History and Sociology in France: From Scientific History to the Durkheimian School 1138102679, 9781138102675

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History and Sociology in France

In the late 19th century and early part of the 20th, with the coming of age of sociology in France, the idea that there could be a “science” of history was the subject of much and varied debate. The methodological problems surrounding historical knowledge that were debated throughout this period concerned not only scientific history, but the social sciences as well, and sociology more specifically. Although sociology was from its origins in competition with the discipline of history, from the outset, it too was interested in history as a form of objective knowledge. Many of sociology’s founders believed that by retracing historical processes, they could make a clean break with abstraction and metaphysics. For their part, historians generally remained hostile to any kind of systematization. And yet, at the end of the 19th century, the science of history would draw some valuable lessons from the emerging methodology of sociology. It was in large part under the impetus of the issues and problems raised by the philosopher Henri Berr and by the Durkheimian School, with the economist François Simiand as its lead protagonist, that the community of historians, increasingly aware of the limits of narrative history, turned so enthusiastically to social and economic history—just as Durkheim and his disciples consulted history in order to avoid the twin pitfalls of the philosophy of history and of introspective psychology. History and Sociology in France focuses on this dialogue of the two neighboring sciences. Robert Leroux is a professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa.

Routledge Approaches to History For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

15 Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies From Documentation to Intervention Jaume Aurell 16 How History Works The Reconstitution of a Human Science Martin L. Davies 17 History, Ethics, and the Recognition of the Other A Levinasian View on the Writing of History Anton Froeyman 18 The Historiography of Transition Critical Phases in the Development of Modernity (1494–1973) Edited by Paolo Pombeni 19 The Emergence of Historical Forensic Expertise Clio Takes the Stand Vladimir Petrović 20 Historical Mechanisms An Experimental Approach to Applying Scientific Theories to the Study of History Andreas Boldt 21 Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography Tor Egil Førland 22 The Work of History Constructivism and a Politics of the Past Kalle Pihlainen 23 History and Sociology in France From Scientific History to the Durkheimian School Robert Leroux

History and Sociology in France From Scientific History to the Durkheimian School Robert Leroux

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Robert Leroux to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-10267-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10351-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Pour Émile Leroux, mon fils

Contents

Introduction

1

PART I

The Idea of Scientific History

11

1

History and the Social Sciences Auguste Comte: The Progress of the Human Intelligence 14 Antoine Augustin Cournot: Between Chance and Necessity 16 Ernest Renan: In Praise of Science 19 Hippolyte Taine: Applying the Scientific Model of Natural Sciences to History 21 The Ramifications of Positivism 24

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2

Contrasting Approaches to Scientific History Fustel de Coulanges and the Beginnings of Scientific History 32 The Positivism of Louis Bourdeau 40 The Historical Sociology of Paul Lacombe 47 Langlois and Seignobos: The Argument for Historical Method Between the Hero and the Masses 59

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PART II

Henri Berr and Historical Synthesis

67

3

69

Henri Berr, the Theoretician of Historical Knowledge Constructing Synthesis 70 Historical Synthesis and Sociology 81 The History Chair at the Collège de France: Moving on From Failure 83

viii 4

Contents Henri Berr, the Organizer and Promoter of Synthesis Objectives of the Revue de Synthèse Historique 87 The Dialogue Between Historical Synthesis and Sociology 89 A Historical Encyclopedia: The Évolution de l’Humanité 92

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PART III

The Durkheimian School and History 5

99

The Durkheimian School and History History as an Auxiliary Science: Émile Durkheim 103 A Heterodox Durkheimian: Célestin Bouglé 111 The Polemist and the Social Scientist: François Simiand 119 A Theory of Collective Memory: Maurice Halbwachs 135

101

Conclusion

149

Bibliography Index

157 175

Introduction

In the last decades of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, with the coming of age of sociology in France, the idea that there could be a “science” of history was the subject of much and varied debate. The many facets of both the confrontation and the collaboration between history and sociology are well known, but they have yet to be the subject of systematic study. From the viewpoint of the history of ideas, this is a gap that deserves attempts to fill it. Toward the middle of the 19th century, the discipline of history entered a decisive phase in its evolution. Striving to break with the romantic tradition, it sought to endow itself with scientific legitimacy. Historians were led for the first time to debate fundamental questions: what are the conditions for a scientific approach to history? What is its objective? Can we identify laws of history? Must history, conceived scientifically, adhere to the model of the natural sciences? In such questions we can discern the beginnings of a dialogue, and certainly the onset of long and lively polemics. Yet, while the community of historians was divided over a number of methodological issues, it was quick to circle the wagons against metaphysical interpretations of humanity’s fate. Surely it is not illegitimate to see this rejection—at least theoretical—of metaphysics as one of the defining characteristics of “scientific history”. The many methodological problems surrounding historical knowledge that were debated throughout the second half of the 19th century were still fully current at the beginning of the 20th century. They concerned not only scientific history but the social sciences as well, and sociology more specifically. Although from its origins, sociology was in competition with the discipline of history, it is no surprise that from the outset, it too was interested in history as a form of objective knowledge. Among the founders of sociology, there were many who believed that by retracing historical processes, they could make a clean break with abstraction and metaphysics. Of course, that was all an illusion. Thus, Auguste Comte, far from abandoning metaphysics for history, plunged into it all the more avidly. His law of the three states is a vibrant illustration. Between Comte and the historians of his time, dialogue was virtually impossible. As we shall see, Comte, the father of positivism,

2

Introduction

wrote caustic pages against the individualistic atomism of the historian, while historians such as Fustel de Coulanges remained hostile to any kind of systematization. Here, we are touching a crucial point. And yet, the science of history would draw some valuable lessons from the methodology of sociology which was emerging at the time. It was in large part under the impetus of the issues and problems raised by the philosopher Henri Berr and by the Durkheimian School, with the economist François Simiand as its lead protagonist, that the community of historians, increasingly aware of the limits of narrative history, turned so enthusiastically to social and economic history— just as Émile Durkheim and his disciples consulted history in order to avoid the twin pitfalls of the philosophy of history and of introspective psychology. It is this dialogue of the two neighboring sciences, which are often in competition because their objectives are so similar, that is the focus of this book.

The Problem of Scientific History: From Romanticism to Positivism Whether under the sway of romanticism or of positivism, the popularity of historical studies never flagged during the greater part of the 19th century. The influence of the French Revolution was particularly important in the development of historiography, even though it was not immediate. In fact, in the first years following that upheaval, history was largely marginalized and was of little concern to the intellectual community. Thus, during the first two or three decades of the 19th century, there were very few historians: “At that time people were living in the present without planning for the future and without worrying much about the past”.1 A historic fact if there ever was one, the French Revolution was, paradoxically, the main root of this mistrust of history; it “devalued the past; taking itself as a brand-new beginning, it simply forgot about the past”.2 The Revolution dug a deep trench between two adjacent centuries, and it made “people of the 19th century feel themselves strangers to those of the 18th century”; it also gave them “a true historical sense”, and helped to “awaken historians to their calling”. In short, it “dragged people into history”.3 In the collective memory, time was now divided into “before” and “after” 1789. “The tremendous upheavals that marked the end of the 18th century”, remarks the Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt, “compel us by their very nature, and beyond any sense of partisanship, to study what happened before and what came after [. . .] Only by considering the past can we readily measure the strength of the movement in which we are now caught up”.4 The revolutionary events of 1830 once again revealed the need to cultivate memory. As of that moment, interest in history began to grow irreversibly. “The revolution of 1830”, writes Camille Jullian,5 “was seen by historians as their victory. In those heady days, Jules Michelet saw at last “a nation”; he saw “la France”.6 In that time of turmoil, Augustin Thierry called out enthusiastically to “plant the flag of historical reform for the France of the 19th century”.7

Introduction

3

From the outset, this rebirth of history seemed to be dominated by a romanticism that dictated its lines of conduct.8 This literary form, essentially bourgeois, infused historical discussion for at least three or four decades. Generally speaking, what interested the romantic historian was not so much the truth of the facts but the manner of telling them. If the historian quickly became a slave to style and form, he was just as thoroughly shackled by his emotions, his sentimental attachments, and his particular tastes. We may take Michelet as the embodiment of the romantic historian. Here was a man who was deeply troubled and agitated. He let himself be carried away by his imagination, by his joys and sorrows, by his worries. He saw in France a nation, a “person”; he delved into its deepest secrets, he was its lover.9 This enthusiasm, this intoxication with the past, was no passing thing: it endured throughout the century. But after the fall of the Second Empire, history had to change. Romantic history was thoroughly discredited. Positivism, in its various guises, sounded the death knell for romanticism and every kind of literary artifice. In the middle of the 19th century, the boundary between romanticism and positivism became more clearly established. The romantic style fell into disuse. In theory, the “positivist” historian was hostile to the idea of entertaining any sympathy for his subject; his writing must not betray any passion. In fact, he regarded metaphysics, value judgments and speculation as suspect and inappropriate. The facts alone must serve as his guide. The “positivist” historian set himself a task: to observe the facts “as they really happened”— or wie es eigenlich gewesen ist, as Leopold von Ranke put it from the other side of the Rhine.10 For many historians, this formula became a powerful axiom. For more than half a century, much of French historiography would insist on the virtues of a neutral and impartial history where the historian would have no other function than to kneel humbly before empirical reality. In this context, some historians came to see written documentation as the key factor in the definition of “scientific” history. The document supported the historian’s argument, and it served to demarcate history from the philosophy of history. With the aid of the document, history could at last claim to be an objective science. Langlois and Seignobos, two of the most important historians of the end of the 19th century, carried this reasoning to its absolute limits. But Fustel de Coulanges had already pointed the way for them several decades earlier. Not only did he see history as a science, he insisted that it was a “pure science”. In his concept, history could entertain great ambitions. In principle, everything is history. History is not “just another science”; it is the mother of all social sciences. The written document ensures its neutrality and gives it the detachment that any scientific investigation demands. “No documents, no history”—this was the battle cry that many historians would raise. For the young director of the Revue historique, Gabriel Monod, the document was a guarantee against any temptation to interpret history by

4

Introduction

appealing to supernatural or metaphysical causes. In his famous methodological program of 1876, Monod, who had a great influence on scientific historians of the next generation like Ernest Lavisse, Charles Seignobos, Camille Jullian etc., declares war on systems of thought and becomes an apologist for history as science. “We have recognized the danger of premature generalizations, of grand a priori schemes that claim to embrace everything and explain it all”.11 And he adds, “the development of the positive sciences, which is the distinctive feature of our century, must surely include, in the field that we call literary, the development of history, the purpose of which is to submit all the manifestations of the human being to scientific knowledge and indeed to scientific laws”.12 We find a similar view in the first volume of the Revue des questions historiques, a royalist and Catholic journal founded by Gaston du Fresne de Beaucourt: historical scholarship must be pursued “without passion, without partisanship, with the sole aim of seeking the truth and telling it”.13 But objectivity is not always a prime feature of historical positivism or of positivism in general. Nowhere in the works of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, despite their intimate association with positivism, will we find a narrow quest for objectivity. In fact, these theorists were steadfast promoters of a science of history that fell within the bounds of art and science, where the historian was an accessory to history. The historian makes history, and he is its product. But above all, the historian is an artist: his emotions enter freely into play, and they shape his interpretation of the past. In the work of Taine and Renan, the historical discipline has not yet broken with its romantic background. History is not merely a scientific discipline, it is an art, and above all, a faith. As will already be clear, and despite the intent of many of its enthusiasts, “positivist” history was not completely free of philosophy, nor did it renounce systematization. For some, like the historian and sociologist Paul Lacombe, history would become scientific only when it had established laws explaining human behavior. History, he said, should show how people try to meet their psychological and biological needs through institutions. Others, like Louis Bourdeau, citing the theories of Auguste Comte, attempted to explain the irreversible progress of human intelligence. According to Bourdeau, as we shall see, history was the science of reason. In the face of these conflicting perspectives, it is difficult at first glance to form a general idea of what has been called—wrongly and without any attempt at precision—“historical positivism”.

The Many Meanings and Ambiguities of the Notion of “Historical Positivism” Given the diversity of viewpoints that it covers, the term “historical positivism” is ripe for misunderstanding.14 Until recently, it was rarely thought necessary to define the concept. Guy Bourdé and Hervé Martin insist that

Introduction

5

“it was and remains a mistake to say that the historical school that took root in France between 1880 and 1930 was of a positivist persuasion”.15 Charles-Olivier Carbonell argues, along the same lines, that historical positivism is “a doctrine without practitioners”. “In fact”, he says, “at that time [the end of the 19th century] there was no positivist school or tendency among French historians, and indeed there never has been”.16 Nothing could be truer. No French historian of the second half of the 19th century would have called himself a positivist. We may take this already as a serious indicator of the term’s ambiguity. In reality, the notion of historical positivism was born much later. It appeared for the first time in the 1940s, at the hands of historians eager to distance themselves from their predecessors. At that time, the notion of historical positivism had a pejorative connotation. Charles Seignobos, an eminent academician, was the target of fierce attacks: “He sings the praises of histoire-tableau [potted history]—which is histoiremanuel [text-book history]”, complains Lucien Febvre;17 he has “a rather simplistic image” of the way we learn, adds Henri-Irénée Marrou.18 Obviously, historical positivism cannot be reduced to a single proponent’s name, however prestigious that name may be. Historical positivism embraces a wide range of perspectives: the label can be applied as readily to Fustel de Coulanges as it can to Paul Lacombe, to Camille Jullian or to Ferdinand Lot, distant forebears of the Annales School—a strange paradox that merely underlines the anachronistic nature of the expression “historical positivism”. How are we then to understand this concept? It would be too easy to say that Auguste Comte was the instigator of historical positivism. Historians such as Fustel de Coulanges or Charles Seignobos shared none of the main ideas of the father of positivism. Indeed, they never considered themselves positivists, and they studiously avoided the word itself. In fact, 19th-century historians were generally hostile to the works of Comte and his disciples. Carbonell’s insistence that “there was no positivist school or movement among French historians of the 19th century” is, to a large extent, true. On the other hand, it could almost be said that in history there are as many positivisms as there are positivists. Faced with such a cluttered landscape, should we simply abandon the term “positivist history”? Historians have thought so for some time now. In their work on the “history schools”, Guy Bourdé and Hervé Martin make no mention of positivist history. More cautiously, they speak of a “method-based school” [école méthodique]. But this new epithet does not resolve the problem. In fact, the expression “methodical school” seems even further from the mark because it implies, in a sense, that historians of that time were using a common method. This is obviously not the case. Bourdé and Martin themselves admit this: “The program of L. Bourdeau stands in contrast to the joint approach of G. Monod, E. Lavisse, Ch.-V. Langlois, Ch. Seignobos and their friends”.19 And what can we say about the gulf that separates Paul Lacombe or Henri Berr from Charles Seignobos or Ernest Lavisse?20 The least we can add is that it is surprising

6

Introduction

to find such divergences within what is supposed to be a school. How can we speak of a school when there is no consensus among its presumed members, when we can identify neither a leader nor any particular founder? The term “scientific history” [histoire-science], which Paul Lacombe was already using at the end of the 19th century, seems a safer bet. It certainly has broader scope, but it also has the merit of bringing together under one label the various tendencies that we find within a succession of writers bent on constructing a scientific history. In fact, scientific history as it appeared at the time was not an academic program but a common inclination among thinkers who were otherwise working independently. The turn of the century saw the overthrow of what had been considered certainties. Morality had to be recast, and the relationship between man and society re-examined according to the criteria of the emerging social sciences. The pace of time was accelerating, and chaos was taking hold. Both historians and sociologists dreamed of a society freed from the yoke of the metaphysicians, one that would give pride of place to scholars and industrialists, to whom he willingly assigned the task of “completing the Revolution”.21 The new world that was taking shape before their eyes sparked mixed feelings, characterized both by bursts of enthusiasm and by gnawing concerns. They were not given to wild theorizing: they cast their ideas in context, they offered answers to the crises that often emerge in the world of science.

Theme and Organization of the Book These few remarks are intended to pinpoint the intent of this book, in the course of which we shall address a multitude of writers and of paradigms. Starting with the definition of scientific history as developed by certain theorists of the late 19th century, moving on through the historical synthesis of the philosopher Henri Berr to Durkheimian sociology (focusing mainly on the work of François Simiand), we shall analyze the relationship between scientific history and sociology from 1880 to 1930, although we will not adhere rigidly to this time frame. The central focus will be on conflicts of method, disputes between practitioners of the two disciplines, and the nature of their arguments and the questions they raise in order finally to see if there are grounds for opting between these two intellectual communities. The theme involves three stages. First, we examine the key role that history played in the development of the social sciences in the mid-19th century among the pioneers of positivist thought, such as Comte, Cournot, Renan and Taine.22 We then look at the various ramifications of scientific history as seen from four perspectives, illustrated by authors as diverse as Fustel de Coulanges, Louis Bourdeau, Paul Lacombe and Charles Seignobos. The essential problem and the common concern of these historians and theorists of history is to construct a program that will allow history to become scientific. But through these perspectives, which contain elements that are both mutually opposing and mutually complementary, we can make out

Introduction

7

two diametrically opposed methodological tendencies: one of them sees history as nothing more than a string of singular events (Seignobos), while for the other, the march of human history is driven by an implacable necessity (Fustel de Coulanges, Bourdeau). We shall see how the science of history swings constantly between these two antithetical perspectives, and we shall then examine the ambiguities and the hesitations that mark the work of some authors (Lacombe). The confrontation between these different perspectives allows us to identify the chief methodological and theoretical issues of scientific history and its relationship with the new discipline of sociology. Many questions will be posed, and they will crop up in various forms throughout this book. For example: does the history of institutions, manners and beliefs belong to the field of history or to that of sociology? Is the history of individual facts a legitimate pursuit from the scientific viewpoint? Does scientific history have to embrace both the necessary and the accidental? Does history have the same explanatory power as sociology? These questions were still central at the beginning of the 20th century and they were debated in an intellectual setting that was undergoing radical change.23 It must be said that the rise of the social sciences did much to renew and revitalize historical studies. Besides indicating valuable new methodological and theoretical routes, these new disciplines shed light on aspects of the past—social, geographic and psychological—that had been little explored. With good reason, this book accords a place of honor to Henri Berr. For more than half a century, he was one of the philosophers who did the most to extend the field of history to new horizons and to encourage entirely new areas of study. His work, too little recognized today, is a true plea for openness of mind, and it sparked considerable debate and discussion within the new coterie of social scientists. Not only did he seek to rally the different sciences to a historical perspective, he also hoped to unite researchers— however varied or even divergent their interests—around a discipline that he called the synthèse historique (historical synthesis). Among other achievements, he founded two journals for promoting this all-embracing science, with its nearly unlimited intellectual possibilities: the Revue de synthèse historique in 1900, with an encyclopedic range of interests, and L’Évolution de l’Humanité in 1919. These often extravagantly ambitious undertakings reveal the limitations and the weaknesses of factual history or events-based history [histoire historisante], and they herald the advent of the “new history”. Thus, in the debates waged by Henri Berr and his collaborators, we can see the object of history migrate steadily from the singular to the general, as events gradually yield the ground to institutions. Durkheimian sociology was, of course, no stranger to this shift. Through his many critiques as well as the example set by his own research, Émile Durkheim and his collaborators helped to ground the science of history firmly to the search for general and institutional facts. History, for its part, had been of great assistance to the budding sociologist in preparing his

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Introduction

program. Very early in his career, he came to regard history as an indispensable “auxiliary science”. For Durkheim, social phenomena could be explained, not through the assembly of individual facts, but on the basis of other social facts gleaned from the span of history.24 In effect, by retracing the stages of history, the sociologist could avoid the perils of subjective interpretation. This concern with distance across time, as we shall see, was fully shared by Célestin Bouglé, François Simiand and Maurice Halbwachs. Of course, scientific theories and methods enunciated more than a century ago may seem stale or trite in certain respects. It is important, however, to appreciate how these theories and these methods were constructed, most often as a result of debates, experiments and disputes. This leads us on to the consideration of the origins of an intellectual context involving two fundamental disciplines.

