1939). Trente-deux sonnets de Michel Ange, by Michelangelo Buonarroti, translated by Paul Hazard (Paris: Boivin, 1942). Preface to Programme, dédié aux prisonniers de guerre des grandes écoles françaises, pour la représentation exceptionnelle de La légende du chevalier, drama in 3 acts, by A. de Peretti della Rocca, Comédie française, 29 septembre 1943, 5 pages (not numbered).

Selected Articles by Paul Hazard “Étude sur la latinité de Pétrarque, d’après le livre 24 des ‘Epistolae familiares’,” Ecole française de Rome: mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire (1904): 219–46. “Les milieux littéraires en Italie, de 1796 à 1799,” Ecole française de Rome: mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire (1905): 243–72. “Le spectateur de nord,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France ( Jan.–Mar. 1906): 26–50. “Tendances romantiques dans la littérature de la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France ( July–Sept. 1907): 555–8. “La classe de français,” Revue pédagogique (Oct. 15, 1908): 346–59. “L’enseignement par l’image et la composition française,” Revue pédagogique (May 15, 1908): 440–4. “Histoire d’un qui ne voit pas,” as Paul Darmentières, Le Correspondant (May 25, 1908): 530–60, 714–41. “La nave,” Revue pédagogique (April 15, 1908): 369–82. “Un poète contemporain: M. Auguste Angellier,” Revue pédagogique (May 15, 1909): 443–62. “A Reggio et à Messine,” Revue pédagogique (Aug. 14, 1909): 119–31. “L’âme italienne, de la Révolution française au Risorgimento, à propos d’une récente publication,” Revue des deux mondes (April 15, 1910): 869–900. “Les enfances de Giacomo Leopardi,” Revue des deux mondes (Sept. 1, 1911): 202–28. “Le problème de l’éducation,” Revue pédagogique (Feb. 15, 1912): 101–17. “Discours sur la langue française,” Revue pédagogique (Feb. 15, 1913): 105–24.


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“Leopardi et la pensée européenne,” Revue pédagogique (May 15, 1913): 451–72. “L’école française jugée par un observateur anglais,” Revue pédagogique (April 15, 1914): 301–20. “La littérature enfantine en Italie,” Revue des deux mondes (Feb. 15, 1914): 842–70. “Les récents travaux en littérature comparée: essai de classification,” Revue universitaire (Feb. 15, Mar. 15, 1914): 112–24, 212–22. “Un nouvel acteur sicilien: Angelo Musco,” Revue des deux mondes ( July 15, 1917): 378–86. “Le vrai Boccace,” Revue universitaire ( July 15, 1917): 117–30. “Maman. [Dédié:] Aux mamans de France, 6 juin 1917,” as Paul Darmentières, Revue de Paris (May 15, 1918): 368–401, 474–508, 824–47. “Un romancier italien: M. Guido da Verona,” Revue des deux mondes ( July 1, 1918): 206–17. “Comment Jean Wouters comprit la guerre,” as Paul Darmentières, Revue des deux mondes (May 15, 1919): 361–77. “Un historien du genie latin,” Études italiennes (Oct. 1919): 196–214. “La littérature comparée,” La Civilisation française (Sept.–Oct., 1919): 346–52. “L’âme française à la veille de la guerre, d’après une récente publication,” Revue internationale de l’enseignement ( July 15 –Aug. 15, 1920): 264–9. “La culture française en Italie,” La Minerve française (Mar. 1920): 591–5. “Dante et la pensée française,” La Minerve française (Nov. 15, 1920): 699–716. “La langue française et la guerre,” Revue des deux mondes (April 1, June 1, Sept. 15, 1920): 580–99, 566–85, 307–27. “Ossian chez les Français, ou du success en littérature,” Nouvelle revue d’Italie (April 15, 1920): 326–39. “L’invasion des littératures du Nord dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar. 1921): 30–67. “Le livre de Mara,” Nouvelle revue d’Italie (Feb. 25, 1921): 112–20. “Ce que Molière représente pour la France,” Nouvelle revue d’Italie ( July–Sept. 1922): 91–113. “Notes sur l’Italie nouvelle,” Revue des deux mondes (Aug. 15, Oct. 1, Nov. 1, Dec. 1, 1922): 779–807, 605–43, 87–121, 576–606. “L’auteur d’Oderahi, histoire américaine,” Revue de littérature comparée ( July– Sept. 1923): 407–18. “Les lettres françaises sous la Révolution,” La Vie des peoples (Nov. 1923): 478–96. “Six professeurs français à l’Université Columbia,” Revue des deux mondes (Oct. 1, 1923): 622–34. “Comment Chateaubriand écrivit une nouvelle espagnole,” Revue de Paris (Dec. 15, 1924): 906–28. “‘Manon Lescaut’, roman janséniste,” Revue des deux mondes (April 1, 1924): 616– 39. “Trois mois au Chili,” Revue des deux mondes (Dec. 15, 1924): 841–67. “Les enseignements d’un manuscript inédit de Chateaubriand,” Journal des savants (Sept.–Oct. 1925): 203–23. “Un brouillon de Lamartine: fragments de ‘Jocelyn’ et de ‘La chute d’un ange’,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (Oct.–Dec., 1926): 619–27. “Romantisme italien et romantisme européen,” Revue de littérature comparée (April–June 1926): 224–45.

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“Stendhal et l’Italie,” Revue des deux mondes (Dec. 1, 1926, Dec. 15, 1926, Jan. 15, 1927): 673–92, 889–912, 406–29. “Comment lisent les enfants,” Revue des deux mondes (Dec. 15, 1927): 860–82. “Dans la lumière de Rio (juillet–septembre 1926),” Revue des deux mondes ( July 1, 1927): 92–119. “De l’ancien au nouveau monde: les origins du romantisme au Brésil,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar. 1927): 111–28. “Chateaubriand et la littérature des Etats-Unis,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar., 1928): 46–61. “Pour le centenaire des romantiques français,” Revue générale (Feb. 15, 1928): 129–44. “Anglais, Français, Espagnols, d’après une publication récente,” Revue des deux mondes (Nov. 1, 1929): 204–18. “Croquis mexicains (août-novembre 1928),” Revue des deux mondes (Feb. 15, 1929): 837–62. “Une source anglaise de l’abbé Prévost,” Modern Philology (Feb., 1930): 339–44. “Traductions populaires des romantiques français au Mexique,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar., 1930): 148–59. “Un collège de jeunes filles en Amérique: Bryn Mawr,” Revue des deux mondes (Mar. 1, 1931): 110–25. “Foscolo et Gray au Nouveau-Monde,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar. 1931): 5–12. “Pour le IVe centenaire du Collège de France,” Le Correspondant ( June 10, 1931): 662–74. “Le quatrième centenaire du Collège de France,” Revue des deux mondes ( June 15, 1931): 838–42. “Les relations intellectuelles entre l’Europe et l’Amérique latine,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar., 1931): 152–62. “Traductions de Lamartine et de Victor Hugo au Brésil,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar., 1931): 117–26. “A New York pendant les elections,” Revue des deux mondes (Dec. 15, 1932): 837–852. “Une nouvelle collection de textes français,” Revue des cours et conferences ( Jan. 15, 1932): 271–6. “Les rationaux,” Revue de littérature comparée (Oct.–Dec., 1932): 677–711. “Rabelais à la Bibliothèque nationale,” Revue des deux mondes (Feb. 15, 1933): 930–5. “Farces et farceurs au temps de la Renaissance,” Revue des deux mondes (Oct. 15, 1934): 936–46. “Londres d’aujourd’hui,” Revue des deux mondes ( Jan. 1, 1934): 88–100. “Le rayonnement d’Athènes en 1786,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar., 1934): 132–41. “Il y a cent ans,” Revue des deux mondes (Oct. 15, 1935): 892–905. “Le troisième centenaire de l’Académie française,” Revue de l’alliance française ( July, 1935): 127–33. “A New York, la nuit de l’élection,” Illustration (Nov. 21, 1936). “Note sur la connaissance de Locke en France,” Revue de littérature comparée (Oct.–Dec., 1937): 705–6. “Les origines philosophiques de l’homme de sentiment,” The Romanic Review (Dec., 1937): 318–41.


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“Etats-Unis 1939,” France-Amérique: revue mensuelle du Comité France-Amérique (April, 1939): 97–124. “L’Europe? Un idéal toujours menacé,” Les Nouvelles littéraires (Aug. 5, 1939). “Gabriele d’Annunzio,” Revue de littérature comparée ( Jan.–Mar., 1939): 9–18. “Le rayonnement intellectuel et les amities étrangères,” Revue de littérature comparée ( July, 1939): 361–75. “Quand un Flamand découvre l’Italie,” Les Nouvelles littéraires ( Jan. 20, 1940). “Esquisses et portraits: Vauvenargues,” Revue des deux mondes (May 1, 1941): 83–94. “Le professeur de français,” The French Review (Feb., 1941): 277–83. “Voltaire et Spinoza,” Modern Philology (Feb., 1941): 351–64. “La couleur dans ‘La Chartreuse de Parme’,” Le Divan (April–June, 1942): 64–74. “L’esprit au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue des deux mondes (Nov. 1, 1943): 104–8. “Pour que vive l’âme de la France,” France de demain (May, 1944): 3–6. “Variations sur la littérature enfantine,” Le Portique ( Jan., 1945): 39–49.

References Baldensperger, Fernand, “Paul Hazard,” Pour la victoire, 3 (19) (1944): 7. Bidou, Henry, “André Maurois et Paul Hazard devant l’Académie,” L’Europe nouvelle, 21 (1938): 708–9. Cabrini, Gabrielle, “Le Professeur Paul Hazard de l’Académie française,” Revue des cours et conférences (Feb. 15, 1940): 365–8. Carré, Jean-Marie, “Paul Hazard,” Revue de littérature comparée (Oct.–Nov., 1939): 5–12. Champion, Edouard, “Hommage à Paul Hazard,” Revue de littérature comparée (Oct.–Dec., 1946): 5–12. Cochin, Henri, “L’Italie vivante,” Le Correspondant, 291 (1923): 102–12. Cohen, Gustave, “Un grand humaniste français: mon ami Paul Hazard,” Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques (May 23, 1946): 1. Durry, Marie-Jeanne, “Paul Hazard,” Le Divan ( Jan.–Mar., 1945): 7–16. Editors, “Paul Hazard (1878–1944),” The Romanic Review, 35 (3) (1944): 185. Giraud, V., “Les origines du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue des deux mondes, 26 (1935): 890–912. Houbert, Jacques, “Notes: La ‘Chartreuse’ Hazard retrouvée,” Stendhal Club, 137 (1992): 73–6. Landré, Louis, “Avec Paul Hazard dans Paris Libéré,” The French Review, 18 (2) (1944): 86–88. Lefevre, Frédéric, “Une heure avec M. Paul Hazard,” Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques (Nov. 29, 1924): 1–2. Lograsso, Angeline H., “Reminiscences of Paul Hazard,” The French Review, 29 (5) (1956): 401–4. Martineau, Henri, “Les chroniques, petites notes stendhaliennes: Paul Hazard,” Le Divan ( July–Sept., 1944): 334–8. Miel, Jan, “Ideas or epistemes: Hazard versus Foucault,” Yale French Studies, 49 (1973): 231––45. Moreau, Pierre, “Paul Hazard,” Le Victorieux XXe siècle (1925): 215–30. Peyre, Henri, “Paul Hazard (1878–1944),” The French Review, 17 (6) (1944): 309–19.

24

Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988) Mark Potter

It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Ernest Labrousse on history, both on the discipline and on the profession, in France during the middle third of the twentieth century. His two major works, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Sketch of the Movement of Prices and Revenues in Eighteenth-century France) and La Crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la Révolution (The Crisis of the French Economy at the End of the Old Regime and the Beginning of the Revolution), published in 1933 and 1944 respectively, served as models and set many of the central terms of the historian’s craft in France well into the 1970s. Indeed, Fernand Braudel, in a 1958 essay entitled “History and the social sciences,” referred to Labrousse’s La Crise de l’économie française as “the greatest work of history to have appeared in France in the course of the last twenty-five years.” Yet, Labrousse’s influence derived from more than the intellectual impact that his books had on other historians; it came as well from the visibility of his post at the Sorbonne, his supervision of doctoral dissertations (thèses), and his organization and leadership of team research projects that were the model of the historian’s craft in France in the 1970s. This influence is all the more remarkable given that, throughout his career, Labrousse occupied something of an ambiguous position within the discipline, at once straddling its core and its fringe. Camille-Ernest Labrousse was born in 1895 in the village of Barbezieux in the Poitou Charente region of the southwest. His family on his father’s side had been small shopkeepers in this village for several generations; both his great-grandfather and his grandfather were ironsmiths. A history of republican political commitment also tied the generations together. Labrousse’s grandfather rallied for the Republic in the Revolution of 1848; his father, perhaps more moderate in his leanings,

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supported the Third Republic at a time when the southwest was split roughly evenly between proponents and opponents of the Republic. Labrousse himself continued this family tradition. At the age of fifteen, he and some classmates founded a self-described Jacobin political club and published a newsletter, of which the first and only issue was dated, in accordance with the revolutionary calendar, 27 prairial of the year 117 of the Republic. Further attempts at local political organization followed as Labrousse pursued his education. Labrousse at first sought a career in political journalism and law. His formal studies began in law, and while practicing law he wrote his dissertation, or thèse de droit, under the direction of Albert Aftalion, on a topic considered at the time to be more a matter of political economy than of either law or history. Defended in 1932 before the Faculté de droit de Paris, this thèse was published the following year as Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus, his first of two magisterial works. Thus, though ultimately an historian at heart, Labrousse began his career pursuing research in law and economics; this background, and his commitment to leftist political activism, shaped not only Labrousse’s career, but also the discipline of history at large in France for more than a generation. The discipline of history into which Labrousse stepped in the 1930s was marked by a division between “traditionalists” and a younger generation of innovative thinkers. For the new generation of historians, economic history in particular was looked upon as the desired path toward disciplinary renewal; while historians did not at first take note of the legal scholar Labrousse, his works did eventually go far in filling a perceived intellectual void within the discipline of history. Taken together, Labrousse’s two main works share a number of broad themes. They address the social roots of the revolutionary crisis in France at the end of the eighteenth century; they underscore the links between social, economic, and political developments; and they seek to elucidate the interplay between economic trends and class relations. History, for Labrousse, did not entail a celebration of the elite or a retelling of great events; it represented instead a social scientific tool for understanding the origin and evolution of social and political problems. Labrousse’s Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus initially grew out of the introductory chapter of an aborted doctoral thesis that sought to study the origins of the social safety net in France. While that initial project went unrealized, Labrousse considerably expanded the introductory chapter into a stand-alone work, which became his thèse de droit. As Labrousse himself explained in a 1980 interview, it was while reworking the aborted thesis into his thèse de droit that he “became, or rather re-became, an historian.” The work’s modest title captures the essence of what Labrousse set out to accomplish: he compiled several data series on prices, incomes, and wages over the eighteenth century. Indeed, the eighteenth century lends itself quite well to such an undertaking. During the previous century, the French monarchy had frequently altered the value of money as measured by its silver content to suit its own needs as a debtor, but after 1726 the value of money remained constant.

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Within such a monetary context, the historian can focus on changes in relative prices, or of the price of one commodity in relation to an index of prices composed of a basket of goods, and thereby draw conclusions as to the relative scarcity or abundance of that good over the course of the century. Also, as Labrousse explains, little change took place over the course of the century in the costs of transportation. Attempts toward liberalization of trade came in 1763 and 1764, but they were of limited effect and were mostly confined to the circulation of grain. Constancy thus prevailed in transportation costs, which were especially high in overland trade, where poor roads and internal tolls added significantly to the final cost of goods transported over any considerable distances. Arbitrage that might have smoothed prices across regions thus remained limited, and significant discrepancies in prices from region to region prevailed. Important for Labrousse’s project is the fact that over the eighteenth century little change took place that might have altered these variables. Labrousse compiled the prices of a number of commodities in his study, including cereals, vegetables and legumes, wine, meat, wool, flax, iron, and fodder crops. Indeed, the “basket” of goods is large enough to allow Labrousse to divide it up among the subcategories of agricultural products for consumption, agricultural products destined for industry, and industrial goods (finished and semi-finished). The price of labor also figures into his study. Finally, Labrousse included figures for landed revenues over the course of the eighteenth century. While the monetary and policy stability of the eighteenth century, at least up until the outbreak of the Revolution, lent itself well to a study of this sort, the extant sources and documentation did not. In 1777 and 1779, the office of the Controller General compiled two separate indices of wheat prices from figures sent by sub-delegates from throughout the provinces, which it then corrected for discrepancies in weights and measures. These are the only kingdom-wide price indices from the Ancien Régime that are extant, and Labrousse compiled the remainder of his figures from mercuriales, or local records of prices compiled by merchants in each market town. The care with which he did so, however, is remarkable, and his meticulousness is reflected in the pages of his work. Henri Sée, in his preface to Labrousse’s volume, attributes to Labrousse a double competence of economist and historian. “But,” Sée argues, “he has created a work that is much more the product of an historian than of an economist,” and the first proof that Sée offers for this assessment is the care that Labrousse brought to the study of his sources. Indeed, much of the first volume (the first 117 pages) is devoted to analyzing the sources of wheat prices. Then, as he moves to “lesser” grains and to each of the industrial and consumer products that round out his “basket” of commodities, he begins each separate investigation with an examination and critical analysis of the sources, weighing their strengths, weaknesses, and potential pitfalls. Labrousse’s findings in this work lead to two broad categories of conclusion. The first, which is an argument that courses throughout the work, is that the price


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movements of the eighteenth century affected different socioeconomic groups in very different ways. A hierarchy of inflation unfolded over the course of the century, Labrousse argues: “If the long-term or even the cyclical [inflationary] movement of prices for food items surpasses those of products destined for industry, which in turn surpasses those of manufactured goods, it is the increase in land rents that surpasses all.” While prices for all products increased an average of 53.7 percent over the century, rents increased by more than 80 percent, or, as measured against the prices of consumer goods, the real value of rents rose by 18–22 percent. Bearing in mind the divergences between different categories of lease, land, and ownership, Labrousse concludes, “It is the feudal landowner – noble or ecclesiastical –who tends to gain the most from the increases in rent.” Wages, unable to keep pace with the price inflation of basic food items, lost 25 percent of their real value as measured against Labrousse’s index of consumer prices, even as those wages increased nominally. The food items that workers and market-reliant peasants were most likely to purchase (rye, for example, as opposed to wheat) underwent considerably sharper variations in price. During this period of economic expansion and price inflation that brought benefits to the feudal landowner, poverty extended to workers and those cultivators, especially sharecroppers and renters of small parcels, whose land did not provide for them year round and who needed to supplement their earnings through wage work. Beyond pointing to this growing gulf between the well-off landowners and the increasingly disadvantaged workers and smallholders, Labrousse ends his work with some observations on the impact that the price and revenue movements of the eighteenth century had on institutions and events. In particular, he offers some preliminary thoughts on the development of physiocratic economic thought. While physiocrats focused their thinking on the long-term tendency for prices to reach their “natural” state, the reality of eighteenth-century market conditions was that prices underwent at times violent cyclical movements within long-term inflationary trends. Further, Labrousse comments on the wisdom of certain fiscal policies, especially the tendency of the monarchy to rely increasingly on taxes on consumption, or aides, during this period of long-term decline in real wages. Labrousse ends with some very brief words on the connection between cyclical and long-term trends in prices, wages, and revenues that coincided with the outbreak of the Revolution in the summer of 1789: Unrest directed against bread markets? That is the antagonism of the wage earner who suffers from his own weak earnings while rents increase. Attacks against toll gates, tax offices, and salt warehouses? That is the contradiction expressed by the worker, with his weak salary and increasing taxes on consumption. Vandalism against country manors? This is, once again, the contradiction expressed by the worker, along with the small holder who suffers more than any other under the prevailing circumstances, and the feudal rights, gaining yearly … and reaching their peak.

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Yet, Labrousse’s perspective on eighteenth-century developments is not that of simple economic determinism, as becomes clear with his second major work, La Crise de l’économie française. Here, Labrousse delves into the relationship between economic crisis and political crisis by focusing on a sort of group psychology as particular classes respond to their specific deteriorating economic conditions. In this second book, as in his first work, Labrousse is interested in economic cycles, trends, and fluctuations. By narrowing his focus to the viticultural sector during the two or three years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Revolution, Labrousse is able to elaborate on the nature and dynamics of crisis. Viticulture and winemaking, according to Labrousse, were sufficiently widespread throughout the kingdom that the historian can use this sector as a sort of proxy for the agrarian economy of France as a whole. Following a long period of price increases for wine, which paralleled the price inflation of consumer goods generally across most of the century, decline set in during the years 1778–80, due to both over-production and under-consumption, to the point where prices fell 51 percent from their peak. Wine suffered from the same demand elasticity that plagued manufactured goods toward the end of the eighteenth century: as the price of bread, which had an inelastic demand, increased, the consumer’s disposable income decreased and demand for “non-essential” items such as wine fell. Wine prices generally remained low until 1787, when they experienced a slight turn-around, though they remained far shy of their 1760–70 levels. Meanwhile, the incomes of winegrowers, especially of those who managed their own vineyards, fell as they faced rising production costs. Incomes declined less for winegrowers who did not cultivate their own vineyards but who instead leased their land out, though they were less numerous than the direct managers who were hurt the most by the profit squeeze. Winegrowers, for Labrousse, formed a socioeconomic group in the agricultural sector akin to an urban artisan class: skilled in their trade and interested in employing production techniques geared toward protecting the quality of their product. Winegrowers were also sensitive to changes in fiscal policies, especially as the increased reliance on consumption taxes adversely affected the demand for their product. As price trends eroded the profitability of winegrowers, royal fiscal policy exacerbated their conditions. Rather than seeing the monarchy as one of several interacting causes of their misfortune, however, winegrowers tended to place most of the blame on the crown. Further, occupying a social space that linked together the countryside (where they lived) and the towns and cities (where they sold their products), winegrowers, increasingly discontented with royal policy, formed into a “rational and independent elite” willing and able to challenge the monarchy. There was, to be sure, nothing new to Labrousse’s observations that the years 1788 and 1789 were years of harvest shortfall and economic crisis, and that the price of bread peaked precisely as revolutionary events unfolded in the late spring and summer of 1789. Labrousse was likely offering an explicit rebuttal to the


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contention of Jules Michelet and Jean Jaurès that the Revolution broke out when the French people were relatively well off; still, by 1944, sufficient work had been done on the economic history of Ancien Régime France that the economic crisis on the eve of the Revolution was well recognized. Yet Labrousse’s work is much more than a statistical confirmation of historical convention: it provides for greater understanding of the crisis on all its levels – political, social, and economic – which managed to sweep up so much of French society with it. Because Labrousse began his academic career in law and political economy, his impact on the discipline of history was not immediate. Between the publication of Labrousse’s two works, Georges Lefebvre “introduced” him to professional French historians in two successive notices published in 1937 in the journals Annales d’histoire économique et sociale and Annales historiques de la Révolution française. In the latter, Lefebvre wrote: “If M. Labrousse is an economist and sociologist by virtue of the phenomena that interest him, he is also an historian, and this appears especially evident after reading his first work.” Not all agreed, however. Henri Hauser questioned Labrousse’s reliance on government records, arguing instead for the greater accuracy of personal household records (livres de raison) and private account books as sources for prices. The dispute went beyond sources to fundamental frameworks when Hauser dismissed Labrousse’s contribution to the history of the Ancien Régime economy in a 1936 book entitled Recherches et documents sur l’histoire des prix en France de 1500 à 1800, where he wrote, “man does not live off averages, nor off variations on the long-term; he lives off actual bread, sold at such a price for such a weight at such a time.” Indeed, as Peter Burke has argued, Labrousse occupied an ambiguous position between the core and the periphery of the main currents of the historical profession. Beyond his formation outside the formal discipline of history, and beyond the debates that arose as Lefebvre introduced his work to the field, this tension between insider and outsider continued to mark Labrousse’s career even as he became an established historian. As the Annales school defined the center of the historical enterprise beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s, Labrousse kept one foot on the fringes of this movement. The Annales, both the journal and historical school, were firmly based at the Sixth Section of the Ecole des hautes études, founded by Lucien Febvre in 1947 as a center for bringing together history and the social sciences. Labrousse’s position, meanwhile, was at the Sorbonne where he filled the chair of Economic and Social History, previously occupied by Marc Bloch. Labrousse’s identity as a Marxist historian, even though it was an identity with which Labrousse himself was uncomfortable because it tended to gloss over much of the complexity of his intellectual and political background, put him at odds with the leaders, past and present, of the Annales movement. Finally, Labrousse’s longstanding interest in understanding the French Revolution contrasted with the Annales school’s rejection of the “event” in history. Indeed, it is significant that the historian who introduced Labrousse to the discipline, Georges Lefebvre, was himself a Marxist historian who devoted his career to studying the

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French Revolution. Yet, despite these indicators of his outsider status, Labrousse is responsible for much of what we associate today with the Annales school. It is incorrect, as Burke reminds us, to characterize the Annales school simply with reference to the heavy usage of quantitative data in long-run series that capture the virtually unmoving structures of everyday life in the early modern world. Instead, it has been a more complex and broadly defined movement of historians who, beginning with Febvre and Bloch, sought to promote the interaction between history and all of the social sciences and who thus embraced a “problem-oriented” history in contradistinction to the political narratives that dominated historical publishing in the nineteenth century. Quantitative methods are not, and have never been, the sine qua non of the Annales school. Yet, despite Burke’s prescription for care when defining the Annales school, there is an undeniable tendency among historians today to identify quantitative methods with the Annales school, and this identification is largely due to the career and work of Labrousse. Labrousse’s contribution to the Annales school, though, was not limited to the use of long-run quantitative data series to capture the histoire immobile that was a central theme to the school. It is the framework in which Labrousse studied and formed conclusions from his data series that most influenced the Annales school. Labrousse’s interests were never limited to measuring; instead, they ranged to understanding, especially with regard to the interaction between various cycles. Borrowing from the theories of economists such as Kondratieff and Juglar, Labrousse uncovered long-term trends, such as the secular price inflation of the eighteenth century with its varying impacts on different social groups; within these long-term trends, short-term cycles of roughly ten years played themselves out. The interactions between distinct cycles enabled Labrousse to comment on a concept that has since become central to so many works of Annales historians: the conjoncture. A term difficult to translate into English, conjoncture implies a conjoining of several distinct trends in such a way that a distinct outcome is produced. To uncover a conjoncture, the historian must confront various trends in matters such as prices, population, income, or wages, and tease out of the trends a dynamic model of continuity and change. Labrousse’s findings in La Crise de l’économie française present a classic example of just such a conjoncture. Here, longterm trends and structures, or the price inflation of the eighteenth century, interacted with a distinct short-term cycle, the decline in wine prices, to produce the pre-Revolutionary crisis in winegrowing, and this crisis interacted with the very short-term (inter-cyclical) spike in cereal prices in the spring and summer of 1789. Much of the political fervor of 1789 arose from this conjoncture of trends. Labrousse was also responsible for importing into the mainstream of the historical profession (in other words into the Annales school) the works and ideas of François Simiand. When asked who had been the greatest intellectual influences on the writing of his first two major works, Labrousse named Simiand first, followed by Marx, and then his thesis adviser Aftalion. Simiand, the “grand old man


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of prices” as described by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, took the long-term perspective of price movements as the historical indicator of first importance. He understood long-term cycles of thirty years or more as alternating between “A phases” and a “B phases.” The former were upward movements, where price inflation brought with it profits and production increases. These periods of growth and expansion were then followed by periods of retraction and depression, B phases, where prices fell, bringing with them profit decreases and production slumps. Labrousse self-consciously framed the eighteenth century as an A phase of inflationary growth, though a growth containing clear contradictions. This Simiand-inspired trope of the alternation between A phases and B phases is indeed common among the Annales school’s major works of the 1950s and 1960s. In Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966), Le Roy Ladurie framed the economy of the south of France from the medieval period until the eighteenth century in precisely these terms. Likewise, Pierre Goubert understood the seventeenth century as a period of depression (B phase) followed by recovery (A phase) in his Beauvais et le Beauvaisis (1960), which he dedicated to Labrousse. The impact that Labrousse had on the field of history – the acceptance of his Simiand-inspired categories, the interest in quantitative history that dominated the Annales school for much of its postwar history – stemmed not only from the force of his two major works, but also from his position at the Sorbonne, where he trained an impressive list of scholars. Labrousse stands apart for the number of scholars whose careers he helped launch and who in turn developed into influential historians in their own right. A partial list of students who wrote their thèses under the supervision of Labrousse includes Pierre Goubert, Pierre Chaunu, Jean Bouvier, Louis Dermigny, Pierre Vilar (who succeeded Labrousse in the chair of Economic and Social History at the Sorbonne), Adeline Daumard, Claude Willard, Annie Kriegel, Pierre de Saint Jacob, and Bertrand Gille. It was estimated that in 1961, 41 percent of the modern or contemporary history thèses being written at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) were in the field of economic and social history. It is not a stretch to think that Labrousse’s presence in the chair of Economic and Social History had much to do with this orientation of scholarship at the time. Outside the array of his immediate students, Labrousse also had a less direct hand, but a hand nonetheless, in the production of such works as Le Roy Ladurie’s Les Paysans de Languedoc and Michel Vovelle’s quantitative study of religious beliefs in Provence, Piété baroque et déchristianisation (1973), both of which acknowledge Labrousse’s influence in their respective forewords. The second half of Labrousse’s lengthy career as an historian saw no further monographs published that would have the kind of impact that his two works from 1933 and 1944 had. Instead, beginning in the 1950s and extending through the 1960s and 1970s, Labrousse directed his efforts toward organizing group research projects on what were at the time very large and important historical questions, usually of a social-historical nature. Thus, in 1945, Labrousse began

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directing a team of economic historians in a study of nineteenth-century business cycles. This project resulted in the 1956 volume Aspects de la crise et de la dépression de l’économie française au milieu du XIXe siècle, 1846–1851, for which Labrousse wrote the introductory synthetic essay. In addition, Labrousse oversaw teams of researchers beginning in the late 1950s who investigated the Western bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and who attempted to define, describe, and explain the social structures of France. The fruits of this collaborative thrust came especially with the publication of the four-volume Histoire économique et sociale de la France, co-edited with Fernand Braudel and published between 1970 and 1982. Labrousse himself indicated that this collaborative work (for which a different author wrote each chapter or major section, but whose different sections tie together with a remarkable thematic unity) was meant to supplant what had been until then the definitive work in French economic history, Henri Sée’s L’Histoire économique de la France (1939). The thematic unity is one clearly brought to the table by Labrousse himself: the economic trends and cycles are understood within the categories of structures, which frame economic activity, conjonctures, and long-term trends, presented as either A-phase growth trends or B-phase recessionary trends. Labrousse brings his own voice directly into the work in the second volume, where he has written a lengthy section on the eighteenth century. Following upon the contractions of the (Bphase) seventeenth century, about which Goubert contributed a brief chapter, Labrousse presents the eighteenth century in a way that synthesizes and brings to fruition his research and his previous major works on that period of growth, price inflation, and increasing class divergence. Whereas some common themes traverse his entire career, as is especially evident in the publication of Histoire économique et sociale de la France, Labrousse was not quite the same scholar in the second half of his career as he was in the first. His energies early on had been devoted largely toward economic history – the quantitative history of prices in the eighteenth century, with consideration granted to the social impacts of those price movements. The problems that then interested him in the latter half of his career were more within the realm of social history, and they spanned the France of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, Labrousse could write at length in a 1974 review essay of Theodore Zeldin’s France 1848–1945 on the meaning of the term “bourgeois.” He defined the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century according to its style and standard of living: sedentary, established within a town or city, with a visible means of support, the bourgeoisie stood apart from soldiers and workers. Yet in the same essay, Labrousse comments on the category of class and the features that distinguish classes from one another. He points to “fortune, function, and family” as the defining features of class, and he is careful to clarify that each of these indicators can be measured by socioeconomic data: “Statistically, [these] three essential yardsticks governed social classification in both industrial and pre-industrial France.” Perhaps, then, Labrousse had not veered too far from his early practices and views, especially


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with regard to quantitative history. But while he had once posited, as his central problem, questions of economic history that he then connected to sociopolitical developments, he moved in the latter half of his career more toward sociohistorical questions that he addressed with his economic historical methods and models. To be sure, his interests and approaches evolved, but it would be a mistake to think that Labrousse ever turned his back on economic history, and especially on quantitative economic history. Yet has economic history turned its back on Labrousse at the dawn of the twenty-first century? Today’s emphasis within economic history on micro-economics and rational choice models has left little room for the macro-economic approaches toward prices, wages, and incomes that Labrousse practiced. John V. C. Nye, in an article on the state of French economic history published in French Historical Studies in 2000, all but declared the quantitative macro-economic approach of the likes of Labrousse and Braudel dead: “The broad-brush view of economic history –in which a story is told in terms of measured output interacting with aggregate supply and demand by using highly abstract indices – barely makes an appearance in modern work …” Yet to ignore Labrousse and his macro-economic approach is to risk neglecting the large and important questions that Labrousse addressed – on the origins of the French Revolution, on the interaction between economic and social trends, on the formation of classes, and on the long-term effects of economic trends on various social groups – and that micro-economic and rational choice models by themselves are ill-equipped to tackle. Indeed, Labrousse understood precisely the strength of his quantitative macro-economic approach to such large questions, as he made clear in the preface to the second volume of Histoire économique et sociale: Thus the economy has its related social history, in direct rapport with the factors of production and exchange, distribution, and consumption which characterized the orders and classes coexisting in the society of the period. This book’s emphasis will be placed on that related history, on the obverse side of the economic history … It is a specific social history, situated on terre firme and based on current modes [of scholarship].

Labrousse remained true to this vision of history throughout his career.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Ernest Labrousse Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Dalloz, 1933). La Crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1944).

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Le Prix du froment en France, 1726–1913, by Ernest Labrousse, Ruggiero Romano, and F.-G. Dreyfus (Paris: SEVPEN, 1970).

Other Works “La société du XVIIIe siècle devant la Révolution,” in Histoire générale des civilisations, 7 vols., edited by Maurice Crouzet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), vol. 5, pp. 345–529. Aspects de la crise et de la dépression de l’économie française au milieu du XIXe siècle, 1846–1851, edited by Ernest Labrousse (La Roche-sur-Yon, France: Imprimerie Centrale de l’Ouest, 1956). Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 4 vols., edited by Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970–82).

Selected Articles by Ernest Labrousse “1848–1830–1789 – Comment naissent les révolutions?” Actes du Congrès historique du centenaire de la Révolution de 1848 (1948): 1–31. “Observations on a new history of modern France,” New Left Review, 86 (1974): 88–101.

Interview Charle, Christophe, “Entretiens avec Ernest Labrousse,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 32–3 (1980): 111–25.

References Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Goubert, Pierre, “Quarante années d’histoire en France,” Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, Académie royale des sciences, des lettres, et des beaux-arts de Belgique, 65 (1979): 229–37. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, “The quantitative revolution and French historians: record of a generation (1932–1968),” in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, translated by Ben Reynolds and Siân Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 17–31. Renouvin, Pierre, “Ernest Labrousse,” in Historians of Modern Europe, edited by Hans A. Schmitt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 235–54. Tannenbaum, Edward R., “French scholarship in modern European history: new developments since 1945,” Journal of Modern European History, 29 (1957): 246–52. Woloch, Isser, “French economic and social history,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1974): 435–57.

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Jacques Le Goff (1924– ) Joëlle Rollo-Koster

It is a characteristic of French culture to raise certain academics and intellectuals to the level of mass-media stars. Jacques Le Goff, world-renowned medieval historian, is one example. His adroit popularization of what may seem an arcane topic has made him familiar not only to his colleagues and peers, but also to anybody who reads, has access to a television set or a radio, or knows how to operate a computer. To his colleagues, he is one of the leaders of the Annales school, the movement of French historians that takes its name from the French historical journal, the Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations. Founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the Annales revolutionized the practice of history by enlacing it within the methodology of the social sciences. Embarking with other historians upon a fresh approach that stressed total history – that is, for example, the inclusion of a study of climate, geography, mentalities, and cultural and economic conditions, in historical surveys – Le Goff became, along the way, one of the founders of historical anthropology, an offshoot of his interest in applying social-scientific methods to historical discourses. His academic position as director of studies and later president of the Ecole des hautes études in Paris made him the successor of prestigious early modern specialists such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel. In French popular culture, Le Goff is the author seen on literary television shows or heard on the French radio station France Culture in the weekly broadcast Les Lundis de l’histoire (Mondays for History). His audience knows him as the historian who boldly stated that the Middle Ages stretched far past the traditional boundaries established by historians, all the way to the industrial revolution. He is known, too, as an author who debunked the old medieval stereotypes embedded in popular culture and narrowed the distance separating modern and medieval

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mentalities by pointing to medieval creations that have endured into the modern world, such as European urban life. Yet Le Goff has also reminded audiences of the chasm that separates the lives of medieval people from those in the present. He explained in easily understood terms how contemporary concepts as familiar as time and space did not operate in the Middle Ages in familiar ways – how, for example, the time of merchants, of clerics, and of peasants differed from each other and also differed from modern conceptions of time. The success of Le Goff is that he has taught audiences, in a simple language, the subtleties of the most advanced modern historical research, introducing important concepts such as “immobile history” (that is, the slow-moving, century-long trends that are often hidden behind major events) into mass, popular conceptions of history. In short, Le Goff, using multiple forms of communication, ranging from his abundant scholarly books to his numerous appearances on television and radio, has attained a rare level of popularity that has made him a familiar voice in all French (and many non-French) circles. One of Le Goff ’s defining characteristics is his passion for and open engagement with the history that he studies. He is what the French would call an historien engagé. Rather than presenting himself as a dispassionate scientist analyzing, tabulating, and dissecting his subjects, Le Goff comes across as an historian who does not shy away from human subjectivity – for him, history is human and has a heart. Take, for example, the French Revolution (a subject distant from his academic specialization, the Middle Ages, but never distant from the life and thought of French intellectuals). When detractors of the French Revolution depict it as a sad and regrettable moment in France’s history, Le Goff comes to its defense, and his simple response reflects his way of thinking about history more generally. The Revolution does not belong to the realm of the purely political; it belongs to the realm of humanity. Actions deemed excessive by subsequent generations have to be placed in their proper historical context, and rather than rehashing negative aspects of the Revolution, historians (and all people) should never forget the admirable heritage of the French Revolution, namely, the proclamation of the citizen’s rights and of humanity’s rights. However imperfectly, the French Revolution served as the basis for Europe’s later democratization, and no one should erase from France’s memory the founding motto of the French Republic, “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Le Goff ’s open engagement with history puts him in a historiographical tradition that harks back to a nineteenth-century French historian for whom Le Goff has openly expressed his admiration, namely, Jules Michelet. In his preface to Pour un autre moyen âge (1977; translated as Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 1980), Le Goff describes Michelet as an “homme d’imagination, de résurrection … homme d’archives qui ressuscite non des fantômes ou des fantasmes mais des êtres réels enterrés dans les documents comme les pensées vraies pétrifiées dans la cathédrale” (“A man of imagination, of resurrection … a man of archival research who does not resuscitate ghosts but the real humanity buried in documents, not unlike real

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thoughts petrified in a cathedral.”) Like Michelet, Le Goff sees his subjects being driven by their passions as much as by reason, and, like Michelet, Le Goff wants to put the scientific aspect of history (the reliance on archival sources) in the service of “resurrecting” the past, an act that is as much emotional as cognitive on the part of the historian. Indeed, Le Goff would sometimes speak of history as something that needs to be re-imagined rather than resurrected (much less reconstructed), thus acknowledging the subjectivity and guesswork that inform historical research. Jacques Le Goff was born in Toulon on January 1, 1924. Le Goff ’s father was quite old, forty-six, when he was born. His father’s age and his mother’s difficult postpartum months explain why he remained without siblings. He himself became a father at a mature age. Toulon, the large Mediterranean port city of his birth, used to be an essential location for the French military (especially the navy) and a springboard for maritime expeditions into French colonies. The history of the city is tied to Vauban, Louis XIV’s military engineer, who designed the city’s defenses (its walls and its arsenal) and the infamous French prison system of the galère (galleys), where common and political prisoners rowed their sentences away in dire conditions. Toulon also played an important role in the French Revolution and in Napoleon’s enterprises. Because Le Goff appreciates the role of geography and topography in history and in human lives, it is to be noted that he is from the south, a Provençal imbued with the cultural identity of his origins. Le Goff likes to discuss his date of birth because it led him early on to reflect on the historical identity of time and chronology, a lifelong passion of his. In his youth, his mother enjoyed retelling him about his father’s honesty in declaring the son’s actual date of birth to French civil authorities. During the years after World War I, a difference of a single day in a young man’s birth date could hasten his entrance into mandatory military service by a year. His mother relished telling Jacques Le Goff how his father refused to lie and to deny to civil authorities, upon Le Goff ’s birth, that his son had really been born on the first of January, even though doing so would have gained the son a year’s respite from military service. What seems like a trivial incident plunged Le Goff into reflection about the mindset of his father – a hero of integrity to Le Goff, an example of moral rectitude – and about time itself. It made Le Goff think about the role of l’imaginaire (imagination) in conceptualizing time, and about the way an era can later be re-imagined through the actions and memory of a loved one. During his schooling, Le Goff learned still more about his birth date and the ways that the measurement of time have changed, and what he learned caused him to ponder even more earnestly the nature of chronology and calendars. Le Goff, for example, was surprised to learn that for many civilizations, and even in medieval France, the first of January was not always the beginning of the year. He also learned to appreciate that changes in the reckoning of time had an ideological component. The leaders of the French Revolution changed and secularized the calendar: even if Le Goff loved the linguistic beauty of the names given by revolutionary leaders to months such

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as pluviose ( January/February), ventose (February/March), or germinal (March/ April), he doubted the wisdom of their calendrical inventions. Le Goff ’s father was a republican for whom the French Third Republic, which lasted from 1871 to 1940, represented the highest political and moral ideals of the time. It had fostered the development of an ideal progressive society, and its rectitude and strong appreciation for justice had enabled France to survive and even to win World War I. Of course, the Third Republic was never quite as wonderful as his father liked to imagine – the ideal existed largely in the mind of his father and others like him who had fought and lived through World War I. Still, this paternal memory, a mixture of reality and imagination, passed on to the son. This bequest was pivotal for Le Goff because his encounter with his father and his memories gave Le Goff his first sensation of history. It was pivotal, too, because it made Le Goff aware of the existence of a double historical reality: one that traditional historians would call the hard facts, and one that is imagined but nonetheless real for the subjects that experience it. One should not underestimate the importance of Le Goff ’s mother in the development of his sense of history. His mother, unlike his agnostic father, was deeply Catholic. Allowed by his father to be educated as a Catholic, Le Goff quickly grew bored of catechism and theology, and instead developed a preference for religious rituals, practices, representations, and images rather than dogma, although Le Goff later learned to appreciate how historians can use the Bible (specifically, how medieval contemporaries received, presented, and understood it) as a powerful tool with which to study the Middle Ages. Le Goff himself describes his mother’s Catholicism as a religion of fear, suffering, and sacrifice – a religion of masochistic devotion of the sort often associated in popular culture with medieval practices. The specific form of Catholicism that Le Goff ’s mother practiced, again a reflection of her times, led him to ponder the power of Catholicism, especially medieval practices and concepts (to which Le Goff was sometimes unsympathetic) such as imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) and contemptus mundi (contempt for the world) that encouraged believers to embrace personal asceticism and to disassociate themselves from the world. The cultural and religious disjunction between his father (an irreligious Breton) and his mother (a devout Provençal) also fueled Le Goff ’s precocious interest in the historical position of women (a topic not widely studied by male historians of his generation). Le Goff spent his childhood years in Toulon. His early years included a great deal of socializing in the city streets, which made him aware of the important role that topography could play in creating and shaping various forms of sociability. Le Goff also witnessed in the 1930s the introduction of innovations such as radios, automobiles, telephones, and refrigerators, all of which radically altered everyday life: this experience forced upon Le Goff an appreciation for the historical significance of material objects, even when compared to the more “spectacular” events and moments of history. Notwithstanding his interest in history, Le


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Goff developed a love for mathematics during his early education, and he traces his skills in historical analysis back to his mathematics teachers and the skills that they developed in him. His interest in and love for medieval history developed in high school, thanks to the inspiration of his teacher Henri Michel, who later became an historian of World War II and of the French Resistance. From Michel, he began to learn about the historical discipline and its methods: that the study of history entails the study of primary source documents, and that the historian has an obligation to explain events rather than merely narrate what happened. In addition to what he learned from Michel, Le Goff ’s reading of Walter Scott, especially Ivanhoe, fueled his growing curiosity about the Middle Ages. The story, especially its depiction of the ethnic rivalry between Anglo-Saxons and Normans that frames the tale, intrigued him. Le Goff was attracted by more than just Scott’s well-told narrative, though; he was also captivated by Scott’s explanations of events, which gave him a taste for historical analysis. As a youth, Le Goff also enjoyed reading tales and legends, a telltale sign of his predisposition toward the “imaginary” and its importance in history. When World War II broke out in 1939, Le Goff was a junior in high school. His father soon became ill, which caused the family to move to Sète, in the southwest of France, where they remained until June 1940. While in Montpellier registering for his baccalauréat (the examination taken by high school seniors), Le Goff heard Pétain’s call for an armistice on the day that he registered, and, a few days later, he heard General de Gaulle’s call to resistance. During the summer of 1940, his family left Sète to resettle in Toulon, where he remained for the next two years. After successfully passing his baccalauréat, he entered Marseilles’ Hypokhâgne and Khâgne (preparatory schools for institutions of higher learning such as the Ecole normale). After a short sojourn in the Alps where he encountered members of the Resistance, Le Goff joined in 1943 what he called the “pseudo-resistance,” hiding weapons and gathering medicine parachuted by the British. From his experience with the Resistance hidden in the Alps, Le Goff remembers what he calls “peasants’ selfishness” when, in the middle of penury, farmers kept back their produce in order to sell if for more money on the black market; he also recalls witnessing anti-Semitism firsthand and learning to despise Pétain, whom Le Goff often characterizes as a stain on French history. Despite the upheaval caused by World War II, Le Goff continued his studies and earned certificates in French, Latin, and Greek. For a time, he also pursued a certificate in philology that would have granted him a licence in Letters; had he earned that licence, he could then have followed a course of study leading to the agrégation in Letters, which would have permitted Le Goff to teach in high schools and at institutions of higher learning. However, a short stint in philology at the Sorbonne changed his mind; Le Goff returned to his love of history and entered the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and the Ecole normale, studying for an agrégation but this time in history. In Paris, the provincial young man discovered the pleasures of the French capital, and these early years of university training gave him his working routine for the rest of his

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life – cinema, theater, and concerts during the day, work at night – as well as a lifelong love for the card game of bridge. Following the end of World War II, Le Goff witnessed firsthand the inability of the men of the Resistance to succeed in the political arena and observed the expansion of the communist party, especially among French postwar youth. However, Le Goff, almost by accident, came to view communism differently from the way his contemporaries viewed it. During a trip to Austria and a fortuitous encounter with a cultural attaché there, he became aware that the French government was interested in opening new cultural contacts with Czechoslovakia and offering financial aid to students willing to travel there and to study the country’s history. Le Goff took advantage of the offer and so found himself in Prague in 1947 and 1948. An eyewitness to that country’s communist coup in February 1948, he returned from Czechoslovakia to France mistrustful of communism and, indeed, without any great interest in contemporary politics. He also decided that Czechoslovakian history was not for him. Le Goff remembers fondly his four years at the Ecole normale, where minimal academic demands left him free to pursue his own intellectual interests. The logical conclusion of the Ecole was the successful passage of the agrégation, a competitive examination that would open the door to teaching at institutions of higher learning (only those who receive the highest scores on the agrégation receive teaching posts). By chance, in the year that Le Goff ’s class took the agrégation, there was a revolutionary break with the examination’s past traditions; specifically, there was a change in the personnel comprising the jury that administered the examination and graded the examinees. In Le Goff ’s year, the jury was composed entirely of historians who belonged to the new Annales school of historical thought, and Fernand Braudel himself, a figure of crucial importance to Annales history, presided over the jury. With these historians, Le Goff spent his year preparing for the agrégation discovering new horizons often unvisited by traditional medievalists. His professors extended the curriculum to include topics such as the Byzantine and Mongol empires, and Le Goff felt a growing need to research history instead of simply studying and mastering the information that was already known. Following his successful passage of the agrégation, Le Goff began to teach at the lycée of Amiens in the autumn of 1950 where, for a while, he lost contact with the Annales school and developed a dislike for secondary education. He received a research grant that allowed him to travel to the University of Oxford in 1951 and 1952, where he intended to study the emergence of a new type of worker in the Middle Ages, the intellectual worker. He felt isolated at Oxford, though, and came to realize his own fondness for cooperation, teamwork, and intellectual exchange – indeed, an appreciation for the benefits of collaborative work would come to characterize his teaching and his writing. He followed his year at Oxford with a sojourn at the Ecole française (French School) of Rome in 1953, where he indulged his love for archival research. He then became attaché of research for the


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prestigious Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research) in 1954, while waiting to become the assistant of Michel Mollat (whom Le Goff still admires for his intellectual openness and liberality) at the University of Lille, which Le Goff did become in 1955. Thanks to his resumption of teaching duties at the university level, Le Goff discovered that conducting research without teaching had been just as frustrating to him as teaching without conducting research. At the University of Lille, Le Goff met Marcel Gillet, a specialist in modern and contemporary history who became one of Le Goff ’s closest colleagues and best friends. While in Lille, Le Goff devoted a great deal of time to his teaching and simultaneously began to publish. He wrote two books on commission, both of which were quite commercial and reissued several times. The first one appeared in 1956 in a series entitled “Que sais-je?” (“What do I know?”). This series provides brief, accessible, and up-to-date overviews of academic topics written by leading scholars for high school and university students – its books therefore blend popular and academic elements. Le Goff ’s contribution was Marchands et banquiers du moyen âge (Merchants and Bankers in the Middle Ages, 1956), which integrated and popularized the work of a number of historians – it draws especially heavily from articles published in the journal Annales that were not yet widely known. In four chapters, Le Goff sketches the professional, social, and political activities of mobile and sedentary merchants, their moral and religious attitudes, and their cultural contributions. He addresses geography, topography, and the physical conditions that merchants faced, as well as changes in business practices that promoted economic efficiency and political reactions to mercantile enterprises, all the while engaging with debates concerning the rise of capitalism during the Middle Ages. Le Goff ’s second book reflects his own intellectual interests more clearly than his first did. Published in 1957 for a new series initiated by Seuil, Les Intellectuels au moyen âge (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan as Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, 1993) is based on Le Goff ’s own, original research on the learned urban class of the Middle Ages. In this book, Le Goff examines the relationship between the urbanization of medieval Western Europe and the emergence of cathedral schools and universities, and he investigates how intellectual work came to be viewed and perceived in the new world of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The book traces the emergence and triumph of a new socio-professional type, the intellectual. Le Goff ’s recognition that the social type of the intellectual – often associated with the modern period but rarely with the Middle Ages – existed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was original. Similarly, Le Goff applies concepts such as secularization and rationalization to an historical period that still suffered from its reputation of being “Gothic” and backward. Yet Le Goff also emphasizes the differences between the medieval and the modern intellectual. Medieval scholastic practices emphasized comprehensiveness and the compilation of encyclopedic knowledge, rather than originality, research, and the production of new knowledge. Medieval intellectuals operated in a distinctive and often hostile milieu; they

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were merchants of words in a society that despised many forms of trade, and intellectuals faced a long struggle in a Christian Europe that regarded science and knowledge as gifts of God from which no individual should profit, rather than as types of property that one might sell. Le Goff ’s methodology, too, was innovative. Le Goff examines, besides the great thinkers who often figured in studies on twelfth- and thirteenth-century thought, the academic curriculum offered in schools and the Goliards, the first student-rebels and the authors of earthy, even bawdy songs and poetry. Le Goff focuses on men rather than on institutions; even more remarkably, Le Goff ’s demonstrates how changes in practice and mentality related to changes in social structure and the personnel in the schools. Thus, there is a strong sociological component to Le Goff ’s analysis of medieval thought, and Le Goff ’s later work on the history of ideas will exhibit this same trait. The late 1950s were a turbulent period for Le Goff. He became involved in leftist politics for a time, yet could not bring himself to make a full political commitment – instead, he found himself simultaneously wishing for and shying away from political engagement. For a while, he became embroiled in trade union activities and syndicalist politics, but his left-wing political inclinations were tempered by the political agitation created in France and elsewhere by Stalin’s politics, as well as by the Soviet interference in Budapest. Professionally, too, the late 1950s were difficult, and 1958 marked a pivotal point in Le Goff ’s career. His first two books had been, in his own words, little books that did not bring him fame. When Michel Mollat was named to a position at the Sorbonne, Le Goff was not qualified to replace Mollat because Le Goff ’s thèse d’état (state thesis) had not yet reached a sufficiently advanced state. For his thèse d’état, Le Goff had initially undertaken a project on intellectual work in twelfth- and thirteenth-century universities and urban schools. Later, he had broadened his subject matter and made ideas and attitudes toward work in the Middle Ages his topic, but Le Goff doubted whether he could finish the thesis and felt insufficiently motivated to try. Le Goff contemplated a change of career, perhaps by becoming a researcher at the CNRS where certainly he would not teach anymore, or perhaps by returning to teaching secondary school. A third option arose when Le Goff ’s friends convinced Fernand Braudel, director of the Sixth Section of the Ecole des hautes études, that he should read Le Goff ’s Les Intellectuels au moyen âge. Braudel did so and accepted Le Goff for a position at the institution, which Le Goff entered in the autumn of 1959. Le Goff ’s new employer, L’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), is a sort of research university. Its focus is on teaching research methods to advanced students in the social sciences and on disseminating the results of the research conducted by the faculty. Directors of studies and assistant and associate professors (maîtres de conférences) discuss their own research in seminars attended by a group of students consisting solely of doctoral candidates. The aim of the school is primarily to train new generations of researchers in both historical theory and practice. Le Goff thrived in his career at the EHESS, finding there an atmosphere that promoted collaboration among historians and balanced research and


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teaching. Entering at the assistant level, Le Goff was quickly promoted in 1962 to director of studies. He served as the institution’s Director between 1972 and 1977 (following in the steps of prestigious historians such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel), and remained at the EHESS until his retirement in 1992. His students remember fondly his seminars where sandwiches and “a little wine” from Nantes (labeled “the Wine of Abélard” in honor of the twelfth-century philosopher who had praised its virtues) followed textual exegesis and analysis of historical documents. Early on in his directorship of the EHESS, Braudel pushed his staff toward internationalization, and he sent Le Goff to congresses in countries such as Italy, Germany, and Poland. Especially influential for Le Goff was his experience in Poland, which yielded deep friendships with several Polish academics, including Bronislaw Geremek, an eminent medieval historian who became involved with the Solidarity movement and eventually became a European senator and Poland’s Foreign Minister. Le Goff married a Polish woman in 1962. The EHESS advocates the strong association of seminar teaching and the historian’s research, and Le Goff embraced this association. For example, some of Le Goff ’s edited volumes such as Le Charivari (Charivari, 1981), and L’Exemplum (The Exemplum, 1982) grew out of his collaborative work at the EHESS. When in 1962 Le Goff first became director of studies, his seminar centered on the history of religious ideas and social groups between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. The following year he changed focus and renamed his seminar “History and sociology of the medieval West,” a title that he kept for the next twelve years. His seminars addressed topics such as collective fears (the fear of illness and epidemics, for example), and from 1965 until 1972, he focused on the relationship between high and popular culture. In 1969, he initiated research on exempla, the short edifying and moralizing tales utilized by preachers in their sermons. In 1973 and 1974, he refocused his seminar on the cultural anthropology of the medieval West, and in 1974 and 1975, he redefined his topic as the historical anthropology of the medieval West. In 1975, Le Goff added to his seminar a research group entitled GAHOM (Groupe d’anthropologie historique de l’occident médiéval, or Group for the Historical Anthropology of the Medieval West), and created a second seminar that focused variously on work in the Middle Ages, gestures in feudal society, royal ideology (especially as regards the Capetians and King Louis IX), and, finally, laughter in the Middle Ages. After his retirement, Le Goff for a while kept his seminars going so that their participants could discuss some of the entries to be found in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’occident médiéval (Encyclopedia of the Medieval West, 1999). During his early years at the EHESS, Le Goff realized that he would never complete his thèse d’état. Instead, after Arthaud Editions asked him in 1960 to write a book for their series on great civilizations, he focused his efforts on producing a global, comprehensive, and encyclopedic treatment of the Middle Ages. While working on this book, Le Goff found the time to write a different general work

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of medieval history, Le Moyen âge, first published in 1962. Covering the period from 1060 to 1330, this book appeared in a series entitled “Voir l’histoire” (“See History”). In keeping with the series title, Le Moyen âge is amply illustrated, and the illustrations are integrated with the text in order to prove Le Goff ’s broader point about the Middle Ages. In his introduction, Le Goff rebuts those Renaissance scholars who had so narrowly defined the Middle Ages as the “dark, Gothic” years that separated a glorious Antiquity from their brilliant own era, and Le Goff advances his own theory (which would come to enjoy widespread popularity) of a long Middle Ages that was simultaneously golden and black legend, remote and different yet the originator of modern society. Le Goff treats the Middle Ages here in a relatively traditional and narrative manner: his discussion progresses chronologically from a discussion of the early prosperity of the eleventh century, along with its technological innovations and commercial development, to considerations of social relationships among aristocrats, peasants, and town dwellers; the centralization of European states and of the Church; and the renewal of learning in urban schools and universities. The text ends with the crises of the fourteenth century brought about by limitations both physical and intellectual. In 1964, Arthaud published La Civilisation de l’occident médiéval, later translated as Medieval Civilization, 400–1500 (1988). As in Le Moyen âge, the illustrations here are offered to the reader as evidence rather than distraction: pictures and text are integrated and mutually supporting, and La Civilisation de l’occident médiéval is yet another work of synthesis, drawing upon the work of other historians while offering few references and only a short bibliography. La Civilisation de l’occident médiéval, however, is innovative in a number of respects. Le Goff separates his narrative and his analysis: the first four chapters follow a traditional narrative approach that describes a chronological historical evolution, while the next six chapters discuss various, often unexpected, aspects of medieval civilization between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. In his introduction to the French edition, Le Goff surprises his readers by asking them directly if they would like to travel back to the Middle Ages, and he reminds his audience that medieval people did not like to travel; they mainly wanted to escape this world and to gain heaven. From the start, he grabs the attention of his audience by confronting it with the distance that separates modern society from a past that idealized death and feared hell. In his analysis, Le Goff does not neglect traditional topics such as rivalries between secular and religious powers, or towns and monasteries, but he spends much of his time discussing elements not often found in works of historical synthesis in the early 1960s: structures of space and time in the Middle Ages; material conditions and everyday life; medieval concepts of society (he discusses the tripartite division of society into a fighting, a praying, and a working class); the mentalities, sensibilities, and attitudes of various classes; diet; disease; climate, topography, and geography; the exploitation of female labor; and even the social exclusion of foreigners and the handicapped. In tackling these unconventional subjects, Le Goff draws upon the tools and methods of the social and even natural sciences, such


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as archeology, climatology, and dendrochronology. Throughout his discussion, Le Goff maintains his characteristically balanced attitude toward the Middle Ages, highlighting both the familiar and the unfamiliar elements of the medieval past and avoiding the excesses of obscurantism and adulation. In writing La Civilisation de l’occident médiéval, Le Goff was one of the first historians to press forward the history of mentality and sensibility. In his own words, he was following in the footsteps of historians such as Maurice Lombard, Fernand Braudel, and Marc Bloch, who had each influenced him specifically. To Lombard and Braudel, he attributes a rethinking of how time and space function in history, and in Bloch he sees a founder of the history of sensibility and mentality. Le Goff ’s text introduced to history new methodologies that were emerging at the time, derived from the French school of anthropology and anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and from comparative historians such as Georges Dumézil. In 1968, Le Goff showed his talent for media when he anchored Les lundis de l’histoire (Mondays for History), a radio show dedicated to history broadcast on France’s cultural radio station, France Culture. Pierre Sipriot, a journalist, had created and produced the radio program since 1966; when he changed positions, he asked Le Goff to take over the show. The general idea was to popularize the intellectual revolution of the Annales school and to discuss topics and books that covered all periods of history, and that were not widely read outside university circles. For a few years, Le Goff single-handedly directed the one-and-a-half-hour radio show, although he eventually shared responsibility for the show with various historians specializing in various periods and places. Until recently, Le Goff continued to discuss medieval and ancient books on the show on a monthly basis. In the late 1960s, Le Goff found himself at the forefront of the French (and, in a sense, of the global) historical profession, as he came to head two of France’s most prestigious historical institutions. In 1969, Fernand Braudel stepped down as editorial director of the journal Annales and named Le Goff, along with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Marc Ferro, as his successor. Le Goff and his colleagues reformed the Annales, opening the journal to social scientists, and they inaugurated the new concept of “special issues” in 1969 with an issue dedicated to history and biology. Opening the Annales to other human sciences paved the way for the development of historical anthropology. Le Goff conceived of the field of historical anthropology as the historicization of humans in their entirety; that is, historical anthropologists would describe past humans’ behavior and thoughts; they would discover their material, biological, affective, and mental lives. Like traditional historians, historical anthropologists would use written texts as their primary source of information about their subjects, but historical anthropologists would analyze topics long familiar to anthropologists who studied contemporary peoples but rarely treated by historians, such as the function and chronological evolution of certain physical gestures, for example, or the history of the body (on the latter topic, Le Goff ’s interest was piqued by Marc Bloch’s classic essay on the healing powers of French and British kings, entitled Les Rois thaumaturges, published in

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1924). Le Goff befriended anthropologists and started applying their methods to his own analysis of medieval saints’ lives (hagiography), travel literature, exempla, and folklore. Then, when Fernand Braudel stepped down from its directorship in 1972, Le Goff ’s colleagues elected him director of the Sixth Section of the EHESS, increasing still more Le Goff ’s already substantial influence and power. He reformed the Sixth Section by proposing and winning a new status for the school that granted it financial independence and autonomy from the French Ministry of Education, and he solved the school’s housing problems by moving to new premises near the Parisian Maison des sciences de l’homme (House of Human Sciences, founded by Braudel in 1965 to house the meetings of social scientists). During the 1970s, Le Goff and his co-editor of Annales, Pierre Nora, collaborated successfully on a series of projects. In 1970, Nora, Professor of History at Oran High School in Algeria, asked Le Goff to join him as editor at Gallimard Editions, an important French publishing house. Together they founded a prestigious history series called “La Bibliothèque des histoires” (the History Library). Le Goff served on this editorial board until he became director of the EHESS, but he continued to work with Nora long after that. Le Goff ’s association with Nora resulted in the publication in 1974 of the three-volume Faire de l’histoire (translated as Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, 1985). This collection of essays, edited by Le Goff and Nora, introduces readers to the writing and research of the era’s best historians, as well as to the latest historiographical developments, which French historians had often pioneered. In 1977, Nora proposed that Le Goff assemble in a single volume the various articles that Le Goff had published between 1960 and 1976. Given the title Pour un autre moyen âge, this influential collection of eighteen articles makes apparent the freshness of Le Goff ’s approach and the diversity of his interests. The volume begins with a re-evaluation of Jules Michelet, the nineteenth-century historian who was, at that time, far from popular among medieval historians. Michelet wrote about the whole of French history, and the sections of his work devoted to the Middle Ages unflatteringly depicted the period in ways reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s in Notre-Dame de Paris: the Middle Ages come across as somber and dreary. Le Goff, however, offers a defense of Michelet, suggesting that Michelet’s documentary erudition and familiarity with the sources was greater than is usually recognized, and that Michelet drew distinctions among various subperiods within the Middle Ages. His re-evaluation of Michelet also emphasizes approvingly that historian’s humanity and his determination to uncover the voices of those who, because of their social class, left relatively little mark on the documentary record with which historians work. Other articles address issues of longstanding interest to Le Goff, such as the mindset of medieval merchants and clerical hostility toward them. Once again, through his consideration of the complex relationship among the clergy, morality and ethics, and merchants, Le Goff combines the history of ideas and social history in a distinctive manner. Medieval clerics accused merchants, who profited from the transportation of goods but produced nothing


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physical themselves, with selling time in a manner not unlike usurers. Time, however, belonged to God, and hence ought not to be sold. Le Goff rightfully identifies this discussion as a pivotal moment in the history of economics, because this challenge to the legitimacy and morality of the merchant class could have dampened or destroyed economic growth during the Middle Ages. In other articles, Le Goff addresses different conceptions of time (clerical time, merchants’ time, and natural time) and the different ways in which time was reckoned; the valorization of manual and intellectual work, and the marginalization of professions such as prostitute, juggler, and acrobat; the relationship between popular and clerical culture; and medieval dreams and dreamers. Le Goff devoted the last section of Pour un autre moyen âge to historical anthropology, and he defends the field and its new methodology. Our daunting lack of historical knowledge concerning humanity during the Middle Ages can be filled by turning to research methods traditionally applied by anthropologists to “primitive” societies, as long as those methods are adapted to the medieval source material. Drawing on research that dealt with illiterate societies and their use of symbolic behaviors and gestures, Le Goff adapts some of that research to the study of the Middle Ages in an article that analyzes the relatively well-documented ritual of commendation, whereby one person became the vassal of another. Before Le Goff, the study of ritual in medieval history was largely limited to the history of liturgy, where historians were more interested in reconstructing the physical act of ritual than in determining its meaning for society. Le Goff ’s classic and groundbreaking discussion of the ritual of commendation, with its emphasis on the reinforcement of personal ties and consensus, contributed to ritual becoming a subject of rapidly increasing interest to medieval historians in subsequent decades. In 1981, Le Goff published the result of ten years of labor originally focused on medieval travels, real and imaginary. La Naissance du purgatoire (translated as The Birth of Purgatory, 1984) showed again this historian’s originality as he assessed the historical evolution of a concept that many never thought had a history, or at least a history whose chronological evolution could be recovered. His starting-point was the detailed description of travels to the otherworld found in the apocalyptic literature, where travelers visited various parts of the “otherworld.” Analyzing this material, Le Goff noticed that, around the twelfth century, the word “purgatory” evolved from an adjective to a substantive noun, from the purgatory fire that cleansed sinners to the location Purgatory. The moment the adjective became a substantive marked the birth of a new geography of eternity. Purgatory was added to the old division between Heaven and Hell. Purgatory also added a new “time” between death and last judgment – the topic, again, shows Le Goff ’s preoccupation with time and space. Le Goff traced the formation of this new geography from Antiquity until the early fourteenth century of Dante. The appearance of this third locale added a new dimension to sin, penance, and the relationship between life and death. Eternal suffering could now be avoided through purgation; and through their recitation of prayers and masses, the living could help the

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dead by hastening their stay in the purging fire. The birth of Purgatory also involved a reconceptualizing of sin and the development of gradations, because some, the venial sins, could be purged, while others, the mortal sins, could not be. The concept of Purgatory forced a rethinking of the Christian concept of redemption and of how Christians distinguished between the elected and damned. Le Goff also considers how certain heretical sects refused to accept the existence of Purgatory and the concept’s social ramifications, as it offered to medieval merchants, whose odds of salvation were generally reckoned to be slim, a greater hope of redemption. As Le Goff prepared publication of La Naissance du purgatoire, he also took on several other projects that added to his reputation. The Italian publishing house Enaudi asked him to write a set of historiographical articles. Le Goff responded by writing ten essays that first appeared in Italian between 1977 and 1981 in the several volumes of the Encyclopedia Enaudi; four of these essays gained a wider readership when they were translated into French in 1988 under the title Histoire et mémoire (translated as History and Memory, 1992). Here, Le Goff examines the relationship and the differences between history and memory, as well as the ways in which individuals and institutions can consciously or subconsciously manipulate the past. In addition to tackling the topic of memory, which became the subject of intense historical investigation in the 1990s, Le Goff renews his defense of historical anthropology as the only science capable of reaching the deepest levels of historical reality, whether material, mental, or political. Le Goff further develops his ideas about the conceptualization of time in primitive and industrial societies, and he contemplates the role of rituals in lessening the distance between the past and the present, the ancient and the modern. Le Goff ’s interest in methodological issues is also apparent in his editorship of La Nouvelle histoire (The New History), published in 1978, which became the academic bible of a new generation of historians and alerted contemporaries to the potential of new technologies, especially the computer, to revolutionize the study of history. With his study of Purgatory, Le Goff had showed once again his interest in what the French call l’imaginaire, a word for which English terms such as “imaginary” or “imagination” are poor substitutes because the English terms connote fancifulness and make-believe, connotations that are absent from the French term. In 1985, Le Goff published L’Imaginaire médiéval (translated as The Medieval Imagination, 1988), which continues in its essays various themes already encountered in Pour un autre moyen âge: time, the relationship between high and low culture, and the history of dreams and dreaming. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Le Goff ’s work is that his collected essays are among his most important contributions. The collections allow readers to grasp his originality and wide range of interests, and the essay format appealed to Le Goff because it allowed him to return frequently to some of his favorite sources and to refine his analyses of various topics. Le Goff begins this collection of essays by reiterating his push for conceptualizing the Middle Ages within the longue durée; that is, for considering


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changes as they occurred in the long term (say, over the course of several centuries). Like other historians of his generation, Le Goff ’s interest in history and the longue durée was rooted, in part, in his experiences during World War II. Rather than making French historians keenly interested in individual personalities and events, such as wars, that shaped history, World War II led Le Goff and his colleagues (paradoxically, according to some commentators) to minimize the significance of wars and individuals as catalysts and causes of change. Instead, Le Goff dealt with deeper and slower changes spread out over long periods of time, allowing him and historians like him to examine what anthropologists often call deep structures, whether mental or physical. The essays collected in the book, divided into five sections devoted to topics such as “the marvelous” and “literature and the imagination,” cover some of the same ground that Le Goff had covered in his earlier work, but he continues to refine here his approach to the history of mentalities, distinguishing among subcategories of imagination (representation, symbolism, and ideology). Le Goff also manages to combine various longstanding interests in surprising ways, especially in his essay on “Gestures in Purgatory,” and he addresses new topics such as the body and its conceptualization in the Middle Ages, thereby engaging a field that had recently emerged in American feminist historiography. In addition to showcasing how anthropological methods could be brought to bear on medieval history, L’Imaginaire médiéval showed historians how they might address literature, a source increasingly ignored by historians as their field moved out of the humanities and into the social sciences. It is, perhaps, in his essay on dreaming that Le Goff is most successful in integrating material history and the history of mentalities. In this essay, Le Goff correlates dreaming with social class during the Middle Ages, showing how there occurred a “liberation” or a democratization of dreaming, which, previously confined to a small class of specialists, came to be accepted as common to all classes and as serving a natural function. This collection of essays became an exemplar of interdisciplinary history, and its rather quick translation into English raised Le Goff ’s profile in the United States, where the Annales school had grown influential. As Le Goff ’s reputation grew in France and elsewhere, he accepted projects that show his range of interest. In 1983, for example, Paris’s RAPT, the organization that operates the city’s mass transportation system, called on Le Goff and his expertise in urban history. Parisian authorities asked Le Goff to participate in a series of seminars that would reflect upon and improve transportation in the city and between the city and its various suburbs. Le Goff and various social scientists took on the challenge and discussed the use of space and time in contemporary Paris, as well as the linkage of center and periphery in the capital. Similarly, French authorities also called on the historian to reform French school programs. France’s government and especially its educational system are highly centralized, and each new government attempts to reform the educational system and curriculum; Le Goff became involved in these periodic efforts.

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In 1986, Le Goff again examined the encounter of religion and the merchant class in La Bourse et la vie: économie et religion au moyen âge, which was translated in 1988 under the catchy title Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages. The focus of this breezy book is the usurer and usury, which was perhaps the largest problem in thirteenth-century moral thought. Le Goff identifies the main problem of medieval Christianity: how to justify capitalism and with it the merchant class in a world whose dominant religion saw itself and money or wealth as being at odds. Incorporating the emergence of Purgatory that he had previously traced, Le Goff is able to suggest that, by the end of the thirteenth century, a new ethic and a new conceptualization of sin and penance allowed usurers to redeem themselves. In the medieval economic theory of reciprocity, usury meant receiving interest (that is, receiving back more than had originally been lent) in an economic operation that should have yielded none. Le Goff shows the difficulty that clerics encountered as they attempted to grapple with the emergence of a monetarized exchange economy with ample amounts of liquid capital. Initially, theologians and preachers simply condemned the usurer as a sinner and a criminal. Just as intellectuals sold knowledge, usurers sold time, but both of those things properly belonged to God, and no person had the right to sell them. In both cases, the practice was tainted, and Christians linked the practice of usury to Jews and Judaism. In order to redeem himself, the usurer had to choose between his purse and his soul, and Le Goff allows that society’s fear of damnation retarded medieval Europe’s economic development to a certain extent. However, as the capitalist economy took hold, and many Christians and Christian institutions succumbed to the temptation of lending money at interest, usurers found themselves with a way out of their spiritual predicament, thanks to the emergence and acceptance of the concept of Purgatory. Usurers who lent money at a reasonable amount of interest sinned moderately, meriting Purgatory but not hell, and after the thirteenth century, the usurer could choose his purse and his (eternal) life. In 1987, Le Goff edited a collection of essays written by various authors about different professions and human “types” as they existed in the Middle Ages. Published as L’Uomo medievale and L’Homme médiéval (Medieval Man) in Italian and French respectively, the book was published in 1990 in an English translation with a genderless title, Medieval Callings. In Medieval Callings, each author addresses a “human type”: monk, warrior, peasant, city-dweller, intellectual, artist, merchant, woman, saint, and outcast. Although critics have suggested that the Annales school, with its emphasis on long-term, impersonal trends, produced “history without people,” this collection of essays is exclusively about people, and reminds audiences that humans of the past were humans like those who exist today. As had become usual, Le Goff ’s latest book was highly successful, and its translation into English was characteristically speedy. As Le Goff neared and passed retirement, he continued his feverish activity. What is most striking about Le Goff and his work in the 1990s is not his sheer


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productivity – it is his embracing of the genre of biography. Le Goff ’s best-known work of biography is without a doubt his voluminous Saint Louis, published in 1996; it is a work one thousand pages in length that took ten years to complete. In his maturity, Le Goff capped his career with a study of a great man, a king and saint. The biographical genre is generally associated with the traditional political and military history against which the Annales school had revolted. Back in 1971, Le Goff had published in English one of his most famous articles in the journal Daedalus. (The article did not appear in French until it was re-edited, translated, and included in the collection L’Imagination médiévale.) In “Is politics still the backbone of history?” Le Goff questioned traditional history that heeded only the factual and political, and he expounded the views of those Annalistes who considered traditional narrative political history to be passé and old. However, Le Goff did not reject political history in itself, only political history as it had been written before. The social sciences would permit historians to return to traditional subjects with a fresh set of questions generated by the encounter between history and anthropology. Le Goff claimed the field of politics and called upon historians to address questions of power, authority, and political symbolism – to address politics, in other words, as a social and cultural phenomenon, rather than as a set of institutions and as an expression of the quirks of individual personalities. Le Goff ’s Saint Louis lives up to the program that Le Goff had sketched twenty-five years earlier. Not surprisingly, Le Goff explains at the outset why he has written a biography and how he settled on King Louis IX as his subject. Before fixing his choice on Saint Louis, Le Goff had considered writing on Francis of Assisi or Frederic II Hohenstaufen. However, because both were already the subject of extensive biographical investigation, Le Goff opted instead for the saint-king. However, Le Goff ’s biography was not going to be a traditional biography. Le Goff took heed of Pierre Bourdieu’s warning against the “biographical illusion” that, because the author knows how the life turned out, brings a sense of predetermination and destiny to the subject’s life, and attempts to smooth out or to ignore all of the subject’s ambiguities and contradictions so that the subject becomes readily comprehensible, a distinct personality fated to became famous. From the many documents he examined (including the first example of a medieval biography regarding a famous subject written by a layperson, Jean de Joinville), Le Goff distinguishes two Saint Louis: the real man as he actually existed, and the one who existed in the imaginations of his medieval biographers. Le Goff attempts to study both of these Saint Louis, and that king’s long reign (he ruled some forty-four years) offers the historian a chance to penetrate the “production of memory” in many contemporary texts and, as far as possible, approach the individual behind the idealized portraits. He attempts to reconstruct the king’s personality and the events of his life, much as any biographer would do, but he startles the reader when he asks in the second section of his biography if Saint Louis really existed – an unusual

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question for a biographer because it negates his own task. The sources that describe King Louis are numerous but often do so in stereotypical ways, and Le Goff devotes a good deal of effort to studying the contemporary image of Saint Louis: who produced it and for what ends, and how it was produced. Le Goff shows a Saint Louis whom his mother and his environment more or less programmed to become the ideal Christian king. The Capetian dynasty needed a saint to become itself a holy dynasty. In Saint Louis, Le Goff attempts what he calls, in Une vie pour l’histoire, a “global biography” that shows how Saint Louis’ milieu produced the biographical subject and delves as deeply into that milieu as into the subject itself. Indeed, Le Goff (with extreme originality) offers a triple vision of the subject, which translates into a triple biographical approach that centers on: (1) chronology and the main events of the subject’s life; (2) a critique of the sources that leads, in turn, to a discussion of the production of the “memory” of Saint Louis; and (3) a discussion of the value system in effect during the king’s lifetime. This methodology brings Le Goff as close as possible to what he calls a global or total biography. After discussing the real and imagined Saint Louis, Le Goff returns to his old obsession, medieval conceptions of time and space, this time treating them insofar as they related to the life of King Louis. Le Goff also examines other elements of King Louis’ milieu, such as the intellectual and artistic environment of his time, his family, and institutional development in thirteenth-century France (especially the evolution of monarchy within feudal society). In his final assessment of King Louis, Le Goff identifies the following as the key element that reveals the true historical character of Saint Louis: he was a king, and a saint with sacred healing power, suffering. This emphasis on affliction plunges modern readers into a medieval value system where kings were compared to, and expected to emulate, the suffering Christ, rather than to serve as triumphant rulers. His multiple defeats, his capture during his first crusade and his death during the second one, constituted a spiritual triumph. In this sense, Saint Louis was very much a medieval king. Although Le Goff ’s Saint Louis could be reckoned as his life’s masterpiece, it was hardly the only work (and not even the only biographical work) that he produced in the 1990s. In 1999, Le Goff published a collection of four previously published biographical essays on Francis of Assisi called, simply, Saint François d’Assise (translated as Saint Francis of Assisi, 2004). The earliest of these essays had first appeared in 1967, which demonstrates how Le Goff ’s interest in exploring the biographical genre long predated the actual publication of Saint Louis. Given Le Goff ’s interests in urban history and religious history, Saint Francis of Assisi was a natural subject for him to address. For Le Goff, Francis of Assisi was a man of strong contrasts who epitomized an era. He spent his life on the roads of Europe but constantly sought solitude; he lived and worked on the margins of society and on the margins of established Christianity, yet he was never labeled as a heretic and, indeed, became a revered saint. Most importantly, he was a figure of great importance who pioneered new forms of piety and religious living, and who


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preached in cities and developed a spirituality, based on his understanding of the apostolic life, that was suitable for the new and growing urban world with its incipient capitalist market economy. As Le Goff likes to remind his readers, the thirteenth century is noteworthy for its marginalization of groups such as Jews, lepers, and heretics, and this marginalization was rooted (in part) in the clash between economic transformations and religious values. Francis of Assisi and the religious order that he founded, the Franciscans, tried to find a balance between a revalorization of manual labor and a liturgical piety expressed through prayer; in other words, they sought a new equilibrium between the active and the contemplative life. Again, Le Goff ’s interest in Francis leads the author to attempt a form of biography that he calls total. Le Goff opens the volume with an article that contextualizes the saint, and he locates Francis in a liminal era between social renewal and the heaviness of old feudal structures. His desire for renewal and the existence of traditions that he could not escape framed Francis’s life, leaving the man and the saint always torn. The second article in the volume is organized chronologically and likewise places the saint in his geographical, social, cultural, and historical context, but as he did with Saint Louis, Le Goff also scrutinizes contemporary portrayals of Francis of Assisi in order to demonstrate how his biographers constructed an image of the man that conformed to specific agenda, an image that the historian has to avoid. The historian needs to plow through what Le Goff calls “Franciscan typology” in order to reach the real man, but Le Goff allows that the real Francis of Assisi is hard to find. The last two essays are an attempt at “reviving” Saint Francis by showing his influence on the Franciscan Order and by highlighting the contradiction between Francis’s aspirations and the evolution of the order that he created. Le Goff concludes that, because the thirteenth century can be regarded as having introduced a number of “modern” elements into medieval Europe, Francis of Assisi can be regarded as a medieval “modern man” insofar as he accepted those elements. Yet Le Goff also argues that Francis of Assisi could be regarded as, in other ways, a thirteenth-century reactionary in search of a return to traditional values, because Francis was no fan of book-learning and the university, or of money. In 2004, Le Goff ’s studies of King Louis and of Francis of Assisi were combined into a single volume and republished as Héros du moyen âge: le saint et le roi (Heroes of the Middle Ages: The Saint and the King). Le Goff ’s latest collaborative enterprise is his edition, published in 1999, of Dictionnaire raisonné de l’occident médiéval, a project that he initiated with one of his most successful students, Jean-Claude Schmitt. In the preface, Le Goff elegantly summarizes his life’s accomplishment when he states that, during the twentieth century, medieval history has been a privileged area of methodological renewal as historians have combined scientific rigor with the use of historical imagination and drawn upon the present to formulate questions about the past without falling into anachronism. The dictionary itself apprises readers of the state of current research on specific topics, especially those dealing with medieval

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society and culture. Authors discuss hypotheses and debates concerning, for example, artisans, epidemiology, eschatology, freedom and servitude, nature, the sea, reason, time, and work. Le Goff ’s only recent original work is his edition of a manuscript containing Saint Louis’ royal ordination, Le Sacre royal à l’époque de Saint-Louis d’après le manuscrit latin 1246 de la BNF (The Royal Ordination at the Time of Saint Louis according to the Latin Manuscript 1246 of the French National Library, 2001). Nonetheless, his fame has hardly abated. In 1999, several of his most important essays were republished as Un autre moyen âge (Another Middle Ages). Several of his radio commentaries were edited and published in 2001 under the title Cinq personages d’hier et d’aujourd’hui: Bouddha, Abélard, Saint François, Michelet, Bloch (Five People of Yesterday and Today: Buddha, Abelard, Saint Francis, Michelet, and Bloch), and interviews that he has granted to various journalists on many different topics have also been gathered together and published. Le Goff ’s center-left politics has generally been moderate and his political involvement relatively understated, but as Europeans began to explore seriously the notion of a European Union, Le Goff became an ardent supporter of the formation of a united Europe (and, it should be noted, the cause of human rights). Le Goff has a deep sense of association with the whole of Europe, including Eastern Europe (which he knows well and where he has spent some time). To an extent unusual in a French historian, Le Goff ’s work transcends national boundaries, and some of his most recent essays and books reflect his interest in European unification, emphasizing how the Middle Ages fostered the concept of a single Europe: La Vieille Europe et la notre (Old Europe and Ours, 1994); L’Europe racontée aux jeunes (Europe Told to Young People, 1996); and L’Europe est-elle née au moyen âge? (2003; translated as The Birth of Europe, 2005). Since 1988 he has also directed the publication of several books on Europe in a series entitled “Faire l’Europe” (Make Europe) published simultaneously in five languages. In 1993, the first three books of the series appeared. He is a strong defender of the rapprochement between France and Germany following the end of World War II, presenting it to Euro-skeptics as a return to the old Carolingian system of West Francia and East Francia. The friendship of France and Germany are, for him, the foundation of the European Union, and he strongly supported the approval of the accords of Maastricht that have redefined the relationships among European nations by, for example, harmonizing their currencies and monetary systems. Le Goff is convinced that the future of Europe rests on the free circulation of ideas, which the erasure of national borders will promote. In a 1998 volume edited by Le Goff ’s friends and colleagues, Jacques Revel and Jean-Claude Schmitt, entitled L’Ogre historien: autour de Jacques Le Goff (The Ogre Historian: Concerning Jacques Le Goff ), various contributors emphasize Le Goff ’s contributions to the field of history, insisting on the significance of his historicalanthropological methodology and on his discussion of historical imagination. The title of the volume is a wink at the man’s love of eating and learning. Le Goff is


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a large consumer of food and words (after all, he is one of France’s most prolific historians). His greatest contribution may be that, thanks to Le Goff ’s work, so many others have come to share his appetite for history.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Jacques Le Goff Marchands et banquiers du moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956; rev. edn., 1993). Les Intellectuels au moyen âge (Paris: Seuil, 1957; rev. edn., Paris: Collection Point Histoire, 1985); translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan as Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). Le Moyen âge (Paris: Bordas, 1962; revised as Le Moyen âge: 1060–1330, 1971). La Civilisation de l’occident médiéval (Paris: Arthaud, 1964; rev. edn., 1984); translated by Julia Barrow as Medieval Civilization: 400–1500 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988; rev. edn., 1990; rev. again, New York: Barnes and Noble, 2000). Pour un autre moyen âge: temps, travail, et culture en occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1977; rev. edn., 1991); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; rev. edn., 1982). La Naissance du purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981; rev. edn., 1991); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; rev. edn., 1986). L’Apogée de la chrétienté: vers 1180–vers 1330 (Paris: Bordas, 1982; revised as Le XIIIe siècle: l’apogée de la chrétienté, vers 1180–vers 1330, 1994). L’Imaginaire médiéval: essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1985; rev. edn., 1991); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, rev. edn., 1992). La Bourse et la vie: économie et religion au moyen âge (Paris: Hachette, 1986; rev. edn., 1997); translated by Patricia Ranum as Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 1988; rev. edn., 1990). Histoire et mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); translated by Steven Rendall and Elisabeth Claman as History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). La Vieille Europe et la notre (Paris: Seuil, 1994). L’Europe racontée aux jeunes (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Saint François d’Assise (Paris: Le Grand livre du mois, 1999); translated by Christine Rhone as Saint Francis of Assisi (London: Routledge, 2004). Un autre moyen âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1999): comprises Pour un autre moyen âge; L’Occident médiéval et le temps; L’Imaginaire medieval; La Naissance du purgatoire; Les Limbes; La Bourse et la vie; Rire au moyen âge; Le Rire dans les règles monastiques du haut moyen âge. Cinq personages d’hier et d’aujourd’hui: Bouddha, Abélard, Saint François, Michelet, Bloch (Paris: La Fabrique édition, 2001). Le Sacre royal à l’époque de Saint-Louis d’après le manuscrit latin 1246 de la BNF (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).

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L’Europe est-elle née au moyen âge? (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003); translated by Janet Lloyd as The Birth of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) Une histoire du corps au moyen âge, by Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong (Paris: Editions Liana Levi, 2003). Héros du moyen âge: le saint et le roi (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).

Edited Works Hérésies et société dans l’Europe pré-industrielle, XIe–XVIIIe siècle: communications et débats du colloque de Royaumont, edited by Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Mouton, 1968). Faire de l’histoire, 3 vols., edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974; rev. edn., 1986); translated by David Denby, Martin Thom, and Ian Patterson as Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). La Nouvelle histoire, edited by Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel (Paris: Retz CEPL, 1978; abridged edn., Brussels: Complexe, 1988). Intellectuels français, intellectuels hongrois: XIIe–XXe siècle: actes du colloque franco-hongrois d’histoire sociale à Matrafured, edited by Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1980). La Ville en France au moyen âge: des carolingiens à la renaissance, edited by Jacques Le Goff, André Chedeville, and Jacques Rossiaud (Paris: Seuil, 1980; rev. edn., 1998). Le Charivari, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1981). L’Exemplum, edited by Jacques Le Goff, Claude Brémond, and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982). Objet et méthodes de l’histoire de la culture: colloque franco-hongrois de Tihany, 10–14 octobre 1977, organisé par l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales et l’Académie des sciences de Hongrie, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Belà Kopeczi (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1982). Crise de l’urbain, futur de la ville: colloque de Royaumont, 1984 RATP-Université-recherche, edited by Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Economica, 1985). L’Uomo medievale, edited by Jacques Le Goff (Roma: Editori Laterza, 1987); translated by Lydia G. Cochrane as Medieval Callings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; rev. edn., 1996); republished as The Medieval World (London: Collins and Brown, 1990; rev. edn., London: Parkgate Books, 1997). L’Histoire de la France religieuse, vol. 1: Des origines au XIVe siècle, edited by Jacques Le Goff and René Rémond (Paris: Seuil, 1988). Histoire de la France, vol. 2: L’Etat et les pouvoirs, edited by Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989). L’Homme médiéval, edited by Jacques Le Goff, Franco Cardini, Enrico Castelnuovo, et al. (Paris: Seuil, 1989; rev. edn., 1994). Dictionnaire raisonné de l’occident médiéval, edited by Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Fayard, 1999).

Interviews Une vie pour l’histoire: entretiens avec Marc Heurgon (Paris: La découverte, 1996). Pour l’amour des villes: entretiens avec Jean Lebrun (Paris: Textuel, 1997). Le Dieu du moyen âge: entretiens avec Jean-Luc Pouthier (Paris: Bayard, 2003).


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References Cantor, Norman F., Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991). Nora, Pierre (ed.), Essais d’égo-histoire: Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, René Rémond (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Revel, Jacques and Schmitt, Jean-Claude, L’Ogre historien: autour de Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). Rubin, Miri (ed.), The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997).

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Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929– ) Jeffrey A. Bowman

In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1973, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie described an histoire immobile, or “history that stands still.” He argued that the period from the beginning of the fourteenth century until around 1720 was one of demographic equilibrium. During these four centuries, the history of France was marked most importantly by long-term continuities. Population was relatively stable. The practices and patterns of food production changed little. These fundamental demographic and economic continuities were mirrored by enduring social structures. The central institutions of village and family life remained largely unchanged. People’s beliefs and attitudes (about property, weather, family, religion, and sex) were similarly characterized by long-term continuities. Le Roy Ladurie’s call for an histoire immobile, although it came early in a distinguished career, nonetheless articulated some of the priorities that characterize major works published during a span of four decades, from Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966; translated as The Peasants of Languedoc, 1974) to the first volume of Histoire humaine et comparé du climat: canicules et glaciers, XIIIème–XVIIIème siècles (Human and Comparative History of Climate: Dog Days and Glaciers, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, 2004). Le Roy Ladurie was the intellectual descendant of the founders of the Annales school, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and their successor, Fernand Braudel. Bloch and Febvre shifted the focus of French historiography away from pivotal battles, revolutionary treaties, and great leaders to the structures of everyday life. In doing so, they came to emphasize the importance of la longue durée, or the history of the long term, rather than that of fleeting political events. Building on the intellectual foundation they had established, Le Roy Ladurie defied the traditional political and intellectual framework for the periodization of European history, focusing his attention particularly on France from the

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later Middle Ages to the middle of the eighteenth century. The decisive developments and key turns that other historians identify in this period (such as the Hundred Years’ War, the growth of an absolutist monarchy, the Renaissance, the Reformation) play more modest roles in what Le Roy Ladurie sees as a period of sustained equilibrium. In his descriptions of premodern France, cities are not so much centers of culture and industry as they are demographic safety valves, absorbing the countryside’s excess population. Campaigning armies are not so much agents of political change as they are disease vectors. Historical change is driven not by discoveries and revolutions but by slowly changing temperatures and shrinking glaciers. The important dates are not singular and easily fixed (a coronation, a treaty), but repeated (the grape harvest, the movement of sheep from summer to winter pastures). The truly revolutionary agents are not kings, generals, cardinals, or scientists, but forests, pastures, fields, and, above all, the peasants who struggle to scratch a living from them. Le Roy Ladurie’s distinctive contribution to Annales scholarship lay in his ability to turn long-term continuities and demographic equilibrium into a compelling story in its own right. The past Le Roy Ladurie describes may have changed very slowly, but it was not uneventful. Le Roy Ladurie urges his readers to reflect on the negotiations and struggles that were at the heart of peasant life, to find a history based more in demography and economics than in genealogy and politics. He is consistently concerned with how premodern peasants (individually, in families, and in villages) interacted with each other and with their natural environment. His inaugural lecture thus recapitulated some of the major findings of his research to that point, most notably in Les Paysans de Languedoc and Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (1967; translated as Times of Feast, Times of Famine, 1971), while anticipating some of the questions that would occupy him in decades to come. Le Roy Ladurie was one of the most eloquent and influential promoters of Annales principles, but his attachment to these principles was never doctrinaire, and from the middle 1950s to the early years of the twenty-first century, his work is characterized more by its remarkable breadth and congenial energy than by its rigid conformity to any particular school of thought. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was born into a prominent Norman family on July 19, 1929, at Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados. The charismatic and conservative Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel’s father, devoted himself to managing a family estate and to grassroots politics. During the 1930s, the precarious economic condition of France’s farmers was an urgent political question. The elder Le Roy Ladurie worked to achieve what he described as “peasant emancipation” by unifying French farmers politically in syndicats agricoles (agricultural syndicates). He edited the journal of the Union central des syndicats agricoles, which he renamed “syndicats paysans” as part of a surprisingly successful campaign to recuperate a term that was generally pejorative. He later served as the organization’s secretary general and briefly as Minister of Agriculture under Pierre Laval, before fighting in the Resistance.

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Jacques Le Roy Ladurie’s political activities introduced the younger Le Roy Ladurie to problems that would occupy him in his scholarly work: the material and political conditions of peasants and the contested nature of French identity. This informal education was complemented by the finest formal training available in France. After attending the elite Ecole normale supérieure, Le Roy Ladurie began his teaching career at the Lycée de Montpellier in 1955. A research fellowship at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique from 1957 to 1960 was followed by an appointment as Assistant á la Faculté des lettres at the Université de Montpellier. In 1963, he moved to the Ecole des hautes études, first as a maîtreassistant, and from 1965 as Directeur d’études in the Sixième Section. In 1967, he became editor of the journal that gave its name to the movement began by Bloch and Febvre: Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations. From there, he went on to professorships at the Sorbonne and at the Université de Paris VII. In 1973, he succeeded his mentor Fernand Braudel to the chair in the History of Modern Civilization at the Collège de France. This string of appointments marks the enviable trajectory of a productive academic career, but Le Roy Ladurie’s contributions to historical scholarship were not entirely within the academy. From 1987 to 1994, he was general administrator of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where he oversaw plans to transfer most of the vast collection from the rue de Richelieu to a new and controversial building at Tolbiac. His scholarly contributions have been acknowledged within his native France and elsewhere. He is a member of l’Institut de France (Academie des science morales et politiques) and a commandeur in the Legion of Honor. Universities around the world (including the universities of Oxford, Michigan, Geneva, Dublin, Leeds, Haifa, and Pennsylvania) have awarded him honorary degrees. By 1966, Le Roy Ladurie had published articles in respected journals (including Annales), but it was the publication of his doctoral thesis in that year as Les Paysans de Languedoc that secured his reputation as an authority on the history of rural France. Paysans is a “total history” of the peasants of a region of southern France, incorporating treatments of demography, economy, social structures, and culture. Relying mainly on voluminous land tax registers and records of tithes, the author traces fluctuations in rural population, changing prices, and shifting patterns of landholding. The accumulated data allow him to chart fluctuations within this period of equilibrium. A period of sustained growth between 1490 and 1570 followed the demographic and economic downturn of the fourteenth century. The population of many parishes grew. The growing population cleared forests, brought new land into cultivation, and pursued more intensive forms of agriculture (vineyards and olives). Few peasants could have celebrated the growth described here because it came at a high price. Malthusian demographic principles occupy a key place in this study, and the author argues that population growth outstripped gains in production. Prices rose faster than wages and real farm income refused to budge. Most peasants were obliged to make more of less. The growing economy of the


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fifteenth century, in other words, witnessed the pauperization of Languedoc’s peasants. The worsening condition of the region’s inhabitants appears clearly in the degradation of the peasant diet. The place of bread grew, while olive oil and meat shrank in significance. Ecological shocks, such as a series of catastrophic harvests between 1526 and 1535, only heightened the effects of this steady decay in the conditions of subsistence. Too many people were competing for too little food. Only a relatively small class of entrepreneurs, celebrated by Le Roy Ladurie as proto-capitalists, exploited the changing situation and built handsome fortunes. Le Roy Ladurie links these demographic and economic fluctuations to new forms of religious and social consciousness. Urban textile workers embraced Huguenot teachings, while their rural counterparts remained resolutely attached to traditional beliefs and practices. As peasants faced mounting challenges, they came to resent traditional tithe payments. Gradually, their resentment coalesced into a series of peasant resistance movements between 1560 and 1594. Beleaguered peasants voiced their discontent and, occasionally, joined forces with urban artisans to demand change. In certain places (in Romans in 1580, in Agen and in the Rouergue in 1635, in Montpellier in 1645) these tensions erupted violently. A period of contraction followed the unhealthy growth of the fifteenth century. Prices collapsed, gross agricultural product declined, peasants abandoned productive land, and, in the final decades of the century, population fell. A creeping economic sclerosis led first to stagnation and ultimately to protracted recession during the final decades of the seventeenth century. These distressing conditions led to resistance, but peasant hostility had shifted from tithes to taxes. Louis XIV’s voracious appetite for military and ornamental programs led to more onerous tax burdens and to peasant misery. These economic conditions had an impact on peasant intellectual life as well. Prophetic and visionary leaders, inspired in part by Huguenot ideas, linked hatred of the tax collector to apocalyptic expectations. There was, for example, an important visionary component to the Camisard revolt and other movements around the year 1700. While the focus of Paysans is demographic and economic, Le Roy Ladurie links economic life to beliefs and cultural expressions. The real protagonist of Paysans is “a great agrarian cycle, lasting from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth.” For Le Roy Ladurie, the tax registers and tithe records reveal a Malthusian drama of rural communities struggling to balance food production and population and confronting insurmountable material limitations. He describes changing yields, prices, wages, and so forth, but the overarching theme is that this period was unified and coherent. Like his intellectual forebears, Le Roy Ladurie is eager to measure historical processes not by years and decades, but by generations and centuries. The book’s argument and his chronology are, of course, intimately related to the evidence upon which Le Roy Ladurie relies. He argues for the importance of quantitative, serial data. The model proposed in Paysans was based in part on tithe

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evidence (that is, offerings in money or in kind to churches), and the author’s enthusiasm for this type of evidence was apparent in other projects as well. Tithes offer historians continuous series of quantitative data distributed widely across time and space. Tithes were a fixed percentage of agricultural output and so they should, as least in theory, reflect overall agricultural production. As historical evidence, then, tithes were a sort of Annaliste holy grail: a continuous, quantitative series with comparative possibilities. In 1963, the economic historian Ernest Labrousse had proposed a systematic investigation of agricultural production in the Ancien Régime based on tithes. In collaboration with Joseph Goy, Le Roy Ladurie played a key role in organizing the international research project. In a synthetic essay, he summarizes the results of two decades of regional studies on tithes from Latin America to Hungary. Acknowledging that not all economists would be satisfied with the objectivity or precision of tithe records, Le Roy Ladurie insists that they are still useful to historians and particularly so when examined in conjunction with other data. Reviewing the great “harvest of data,” he argues that the chronology he had proposed for Languedoc also obtained (with regional variations) in other parts of France and beyond. Agricultural production had a certain limit from the fourteenth century to the early eighteenth. A fifteenthcentury demographic recession was followed by rapid growth in the sixteenth century and then stagnation around the year 1600. During the sixteenth-century recovery, population grew, wages fell, prices rose, and farms fragmented. Throughout France, these conditions set the stage for the economic crisis of the seventeenth century, whose effects were exacerbated by wars. In other words, Le Roy Ladurie argues that the period of sustained equilibrium he identified in Paysans – and the same Malthusian logic of insurmountable material limitations – was applicable to France as a whole. Aside from its innovative chronology, two other differences set Paysans apart from books (such as Marc Bloch’s seminal Les Caractéres originaux de l’histoire rurale française of 1931) that had been Le Roy Ladurie’s models. The first was a reorientation in the type of evidence. The second was a focus on regional characteristics. Most historians acknowledge Paysans to be a groundbreaking study and a significant contribution to the understanding of premodern Europe. But some economic historians suggest that the author’s definitions of rents, wages, prices, and tithes are frustratingly imprecise. Others suggest that the book’s Malthusian framework was an interpretive prison rather than a rich explanatory model. Robert Brenner criticizes the Malthusian model, saying that it yields a distorted understanding of the structure of social class in premodern France. Le Roy Ladurie published Histoire du climat only a year after Paysans. With this sweeping study of the history of climate, he proposed another innovative way of looking at the European past. The problem of identifying and interpreting historical evidence for meteorological phenomena is particularly acute. Written records about the climate in the premodern world are irregular and unreliable. Chronicles


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and letters include stray mentions of bountiful harvests, hot summers, and early frosts, but these references fall far short of the continuous, quantitative, and homogeneous series of data that were prized by Le Roy Ladurie and his contemporaries. In Histoire du climat, Le Roy Ladurie, while still gleaning insights from these patchy written sources, bases his argument on the more scientific evidence to be derived from dendrochronology and phenology. Each tree ring is a trace of the weather of a particular year, and each tree thus a treasure house of regular data from which researchers can reconstruct dry or wet, hot or cold periods with more precision than any written source would allow. Varying dates of the grape harvest each year provide a similar series. Earlier harvest dates correspond to warmer years. Evidence of glacial advances and retreats also reveal climatic change; the thrusts of the Mer de Glace, for example, that wreaked havoc in the first decades of the seventeenth century, suggest cold periods of several decades. Serial evidence gives researchers a firmer footing for reconstructing the history of the climate, but Le Roy Ladurie acknowledges that it is not always easy to translate even regular series into historical certainties. A late harvest date might indicate a particularly cool growing season or might merely reflect the winemaker’s desire to encourage “noble rot” on the vines. The abandonment of a vineyard in northern France might be an index of climatic change or the result of strictly economic factors, such as the falling price of wine. From this evidence, Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs a chronology of climate change from the tenth century until the twentieth, involving three great movements: (1) a warm period around the year 1000; (2) a “Little Ice Age” characterized by cooler weather and marked by glacial thrusts around 1200–1300 and again between 1580 and 1850; and (3) the contemporary period marked by gradual warming. The period between 1580 and 1850 receives most attention. Springs and summers between 1510 and 1560 were warmer than average (the growing peasant population described in Paysans was laboring under a hotter sun). In the final years of the sixteenth century, average temperatures began to drop and they continued to do so for more than a century. The 1690s witnessed colder, damper winters and shorter growing seasons. The conditions of late harvest (cool, wet growing seasons) would have signaled even greater difficulty for grain growers. European glaciers stretched to their maxima between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century, and provide further evidence of the “Little Ice Age” or Fernau stage from the late sixteenth century. A warming trend began in the eighteenth century. The rapid retreat of glaciers around the globe beginning in the late nineteenth century points to the continued extension of this trend. Oscillations of this magnitude, of course, had consequences for the peasants who were at the center of Le Roy Ladurie’s earlier work, but here he approaches the history of climate in its own right. He makes few attempts to link climate to social structures or particular events. He suggests that Viking colonization of the North Atlantic and the great clearances of the eleventh century owed something to the warmth of the period around the year 1000. He also suggests that there

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may be a correlation between a period of economic contraction in the late sixteenth century and the Fernau oscillation contemporary with it. Ultimately, Le Roy Ladurie leaves most of these questions about the effect of climate to other researchers, although he would return to some of them decades later in his Histoire humaine et comparé du climat. Histoire du climat is a noteworthy achievement. As in Paysans, Le Roy Ladurie encourages his readers to see gradual changes and long-term continuities. In addition to this different sense of the tempo of historical change, he also presents a different type of intellectual framework for reconstructing the past – one that celebrates connections between historians, on the one hand, and scientists (climatologists, glaciologists, and archaeologists) on the other. Finally, the project marks something characteristic of his entire career: an expansive sense of the kinds of insights to which historians should aspire. Le Roy Ladurie displays the same fearlessness in the face of core samples and tree rings as he did when confronting sixteenth-century tax registers. Histoire du climat was, in many ways, a departure from the types of demographic research he had undertaken in Paysans, but tracing the history of the climate over the course of a millennium was perhaps the logical extension of the scientific hopes of the founders of the Annales and of their enthusiasm for extended time frames. The nearly simultaneous publication of these two ambitious early works (Paysans and Histoire du climat) made Le Roy Ladurie the logical successor to his own mentor’s chair at the Collège de France. The appointment was apparently not a surprising one; he was known among Braudel’s disciples as “Le Dauphin” (“the heir apparent” or “crown prince”). In the same year he assumed that chair, he published the first volume of Le Territoire de l’historien (1973), a collection of twenty-nine previously published articles and essays. In these, he discusses the value of quantitative, serial evidence, urges historians to think in terms of the longue durée, points to some of the ways that historians might explore the material and cultural history of rural civilizations, and calls for an interdisciplinary approach to historical problems. Many of the ideas here inform Paysans and Histoire du climat, but some of the essays themselves make for invigorating reading, summing up as they do the priorities and preoccupations of French historians in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Le Roy Ladurie’s ambitious and well-respected books, along with his articles in scholarly journals and in the press, had made him a leading figure in the historical profession. Although many were familiar with Le Roy Ladurie’s work, few would have predicted the direction he took in his next book and no one would have anticipated its enormous success. The chronological and geographical scale of Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975; translated as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, 1978) was more circumscribed than that of Paysans and Histoire du climat, but the project itself was no less ambitious. Between 1318 and 1325, an inquisitor named Jacques Fournier conducted an inquisition throughout


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the diocese of Pamiers in the hopes of identifying Cathar heretics and stamping out unorthodox belief in the region. Fournier compiled a register, recording testimony given during more than five hundred interrogations. Roughly two dozen of these witnesses lived in a village called Montaillou. With the register as his evidence, Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs daily life a Pyrenean village that was a hotbed of Cathar activity. His goal is not merely to describe popular religious beliefs and practices (though he devotes several chapters to these), but to provide a comprehensive and accessible ethnographic study of the roughly two hundred people who lived in Montaillou. Montaillou has two parts. The first is devoted to the unchanging structures and seasonal patterns that dominated the lives of peasants in premodern France; that is, to an ecology of the village. The second part, “Archéologie de Montaillou: du geste au mythe,” explores gestures, attitudes, and the mores of the village’s inhabitants. Le Roy Ladurie tries to write the histoire des mentalités collectives (“history of collective mentalities”) of Montaillou’s villagers. Great lay and ecclesiastical authorities, such as the Count of Foix and the Bishop of Pamiers, played little part in the daily life of Montaillou. The domus, or family home, was the central institution of village life and the people of Montaillou would have easily identified which households had Cathar sympathies. One family, the Clergues, occupied the top of the social ladder, but they were in most respects not sharply differentiated from their neighbors. Bernard Clergue was the local agent of the Count of Foix. His brother, Pierre, was the village’s libidinous priest. Many of Montaillou’s less illustrious inhabitants were shepherds, and the annual cycles of pastoral transhumance played a key role in the region’s economy. Shepherds, such as the emblematic Pierre Maury, spent several months of every year moving their flocks between the Pyrenees and pastures to the south in Catalonia. This life fostered a particular set of mentalités pastorales (“pastoral mentalities” or “pastoral mind-set”) characterized by a carefree generosity of spirit and a sense of contentment with one’s place in the world. Here, with a touch of the nostalgia that characterizes many treatments of rural history written in the 1970s, Le Roy Ladurie sees “l’image fragile d’un certain bonheur d’Ancien Régime” or “the fragile image of a certain Ancien Régime happiness.” The (longer) second part of the book excavates the mundane daily habits and thoughts of these medieval villagers. Chapters explore body language, bathing habits, childhood, death, work, conceptions of time, and literacy. While inquisitors were eager to identify and eradicate heresy, the boundary between orthodox Christianity and Cathar heresy was murky for the inhabitants of Montaillou. The Clergues appear again, here not because of their social position but because of Pierre’s Clergue’s many well-documented amorous escapades (testimony reveals that the energetic priest had more than a dozen lovers). Throughout Le Roy Ladurie’s construction of the mentalités of Montaillou’s inhabitants, he emphasizes that these villagers were inclined to abstract reflection on religious and moral

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questions. They may have grappled with religious and moral questions using different cognitive tools than those of the formally educated inquisitors, but grapple they did. Montaillou is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction, but it is not without shortcomings. Le Roy Ladurie sets out to give readers the sense of listening directly to the voices of medieval peasants, even going so far as to have their “speech” set in italics. Some critics accuse the author of ignoring the problematic nature of the source upon which he relies. They argue that he accepts too readily the register of Jacques Fournier as a sort of ethnographic record. Given the threatening circumstances in which testimony was recorded, witnesses were likely to distort, misremember, or lie in order to save their own skins or (as Le Roy Ladurie himself suggests) to settle old scores with their enemies. The register, after all, was compiled not by peasants but by inquisitors and it may reflect less the opinions of the villagers of Montaillou than those of the clerics of Pamiers. Some readers object that, however much we may want to hear the voices of medieval peasants, they are still an arm’s length away. Criticisms such as these, serious though they are, have not prevented Montaillou from being the most influential and widely read account of peasant life in medieval Europe. If Paysans established Le Roy Ladurie’s reputation among professional historians, this bestseller won him a popular readership around the globe and the attention of generations of undergraduates. Montaillou marked both the expansion of Le Roy Ladurie’s readership and a shift in the orientation of his research. Historians of the Annales school were often accused of being obsessed with the accumulation of serial data whose interpretation yielded results that were dry and inaccessible to non-specialists. While regional studies might begin with lush evocations of sun, soil, and sheep, these were soon lost in abstract formulae and diagrams With Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie singlehandedly showed that the history of premodern, rural France could win a large and appreciative audience. He accomplished this goal in part because he was pushing historical research in a new direction. In many ways, his main concern in Montaillou was the enduring truths of village life, but the inquisitorial register upon which he relied recorded the events of only a few years. The value of the register as evidence for the attitudes of medieval peasants is still debated, but no one suggests that it provides the sort of quantitative, serial information about economic and social structures that many historians (including Le Roy Ladurie) had been advocating for several decades. Montaillou may not have been an outright renunciation of some of the guiding principles of contemporary historiography, but it was, at the very least, a powerful reminder that historians of the premodern rural world could do more than compare the tithes of Béziers with those of Beauvais. These new directions also gave shape to Le Carnaval de Romans (1979; translated as Carnival in Romans, 1979). In Paysans, Le Roy Ladurie describes sixteenthcentury conflicts over tithes and taxes and mentions, as one example, Carnival


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festivities in Romans in 1580 that turned bloody when members of the town’s elite assassinated the leader of a smoldering resistance movement. In the weeks that followed, more suspected plotters were tried and executed, bringing the death toll to as many as thirty people. The toll may seem modest given the general readiness with which blood was shed in the streets of sixteenth-century France, but in Carnival in Romans Le Roy Ladurie returns to the tumult of 1580 in order to anatomize the political, economic, and social structures of an Ancien Régime city. The conflicts of 1579 and 1580 pitted patricians against middling craftsmen, especially butchers and drapers. In 1580, the customary celebrations of Carnival metamorphosed into something between a raucous party and a minor civil war. Protests and violence elsewhere in the Dauphiné foreshadowed the slaughter at Romans. In the years leading up to 1580, urban craftsmen and rural peasants had been subject to increasingly onerous taxation and they had not suffered the growing pressure without protest. They resented the growing tax burdens both because they saw them as resulting from civic mismanagement and because the region’s nobility enjoyed exemptions from most taxes. As nobles acquired more land, modest property-holders had to bear a larger proportion of the tax burden. Their complaints were not just inevitable carping. Le Roy Ladurie shows that the tax burden of the middling classes had indeed grown swiftly. In response to this tax squeeze, urban workers formed leagues to voice their opinions and advance their interests. They were well organized, eloquent in their demands, and not easily cowed. A cahier de doléance, or “collection of complaints,” from the mid-1570s expresses the grievances of the Third Estate in the Dauphiné lucidly. Le Roy Ladurie suggests that the ideas about government and taxation expressed by the butchers and cloth-workers echoed the more learned formulations of Jean Bodin and other contemporary political theorists. In Carnaval, Le Roy Ladurie exhibits the same sensitivity to the complexities of the political and social world of the premodern French that was apparent in Paysans and Montaillou. He devotes his attention to unpacking the common and divergent interests of different groups. Sometimes the town’s bourgeois patricians allied themselves with nobles in the surrounding countryside. At other times, they were at cross-purposes. During the events of 1580, some humble quarters of the city (particularly those dominated by vineyard owners) did not support the craftsmen in neighboring quarters. Peasants in other parts of the Dauphiné had rebelled, but Le Roy Ladurie emphasizes that their interests and objectives were not the same as those of the urban craftsmen who suffered in Romans. His vivid sketch of the dramatis personae in Romans gives readers a keen sense of how the people of premodern France formed communities according to economic interests, ideological commitments, and religious beliefs. The events of 1580, in Le Roy Ladurie’s hands, help readers understand the moral and pragmatic calculus of the people of Romans – how oligarchs, craftsmen, and peasants identified their friends, helped their allies, and strove to thwart their enemies.

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The book is entitled Carnival in Romans rather than Tax Revolt in Romans or Conflicts of Interest in Romans, and it is significant that the events described took place at a particular moment on the civic, liturgical, and agricultural calendar. In the weeks preceding Lent, confraternities here and elsewhere organized processions, presentations, and competitions. In 1580, these events articulated tensions between different groups in Romans. In the Ancien Régime, divisions (religious, social, and economic) played themselves out in the festive life of the city. Drawing on the work of anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, Le Roy Ladurie explores the symbolic forest of Carnival’s world-turned-upside-down. Confraternities associated themselves with capons or partridges, with bears or rabbits, and their choices said something about how their members viewed the world. The celebration of Carnival in 1580 in Romans may have been exceptionally violent, but such celebrations were always pregnant with social and political significance. Le Roy Ladurie had reconstructed the social and political tensions first of a medieval village (Montaillou) and then of an early modern city (Romans). The overarching design of the two books is similar. In both, Le Roy Ladurie does not dismiss isolated historical events as unimportant, but rather tries to set them in relation to enduring economic and social structures. Events of short duration, such as carnival week in Romans in 1580, when carefully examined, allow historians to reconstruct the structures that gave those events meaning. Le Roy Ladurie’s eagerness to test the limits of different types of historical evidence is also apparent in two books published in the early 1980s: L’Argent, l’amour et la mort en pays d’oc (1980; translated as Love, Death, and Money in the Pays d’Oc, 1982) and La Sorciére de Jasmin (1983; translated as Jasmin’s Witch, 1987). Both projects are rooted in Le Roy Ladurie’s enduring interest in rural, premodern France. In both, Le Roy Ladurie pursues the interest in symbolic life that had characterized Carnaval. But his turn to literary sources as historical evidence marked another departure. In L’Argent, rather than unpacking the events of a particular year as he had done in Carnaval, he turned to a particular variety of literary evidence (folklore) and a particular mode of analysis (structuralism). In 1765, the abbé Fabre published an Occitan novella entitled Jean-l’ont-pris. Le Roy Ladurie builds his analysis around this novella, arguing that its preoccupation and organization are closely related to an ample body of Occitan folklore. This body of folklore, he argues, reveals important truths about the moral economy of premodern peasants. Le Roy Ladurie identifies the “love square” as the fundamental structure in Occitan folklore. The marshaled folklore of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries tells a single story with only minor variants. A young male protagonist strives to win the affection of a young woman and to marry her. In order to do so, he must overcome both the heroine’s father (or surrogate father) and rival suitors. The courtship, the impediments to it, and the hero’s eventual success in spite of those impediments, invariably have something to do with money. Le Roy Ladurie is


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primarily interested in this structure not as a literary production, but rather as a reflection of enduring mentalities. The “love square” tells readers something about the chronic concerns of people of the rural south. Readers see how fortuneless young men pursued marriages, how women assessed whether suitors were suitable for marriage, and how people sought to protect their fortunes. In general, the logic of the “love square” reveals how peasants strategized. Since Paysans, Le Roy Ladurie had worked steadily to understand and explain the economic and intellectual world of premodern, rural France, and these concerns are still present in L’Argent. Le Roy Ladurie, for example, insists that in many respects this world is characterized by long-term continuities. What is notably different here is that rather than beginning his analysis with ecology, demography, and agriculture, he begins with literature and with mentalités. In Paysans, and to an even greater extent in Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie had written about the mental furniture of medieval peasants. But in these earlier works, his treatment of mentalities and of cultural production had been predicated on a foundation of economic analysis; here he begins with folklore rather than crop yields. The suggestion that folklore might be exploited as historical evidence about everyday life is an invigorating one, and other historians have seen the same promise. L’Argent is thus an interesting experiment or, given the number of tales assessed in terms of the “love square,” series of experiments. Some readers were, however, unsatisfied. They found stultifying the repeated application of a model that perversely seemed both schematic and infinitely flexible. Rather than breathing life into folktales, the analysis instead drained them of any vitality. Other readers who had applauded the precision and care of Paysans were disappointed that the alleged connections between literary structures and historical realities were hinted at rather than thoroughly examined. Le Roy Ladurie continued his exploration of Occitan folk culture in La Sorciére. In 1840, a hairdresser-poet from Agen, named Jacque Boé and known generally as “Jasmin,” published a poem in Occitan entitled Françouneto, named for the poem’s protagonist. The poem is the literal and figurative center of the project. From it, Le Roy Ladurie sketches a picture of the place of witches and witchcraft in the area around Agen from the late sixteenth century until the mid-nineteenth. The book is divided into three sections. The first explores the place of witches and witchcraft in Gascon society, and relies both on the poem and a few scattered judicial records of witchcraft accusations. The second part is a prose translation of Jasmin’s poem. The book’s final section is devoted to chronology. The author’s ultimate goal is not merely to date the events described in Jasmin’s poem, but to show that there is a solid core of historical truth to the events described in the poem. In the poem, an attractive peasant girl, Françouneto, draws the attention of many suitors with her good looks and lively dancing. Sadly, the suitors who pursue her tend to suffer serious accidents or are driven to such distraction that they botch important agricultural tasks, such as pruning the vines. During some

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high-spirited play at a village dance, Pascal, the flower of the region’s youth and a devoted admirer, injures his arm and his ability to earn his living as a smith. During a merry New Year’s dance some time later, Laurent slips and breaks his arm while pursuing Françouneto. Neighbors begin to suspect that she is in some way responsible for these calamities. A warty sorcerer arrives and adds fuel to the fire of speculation when he informs the gathered villagers that Françouneto is of Huguenot parentage and that she is a witch. The announcement has a predictably sobering effect on the gathering. Françouneto hopes that everyone will dismiss the announcement as a groundless joke, but her neighbors recoil from her. She faints. The villagers begin to compile their own dossiers of evidence, remembering, for example, that the fields of the alleged witch’s family were immune from the normal vicissitudes of weather and climate, while neighboring crops were ruined by hail. As the evidence mounts, townsfolk (including erstwhile suitors) ostracize her. She undertakes a pilgrimage to a nearby shrine, but a violent storm erupts destroying grain and grapes. Tempers flare and the stalwart Pascal only barely manages to prevent angry villagers from burning down the house where the heroine lives with her grandmother. When Françouneto’s fiancé backs out of a proposed marriage, Pascal bravely takes the reluctant bridegroom’s place. Pascal and Françouneto are married and when the marriage is consummated without a hitch, the villagers abandon their suspicions. The happy couple is left in peace. Le Roy Ladurie examines the events of the poem alongside other bits of evidence about witches in the region. In the late eighteenth century, members of the Milamé family were, like Françouneto, suspected of hurting workmen, provoking damaging storms, and bringing about the death of pigs. The fact that their own fortunes prospered in difficult times heightened their neighbors’ suspicions. There were, doubtless, some trying times for the Milamé family, but their case, like Françouneto’s, ended happily. Officials determined that the accusations against them were slanderous and they were exonerated. Le Roy Ladurie’s objective in placing Françouneto alongside the Milamé cases and other evidence is to identify a cluster of ideas related to witches in the Agenais. Witches injured laborers, disrupted reproduction (animal and human), conjured undesirable weather (especially hail), occasionally transformed themselves into animals, and had very bad breath. Some elements of this profile are genuinely rural and of distant origins, others emerged from more learned medieval scholarly discussion of witchcraft. Together, they yield an identifiable profile for the late medieval and early modern witch. In the book’s final section, the historian searches for the kernel of historical truth in the poem. According the Le Roy Ladurie, Jasmin constructed his poem around a nucleus of longstanding oral tradition. The early part of Jasmin’s poem is larded with references to events of the late sixteenth century. Le Roy Ladurie argues that the poem does indeed record genuine historical events but that these took place in the late seventeenth century rather than the late sixteenth. He


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reconstructs the oral transmission of the Françouneto tradition over many generations by examining local property records. Finally, he surveys surviving local traditions not only up to moment of the poem’s composition, but even to the lingering traces of the oral tradition to be gleaned from villagers in 1982 when Le Roy Ladurie was doing his research. As in L’Argent, the intended lesson of this reconstruction is that there were impressive long-term continuities in peasant mentalities. A vital substructure of orally transmitted rural belief shaped the way that peasants saw the world and this substructure changed, if at all, more slowly than the climate itself. The official teachings of the Catholic Church appear only as a thin veneer upon these rock-like rural mentalities. Beginning with Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie’s research projects had focused increasingly on peasant mentalities (rather than on demography) and on literary evidence (rather than serial, quantitative data). But he had not necessarily abandoned the ambitions of an histoire totale that would incorporate ecological, economic, social, and cultural factors. In “Les masses profondes: la paysannerie,” which first appeared in 1977 as part of the Histoire économique et sociale de la France edited by Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse and was translated in 1987 as a separate volume called The French Peasantry, 1450–1660, Le Roy Ladurie’s goals are synthetic. Le Roy Ladurie surveys the demography, ecology, and economy of rural France from the fourteenth century until the late seventeenth. He again presents the model of sustained demographic equilibrium introduced in Paysans, but extends this model to other regions. Readers see the familiar peasants of Languedoc alongside their Norman, Alsatian, and Burgundian counterparts. Regional variations receive their due in this book, but on the whole Le Roy Ladurie argues that the inhabitants of the hexagon shared the same fates and suffered the same miseries during these four centuries. Yields were relatively stable in terms of product per seed and product per hectare from the fifteenth century until the mid-nineteenth. This was a period of demographic equilibrium, but plague, famine, and unrest (such as the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War) did cause population fluctuations. Population pressures in the fourteenth century outpaced production capacity. The low point (brought on by famine, plague, and war) was reached around 1430 when the population of France dipped to around ten million. Some villages and farms were abandoned, but the French countryside seems to have enjoyed more stability in this regard than did that of Germany, the Low Countries, or England. Le Roy Ladurie’s reconstruction is based on several serial indices: annual wheat consumption, tithes, salt production, age at marriage (later in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth), the height of army recruits (taller in the north than in the south), ground rents (doubling in Languedoc between 1640 and 1690, but slumping during the same period in the north), interest rates (dropping between 1570 and 1790 in Montpellier and Narbonne), wages, and wine consumption (the average agricultural worker in Languedoc enjoying 1.5 to 2 liters a day of wine through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

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Demography is Le Roy Ladurie’s chief concern here, but questions of political and social organization, from the domus (small domestic groupings familiar to Montaillou’s readers) to forms of political organization and resistance, also receive attention. In this period of stability, Le Roy Ladurie identifies some genuine political and economic shifts. Land ownership became concentrated in fewer hands in the seventeenth century. The growing economic power of the state and the growing burden of state taxation marked a real difference between the fourteenth century and the seventeenth. These premodern peasants lived in a complex social world, where different types of people (landlords, plowmen, day laborers) were affected differently by economic and demographic change. Urban artisans were, for example, more likely to have Calvinist sympathies than their rural counterparts. From the sixteenth-century Sire de Goubervill, readers learn not only about estate management in Normandy, but also about health care, religion, and the sexual mores of gentry. Le Roy Ladurie sees some cultural changes as well, such as the uneven spread of peasant literacy. The tax burdens of the seventeenth century provoked peasant resistance movements, and these are the subject of the book’s final chapter. These movements were marked by considerable variety. Some, for example, were more anti-noble than others. In general, hostility to taxes did the most to galvanize peasant resistance from an anti-salt-tax revolt of 1548 in Guyenne to massive tax strikes in the southwest a century later. Although these revolts were not revolutionary in their ultimate results, Le Roy Ladurie argues that they did manage to effect real change. The themes of French Peasantry will be familiar to readers of Paysans and Carnaval (demographic continuities, fluctuations, peasant resistance), but the broader geographical framework allows Le Roy Ladurie to incorporate research from many regional studies. Many readers applaud the breadth of coverage here, but some suggest that the author overlooks the nuances of the regional studies upon which he relied. The evidence for such a comprehensive treatment of rural life in the period is patchy, and Le Roy Ladurie did not to every reader’s satisfaction acknowledge the interpretive difficulties arising from comparing serial evidence from different locations and periods. Despite these reservations, the result is a welcome synthetic account of premodern France. The French Peasantry was the sort of book that one would have expected from Le Roy Ladurie at this stage in his career. His research had focused on peasants for decades. Here he could rearticulate the model of a period of demographic stability from the early fourteenth to the early eighteenth century he had championed, while incorporating the research of a generation of historians who had worked in fields that were at least, in part, of Le Roy Ladurie’s own making. The subject of Le Roy Ladurie’s next project was much less predictable. Adherents of the Annales school rejected traditional forms of narrative political history. In journal articles, lectures, and in books such Paysans and L’Argent, Le Roy Ladurie himself had promoted the history of the longue durée. His publications had in many ways exemplified the pursuit of a history focused not on revolutions and


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campaigns, but on continuities and cycles – not on kings and generals, but on butchers, vineyard owners, and, occasionally, witches. But, while Le Roy Ladurie was in many ways the greatest promoter of the Annales school, he was no more rigidly orthodox in his historiographical convictions than were the inhabitants of Montaillou in their religious beliefs. The publication of two volumes, L’Etat royal, de Louis XI à Henri IV, 1460–1610 (1987; translated as The French Royal State, 1994) and L’Ancien régime, 1610–1774 (1993; translated as The Ancien Régime: A History of France, 1610–1774, 1996), suggested that Le Roy Ladurie did not see the commitments of the historical demographer as essentially in conflict with those of the royal biographer. The two volumes trace three centuries of French history, focusing on monarchs, their ministers, and the gradual construction of the French state. Lavishly illustrated, they were meant for a broad audience. In earlier works, Le Roy Ladurie had noted that one significant change among the many continuities that characterized the period from 1300 to 1720 was the growth of state power. He was mainly concerned in earlier works to show the effect that upward-spiraling taxes had on peasants and urban craftsmen. In L’Etat royal and L’Ancien régime, he examines the same period from a very different perspective. Le Roy Ladurie traces the development of a state bureaucracy and the growth of absolutism. While his peasants squirmed under increasing tax burdens, Le Roy Ladurie finds much to admire in the plans and ambitions of the kings, their ministers, and their generals. These two volumes focus on political and dynastic history, but they do not mark an unapologetic return to the narrative political history that the Annales school had deplored. The story of the rise of the French state is here enriched by the discursive, lively writing for which Le Roy Ladurie was by this time justly renowned. The most sympathetic construction might be that the two volumes suggested a reconciliation between different modes of understanding the French past; they reflected the hope that a more traditional history of events and institutions might be wed to the sort of structural history of the longue durée that Le Roy Ladurie had himself promoted. To some, however, the triumphant return of the kings seemed like an admission that the vital principles of Annales historiography lacked popular appeal. The remarkable achievement of Montaillou notwithstanding, a general readership would always choose the entertainments of monarchs illustrated with deluxe manuscripts to the toil of peasants described in charts and graphs. Le Roy Ladurie next embraced another variety of historical writing that had been largely out of fashion: biography. On several occasions in Paysans, he had turned to the valuable trove of letters and memoirs related to the Platter family: Thomas Platter Sr. and two of his sons, Felix and Thomas Jr. In Paysans, anecdotes from Felix’s memoirs lend welcome color to the analysis of tithes and tax registers. In their youth, the two younger Platters spent several years in Montpellier (just as Le Roy Ladurie had done early in his academic career). The Platters studied medicine in the distinguished university town before returning to pursue careers

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in their native Basel. Like many historians, Le Roy Ladurie recognized the Platter papers as a remarkable corpus of evidence about education, daily life, commerce, printing, and travel in early modern Europe. While references to the Platters were mere grace notes in Paysans, Le Roy Ladurie decided that he could wring more from them. The result was a two-volume family biography, Le Siécle des Platter, 1499–1628 (1995, 2000; volume 1 translated as The Beggar and the Professor, 1997). Le Roy Ladurie focuses on these three men, but he urges his readers to see their careers, disappointments, and achievements as broadly representative of sixteenthcentury life. The story of the founder of this minor dynasty is one of restless energy, ambition, and social ascent. Thomas Platter began life as a goatherd and beggar. Through ingenuity and toil, he rose in the world. Having mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew with the benefit of little formal instruction, he became a schoolmaster in Basel in the 1540s. Around the same time, he started a printing business. He came to enjoy a prominent social position in bustling Basel, but as proof that Platter retained connections with his humble beginnings, Le Roy Ladurie describes Thomas’s rural retreat near Basel and a visit to this childhood home in the Upper Valais in 1563. His son Felix began life in a more privileged position and fulfilled all the hopes placed in him by becoming a respected (and well-paid) doctor. From Felix’s memoirs, we learn not only about his early education, but also about his fondness for sweets and the toy soldiers he played with as a child. Drawn by Montpellier’s distinguished medical faculty, Felix spent five years in Montpellier. His memoirs describe not only his considerable success as a student but also group trips to bathe in the Mediterranean and the clash of drinking habits between his German-speaking friends and the natives of Languedoc. On his return to Basel, Felix embarked on a grand tour of the hexagon, visiting schools, cities, friends, and, like tourists of every age, becoming very sick on bad fish. The second volume, written in collaboration with Francine-Dominique Liechtenan, takes up the family saga with Felix’s younger half-brother, Thomas Jr. The events of the wider world do occasionally intrude on this intimate account of the exams, spats, marriage negotiations, and financial worries that are at the heart of the Platters’ story. Thomas’s printing shop published the first edition of Calvin’s Christianae religionis institutio in 1536, and the sixteen-year-old Felix crossed the path of one of Charles V’s armies during his trip to Montpellier. Le Roy Ladurie is not the first historian to see in the Platters a vivid illustration of the sixteenth-century world. For him, theirs is the story of the heroic ascent of a tireless and enterprising autodidact. The author wants readers to root for Thomas Platter as his fortune grows and as his son’s reputation spreads. In Thomas Platter, Le Roy Ladurie had perhaps found the proto-capitalist peasant he went looking for thirty years earlier in Paysans. Their individual personalities emerge in Le Roy Ladurie’s account, but they also are meant to represent the dynamism, hustle, and demographic growth of the sixteenth century.


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The narrative trajectory of Le Siécle des Platters is one of social ascent. Thomas Platter is a scrappy goatherd who moves from the bottom of the heap to the comfort of bourgeois prosperity through his own pluck. Le Roy Ladurie’s SaintSimon ou le système de la Cour (1997; translated as Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, 1997) is, like Le Siécle des Platters, the exploration of a particular social world based on memoirs, but it begins and ends at the apex of French society. The writings of the Duc de Saint-Simon have long been one of the key sources for understanding Louis XIV’s court. In Saint-Simon, Le Roy Ladurie makes of the courtier-diarist an ethnographer who reports on the social organization, norms, and values that obtained in the loftiest of all social orbits. Saint-Simon is composed of two parts. The first is a sociological and cultural examination of the court of Louis XIV. The second, “The regency system,” is a political narrative describing the shuffling of alliances and institutions that took place in the wake of the Sun King’s death. Saint-Simon’s attitude was fundamentally conservative. Although he wrote his memoirs of Louis XIV’s court during the reign of Louis XV, Le Roy Ladurie argues that his general outlook hearkens back to an even earlier period, the reign of Louis XIII. A tireless advocate of privilege and legitimacy, the duke expresses his dismay at the pretensions of royal bastards. Above all, Le Roy Ladurie’s Saint-Simon is an anatomist of political alliances. His obsessive interest was in how courtiers built and maintained rival factions. Cabals formed around Madame de Maintenon (the king’s mistress), Monsieur (the king’s brother), Monseigneur (the king’s grandson), and other key figures. Each courtier was like a billiard ball whose actions caused rivals and allies to ricochet around marble halls and Le Notre’s manicured topiaries as they were recalculating their own advantage. With Le Roy Ladurie as his contemporary interpreter, Saint-Simon gives us a subtle and layered picture of the political logic of court life, although it may ultimately come as little surprise to the reader that the intricate hive of relations at court was predicated upon a collective obsession with hierarchy. Saint-Simon is, as Le Roy Ladurie shows, an astute guide to these perilous waters. With Saint-Simon, Le Roy Ladurie again relies on a particularly eloquent witness (much like Felix Platter or the abbé Fabre) to survey the terrain of a particular social world. In this case, however, the terrain itself is markedly different. Le Roy Ladurie is no longer quaffing piquette around the hearths of Occitan peasants, but squabbling over seating assignments with peevish courtiers. In the book’s final pages, he advocates the creation of a Museum of the History of France at Versailles that would rekindle the love of France that is, in his account, not as ardent as it once was or should be. It is in many ways an appealing proposal, but the reader must wonder whether it reflects a fundamental change in the historian’s sympathies from earlier works where he suggested that the real embodiment of France was not to be found in gilded palaces, but rather in the orchards of Normandy, the olive groves of Languedoc, and the vineyards of Burgundy. Le

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Roy Ladurie has usually kept one eye trained on the peasants with which he began his career, but the human focus of his successive publications has moved from the shepherds of Montaillou, through the butchers of Romans and students of Montpellier, to the aristocrats of Marly and Versailles. A survey of Le Roy Ladurie’s major works can only hint at the extent of his contribution to modern French historiography. Collectively, his books reflect some of the most important developments in historical research in the second half of the twentieth century. He has pioneered new models for understanding demographic and economic structures of the premodern past, expanded the range of historical inquiry to include public festivals, folklore, and the climate, and even when his subject matter was relatively traditional he has brought the study of French history to a much wider audience through his conversational style. Le Roy Ladurie’s varied contributions do not invite easy summary, but his impact has been especially profound in three broad, overlapping areas. First, he promoted the principles of Annales historiography and, at the same time, suggested new directions that followers of the Annales might take. Second, he expanded the territory of the historian, adding entirely new subjects and building connections between history and other disciplines. Finally, he created a history that was popular in two senses. He gave his readers a sense of the collective history of France which embraced the struggles and ideas of the shepherds, butchers, and students who had, until Le Roy Ladurie’s generation, appeared infrequently in historical writing. At the same time, he presented these struggles and ideas in a style that was inviting to a broad readership. The final paragraphs of this chapter will be devoted to these three broad areas of influence. It is a fitting coincidence that Le Roy Ladurie was born in the same year that Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch launched their Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, forerunner to Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations. Febvre, Bloch, and later Fernand Braudel transformed the nature of historical research in France and throughout the world. The research of dozens of prominent historians reflects their legacy, but none has been more productive and influential than Le Roy Ladurie. He promoted the Annales principles formulated by Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, but in his own research he also pushed their ideas in new directions. Like many adherents of the Annales school, Le Roy Ladurie emphasized the importance of enduring structures, the unchanging rhythms of rural life. This emphasis, for Le Roy Ladurie and others, was accompanied by a strong preference for serial, quantitative evidence. Tax registers, tithes, or tree rings were to be preferred to chronicles, letters, or memoirs as historical evidence. These priorities led Le Roy Ladurie to identify the “great agrarian cycle” stretching from the early fourteenth to the early eighteenth century. This chronology gave readers a new perspective on the rural world, while overturning periodizations based on political and intellectual history. Le Roy Ladurie’s continuities effectively collapsed the distinction between the later Middle Ages and the early modern period. The treaties, battles, and coronations that had been the subject of traditional


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narrative history were, in his eyes, ultimately less significant than the chronic challenges of scratching a living from the uncooperative soil. The difficulties of survival, and the resourcefulness of the Languedocien peasants who faced those difficulties, changed slowly. Enduring ecological, demographic, and economic structures determined human experience and shaped social relationships and ideas. The project of excavating France’s rural history was for Le Roy Ladurie’s generation a collaborative one. Paysans was part of the rich harvest of regional studies published in the 1960s and 1970s, based on serial data and focused on long-term continuities in economic and social structures. A few of these studies (such as Pierre Goubert’s on the region around Beauvais) preceded Le Roy Ladurie’s, but most of the studies (those of Pierre Bonnassie and Pierre Vilar on Catalonia, Pierre Toubert on Latium, Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier on the province of Narbonne, Jean-Pierre Poly on Provence, to name only a few) came in the decade after the publication of Paysans. Collectively, these regional studies constitute one of the great achievements of twentieth-century historical research. Le Roy Ladurie’s Paysans resembles these other studies in many ways, but even at this early point in his career, Le Roy Ladurie devoted more attention to the attitudes and thoughts of his Languedocien peasants than did most of his contemporaries to the inhabitants of the regions they studied. This difference of emphasis hinted at the direction that his subsequent research would take. He continued to be interested in the long-term continuities of rural life and social structures, but the question of mentalités (rather than demography and economics) grew more prominent in his work, especially as he came to focus on new varieties of evidence. His eagerness to exploit different varieties of evidence reflects a broader commitment to extend the aspirations of historical research. Marc Bloch had encouraged historians to think broadly about varieties of historical evidence, and Le Roy Ladurie took this lesson to heart. He reconstructs the wages of farm laborers from tax registers, decades of miserable weather from tree rings, student culture in university towns from memoirs, attitudes toward money and marriage from folktales, and the abstract reasoning of medieval villagers from inquisitorial records. Ladurie’s scholarship is, in other words, marked by a remarkable intellectual agility. This promiscuous sense of what constitutes historical evidence has yielded rich rewards, but some critics have suggested that Le Roy Ladurie does not always accept these sources on their own terms. He does not, for example, acknowledge that the voices of Montaillou’s peasants are heard only through an inquisitorial apparatus or that the Françouneto is first and foremost a literary construction. Instead, he shows a remarkable confidence that Balzac, the Duc de Saint-Simon, Felix Platter, the abbé Fabre, and Rétif de la Bretonne can all be reimagined as ethnographers. Le Roy Ladurie has shown an admirable willingness to experiment throughout his career, and it should come as no surprise that not all of these experiments have been equally successful.

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The corollary to Le Roy Ladurie’s enthusiasm for different varieties of evidence is his receptivity to the work of scholars in other fields. He regularly acknowledges his debts to French colleagues, to historians outside France, and to researchers in other fields. Le Roy Ladurie also followed the example of the founders of the Annales school, whose enthusiasm for Durkheim’s sociology and Vidal de la Blache’s geography set a precedent for interdisciplinary research. Biology, glaciology, literary study, and meteorology have all played a role in Le Roy Ladurie’s scholarship, but the most important area of interdisciplinary exchange has been between history and the social sciences. He and many of his contemporaries have been eager to apply the lessons of archaeology and sociology to historical research. Montaillou and Saint-Simon are both inspired by the idea of historical ethnography – the notion that a knowledgeable and systematic observer can explain the curious customs and ways of thought of a different culture. Montaillou is more a book about the steady character of village life than it is about an episode in the history of the inquisition; its time frame is the sort of ethnographic present that characterized the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists. Elsewhere, Le Roy Ladurie relies on anthropologists Victor Turner, Arnold van Gennep, and Edmund Leach to unpack the ritual life of early modern cities. Le Roy Ladurie’s third great achievement is as a popular historian. His scholarship is popular first in the sense that his vision of France’s past embraces not only courtiers and kings but also peasants and butchers. In Paysans and elsewhere, he takes the struggles, aspirations, and ideas of the humble and middling classes as seriously as the conquests and programs of the powerful. Often he aims to show his readers how these otherwise voiceless masses scraped out a living, how they built communities, and how they thought about the natural and social worlds around them. While his interest in peasants usually begins with harvest data and material conditions, it usually extends to their mental worlds. Le Roy Ladurie is also a popular historian in the sense that many people (professional historians and otherwise) enjoy reading his books. Even when he begins with the sort of evidence that leaves all but the most committed readers uninspired, Le Roy Ladurie invariably manages to wrap some flesh around these rattling skeletons of quantitative data. To professional historians, he has proposed models for understanding change and continuity in premodern France, but he has simultaneously brought some of the principles of Annales historiography to a popular readership. Among his unquestionable skills as an historian is his ability to find the drama of daily life, to paint for his readers a vivid picture of real people responding to threats, challenges, and opportunities. The chronic tensions in the Dauphiné in 1579 and 1580 are mirrored in the royal judge Antoine Guérin and the leader of the opposition, Jean Serve-Paumier. Alongside descriptions of the demographic effects of the Hundred Years War and shifts in taxation, Le Roy Ladurie shows readers the fifteenth-century careers of Mansenx, a land speculator, and the widow Clouet, tending her profitable vineyards on the outskirts of Paris. He explains how the villagers of Montaillou strove to make sense of both Cathar


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and Catholic teachings. Over the course of five decades, he has given premodern France a personality – or, rather, a gallery of personalities, from the happy shepherd moving his flock back and forth over the Pyrenees to the calculating courtier orbiting the Sun King.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Histoire du Languedoc (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). Les Paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris: SEVPEN, 1966; abridged edn., Paris: Flammarion, 1969); translated by John Day as The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1974). Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (Paris: Flammarion, 1967); translated by Barbara Bray as Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971). Anthropologie du conscrit français d’après les comptes numériques et sommaires du recrutement de l’armée (1819–1826): présentation cartographique, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, JeanPaul Aron, and Paul Dumont (Paris: Mouton, 1972). Le Territoire de l’historien, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973, 1978); vol. 1 translated by Siân Reynolds and Ben Reynolds as The Territory of the Historian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); selections from volume 2 translated by Siân Reynolds and Ben Reynolds as The Mind and Method of the Historian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); translated and abridged by Barbara Bray as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: George Braziller, 1978). Le Carnaval de Romans: de la chandeleur au mercredi des cendres, 1579–1580 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); translated by Mary Feeney as Carnival in Romans (New York: George Braziller, 1979). L’Argent, l’amour et la mort en pays d’oc (Paris: Seuil, 1980); translated by Alan Sheridan as Love, Death, and Money in the Pays d’Oc (Aldershot: Scolar, 1982). Paris–Montpellier: PC–PSU, 1945–1963 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). Tithe and Agrarian History from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries: An Essay in Comparative History, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Joseph Goy, translated by Susan Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Parmi les historiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). La Sorcière de Jasmin (Paris: Seuil, 1983); translated by Brian Pearce as Jasmin’s Witch (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987). Pierre Prion scribe: mémoires d’un écrivain de campagne au XVIIIe siécle, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Orest Ranum (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). L’Etat royal, de Louis XI à Henri IV, 1460–1610 (Paris: Hachette, 1987); translated by Juliet Vale as The French Royal State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). L’Ancien régime, 1610–1774 (Paris: Hachette, 1993); translated by Mark Greengrass as The Ancien Regime: A History of France: 1610–1774 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

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Le Siècle des Platter, 1499–1638, vol. 1: Le Mendiant and le professeur (Paris: Fayard, 1995); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-century Family Saga (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). L’Historien, le chiffre et le texte (Paris: Fayard, 1997). Saint-Simon: ou le système de la Cour, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jean-François Fitou (Paris: Fayard, 1997); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Le Siècle des Platter, 1499–1638, vol. 2: Le Voyage de Thomas Platter (1595–1599), by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Francine-Dominique Liechtenan (Paris: Fayard, 2000). Histoire de la France des regions: la péripherie française des origines à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2001). Histoire des paysans de France: de la peste noire à la Révolution (Paris: Seuil, 2002). Histoire humaine et comparé du climat: canicules et glaciers, XIIIème–XVIIIème siècles. (Paris: Fayard, 2004).

Other Works “Les masses profondes: la paysannerie,” in Histoire économique et sociale de la France, vol. 2, edited by Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977); translated by Alan Sheridan as The French Peasantry, 1450–1660 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987).