Notes 1 Charles-Victor Langlois, Les Études historiques (Paris: Larousse, 1915), p. 10. 2 Jean Ehrard and Guy Palmade, L’Histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964), p. 50. 3 Pierre Moreau, L’Histoire en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1935), p. 29. 4 Jacob Burkhardt, Considérations sur l’histoire universelle (Genève: Droz, 1965), p. 11. 5 Camille Jullian was influenced by Fustel de Coulanges and by the German historian Mommsen. He published what he called the “first scientific” book on la Gaule (1907–1928) and he was the editor of Fustel de Coulanges’ Histoire des institutions de l’ancienne France (1890). 6 Camille Jullian, Extraits des historiens français du XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1896), p. XL. 7 Augustin Thierry, “Dix ans d’études historiques”. In Œuvres complètes, 6 (Paris: Furne, 1846), p. 40. 8 See Charles-Olivier Carbonell, L’Historiographie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 84–88. 9 See Paule Petitier, Jules Michelet, l’homme histoire (Paris: Grasset, 2006). 10 On the Rankean model, see Georg Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 17–23; Henri Berr, “Ranke et sa conception de l’histoire”, Revue de synthèse historique (8, 1903), pp. 93–96. 11 Gabriel Monod, “Du progrès des études historiques en France”, Revue historique (1, 1876), pp. 33–34. 12 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 13 Gaston du Fresne de Beaucourt, “Introduction”, Revue des questions historiques (1, 1866), p. 9. 14 See Jaume Aurell, La escritura de la memoria (València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2005), pp. 23–38. 15 Guy Bourdé and Hervé Martin, Les Écoles historiques (Paris: Seuil, 1983), p. 161. 16 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, Histoire et historiens. Une mutation idéologique (Toulouse: Institut d’Études politiques de Toulouse, 1976), p. 410. 17 Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), p. 72. The English historian R. G. Collingwood called this “scissors-and-paste history” (see The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946).

Introduction

9

18 Henri-Irenée Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 73. 19 Guy Bourdé and Hervé Martin, Les Écoles historiques, p. 162. 20 Ernest Lavisse (1842–1922) was a patriotic who considerd history as a scientific discipline. He wrote Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu’à la Révolution (1901). 21 Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Du système industriel, 1 (Paris: Charles-Augustin Renouard, 1821). 22 See Louis Liard, La Science positive et la métaphysique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1898 (1878)); Émile Boutroux, “Comtisme et positivisme”, Revue bleue (17, 1908), pp. 161–165; Donald Geoffrey, Charlton, Positivism in France during the Second Empire 1852–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 23 See Robert Bonnaud, Histoire et historiens de 1900 à nos jours (Paris: Kimé, 2001). 24 See Gérard Noiriel, Sur la crise de l’histoire (Paris: Belin, 2005), pp. 92–94.

Part I

The Idea of Scientific History

1

History and the Social Sciences

The enthusiasm for history that emerged at the beginning of the 19th century had a great influence on the social sciences. Born of the crisis of Western societies—caught up in what seemed a sudden acceleration of history—it is natural enough that these sciences should attempt to define the laws governing human destiny. The social sciences were historical by necessity: Comte, Cournot, Renan and Taine could not conceive of them in any other manner. The Revolution of 1789 can be considered to be the source of their social and political thinking. When romanticism began to run out of steam around the beginning of the 19th-century mark, the social sciences attempted to define themselves as true sciences, drawing inspiration in most cases from the model of the physical and biological sciences. It is often said that the 19th century was the century of history (le siècle de l’histoire) because of the large number of significant events which unfolded during its course. But one could also say that the 19th century is just as much the century of historical method, in the sense that history attempted to define itself as a science under the influence of a kind of positivism, but a form of scientific thought was often very far removed from that of Auguste Comte. This “scientific history” (histoire-science) defined itself at first in its break with the romanticism in the style of Jules Michelet and then in opposition to a philosophy of history, which was deemed to be too abstract and too remote from empirical facts. This new history, which was inspired by the model of the natural sciences, sought to provide a new interpretation of the French Revolution. Contrary to the historians of the day, the new generation of social scientists (or proto-sociologist) refused to see this event as a fortuitous, completely unforeseen event. Rather, they thought that it had been in preparation for centuries and that the coming together of all the necessary preconditions was the clearest illustration of this. Taine, for example, turned to the Revolution in the aftermath of the defeat of 1870. Many authors of the second part of the century, who developed each in their own way what one would later call “historical sociology”, were not, for all that, positivists.

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The Idea of Scientific History

Auguste Comte: The Progress of the Human Intelligence The thinking of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a perfect reflection of the intellectual ferment provoked by the shock of the Revolution. As he himself admitted, “without the Revolution there would have been no theory of progress and no social science”. In the wake of the Revolution, and indeed throughout the 19th century, there was one question that preoccupied many thinkers: what are the principles of social order? Comte believed that it was up to positive philosophy to discern those principles. And he considered that philosophy would become less and less interested in metaphysical speculation and that it would inevitably attempt to forge ever-closer links with science. But, he insisted, before it could be scientific, philosophy would have to be practical. As the sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl points out, Comte’s entire work was inspired by this social reform movement: “with Comte, the scientific interest, however lively it may be, is subordinate to the social interest”; in effect, “it asks philosophy to establish the bases of modern society”.1 The science of society would thereafter have a supremely important function: it must preside over the reorganization of morals and manners. “I regard all institutions as pure nonsense, and they will remain so until the spiritual reorganization of society is complete or at least well under way”.2 The reform of society and the reform of knowledge were supposed to complement each other. If society was to be reorganized, the same must hold for science. On this point, Comte proposed a classification of sciences. His classification is highly selective: it leaves aside all the artistic disciplines (literature, philology, poetry etc.) as well as all the concrete sciences (geography, zoology etc.), and considers only the abstract or theoretical ones, i.e. those that have as their objective to discover and understand laws. In the end, Comte recognized only six sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. And he placed these sciences within a strict historical timeframe. As his classification of the sciences demonstrates so eloquently, Comte’s grand plan was to understand the progress of human intelligence. Which science is best equipped to grasp the main features of that progress? To begin with, Comte rejects introspective psychology à la Victor Cousin, which he deems unworthy of a place in his classification—as he saw it, the individual had no scientific rationale and was merely an abstraction. Thus, Comte argues that the movement in which humanity is caught up can be understood only through a collective psychology, which he named “social physics” or “sociology”. In his view, this justified the creation of a science of society which, like all the other sciences, would revolve around two aspects: the static and the dynamic. The static element, which is the science of order, is supposed to reveal the laws of coexistence, whereas the dynamic element, which is the science of progress, must examine the laws of succession. Sociology, according to Comte, becomes a real science only when it superimposes these two stages of knowledge.

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This fundamental place of history in the work of Auguste Comte is so well known that we do not need to linger over it here: suffice it to say that the father of positivism was hostile to the narrative nature of the historiography of his time. “We do not yet have a true history conceived in a scientific spirit”, he writes in an early essay, “by which I mean a history that seeks to discover the laws that govern the development of the human species”.3 In his Cours de philosophie positive, Comte mentions that political and military history, so dear to historians of the time, was nothing more than a display of erudition that was “sterile and misdirected”, one that tended to distract from the study of social evolution.4 Thus conceived, history is superficial and not of much use; it is merely “an incoherent compilation of facts”.5 Assembling a multitude of heterogeneous facts runs counter to any serious scientific approach. Consequently, history is still far from the ideal stage, which Comte calls the positive stage, but history remains a fundamental method. The study of individual facts, he notes, helps to “maintain theological and metaphysical belief in the limitless and creative power that lawgivers wield over civilization [. . .] This unfortunate effect results from the fact that, in great events, we see only people and never the things that drive them so irresistibly”.6 Hence this merciless judgment: “all the historical works written to date, even the most laudable, had never been, and by necessity never could be, anything more than annals, i.e. a description and chronological account of a certain sequence of particular facts, more or less important and more or less accurate, but always isolated from each other”.7 In history, of course, not everything is of equal importance: “We must look to the human past only for social phenomena that have obviously exerted real influence, at least indirect or remote influence, on the gradual unfolding of the successive phases that have brought the most advanced nations to their present state”.8 The law of the three stages [la loi des trois états], which is considered one of Comte’s most original propositions, establishes the principle of harmony between the history of thought, the general history of science and the history of society. It was in 1822, in what he called his “plan for reorganizing society” (Plan des travaux pour réorganiser la société), that Comte set forth for first time, in an embryonic way, his famous law of the three stages of human development: the ideological and military stage, the metaphysical and legalistic stage and the positive and industrial stage. In the Cours de philosophie positive, he argues that the phases of social development depend more on the types of knowledge inherent to them: the theological stage corresponds to an archaic social structure, the metaphysical stage to a feudal social structure and the positive stage to an industrial social structure. In the end, there is only one dynamic law, and it governs all sociology and all human knowledge: “Do we not, each of us, in looking back on our own lives, remember that we were successively a theologian in our childhood, a metaphysician in our youth, and a physicist in adulthood?”9 In his Système de philosophie

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positive, published at the end of his life, he devoted a volume to history. This volume is called Philosophy of history.10 From his first to his last works, Auguste Comte never changed his mind about history and the role that discipline plays in his system of thought. According to him, positivism “explains the mental evolution of Humanity, lays down the true method by which our abstract conceptions could be classified; thus reconciling the conditions of order and movement, hitherto to more or less variance. Its historical clearness and its philosophical force strength each other, for one cannot understand the connection of our conceptions except by studying the succession of the phases through which they pass. And on the other hand, but the existence of such a connection, it would be impossible to explain the historical phases”.11 But Comte, as we could see, is opposed to history as an encyclopedic knowledge. For him, as his famous law of three stages reminds us, history is nothing else than a psychology of humanity.

Antoine Augustin Cournot: Between Chance and Necessity Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801–1877) was a mathematician, economist and philosopher. He became familiar early with many authors from various disciplines, including Leibniz, Laplace, Darwin and Poisson, and was a keen follower of both natural sciences and emerging social sciences (especially political economy). His devotion to epistemology, as we will see, makes the core of his writings. The vision of history that dominated Antoine Augustin Cournot’s thinking was the product of a culture shaped by mathematics and by philosophy. He did not, however, espouse a mechanical application of the mathematical model to the social sciences. He knew too well that social phenomena are specific in their nature, in that they are the result of strategic intentions and behavior. From this perspective, psychology, which he regarded as an unscientific discipline, seemed to him of little use. He preferred to fall back on philosophy and on history. Yet these disciplines, taken in isolation, seemed to him incomplete. He set out therefore to tie philosophical speculation and historical narration together with close links of reciprocity. “If we are to have a philosophy of history, we must first know history, just as, if we are to have a philosophical anatomy, we must first have mastered descriptive anatomy. The condition is obvious in both cases; and moreover, when it comes to history in particular, it is clear that we cannot recount it without placing events in order, one behind the other, as they occurred in time. Whereas if we are to appreciate the subordination of the great features of history and of the secondary features or accidents of detail, we must at the same time look at the sequence of events that have come in succession over the centuries, in a procedure that is quite the reverse of that used in narrative history”.12 This approach reflects not only a research strategy, but also a lively interest

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in observing empirical facts, something we hardly find with Auguste Comte. In this way, Cournot is able to discern laws of history that are not linear but are, to the contrary, marked by discontinuities of all kinds. The idea of the “reason of things” is an especially clear illustration of this. It holds that everything has a cause. Like Leibniz, Cournot seeks to extract an order, a generality, from irregular and accidental phenomena.13 He tries, he says, to discern the “general aspect” (allure générale). The goal of the philosophy of history, or what Cournot calls “historical etiology”,14 is then to establish an order, a hierarchy among the facts in order to determine, not a singular cause, but the many causes that contribute to a phenomenon or a trend. Cournot possessed an encyclopedic knowledge that allowed him to read history in this way. In his writings, he restores dignity and importance to the aspect of chance: it becomes “a true fact in itself”,15 perfectly objective, which cannot be reduced to some subjective finality. Thus, “the word ‘chance’ is not unrelated to external reality; it expresses an idea that has its manifestation in observable phenomena, and an effectiveness that we can see in the governance of the world; [it is] an idea based on reason, even for intelligences that are far superior to human intelligence and that could peer into a multitude of causes of which we are unaware”.16 Chance, in fact, is nothing more than the conjunction of causes that are themselves independent.17 But the general orientation of mankind, marked first and foremost by the progress of reason and technology, suggests that chance is bound to recede. Three great phases—prehistoric, historic and post-historic—testify to this inevitable retreat. There is in this orientation a kind of fatality, a pessimism that Cournot cannot always conceal. The prehistoric phase relates to an obscure moment in social and intellectual development where individual forces are virtually anonymous and of no great impact. There we find no great men, no geniuses, no great inventors. The main characteristic of prehistoric or archaic societies is their homogeneity. Their way of life is instinctive, spontaneous. At this stage, instinct dominates reason. The prehistoric phase, to borrow the language of biological science, is a vitalist phase. The historic phase, which according to Cournot coincides roughly with the advent of writing, begins only when social life reaches a fair degree of sophistication. It is at this moment that a continuous transformation occurs, a progress that is characterized by the preponderance of reason over instinct and by the occurrence of fortuitous events. In fact, the historic phase, the intermediary point in social evolution, can be characterized essentially as the “theater of great personages”.18 But as the number of great individuals gradually declines, as events become rarer and even predictable, when chance, in short, has significantly receded, societies will enter the post-historic phase. Mankind of the future, then, will have to be industrious, there will be no geniuses, and discoveries will be doomed to disappear in anonymity. Moreover, Cournot maintains,

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without much enthusiasm, peoples are destined to become more like each other, to intermingle, and ultimately to blend into a “general civilization”.19 This reading of history sparked much comment at the beginning of the 20th century. Some sought in it lessons for the future, and it was often reduced, in cursory judgments, to the realm of prophecy. Yet this, it seems, betrays an important misunderstanding. Antoine Augustin Cournot was not necessarily trying to predict. He subscribed above all to a scientific realism that prevented him from decreeing an eventual end to history. He merely tried to determine what was likely to happen if certain conditions were fulfilled. At this point, history resembles a game of chess where every move, even one that appears least significant, is part of a broader strategy.20 Action can now be seen as dependent on the rationality of the players.21 Military history, which has often attracted the attention of historians, is a fine example. Cournot explains military history as a combination of strategies confronting and clashing with each other. To highlight the main moments of a battle and to record the outcome of a chess game are in fact analogous operations: in both cases, we are establishing linkages between each move, between each event, in order to show the relative influence each exerts on subsequent events. But it is only to rational actions, strictly speaking, and not to agents, that the stuff of history can be reduced. It is true, as Cournot recognized himself, that subjective action is shaped by its setting but not completely determined by it. Interaction does not occur necessarily between two or more individuals, but between the individual and the social milieu. In seeking to articulate relationships of reciprocity between the necessary and the fortuitous, Cournot, who said he was opposed to “systems men”,22 succeeded in mobilizing the attention of two intellectual communities, the sociologists and the historians. The sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Célestin Bouglé claimed explicitly to be his heirs.23 As to Henri Berr, he was quite ready to call Cournot “the precursor of synthesis”, for “he could see that chance and order, accident and reason are constantly doing battle in the unfolding of history”.24 This assertion, coming from a philosopher who was always seeking to forge alliances between the historical discipline and the emerging social sciences, seems quite natural. But it is perhaps more surprising to read, from the pen of Lucien Febvre, a great admirer of Michelet, the following remark: “Cournot, this philosopher-mathematician, this great theoretician of chance, this investigator of probabilities [. . .]—how much we historians have to gain from reading him!”25 The work of Cournot thus became a beacon for those hoping to open a dialogue between history and sociology. But Cournot rejects Comte’s law of the three stages. On this basis, he defines the role of philosophy. “Whether there are or are not laws, it is enough that these facts are sometimes subordinate and sometimes independent of each other, in order that a critical philosophy should set for itself

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the task of determining independence or subordination whether necessary and proper”.26 Philosophy, as we could see, bridges gap between necessity and chance. Cournot will, then, have a huge influence on Lacombe, Berr and Bouglé.