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Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) Lawrence Harvard Davis

Georges Lefebvre was one of the most influential French historians of the twentieth century, a pioneer in the study of the French Revolution. His professional career, however, provoked controversy, and since his death in 1959 historians have grappled with the meaning of his scholarship and his role as a public intellectual. Lefebvre was a proponent of the social, or “orthodox,” interpretation of the French Revolution, an historiographical tradition founded by socialist politician and scholar of the Revolution Jean Jaurès. This interpretation held that the Revolution brought the bourgeoisie to power at the expense of the Church and nobility, the representatives of an outdated feudal order. The bourgeoisie then enshrined the principle of private property and equality in law, a factor that contributed to the rise of a capitalist order in France and ultimately the world. The bulk of Lefebvre’s scholarship reflects the framework of the social interpretation. However, his work diverges from this interpretation in one significant way: he was a specialist in the study of the French peasantry. He sought to understand how the Revolution impacted the lives of rural folk and, in turn, how this social group influenced the course of revolutionary events. The controversy surrounding Lefebvre’s career comes from two sources. The first was his defense of the social interpretation of the Revolution, which was strongly influenced by Marxism. The second was political allegiances, which were formed to a significant degree by twentieth-century French and European politics. In the years before World War II, Lefebvre was an independent socialist who supported the Popular Front coalition of socialists and communists. After the war, he became a “fellow-traveler” of the French Communist Party because he believed it had provided the most significant resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. As a result, historians have held various viewpoints regarding his contribution to

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the field of French Revolution studies. Historians sympathetic to his work have written that, despite his politics, Lefebvre’s work is still relevant. Keith Michael Baker views Lefebvre as providing an important link between social and cultural history. In his book Inventing the Revolution (1990), Baker wrote that Lefebvre’s research into the Great Fear was important because it demonstrated that “traditional local fears of beggars, during periods of scarcity and unrest, were an important element of the political situation that developed in the French countryside in the summer of 1789. But these fears were not the expression of brute instinct: they had a cultural and social logic of their own.” Other historians have focused on Lefebvre’s politics and openly pro-Revolution sympathies. François Furet, who helped launch a revision of the social interpretation in the 1960s, wrote the following in his book Interpreting the French Revolution (1981): “The twentieth century’s greatest university scholar of the French Revolution … based his synthetic vision of the immense event to which he devoted his life on nothing more than the convictions of a militant adherent of the Cartel des Gauches and the Popular Front.” The controversy regarding Lefebvre’s contributions to the field continues, although many scholars have questioned the veracity of the social interpretation of the Revolution. In addition, historians continue to debate the merits of his research into the French peasantry in eighteenth-century France. Georges Lefebvre was born in 1874 in Lille, France. The son of an accountant, he earned his agrégation in history and geography in 1899 from the University of Lille. He then embarked on a successful teaching career at various lycées, including Cherbourg, Tourcoing, Lille, Saint-Omer, and, in Paris, at lycées Pasteur, Montaigne, and Henri IV. Soon after completing his doctorate at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), he accepted his first university teaching post at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1924. The career path Lefebvre took from lycée level to university level was common in Lefebvre’s generation, and accorded scholars an opportunity to hone their teaching and research skills before attaining the rank of university professor. Lefebvre began researching the French Revolution as a lycée professor. In 1914, he published an introduction to Documents relatifs à l’histoire des subsistances dans le district de Bergues pendant la Révolution (1788–an IV). The book is a collection of documents from the Revolution and part of a series that had been established by Jean Jaurès. In the introduction, Lefebvre discusses the importance of the grain trade in maritime Flanders during the revolutionary period and its relationship to the economic crises of 1788–93. In 1924, Lefebvre published his first book, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Peasants of the Nord region during the French Revolution). Based on his doctoral thesis, the book reflects the social interpretation of the Revolution that became the hallmark of Lefebvre’s scholarship. He focuses on the peasantry, a social group that had been long neglected by historians. Lefebvre documents the everyday life of peasants, from the religious rituals they practiced to their diet. He concludes that peasant support of the Revolution could not be

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easily categorized. Although the peasants supported the new emphasis on individual property and supported the end of aristocratic domination of their villages, they sought to retain the collective rights that had existed in the feudal world. In 1928, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre invited Lefebvre to join the faculty of the University of Strasbourg. Bloch and Febvre were associated with the avantgarde Annales school. Lefebvre’s research into the peasantry impressed them, and they asked him to join in the creation of a new historical journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. Lefebvre’s contact with the Annales school and its interdisciplinary approach to historical study had an important influence on his scholarship because it allowed him to interact with scholars from various disciplines, including historians, sociologists, geographers, psychologists, anthropologists, and economists. Certain features of the Annales school marked Lefebvre’s subsequent work. First, historians of that school engaged various disciplines outside history in their writing in order to construct a “total” history of a given period. Second, these historians were fascinated with discerning the “mentalité,” or mentality, of peoples from the past. Lefebvre himself sought to illustrate the mentalité of the peasantry through an understanding of the ways in which the peasants viewed reality, which was influenced to a large extent by their culture and economic situation. Third, Annales historians rejected a contemporary reliance on historical narrative of events to explain the past in favor of a problem-oriented methodology. This often meant a focus not on political events and the elite individuals who made them, but on social groups that comprised the “masses.” The one aspect of the Annales school approach that Lefebvre did not embrace fully was the dismissal of narrative in answering the questions posed by the past. A good example of Annaliste influence on Lefebvre’s work is his book La Grande Peur de 1789 (translated as The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, 1973), published in 1932. The book became his most important study of revolutionary mentalité and an important contribution to peasant studies. Lefebvre uses the cahiers de doléances, or grievance lists, from 1789 as his major source and recreated the material and mental world of the peasantry during the first year of the Revolution. He begins with a discussion of the economic situation of the average peasant, which ranged from mediocre to poor, depending on the region of France under consideration. Generally, peasants simply did not own enough land to support their families, despite Lefebvre’s calculation that on the whole peasants owned up to one-third of the land in the country. Lefebvre believed that the economic vulnerability of the French peasantry in 1789 fueled the constant fear that was a part of peasant consciousness. Peasants were motivated by fear, which was caused not only by their economic situation but by fear of the seigneur, or lord, who dominated them, by fear of the townspeople, and, most importantly, by fear of beggars, itinerant peddlers, and wanderers who often inflicted damage on peasant lands. Population growth caused fear to spread to the town as unemployed peasants looked there for work, and in the process caused disruptions in the marketplace and tavern.

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Lefebvre’s reconstruction of peasant mentalité in the early years of the Revolution is the major reason why La Grande Peur de 1789 became a classic work. He illustrates the vivid popular memory of the peasantry through its tradition of telling stories by the fire, a major means of entertainment at the time. Stories of rape, torture, and murder at the hands of foreign troops stoked the peasants’ fear once the Revolution began. Peasants often did not or were unable to discern the difference between reliable and false information, and rumor often passed without criticism. In May 1789, the meeting of the Estates General provided the political spark that set the Great Fear into motion when the Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly. Peasants assumed that the king would send in foreign troops to stop the Revolution, and the Great Fear set off violence in the countryside against members of the nobility, including peasant cooptation of noble lands. The immediate reaction in Annaliste circles to La Grande Peur de 1789 was overwhelmingly positive. In May 1933, Marc Bloch provided a balanced and thorough review of the book in the pages of Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. He praised Lefebvre for shedding light on a moment in French history that historians long considered an amusing event best left to psychologists. In addition, he congratulated Lefebvre for writing an original piece of scholarship that allowed the reader “to penetrate the heart of French society at the time, in its intimate structure and network of multiple currents.” In 1932, the death of Albert Mathiez provided Lefebvre with an opportunity for advancement in the profession. Mathiez was the founder and president of the Société des études robespierristes and editor of a journal dedicated to the study of the Revolution, Annales historiques de la Révolution française. At the time of his death, Mathiez was the leading authority on the Revolution in France. Like Lefebvre, Mathiez was an adherent of the social interpretation of the Revolution and was a fierce defender of the revolutionary tradition. Lefebvre’s appointment as Mathiez’s successor gave him an influential position from which he would shape French Revolution studies for the next twenty-five years. In 1935, Lefebvre reached an important milestone in his career when he was appointed professor of history at the Sorbonne. Two years later, he was named to the prestigious chair in the History of the French Revolution, a post he held until his retirement in 1945. Lefebvre was now the ultimate authority on the Revolution and continued to write influential books, articles, and book reviews. Lefebvre’s decision to go to Paris was influenced not only by professional considerations but also by the deterioration of the political situation in Strasbourg after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Nazi sympathizers in Strasbourg, a city close to the German border, at once made themselves heard. In many restaurant and hotel entrances signs reading “dogs and Jews forbidden” could be found. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, too, soon found themselves in Paris, where they were able to carry on the next stage of their careers in relative safety from the dangerous political situation in eastern France.


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Lefebvre reached Paris at a crucial juncture in modern French history. The 1930s were an era of political strife that challenged the political, social, and cultural stability of France. In order to defend the French Republic and democratic tradition from what he considered to be the destructive designs of “fascists” both within France and from Germany and Italy, he became a staunch supporter of the Popular Front government. The Popular Front was a coalition of socialists, communists, and radical republicans that held power from May 1936 until June 1937. Lefebvre’s support of the Republic came from the fact that he and many French intellectuals of his generation came to political maturity during the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s. As a supporter of the unjustly accused Captain Dreyfus, Lefebvre committed himself to preserving the ideals of “truth” and “justice” that he believed to be part of the French revolutionary tradition. He also believed that fascism threatened these values and therefore had to be defeated. In a letter to his friend, Alfred Rufer, on January 21, 1934, he wrote of the importance of his role as a defender of the Republic: “If I am able to contribute to convincing dignified republicans of the necessity of unity, I will have attained my goal.” In 1935, he published Napoléon, a biography of the French emperor. He probably had Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini on his mind when he wrote this book, and he takes great pains to illustrate the differences between Napoleon and contemporary European dictators. He insists that, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Napoleon hated injustices such as civil inequality and religious intolerance. Instead, his reign preserved the principles of the Revolution through a reconciliation of authoritarian rule and social and political reform. As Lefebvre was reaching the pinnacle of his career, political divisions during the Popular Front years began to draw his attention away from his research. The threat that fascism posed to French political and social stability was reflected in the violence between left-wing and right-wing students at the University of Paris. In response, Lefebvre helped found the Cercle Descartes (Descartes’ Circle) in 1936, an organization he hoped would bring professors with diverse viewpoints together to engage in rational debate. Lefebvre found inspiration in Descartes’ thought, and believed that the rational tradition that the mathematician represented was in danger of being destroyed by what he considered to be “fascist” elements in the university and in France generally. Between 1936 and 1939, the life of the Cercle, Lefebvre acted as its president. The group included professors from elementary and secondary schools as well as universities, and represented views that ran across the political spectrum. The group sponsored conferences on topics ranging from international relations to current scientific topics, from education reform to philosophy. On September 1, 1939, World War II broke out in Europe. The experience of the war and the German occupation of France affected Lefebvre to a large degree. In the aftermath of the occupation in June 1940, he was placed in direct personal and professional danger. His history of the origins of the Revolution, Quatre-vingt-

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neuf (1939; translated as The Coming of the French Revolution, 1789, 1947), published the year before and a product of his involvement in the 150th anniversary celebration of the French Revolution, was labeled as subversive by the new occupation authorities and was summarily destroyed. Lefebvre lost the prestige that he had enjoyed as a scholar and public intellectual before the war. Compounding his situation were several personal tragedies that deeply affected his psyche. His second wife died in 1941 and the Gestapo executed his beloved brother, Théodore, a member of the Resistance, in 1943. In 1944, Marc Bloch, his colleague from Strasbourg days, was also executed for Resistance activity. In the autumn of 1940 the German occupation authorities distributed the first list of banned books. French editors were required to prevent the circulation of books and other materials that were considered a threat to public order, especially books by Jewish writers. Because Lefebvre was a prominent professor, his name was placed on the list that same autumn. Quatre-vingt-neuf was banned because its pages reflected Lefebvre’s embrace of French nationalism and his call on the youth of France to defend the principles of the Revolution and resist France’s enemies, a pointed reference to the contemporary international situation. In addition, the Société des études robespierristes, of which he was president, was forced to abandon its activities. The war years were unproductive compared to the preceding decade. As a banned author, he had few opportunities to continue writing on the Revolution. However, in 1944, on the eve of the Liberation, he wrote three essays that reflect his support of French nationalism: “D’elle,” “Le ressort,” and “La Révolution française et son armée.” Taken together, the essays are an attempt by Lefebvre to understand and interpret the wartime experience within the context of the revolutionary tradition. He draws comparisons between the occupation and the dark days of the Revolution when the principles of 1789 were in danger. The essays also celebrate those who resisted the Vichy regime and advocate harsh punishments for those who were guilty of collaboration. After the war, Lefebvre became a fellow-traveler of the French Communist Party (PCF), which is to say, he did not become a formal member but sympathized with the party’s political program. His support, however, was mainly due to his belief that the PCF had provided the bulk of resistance to the Germans and that the Soviet Union deserved a large amount of credit for the defeat of Nazism. He lent the PCF his stature as a prominent intellectual, and in 1946 he joined the Comité de patronage of La Pensée, the party’s intellectual journal. He also became a contributor to the journal. Lefebvre continued writing on the history of the Revolution after his retirement in 1945. In 1947, Quatre-vingt-neuf was translated into English; it quickly became a standard work in the English-speaking world, where it was read by undergraduates as well as scholars. In 1951, he completed La Révolution française (translated in two volumes as The French Revolution from its Origins to 1793, 1962; and The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799, 1964). Structured around a tight nar-


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rative of the Revolution, this book contributed significantly to the social interpretation of the Revolution and immediately led to the revisionist critique of his scholarship that began in the 1950s and continued into the 1960s. The Marxist methodology Lefebvre used to interpret the Revolution was important, because he viewed 1789 as a significant break between a pre-Revolution era when French society was based on a hierarchical corporate society that rested on birth and privilege, and a post-Revolution era when society was based on the individual. Lefebvre portrays the bourgeoisie, or middle class, as a coherent class intent on creating a civil society once its domination was assured. In addition, this class immediately took it upon itself to remove all barriers to the free organization of individuals. In Lefebvre’s view, the social corporations that existed in pre-revolutionary France reflected a defunct medieval order. For example, the clergy of the Catholic Church was one social corporation that the bourgeoisie sought to transform through revolutionary activity. The clergy enjoyed property rights and financial resources that the bourgeoisie sought to destroy in order to bring about a leveling of French society. In 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy made clerics employees of the state. The nobility, another social corporation, became the target of the Revolution because of its hereditary titles, privileges, and seigneurial authority. The bourgeoisie sought to destroy distinctions between noble and commoner, a point he believed pleased the peasants greatly. The sweeping away of feudal social corporations and legal inequality, and the establishment of a new capitalist order that included private property as a fundamental legal notion, provided the foundation of the liberal political order of the nineteenth century. Lefebvre attempts to illustrate the revolutionary mentalité of the period. His conception of this mentalité during the Reign of Terror (1792–4) is derived from complex psychological phenomena that he believed to have been put into motion through threats to the Revolution and nation, threats that appeared rational and justified by events. However, once this mindset was adopted, it took on an irrational character, capable of great violence and a “punitive will” largely detached from the threats that originally had set it into motion. Narrative provides Lefebvre with his starting-point in explaining the escalation of violence that led to the Terror: “fear” dominated the Third Estate because of the belief in an aristocratic reaction; “defensive action” was expressed in the events of 1789 in Paris, where barricades were erected and where the search for guns led to the storming of the Bastille; the “punitive will” provoked the massacres of 1792 and, when danger again loomed in 1793, the Terror. In Lefebvre’s final analysis, only with the “uncontested” triumph of the Revolution did fear subside. La Révolution française became the standard text for scholars looking for a coherent history of the Revolution. American historian Crane Brinton, a non-Marxist scholar, praised the book in a review published in the American Historical Review in 1952. He wrote that he admired Lefebvre’s balanced approach, while acknowledging that Lefebvre was a “temperate Marxist in the sociological rather than in

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the partisan sense.” Brinton admired Lefebvre’s allowance for the interplay of the many “variables” of the revolutionary drama, from social, intellectual, and political aspects to the role of individual personalities. Brinton also wrote that Lefebvre’s portrayal of the Terror was a delicate balance between the force of events and the punitive will. He concluded that “in sum, this is a work of major importance, the crowning achievement of a gifted scholar, heart-warming evidence that in our troubled times fairness, moderation, and open-mindedness are still in the service of historical writing.” Despite the warm reception of La Révolution française in the pages of the American Historical Review, a negative reaction to Lefebvre’s scholarship appeared, not in France, but in Britain. Alfred Cobban, a professor of French history at the University of London, presented a challenge to Lefebvre in a lecture given in May 1954 entitled “The Myth of the French Revolution.” In it, he formulated a challenge to interpretations of the Revolution that attempted to understand this event “in a single all-embracing view.” He targeted Lefebvre directly, especially his use of Marxist methodology in his book The Coming of the French Revolution, 1789. Because this intellectual attack came from across the English Channel, it would have enormous consequences for the historiography of the French Revolution throughout the English-speaking world. Cobban fixed his analysis on Lefebvre’s postwar scholarship, especially Lefebvre’s conception of the Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution.” Cobban denied the assertion made by Lefebvre that the Revolution laid the foundation for the success of capitalism in France and, by extension, of the bourgeoisie as well. Lefebvre had argued that the Revolution removed the feudal barriers that had blocked the transformation to a new capitalist reality around which the industrial world of the nineteenth century was based, and through which means the bourgeoisie would exercise its dominance. In Cobban’s view, this was tantamount to a teleological rendition of the causes and outcome of the Revolution that forced any understanding of the Revolution into a theoretical straightjacket. Cobban argued that the notion of the Revolution as being primarily bourgeois and antifeudal was wrong, because the Revolution had begun as an aristocratic revolt against the monarchy and because the National Assembly consisted of men who had bought their titles of nobility and had lived lives resembling those of the nobility. Lefebvre responded to Cobban directly. In 1956, he published an indignant reply in Annales historiques de la Révolution française entitled “Le mythe de la Révolution française” (“The myth of the French Revolution”). His response suggests that Cobban’s work was isolated and an example of Cold War political axegrinding by an anti-Revolution, anti-communist conservative. Lefebvre impatiently rejects Cobban’s assertions as superficial and insists that feudal rights did exist in 1789 in the form of tax exemptions for noble lands and in special noble privileges such as hunting and fishing. He writes that “feudalism” in its medieval incarnation


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no longer survived; however, the “obligations” that were part of the seigneurial system survived. He also challenges Cobban’s notion that the Revolution did not pave the way for capitalist development. Cobban had taken great pains to demonstrate that the bourgeoisie was largely indifferent to capitalism and would have been unable to play the economic role that Lefebvre had assigned it. Lefebvre credits Cobban’s effort toward distinguishing the different types of bourgeoisie; however, he chastises him for placing too much emphasis on the role of “ideas” in preparing the way for the Revolution, as opposed to the social and economic conditions that were the foundation of the victory of the bourgeoisie. Lefebvre’s final book, Etudes orléanaises (Studies of the Orléans Region), was published posthumously in two volumes in 1962 and 1963. In this book, Lefebvre relies heavily on Marxist methodology and emphasizes social structures, quantitative history, and demographic history. Lefebvre gears his analysis of the social structures of Orléans toward an understanding of how social classes change over time in relation to economic change. For example, his discussion of the bourgeoisie also reflects a great deal of effort on his part to distinguish the different levels of this class through an analysis of income levels. He also insists that wealth was not the only characteristic of this class, and that bourgeois attitudes and lifestyle also defined it in contrast to other classes. One example he cites is the bourgeois respect for birth and wealth and marked disdain for those who owned little or no property. Reaction to Etudes was mixed, despite Lefebvre amassing a wealth of statistics to support his research. In a review published in Annales historiques de la Révolution française in 1965, Jacques Godechot commented that the work was uneven because the excellent statistical data that Lefebvre provided was offset by his superficial demographic analysis of Orléans. Some scholars have voiced disappointment with Lefebvre’s documentation of the lives of the workers of Orléans because he classified these workers mainly by income. Because of the paucity of evidence, analyzing the wages of these “workers” before the Revolution forced Lefebvre to limit his study to the years of the First Republic, especially 1793, when wages were fixed by a law called the “Maximum.” By the time of Lefebvre’s death in 1959, revisionists such as Alfred Cobban were beginning to achieve success in their challenge to the social interpretation of the French Revolution. Cobban’s intellectual successors, most notably François Furet, began to dominate the historiography of the Revolution. They focused on Lefebvre’s interpretive flaws, especially his use of Marxist methodology to explain the Revolution. Furet and other revisionist historians denied the social interpretation in favor of the study of the political culture of the Revolution, and in the process opened up new avenues for understanding the meaning of 1789. However, historians such as Jacques Revel have continued to argue that Lefebvre’s research into the peasantry during the Great Fear is still valid and relevant for students and scholars today.

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References and Further Reading Selected Books by Georges Lefebvre Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Lille: O. Marquant, 1924; rev. edn., Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1959). La Révolution française, by Georges Lefebvre, Raymond Guyot, and Philippe Sagnac (Paris: Alcan, 1930; rev. edn., 1938). La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: A. Colin, 1932; rev. edn., Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement superieur, 1956; rev. again, Paris: A. Colin, 1970); translated by Joan White as The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973). Questions agraires au temps de la Terreur (Strasbourg: F. Lenig, 1932; rev. edn., La Rochesur-Yon: H. Potier, 1954). Napoléon (Paris: Alcan, 1935; rev. edn., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941; rev. again, 1953; rev. again, 1965; rev. again, 1969); translated by Henry F. Stockhold as Napoleon: from 18 Brumaire to Tilsit, 1799–1807 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) and by J. E. Anderson as Napoleon: from Tilsit to Waterloo, 1807–1815 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). Les Thermidoriens (Paris: A. Colin, 1937; rev. edn., 1946; rev. again, 1951; rev. again, 1960). Quatre-vingt-neuf (Paris: Maison du livre francais, 1939); translated by R. R. Palmer as The Coming of the French Revolution, 1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947); first Princeton classic edition with an introduction by Timothy Tackett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Le Directoire (Paris: Colin, 1946; rev. edn., 1950; rev. again, 1958; rev. again, 1971). De 1774 à nos jours, by Georges Lefebvre, Charles Pouthas, and Maurice Baumont, vol. 2 of Histoire de la France pour tous les Français (Paris: Hachette, 1950). La Revolution française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951; rev. edn., 1957; rev. again, 1963; rev. again, 1968); translated by Elizabeth Moss Evanson as The French Revolution from its Origins to 1793 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962) and by John Hall Stewart and James Friguglietti as The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). Etudes sur la Révolution française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954; rev. edn., 1963). Etudes orléanaises, 2 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1962, 1963). Cherbourg à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution (Caen: Logis des Gouverneurs, 1965). La Naissance de l’historiographie moderne (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).

Other Works by Georges Lefebvre Introduction to Documents relatifs à l’histoire des subsistances dans le district de Bergues pendant la Révolution (1788–an V), 2 vols. (Lille: Camille Robbe, 1914, 1921). “D’elle,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 41 (1969): 570–3; originally published in L’Université libre, no. 3 (September 23, 1944).


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“Le mythe de la Révolution française,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 28 (1956): 337–45. “Le ressort,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 41 (1969): 573–6. “La Révolution française et son armée,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 41 (1969): 576–82.

References Baker, Keith Michael, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Cobban, Alfred, The Myth of the French Revolution (London: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970). Davis, Lawrence Harvard, “Georges Lefebvre: historian and public intellectual, 1928– 1959,” unpublished dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2001. Friguglietti, James, Bibliographie de Georges Lefebvre (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1972). Furet, François, Interpreting the French Revolution, translated by Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Godechot, Jacques, Un jury pour la Révolution (Paris: Editions sociales, 1974). Soboul, Albert, “Georges Lefebvre, historien de la Révolution française (1874–1959),” in Etudes sur la Révolution française, by Georges Lefebvre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), pp. 1–22.

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Albert Mathiez (1874–1932) James Friguglietti

The French Revolution lasted some ten years, from the meeting of the Estates General in May 1789 until Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power in November 1799. For more than two hundred years, historians have studied and debated its origins, course, and consequences. One of the most prominent of them was the Frenchman Albert Xavier Emile Mathiez, whose extensive publications, lucid style, and partisan arguments earned him an international reputation as the preeminent authority on the Revolution. This bright future could not have been foreseen when Mathiez was born in 1874 to a peasant family living in the eastern province of Franche Comté. For generations, his ancestors had eked out a living by cultivating the infertile soil. From his forebears, Mathiez inherited a stocky, muscular body, blond hair, and blue eyes, as well as a capacity for hard work and a fierce spirit of independence. Raised first in the country, then in small towns where his father Constant maintained an inn, the young Mathiez early developed a strong aptitude for learning. In primary school, he earned prizes in history, geography, languages, and science. His talents won him a scholarship to a lycée (secondary school) at Sceaux outside Paris. In 1894, Mathiez gained admission to the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure (national teachers college), which trained the country’s secondary school teachers. During three years of intense study, Mathiez cultivated his talents as a teacher of history and geography. In his history classes, he absorbed the principles of “scientific” method, which emphasized the discovery, scrutiny, and balanced interpretation of original documents, a method developed by German scholars. Beginning in 1896, he undertook research in Parisian libraries and archives for a study of the women’s march on Versailles in October 1789, when a large crowd,

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angered by rising food prices, forcibly returned the royal family to the capital. Mathiez’s lengthy article was published in France’s most important historical journal, the Revue historique, in 1898–9. It was a remarkable achievement for so young a scholar, one that launched him on his career as an historian of the Revolution. Meanwhile, in 1897, Mathiez passed the difficult agrégation (qualifying examination) which enabled him to teach in France’s secondary schools. He spent the next fifteen years as a teacher in a variety of provincial schools teaching history and geography. In 1899, Mathiez concentrated his energy on securing his doctorate, the next step in his academic career. Under the supervision of Alphonse Aulard, who taught at the University of Paris and was at that moment the leading historian of the Revolution, he did intensive research on his two theses. In 1904, he was able to undergo his dissertation defense before a jury of well-established professors. His principal thesis, some 753 pages long, explored two revolutionary religions that developed following the end of the Terror: Theophilanthropy and Tenth Day Worship. Mathiez explained that these were intended to replace Catholicism and the mass with simple ceremonies that featured moralizing sermons. After Napoleon seized power, these republican observances soon disappeared. More controversial was his briefer secondary thesis dealing with the origin of revolutionary cults from 1789 to 1792. It attempted a sociological analysis of religion and applied the theories advanced by Emile Durkheim. Mathiez accepted Durkheim’s proposition that social forces control believers as well as arouse their religious feelings and determine their manner of worship. He also insisted on the importance of symbols, the destruction of rival forms of worship, and the punishment of individuals who refused to obey the new practices. As social phenomena, revolutionary cults were created by partisans of the new political order at the expense of established faiths. Although the jury displayed some reservations about his sociological interpretation of revolutionary religion, it awarded him his doctorate with the distinction “very honorable.” Mathiez reinforced his scholarly reputation by producing a series of articles, many of which appeared in Aulard’s journal, La Révolution française. The majority dealt with questions of religion, particularly divisions within French Catholicism. In 1907, he collected eight of them into a volume entitled Contributions à l’histoire religieuse de la Révolution française (Contributions to the Religious History of the French Revolution). On the surface, relations between Mathiez and Aulard seemed quite cordial. In 1908, however, the two became embroiled in a quarrel that not only caused a dramatic break between them, but also divided historians of the Revolution. The two men seemed to have much in common. Both were provincials who had been educated at the Ecole normale supérieure and become ardent defenders of the republican tradition. Aulard had served as Mathiez’s mentor and helped advance his career. For his part, Mathiez had written a highly laudatory article to support Aulard’s candidacy for a possible campaign for the Senate in 1905. He praised the

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James Friguglietti

elderly historian for his scholarship and teaching, claiming that Aulard had created the “scientific” history of the Revolution. But unspoken were Mathiez’s grievances against Aulard. The twenty-five-year difference in age – Aulard was born in 1849, Mathiez in 1874 – contributed to their rupture. Their incompatible temperaments – the elder being placid, the younger quite volatile – also separated them. But most important were their divergent views of the two leading figures of the Revolution: Georges Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Aulard had long extolled Danton for his heroic leadership, physical courage, and eloquent oratory. Gradually, Mathiez had come to see Danton as opportunistic, corrupt, and bombastic, while he considered Robespierre a true democrat and man of unassailable integrity. He assimilated the venal Danton to his defender Aulard, whom he now saw as a mediocre historian with an insatiable appetite for power and influence in the academic world. Toward the end of 1907, Mathiez, along with other scholars and socialist politicians, founded the Société des études robespierristes (Society for Robespierrist Studies). It aimed not simply to publish material dealing with Robespierre, but also to rescue his reputation from the opprobrium that had covered him since his overthrow in 1794. To promote its interests, the new organization published a journal entitled Annales révolutionnaires (Revolutionary Annals), which was issued six times a year. The first number, issued early in 1908, contained nothing that might have disturbed Aulard. But in the second, Mathiez presented a highly critical review of a book that the elderly historian had recently written: Taine, historien de la Révolution française (Taine, Historian of the French Revolution, 1907). In it, Aulard had assailed the partisanship and defective scholarship of the conservative historian Hippolyte Taine. Mathiez used his review to dissect Aulard’s own research and judged it to be as weak as Taine’s supposedly was. No doubt irritated, the even-tempered Aulard declined to reply in kind. Yet he took his revenge and baited Mathiez by reprinting in his own journal the laudatory article that his youthful protégé had written in 1905. Aulard prefaced the text by commenting that it had been produced by someone who bore the same name as the individual who had published the unfavorable review of his work on Taine. One was complimentary, the other malevolent. Stung by Aulard’s remarks and no doubt embarrassed by his earlier fulsome praise of Aulard, Mathiez broke openly with his former mentor and friend. He angrily declared that the homage he had paid three years earlier had been produced “on command.” Mathiez now criticized Aulard’s work as an historian, as well as claiming that he had tried to destroy the newly formed Society for Robespierrist Studies and denigrated the character of its namesake. Aulard, however, declined to reply. His contemptuous silence only provoked Mathiez to renew the assault on the elderly historian’s scholarly reputation. This one-side quarrel would continue until Aulard died in 1928. The consequence of this dispute was the parallel existence of two historical societies and two important journals, both devoted almost exclusively to the French Revolution.


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Mathiez’s voluminous publications did help to advance his academic career. After teaching in secondary schools for years, he was promoted in 1908 to a professorship at the University of Nancy. Three years later, he received a teaching position at the University of Besançon in his native Franche Comté. There, Mathiez undertook to study the history of the province during the Revolution, conducting extensive research in the local archives. The sudden outbreak of war in 1914 brought Mathiez’s scholarship to a halt. He suspended publication of his journal as he watched many of his younger associates march to the front. Having lost his left eye in an accident years before, Mathiez remained exempt from military service. He nonetheless contributed to the national war effort by writing timely articles for Parisian and provincial newspapers. In a steady stream of columns, Mathiez denounced the German invader for his barbarism and called for his decisive defeat. He blamed Prussian militarism and despotism for causing the war, while he declared that France was fighting to protect humanity and civilization. Mathiez placed his extensive knowledge of the Revolution in the service of his country. In a series of articles, later collected in La Victoire en l’an II (Victory in the Year II, 1916), he described how the remnants of the old royal army, conscripts, and volunteers had been forged into a victorious national force. This new army was supplied with weapons, munitions, and equipment thanks to improvised, efficient methods of production. The results, he claimed, astounded the world and ensured French victory over its monarchist enemies. In the conduct of the present war, Mathiez recommended the advice of the revolutionary Lazare Carnot to “attack and attack unceasingly.” This strategy had worked in 1793–4, Mathiez declared, and would work again. In addition to military questions, Mathiez examined economic and social problems caused by the war. The scarcity of food, fuel, and clothing that he experienced in Besançon, as well as the rising cost of living, led him to investigate similar conditions during the Revolution. Out of numerous articles would emerge his most original work, La Vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur (The High Cost of Living and the Social Movement during the Terror), eventually published in 1927. Mathiez’s study demonstrated that scarcity and inflation generated popular unrest that compelled the government of the First Republic, most reluctantly, to take drastic action to restrain prices by means of regulations and requisitioning. In his eyes, the Terror became a centralized dictatorship that succeeded in stimulating industrial and agricultural production while improving transport and stabilizing finances. To enforce controls over production and prices, however, the National Convention resorted to widespread arrests, imprisonment of suspects, and execution of those found guilty of violating the law. Mathiez’s work opened fresh perspectives on the Revolution by examining the attitudes of the popular classes and the agitation of their radical leaders. Two other aspects of the Revolution that he explored were diplomacy and defeatism. The university lectures that he delivered on the subject were published

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as Danton et la paix (Danton and the Peace, 1918). The work explored the origins of France’s wars against the coalition powers, as well as the secret diplomacy conducted by the governing Committee of Public Safety to bring an end to the conflict. The leading defeatists – those who sought to attain peace even on unfavorable terms – were, Mathiez claimed, Danton and his associates. Far from being the sincere patriot that Aulard had depicted, Danton proved to be an “unscrupulous intriguer” who wanted a “shameless” peace with the invading enemy. It was entirely fitting, therefore, that he should pay with his life in 1794. In contrast, Mathiez portrayed Robespierre as a true patriot who exposed and thwarted Danton’s schemes, saving the Republic. If Mathiez and Aulard remained as far apart as ever in their quarrel over the merits of Danton and Robespierre, both historians were delighted when Russian Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown by a popular revolution in March 1917. In an article entitled “Long live Russia,” Mathiez praised the Russians for having followed the example of revolutionary France. He firmly believed that the new Russian government would bring forth a democratic and parliamentary regime that could not fail to strengthen the Allies against Germany. But as the year wore on and the Provisional Government suffered defeats on the battlefield and political divisions at home, Mathiez lost faith in it. When Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew it in November, he compared them to France’s Montagnards who, in 1793, had ousted the moderate Girondins from power and gone on to defeat the monarchist invaders. He must have been thoroughly disillusioned when Lenin signed a treaty at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, sacrificing considerable territory, population, and resources in exchange for peace. Only the decisive Allied victory in the autumn of 1918, achieved with the intervention of the United States, saved him from total despair. With war’s end, Mathiez obtained a teaching post at the University of Dijon. There he stirred disquiet among his students as the “historian of Robespierre.” A demanding professor, he informed his classes that “if I shake you severely, it’s for your own good.” In his lectures, he continued his relentless assault on Danton, whom he styled “a real bandit that a stupid legend has made into a hero.” In his book Robespierre terroriste (Robespierre the Terrorist, 1920), a collection of articles written during the war, Mathiez praised his hero as a model of republican virtue and financial probity who had led France to victory in 1794. During the 1920s, Mathiez also undertook a project that paid tribute to the assassinated socialist leader Jean Jaurès. He reissued the important study of the Revolution that Jaurès had published in four quarto volumes between 1901 and 1904 as part of the Histoire socialiste (Socialist History). Under the title Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française (Socialist History of the French Revolution, 1922–4), Mathiez’s edition appeared in eight volumes with annotations and chapter divisions that Jaurès had omitted. The study embodied the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution which stressed the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the monarchy and aristocracy, won with the active support of the popular classes, who were in turn eventually repressed when their economic and social demands threatened


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middle-class security. Mathiez adopted and amplified this interpretation of the Revolution in his own version of the period. Entitled simply La Révolution française (translated as The French Revolution, 1927), his compact, three-volume work was designed for a popular audience. Volume one (1922) covered the origins and first years of the Revolution. Volume two (1924) described the conflict between moderate Girondins and radical Montagnards that ended with the victory of the latter in 1793. Volume three (1927) recounted the climactic Year II of the Republic (1793–4) when the Montagnards overcame the triple threat of popular agitation, civil war, and foreign invasion. Mathiez justified the Terror as the necessary means for maintaining national unity and defeating monarchist armies, as well as establishing political and social equality. For Mathiez, the overthrow of Robespierre in July 1794 marked the end of the democratic republic along with the Terror. Written in a clear, readable style and incorporating the latest research, The French Revolution sold briskly both in France and abroad in English and German translations. Mathiez’s politics strongly influenced his writings. Angered by the triumph of French conservatives after the Great War, and inspired by the successes of the Bolsheviks in Russia, he warmed to the newly established French Communist Party. He discerned similarities between Bolsheviks and Jacobins, Lenin and Robespierre. In the early 1920s, he contributed numerous articles to the Communist Party press that praised the Soviet Union and denounced his own country’s conservative policies. Yet, he soon came to believe that the French Communist Party had fallen too much under the control of Moscow and that party intellectuals were placed under too many constraints. By 1922, Mathiez broke with the party and reverted to his independent socialism, concentrating on his own scholarship. His ardent support for the Bolsheviks, however, antagonized faculty at the University of Paris, who passed him over as Aulard’s successor when the elderly historian retired in 1923, choosing instead the non-controversial historian Philippe Sagnac. Despite this serious setback to his career, Mathiez continued to teach at Dijon, directed the Society for Robespierrist Studies, edited its journal, known from 1924 as the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (Historical Annals of the French Revolution), and pursued his archival research. Many of his journal articles were reprinted in two of his books: Autour de Robespierre (Robespierre’s Circle, 1925), which praised the Incorruptible for his political leadership, and Autour de Danton (Danton’s Circle, 1926), which exposed the dishonesty of Danton and his associates. A third study, La Réaction thermidorienne (1929; translated as After Robespierre: The Thermidorian Reaction, 1931), continued his three-volume history of the Revolution. Longer, more detailed, and better documented than its predecessors, the work covered the period following the overthrow of Robespierre when the opponents of popular democracy triumphed. Mathiez’s numerous publications enabled him to move from the University of Dijon to the University of Paris in 1926, temporarily replacing Sagnac, who had taken a teaching position in Egypt. In the French capital, Mathiez enjoyed greater recognition and the opportunity to conduct intensive research in the national

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archives. When Sagnac eventually returned from abroad in 1929, Mathiez was able to remain in Paris by securing a post at the Ecole pratique des hautes études. Coincidentally, in October 1928, Mathiez’s arch-rival Aulard suddenly died. His disappearance left Mathiez as the leading authority on the Revolution, a position he unfortunately had only a brief time to enjoy. Mathiez had now attained an international reputation thanks in large part to translations of his books. Foreign scholars, including various Americans, who visited Paris to conduct research, went to consult him about their work. In 1930, Mathiez himself produced Girondins et Montagnards (Girondins and Montagnards). A collection of articles that studied the struggle between the two principal factions in the National Convention, it analyzed their differences and the reasons for the victory of the Montagnards. The last book that Mathiez published was Le Dix août (The Tenth of August, 1931), a vivid account of the overthrow of King Louis XVI in August 1792, written for a general audience. The heavy demands placed on him by his academic and scholarly responsibilities began to undermine his once robust health. Despite pleas by his colleagues to lighten his load, Mathiez refused to do so. While teaching a class at the University of Paris on February 25, 1932, he suffered a paralyzing stroke and died in a hospital several hours later. His sudden death shocked his students and friends. A memorial issue of his journal carried tributes written by French and foreign historians that praised Mathiez as a teacher, scholar, and colleague. His remains were cremated and his ashes placed in Père Lachaise cemetery. Albert Mathiez’s contributions to the history of the French Revolution were numerous. His impressive output, based largely on extensive archival research, added considerably to the knowledge of the period. He opened new perspectives not only on the political and religious developments of the period, but also on its economic and social aspects, particularly agitation by the popular classes. More than any previous scholar, Mathiez worked to rehabilitate Maximilien Robespierre, portraying him as the chief defender of democratic and republican ideals, an eloquent orator, defender of the people, and incorruptible statesman. His strenuous efforts on behalf of Robespierre were not entirely objective, however, for in contrasting him with his opportunistic and venal rival, Danton, Mathiez also undercut the reputation of his former patron Alphonse Aulard. Mathiez’s violent temper too often alienated colleagues and intimidated students. Yet his extensive publications and creation of an historical society and quality journal, both of which continue to function a century after their creation, attest to Mathiez’s enduring influence.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Albert Mathiez Les Origines des cultes révolutionnaires (1789–1792) (Paris: Société nouvelle de la librairie et d’édition, 1904).


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La Théophilanthropie et le culte décadaire, 1796–1802: essai sur l’histoire religieuse de la Révolution (Paris: F. Alcan, 1904). Les Lois françaises de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: F. Alcan, 1906). Contributions à l’histoire religieuse de la Révolution française (Paris: F. Alcan, 1907). Le Club des Cordeliers pendant la crise de Varennes et le massacre du Champs-de-Mars (Paris: H. Champion, 1910); Supplément (Paris: H. Champion, (1913). Un Procès de corruption sous la Terreur: l’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes (Paris: F. Alcan, 1910). La Révolution et l’Eglise: études critiques et documentaires (Paris: A. Colin, 1910). Les Conséquences religieuses de la journée du 10 août 1792: la déportation des prêtres et la sécularisation de l’état civil (Paris: E. Leroux, 1911). Rome et le clergé français sous la Constituante. La Constitution civil du clergé. L’Affaire d’Avignon (Paris: A. Colin, (1911). Les Grandes Journées de la Constituante, 1789–1791 (Paris: Hachette, 1913). La Monarchie et la politique nationale (Paris: A. Colin, 1916). La Victoire en l’an II: esquisses historiques sur la défense nationale (Paris: F. Alcan, 1916). Etudes robespierristes, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1917–18). Danton et la paix (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1918). La Révolution et les étrangers: cosmopolitisme et défense nationale (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1918). Robespierre terroriste (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1920). La Révolution française, 3 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1922–7); vol. 1: La Chute du roi (1922); vol. 2: La Gironde et la Montagne (1924); vol. 3: La Terreur (1927); all three volumes translated by Catherine Alison Phillips as The French Revolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927). Autour de Robespierre (Paris: Payot, 1925); translated by Catherine Alison Phillips as The Fall of Robespierre and Other Essays (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927). Autour de Danton (Paris: Payot, 1926). La Vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur (Paris: Payot, 1927). La Réaction thermidorienne (Paris: A. Colin, 1929); translated by Catherine Alison Phillips as After Robespierre: The Thermidorian Reaction (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1931). Girondins et Montagnards (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1930). Le Dix août (Paris: Hachette, 1931). Le Directoire, du 11 brumaire an IV au 18 fructidor an V (Paris: A. Colin, 1934). Etudes sur Robespierre (1758–1794) (Paris: Editions sociales, 1958).

Edited Work Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, 8 vols., edited by Albert Mathiez (Paris: Editions de la libraire de l’Humanité, 1922–4).

References Acomb, Frances, “Albert Mathiez (1874–1932),” in Some Historians of Modern France, edited by Bernadotte E. Schmitt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 306–23. Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 51 (May–June 1932), memorial issue.

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Friguglietti, James, “Albert Mathiez: an historian at war,” French Historical Studies, 7 (Fall 1972): 570–86. Friguglietti, James, Albert Mathiez, historien révolutionnaire (1874–1932) (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1974). Friguglietti, James, “La querelle Mathiez–Aulard et les origines de la Société des études robespierristes,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 353 ( July–September 2008): 63–94. Godechot, Jacques, Un jury pour la Révolution (Paris: R. Laffont, 1974).

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Roland Mousnier (1907–1993) Sharon Kettering

Roland Mousnier was one of the most original, prolific, and influential French historians of the late twentieth century. Born in Paris, he attended high school at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, studied at the Ecole practique des hautes études, and in 1931 completed his course work at the Sorbonne for a doctorate in early modern French history. He taught at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen from 1932 to 1937, married Jeanne Lacacheur in 1934, and began the research for his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Georges Pagès, the well-known institutional and political historian. Finishing his dissertation after Pagès’s death in 1939, Mousnier defended and published it in 1945. He taught in Paris at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly from 1937 to 1940, and at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand from 1940 to 1947. A political conservative and a devout Roman Catholic, his convictions led him to join the Resistance in World War II. He was arrested by the Gestapo in Rouen and narrowly escaped deportation to Germany. After the war, he joined the Faculty of Letters at the University of Strasbourg as a professor from 1947 to 1955, and he taught at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris–Sorbonne as a professor from 1955 to 1977. A member of the Institute of France, he remained active in researching and writing after he retired, and published his last book in 1992 only a few months before his death in February 1993. The breadth and originality of Mousnier’s pioneering doctoral thesis, La Venalité des offices sous Henri IV and Louis XIII (The Venality of Offices under Henry IV and Louis XIII, 1945), established him as a leading institutional and political historian of seventeenth-century France. His book was based on extensive research in the departmental and Parisian archives, and the profusion of evidence made his conclusions widely accepted. Mousnier focused his inquiry on nobles who were venal officeholders, on the tensions and conflicts between these robe or administrative

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nobles and the more traditional military or sword nobles, and on the role of nobles in the newly emerging royal bureaucracy and in the popular revolts occurring throughout France in the early seventeenth century. Mousnier was studying politics, elites, and institutions at a time when these subjects were not fashionable. The Annales school of history was at its height of popularity during the second half of the twentieth century. The Annalistes criticized traditional historians for their narrative approach to historical writing and for their preoccupation with politics, great men, and warfare; that is, for what Annalistes called “writing history from the top down.” The Annalistes were interested in long-term socioeconomic causation, in social structures, and in a wide range of life experiences, including those of rural peasants, urban wage workers, women, children, the elderly, the dying, and marginal social groups such as beggars, prostitutes, and criminals. The Annalistes described themselves as “writing history from the bottom up” and dismissed Mousnier and his work as traditional. A case in point is Mousnier’s L’Assassinat d’Henri IV, 14 Mai 1610 (translated as The Assassination of Henry IV, 1973), published in 1964. This book investigated the nature of the society that had produced the king’s murderer by exploring its social and political tensions, and its religious, economic, fiscal, and diplomatic problems. Written in a readable narrative style, it became Mousnier’s most popular book, although the Annalistes dismissed it. In fact, Mousnier and his work were not so purely traditional as the Annalistes maintained. He shared many of the same interests as the Annalistes, although he offered an alternative historical approach by studying what they did not: politics; elites; administrative institutions such as the church and the new bureaucracy; financial, diplomatic, and military history; and short-term events such as assassinations, revolts, and wars. Nonetheless, like theirs, his work was based on extensive archival research and on an analytic consideration of both long-term and shortterm problems. Mousnier, too, was interested in comparative history, computer analysis, and interdisciplinary ideas and methods borrowed from sociology, anthropology, genealogy, and geography, among other disciplines. He spent a year in the United States studying sociology and anthropology. Mousnier was a social historian as well as an institutional and political historian, and he was deeply interested in the structural characteristics of early modern French society and in social causation. In his doctoral dissertation, he had presented his concept of early modern French society as a society characterized by vertical social stratifications based on rank, what he called a “society of orders,” and Mousnier developed this concept in his later books such as Les Hiérarchies sociales de 1450 à nos jours (1969; translated as Social Hierarchies: 1450 to the Present, 1973). In this book, he used Bernard Barber’s functional theory of social stratification to examine various societies across time including, among others, France, Russia, China, Tibet, and Nazi Germany. He was widely criticized, however, for oversimplifying the societies that he studied and the social theory that he used.

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Mousnier was an excellent teacher who believed in the pedagogical importance of historical seminars and colloquia, a teaching method adopted and widely used by his colleagues. His many students came to include some of the most distinguished historians of early modern France, for instance, Michel Antoine, Elie Barnavi, Yves-Marie Bercé, Pierre Blet, Jean-Marie Constant, André Corvisier, Jean-Claude Dubé, Yves Durand, Madeleine Foisil, Jean Gallet, Maurice Gresset, Pierre Grillon, Arlette Jouanna, Jean-Pierre Labatut, Georges Livet, René Pillorget, and Myriam Yardeni. Through his teaching and writing, Mousnier influenced a generation of French historians, although the Mousnierites were always too diverse in their interests to be called a school. He espoused group investigations of historical problems, founding a research center in 1958 (Centre de recherches sur l’histoire de la civilisation de l’Europe moderne) and a research institute in 1970 (Institut de la recherches sur les civilisations de l’Occident moderne) to facilitate coordinated team research into historical questions. Mousnier published the proceedings of many of the seminars and colloquia that he sponsored. In 1958, Mousnier launched a critical attack on Boris Porchnev, a Soviet Marxist historian who used classes and class conflict to explain early seventeenth-century French popular revolts. Rejecting the Marxist interpretation of history as reductionism, Mousnier contrasted his archival research and conclusions with the dogmatic, ideological schematization of Marxist analysis. His attack began with an article, “Recherches sur les soulèvements populaires en France avant la Fronde” (“Research on popular uprisings in France before the Fronde,” 1958), which was republished in 1970 in a collection of his articles entitled La Plume, la faucille et le marteau (The Pen, the Sickle, and the Hammer). He provoked a debate about the structural characteristics of early modern French society that raged throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The debate introduced Mousnier’s work to British and American scholars, and many of his books were translated into English at this time. A number of Anglo-American scholars, some of whom agreed and some of whom disagreed with Mousnier, were influenced by his work, including William Beik, Richard Bonney, James Collins, Robert Harding, Michael Hayden, Sharon Kettering, J. Russell Major, A. Lloyd Moote, David Parker, and Orest Ranum. Mousnier’s influence, therefore, stretched far beyond the borders of France. In his attack on Porchnev, Mousnier noted that most historians regarded early modern French society as divided into three estates because contemporaries had believed this. The troubling question was – what subdivisions existed within the three estates? Mousnier believed that the three estates were subdivided into a hierarchy of groups known as orders, which were ranked vertically according to the esteem, honor, and prestige attached to their social and political functions by society. An individual became a member of an order by birth, by his own acquisition of offices, titles, fiefs, royal favors, and academic degrees, and by his pursuit of an occupation or profession. Wealth alone, or an individual’s role in the production of material goods, did not determine rank.

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As a Marxist, Porchnev viewed early modern society differently. He believed that individuals were classified according to their wealth and economic activity as members of the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. Early seventeenth-century popular revolts were anti-feudal, anti-fiscal protests by the masses (peasants in the countryside and workers in the towns) against the power of a feudal state dominated by the traditional ruling classes, the clergy, nobility, and monarchy. The bourgeoisie, which invested in the system by buying ennobling offices and fiefs, had in this way betrayed its historic mission of leading a revolution by joining the elite in defending a feudal-absolutist state. France had to wait until the end of the eighteenth century for a bourgeois-led revolution that would destroy the Old Regime. Mousnier agreed that the popular revolts of the early seventeenth century were tax protests by the peasants and urban poor, but he believed that these revolts were led by disaffected nobles whose power had been attacked by the monarchy. The Bourbon monarchy used the newly emerging bureaucracy to intimidate and to coerce these unruly nobles. Venality, the purchase of ennobling state offices, allowed the monarchy to create a new administrative elite, the robe nobility, which it used to challenge the power of the old feudal elite, the sword nobility. Mousnier described a society of vertically integrated, culturally determined orders linked by personal ties, and rejected the Marxist view of a society of broad, horizontal, materially based classes engaged in a class struggle. Both interpretations were attacked. Critics complained that the historical reality was messier and more complicated than either the Marxist or Mousnier models, which were both too schematized, simplistic, and theoretical. Mousnier was criticized for idealizing early modern society by disregarding its economic foundations and for taking contemporary descriptions too literally. Porchnev was criticized for adhering too closely to Marxist ideology. Mousnier attempted, unsuccessfully, to apply his model to other societies around the world and across time in his book Fureurs paysannes: les paysans dans les révoltes du XVIIe siècle (France, Russie, Chine) (1968; translated as Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-century France, Russia, and China, 1970), but his model worked best for early modern France. He was widely criticized for historical errors and oversimplifications in this book, and for misunderstanding and misapplying sociological theory. The Marxist model was more successfully applied across time and space, but it did not take into account the unique features of seventeenth-century France, such as the development of the early modern state. The emerging royal bureaucracy was an important force for social change, and historians using class analysis after the Mousnier–Porchnev debate included the state in their analyses for this reason. Both models were criticized for describing only a part of early modern society. Mousnier was criticized for ignoring the role of wealth and economic activity in determining social identity, and Porchnev for ignoring cultural factors such as esteem, honor, and prestige. It was pointed out that their overlapping typologies were complementary rather than mutually exclusive ways of looking


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at the same group of people. Early modern France was both a society of orders and a society of classes, and Frenchmen were ranked both by the nature of their wealth and economic activity, and by culturally determined categories or orders. In both typologies, the social hierarchy was roughly the same, with a propertied local elite at the top and a mass of propertyless indigents at the bottom. Most historians, in fact, rejected both the Marxist and the Mousnier models; the debate over whether early modern France was a society of orders or classes raged into the 1980s, but then classes quietly faded away, hastened by the collapse of Marxist governments in the late 1980s. Mousnier’s last great synthesis, the two-volume Les Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue, 1598–1789 (1974, 1980; translated as The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789, 1979, 1984), described four simultaneously overlapping societies in early modern France, composed of (1) lineages or extended families, (2) fealties or patron–client relationships, (3) orders or estates, and (4) corporations or territorial communities. An individual was a member of all four societies at the same time, and could belong simultaneously to many other groups and subgroups, including those that were incompatible. Already in his doctoral dissertation Mousnier had devoted attention to, and emphasized the importance of, the patron–client relationships that bound superiors and inferiors together in the hierarchical society of early modern France. Mousnier called them fidélités or fidelity relationships, and insisted that absolute devotion and loyalty until death was their defining characteristic. Les Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue once again presented his definition of patron–client relationships, and this definition sparked criticism, debate, and further investigation by American, French, and British scholars in the 1980s and 1990s. This book became a useful reference tool because of its succinct descriptions of French institutions and social groups, but Mousnier never adequately explained how these multiple societies and groups interacted, or how conflicts between them were reconciled. Likewise, he never explored or defined the multiplicity of personal ties and linkages connecting them, or explained how they all functioned together to maintain vertical integration. Roland Mousnier’s lasting contribution to the study of history was to force a generation of post-World War II scholars to rethink their assumptions about the nature of early modern French society and government. A prolific historian, he published over thirty books and twice that number of articles. He was boldly original, outspoken, and controversial, and the criticism that he provoked served only to encourage him to rework his arguments. He never responded to criticism with the shrill personal attacks that so often characterize scholarly debate. Instead, he went back to the archives, found new evidence, honed his arguments, and presented them again in the best tradition of scholarly discourse. His high standards of scholarship, intellectual rigor, and insistence on solid archival research to support his arguments are another of his lasting contributions. He showed courage and conviction in challenging the Annalistes and the Marxists, historical approaches that have now been broadly challenged, and while some of his arguments, espe-

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cially those concerning social stratification and the society of orders, appear dated if not moribund, they provoked inquiry and investigation that are still ongoing and therefore represent another of Mousnier’s contributions. By stimulating the thinking of other scholars, even if they disagreed with him, Roland Mousnier opened a multitude of doors into the past.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Roland Mousnier La Venalité des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (Rouen: Editions Maugard, 1945; rev. and enlarged edn., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971). Le XVIIIe siècle: l’époque des lumières (1715–1815), by Roland Mousnier and Ernest Labrousse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953; rev. edn., 1959; rev. again, 1963; rev. again, 1967). Les XVIe et XVIIe siècles: la grande mutation intellectuelle de l’humanité, l’avènement de la science moderne, et l’expansion de l’Europe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954). Progrès scientifique et technique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958). L’Assassinat d’Henri IV, 14 Mai 1610 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); translated by Joan Spencer as The Assassination of Henry IV: The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early Seventeenth Century (New York: Scribner, 1973). Fureurs paysannes: les paysans dans les révoltes du XVIIe siécle (France, Russie, Chine) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1967); translated by Brian Pearce as Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenthcentury France, Russia, and China (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). Les Hiérarchies sociales de 1450 à nos jours (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969); translated by Peter Evans as Social Hierarchies: 1450 to the Present, edited by Margaret Clarke (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). Le Conseil du roi: de Louis XII à la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). La Plume, la faucille et le marteau: institutions et société en France, du Moyen Age à la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). Les Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue, 1598–1789, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974, 1980); translated by Brian Pearce as The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 1984). Recherches sur la stratification sociale à Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: l’échantillon de 1634, 1635, 1636, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Pedone, 1976). Paris, capitale au temps de Richelieu et de Mazarin (Paris: A. Pedone, 1978). L’Homme rouge, ou, la vie du cardinal Richelieu, 1582–1642 (Paris: R. Laffont, 1992).

Edited Works Lettres et mémoires adressés au chancelier Séguier (1633–1649), edited by Roland Mousnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964). Problèmes de stratification sociale: deux cahiers de la noblesse, 1649–1651, edited by Roland Mousnier, Jean-Pierre Labatut, and Yves Durand (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965).


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L’Age d’or du mécénat (1598–1661): actes du colloque international CNRS – Le mécénat en Europe, et particulièrement en France avant Colbert, edited by Roland Mousnier and Jean Mesnard (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1985). Richelieu et la culture: actes du colloque international en Sorbonne, edited by Roland Mousnier (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1987).

Selected Articles by Roland Mousnier “Recherches sur les soulèvements populaires en France avant la Fronde,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 5 (1958): 81–113. “Le concept de classe sociale et l’histoire,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, 48 (1970): 449–59. “Les concepts d’ordres, d’états, de fidélité et de monarchie absolue en France de la fin du XVe siècle à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue historique, 502 (1972): 289–312. “Le problème des fidélités aux XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIIIe siècles,” Revue historique, 505 (1975): 540–2. “Les fidélités et les clientèles en France au XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIIIe siècles,” Histoire sociale, 15 (1982): 35–46.

References Arriaza, Armand, “Mousnier and Barber: the theoretical underpinning of the ‘society of orders’ in early modern Europe,” Past and Present, 88 (1980): 39–57. Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Bush, M. L., Social Classes and Social Orders in Europe since 1500 (London: Longman, 1992). Coveney, P. J., France in Crisis, 1620–1675 (London: Macmillan, 1977). Durand, Yves (ed.), Hommage à Roland Mousnier: clientèles et fidélités en Europe à l’époque moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981). Gately, M. O., Moote, A. L., and Wills, J. E., “Seventeenth-century peasant ‘furies’: some problems of comparative history,” Past and Present, 51 (1971): 63–80. Hayden, J. Michael, “Models, Mousnier and qualité: the social structure of early modern France,” French History, 10 (1996): 375–98. Hunt, Lynn, “French history in the last twenty years: the rise and fall of the ‘Annales’ paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986): 209–24. Kettering, Sharon, “Patronage in early modern France,” French Historical Studies, 17 (1992): 839–62. Porchnev, Boris, Les Soulèvements populaires en France de 1623 à 1648 (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963). Salmon, J. H. M., “Venality of office and popular sedition in seventeenth-century France,” Past and Present, 37 (1967): 21–43.

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Pierre Nora (1931– ) Richard C. Holbrook

On June 6, 2002, Pierre Nora took his place in the Académie française, and, following ancient custom, delivered a discours (speech). He began with the observation that the forty members of the Académie are known as immortels (immortal). It is an intriguing designation, he said, because the one thing that academicians are not is immortal. An academician only occupies an office, assumes a dignity, and performs a function. Nora identified himself, in particular, as an historian “of France and its national memory,” and thus was inclined to view the Académie as “the highest incarnation of France and its history, of all its histories, the only single surviving institution from the monarchy. It is like a relic, an archive.” It is appropriate, he continued, that the Académie welcome those who best know how to “adjust the view of Frenchmen in their time toward the France of old.” Nora declared that, for his generation, history will be more complicated, less affirmative, and more insistent. That history will shape historians more than they shape it. To write it, one will need to create a model of France that, unlike the traditional mold, provides for an awareness of self. Such a history will be more social than political, more in tune with memory than politics, more focused on patrimony than on nation. Nora’s peroration concluded with a discussion of journalist Michel Droit, his Académie predecessor, who covered events in France from 1965 to 1975, events that, in Nora’s view, forced changes in the way history is written. Sociologists, Nora said, were already designating this period as a second and silent French Revolution. Changes in the social and national model signaled that “a conclusion of history” had occurred. The France that had so long been a “military, Christian, statist, imperialist, and messianic power” had suddenly been effaced, leaving in its wake a France that was, and even today still is, painfully seeking itself. This meta-

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morphosis required the historian to take stock and rethink “his views, his approach, and his method. I then set to work.” During the ceremony at the Académie, Nora referred to two major influences on his approach to history, Judaism and the Enlightenment. He pointed to the Star of David above the central wing of the Académie, declaring that he is “of those who persist in believing that what the Jews have to say to the world draws more upon the spirit than upon weapons …” It embodies “a historic tradition and an age-old culture to which I am proud to belong [and] I would not be what I am without them.” Then he turned to the Botticelli painting that illustrates the Divine Comedy, calling attention to the stars surrounding the poet entering paradise. These small lights symbolize for Nora his indissoluble attachment to the tradition of the Enlightenment and to the eternal flame of hope. The son of a surgeon, Pierre Nora spent the first part of World War II in Grenoble with his mother, two brothers, and a sister until danger forced them to disperse. One winter night, the twelve-year-old Pierre was living alone in a pension when the Gestapo came looking for him and he escaped through a window. His brother Simon found him refuge in the forests of the Vercors, where he remained until the end of the war, keeping, then burying a wartime journal. Following the war, he rejoined his family and returned to Paris. There he studied the humanities, receiving a licence de lettres et de philosophie and, in 1958, the agrégation d’histoire. His first teaching assignment took him to Oran, Algeria, for two years. His experiences and observations there, at a time when the Algerian revolt was grinding down to its bloody conclusion, prompted him to write a study of the pieds noirs. That book, Les Français d’Algérie (The French of Algeria, 1961), was one of the first to examine the trauma of colonialism. Nora’s focus in Les Français d’Algérie was on mentalities, the mental frameworks that comprise opinions, illusions, and prejudices, in this case, those of the French pieds noirs, the French nationals born in and constituting 10 percent of the population of Algeria. From a moral standpoint, it was just and fair to condemn the Algerian French, Nora said, but to understand the reasons for the Algerian revolt required viewing the situation from the standpoint of an historian. Nora began with a psychological portrait of the French of Algeria, his first venture into the approach that was to characterize his later work. The French brought to Algeria attitudes traceable back to the French Revolution. But trying to assert the beneficence of the liberal principles of the Revolution, they found themselves unconsciously ensnared in contradictions. While promoting effective government, they destroyed Muslim society. They imported the Civil Code and used it to despoil the Arabs of their lands in the name of the common good. While instituting anti-poverty reforms, they resisted implementing political change. French citizenship for Arabs, for instance, seemed to them a step toward revolutionary upheaval. Governing in this way, they developed a mindset in which generosity, anxiety, and guilt mingled. Colonialism had, in effect, turned them into repentant racists, who still managed to believe they enjoyed Arab loyalty.

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Preoccupied with questions of liberal morality and economics, they ignored the weight of history, particularly significant in the aftermath of World War II. The pieds noirs, Nora observed, never grasped what the French defeat of 1940 meant for the Arabs. On returning to Paris, Nora embarked on a course which markedly distinguishes him from other historians, both in France and America. He took up a dual career, in academia and publishing. After issuing Les Français d’Algérie in 1961, René Julliard invited Nora to join Editions Julliard. The invitation was timely. For Nora, traditional frameworks of analysis had become too narrow and “constrained by outmoded rhetoric,” in René Rémond’s words. Nora now had the opportunity to knock down academic barriers and to encourage crossbreeding among disciplines as well as to foster new ideas and perspectives. Julliard’s proposition was to create a new genre, one that would bring the “laboratory” of the historian – the libraries and archives – to the general reader. The historian would be invited to practice a different kind of history. Meanwhile, Nora began to introduce his themes – mentalities, memories, the significance of historical context – in his teaching. He led seminars on topics such as “the rumor” and “the best seller.” He worked as a maître-assistant at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris until 1977, when he became director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where historian François Furet was president. The EHESS has been described by historian Pierre Rosanvallon as “the most important institutional locus for work within a liberal framework” (cited by Nick Hewlett in Democracy in Modern France). In the late 1970s, colleagues at the EHESS created a seminar where Nora met with Furet, Rosanvallon, and other historians and political philosophers Jacques Julliard, Marcel Gauchet, and Pierre Manent to discuss liberal approaches to history and political thought. While working in the academy and the publishing house, Nora continued writing, completing “Le ‘fardeau de l’histoire’ aux Etats-Unis” (The “burden of history” in the United States) in 1966. The themes of “consciousness through memory” and “national mentalities” ran through this overview of American historiography. Nora wrote of a country “naturally obsessed by its national identity,” in which historians play the role of “directors of awareness” and “interpreters of national sentiment.” American collective psychology was formed in colonial times, when successive waves of immigrants adopted the “ideology” (Nora’s word) of their new home, by which Nora understands the ideas of equality, happiness, and liberty grounded in the religious, universalist principles of the Founding Fathers. Acceptance of that past signified the promise of a common future and a past that was linear, progressive, and normative. Any demand for change was accompanied by reference to the past, as, for instance, in the New Frontier. Nora thus viewed American history as imposing a burden. As historian Richard Hofstadter has noted, “It was our destiny as a nation not to have an ideology, but to be one.”


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At his publishing house, René Julliard had wanted to take advantage of the paperback, a technical and commercial revolution that was lowering costs and potentially increasing readership. “Put the document in the pocket of the reader” was the slogan and challenge Nora devised. Nora had already begun with the “Collection Folio Archives” in 1964. He participated at all levels of the process, choosing subjects and finding appropriate historians to select and edit the documents. The document collections range widely over periods and countries from Ancient Rome and the trial of Joan of Arc to the Jesuits in China and the KKK in the United States. The effort was a publishing success; it now numbers some hundred titles. In 1965, after Julliard’s death, Nora joined Editions Gallimard and brought with him the “Collection Folio Archives.” Speaking at Nora’s installation in the Académie, Antoine Gallimard lauded him for anticipating, spurring, and participating in a profound change in publishing. Under Nora’s direction, Gallimard extended its purview beyond its recognized expertise in literature. The effort obliged Nora to become acquainted with other disciplines, like economics, linguistics, and sociology. In 1966, the project was launched under the name, “Bibliothèque des sciences humaines.” It now has about 140 titles on topics including capitalism, art criticism, Buddhism in China, Indians in Bolivia, paganism, and work and leisure. In 1971, Nora launched the series “Bibliothèque des histoires,” now with nearly 180 titles, including monographs by today’s major French historians. Nora wrote of this series that there was a “need to create, along with the “Bibliothèque des sciences humaines,” a place for history in its multiple dimensions” that reflected changes in the writing of history. Nora wanted books that paid particular attention to what was intangible in cultures, civilizations, and events – those ideologies, symbols, and commemorations that register collective assumptions about the surrounding world. Like the “Bibliothèque des sciences humaines,” this series includes non-French scholars – American, German, English, Brazilian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, and Russian. Their translation into French, as Nora intended, ensured a French audience. Nora drew in authors from the EHESS, previously the Sixth Section of the Ecole pratiques des hautes études, and the Collège de France, paying particular attention to the legacy of the Annales school – a reissue of Marc Bloch’s Les Rois thaumaturges – and to the history of mentalities in the Middle Ages – Georges Duby’s Guerriers et paysans and Les Trois Ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, and Ernst Kantorowicz’s Les Deux Corps du roi. Les Trois Ordres and Montaillou became best sellers for historical works, with over 50,000 copies each. In 1974, Nora himself contributed to the “Bibliothèque des histoires” the book Faire de l’histoire (Constructing the Past) written with fellow historian Jacques Le Goff. In this collection of historians’ essays on topics in methodology, they highlighted the dangers inherent in doing history through other disciplines. An obsession with the quantifiable, they said, threatened to turn historians into statisticians.

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They enjoined the historian to remember that “history must also define itself as the science of change, of transformation …” and not let itself be used simply as a testing ground for social-science models, an “aggression” as far as Le Goff and Nora were concerned. Nora furthered the critique of historical method in another volume of the “Bibliothèque” series, Essais d’ego-histoire (Ego-history: Historians on Themselves) published in 1987. He invited Duby, Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, and others to become historians of themselves, to “make a portrait of the artist as historian,” and to trace their break from inherited approaches to doing history. They had gone either from a concentrated and exhaustive focus on one topic, an approach inherited from the nineteenth century, or from an examination of the dialectic of superstructure and infrastructure, taking a Marxist angle to a study of economic and social history and drawing on the disciplines of economics, psychology, and anthropology to situate their history in the “sciences des societés dans le temps” (“the organized knowledge about societies in time.”) Nora added as an aside, almost as a sigh, that the French school of history after World War II was “our only great export product.” Through his work as editor, Nora was reformulating his ideas on historiography, mentalities, the meaning of nation, and of the French nation in particular. His role afforded him the opportunity to write, as well. He chose, in particular, to add commentary to books touching on mentalities, but in one case a windfall dropped into his lap. That was Auriol’s Journal du septennat, which was published through the Institut d’études politiques. Vincent Auriol, president of France from 1947 to 1954, had kept a daily journal that proved him, in Nora’s eyes, a decisively important political figure in postwar Europe. The journal brings the reader into Auriol’s world of the Fourth Republic with its intractable internal and external problems: the collapse of France’s colonial empire, the beginnings of wars of liberation in former colonies, economic stagnation, rationing more severe than during the war years, and unremitting political strife between Gaullists and communists. Nora, who led the editorial team for the seven-volume publication of the Journal du septennat, wrote in his introduction that “we [had] the very firm conviction of serving history.” He was particularly struck by Auriol’s image of France as the “pygmy between two colossi” during the opening moments of the Cold War. Nora went on to explore how France’s views of the Soviet Union and America both reflected and shaped its image of itself. In a 1978 article, “America and the French intellectuals,” Nora looks at a “curious moment [in French cultural history] when the negative remodeling of the image of socialism [occasioned by Solzhenitsyn’s exile from the USSR in 1974] seemed to have favored a rehabilitation of the image of the United States …” But the potential “rehabilitation” was countered by injured nationalism. France, having now been liberated twice by the American army, could no longer boast that it enjoyed the status of “a great power.” It reacted by reasserting French culture at the expense of American


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culture. American social sciences, with assumptions of rationalization and efficiency, plus a claim to the correlation between economic growth and democratic progress, were viewed as nothing more than tools of American imperialism. The May 1968 riots in France further challenged French attitudes. France discovered that postures like anarchism and surrealism, taken up by French students, had already been invented on American campuses. Writing a lengthy comment for another “Bibliothèque” work afforded Nora further opportunity to explore the concept of national mentalities. In 1975, Gallimard issued a selection from the Lettres de Russie: la Russie en 1839 (Letters from Russia: Russia in 1839) by the Marquis de Custine, first published in 1843. In his commentary, Nora described Custine as having gone to Russia to “find arguments against representative government” and returning as an “advocate for constitutions.” Custine was the first outside observer to denounce Russia’s “oppression disguised as a love for order,” combined with a “fanaticism of obedience,” which condemned Russian society to lying, hatred for the foreigner’s observations, and expanding tyranny. Drawing parallels between the Czarist Russia of the 1830s and post-revolutionary Russia was irresistible. Nora contended that all the forms of Czarist autocracy were carried over into the Bolshevik dictatorship. Gallimard provided further evidence of continuing tyranny in its 1976 publication of Un procès “ordinaire” en URSS: le Dr. Stern devant ses juges (An “Ordinary” Trial in the USSR: Dr. Stern before his Judges). In the preface, Nora charged that the 1974 trial for bribery and misconduct was retaliation for the Jewish physician’s request for a visa to leave the Soviet Union. Nora did not limit his involvement with the Stern case to his work for Gallimard. He had joined fifty Nobel Prize winners in signing a petition, published in Le Monde, March 25, 1975, asserting that the eight-year prison sentence was grotesque and iniquitous. Nora was becoming a public intellectual. By the 1980s, Nora’s thinking about the nature of history and historians’ methods, about mentalities and nationhood, and about France and its history had led him to a new project, one that was to become his major work, the one for which he is best known. In his teaching, Nora had begun looking at historiography in terms of collective memory under the rubric “History of the present.” The idea, which was tested on his seminars at the EHESS from 1978 to 1981, “was to study national feeling, not in the traditional thematic or chronological manner, but instead by analysis of the places in which the collective heritage of France was crystallized, the principal lieux, in all senses of the word, in which collective memory was rooted, in order to create a vast topology of French symbolism.” Drawing on British historian Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966), which examines an important tradition of mnemonic techniques, Nora came to see classical memory as based on a systematic inventory of loci memoriae. The seminars were a success. The Lieux de mémoire (translated as Realms of Memory, 1996–8), with Part I appearing in 1984, was the result.

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Les Lieux de mémoire is a compilation of essays written by about 120 authors and appearing in three parts in seven volumes (La République [one volume, 1984], La Nation [three volumes, 1986], and Les France [three volumes, 1992]). As conceived by Nora, its aim was to examine the role of memory and the relationship of the chosen objects of study to contemporary circumstances and thereby to derive perceptions and definitions of French identity developing over time. Nora had recruited scholars of history, literature, and art. He provided them with no written guide, preferring to work with each author individually and communicating with each personally. The organization of the work is not linear, but, in Nora’s term, “polyphonic.” The lieux include the material and concrete, the abstract, the institutional, and the commonplace. Nora contributed essays to all three volumes. His overriding purpose was to explore the questions: What is a nation? How was France’s uniqueness as a nation achieved? Nora’s previous work gave momentum to this project, and events of the 1970s, touched on in “America and the French intellectuals,” further shaped it. Old ideas of the nation had been overturned by changes in French society, all rooted in developments outside France. The 1973 oil crisis marked the end of a long period of economic growth. Urbanization and consumerism reflecting American practices were reshaping the world, and traditional rural society – with that defining piece of French identity, the peasant – was disappearing. Vatican II had abolished the Latin mass, the centerpiece of Roman Catholic worship for most French people, and with it came a crumbling of religious commitments. De Gaulle’s retirement in 1969 ended all illusions about how much France meant in world affairs. The painful awareness of a shift in international status was further aggravated by the residual effects of the colonial wars. Within France itself, new kinds of social stress had appeared, related more to immigration from former colonies than to traditional religious and political differences. “A nation that had long been agriculturalist, imperialist, and state-centered has passed away,” wrote Nora in Realms of Memory, III. These upheavals had been reflected in shifts in how French historians approached their work. The subject had become more political. It had become more contemporary as historians spoke out on the implications of history for the present. It had become more reflective. Historians were more open about the constraints under which they wrote. The traditional points of reference – Nora often uses the word repère – showed signs of obsolescence. The revolutionary idea, so long a fixture of French political culture, was fading. The discrediting of Marxism had destroyed the idea of beneficial revolutionary change. The French version of communism lost traction as an ideological force, and Marxism no longer served as the preferred tool of historical and social analysis. In these circumstances, Nora asked, what questions should an historian now pose and what approach should one take? Such issues were not new to him. In Les Français d’Algérie in 1961, and in an article on Lavisse the instituteur (in Revue historique of 1962), he had explored defining features of French identity and their


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permanence over time. And in his seminars at the EHESS he had asked his students to begin investigating “a vast topology of French symbols,” now the objective of Les Lieux de mémoire (in English Realms of Memory, 1996–8, Introduction). With such a topology, memory could be a subject of history because “everything from the past of a nation has left a trace in the collective memory” that could be studied. The historian’s task would be to “write the history of this refraction of the past that becomes a component of the identity of a people.” How does one write history, given this focus? Historians would not examine events as events but “see their construction in time, the fading and resurgence of their meaning; not the past as it occurred, but as it is used, misused, and re-used … not the tradition, but the manner in which it was constituted and transmitted.” There was an added note of urgency. An inventory might forestall the “rapid disappearance of our national memory.” In organizing Les Lieux de mémoire, Nora devoted part I to the republic itself because in his view it is the virtual core of the national memory. The Third Republic, which for many French was the true republic, is a particularly fitting topic for memorial study. Specific essays discuss symbols, monuments, pedagogy, commemorations, and counter-memory as the building blocks of republican identity. Part II, La Nation, discusses the legacy of the distant past – the monasteries, royal sanctuaries, and Reims, the city of royal sacre, or anointing – then continues with historiography, the land, and, finally, the state, territory and its limits, patrimony contained in archives and libraries, gloire, and words and writing. Part III, Les France, looks at conflicts and divisions in politics and religion, as well as differences in regions and generations. Nora chose the title, Les France, not as an exercise in whimsical grammar, but as a way to dramatize the diversity of France and its identity. The mixed plural and singular was his way of capturing the “principle of decomposition that underlies the enterprise and is at the heart of a ‘lieu de mémoire.’ ” There is a unified France, but there cannot be a unified history of France, for each of these lieux contains in itself all of France. Part III addresses conflicts and divisions, from the Gauls and Francs, the Ancien Régime and the Revolution, to Vichy and Gaullists and communists. It takes into account religious minorities in France and divisions in space, like the forest and the département, and time, like generations. Nora took as the starting-point of the Lieux de mémoire the historical shocks that hit France in the twentieth century and severed its links to its past. The effort to recover that past would become the task of history, and the focus of Nora’s essays. In “La nation-mémoire” (Lieux, II) he laid out the types of national memory. The first corresponds to the feudal monarchy, with its obsession for ancient origins. Christian and dynastic, it will fix the institution of the monarchy in the divine. Next was the state-memory, the representation of the state in memory through monuments (Versailles), court ritual (memoirs), the Louvre (residence of the king, the national museum after the Revolution), and the institutions that serve memory (Collège de France and the Académie française). Pasquier’s “research,” the

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Recherche de la France written during the Wars of Religion, provided legitimacy for the state in its “parlementaire” and Gallican version. In the nation-memory, the nation became aware of itself, decreeing itself in the Revolution, gathering in its past through historiography, and creating institutions (archives, museums) for exploring and conserving its memory. The link between erudition and patriotism continued in the work of historian Ernest Lavisse, which expressed citizen-memory. Under the shocks of the twentieth century, beginning with World War I, memory assumes meaning increasingly as patrimony-memory, that transformation of memory into a collection of legacies and objects. Nora devoted two essays to the work of Lavisse, in which French national memory was consolidated and made authoritative. Galvanized by France’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Prussia, Lavisse turned public instruction at the primary and university levels into tools for constructing the unitary memory of France and preparing the republic for any challenge. He composed a manual, the Petit Lavisse, for the teaching of history in elementary schools. He reformed the training of historians to incorporate the techniques of German philology for archival research. Lavisse organized the writing of the multi-volume Histoire de France that, in effect, was an assertion of French identity. For Nora, these volumes reveal the interpenetration of scholarly certainty and an obsessive cult of country, a fusion of the universal truth of the archive and the particular truth of the nation. History was a moral endeavor, as it was the way to form citizens ready to die for France. Nora sees Lavisse’s achievement as one of the major symbolic elements in the nation’s heritage. Lavisse’s work also shows, in Nora’s view, that history is not an innocent exercise. It is criticism by nature, in this case to denounce the inadequacies of its predecessors, and its role in forming the national consciousness means that it has a polemical content (Lieux, I, “La fin de l’histoire-mémoire” in “Entre mémoire et histoire” [“The end of history-memory” in “Between memory and history.”]) There was a companion work to the Petit Lavisse, the Dictionnaire de pédagogie by Ferdinand Buisson, national director of elementary education (1879–96) and a friend and admirer of Lavisse. For Nora, Buisson’s Dictionnaire is the undisputed link that ties the Revolution to the republic, to democracy through education. The essays it contains reconstruct the entire world of education for children in the Third Republic. Like Lavisse’s manual, it is a tool designed as a theoretical and practical guide for primary educators. No person of note, including Lavisse, failed to contribute. The Dictionnaire represents a moment of continuity for Nora with the re-conquered past and contemporary debate on education mutually reinforcing each other. It signaled the arrival of the key person in the drama for Buisson and for Lavisse, the instituteur, the young primary school teacher entrusted by the republic with the all-important task of teaching children to love France. What makes the Dictionnaire a lieu par excellence is that its appearance marked a moment that


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nourished memory, a key feature of a lieu. It serves as the memorial capital of a collectivity that has disappeared. Three other Nora essays in Part III also deal with how zealously France has been invested in its own history and historical perceptions of its identity and memory. In the essay entitled “La génération” (“Generation”), Nora takes up an elusive topic. A generation refers to a symbolic unit of time, but is it a statistical or a psychological phenomenon? How long does it last? Who determines who belongs to it? And if it arises from an event, are not all events multi-generational? Nora argues that generation is a genuine lieu de mémoire, as the events of May 1968 prove. Those events, which illuminated France’s perception of the present, constitute a lieu because they have the capacity for retrospective explanation. May 1968 is the culmination of the idea of generation that begins with the generation of 1789. The generational concept began with a clear expression of the link between the end of hereditary rule and the new legitimacy of representative government. For the revolutionaries, the past was no longer the law. The Romantic generation of the early nineteenth century reinforced Nora’s argument, representing for him that crucial moment in French history when politics, literature, power, and words (specifically poetry) were linked in defining a generation’s identity. The core of French national identity was articulated – the individual’s relationship to power. The concept of generation may be elusive, but Nora argues that it has proved useful for writing the political history of France since the Revolution. In his “L’ère de la commémoration” (“Era of commemoration”), Nora examines shifts in the meaning of commemoration. The classic model was an impersonal affirmation of the sovereignty of France, the republic and the nation, presided over by the state with the underlying assumption of a unified history. Today, partisan politics, seen in competing views of two world wars, has shattered traditional forms of civic commemoration and subjects the past to capricious use. The change in the nature of commemoration reflected the change France had experienced, going from a country with a unified national consciousness to a patrimonial type of consciousness, visible in the success of the Année du patrimoine in 1980. Patrimoine has come to mean not so much inherited property as the possessions that make us who we are. It connotes everything that makes people feel they have roots in a particular place or links to society as a whole. Nora begins his essay “Gaullistes et communistes” (“Gaullists and communists”) by exploring the collapse of the defining, unifying myth of the nation. The Revolution forged that myth and, until the two world wars, it remained an axiom, deeply rooted in the national consciousness and forming the basis for French universalism: the history of France is the history of reason on the march. Nora observes that it has been easier for France to suffer the actual loss of power than to give up the idea of its mission and vocation. Gaullists and communists embody the extreme versions of this idea. Both feed on memory. Their two versions of

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national legitimacy illustrate how politics in France “is driven by the invocation of great memories and emotional manipulation of the past.” For this reason, Nora defines the two as lieux. In concluding Les Lieux de mémoire, Nora regards the work as an inventory of the principal “lieux” of France, in which “our national memory is anchored.” In his summarizing essay, “Comment écrire l’histoire de France?” (“How to write the history of France?”), Nora confesses that the sheer number of possible lieux makes the topic unmanageable and risks emptying the concept of all meaning. There is an additional historiographical problem. Nora claims that there is a unitary France, but the lieux that it contains cannot together form a unified history because each one reproduces France in its own way. That leaves Nora with a major question: Can a history of France be written today? He answers indirectly. First, all previous histories of France presuppose France as a symbolic unity and have sought to explain the present by what happened in the past. Now, if one takes the historiographical approach, one can still define France as a symbolic unity. The historian can emphasize the effects of events, their construction in time, and the way they have been re-formed and transmitted over time. This approach responds to the current search for self-awareness and attachment, as well as to the demand for preservation of the country’s heritage. The radical changes forced upon France in the twentieth century and consequent modifications in national feeling, moreover, “dictate” (Nora’s word) a return to the idea of nation because it can still provide welcome stability and permanence. That idea is inherent in memory, which means that sense of fidelity to the past and to the reconstruction of the past that provides for legitimacy of sentiment and foundation of identity. In short, the nation is in the details, those lieux that are a France for all. These volumes offer a history quite distinct from previous histories. They constitute a selective exploration of the collective inheritance of the country. Les Lieux de mémoire, a history of representations and mentalities, is very different from the national history taught and promoted in the nineteenth century. In contrast to Lavisse’s definitive history, historic events can be viewed as paradoxes. The period of the French Revolution offers a good example: the Revolution, over or not; the 1793 war in the Vendée, genocidal or not; the Terror, an aberrant episode or an intrinsic part of French political life. The choice of objects for study was arbitrary, for which Nora makes no apology. The sense of a coherent whole, the touchstone of national history, may be lacking, but the image of a long-evolving French identity is not. As his project developed, Nora refined the concept of lieux: objects to be studied were to be “constructed” as lieux; that is, the historian would have to go beyond the historical reality of the object and search out “the symbolic reality and recover the memory it sustained.” Success would depend on the author’s ability to relate the “symbolic whole to the symbolic fragments.” By the time Nora concluded the enterprise in 1992, a definition had been distilled. A lieu de mémoire would be any


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significant entity, whether material or immaterial in nature, which by effort of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element in the memorial heritage of any community. So reads the definition that entered the dictionary, Le Grand Robert de la langue française, in 1993. The impact of this new mode of doing history was almost immediate. The concept of the lieu has been accepted as an intellectual category and the work emulated outside France. There are now I Luoghi della memoria (three volumes), under the direction of Mario Isnenghi (Rome: Laterza, 1996–7); Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (three volumes), under the direction of Étienne François and Hagen Schulze (Munich: Beck, 2001–2); and Plaatsen van herinnering (four volumes), under the direction of Henk Wesseling (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2005– 7). And Nora’s idea has captured the imagination of people outside the field of history. American journals have referenced his ideas of memory, and lieu de mémoire specifically, in discussing such remote subjects as Aeschylus’ The Persians, the Harlem Renaissance, and Chinese art. The scope of Nora’s influence may be difficult for people outside France to grasp, and even in France his position is unique. His monumental Lieux de mémoire, his leadership of a major publishing house, his own scholarship and academic activities, a unique combination of achievements, made him a respected, soughtafter public intellectual. And to add to his multifaceted career, he became the director of a review, an unprecedented step for a French publisher. The post of éditeur at Gallimard positioned him at the center of events and trends in politics and society. In 1980, he had created the journal, Le Débat. One justification for a new journal was to provide an outlet for shorter works by Gallimard’s history and humanities authors. Another was the rejection of the “posture of the thinker” who served as a touchstone of criticism (Nouvel Observateur, November 2, 2000). The journal’s aim soon expanded to include fighting “against media reductionism and against academic specialization … The rejection of political partisanship and commitment merely reflects our desire for civic responsibility.” The journal’s arrival sparked controversy right at the outset. Another journal, Commentaire, had been founded at about the same time by the philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron, who saw in the new journal an attack on his work. The value of Nora’s work and Le Débat, in particular, were recognized in 1988 through the granting of the Diderot-Universalis Prize, an award for exemplary work in the diffusion of culture. Along with an award of 50,000 francs, it commended “the historian and editor Pierre Nora for his editorial work in the area of sciences humaines, and the review Le Débat for its critical reflection on the problems of our times.” Nora moved even more actively into the public arena when, in the wake of the 2005 riots outside Paris, the role of history in the state and the place of morality and memory in history were again called into question. Laws had been passed: the Gayssot law criminalizing the denial of crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg trials (1990), recognition of the massacre of the Armenians as genocide (2001), the Taubira law declaring slavery and the Atlantic slave trade as a crime

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against humanity and requiring the subject of slavery to be included in the school curriculum (2001), and the Vanneste amendment that promoted the “positive role” of colonization (2005). Always an advocate for the independence of the historian, Nora joined with nineteen other historians to denounce these government initiatives. Their position appeared in a petition published in December 2005 in the Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde calling for abrogation of these laws. The legislator’s task, according to the statement, is not to “pronounce historical truth” or prescribe methods of research or set criteria for conclusions. That position was immediately challenged in a counter-petition signed by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, Shoah director Claude Lanzmann, and twenty-nine other writers, jurists, and historians. They argued that “libel or the diffusion of false information” regarding the Holocaust constitutes a threat to public order (see www.imprescriptible.fr; December 20, 2005). The battle over the laws continues with the battle lines sharply drawn. In a 2008 interview in Nouvel Observateur, Nora lamented that France was “effectively the only democratic country to develop this practice of legal truth, ordinarily a feature of totalitarian regimes” (August 14, 2008). Lanzmann amplified the point in a debate with Nora, claiming to cite Sartre’s Reflexions sur la question juive (1946; English translation, 1965) that “anti-Semitism is not an opinion but a crime.” Sartre in fact said it was a “passion.” Nora denounced this “glaciation” of the past, since it would ultimately threaten any historian with legal penalties (Nouvel Observateur, “Pourquoi légiferer sur l’histoire?” [“Why legislate history?”], October 9, 2008). Yet the argument finds Nora challenged to reconcile his values as an historian with his identity as a Jew. Soon after this debate, Christiane Taubira, a French Guiana-born deputy of the National Assembly after whom the law is named, asserted that a “legislator is justified in intervening whenever the national romance comes into play” (Le Monde, October 16, 2008; Le Canard enchaîné, November 5, 2008). She then made note that Nora’s Lieux de mémoire dedicated only about a dozen pages out of five thousand to any discussion of colonialism. Nora’s original group of nineteen petitioners did not give up. It has become Liberté pour l’histoire, an association of six hundred scholars with Nora as its leader. Their aim is to “defend research against the institution of official truths about the past [with its threat of] thought police and to defend freedom of expression for historians against political interference and ideological pressures of any kind or origin.” In his 2009 New Year’s address as president, Nora tallied their triumphs. Their meeting with a parliamentary committee had led to a declaration that the National Assembly ought not to pass laws that define events of the past using modern terminology of “genocide” or “crimes against humanity.” The government would not resubmit to the Senate a second proposal on Armenian genocide. One section of the Taubira law concerning the role the French played in its colonial mission was struck down and the content of the history curriculum in schools would not be prescribed by the central government. “[N]i vrai universitaire … ni vrai historien … ni vrai éditeur, dites-vous. Qui donc êtes-vous, Pierre Nora? Qui avons-nous admis parmi nous?” (“Not a true academic …


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not a true historian … not a true editor? Who then are you, Pierre Nora? Whom have we admitted among us?”: historian René Rémond at Nora’s installation in the Académie française, playing off Nora’s self-characterization.) Not really an academic? He may not have pursued rank, but he both taught a new approach to his field and nurtured a new generation of teachers and scholars. Not really an éditeur? Some six hundred books owe their existence to him. His personal support guided and encouraged many authors, and his commentaries won acclaim for others. As for history, his essays, beginning with Les Français d’Algérie, have extended the perspective on French mentalities. Les Lieux de mémoire has obliged historians everywhere to consider the role of memory as they study the past. And more, it added an “entire province to the territory of history.” Contemplating Les Lieux de mémoire, Rémond declared Nora “the Diderot of this encyclopedia of our century.” Throughout his career Nora dedicated himself to questions that challenged the limits of his field. What is memory? What is history? What is a nation? What is France? What is the job of an historian? In their original petition, the founders of Liberté pour l’histoire wrote, [H]istory is not a religion. The historian accepts no dogma, respects no prohibitions, knows no taboos … The role of the historian is neither to praise nor to condemn but to explain. History is not the slave of the present. The historian does not tack onto the past modern ideological formulations or introduce into bygone events today’s sensibility. History is not memory. The historian, in scientific steps, gathers people’s memories, compares them with each other, juxtaposes them with documents, objects, traces, and establishes facts. History takes memory into account but is not reduced to it. (Nouvel Observateur, December 14, 2005)

In all his work, Pierre Nora explored, defended, and embodied these principles. And he carried them beyond his professional milieu into his community. As he said in his 2009 New Year’s address, “Liberty for history is liberty for everyone.”

References and Further Reading Books and Articles Authored or Edited by Pierre Nora Les Français d’Algérie, with an introduction by Charles-André Julien (Paris: Julliard, 1961). Archives et construction d’une histoire nationale: le cas français ([S. l.] [1976?]). “America and the French intellectuals,” Daedalus (“A new America?” winter, 1978): 325–37. La CFDT [Confédération française démocratique du travail] en questions by François Ceyrac et al., interviews and analysis collected and introduced by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora with an introduction by Colin Lucas. Selections from Faire de l’histoire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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“Between memory and history: Les Lieux de mémoire,” Representations, 26, special issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (spring, 1989): 7–24. “Chateaubriand, figure de l’intellectuel,” in Chateaubriand, éclaireur du monde actuel. Actes du colloque, Paris, 10 juin 1998 (Paris: Les Editions de la bouteille de la mer, 1999). Discours de réception de Pierre Nora à l’Académie française et réponse de René Rémond: Suivis des allocutions prononcées à l’occasion de la remise de l’épée (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).

Series “Bibliothèque des histoires” “Le ‘fardeau de l’histoire’ aux Etats-Unis,” in Mélanges Pierre Renouvin: études d’histoire des relations internationales (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). Journal du septennat, 1947–1954, 7 vols., by Vincent Auriol, edited by Pierre Nora, with an introduction by Pierre Nora and Jacques Ozouf (Paris: A. Colin, 1970–8). “L’ombre de Taine,” Contrepoint, 9 ( Jan., 1973): 71. Faire de l’histoire, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 3 vols; vol. 1: Le Retour de l’évenément. Lettres de Russie: la Russie en 1839, by Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, 1790–1857, edited and introduced by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Essais d’ego-histoire, contributions by Maurice Agulhon et al.; collected and introduced by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

Series “Collection Folio Archives” Les Lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92). Essays by Pierre Nora appear in the following volumes: Part I, La République: “Présentation,” “Entre mémoire et histoire,” “Lavisse, instituteur national,”* “Le dictionnaire de pédagogie de Ferdinand Buisson,” and “De la république à la nation”; Part II, La Nation, vol. 1: “L’histoire de France de Lavisse”;† vol. 2: “Les mémoires d’état”;† vol. 3: “La nationmémoire”; Part III, Les France, vol. 1: “Comment écrire l’histoire de France?,” “Gaullistes et communistes,”* “La génération,”* “L’ère de la communication”;* vol. 2: “Présentation” (*English translation appears in Realms of Memory; † English translation appears in Rethinking France). Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, edited by Pierre Nora; English language edition edited and with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman; translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8). Science et conscience du patrimoine: entretiens du patrimoine, Théâtre national de Chaillot, Paris, November 28–30, 1994, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Fayard, Editions du patrimoine, 1997). L’Ogre historien: autour de Jacques Le Goff, edited by Jacques Revel and Jean-Claude Schmitt; contributions by Marc Augé, et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). Rethinking France, edited by Pierre Nora; translated by Mary Trouille et al.; translation directed by David P. Jordan, vols. 1 and 2 published, vol. 3 in press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001–6). La Pensée tiède: un regard critique sur la culture française, by Perry Anderson, translated by William O. Desmond and response by Pierre Nora, La Pensée réchauffée (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2005). Liberté pour l’histoire, co-authored with Françoise Chandernagor (Paris: CNRS, 2008).


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Introductions and Prefaces Les Luttes de classes en France: le 18 brumaire de Louis Bonaparte de Karl Marx, introduction by Pierre Nora, translation of Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich: Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1964). Un procès “ordinaire” en URSS: le Dr. Stern devant ses juges by Mikhail Shtern, defendant (Regional tribunal of Vinnitza, December 11–31, 1974), edited by August Stern; translated from the Russian by Ania Chevallier; preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Le Métier de lire: réponses à Pierre Nora, preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990; rev. edn., 2001). Tristes tropiques by C. Lévi-Strauss, preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: France loisirs, 1990). Chroniques d’humeur by André Fermigier, foreword by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). Littérature: textes et documents by Dominique Rincé, Bernard Lecherbonnier, et al.; historical introduction by Pierre Nora (Paris: Nathan, 1996). Montagnes, Méditerranée, mémoire: mélanges offerts à Philippe Joutard, preface by Pierre Nora, texts collected by Patrick Cabanel, Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset, and Jean Guibal (Aix-en-Provence; Grenoble: Université de Provence, Musée Dauphinois, 2002). L’Ecole républicaine et la question des savoirs: enquête au cœur du Dictionnaire de pédagogie de Ferdinand Buisson, edited by Daniel Denis and Pierre Kahn, preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: CNRS, 2003). Maurice Halbwachs: un intellectuel en guerres mondiales, 1914–1945 by Annette Becker, preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: A. Viénot, 2003). Edition de sciences humaines et sociales: le cœur en danger. Report of the fact-finding mission for the Centre national du livre sur l’édition de sciences humaines et sociales en France, March 2004, by Sophie Barluet, preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: PUF, 2004). Le Dimanche de Bouvines: 27 juillet 1214 by Georges Duby, preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 2005; a reissue of the original 1973 edition originally published in the series, “Trente journées qui ont fait la France,” since renamed “Les journées qui ont fait la France”). Le Temps suspendu: les Archives nationales, Centre historique des Archives nationales, photography by Patrick Tourneboeuf, preface by Pierre Nora (for the text; Trézélan: Filigranes, 2006). Images, mémoires et saviors: une histoire en partage by Bogumil Koss Jewsiewicki, preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2009).

Articles from Le Débat “Que peuvent les intellectuels?” 1 (May, 1980): 3. “Un idéologue bien de chez nous: B.-H. L.,” 13 ( June, 1981): 102. “Écrivez, on ne vous lira pas,” 19 (Feb., 1982): 14. “Continuons Le Débat,” 21 (Sept., 1982): 3. “Mémoire de Michel Foucault,” 41 (Sept.–Nov., 1986): 3. “L’aventure des idées: relégimation du religieux,” 50 (May–Aug., 1988): 157. “Dictionnaire d’une époque: existence,” 50 (May–Aug., 1988): 171. “Dictionnaire d’une époque: aliénation,” 50 (May–Aug., 1988): 174.

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“Dix ans de Débat,” 60 (May–Aug. 1990): 3. “Dans le bon sens,” 62 (Nov.–Dec., 1990): 4. “Bibliothèque de France: d’où venons-nous, où allons-nous?” 70 (May–Aug., 1992): 113. “Mémoires comparées,” 78 ( Jan.–Feb., 1994): 3. “La loi de la mémoire,” 78 ( Jan.–Feb., 1994): 187. “Le vin est tiré … ,” 84 (Mar.–April, 1995): 140. “C’est un secret d’état,” 91 (Sept.–Oct., 1996): 49. “Traduire: nécessité et difficultés,” 93 ( Jan.–Feb., 1997): 93. “A lire: la fin de l’idéologie de Daniel Bell,” 95 (May–Aug., 1997): 188. “François Furet dans Le Débat,” 96 (Sept.–Oct., 1997): 7. “A lire: l’expérience de l’histoire de Reinhart Koselleck,” 99 (Mar.–April, 1998): 188. “Retour sur les lieux du crime,” 105 (May–Aug., 1999): 118. “Adieu aux intellectuels?” 110 (May–Aug., 2000): 4. “L’aventure des idées: éléments d’une chronologie, 1989–1999. Sous le signe de la commémoration,” 111 (Sept.–Oct., 2000): 209. “Points et contrepoints: Mitterrandologie. François Mitterrand ou la biographie perpétuelle,” 112 (Nov.–Dec., 2000): 100. “Pour une histoire au second degré,” 122 (Nov.–Dec., 2002): 24. “Mémoire et identité juives dans la France contemporaine: les grands déterminants,” 131 (Sept.–Oct., 2004): 20. “Du Général à l’Amiral,” 134 (Mar.–April, 2005): 156. “Malaise dans l’identité historique,” 141 (Sept.–Oct., 2006): 48. “Le Débat,” 150 (May–Aug., 2008). Explanation of reasons for publishing Le Débat (available at www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france-priorities_1/books-and-writing_2113/ revue-revues_2114/colonne-droite_2197/presentation-of-the journals_2198/debat_ 2036.html).

Recordings “Michelet, historien de la France,” by Pierre Nora, “A voix haute” (Collection de CD des Éditions Gallimard, 1999), 60 minutes. “René Rémond: un historien dans le siècle,” Colloque du mercredi novembre 29, 2006 / Marie Odile Germain, Pierre Nora, Jacques Prévotat, et al. (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2006), 4 video cassettes, 6 hours. Collection: Conférences de la Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Reference Hewlett, Nick, Democracy in Modern France (London: Continuum, 2004).

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Mona Ozouf (1931– ) Harvey Chisick

Mona Ozouf is a powerful and gifted scholar whose published work extends to the fields of history, women’s studies, and literary criticism. In 1998, she was awarded the Dr. A. H. Heineken prize for her work on the French Revolution. Together with François Furet, she developed a line of interpretation of the French Revolution that, by that event’s bicentenary, had come to pose a major challenge to the older “social interpretation,” associated with historians such as Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul, which had dominated academic writing on the subject for most of the twentieth century. For many scholars, this line of interpretation has undermined or replaced the social interpretation of the French Revolution. For the most part, this revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution is associated primarily with Ozouf ’s frequent collaborator François Furet, probably because Furet, in addition to being a gifted and prolific author, has also been a highly effective academic administrator and politician who achieved an unusually high media profile. Furet played an important role in organizing the bicentenary celebration of the French Revolution in France, and he was often called upon by newspapers and other forms of mass media to provide guest columns and interviews. If one looks behind the fanfare, however, one finds a longstanding, symbiotic, and close partnership between Furet and Ozouf. The work which probably deserves to be seen as Furet’s and Ozouf ’s most influential elaboration of their revisionist treatment of the French Revolution is their Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1988; translated as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1989). The two editors planned this work together, and they each contributed a roughly equal number of entries to it. To be sure, there are differences of temperament and emphasis in their work, and though Ozouf is less given to polemics than

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Furet, the revisionist project on which they, with a number of like-minded colleagues, were embarked, deserves to be seen as a project in which they collaborated more or less equally. Mona Ozouf was born and raised in Brittany. Her home, as described in the moving “Introduction” to L’Ecole de la France (The School of France, 1984), was fully bicultural, catching the age-old tension between Breton localism and the centralizing cultural and linguistic imperatives of the national government. Ozouf ’s home environment incorporated these tensions to an exceptional degree since her father was both the village schoolmaster, and thereby a representative of francophone high culture, and a Breton patriot who spoke the local dialect and kept the classics of Breton literature in his library. Ozouf completed her high school education in her native province, and even did her first year of preparatory classes for the competitive examinations for entrance to the elite institutions of higher education, the grandes écoles, in Rennes, moving to Paris only for the second year of these classes (khâgne). Given the national system of academic centralization, which favored the capital, Ozouf assumed that she could not compete effectively with students trained in Paris for her preferred area of study, namely literature, which at the time required a high level of competence in the classical languages. Instead, she opted to pursue a degree in philosophy. One might not expect the career of a distinguished historian to begin with a painful hesitation between the fields of literature and philosophy, but then there is little in the career of Mona Ozouf that is typical of the apprenticeship and training of academic historians. Unlike most historians of her generation, Ozouf did not write a thesis. She began her career by teaching philosophy in a lycée, or secondary school, and then, between 1952 and 1955, she taught at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure. The responsibilities of instructors in this institution were so onerous as to leave little time for research and writing. Two developments, however, permitted Ozouf to make the shift from teaching philosophy to writing history. First, she married the respected historian Jacques Ozouf, who was also a collaborator and friend of François Furet, and so became part of a circle of historians and intellectuals for whom history was part of their daily lives. Second, she won a post at the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique, or CNRS, a state-funded research institute whose members, freed from the burdens of preparing classes and marking assignments, devote themselves to research, writing, and organizing seminars on subjects of common interest. Mona Ozouf ’s first book, L’Ecole, l’église et la République, 1871–1914 (School, Church and State, 1871–1914), appeared in 1962. Treating the role of education and the relationship between Church and state in the Third Republic, this work reflects a longstanding interest of Ozouf in pedagogy and its place in the public sphere, but it can hardly be said to mark a watershed in historiography. Fourteen years later, however, Ozouf published La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (1976; translated as Festivals and the French Revolution, 1988). This monograph, by

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contrast, was one of the most innovative and important studies of the Revolution published during the second half of the twentieth century. It not only treats a subject that had received little sustained attention, but also provided a model for an approach to the French Revolution that differed fundamentally from that then in vogue. During the 1960s and 1970s, historians generally assumed that adequate answers to important historical questions had to be framed in terms of social groups, social structure, and social dynamics. Partly because of the influence of a widely diffused academic Marxism, partly because high hopes were held for the application of the social sciences to history, the structures and workings of society were central to the agendas of most historians. Mona Ozouf was among the first to treat historical problems, such as the causes and nature of the French Revolution, from a cultural, anthropological, and philosophical perspective. Her study of revolutionary festivals is less concerned with descriptive narratives of the festivals or with social analysis of their participants than with issues of symbolic representation, political and cultural function and the meaning of the festival (Ozouf consistently and pointedly prefers the singular) and, through it, of the Revolution. In terms of organization, Ozouf ’s La Fête révolutionnaire opens with an historiographical chapter, followed by a chronological analysis of the main festivals from 1790 to 1799. The book then shifts from narrative to thematic analysis as Ozouf tackles the themes of space, time, pedagogy, popular participation, and sacrality. Her intention is to analyze the symbolic representation of the festivals, to explain their ideological function and the contradictions they engendered, and to determine whether there was a single underlying formative pattern whose imprint all revolutionary festivals bore. The pattern of the festival that Ozouf uncovers is taken as a reflection of what the Revolution really was. It is thus Ozouf ’s distinction to have rethought the Revolution in symbolic and ideological terms. In analyzing symbolic representation in the Revolution, Ozouf showed an interest in cultural anthropology and language that were only just beginning to have a broader influence in French academic writing. Ozouf also went back to some of the great, mostly non-Marxist, historians and social theorists of the nineteenth century, such as Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Alexis de Tocqueville, giving their work more serious and extensive consideration than it usually received. In its tacit rejection of the idea that socioeconomic categories were sufficient or adequate to explain what the Revolution was really about, and in its adoption of an approach that saw the Revolution as a cultural phenomenon rather than as an expression of social conflict, La Fête révolutionnaire is the founding text of the Furet–Ozouf, or Ozouf–Furet, approach to the French Revolution. There are a number of themes that set off Ozouf ’s approach to the Revolution from the social interpretation. On the whole, it is more abstract. She repeatedly raises the question of whether there were multiple models, or a single model, of the revolutionary festival. Her conclusion is that there was only one. In summarizing the findings of her chronological survey of the festivals she writes: “The

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astonishing continuity that we have discovered in the festivals of the French Revolution lead one to believe that, if the Revolution is an indissoluble whole, that certainly is reflected in its festivals. From now on let us speak not of the festivals but of the festival of the French Revolution.” For social historians, who regard policies and programs as outcomes of the interplay of different social and economic groups pursuing their own interests, the question of an underlying form or model for revolutionary festivals is hardly important. For Ozouf, it is vital because she sees it as the embodiment of principles and ideas that shaped the Revolution. Ozouf further treats the Revolution as an attempt to realize utopia. She asserts that, “From the outset … there was a misunderstanding between revolution and utopia. The Revolution imagined itself, and willed itself, to be the daughter of utopia.” Festivals are seen as “ceremonial utopias” and the Revolution as an “utopian project.” This project involved projecting images of harmony and social unity, of fundamental equality (“utopia is isotopia”), and of revitalization that overcomes decadence, but also requires uniformity, order, and minute regulation. Ozouf does not deny that certain of the festivals were joyful, as one might expect a festival to be, but she argues that the revolutionary festival bore within it an element of violence, which had a dual character. On the one hand, the festival attempted to conjure away memories of a violence that was integral to the establishment and progress of the Revolution; on the other, an implicit threat of violence and coercion was necessary to enforce the unity and harmony that the festival sought to foster. Ozouf does not accept L. S. Mercier’s view that the violent popular uprisings of the Revolution, or journées, were festivals. Lives were not lost and property was not destroyed in festivals as they were in journées. Nevertheless, in these sublimated forms, violence, or the masking of violence, remained central to the festival. By the same token, Ozouf does not deny that the revolutionary festivals played a pedagogic role and sought to assert the key values of the new regime, but she finds fear a basic motivating force behind the festivals. One of the functions of the revolutionary festival was to unify a polity that had undergone far-reaching changes. Behind this aspiration to unity, however, lurked the necessarily illiberal demand for unanimity. This unanimity was, when necessary, achieved by coercion and exclusion. In the case of the Festival of the Federation of the summer of 1790, which for many historians is the most inclusive of revolutionary festivals and the one in which the public participated most freely and enthusiastically, Ozouf sees the double exclusion of aristocrats and of the people (in the sense of the lower classes). The practice of formal or passive exclusion, moreover, could easily be extended in the popular societies and clubs to the active purging of the unworthy. For Ozouf, the persistent demand for and aspiration to unity, integration, and unanimity on the part of the organizers of revolutionary festivals reflects an attempt to mask or deny real existing inequalities, so


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much so that Ozouf characterizes the aspiration to social unity in the Festival of the Supreme Being as amounting to “a huge lie.” Though most festivals were established, organized, and closely supervised by the authorities, there were also cases in which initiative, or the expression of festive elements in certain activities, came from the grass roots. Festivals of mockery and intimidation, usually directed against enemies of the Revolution, are seen as a continuation of the burlesque traditions of popular culture, and occur with greater frequency where the tradition of carnival was better maintained. Ozouf also offers a searching analysis of the traditional popular symbol of the maypole, noting that as a sign of rejoicing and renewal it was given a prominent place by certain peasant communities in commemorations of the achievements of the early Revolution that meant most to the peasantry. However, the maypole was highly ambivalent, as it might be taken simultaneously as a liberty tree, a gibbet threatening violence, or a fertility symbol of an immemorial pagan culture. In any case, Ozouf treats the expressions of peasant and worker collective activity and celebration not as a reflection of class interest or orientation, but as aspects of a popular culture that extend beyond the economic or political projects and interests of given groups. One of the key categories of Ozouf ’s treatment of the Revolution is the sacred, taken in a broad sociological and anthropological sense. As an integrating and unifying force, religion was central to efforts to overcome the social disruption that the Revolution brought with it. Ozouf asserts that “Like the Revolution, the festival is a religion unaware of itself; like it, the festival is an imperious, almost instinctual creation.” In equally sweeping terms, she maintains that the central role of Antiquity in revolutionary festivals “expressed also, and above all, in a world in which Christian values were declining, the need for the sacred. A society instituting itself must sacralize the very deed of its initiation.” Whether a drive to sacralize is really central to a movement that can reasonably be placed in a centuries-long trend toward secularization in Western European society is an open question. Further, whether it is appropriate for modern, secular intellectuals to have recourse to a category for which they have little if any empathy, and to apply concepts and terminology used by anthropologists to describe vastly less complex and variegated societies than those of early modern Europe, societies that in some cases have no clear notion of the secular, or at any rate that make no clear distinction between sacred and profane, is a question that deserves consideration. Whatever one may think about this, Ozouf ’s use of the category of sacrality adds to the abstraction of her broadly philosophical attempt to get at the meaning of the Revolution. Without engaging in polemics, Ozouf provides an interpretation of the French Revolution that is basically different from, and arguably incompatible with, the social interpretation. She seems less sympathetic to the Revolution and its activists than exponents of the social interpretation often are, and many of her historiographical concerns and categories have little in common with theirs. The concerns

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and categories deployed by Ozouf in her 1976 monograph, however, contain most of the interpretative elements that came to characterize the Ozouf–Furet approach to the Revolution. Scholars working in the tradition of the social interpretation of the French Revolution tended to assume a broad correlation between social and economic standing and interests and politics, and they thought that the Revolution could best be explained in terms of social structure, patterns of land ownership and exploitation, relations between material conditions and aspirations, and the political objectives of different levels of the population. The aspirations of peasants and workers during the eighteenth century to assure subsistence goods at affordable prices received a more sympathetic hearing, and more incisive analysis, from historians such as E. P. Thompson, Georges Lefebvre, George Rudé, and Albert Soboul than from historians on the right. While it would not be fair to say that Mona Ozouf is integrally critical of the Revolution, the categories she uses to analyze and describe it and its activists do not reflect a particularly positive view of the Revolution and the forces that drove it. Criticism of the French Revolution is, of course, as old as the Revolution itself. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published as early as November 1790, offered a far-reaching and influential critique. Ozouf knows Burke’s work well and cites it on occasion. Yet Ozouf ’s critique of the Revolution emerged as much from a liberal as from a Burkean tradition. For Ozouf, as for many liberals, society or the “social sphere” functions largely on the basis of voluntary adherence to contract and informally articulated codes. Both Ozouf and Furet maintain that the social sphere is properly autonomous, and the attempts of politicians in the revolutionary assemblies, and of their supporters in popular societies and Jacobin clubs, to impose their utopian schemes on a recalcitrant society were a basic and tragic error. The political cannot, and should not, attempt to infringe on the autonomy of the social. The use of force to implement abstract programs and to change consensuses arrived at through long evolutionary processes was bound to end badly, no matter how well intentioned or idealistic the coercers might have been. Reference has already been made to the element of fear that Ozouf found in festivals and the pervasiveness of fear in the Revolution generally. Together with fear, violence and the need to contain or offset memories of violence play a key role in Ozouf ’s analysis of ostensibly pacific and symbolic demonstrations. The categories of exclusion and coercion also play prominent roles in revolutionary festivals, categories that Furet developed further in his account of the Jacobin clubs. Ozouf repeatedly characterizes the attitudes and outlooks of leaders and participants in the Revolution as obsessive. While intense concern with certain issues is not unusual in times of crisis, the terms “obsession” and its derivatives suggest psychological imbalance. Criticism of the abstraction and utopianism of the revolutionaries is also close to the position taken by Hannah Arendt in her study On Revolution (1963). She argues that politics is properly a realm of freedom into which the imperatives of


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the realm of necessity, which is to say socioeconomic considerations, ought not to be allowed to intrude. On these grounds, Arendt commends the Americans for not allowing issues concerning property and the distribution of the means of subsistence to influence their war of independence and the settlement that emerged from it. That this settlement involved the negation of the humanity of an entire black slave population did not disturb a social critic whose philosophical formation was to a considerable extent Hegelian. The overall effect of Ozouf ’s approach is to shift investigations of the Revolution to a more abstract level. In their search for an alternative to the social interpretation of the French Revolution, Ozouf and Furet turned to the texts of revolutionaries, who sought to explain what their goals were, and to commentators and historians, especially Michelet, Quinet, and Tocqueville, but also others, who had grappled with the issues of what the Revolution was and what it meant. The tendency to interpretation and abstraction in Ozouf and Furet’s approach to the Revolution has resulted in a renewed emphasis on intellectuals, artists, journalists, and historians, a return to printed sources, and a more intellectualized view of the Revolution, a view from the shoulders up, as it were, than the social interpretation allowed. There are both gains and losses here. What is gained is an appreciation of the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the Revolution that were too often neglected or treated as merely derivative by most historians working within the paradigm of the social interpretation. Ozouf and Furet have thus restored to the agenda of historians aspects of a complex of events that deserve and even require attention if a full analysis of those events is to be possible. What is lost, though, is an adequate weighting of social and economic categories, for Ozouf and Furet do not much care to address them. The result is an explanation in cultural and political terms to the neglect of social ones. However, the assertion that politics is an autonomous sphere is problematic because, in complex societies, the social, political, and cultural spheres are inextricably intertwined. Ozouf and Furet are to be commended for having reintegrated cultural and political factors into research on the French Revolution. Nevertheless, a narrative that synthesizes socioeconomic and cultural factors remains to be written. Ozouf ’s La Fête révolutionnaire was well received, and certainly by the late 1980s scholars spoke of the book in glowing terms. One reviewer of the English translation, writing in the American Historical Review, refers to “Ozouf ’s remarkable insights into the festivals and the revolution,” while another, in the English Historical Review, speaks of Ozouf ’s book as “one of the finest and most enduring examples of the revisionist historiography of the French Revolution.” Another measure of the success of La Fête révolutionnaire is its sales. While few academic monographs in history nowadays sell a thousand copies, Ozouf ’s book had, by the beginning of 1989, sold over 22,000 copies in French alone. It is usual for historians to produce articles on a subject in the course of working toward a more comprehensive treatment in book form. Mona Ozouf first produced an important monograph on the Revolution, then developed and articu-

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lated her views in articles, and particularly in collections of articles, as well as in edited collections. Together with François Furet, Ozouf edited and contributed to a series of collective works on specific themes in the history of the French Revolution, such as the problem of ending or stabilizing the Revolution (1990), the Girondins (1991), republicanism (1993), and a more general volume on the interpretation of the Revolution (1999). In 1984, Ozouf ’s collection of essays, L’Ecole de la France, appeared. It is divided into four sections, the first treating the Revolution, the second education, the third utopia, while the last examines aspects of French identity. Some of the essays return to the subject of revolutionary festivals, two deal with the problem of commemoration, and others treat themes relevant to Ozouf and Furet’s broader interpretative project. In an essay entitled “ ‘Jacobin’: fortune et infortunes d’un mot” (“ ‘Jacobin’: the fortune and misfortune of a word”), Ozouf offers a definition of the term that is in harmony with Furet’s theoretically bold treatment of the movement in his influential and controversial essay “The French Revolution is over,” originally published in French in 1978. Like Furet, Ozouf emphasizes the role of the Jacobins in the Terror and the specifically illiberal aspects of Jacobin political culture. As she had done more generally in her book on revolutionary festivals, she finds among the Jacobins a utopian tendency that leads toward a devaluation of the private and social spheres, and what she terms a “suspension of reality.” In another essay in this collection that also appeared in English as “War and terror in French revolutionary discourse,” Ozouf addresses what Furet in “The French Revolution is over” had called the “thesis of circumstances” used by certain historians sympathetic to the Revolution to explain or justify the Terror. Having examined the discourse of politicians in September 1792, from August 20 to September 20, 1793, and from 27 Floreal to 27 Prairial Year II (May and June 1794), Ozouf shows that spokesmen for the Revolution did not themselves see the Terror primarily as a response to the war in Europe and the civil war in France. Many historians, however, uncritically adopted the Jacobin understanding of the Terror as a “generalized war” and as “consubstantial with the Revolution.” In 1989, Mona Ozouf published a collection of articles entitled L’Homme régénéré: essais sur la Révolution française (Man Regenerated: Essays on the French Revolution). In it, she addresses, more directly than she had done in her earlier work, the role of ideas, particularly of the Enlightenment, in the Revolution. There are essays on public opinion, the flight to Varennes, Barnave’s ideas on re-educating the Queen, the formation of the new revolutionary man, fraternity, regicide, and the way the Revolution was seen by the utopian socialists; Ozouf also returns to earlier interests when she examines popular activities in the early Revolution in Quercy, already discussed in La Fête révolutionnaire. The essay on the formation of the new man is a searching investigation of what Ozouf regards as the Revolution’s impossible project, which is nevertheless central to its development and meaning, of forming a basically new, or at least different, kind of person. In a sense, this reconstruction of humanity was the Revolution’s


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ultimate utopian vision and program, and so reflects both its deepest aspirations and its ultimate futility. Many of the themes in L’Homme régénéré also figure in one of the most important books published for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1988; translated as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1989). Edited by Furet and Ozouf, the Dictionnaire critique is not, as the editors and main contributors readily admit, a dictionary in the ordinary sense of the term. If one wants information about a particular person or event, one would do better to go to the Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française (1989), edited by Albert Soboul, or to one of its English equivalents. The Dictionnaire critique is composed of ninety-nine essays that are longer, and more reflective and critical, than is usual for reference works. The English version of the Critical Dictionary has twenty-one articles by Ozouf, and another twenty-two by Furet, so together their contributions account for nearly half of the book. Other contributors are, with some exceptions, drawn from the institution with which the editors are associated, the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. In many ways, the Critical Dictionary is the fullest and most self-conscious formulation of the Furet–Ozouf interpretation of the French Revolution. Emphasis is placed on culture and politics; the tone is more decorous and the presentation more moderate than in the heated polemics of Furet’s “The revolutionary catechism” or “The French Revolution is over,” though Ozouf, whose restraint is notable, exceptionally allows herself to describe Albert Mathiez, probably the leading scholar of the French Revolution of his generation and the second occupant of the chair of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, as “occupying the chair of Fouquier-Tinville,” the public prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the Terror. The Critical Dictionary is divided into five broad categories: events, actors, institutions, ideas, and historians. The last two categories reflect longstanding interests of Furet and Ozouf, while treatments of the other main categories are in harmony with the cultural and political approaches that the editors revived or pioneered. Ozouf ’s contributions include the essays on de-Christianization, federalism, federation, the king’s trial, and Varennes; Danton, Marat, Girondins, and Montagnards; département, revolutionary calendar and revolutionary religion; equality, fraternity, liberty, public spirit, regeneration, Rousseau and Voltaire; and Jean Jaurès and Hippolyte Taine. The articles in the “ideas” section are particularly well written and illuminating, and reflect the view of Furet and Ozouf that the Revolution is best understood in terms of the values and ideals that its chief spokesmen and their predecessors in the eighteenth century articulated and strove to achieve. Her training in philosophy has prepared Ozouf admirably for handling key ideas of the Revolution as treated in the works of more important thinkers, but it has not disposed her to look at the climate of opinion and anxieties of the second half of the eighteenth century as expressed in such informal and popular sources as periodicals, newspapers, and placards.

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Many of the themes in Ozouf ’s and Furet’s earlier writings reappear here. The utopian features of the Revolution are again commented upon, as is the question of sacrality. As to whether the Revolution can properly be said to have had a religion, Ozouf asserts that if “a reinvestment of the sacred in the fatherland and humanity” is an adequate definition of religion, then it could, but if transcendence is required, then it could not. The failure of the Revolution to recognize the autonomy of the social sphere, and the importance of the separation of the social from the political so as to maintain liberty, are also discussed. Ozouf and Furet show their interest in the problem of ending or stabilizing the Revolution here as they had previously, and as Furet was again to do in his narrative history of France from 1770 to 1880. They also extend their treatment of the Revolution here, as they had in their earlier writings, to Thermidor, which involves the problem of ending the Terror, and even to the regimes beyond. Many historians tacitly assume that the Revolution ended with the fall of Robespierre, so Furet and Ozouf have done a service by again making the later phases of the Revolution integral to its narrative. In the Critical Dictionary, Ozouf and Furet tend to be more moderate and understanding of the conundrums faced by the Revolution than they had been in their earlier writings. The role of circumstance, which Furet had criticized as a convenient mask for ideology, is again restored to something like its usual place, perhaps because the more one engages in narrative as opposed to analysis, the more indispensable circumstance becomes as an explanatory category. Stories, after all, cannot be told in terms of theory alone. In a finely crafted phrase in her article on liberty, Ozouf refers to “the tempered violence of education.” The valuable insight here is that imposing a specific education on an infant or child who is powerless to express his or her wishes about the kind of education that he or she is to receive, or the kind of person he or she wishes to become, is a kind of coercion inseparable from socialization. Even in the most liberal of regimes, then, “the political” will make some demands on “the social.” Furthermore, recourse to coercion is something that was not unique to revolutionary regimes, but was shared with contemporary Britain, Austria, Italy, or, indeed, with any human configuration in which state and society can be distinguished. Just as there is no history without circumstances, so too there is no politics without coercion. After this series of collected and edited works, Mona Ozouf published her second monograph in the history of the French Revolution. It appeared in 2005 as part of the prestigious Gallimard series “Les journées qui ont fait la France” (“The Days that Made France”), and is entitled Varennes: la mort de la royauté (Varennes: The Death of the Monarchy). Requiring a firm narrative framework, it is not the sort of subject that might have been expected to appeal to the interpretative approach Ozouf favored. And yet the combination of extensive research, on the one hand, and thoughtful interpretation, on the other, provides a treatment of the flight to Varennes and its consequences as a pivotal event in the development of the Revolution as a whole and confirms Ozouf as a master of her craft.


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In addition to a full narrative and careful analysis of the flight of the royal family from Paris on June 20, 1791, to their being recognized and stopped in Varennes then returned to the capital, Ozouf offers a close examination of the character and motives of the king and his circle, of the constitutional issues involved, and how the set of events under consideration played out in the political culture of the time. Under constant scrutiny by the National Guard and the popular movement of Paris, the Tuileries became a “little hell” for the royal family, while the Civil Constitution of the Clergy tried Louis’s religious sensibilities, and the outlines of the Constitution being drafted by the Assembly left him so little real power that he could not conciliate it with his own liberal and reformist concept of kingship. The king’s declared objective, Ozouf points out, was to gain the fortified town of Montmédy in Lorraine, not to flee the kingdom, and she tends to accept this as in character for Louis. The delays and misunderstandings that resulted in the royal party falling behind schedule are noted, but so too was the tendency of the revolutionaries to work according to a modern, businesslike notion of time, while the royal entourage retained a more leisurely and aristocratic attitude to time that made them disinclined to hurry. The episode of Varennes precipitated an early public advocacy of republicanism, but one that was divided and too weak to prevail. Nevertheless, Varennes did irreparable damage to the concept of monarchy, and the subsequent fate of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette can be seen as a consequence of this. According to Ozouf, the episode resulted in a shift against the monarchy in public opinion, “the new holy oil” that, as in a coronation, conferred legitimacy, and continued the process of desacralization of the monarchy in a broader context of disenchantment. Varennes also treats the immediate political fallout of the flight of the royal family in the demonstration of the Champ de Mars of July 17 and its violent repression, as well as in the debates around the Constitution and the king’s place in it, and concludes with an overview of the impression that the episode left in literature and cinematography. In its engagement with symbolic representation and emphasis on public opinion and politics, Varennes carries forward many of the concerns Ozouf had addressed in her earlier work on the French Revolution. In 1995, Mona Ozouf published a collection of short biographies of leading French women writers and thinkers from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, together with an essay on feminism. This book appeared two years later in English translation as Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity. It both throws further light on Ozouf ’s views of the French Revolution and argues that a significant difference exists between Anglo-Saxon and French varieties of feminism. As in her earlier work, Ozouf expresses her reservations about quantitative methods and her preference for narrative, here based on private sources, such as letters and diaries, rather than on works intended for publication. The women whose lives Ozouf sketches were all writers and intellectuals, and all reflected on the feminine condition, though only a few would be recognized as feminists. They

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are: Mme. du Deffand, Mme. de Charrière, Mme. Roland, Mme. de Staël, Mme. de Rémusat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir. The women who experienced the institutionalized and articulated inequalities of the Ancien Régime were all able, through their aristocratic status or outstanding abilities, to offset, to varying degrees, the formal limitations on their gender. The Revolution, however, complicated the question of the status of women. Some American scholars, such as Joan Landes, Carole Pateman, and Joan Wallach Scott, have argued that, by closing the public sphere to women, the Revolution caused a regression in their status. Ozouf, by contrast, brings attention to an articulate minority of revolutionaries, Condorcet among them, who argued for political rights for women, and points out that the overall trend of the Revolution “made all inequality illegitimate.” Furthermore, the republican tradition that emerged from the Revolution was universalist and egalitarian, and though it required time for the memory of female support of the Church and opposition to the Republic to fade, the logic of republicanism required that female citizens be granted the same civil and political rights as men. The influence of the idea of progress worked in the same direction, while schools, which Ozouf has studied extensively, contributed significantly to achieving equality for women. She asserts that, “In France education was the site where the state invented egalitarian rights, where the decisive victories for women were won.” It is Ozouf ’s position, then, that in the long run the values of the French Revolution contributed toward improving the status of women and assuring them equal rights. Ozouf also argues that French feminism is more moderate and inclusive than that of many Anglo-Saxon feminists, and she calls this moderation and inclusiveness the “French singularity.” The development of French feminism is related to the founding stage of modern French society, namely the French Revolution. Based on an inclusive vision of mankind, the dominant strands of French feminism are universalist and result in a “humanist feminism.” This kind of feminism allows “universalist, abstract, and rational argument” to take precedence over “particularist, empirical, and emotional argument.” While France did have a number of spokeswomen for a radical “feminism of difference,” this strand of feminism remained a marginal phenomenon, and humanist feminism continued to predominate. In America, by contrast, a thoroughgoing particularist feminism of difference that posited a fundamental hostility between the sexes took root, a form of feminism that Ozouf compares to Marxism, an ideology for which she has little affection or respect. As might be expected, Ozouf ’s arguments did not endear her to certain North American feminists. But then Mona Ozouf has devoted her career to looking for and providing the most compelling arguments and interpretations for the subjects she has investigated, not to seeking popularity. Mona Ozouf ’s outstanding academic achievement has no doubt been to put forward, together with François Furet, a cultural and political interpretation of the French Revolution that was intended to rival the social interpretation. This


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new interpretation is in itself a major achievement. To it, however, must be added extensive research and writing in the history of education and two important recent studies in literature, one on the nineteenth-century novel and the other on Henry James. Thus, Mona Ozouf has not only made significant contributions to historical scholarship, but she has also been able to return to, and publish in, a field that she long ago believed to be closed to her because her Latin, she suspected, was not quite good enough.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Mona Ozouf L’Ecole, l’église et la République, 1871–1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962). La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); translated by Alan Sheridan as Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). L’Ecole de la France: essais sur la Révolution, l’utopie et l’enseignement (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). L’Homme régénéré: essais sur la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Les Mots des femmes: essai sur la singularité française (Paris: Fayard, 1995); translated by Jane Marie Todd as Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). La Muse démocratique: Henry James, ou les pouvoirs du roman (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1998). Les Aveux du roman: le XIXe siècle entre ancien régime et Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). Varennes: la mort de la royauté (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).

Edited Works La Classe ininterrompue: cahiers de la famille Sandre, ensiegnants, edited by Mona Ozouf (Paris: Hachette, 1979). Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Terminer la Révolution: Mounier et Barnave dans la Révolution française, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1990). La Gironde et les Girondins, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Payot, 1991). Le Siècle de l’avènement républicain, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). La Révolution en débat, edited by Mona Ozouf and François Furet (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).

Selected Articles by Mona Ozouf “Architecture et urbanisme: l’image de la ville chez Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 21 (1966): 1273–304. “De Thermidor à Brumaire: le discours de la Révolution sur elle-même,” Revue historique, 243 (1970): 31–66.

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“La fête révolutionnaire et le renouvellement de l’imaginaire collectif,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 47 (1975): 385–405. “Deux légitimations historiques de la société française: Mably et Boulainvilliers,” by Mona Ozouf and François Furet, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 34 (1979): 438–50. “L’invention de l’ethnographie française: le questionnaire de l’Académie celtique,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 36 (1981): 210–30. “War and terror in French revolutionary discourse,” Journal of Modern History, 56 (1984): 579–97. “ ‘Public opinion’ at the end of the Old Regime,” Journal of Modern History, supplement, 60 (1988): 1–21. “L’idée républicaine et l’interprétation du passé national,” Annales: histoire, sciences sociales, 53 (1998): 1075–87.

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Michelle Perrot (1928– ) Denise Z. Davidson

In her distinguished career as an historian, Michelle Perrot has contributed to three separate, yet overlapping, fields: labor history, the history of prisons, and women’s history. Though she is perhaps best known, especially outside France, for her accomplishments in women’s history, her earliest work focused on the other two areas, and she has continued to publish in all three fields throughout her career. Initially a practitioner of “scientific” history, Perrot’s investigations have shifted in terms of both subject matter and methodology, from quantitative analysis of nineteenth-century strikes using the earliest computer technology and punch cards to more literary and “postmodern” approaches to thinking about the past. Despite such evolution, she has remained consistent in her goals: politics and contemporary concerns have inspired her historical interests; and she has always demonstrated a commitment to telling the stories of those who have traditionally been left out of history – those in the “shadows,” to use a term that appears in the title of one of her more recent publications, namely, workers, women, and prisoners. Author of countless articles, prefaces, book introductions, and other more “popular” pieces of writing, it is hard to imagine how Perrot could have been more prolific or more influential. Born in Paris’s twelfth arrondissement as Michelle Roux, Perrot (to use the married name she is known by) grew up in a solidly bourgeois family. During her childhood, she divided her time between the lively Parisian neighborhood of the rue Saint-Denis where her father owned a business, and the village of Moncontourde-Poitou (located in western France in the department of Vienne), where her paternal great-grandfather’s home was situated. Her widowed grandmother lived there as well. Her parents, both anti-clerical, chose to send Perrot to a Catholic school, the Cours Bossuet, because it was the respectable place to send a girl of

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their class, especially after public secondary schools became free and thus crowded with the “wrong” kind of students. Classrooms at the Parisian public high school Perrot’s mother had attended were overflowing, and her mother went against her principles and sent her daughter to private school. As a result, Perrot received a very conservative, religious education, even passing through phases of intense religious devotion while young. Though she later described herself as an atheist, the religious beliefs she formed in childhood had long-lasting effects on her. As she explained in one interview, it caused her to discover the “other” early in life, to feel compassion for those who suffered injustice. In the spring of 1939, Perrot moved with her parents to a northern suburb of Paris, Montmorency, in search of a purer physical and moral environment, but what optimism they may have felt about the move quickly disappeared. Fleeing their new home as the war began in 1940, they returned to find it occupied by Germans. Though Perrot’s mother managed to find a way to reclaim their house, the luxurious and spacious building had lost its charms. Perrot saw her father, who detested French collaborators and whose business came to a virtual standstill because of his refusal to sell on the black market, fall into a striking passivity. She, too, suffered physically and mentally, finding it difficult to make herself eat when she knew others lacked for food. At fifteen, she became ill with scoliosis, made more visible by her anorexia. She spent several months lying on a board to cure the scoliosis, while her solitude helped cure the anorexia. To occupy her days she read voraciously, particularly Russian and American literature, viewing this choice of reading matter as a form of resistance to the Nazi occupation. Returning to school in the fall of 1943, she was seduced by the rigorous and scientific method of her teacher of Bible history. Listening to his lectures on the history of the Mediterranean basin, as viewed through the lens of the Bible, gave Perrot her passion for analysis of the past. Perrot graduated from lycée in 1946, just as the war was ending, and at that point announced to her parents that she wished to study history. She enrolled at the Sorbonne, where she completed her initial university degrees (licence and maîtrise in history and geography, and art history), studying with Ernest Labrousse, the period’s pre-eminent economic historian and proponent of a “scientific” history based on the quantitative analysis of large series of data. When she first met with Labrousse to discuss the subject she would work on for her masters’ thesis, she proposed a study of feminism (Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had just been published). Unable to imagine feminism as anything but a twentiethcentury movement, Labrousse did not think it plausible to examine such a “recent” subject, and encouraged her to study workers in the nineteenth century. After receiving her agrégation in 1951, Perrot went to teach at a girls’ high school in Caen, on the Normandy coast, a city still rebuilding after suffering massive destruction during World War II. It was in Caen that Perrot built some important lifelong relationships, including the one with her new husband Jean-Claude Perrot, who would become a renowned historian himself. She also began to stretch her

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wings politically during these years. She had observed some cell meetings of the Communist Party while at the Sorbonne, but did not become a member. Having visited Algeria in 1951, where she spoke with Algerian nationalists, Perrot did all she could to fight against the Algerian war when it broke out in 1954. She joined a women’s association in Caen with links to the French Communist Party and, with the contacts she made there, helped to organize a demonstration against the war that took place on the streets of Caen. However, she was never willing to follow the party line. When news came of Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s excesses, the French Communist Party refused to accept its veracity. Perrot disagreed with that response. Though she was not a communist in the strictest sense, Perrot remained committed to left-wing political movements. When she returned to Paris in 1958 to begin work on her doctoral thesis, the subject she selected was directly related to her political beliefs. She chose to study workers as a form of solidarity with them; she selected strikes, more specifically, because they gave her an opportunity to bring workers’ words and experiences to the heart of her study, to give voice to a group not usually heard. The result was Les Ouvriers en grève, an enormous study of every strike in France from 1871 to 1890, defended in January 1971 and published in two volumes in 1974. She did research at the National Archives in Paris and in departmental archives all over France, collecting data on the number of days strikes lasted, the demands made by workers, the responses of employers, the level of violence, and other issues. Having completed most of the research for her thesis, Perrot was just beginning to write it when the “events” of May 1968 took place, and Perrot found herself in the thick of it. She stopped writing, and joined her fellow students at the Sorbonne in the streets of Paris, later describing that time as optimistic and invigorating. She was also one of the founders of the new university that opened in response to May 1968, Jussieu or Paris VII, where she spent the remainder of her career, from 1969 until her retirement in 1993, rising through the ranks until she was named profeseur titulaire in 1974 and then classe exceptionnele in 1992. Ensuring the continuation of Perrot’s work, the woman who succeeded her at Jussieu, Gabrielle Houbre, was one of Perrot’s students. The published version of Perrot’s thesis, Les Ouvriers en grève, was immediately recognized as a significant contribution to the history of workers in France. She made use of her statistical evidence to uncover the average size, duration, and outcome of strikes, and to find patterns regarding the demands of workers, how they organized, the actions of the strikes, and many other features. She presented an argument, largely inspired by her experiences of 1968, that strikes were at their most meaningful during their “adolescence,” a period of spontaneity that would not last long as the 1884 law legalizing strikes had a “structuring effect” that brought an end to the more “heroic” phase of early union activity. Though many expressed reservations at the chronological demarcation and limitations of Perrot’s study (some wishing she had begun it earlier, with the 1864 law legalizing unions rather than beginning with the repression of the Commune of 1871; others

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expressing a desire for her to take her analysis further, beyond 1890), reviewers lauded the exhaustive research, the sensitive analysis, and the lively style in which it was written. In a nine-page review published in the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1975), Jacques Girault described the published version of the thesis as “exemplary … the perfection of its genre … [and] chaleureuse” (warm, passionate, inviting). Among his criticisms, if one can call them that, was an insistence that Perrot should have pushed her study further and not stopped in 1890: “two volumes are not sufficient!” A more serious issue raised in this review was the sociological method used by Perrot, which limited her to analysis of workers as a group. The reviewer wished, for example, that she had taken more time to analyze women’s opposition to strikes, though he recognized that sources did not exist to do this. By posing different questions of different sources, Perrot would clearly take up the issue of women’s responses to industrial advancement and other kinds of changes in her later work. In a review published in the Journal of Modern History in 1976, Charles Tilly applauded the thesis, describing it as “a brilliant feat” and her prose as “vivid, often passionate.” He particularly appreciated her ability to go beyond summarizing her quantitative findings by illuminating them with “discussion of individual cases and forms of mutual aid,” and thus creating a “collective biography” of workers and of strikes. Even more, Tilly praised Perrot’s efforts to “see the lined face of the worker, the lumpy shape of daily life.” In 1984, Perrot’s thesis was published in an abridged form (actually the third part of the thesis) so as to attract a wider audience in France. Titled Jeunesse de la grève, that version was translated into English and published as Workers on Strike in 1987. The English translation received a warm reception as well. In a review published in the American Historical Review in 1989, Gary Cross described Perrot as “one of the most influential nineteenth-century social historians … a pioneer in the effort to get beneath the history of French labor ideology.” Cross also argued that Perrot’s study, in going well beyond purely quantitative approaches, “anticipated the present preoccupation with the language of social movements.” He was impressed at Perrot’s ability to find complex meanings in strike songs, speeches, and meetings. In a review published in the Journal of Modern History in 1990, Roger Price described Workers on Strike as “a rich and informative book, one which deserves to be read by everyone interested in working-class history.” Recognizing the continued relevance of Perrot’s first major study, the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales republished the long out-of-print complete version of the thesis in 2001. Few doctoral theses prove this durable. Though she continued to work in labor history, and published articles in that area throughout the 1980s, Perrot’s work evolved in terms of both content and method. The history of prisons and the experience of prisoners became one passion, women’s history another. She met Michel Foucault at a colloquium on the history of prisons in 1973, and found his approach fascinating, though she also expressed certain reservations. Following the 1975 publication of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (translated as Discipline and Punish: Birth of


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the Prison, 1977), Perrot orchestrated a debate on the history of prisons between Foucault and several historians. That debate was published as L’Impossible prison (The Impossible Prison) in 1980. Perrot’s essay in that collection, on prisons and the revolution of 1848, focused on the experiences of those detained and the relationship between criminality, poverty, and revolution. The study made clear the interconnections between life inside and outside prisons, the persistent solidarity that reigned among the popular classes and those held behind prison walls. Perrot continued to engage in research on prisons, publishing more than twenty-five articles on the subject, which appeared as a collection of essays entitled Les Ombres de l’histoire (The Shadows of History) in 2001. In explaining her interest in the history of prisons, Perrot always cites the experience of seeing female prisoners taking air in the courtyard of the prison situated next door to her grammar school. The sight of these prisoners, whom she observed in 1936 and 1937, fascinated her at the time, and inspired a curiosity and sense of connection that remained with her for the rest of her life. Active in the movement to reform prisons, she also felt a need to expose the realities of current conditions in prisons and to trace their history. As she put it in the introduction to Les Ombres de l’histoire, “writing the history of prisons represents a modest attempt to … make them visible” to a society that wants to forget them. Like her interest in women’s history and working-class history, Perrot’s scholarly pursuits always link to her political passions. Once Perrot took her post teaching at Jussieu, she immediately began offering courses in women’s history. In the fall of 1973, in collaboration with Pauline Schmitt and Fabienne Bock, she offered a lower-level course with the title: “Do women have a history?” All three had been active in the women’s movement, participating in demonstrations and other activities as part of the fight to make abortion legal in France. From the beginning, the course was driven by feminist political goals as much as scholarly and pedagogical ones. It was also controversial, as many leftist men disagreed with the idea that women’s history deserved attention. At its first meetings, the course overflowed with students, many of them hostile. Yet Perrot and her collaborators persevered, receiving support from many of France’s most distinguished scholars who came to present material in the class despite the fact that little was yet known about the history of women. Among those who gave lectures on the condition of women in their respective periods were Jacques Le Goff, Jean-Louis Flandrin, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Mona Ozouf. Their participation ensured that students and scholars would have no choice but to accept the validity of women’s history as a subject of study. Soon the question mark was dropped from the title of the course as Perrot, almost single-handedly, led an increasingly large cohort of young women writing women’s history. She also began a monthly seminar on women’s history at which students and scholars presented their work in progress and exchanged ideas in this burgeoning field. Although Perrot has argued that it would be wrong for a separate category of women’s history to emerge, and that the ideal would be for all

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historians to recognize the importance of “relations between the sexes” – “gender” in the anglophone world – she also insists that writing the history of women is a necessary stage in achieving that ultimate goal, as the history of men is omnipresent. Perrot’s dozens of articles and essays on the history of women treat issues relating to the overlapping nature of the public and private spheres, women’s relationship to politics, and the question of power in relations between men and women. The source material for her work in women’s history runs the gamut from literary material and other published work treating gender issues to unpublished letters (such as those of the daughters of Karl Marx) and archival sources. It is largely thanks to Michelle Perrot that women’s history has become an accepted part of historical study in France, and that centers of research on women’s history have emerged around the country, in cities such as Marseille/Aix, Lyon, and Toulouse. A recent list of the doctoral dissertations completed under Perrot’s supervision includes forty-nine titles, most of which have been published. Many of the women who completed theses with Perrot, including Christine Bard, Sylvie Chaperon, Nancy Green, Odile Krakowitch, and Françoise Thébaud, now hold prominent positions around France. This second (and even now third) generation of French women’s historians and feminist scholars can trace their intellectual and institutional roots to Michelle Perrot’s early efforts to build a scholarly community accepting of such topics and approaches. Perrot has also been a master at collaboration, whether in political movements, organizing conferences and publishing the proceedings, or co-writing or co-editing books. Together with scholars at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, she helped found the first French journal of women’s history: Pénélope, Cahiers pour l’histoire des femmes, which published thirteen volumes from 1979 to 1985. Though it ceased publication, another journal of women’s history, Clio, was founded in 1995 by a group of scholars led by one of Perrot’s former students, Françoise Thébaud. Among Perrot’s mostly widely known efforts are two multivolume edited collections. Perrot was the primary editor of volume 4 of the Histoire de la vie privée entitled De la Révolution à la grande guerre, which appeared in 1987 (translated as History of Private Life, volume 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, 1990). She also wrote much of the content of the volume: introductions to each section, as well as her own chapters treating the family, gender roles, and the home in the nineteenth century. The series played an important role in bringing “private” affairs into the realm of history. In the general introduction to volume 4, Perrot explained with great clarity the significance, and potential frustrations, of studying private life: “In this realm the effable creates the ineffable, light produces darkness. The unsaid, the unknown, the unknowable – and our tragic awareness thereof – increase apace with the knowledge that digs vast chasms of unfathomable mystery beneath our feet.” Such an unusual approach to history, an emphasis on the unknowable, elicited mixed responses from reviewers. In the New York Review of Books (1991), David Cannadine complained about much of the volume’s writing, which “consists of wild and pretentious generalizations


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ranging from the unverifiable to the meaningless.” However, in a review published in the American Historical Review (1991), Bonnie Smith viewed the “illusiveness of this book’s narrative path” much more positively, and saw a lesson to be learned from the volume’s “interpretive sprawl.” Smith seemed willing to accept the notion that “the very ambivalences of the concept of the private make writing its history a messy affair.” Perrot went from that project to co-editing the entire five-volume collection Histoire des femmes en Occident, with Georges Duby, which appeared in 1991 and 1992. Receiving more unanimous praise, the collection was almost immediately translated into English (as A History of Women in the West, 1992–4) and a dozen other languages. It also inspired other, non-Western projects, including histories of women in Japan and in Morocco. In a review of the volume Perrot was most directly involved in producing, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War (volume 4), Mary Jo Maynes, in the American Historical Review (1995), described Perrot’s contribution as among the strongest in the volume. Here Perrot analyzed “spatial imagery inherent in the notion of women’s place,” providing a useful overview that “might well be read as an introduction to the whole book” as it provided a clear “chronological and conceptual framework.” These two ambitious projects brought Perrot international recognition primarily as an historian of women, though her work has ranged much more widely than just women’s history. Both collections have remained in print since they appeared, and have had wide-reaching influence across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. During these same years, Perrot also turned her attention to different kinds of projects. In the early 1980s, she edited Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on prisons, as part of a large, multi-volume project bringing together all the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. Later, Perrot edited for publication the writings and letters of George Sand, including one collection of Sand’s political writings and one of her correspondence with Armand Barbès. These projects allowed Perrot to explore women’s history and the history of prisons in a different context, through the eyes of thoughtful and observant individuals of the nineteenth century. Perrot has also taken great strides in making complex scholarly debate accessible to the general public. Throughout her career, she has regularly published articles in the French “popular” historical magazine L’Histoire. In addition, many of her book-length projects have addressed audiences much wider than just her fellow academic historians. In 1992, Perrot co-edited with Georges Duby the beautifully illustrated Images des femmes (translated as Power and Beauty: Images of Women in Art). Published simultaneously in French and English in 1992, this “coffee-table” book features images of women dating from prehistory to the present day, along with thoughtful analysis of their significance by historians and art historians. Among Perrot’s publications addressed to a wider audience is another innovative and generously illustrated book which takes the form of an interview with the historian, simply titled Femmes publiques (Public Women) published in 1997. Here, Perrot makes accessible to the general public debates among historians about women’s access to the public sphere in the nineteenth century.

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Perrot addresses the terms of women’s entrance into public spaces, how their appearance in public was interpreted at the time, and the ramifications of these views for the present day. More recently, she has taken on the role of a public intellectual on the radio station France Culture where she collaborates on a weekly program entitled Les Lundis de l’histoire (Mondays for History), along with Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Philippe Levillain. In 2005, France Culture broadcast a series of twenty-five twenty-minute interviews with Perrot discussing topics in women’s history. The interviews are available on a CD-MP3, packaged with Perrot’s most recent book, Mon histoire des femmes (2006). Retired from teaching in 1993, Perrot continues to research and write with almost unbelievable energy, while also continuing to provide advice and encouragement to succeeding generations of historians. She presides over conferences on a regular basis; she publishes articles and books, both scholarly and popular, dealing with a broad range of historical topics. Perrot’s talent also shines in the dozens of elegant prefaces to works of women’s history, labor history, and prison history she manages to write every year. Perrot’s life has been a model of political and scholarly engagement. Even those who might disagree with her views seem to respect and admire Perrot, who is known for her graciousness and generosity of spirit. Perrot has received all the possible honors available to a French academic, even being named to the Legion of Honor in 1992. Unquestionably the grande dame of French women’s history, Michelle Perrot established and put on solid ground that field within the French academy, but she has also done much more than that. Her often innovative and interdisciplinary studies of workers, women, prisons, and the political thought of writers like Sand and Tocqueville will continue to shape scholarship for years to come.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Michelle Perrot Le Socialisme français et le pouvoir, by Michelle Perrot and Annie Kriegel (Paris: Etudes et documentation internationale, 1966). Enquête sur la condition ouvrière en France au XIXe siècle, microfiche collection (Paris: Hachette, 1971). Les Ouvriers en grève (Paris: Mouton, 1974; expanded edn., Paris: EHESS, 2001). Le Panoptique ou l’oeil du pouvoir, by Michelle Perrot and Michel Foucault (Paris: Belfond, 1977). Jeunesse de la grève: France, 1871–1890 (Paris: Seuil, 1984); translated by Chris Turner as Workers on Strike: France 1871–1890 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Femmes publiques, by Michelle Perrot with Jean Lebrun as interviewer (Paris: Textuel, 1997). Il était une fois – l’histoire des femmes: Michelle Perrot répond à Héloïse et Oriane (Evreux: Lunes, 2001). Mon histoire des femmes (Paris: Seuil, 2006; Points Histoire, 2008).