Ernest Renan: In Praise of Science In the same vein as Auguste Comte’s work, that of Ernest Renan (1823– 1892) bears the imprint of the French Revolution. With Renan, the abrupt acceleration of history that flowed from that event gave rise to many concerns and uncertainties but also to great hopes. The central theme of his work is found in his book on the future of science, L’Avenir de la science, which was written in his youth, in 1848, but published in 1890, and one that Charles Péguy quite rightly hailed as “a testament to life”.27 In the aftermath of the Revolution, the value of religion was called into question by the intelligentsia, and its influence declined not only because people no longer believed it had a monopoly over moral values, but also because some thought it no longer capable of explaining human destiny in a satisfactory way.28 The void left by religion encouraged the emergence of a plethora of philosophical systems in a sequence extending throughout the first half of the 19th century. The young Renan was among those who had lost faith.29 He gave himself a new mission: to free the spirit from the “grave danger” of Catholicism, which “has disastrous effects on development of the brain”.30 Henceforth, he would believe only in science, which he deemed a virtue. If people no longer believed in religious values, then it was essential, as Renan saw it, that they should at least have a concept of the world, for “to live without a system for understanding things is not to live a human life”.31 Science thus becomes, for Renan, “a way of disobeying God”32—and this, of course, explains why “Christianity has not been very favorable to the development of positive science”.33 But Ernest Renan thought that science had not only an extraordinary intellectual power; he considered, like Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, it the principal force for organizing the moral order. Science would therefore have to replace religion, even if it differed fundamentally in its principles: “it does not come from on high”, it “emerges from the depths of our consciousness”. Like religion, however, it is a sacred thing, and its function is analogous: to resolve “the human enigma”, “to tell man definitively the meaning of things” and, finally, to serve man as a symbol.34 “It is then no exaggeration”, writes Renan, “to say that science contains within it the future of humanity, that it alone can reveal to man his destiny and teach him how to achieve his purpose”.35 It was the upheavals sparked by the Revolution that gave birth to rational thought: that event marks “the advent of thinking in human governance. It is the time when the child, brought to this point by spontaneous instincts, caprice and the will of others, becomes a person who is free, moral and

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responsible for his acts”. In fact, for Ernest Renan, all the time that elapsed before 1789 was “the irrational period of human existence (. . .) The true history of France begins in ’89; everything that went before was a gradual preparation for ‘89 and is of no interest beyond that”.36 The year 1789, then, was much more than a political revolution that led to the overthrow of the monarchy. It was also more than a democratic revolution that gave power to the people: it was, above all, a revolution of thinking. Previously, there were institutions, beliefs and dogmas, and no one ever questioned their origins and their profound meanings: “the world was a grand machine organized so long ago and with so little thought that people believed God himself had put it together”.37 Ernest Renan’s system, like that of Comte, sets out to enlighten mankind as to the progress of human intelligence. However, Renan brings into play some sciences that Comte had dismissed as unimportant. Philology is a prime example. Renan gives it an essentially heuristic function. Philology, he writes, “has no purpose in itself: it has its value as a necessary condition of the history of the human mind and the study of the past”.38 It is, in fact, “the exact science of the phenomena of the mind. It is to the social sciences what physics and chemistry are to the philosophical science of matter”.39 Philology provides access to the facts: what remains is to interpret them and to theorize about them. It is here that psychology intervenes. In Renan’s mind, psychology has a very broad meaning; it is defined as the science of the genesis of a “being”, individual and collective, “creating itself and arriving by varying degrees at full possession of itself”. Once again, Renan refuses to present himself as an evolutionist in Auguste Comte’s meaning of that term. The evolution of mankind, he insists, did not necessarily pass through successive historical phases of development: “if there is one idea that I see as outmoded, it is that nations succeed one another, passing through the same phases to perish in their turn, then to live again under other names, with the same dream beginning over and over again. What a nightmare humanity would then be! How absurd revolutions would seem! How pallid and meaningless life would be!”40 Yet, from the methodological viewpoint, Renan, like Auguste Comte, tends to consider the individual as a pure abstraction. Behind any successful individual, he insists, there is “the crowd”—the masses—and although its role is often obscured, it is no less important: “The crowd lends him the raw material; the man of genius gives it expression, shapes it and brings it to life; then the crowd, which feels but cannot speak, sees itself reflected and rejoices aloud”. All power of creation emanates from the collectivity: “it is the masses that create; for the masses possess the moral instincts of human nature, eminently and a thousand times more spontaneously”.41 This assertion, which dates from the middle of the 19th century, presages some core ideas of Émile Durkheim’s sociology. And, following the route of 1870, when Paris fell to the Prussian army and the Second Empire of Napoleon III collapsed, Renan refers to the idea of “collective conscience”: “A country

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is not the simple sum of the individuals who comprise it; it is a soul, a conscience, a person, a living being”.42 Who were the guilty parties in this denial of the collective role? Ernest Renan identifies them clearly: they are, on one hand, the historians, whose sole interest is in presenting events and singular occurrences and, on the other hand, the philosophers who, ignoring empirical facts, take refuge in vast, abstract systems. How can these two paradoxical approaches be reconciled? Renan envisages an in-depth reform of intellectual scholarship. “The human goal is not happiness”, he insists: “it is intellectual and moral perfection”.43 And the route to this perfection is through knowledge. Thus, a primary and extremely urgent task of all the sciences is to fight against the mindset of specialization, against “sectarian and confined studies”. The best way to avoid the pitfall of specialization, as Renan sees it, is to proceed in three successive steps, inspired by Hegelian philosophy, involving “first, a general and confused view; second, a distinct and analytic view of the parts; third, a synthetic reconstruction of all, with understanding of the parts; the human mind, similarly, passes through three stages that we may call in turn syncretic, analytic and synthetic, and that correspond to these three phases of knowledge”.44 “Perfect science is possible only if it is based on an analysis and a distinct view of its parts [. . .] Mankind will be knowledgeable only when science has dissected the human being, explored it to the last detail, and reconstructed it”.45 Analysis and synthesis, then, become the two fundamental stages of the scientific approach: “The heroes of science are those who are capable of the loftiest visions and yet have forbidden themselves any precipitous generalization, and have resigned themselves, through scientific virtue, to the status of humble workers”.46 The approach proposed by Renan, then, is a compromise between the strict empiricism of the historian and the hyper-theorization of the philosophers. This fusion of analysis and synthesis is, in Renan’s eyes, the only way to restore unity to thought and knowledge. It is also the essential condition for preparing a new moral order.

Hippolyte Taine: Applying the Scientific Model of Natural Sciences to History Historian, philosopher and sociologist, born at Vouziers in 1828, Hippolyte Taine excelled in his studies at the Lycée Condorcet and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1848. Although his first works dealt with literary criticism, he was also attracted to psychology (individual and group), as exemplified in his Essai sur Tite-Live (1856) and his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (four vols, 1864) works in which he developed what he claimed to be a scientific method. No doubt influenced by the events of 1870, Taine turned to political questions in his Origines de la France contemporaine (four vols, 1875–1893). Despite some objections as to his attention to

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historical detail, the fact remains that Taine, whose name is above all associated with conservatism, offered a critique of Jacobinism and the Commune of Paris. He was distrustful of democracy and in favour of a minimalist state dominated by elites. Like Renan, Taine belongs to the positivist school, in its broad conception. Convinced of the benefits of science, he was sure that the development of positivism was the outstanding achievement of the intellectual history of the past three centuries. He demanded a great deal from science: it was to be his guide and his faith. The natural sciences, including physiology, would serve as his model for constructing the laws of human history.47 Very early on, Taine, who called himself an “anatomical historian”,48 was seized by concern to elevate history to the status of a science. At the École Normale, he had already laid the basis of his own philosophical system “in contradiction to the instruction he was receiving”.49 At that time, and throughout the early part of his intellectual career, Taine was strongly attracted by history, but as applied to literature.50 He read Lafontaine and Racine keenly and applied to them his theory of the “milieu”, which was then in gestation. But his concept of this literary history was a scientific one. In 1852, when he was only 25, he wrote to his friend Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol: “I ponder increasingly over this grand philosophical conundrum (pâtée philosophique) [. . .] of making history a science and giving it an anatomy and physiology as we do the organic world”.51 Mere youthful bravado? Not at all. This conception of history would remain ingrained and virtually unchanged in Taine’s mind. In his Essais de critique et d’histoire, he insisted that “there is an anatomy in human history as in natural history”,52 for if “we deconstruct a personage, a literature, a century, a civilization, in short any natural group of human events, we will find that all its parts are mutually dependent as are the organs of a plant or an animal”.53 In Taine’s eyes, however, history is still an art, and its primary function is to take account of emotions, for “men have never done great things without emotions”.54 Events and individuals are also among the concerns of scientific history. “The human life that the historian imitates is not a formula but a drama, and the laws act upon it only through events”.55 The lives of great men, too, are intimately bound up with the human drama: “as the heroic sentiment is the cause of everything else, it is on that sentiment that the historian must focus. As it is the source of civilization, the engine of revolutions, the master and the re-creator of human life, it is to that sentiment that we must look to find civilization, revolutions and human life”.56 Like Renan, Hippolyte Taine believed that the science of history must expose the principles governing the mental evolution of peoples.57 In this regard, he sought to unify psychology and history, sciences which, he maintained, had the same focus of interest—the genesis of man—although they approached it in different ways. In De l’Intelligence, which Paul Lacombe rightly called a “document of national psychology”,58 Taine writes: “the student of man and of mankind, the psychologist and the historian, although

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they have separate viewpoints, have nevertheless the same objective; that is why each new insight achieved by one must be taken into account by the other. This is clear today, especially in history. We see that in order to understand the transformation that any human molecule or any group of human molecules goes through we must turn to psychology”.59 In this way, he establishes a division of labor between the historian and the psychologist: the former must compile the facts, and the latter must construct theoretical principles from them. To the end of his life, Taine remained absolutely steadfast in his conception of history, changing not even the slightest detail. As history and the natural sciences were sibling disciplines, he believed that they must adopt common methodological principles. In his last body of work, the Origines de la France contemporaine, he presents his beloved country as if it were a living being. He analyzes it in all its complexity, not with the cold logic of the scientist, but with the passion of an artist. He sets out to retrace its development.60 The first volume on the Ancien régime begins with this query: “What is contemporary France? To answer that question requires a knowledge of how France was formed, or, what is much better, being present at her formation, as if a spectator. At the close of the last century she undergoes a transformation, like that of an insect shedding its coat. Her ancient organization breaks up; she herself rends the most precious tissues and falls into convulsions which seem moral. And then, there is recovery, after multiplied throes and a painful lethargy. But her organization is no longer what it was; a new being, after her organization is no longer what it was; a new being, after terrible internal travail, is substituted for the old one”.61 This is not the language of a historian, who would surely never use such metaphors. Taine’s work is more that of a philosopher pondering history than that of a historian looking back philosophically at the past. Prior to the Origines de la France contemporaine, Taine had written nothing on social history; he had confined himself to the theory of history, to the history of art and to literary history. The Origines represent a turning point in his work. The debacle of 1870 certainly played a role in this break—thanks to Claude Digeon’s work,62 we can appreciate the full impact that this drama had on the generations of French intellectuals who experienced it. Taine’s biographer, Victor Giraud, wrote at the beginning of the 20th century that “this was a sad awakening. For Taine, as for Renan and still others, Germany had been his intellectual inspiration. For him, perhaps more than for anyone else, it had been like a second homeland”.63 Taine wrote history, but he was also played an active role on the stage of history, and he reveled in it. The upheavals of 1870 opened the way for him to pursue new intellectual preoccupations. As of that moment, he put philosophical speculation behind him and devoted himself entirely to reconstructing the French heritage, with a haste dictated by his patriotism. As Gabriel Monod put it, Taine “would be a physician looking for symptoms of the malady, eager to diagnose its

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nature and hoping to cure it”.64 This concern for social reform is one of the essential elements of positivist doctrine. Jean-Paul Cointet has shown recently that Taine was, with his Origines de la France contemporaine, one of the ancestors of a “new history” (une nouvelle histoire). Taine, as he explained himself, was opposed to both traditional historiography focusing on events, battles and great men, and philosophy or religious interpretations. On this basis, he described his approach: “They exist for the birth, maintenance, and development of human societies, for the formation, conflict, and direction of ideas, passions and determinations of human individuals. In all this, Man is bound up with nature; hence, if we would comprehend him, we must observe him in her, after her, and like her, with the same independence, the same precautions, and in the same spirit. Through this remark alone the method of the moral sciences is fixed. In history, in psychology, in morals, in politics, the thinkers of the preceding century, Pascal, Bossuet, Descartes, Fénelon, Malebranche, and La Bruyère, all based their thoughts on dogma. It is plain to every one qualified to read them that their base is predetermined. Religion provided them with a complete theory of the moral order of things; according to this theory, latent or exposed, they described Man and accommodated their observations to the preconceived model. The writers of the eighteenth century rejected this method: they dwell on Man, on the observable Man, and on his surroundings; in their eyes, conclusions about the soul, its origin, and its destiny, must come afterwards and depend wholly, not on that which the Revelation provided, but on that which observation does and will provide. The moral sciences are now divorced from theology and attach themselves, as if a prolongation of them, to the physical sciences”.65 He is mainly interested by the everyday life of the French people. What do they do? What do they eat? What do they produce? How do they live? How do they think? How do they see the new social hierarchy? We can see here the influence of Taine on the Annales School. Jean-Paul Cointet is right when he claimed that Taine wrote a “social monograph” [une monographie sociale].66

The Ramifications of Positivism Cournot and Comte diverged in their thinking on many points, and indeed, there is abundant literature to illustrate those differences. Far from giving himself over to any form of determinism, Cournot saw chance as an essential element in the evolution of human societies. From this standpoint, then, he could only be in disagreement with the determinism that he detected in Comte’s law of the three stages. Cournot rejected the idea that the sciences are inevitably destined, in their logical unfolding, to arrive at the final stage, the positive stage.67 The fact that Renan and Taine can be considered positivists by some historians of social sciences does not mean that they were disciples of

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Comte: on the contrary, they were hostile to his works and those of his followers. Each in his own way was opposed to Auguste Comte’s system of thought. Renan writes: “M. Comte adopts an a priori method with regard to the social sciences. Instead of following the infinite twists and turns of human societies [. . .] he aspires from the outset to a simplicity which the laws of humanity afford to a much lesser degree even than do the laws of the physical world [. . .] The task of tracing mankind’s history is over once he has tried to prove that the human intellect proceeds from theology through metaphysics to positive science. Morality, poetry, religion, mythology, all are pure fantasy of no value [. . .] M. Comte’s misfortune is that he has a system and that he does not venture far enough into the innermost reaches of the human mind, which is open to currents from every direction”.68 Taine strikes a very similar note: “What we know about M. Comte is unlikely to attract many readers to his works. Among bad writers he is probably one of the worst; if the first volumes of his Cours are tolerable, the latter ones and, in general, the works where he deals with politics, religion and history are, in their barbarity, the equal of the most tiresome writings of German philosophy or scholastic philosophy. I find it hard to read more than 50 pages at a sitting—and if I am to remember any specific ideas, I still have to take up a pen and translate them”.69 The harshness of these attacks leaves little doubt as to how Renan and Taine felt about the works of Auguste Comte. And yet, they are still often presented as disciples of Comte. Curiously enough, it has been argued that Renan and Taine were “the direct heirs of Comte’s positivism”.70 This assertion is highly contestable, and it would seem more accurate to admit, as one author puts it, that “Renan is at pains to discard the positive philosophy of Comte”.71 The philosopher Henri Bergson goes still further: “Renan had no intellectual kinship with Comte”.72 The same can be said for the thinking of Taine,73 which is more reminiscent of Hegel than of the father of French positivism:74 what could be further from Comtism then his psychology of sensations or his history of art?75 Nor does either Renan or Taine show much sign of humility before the object of their observation. They both maintain the essential traits of romanticism. The philosopher Émile Bréhier put it well: “We see in Renan a conflict between an intellectual awareness that submits to the methods of positive science and his romantic aspirations”. And with respect to Taine, “in meditating upon the works of Spinoza, Condillac and Hegel, he arrived at a notion of intelligibility that seems at first glance quite foreign to the positivist preoccupations that held sway around 1850”.76 It is also true that, in contrast to Comte, Taine and Renan conducted empirical research on numerous fronts: as examples, we have Renan’s work on the history of religion and Taine’s writings on contemporary France. Yet Comte, Cournot, Renan and Taine still have some traits in common: from their individual perspectives, they proposed a philosophical system in which history occupied a central position. More generally, their basic

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concern was to understand and analyze the progress of the human intelligence. What is more, they all arrived at the irrefutable conclusion that science must be the principal instrument of that progress. And they were certain that all the ills of modern societies could be cured through science— they entertained the dream that science could reestablish moral order. It is no surprise, then, that in their research, these authors gave pride of place to the temporal dimension: they were tormented witnesses to the great upheavals and to the sudden acceleration of history. The French Revolution, as we have seen, was the core inspiration of the entire positive philosophy of Auguste Comte. And it was the events of 1848 that thrust Renan into the midst of the revolutionary yearnings of 1789. In his varied writings, the echoes of the Revolution resonate loud and clear. Finally, in the wake of the humiliation of 1870, Taine put his scientific culture at the service of his country. All of this leads us to pose a question about the works of these forerunners of French positivism, a question that evokes the ambiguity and the exceedingly broad scope of the notion of positivism: what influence did they have on the “positivist” French historiography of the late 19th century? At first glance, that influence is difficult to measure. More precisely, it makes itself felt rather indirectly. As we know, Comte was reviled by the historians, and Renan, Taine and Cournot fared little better in the support they garnered from that quarter. They have often been regarded not as scientists but as metaphysicians or, at best, as philosophers of history. At the crossroads of romanticism and positivism, the influence of Renan and Taine was largely confined to the realm of literary criticism. In all their voluminous and diversified works, Comte, Cournot, Renan and Taine in fact did no more than sketch out the bases of a scientific approach to history. They did not endow it with either a program or a method. Their approach remained above all philosophical, and in the case of Renan and Taine, it was bound up in literary and poetic trappings more reminiscent of the Romantic era. For scientific history, this provides all the grounds needed for an unequivocal condemnation.