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Collections Les Femmes, ou les silences de l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1998). Les Ombres de l’histoire: crime et châtiments au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2001).

Other Works “Premières mesures des faits sociaux: les débuts de la statistique criminelle en France (1780–1830),” in Pour une histoire de la statistique (Paris: INSEE, 1976), pp. 125–37. Travaux des femmes dans la France du XIXe siècle (special issue of Mouvement social, no. 105), edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Editions ouvrières, 1978). Les Lettres des filles de Karl Marx, edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979). “The three ages of industrial discipline in nineteenth-century France,” in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-century Europe, edited by John Merriman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 149–68. L’Impossible prison: recherches sur le système pénitaire au XIXe siècle, edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Seuil, 1980). L’Espace de l’usine, edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Editions ouvrières, 1983). Ecrits sur le système pénitentiaire en France et à l’étranger, by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, 2 vols., edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). “The first of May in France: the birth of a working-class ritual,” in The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawn, edited by Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick, and Roderick Floud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 143–71. Une histoire des femmes est-elle possible? edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Rivages, 1984); translated by Felicia Pheasant as Writing Women’s History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Le Journal intime de Caroline B., edited by Michelle Perrot and G. Ribeill (Paris: Montalba, 1985). “On the formation of the French working class,” in Working-class Formation: Nineteenthcentury Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, edited by Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 71–111. Compte générale de l’administration de la justice criminelle en France pendant l’année 1880 et rapport relatif aux années 1826–1880, edited by Michelle Perrot (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1989). Histoire de la vie privée, vol. 4: De la Révolution à la grande guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1997); translated as History of Private Life, vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, edited by Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990). Histoire des femmes en Occident, edited by Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1991–2); translated as A History of Women in the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992–4); vol. 4: Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, edited by Michelle Perrot and Geneviève Fraisse. Images des femmes, edited by Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby (Paris: Plon, 1992); translated by Berlitz Translation Services as Power and Beauty: Images of Women in Art (London: Tauris Parke, 1992). Femmes et histoire, edited by Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby (Paris: Plon, 1993).

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“Vies ouvrières,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, vol. 3: De l’archive à l’emblème (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), pp. 87–129. “La jeunesse ouvrière: de l’atelier à l’usine,” in Histoire des jeunes, edited by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), pp. 85–143. George Sand, politiques et polemiques, edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1997). Les Engagements du XXe siècle, edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po., 1998). “1914: Great feminist expectations,” in Women and Socialism/Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars, edited by Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), pp. 25–44. Sand-Barbès: correspondance d’une amitié républicaine: 1848–1870, preface and notes by Michelle Perrot (Lectoure: Editions Le Capucin, 1999). “Zola antiféministe? Une lecture de Fécondité (1899),” in Un siècle d’antiféminisme, edited by Christine Bard (Paris: Fayard, 1999), pp. 85–102. An 2000: quel bilan pour les femmes? edited by Michelle Perrot (Paris: La Documentation francaise, 2000). La Commune de 1871: l’événement, les hommes et la mémoire, edited by Michelle Perrot, Jacques Rougerie, and Claude Latta (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de SainteEtienne, 2004). Filles de mai: 68 dans la mémoire des femmes, edited by Michelle Perrot (Latresne: Bord d’eau, 2004). Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre, by George Sand, edited by Michelle Perrot ([Bègles]: Le Castor astral, 2004).

Selected Articles by Michelle Perrot “Archives policières et militants ouvriers sous la Troisième République,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, 37 (1959): 219–39. “Le premier journal marxiste français: L’Egalité de Jules Guesde (1877–1883),” Actualité de l’histoire, 28 (1959): 1–26. “Les rapports des ouvriers français et des ouvriers étrangers 1871–1893,” Bulletin de la Société d’histoire moderne, 58 (1960): 4–9. “La presse syndicale des ouvriers mineurs (1880–1914): notes pour un inventaire,” Mouvement social, 43 (1963): 93–116. “Sources, institutions et recherches en histoire ouvrière française,” by Michelle Perrot and Jean Maitron, Mouvement social, 65 (1968): 121–61. “The strengths and weaknesses of French social history,” Journal of Social History, 10 (1976): 166–77. “Workers and machines in France during the first half of the nineteenth century,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 5 (1977): 198–217. “De la nourrice à l’employée … travaux de femmes dans la France du XIXe siècle,” Mouvement social, 105 (1978): 3–10. “La ménagère dans l’espace parisien au XIXe siècle,” Annales de la recherche urbaine, 9 (1980): 3–22.


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“Sur l’histoire des femmes en France,” Revue du Nord, 63 (1981): 569–79. “De la manufacture à l’usine en miettes,” Mouvement social, 125 (1983): 3–12. “Quinze ans d’histoire des femmes,” Travaux historiques, 12 (1988): 19–27. “Où en est en France l’histoire des femmes?” French Politics and Society, 12 (1994): 39–57. “La cause du peuple,” Vingtième siècle, 60 (1998): 4–13. “1848: la révolution des femmes,” L’Histoire, 218 (1998): 62–5. “Féminisme et modernité,” Sciences humaines, 85 (1998): 26–9. “Alain Corbin et l’histoire des femmes,” French Politics, Culture, and Society, 22 (2004): 44–55.

Interviews “New subjects, new social commitments: an interview with Michelle Perrot” (Laura Frader and Victoria deGrazia, interviewers), Radical History Review, 37 (1987): 27–38. “Fifty years after Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, what is the situation of French feminism? A conversation with French historian Michelle Perrot” (Ingrid Galster interviewer), European Journal of Women’s Studies, 8 (2001): 243–52. “Des femmes, des hommes, et des genres,” interview of Michelle Perrot and Alain Corbin by Raphaëlle Blanche and Danièle Voldman, Vingtième Siècle, 75 (2002): 167–76.

References Basch, Françoise, et al. (ed.), Vingt-cinq ans d’études feministes: l’expérience Jussieu (Paris: Université de Paris 7, 2001). Nora, Pierre (eds.), “L’air de temps” (autobiographical essay by Michelle Perrot), in Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 241–93.

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Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) Walter Prevenier

Henri Pirenne was born in 1862 in Verviers, Belgium. The town, although small, was a center of the Belgian textile industry, and he himself was the son of a cloth manufacturer. Pirenne’s family roots, without a doubt, determined his later interest in economic history and his ideological convictions. His experiences with the management of a real business (his father’s factory) and with the bourgeois lifestyle (his family and that of his wife were both middle class) fueled his interest in, and furthered his understanding of, the behavior of medieval burghers and workers. His tolerance in social and religious matters might be explained by the fact that his father was a liberal politician and a Freemason of Protestant descent, while his mother was a Catholic. In 1879, Pirenne started his study of history at the University of Liège, where two teachers especially had a significant impact on his personality and career. Godefroid Kurth was a historian of German descent whose ideas on history reflected his ultramontane Catholic faith. After encountering in 1874 Leopold von Ranke’s seminar system and scientific approach to history, Kurth became the first Belgian historian to put aside a Romantic approach to history in favor of a positivist approach centering on a critical examination of primary sources. The second teacher, Paul Fredericq, a liberal and a Protestant, studied the seminar concept in France and Germany and created at Liège in 1880 Belgium’s first seminar in early modern history. Both teachers were familiar with French, Dutch, and German culture and language, and when Pirenne had defended his doctoral dissertation in July 1883, they both encouraged him to study languages and to travel abroad for his postgraduate education. Pirenne started in Paris in November 1883. He studied diplomatics at the Ecole des chartes with Arthur Giry, and he received practical training in medieval studies from Gabriel Monod and in economic history from Giry at the Ecole pratique des

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hautes études, where he also discovered a new course in medieval archeology taught by Robert de Lasteyrie. In November 1884, Pirenne moved to Leipzig, where he studied paleography with Wilhelm Arndt, and then to Berlin, where he studied diplomatics with Harry Bresslau and economic history with Gustav Schmoller. Pirenne’s most memorable encounters in Berlin were with Georg Waitz, who was the president of the Monumenta germaniae historica (one of the world’s leading historical societies), and with Leopold von Ranke himself, hailed by his followers as the founding father of objective scientific history and, at the time of his meeting with Pirenne, about ninety years old. Pirenne developed a great respect for this master of German historical science, and Pirenne never neglected Ranke’s demand that historians subject primary source materials to a scrupulous analysis. Pirenne’s familiarity with the auxiliary sciences of history (paleography, diplomatics, and so on) turned out to be of fundamental importance. It enabled Pirenne to make available in Belgium a quality education in these technical fields and in critical source analysis more generally; it also assured Pirenne a solid advantage over his mostly self-trained contemporaries in the 1880s. The scholar with the greatest impact on Pirenne during his formative years, however, was the German historian Karl Lamprecht. Disdained by most of his colleagues, Lamprecht departed radically from Ranke with regard to approaches to historical study. Lamprecht was one of the first modern historians to be sensitive to the impersonal, collective forces in history, seeing them as even more important than the personalities and ideologies of famous individuals. Lamprecht also established connections between historical research, on the one hand, and the fields of economics and sociology, on the other hand, long before the French historians of the Annales school proclaimed their commitment to interdisciplinarity. In the late nineteenth century, Belgium’s Minister of Education decided on the appointment of professors at state universities, and the appointments were often political choices. Pirenne, born into a liberal family, joined the faculty of the University of Liège in 1885 (where he taught courses on paleography and diplomatics) only thanks to a Catholic Minister of Education and the protection of his Catholic adviser Kurth. In October 1886, he moved to another state university, the University of Ghent. It was not an obvious decision for a Walloon pur sang to leave his home for a job in a Flemish city where he had no friends or family. Pirenne, however, immediately adapted to his new environment. Very soon after his arrival, he made the acquaintance of a daughter of a bourgeois family from Ghent, Jenny Vanderhaegen, whom he married in December 1887. One need not be overly surprised at Pirenne’s fast adaptation to his new surroundings: social elites in Ghent were as strongly francophone as those in Liège. Their rich social and cultural lives were conducted in French, which was also the teaching language at the University of Ghent. Before 1886, most history teaching at Ghent still belonged to the Romantic school, in which history was presented as a species of literature. In 1883, however,

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Paul Fredericq came over to Ghent from Liège and immediately introduced for the field of early modern history a seminar-based pedagogy that involved practical “exercises” with historical sources. Fredericq’s innovation made it easy for Pirenne, arriving in 1886, to introduce a seminar on medieval history in which students were made familiar with the study of primary sources, often written in Dutch (a language that posed no problem to Pirenne). In 1890, largely on Pirenne’s initiative, the History Department at the University of Ghent definitively put an end to the teaching of a literary, Romantic approach to history, and revised totally its program and curriculum. This overhaul meant replacing classes taught by amateurs with seminars taught by professionally trained historians. It also meant introducing a doctoral program in which degree candidates had to carry out original research. Apart from the medieval seminars, Pirenne was in charge of an introductory survey to medieval history and, from 1893 onward, an innovative course on social and economic history. Pirenne’s approach to the novel institution of the research seminar, and to teaching more generally, reveals his creativity. It also reveals the way in which he benefited from an education that included time spent at both French and German universities: Pirenne was able to draw on what was best in both pedagogical systems. In his courses, Pirenne read primary sources together with his students. He also provided his students with the highly specialized skills necessary for working with medieval sources. Pirenne introduced his students to medieval languages so that they could encounter the source material without the mediation of a modern translator. Pirenne taught them paleography so that they could read unpublished medieval parchments and papers held in European archives, and he taught them diplomatics so that, by taking into account the provenance of each document as revealed by the analysis of its physical and internal form, his students could analyze their sources critically. Pirenne put his publications in the service of his teaching. In 1909, Pirenne published his Album belge de diplomatique (Belgian Album of Diplomatics), a collection of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts that made original medieval materials more accessible to his students. Pirenne also published several critical editions of medieval texts both literary and administrative, providing readers with still more primary source material with which to work. He edited the famous twelfthcentury account written by Galbert of Bruges about the murder of Count Charles the Good. Together with Georges Espinas, he produced a four-volume collection of legal, administrative, and financial documents concerning the medieval textile industry in the Belgian Commission royale d’histoire. Pirenne himself was elected a member of this Commission in 1891. In 1907, he became its energetic SecretaryGeneral, a position he held for twenty-eight years until his death in 1935. Pirenne’s crucial role on this Commission allowed him to bring Belgian erudition to the European level: in 1896 Pirenne introduced new editorial standards, comparable to those in France and Germany, for critical editions of texts. Pirenne promoted the complete publication of the records of the meetings of the Estates General in


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the Low Countries, and he likewise promoted the Commission’s publication of the Recueil des actes des princes belges (Collection of the Acts of Belgian Princes), which commenced in 1936 and provided critical editions of charters issued by the counts and dukes who ruled in the Low Countries prior to the Burgundian period, based on a diplomatic analysis of their chanceries. While the publication of primary source materials absorbed much of Pirenne’s ample energy, he found the time to produce works of original research. With a study on Ypres of 1903 based on the methods of German scholars, Pirenne created the field of medieval historical demography in Belgium. Pirenne’s position with the Commission royale d’histoire was one of a number of important administrative posts that allowed Pirenne’s influence to extend throughout the Belgian, European, and, indeed, global historical profession. Pirenne served as President of the Commission de la biographie nationale, of the Institut historique belge de Rome, and in 1920 of the Union académique internationale, an institution that has striven under Pirenne’s influence to produce a new edition of the important Latin dictionary originally composed by the seventeenthcentury philologist Charles du Fresne seigneur du Cange. Pirenne was one of the founders of the Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, the most important Belgian journal for historians and philologists. He played a prominent role in the International Committee of Historical Sciences, founded in 1898, which brings together every five years hundreds of historians from all over the world. World War I caused a crisis in this institution, and Pirenne, by organizing a successful meeting of the group at Brussels in 1923, became one of the architects of its revival. The curriculum that Pirenne helped to develop attracted many beginning students, fascinated by the refreshingly new approach. In the forty-four years of his career at Ghent, Pirenne successfully advised some thirty-two doctoral students. The exceptional degree of his impact on the field of history, and on Belgian and European academic life more generally, is apparent in the following facts. Many of Pirenne’s students went on to enjoy distinguished careers in history. Some of Pirenne’s students (François-Louis Ganshof, Hans Van Werveke, Gaston Dept, Victor Fris, Henri de Sagher, and Charles Verlinden) went on to teach at the University of Ghent. Others had teaching careers elsewhere in Belgium, in Europe, and, indeed, around the world: Fernand Vercauteren and Herman Van der Linden at Liège; Guillaume Des Marez at Brussels; Jan Denucé at Antwerp; Jacques Pirenne at Geneva; and Willem Blommaert at Stellenbosch in South Africa. Many students from abroad attended his seminars: Henri Obreen and Willem Sybrand Unger from the Netherlands, and Marian Serman from Romania. An especially large contingent of foreign students came from the United States: John R. Knipfing, Robert Reynolds, and Gray C. Boyce from the University of California at Berkeley; James L. Cate from the University of Chicago; Henry S. Lucas from the University of Michigan; and Charles H. Taylor and Carl Stephenson from Harvard University.

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Just as Ranke shaped Pirenne’s teaching, so, too, he influenced Pirenne’s writings and research. Pirenne was the first historian to deliver a comprehensive, scientific history of Belgium, and he did so in no fewer than seven volumes. This immense task occupied a lot of his time between 1894 and 1932. Though Belgium did not exist as a nation until 1830, Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique (History of Belgium, 1900–1932) goes back to the early Middle Ages. Pirenne believed that the medieval principalities located within the territory of what would later become the Belgian state possessed a significant common past and identity, and that they constituted a specific economic and cultural area in Europe. This thesis has been fiercely attacked as an ideological, teleological, and anachronistic construction – a severe judgment, especially when applied to an historian reputed to be a pioneer of a new, more critical, and professional history, eager for hard facts and objectivity. It is also remarkable that this “national” history of Belgium was written by a cosmopolitan historian, ambitious to supplant the nationalistic Romanticism of Jules Michelet and Thomas Macaulay, and of Léon Vanderkindere and Kervyn de Lettenhove in Belgium. The key to this paradox may be found in the initiative that led to this work. It was Karl Lamprecht who asked Pirenne, in 1894, to write a volume for his series “Geschichte der Europäischen Staaten” (“History of European States.”) Lamprecht’s proposal forced Pirenne to reflect on the question of whether there was enough coherence within the medieval territories of the Low Countries to call their common past a “History of Belgium.” Pirenne’s answer can be found in the preface to volume 1: “I wanted before all else to bring out the quality of unity.” The Histoire de Belgique certainly is the product of the presumptive decision that some kind of “Belgium” existed in the Middle Ages. Once published, the book gave Belgians the feeling of being a nation with a long past. In many ways, Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique was innovative, especially in its claims for the primacy of social and economic factors (albeit in interplay with cultural, religious, political, and institutional factors) in Belgian history, as well as in its dependence on a critical reading of primary sources. Pirenne’s main contention is that the common history of the various regions of the medieval Netherlands was not so much a matter of politics as of a common sensitivity for industry, commerce, religious movements, and art. The area called Belgium from 1830 onward was a microcosm of Europe, a “Mischkultur” on the crossroads of international trade routes, borrowing a great deal of its neighbors’ culture and technology and then blending together imported and indigenous elements in a sort of melting pot. In La Nation belge of 1899, Pirenne specifically presented Belgium as a composite of Germanic and Romance cultures. His inspiration came from “Flamands et Wallons” published in 1859 by his former professor at the University of Liège, Auguste Stecher. This analysis of Belgian history was probably shaped also by Pirenne’s observation of Belgium’s bridge function in his own lifetime. For all of its strengths, the Histoire de Belgique has been criticized for certain weaknesses. Pirenne neglected to emphasize the specificity and the regional loyalty of


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Belgium’s subregions, as well as the real ambition for independence of each of their dynasties. Pirenne’s thesis suggests too strongly that the fifteenth-century Burgundian Netherlands resulted inevitably in the Belgian state of 1830. The core of Pirenne’s work deals with the history of medieval European cities, especially the medieval urban economy. In his first urban study of 1889, Pirenne tackled the history of Dinant in the principality of Liège, and in this early work the institutional approach to urban history still dominates. Pirenne’s first foray into the field of urban history and his experience with institutional history were very beneficial for his later work, helping him never to forget the impact of juridical and political structures on urban history. His teaching at Ghent from 1886 onward inspired Pirenne to broaden his research to include Flemish cities. Later, during World War I, Pirenne widened his research still more to include the cities of Italy, Eastern Europe, Byzantium, and the Near East. Indeed, Pirenne’s willingness to employ a comparative approach to urban history represents one of his greatest methodological innovations. Pirenne’s earliest use of systematic comparison dates from 1900. Before 1900, Pirenne limited himself largely to the Meuse cities within the bishopric of Liège. Moving to Ghent, he became fascinated by the very specific social, economic, and juridical characteristics of the medieval Flemish cities, and felt forced to explain the divergences between the Flemish cities and those that he had studied in the earliest part of his career. In 1904, Pirenne took one step further in a study on the merchants of Dinant, in which he noticed remarkable parallels between them and the businessmen of Douai in Flanders, especially with regard to the business techniques and behavior of the famous patrician Boinebroke. Pirenne concludes “que des deux côtés, les mêmes causes ont produit les mêmes effets” (“on both sides, the same causes produced the same effects.”) This observation of recurrent patterns is a concept that he borrowed from Karl Marx and Max Weber. Like Weber, Pirenne abstracted “ideal types,” such as the late medieval prototype of the merchant-entrepreneur, from empirical data, although the existence of this “ideal type” has been rejected by later research. Pirenne was also an innovator in his understanding of, and emphasis on, the realities of daily living. John Mundy noticed Pirenne’s admiration for captains of business “as the principal generative agents of human advancement,” but Mundy also noted “a certain sympathy and even love for workers.” Pirenne was well aware of the active role of workers in a series of medieval revolts around 1300, of the abuses and political mistakes of the patrician elites who refused to establish a fair fiscal system, and of the fundamental shift to an economy based on a division between capital and labor. Yet another innovation is Pirenne’s thesis concerning the role of new, peripatetic merchants and adventurous settlers in the rise of the medieval city during the eleventh century. Pirenne’s theory concerning the importance of these groups for urban revival certainly lacked sophistication and nuance, and it has been largely rejected in its original form, but the theory certainly succeeded in inspiring later research, and it represents one of the first attempts to

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understand medieval urban history in terms of social structures. Just as innovative was his use of archaeological data for urban history, but this innovation was also one of Pirenne’s vulnerabilities – during his lifetime, the number of excavations of medieval cities was still fairly small. Pirenne was a flexible and creative researcher, constantly in search of new models of interpretation. In Les Anciennes Démocraties des Pays-Bas (1910; translated as Belgian Democracy, 1915; and as Early Democracies in the Low Countries, 1963), he explores the hypothesis that the later successes of the medieval Low Countries might be explained by their early discovery and cult of what he then called “democratic” institutions. Pirenne has been criticized for using the term “democratic” anachronistically, and “democratic plutocracy” would have been more appropriate. Pirenne was well aware of the connotations and limited usefulness of the term “democratic” in medieval history, however, as is evident in the following passage: “the municipal democracies of the Middle Ages consisted of privileged members. They did not, and could not, know the ideal of a liberty and an equality open to all. To them liberty always remained the exclusive property of the limited class that had first fashioned the urban polity.” Pirenne, although greatly influenced by Ranke and the Rankean conception of scientific history, nonetheless believed that Ranke’s positivist approach to textual analysis lacked complexity. Pirenne liked the Hegelian, dialectical explanation of historical change, and his acquaintance with Karl Lamprecht led to a temporary flirtation with Marxist analyses from circa 1900 on. This flirtation is evident in the first volume of Pirenne’s seven-volume Histoire de Belgique and in his Les Anciennes Démocraties des Pays-Bas. For example, although he believed that conflict between France and Flanders created “a kind of national consciousness” in medieval Flemish cities, Pirenne nonetheless rejected nineteenth-century Romantic and nationalist interpretations of the Flemish revolts that took place circa 1300, instead embracing an explanation that identified prevailing social and economic conditions as the prime cause for those uprisings. Marxist historical materialism and social-economic determinism are reflected in Pirenne’s significant article of 1914: “Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme” (translated as “The stages of the social history of capitalism,” 1914). This article rejects the famous thesis articulated by Max Weber’s that Calvinism was the prime source of capitalism, and instead favors the idea of a capitalism rooted in social evolution as merchants, unable to adapt to challenges, found themselves displaced by more ambitious (and more capitalistic) entrepreneurs. Pirenne also rejects a unilinear model of capitalist development in favor of alternating phases of heavy economic regulation and widespread economic freedom. This already brilliant academic career would have developed peacefully if not for two factors: World War I and the language problem at the University of Ghent. World War I was first a family drama for Pirenne, as one of his sons died at the front. It was also a professional drama. In 1916, the German Governor in Belgium, General von Bissing, changed the teaching language at the University of Ghent


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from French to Dutch. Most of the professors took a firm stand against this plan. Pirenne and Fredericq, high-profile spokesmen of the protest, were arrested on March 18, 1916 and deported, first to Crefeld and later to a camp at Holzminden, Germany. This long captivity lasted until November 1918 and wholly disrupted Pirenne’s family life. It also had a profound influence on his perspective on life and on his professional approach to history. Pirenne’s insights into social, cultural, and political realities were profoundly deepened by unexpected encounters with individuals from social backgrounds and professions totally different from the familiar world of academics. Almost 10,000 civilians lived in Pirenne’s detention camp. Some were intellectuals and aristocrats, some were workers and shopkeepers, and some were prostitutes and criminals. Pirenne lectured in his camp on Belgian history and European economic history, and he learned some Russian from fellow prisoners. More importantly, Pirenne became aware of the impact of Eastern Europe on world history. In July 1917, he started to write, mostly from memory and without notes and books, a general history of Europe that was not published until much later, in 1936, under the title Histoire de l’Europe des invasions au XVIe siècle (History of Europe from the Invasions to the Sixteenth Century). He also composed a first draft of what would become his famous book Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937; translated as Mohammed and Charlemagne, 1939). From October 1917 to November 1918, Pirenne kept an intellectual diary in which he reflected on the nature of history, on methodology, and on the value of his profession; it was published in 1994 with its original title Réflexions d’un solitaire (Reflections of a Solitary). The war and the deportation shocked Pirenne deeply. He identified himself with resistance to the German occupation. As a consequence, he broke most of his connections to German historians in spite of his admiration for them since his educational years at German universities. He was disappointed by German imperialism, despised its militarism, and felt betrayed by his many German colleagues (even friends like Karl Lamprecht) who justified and legitimized German imperialistic ideology. In each of the three opening speeches that he gave as Rector of the University of Ghent in 1919, 1920, and 1921, Pirenne stressed this anti-German theme. In the first of these addresses, Pirenne criticized the emergence of racist theories in nineteenth-century Germany. The last of these addresses was a defense of cosmopolitism and a rejection of pan-Germanism with the eloquent title “Ce que nous devons désapprendre de l’Allemagne” (“What we should not learn from Germany”). When Pirenne assisted in the revival of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, his anti-German feelings remained evident. Pirenne helped to organize a ban of German and Austrian historians from the group’s meeting at Brussels in 1923 and from following meetings (but as a result of American pressure, the German and Austrian historians were reintegrated from 1926 onward). The Belgian government in 1918 reversed the Germans’ change of teaching language at the University of Ghent’s from French to Dutch, restoring the sole use of French there, but soon activists within the Flemish movement tried to

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extend the introduction of Dutch in administration and in the legal system to higher education. In 1923, the Minister of Education divided the University of Ghent into a French and a Dutch section. The French-speaking faculty was allowed to continue teaching in French. In fact, Pirenne, as a Walloon, understood the Flemish demands, but he hoped to maintain the university as a bilingual institution. He opposed any more radical language change that would have banned French as a teaching language, and believed that the abandonment of French would damage the university’s international contacts. When, in 1930, Dutch became the exclusive teaching language at the University of Ghent, Pirenne applied for early retirement. Several universities offered him a position, but he preferred to concentrate on research and writing. He moved to Uccle, a calm place near Brussels, where he died on October 24, 1935. After World War I, Pirenne became a Belgian public figure of national popularity, as well as part of the intellectual and political establishment in Belgium and Europe. Some called him an official national historian, others a mandarin. He was indeed an excellent networker whose international contacts were extensive. So great was his stature that Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, from 1921 onward, asked Pirenne several times to become the first director of a journal that they intended to create, the famous Annales. Pirenne refused not because his views on history and the historical profession diverged from those of Bloch and Febvre, but because his duties in Belgium and abroad (which, by the 1920s, included the rectorship of the University of Ghent, speaking tours, and extensive publishing) were already heavy. Despite declining their invitation, Pirenne maintained for years an intense correspondence with his two Strasbourg colleagues; he encouraged them fiercely and published articles in their journal once it had been established. These letters reveal Pirenne, Bloch, and Febvre exchanging methodological and interpretative ideas that would come to be the hallmark of the Annales school. Pirenne also became an unofficial ambassador of Belgian culture to the world, promoting the idea that Belgium was not an “artificial country.” When Pirenne traveled to the United States for three months in 1922, he met President Warren Harding and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. That trip, however, was above all a lecture tour that took Pirenne to many famous institutions of higher learning: Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford. Pirenne’s talks exposed many colleagues and young students to his scientific approach to history and convinced many to study at Ghent with him. Princeton University Press in 1925 published Pirenne’s Princeton talks under the title Medieval Cities; this book was often reprinted and is still available in the paperback version of 1974. Pirenne’s conceptions of the historian’s craft were never static. His thinking, to the end, remained flexible and creative. In 1933, for example, Pirenne revised his arguments concerning the revolts in Flanders circa 1300. Now Pirenne argued that “the conflict more and more took on the appearance of a class struggle between poor and rich. But it was no more than an appearance.” Pirenne was not rejecting


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his earlier belief in the importance of social and economic factors, but he was recognizing that the social categories that he had employed in his earlier analysis, especially a dichotomy between poor and rich, were insufficiently complex. More broadly, following Word War I, Pirenne lost interest in the Marxist approach to history that characterized some of his earlier writings. This evolution was the result of the despairing years of Pirenne’s imprisonment in a German camp, which led Pirenne to engage in strong personal soul-searching. Specifically, he came to see the Marxist approach as overly deterministic and overly wedded to abstract, ahistorical models. Instead of the inevitability of historical developments, Pirenne came to stress more and more the elements of chance and accident in history. He also increasingly stressed the importance of dominant individuals, their ideas and their quirks of personality, in determining historical outcomes. While he never lost his talent for simplification, synthesis, and broad historical interpretation, Pirenne embraced an even more purely empirical and scientific approach to history after World War I. The end-product of Pirenne’s long series of methodological experiments can be found in two successive publications: Medieval Cities, based on the lectures that he gave in America in 1925; and “Le mouvement économique et social au moyen âge” (1933; translated as Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, 1936), in which Pirenne puts forth the most mature synthesis of his views on medieval history. (Its English translation has been reprinted many times and it has been translated into German, Dutch, and Yugoslavian too.) Pirenne’s best-known work, certainly a magnum opus, is the posthumously published Mahomet et Charlemagne, which treats the problem of the end of Antiquity and the birth of the Middle Ages, especially as regards the continuity of urban life between the Roman and the medieval eras. This book was the product of a long gestation. An early glimpse of the book’s central ideas can be found in the notes of a student who took one of Pirenne’s courses in 1889. Pirenne’s long and forced isolation in the German camp of Holzminden during World War I also contributed to the book – the lack of access to a library and to archives forced Pirenne to concentrate on historical synthesis and major issues rather than on minutiae. Pirenne further refined these ideas, which were growing increasingly sophisticated and provocative, in two articles published in 1922 and in 1923 respectively in the Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire. Against the prevailing theory (which could be traced back to the eighteenthcentury English historian Edward Gibbon), namely, that the collapse of the Roman Empire resulted from fifth-century invasions by Germanic barbarians, Pirenne argues in Mahomet et Charlemagne that the collapse of the ancient world and Roman civilization (as opposed to the Roman Empire strictly speaking) resulted from the Arab conquest of the southern, African, coast of the Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries. This conquest turned the Roman mare nostrum into what Pirenne called an Islamic lake. It thereby ended the Mediterranean’s role as the dynamic center of the Roman military system and of the ancient world economy,

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and it destroyed Europe’s commercial and intellectual contacts with the Near East. The Carolingian Empire of the eighth and ninth centuries reverted to an overwhelmingly agrarian economy and developed a political structure that one might term feudal. As Pirenne put it, “In the seventh century the Roman Empire had actually become an Empire of the East; the Empire of Charles was an Empire of the West,” or, even more famously, “Without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable.” Ultimately, the Arab conquest is responsible for the movement of the core of the world’s economy from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. If ever there has been a hiatus in the European economy and in European history more generally, it should be located in the ninth and not in the fifth century. The grand sweep of Pirenne’s thesis made it vulnerable not just to the discovery of new, mostly archaeological, sources, but also to new interpretations and understandings of well-known documents. That vulnerability becomes clear in two books dedicated entirely to an evaluation of the “Pirenne thesis,” published in 1958 and 1983 respectively. The first, The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism and Revision, edited by Alfred Havighurst, ran through three editions between 1958 and 1976; it is a collection of various contributions that address the thesis that Pirenne articulated in Mahomet et Charlemagne. The second volume, Richard Hodges’s and David Whitehouse’s Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe: Archeology and the Pirenne Thesis, published in 1983, reviews the thesis in the light of new research (especially in the form of innumerable archaeological excavations) conducted since Pirenne’s death. The volume by Hodges and Whitehouse also tests several of the hypotheses formulated in preceding decades by Pirenne’s critics. These two archaeologists were, unlike Pirenne, well positioned to integrate archaeological materials and written documents and to combine Islamic and European history. In 1996, a revised French translation of Hodges’s and Whitehouse’s book added even more recent archaeological material. These volumes do not totally discredit the Pirenne thesis, but they do adjust and correct the thesis in many ways. They also reveal Pirenne’s ability to provoke and to inspire his fellow historians five and six decades after his death, and not just historians interested in economic history per se. Christopher Dawson and Pierre Riché applied Pirenne’s thesis to the problem of the cultural and religious transition from the ancient to the medieval world, even though Pirenne himself did not focus much on those issues. Archaeological and numismatic findings of the past sixty years have changed dramatically historians’ perceptions of the origins and structure of medieval cities as well, as has been demonstrated by another scholar from the University of Ghent, Adriaan Verhulst, in his synthesis, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (1999). It has become clear that European long-distance trade was not the dominant feature of the medieval urban economy, and some historians now argue that the economic take-off of the ninth century was largely spearheaded by religious establishments such as abbeys and churches. Later historians demonstrated that


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there was a larger diversity of towns, both with regard to their origins and with regard to their structures, than Pirenne’s work suggested. Pirenne argued that there was an economic rupture that separated the Roman towns and cities of the antique world from their medieval descendants, but in the 1950s Edith Ennen (among others) argued that Italian towns and cities never disappeared in the early Middle Ages; indeed, much more continuity between Roman and medieval towns can be shown than Pirenne claimed. Nonetheless, not all of Pirenne’s ideas have been rejected completely. In Spain, and in some parts of the south of France, urban life faltered and in some cases failed with the collapse of the Roman Empire, and this disjunction in urban life was even greater in northern Europe. The strongest attack came against Pirenne’s chronology, especially his suggestion that the economy of Western Europe performed poorly in the ninth and tenth centuries, and then began to improve rapidly and dramatically in the eleventh century. Subsequent historians have agreed that the medieval European economy grew robustly for most of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, but they have disagreed as to when that economic growth began. Guillaume Des Marez (a student of Pirenne), Robert Lopez, and David Herlihy later insisted on an economic revival that began in the tenth century, and Michael McCormick has recently situated its origins in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Even when subsequent historians disagreed with Pirenne’s specific arguments, though, they could not safely ignore him or his insights. In 1963, Hans van Werveke revised and published separately Pirenne’s “Le mouvement économique et social au moyen âge,” adding a critical bibliographical annex thirty-seven pages in length that addresses the most significant research in the field published between 1933 and 1963. It is amazing how easily one can link most of that research to one or another paragraph of Pirenne’s 1933 synthesis. Pirenne never lived in an ivory tower. He was passionately involved in the great causes of his time. At the same time, he was a conscientious academic and a solid professional, as well as a lover of social occasions with their combination of good wine, great food, and lively talks with friends, colleagues, and students. Pirenne encouraged his students professionally and psychologically, serving as a kind of father to them and remaining their counselor throughout their careers. Pirenne’s students, for their part, loved him and feted him several times, publicly in 1926, more intimately in 1930 after his last class, and again after his death in 1935. In 1962, Pirenne’s students and others (including the king of Belgium and the whole Belgian establishment) officially commemorated and celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. To say that Pirenne was a product of his social and intellectual milieu is to take nothing away from his accomplishments as an historian. Socially, Pirenne was a bourgeois; politically, he was a liberal in the classic European sense of the term. As the son of an industrialist, Pirenne certainly demonstrates in his work considerable admiration for captains of industry and businessmen, and he is hostile to state intervention in the economy. Pirenne’s practical familiarity with the social

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conditions in his own family enterprise, as well as his contact with German Marxist historians, fostered a solid understanding of the mentality and aspirations of workers in the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. As a result of living so many years in a Flemish city, Ghent, with a French-speaking upper class and a Dutch-speaking working class, Pirenne was attuned to the social backgrounds of the Flemish movement. Intellectually, Pirenne was a child of the Enlightenment and its belief in historical progress rooted in the spread of rationalism. Pirenne, in embracing positivism, fiercely revolted against Romanticism. He especially revolted against a specific component of Romantic history and Romantic thinking in general: the Romantic conception of Volksgeist (national spirit) as a force for historical development and change. He considered the belief in “national spirit” to be responsible for the pan-Germanism and the aggressive militarism in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and thus, by extension, for World War I as well. In private correspondence, he interpreted the rise of Nazi racial ideology as another legacy of nineteenth-century Romantic ideas. Although World War I was a blow to his optimism, Pirenne (despite hard feelings toward Germany) afterward maintained his appreciation for tolerance, open-mindedness, and cosmopolitanism, as well as his ability to move within French, German, and Dutch cultures. Professionally, Pirenne embodied a rare combination of gifts and skills. He blended solid erudition and technical virtuosity with a gift for historical synthesis and broad interpretation. The fact that most of his interpretations have needed to be revised does nothing to diminish his accomplishments. If anything, it amplifies them, if we believe a statement that Marc Bloch made in 1935 with regard to one of Pirenne’s works: “Tout grand livre, en même temps qu’une leçon, est un point de depart” (“Every great book is, at the same time, a source of instruction and a point of departure.”)

References and Further Reading Letters The Birth of Annales History: The Letters of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921–1935), edited by Bryce Lyon and Mary Lyon (Brussels: Commission Royale d’Histoire, 1991). Karl Lamprecht: Briefwechsel mit Ernst Bernheim und Henri Pirenne, edited by Luise SchornSchütte (Cologne: Böhlau, in press).

Bibliography Ganshof, François-Louis, “Bibliographie des travaux historiques d’Henri Pirenne,” in Henri Pirenne: hommages et souvenirs (Brussels: Nouvelle société d’éditions, 1938), pp. 145–64.


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Selected Books by Henri Pirenne Histoire de la constitution de la ville de Dinant au moyen-âge (Ghent: Université de Gand, Recueil de travaux publiés par la Faculté de philosophie et lettres, 1889). La Nation belge: discours prononcé à la distribution des prix aux lauréats du concours général de l’enseignement moyen le premier octobre 1899 (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1900). Histoire de Belgique, 7 vols. (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1900–32). Album belge de diplomatique: recueil des facsimilés pour servir à l’étude de la diplomatique des provinces belges au moyen âge (Brussels: Vandamme and Rossignol, 1909). Les Anciennes Démocraties des Pays-Bas (Paris: Flammarion, 1910); translated by J. V. Saunders as Belgian Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915), and as Early Democracies in the Low Countries, with an introduction by J. H. Mundy (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925). Les Villes du moyen âge: essai d’histoire économique et sociale (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1927). “Le mouvement économique et social au moyen âge,” by Henri Pirenne, Gustave Cohen, and Henri Focillon in Histoire du moyen âge, edited by Gustave Glotz, vol. 8: La Civilisation occidentale au moyen âge du XIe au milieu du XVe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1933; rev. and enlarged as Histoire économique et sociale du moyen âge, 1963); translated as Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936). Histoire de l’Europe des invasions au XVIe siècle (Brussels: Nouvelle société d’éditions, 1936). Mahomet et Charlemagne (Brussels: Nouvelle société d’éditions, 1937); translated by Bernard Miall as Mohammed and Charlemagne (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939). Les Villes et les institutions urbaines, 2 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1939). The Journal de Guerre of Henri Pirenne, edited by Bryce Lyon and Mary Lyon (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1976). Réflexions d’un solitaire, edited by Bryce Lyon and Mary Lyon, in Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire, 160 (1994): 143–258.

Edited Works Galbert de Bruges, Histoire du meurtre du Comte de Flandre, Charles le Bon (1127–1128), edited by Henri Pirenne (Paris: A. Picard, 1891). Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière de Flandre, edited by Henri Pirenne and Georges Espinas, 4 volumes. (Brussels: Commission royale d’histoire, 1906–1924).

Selected Articles by Henri Pirenne “Les dénombrements de la population d’Ypres au XVe siécle, 1412–1506: contribution à la statistique sociale du moyen âge,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1 (1903): 1–32.

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“Les marchands-batteurs de Dinant au XIVe et XV siècle: contribution à l’histoire du commerce en gros au moyen âge,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2 (1904): 442–9. “Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme,” Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres (1914): 258–99; translated as “The stages of the social history of capitalism,” American Historical Review, 19 (1914): 494–515. “Mahomet et Charlemagne,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 1 (1922): 77–86. “Un contraste économique: Mérovingiens et Carolingiens,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 2 (1923): 223–35.

References Bierlaire, Franz and Kupper, Jean-Louis, Henri Pirenne de la cité de Liège à la ville de Gand, Actes du Colloque organisé à l’Université de Liège le 13 décembre 1985 (Liège: Université de Liège, 1987). Boone, Marc, “ ‘L’Automne du Moyen Age’: Johan Huizinga et Henri Pirenne ou ‘plusieurs vérités pour la même chose’,” in Autour du XVe siècle: journées d’études en l’honneur d’Alberto Varvaro, edited by P. Moreno and G. Palumbo (Geneva: Bibliothèque de la Faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’Université de Liège, 292, 2008), pp. 27–51. Despy, Georges and Verhulst, Adriaan, La Fortune historiographique des thèses d’Henri Pirenne (Brussels: Institut des hautes études de Belgique, 1986). Dhondt, Jan, “Henri Pirenne: historien des institutions urbaines,” Annali della Fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa, 3 (1966): 81–129. Havighurst, Alfred (ed.), The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism and Revision (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1958). Hodges, Richard and Whitehouse, David, Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe: Archeology and the Pirenne Thesis (London: Duckworth, 1983). Lyon, Bryce, Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual Study (Ghent: E. Story Scientia, 1974). Lyon, Bryce, The Origins of the Middle Ages: Pirenne’s Challenge to Gibbon (New York: Norton, 1972). Mundy, John, “Henri Pirenne: a European historian,” Journal of European Economic History, 6 (1977): 473–80. Schöttler, Peter, “Henri Pirenne, historien européen entre la France et l’Allemagne,” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, 76 (1998): 875–83. Toubert, Pierre, “Henri Pirenne et l’Allemagne (1914–1923),” Le Moyen Age, 107 (2001): 317–20. Violante, Cinzio, La Fine della ‘grande illusione’: uno storico europeo tra guerra e dopoguerra, Henri Pirenne (1914–1923) (Bologna: Società editrici il Mulino, 1997).

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René Rémond (1918–2007) Samuel Kalman

In his 1999 work, La Politique est-elle intelligible? (Is Politics Comprehensible?), René Rémond summarized his career as a French historian: “Mes enseignements, mes livres, mes interventions dans les média trouvaient leur raison d’être dans la conviction qu’il était possible de déchiffrer les énigmes de la vie politique et l’ambition des rendre intelligible à tous” (“My teaching, books, and media appearances have always been motivated by the belief that it is possible to decipher the enigmas of political life, and by the ambition to make them intelligible to everyone.”) For over sixty years, he pursued this goal through the study of the history of politics and religion in modern France, balancing evident erudition with the urge to teach the general public. As a member of the Académie française and President of the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques (FNSP), among other prestigious institutions, throughout his career Rémond was internationally recognized for his expertise. Rémond was born in Lons-le-Saulnier on September 30, 1918, where his parents took refuge from German air raids at the end of World War I. His father’s family belonged to the rural bourgeoisie in the Franche-Comté, and true to his upbringing worked as an industrial draftsman for a large French concern. More artistic in nature, his mother studied piano at the National Conservatory, the daughter of a decorated army officer. She was also a devout Catholic, but remained aloof from the virulent anti-republicanism epitomized by the Action française. The young Rémond followed suit, becoming an avid reader of the Dominican periodical Sept and a member of the decidedly unconservative Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne ( JEC) at the age of fourteen. He advanced quickly in the JEC hierarchy, eventually becoming Secretary-General of the group in 1946–7. The JEC’s ardent republicanism and deep piety permeated Rémond’s life and work.

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The future historian also became the first in his family to enjoy the benefits of higher education, enrolling at the famed Lycée Carnot in Paris, and subsequently earning a place at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure (ENS). However, like so many others of his generation, Rémond’s career path was interrupted by the coming of World War II in 1939. Although he never experienced combat, he nonetheless served in reserve units until October 1941, and the experience left a profound impression: “Je me rappelle notre émotion à apprendre, le 14 juin, l’entrée des Allemands à Paris. Nous enragions de notre impuissance” (“I remember our emotion upon hearing of the German entry into Paris on June 14. We were furious about our powerlessness.”) Yet Rémond did not silently endure the occupation. Finally entering the ENS in November 1942, he joined fellow students in a Resistance cell at the school residence. “Nous étions cinq dans notre ‘turne’ ” (“We were five in our ‘pad’), he later recalled. “C’était le réfus d’une domination étrangère et de l’occupation du territoire nationale par l’ennemi, et aussi le combat contre une idéologie pernicieuse” (“It was the rejection of foreign domination and the enemy’s occupation of our national territory, and also the fight against a pernicious ideology.”) As a convinced republican and practicing Catholic, Rémond consciously rejected Nazism as barbaric, instead acting as a courier for Resistance fighters and spying on Wermacht activity in Paris and the surrounding area. Following the Liberation in 1944, Rémond graduated from the ENS as an agregé in history and geography, and began teaching at the Institut d’études politiques in Paris. He subsequently entered graduate school at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Pierre Renouvin. Rejecting the French historiographical turn toward economic and social studies resulting from the rise of Marxist theory and the Annales school, Renouvin doggedly championed political history, and particularly the study of international relations. However, his theoretical model differed dramatically from past diplomatic historians, who almost exclusively emphasized the study of great men and major events. Renouvin countered with the notion of mouvements profonds, which took into account a variety of factors from geography and demography to national memory. This innovative methodology had a profound effect on Rémond, who throughout his career repeatedly insisted upon the multidisciplinary nature of historical teaching and research, extolling sociology, political science, and even psychology. His doctoral thesis certainly exemplified Renouvin’s approach. Published in 1962 as the two-volume Les Etats-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1852 (The United States in French Public Opinion, 1815–1852), accompanied by an enthusiastic introduction from the adviser, it eschewed the reality of American history and life in favor of the French perception of them. For, as he stated in his conclusion, “l’expérience américaine est comme un miroir qui nous renvoie le reflet, à peine déformé, de l’opinion française” (“the American experience is like a mirror that shows us the faintly distorted reflection of French opinion.”) Having published a short history of the United States in 1959, Rémond wished to understand

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Franco-American relations through the interdisciplinary prism of political, economic, religious, and even cultural factors. The first volume examines the ties that bound the two countries together during the first half of the nineteenth century, analyzing tourism, commercial ventures, and various French writings about the young American nation. Volume two links these phenomena to historical factors, outlining the initial enthusiasm for the United States during the Restoration era, when intellectuals and statesmen lauded the democratic yet mannered personae of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. This perception disappeared after 1832, the victim of diplomatic crises and brusque Jacksonianism, before briefly reappearing in the enthusiastic espousal of liberty that characterized the Revolution of 1848 in France. Rémond concludes that many Frenchmen deluded themselves into believing the idealized myth that the United States variously represented a pastoral paradise of liberty and common sense or an emerging economic and diplomatic powerhouse that personified dynamism and youthful energy, unsullied in either case by European material decrepitude. Not only was such a view completely naïve, but it inevitably clashed with the aristocratic elitism that characterized French society and culture. For Rémond, this sudden awareness engendered a series of assumptions and judgments about the United States that remained entrenched in French thought well into the twentieth century. Lauded as an “excellent thesis” by noted diplomatic historian J. B. Duroselle, Les Etats-Unis devant l’opinion française garnered its author, already by 1956 the directeur d’études et de recherche at the FNSP, substantial acclaim. But by the time of its publication, Rémond had already acquired a reputation in his field. As is often the case in France, he began publishing well before the completion of his doctorate. His first work was a 1948 pamphlet commissioned by the Comité nationale du centenaire de la Révolution de 1848. Entitled Lammenais et la démocratie (Lammenais and Democracy), the effort briefly examined the ultramontane philosopher’s conversion to the republican cause from the 1830s onward. In writings such as Paroles d’un croyant (The Words of a True Believer), the former ultraroyalist wedded a plea for democracy and intellectual truth to Catholic teachings concerning social justice, scorning socialism in favor of Christian morality. Rejecting the traditional portrayal of Lammenais, which proposed a fundamental discontinuity between the young conservative and his subsequent conversion to political liberalism, Rémond instead argued that the theologian’s newfound beliefs reflected unchanged concerns. Thanks to the author’s status as a novice historian, this effort received scant critical attention. Rémond’s next work, however, launched him to the top of the historical profession. Widely debated and extremely controversial, it revived a topic emblazed in the national consciousness: the history of the French right. Written in the shadow of the authoritarian Vichy regime, which implicated a wide swathe of the population in collaboration with the Nazis during World War II,

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the study represented a very risky proposition. Rémond had first approached the topic in 1952, in an article entitled “Y a-t-il un fascisme français?” (“Is there a French fascism?”) published in the Christian democratic journal Terre humaine. Within its pages, he rejected the notion that France had succumbed to fascism either during the interwar era or the Vichy years. Its most influential right-wing leagues, from the royalist Action française to the populist Croix de feu/Parti social français (CDF/PSF), were conservative rather than radical in nature, while the country’s economic and social stability effectively prevented the crises that enabled Mussolini and Hitler to take power in Italy and Germany. Even the Vichy regime represented solely reactionary concerns: the re-establishment of moral order and the legitimacy of elites. In 1954, Rémond expanded upon this argument in La Droite en France: de 1815 à nos jours (translated as The Right Wing in France from 1815 to de Gaulle, 1969), presenting a comprehensive history of the modern French right. Although he acknowledges the birth of the modern political spectrum in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, he implicitly dismisses the idea of a monolithic right wing based upon common doctrinal principles. Instead, Rémond claims that the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of three mutually exclusive variants, termed Ultra, Orleanist, and Bonapartist. Inheritors of the counterrevolutionary mantle, the Ultras ascended to power during the post-Napoleonic restoration, rejecting “Jacobin” liberalism and working for the reconstruction of the Ancien Régime. With the foundation of the July Monarchy in 1830, this faction was relegated to the role of legitimist opposition, replaced by Orleanism, a moderate doctrine that combined the acceptance of economic liberalism with limited parliamentary government and a conservative monarch who functioned as “Chief Magistrate.” The Orleanist clientele included the bourgeoisie, whereas the Ultras catered exclusively to the aristocratic elite. However, the Revolution of 1848 eclipsed Orleanism in turn, leading to the emergence of a third right-wing type, Bonapartism, which attempted to combine the left and right under the rubric of nationalism, populism, and moral order. This historical model provoked little controversy, furthering pioneering studies of the right by André Siegfried and François Goguel, among others. But Rémond took his argument further, claiming that all three strands mutated following the collapse of the Second Empire, the birth of the Third Republic, and the concomitant eclipse of royalism. The Ultras transformed into the ralliés, representatives of the ultramontane right whose staunch Catholicism precipitated their conversion to republicanism in accordance with papal wishes. Similarly, the Orleanists became the left-leaning Modérés, staunch allies of the Radical Party, with whom they shared an affinity for economic and political liberalism. Perhaps the most dramatic shift occurred within the Bonapartist camp, which became nationalist, adding an emphasis on strict authority and the cult of the leader to their populism and antiparliamentarism. Beginning with the Boulanger and Dreyfus affairs at the end of the nineteenth century, this new nationalism culminated in the interwar


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appearance of the extra-parliamentary leagues, which rejected political parties in favor of Caesarism and “boy scout games” for adults. As a consequence, there existed no mass-based fascism in France. Mussolini and Hitler proved attractive to a mere handful of minuscule groups on the French right, and Rémond restates his argument that Vichy represented “l’anachronique remontée du passé” (“the anachronistic recovery of the past”) rather than Gallic fascism. Thus, Rémond claims that the history of the modern French right can be characterized by continuity and heterogeneity. In subsequent editions of the book (it was revised and reissued in 1963, 1968, 1982, and 2005), he expands its central premise to include modern versions of the three categories. For example, Bonapartism once again mutated into Gaullism, from the postwar Rassemblement du peuple français to Jacques Chirac and the Rassemblement pour la République in the 1980s. Yet the most controversial element remains Rémond’s denial of the existence of a genuine, popular French fascism. He has continued to insist that the term should refer exclusively to Mussolini’s regime and its unique doctrine. Critical responses have varied considerably. Reviewing the 1954 edition of the book in the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, J. B. Duroselle praised “cet ouvrage élégant, fortement construit et solidement pensée” (“this elegant work, astutely put together and well thought out.”) In a similar vein, writing in the English Historical Review in 1979, D. R. Watson referred to La Droite en France as “a necessary corrective to the very unscientific interpretations that existed, even in academic discourse, at the time he wrote in the early 1950s.” In addition, a considerable number of French historians of the extreme right have accepted Rémond’s thesis and embraced his assessment of French fascism, including such luminaries as Pierre Milza and Philippe Burrin. Outside France, however, historians have contested his thesis and approach. These authors unanimously accept Rémond’s categorization of the nineteenth-century right, but maintain that the extremerightist leagues of the interwar era constitute a new type, one perilously close to an authentic French fascism. Thus, William D. Irvine applauds Rémond’s book as “the single best synthesis of the French right in France,” but simultaneously excoriates his minimization of the strength of the extreme right and its novelty, particularly the million-strong CDF/PSF. The most vehement criticism has come from Zeev Sternhell, whose works La Droite revolutionnaire 1885–1914 (The Revolutionary Right, 1885–1914, 1978) and Ni droite, ni gauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France (1983; translated as Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, 1986) not only posit the persistence of fascism in France, but claim that the doctrine first emerged there. In a 1994 interview in Le Monde, Sternhell referred to Rémond as the bestknown representative of “traditional French historiography,” meaning, in this context, a conservative clique virulently opposed to the notion of a mass-based French extreme right for purely ideological reasons. Rémond consistently rebutted such charges, defending his claims about Bonapartism and oppugning Sternhell’s evidence.

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Despite the controversy, La Droite en France continues to claim an avid readership. However, the work and its critics have somewhat obscured Rémond’s subsequent efforts, rendering a disservice to its author. For his publishing efforts increased in the 1960s, perhaps his most fruitful decade. In keeping with his interest in French politics, Rémond published the first two volumes of an influential textbook on the subject in 1964 and 1969 (the third and final volume appeared in 2002), La Vie politique en France depuis 1789 (Political Life in France since 1789), and in 1967 he co-edited the papers of a colloquium dedicated to the career of Léon Blum, France’s first socialist Prime Minister. In later years, he directed similar efforts for conferences discussing various French leaders, including Edouard Herriot and Edouard Daladier. Rémond’s most notable works in the 1960s concerned the history of religion, a topic that had briefly appeared in previous efforts, but now took center stage. Much of his writing during and after this time examined the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary France, particularly the fight between modernizing and republican Catholics and their more conservative brethren. On the one hand, this newfound interest reflected intellectual curiosity, particularly Rémond’s dogged advocacy of a multidisciplinary approach to scholarship. However, his own past activities and contemporary disposition certainly influenced his historical curiosity. A pious Catholic, Rémond served as president of the Centre catholique des intellectuels français from 1965 onward, an organization committed to bridging the gap between faith and intellect, reconciling Christianity with a variety of academic approaches, from sociology to psychoanalysis. Yet he remained a committed republican, and that same year accepted a position on the Comité des programmes de la television, an organization linked to the Ministry of Information’s Office de la radio et télévision française, and later became a member of that organization’s Conseil d’administration. These activities continued into the 1970s, when he served as a member of the Conseil d’administration for Radio France and Antenne 2 from 1972 to 1978, and as a member of the Comité supérieur de la magistrature between 1975 and 1979. Thus, Rémond’s later writing reflects his own personal devotion to the Catholic Church and the Fifth Republic. Under the title Les Catholiques, le communisme, et les crises, 1929–1939 (Catholics, Communism, and Crises, 1929–1939), published in 1960, Rémond gathers together hitherto-ignored documents concerning a virtual civil war between the Catholic left and right during the 1930s. In the accompanying text, he expressively recounts the battles between convinced ralliés, fervent supporters of the Third Republic and social Catholicism, and hard-line opponents of the revolutionary tradition who actively contested the laic government. Covering a wide range of issues from labor to diplomacy, the assembled documents vividly portray intellectual debates between Christian democratic organizations and their right-wing confreres. The volume also reflects the author’s participation in the fight, as a leading member of the left-leaning Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne. As he later recalled in a 1976 interview, “je me sentais souvent en


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rupture – disons plutôt en désaccord – avec le vocabulaire, les sentiments, les idées que véhiculaient tant de sermons” (“I frequently felt at odds – or rather in disagreement – with the vocabulary, beliefs, and ideas conveyed in so many sermons.”) Similar themes permeate Rémond’s next work, which discusses similar intellectual debates in late nineteenth-century France. Entitled Les Deux Congrès écclésiastiques de Reims et de Bourges, 1896–1900 (The Two Ecclesiastical Congresses at Reims and Bourges, 1896–1900, 1964), this book examines two nationwide congresses organized by abbé Lemire, which resulted in a fervent discussion of the ralliement and relations between Church and state. Much like the later battles of the 1930s, the two meetings pitted conservative clerics hostile to religious and political democratization against proponents of Catholic modernization. Despite the temporary setbacks endured by the liberal faction, Rémond forcefully argued that Lemire’s assemblies initiated a lasting rapprochement between the Church and the Third Republic. The book appeared in 1964, the year in which Rémond became one of the first faculty members of a new French university in Nanterre. Created to alleviate the increased postwar demand for higher education, the institution was situated in a poor industrial neighborhood ten miles west of Paris characterized by decaying factories and dingy housing. For incoming students, many from privileged backgrounds, their first contact with working-class hardships resulted in political radicalism. In addition to unfamiliar surroundings, the newcomers faced overcrowding in classrooms and residence halls, only increasing their anger. Hence the new professor of history witnessed firsthand the explosive growth of the extreme left at the university, which climaxed in the student-led revolt of May 1968. Looking back on the “events” of May in a later interview, Rémond claimed that he – and his colleagues – were taken completely by surprise when confronted with a “volcanic eruption” of violent protest. Although he disapproved of the riots that ensued, as an historian, Rémond nonetheless conceded that the experience was invaluable: “La crise de mai 1968, et, davantage, la période de reconstitution qui suivit, me fournirent une occasion priviligée de réflechir au fonctionnement d’une société organisée” (“The crisis of May 1968, and even more so the period of restoration which followed it, provided me with a rare opportunity to reflect upon the functioning of an organized society.”) With the failure of the subsequent national strike wave, and President Charles de Gaulle’s restoration of parliamentary order, the crisis seemingly ended in June. Yet at Nanterre the tension persisted in the aftermath of the rioting, and student militancy remained an impediment to the restoration of normalcy. Hence, Rémond formed a departmental conseil pédagogique, composed of four students and an equal number of faculty members, to resolve curricular and regulatory problems in a bipartisan manner. Concerned about future violence at the university and impressed with his reputation among the students, the administration correspondingly turned to Rémond in a leadership capacity, first as Dean of the Faculté des lettres in 1970, and then as university President a year later, a position

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which he held for five years. Under his tutelage, Nanterre was transformed into a respected scholarly institution, becoming the central depot for French doctoral theses, a major coup for a non-Parisian institution. Despite the demanding schedule imposed by his position at Nanterre, Rémond somehow found the time to write both the three-volume Introduction à l’histoire de notre temps (An Introduction to the History of our Time, 1974) and one of his most influential works, L’Anticléricalisme en France de 1815 à nos jours (Anticlericalism in France since 1815). First published in 1976, the latter continues Rémond’s examination of the intersection between politics and religion, arguing for the primacy of anticlericalism in French history from the Restoration to the Fifth Republic. Referring to the doctrine as “un élément essentielle de notre histoire politique, peut-être même un élément fondamental de notre système politique” (“an essential component of our political history, perhaps even an element inherent in our political system”), he rejects the traditional Marxist characterization of anticlericalism as a simple bourgeois trick to deflect attention from serious social problems. Instead, he situates its propagation within the post-revolutionary struggle for control over the French public mentalité, or mindset. Its chief dicta – freedom of conscience, the separation of Church and state, the primacy of civil society – emerged most forcefully whenever clerical parties gained a perceived or real political advantage. Describing the various strands of anticlericalism and their chief concerns, from fear of the Church as a state within the state to worries about papal influence over French youth, Rémond rejects the notion that the doctrine constituted a complete philosophical system, instead positing its utility in combination with different ideologies, from socialism to Bonapartism. Once again, reviewers praised Rémond’s eloquent prose and rigorous scholarship. Writing in Le Monde, Jean-François Six extolled the book as “un modèle de recherche historique” (“a model of historical research”) and particularly lauded the author’s attention to contemporary anticlericalism, frequently omitted in previous historical treatments of the subject. Perhaps buoyed by such rave reviews, Rémond published no fewer than six works over the next seven years, ranging from the political treatise La Règle et le consentement (Rule and Consent, 1979) to a new edition of his classic text on the French right. The most celebrated work appeared in 1983: 1958: le retour de De Gaulle (1958: The Return of de Gaulle). It examines Charles de Gaulle’s triumphant return to French politics during 1958, when the crisis-ridden Fourth Republic collapsed and the Algerian conflict threatened to bring civil war to French soil. To Rémond, the “year of de Gaulle” inaugurated an era of renewed stability. Yet the General’s return to power did not simply result from institutional problems revealed by the Cold War and the Algerian imbroglio, as certain historians have alleged. He further rebuts the Marxist notion of Gaullism as a front for big business and the conspiracist view of May 13 as a right-wing coup d’état. Instead, Rémond presents the year’s events as the product of day-to-day maneuvering and circumstance. Indeed, there existed no certainty that de Gaulle would ascend to


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the presidency and successfully form a Fifth Republic, the product of delicate inter-party negotiations and tense moments awaiting the public verdict. If his government succeeded, it owed this accomplishment to a detailed knowledge of past political, military, and diplomatic mistakes, and to the ability to correct them. That de Gaulle successfully stabilized France is nonetheless remarkable, according to Rémond. The inability of any party to form a government in 1958 due to a lack of suitable candidates was compounded by economic struggles and the mounting Algerian crisis. In his view, “l’Algérie a été le detonateur de la crise qui fut funeste au régime … jamais depuis l’automne de 1947 la France n’a été si près de l’eventualité d’une guerre civile” (“Algeria was the detonator of the crisis that proved fatal to the regime … not since the autumn of 1947 had France been so close to the possibility of civil war.”) Yet the General’s appeal to both the left and right, as well as his ability to negotiate with the insurgent French army in Algiers, led to resounding success in the September referendum that ratified a new constitution and the formation of the Fifth Republic. In the final analysis, Rémond places the turbulent events of 1958 in a recurring pattern in modern French history, no different from the aftermath of military defeats in 1870 or 1940. The truly remarkable aspect, he writes, proved to be the new system’s stability: “les institutions léguées par la crise de 1958 ont reçu aujourd’hui l’adhésion de la quasi-totalité des Français, y compris de ceux qui furent les adversaires les plus determinées” (“the institutions bequeathed by the crisis of 1958 have today received the near-unanimous support of the French people, including those who were previously the most resolute opponents.”) Somewhat remarkably, after the publication of 1958: le retour de De Gaulle, Rémond wrote or collaborated upon a further twenty-two books and collections, in addition to fulfilling his duties as head of the Conseil supérieur des archives and president of the FNSP. He also co-founded the Institut d’histoire du temps présent in 1979, serving as its president until 1990, and he edited the Revue historique for twenty-five years beginning in 1973. In addition, at the request of the French government, Rémond presided over various commissions, including one investigating links between war criminal/milicien Paul Touvier and the Catholic Church in France during his years in hiding from justice, and another examining recently discovered documents purported to be the infamous October 1940 census of Jews undertaken during the German occupation. Among his historical writings, the most prominent continued the exploration of the history of religion. In 1992, Rémond co-edited the monumental fourvolume Histoire de la France réligieuse (A Religious History of France) with Jacques Le Goff, contributing the concluding section entitled “Un chapitre inachevé (1958– 1990)” (“An unfinished chapter, 1958–1990”). Then, in 1998, he published Réligion et société en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siècles (translated as Religion and Society in Modern Europe, 1999), a synthesis of his previous work on religious history. An examination of the modern interplay between European churches and civil society, the work traces the history of secularization from the French Revolution, which

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breached the previously privileged position of religion vis-à-vis the state, through the contemporary era, when church attendance plummeted and old conflicts between faith-based organizations and the state largely disappeared. According to Rémond, this final stage represents the culmination of over one thousand years of relations between Church and state, at which time “the nation became a religion in its turn, a secular religion … people devoted their lives to it, died for it, dedicated all their lives to it, fought for its liberty and greatness.” With the victory of secularization, all ties were severed between Church and state, and all religions granted equal status, while secular governments enjoy complete freedom of action. Within a modern pluralistic democracy, freedom of religion is guaranteed to each citizen, faith becomes a private matter, and churches no longer govern collective behavior. Given such a distinguished career, it seems fitting that in 1998 René Rémond received the highest honor reserved for French intellectuals: election to the Académie française, replacing the recently deceased historian François Furet. That he continued to write and to serve the historical community until shortly before his death on April 14, 2007 testifies to his professional commitment and seemingly limitless intellectual curiosity. His espousal of Catholicism and French republican values remained undiminished throughout his life and career, and he consistently championed the history of religion, and especially the study of politics: “la politique est toujours surprenante. Les choses ne se passent jamais comme on pouvait le prévoir” (“politics is always surprising. Things never turn out the way we predict them.”)

References and Further Reading Selected Books by René Rémond Lammenais et la démocratie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). La Droite en France: de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1954; rev. edn., 1963; rev. again, 1968; rev. again, 1982; rev. again 2005); translated by James M. Laux as The Right Wing in France from 1815 to de Gaulle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969; rev. edn., 1971). Histoire des Etats-Unis (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). Les Catholiques, le communisme, et les crises, 1929–1939 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960); revised as Les Catholiques dans la France des années trente (Paris: Éditions Cana, 1979) and Les Crises du catholicisme dans la France des années trente (Paris: Éditions Cana, 1996). Les Etats-Unis devant l’opinion française (1815–1852), 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962). Les Deux Congrès écclésiastiques de Reims et de Bourges, 1896–1900 (Paris: Sirey, 1964). La Vie politique en France depuis 1789, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964, 1969): vol. 1: 1789–1848; vol. 2: 1848–1879. Introduction à l’histoire de notre temps, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1974). L’Anticléricalisme en France de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1976). La Règle et le consentement: gouverner une société (Paris: Fayard, 1979).


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1958: le retour de De Gaulle (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1983; rev. edn., 1998). Notre siècle (1918–1988) (Paris: Fayard, 1988). Paul Touvier et l’eglise, by René Rémond, Jean-Pierre Azéma, François Bédarida, et al. (Paris: Fayard, 1992). Le Fichier juif, by René Rémond, Jean-Pierre Azéma, André Kaspi, et al. (Paris: Plon, 1996). Religion et société en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siècle: essai sur la sécularisation (Paris: Seuil, 1998); translated by Antonia Nevill as Religion and Society in Modern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Regard sur le siècle (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2000). La République souveraine: la vie politique en France, 1879–1939 (Paris: Fayard, 2002).

Works Edited by René Rémond Forces religieuses et attitudes politiques dans la France depuis 1945 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965). Léon Blum, chef de gouvernement (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967). Le Gouvernement de Vichy et la révolution nationale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972). Édouard Daladier, chef de gouvernement (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1977). La France et les Français en 1938–1939, edited by René Rémond and Janine Bourdin (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1978). Quarante ans de cabinets ministériels (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1982). Cent ans d’histoire de “La Croix” (Paris: Éditions du Centurion, 1988). Histoire de la France religieuse, edited by René Rémond and Jacques Le Goff, 4 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1988–92). Pour une histoire politique (Paris: Seuil, 1988).

Interviews Vive notre histoire: Aimé Savard interroge René Rémond (Paris: Editions du Centurion, 1976). Entretien avec René Rémond (Paris: Beauchesne, 1992). Une mémoire française (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002).

Selected Articles by René Rémond “Y a-t-il un fascisme français?,” Terre humaine, 7–8 ( July–August 1952): 37–47. “Evolution de la notion de la laïcité entre 1919 et 1939,” Cahiers de l’histoire, 4 (1) (1959): 71–87. “Les intellectuels et la politique,” Revue française de science politique, 9 (4) (1959): 860–80. “La morale de Franklin et l’opinion française sous la monarchie censitaire,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 7 (3) (1960): 193–214. “France: work in progress,” Journal of Contemporary History, 2 (1) (1967): 35–48. “Il fascismo italiano visto dalla cultura cattolica francese,” Storea contemporanea, 2 (4) (1971): 685–96. “Le Catholicisme français pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, 64 (173) (1978): 203–14.

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“Droite-gauche: division réelle ou construction de l’esprit?” Bulletin de la société d’histoire moderne, 83 (22) (1984): 7–15. “Le renouveau de l’histoire politique,” Bulletin de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, 74 (1988): 249–56. “Pensée sociale de l’église et mouvements catholiques,” Revue du Nord, 73 (290–1) (1991): 469–76. “La complexité de Vichy,” Le Monde (Paris), October 5, 1994.

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Daniel Roche (1935– ) Harvey Chisick

Daniel Roche is one of the leading French historians of a generation in which the French were often at the cutting edge of methodological and historiographical innovation. With scholars such as Fernand Braudel, Ernest Labrousse, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Pierre Goubert, Dominique Julia, Michel Vovelle, François Furet, and Roger Chartier, Roche contributed to the leading French historical journal of the 1960s through the 1980s, and perhaps beyond, the Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations. Like most of the contributors to this distinguished periodical, Roche sought to identify and analyze the deep-lying, usually impersonal forces that indirectly, though surely, determined the course of human affairs. And like many historians of the Annales school, Roche devoted himself to archival work, particularly to documents found in series long or large enough to allow an appreciation of broad social phenomena. Much of this work was carried out collectively. Unlike many of his colleagues at the Annales, however, Roche’s studies were directed to the field of culture, broadly understood, and because most of his work concerned the eighteenth century, he was less concerned with the almost timeless rhythms of the countryside, which some have characterized as histoire immobile, or “unchanging history,” and more with the transformations that French society was undergoing in the century or so before, and during, the French Revolution. It is probably fair to say that Daniel Roche is the outstanding exponent of the Annales school’s approach to cultural history. Daniel Roche was born in Paris in 1935 to a comfortable middle-class family whose social and political outlooks ran from traditional to conservative. He received his primary and secondary education in Paris and its immediate environs, and took his bachelor’s degree in history and geography at the Sorbonne in 1958. Two years later, the way to a teaching career was opened when he passed the

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onerous, competitive, state-wide examination, the agrégation. Many French academics make success in this competition the basis of their subsequent careers. For Roche, however, it became a beginning, as he then undertook research for a massive state doctorate (thèse d’état), the research and writing of which required more than ten years. Like many outstanding French academics and intellectuals, Roche taught for a time in the secondary school system, in his case at Châlons-sur-Marne, where he also put the local archives to good use. In 1962, he began teaching at an elite teacher training school (école normale) near Paris, and in 1969 he was appointed to a research position in the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). Having completed his massive dissertation on French provincial academies during the eighteenth century, he received his doctorate (doctorat d’état), a degree which is no longer mandatory for the highest levels of French academia, but which nevertheless has provided the framework, in the cases of historians such as Pierre Goubert, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Roche himself, for some of the most creative and comprehensive historical scholarship of the twentieth century. Following the acceptance of his thesis, Roche received an appointment at the University of Paris and began his long and distinguished teaching career in higher education. With the publication of his thesis on French provincial academies in 1978 as Le Siècle des Lumières en province: académies et académiciens provinciaux, 1689–1789 (The Enlightenment in the Provinces: Provincial Academies and Academicians, 1689– 1789), Roche gained immediate recognition as a leading authority in the cultural history of the eighteenth century. To appreciate the significance of Roche’s study of the provincial academies, it is necessary to bear in mind how the Enlightenment was usually depicted in mainstream historiography. In most textbooks and detailed studies up to the 1970s, the Enlightenment was characterized as radical and given to abstraction, and it was usually seen as an intellectual antecedent to the French Revolution. The main spokesmen of the movement were taken to be the philosophes, thinkers and writers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot, who, with their followers, were seen as alienated from, and hostile to, a regime in which they found much to criticize. The main geographical focus of the movement was Paris. In its broad outlines, the Enlightenment was regarded as expressing the aspirations and advocating the interests of a rising middle class, the bourgeoisie. Roche’s findings on the provincial academies contradict the traditional view of the Enlightenment on almost every point. His analysis of more than 6,000 academicians for the eighteenth century shows that 43 percent were nobles, and roughly 20 percent were clerics. The members of the Third Estate who belonged to the academies were overwhelmingly engaged in the liberal professions rather than commerce, thus reflecting what is sometimes called a “bourgeoisie of oldregime type.” With the combined elites of an aristocracy that played a leadership role within the academies, a clergy that maintained, at least to a significant degree,

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its traditional place in the world of learning, and comfortable, respectable doctors and lawyers, we are far indeed from the poor, bitter, and alienated intellectuals who have often been portrayed as playing a central role in the Enlightenment. To determine what subjects interested the members of the provincial academies, Roche categorized and analyzed the materials treated in their sessions and often published in their proceedings, as well as the topics set for essay contests that played an increasingly important role in the intellectual life of the time and by which academies sought to set the agenda of public discussion. In terms of subjects treated, there occurred a shift over the eighteenth century from literary and antiquarian topics to more pragmatic social, scientific, and economic ones. While never altogether abandoning their interests in the fine arts, history, and theoretical sciences, French provincial academicians came to show greater interest in questions touching on the material well-being of ordinary people and the more efficient running of government. Examples of issues chosen by the academies for their essay contests include ways of improving the production and storage of grains; ways of effectively treating common diseases; and the organization of poor relief, of the penal system, and of education. The impression given by the range of subjects and the approaches of provincial academies to the issues they chose to address indicates a broadly pragmatic and reformist outlook. Far from being alienated or hostile to the Old Regime, the elites who enjoyed membership in the provincial academies appear to have been fully integrated into it, believed it to be viable, and sought to shore it up by thinktanking constructive reforms over a wide range of issues. Established on the basis of royal letters patent, and often cooperating closely with intendants, the main servants of the crown in the provinces, these academies, while generally openminded and progressive, remained committed to the status quo. Daniel Roche never claimed that the provincial academies were the whole Enlightenment, but he made clear in an unprecedented way that one of the key foci of enlightened endeavor was composed of local notables who were well integrated into the structures of Old-Regime society, and who cooperated harmoniously with the royal administration. Roche does not deny the roles of the philosophes or the disaffected radicals of Grub Street in the Enlightenment, but he does bring attention to the extensive network of provincial academies in which a moderate, responsible, and reformist version of the movement flourished. The methodology of Roche’s study of French provincial academies also deserves comment. It is based on archival sources, which required carrying out research in the municipal libraries, departmental archives, and sometimes private archives in which the records of the academies are kept. The interface of the academies with the local institutions and environment is taken into account, making Le Siècle des Lumières en province an important study in social history. Wherever possible, Roche quantifies his material, so that his generalizations are based on hard data, which are presented in the tables and graphs that form the bulk of the second volume of the work. According to Isabel F. Knight, in studying French provincial

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academies, “Roche has added immeasurably to our understanding of the complex symbiosis between the Old Regime and the Enlightenment, which was at once its creation and its nemesis.” In 1981, Roche published his second book, Le Peuple de Paris, the English translation of which appeared in 1987 as The People of Paris. In social and geographical emphasis it was far removed from his study of the provincial academies, though in approach it was similar. Like his earlier work on the academies, Roche’s study of the popular classes of the capital is based firmly on archival sources complemented by relevant literary and iconographic works of the period and findings of recent research. It is also solidly quantitative in approach. The book opens with chapters that describe the urban space and demographic composition of the French capital in the eighteenth century, and that provide an initial definition of the “people.” In order to evaluate the material conditions and cultural life of the working population of Paris, Roche and his collaborators assembled databases of two hundred notarized summaries of the property of workers and servants at the time of their deaths (inventaires après décès) for the beginning and end of the century. Though the archives of notaries exclude the poorest levels of the population, they provide otherwise inaccessible information on the possessions of ordinary people and provide a firm basis for the description of the material civilization from which Roche moves to the reconstruction of outlook and culture. The middle chapters of the book treat the material conditions of popular existence, specifically housing, furnishings, and clothing. These are themes to which Roche will return later in his career, and to which he will devote substantial books. In some areas, there is little if any change over the eighteenth century. Workingclass families normally shared a single room, so crowding was inevitable and privacy an unachievable luxury. If a family owned only one bed, which was often the case, sharing was inevitable. On the other hand, significant changes could also be discovered over the century. Around 1750, stoves were introduced into Parisian homes, so cooking no longer had to be done over the open flames of the hearth. Metal kitchen utensils began to give way before cheaper ceramic ones. And perhaps most striking among the working classes, clothing became more varied, more plentiful, and more colorful, especially for women. Roche argues that, taken together, these phenomena indicate the emergence of a consumer culture. This argument is a significant claim for social and cultural change, and Roche is among the first to make it. Economic historians agree that in specific areas conditions for the working population deteriorated over the eighteenth century. Wages on average increased by about a third over the century, while the price of bread increased by two-thirds, firewood by more, and in Paris rents doubled. Hence real wages fell. This would have resulted in real hardship for many, but Roche emphasizes less the weight of this hardship than the ways ordinary people adapted to deteriorating conditions. Buying cheaper ceramic kitchenware instead of metal was a way of coping, as was


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opting for cheaper, more colorful cotton materials rather than more expensive woolen ones. Roche also points out that the prosperity of the wealthy reached certain levels of the working population, particularly servants who lived in, and so were spared the rising costs of food and housing. The final chapters of Le Peuple de Paris treat popular culture and the way in which people interacted with other elements of the population. Using documents that required signatures, Roche was able to show that literacy among workers and servants rose significantly over the century. Similarly, records of possessions at the time of death show that among workers book ownership more than doubled from the reign of Louis XIV to that of Louis XVI. Pamphlets, newspapers, songs and images, shop signs, posters, and placards were all found throughout the urban environment, and ordinary people routinely came into contact with them. Roche finds that in their interaction with these media the popular classes selectively appropriated what was relevant to them, and did not imitate passively. In his examination of the lifestyles of the poor, Roche adopts the stance of a social anthropologist. He finds that the extended family continued to play an attenuated role in the lives of the lower classes and that neighborhoods were key organizing factors in popular life, as were taverns, which acted as foci for both social and marginal economic activities. Violence was an integral and distinctive part of popular culture, and not simply the symptom of disorder that the elites tended to see it as. Roche shows that although the police were concerned to place the people under surveillance and to control their activities, they also shared certain assumptions with them, such as the responsibility of the government to provide grain at affordable prices, an issue that proved a focus for the emerging political awareness of the working population. Having distinguished servants from the working population as a whole, Roche finds that they not only enjoyed greater economic prosperity, but that they also served as key social and cultural intermediaries. What emerges from this description of the lives and behavior of working people is a conviction that they did have a sense of identity and a distinct culture of their own, that these things had their logic, and that the poor and working population of Paris adapted actively and creatively to the conditions in which they lived, and were not simply passive victims of circumstances beyond their understandings and control. In 1982, the year after the appearance of Le Peuple de Paris, Roche published a very different book on a worker of the capital. This book was the autobiography of an artisan entitled Journal de ma vie: édition critique du journal de Jacques-Louis Ménétra, compagnon vitrier au XVIIIe siècle. It was translated into English as Journal of my Life in 1986, and into Italian in 1992. While Le Peuple de Paris was based primarily on the quantitative analysis of data from archival sources, the Journal is the subjective account of the life and times of a single worker. Ménétra’s autobiography represents a member of the Parisian people speaking in his own voice and expressing the concerns of ordinary workers. Though it was not unusual for members of the working population who had risen to become men of letters to

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write their memoirs, as Rousseau, Marmontel, and Valentin Jamery-Duval did, it was extremely rare for a worker who had never been anything else to do so. Daniel Roche was not the first scholar to have seen Ménétra’s autobiography, which is found in the holdings of the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. Jeffry Kaplow had used it for his study of the working population of Paris, The Names of Kings (1972). It was Roche, however, who believed that this exceptional work merited publication, and was prepared to carry out, with collaborators, the research necessary to identify specific persons and events in the life of an obscure journeyman artisan. Jacques-Louis Ménétra was born in Paris in 1738, and with the exception of his tour de France, undertaken once he had finished his apprenticeship, lived there for nearly his whole life. He describes his family, upbringing, occupational training, social activities, courting, professional life, leisure activities, relations with family and friends, his acquaintance with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his experiences during the Revolution. Ménétra’s life and career are carefully documented, and the autobiography of the eighteenth-century worker is accompanied by a searching essay in social history that explains and contextualizes all aspects of Ménétra’s experience. Roche’s edition of Ménétra’s journal complements his Le Peuple de Paris not only in providing a subjective first-hand view of the situation and feelings of workers from the inside out, but also in focusing on work and family, areas that received relatively little attention in the earlier study. In 1987, Roche temporarily left the Sorbonne to take up a four-year appointment as Professor of the History of European Culture at the European University in Fiesole, overlooking Florence. During his time there he published a number of other books. The first of these was, unlike his earlier monographs, a synthesis co-authored with Pierre Goubert, and entitled Les Français et l’ancien régime (The French and the Old Regime). It was conceived as a university-level textbook that would also be of interest to the educated general public. The first volume, devoted to society and the state, was a revision of a two-volume text that Goubert had written for the same publisher ten years earlier, and which was widely regarded as authoritative. The second volume, subtitled “Culture and Society,” was mostly by Roche. The approach to culture adopted here is very much that of the Annales school. More interested in attitudes, or mentalités, than in formal thought, and more concerned with the social and institutional bases of cultural life than with the great texts of the Enlightenment, two of the first three sections of “Culture and Society” deal with social institutions and forces. The first section treats the Church and religion, particularly the beliefs and practices of ordinary people and the way in which they related to the Church and it to them. The second section, entitled “Being Born, Living, Dying” is grounded in demography and clearly reflects the conviction of Roche and Goubert that social history and cultural history cannot properly be dissociated.


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The third section of the book deals more directly with high culture. The main subjects treated here are education, cultural frontiers, literacy, the book trade, its development and the way the state sought to regulate it, who read and what reading practices were, and foci of the sociability of the literate, such as libraries, reading rooms, Freemason lodges, salons, and, of course, academies. This section also treats the culture of images, such as painting and prints, the stage, in both its popular and elite manifestations, and music and song. The cultural panorama portrayed in the first three sections of the book includes the whole population of France, and not just the privileged few who shared in the Enlightenment. The final section of “Culture and Society” addresses changes that occurred over the eighteenth century. Entitled “From Change to Crisis,” it takes up the issue, dear to scholars of the Annales school, of the “conjoncture,” or the confluence of socioeconomic, demographic, political, and cultural changes that created the preconditions for (but did not necessitate) the French Revolution. Goubert and Roche suggest that more than human failings, tensions between broader socioeconomic and cultural forces and inflexible state structures resulted in the undoing – in any case less than complete – of the Old Regime. In 1988, while still in Florence, Roche published a collection of his articles, most of which had already appeared elsewhere, entitled Les Républicains des lettres (The Republicans of Letters), a reference to the “Republic of Letters,” with an emphasis on the participants. It begins with an introduction that throws light on the author’s professional development and what being an historian means to him; it then presents a series of specific studies dealing with various aspects of the history of books and the lives and activities of the intellectuals who produced them, and the contexts in which they did so. As might be expected, this volume contains a number of studies on academies, specifically on the roles played by politics, history, and science in their activities (chapters 5–7). Aspects of the book trade and reading are treated (chapters 1, 3, and 4), while institutions, channels of diffusion, and the relation of social and professional groupings are the subjects of more specific studies (chapters 8–10, and 12–15). Individual members of the “republic of letters” are the foci of several other selections in this volume, but none deals with the major thinkers of the time, and none is concerned with formal thought. There is an article on the library of Dortous de Mairan, which tells about what he read rather than what he wrote (chapter 2). The correspondence of the academician Séguier of Nîmes is examined in order to determine his network of friends and collaborators (chapter 11). In his concluding chapter, Roche compares the views of Jacques-Louis Ménétra, whose memoirs he edited, with those of Louis Simon, another obscure member of the working population who left a written account of his experiences (chapter 16). Simon, who was born to a family of artisans only three years after Ménétra, lived in a remote rural community and made his living at a combination of farming, cloth working, and keeping an inn. The articles collected here, and the different methodologies used in them, show in

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greater detail aspects of Roche’s work that are not always immediately apparent in his longer studies, but which inform and enrich them. For the bicentenary of the French Revolution Roche co-edited with Robert Darnton, the leading American scholar of the Enlightenment, a collection of essays entitled Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1755–1800. Taking as its main themes, the regulation of the book trade and the ways this regulation was circumvented, the production of books, the experiences of those who worked in print shops, the commerce of print culture, and emerging or neglected genres, such as periodicals, pamphlets, almanacs, prints, songs, and ephemera, this collection treats the history, mechanisms, and diffusion of print culture rather than ideas. The contributions of such leading scholars as Raymond Birn, Carla Hesse, Pierre Casselle, Philippe Minard, Michel Vernus, Jeremy Popkin, Antoine de Baecque, Jean Dhombres, Lise Andries, Rolf Reichardt, Laura Mason, and James Leith, as well as those of the editors, make this book one of the most solid and valuable collections of essays commemorating the French Revolution, of which there was no lack. Also in 1989, Roche’s study of dress and fashion, which he had been working on for the previous five years, appeared in French as La Culture des apparences, and in 1994 it was published in English translation as The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime. Roche had already broached this subject in chapter 6 of Le Peuple de Paris, and he returns to the same kinds of source – inventories after death, contemporary literature and iconography – used in the earlier book. He also examines a range of theoretical literature, primarily anthropological and psychoanalytical, to orient his study. Roche goes beyond the many formal studies of clothing and fashion in recognizing that clothing plays key social and economic roles as a focus for production and consumption of items that simultaneously serve practical and symbolic purposes. As an outward “sign of adhesion, of solidarity, of hierarchy, of exclusion,” clothing “is one of the codes for reading society.” More than this, “Fashion reveals social relations and the way they evolve.” The tendency of male fashions from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century was toward subdued colors and uniformity, typified in the gray or black business suit. While women, especially aristocratic women, were allowed more variety, more color, and more exposure in their dress, Roche asserts that bourgeois dress reflected “an obsessive pursuit of decency and modesty,” concerns that contrasted sharply both with the wretched slovenliness of the poor and the flamboyance of the aristocracy. Roche posits a “sartorial Old Regime” the main features of which were a continuity based on the economic inability to do better among the poor and most of the peasantry, a close correlation between social standing and costume, and an assumption that dress was properly a subject for state and societal control. At the same time, driven by increasing economic prosperity and consumer demand, townsfolk, and especially residents of the capital, began to change the styles and increase the sizes of their wardrobes, the lead being taken everywhere by the


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wealthy and by women. More, and more varied, clothes, especially for women, and a relatively sudden generalization of the use of linen, suggest the beginnings of modern consumerism and a “clothing revolution.” The French Revolution formalized the break between clothing and social standing that had been occurring slowly for perhaps a century, but substituted new ideas of dress in place of older ones. Roche approaches clothing as a subject in social and cultural history. As he does elsewhere, he insists on the importance of “material civilization” to culture, and on the need to see cultural developments in the context of the social structures and the economic frameworks in which they occur. Roche shows that the Enlightenment was not just a matter of books and periodicals being passed from one academician or Freemason or member of a reading room to another, but also of what was being worn: “The clothing transformation, the commercialization of fashion and the linen revolution helped to place the collective sensibilities far from the horizons of Christian asceticism, on the side of earthly happiness.” And it was earthly happiness in its many forms and guises that the Enlightenment was principally about. In 1997, Roche published a large volume entitled La France des Lumières, which appeared the following year in English translation as France in the Enlightenment. While less directly concerned with social history and demography than was the second volume of Les Français et l’ancien régime, this book nevertheless treats the culture of French Enlightenment as firmly rooted in the practical social, economic, and political conditions of the time. As Roche himself puts it, “we must restore economic life to a place among the causes of spiritual culture.” The version of the Enlightenment that Roche presents here is original precisely because he takes socioeconomic conditions and political and administrative imperatives and aspirations as his starting-points. Traditionally, historians of the Enlightenment have sought to define and analyze the main themes of the thought of the movement, and with rare exceptions, such as, for example, Daniel Mornet, they have done so primarily by using the texts of representative thinkers, generally philosophes, such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, or La Mettrie, Helvétius, Holbach, and Marmontel. This approach tends to be text-based and to privilege well-known and original writers, and to oppose progressive and often radical intellectuals to conservative authorities. Roche does cite the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and their works, but they play a secondary role in this book. He sees the origins of Enlightenment attitudes to politics in the attempts of intellectuals and administrators to gather information about the kingdom and its population so as to control and manage it more effectively. Knowledge was a prerequisite for the effective exercise of power, as it was for the adjustment of laws, practices, and institutions to changed or changing circumstances. In mapping the territory of France and collecting information on its population, resources, and commerce, the absolute monarchy sought to understand, to control, and to reform the state and its agents.

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According to Roche, there was an impetus to reform within the government. However, as in the key issue of taxation, the principles of the regime precluded the required adjustments, so far-reaching reform projects were “impossible,” and without them the regime could not be saved. For Roche, most reformers, men such as Turgot and Malesherbes, were moderates who were well integrated into the Old Regime and had neither the interest nor the desire to overthrow it. Roche traces progressive social and economic ideas not primarily to published works on these subjects, but to socioeconomic forces. The growth of towns created conditions for more open forms of social mixing and more various kinds of cultural interchange, while the numbering of houses and the increasing use of watches caused ordinary people to perceive urban space and time differently. The influx of country folk into towns, then the return of a quarter or a third of them to their parishes of origin, spread new attitudes. Economic prosperity underlay the emergence of a first form of popular consumerism, and helped to shift the interests of ordinary people from the spiritual to the material level. Rates of literacy increased over the century, giving more people access to print culture, while the development of a variety of foci of literate sociability among the better-off, and the activities of servants and rural curés, or clerics, who acted as cultural intermediaries, further disseminated ideas and values associated with the Enlightenment. Roche does not deny that the Enlightenment involved significant changes in thought and attitudes, but he shows, probably more effectively than anyone else, that material and social conditions influenced and shaped ideas and values, and that these changes concerned ordinary people, and not just those who acquired and read the great works of philosophy and literature of the time. In 1997, Roche published a study entitled Histoire des choses banales, which appeared in English three years later as A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800. This book describes and analyzes the shift from traditional to modern culture, and, like much of Roche’s work, emphasizes the material bases of culture, and the way changes in material conditions influence and interact with attitudes toward, and assumptions about, society and the world. It both elaborates and goes beyond themes broached in La Peuple de Paris and La Culture des apparences. The opening three chapters of Histoire des choses banales treat the way social and economic organization offsets limits imposed on mankind by nature, examine towns and trade, as well as subsistence economics and luxury. The remaining chapters deal with such central issues of ordinary life as housing, lighting, heating, water, furnishings, clothing, and food. One of the main themes of Histoire des choses banales is the emergence of consumerism. As presented by Roche, this phenomenon is an integral part of a broad shift from a culture of scarcity and tradition, in which deprivation, austerity, and religion play key roles, to conditions of plenty in which there is greater scope for choice, and in which utility and comfort become key values. This process involved both limited and gradual technological advances, such as the lighting of city streets and the introduction of stoves instead of fire-


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places, and attitudinal shifts, such as concern with hygiene and personal cleanliness that stimulated the demands for linen and water, primarily for purposes of laundry rather than bathing. The larger story that Roche tells here extends back to the Middle Ages and occasionally forward to the twentieth century, as in his treatment of uses of, and attitudes toward, water. Though the most dramatic advances in the mastery of water, such as effective sewerage systems and indoor plumbing, occurred only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Roche locates the key turning point in the eighteenth century, where he finds fundamental changes in aspirations and attitudes, as well as significant innovations in city planning and methods of managing this resource. The Enlightenment is never far from the processes of modernization that Roche treats but, unlike many contemporary historians, the texts of the philosophes are never dissociated from the material and social conditions in which they developed and which they elucidate and, in turn, influenced. Impressive as Roche’s output of books and articles was to this point, it was followed by another ambitious study a few years later. In 2003, he published a book of more than a thousand pages entitled Humeurs vagabondes. Taking the phenomena of travel and displacement in their broadest acceptations, the book is divided into three parts, each the size of a substantial monograph. The first treats knowledge about travel and the extent of mobility; the second, constraints and freedoms; and the third, discovery of the self and of the world. Like Roche’s earlier work, it blends a wide variety of sources and differing points of view. He treats not only the content and popularity of travel literature, but also the modes and conditions of its production; not only the reflections on travel of Montaigne and Montesquieu, of Voltaire and Rousseau, but also the experiences of ordinary working people and of émigrés during the French Revolution; not only writings about travel, but also the socioeconomic and material contexts and the cultural ramifications of travel. This enormous book is a monument both to the erudition and skill of Roche as a social and cultural historian, and to the inexhaustibility of cultural history as he practices it. The career of Daniel Roche is in many ways exemplary for a French academic. He has worked for many years with colleagues and students on collective projects, these teams or équippes often achieving more than scholars working in relative isolation, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Roche also found time to edit the prestigious journal, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, an onerous task that scholars of the first rank are seldom willing to perform. He has also edited and written prefaces for countless collections and studies by students and colleagues. His academic affiliations have been eminent. His chairs in the Sorbonne and the European University at Florence are highly prestigious, and exceeded in prestige only by his appointment to the chair of the History of Enlightenment France at the Collège de France in 1997. An exceptional tribute to Daniel Roche was a symposium held by the Western Society for French History at Irvine, California in 2003 to consider the corpus of

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his work to that time. In his introduction to the papers of the symposium published in French Historical Studies the following year, Timothy Tackett referred to Roche as one of the “contemporary scholars who have most strongly marked the field of French history,” and the papers devoted to different aspects of Roche’s work reflect the high regard in which he is held by his colleagues. In his response, Roche graciously thanked the panelists who had evaluated his work, explained something of his orientation as a social historian, and, with a combination of humor and seriousness, reasserted his belief in the fruitfulness of the approaches of Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. The contribution of Daniel Roche to the writing of history is not easily characterized. To be sure, throughout his career he has remained committed to social history as practiced by Braudel, Labrousse, and Goubert. But he extends their approaches to the history of culture. Certain themes in Roche’s work, such as attitudes toward and uses of clothing, fire, and water are necessarily set in the perspective of the longue durée, or long term of several centuries, dear to Braudel and the Annales school. Most of his work, however, has focused on the eighteenth century, perhaps because the eighteenth century is for Roche the hinge upon which modernity turns. Unlike many historians now writing, Roche has consistently asserted the importance of the material bases of culture, and while reading and using both major and minor thinkers, he centers his research on archival sources that provide information, and allow perspectives, that literary sources do not. For Roche, culture interacts with, and emerges from, material and socioeconomic matrices, and cannot properly be separated from them. This approach opens cultural history to include the working population, and makes of the Enlightenment, the field in which he has worked most, a movement of more than just wealthy and literate elites. In the preface to La Peuple de Paris, Roche wrote, “For me social history has not gone out of fashion ….” While it must be admitted that Roche’s social history is social history with a difference, more than twenty-five years later he would almost certainly subscribe to the same view.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Daniel Roche Le Siècle des Lumières en province: académies et académiciens provinciaux, 1689–1789, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1978). Le Peuple de Paris: essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1981); translated by Marie Evans and Gwynne Lewis as The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987). Journal de ma vie: édition critique du journal de Jacques-Louis Ménétra, compagnon vitrier au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Montalba, 1982); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as Journal of my Life by Jacques-Louis Ménétra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).


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Les Français et l’ancien régime, by Daniel Roche and Pierre Goubert, 2 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1984). Les Républicains des lettres: gens de culture et Lumières au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1988). La Culture des apparences: essai sur l’histoire du vêtement aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1989); translated by Jean Birrel as The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). La France des Lumières (Paris: Fayard, 1997); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Histoire des choses banales: naissance de la société de consommation, XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1997); translated by Brian Pearce as A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Humeurs vagabondes: de la circulation des hommes et de l’utilité des voyages (Paris: Fayard, 2003).

Selected Edited Works Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800, edited by Daniel Roche and Robert Darnton (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). Ville promise: mobilité et accueil à Paris (fin XVIIe–début XIXe siècle), edited by Daniel Roche (Paris: Fayard, 2000).

Selected Articles by Daniel Roche “La diffusion des Lumières. Un exemple: l’Académie de Châlons-sur-Marne,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 19 (1964): 887–922. “Milieux académiques provinciaux et sociétés des Lumières: trois academies provinciales au XVIIIe siècle: Bordeaux, Dijon, Châlons-sur-Marne,” in Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, (Paris: Mouton, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 93–184. “Encyclopédistes et académiciens dans la France du XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société académique du Bas-Rhin, 89–90 (1967–8): 34–54. “Les primitifs du rousseauisme: une analyse sociologique et quantitative de la correspondance de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 26 (1971): 151–72. “Voltaire aujourd’hui,” Revue historique, 500 (1971): 341–58. “Académies et loges maçonniques: problèmes de sociologie culturelle à l’âge des Lumières,” Histoire littéraire de la France (Paris: Editions sociales, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 273–301. “Le livre: un changement de perspective,” in Faire l’histoire, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), vol. 3, pp. 115–36. “Talents, raison et sacrifice: l’image du médecin des Lumières d’après les éloges de la Société Royale de Médecine (1776–1789),” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 32 (1977): 866–86. “De l’histoire sociale à l’histoire culturelle,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome, 91 (1979): 7–19. “Nouveaux Parisiens au XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers d’histoire, 24 (1979): 2–20. “Urban reading habits during the French Enlightenment,” British Journal of Eighteenthcentury Studies, 2 (1979): 138–49, 220–30.

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“Lumières et maçonnerie,” in Histoire de la Franc-Maçonnerie en France, edited by Jean André Faucher (Toulouse: Privat, 1981), pp. 97–116. “Le temps de l’eau rare: du moyen âge à l’époque moderne,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 39 (1984): 383–98. “Mouvement académique et sociabilité culturelle,” Revue des sciences morales et politiques, 141 (1986): 199–212. “Les occasions de lire,” XVIIIe siècle, 18 (1986): 23–32. “Paris, capital of the poor,” French History, 1 (1987): 182–204. “La violence révolutionnaire vue d’en bas,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 44 (1989): 47–65. “Peuple des mots, peuple des images: les représentations du peuple de l’ancien régime à la Révolution; peuple, plebe, populace, idées, representations, quotidien, de l’ancien régime au temps des Girondins,” Revue française d’histoire du livre, 66–7 (1990): 15–32. “Natural history in the academies,” in Culture of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, S. A. Secord, and E. C. Spray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 127–44.

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Gaston Roupnel (1871–1946) Philip Whalen

The life and works of Gaston Roupnel shed light on the rich cultural setting and professional environment from which the modern French historical profession emerged during the early twentieth century. His career also serves to recall the variety of historical dispositions and outlooks that coexisted during this uneven and transitional period. With one foot in nineteenth-century philosophical traditions and the other in the social sciences of the 1920s and 1930s, Roupnel practiced historical geography at a time when the French were preoccupied, in turn, by economic and demographic resilience following World War I, rural depression and depopulation during the 1920s, “return to the soil” themes throughout the 1930s, and a renewed search for cultural roots immediately after World War II. Well received by contemporary popular audiences and academic audiences, Roupnel’s scholarship – which included contributions in philosophy, history, fiction, journalism, geography, and current affairs – focused primarily on Burgundy’s Dijonnais region from the early sixteenth to the early twentieth century. He employed his historical training, ethnographic expertise, and empathetic imagination to investigate the ecological and structural links between evolving agrarian patterns and the daily lives of local elites and ordinary people. These fields of interest were tied together through his chaired position in Burgundian history, literature, and patois at the University of Dijon. Roupnel’s scholarship reflected the influence of various disciplines that contributed to new directions in historical research. He adopted Paul Vidal de la Blache’s emphasis on regional unity and holism; embraced Henri Berr’s call for methodological synthesis in the social and human sciences; bridged the philosophical insights concerning subjective experience of Henri Bergson’s vitalism and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology; advocated the application of the longue durée (long

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historical perspective) first developed by human geographers such as André Allix and Jules Sion; employed the conjuncture (seasonal cycles to mid-range trends) developed by François Simiand and Ernest Labrousse; anticipated the socioeconomic and demographic methodologies associated with Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s Annales project; pursued the investigation of the mentalités of historical groups pioneered by human geographers and sociologists; and significantly informed the cultural and practical agendas of interwar Burgundian regionalism. Although Roupnel helped pioneer structural history, social history, the study of popular culture, and regional political economy, his intellectual and professional itinerary – like a good number of amateur and professional historians – resisted developments subsequently adopted by the French historical profession. Most problematic, and ultimately damaging to his reputation as a French historian, was not simply Roupnel’s willingness to allow imaginative interpretations to encroach on deductive and empirical research methods, but his reluctance to bow before the different disciplinary rules of evidence pertinent to each approach. Like a number of historical geographers and historians who sought to “read history in reverse” during the 1920s and 1930s, Roupnel originally employed the regressive method first developed by F. W. Maitland and Frederic Seebohm to reconstitute agrarian history from fragmentary evidence. Roupnel calculated the population of late seventeenth-century Dijon and the Dijonnais region in La Ville et la campagne (Town and Country, 1922), for example, by comparing mid-seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century taille records to interpolate the missing data. He similarly used this method in Histoire de la campagne française (The History of the French Countryside, 1932) to model agrarian landholding patterns. Roupnel’s efforts to understand the present through the past and the past through the present often entailed the empathetic reconstruction of collective mentalities as a means of better understanding the motivations and experiences of past lives. This method produced insightful interpretations when grounded in empirical sources – as in Roupnel’s work calculating population in seventeenth-century Dijon – but failed to convince when based on unverifiable and rapidly discarded anthropological theories concerning the operations of “primitive mentality” discernible in the collective mentality of early-modern and modern peasants (“l’âme paysanne”). Rather than abandoning this inductive project, Roupnel stubbornly sought to justify his insights by invoking a monist epistemology anchored in an idiosyncratic blend of contemporary theories about relativity, embryonic morphology, primitive mentality, and sundry unsound analogies between the social and natural sciences. This project, flawed and wedged between Roupnel’s earlier contributions to French history and later participation in the cultural construction of Burgundian regionalism, reveals the efforts of a passionate pioneer of early twentieth-century French rural historical studies struggling to employ divergent disciplines to better understand and reconstruct the lives of ordinary individuals.

Gaston Roupnel (1871–1946)

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Born on September 23, 1871 in the village of Laissey in the department of Doubs in the Franche-Comté, Louis Gaston Félicien Roupnel moved to Burgundy as a child. His father, Auguste Roupnel, was a self-educated man whose fondness for reading provided a favorable environment for his son’s intellectual development. After the loss of his sister, Marie Bathilde, in 1882 and his mother, Suzanne, in 1884, Gaston was sent to board at the lycée in Dijon to study in the “cycle secondaire.” His studies were average; he did poorly in the classics and humanities, well in history and French, and best in the sciences. Teachers found his style too literary and florid. He only began to distinguish himself in history, French, and philosophy during his final year. Roupnel enrolled at the University of Dijon in 1891 where he studied history and geography under Louis Stouff and Paul Gaffarel. His studies were briefly interrupted for obligatory military service in 1892–3. He returned to complete his studies and received his licence (equivalent to the BA) by presenting an extensive and entirely conventional thesis on regional legal and institutional history published as Le Régime féodal de Châtillon-sur-Seine (The Feudal Regime of Châtillon-sur-Seine) in 1896. Upon a recommendation by Louis Stouff, Roupnel then pursued graduate study in history under Ernest Lavisse, Paul Guirard, and Charles Seignobos, and in geography under Paul Vidal de la Blache at the Faculté des lettres at the Sorbonne in Paris. There, Roupnel earned a reputation for being a talented and independent thinker. Despite twice finishing in the top ranks of his class, he twice failed his oral examinations before finally succeeding in 1899. Although not graduating from it, Roupnel famously quipped, that “the Ecole normale supérieure was neither normal nor superior.” Such distance produced tensions that would later affect his relations to academic institutions and the French historical profession. Roupnel began his teaching career at the secondary level at the age of twentyeight. He worked at the Lycée de Saint-Etienne in 1899, Collège d’Epinal in 1900, Lycée de Douai in 1903, Prytanée militaire de La Flèche in 1904 (a subsidized military school for the sons of veterans), Lycée de Grenoble in 1908, and at the Faculté des lettres at the University of Grenoble, where he lectured on the history of the Dauphiné; and the Lycée Carnot de Dijon as “professor” of geography and history in 1910. Academic supervisors described Roupnel’s lectures as animated and informal chats that thinly veiled a thorough erudition, preparation, and organization. His work on his doctoral dissertation advanced slowly as he contemplated possible research projects touching on the urban and popular culture of seventeenth-century Dijon. He married Suzanne Pauline Bizot, the daughter of a Gevrey-Chambertin winegrower, in 1907. The couple had a son, Louis, in 1908, and lived in the village of Fixin midway between Gevrey-Chambertin and Dijon. From this milieu, Roupnel gleaned ethnographic details about daily life in the wine-producing villages of the Côte-d’Or to incorporate into his works. In 1910, he published an entertaining narrative written in the local patois about cuckolded husbands, village

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drunks, and fallen women. Placing second in the Prix Goncourt, Nono provided a particularly sobering depiction of the challenges – especially following the phylloxera epidemic (1865–90) that ravaged French vineyards – of French rural life during the early twentieth century. Nono established Roupnel’s reputation within the genre of regional literature. He repeated this literary success with Le Vieux Garain (Old Garain) in 1913. This cautionary tale addressed the themes of good and evil, malice and innocence, and mercy and abuse in daily village life. The ethnographic quality of Roupnel’s descriptions of Burgundian peasants and vintners garnered critical attention. Charles Seignobos, among others, ranked Roupnel’s ability to explore and articulate the mentality of French peasants alongside that of Georges Guillaumin. In 1915, Roupnel published a provocative article entitled “Une guerre d’usure, la Guerre de Sécession” (“A war of attrition, the War of Secession) in the prestigious Grande Revue. It compared World War I to the American Civil War to argue that the exhaustion of the Confederacy would be paralleled by the collapse of the central axis powers within three to four years. Discussed on the floor of the German Reichstag, “Une guerre d’usure” gained Roupnel a certain celebrity and difficulties with wartime censors who feared the article might demoralize public opinion given the length of engagement it predicted. Following this notoriety, Roupnel accepted an editorial position at the Dépêche de Toulouse, a nationally syndicated newspaper and pre-eminent center-left forum outside national and regional political assemblies. During this tenure, from 1916 to 1924, on the front pages of this widely circulating provincial newspaper Roupnel regularly contributed short stories, satires, character sketches, and editorials on current diplomatic affairs seen in historical perspective. He also contributed dozens of short stories to Le Matin and L’Excelsior between 1912 and 1916. Five were reprinted in French in H. L. Mencken’s literary magazine The Smart Set in 1920–1. Working for the Dépêche de Toulouse allowed Roupnel to develop important contacts within national political and literary circles. These included the author Paul Margueritte, journalist Pierre Mille, editor Jacques Rivière, novelist Romain Rolland, theatrical directors Jacques Copeau of Le Vieux Colombier and F. Gémier of the Théatre Antoine, activist-novelist Marcel Martinet, illustrators Gabriel Belôt and Georges Graux, conference organizer Paul Desjardins, novelist Edmond Rostand, poet Marie Noël, novelist Georges Duhamel, the critic Daniel Halévy, and Edouard Herriot, the Minister of Public Education and Fine Arts and future Prime Minister – a very good contact for an aspiring university professor. These contacts also helped Roupnel promote his students. Robert Delavignette, notably, went on to become the Head of the French Colonial School, while Pierre de Saint Jacob would become a second-generation Annales historian by virtue of studying under Marc Bloch. Drafted into auxiliary military service in 1916, Roupnel served at a desk job at the Vaillant base in Dijon. After the war, in 1919, Lucien Febvre and Albert Mathiez supported Roupnel’s candidacy for the latter’s chair in Modern and


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Contemporary History at the University of Dijon. Roupnel used this time to develop a dissertation proposal on “La société dijonnaise au XVIIe siècle d’après la litérature populaire” (“Seventeenth-century society in Dijon in light of popular literature”) and a then obligatory supplemental thesis on “La société de l’Infanterie dijonnaise,” a lay theatrical fraternity that performed public farces. On the advice of his dissertation adviser, Charles Seignobos, Roupnel wrote a dissertation on Les Populations de la ville et de la campagne dijonnaise au XVIIe siècle (Town and Country in the Seventeenth-century Dijonnais), which he defended at the Sorbonne on April 26, 1922. This work identified economic, sociological, and demographic forces that created “conjunctures” (trends or the confluence of socioeconomic, demographic, political, and cultural changes) that collectively impacted on the structures and institutions of seventeenth-century Burgundian society and marked Roupnel’s reputation as a promising scholar. Considered innovative by contemporary historians and geographers, this work traced nearly imperceptible, largely unanticipated, and discrete financial transactions that collectively impacted on society and culture. La Ville et la campagne was accompanied by an eighty-two-page annotated bibliography (Bibliographie critique) of archival and reprinted contemporary journals, correspondences, and diaries available at the communal, municipal, and departmental levels. Published under the title La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais, Roupnel’s dissertation was the first installment of an intended but never completed four-volume histoire total (combining political, social, and cultural histories) of Dijon and its hinterland (the Dijonnais) in the mid-seventeenth century. “The present volume is merely a partial installment of this ambitious project; an economic study of the Dijonnais region. It examines what were the rural and urban regimes through their reciprocal influences.” Subsequent volumes were to have focused on politics, literature and language, and private life. The study of the entire activities of a province provided, Roupnel believed, the only method that could demonstrate the “preponderant influence” of indigenous forces and resources. La Ville et la campagne was the first rural history of a seventeenth-century French region. Comparable to Lucien Febvre’s earlier Philippe II et la Franche-Comté (Philip II and the Franche-Comté, 1912), La Ville et la campagne examined how patterns of land tenure during the first half of the seventeenth century generated important economic developments and cultural changes. Roupnel examined the nature and consequences of the Burgundian nobility of the robe’s seigneurial investments in the Dijonnais following the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War. This consanguinary “social class,” he showed, acquired power and authority by exploiting the economic opportunities generated by Dijon’s ravaged and depopulated countryside. Dijon’s new robinocracy, Roupnel argued, consolidated its ascendancy not, as previously believed, by acquiring offices (which it did) but primarily by investing its energies and finances in rural estates within the immediate Burgundian countryside. Roupnel’s analysis also touched on the socioeconomic activities of the

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ordinary citizens, passing vagrants, and corporate organizations of Dijon’s various parish communities. Roupnel’s La Ville et la campagne pioneered social historical methods later privileged by the Annales school. This monograph eschewed the centrality assigned to heroic individualism, “surface agitation,” and political chronology found in traditional French historical narratives, and focused, instead, on identifying the economic, sociological, legal, and demographic trends (conjunctures) that were constitutive of important changes in seventeenth-century Burgundy. Lucien Febvre judged La Ville et la campagne as “suddenly reveal[ing] the work of a real historian” and found it to be “a rare and nourishing work of social history” that, however, “made one thirst and hunger for more.” In the first and second volumes of the journal, Annales, Marc Bloch called La Ville et la campagne both “a remarkable book” and a “fundamental text” from which other historians could profit. Henri Hauser wrote in the Revue historique that – except for Henri Sée’s comparative, Esquisse d’une histoire du régime agraire en Europe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Outline of a History of the European Agrarian Regime during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) – he knew of no other work in the field so penetrating. Along with his appreciation of the work’s powerful insights and poetic style, Hauser criticized La Ville et la campagne for being chronologically vague, relying on nineteenth-century digest, and omitting materials. Pierre de Saint Jacob’s preface to the 1955 printing of La Ville et la campagne underscored Roupnel’s seminal work on the role played by Djion’s robinocracy in the economic redevelopment of the village communities in the early seventeenth-century Dijonnais: “sachons gré à Roupnel d’avoir posé avec une telle vigeur l’un des problèmes les plus riches de notre histoire agraire” (“let us thank Roupnel for having so forcefully advanced one of the most important questions of our agrarian history”). Noting that Roupnel’s work concerning the morphology of seigneurial holdings were often more intuitively sketched than fully developed, Pierre Goubert, a second-generation Annaliste whose Beauvais et le Beauvaisis remains one of the most ambitious and complete examples of a regional histoire totale, nonetheless identified Roupnel’s La Ville et la campagne as his only point of regional comparison and departure in 1960. Roupnel’s academic accomplishments made it possible for him to leave the Dépêche de Toulouse – where he had contributed over one hundred editorial articles – and focus on his scholarship. Roupnel became a member of the Editorial Committee of the Annales de Bourgogne, where he associated with Louis Stouff, Georges Chabot, Ernest Champeaux, Henri Drouot, Albert Mathiez, Henri Pirenne, and Georges Droux among other scholars. He was selected to join the Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon in 1923, and subsequently became a member of its Administrative Council and Publications Committee. In April 1924, Roupnel’s national reputation as an outspoken regionalist was such that he was asked to deliver the 57th Congress of Learned Societies’ keynote address in Dijon. An esteemed public speaker, Roupnel addressed the merits of “disinterested” learning and the importance of the “learned societies” to the


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research agendas of national universities. This talk echoed his support for provincial universities in “La réforme des universités” (“The reform of universities,” 1923) and “De quoi meurent les universités,” (“What kills universities,” 1923) written for the Dépêche de Toulouse. Roupnel’s interventions regularly framed contemporary topics and themes in comparative historical perspective for popular rather than academic audiences. Roupnel provocatively argued that the most profound human activities were intelligible to all. He argued in “L’art et le peuple” (“Art and the people,” 1922), for example, that the ability to cultivate an appreciation for art was innate and therefore not determined by class. Moving beyond the simple assertion that “the people” had the aptitude necessary to access the world of aesthetics or intellect, Roupnel privileged “the people” by redefining the epistemological and methodological practices that experts ordinarily monopolized. In an era of increasing disciplinary specialization, he chastised ivory-tower scholars, among others, for not recognizing that “all the doors of knowledge open onto the same corridor” in “L’université et la région” (“The university and the region,” 1923). Roupnel lampooned the “pernicious intrusion of new experts” in “La trêve du cuisinier” (“The cook’s truce,” 1921), and attacked the “nouvelle cuisine” of his day as indigestible erudition and inferior to traditional regional cuisines in “La renaissance de l’auberge” (“The rebirth of the inn,” 1922) and “La somptuosité de la Bourgogne” (“The sumptuousness of Burgundy,” 1925). Arguing that the best ingredients and recipes were most often found closer to home, Roupnel quipped that “newfangled gourmets were nothing more than gourmands who had lost their appetites” in “Eloge de la cuisine familiale” (“In praise of family cooking,” 1929). Roupnel included the disciplines of history and geography in his anti-elitist critique in an article entitled “La géographie au village” (“Geography in the village,” 1923). He argued – both charmingly and quite problematically – that the skills requisite for translating complex notions such as terroir into practical applications came naturally to those inhabiting the rural world. Roupnel’s treatment of the experiences of ordinary people struggling with rural depopulation and economic depression during the interwar period was intended to appease contemporary anxieties. It also signaled the academic historian’s clear departure from strictly academic and disinterested preoccupations. Neither of the two books that Roupnel published in 1927 was on history. The moral vignettes compiled in Hé! Vivant! presented psychological portraits of ordinary turn-of-the-century Burgundians caricatured in their mediocrity but redeemable by virtue of their ability to find spiritual salvation within their rustic existence. The book Siloë, by contrast, provided an esoteric, philosophical characterization of the nature of “Universal Spirit” and the phenomenology of human consciousness. Siloë articulated a theory of evolutionary naturalism that would heavily influence Roupnel’s future work in rural history. Echoing F. W. J. Schelling’s system of Transcendental Idealism and written in a pantheistic idiom calculated to engage Christian polemicists, Siloë drew from contemporary physics and

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evolutionary biology to posit a metaphysical theory anchored in phenomenological beliefs about the existence of “Universal Spirit” as immanent, transcendental, perpetually recurring, and subjectively apprehended in a fleeting instant or moment (the Roupnelian measure of time subsequently adopted in 1932 by Gaston Bachelard in L’Intuition de l’instant [The Intuition of the Instant]). Quite forgotten nowadays and little read in its day, Siloë revealed Roupnel’s desire to address epistemological concerns that divided the human sciences. Although the monism he embraced was and remains roundly rejected by modern historians, Roupnel’s efforts were rewarded with elevation to the rank of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur on January 29, 1927, and he received the Prix Maria Star from the Société des gens de lettres de France on December 19, 1927 in recognition of these contributions. Roupnel then began attending intellectual retreats organized by Paul Desjardins between 1929 and 1936 and attended by members of the Nouvelle revue française at the ancient Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy. It was there that he read early drafts from his Histoire de la campagne française during a retreat on Burgundian history in 1929. Roupnel’s professional itinerary reveals how provincial historians contributed to regional agendas and national debates related to French modernization. He participated in all aspects of Burgundy’s wine industry. As président du Syndicat des viticulteurs de Chambertin (The Union of Winegrowers of Chambertin) and successful manager of his own vineyards, Roupnel returned to journalism to defend the industry’s interests when necessary. He was instrumental in a national campaign for the regulation of fraud and stricter labeling practices in the wine industry through the application of the concept of vins d’appellation d’origine controlée. His hard-hitting “La crise du vin” (“The wine crisis,” 1922) and “Le cru et la marque” (“The wine and the label,” 1930) outlined legal, fiscal, and administrative steps required to bolster the wine industry. Audiences could also turn to his prefaces to Camille Rodier’s history, Le Clos de Vougeot (The Clos Vougeot, 1931) or Max Cappe’s poetry anthology, Les Chants du terroir: poèmes bourguignons (Songs of the Soil: Burgundian Poems, 1932) to read about how Burgundian vineyards exemplified a unique ecological relationship. These prefaces depicted the history of Burgundy as manifesting an intimate, intersubjective, and holistic relation between Burgundians and their milieu which was manifested through the region’s distinct terroir, folkways, and wines. Taken together, Roupnel’s articles and prefaces read as a manifesto for twentieth-century Burgundian cultural regionalism. Roupnel studied the relationship between agrarian practices and peasant culture more broadly in his Histoire de la campagne française in 1932. Histoire provided a longue durée study (from the Neolithic to the modern period) of France’s open-field regions in terms of human activity and geographic milieu. These ideas informed the work’s application of significant categories of sociohistorical analysis, such as time, space, memory, and causality. Indeed, readers familiar with the epistemological and metaphysical ideas formulated in Siloë were best prepared to appreciate


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Roupnel’s idiosyncratic blend of empirical field practice and intuitive methodologies offered in Histoire de la campagne française. Histoire de la campagne française was published less than a year after Marc Bloch’s Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931; translated as French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, 1966) and two years before Roger Dion’s Essai sur la formation du paysage rurale français (Essay on the Morphology of the French Rural Landscape, 1934). If the human geography of rural France during the first three decades of the twentieth century had been essentially interested in how agricultural and household practices constituted and structured lifestyles (genres de vie), the works of Gaston Roupnel, Marc Bloch, and Roger Dion introduce a longue durée historical dimension to a field generally characterized by a static analysis of social phenomena. Each work proposed a general theory addressing the social traditions and geo-morphological history of agrarian France. Roupnel’s theory of the origins, nature, and morphology of French agrarian civilization identified multiple variations of one model centered on the open-field system as paradigmatic. Stretching from the Neolithic period to the present, Roupnel’s study was based on the analysis of France’s north and eastern agricultural regions. Insofar as he was interested in ecological aspects of agrarian settlements, Roupnel privileged an interdisciplinary approach that focused on daily relationships between mankind and milieu to create habitat patterns. This gave rise to a more persuasive – for lack of documentation – than convincing discussion of how land parcels were designated and cultivated through a system of collective practices fashioned around the imperatives of rural topography and geography. This intervention into the debates concerning the origins and evolution of land parcels revealed a rare field (rather than cartographic) expertise among historians. Grounded in a philosophical and literary tradition that depicted Nature (both transcendent and immanent) as the physical manifestation of a cosmic synthesis between humankind, spirit, and the natural world, Histoire de la campagne française framed the relationship between French peasants and their bio-physical milieu in a fashion reminiscent of nineteenth-century Germanic Naturephilosophie. However much Roupnel’s imaginative combination of empirical field research, inductive reasoning, and intuitive empathy pointed in the direction of how cognitive and subjective practices might play an important role in ethnographic reconstruction and the mapping practices in rural geography, this agenda was marred by unsound analogies, psychological speculation, and an unverifiable monist ontology. Indeed, recognizing both Roupnel’s multidisciplinary strengths as well as his maddening oscillation between different evidentiary systems, Pierre Chaunu once argued, in the “Postface” to the 1981 edition, that Roupnel’s Histoire de la campagne française was more fruitfully read as a work of geography and ethnography rather than history. Roupnel’s research practice exploded the disciplinary categories and evidentiary criteria embraced by the French social and human sciences. However much lauded by the philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in L’Intuition de l’instant in

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1932, Roupnel’s reduction of individual ego to an epiphenomenal flash in time, his conflation of psychological and historical research practices to produce speculative chapters linking the primitive mentality of archaic peasants to the alleged collective traits of modern French peasants, and his efforts to position rural existence as the essence and guarantor of French civilization have had the effect of overshadowing his real contributions to history and allied disciplines. Pierre de Saint Jacob compared the works of Bloch and Roupnel in Etudes rhodonnaises (1935). Noting Bloch’s well-documented synthesis of the state of contemporary rural French studies as against Roupnel’s “frequent imprecisions and occasional obscurities,” de Saint Jacob argued that that the merits of Roupnel’s book lay in the whole rather than the sum of its parts. Histoire de la campagne française, he wrote, should be judged in terms of its ability to synthesize complex materials and create a unified vision “from diverse elements that would appear mutually exclusive, an intimate poetry, a subtle of the soul of things, firm deductions, and objective analysis … and a concern to show, explain and delight.” Pierre Chaunu recognized Roupnel’s enviable combination of narrative style and historical engagement with the natural milieu: “historian and poet, historian because poet” he noted. Pierre de Saint Jacob addressed this lyric reputation in the preface to the re-edition of La Ville et la campagne in 1955. He described it as, illustrating a signal moment in Burgundian history and the work of a master … the book unites all of Gaston Roupnel’s talents … the human sense; a constant link between deep structures and the vicissitudes of fortune; a light documentation reduced to precious details, meaningful numbers, and examples that skillfully illustrate the contours of history; a constant discussion in which the philosopher and poet resist succumbing to the exigencies of scientific history … and above all, a rhythm of ideas and phraseology that gives no rest. This hardly explains the strange charm of this book. (See also Le Roy Ladurie on Roupnel’s poetic qualities in the “Preface” to the 1981 edition of Histoire de la campagne française.)

As he was Roupnel’s research assistant and one of his two most promising students (the other being Robert Delavignette who became the director of l’Ecole coloniale), Pierre de Saint Jacob’s departure for graduate studies in Lyon in 1932 signaled the end of Roupnel’s historical research agenda (an unfinished manuscript on the seventeenth-century parlementaire Charles de Brosse, which I discovered with other manuscripts and personal correspondence in the attics of two homes belonging to descendents of Roupnel in Gevrey-Chambertin in 1999, languishes at the University of Burgundy’s Maison des sciences de l’homme). Roupnel’s interest in rural themes now shifted from the seventeenth century to Burgundy’s twentieth-century wine, gastronomy, and tourism industries. Roupnel spent the later 1930s working with provincial intellectuals and leaders to fashion a recognizable Burgundian cultural identity that was amenable to economic exploitation through what was then called “applied folklore.” He contributed his considerable literary talents to valorizing regional projects – especially those


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related to gastronomy and tourism – as competitive and emblematic modernization schemes. He collaborated with civic leaders, cultural intermediaries, and provincial academics to historicize local traditions, revive popular festivals, inaugurate provincial societies, and edit journals that promoted all aspects of Burgundian history and culture. Overlooked by commentators quick to collapse the themes addressed in Roupnel’s Histoire de la campagne française with Vichy France’s exploitation of them, is the fact that Roupnel’s scholarship during the 1930s turned away from the examination of the lives of field laborers of previous centuries and addressed, instead, the contributions of skilled, semi-urban laborers such as the vintners of contemporary Burgundy. Roupnel was selected president of Dijon’s newly formed Society of Folklore in 1929. This honor recognized his scholarship and civic services promoting regional history, folklore, and heritage. For example, he underscored the historical and cultural roots of Dijon’s Gastronomical Fair in “L’affaire Jérémie” (“The Jérémie affair”) in the official guide to the XIIe Foire Gastronomique de Dijon; the article “La somptuosité de la Bourgogne;” and passages of La Bourgogne: types et coutumes (Burgundy: Characters and Customs, 1936). His “Paysannes et bourgeoises de France: comment les françaises ont fait la France” (“Peasants and bourgeois: how Frenchwomen made France,” 1933) illustrates how Roupnel used a discourse of rustic modernism to imbricate conservative values, evolving labor patterns, and folkloric traditions. Published in the Nouvelle revue feminine, this anti-feminist tract celebrated the French vigneronne’s (vintner’s wife’s) instructional, managerial, spiritual, economic, and reproductive contributions to the modern French economy while restricting her social expectations to the maintenance of home and family. Elevated into an “angel of the hearth” through an existence of beatified self-sacrifice, Roupnel’s vigneronne became the guarantor of regional cultural identity. She offered an alternative to male farmhands as the icon of French rural vitality. Roupnel developed this conservative vision into a book-length treatment of Burgundy’s turn-of-the-century folklore entitled La Bourgogne: types et coutumes (1936). La Bourgogne employed the representational strategies of human geography and descriptive folklore to link the labors of rusticized vignerons and romanticized vigneronnes to modern economic agendas. The work revealed Roupnel’s keen knowledge of traditional and evolving folkways related to Burgundian viniculture and viticulture. The winegrowers depicted in his La Bourgogne provided a refreshingly modern while reassuringly rustic alternative to tired images of open-field peasants depicted in the works of Balzac, Tain, Millet, and Roupnel’s earlier Histoire de la campagne française. Burgundian winegrowers, he argued, provided a distinctly regional alternative version of French rural identity. They were sociable and skilled laborers who lived in modern villages and therefore could be counted upon to hold republican views and contribute to the project of French modernization. Roupnel complemented this tableau in public lectures given at the University of Dijon, in the prefaces he wrote for other authors, and through professional

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projects. For example, he addressed Burgundy’s artistic and literary traditions in the “preface” to the catalogue for an exhibition of “Burgundian Art through the Ages” held at the chic Jean-Charpentier gallery in Paris (Art bourguignon et Bourgogne, 1936) and wrote passages (recognizable by style and punctuation) on wine, gastronomy, and tourism for Edmond Labbé’s twelve-volume Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne: rapport general (1938) by virtue of being a member of the Regional Committee for Burgundy, the Franche-Comté, and Aine at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Roupnel’s final years began with a family tragedy. His twenty-nine-year-old son, Louis Roupnel, committed suicide in the family home during a severe bout of neurasthenia on October 1, 1937. Roupnel thereupon retired from the University at Dijon. Aged, physically exhausted, and having outlived an only child, he returned to Gevrey-Chambertin and sought some kind of accommodation with Roman Catholicism. While retaining a role on a few selected historical and literary committees, such as the Paulée de Meursault and the Prix Sully (from 1939 to 1944), Roupnel devoted his time and energies to removing the profanity and bawdier passages from his Vieux Garain, as well as replacing the theosophical ideas and pantheistic dimensions of Siloë with Christian theology. Roupnel then, during Dijon’s military occupation by German forces, wrote a collection of essays on the nature of historical analysis and the consolations of historical meditation. Addressing social theory, historiography, and historical methodology, Histoire et destin (History and Destiny, 1943) delivered a vehement critique of traditional narrative history (“histoire événémentaille”) and mainstream historical practices. The essays developed and intertwined two important themes. Roupnel argued that historical facts were – in and of themselves – without importance since the importance of historical events depended on how they were perceived and interpreted. While maintaining a philosophical faith in the reality of historical laws, Roupnel was keenly aware, following the debacle of France’s collapse in 1940, of his previous overconfidence in the “lessons of history.” His approach to the problem of historical knowledge lay not in the realm of modernist relativism but rather in the benefits of longue durée social and economic history. His effort to locate the “thrust behind historical continuity” led to the work’s surprising and rather problematic second theme. Roupnel obstinately argued for a discredited philosophy of history founded on a spiritual teleology rather than on professional theories of progress and scientific methodology. Histoire et destin’s eschatology anticipated the idealist and Christian assumptions developed in Roupnel’s La Nouvelle Siloë (1945). Rarely cited by historians, this work did not endear Roupnel to those from whom he had already distanced himself. Daniel Halévy reviewed Histoire et destin as a logical sequel to Siloë. Histoire et destin’s metaphysical, spiritual, and poetic dimensions left many secular humanists unconvinced and practicing historians perplexed. While numerous historians recognized and supported Roupnel’s call for a new structural social history – indeed, by 1943, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s Annales project was already well established if not yet dominant within


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the French historical profession – the critical response to Histoire et destin was decidedly mixed and reserved. Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel remained supportive of Roupnel’s singular and iconoclastic historical project despite its poetic exuberances, uneven quality, and occasional bile. Roupnel’s final work – which was found in his briefcase when he died at home on May 14, 1946 – was a brief history of Jesus Christ, “La vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ” (“The life of Our Lord Jesus Christ”), written from a humanist perspective. Given the overlap between Roupnel’s rural themes and Vichy France’s appropriation of folkloric traditions, “return to the soil” policies, and support for traditional Catholicism, questions linger concerning Roupnel’s ideological commitments before and during World War II. While Léon Daudet had once mistakenly accused Roupnel of being a spy “for the enemy” during World War I (in Action française, August 28, 1917; retracted in Le Sourire, February 7, 1918), Roupnel never participated in or supported reactionary groups such as Action française (contra Lindenberg). Nor did Roupnel associate himself with collaborationist groups or political agendas active between 1939 and 1945. Some might entertain the belief that Roupnel might have done more to disassociate himself from the régime that exploited his folklore, geography, and history to promote its own domestic policies. His participation in the jury of the Prix Sully after 1939, for example, might be interpreted as de facto support for the Révolution Nationale. Others, myself included, read Roupnel’s inveterate pacifism; his rejection of Vichy’s administrative centralization; his enduring confidence in France’s ability to recover from traumas (such as the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War); and his assertions concerning the inevitable failure of collaboration and/or occupation (pronounced in his 1942 article “Histoire et destinée” [“History and the destined”] published in the collaborationist Revue universelle no less) as a continuation of interwar republican and regionalist celebrations (the “harmonious assembly of little nations”) of French resources, resilience, and identity as naïve and overly optimistic – given the direness of France’s wartime situation – but not necessarily damning. Fernand Braudel, a long-time friend and supporter, posthumously defended Roupnel in a letter that Lucien Febvre thought appropriate to reprint in the Annales in 1947. Additional evidence concerning his sympathies or loyalties gleaned from “En Bourgogne: la guerre et le paysan” (“The war and the peasant in Burgundy,” published posthumously in 2000); the article “Histoire et destinée”; Histoire et destin; his preface to Paysannerie et humanisme (Peasantry and Humanism, 1944); and colleagues such as Henri Drouot and Fernand Braudel remains incomplete, ambiguous, and somewhat contradictory. Recent scholarship concerning Roupnel underscores the fact that the subject of his ideological sympathies remains a matter of interpretation and debate. Without conclusive evidence linking Roupnel to Philippe Pétain’s Révolution Nationale or the Vichy government before his criticisms in 1943, the accusations of Vichy or right-wing sympathies occasionally leveled against Roupnel – however glib or poorly informed – do more than keep the discussion of Roupnel’s

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reputation alive. They reflect a difficulty reconciling the evidence – within the discourse of social biography – of a successful intellectual itinerary, questions over whether Roupnel himself was a good or a bad character, a record of distinguished, iconoclastic, and uneven scholarship, and inveterate adherence to a French chauvinism that appeared naïvely outdated and insufficient upon the fall of France in 1940. This enterprise is compounded when scholars, as in modern and contemporary French history for example, do not read beyond their periods or outside their areas of expertise. Two recent works, however, have attempted to address Roupnel’s activities and contributions. My Gaston Roupnel: âme paysanne et sciences humaines (Gaston Roupnel: The Peasant Soul and the Human Sciences, 2001) traces the poetics or “internal ordering” of Roupnel’s interdisciplinary agenda, while Annie Bleton-Ruget and Philippe Poirrier’s collection of essays in Le Temps des sciences humaines: Gaston Roupnel et les années trente (The Era of the Human Sciences: Gaston Roupnel and the Nineteen-thirties, 2006) address the ideological links between the politics of the 1930s and Roupnel’s production of knowledge in discrete fields. Together, these works show that Roupnel’s preoccupations during this time were extensions of Third Republic themes and also draw attention to the internal contradictions and tensions that constituted those themes before, during, and after France’s “dark years” (1940–5). Roupnel’s legacy as a pioneering historian and geographer remains incontestable and is frequently noted in the scholarship of previous generations of historians. His subsequent interventions, however, contributed more toward the production of the Burgundian heritage, tourism, and folklore industries. Like Michelet, and some might say the later Braudel, Roupnel remains problematic to the extent that his style and ideas were often more seductive than his documentation was rigorous. As evidence of his declining academic reputation, the University of Burgundy in Dijon, which retains an amphitheater named after Gaston Roupnel, allowed his chaired position in Burgundian History, Literature and Patois to lapse (in part because the position no longer aligned with departmental appointments) in the early 1990s.

References and Further Reading Papers “Fonds Roupnel,” Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon, France. “Fonds Roupnel,” Maison des Sciences de l’homme, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France.

Selected Books by Gaston Roupnel Nono (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1910). Le Vieux Garain (Paris: Fasquelle, 1913).


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Bibliographie critique: La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (Paris: Editions Ernest Leroux, 1922). La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (Paris: Editions Ernest Leroux, 1922). A second printing prefaced by Pierre de Saint Jacob was published in 1955 (Paris: SEVPEN). Hé! Vivant! (Paris: Stock, 1927). Siloë (Paris: Grasset, 1927). Histoire de la campagne française (Paris: Grasset, 1932). Art bourguignon et Bourgogne (Paris: Galerie Jean-Charpentier, 1936). La Bourgogne: types et coutumes (Paris: Horizons, 1936). Histoire et destin (Paris: Grasset, 1943). La Nouvelle Siloë (Paris: Grasset, 1945).

Edited Collections Vins, Vignes et Gastronomie bourguignonne selon Gaston Roupnel, edited by Philip Whalen (Clémency: Terre en Vues, 2007). Dijon et la Bourgogne selon Gaston Roupnel, edited by Philip Whalen (Dijon: Les Editions CLEA, 2010).

Prefaces Boulard, Fernand, Paysannerie et humanisme (Paris: SEDAP, 1944). Cappe, Max, Les Chants du terroir: poèmes bourguignons (Dijon: Imprimerie Lèpagnez, 1932). Charrier, Henri, Les Voix éparses (Dijon: Imprimerie Darantière, 1936). “Préface à l’Histoire de la campagne française,” in Philip Whalen, “La mise en lumière des travaux de Gaston Roupnel (1871–1946) en vue de la ‘Préface’ inédite de l’Histoire de la campagne française,” Ruralia, 8 (2001): 89–101. Rodier, Camille, Le Clos de Vougeot (Dijon: L. Venot, 1931).

Selected Articles by Gaston Roupnel “Le régime féodal dans le bourg de Chatillon-sur-Seine,” Revue bourguignonne de l’enseignement supérieur, 6 (1896): 167–94. “Une guerre d’usure, la Guerre de Sécession,” Grande revue (Oct., 1915): 432–65. “Guerre de coalition,” Dépêche de Toulouse, July 15, 1916. “La censure et l’opinion,” Dépêche de Toulouse, July 30, 1916. “La question du grec et du latin,” Dépêche de Toulouse, August 29, 1916. “ ‘1870,’ ” Dépêche de Toulouse, March 21, 1917. “Les conditions nouvelles de la paix armée,” Dépêche de Toulouse, May 19, 1917. “Les principes de la pacification,” Dépêche de Toulouse, September 1, 1917. “L’exemple russe,” Dépêche de Toulouse, November 4, 1917. “La politique de Hertling,” Dépêche de Toulouse, February 12, 1918. “Fantôme d’Orient,” Dépêche de Toulouse, March 23, 1918. “La loi du travail,” Dépêche de Toulouse, May 8, 1918. “En société des nations,” Dépêche de Toulouse, August 1, 1918.

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“Réparation,” Dépêche de Toulouse, January 21, 1919. “Proportionnelle des idées,” Dépêche de Toulouse, May 28, 1919. “La trêve du cuisinier,” Dépêche de Toulouse, December 29, 1921. “La renaissance de l’auberge,” Dépêche de Toulouse, July 20, 1922. “La repopulation et la vie agricole,” Dépêche de Toulouse, August 4, 1922. “L’art et le peuple,” Dépêche de Toulouse, August 31, 1922. “La crise du vin,” Dépêche de Toulouse, November 2, 1922. “La réforme des universités,” Dépêche de Toulouse, February 2, 1923. “La géographie au village,” Dépêche de Toulouse, August 28, 1923. “De quoi meurent les universités,” Dépêche de Toulouse, December 3, 1923. “L’université et la region,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon, 1 (1923): 125–40. “Discours prononcé à la Séance de Clôture du Congrès [des Sociétés savantes de France tenu le samedi 26 Avril 1924 à Dijon],” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belleslettres de Dijon, 96 (1924): 23–33. “La somptuosité de la Bourgogne,” L’Alsace française, November 7, 1925. “La terre et les vendanges,” Bien public, October 22, 1929. “Eloge de la cuisine familiale,” Bien public, November 20, 1929. “Le cru et la marque,” Le Progrès de la Côte-d’Or, March 3, 1930. “Discours à la séance de réception de H[enri] Pirenne comme docteur h. c. de l’Université de Dijon,” Bulletin de la Société des amis de l’Université de Dijon, (1931–2): 13–23. “Paysannes et bourgeoises de France: comment les françaises ont fait la France,” Nouvelle revue feminine, 3 (1933): 126–31. “M. Gaston Bachelard,” Le Miroir dijonnais et de Bourgogne, 207 (1939): 178–86. “Edouard Estaunié (1862–1942),” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon, 109 (1940–2): 283–92. “Histoire et destinée,” Revue universelle (Oct., 1942): 282–91. “La vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ,” Pays de Bourgogne, (1963): 47–53, 777–87. “En Bourgogne: la guerre et le paysan,” Pays de Bourgogne ([posthumous] 2000): 11–16.

Letters “Lettre à Fernand Braudel,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 2 (1947): 30–1. “Lettre du 17 January 1946 de Gaston Roupnel à Pierre Teihard de Chardin,” in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, edited by Claude Cuénot (Paris: Club des Editeurs, 1958), pp. 459–60.

Interviews Boitouzet, Lucien, “Une heure avec Gaston Roupnel …,” La Semaine ( January 14, 1945): 3. Brousson, Jean-Jacques, “En Bourgogne chez Gaston Roupnel,” Nouvelles littéraires artistiques et scientifiques (May 2, 1946): 1, 6. “Le génie bourguignon existe-t-il encore? Les réponses … Gaston Roupnel,” Bien public (August 13, 1924): 1. Villemot, Henri, “Entretien avec Gaston Roupnel,” Bourgogne d’Or (December 1934): 61–4.


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References Bachelard, Gaston, L’Intuition de l’instant (Paris: Stock, 1932). Bernhardt, Magda, Gaston Roupnel und Burgund (Wurzburg: Bruchdruckerie R. Mayr, 1934). Bleton-Ruget, Annie and Poirrier, Philippe (eds.), Le Temps des sciences humaines: Gaston Roupnel et les années trente (Paris: Manuscrit-Université, 2006). Bloch, Marc, Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (Paris: Armand Colin, [1931] 1960). Bloch, Marc, “Une région: la Bourgogne,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 1 (1929): 300. Bloch, Marc, “La vie rurale,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 2 (1930): 115. Braudel, Fernand, “Faillite de l’histoire, triomphe du destin,” Mélange d’histoire sociale, 6 (1944): 71–7. Chaunu, Pierre, “Postface,” in Gaston Roupnel, Histoire de la campagne française (Paris: Plon, 1974), pp. 367–9. Demangeron, Albert, “Une histoire de la campagne française,” Annales de géographie, 42 (1933): 410–15. Drouot, Henri, Notes d’un Dijonais pendant l’Occupation allemande, 1940–1944 (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 1998). Febvre, Lucien, “Les morts de l’histoire vivante – Gaston Roupnel,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 2 (1947): 480. Febvre, Lucien, “Une physiologie de la campagne française,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 6 (1934): 76–9. Goubert, Pierre, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960). Halévy, Daniel, “Un historien de la campagne française: M. Gaston Roupnel,” Revue des deux mondes, 103 (1933): 79–96. Hauser, Henri, “Gaston Roupnel, La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais,” Revue historique, 111 (1923): 253. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, “Postface,” in Gaston Roupnel, Histoire de la campagne française (Paris: Plon, 1974), pp. 349–60. Lindenberg, Daniel, Les Années souterraines (1937–1946) (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1990). Lot, Ferdinand, “Histoire et destin, à propos d’un livre récent,” Hommage offert à Ferdinand Lot pour son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Paris: Droz, 1946), pp. 7–16. Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon, special Roupnel issue, 120 (1973). de Saint Jacob, Pierre, “Avant propos au livre de Gaston Roupnel, La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955), pp. viii–x. de Saint Jacob, Pierre, “Les chroniques de Gaston Roupnel,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon (1947–53): 52–65. de Saint Jacob, Pierre, “Deux études d’histoires rurale expliquant la géographie,” Etudes rhodonnaises, 11 (1935): 98–105. de Saint Jacob, Pierre, “Gaston Roupnel (1871–1946),” in Annales de Bourgogne, 18 (1946), 226–33.

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Sée, Henri, “Gaston Roupnel, La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle,” Revue de synthèse ( June, 1923): 83–96. Slade, Madeleine, “The French country-side,” Times Literary Supplement (April 6, 1933). Weil, Simone, L’Enracinement (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); translated as The Need for Roots (London: Routledge, 1995). Whalen, Philip, Gaston Roupnel: âme paysanne et sciences humaines (Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon, 2001). Whalen, Philip, “Historical oubliettes, Roupnel’s reputation, and other historiographical considerations,” H-France Review, 3 (October 2003): 532–46. Whalen, Philip, “The life and works of Gaston Roupnel,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2000. Whalen, Philip, “ ‘A merciless source of happy memories’: Gaston Roupnel and the folklore of Burgundian Terroir,” Journal of Folklore Research, 44 (1) (2007): 21–40. Whalen, Philip, “La mise en lumière des travaux de Gaston Roupnel (1871–1946) en vue de la ‘Préface’ inédite de l’Histoire de la campagne française,” Ruralia, 8 (2001): 89–101.

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Henry Rousso (1954– ) Hugo Frey and Christopher Flood

Henry Rousso is a leading contemporary historian who specializes in the history, politics, and legacies of the Vichy regime (1940–4). He has published widely on these subjects and holds the qualifications of agrégé (university teacher) and habilitation à diriger des recherches (accreditation to supervise research) from the Institute of Political Science, Paris. The latter title was awarded in 2000 for the five-volume dissertation, Histoire et mémoire des années noires (History and Memory of the Dark Years, supervised by Jean-Pierre Azéma). Subsequently, it was re-edited into the single volume, Vichy: l’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire (Vichy: The Event, its Memory and History, 2001). Between 1994 and 2005, his academic post was the directorship of a government-funded research laboratory, the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (Institute for the Study of Contemporary History, hereafter IHTP), again located in Paris. In addition, he holds the state decoration for achievement, the Chevalier de l’Ordre national du mérite (Knight of the National Order of Merit). In his capacity as an expert in contemporary history, Rousso has been drawn into the worlds of politics, journalism, and wider public service. For example, he was invited to participate as an expert witness in the trial of the former collaborator, Maurice Papon (1997). Rousso rejected this offer because of his intellectual concerns regarding the merits of the role that a historian might play in a court of law. In addition, he was charged by the Ministry of Education with chairing a commission investigating the activities of a group of extreme right-wing intellectuals who have been employed at the University of Lyon III. That Henry Rousso should be selected to guide this sensitive inquiry is testament to the high regard in which he is held, not only in the profession but also in governmental circles (see the final published report, Le Dossier Lyon III, 2004).