Notes 1 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La Philosophie d’Auguste Comte (Paris: Alcan, 1913), pp. 3–4. 2 Auguste Comte quoted in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La Philosophie d’Auguste Comte, p. 5. 3 Auguste Comte, Plan des travaux scientifiques pour réorganiser la société (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1970), p. 168. 4 Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 5 (Paris: Baillière, 1869), pp. 4–5. 5 Ibid., p. 10. 6 Auguste Comte, Plan des travaux scientifiques pour réorganiser la société, p. 115. 7 Ibid., p. 168. 8 Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 5, p. 3.

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9 Ibid., 1, p. 11. 10 Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 262. 11 Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, 1 (London: Longmans, Green and co., 1875), p. 35. 12 Antoine Augustin Cournot, “Traité de l’enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire”. In Œuvres complètes, 3 (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 489–490. 13 “Just as everything must have its reason, so everything that we call an event must have a cause. Often the cause of an event escapes us or we take something to be its cause which is not. But neither our inability to supply the principle of causation, nor the mistakes into which we fall when we apply it carelessly, have shaken our adherence to this principle as an absolute and necessary law. We always trace an effect back to its immediate cause; in turn, this cause is conceived nor can observation attain any limit to this progressive series. Turning in the other direction, a present effect becomes, or at least may become, the cause of a subsequent event, and so on to infinity” (Antoine Augustin Cournot, An Essay on the Foundations of Our Knowledge (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 39. 14 Antoine Augustin Cournot, “Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes”. In Œuvres complètes, 4 (Paris: Vrin, 1973). 15 Ibid., p. 9. 16 Antoine Augustin Cournot, “Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme”. In Œuvres complètes, 5 (Paris: Vrin, 1979), p. 175. 17 See Thierry Martin, Probabilités et critique selon Cournot (Paris: Vrin, 1997). 18 Antoine Augustin Cournot, “Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme”, p. 134. 19 Raymond Ruyer, L’Humanité de l’avenir d’après Cournot (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930); Louis Arnélia, “La fin de l’histoire: le point de vue de Cournot”, Diogène (79, 1972), pp. 27–59. 20 In his Essay, Cournot writes: “The conditions of a historical connection begin to come out in a game such as backgammon. Here each throw of the dice, although brought about by fortuitous circumstances, nevertheless has an influence on the results of the subsequent throws. The requirement of historical connection show themselves still more in the game of chess, in which the reflective determination of the player is substituted for the chance of the dice, yet in such a way that the ideas of the player give rise to a multitude of accidental encounters when crossing those of his opponent. The account of a game of backgammon or of chess, if we should decide to pass the record of it along to posterity, would be a history just like any other, having its crisis and its denouements. This is so because the moves not only follow one another, but they are also linked together in the sense that each moves has more or less influence on the series of subsequent moves and its influenced by the preceding moves. Should the game become still more complicated, the history of a part of it would become philosophically comparable to that of a battle or campaign, except for the importance of the results. It might even be possible to say without whimsy that there have been many battles and many campaigns whose history no more deserves to be remembered today that does that of a game of chess” (1956), p. 452. 21 Bertrand Saint-Sernin, Cournot, le réalisme (Paris: Vrin, 1998), p. 168. 22 Antoine Augustin Cournot, “Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes” In Œuvres complètes, 4 (Paris: Vrin, 1973) p. 500. 23 On Cournot’s sociology, see Jean Paumen, “Les Deux sociologies de Cournot”, Revue de l’Institut de sociologie (2–3, 1950), pp. 5–43; Robert Leroux, Cournot sociologue (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004), pp. 169–180. On the

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

The Idea of Scientific History links between Cournot and Tarde see Thierry Martin, “From Philosophy of History to Social Science: Gabriel Tarde reader of Cournot”. In Robert Leroux (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde (London: Anthem Press, 2017). Henri Berr, La Synthèse en histoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1953), pp. 205–206. Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), p. 294. See Augustin Cournot, “Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes”. Charles Péguy, “De la situation faite à l’histoire et à la sociologie dans le monde moderne” (1906). In Œuvres en prose, 3 (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue, 1927), p. 69. See Jean-Pierre van Deth, Ernest Renan. Simple chercheur de vérité (Paris: Fayard, 2012), pp. 213–228. Ibid., pp. 103–131. Ernest Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1871/1972), p. 97.In Œuvres complètes, 1 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy), p. 392. Ernest Renan, “L’Avenir de la science” (1890). In Œuvres complètes, 3 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy), pp. 746. Ibid., p. 742. Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1866), p. 111. Ernest Renan, “L’Avenir de la science” (1848), 3, p. 744. Ibid., pp. 756–757. Ibid., p. 747. Ibid., p. 750. Ibid., p. 832. Ibid., p. 847. Ibid., p. 866. Ibid., pp. 885–886. Ernest Renan, La Réforme morale et intellectuelle en France (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1871/1972), p. 47. Ernest Renan, “Réflexions sur l’état des esprits” (1849). In Œuvres complètes, 1 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy), p. 214. Ernest Renan, “L’Avenir de la science” (1890), In Œuvres complètes, 3 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy), p. 968. Ibid., p. 974. Ernest Renan, “La Métaphysique et son avenir” (1860). In Œuvres complètes, 1 (Paris-Calmann-Lévy), pp. 701–702. See Pascale Seys, Hippolyte Taine et l’avènement du naturalisme. Un intellectuel sous le Second Empire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). Wolf Lepenies, Between Litterature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 60. Henri Sée, Science et philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Alcan, 1933), p. 386. Patrizia Lombardo, “Hippolyte Taine between Art and Science”, Yale French Review (77, 1990), pp. 117–133. Hippolyte Taine, sa vie et sa correspondance. Correspondance de jeunesse (Paris: Hachette, 1905), p. 274. Hippolyte Taine, Essais de critique et d’histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1858), p. ix. Ibid., p. ii. Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la literature anglaise, 5 (Paris: Hachette, 1863), p. 282. Hippolyte Taine, Essai sur Tite-Live (Paris: Hachette, 1896), pp. 189–190. Ibid., p. 282. See Nathalie Richard, “L’Histoire comme problème de psychologie. Taine et la psychologie du Jacobin”, Mille neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle (20/1, 2002), pp. 153–172.

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58 Paul Lacombe, Taine, historien et sociologue (Paris: Giard & Brière, 1909), p. 43. 59 Hippolyte Taine, De l’intelligence, 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1906), pp. 20–21. 60 See Jean-Paul Cointet, Taine: Un regard sur la France (Paris: Perrin, 2012). 61 Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France comteporaine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2011), p. 4. “There are laws in the social and moral world, Taine writes, as in the physiological and physical world” (The Origines of Contemporary France. The Modern Régime, p. 121. 62 Claude Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959). 63 Victor Giraud, Essai sur Taine (Paris: Hachette, 1902), p. 87. 64 Gabriel Monod, Les Maîtres de l’histoire, Renan, Taine, Michelet (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1894), p. 123. 65 Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France comteporaine, p. 134. 66 Jean-Paul Cointet, Hyppolite Taine: Un regard actuel sur la France (Paris: Perrin, 2012), pp. 285–287. 67 Antoine Augustin Cournot, “Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes”. In Œuvres complètes (Paris:Vrin, 1973), p. 205. 68 Ernest Renan, “L’Avenir de la science” (1890), 3, p. 848. See Annie Petit, “Le prétendu positivisme de Renan”, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaine, 8, 2003, pp. 73–101. 69 Hippolyte Taine quoted in Jean-Thomas Nordmann, “Taine et le positivisme”, Romantisme (21–22, 1978), p. 23. 70 Guy Dholquois, Histoire de la pensée historique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991), p. 166. 71 Keith Gore, L’Idée de progress dans la pensée de Renan (Paris: Nizet, 1970), p. 83. 72 Henri Bergson, “La Philosophie”. In La science française (Paris: Larousse, 1915), p. 23. 73 In Taine’s case we could use the term “scientism” instead of “comtism”. See Henri Gouhier, Foreword. In Hippolyte Taine, La Philosophie classique du XIXe siècle (Paris/Genève: Ressources, 1979), p. 5. 74 See D. D. Rosca, L’influence de Hegel sur Taine théoricien de la connaissance et de l’art (Paris: Gamber, 1928). 75 On Taine and Comtism, see Jean-Paul Cointet, Taine: un regard sur la France (Paris: Perrin), 2012, pp. 161–165. 76 Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie, XIXe-XXe siècles, 3 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991), pp. 813–814.

2

Contrasting Approaches to Scientific History

The scientific approach to the study of history owes more to the work of professional historians than to that of philosophers. Beginning in the last two or three decades of the 19th century, there were many historians laboring to construct a science of history. Charles-Victor Langlois insisted that the advent of scientific history could not be attributed to any one historian, but was the result of a collective and anonymous effort.1 To tell the truth, this assertion does not take us very far. In dating the birth certificate of scientific history, we could, of course, take the first works where this expression is explicitly used. But to do so runs the twin risks of overlooking, on one hand, the important contributions in which this phrase does not appear and, on the other hand, of lingering too long over attempts that, while they claimed to represent scientific history, are of secondary importance. We will have to make some choices, then, and to focus on those contributions that seem most fertile. A sample of carefully selected perspectives can give us an overview of the field of scientific history. The work of Fustel de Coulanges can surely be taken as marking the origins of scientific history. His role was that of a pioneer, an innovator. He is a perfect example of the revival of historical scholarship in France in the last third of the 19th century. Although he was a contemporary of Taine and Renan, he stands in contrast to them in a very specific aspect: he was a historian by training and by profession. This is not just a question of academic qualification, for Fustel de Coulanges actually worked and thought as a historian. He shunned all speculation and insisted on adhering rigorously to empirical facts. His method, which heralded Durkheimian sociology, is better defined than that of any other historian of his time. We may speak here of a dual rupture: a rupture with romanticism, on one hand, and a rupture with the philosophy of history, on the other. But the rise of scientific history did not imply a unanimous rejection of the philosophy of history. The works of Louis Bourdeau are a case in point. This reader of Auguste Comte was preoccupied with the progress of scientific knowledge, and he was in open revolt against the method of his contemporary historians. His plan was to arrive at a philosophical interpretation of human development. In his principal work, L’Histoire et les historiens (1888),

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The Idea of Scientific History

intended as a pre-emptive manifesto against “events-based” history, Bourdeau argues for a seamless history, free of all of discontinuities, where the individual is caught up in an irresistible necessity, and where the object of attention is the development of reason. Bourdeau dreams of using statistics to turn history into a true social science. Many of his ideas evoke sociology and point to the eventual development of a historical demography. Paul Lacombe also tried to revive the philosophy of history, but without necessarily dismissing the singular and the accidental which, according to him, can contain the seeds of the general and the institutional. The individual fact, for Lacombe, becomes interesting for science only when it is institutionalized through imitation and emulation. Thus, in several of his works, Lacombe tries to define a stance vis-à-vis the discipline of sociology. On one hand, he cites Comte and Durkheim, and on the other, Cournot and Tarde. This interest in diverse perspectives can be explained only by the constant concern for synthesis that runs through all of Lacombe’s work, and that bears some obvious similarities to the theses of Henri Berr. This renewed philosophy of history, however, failed to excite enthusiasm among the majority of professional historians. Charles Seignobos and his collaborator Charles-Victor Langlois took a strong stand against all philosophical interpretations of history. They were certain that history, rather than miring itself in speculation, must adopt a precise and rigorous method. And very early on, these two authors were convinced that the document was the royal road to objective and scientific learning. These varied approaches constitute a fair sampling of the main perspectives that we find under the banner of scientific history. They are also interesting because of their stance with regard to the sociological tradition of the time.

Fustel de Coulanges and the Beginnings of Scientific History Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889), one of the most important historians of the second part of the 19th century, is the true originator of scientific history. We shall not go into a detailed analysis of the varied intellectual output of this eminent historian, as there are already some excellent treatises on the subject.2 Our objective is more specific: to show the ways by which Fustel de Coulanges seeks to develop a history that is treated scientifically and how this is defined in relationship to the new discipline of sociology. Fustel de Coulanges and the Historical Science of His Time The role played by Fustel de Coulanges in developing the discipline of history in France is in many ways that of a pioneer. He was not, of course, the first to promote a scientific approach to history, but he was the first to

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propose a rigorously defined method for such a science. Although he never wrote a treatise on method, his concern for method was very real, and we find many methodological fragments scattered in various guises throughout his work. This method is constructed in the polemic tradition.3 Fustel de Coulanges wanted above all to break away from the historical tradition of his time, which was that of romanticism. And the best representative of that tradition was, without a doubt, Michelet. In the romantic recitation, as we know, the author maintains a privileged, almost intimate rapport with his subject; he openly confesses his feelings and his emotions. In short, his pen is constantly governed by the state of his soul and its anxieties. The preface to Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France, written in 1869, constitutes the finest possible example of this: “I have put my whole life into this book. It is the only thing that ever happened to me. But is there not a danger in this identity between book and author? [. . .] If this is a failing, we must confess that it serves us well. The historian who is devoid of it, who tries to efface himself and not to be part of what he is writing, is not a historian at all [. . .] It is history, over the course of time, that makes the historian, and not the other way around”.4 History and the historian become mingled. Michelet converses with history: the time in which he lived provided him a perfect tryst. In the eyes of Fustel de Coulanges, such an approach is the very antithesis of science, it is “pure rêverie”. “Proper method” demands, on the contrary, that the historian must avoid any personal identification with his subject, that he must be neutral and impartial; his surest guide is not his emotions, but rather the facts. In his Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, Fustel de Coulanges writes what could be taken, in many respects, as methodological guidelines for the historians of his time: “To put one’s personal ideas into the study of texts is the subjective method. The historian may believe he is looking at an object, but it is his own idea that he is seeing [. . .]. Many people think however that it is useful and good for the historian to have preferences, some ‘master ideas’, some higher concepts. The best historian is the one who cleaves most closely to the texts, who interprets them fairly and accurately, and who does not write or even think except as they dictate”.5 We might say that, in writing these lines, Fustel de Coulanges was reacting directly to Michelet’s famous preface. It is certain, in any case, that Fustel de Coulanges read Jules Michelet, although he does not cite him. The two historians were of different generations: Michelet was born in 1802, Fustel de Coulanges in 1830. Here, what is novel with scientific history in comparison to romanticism is not its reliance on the document, for Michelet also consulted documents, but rather the concern for objectivity. This determination to create a science, a “pure science”, as Fustel so earnestly desired, was quite foreign to Michelet. It was in an intellectual climate dominated by Michelet and his disciples that Fustel de Coulanges learned the trade of the historian. Very early on,

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The Idea of Scientific History

Fustel de Coulanges struck a lonely figure within the community of historians. At first glance, indeed, it is difficult to identify his work with any particular system of thought or any one doctrine. In the first place, Fustel de Coulanges was not a specialist. He never confined himself to studying a given period of human history; his research embraced vast episodes in time: “the historian is not really fulfilling his purpose unless he can embrace a long series of centuries”.6 Perhaps because of the resounding success of his book La Cité antique, Fustel de Coulanges has often been thought of as a specialist in antiquity. Yet he was nothing of the sort, as François Hartog has shown so clearly.7 If Fustel de Coulanges had a perfect knowledge of that time, he never restricted himself to it. In fact, he devoted most of his writings to the history of medieval and modern France. When we look at the development of his thinking, we are amazed by the breadth and diversity of the works that piled up under his name. At one moment, he is writing about ancient and medieval history, at the next, he is tackling the political and social problems of his own time—which, of course, brought him, like many others, to think about the causes of the 1870–71 debacle. And sometimes, he is discussing method and attempting to define the field of history. On the ideological level, Fustel de Coulanges sought to be discrete and independent. “The spirit of research and of doubt is incompatible with any preconceived idea, any exclusive belief, any partisan mindset. There must be no prejudices, either political or religious. The historian must be neither a republican, nor a monarchist nor an anti-Catholic, for each of these opinions makes the mind see things in a personal way”.8 In fact, as Carbonell explains, Fustel de Coulanges’s stance “with regard to the major historical journals of his day reveals a man who, like his work, cannot be classified. He collaborates as much with the Revue des questions historiques, the mouthpiece of the Catholic and Royalist school, as with the Revue historique, which has to some extent succeeded the Revue critique as the platform of the rival school”.9 Fustel de Coulanges’s work is that of an erudite loner patiently collating documents. He claimed no doctrine, he knew no master, and he attracted very few disciples, among whom Camille Jullian and Paul Guiraud. But Fustel de Coulanges was more of an instigator than a bystander. As Gabriel Monod stressed, he was a man of learning, “scornful of the beaten path and of received opinions”.10 Consequently, it is hard to make out precisely the influences that worked on him. For him, the science of history had yet to be developed, and its method had yet to be constructed. He believed that there were no models to be followed or imitated. “The interest that Fustel de Coulanges took in his predecessors was only to do battle with them”, writes Camille Jullian: “their effect on him was only to evoke a reaction”.11 Fustel de Coulanges was “independent with respect to the others”, noted Georges Pellissier.12 In short, Paul Guiraud concluded, Fustel de Coulanges “was always his own man”.13