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Rousso was born in 1954 in Alexandria, Egypt, but by 1956 his family was forced to leave that country following Nasser’s response to the Suez crisis. As a student, Rousso was educated in Paris at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure de SaintCloud. In 1976, he read for a master’s degree at the University of Paris (Paris I), where his first scholarly research focused on Vichy’s comités d’organisations. The organizations in question were the corporatist bodies that had sought to revive industry under the Nazi Occupation. On the completion of his master’s thesis, Rousso registered to write a thèse d’état (the French equivalent of a higher doctoral dissertation). First, Jean Bouvier, and following the latter’s premature death, Antoine Prost, supervised the research. The focus of the project remained contemporary economic history. However, Rousso did not complete these studies and his interests gradually drifted away from economics, although he did continue to publish in the field. At still a relatively young age, Rousso contributed a series of important shorter publications. For example, his article “L’Organisation industrielle de Vichy” (“Vichy’s industrial organization,” 1979), was published in the Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, the journal of the historical institute that Rousso would some years later direct, the IHTP. Rousso uses this article to underline how industry had sought collaboration with the German occupiers. In so doing, he revises the more defensive vision of the regime that had been articulated by its former officials, notably François Lehideux. Rousso asserts that the idea that business structures such as the comités had provided a screen against the excesses of Nazi policy is absurd. Rousso’s argument is strongly informed by Robert Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order (first published in France in 1973). In the light of Paxton’s work, Rousso analyzes the modernizing element of the Vichy regime, Paxton’s “New Order” technocrats, and the part they played in economic collaboration. Similarly, following Paxton’s line of argument, Rousso emphasizes how collaboration had been a French initiative rather than a German demand. Rousso’s first monograph was published in 1980, in a series directed by Fred Kupferman. Un château en Allemagne (A German Castle) is a quirky but passionate example of political history writing. Devoted to the final days of the Pétain regime in exile in Sigmaringen (located in southern Germany), the study is an original and entertaining piece of scholarship. Continuing to work under the influence of Paxton’s interpretation of Vichy, Rousso demonstrates how factionalism within the regime lasted until the final hours of its life. Indeed, Rousso’s account of the last days of Vichy suggests that ideological divisions and personal jealousies were accentuated by the pressure of exile and the threat of physical oblivion. Furthermore, looking beyond the Sigmaringen clique, Rousso uses his monograph to explore the experiences of other groups of French living and working in Germany in 1944–5. His treatment provides original discussion of fascists like Jacques Doriot, as well as more nuanced interpretation of the lives and attitudes of prisoners of war and the volunteer factory workers who were trapped in Germany. Rousso’s identification of the need to write the history of these forgot-

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ten and politically troublesome groups is insightful. It is indicative of a youthful confidence. Indeed, the best-known work on this subject prior to Rousso’s publication was the fictionalized memoir of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, D’un château l’autre (Castle to Castle, 1957). Similarly, Rousso’s choice of Sigmaringen also implies the oblique importance of Marcel Ophuls’s groundbreaking documentary, Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity, 1971), that in part had used Sigmaringen as a setting for interviews with the collaborator Christian de la Mazière. Methodologically speaking, Un château en Allemagne is the work of a political historian, writing in a persuasive narrative mode. The book is presented through a series of chronological sketches and impressions, written with brio and passion. Notably, like his predecessor Céline, Rousso displays a talent for ironic and mocking humor. For example, the first substantial chapter of the study opens with the sharp reminder: “Sigmaringen est une ville d’eaux – encore une!” (“Sigmaringen is a spa town – yet another one!”) Such remarks set the tone for the rest of the study; Rousso’s narrative is marked by a sense of satirical anti-fascism. In addition, there is a populist side to the presentation of historical evidence, and on several occasions in the book Rousso conflates sets of primary sources to reconstruct the past through a quasi-fictional literary format. In these passages, Rousso synthesizes different factually documented experiences into single, symbolically resonant episodes that, nevertheless, had not literally occurred in the form in which Rousso reconstructs them. In retrospect, it is evident that the final pages of Un château en Allemagne anticipate much of Rousso’s research agenda for the 1980s and 1990s. Having vividly described the chaotic events that surrounded the death of the collaborationist Doriot, Rousso makes a series of impressionistic comments on the wider legacies of the Sigmaringen debacle. Here he explains that many of the milice (the fascist police) who had fled to Germany in 1944–5 subsequently escaped justice and returned to France. Rousso next imagines a typical career path of just such a militia man: “En 1952, il est engagé dans une entreprise américaine en France: l’ElectroAméricain Company. Son travail? La répression syndicale … L’assassin de Darnand n’a pas perdu la main.” (“In 1952, he was hired by the Americans in France – the American-Electric Company. His work? To put down the unions … Darnand’s killer had not lost his touch.”) Moreover, other collaborators probably continued to feel a secret pride in their record. Rousso notes that by the mid-1970s they were a fashionable group again, publishing their war memoirs with chic Parisian editors. Rousso’s provocative glimpses of the afterlife of the former Vichy activists highlight the subject matter that would preoccupy much of the next phase of his career. Le Syndrome de Vichy (translated as The Vichy Syndrome, 1991), first published in 1987 and reprinted with minor revisions in 1990, provides a detailed analysis of the historical memory of Vichy from 1944 to the present. Here, Rousso offers a totalizing explanation of how the French nation had come to terms with the memory of the années noires. In other words, he writes a treatment of how

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memories of the 1940s influenced and shaped the politics of the postwar era. In charting this history, Rousso analyzes a spectrum of cultural products. These include literary, filmic, journalistic, overtly political, and other sources. Having identified them as “vectors of memory,” Rousso studies these texts to show that France experienced a collective “sickness” or syndrome in its long-term attitudes toward Vichy. A sophisticated periodization, using the language of psychoanalysis, frames the interpretation of the sources. Rousso suggests that there have been four stages of memory of Vichy. First, there was a period of “incomplete mourning” (1945–54) during which the nation was unable to come to terms with its record. Second, the French, incapable of achieving unity or reconciliation on the subject of Vichy, “repressed” the episode (1954–71), while memories of collaboration were replaced by selective recollections of the heroism of the Resistance. Third, Rousso describes “the broken mirror” (1971–4), the period in which the phase of repression was contested and then shattered. Fourth, the topic of Vichy is shown to have become an obsessional reference point from 1974 onward. Thus, disproportionate repression is seen to have given way to equally problematic and unstable fascination with the “dark years” of the 1940s. Like Rousso’s earlier selection of Sigmaringen as the subject for a popular and stylish history, the memory of Vichy was a wise and timely subject to research, corresponding to some extent with the fortieth anniversary of World War II. It was a professional choice characteristic of a scholar with a consistently impressive eye for academic, intellectual, and popular trends. However, unlike Rousso’s earlier publication, which was devoted to a controversial episode of micro-history, Le Syndrome de Vichy is expansive in range, being a national history of forty years of collective memory. In particular, while the work is based on solid empirical research, it is also founded on the powerful framing concept of the “syndrome” itself. Rousso’s insightful borrowing of this term from medicine captured the imagination and dramatized just how genuinely problematic the legacies of Vichy had proved to be for the postwar generation. While, of course, no single historian could hope to write a complete history of the memory of the années noires, Rousso’s notion of “syndrome” offered an intriguing interpretative hook on which to hang the subject. Of course, several other scholars had worked on questions of collective memory and commemoration before Rousso, such as his former doctoral supervisor, Antoine Prost. Similarly, the question of the legacy of Vichy had been part of the wider cultural mood since the early 1970s and the mode rétro films of Ophuls, Malle, Molinaro, Cavanni, and Losey. Nevertheless, Rousso was the first historian to outline a complete explanation of just what was “wrong” with the nation’s memorial psyche. The historical profession broadly welcomed Rousso’s insights and his overarching thesis. Notably, the work is cited favorably by Philippe Burrin in his contribution to Pierre Nora’s prestigious Lieux de mémoire collection. Likewise, it implicitly informs essays by François Bédarida on the historiography of Vichy and the


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Resistance that were first published in the social-Catholic journal Esprit. Outside Paris, Le Syndrome de Vichy is no less important to Anglo-American scholarship in the areas of French history or French studies. For example, in 1995, the journal French Historical Studies devoted a special issue to the problem of the “Vichy syndrome” that included contributions from Bertram Gordon and Pierre Nora, among others. Shortly afterward, an issue of Contemporary French Civilization included debates on the impact and importance of Rousso’s account of collective war memory. In this way, Rousso’s scholarship has impacted far beyond the elite circles of French historiography to shape a generation of scholars and students working in Anglo-American French studies. Ideas that were first expressed by Rousso in Le Syndrome de Vichy became a popular currency in West European and American higher education. Websites and undergraduate and postgraduate programs explore and debate the issues first formulated in Rousso’s study. Notwithstanding the impressive and extensive influence of Rousso’s publication, his interpretation of war memory has been criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds. The theoretical problem is Rousso’s use of the concept of collective memory. Responding to Rousso at a specially organized seminar on interdisciplinarity, Marie-Claire Lavabre, a political scientist, pointed to the conceptual looseness of Rousso’s use of a plethora of terms such as mémoire collective, mémoire nationale, mémoire de groupe, mémoire officielle, mémoire dominante, and others. She observed that there is a fundamental confusion in Rousso’s handling of memory and its various forms. It blurs the distinction between two very different phenomena: on the one hand, the political, social, and cultural symptoms of distorted behavior revealing the persistent effects of the trauma of occupation; and, on the other hand, the political manipulation of the past for ideological reasons. The first of these is based on assumptions regarding the weight of the past in the present, whereas the other assumes the selective, instrumental use of the past for present purposes. Rousso’s evidence in Le Syndrome de Vichy tends to illustrate the latter but frames the subject more widely in terms of the former. Given the severity and plausibility of this critique, it should be added that Rousso showed a great respect for Lavabre’s thesis by publishing it in a volume that he co-edited, Histoire politique et sciences sociales (Political History and the Social Sciences, 1991). His published response in the same volume did not, however, clarify matters, and the role of theory (political, psychoanalytic, cultural, film, and gender) continues to be peripheral to his thinking, although in 2008 he co-edited a volume on history, political science, and interdisciplinarity. A different type of criticism came from the American historian Bertram Gordon. In the aforementioned issue of French Historical Studies, he argues that, while aspects of Rousso’s work remain significant and insightful, an empirical study of publishing on Vichy does not reflect the periodization that has been claimed. Studying directories of French publishing – Biblio, Bibliographie de la France, Bibliographie nationale, and others – Gordon argues persuasively that interest in Vichy, having peaked in the late 1940s, has remained relatively low since then,

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albeit with some increase in the 1980s and 1990s. There have been few significant “troughs” or “repressions” during which the subject has received proportionately less attention; conversely, publishing in the 1970s and 1980s does not show massive evidence of a public obsession with the topic. Thus, for Gordon, it was demonstrable that in the realm of non-fiction publishing there was no sign of the “Vichy syndrome.” Gordon’s critique is more damaging to Rousso than Lavabre’s earlier intervention because it is based on empirical grounds, precisely the scholarly territory that Rousso favors. Notably, Gordon’s research highlights the fact that, while Le Syndrome de Vichy covers an impressive range of empirical sources, Rousso’s research was not exhaustive. Therefore, like most works of history and historiography, his thesis is open to revision and qualification based on the analysis of new documentation. Rousso’s response of 1995 to Gordon was to argue that Gordon’s evidence relating to publishing cycles of non-fictional works did not disqualify his thesis with regard to patterns of political activity, literary and cultural debate, or filmic representation. Nevertheless, even if the rejoinder is valid, it still points to a revision of the original work. By arguing that different periodizations of historical memory ought to be applied to different forms of representation, Rousso weakens the thesis of his book. Reflecting once more on his own work in Vichy: l’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire, Rousso has also acknowledged that his original periodization of the syndrome might well be subject to future revision. He has recently expressed some doubts concerning his original approach to the final and longest phase of the syndrome, the period of obsession from 1974 to the present. On this matter, Rousso has come to acknowledge that his use of the phrase “obsession” was perhaps too vague. Furthermore, with the passing of time, the length of this period of obsession is also problematic, constituting some thirty years of the “syndrome.” Aside from these caveats, Rousso continues to defend his original thesis. Because writing Le Syndrome de Vichy provided Rousso with a clear and prestigious public identity, it would be naïve to expect him to participate in the refutation of his own work. Beyond academia, simplified aspects of Rousso’s thesis on the memory of Vichy have passed into popular media debates, gaining an almost mythological status as an explanation of how France is haunted by its own history. Journalists and other commentators were quick to latch on to Rousso’s core ideas, and subsequently they tended to simplify those ideas in order to explain how the Vichy regime remained controversial. Themes that Rousso had raised, such as “repression” and “obsession,” provided powerful and emotive ways through which to understand complex sociopolitical events. However, it is important to underline that at no point in his monograph does Rousso literally state that the French were “silent” about or completely repressed the subject of Vichy in the 1960s. Instead, Rousso paints the history of “repression” in far more subtle terms, speaking of tendencies and propensities, using detailed caveats to moderate his own assertions. For example, writing on the scope of the period of repression (1954–68) Rousso


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explains the nuances: “Au total, les refoulements des années 1960 ont vu une renaissance spectaculaire de la mémoire résistante, sous l’angle, il est vrai particulier, de la mémoire gaulliste. Mais s’impasent tardivement, après de multiples résurgences, cette vision épique n’a pas effacé les rancoeurs, ni les interrogations.” (“Despite some repression of wartime memories in the 1960s, memories of the Resistance were thus widely discussed, but largely within the framework established by the Gaullist version of the past. Yet that epic vision did not establish its priority until rather late in the day and was never able to silence all doubt or eradicate all bitterness.”) Despite the sense of balance and professional caution illustrated in this quotation, a popularized view of the syndrome was quickly recycled into the public imagination. Understandably, for many readers of Le Syndrome it seemed clear that France had literally “forgotten Vichy” and by the 1980s was suffering an obsessional neurosis as a consequence. This aspect of the impact of Le Syndrome de Vichy has been regretted by its author, who has stated that his work almost became part of the syndrome that it described. Nonetheless, unlike the contributions of the vast majority of scholars at work in academia, Rousso’s writing has informed how his nation has experienced its own history, albeit in a simplified and possibly, if one accepts Gordon’s thesis, an empirically problematic way. The triumph of the Le Syndrome de Vichy led Rousso to write a second complementary work that continues and expands on the original thesis. Produced in collaboration with the journalist Eric Conan, Vichy: un passé qui ne passe pas (1994; translated as Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, 1998) extends the scope of the earlier work to account for more contemporary scandals and crises that were shaped by the memory of Vichy. The main body of the publication consists of a series of chapters focusing on the controversies that occurred during 1990–4, the period of fiftieth anniversaries of wartime events. The first of these chapters, “Le Vél d’Hiv’ ou la commémoration introuvable” (“The Winter Cycle Stadium raid or the impossible commemoration”), examines the commemoration of the mass round-up of Jews in July 1942 and the acrimonious campaign to pressure President François Mitterrand into making an official acknowledgment of Vichy’s crimes against the Jews. Subsequent chapters deal with allegations that French archivists had hidden important documents from researchers, the trial of the war criminal Paul Touvier, and the revelations surrounding François Mitterrand’s experience of the Occupation. Rousso and Conan identify a number of trends that link these episodes together. In particular, they note that the contemporary obsession with Vichy has led to an excessive emphasis on issues relating to aspects of antiSemitism, Franco-Jewish history, and the Holocaust. They suggest that, whereas in the 1960s there had been an unfortunate lack of attention to these issues, now a generation has (falsely) been led to believe that the Vichy regime could be exclusively associated with anti-Semitism and fascism. For Rousso and Conan, French fascism played a part in the années noires but was most certainly not their defining or exclusive feature. In their opinion, those living in the 1990s were overemphasizing this aspect of Vichy at the expense of other topics and different

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interpretative themes. Throughout Vichy: un passé qui ne passe pas there is an implicit and sometimes explicit plea to let the history of Vichy be written calmly by those best qualified to produce a scientifically rigorous treatment. The empirical-positivist tendency hinted at in Vichy: un passé qui ne passe pas is confirmed by Rousso’s second major publication of 1994. Working in collaboration with the national archives, Rousso co-edited a definitive guide to sources relating to World War II. La Seconde Guerre mondiale: guide des sources conservées en France (World War II: Guide to Sources Preserved in France) represents a monumental research effort, gathering together accurate information on the nature and scope of primary sources found in public institutions (national and regional archives) and private or charitable organizations (libraries, research institutes, specialized museums, and so on). Running at well over one thousand pages in length, the publication is a definitive gazetteer for all researchers interested in writing on this subject. Importantly for its value as a scholarly tool, the tome is coherently organized into four chapters, based on a logical division of the nature and location of the holdings to which they refer. This volume is impressive, and there is more than a touch of false modesty when Rousso admits in his own introduction to the work that it might not be a complete catalogue. The Guide is a major advance in the field and will undoubtedly become a bible for all future historians wishing to research the experience of World War II in France. Not all of Rousso’s post-Vichy Syndrome activities have been as unproblematic as the major academic achievement of the Guide. Over the years, Rousso has been especially prominent in the popular press, offering informed opinion pieces and simplified discussions of his research findings. In 1997, Rousso found media-related issues briefly spiraling beyond his control during the damaging course of events that became known as the “Aubrac affair.” Rousso and several other prominent historians of the Vichy period were invited to the newspaper headquarters of Libération to interview two well-known Resistance fighters, the now elderly Raymond and Lucie Aubrac. The Aubracs had instigated the meeting in an attempt to refute controversial charges made against their war record by the journalist Gérard Chauvy. However, as the meeting developed, it became clear that, while Rousso and others would discount aspects of Chauvy’s thesis, they were equally unwilling to support categorically the Aubracs. In particular, they found it problematic that various postwar publications by the two Resistance fighters had included differing accounts of their life stories. Hurt by this ambivalent response, the Aubracs left the meeting as frustrated as when they had entered it. In retrospect, Rousso’s contribution to the discussion was excessively pedantic, too scholarly, and too insensitive to humane considerations of the understandable contradictions of living memory. The very subtle and elegant way in which Rousso had written his own work was here exchanged for a harsh empirical tone. For many observers, a sad consequence of the Aubrac affair was that the professional reputation of several scholars was diminished, including, in part, Rousso’s own.


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As is understandable for a scholar whose work has included the management of an important research unit for over a decade, Rousso has yet to publish a third single-authored research monograph. Instead, his professional historical work (as opposed to his media activities) has been spent editing collections (including brief forays back to economic history), contributing essays, and attending and organizing scholarly events. A short collection of interviews, entitled La Hantise du passé (translated as The Haunting Past, 2002) was published in 1998. This book offers a chance to reflect on, but not to apologize for, the Aubrac affair. Otherwise, little new material is presented here. Likewise, previously published articles and chapters are gathered together in Vichy: l’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire, the volume published in 2001 and based on Rousso’s “habilitation” work. In addition, in the same year, Rousso was appointed to the prestigious role of president of the Entretiens du patrimoine, a position previously held by Pierre Nora, François Furet, Jacques Le Goff, Régis Debray, and François Loyer. The papers presented at that meeting were edited by Rousso and are found in Le Regard de l’histoire: l’émergence et l’évolution de la notion de patrimoine au cours du XXe siècle en France (The Eye of History: The Emergence and Evolution of the Idea of Heritage in Twentieth-century France, 2003). As noted in the introduction to this chapter, other more complex historico-political projects have also been taken up. Rousso’s work on the penetration of extreme right-wing intellectuals in two universities in Lyons was quickly published as a monograph (Le Dossier Lyon III: le rapport sur le racism et le négationnisme à l’université Jean-Moulin, 2004; The Lyons III Dossier: The Report on Racism and Holocaust denial at the Jean-Moulin University). That work is a unique insight into how extreme right-wing scholars found and maintained positions in academia. Just such an important public contract came to Rousso when he decided to author the new history of the Vichy regime in the famous study guides, “Que sais-je?” (Le Régime de Vichy, 2007; The Vichy Regime). The result here is a nuanced and sophisticated short work that is likely to shape the minds of a generation of francophone students. Even in under two hundred pages of text, Rousso’s sharpness of thought and desire to write an accurate, fair, and critical account shines through. Concision is not common among French historians, or intellectuals, yet Rousso achieves much more in far less space than many of his contemporaries. The clarity of judgments made in the work means that it is quite as likely to influence researchers, as much as assist educators and students. Certainly Rousso does not shy away from any of the key controversies, the legality of regime, the popularity of Pétain, the violence of the state toward the people of France, the Jewish community, the Freemasons, the communists, and the resistance movements. On occasion, Rousso has spent time outside France presenting papers at leading American and British universities and research centers, as well as holding a number of visiting professorships. One focus of his recent research – presented in a series of public lectures in 2003 – is the trial of Klaus Barbie (1987) and the wider implications of the role that television played in recording that event. Combining

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insights from the history of jurisprudence and from media studies, Rousso is now starting to re-evaluate in greater detail one key event that was first glossed over in Le Syndrome de Vichy. In this recent work, there is a newfound sensitivity to women’s history and the role that gender plays in the representation of history. There is also a re-evaluation of the notion of witnessing and experiencing trauma. There is a greater awareness of the power of the media, especially television. Perhaps these latest variations on well-known Roussoesque themes point to lessons learned from the Aubrac affair. More importantly, they confirm Rousso’s status as one of the most innovative interdisciplinary scholars of his generation. They equally underline the fact that Rousso continues to be drawn back to the années noires and their complex implications.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Henry Rousso Un château en Allemagne: Sigmaringen 1944–1945 (Paris: Ramsay, 1980); republished as Pétain et la fin de collaboration: Sigmaringen 1944–45 (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1984). La Collaboration: les noms, les thèmes, les lieux (Paris: MA Editions, 1987). Le Syndrome de Vichy 1944–198- (Paris: Seuil, 1987; rev. and enlarged edn., 1990); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Les Années noires: vivre sous l’Occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). La Seconde Guerre mondiale: guide des sources conservées en France, 1939–1945, by Brigitte Blanc, Henry Rousso, and Chantal de Tourtier-Bonazzi (Paris: Archives Nationales, 1994). Vichy: un passé qui ne passe pas, by Eric Conan and Henry Rousso (Paris: Fayard, 1994; rev. and enlarged edn., Paris: Seuil, 1996); translated by Nathan Bracher as Vichy: An EverPresent Past (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998). La Hantise du passé: entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Editions Textuel, 1998); translated by Ralph Schoolcraft as The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Vichy: l’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Le Dossier Lyon III: le rapport sur le racism et le négationnisme à l’université Jean-Moulin (Paris: Fayard, 2004). Le Régime de Vichy (Paris: PUF, 2007).

Selected Edited Collections De Monnet à Massé: enjeux politiques et objectifs économiques dans le cadre des quatre premiers plans (1946–1965) (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1986). La Planification en crises (1965–1985) (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1987). Histoire politique et sciences sociales, edited by Denis Peschanski, Michael Pollak, and Henry Rousso (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1991).


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Le Régime de Vichy et les Français, edited by François Bédarida and Jean-Pierre Azéma, with the collaboration of Denis Peschanski and Henry Rousso (Paris: Fayard, 1992). La Vie des entreprises sous l’Occupation: une enquête à l’échelle locale, edited by Alain Beltran, Robert Frank, and Henry Rousso (Paris: Belin, 1994). Stalinisme et nazisme: histoire et mémoire comparées, edited by Henry Rousso and Nicolas Werth (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1999). La Violence de guerre 1914–1945: approches comparées des deux conflits mondiaux, edited by Henry Rousso et al. (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2002). Le Regard de l’histoire: l’émergence et l’évolution de la notion de patrimoine au cours du XXe siècle en France (Paris: Fayard, 2003). La Fabrique interdisciplinaire: histoire et science politique, edited by Michel Offerlé and Henry Rousso (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

Selected Special Issues of Journals “Les guerres franco-françaises,” edited by Henry Rousso, Jean-Pierre Azéma, and JeanPierre Rioux, Vingtième siècle: revue d’histoire, 5 ( Jan.–Mar., 1985). “Histoires d’Allemagnes,” edited by Henry Rousso, Hinnerk Bruhns, and Etienne François, Vingtième siècle: revue d’histoire, 34 (April–June, 1992). “Stratégies industrielles sous l’Occupation,” edited by Henry Rousso and Dominique Barjot, Histoire, économie et société, 3 (1992). “1945: Consequences and sequels of the Second World War,” edited by Henry Rousso, David Dilks, and Peter Romijn, Bulletin du Comité international d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 27/28 (1995).

Article “L’Organisation industrielle de Vichy,” Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 116 (October 1979): 27–44.

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Pierre de Saint Jacob (1905–1960) James B. Collins

Pierre de Saint Jacob occupies a unique place in the pantheon of twentieth-century French historians, due first to his highly unusual professional trajectory and then to his untimely early death, immediately upon his promotion to the chair in Early Modern History at the University of Dijon. Saint Jacob’s reputation rests primarily on a single posthumous book, Les Paysans de la Bourgogne du nord au dernier siècle de l’Ancien Régime (The Peasants of Northern Burgundy in the Last Century of the Ancien Régime), based on his thesis, supervised by Ernest Labrousse, defended in 1959. Labrousse had taken in Saint Jacob, who had become an intellectual orphan after the deaths of his first mentor, Gaston Roupnel, and of his initial thesis director, Marc Bloch, during the war. One can see the medievalist at work in many of Saint Jacob’s articles, above all in the remarkable series of four pieces on the Burgundian village, “Etudes sur l’ancienne communauté rurale en Bourgogne,” that he published in Annales de Bourgogne between 1941 and 1953: “Le village: les conditions juridiques de l’habitat” (“The village: the juridical conditions of the habitat,” 1941); “La structure du manse” (“The structure of the ‘hide,’ ” 1943); “La banlieue du village” (“The outskirts of the village,” 1946); and “Les terres communales” (“The commons,” 1953). These articles show the twin influences of Bloch and of Roupnel. Saint Jacob spent his life teaching in the provinces, and rarely participated in the Parisian seminars where the new generation of Annalistes – René Baehrel, Pierre Goubert, Jean Jacquart, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and others – were training under Labrousse and Fernand Braudel. Saint Jacob’s correspondence implies that he had a closer relationship with Lucien Febvre, who frequently admonished him to focus more on finishing his thesis. Saint Jacob’s articles, and his later thesis book, show the influence of Roupnel, perhaps more famous as a novelist than as an historian. We

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can understand him in that light from the brief introduction to his posthumous article in the inaugural issue of Etudes rurales (1961), in which the editors, Georges Duby and Daniel Fauchet, wrote that Saint Jacob had “a close familiarity with men and things, which he considered as much from the perspective of a peasant as from that of an historian.” Saint Jacob’s training with three dramatically different masters – Roupnel, Bloch, and Labrousse – gave him a remarkably diverse set of approaches to his materials. He belonged to a pre-Annaliste generation, even though he published his thesis during the first great Annaliste wave, along with Baehrel (b. 1904) and Goubert (b. 1915). The most obvious methodological difference jumps off the page, and alerts us to a critical moment in the development of French history: Saint Jacob, in contrast to his colleagues, makes no use of advanced statistical methods. His work contains a vast range of statistical data, but one can contrast his methods – those of the generation trained prior to 1950 – and those of the others, particularly Baehrel, who provided an elaborate mathematical apparatus for his conclusions (which, it should be noted, differed starkly from those of his colleagues, in part because he used far more sophisticated mathematical tools). Interestingly, Labrousse, who himself pioneered statistical work, supervised both Goubert and Saint Jacob, while Braudel supervised Baehrel, and, soon afterwards, Le Roy Ladurie: both of them followed Braudel in taking a much more long-term view of their regions, in contrast to Goubert and Saint Jacob, who each focused on a period of about a hundred years. Saint Jacob also reflected in his approach Roupnel’s discursive method, although he differed from Roupnel in his extensive use of archival sources. Where Roupnel’s famous thesis on the Dijonnais countryside in the middle of the seventeenth century relies heavily on a nineteenth-century printed edition of two of the hearth investigations, Saint Jacob’s work always relies on a broad range of archival sources. The later superb Dijonnais scholarship on rural Burgundy – Régine Robin, Jean Bart, and Françoise Fortunet, among others – remains distinct for its constant willingness to bring peasants to life. Their work follows the path cleared by Saint Jacob. Saint Jacob grew up in Mervans, a village in the department of Saône-et-Loire. His father’s family had long experience in many facets of rural life, from woodcutter to shoemaker and tailor. Son of a village tailor – the “de” of his surname a reflection of the family’s ties to an eponymous hamlet, rather than, as is so often assumed, a noble particule – Saint Jacob initially followed the trajectory of a village school teacher: local primary school; regional superior primary school, at Louhans; brevet simple, leading to the Ecole normale at Mâcon (at the age of 15). He distinguished himself there as “particularly gifted for letters, in which his sensibility and the subtlety of his spirit enable him best to express himself ” (report of the director, 1924). Lacking a baccalauréat, he had to take special courses in English and Latin (in which he was largely self-taught), then followed classes at the University of Dijon, where he obtained first his bachelier (1930) and then his licence (1931).

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Throughout this period, he taught in local grammar schools. Failing to pass the agrégation in 1933, 1934, and 1935, he became a professor of literature and history at the lycée of Tournon in 1935. He moved from there to Vesoul, where he prepared once again the agrégation: he succeeded in 1938, and moved the next year to the Lycée Carnot at Dijon, where he would remain until 1956. To call such a trajectory unusual is an understatement: not many leading French historians supported themselves as primary school teachers, and rare indeed was the chaired professor – Saint Jacob’s appointment to the chair created for him at Dijon was announced the day before his death – who started his university career at fifty. Saint Jacob studied history with Gaston Roupnel at Dijon in the 1930s. Roupnel was writing in those years his general history of rural France, and, a bit later, Histoire et destin (History and Destiny, 1943). Roupnel wrote (February 12, 1945) a remarkable letter of recommendation to the Sorbonne for Saint Jacob: “I can certify that no student has given me such complete satisfaction. None has given me as well similar expectations, and I have a great hope that he will become an historian.” This last phrase, in the French, “qu’il fera oeuvre d’historien,” meant specifically an historian of the highest level, one who had prepared his doctorat d’état. Saint Jacob’s own deep roots in the countryside gave him an affinity for Roupnel, who always had a profound regard for the humanity of the vignerons and other peasants of Burgundy. In his eulogy for Roupnel, Saint Jacob made precisely that point: “His [Roupnel’s] students know his usual formulas: ‘always resuscitate, bring to life, evoke, rediscover life in all its senses.’ ” Saint Jacob’s own work on the peasants never departs from this counsel: far more than his contemporaries, he gives the peasants agency. Where Le Roy Ladurie insists on the inexorable forces of the longue durée, Saint Jacob, without ignoring large historical trends, looks to the actions of individual men and women. His Burgundian peasants meet together in village assemblies; they act and react. Saint Jacob’s thesis contains far more on village institutions, whether it be the assembly or even the meix/manse itself, than those of Goubert or Le Roy Ladurie. Although both Le Roy Ladurie and Baehrel go deep into the eighteenth century, Saint Jacob has more material on its second half than most of his colleagues. Saint Jacob brings us up to the 1780s. Some of his articles touch upon the revolutionary period, a bold step for a moderniste of his time. He does less demographic work, but far more with tax records, not simply the taille and capitation, but the contrôle des actes et le centième denier, to which he dedicated a short, brilliant article in one of the first issues of Annales (1946). Fifty-two years later, the outstanding monograph on the eighteenth-century countryside of Touraine by Brigitte Maillard saw fit to cite only three titles in a section on methodology: Saint Jacob’s article was one of them. American historians have also drawn upon Saint Jacob’s methodology to use this still somewhat neglected source. For an author who published just one monograph, Saint Jacob continues to have an extraordinary influence on the historiography of rural France, and, because of the broader impact of the Annales school, on rural history elsewhere.


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As Annie Bleton-Rouget has demonstrated, it was not always thus: his thesis received little immediate attention; neither Annales nor Histoire moderne et contemporaine even reviewed it. We may see here evidence of a split between the students of Braudel and those of Labrousse. Braudel himself wrote Annales’ review of Goubert’s thesis, which he panned. Saint Jacob’s book at first had less of an influence on the broad world of historians, than on a few specific ones. Robert Schnerb and Jean Vidalenc wrote glowing reviews of it in 1961, a fact which perhaps explains why most leading PhD-granting American university libraries bought a copy of it. Yet the great specialists had all read it, as would become clear in their collective synthesis, Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France, 1975), whose early modern sections came from the pens of Jacquart and Le Roy Ladurie. Again and again, when discussing village communities, commons, taxes, and nearly every other aspect of material life, Jacquart uses examples taken from Burgundy, virtually the only province he discusses, other than the Ile-de-France (on which he wrote). A quick check with Saint Jacob’s thesis reveals that almost all of the examples come from his work (a small number come from the thesis of Lucien Febvre on the France-Comté). In the eighteenth-century section, Le Roy Ladurie relies heavily on Saint Jacob, and on Abel Poitrineau’s work on the Auvergne. Both in the anglophone and francophone worlds, Saint Jacob revitalized the debate on the so-called “seigneurial reaction” in late eighteenth-century France. Even dealing with one of the few regions in France that still had large numbers of serfs, Saint Jacob was careful to distinguish between a seigneurial reaction and a capitalist impulse abetted by the physiocrats. Recent monographs on aristocratic families have borne out some of Saint Jacob’s insights: “feudal” revenue did rise as a percentage of income, but defining revenue from mills as “feudal” ignores the capitalist dimension of change, just as Saint Jacob suggested fifty years ago. In the anglophone world, Saint Jacob’s influence has been fundamental, running from Robert Forster in the 1960s and 1970s, through Hilton Root and Liana Vardi in the 1980s, on to Mack Holt, Thomas Brennan, and James Collins in the 1990s, and to Robert Schwartz and Jeremy Hayhoe in the 2000s. The catalogues of the major American university libraries help us understand why: a sample of sixteen of the top PhD-granting programs with major libraries shows the three most widely held early Annales theses are those of Goubert (16), Le Roy Ladurie (15), and Saint Jacob (15), a level not reached by any of the other great Annales theses until that of Perrot (1975) on Caen (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Chicago, California-Berkeley, Stanford, North Carolina, UCLA, Illinois. Wisconsin was the sole exception; they own a copy of the 1995 re-impression. Twelve of the sixteen libraries also own a copy of the documents book). Not surprisingly, many of the leading North American early modern specialists of France have written on Burgundy, a trend that continues. The extraordinary wealth of documentation in Dijon provides one reason, but Saint Jacob’s work is the second. He stands head and shoulders above

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any other early specialist of Burgundy, not only for his monograph, but for his invaluable published collection of sources, Documents relatifs à la communauté villageoise en Bourgogne (Documents Related to the Village Community in Burgundy). Until quite recently, Saint Jacob’s collection, and the documents in the appendix of Yves-Marie Bercé’s Histoire des Croquants (1974), provided nearly the only easily accessible primary sources on village life, for those studying in North America. The English translation, History of Peasant Revolts, does not have the documents. Those seeking primary sources for seminar papers about French rural life often turned to Saint Jacob’s collection and Bercé. Saint Jacob influenced historians across the political and intellectual spectrum. In his book on the Saulx-Tavanes family, Robert Forster notes that Saint Jacob first drew his attention to the rich sources available for the family; historians of the Revolution, like Donald Sutherland and Liana Vardi, even when disagreeing with Saint Jacob, invariably credit him with being among the rare early historians who gave the peasants agency; Thomas Brennan signals his debt to Saint Jacob for knowledge of two of the key sources of his superb monograph on the eighteenth-century wine trade; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century specialists like Holt and Collins learned of the remarkable collection of investigations of hearths, carried out for the Estates of Burgundy, through Saint Jacob. Saint Jacob writes tellingly about these wonderful documents: Their value is that of a broad inventory of rural resources. It does not seem as if they are suspect; the investigator came with the desire to know, and he reported with sincerity on what he saw … That which his human sources told him is less sure, but many times, one perceives that he is easily capable of discovering falsehood … To be sure, these detailed reports are the most remarkable general document of 17th-century Burgundian rural history … His inquiry, dug from the sources of life itself, is it not the one that the historian dreams constantly to be able to make?” (Les Paysans, 3–4)

Here we see the sentiment that sets Saint Jacob apart: he seeks less the long series of quantitative (or quantifiable) sources, like lease contracts or cadastral registers, that lie behind the analyses of Goubert or Le Roy Ladurie, and more the qualitative source, the one that brings peasants to life. As both Antoine Follain and Jean-Marc Moriceau have pointed out, however, Saint Jacob, trained more in Roupnel’s narrative methods, did not take advantage of the vast statistical database provided by the hearth investigations (for example, on crop yields). He cites many of the figures, but nowhere does one find a careful mathematical analysis. In articles such as his examination of the population of Chalon-sur-Saône on the eve of the Revolution, one finds a similar reticence to engage in diachronic analysis of sources such as tax rolls. We find out much about the occupational distribution of Chalon in the 1780s, but nothing at all about how that differed from the Chalon


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of 1750 or 1700. (Chalon has an extensive run of tax rolls from the 1690s forward. To be fair to Saint Jacob, he would have needed a team of graduate students to do them justice; had he lived long enough to take his chair at Dijon, he might well have organized precisely such a project. As in other Burgundian towns of its size, the occupational distribution at Chalon underwent radical change in the eighteenth century.) What of Saint Jacob the man? Pierre Lévêque, one of his former students at Dijon, remembers him as a demanding but fair instructor, beloved of his students and colleagues. Saint Jacob made little secret of his convictions: a true son of the Third Republic, and of the milieu of its most ardent warriors, the school teachers, he stood for laicism, reason, tolerance, and social egalitarianism. Although clearly influenced by Marxist historians, and often classified among them, he eschewed the French Communist Party, whose Stalinist rigor he found repugnant, according to Lévêque. Jean Richard, the great Burgundian medievalist, once said of Saint Jacob that “everything that resembled an injustice made him indignant,” and Goubert noted the “firmness of his positions,” often defended with considerable warmth: Goubert remembered Saint Jacob as a ferocious intellectual jouster. Saint Jacob, the man of contradictions: historian of peasants, he collected eighteenth-century art and enjoyed playing Mozart duets with his wife, Fernande Thabussot, she on the piano, he on the violin. Lévêque remembers that Saint Jacob, who knew more of the injustice of Louis XV’s France than virtually any historian, still referred to the 1700s as “this intelligent century.” That conviction underlay Saint Jacob’s initial thesis idea: to trace the impact of “Enlightened” reforms on the Burgundian countryside. What makes Saint Jacob’s monograph still a vibrant, living contribution to the study of rural France is that, when he found out that his hypothesis was wrong, he did not hesitate to reject it. To that lesson fundamental to all historical research, Saint Jacob added two others. First, his work showed that power is always negotiated: the terms of the negotiation may favor the stronger to a greater or lesser degree, but they still must negotiate with those over whom they wield power. Second, he showed that peasants took control of their lives, to the extent their circumstances allowed it. They were not some amorphous mass acted upon by the inexorable forces of history, but living men and women who helped weave, through their individual and collective action, the fabric of their lives, and of human history. In this second matter, economic history has shifted very much in Saint Jacob’s direction, and away from the impersonal forces that so attracted his contemporaries.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Yves de Saint Jacob and Pierre Lévêque for sharing information about Pierre de Saint Jacob. I would also like to thank the Leverhulme Trust

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for a research professorship in the spring of 2009 which provided me with the time to write my contributions to this volume.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Pierre de Saint Jacob Les Paysans de la Bourgogne du nord au dernier siècle de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960; reissued, with a superb introduction by Jean-Marc Moriceau, by the Association d’histoire des sociétés rurales, 1995). Documents relatifs à la communauté villageoise en Bourgogne du milieu du XVIIe siècle à la Révolution (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1962). Campagnes en mouvement en France du XVIe au XIXe siècle: actes du Colloque international d’histoire rurale, Autour de Pierre de Saint Jacob, edited by A. Follain (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2008). See the essay about Saint Jacob, jointly authored by A. Follain and by Yves de Saint Jacob. On the reception of Saint Jacob’s work, see especially the essay by Annie Bleton-Rouget. For examples of Saint Jacob’s influence on anglophone scholars, see the essays by T. Brennan, J. Collins, J. Hayhoe, and R. Schwartz. Des terroirs et des hommes: études sur le monde rural et le pays bourguignon (essays of Pierre de Saint Jacob) (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2008), which contains Saint Jacob’s most important articles, a full bibliography, Pierre Lévêque’s invaluable “Postface: Pierre de Saint Jacob (1906–1960).”

References Baehrel, René, Une croissance: la Basse-Provence rurale de la fin du seizième siècle à 1789: essai d’économie historique statistique (Paris: SEVPEN, 1961; reissued 1988). Bart, Jean, La Liberté ou la terre: la mainmorte en Bourgogne au siècle des Lumières (Dijon: CNRS, 1984). Brennan, Thomas, Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Cuvillier, Jacques, Famille et patrimoine de la haute noblesse française au XVIIIe siècle: le cas des Phélypeaux, Gouffier, Choiseul (Paris: Harmattan, 2005). Forster, Robert, The House of Saulx-Tavanes: Versailles and Burgundy, 1700–1830 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Fortunet, Françoise, Charité ingénieuse et pauvre misère: les baux à cheptel simple en Auxois au XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 1985). Hayhoe, Jeremy, Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-century Northern Burgundy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008). Jacquart, Jean, La Crise rurale en Ile-de-France, 1550–1670 (Paris: A. Colin, 1974). Maillard, Brigitte, Les Campagnes de Touraine au XVIIIe siècle: structures agraires et économie rurale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1998).


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Neveux, H., Jacquart, J., and Le Roy Ladurie, E., Histoire de la France rurale, vol. 2: L’Age classique des paysans, 1340–1789 (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Robin, Régine, La Société française en 1789: Semur-en-Auxois (Paris: Plon, 1970). Root, Hilton, Peasants and King in Burgundy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Roupnel, Gaston, Letter of February 12, 1945, personal papers of P. de Saint Jacob, communicated to me by Philip Whalen. Vardi, Liana, The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profit in Northern France, 1680–1800 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

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Henri Sée (1864–1936) Mark Potter

Henri Eugene Sée, whose career bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was active in the historical profession at a pivotal time in its academic maturation. By the time that Sée obtained his post in 1893 at the University of Rennes in Brittany, history had taken root as a professional discipline within academia. Only a short time before then, history had been the domain of amateurs. Voltaire, Jules Michelet, and François Guizot were three such notable amateur historians who pursued – and produced – history as a literary device. Credit for ensconcing history as a discipline within the walls of academia goes first to the German historian Leopold von Ranke, who in 1833 began regularly offering a university seminar in history. In France, this initial professionalization of the discipline within academia took place in the 1860s; Henri Sée thus inherited the standards and ideals of history as a newly formed academic discipline passed down to him by Ranke, and more directly by his mentors, among whom were the ancient historian Denis Numa Fustel de Coulanges and the political historian Ernest Lavisse, editor of a ninevolume history of France from its origins to the Revolution. Sée was born on September 6, 1864 in the small town of Saint-Brice, located in the department of Seine-et-Oise (today the Val d’Oise), just north of Paris. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Paris where he attended lycée and then the Sorbonne. At the Sorbonne, he pursued his studies in history through the completion of his doctoral degree. He defended two dissertations in 1892, Louis XI et les villes (Louis XI and the Towns, 1891) and De judiciariis inquestis, prœsertim coram regiis judicibus, XIIIe seculo agente (Concerning Judicial Inquests, especially before Royal Judges, during the Thirteenth Century). Two principal traits characterized history in its first decades as an established academic discipline. Fustel de Coulanges, who was instrumental in bringing

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history into French academia and establishing distinctive professional standards, was particularly influential in passing the first of these to his student Sée. The professional historian, Sée learned from his mentor, must shed his prejudices and biases and adhere to the documentary evidence with a scientific objectivity. Sée took these lessons and made them into the centerpiece of his career as a teacher and researcher. The result was a “positivist” approach to history, typical of the late nineteenth century that took for granted that objective truths could be uncovered through careful research. The second trait that characterized history as it entered into academia was its emphasis on politics, events, and the accomplishments of great men. Henri Sée was undeniably a product of this “histoire historisante,” as this traditional focus on the political has been termed, but – again taking a cue from his mentor Fustel de Coulanges – Sée pushed against its limits and forged new paths of inquiry and research. To be sure, he shared the goals, standards, and methods of history as it was commonly practiced by those who established its academic credentials, but, as a quick look at his bibliography would suggest, he explored numerous topics beyond the accomplishments of great men. This challenge to the traditional was not yet evident in Sée’s dissertation on Louis XI’s relations with the towns, in which he traced the decline of municipal liberties at the hands of the monarchy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Very soon after settling into his post at the University of Rennes, though, Sée embarked upon a research program that sought to expose the history of the under classes, and especially of the rural under classes. He also turned his attention to the regional archives of Brittany, creating a sort of local cottage industry by directing his students to the tasks of pouring through the archives and recording social and economic trends from the medieval through the early modern periods, while he himself actively engaged in publishing. The result was, on the one hand, a number of journal articles on an array of Breton topics: “L’administration de deux seigneuries de Basse-Bretagne” (“The administration of two lordships in Lower Brittany,” 1903–4) and “Les forêts et la question du déboisement en Bretagne à la fin de l’Ancien Régime” (“Forests and deforestation in Brittany at the end of the Ancien Régime,” 1924) are but two examples. Sée also managed in this early stage of his career to publish several books on Breton topics. Other than his Les Etats de Bretagne au XVIe siècle (The Estates of Brittany in the Sixteenth Century, 1895), these all touched on social and economic history, especially of the lower classes. Typical of his work at this stage of his career was Les Classes rurales et le régime domanial en France au moyen âge (The Rural Classes and the Manorial System in France during the Middle Ages, 1901). Sée set out in this work to do nothing less than write a “history of the rural classes in France during the Middle Ages.” The first step to this end, he recognized, was to uncover the complexities of medieval property. “The dominant fact of rural life,” Sée argues in his preface, was “the organization of the manorial system, and there was doubtless no phenomenon that characterized more strongly the

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economic history of the Middle Ages.” Sée thus examined some 125 cartulaires (collections of privileges and rights enjoyed by landowners) from throughout France and supplemented them with manuscripts (especially local customary codes) and whatever few secondary works on local rural history that were available at the time. The result is a sweeping history of rural class relations, particularly of the division of property and rights between lords and peasants that constituted the manorial system, from the decline of the Western Roman Empire to the end of the Middle Ages. The manorial system evolved through this broad expanse of time, strengthening through lordly consolidation of power, and then continuing in place even as those feudal relations that bound lords and vassals became displaced by growing central authority. Economics, according to Sée, played a significant role in this history of the manorial system, and here Sée introduced some of his fundamental views on the role of economics in history. While political developments also affected change in the structure of property and in rural class relations, “economic phenomena retained their preponderant influence.” As an example, he argues that economic trends in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were responsible for weakening the condition of servitude that characterized serfdom: lords had no choice but to loosen their control over their tenants in the face of increased mobility, commercial activity, and economic opportunity. The most significant developments in economic activity were taking place within the commercial sector, and the opportunities for mobility that grew out of these developments amounted to “the most significant causes of the growing trend of emancipation.” These two positions – the importance of economic trends in history and the centrality of commerce as an engine of change – would remain dominant themes throughout Sée’s career. This work, rather typical of Sée’s writings, provides little in the way of methodological sophistication. Sée’s descriptive prose paints pictures drawn from numerous examples that he has culled from his sources: usually two or three examples are mentioned in support of a specific point. There is little in the way of aggregation or of statistical analysis. This observation is not to say, though, that the conclusions presented are without merit. As Harold Parker notes in his 1970 essay on Sée’s life and work, Sée’s conclusions – many of which have withstood the test of time –are more than likely based on careful reading of his sources and on the experience of a devoted researcher. That he did not devote space in his early monographs to exploring questions of method, and instead narrowed his textual presentation to offering the most salient examples in support of his conclusions, is no necessary indication of historical sloppiness. Indeed, as his later works would make clear, critical appraisal of his sources was at the heart of Sée’s enterprise as an historian. While Sée offered no explicit methodological exposition in his Les Classes rurales et le régime domanial en France au moyen âge, he took the occasion to do so later, specifically at the time of his publication between 1909 and 1912 of Cahiers de

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doléances de la sénéchaussée de Rennes pour les états-généraux de 1789 (Grievances from the Seneschalty of Rennes for the Estates-General of 1789). To accompany this four-volume edited collection of parish cahiers, Sée published an article in 1910 entitled “La redaction et la valeur historique des cahiers de paroisses pour les états-généraux de 1789” (“The redaction and the historical value of parish cahiers from the Estates-General of 1789”), in which he commented on the advantages and pitfalls of using parish cahiers as a source for uncovering peasant attitudes on the eve of the Revolution. It had been correctly observed, Sée remarks in this article, that more often than not these lists of grievances from peasant communities followed templates drawn up by urban bourgeois or that they voiced the attitudes of the parish assembly presidents, who were often judicial officeholders (magistrates). Yet Sée rejects the conclusion that the parish cahiers are therefore of no use in divulging peasant attitudes. Through critical comparison of cahiers with one another, the researcher can tease out variations among them, which may provide evidence of original local attitudes. Indeed, Sée argues, “the lists of grievances that appear the least original feature bits and pieces that bear no indication of being borrowed from other sources and that possess thus a real value.” Sée advocates the use of archival sources to verify the accuracy of claims in the parish cahiers, and, finally, Sée urges the researcher to be mindful that the parish cahiers are best suited to address certain specific questions, namely those that touch upon the economic and social conditions of peasant communities. Sée’s methodological thinking stops at this point, however, and he offers little guidance on how to proceed from documentary evidence to conclusion. Topics as vast as Sée’s – rural class relations, for example –and the empirical variation revealed by archival sources beg for some such methodological explanation. Further, as Geoffrey Hodgson demonstrates in How Economics Forgot History (2001), precisely while Sée was writing and publishing, lively debates were taking place in Europe, albeit more so among political economists than among historians, on the value of empirical versus deductive inquiry in understanding economic history. Yet Sée steered clear of such theoretical debates, and as best as one can tell from Sée’s writings, his “method” involved a blend of the empirical and the deductive, which produced what Sée might have been comfortable calling a “scientific” intuition. Sée’s first wave of publishing, in which he devoted his efforts primarily to archival research and writing in the area of rural, and especially Breton rural, history, drew to a close with his publication in 1912 of the last of the four volumes of Cahiers de doléances de la sénéchaussée de Rennes pour les états-généraux de 1789. He took a hiatus from publishing anything of significance during World War I, and then, shortly after the war, illness prompted him to retire from his university post in 1920 at the age of 56. Yet, taking the title professeur honoraire upon his retirement, Sée had no intention of withdrawing from the community of historical researchers and writers. Indeed, his publishing productivity, already respectable up to this point in his career, increased significantly, and he managed

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to publish an impressive 136 articles and fourteen books in the decade following his retirement. The style and substance of Sée’s works underwent some notable changes with this new phase of his career. His books became more synthetic. While he had from the beginning of his career blended his own archival research with syntheses of secondary sources, now the balance shifted noticeably toward synthesis. Such a shift also allowed Sée to branch out considerably in subject matter. Now, in addition to rural, social, and economic history, he tackled the history of political thought and the philosophy of history. The first of these forays was into the topic of early modern political thought, with the 1920 publication of Les Idées politiques en France au XVIIIe siècle (Political Ideas in Eighteenth-century France), followed by Les Idées politiques en France au XVIIe siècle in 1923. The first consisted of selected passages, accompanied by short analytical statements, from some of the most important political writers of the eighteenth century. The second was a synthetic work in which Sée traces the rise of the monarchical doctrine of absolutism to the very first challenges that that triumphant doctrine engendered under Louis XIV. This was followed in 1925 with a similarly synthetic work on eighteenth-century political theory, L’Evolution de la pensée politique en France au XVIIIe siècle (The Evolution of Political Thinking in Eighteenth-century France), which begins where Sée had left off in his volume on the seventeenth century and describes the rise and ultimate triumph of liberalism. In these works, Sée follows very much a “great man” approach in which he accepts a traditional canon, and in which he traces the progression of ideas, from the rise and triumph of absolutism to its challenges and collapse in the face of liberalism, as articulated by specific writers over the course of the two centuries. Indeed, the triumph of liberalism was worthy of celebration, for – as Armand Rébillon explained in his tribute to Sée’s life and career – it was in the ideas of humankind, rather than in the impersonal mechanics of economic forces, that Sée saw the greatest hope for progress. There is little more in these works on political theory, though, that can be considered original. Sée largely limited himself to describing sets of ideas attributed to particular individuals, and he had a very simple and linear understanding of the relation between context and text. A common refrain in these works was that events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drove the formation of ideas, whether it was the unrest of the sixteenth century that brought forth the articulation of the doctrine of absolutism, or the very excesses of absolutism under Louis XIV that fostered the liberal sense that the needs of the nation came before those of any one particular individual. And with a stance that betrayed his biases more than he likely recognized, Sée often judged, rather anachronistically, reform-minded thinkers according to how favorable they were to the lower classes. Thus, he praises the Count of Boulainvilliers for being “less aristocratic than Saint-Simon, more favorable than Fénélon toward political liberties; he was one of the first writers to voice concerns about the condition of the popular classes.”

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Sée returned as well to social and economic history at this point, diverging from his early approaches to these topics to engage more explicitly in theory. In La France économique et sociale au XVIIIe siècle (1925; translated as Economic and Social Conditions in France during the Eighteenth Century, 1927), Sée reconfirmed his interest in the lower classes by devoting roughly half the book to peasants, petty tradesmen, workers, and the problem of poverty. Demonstrating some real sophistication in his understanding of Ancien Régime society, he organized his work, not by following the traditional legal categories of first, second, and third estates – an approach that would have had “the grave defect of not being based upon economic life” – but rather by distinguishing among forms of property, or between “the classes that directly or indirectly live from land property, from rural economy, and those that derive their subsistence from urban economy, from personal property, from commercial and industrial activity.” In the rural economy, Sée describes the manorial system as being shaped by a feudal reaction, or an aggravation of “manorial exploitation” toward the end of the eighteenth century, and “it is thus,” he argues, “that we may explain the vehement claims that they [the peasants] made in the parish memorials (cahiers) of 1789.” Sée considered the commercial sector in this work as well. Here again, he argues that commerce was a central driving force in economic history, preceding and determining the progress of industry. And so, while grand commerce, or longdistance trade in the new consumer commodities of the eighteenth century, developed considerably and affected the growth and prosperity of port cities like Bordeaux, it was only just beginning to have its effect on the mechanization and organization of industry, still in their infancy at the end of the century. Indeed, Sée elaborates in his Les Origines du capitalisme moderne (1926; translated as Modern Capitalism: Its Origins and Evolution, 1928) that full-fledged capitalism, consisting of the expansion of grand commerce, the development of industry and machinery, and the establishment of financial institutions, did not unfold in France until the middle of the nineteenth century. With regard to ideology, it is clear that Sée used Marxist categories in his writings without committing himself to a Marxist orientation. By not accepting legal distinctions as representations of economic reality and insisting instead on approaching economic history according to property relations, by understanding that capitalism has a history with a beginning and with phases of development, by demonstrating a concern for the lower classes throughout European history, Sée betrays some sympathy with the Marxist model of historical materialism. Indeed, Sée, who was personally committed to a socialist political vision, himself wrote in Matérialisme historique et interpretation économique de l’histoire (1927; translated as The Economic Interpretation of History, 1929) that the “materialistic conception of history … contains a large element of truth. Furthermore, it has effectively stimulated investigations in economic history.” Nonetheless, Sée was more critical than praising of Marxist historical materialism, and it is in this criticism that Sée effectively lays out for all to see how he views the work of the historian. He charges, for example, that Marx and Engels

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“twist[ed] facts to suit their ideas,” and that their project “had the prime defect of not being a disinterested scientific product.” By contrast, in the preface to this work, Sée describes his own undertaking in the following words: The aim has been simply to describe the genesis of the materialistic conception of history, to determine its character and to test it in the light of contemporary facts and historical data. Does the doctrine clash with the truth as historical criticism reveals it to us, and if so, to what extent? These are the fundamental questions examined. With entire impartiality, and as objectively as possible, an attempt has been made to estimate the strength and weakness of a doctrine which has not only had its practical effect on the masses but has also exerted an important influence on history, on political and social economy, and on sociology. (Emphasis added.)

The contrast, thus, could not be clearer, between Sée’s perception of his own work (impartial and objective) and his perception of Marx and Engels’ (lacking disinterest). Their materialist theory, he further argues, is flawed for being formulated as a “law of evolution, that is, a veritable law whose forecasts must inevitably be realized,” and it falls short of being the scientific model that its authors took it to be. History, according to Sée, is much more complex, and at its heart we find “Action and reaction of economic and political phenomena: is this not precisely what history reveals, without its being possible always to discover which of the two predominates?” To be sure, Sée embraced the idea that history was a science, as he makes clear in his 1928 work Science et philosophie de l’histoire (Science and the Philosophy of History). Yet the scientific nature of history, as Sée understood it, does not express itself in fixed laws of social or economic evolution. He argues instead that history is a science whenever the historian takes care to appreciate the complexities of different phenomena acting upon one another, turns to the documentary evidence and uses critical, comparative methods to investigate problems, and remains committed to uncovering the truth, or at least as close an approximation to the truth as is possible. This optimistic vision of history assumes that there is, first of all, an historical truth, and that, with hard work and dedication, the historian can make progress in uncovering it. As such, Sée brought to the historical profession the outlook and values of the Enlightenment, and while those values informed his idealism and dictated his stated scientific disinterest, they also – unbeknownst to Sée himself – shaped his biases.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Henri Sée Louis XI et les villes (Paris: Hachette, 1891). Les Etats de Bretagne au XVIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 1895).

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Etudes sur les classes rurales en Bretagne au moyen âge (Paris: Picard, 1896). Les Classes rurales et le régime domanial en France au moyen âge (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1901). Les Classes rurales en Bretagne du XVe siècle à la Révolution (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1906). Les Idées politiques en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1920). Esquisse d’une histoire du régime agraire en Europe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Giard, 1921). Les Idées politiques en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Giard, 1923). La Vie économique et les classes sociales en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Alcan, 1924). L’Evolution commerciale et industrielle de la France sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Giard, 1925). L’Evolution de la pensée politique en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Giard, 1925). La France économique et sociale au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 1925); translated by Edwin H. Zeydel as Economic and Social Conditions in France during the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1927). Les Origines du capitalisme moderne (Paris: A. Colin, 1926); translated by Homer B. Vanderblue and Georges F. Doriot as Modern Capitalism: Its Origins and Evolution (New York: Adelphi, 1928). Histoire de la Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898–1926 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1927). Matérialisme historique et interpretation économique de l’histoire (Paris: Giard, 1927); translated by Melvin M. Knight as The Economic Interpretation of History (New York: Adelphi, 1929). La Vie économique et sociale de la France sous la monarchie censitaire, 1815–48 (Paris: Alcan, 1927). Science et philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Alcan, 1928). Esquisse d’une histoire économique et sociale de la France depuis les origines jusqu’à la guerre mondiale (Paris: Alcan, 1929). Evolution et Révolution (Paris: Flammarion, 1929). Französische Wirtchaftsgeschichte, 2 vols. ( Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1930, 1936). Science et philosophie d’après la doctrine de M. Emile Meyerson (Paris: Alcan, 1932). Le XVIe siècle, by Henri Sée and Armand Rébillon (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1935). Histoire économique de la France: le moyen âge et l’ancien régime (Paris: Armand Colin, 1939).

Other Works Cahiers de doléances de la sénéchaussée de Rennes pour les états-généraux de 1789, edited by Henri Sée and André Lesort, 4 vols. (Paris: E. Leroux, 1909–12). L’Evolution économique de l’Angleterre, by William Ashley, translated by Henri Sée (Paris: Giard, 1925). Voyages en France, 1787, 1788 et 1789, by Arthur Young, edited and translated by Henri Sée (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931).

Selected Articles by Henri Sée “L’administration de deux seigneuries de Basse-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle: Toulgouët et Le Treff,” Annales de Bretagne, 19 (1903–4): 285–320. “La redaction et la valeur historique des cahiers de paroisses pour les états-généraux de 1789,” Revue historique, 103 (1910): 292–306.

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“Remarques sur l’application de la méthode comparative à l’histoire économique et sociale,” Revue de synthèse historique, 36 (1923): 37–46. “Les forêts et la question du déboisement en Bretagne à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” Annales de Bretagne, 36 (1924): 1–30, 355–79.

References Hodgson, Geoffrey, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London: Routledge, 2001). Parker, Harold T., “Henri Sée (1864–1936),” in Classic European Historians, edited by S. William Halperin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 318–51. Rébillon, Armand, Henri Sée: sa vie et ses travaux (Rennes: Imprimerie Oberthur, 1936).

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François Simiand (1873–1935) Philip Whalen

François Simiand single-mindedly sought to reform the methodological practices and theoretical orientations of the social and human sciences in early twentiethcentury France. His scholarship made a lasting impact on twentieth-century French social history and economic sociology. He believed, as Jacques Revel has noted, that new rules of sociological method could provide the foundation for a unified social science in which the various disciplines would exhibit particular modalities. Simiand entreated historians, economists, and geographers to produce scholarship that balanced empirical investigation and inductive analysis: neither facts without theory nor theory without facts. An economist by training, a sociologist (and founding member of the French School of Sociology and L’Année sociologique) by disciplinary inclination, and a “prudent” socialist activist, Simiand emerged from a fluid period of interdisciplinary experimentation (associated with Henri Berr’s Revue de synthèse historique) to influence Marc Bloch’s and Lucien Febvre’s early Annales project. Animated by the Durkheimian agenda of studying all aspects of social life as objective reality, Simiand’s work in economic history convincingly demonstrated how the investigation of collective beliefs (réprésentations collectives) in a given milieu, how a focus on seasonal cycles (conjonctures) and long-term trends (longue durée) rather than on “epiphenomenal” or unique events, how understanding causality in terms of social forces as opposed to individual actions, and how a more rigorous use of empirical rather than deductive interpretive methods could benefit historical research. Against the hopes of Berr, Bloch, and Febvre, however, Simiand shared Durkheim’s methodological and territorial concerns; he envisioned French sociology as a master discipline best suited to synthesize, analyze, compare, and theorize

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the research of other fields. Durkheim’s efforts (during the late 1800s) to institutionalize sociology as a major academic discipline within the French university system had already encountered hostility from the historical and geographical professions. His ecumenical claims concerning sociology’s role as the keystone of all emergent social sciences directly challenged the newly organized French historical profession’s enthronement as the de facto “queen of the sciences of man.” He sharpened this debate in, among other places, his review of Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie in L’Année sociologique (1898–9). There, Durkheim attacked Ratzel’s geocentric formulations and rhetorically asked which academic profession was best suited to pursue investigations concerning the organic and societal determinants of social behavior and change. He then argued that historians had forfeited their claim to leadership over the social sciences as the result of their unsound and unscientific methodologies, excessive specialization, inadequate emphasis on synthesis, refusal to develop general laws of historical development, and lack of concern for scholarship useful for contemporary purposes. This imperial presupposition informed the combative tone of Simiand’s work and relations with other disciplines – history included. François Joseph Charles Simiand was born into a family of secular public school educators in Gières (Isère), France on April 18, 1873. Following “brilliant” studies in all of his classes as a scholarship student at the Lyceum of Grenoble in 1890, he attended the elite preparatory school, Lycée Henri-IV, in Paris where, under the admiring tutelage of Henri Bergson among others, he graduated second in his class with first prizes in French composition and history in 1892. He then entered the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure but was immediately drafted to fulfill yearlong obligatory military service. He returned in 1893 and studied the works of Auguste Comte in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s class. He received his BA (licence dès lettres) in 1894. Simiand received his agrégation, a postgraduate degree, and graduated first in philosophy in the class of 1896. He then pursued doctoral studies in philosophy at the Fondation Thiers from 1896 to 1899, where he encountered the sociological ideas of Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. While still a graduate student, Simiand was a popular lecturer at the People’s University in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. He subsequently transferred to law school in order to better concentrate on sociological issues through its economic curriculum. The socialist political theory and ideals of civic engagement shared by many students and faculty at the Ecole normale at the turn of the century influenced Simiand. He embraced Lucien Herr, Jean Jaurès, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Charles Andler’s reformist agendas for social justice, and believed that the social science envisioned by Durkheimian scholars provided the analytical tools necessary to engineer social change. Imbued with a Saint-Simonian sense of dirigisme, a neoKantian faith in human reason, and a Comtian concern for accurate data concerning social relations, Simiand became an active member of socialist student organizations and published a series of articles in the Manuel général de l’instruction primaire (General Manual for Primary Instruction) critiquing existing tax schemes,

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the division of labor, public education, and so forth. He signed a petition addressing the violation of judicial procedure in the Dreyfus Affair in 1906. Simiand also organized international conferences for socialist students and drafted various manifestos. His interest in labor movements and social change led him to the employment that would complement his academic interests throughout his professional career. He worked as Librarian for the Ministry of Commerce (1901–6) and then the Ministry of Labor (1906–21). By eschewing a conventional academic career and establishing his own research base, Simiand assured the independence and autonomy of his intellectual, political, and disciplinary commitments. This position helped him launch and direct a variety of research, editorial, and publishing projects. Simiand secured a reputation as a sharp and combative polemicist through hard-hitting book reviews he contributed to the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Metaphysical and Moral Review) in 1897–8; the Revue politique et parlementaire (Political and Parliamentary Revue); and the Revue du mois (The Monthly Review), among other publications. This “enormous bibliographic work [in the vicinity of five hundred reviews] … established the scholarly reputation of economic sociologists” at the dawn of the twentieth century. This reputation was enhanced by his editorial co-direction with Hubert Bourgin, Georges Bourgin, Paul Fauconnet, Célestin Bouglé, and Maurice Halbwachs of the special section on economic sociology in all twelve volumes of L’Année sociologique (The Sociological Year) published between 1898 and 1913. Simiand wrote encyclopedic entries for the Grande encyclopédie, and he served on the Editorial Committee of the Revue d’économie politique (Political Economy Revue) and as Editing Director of a “New Economic Library” series. He also taught courses with Marcel Mauss on union activity and organization from 1898 through 1910; lectured in the history of economic theory at the Ecoles des hautes études in Paris until 1914; and delivered a series of lectures at the London School of Economics in January and February of 1914. Despite Henri Bergson’s and Jules Renard’s support, Simiand sought, but failed to receive, the chair in the Studies of Social and Economic Activities (chaire d’études des faits économiques et sociaux) at the Collège de France previously held by Emile Levasseur. His socialist sympathies were alleged to have alienated business and merchant interests. Simiand developed a critique of existing methodological practices in the social and human sciences by publishing reader’s notes and reviews in various journals. As editor of the sociology pages in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in 1896–7, Simiand attacked the metaphysical assumptions that underpinned the organicist sociology associated with the Revue internationale de sociologie (International Revue of Sociology) as unsound, outdated, and untenable. His review of Organisme et société (Organism and Society) by René Worms (who also happened to be the president of the Revue internationale de sociologie), for instance, challenged the author’s reliance on nineteenth-century theories that linked the natural and social sciences through outdated theories of embryonic development. Simiand similarly

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inveighed against Marcel Bernès’s treatment of society as a moral entity in Sociologie et morale (Sociology and Morality, 1896), as philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically suspect. Simiand even questioned Emile Durkheim’s reliance in Le Suicide, étude de sociologie (On Suicide, 1897) on data conflating single and therefore unique events with repeated and presumably uniform phenomena. Simiand’s research on the history of industrial costs, productivity, and wages outlined new sociological methods. He used statistical archives (especially the Statistiques de l’industrie minéral published by the Administration d’état du corps des mines) to reconstruct a history of prices and pricing. His “Essai sur le prix du charbon en France au XIXieme siècle” (“Essay on the price of coal in France in the nineteenth century, 1900–1), first published in L’Année sociologique, launched the principal project of Simiand’s career. He spent three decades transposing sociological concepts and methods of analysis to economic history in order to establish a new méthode positive (empirical method), thereby pioneering the field of economic sociology. Simiand then investigated the history of wages in the coal industry as an essential component of overall prices. This dissertation project, entitled “Le salaire des ouvriers des mines de charbon: contribution à la théorie économique du salaire” (“Workers’ wages in coal mines: a contribution to the economic theory of wages,” 1904), completed his requirements for a PhD in Law in 1904. The work was subsequently published in an expanded edition under the same title in 1907. These works touched on some of the most important elements of Simiand’s later works. He depicted modern economies as evolving cyclically, informed by social as well as industrial factors, and subject to verifiable statistical analysis. His confidence in the methodological value of statistical analysis, historical trends, and collective psychology emboldened Simiand to critique their absence in contemporary historical practice. He addressed “[t]he unease about method, of which one sees many signs at present among historians,” in terms of “the relations of proximity, of rivalry, and indeed of conflict that exist more and more between traditional history and the new social science.” Indeed, because Simiand developed his methodological ideas through his critiques of contemporary works in the social and human sciences, the two voices remain inextricably linked throughout his oeuvre. Pierre Lacombe had already challenged historians to adopt sociological perspectives and to redirect their energies toward normative phenomena, causal explanations, social relationships, and comparative methodologies in L’Histoire considérée comme science (History Considered as Science, 1894). Charles Seignobos – who, with Victor Langlois, published in 1898 their Introduction aux études historiques (Introduction to Historical Studies) which defended history’s disciplinary autonomy and made the close, critical reading of primary sources the center of the historical method – resolutely rejected Lacombe’s project and reaffirmed the superiority of historical methods over those of other humanities disciplines in La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences (Historical Method Applied to the Sciences, 1901). Simiand countered with a thoroughgoing and provocative critique of con-


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temporary historical methods and objectives in a lecture given at the 1903 Société d’histoire moderne conference entitled “Méthode historique et science sociale” (“Historical method and social science”), which was later published in Henri Berr’s Revue de synthèse historique (Review of Historical Synthesis, 1903). Simiand charged historians with worshipping three false historical idols: “the perpetual preoccupation” with high politics, the chronological and obsessive pursuit of uninterrupted origins of “great events,” and the “inveterate habit” of conceiving history in terms of the activities of “great” individuals. This thirty-year-old firebrand and “methodological fanatic” charged Seignobos – the doyen of French historical studies and therefore, by extension, the historical profession at large – with numerous methodological deficiencies, imprecisions, and inconsistencies. Thinking as a sociologist eager to elevate the “social” over the “individual,” and building on the argument outlined in his Déduction et observation psychologiques en économie sociale: remarques de méthode (Psychological Observations and Deductions in Social Economy: Reflections on Method, 1899), Simiand faulted historians for not rigorously maintaining a distinction between subjective and objective categories and for providing ample description (however useful) at the expense of sound explanation. Historical narratives that focused on the lives of individuals, he argued, often conflated social phenomenon with subjectivity and thereby mistook independent and external factors for the characteristics that constitute individual personality. He found this mistake to be entirely peculiar, coming as it did from a profession that regularly denied the objective reality of social psychological phenomena as “pure abstraction.” However much they may themselves be abstractions, Simiand posited that social categories provided superior analytic criteria insofar as they described and theorized social phenomena regularly repeated over time: “The regularities of coexistence and succession among phenomena that are uncovered and expressed by science impose themselves on us; they are not our doing, and therein lies their objective value.” This line of reasoning implicitly recognized that the temporal dimension of historical analysis – that is, the study of change over time – was an essential component of the sociological project. In contrast, he noted, the historians’ propensity for favoring singular over regular events was enshrined in a methodology that fetishized documents associated with unique and accidental occurrences whose causal antecedents remained ambiguous. This propensity produced false perspectives, misguided causality, and suspect teleologies. Simiand pointed to Seignobos’ attribution of the most important developments in the nineteenth century to the words and deeds of famous statesmen and kings as an illustrative example of mistaking the spark for the powder keg. Simiand extended this critique to the economic historian Henri Hauser, accusing him of using imprecise social categories and an “eclectic” methodology in De l’enseignement des sciences sociales (Teaching in the Social Sciences, 1900). The French field of human geography – very influential in the French educational system as a result of Paul Vidal de la Blache’s tutelage and scholarship – was

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also subjected to Simiand’s critical interrogation. His review essay of Albert Demangeon, Raoul Blanchard, C. V. Allaux, Antoine Vacher, and Jules Sion’s monographs in L’Année sociologique (1909) faulted geographers for their penchant for narrowly focused regional studies (in truth, they were equally interested in comparative studies, especially in colonial research) and for not generating quantifiable information that more easily lent itself to theoretical analysis. Simiand also maintained that such enterprises were better conducted within social morphology, a subdiscipline of sociology that focused on the structural determinants of social change. In practice, social-morphological studies bore a striking resemblance to geographical genre-de-vie (folkway) studies that focused on livelihood patterns within well-defined parameters (local/regional/national milieux) in the belief that occupational homogeneity provided the optimal rationale for social organization. Like geographers, social morphologists examined social groups rather than individuals but differed amongst themselves concerning how much to emphasize environmental factors before minimizing the impact of social factors in modifying human responses. Simiand addressed emerging trends in economic history in his book reviews. His critical comments concerning Emile Levasseur’s Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industire en France avant 1789 (The History of Working Classes and Industry before 1789, 1900); Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industire en France de 1789 à 1870 (The History of Working Classes and Industry from 1789 to 1870, 1903); Charles Gide’s Economie sociale: les institutions du progrès social au début du XXème siècle (The Institutions of Social Progress in the Early Twentieth Century, 1905); and Paul Mantoux’s La Révolution industrielle au XVIIIème siècle (The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1906) in L’Année sociologique (1902–6) emphasized the need for a greater recognition of the role of social phenomena in both economic development and political policy-making as well as greater efforts to develop better schemas of historical periodization. He remained disappointed, however, by the continued dependence of economic historians on traditional political narratives and on the activities of “great” individuals as explanatory devices. Simiand examined the theoretical limitations of neo-classical economic theory in reviews of Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, and Vilfredo Pareto, subsequently collected in La Méthode positive en science économique (Positive Method in Economic Science, 1912). He faulted their poor theoretical orientation and ignorance of social realities, as well as the limitations of static models and the use of deductive rather than inductive research methods. Anticipating his Statistique et expérience (Statistics and Practice, 1922), Simiand focused on how static economic models (based on stable scenarios) “pathologized” downward cycles and could not explain the changing realities of economic history. Simiand also rejected the individualist assumptions of Adam Smith’s homo economicus and the neo-classical model of supply and demand as reductive and based on earlier economic realities.