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These portraits, sketched by disciples of Fustel de Coulanges, had the common characteristic of being enthusiastic and exalted, but they were not fully in accord with reality. It is true that Fustel de Coulanges had an innovative mind, but it cannot be claimed that his thinking was unmarked by any external influence. One can draw comparisons between Fustel de Coulanges and certain authors. His style, clear-cut and sober thanks to the rigor and detail of his analysis, is reminiscent of Montesquieu or Tocqueville, and indeed, he embraces the same liberal conception of history as do those writers. One might also see in his work, if perhaps indirectly, the influence of François Guizot. While Fustel de Coulanges strove to distance himself from his predecessors, his reaction to the historians of his time was just as uncompromising. When it came to discussing the work of a contemporary, his language was often severe and rarely conciliatory. In the course of his career, he was constantly embroiled in some argument or conflict over method. His life was, in fact, a true intellectual battle. He was quick to correct any historian who, in his view, did not practice “proper method”. A well-known example will illustrate this. In 1887, toward the end of his life, Fustel de Coulanges took aim at Gabriel Monod, the young director of the Revue historique. He set out to expose the failings of Monod’s method in the pages of the Revue des questions historiques, the great rival to the Revue historique. The debate concerned a text of Gregory of Tours, which Monod seemed to have misinterpreted. Fustel de Coulanges’s tone is that of the teacher instructing a pupil: “The analysis of a text, as that of a charter, an article of law, a letter, a historian’s account or a simple sentence, consists in examining each of the elements of that text, establishing the meaning of each word, and discovering the true thought of the person who wrote it”.14 Monod, insists Fustel de Coulanges, does not adhere to this scientific rigor: “If M. Monod had done a real analysis he would have taken each word of the historian one by one, he would have sought its meaning, and above all he would have traced the author’s thinking in each line, and he would have discerned the fact, the usage, or the institution that the author had in mind in writing that line. Instead, he proceeds differently. He takes each sentence of Gregory of Tours in turn, but rarely does he explain it”.15 A serious failing indeed! Further on, Fustel de Coulanges accuses Monod of subjectivism. “Instead of studying the object in itself, you apply to it your own personal ideas. You believe you are looking at the object, but you are really looking only at your own thought. You are dominated by your own thought to the point that you see only it, and you see it everywhere. Therein lies the greatest cause of error when it comes to history. If history is the most difficult of sciences, it is because it demands that the researcher must be free of any preconceived idea”. And Fustel de Coulanges cites the example of the natural sciences to give greater authority to his view: “in physics and chemistry, there is less danger of preconceived ideas, because experiments, at least, are always performed independently of the experimenter’s ideas. In

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The Idea of Scientific History

history, a thought that occupies the mind can distract the researcher to the point where a text may appear to him the opposite of what it is”.16 History as a “Pure Science” In his repeated insistence that history is a pure science, it is clear that Fustel de Coulanges is trying to distance scientific history from literary history. Before being a writer, the historian must be a scholar. “I am a scholar by habit, I slave over texts”, he says modestly. “I am fully aware of what I lack to be a writer”.17 Of course, Fustel de Coulanges had all the talents of a writer. But he was so fearful of being associated with the literary movement of his time that he seemed irritated when the quality and rigor of his style were praised. His main worry was that style might mask the scientific character of history. For him, dialogue between art and science was impossible. Tourneur-Aumont offers a revealing anecdote on this score, recalling that Fustel de Coulanges “disliked the name of the ‘Faculty of Letters’ because he thought it misrepresented the nature of the historical science he was teaching there”.18 Scientific investigation demands that the researcher maintain an objective detachment with respect to his subject, as the ethnologist does when examining the habits and customs of a society different from his own. The historian must study the past without sympathy, without making judgments, and without taking the present as reference, for history is an autonomous matter that explains itself. How can such neutrality be achieved? Fustel de Coulanges replies: “we are bound to be mistaken about these ancient peoples if we regard them through the prism of the opinions and facts of our own time. To know the truth about these ancient peoples, it is best to study them without thinking of ourselves, as if they were complete strangers to us”.19 Each people has its own peculiarities, and the historian must take these into account without interference: “Greece and Rome present to us an absolutely inimitable character. Nothing in modern times resembles them”.20 These passages from La Cité antique contain some valuable methodological pointers. They expose the thorny problem of temporal distance. Man changes, along with his institutions, his beliefs and his customs, but the historian changes more than anyone. Consequently, the historian of the 19th century does not have the same vision of past events as did one who lived through them. Unfortunately, according to Fustel de Coulanges, the historian is too often a prisoner of the present. “History needs to understand the institutions, the beliefs, the customs, the entire life of a society, its way of thinking, the interests that contend within it, the ideas that guide it. On all these points our view is utterly obscured by preoccupation with the present”.21 It is imperative, then, “not to judge with our modern ideas.”22 The best way to study ancient societies objectively is to consult the players of their era, to sift through the traces that they have left in documents. “It seems to us that, if we want to understand antiquity, the first rule should

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be to rely on the testimony that it has bequeathed us”. In fact, the historian must in his mind transpose himself into the midst of past generations and “judge according to the ideas of their time, not those of today. The historian is not supposed to tell us what he thinks personally, he must instead tell us what the people of that time were thinking”.24 The present is of no use for understanding the past: “history is a science; it proceeds according to a rigorous method; it must see the facts as they were seen by their contemporaries, and not as the modern mind imagines them”.25 Plato, Virgil, Homer, Sophocles—these were men of their times, and consequently, it is they who must serve as our guide for explaining antiquity. They are direct witnesses. According to Fustel de Coulanges, the more “direct” the knowledge that history achieves, the closer it will be to a science. We must, then, “take the ancient texts to the letter, as far as possible”26 and “accept nothing as true that is not documented”.27 At first sight, the document is neutral and objective: it allows us to sidestep the historical pitfall of metaphysical speculation. “History is not something to be pursued through the imagination. It is a science, and it must proceed through observation. If we are to have the right to say that an ancient society had this or that institution or regime, then the documents left to us from that society must contain evidence of such an institution or regime. Without documents, there can be only fantasy and error”.28 In short—no documents, no history. A word of caution is in order here, however: the historian must not accept sources without critical examination, for “science does not dwell in documents; it dwells in the intelligence that knows and understands the various documents”.29 Given the abundance of documents, the historian must be a “doubter” in the Cartesian sense—he must free himself of all religious, political or ideological precepts. The historian must doubt, but he must also compare. In a way, the comparative method can protect the science of history from what Fustel de Coulanges dismissively called “specialism”: “It is undeniable that the comparative method is not only useful but indispensable”.30 But that method brings with it some risks—comparison can lead to subjectivity. If the comparative method prevails, warns Fustel de Coulanges, “history will cease to be a science and will degenerate into daydreaming”.31 The Cité antique is a fine example of comparative scholarship. In it, Fustel de Coulanges shows both the analogies and the differences between the religious beliefs of Greeks and Romans, and some of his conclusions point directly to Durkheimian sociology.32 The comparative analysis is confined here to societies that are at roughly the same stage of intellectual and material development. The situation becomes problematic when one compares different eras. The historian of the 19th century must not compare ancient societies in terms of the upheavals of his own time or his personal concerns, as Fustel de Coulanges criticized Gabriel Monod for doing. Herein lies the great difficulty of the historian’s trade: despite all the external temptations and the appeals of his own

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The Idea of Scientific History

milieu, he must remain neutral and objective. That may be the methodological ideal, but the reality is different, and Fustel de Coulanges is well aware of this: “everyone knows that comparison is the basis for all human reasoning. Even when we open our eyes and see, we are really making a comparison or a series of comparisons, without thinking about it. When we observe a historical fact, there is in our mind a term of comparison, even if we do not realize it”.33 Nevertheless, Fustel de Coulanges concludes, the comparative method, “so dangerous for those who misuse it, is still essential to the historian”.34 As History Meets Sociology The Cité antique represented a break with the historiographic tradition of his time. Marking the centenary of Fustel de Coulanges’s birth, Camille Jullian insisted that his work “had its origins in a moral aspiration, and he was proclaiming a way of understanding the past; he suggested the method for retrieving and recognizing it and, in the end, he prepared the way for a new science”.35 A new science, of course, demands a new method. “Here we have ancient peoples’ beliefs that seem to us wrong and ridiculous. Yet they held sway over men for a great many generations. They governed souls, they ruled societies, and they were the source of most domestic and social institutions”.36 The proposed method, then, is objective: it absolutely prohibits any kind of value judgment. It points the way to comprehending the strangeness of ancient beliefs. The method also combines a history of institutions. “The oldest institutions are the ones it is most important for us to know. For these institutions and the beliefs that we find in the glory days of Greece and Rome are only the development of previous beliefs and institutions, and we must search for their roots far back in the past. It is in an older era, in an antiquity without date that beliefs were formed and institutions established or prepared”.37 It is clear here that we are not dealing with a romantic historian. Fustel de Coulanges shows a lively curiosity for the study of the forms of sociability. Throughout his work, he attributes primal causality to religion. In ancient times, he maintains, nothing can be explained without taking religion into account; it was around religion that individuals grouped themselves, that families were constituted, that the law was organized and that social life took shape and disintegrated. “The ancient family was a religious association even more than an association imposed by nature”.38 “The foundation of a city was always a religious act”.39 Human communities, then, take shape as a function of beliefs. The more closely individuals and groups draw together, the more religion tends to simplify itself, and the pantheon of divinities shrinks in number. “The triumph of Christianity marks the end of antique society. With the new religion, this social transformation that began six or seven centuries earlier reaches its fulfillment”.40 A new fact of extreme importance appears: the State separates itself from religion. “Jesus Christ taught that his kingdom was not of this

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world; he thus put asunder what all antiquity had joined together”. The history of antiquity is, then, the history of a belief. “We have constructed the history of a belief. It becomes established: human society is constituted. It changes: society passes through a series of developments. It disappears: the face of society changes. This is the law of ancient times”.42 The thesis defended in La Cité antique is a sociological one. As Henri Berr asserted, Fustel de Coulanges “had the merit of concerning himself with what sociologists so often overlook, the action of ideas on events”.43 Like the sociologists, Fustel de Coulanges gives pride of place to method and proposes a theoretical model for understanding the social mutations of ancient human societies. In short, he seeks to explain the primitive forms of sociability.44 Yet, it is certain that Fustel de Coulanges would have been strongly opposed to having his name associated with sociology. The very word “sociology” got his dander up. At the beginning of his Alleu et le domaine rural he confesses: “I do not like the word sociologie, not because it is new but because it is too ambitious; I prefer the word historique, which has fewer pretensions and conveys the same meaning”. In the intellectual context of the time, Fustel de Coulanges’s reasoning is perfectly logical. If, from this perspective, the word “sociology” and the word “historic” have the same meaning, how then can one justify the existence of sociology as an autonomous science? In other words, if history is practiced scientifically, sociology must either disappear or (and this amounts to the same thing) be subsumed into historical analysis. “This word ‘sociology’ is an invention of the last few years”, he complains. “The word ‘history’ had the same meaning and said the same thing, at least for those who understood it correctly. History is the science of social facts, which is to say it is sociology itself”.45 The nascent sociology could not be completely in disagreement with such a remark. Indeed, Durkheim gives us the proof with the first issue of the Année sociologique: “Fustel de Coulanges loved to repeat that the only true sociology is history: nothing could be more incontestable, provided history is done sociologically”.46 As Georges Lefebvre points out, “without claiming to be a sociologist, Fustel de Coulanges practices a method that tends naturally towards sociological conclusions”.47 “His historical method had a sociological and humanist purpose”, remarks Tourneur-Aumont.48 Fustel de Coulanges was “the psychologist of the masses and of eras”, concludes the historian Gabriel Hanotaux.49 Fustel de Coulanges—and this is to his credit—did what historians have often neglected or scorned: he thought carefully about his trade and about the limits of his discipline. Better than anyone else of his time, he demonstrated the conditions for a scientific history. Not satisfied with simple narration, he attempted, as La Cité antique proves, to make history a theoretical discipline. While this effort earned him the praise of Taine,50 it attracted the criticism of many contemporary historians. Charles Morel, writing in the Revue critique, complained about the theoretical intent of La Cité antique. “Fustel de Coulanges has been so preoccupied with demonstrating his

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theory that for him history does not exist and this leads him to inadmissible conclusions. His book sets out to falsify history completely. Here he rejects tradition because he finds it constraining; there he takes it up again because he finds it supports his idea. In a word, there is not the least trace of historical criticism. Everything is forced and exaggerated, nuances disappear and the painting becomes a complete forgery. In short, he has failed, as all will fail who try to construct history a priori”.51 This commentary serves to emphasize the extent to which Fustel de Coulanges was seen as an outsider among historians of the 1860s. Yet his method and his intentions would be frequently imitated in the years 1870–1880 and beyond. Fustel de Coulanges’s work pertains to a unique intellectual universe: that of the developing social sciences. This is why, almost inevitably, he was the first French historian to pose the problem of the relationships between history and sociology. He thus opened up a rocky path, one that would resonate with fierce disputes among the many travelers who ventured down it. And, as we shall see, most of the historians who championed scientific history would be led to define their approach in terms of the new discipline of sociology.

The Positivism of Louis Bourdeau We know little about the philosopher Louis Bourdeau (1824–1900). Textbooks on the philosophy of history never mention him. In fact, as a philosopher, his innovations were minimal, but as a historian, on the other hand, he seems to have made some considerable contributions. Yet on that score as well, his work has gone largely unappreciated. Writing in the Revue historique, Gabriel Monod regrets that “the books of M. Bourdeau do not have the reputation they deserve. Their time will come once people are convinced that social science is not only the sole foundation of history but is in fact the essence of history”.52 Bourdeau’s work is a perfect example of the grand attempts at synthesis that appeared in such great numbers during the second half of the 19th century. Bourdeau meditated on a great variety of subjects. Among his books we may cite his scientific treatise, Théorie des sciences (1882), and in particular his polemical work, L’Histoire et les historiens (1888). The first does not deal with history, but it seems to lay out the basis for his entire thinking. In this book—written at a high level of abstraction—the author strives to separate general science from particular science, and he tries to implement the principles of comprehensive science, a “master science”, in reaction to the splintering of knowledge that was taking place at his time. French science, however, had grown all too accustomed to the appearance of these heavy and abstract treatises proposing new classifications of the sciences, and Louis Bourdeau’s undertaking aroused little interest. The solution to the problem that Bourdeau poses in his Théorie des sciences is resolved to a large extent in his other book, L’Histoire et les historiens. At last, he has found the “master science”, and he identifies it clearly—it is history.

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Bourdeau is evidently thinking of a historical discipline overhauled to its core: a historical discipline that no longer focuses on particular facts but rather on necessity, a new discipline that can give rise to general laws. The problem is that history is almost never practiced in this way, and that is why, Bourdeau insists, it must be given a new methodological approach. Bourdeau’s intention, as convoluted as it is, cannot be completely grasped without viewing it in parallel with his previous thinking about the future of science. Outline of a Theory of Science The Théorie des sciences was published by the Germer Baillière house in two hefty volumes in 1882. It was, in fact, the first published work of Louis Bourdeau, who was then 58 years old. In it, he develops a complex classification of the sciences, along Comtean lines. Upon its appearance, the work was either ignored or subjected to sharp criticism by those who deigned to read it seriously. An anonymous author writes, in the Revue philosophique, “in 50 years, the work of Comte. will still represent what it does today, a historical document of the greatest importance for the state of the sciences at a given time; as for M. Bourdeau’s tome, it will be far from meeting the conditions that such a document must satisfy”.53 Yet the book is a perfect illustration of its time: it speaks to us of the splintering of knowledge, the signs of which became increasingly evident in the last third of the 19th century. As a spectator aghast at the proliferation of scientific disciplines, Bourdeau complains: “Thus zoology has had to divide up the entire animal kingdom into discrete segments, and now we have independent sciences for zoophytology, malacology, helminthology, ornithology, mammalogy, anthropology [. . .] Every one of these partial sciences is in turn broken down to the point where we are left with species-specific monographs. Anthropology, a much reduced segment of zoology, has been split into a multitude of branches, depending on whether we are considering physical man (anatomy, physiology, medicine, ethnography), moral man (psychology, ethics, aesthetics, morals) or social man (philology, history, political economy, law)”.54 The historical discipline has been subjected to an analogous principle, and Louis Bourdeau is worried: “History, by applying the same system, divides its immense subject matter by regions, by eras, by states, by series of events, and in the end it loses its way in the minutia of biographies and anecdotes”.55 Nothing could be more pernicious for scientific knowledge in general than to attach too much value to specialized studies. They give us “only parts of knowledge, always on the point of dissolving into fragments. No one considers science in the fullness of its developments and no one has a real sense of their unity”.56 Bourdeau, then, proposes to erect knowledge into a system. Every system, of course, must start with a classification: “partial reforms were not enough; there had to be a complete overhaul. The classification of the sciences must embrace and coordinate all knowledge”. Like Auguste Comte, Bourdeau was encyclopedic in his fields of interest. In fact, he

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wanted to carry forward the work of Comte. Yet his orthodoxy was not absolute. Bourdeau takes issue with the Comtean system on a very specific point. In his classification, Comte accepted six general sciences: as Bourdeau sees it, however, astronomy, biology and sociology are not general sciences, but particular sciences. “The reform, then, has gone only halfway”. Comte’s theory of sciences “is thus both insufficient and defective. It needs to be completed and rectified”.57 Comte had not cast off the yoke of metaphysics: he wanted, above all, to institute a general philosophy and not a general science. Bourdeau’s project was to promote a “comprehensive science”. What are the general sciences, and what is their subject matter? What are the factors for integrating the sciences? And how can we define that integration? First, Louis Bourdeau argues that the shape or object of the general sciences is enshrined in nature, and as he sees it, there are seven “aspects of nature”: 1, existence; 2, scale; 3, collocation; 4, modality; 5, composition; 6, structure; and 7, functions. In this way, according to Bourdeau, we will quite naturally find seven sciences that will explain this series of diverse phenomena: 1, logic, the science of realities; 2, mathematics, the science of scale; 3, dynamics, the science of situations; 4, physics, the science of modalities; 5, chemistry, the science of combinations; 6, morphology, the science of forms; and 7, praxeology, the science of functions. According to Bourdeau, each of the branches of knowledge follows the same intellectual path: “The subject matter of a science resembles a vast tapestry in which we must examine each thread separately in order to determine the matter, and then consider how they are put together to form the fabric. In any subject of study we must first scrutinize the facts one by one, delving into the details as far as possible, and then compare them so as to understand their order”.58 He identifies here two essential stages of scientific knowledge: analysis and synthesis. Can history combine these two aspects inherent to any scientific approach? Or is it destined to remain a literary genre? History, the Science of Reason “History has to be completely remade, or rather, it is not yet made. The very fundamentals of the science have yet to be established. The edifice awaits its architects. At most we can say that the past has bequeathed us the materials. For a science to be constituted, there are several conditions that must be met: first, its subject matter must be clearly defined; next, the problems to be resolved, arranged by order of increasing complexity, must comprise a rational program; there must also be a method that can shed light on the truths sought; lastly, the knowledge acquired must be capable of formulation into laws”.59 This stern assessment, issued as a reproof at the outset of his book, L’Histoire et les historiens, poses a direct challenge to the practice of history, and it sets the polemical tone for the entire work. From an epistemological viewpoint, Louis Bourdeau argues, historians betray some glaring lacunae: “they are not at all concerned to determine clearly the function of history

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in the order of the sciences”. The same goes for their methodology: “just how far should we drag out the details, the ins and outs of famous events? They do not tell us. The frontier remains unclear; each one places the markers according to his whim”.60 It is up to scientific history to eliminate these arbitrary local diversities in order to provide us with universal and positive knowledge, on a par with the natural sciences. History, then, needs to change its program and its method. The solution, as Bourdeau sees it, is simple and recalls the Comtean approach: history, he argues, must above all define itself as “the science of the development of reason”, for it is reason that distinguishes the human species from other living beings. “If man, through his organization, compares himself to animals and ranks himself among them, and even if he can be assimilated to them by his baser modes of activity, reflexivity, instinct and intelligence, his reason raises him above all living creatures, and constitutes, in the order of physical functions, a kind of separate kingdom, as superior to the animal kingdom as the latter is to the plant kingdom, and as both of those kingdoms are to the inorganic world of minerals”.61 We see, then, that reason, which is the defining characteristic of the human species, is considered here from an evolutionary perspective: “It is the fourth kingdom, the human kingdom, characterized by the exercise of reason, which science aspires to know after the other three”. Consequently, the subject matter of positive history “must clearly embrace the universe of the facts that reason directs or that influence it. Wherever human beings live, wherever they exercise their reason, and wherever the species works on itself to accomplish changes, there is where the stuff of history is made”.62 “The true subject matter of history, the only one that is important to know, is the order of the functions of reason”.63 For reason, Bourdeau concludes, is the soul of humanity and is its surest guide. Critique of Traditional Historiography This celebration of scientific history quickly takes on the aspect of a methodological crusade. Louis Bourdeau asserts, first, that historians make “of the human species two unequal parts: they place famous men on one side, and the vast unknown masses on the other side, and they decide that the first alone deserve attention in their stories”.64 In this way, historians neglect the bulk of mankind, for “there are very few famous men in comparison with those who are not. Can science, without betraying its mandate, sacrifice the countless mass of obscure people to a handful of illustrious men, or those presumed to be so? What would you think of a geographer who, in any description of the earth, was content to mention only the highest mountains?”65 Bourdeau roundly condemns the history of elites à la Carlyle: “it is sheer mockery to proffer the history of the king as that of a people and to suppress the human race for the greater glory of a few heroes. Humanity can be properly represented only by itself”.66 And he adds: “Human nature is one. The hero and the common man are molded from the same clay”.67

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Any individual action, however innovative it may appear, is the result of necessary causes. “Progress is the joint result of a multitude of anonymous activities, rather than the revelations of a few geniuses”. “Glorious personifications have only poetic value. In them we admire our ideal”.68 Progress comes from the mental activity of humanity, Bourdeau tells us, reflecting the great influence of Auguste Comte’s ideas: “Progress occurs at a slow and measured pace, following the stages of a continuous evolution. Yet historians see only one moment of that evolution, the moment when things come to a conclusion. They forget its mysterious conception, its painful gestation, its successive advances, and sometimes, in the confusion of the event, they even mistake the midwife or the wet nurse for the mother”.69 With Bourdeau, then, there is a constant intermingling of methodology and polemics. Throughout his work, Louis Bourdeau is at pains, with the help of numerous examples, to downplay the creative action of the individual. Thus, “there is no such thing as true invention, there are only improvements. Inventors come and go, each adds something, none creates anything. Any discovery you care to mention had its way paved by previous discoveries, and in turn it makes other discoveries possible”.70 Even when it comes to art, individual contributions are enveloped in an implacable necessity: “To the seemingly simple question, who is the author of such-and-such masterpiece, historians will always reply with a proper name. They hold each work of art to be an individual creation and they will never admit that a child can have several fathers. Yet when we look at it closely, the problem becomes more complex and, after some thought, we find ourselves compelled to admit that the author of a masterpiece is in fact everyone”.71 And in science: “we owe almost everything to the legions of nameless explorers”. Scientific knowledge is first and foremost a collective good: “in terms of scientific notions, almost nothing is due to an individual—everything is due to everyone [. . .] Taken as a whole, science is less the creation of a privileged elite than the conquest of a multitude of obscure researchers”.72 The moral tendencies of a collectivity can be explained by an analogous movement: “statistics show that, among a given people, the number of crimes, misdemeanors, suicides etc. and even the number of different types of crimes, misdemeanors or suicides, varies little from one year to the next, offering proof that, underlying what seem to be personal initiatives, there is a general and fixed causation at work”.73 This denigration of the individual, in its many forms, leads Bourdeau into the last redoubts of holism. In these ideas we can discern the outline of a program addressed to the community of historians. Bourdeau’s work often leaves the impression, in fact, that it is but a pretext for giving historians a stern lesson in methodology. Some passages are squarely in the form of recommendations: “Trace from age to age the movement of population, the state of public prosperity, and show the causes that make for growth or decline; show the transformations in tastes, the progress of science, the improvement in manners, the spread of civil liberties. Do not fear to enter into detail on the most ordinary things.

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The history of food will be of interest to everyone who eats, the history of clothing to everyone who is clad, the history of habitation to everyone who is housed, the history of art to all people of taste, the history of ideas to anyone who thinks, the history of morality to all people of good will”.74 These lines, written in 1888, contain most of the elements that characterize what would later be called the “new history”. We see in them already a history pursued in multiple directions. We detect a clear determination to discover the principles of demographic, economic and social history, and at the same time, we can perhaps discern the first inklings of a history of mentalities. The resemblance between Bourdeau’s program and that of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, outlined in the Annales, is surely striking. The Importance of Quantitative Method in History How is history to shed the yoke of narration? How is it to escape the trap of metaphysics and the philosophy of history? How can history achieve objectivity? We have already seen the answer that Louis Bourdeau offered to these questions: human history is woven from restrictive consistencies, from constant sequences, and it is the task of scientific history to bring them to light. But how is this to be done? The enthusiasm for quantification, in vogue since the beginning of the 19th century, offered a response to the questions raised by Louis Bourdeau. He was profoundly convinced that scientific history should forge close links with the nascent discipline of statistics: “The entire future of historical scholarship depends on this new science of statistics, which is still relegated to the shadows by its humble origins. It alone gives us the means to explore everyday life, to pursue in-depth study and to establish an exact representation”.75 Statistics, then, offers the best route to scientific accuracy: “The natural sciences, once freed from the mindset of speculation and hypothesis, have had to submit their notions to the test of calculation in order to constitute themselves in a positive state”.76 The explanatory power and the scientific value of history, then, depend directly and solely on its capacity to become a quantitative science: “A simple figure is often more explicit than a lengthy narrative. The tally of killed and wounded, which conscientious historians sometimes mention at the end of their account of a battle, does more to convey the heat of the fray than does the picturesque recounting of its main incidents”. Statistics takes little interest in exceptions and happenstance; it addresses the problem of averages and of deviations, it develops probabilities. With statistics, we can look forward to the development of a social and demographic history: “The annual number of births provides the measure of a people’s fertility. The number of deaths reveals its pathological continuum, the prevailing illnesses, the relative healthiness of the region”.77 But that is not all. The statistical method also saves the historian from the hazards of speculation. It is “too prosaic to lend imagination to the work. It is not contaminated by any ideals. We no longer have to choose a subject

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because of its beauty, to sort out its picturesque elements, to coordinate them artfully and to craft a brilliantly written story that will entice the literati; all we have to do is count and add up, a straightforward operation that excludes any subjective interference. Figures constitute the most perfect of languages” for “they give us the best idea of scale. Calculating them is a task, not for dreamers, but for men of science”. Statistical data spare the historian from value judgments and personal inferences: “The study of general functions leaves us calm because we feel ourselves powerless to change their order, and we are licked in advance by the all-dominating force of the bare facts”.78 This faith in statistical method leads inevitably to a prophetic vision of historical knowledge: “A reform must come, and it will be imposed either by historians or upon them. The age of literary historiography is coming to an end, and that of scientific history is about to begin”. But at the time when Bourdeau was indulging in this optimism, the reform of historical knowledge was progressing very slowly. The literary form still permeated historical discussion. Bourdeau had a radical solution: “The time has come to divorce the two methods (the narrative method and the statistical method) and to apply them separately. Let the great writers compose their pretty stories and let us insist that scholars finally produce a true history, from which we can learn the developments and the laws of human activity”.79 That is the key phrase, that is the objective of scientific history. By learning “the developments and the laws of human activity”, Bourdeau insists, we can not only instruct ourselves about the past but we can, with due caution, predict the future: “However great the historical interest in reconstructing the past, the power to issue forecasts is of much greater value because, on one hand, it submits the proposed laws to a decisive test and, on the other hand, it gives us the means to apply those laws to our own lives”.80 From this perspective, the timeframe of history no longer relates exclusively to the past: “hence, no longer constrained by the limits of observation, our mind can encompass time without bounds. Rediscovering what is no more, foreseeing what is not yet, it takes both a retrospective and a prophetic view of things”.81 In this way, history can inform us about the countless uncertainties of tomorrow. That is why, Bourdeau concludes, history will one day be “the most fertile” science. “The natural sciences tell us only how things are governed; history will give us governance over our own activity. It will then have earned the title of instructrice de la vie [teacher of life]. It is the master science. It tells us about ourselves and our entire existence”.82 There is no need here to dwell on the awkward phrases or the somewhat naïve and dogmatic passages that run through Bourdeau’s work. What is important is to recognize in it an authentic attempt to construct a theory of history. What was original about Louis Bourdeau was his ability to conceive of a historical science that was open to new horizons. Open to new subjects— history would no longer content itself with the study of politics and events; it would strive to understand the manners and customs of past societies.

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Open as well in terms of time—history would no longer be confined to studying the past; it would also embrace the present and the future. It is surprising that, in this book, Louis Bourdeau makes very little reference to the work of the historians of his time. Fustel de Coulanges is barely mentioned, and Gabriel Monod is completely ignored. Curiously, Louis Bourdeau limits himself primarily to quoting the historians of classical antiquity, such as Thucydides and Titus Livius, although he does discuss the philosophies of history put forward by Vico, Comte and Herder. This reticence as to the historians of his time might perhaps explain why his book attracted so little notice from the community of historians. Perhaps he was seen as a man of the past in invoking Auguste Comte’s ideas. Or, on the contrary, perhaps he was ahead of his time: his championing of statistical method might suggest this. We can readily understand why Charles Seignobos, the prime representative of “events-based” history at the turn of the century, insisted that the “lamentable failure” of Bourdeau was to have tried to apply statistics to historical facts.83 It is true that Bourdeau’s use of statistical method was simplistic: his definition of its role was too cursory and his ambitions for it were exaggerated. His haste to discredit the creative force of the individual was surely unacceptable, and Henri Berr, as we shall see, was emphatic about the limits of such determinism. Yet the fact remains that, at the end of the 19th century, the work of Bourdeau sounded the bell for change. From his lonely position on the sidelines, Bourdeau was one of the first to challenge systematically the method of his contemporary historians. And in other works, he urged them to study such apparently insignificant subjects as the history of food. “Scornful of the conditions of everyday life, historians find unseemly the curiosity that attaches to this sound detail. They float in an ideal world, out of touch with the needs of prosaic reality. There is little nourishment in their story [. . .] For the exact science of human affairs, a bare meal menu is more instructive than a blow-by-blow war story”.84 When we read such a passage, we can only wonder why the works of Bourdeau received so little notice from the historians of the Annales.85

The Historical Sociology of Paul Lacombe Paul Lacombe (1834–1919) cannot be classified within the traditional limits of specializations. His work embraces the fields of history, of sociology, of economics, of psychology and of literature. But it is in the theory of history that his contribution was most fruitful. Nevertheless, this concern for the theory of history appears relatively late in his work. After a long career as a historian, Lacombe saw the need to think carefully about the subject matter and the method of historical science. Numerous authors and currents of thought influenced his theoretical approach. Although Lacombe read “in all directions”, as his friend Henri Berr put it, he seems to have drawn his intellectual inspiration from the French philosophers of the 19th century, and

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especially from Comte, Cournot and Taine. Nevertheless, Paul Lacombe’s mind remained quite independent—he belonged to no school, and he could not be linked to any particular current of thought. In the last decade of the 19th century, Paul Lacombe wrote two major works: De l’histoire considérée comme science (1894) and Introduction à l’histoire littéraire (1898). His byline also appears frequently in the philosophical journals of the day. In 1900, when Henry Berr founded the Revue de synthèse historique, he became a loyal contributor to it. There is no doubt that this journal, in which, as Berr tells us, “he felt right at home from the outset”, was a fine match for Lacombe’s “theoretical preoccupations” and that it gave him “the opportunity to refine his essential theses through discussion and to market them through various applications”.86 Salvation Through Science We may say at the outset that much of Paul Lacombe’s mature work is devoted to answering a fundamental question: how and under what conditions can history become a science? “To construct a science of history is a task that we must attempt today. Not only does this mean employing the countless materials that hitherto have been put to almost no use; there is also an urgent need to relieve the human mind of a burden that has become crushing. The only way to diminish the weight of the phenomena piled up in the mind is by linking them, and that link can only be a scientific generalization”.87 An individual fact taken in isolation is of little interest to science. As with the natural sciences, history must look for similarities and repetitions in order to arrive at general laws: “history, treated scientifically, searches for laws”.88 Whence this definition of science: “What we call science is a set of truths, that is to say propositions stating that there is a constant similarity between such and such phenomena”.89 History had hitherto been nothing but an anecdotal recitation, assembling a multitude of miscellaneous facts. The reason for this was not hard to discern: historical science had no method. This science, then, was still in its infancy. Much remained to be done, as Lacombe insisted in the very first issue of the Revue de synthèse historique: “In scientific history, we are no further ahead than chemistry was a hundred years ago”.90 The solution, as Lacombe saw it, was simple: history must pay less attention to “events than to significant facts that translate the permanent needs of social life and the ongoing work of civilization”.91 And these needs must be observed objectively, “coldly, rigorously, severely”.92 History would then become an inductive science. Seeking a Compromise Between the Individual and the Institutional Scientific history must then look for similarities. In what ways do people resemble each other? What are the general traits of the human species? Questions such as these show clearly that Lacombe was not only attempting

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to propose a program for the science of history, but that he hoped to develop a general theory of human behavior. “In spite of time and space, the prime aims of humanity remain the same; the unavoidable needs of the body do not and never will allow those aims to differ except within narrow limits”.93 Here we have the backbone of a theory of history. The man seeking to satisfy his needs, Paul Lacombe calls “the general man” (and we might call him the “common man” or “everyman”): “Fundamental needs drive us from within, but we can readily see them as external forces that pull us and lead us”.94 These external forces flow from institutions. To understand the meaning of history, we need to examine the institutions that correspond to man’s fundamental needs. Those fundamental needs, Lacombe tells us, are the following: economic, procreative [génésique], emotional [sympathique], honorific, artistic and scientific. Institutions correspond to a combination of needs. Accordingly, Lacombe ranks eight institutions by order of “urgency”: economic institutions, family institutions, moral and legal institutions, institutions of distinction or class, social [mondaines] institutions, political institutions, artistic and literary institutions, scientific institutions and religious institutions. In a series of works from his last years, Lacombe set out to examine these various institutions and the problems associated with them—an ambitious undertaking that he finally had to abandon. The “general man” of whom Paul Lacombe speaks is, in fact, an abstraction. The “singular man”, on the other hand, is very real—he is the man who belongs to a particular time or place. “It is the historical individual considered in the effects that flow from his singular nature, and no longer from the mental base that he has in common with the men of his time or of all times”. Singular man, taken in isolation, is of no interest to science because he is contingent, and contingency, Lacombe insists, “cannot be completely explained”.95 Yet, Lacombe complains, it is in contingencies of all kinds that historians have shown the greatest interest. General man and singular man, then, are fundamental opposites, but at the same time they are complementary. General man and singular man meet in what Lacombe calls “temporal or historical man”. “In every individual there is the man of a certain time and place (these always go together), the man who has ways of thinking, feeling and acting that are neither singular nor general, but common to a more or less broad group: we shall call him temporal or historical man”.96 In other words, “temporal man” is “general man”, “affected by a particular set of circumstances or, if you will, by a specific milieu”.97 The concept of temporal or historical man speaks eloquently to the spirit of synthesis that permeates Lacombe’s work: “Our century has reacted against the preceding one, when there was much speculation about general man; our century has chosen to accept only temporal and local man”. These two tendencies are exaggerated and explain only part of historical reality, for the general and the singular are “irrevocably embodied in any person”.98 A compromise is needed, then: Lacombe concludes that each person bears the “triple seal” of the general, the temporal and the singular.

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In the end, the individual is the efficient cause of the general: “sociological phenomena must first be translated into psychological terms, and then, if we can, we must translate those psychological phenomena themselves into biological language”.99 In L’homme et la guerre, Paul Lacombe makes some further concessions to the individual person. “All of history, including the most recent, quite contemporary history, shows that a man made of the right stuff can impose his will on a surprising number of his fellows; he can enlist an entire people or even several peoples, half willingly, half by force or stealth, to follow the path of his choice. Just consider the impact that Napoleon, Palmerston, Lincoln, Alexander II, Cavour or Bismarck had, for good or ill, on the destiny of nations!”100 This sounds like Charles Seignobos. Then, in his Introduction à l’histoire littéraire, Lacombe develops a theory of knowledge in which he shows that the author of a great work is not just a simple reflection of his milieu but, on the contrary, is master of the process of artistic and scientific creation. Criticizing Taine’s thesis for having misunderstood “what pertains to the individual”, Lacombe writes, by way of example: “We cannot hope to explain a Racine by his time, or a Plato by his race”. With respect to Racine, Lacombe notes that “he was a profound psychologist, but he stayed within the limits—and those limits were most certainly set by the time in which he lived”.101 Paul Lacombe concludes, then, that we must not consider institutions as autonomous or sui generis, as Durkheim would have us do. On the contrary, “the institution starts with a man who begins to practice something new, and then it gradually becomes the standard [. . .] Nor does an institution suddenly die—instead, it gradually shrinks and ends up, as it began, an individual act, an event. We may say then that the institution is an event that has been successful”.102 Gabriel Tarde would not have put it differently. The point is that Lacombe too, it seems, was deeply convinced that imitation provided the key to history. Outline of a Psychologizing Theory of Human Evolution Quite naturally, in pursuing his project, Paul Lacombe drew heavily upon psychology, a science that was flourishing in the last decades of the 19th century. “To understand general man”, he writes, “is the particular objective of one science, psychology. Precisely because psychology delivers general man to history, we already have the essential idea of the relationships that link these two sciences”.103 In fact, history is merely “the application of psychology in space and time”.104 The function of psychology is to allow historical science to explain the evolution of human needs. “Any goal pursued, any human aim has a cause: in the inner man, it is a mental state, which we may call a need. Everything that calls a man from within to act beyond himself will then for us be a need”.105 As Lacombe sees it, a need is a scientific fact because it lies at the origin of institutions: it is for the purpose of satisfying his needs that man has created institutions.