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Most notable among Simiand’s early works in economic history are those that rely on the statistical analysis of hard data, such as his “Essai sur le prix du charbon en France au XIXe siècle,” Le Salaire des ouvriers des mines en France, and Le Salaire des ouvriers des mines de charbon: contribution à la théorie économique du salaire (The Salaries of Coal Mine Workers: Contribution to the Economic Theory of Salary), published in 1901, 1904, and 1907 respectively. This project was extended in “La formation et les fluctuations des prix du charbon en France, pendant 25 ans (1887–1912)” (“The price of coal in France from 1887 to 1912: standards and fluctuations) in 1925. In his Statistique et expérience and Recherches statistiques historiques (Historical Statistics Research, 1931), Simiand argued that statistical analysis represents the use of an “experimental method” insofar as the data generated reflect regular, repeated, and verifiable phenomena. Simiand further developed his challenges to historians and economists, calling upon the former to theorize their practice more often and calling upon the latter to historicize their practice by paying greater attention to documentary and statistical evidence, challenges already articulated in Simiand’s “La méthode positive en science économique” (“Positive method in the social sciences,” 1911). Simiand’s professional interest in economic history supported his personal commitment to engineering social progress. His experience serving as director of a cooperative technical school, for example, provided the basis for a pedagogical discussion of socialist economics in “Le problème économique” (“The economic problem”) in the collaborative Le Socialisme à l’oeuvre: ce qu’on a fait, ce qu’on peut faire (Socialism at Work: What We Have Done, What We Can Do, 1907) with Georges Renard, Aimé Berthod, Georges Fréville, Adolphe Landry, and Paul Mantoux. In addition to contributing articles to the Revue socialiste (Socialist Revue), Carnets socialistes (Socialist Notebooks), and the Revue d’union (Union Review), Simiand also collaborated on a number of editorial projects, working, for example, with Charles Péguy to found the “Georges Bellais Books” collection. Following Péguy’s departure from the Socialist Party, Simiand edited the “Socialist Library” (Bibliothèque socialiste) collection from 1898 to 1910. Simiand drafted and published a petition against three-year obligatory military service in L’Humanité (March 13 and 16, 1913) with Emile Durkheim, Lucien Herr, and Charles Seignobos. He also continued to co-edit L’Avenir, revue du socialisme (The Future, Socialist Review) with Henri Bourgin from 1916 to 1919. He parted with militant party socialists, however, over the issue of their pacifism and support for the Soviet Union. Mobilized into the French army in Paris on August 15, 1914, Simiand quickly married Louise Voluchenèdre, the daughter of a smith and twenty-one years his senior, on October 20, 1914. His leadership and expertise were instrumental to the reorganization and modernization of France’s heavy armament industries. He was appointed to head Under-Secretary of State Albert Thomas’ Artillery and Munitions Cabinet from May 1915 until September 1917. Exhausted from overwork, Simiand took several months’ emergency convalescence in 1915 before

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returning – not entirely in good health and following surgery – to head the cabinet of the Minister of Armaments and War Production, first under Albert Thomas in 1916 and then Louis Loucheur in 1917. For these services, Simiand was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor on October 6, 1917. Following the end of World War I in 1918, Simiand held several civilian posts in the French government. He was briefly (February 1919 to April 1919) French Secretary to the Committee on Raw Materials for the Supreme Economic Council before being appointed to Strasbourg as the all-important Director of Labor, Social Welfare and Legislation in the newly repatriated departments of Alsace and Lorraine. Simiand described how he smoothed the transition from authoritarian German to more democratic French labor systems, organizations, and laws in his “Travail, législation ouvrière et assurances sociales” (“Work, legislation, and social security,” 1921). He also lectured in economics and labor law at the Strasbourg School of Law from April 1919 to October 1920. The experience of running France’s war economy confirmed Simiand’s belief in the expediency of central economic planning and the use of empirical information on which to base rational policies, a belief shared by a number of interwar ministries. Simiand’s scholarship during the late 1920s and early 1930s was prodigious. His research and lectures throughout this period illustrated the proposition that sociological methods could benefit both historical and economic inquiry. Simiand’s work also offered an unprecedented examination of France’s industrial sectors in historical and sociological perspective, while providing iconoclastic reinterpretations of existing theories of economic progress. Simiand sought to understand how fluctuations and imbalances in prices, production, and wages pointed to underlying economic laws and principles that were themselves activated by organizations and social groups motivated by profit. In 1932, three volumes of lecture notes (from his lectures at the Ecole pratique des hautes études) on the causes and rhythms of price fluctuations in modern Europe since the eighteenth century were published as Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement général des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Old and New Research on the General Movement of Prices from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century), and three more volumes of lecture notes appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s in his Cours d’économie politique professé au Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Course on Political Economy Offered at the National Conservatory of Arts and Trades, 1929–31). Building on Clémont Juglar’s theory of ten-year business cycles and Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratiev’s long-wave (fifty to sixty years) theory of economic cycles, Simiand investigated the morphology of economic cycles in European and world history in his three-volume Cours d’économie politique professé au Conservatoire national. These collected lectures describe a pattern of long-term, alternating economic cycles that Simiand calls phases A and B. Phase A designates a period of economic growth characterized by rising prices, expanding trade networks, increasing populations, a rising Gross National Product, business optimism, overseas expansion, and inflation. Phase B designates a period of economic stagnation or contraction


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characterized by stable or falling prices, a steady or falling population, a declining Gross National Product, business pessimism, a contracting economy, and reduced investments. Simiand’s phases vary in length and correspond to historical epochs such as the sixteenth-century “Price Revolution,” the “General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” and the “Industrial Revolution.” Simiand is careful to note that these phases A and B are descriptive and do not exist without modifications. He recognizes that economic phases are not universal, continuous, or monolithic; they are experienced at different times, in different regions, and contain within them smaller countervailing cycles. Perhaps Simiand’s most important point is the recognition that these cycles are a normal component of economic development. Simiand’s subsequent works further developed his theory of economic cycles. Both Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement général des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècle and Inflation et stabilisation alternée: le développement économique des EtatsUnis, des origines coloniales au temps présent (Alternating Inflation and Stabilization: The Economic Development of the United States, from the Colonial Period to the Present, 1934) examine economic evolution in terms of social and monetary causes that predate and are more important than short-term crises that serve as immediate triggers. Together, these works outline a theory of cyclical economic development that radically challenged existing explanatory models. Simiand’s Les Fluctuations économiques à longue période et la crise mondiale (Long-term Economic Fluctuations and the Global Depression, 1932) brings Simiand’s theories to bear on the contemporary economic crisis. It argues that the 1929 market crash could be understood in terms of economic cycles traceable to the eighteenth century. The crash, he argues, reveals a ten-year shift from an expanding to a contracting global economy: “let us recognize ourselves at present as being at the turn from phase A to phase B.” Providing fresh examinations of the causes of the Great Depression of 1929 and the theories that failed to explain it, Simiand’s magnum opus is yet another threevolume work, entitled Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie: essai de théorie expérimental du salaire. Introduction et étude global (Salary, Social Evolution, and Currency: Toward an Experimental Theory of Wages, 1932). This book synthesizes his ideas, research, and theories – many of which Simiand had been refining since the turn of the century – to demonstrate how and explain why both monetary mechanisms and Keynesian factors (responsible for salary fluctuations) should figure in the study of modern economies. Le Salaire also substantially lessens Simiand’s earlier hostility to methodological diversity, the legitimacy of other disciplines, and their ability to generate synthetic and analytic theoretical statements. He recognizes the legitimacy of comparative and other disciplinary approaches providing they adhere to rigorous scientific methods. Simiand’s theory of money links quantitative and qualitative elements. His research in the patterns and trends of collectively held beliefs supported a Keynesian or “realist” approach to economic analysis. Initially addressed through his book

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reviews in L’Année sociologique, such as his 1912 review of Irving Fisher’s The Purchasing Power of Money and his “Quelques remarques sur la récente littérature monétaire” (“Reflections on recent market literature”) of 1923–4, among others, Simiand developed a monetary theory, called “social monetarism,” that identified money as the product of social relations: “certain activities or relations lead to specific results constitutes a causal objective fact and not an interpretation …” (Le Salaire). First presented at the Institut français de sociologie (French Institute of Sociology) and published in the Annales sociologiques, his “La monnaie, réalité sociale” (“Money: social reality,” 1934) interpreted money as both a material product and a method of exchange, and as a social symbol that reflected status, whose social construction (the product of “sentiment as much as reason”) was necessary for understanding the expansion and contraction of modern economic cycles. Building on his review of W. W. Carlyle’s The Evolution of Modern Money (in L’Année sociologique in 1901), as well as on his readings of J.-J. Gislain and P. Steiner’s La Sociologie économique (Economic Sociology, 1905) and of Marcel Mauss’s work on the symbolic aspects of money in “Essai sur le don” (“The Gift,” 1924), Simiand ascribed various attitudes toward commercial prospects to discrete social groups. Their differing levels of confidence in money, he argued, translated into variably converging and diverging political policies, as well as spending behaviors that further varied depending on the contemporaneous phase of economic contraction or expansion. At the macroeconomic level, then, social perceptions and behaviors ranging from the willingness to pay off existing debts to the setting of interest rates – rather than strict economic laws concerning markets and homo economicus – exogenously determined the availability of the money supply. Simiand’s last major work, Inflation et stabilisation alternée: le développement économique des Etats-Unis, brings his most developed ideas to bear on the case study of what he considered to be the paradigmatic modern exchange economy. Based on his lectures at the Collège de France in 1933, Inflation et stabilisation alternée examines the history of the United States from the eighteenth century to the 1930s in terms of economic cycles (A and B phases) and the link between national (domestic) and global (international) factors as mediated through international monetary systems based on precious metals. Claiming that the United States was born “under the sign of inflation,” Simiand considers it to represent both a prototypical and model example of a modern complex economy insofar as it combined impressive growth orientation, violent market fluctuations, and innovative monetary policies. Despite expressing reservations concerning Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Simiand’s text offers insights into his own political ideas concerning how and when governments should engineer social progress by manipulating monetary policies and breaking currency/reserve ratios in order to prompt or manipulate domestic economic subcycles within the global (A and B phases) economy. In the end, however, Inflation et stabilisation alternée seeks a middle ground between laisser-faire and directed economies. Although economists now agree that markets warranted all possible measures of economic stimulus


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following the crash of 1929, Simiand appears to have fallen back on his World War I experience when he argues that because global economies based on complex systems of exchange inevitably produce economic imbalances, governments should seek to organize but cannot control. Thanks in part to these continuing contributions to the field of economic history, and despite hostility for his socialist leanings, Simiand was nominated Director of Studies at the Ecole pratique des hautes études at the Sorbonne in 1920 and elevated to Professor of Political Economy at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in 1923, a post that he held until 1934. He became president of the Société de statistique de Paris in 1921. He was also elected vice president and then president of the Institut français de sociologie (French Institute of Sociology), serving from 1924 to 1933. Simiand’s considerable professional obligations dovetailed with his political interests. He wrote newspaper articles for L’Aurore, La Volonté, Le Coopérateur de France, and – under the pseudonym François Daveillans – the Revue blanche. Simiand collaborated with socialists associated with Lucien Herr’s circle and was, for example, one of the first to sign Charles Gide’s “Manifeste coopératif ” (“Cooperative manifesto”) in 1921. Despite a demanding schedule and fragile health, he actively consulted with labor unions on technical issues, directed self-help study groups (such as the Groupe d’études socialistes et l’école socialiste), delivered public lectures on the merits of cooperative workers’ institutions, and provided editorial assistance to journals such as Cahiers du socialiste (with Robert Hertz), Revue socialiste, and Albert Thomas’ Revue syndicaliste. Simiand founded and became the director of a new cooperative technical school for union members (L’Ecole coopérative de la Fédération nationale des coopératives de consommation) in 1928. It was (re)named L’Ecole coopérative François Simiand in 1930. Although Simiand no longer officially associated with the Socialist Party, he continued to support various labor movements by providing technical advice and strategizing union activities. For example, upon replacing Georges Renard as Professor of Labor History at the Collège de France in 1932, his inaugural address outlined the scope of academic work accomplished and remaining to be done in labor history in Histoire du travail (The History of Work, 1933). Simiand worked with Gaëten Pirou to publish a series of hard-to-find texts by important economic theorists called “Collection des principaux economists” (“Collection of Principal Economists,” 1933–8). He remained at the Collège de France until 1935. Before he could assume a new position as Head of Regional Labor Organizations in the region (département) of l’Oise, he died in Saint-Raphaël on April 13, 1935. The Collège de France held a commemorative session in Simiand’s honor on April 25, 1936. Simiand’s reputation has unevenly endured the absorption of some of his fundamental ideas and their displacement as a result of changing disciplinary and research interests. Aside from his junior associates, such as Maurice Halbwachs and graduate students who tended to pursue careers in mainstream sociology, Simiand left no “school” of scholars to bear his name. Although Durkheimian

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scholars achieved prestigious positions within their lifetime, their collective heritage fared poorly within French sociology following World War II. Simiand’s methodological agenda, however, was well received within French economic, anthropological, and historical traditions. Simiand’s preoccupations with inductive reasoning, cliometric analysis, longue durée perspectives, collective beliefs, and economic cycles greatly influenced the works of economic historians such as Ernest Labrousse’s Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIème siècle (Sketch of the Movement of Prices and Revenues in Eighteenth-century France) in 1933, Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et la monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) in 1949, and their joint Histoire économique et sociale de la France (An Economic and Social History of France) in 1970–82. Indeed, although Simiand declined in order to complete his own projects, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre asked him to head the Annales research on the history of prices (in 1930). Simiand’s legacy remains paradoxical. Very little of his work has been translated into English. Nonetheless, interest in Simiand’s work remains evident, even today. In 1960, Fernand Braudel republished Simiand’s 1903 “Méthode historique et science sociale” in Annales as a methodological manifesto for “new history” with an editorial comment calculated to help young historians “better understand the dialogue between history and the social sciences, which remains the goal and reason for our journal.” An anthology of his essays was collected, edited, and published by Marina Cédronio in 1987 under the title Méthode historique et sciences sociales (Historical Method and Social Sciences). A three-day “François Simiand” conference (journées d’études) held in Paris May 13–15, 1992 has greatly helped to resituate one of France’s most eminent economists, sociologists, and historians in contemporary discussions concerning intellectual and methodological currents within France’s early twentieth-century social and human sciences. Twenty-four papers edited by Lucien Gillard and Michel Rosier have been collected into an indispensable volume: François Simiand (1873–1935): sociologie, histoire, économie (François Simiand [1873–1935]: Sociology, History, Economy, 1996). Questions concerning Simiand’s emphasis on direct observation as an unproblematic research method remain difficult to resolve. Ludovic Frobert, among others, invokes Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of critical projection to underscore Simiand’s imaginative process as revealing the pole of a methodological spectrum which arguably retained elements of nineteenth-century positivism as its counterweight. In order to replace homo economicus as the wellspring of economic behavior, Simiand’s methodology was further complicated by his ventures into the realms of social psychology and other collective beliefs neither dictated nor explained by statistical tables and hard data. In the final analysis, however – and perhaps this compliment is the highest paid to him – those whom Simiand sought to convert to the standards of more rigorous investigation, did so, not under the aegis of sociology as a master narrative, as he had hoped, but within their respective disciplines.


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References and Further Reading Selected Books by François Simiand Déduction et observation psychologiques en économie sociale: remarques de méthode (Paris: Armand Colin, 1899). De l’enseignement des sciences sociales à l’école primaire en France (Paris: Alcan, 1900). Le Salaire des ouvriers des mines en France (Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1904). Le Salaire des ouvriers des mines de charbon: contribution à la théorie économique du salaire (Paris: Comély, 1907). La Méthode positive en science économique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912). L’Enseignement commercial et la formation des professeurs (Paris: 36 rue Vaneau, 1914). Statistique et experience: remarques de méthode (Paris: M. Rivière, 1922). Economie politique: cours professé au Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, 2 vols. (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1928, 1930). Cours d’économie politique professé au Conservatoire national des arts et métiers en 1928–1929, 1929–1930, 1930–1931, 3 vols. (Paris: Domat-Monchrestien, 1929–31). Les Fluctuations économiques à longue période et la crise mondiale (Paris: Alcan, 1932). Histoire du travail au Collège de France (Paris: Alcan, 1932). Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement général des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Domat-Monchrestien, 1932). Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie: essai de théorie expérimental du salaire. Introduction et étude global, 3 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1932). De l’échange à l’économie complexe (Paris: Editions de la Pensée Ouvrière, 1934). Inflation et stabilisation alternée: le développement économique des Etats-Unis, des origines coloniales au temps présent (Paris: Domat-Monchrestien, 1934). Méthode historique et sciences sociales, edited by Marina Cédronio (Paris: Editions des Archives contemporaines, 1987). Critique sociologique de l’économie, edited by Jean-Christophe Marcel and Philippe Steiner (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006).

Selected Articles by François Simiand “L’année sociologique française 1896,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 5 (1897): 489–519. “Etudes critiques: l’année sociologique française 1897,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1898): 606–9. “Essai sur le prix du charbon en France au XIXième siècle,” L’Année sociologique, 5 (1900–1): 1–81. “Méthode historique et science sociale: étude critique d’après les ouvrages récents de M. Lacombe et de M. Seignobos,” Revue de synthèse historique, (1903): 1–22, 129–57; reprinted in Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 15 (1960): 83–119; translated as “Historical method and social science,” Review, 9 (2) (1985): 163–213. “Systèmes économiques,” L’Année sociologique, 7 (1904): 569–97. “La causalité en histoire,” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 5 (1906): 245–90.

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“Le problème économique,” in Le Socialisme à l’oeuvre: ce qu’on a fait, ce qu’on peut faire, edited by Georges Renard (Paris: E. Cornély, 1907). “Le salaire des ouvriers des mines de charbon en France,” Journal de la Société de statistique de Paris, 1 (1908): 89–107. “La théorie économique du salaire et l’économie politique traditionelle,” Revue du mois (1909): 346–9. “La méthode positive en science économique,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1912): 889–904; reprinted in Critique sociologique de l’économie, edited by Jean-Christophe Marcel and Philippe Steiner (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006). “Travail, législation ouvrière et assurances sociales” in Les Débuts de l’administration française en Alsace et en Lorraine, edited by Georges Delahache (Paris: Hachette, 1921). “Monnaie et faits monétaire: quelques remarques sur la récente littérature monétaire,” L’Année sociologique, n.s. 1 (1923–4): 758–65. “La formation et les fluctuations des prix du charbon en France, pendant 25 ans (1887– 1912),” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, 13 (1925): 63–108. “Le salaire, l’évolution et la monnaie,” Revue d’économie politique, 14 (1931): 1169–89. “Quelques remarques sur l’évolution économique internationale et les grandes fluctuations monétaires,” in Economic Essays in Honour of Gustav Cassel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933), pp. 581–90. “Une enquête oubliée sur une grande crise méconnnue (la crise de 1884 à Paris),” in Mélanges Edgar Milhaud (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934), pp. 289–303. “Les essais économiques et monétaires de M. Charles Rist,” Revue d’économie politique, 18 (1934): 172–88. “La monnaie, réalité sociale,” Annales sociologiques, série D, 1 (1934): 1–86. “La psychologie sociale des crises et les fluctuations économiques de courte durée,” Annales sociologiques, série D, 2 (1937): 3–32.

Selected Book Reviews by François Simiand “Compte rendu de M. Bernès, Sociologie et morale,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1897): 509–17. “Compte rendu de M. Giddings, Principes de sociologie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1897): 505–9. “Compte rendu de R. Worms, Organisme et société,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1897): 491–9. “Compte rendu de Charles Langlois et Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1898): 633–41. “Compte rendu de Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide, étude de sociologie,” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1898): 641–5. “La revue L’Année sociologique de Emile Durkheim: ‘Conclusions à l’année sociologique française 1897,’ ” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1898): 652–3. “Compte rendu de G. Schmoller, Grundriss der Allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftlehre,” L’Année sociologique, 4 (1900): 487–96. “Compte rendu de A. Bowley, Elements of Statistics,” L’Année sociologique, 5 (1901): 472–4. “Compte rendu de E. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industire en France avant 1789,” L’Année sociologique, 6 (1902): 456–9.


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“Compte rendu de E. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industire en France de 1789 à 1870,” in L’Année sociologique, 8 (1904): 556–8. “Compte rendu de Ch. Gide, Economie sociale: les institutions du progrès social au début du XXème siècle,” L’Année sociologique, 9 (1905): 516–22. “Compte rendu de P. Mantoux, La Révolution industrielle au XVIIIème siècle,” L’Année sociologique, 10 (1906): 539–51. “Compte rendu de A. Demangeon, La Picardie et les régions voisines; R. Blanchard, La Flandre: étude géographique de la plaine flamande en France, Belgique et Hollande; C. V. Allaux, La Basse Bretagne: étude géographique humaine; A. Vacher, Le Berry: contribution à l’étude géographique d’une région française; J. Sion, Les Paysans de la Normandie orientale: pays de Caux, Bray, Vexin normand, Vallée de la Seine,” L’Année sociologique, 11 (1909): 723–32. “Irving Fisher, The Purchasing Power of Money,” L’Année sociologique, 12 (1909–12): 704–5.

References Besnard, Philippe, The Sociological Domain, the Durkheimians, and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Bloch, Marc, “Le salaire et les fluctuations économiques à longue pèriode,” Revue historique, 173 (1932): 1–31. Chaunu, Pierre, “Histoire sérielle, bilan et perspective,” Revue historique, 494 (1970): 297–320. Damalas, B. V., L’Oeuvre scientifique de François Simiand (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1943). Day, John, “François Simiand and the Annales School of History,” in Money and Finance in the Age of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 139–50. Dreyfus, M., “Simiand, Francois,” Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais, 41 (1992): 47–51. Durkheim, Emile, “F. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie,” L’Année sociologique, 3 (1898–99): 550–8. Febvre, Lucien, “Correspondance avec François Simiand,” Vingtième siècle, 3 (1989): 103–10. Febvre, Lucien, “Histoire, économie et statistique,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (1930): 581–90. Febvre, Lucien, “Pour les historiens un livre de chevret: le cours d’économie politique se Simiand,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (1933): 161–3. Frobert, Ludovic, Le Travail de François Simiand (1873–1935) (Paris: Economica, 2000). Gillard, Lucien and Rosier, Michel (eds.), François Simiand (1873–1935): sociologie, histoire, économie (Amsterdam: Editions des Archives contemporaines, 1996). Halbwachs, Maurice, “François Simiand,” Journal de la Société de statistique de Paris, 3 (1935): 252–6. Heilbron, Johan, “Economic sociology in France,” European Societies, 3 (1) (2001): 41– 76. Keylor, William R., Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

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Lebaron, Frédéric, “Bases of sociological inquiry: from François Simiand and Maurice Halbwachs to Pierre Bourdieu,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 38 (1) (2001): 54–63. Leroux, Robert, “Le problème de l’histoire chez François Simiand,” in Histoire et sociologie en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). Marcel, Jean-Christophe, Le Durkheimisme dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001). Mauss, Marcel, “Francois Simiand,” Le Populaire, April 19, 1935. Morazé, Charles, “Les leçons d’un échec: essai sur la méthode de Simiand,” Mélanges d’histoire sociale, 1 (1941): 5–24. Mucchielli, Laurent, “Aux origines de la nouvelle histoire: l’évolution intellectuelle et la formation du champ des sciences sociales,” Revue de synthèse, 4 (1) (1995): 55–99. Noiriel, Gérard, “L’‘éthique de la discussion’ chez François Simiand,” in Penser avec, penser contre: itinéraire d’un historien (Paris: Belin, 2003), pp. 47–61. Revel, Jacques, “Microanalysis and the construction of the social,” in Histories, French Construction of the Past, edited by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 492–502. Steiner, Philippe, La Sociologie économique, 1890–1920: Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Joseph Schumpeter, François Simiand, Thorstein Veblen et Max Weber (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995). Whalen, Philip, “The milieu discourse in French history, geography, and sociology,” in “The life and works of Gaston Roupnel,” unpublished PhD thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2000, pp. 132–202.

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Albert Soboul (1914–1982) Peter McPhee

Albert Soboul’s eminence as an historian stemmed from his profound knowledge of the history of France between 1770 and 1815, and from his capacity to articulate this knowledge within a formidable explanatory narrative. Soboul’s corpus was remarkable: he produced over three hundred books, chapters, and articles before his death in 1982. His doctoral thesis on the Parisian sans-culottes was regarded as a landmark in the historiography of popular participation in the French Revolution. In subsequent overviews of the Revolution, he articulated a detailed, compelling, but controversial Marxist analysis and narrative of the complex interplay of class interests in a society undergoing extreme stress. In particular, his 1962 history of the Revolution represents the ultimate statement of French Marxist understanding of the Revolution as a profoundly transforming revolution driven by long-term, fundamental socioeconomic forces mediated through the actions of a distinctive structure of social classes. The first half of Soboul’s life has been vividly recalled in a series of interviews given shortly before his death and published by Claude Mazauric in 2004 as Soboul: un historien en son temps. Albert Soboul (1914–1982) (Soboul: A Historian in his Time. Albert Soboul [1914–1982]). His father had been a landless laborer and a textile worker before being granted sixty hectares of semi-arid land in Algeria. He died seven months after his son’s birth, on November 29, 1914, at the start of the Great War. Albert and his sister Gisèle were raised in a small house in the tiny village of la Croisette d’Uzer in the southern French department of the Ardèche, before returning with their mother to Algeria. When his mother died in 1922 the orphans were taken as pupilles de la nation, or wards of the state, to live in Nîmes with their aunt Marie, a teacher at the Ecole normale d’institutrices, of which she became director in 1926. From 1924 to 1931 Soboul attended the Lycée Alphonse Daudet

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in Nîmes. There, his history and philosophy teacher, Jean Morini-Comby, a published historian of the Revolution, inspired the young man with his passion for historical study and for the works of Corneille, Racine, and Michelet. While Soboul was to become, above all, an historian of France and of the Parisian sansculottes movement during the French Revolution, his links with Nîmes were always close, and he wrote many of his books, articles, and conference papers in his family’s home there. His aunt Marie, as Soboul later recognized, was perhaps the crucial formative influence on him, personifying as she did the values of the “laic Republic”: a commitment to secular reason, a modest lifestyle, and dedication to “the people.” After World War II, she became a member of the Department of the Gard Liberation Committee, and she was a municipal councillor in Nîmes until 1959. After a year’s university study in Montpellier, Soboul went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in October 1932. There, he quickly became involved with the left-wing students of the Latin Quarter, through the Union fédérale des étudiants, a Parti communiste français (PCF) front, but Soboul formally joined the party only in June 1939. After passing his agrégation in 1938, he decided to become an historian and, on the advice of the Marxist historian Jean Bruhat and in the context of the 1939 sesquicentennial, chose to undertake his first research on the ideas of Saint-Just (Soboul published this work using the pseudonym of Pierre Derocles). It was at this time that he first encountered Jean-René Suratteau, a fellow historian of the Revolution who would become Soboul’s life-long friend, and that Soboul met PCF leaders such as Jacques Duclos, Maurice Thorez, and Gabriel Péri. After mobilization in 1940 and subsequent retreat to Bordeaux, Soboul was finally appointed as a teacher in Montpellier, where he threw himself into political activities with his friends from school days. On Bastille Day in 1942, Soboul was one of the organizers of an anti-Vichy demonstration in Montpellier, after which he was arrested and dismissed from his position. It is not known precisely what involvement he had in the Resistance, although he later referred to activities with the maquis in the Vercors in eastern France, where friends had found him temporary work at Villard-de-Lans in 1943. After the war he was offered the position of secretary to the new departmental administration of the Gard but, whether through choice or because of disapproval from Paris, opted for a career as an historian. In 1948, Soboul commenced his doctoral thesis, “Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II” (“The Parisian sans-culottes in the year II”), under the supervision of Georges Lefebvre. Soboul undertook his research while teaching in a Paris lycée, then at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). From the outset, Soboul’s work was characterized by a formidable erudition, a penchant for meticulous archival work, and a talent for interpreting his research within a supple but powerful Marxist narrative. Like the best historians of his generation, his work demonstrated a capacity for close analysis of the connections between ideologies and social structures. This talent was evident in a

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supplementary thesis completed by Soboul as he was commencing his doctoral research, on the countryside around Montpellier, published in 1958 as Les Campagnes montpelliéraines à la fin de l’ancien régime: propriété et culture d’après les compoix (The Countryside around Montpellier at the end of the Ancien Régime: Ownership and Cultivation according to Feudal Registers). In subsequent articles, Soboul demonstrated a close understanding of the changing rural society and property relations which emerged from the Revolution. He showed how tensions generated by threats to survival from within and without the rural community were a function of the social relations of production in the countryside and the changing forms of production of a particular region. Some of these threats were age old. For example, everywhere, but particularly in regions more recently incorporated into the French state, the apparently inexhaustible needs of the state for taxes and conscripts remained charges to be avoided, sidestepped, reduced, or even denied wherever possible. Soboul demonstrated how one of the central unresolved issues of the revolutionary period, the confrontation between ancient collective rights (droits d’usage) to forests, common land and gleaning, on the one hand, and the individual property rights sanctified in the Code Rural of the Revolution and subsequent legislation, on the other, was still being played out in the 1840s (this issue was expertly summarized in English in “The French rural community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” Past & Present, 10 [1956]: 78–95). These tensions underpinned the extraordinary explosion of rural collective protest after the proclamation of the Second Republic in February 1848. Soboul’s doctoral thesis was published as Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II: histoire politique et sociale des sections de Paris, 2 juin 1793–9 Thermidor An II (1958; translated as The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution 1793–4, 1964). It was immediately seen as one of the most important contributions to the understanding of the Revolution and made Soboul’s reputation. He had worked closely in Paris with George Rudé and Richard Cobb, and was stung by the latter’s criticism that he had reified the chaotic world of a city in revolution into a “movement.” Later criticism from Richard Andrews and David Andress alleged that many of his sans-culottes were in fact bourgeois who adopted this political term through expediency. Soboul was unattracted to the work of Braudel and the Annalistes because of what he considered to be a fatal absence of close, archivally based analysis of specific times and places. The essence of Soboul’s history was the juxtaposition of social and political history, although his capacity for political analysis was often predominant. Michel Vovelle has commented that, the first time that he met Lefebvre, then an elderly man, he said “Don’t do a thesis like Soboul’s: he’s writing the last political thesis on the Revolution.” Despite the closeness of the ties between Lefebvre and Soboul, Lefebvre himself had evidently come to feel that Soboul’s predilection for political analysis and the identification of a “popular movement” had taken him away from a more richly nuanced social history.

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While it was his history of popular movements and his overviews of the Revolution for which he was known, Soboul was also attracted to biography, producing lively portraits of figures as diverse as Babeuf, Bonaparte, and Madame Tallien. His biographical portraits were not, however, influenced by the work of his wife Irène, a psychoanalyst. Nor was he particularly attracted to statistical research. Despite a close friendship with Michel Vovelle, he remained slightly mistrustful of the history of mentalités as altogether too vague for scientific analysis. His overviews of the revolutionary period were, however, distinguished by a formidable knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. Soboul was appointed to succeed Marcel Reinhard at the Sorbonne in 1967 after holding a position in Clermont-Ferrand from 1960 onward. From 1972 to 1982 he conducted a famous series of Saturday afternoon seminars, with presentations from doctoral students, overseas specialists, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. Even those who were politically and historiographically at odds with him were captivated by his generosity and tolerance, despite his capacity for emotional outbursts. In these years, too, Soboul articulated, repeatedly and with passionate conviction, a compelling, cohesive, and contested overview of the Revolution. As he argued in a key book, Précis d’histoire de la Révolution française (1962; translated as The French Revolution, 1787–1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon, 1975), the Revolution was profoundly revolutionary in its short- and long-term consequences: “A classic bourgeois revolution, its uncompromising abolition of the feudal system and the seigneurial regime makes it the starting-point for capitalist society and the liberal representative system in the history of France.” Moreover, argued Soboul, the sans-culottes and the Babouvists, in particular, twice tried to push the Revolution beyond its bourgeois limits, prefiguring a time – and this contention came to be the heart of the political acrimony – when industrial expansion would enable a larger, socialist, working class to remake the world in its turn. The three labels of Marxist, Leninist, or Jacobin were applied to discredit Soboul and his view of the Revolution. First, he was (correctly) seen as a Marxist because of the causal connections he posited between economic structures, class tensions, and political behavior, and because he understood the significance of the Revolution to lie in its acceleration of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Less correctly, he was described as Leninist in his apparent approval of the “Jacobin dictatorship,” as he called it, and Babeuf ’s planned seizure of power. At a time of revolutionary crisis, Soboul accepted the need for temporary but draconian controls as being in the people’s interests, but located the logic for such controls in specific circumstances rather than appealing to an ideological heritage. Finally, because of his evident admiration for the way the Jacobin régime of 1793 and 1794 saved the Revolution in the face of overwhelming odds, while enacting radical social legislation, Soboul was charged with having constructed a Jacobin interpretation of the Revolution. Soboul understood the Terror to have been a necessary


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response to the threat of counter-revolution, and the imprisonment and execution of opponents were therefore explicable, even if regrettable. Such an overview attracted increased criticism. From the mid-1950s, the collapse of the political authority of Marxism had encouraged “revisionist” historians to dispute long-accepted Marxist certainties about the origins, nature, and significance of the Revolution. Historians such as Alfred Cobban, G. V. Taylor, François Furet, and Denis Richet contested the explanation of the Revolution as the political resolution of a long-term and deep-seated social crisis, arguing instead that it was the result of short-term fiscal and political mismanagement; they regarded the increasing violence of the Revolution as a disproportionate response to counter-revolution. Most importantly, they disputed Soboul’s Marxist conclusions that the Revolution was a bourgeois and peasant triumph which cleared the way for the flowering of a capitalist economy. Jacques Godechot and Robert R. Palmer advanced an alternative interpretation of the French Revolution as constituting only a part – albeit the most spectacular part – of an “Atlantic Revolution” which swept Europe in the decades after the American Revolution. In response, Soboul dismissed these revisionist or “minimalist” perspectives as born of a political antipathy to the possibilities of revolutionary transformation, or, in Soboul’s own words, “the vain attempts to deny the French Revolution – that dangerous precedent – its historical reality and its specific social and national character.” The “Atlantic Revolution” was seen by him to be Cold War historiography designed to interpret French history within a Western alliance. Soboul’s crowning work was the three-volume, 1,500-page La Civilisation et la Révolution française (Civilization and the French Revolution, 1970–83). He saw the second volume to the printer a few days before his death and the third was published posthumously. Less well known than his other works because they have not been translated into English, the volumes are an expansion, chronologically and substantially, of his classic 1962 volume. For Soboul, the Revolution, while “settled” in 1795, lasted until 1815: the Civil Code of 1804, with its emphasis on the sanctity of property rights, was effectively the law of the new bourgeois society based on an amalgam of landed aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and nouveaux riches. His interpretative schema remained essentially unchanged, with an historiographical overview continuing to target Cobban, Taylor, and Furet. Only in his recognition that the Revolution had in part been caused by the “contagion” and “propaganda” from earlier revolutions in England, the United States, and the Netherlands did Soboul indicate a partial rapprochement with Godechot and Palmer. His earlier disagreement with Godechot, Palmer, and other proponents of the Atlantic or Western revolution thesis had been that the French Revolution should not be located within international contexts because doing so diminished its importance and undermined its specific character. Soboul now located the French Revolution within the broad outlines of world history and Marxist narrative, while continuing to insist on its specificity. To a greater extent

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than in his previous work, Soboul now also acknowledged and sought to explain the violence of revolutionary crowds; oddly, however, he had little to say about the civil war in the Vendée and counter-revolutionary crowds. Soboul himself resisted the label of “Marxist historian of the French Revolution,” both because of the paucity of references to the Revolution in Marx’s writings and because he understood it to be code for “deterministic” or “rigid” when used by critics. Those critics charged him with writing, in François Furet’s words, a “kind of Leninist-populist vulgate” or with using a defense of the Terror to justify communist dictatorship. In his 1982 obituary of Soboul in Le Monde, Maurice Agulhon criticized the anti-communist motivations of those who had attacked Soboul on the grounds that his work amounted to a justification of communist dictatorship: “Soboul wrote what he believed proper to write without regard for expediency or for discipline.” Soboul himself was impatient with those, like Daniel Guérin, whom he charged with reading later social categories such as the “proletariat” back into the French Revolution: Soboul was too familiar with the detail of actual occupational and social structures and too insistent on historical specificity to accept such anachronism. Soboul’s response to the publication in 1982 of William Doyle’s The Origins of the French Revolution was to state that “I have never conceived of Marxism as a dogma, but rather as one method of approach among others.” While he had been “converted” to Marxism and the PCF before 1939, it was only in the late 1970s, as some of Marx’s works on surplus value were translated into French, that he went back to direct reading of Marx. Equally influential in Soboul’s return to Marx’s own writings was the growing French acquaintance with the work of the Russian historian Anatoli Ado on the French Revolution, especially significant for the field of rural history. Soboul understood urban–rural relations to have been central to the origins, development, and significance of the Revolution. In much of his writing on the Revolution there is a parallel approach to the peasantry and sans-culottes as two social groups which, however diverse, nonetheless similarly carried through the most revolutionary attacks on the Ancien Régime, but whose own demands were in crucial ways opposed to economic change and doomed to frustration by divisions within their midst. The most important development in Soboul’s thinking in the years leading up to his death was Soboul’s application of Anatoli Ado’s ideas to the period of Jacobin domination during the Terror. In 1971, Ado produced a study (not translated into French until 1996) that is one of the most coherent, detailed studies ever written of the complex peasant participation in the French Revolution from the rural revolts (or Grande Peur, Great Fear) of the summer of 1789 to the final abolition of seigneurial dues in 1793. Ado’s work also challenged some of the long-accepted certainties about the consequences of the French Revolution, apparent in a detailed, admiring review by Soboul in 1973 (reproduced as chapter five in Problèmes paysans de la Révolution: 1789–1848: études d’histoire, 1976). Ado constructed a cohesive, dynamic narrative of peasant revolution in


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constant tension with revolutionary assemblies hesitant to legislate the full consequences of the August 1789 promise to abolish feudalism entirely. He charted the unified peasant protests of 1790 and 1791, insistent on the complete abolition of feudalism and the restoration of communal control over common land, and their splintering in 1792 and 1793 as the poorer sections of the rural population demanded the subdivision of the commons by head, controls on prices, and reforms to sharecropping. It is particularly in its re-examination of the classic thesis of Georges Lefebvre that the greater importance of Ado’s work resides. In essence, Lefebvre’s argument, eloquently reformulated by Peter Jones in The Peasantry in the French Revolution (1988), was that the peasant revolution followed its own rhythms, and cannot be subsumed as the rural face of the liberal bourgeois revolution. Peasant action secured the abolition of seigneurial and corporate privilege but in the process consolidated pre-capitalist agrarian structures. Decisions taken by successive assemblies, under massive peasant pressure in 1792 and 1793, to finally abolish compensation due to nobles for the end of feudal dues and to make émigré land available in small plots at low rates of repayment, encouraged small owners to stay on the land. For generations of historians – whether followers of Soboul’s Marxist social history or Alfred Cobban’s revisionism – herein lay the explanation of the supposed economic “backwardness” of nineteenth-century France compared with England. Instead, argued Ado, the real obstacle to a more rapid transition to agrarian capitalism in the nineteenth century was the survival of large “retrograde” or neoseigneurial property rented out in small plots on short-term and restrictive leases. A more rapid transition to agrarian capitalism would have come from a fuller victory of the small peasants and laborers – les partageux – who campaigned in 1792 and 1793 for the subdivision of common land and large estates. The motives of the poorest peasantry may not have been individualistic, but the consequences of their actions, if successful, would have been to accelerate class polarization and market-oriented production. For, rather than assuming the expansion of smallscale agriculture to be a brake on capitalism in the countryside – as anglocentric economic history has done – Ado identified it as capable of responding productively to new marketing opportunities. It was this rethinking of the relationship of the peasant revolution to the transition to capitalism that so startled Soboul in 1973 and that represents the issue’s most significant reconceptualization since Lefebvre’s in the 1930s. While there are many examples, particularly in northern France, of the ways in which the political economy of successive revolutionary assemblies facilitated large-scale capitalist agriculture, corroboration for Ado’s thesis came from studies of communities and regions in the nineteenth century which identified small and medium producers as the initiators of specialist agriculture. It was apparent to Soboul that his views of the place of the peasant revolution in the French Revolution would have to be revised. Jacobinism, he concluded in

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the third volume of La Civilisation et la Révolution française, “allowed, during the Revolution, the transition from feudalism to capitalism through a truly revolutionary process … one which had in the forefront the small and medium direct producers, peasants and artisans, a social category which was ferociously hostile to privilege, to monopoly, to commercial capital or usury, from which would soon emerge the industrial entrepreneur.” It was particularly in the context of the bicentenary of the Revolution and the rise to prominence in the United States of a new type of cultural history that some of the criticisms of Soboul became most dismissive. At the time of the bicentenary, François Furet targeted “Marxism–Leninism” and its “anachronistic identification with the Soviet experience” as representing “a rigid and impoverished system of interpretation” (see A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, 1989). While Soboul was increasingly accused of a Stalinist rigidity in his defense of his orthodoxy, he in fact had been prepared to consider ways in which his conceptual framework might be challenged or modified. He had been far more open to new approaches than was suggested by caricatures of him: for example, in applying the history of mentalités to the way that the heroic imagery of the sans-culottes drew upon an ancient imagery of saints. Soboul’s own work was characterized by meticulous historical methodology and influenced by a far more supple Marxism than his critics ever conceded. Compared with that of the historians of the preceding generation who had taught him, his understanding of eighteenth-century society was, in fact, “revisionist.” In collegial relations, too, Soboul’s loyalty to a unitary Marxist understanding did not outweigh his historian’s fascination for new knowledge and his inclination to encourage new research by historians from different countries bringing different perspectives. While his occasional broadsides at conferences were unforgettable, his personal generosity was equally well known. But Soboul’s refusal to be drawn into specific debate with the “revisionist” school was, in Michel Vovelle’s words, “a strategic error,” allowing his critics to portray the “orthodox” JacobinMarxist school as sclerotic and rigid. In Vovelle’s words, the end of Soboul’s career was not a happy one. Like many of the historians of his generation, Soboul was formed both by his appreciation of the opportunities opened to him by the educational structures of the Third Republic and by his own experiences of World War II and the Resistance. For him, like many others, active membership of the PCF became an extension of his republican patriotism: there was no contradiction felt between adherence to an international communist movement and loyalty to the values of a national republican and democratic tradition. Similarly, his loyalty to the PCF until his death should not be read as a simple adherence to the pro-Soviet line of Georges Marchais and others, because Soboul regarded himself as a “non-aligned” communist ready to engage in candid debate over Stalinism, as in 1956 and 1968. He was involved in frequent disagreements with the party leadership, but would have regarded resignation as a betrayal of his roots and personal loyalties. Nevertheless,


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in 1980, in his last political intervention, he openly and passionately sided with the PCF candidate in the presidential elections. In 1988, the city of Nîmes decided to honor Soboul by naming a square after him near another named after the Martyrs of the Resistance; a plaque was also placed on the wall of his old school, the Lycée Alphonse Daudet (there is another on the wall of his family’s modest home in La Croisette d’Uzer). The village of Villard-de-Lans, where he had worked in 1943, also named a street after him. Soboul had traveled widely, particularly in Eastern Europe but as far afield as Australia and New Zealand shortly before his death. He sustained close personal ties with many of the leading international scholars of the Revolution, from George Rudé, Armando Saitta, Makato Takahashi, and Kare Tonnesson to Anatoli Ado, Victor Daline, and Walter Markov. But when Daline asked him for an autobiographical entry for an encyclopedia, he concluded: “I only recognize two masters: my aunt (who died in 1963) and Georges Lefebvre. They formed my critical spirit. They taught me about liberty and the love of the people. I owe them everything and regret that I am not equal to the great example that both of them left me.”

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Albert Soboul Saint-Just: ses idées politiques et sociales, as Pierre Derocles (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1939). L’Armée nationale sous la Révolution (1789–1794) (Paris: Editions France d’Abord, 1945). Les Papiers des sections de Paris (1790–An IV): répertoire sommaire (Paris: M. Lavergne, 1950). La Révolution française, 1789–1799 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1951). Les Campagnes montpelliéraines à la fin de l’ancien régime: propriété et culture d’après les compoix (Paris, 1958). Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II: histoire politique et sociale des sections de Paris, 2 juin 1793–9 Thermidor An II (La Roche-sur-Yon: H. Potier, 1958); translated by Gwynne Lewis as The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Précis d’histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1962); translated by Alan Forrest and Colin Jones as The French Revolution, 1787–1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). La Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1965); translated by Geoffrey Symcox as A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977). La France à la veille de la Révolution (Paris: Société d’Edition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1966). Paysans, sans-culottes et jacobins (Paris: Clavreuil, 1966). La Première République, 1792–1804 (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1968).

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La Civilisation et la Révolution francaise, 3 vols. (Paris: Arthaud, 1970–83); vol. 1: La France à la veille de la Révolution; vol. 2: La Révolution française; vol. 3: La France napoléonienne. La France à la veille de la Révolution (Paris: SEDES, 1974). Problèmes paysans de la Révolution: 1789–1848: études d’histoire (Paris: F. Maspero, 1976). Comprendre la Révolution: problèmes politiques de la Révolution française (1789–1797) (Paris: F. Maspero, 1981); translated by April A. Knutson as Understanding the French Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1988). Répertoire du personnel sectionnaire parisien en l’an II (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985). Portraits de révolutionnaires (Paris: Messidor/Editions Sociales, 1986).

Edited Works Robespierre, Maximilien, 1758–1794: oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, edited by Albert Soboul, Marc Bouloiseau, and Georges Lefebvre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). Le Grand Sanhédrin de Napoléon, edited by Albert Soboul and Bernhard Blumenkranz (Toulouse: Privat, 1979). Girondins et montagnards: actes du colloque, Sorbonne, 14 décembre 1975, edited by Albert Soboul (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1980).

References Agulhon, Maurice, “L’historien des sans-culottes,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 249 (1982): 327. Andress, David, The French Revolution and the People (London: Hambledon, 2004.) Andrews, Richard, “Social structures, political elites and ideology in revolutionary Paris, 1792–1794: a critical evaluation of Albert Soboul’s Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II,” Journal of Social History, 19 (1985): 72–112. Cobb, Richard, People and Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Cobb, Richard, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Daline, Victor, “Hommage à Albert Soboul: un ami fidèle,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 251 (1983): 359–63. Dupuy, Pascal and Shafer, David, “Albert Soboul, son oeuvre et sa personnalité vues par les historiens anglais et américains,” Bulletin d’histoire de la Révolution française, années 1992–1993 (Paris, 1994), pp. 39–48. Furet, François and Ozouf, Mona (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1989). Jones, Peter, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Mazauric, Claude, Soboul: un historien en son temps. Albert Soboul (1914–1982) (Nérac: Editions d’Albret, 2004). Parker, Harold T. (ed.), Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850: Selected Papers, 1984 (Athens, GA: Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1986).

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Michel Vovelle (1933– ) Peter McPhee

Michel Vovelle’s major achievement – and it has been a most significant one – has been to develop links between classical social history and the new cultural history, to the benefit of both. He was a key actor in the historiographical turn away from the Annales paradigm of the longue durée, articulated by Braudel and others, toward a history of mentalités, of popular culture, even of “microhistory.” Vovelle has written, above all, on rural society and on death and attitudes toward it, particularly across the great divide of the French Revolution. In this, he was assisted by the fact that the Annalistes had never attempted a study of France after 1789, an implicit recognition of the limitations of their approach to understanding specific events that have profound economic and social consequences. At the same time, Vovelle has succeeded in enriching the familiar outlines of the history of the French Revolution left to him by his predecessors Lefebvre and Soboul by going beyond the Marxist dialectic of class interests, socioeconomic change, and political practice without abandoning broad narrative outlines and connections. Vovelle was born in Gallardon (Eure-et-Loire) in 1933. A brilliant student, he entered higher education at the Ecole normale supérieure at Saint-Cloud in 1953, where he was placed first among the entering candidates. Once an agrégé in 1956, he was appointed to the teaching staff. There he wrote his first book, interestingly a biography of Jean-Paul Marat. Vovelle was encouraged by one of his teachers at Saint-Cloud – the historian and communist militant Emile Tersen – to undertake further historical work with Ernest Labrousse. Even though at that time Labrousse was being attacked pseudonymously by a leftist, or gauchiste, group at the Sorbonne, which included François Furet, Annie Kriegel, and perhaps Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, as being too moderate and even pro-American in his views, he was still regarded as the major “master” on the left.

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With Labrousse, Vovelle had the classic postwar formation of the new generation of historians of modern and contemporary France. While marked by the Annalistes’ challenge and posing of large questions within a broad chronological and geographical framework, this formation was essentially a training as a social historian of a specific time and place. Vovelle was taught by Labrousse and others that explanations of collective social behavior needed to integrate economic and political history with human geography. Like that of the Annales historians, such an approach proceeded on the basis of a hierarchy of causality – from economic structures to social forces to political behavior – but, as Marxists, Vovelle and others saw behavior as the proper objective of historical study rather than as mere “events.” In that sense, Vovelle’s work bears the mark of the confident positivist view of history that he encountered at his lycée and then at university. This faith in the promise implicit in the pursuit of truth was further entrenched by membership of the Parti communiste français, itself based on the certainty and power of historical knowledge. In Les Aventures de la raison: entretiens avec Richard Figuier (The Adventures of Reason: Interviews with Richard Figuier, 1989), Vovelle recalls how he went to Labrousse wanting to do his diplôme d’études supérieures on the Paris Commune and left, half an hour later, with a topic on late eighteenth-century Chartres, part of a new social project Labrousse had outlined in a famous paper to a Rome conference in 1955 (Labrousse claimed to have just allotted the Commune to Jacques Rougerie). Vovelle’s methodology required him to use the previously untapped records of the registry office, which maintained documents such as wills and property transfers: he recalls the archivist opening the door of a vast room and smiling “They’re here.” Vovelle wrote the chapters that constitute Ville et campagne au XVIIIe siècle: Chartres et la Beauce (Town and Countryside in the Eighteenth Century: Chartres and the Beauce Region, 1980) between 1958 and 1962 under the guidance of Ernest Labrousse: they might have become a dissertation, he recalls, “if circumstances had not dictated otherwise.” He made widespread use of archival sources such as the enregistrement des actes, which was, at the time that he wrote, virtually unexplored. His analysis of rural society in a brief chapter is based on an extraordinary depth of research: here he contrasts the Beauce with the Midi and its “microbourgeoisie” in small towns and villages. The book was highlighted by a seminal essay written with Daniel Roche in 1959 on the meaning of “bourgeois” as a social category, a study of those who either self-identified or were formally described as “bourgeois” (those who lived from rents and bonds). In his studies of Chartres and its region, Vovelle demonstrated that an understanding of the structures and behaviors of a region could only be achieved in terms of a dynamic between town and country. In many ways, the provincial centers of Ancien Régime institutions were parasitic on the countryside: cathedral chapters, religious orders, resident nobles, merchants, and other professionals extracted seigneurial dues and rents from peasants, which were then expended in

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provincial towns such as Chartres through direct employment of domestic servants, indirect maintenance of skilled trades (especially in luxury goods), and in provision of charity. Vovelle describes this relationship as one of both dependence, as towns were utterly dependent on the extraction of “surplus,” and domination, as the rural world was thoroughly under its control. The central link between town and country was incipient tension over the staple diet of working people: grain, and especially wheat. Master craftsmen and their employees, on the one hand, and different sections of the rural community, on the other, necessarily had conflicting interests. The supply of wheat to Paris from the capitalist farms of the Beauce around Chartres was constantly threatened by bands of “outlaws” patrolling the highway before merging back into their impoverished villages, but Vovelle is able to show how, across the revolutionary decade after 1789, the targets of collective protest went from lords, or seigneurs, to the “proprietary class” of bourgeois. Most importantly, Vovelle shows how, as a direct result of the Revolution, the countryside largely liberated itself from towns, leaving marketing and administration as the remaining links. The cathedral chapter was dissolved and its properties sold. In his preface to the collection, Labrousse celebrates Vovelle’s analysis which, while centered on the Beauce, in effect addresses “national problems of social history.” After military service in Algeria, Vovelle was appointed to the Faculté des lettres at the Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I) in 1961. He was to spend twenty-two years there, finally as a full professor of modern history. This period was one of extraordinary fertility as Vovelle authored groundbreaking studies of popular culture and mentalités, iconography, history of attitudes to death and beyond, as well as general histories, notably La Chute de la monarchie (1972; translated as The Fall of the Monarchy, 1983). When Vovelle went to Aix, his initial idea was to study the counter-revolution that erupted during the course of the French Revolution, especially as it related to the question of acceptance or refusal of de-Christianization. At first, Vovelle understood himself to be furthering the work of the great historians of the countryside, such as Lucien Febvre and Gaston Roupnel. But, because responses to de-Christianization were paralleled by other manifestations of collective opinion, whether political or religious, in other periods, he became convinced that there was “une histoire plus longue,” an even longer history to be written. In the end, he was to launch a new history of mentalités. In particular, in the unfamiliar environment of Provence, Vovelle soon became interested in the 1960s in the cultural particularities of the south. His developing interest in iconography resulted in his 1970 book with Gaby Vovelle, Vision de la mort et de l’au-delà en Provence, du XVe au XIXe siècle, d’après les autels des âmes du purgatoire (The Vision of Death and the Beyond in Provence from the Fifteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century, according to the Altars for Souls in Purgatory). Most importantly, his researches led him beyond a study of religious belief in its external manifestations to the most deep-seated assumptions and practices, the mentalités underpinning private as well

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as public behavior. Here, he extended the work on the quantitative study of wealth by François Furet and Adeline Daumard. In particular, he used for the first time documents kept in notarial archives as sources of information about private life. Some 25,000 wills became a key source for his dissertation, opening ways of answering new questions through their requests for masses, accounts of membership of religious associations, strictures on burial, donations to charities, and so on. In Provence, the number of people requesting in their wills masses for their souls declined from 80 to 50 percent between 1750 and 1789, at which point 46 percent of men and 67 percent of women made such requests. Vovelle’s dissertation, completed at the Université de Lyon in 1971, was entitled “Piété baroque et déchristianisation: les attitudes devant la mort en Provence au XVIIIe siècle d’après les clauses des testaments” (“Baroque piety and de-Christianization: attitudes toward death in Provence in the eighteenth century according to provisions in wills”). He opened his oral defense of the dissertation, which is reproduced in Les Aventures de la raison, with an incisive remark: I belong to a generation of historians who came to the history of mentalités from social history … I came to this perilous “third level,” to borrow Ernest Labrousse’s expression, from counting people and their property to an inquiry into their collective attitudes, their aspirations, and their behavior, while remaining faithful to the methodology of quantifying history which, in the famous phrase, counts, measures, and weighs.

The book was published as Piété baroque et déchristianisation, attitudes provençales devant la mort au siècle des Lumières, d’après les clauses des testaments (Baroque Piety and De-Christianization: Provençal Attitudes toward Death in the Century of Enlightenment, according to Provisions in Wills) in 1973, and it immediately established him, with Maurice Agulhon, as a leading light in a new history of mentalités. Nevertheless, the book was criticized in Le Monde by Le Roy Ladurie, then still a gauchiste, as not sufficiently Marxist, the work of someone expert at discussing the “how” of history but unable to answer the “why.” A second book that resulted from Vovelle’s doctoral research – Les Métamorphoses de la fête en Provence, de 1750 à 1820 (The Transformations of Festivals in Provence from 1750 to 1820, 1976) – was also profoundly influenced by Agulhon’s simultaneous studies of “meridional sociability” as revealed through religious confraternities and associations. Vovelle was intrigued by the remarkable presence of a whole system of traditional festivals in Provence, ranging from religious festivals to popular rituals, already undergoing change after 1750, and by the impact of a radically different calendar of revolutionary commemoration after 1790. Did revolutionary festivals adapt to far older forms or did they remain distinct? And did they prove ephemeral once the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1815? In a society rich in religious rituals and displays of royal splendor, Vovelle found that the initial forms of enacting revolutionary unity drew on old rituals for style,


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if not for substance or imagery. Conversely, long-established collective displays were not immune from the spontaneous syncretism of regional culture and revolutionary politics. In these years, collective display also went through what Vovelle describes as a “creative explosion,” as popular initiatives in organizing festivals and in remodeling ancient rituals meshed with the Convention’s encouragement of civic commemoration. When news arrived, for example, of Louis XVI’s execution, or of a military victory, whole villages improvised celebrations. DeChristianization ceremonies, in particular, had a carnival and cathartic atmosphere, often utilizing the promenade des ânes, or promenade of asses, used in the Ancien Régime to censure violators of community norms of behavior. With the disappearance of revolutionary festivals in the year VII, followed by the combined effects of the repression of revolutionary symbolism and of the reinvention of the “traditional” festival under the Restoration monarchy, Vovelle was forced to conclude that the Revolution’s impact had here been ephemeral. But that was not to say that all of its effects disappeared. This dynamic interaction of the longue durée and the dramatic temps court, the long term and the short term, was at the heart of Vovelle’s interest in rural society and of his impatience with ethnographers’ assumptions of the timelessness of rural societies. Vovelle was not alone in developing this approach – Agulhon and Mona Ozouf were doing likewise at the same time – but Vovelle’s methodology was characterized more by his ease with quantification. Les Métamorphoses de la fête is a masterpiece of social history, drawing on an astonishing array of sources and methodologies, from discussion of the iconography of festivals to their seasonal and geographical incidence. (His work was expertly summarized in English in “Le tournant des mentalités en France 1750–1789: la ‘sensibilité’ pré-révolutionnaire,” Social History, 5 [1977].) Vovelle’s particular contribution to French historiography in these works was to be one of the first to move beyond classic social history, which typically operated within a departmental or regional cadre, to treat all behaviors, public and private, as the primary focus of inquiry. At the same time, he repudiated any notion that cultural practices could be studied in isolation or that mentalités and ideologies were autonomous belief-systems. Vovelle dramatically expanded the possible fields of investigation for social historians by broadening the range of questions they might ask and the sources they might use. Vovelle’s approach to the study of mentalités was central to the understandings he achieved as regards the history of the meanings of death in La Mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Death in the West from 1300 to the Present, 1983). He was fascinated by the juxtaposition of beliefs, rituals, and “certainties” with that final moment of truth that none can avoid. He had long been interested in iconography, and his understanding of art was integral to his history of representations of death in a society that relied so much on the visual. Eighteenth-century France was most often characterized by forms of communication of a non-written kind: the spoken or sung word, the resonant statements made by gesture, buildings,

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painting, clothing, and actions. But here, too, he insisted on the need for historians to go beyond the use of imagery for illustrative or reflective purposes, and instead make imagery an object of analysis in its own right. In this sense, Vovelle argued, cultural history must also be social history. In 1980, Vovelle published a superb collection of articles on Provence, De la cave au grenier: un itinéraire en Provence, de l’histoire sociale à l’histoire des mentalités (From the Cellar to the Loft: A Journey in Provence, from Social History to the History of Mentalities), which had previously appeared in journals between 1964 and 1978. The volume’s title took its name from a conversation between Vovelle and Le Roy Ladurie in which the latter had expressed his desire to remain in the familiar world of socioeconomic structures rather than the less certain world of mentalités (he had not then written Montaillou). For Vovelle, these twenty articles written across fifteen years represented an itinerary, from quantitative studies of migration and social structures through studies of popular upheavals to reflections on religious practice and festivals. For example, his study of relations between the Marquis de Sade and his lordship of Lacoste in the Lubéron (1969) shows how relations deteriorated from a certain level of popular sympathy for a man perceived to be a victim of despotism to the pillaging of his château on September 17, 1792. Vovelle here demonstrated his capacity for moving easily between structures and mentalités, probing why a rural world from which Sade drew his considerable wealth (17,500 livres annually) should be so absent from his fiction, as if he simply did not see it. His lordship was in the hands of a notary from Apt; only one of the 440 books in his library in 1769 was on agronomy. The pillage of his château has been used by sadistes as a way of illustrating the depths of ignorance of the masses; however, Vovelle inserts it into the broader context of the antifeudal uprisings of the summer of 1792 in Provence. Here, Vovelle demonstrates the value of quantification, allied with a close knowledge of printed sources and topography, for examining various levels of individual criminality, ranging from smuggling to full-scale uprisings. At the same time, his ability to pose fresh questions of vast quantities of material – for example, wills – and to use quantification to illuminate changes in beliefs is also in evidence. But this history of mentalités was always a way of enriching social history; Vovelle was critical of the American assumption of the “autonomy of the mental,” especially as expressed in the psycho-history he encountered at Princeton in 1976 and 1977. He also tried to link the understanding of broader socioeconomic and mental contexts with individuals: hence, his biographical studies of the provincial revolutionaries Joseph Sec and Théodore Desorgues. Sec, in particular, appealed to Vovelle because of his social ascension – for Vovelle, like Soboul and Agulhon, is a classic case of a similar ascension; these three were the sons of school teachers themselves from artisan or peasant backgrounds. Much of Vovelle’s academic career was devoted to the creation of institutions, the organization of conferences, the establishment of links among various scholarly bodies, and the supervision of theses and dissertations. He established the


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Centre méridional d’histoire sociale at Aix in 1974, and from 1975 to 1983 organized a series of five conferences on themes to do with cultural history. After 1983, he was to take a similar organization-building approach to Paris and the national stage. In that year, he succeeded his friend Albert Soboul as Professor of the History of the French Revolution at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Over the next decade, much of his work consisted of producing overviews of the nature and importance of the Revolution. Many of his earlier studies were synthesized into a brilliant but uncelebrated overview produced for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, La Mentalité révolutionnaire (The Revolutionary Mentality, 1985). Here, Vovelle addresses the most difficult question of all – what was the impact of the Revolution on the “collective subconscious” – by discussing changes and continuities in the collective expression of fear and anger, violence, religion, festivals, even love and death. At the same time, his long-term interest in the history and political uses of imagery was to result in the five-volume collection La Révolution française: images et récits (The French Revolution: Images and Accounts, 1986), and Histoires figurales: des monstres médiévaux à Wonderwoman (Figurative Histories: from Medieval Monsters to Wonder Woman, 1989). Equally important was a remarkable range of activities connected with the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989. The sudden death of Soboul in 1982 led Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then Minister for Research, to ask Vovelle to report on the possibilities of celebrating the bicentenary. Labrousse, then very elderly, was asked to head the first committee, in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). By 1989, Vovelle had become increasingly concerned that the easy formulation by Furet that “la Révolution est terminée,” or “the Revolution is over,” was connected with a decline in the Revolution’s place in French education and even with a sapping of the republican and democratic project. On June 11, 1988, he made an extraordinary speech in Arras, Robespierre’s home town. Taking his title “Pourquoi nous sommes robespierristes” (“Why we are Robespierristes”) from the speech the founder of the Société des études robespierristes Albert Mathiez had made in 1920, Vovelle was deliberately following in the footsteps of his predecessor Georges Lefebvre, who had addressed an audience in Arras in 1933. The themes were classic: Robespierre the democratic republican and social democrat, the “patriotic internationalist” who had sought to avoid war, and, most controversially, the man of law who had always insisted on the Terror being mediated through due process. There was nothing here about Robespierre’s role in the trials of Danton and Desmoulins, or the Law of 22 Prairial ( June 10, 1794) which dramatically broadened the categories of counter-revolutionary activity for which the punishment was death. In the lead-up to the bicentenary, Vovelle organized three conferences between 1985 and 1989, and he made seventy visits all over the world. The Sorbonne conference of July 6–12, 1989 attracted 800 participants, with 300 communications from individuals hailing from forty-three countries. In all, it has been estimated that there were 549 conferences (320 outside France) on the Revolution in the

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years from 1984 to 1990. Vovelle’s festschrift – with contributions by more than sixty colleagues from fourteen countries – was testimony to his international presence. Despite the energy invested in the bicentenary by Vovelle and others, the commemoration of the Revolution was contested and debated. His concern that the meaning and magnitude of the Revolution’s legacy was being devalued resulted in Combats pour la Révolution française (Fights for the French Revolution, 1993). Vovelle was always fascinated by the connections between multiple periods of time: the interaction of long-term structures and ideas with the shock of sudden change, as in 1789, and the ways in which apparently durable structures, such as the political choices revealed in 1849, may change across time, as after 1981. Of particular importance was his 1993 book La Découverte de la politique: géopolitique de la Révolution française (The Discovery of the Political: Geopolitics of the French Revolution), very much a response to what he saw as the ahistorical approach to determinative family structures used by Emmanuel Todd and Hervé Le Bras and the unconvincing argument of Eugen Weber on the timing of rural politicization. Here, Vovelle seeks to write “total history” in order to trace the origins of popular involvement in politics and the origins of regional traditions: social, cultural, economic, spatial, and demographic. He succeeds in inserting the revolutionary decade into a longer durée of cultural change, religious crisis, political opposition, and rural protest. He rediscovered Labrousse and the importance of agricultural structures, price movements, and communication routes. All this went far beyond the usual maps of political participation and choice to synthesize thirty-two indicators of political involvement, such as reactions to religious reform, the spread of rumor, and the propensity to write to Paris. Vovelle concludes that family structure could not be seen as determinative, yet neither could religion: there were traditional Catholic areas which voted left. In the end, in the hierarchy of variables, the ease and openness to information (not distance from Paris), as well as material well-being, were far more important than literacy, religion, or the density of popular societies, in determining levels and types of political involvement. In some ways, La Découverte de la politique was Vovelle’s most ambitious and significant book. It did, however, demonstrate the extreme difficulties of using the practice of electoral politics or the techniques of quantification to attempt to construct a map of political opinion. It is revealing that his conclusion – “Histoire politique et histoire sociale” – is an affirmation of his earliest work as an historian: without wishing to suggest a deterministic explanation, he insists that it was economic structures and social relationships that essentially conditioned this political apprenticeship. He saw his analysis as an example of total history, combining the social, the cultural, the “mental,” and the political. “Was the Revolution a profoundly exotic event, an aberration or a long term event? For me, the Revolution brought the consciousness of politics, our entry into modernity.” In 1996, Vovelle provided the preface to the long-awaited Paysans en Révolution by Anatoli Ado, his 1971 dissertation written at the University of Moscow. For


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Vovelle, this thesis confronted one of the central elements of the Revolution, whose effects have endured until the present, as well as one of the central debates about the Revolution, namely, what was the relationship among rural revolt, the French Revolution more generally, and the development of capitalism (especially agricultural capitalism) in France. (For more information about Ado’s thesis and its reception in France, see chapter 41 on Albert Soboul.) Marx had had little to say directly about the French Revolution, even if its significance is all-pervasive in his work. In this case, however, Ado’s analysis was informed by brief but crucial passages in volume 3 of Capital (especially chapters 20 and 47) and in Lenin’s 1905 essay on land reform, specifically on “the really revolutionizing path” to capitalism through small-scale commodity production. Ado’s work gave Vovelle a rare opportunity to discuss directly Marxist constructs. One of the merits of Ado’s work, concludes Vovelle, is “its methodology, which is a Marxism at once unchallenged yet mastered and used with suppleness.” Vovelle was here making a direct connection with his own training as a social historian for, as an historian of rural society and the French Revolution, Vovelle worked in an historiographical context shaped in part by the group of Russian historians – Loutchisky, Kowalesky, and Kareiev – who were forced to emigrate in the repressive atmosphere following the Revolution of 1905. Certainly, Ado’s rebuttal of entrenched ideas about the “retarding” economic consequences of the peasant revolution required Vovelle to rethink some of his own certainties about the social consequences of the Revolution. Vovelle has always seen a key responsibility of the historian as being to intervene in current debates and to enrich them with an historical perspective, whether through reflecting on the resurgence of rural festivals (“Le détour par l’histoire dans la redécouverte de la fête aujourd’hui” [“The detour through history in today’s rediscovery of the festival”], Etudes rurales, 86 [1982]) or revisiting Jacobinism in order to respond to its misuse in contemporary debate (Les Jacobins, 2001). Vovelle has remained an active participant in public life through l’Humanité, for example, criticizing Claude Allègre, Minister of Education, in March 2000 for scrapping the Commission d’histoire de la Révolution française, founded in 1903. Vovelle intervened in debates following the whistling of the “Marseillaise” during a France–Algeria football match in 2002. Concerning the whistling incident, Vovelle was depressed to learn that students were learning so little about the French Revolution in school that some in the crowd believed the “Marseillaise” to be a song written for the 1998 World Cup. Vovelle was founding president of the Société des amis de l’Humanité in 1993, and he remained in the position until 1999. Michel Vovelle has left an extraordinary bibliography: about thirty soleauthored books and many others in collaboration, and well over 260 articles, prefaces, and other commentaries. He has been as creative as he has been productive in the range of his interests and constantly inquisitive about new ways of understanding revolutionary France. At the same time, he integrated new insights

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into an overarching narrative which resembled in key ways that articulated by his formative teachers. Despite the fact that Vovelle’s work parallels that of the Annales school with its emphasis on the longue durée and imaginative use of quantification, he was never close to Braudel or to his school, essentially for political and temperamental reasons. Vovelle’s early work was instead very much under the influence of Ernest Labrousse’s classic socioeconomic history: society understood through occupational and property structures, with research on documents ranging from land surveys to notarial records. He soon enriched this type of history, however, by using it as the basis for a history of mentalités: de-Christianization, attitudes to death, changes to popular festivals, and the impact of the Revolution on popular culture. Few other historians have made such a rich and innovative contribution to the historiography of the French Revolution.

References and Further Reading Selected Books by Michel Vovelle Vision de la mort et de l’au-delà en Provence, du XVe au XIXe siècle, d’après les autels des âmes du purgatoire, by Michel Vovelle and Gaby Vovelle (Paris: A. Colin, 1970). Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine, vol. 1: La Chute de la monarchie (1787–1792) (Paris: Seuil, 1972); translated by Susan Burke as The Fall of the Monarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Piété baroque et déchristianisation: attitudes provençales devant la mort au siècle des Lumières, d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973). Mourir autrefois: les attitudes devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). L’Irrésistible ascension de Joseph Sec, bourgeois d’Aix, suivi de quelques clés pour la lecture des naïfs (Aix: Edisud, 1975). Les Métamorphoses de la fête en Provence, de 1750 à 1820 (Paris: Flammarion, 1976). Religion et révolution: la déchristianisation de l’an II (Paris: Hachette, 1976). Breve storia della Rivoluzione Francese (Rome: Laterza, 1979). De la cave au grenier: un itinéraire en Provence, de l’histoire sociale à l’histoire des mentalités (Aix: Edisud, 1980). Ville et campagne au XVIIIe siècle: Chartres et la Beauce (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1980). Idéologies et mentalités (Paris: Maspero, 1982); translated by Eamon O’Flaherty as Ideologies and Mentalities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). La Mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1983; expanded edn., 2001). La Ville des morts: essai sur l’imaginaire collectif urbain d’après les cimetières provençaux, 1800– 1980, by Michel Vovelle and Régis Bertrand (Marseille: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1983). La Mentalité révolutionnaire (Paris: Messidor, 1985). Théodore Desorgues ou la désorganisation (Paris: Seuil, 1985). La Révolution française: images et récits, 5 vols. (Paris: Livre Club Diderot, 1986). 1793, la Révolution contre l’Eglise: de la raison à l’étre suprême (Brussels: Complexe, 1988). Les Aventures de la raison: entretiens avec Richard Figuier (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1989).


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Histoires figurales: des monstres médiévaux à Wonderwoman (Paris: Usher, 1989). Combats pour la Révolution française (Paris: Coédition La Découverte–Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, 1993). La Découverte de la politique: géopolitique de la Révolution française (Paris: La Découverte, 1993). L’Heure du grand passage (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). La Passion de la République, by Michel Vovelle et al. (Paris: Messidor, 1993). La Révolution française (Paris: A. Colin, 1993). Les Ames du Purgatoire, ou le travail du deuil (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Giacobini e giacobinismo (Rome: Laterza, 1997). Les Jacobins (Paris: Découverte/Poche, 2001). La Marseillaise, with Emmanuel Hondré (Paris: Arts et Culture, 2002). Les Folies d’Aix ou La fin d’un monde (Pantin: le Temps des cérises, 2004). Les Mots de la Révolution (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2004). La Révolution française expliquée à ma petite-fille (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006). 1789, l’héritage et la mémoire (Toulouse: Privat, 2007).

Works Edited by Michel Vovelle Marat: textes choisis (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1962). L’Historia universal – époque moderne, du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, vol. 10 (Barcelone: Salvat Editores, 1982). L’Etat de la France pendant la Révolution (1789–1799) (Paris: La Découverte, 1988). Les Images de la Révolution française: études réunies et présentées par Michel Vovelle. Actes du colloque des 25–27 octobre 1985 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988). Paris et la Révolution: actes du colloque de Paris I, 14–16 avril 1989 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989). Bicentenaire de la Révolution française: l’image de la Révolution française. Communications présentées lors du Congrès mondial pour le bicentenaire de la Révolution. Sorbonne, 6–12 juillet 1989, 4 vols. (Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989–90). Les Colloques du bicentenaire: répertoire des rencontres scientifiques nationales et internationales, edited by Michel Vovelle and Danielle le Monnier (Paris: La Découverte–IHRF– Société des études robespierristes, 1991). Recherches sur la Révolution: un bilan des travaux scientifiques du bicentenaire (Paris: La Découverte–IHRF–Société des études robespierristes, 1991). Mémoires de Fouché (Paris: Editions de l’Imprimerie Nationale, 1993). Révolution et République: l’exception française. Actes du colloque de Paris I, Sorbonne, 21–26 septembre 1992 (Paris: Kimé, 1994). L’Homme des Lumières (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Le Siècle des Lumières, vol. 2, edited by Michel Vovelle et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).

References Daumard, Adeline, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 à 1848 (Paris: Ecole pratique des hautes études, 1963).

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Daumard, Adeline and Furet, François, Structures et relations sociales à Paris au milieu du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Cahiers des Annales, 1961). Duprat, Catherine, “L’historien, l’image et le temps,” in Mélanges Michel Vovelle. Sur la Révolution: approaches plurielles, edited by Jean-Paul Bertaud et al. (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1997), pp. xi–xxvi. Kaplan, Steven Laurence, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians’ Feud, France 1789/1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Le Bras, Hervé, Les Trois France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1986). Todd, Emmanuel, La Nouvelle France (Paris: Seuil, 1988). Vovelle, Michel, “La mia strada alla storia,” Studi Storici, 40 (1999): 657–80. Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

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