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It is “needs”, then, that drive all of human evolution. Lacombe regarded those needs not as biological impulses but as psychological forces. “Fundamental needs drive us from within, but we can readily see them as external forces that pull us and lead us. These permanent forces constitute the primordial causes of history”.106 When Lacombe speaks of the individual person [l’individu], he is clearly not talking about the famous man, the political figure or the genius, but about “general man”. “Science cannot cope with the great man: he is a distraction”107—he belongs, in effect, to the contingent or the accidental. According to Lacombe, it is imperative for all science to separate the general (or the determinate) from the contingent (or the accidental), not in order to contrast them, but in order to show their reciprocity. How does this reciprocity work in practice? Invention, for example, is first and foremost an individual deed, and yet behind the personal initiative lurk permanent causes conditioned by the context, born of collective needs. Thus, “the invention of printing could have taken place in ancient Greece or Rome: the ancients had in papyrus the equivalent of paper, they had ink, and they had punches. Yet it did not happen there. If the need to possess books had had the compelling force of an economic need, such as the need to possess money, for example, it is likely that printing would have been invented in antiquity”.108 While it is true, by all evidence, that innovation can be stimulated by resources proper to the time and place or by external conditions of all kinds, the fact remains that it is initially contingent and fortuitous. “Once the individual produces an innovation, society enters the scene; its role is to accept or to reject the innovation, to imitate it or not, to respond to the event by some or other intellectual and moral impression”.109 Here we have a shift from the contingent to the determinate. In other words, the birth of things is fortuitous, but determination increases as things endure over time. It is thanks to the phenomenon of imitation, Lacombe tells us (echoing the sociologist Gabriel Tarde), that an event can be transformed into an institution. Lacombe arrives at this conclusion: “What is most determinate about the life of societies is that intelligence goes on expanding and deepening. If we could believe that nature has a goal for us, we would say that goal is the growth of human intelligence”.110 Yet despite this assertion, Lacombe refuses to believe in the irreversible march of progress. In many passages, indeed, he rejects an evolutionary reading of history of the Comtean or Spencerian type. Progress does not follow a straight line: “Let us accept the evidence: the Middle Ages were a time of regression at least on some points. That is enough to make it illegitimate to consider progress as a constant law, for if there has been regression on some points then, under the effect of unknown circumstances, there could one day be regression on other points or on all points”.111 History, which is of psychological inspiration, is therefore a synthetic science: it synthesizes the general and the particular, the accidental and the

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institutional, the contingent and the necessary. This viewpoint leads directly to the historical synthesis of Henri Berr, as we shall see. The psychology to which Paul Lacombe refers is in a sense a collective psychology, or sociology. Scientific history was interested in institutional facts, as was the emerging sociology. But, as we have seen, Lacombe had no use for the sociological determinism espoused by some authors of his time. Far from rejecting the individual and the accidental, he takes them as a point of departure, indeed as efficient cause, for the general and the institutional. How, then, can we distinguish scientific history from sociology? In fact, Lacombe saw no difference between the two disciplines, and he explained his view clearly: “Since as we see it there are only two orders of works, one corresponding to the search for reality, the other to the search for truth, scholarship on one hand, history and sociology on the other, we could have consistently used the word ‘sociology’ in place of ‘history’, especially as ‘sociology’ seems destined to prevail. We have however decided to keep the term history [. . .] Under the heading of sociology, my work would run the risk of promptly alienating all those who pursue scholarship or history in the ordinary meaning of the word. Yet it is to those scholars, even more than to the sociologists, I think, that this book is destined to be of some service”.112 The real dividing line, then, lies not between historical science and sociology, but between historical science and history. Here, a paradox springs at us. Although Paul Lacombe claims to be addressing the community of historians, he almost never cites the historians of his own time. He is always careful to position himself in relation to the sociological tradition. Nearly two decades after publication of L’histoire considérée comme science, dealing with history as a science, Lacombe confessed his intellectual membership in the sociological community: “In 1894 I published a work entitled L’histoire considérée comme science. Today, I would probably give that book a different title, for it deals with subjects to which the name of sociology is now by convention applied”.113 And if Lacombe had really thought of himself as a sociologist, it is certain that he would have tried to strike a compromise between Émile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde—or between a holistic approach and a individualistic approach. To be convinced on this point, it is enough to consider this passage from De l’histoire considérée comme science in which Lacombe defines society as “a group of people who accept mutual constraints and who imitate each other particularly”.114 In other words, according to Paul Lacombe, history is a mixture of necessity and contingency. He then almost perfectly anticipated what later became known as “historical sociology”.

Langlois and Seignobos: The Argument for Historical Method Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos reacted sharply to the attempts to resurrect a philosophy of history.115 Hostile to metaphysical

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interpretations, suspicious of the relentless advance of the social sciences, these two historians attempted at the end of the 19th century to codify historical practice definitively, through their famous Introduction aux études historiques. This book, the first methological treatise in France, was an attempt to define a scientific approach for history based on archives, away for philosophy of history. In the 1890s, they both start to analyze the relationship between history and social sciences, especially sociology. Charles-Victor Langlois (1863–1929) was a medievalist. A pupil of Ernest Lavisse, he studied in 1881 at the elite École nationale des chartes, where he was trained as an archivist. He earned a degree in history in 1884 and three years later was awarded a doctorate in humanities. His thesis on the reign of Philip the Bold (Philip III) attracted considerable attention. In 1888 he was appointed lecturer in “auxiliary sciences” at the Sorbonne, where he held the chair in medieval history from 1909 to 1913. From 1913 to 1922, he was Director of the National Archives. During those years, he contributed to the first series of the great Histoire de France directed by Lavisse, for which he wrote the third volume dealing with St. Louis, Philip the Fair and the last Capetians (1226–1328).116 Charles Seignobos (1854–1942) played an even more decisive role in the development of historical scholarship in France. A pupil of both Fustel de Coulanges and Ernest Lavisse, he was one of the most important historians in France during the first two decades of the 20th century. He was the first of the new generation of academics to propose a scientific definition of historical method.117 At an early age, Seignobos was attracted to the scientific history championed by the German historian Leopold von Ranke. As many other historians had done before him, including Gabriel Monod and Camille Jullian, he undertook a tour of study in Germany in the late 1870s.118 But he became quickly disillusioned with the Germany that he had so idealized. The day of the great teachers was passed, he noted bitterly, and what he now found in its place was a “sterility” imposed by historians from a few famous schools. “Can we complain of not seeing architects emerge from a generation of men raised as day laborers?” he asks.119 Yet, Germany was still a model of scientific and intellectual rigor. Upon his return to France, in 1881, Seignobos penned an article for the Revue internationale de l’enseignement in which he sings the praises of history teaching in Germany: “We must not forget the services it has rendered in the past. It has cleansed history of rhetoric, and taught us to resort to original documents. France would do well to follow this example. All things considered, we have a great deal to envy in Germany”.120 In that same year Seignobos earned his doctorate, with a thesis on the post-1360 feudal regime in Burgundy. Following a brief stint (1879–1882) as a professor at the University of Dijon, Seignobos joined the teaching staff at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he taught historical method and modern

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and contemporary history. Most of his writings are devoted to the history of France. Like Langlois, he contributed to the Histoire de France contemporaine, a project spearheaded by Ernest Lavisse, for which he published three volumes: La Révolution de 1848, Le Second Empire (1848–1859); Le Déclin de l’Empire et l’établissement de la Troisième République (1859– 1875); and L’Évolution de la Troisième République (1875–1914). In each of these volumes, Seignobos presents a narrative history tracking in detail a wide variety of historical events and developments. To the end of his life, Charles Seignobos veered little in his approach to history. He remained firmly attached to the particular and the political, as evidenced in one of his last books, Histoire sincère de la nation française (1933)—his “honest history” of France—and this despite the steady evolution of the historical discipline under the influence of the Durkheim school and the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. In the introduction to that book, he wrote: “One might judge that I have dwelt too long on politics; the fact is, I am convinced that political authority and political accidents, invasions, wars, revolutions, changes of sovereign, have at all times exerted a decisive influence on the development of the French people”.121 And he adds, still more explicitly, that the history of France is really a tale of happenstance: “The borders of France took shape only slowly, through a series of accidents”.122 How can a discipline that focuses on events and accidents consider itself a science? That was the thorny problem Seignobos attempted to resolve in the course of his work. The Cult of the Document According to many historians opposed to the philosophy of history and to metaphysics, scientific history had only one route open to it: it would have to subject itself to the document, asserting nothing without an in-depth knowledge of primary sources. This idea was already widespread at the end of the 19th century. Fustel de Coulanges was one of those who strongly defended this methodological principle. The first thing he asked his students was, “do you have any documents?” This simple question illustrates clearly the degree to which Fustel saw history as dependent on documents. For Camille Jullian, the document was not only a means but also an end: “the study of documents is the beginning and the end of true science”.123 For yet other historians, the document was the perfect substitute for the direct experimentation that was impossible in historical studies. Texts, insisted the Belgian historian Charles De Smedt, “are for the historian what observations and experiments are for the natural sciences”.124 Many more examples could be cited from the legions of historians who believed that scientific rigor in history depends on the document. In their assertion that history is made with documents—“no documents, no history”125—Langlois and Seignobos were thus stating nothing new: they were merely reiterating a commonly cited methodological mantra.

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The historian must first seek out and compile the documents necessary to his investigation. This basic operation may be called heuristic. The historian must then analyze the documents, decipher them, compare them and, above all, verify their validity. The historian must be skeptical in his approach to the document, and as Fustel de Coulanges maintained he must “doubt” in the full Cartesian sense of that term: “All that has not been proven must be temporarily regarded as doubtful; no proposition is to be affirmed unless reasons can be adduced in favor of its truth”.126 In order to decipher documents, sound philological knowledge is essential so as to place each word, each sentence in its particular context. In his very earliest writings, Charles Seignobos was already deeply convinced of the great intellectual importance of the document: “The only way to historical knowledge is through the document. Documents are the sole stuff of historical knowledge”.127 We can detect here a serious methodological warning. In the absence of documents, the historian, rather than speculate on the progress of human societies or try to revive the philosophy of history, is doomed to keep his silence, at the risk of leaving in limbo certain eras or historical phenomena. This stance amounts to strict empiricism. In science, the facts can be approached in two ways: either directly, by observing them while they are happening, or indirectly, by studying the traces they leave behind. In contrast to most of the natural sciences, history yields indirect knowledge. And it is for this reason, as Seignobos sees it, that historical knowledge is imperfect, and that history “ranks at the bottom of the scale of sciences”.128 In the sciences that are based on observation, it is the event itself that is the point of departure; in history, before we arrive at facts, we must go through an indispensable intermediary, and that is the document. Historical method, then, is inevitably problematic: “Compared with other students the historian is in a very disagreeable situation. It is not merely that he cannot, as the chemist does, observe his facts directly; it very rarely happens that the documents which he is obliged to use represent precise observations. He has at his disposal none of those systematic records of observations which, in the established sciences, can and do replace direct observation”.129 The historian, then, has little chance to be objective: “from the very nature of its material history is necessarily a subjective science”.130 “History Is the Science of What Happens Only Once” Despite these reservations, history is indeed a science in the full sense of that word. But, Charles Seignobos is quick to point out, it falls in the category of “descriptive sciences”, which are quite different from the general sciences, such as physics, chemistry or biology, that seek to discover laws by examining successive events of the same kind, with the goal not simply of determining reality but of foreseeing what will happen under given conditions. The descriptive sciences strive to understand particular realities, to

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determine how those realities are distributed in time and in space. “History is here in the same situation as cosmography, geology, the science of animal species; it is not the abstract knowledge of general relations between facts, it is a study which aims at explaining reality. Now, reality exists but once. There has been but a single evolution of the world, of animal life, of humanity. In each of these evolutions, the successive facts have not been the product of abstract laws, but of the concurrence at each moment of several circumstances of different nature. This concurrence, sometimes called chance, has produced a series of accidents which have determined the particular course taken by evolution. Evolution can only be understood by the study of these accidents; history is here on the same footing as geology or paleontology”.131 And because each accident is unique, it does not lend itself to any comparison. “Almost never are we dealing with phenomena that are sufficiently analogous to allow for comparison”, Seignobos insisted during a debate with Durkheim at the Société française de philosophie.132 “The things of the past, which are to be pictured in the imagination, were not wholly similar to the things of the present, which we have seen. We have never seen a man like Caesar or Clovis, and we have not experienced the same mental states as they”.133 The objective of history, then, lies in coming to terms with the singular event: “The human actions which form the subject matter of history differ from age to age and from country to country, just as men and societies have differed from each other; and, indeed, it is the special aim of history to study these differences. If men had always had the same form of government or spoken the same language, there would be no occasion to write the history of forms of government or the history of languages”.134 In the end, it is men who have changed the state of society, either as creators or initiators of a habit (artists, scholars, inventors, founders, apostles) or as leaders of a movement, heads of state, parties, armies. It is events that have brought about change in the habits or the condition of societies. Here we have a serious warning, although it is not fully stated, against, to speak like many of his intellectual opponents, “the methodological imperialism” of Durkheim.135 And a few years later, in La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales, Seignobos comes out openly on the offensive, hailing the virtues of the individual as the driver of social change: “The action of the individual is evident [. . .] the initiator leads society to change its ways”. In fact, the individual “has a direct impact on certain economic usages, on the organization of production, on commerce, even on the distribution of the population, for example by creating or destroying a city”.136 The Case for Historical Method In their 1898 treatise, Langlois and Seignobos confine themselves almost exclusively to considerations of a methodological kind; theoretical and epistemological problems are virtually ignored or are passed over quickly. The

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work is essentially a guide for the student eager to grasp the principles of history treated scientifically. Let us return to Charles Seignobos in 1901. With the publication of the Introduction aux études historiques, the intellectual context has shifted. With the rise of the Durkheimian school, constituted around the Année sociologique, Seignobos has serious grounds to think about the role of history in the family of the social sciences. In this context, his new book, La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales sets out to prove that the social sciences are dependent on historical method. For, Seignobos maintains, all the studies of social facts are based on written documents. The structure of the work is organized essentially into two broad sections: the first summarizes the main ideas and methodological guidelines of the Introduction; the second (and in fact the original) section discusses the relationship of history with the social sciences. The first step is to define the terms “history” and “social sciences”. History, as Seignobos tells us, “is the science of past human events”. More precisely, “history is everything that we can no longer observe directly because it has ceased to exist”.137 For their part, the social sciences “study social facts, i.e. those that are produced in society: human habits of all kinds, intellectual phenomena, political or economic institutions”.138 Seignobos considers that the social sciences embrace three specific branches: 1, statistical sciences, including demography; 2, the sciences of economic life; and 3, the history of doctrines and of economic experiments. He is careful not to name sociology: he merely states, with ill-disguised contempt, that sociology is “a word invented by philosophers”.139 Sociology is pushed further to the sidelines when Seignobos says that the social sciences “have only one characteristic in common, and that is to study phenomena that correspond to the material interests of mankind”.140 He thus rejects the influence of ideas, which constitute one of the core subjects of sociology. Charles Seignobos seeks to prove that historical method is “indispensable” to the social sciences as a whole. There are, he says, two main reasons for this: “1. Every social science, whether it be demographics or economics, has to base itself on the direct observation of phenomena. Yet in practice, the observation of phenomena is always limited to a very narrow field. To arrive at a broader understanding, we must always resort to the indirect procedure, the document. Now the document can only be studied by using the historical method [. . .] the historical method, then, is essential for making proper use even of contemporary documents. 2. Every social science applies itself to phenomena that do not remain constant; to understand them we must know their evolution [. . .] This need to know their evolution is still greater when it comes to economic life, where no organization is intelligible except through its past history. We need, then, a historical study of previous social phenomena, and that study is possible only through the use of a historical method”.141 This sums up very nicely the dependence of the social sciences on history. The social sciences, Seignobos tells us, are primarily sciences of indirect

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observation. For that reason, they must follow the procedures of the historical method. Not only is history a guide to all the social sciences, but it is, in a sense, the preeminent science of social facts. In making this case, Seignobos is responding directly to the methodological imperialism of the newly minted Durkheimian sociology. Yet Seignobos rarely uses the term “sociology”, which, as Fustel de Coulanges insisted is just a “word” and not a properly constituted science. This being the case, which science should be tasked with studying the evolution of human societies? Seignobos recognizes the legitimacy of social history, although he views it as merely one of the many branches of general history. Nevertheless, throughout this work, it is social history that commands most of his attention. Seignobos gives a very broad definition: social history, he says, is the study of material facts. To this must be added a strict constraint: “for a phenomenon to be social, it must be the act, or the condition, or the material dependence of a man or a group of men”.142 A “social” fact is merely a result of individual phenomena: “every social phenomenon contains an individual mental element needed to give it its own character”.143 “Consequently, in order to describe historical or social phenomena we must understand their cause”.144 This methodological fine point quickly becomes a declaration of war against Durkheim’s theory. “Experience allows us to know only the individual consciousness. The collective consciousness, then, is either a mere word game, for [. . .] the consciousness of belonging to a collectivity is not collective consciousness; or else, if it is attributed to a ‘mental individuality of a new kind’, taking Durkheim’s expression, neither that individuality nor that special consciousness—inaccessible to all observation—can be anything but hypotheses, subjective if not metaphysical [. . .] The state of the individual consciousness is all we can know”.145 The notion of collective consciousness, then, is purely fanciful in the eyes of Charles Seignobos. During a debate at the French Philosophy Society, Seignobos challenged Durkheim thus: “I would really like to know where is this place where society thinks consciously?”146 Put in this candid manner, the question offers a good illustration of the bugbear that always lurks in the historian’s mind—the fear that history will be confused with metaphysics. Langlois and Seignobos endowed the historical method with rules. For a long time, the Introduction was considered the founding work of what has been (erroneously) called “historical positivism”. However, the ascetic aspect of the method championed in their work quickly aroused opposition. From the turn of the century, attacks on the thinking of Langlois and Seignobos became steadily more frequent. Many have seen in their approach a kind of intellectual sclerosis. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne was one of the first to denounce it. Writing of Langlois and Seignobos in 1898, he declared: “A great many [historians] will insist passionately that what they do is a science. Their vehemence has always struck me as incomprehensible. The real question is not to find a name for what they do, but to

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decide whether what they do is worth doing”. In 1913, in an article in the famous Revue des deux mondes, the historian Gabriel Hanotaux dismissed the document method abruptly: “the abuse of the document smacks of laziness”.148 Charles Péguy employed his customary irony to turn on its head the aphorism of Langlois and Seignobos: “History is also made against documents”.149 Even the psychologist Théodule Ribot joined the debate, recalling in an article that “in history, objective observation is not possible. The knowledge to be gleaned from written or other documents has its place, but those documents are only roughly or approximately true, and they can be challenged”.150 And lastly, we may imagine that Paul Valéry was thinking of Langlois and Seignobos when he wrote in the 1930s: “Great events are perhaps great only for small minds. For more attentive minds, it is the unperceived and continual events that count”.151 In the end, we may say that the work of Langlois and Seignobos demonstrates the many difficulties inherent in the meeting of history and the social sciences.

Between the Hero and the Masses The scientific historiography of the late 19th century appears to us as a vast field of immense diversity. If there was unanimous agreement on the need to construct a science of history, the means employed to that end differed fundamentally. Authors, ideas and methodological concepts sometimes seemed to be separated by an unbridgeable gulf. And yet, in all that diversity of views we can make out a degree of consensus. Romanticism is often seen as the arch enemy of scientific historians. Yet, we must ask, is the divide between romantic history and scientific history really as deep as the scientific historians of the time would lead us to believe? Jean Walch argues that the essential rupture in French historiography was not between romanticism and historical positivism but between traditional historiography of the pre-Revolution era and romantic historiography.152 In his Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, dealing with the “theory and history of historiography”, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce maintained that it was romanticism that had abolished the “historical dualism” according to which reality contained facts that were positive and facts that were negative, those that were “elite” and those that were “outcasts”, while positivism insisted that all facts are facts and all have an equal right to be entered in history.153 But then, later on, he asserts curiously that positivism “rejected individualistic atomism and spoke of masses, races, societies, technique, economy, science, social tendencies; of everything, in fact, except the arbitrary”.154 On this point we must cavil—positivism does not reject “individualistic atomism”, and the work of Langlois and Seignobos is eloquent testimony to that fact. On the other hand, it is difficult to agree with Croce that “individualistic atomism” is the hallmark of romanticism. Indeed, romanticism

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too was interested in races, peoples, institutions and society. Michelet and Thierry talked of nothing else. Pierre Moreau showed that, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, romantic historiography had almost completely dissociated itself from the individual. That shift, according to Moreau, could only be explained by the social climate that prevailed in the aftermath of the revolutionary upheavals: “The achievements of leaders or great men were less apparent than the collective doings, the work of the crowd, the mobilized masses. Until then, the protagonists of history had been sovereigns and captains, front-stage actors in the drama. Henceforth, history would feel more the presence of the great nameless player”.155 In a similar vein, Durkheim adds: “For a century now, historians have been highlighting the action of collective and anonymous forces that lead the people on because they are the work of the people, because they emanate not from this or that individual but from society as a whole”.156 Yet, this does not mean that all historians from the beginning of the 19th century were suddenly fascinated by the panoply of social manifestations and their impacts. In the history of ideas, abrupt discontinuities are rare. Changes in mentality can be observed only from some distance. In the wake of the French Revolution, many historians remained closely attached to the event and the great man. By contrast, from the middle of the 19th century, specialists in the nascent social sciences began to see the need to refer to historical facts, while contrasting their approach with that of historians. On this point, the case of Alexis de Tocqueville is instructive. The approach proposed in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution is explicitly opposed to the historical practice of his time. Tocqueville begins his work with this avowal: “It is not my purpose here to write a history of the French Revolution; that has already been done, and so ably that it would be folly on my part to think of covering the ground again. In this book I shall study, rather, the background and nature of the revolution”.157 The frequently reconstituted “history” to which Tocqueville refers is obviously that of events and individuals. What he proposes, by contrast, is a theory of the revolutionary phenomenon: “True, we imagine we know all about the French social order of the period, for the good reason that its surface glitter holds our gaze and we are familiar not only with the life stories of its outstanding figures but also with the brilliant critical studies now available, with the works of the great writers who adorned that age. But we have only a vague, often quite wrong conception of the manner in which public business was transacted and institutions functioned, of the exact relations between the various classes in the social hierarchy, of the situation and sentiments of that section of the population which as yet could neither make itself heard nor seen; and by the same token, of the ideas and mores basic to the social structure of 18th-century France”.158 Here, Tocqueville is challenging the explanatory power of narration. And he clearly understands how to distance himself from the “great writers” (by which he merely means the historians of his time) in order to

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develop, as Raymond Boudon has noted, a theory of social change. Facts, descriptions, all those are but of secondary interest: “I shall of course cite the facts”, Tocqueville writes to a friend, “and I will follow their course, but it will not be my main concern to recount them”.160 The facts serve as a point of orientation, nothing more. The individual must leave the forestage to the “classes”, Tocqueville insists in a language strangely reminiscent of Marx: “One can of course counter with individuals, but I am talking about classes: they alone should concern the historian”.161 On the other hand, Tocqueville is quick to condemn the philosophical systems that claim to interpret the meaning of social evolution: “For my part, I detest these absolute systems that try to show all the events of history as dependent on grand first causes, linking them in a fateful chain, and in effect removing men from the history from mankind. I find them narrow in their pretended scope, and false in their air of mathematical truth”.162 We can well imagine that this attack was aimed at Auguste Comte. Although in most of his works, Tocqueville makes little reference to historians of his time, it is interesting to note that in the second volume of Democracy in America he distinguishes two types of historians, without naming any in particular. There are first, he says, those who were writing in “aristocratic ages” and who reduced history to specific events; then, there are those who live in “democratic ages” and who “set great store by general causes”. Tocqueville refuses to side with either of these extreme interpretations. “For my part, I am sure that at all times one portion of the events of this world must be attributed to very general facts, and another to very particular influences. These two causes are always intermingled: it is only the proportion of the mix that varies”.163 As we have seen, the interpretation of causes lay at the origin of a great many debates within the discipline of historical science. Two broad and contrasting methodological tendencies can be identified: one places emphasis on the event and the accident, while the other interprets human evolution in light of an implacable need. The historian Gabriel Hanotaux highlighted this dichotomy: “Human history is geography and economics, but it is also psychology: the psychology of individuals, the psychology of crowds, and we now know how much at odds these two psychologies are within their very unity”.164 Was the 19th century, then, the “century of history”? It was, but it was also the century of historical method. The last two decades were particularly rife with methodological debates and discussions. In a letter of 1941, Charles Seignobos complained to Ferdinand Lot: “I have the impression that for perhaps a quarter of a century thinking about historical method, which was very active in the 1880s and 1890s, has reached a dead end. I have read nothing new, nothing but snatches of philosophy of history, which is to say, metaphysics”.165 At the turn of the 20th century, Charles-Victor Langlois evidenced a nostalgia similar to that of his former collaborator, when he stated bluntly that “whatever happens from now on, the 19th century will

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remain the high point of historical studies, the time when methods were definitively constituted and when humanity learned and understood the most about its past”.166 Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 20th century, we were to learn even more about the past, thanks to the development of the social sciences and the introduction of new methodological approaches.

Notes 1 Charles-Victor Langlois, “Les Études historiques au XIXe siècle”, Revue bleue (14, 1900), pp. 225–236; Les études historiques (Paris: Larousse, 1915). 2 See François Hartog, Le XIXe siècle. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988); François Héran, “L’Institution démotivée. De Fustel de Coulanges à Durkheim et au-delà”, Revue française de sociologie (28, 1987), pp. 67–98; “De La Cité antique à la sociologie des institutions”, Revue de Synthèse (3–4, 1989), pp. 363–390. 3 Paul Guiraud, Fustel de Coulanges (Paris: Hachette, 1896), pp. 145–169. 4 Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, 1 (Paris: Librairie internationale, 1871), pp. vii–viii. 5 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1905), pp. 32–33. 6 Fustel de Coulanges, “Leçons inédites”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1900), p. 243. 7 François Hartog, Le XIXe siècle. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), p. 14. 8 Fustel de Coulanges, “Une Leçon d’ouverture et quelques fragments inédits”, Revue de synthèse historique (2, 1901), p. 262. 9 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, Histoire et historiens. Une mutation idéologique (Toulouse: Prerres de l’Institut d’études politiques, 1979), p. 320. 10 Gabriel Monod, “M. Fustel de Coulanges”, Revue historique (41, 1889), p. 277. 11 Camille Jullian, “Fustel de Coulanges”, Revue des Deux Mondes (15 mars 1930), p. 246. 12 Georges Pellissier, “Fustel de Coulanges”, Revue bleue (7, 1897), pp. 815–817. 13 Paul Guiraud, “La Méthode historique de Fustel de Coulanges”, Revue des Deux Mondes (84, 1896), 73–111. 14 Fustel de Coulanges, “De l’analyse des textes historiques”, Revue des questions historiques (41, 1887), p. 5. 15 Ibid., p. 8. 16 Ibid., pp. 34–35. 17 Fustel de Coulanges quoted in François Hartog, Le XIXe siècle. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), pp. 153–158. 18 J.-M. Tourneur-Aumont, Fustel de Coulanges 1830–1889 (Paris: Boivin, 1931), p. 170. 19 Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), p. 2. 20 Ibid., p. 2. 21 Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1893), p. 406. 22 Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique, p. 163. 23 Ibid., p. 152. 24 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, 3, p. 168. 25 Ibid., p. 303. 26 Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques, p. 407.

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27 Fustel de Coulanges, “Une leçon d’ouverture et quelques fragments inédits”, p. 256. 28 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, 4, p. 172. 29 Fustel de Coulanges, “Une leçon d’ouverture et quelques fragments inédits”, p. 260. 30 Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques, p. 87. 31 Fustel de Coulanges, “Réponse à l’article de M. Paul Viollet”, Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature (22, 1886), p. 261. 32 See François Héran, “L’institution démotivée. De Fustel de Coulanges à Durkheim et au-delà”, pp. 67–98; “De La Cité antique à la sociologie des institutions”, pp. 363–390. 33 Fustel de Coulanges, “Une leçon d’ouverture et quelques fragments inédits”, p. 262. 34 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, 3, p. 60. 35 Camille Jullian, “Fustel de Coulanges”, Revue des Deux Mondes (March 1930), p. 252. 36 Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique, p. 15. 37 Ibid., p. 4. 38 Ibid., p. 41. 39 Ibid., p. 151. 40 Ibid., p. 456. 41 Ibid., p. 461. 42 Ibid., p. 464. 43 Henri Berr, Revue de synthèse historique (2, 1901), p. 242. 44 François Héran, “De La Cité antique à la sociologie des institutions”, pp. 363–390. 45 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, pp. 4, iv. 46 Émile Durkheim, “Préface”, L’Année sociologique, 1896–1897 (2, 1898), p. iii. 47 Georges Lefebvre, Naissance l’historiographie moderne (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), p. 27. 48 J.-M. Tourneur-Aumont, Fustel de Coulanges 1830–1889, p. 56. 49 Gabriel Hanotaux, “Fustel de Coulanges et le temps present”, Revue des Deux Mondes (September 1923), p. 54. 50 François Hartog, “Préface”. In La Cité antique (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), p. viii. 51 Charles Morel, L’État et la religion dans l’Antiquité. Cours examen du livre de M. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique (Paris: Librairie A. Franck, 1866), pp. 10–14. 52 Gabriel Monod, “Bulletin historique”, Revue historique (1896), p. 92. 53 Revue philosophique (4, 1882), p. 445. 54 Louis Bourdeau, Théorie des sciences, 1 (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1882), pp. vii–viii. 55 Ibid., pp. vii–viii. 56 Ibid., p. ix. 57 Ibid., pp. xvii–xviii. 58 Ibid., p. 21. 59 Louis Bourdeau, L’Histoire et les historiens. Essai sur l’histoire considérée comme science positive (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1888), p. 1. 60 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 61 Ibid., p. 10. 62 Ibid., pp. 11–12.

64 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

The Idea of Scientific History Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., pp. 59–66. Ibid., pp. 74–75. Ibid., pp. 126–127. Ibid., p. 289. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., pp. 292–296. Ibid., pp. 309–310. Ibid., pp. 320–324. Ibid., p. 411. Ibid., p. 397. Ibid., pp. 431–432. Charles Seignobos, Études de politique et d’histoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1932), p. 44. Louis Bourdeau, Histoire de l’alimentation (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1894), p. 5; see Le problème de la vie, essai de sociologie générale (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901); Le problème de la mort, ses solutions imaginaires et la science positive (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904). See Peter Schöttler, “Fernand Braudel, prisionnier en Allemangne: face à la longue durée et au temps présent”, Socialgeschichte (10, 2013), p. 21. Henri Berr, L’histoire traditionnelle et la synthèse historique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1921), p. 118. Paul Lacombe, De l’histoire considérée comme science (Paris: Vrin, 1898), p. xi. Paul Lacombe, “La Méthode en histoire. Essai d’application à la littérature”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (3,1895), p. 422. Paul Lacombe De l’histoire considérée comme science (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930), p. 2. Paul Lacombe, “La Science de l’histoire d’après M. Xénopol”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1900), p. 51. Paul Lacombe quoted in Daniel Essertier, Philosophes et savants du XIXe siècle. Extraits et notices (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930), p. 286. Paul Lacombe, Introduction à l’histoire littéraire (Paris: Hachette, 1898), p. 354. Paul Lacombe, De l’histoire considérée comme science, p. 4. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., pp. 248–249. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 34. Paul Lacombe, L’Homme et la guerre (Paris: Bellais, 1900), pp. 408–409. Paul Lacombe, Introcution à l’histoire littéraire (Paris: Hachette, 1898), pp. 24–26. Paul Lacombe, De l’histoire considérée comme science, p. 10.

Contrasting Approaches to Scientific History 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

118

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

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Ibid., pp. 26–27. Paul Lacombe, La Famille dans la société romaine (Paris: Vigot, 1889), p. 425. Paul Lacombe, De l’histoire considérée comme science, p. 35. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., pp. 291–292. Ibid., p. viii. Paul Lacombe, L’Appropriation du sol. Essai sur le passage de la propriété collective (Paris: Armand Colin, 1912), p. v. Paul Lacombe, De l’histoire considérée comme science, p. 234. See Antoine Prost, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 7–11, 13–32. Robert Fawtier, “Charles-Victor Langlois”, English Historical Review (45, 1930), pp. 85–91. William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Pim den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). On the influence of Germany on French historians, see: Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959); Isabel Noronha-DiVianna, Writing History in the Third Republic (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Charles Seignobos, “L’Enseignement de l’histoire dans les universités allemandes”, Revue internationale de l’enseignement (1, 1881), p. 589. Ibid., p. 600. Charles Seignobos, Histoire sincère de la nation française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969), p. 9. Ibid., p. 15. Camille Jullian, Extraits des historiens français du XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1896), p. cxxvii. Charles De Smedt, Principes de la critique historique (Liège: Librairie de la Société bibliographique belge, 1883), p. 41. Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G. G. Berry (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1926), p. 17. Ibid., pp. 156–157. Charles Seignobos, Études de politique et d’histoire (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1932), p. 5. Presses universitaires de Francebid., p. 31. Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, p. 67. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., pp. 245–246. Charles Seignobos, “Débat sur l’explication en histoire et en sociologie”, Bulletin de la société française de philosophie (8, 1908), p. 206. Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, p. 220. Ibid., p. 225. See Philippe Besnard, “L’impérialisme sociologique face à l’histoire”. In Historiens et sociologues aujourd’hui, journées d’études annuelles de la société française de sociologie (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1984), pp. 27–35.

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136 Charles Seignobos, La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901), p. 299. 137 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 138 Ibid., p. 6. 139 Ibid., p. 7. 140 Ibid., p. 13. 141 Ibid., p. 14. 142 Ibid., p. 214. 143 Charles Seignobos, Études de politique et d’histoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1932), p. 16. 144 Charles Seignobos, La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales, p. 216. 145 Ibid., p. 17. 146 Ibid., p. 238. 147 Henri Pirenne quoted. In Joseph Hours, Valeurs de l’histoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1960), p. 77. 148 Gabriel Hanotaux, “De l’histoire et des historiens”, Revue des Deux Mondes (September 1913), p. 317. 149 Charles Péguy, Œuvres en prose, 3, 1909–1914 (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue, 1927), p. 242. 150 Théodule Ribot, “La Conception finaliste de l’histoire”, Revue philosophique (83, 1917), p. 212. 151 Paul Valéry, Regards sur le monde actuel et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 63. 152 Jean Walch, “Romantisme et positivisme. Une rupture épistémologique dans l’historiographie”, Romantisme (19, 1978), pp. 160–172. 153 Benedetto Croce, Théorie et histoire de l’historiographie (Genève: Droz, 1968), p. 191. 154 Ibid., p. 192. 155 Pierre Moreau, L’Histoire en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1935), p. 30. 156 Émile Durkheim, L’Éducation morale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), p. 234. 157 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday Company, 1955), p. vii. 158 Ibid., pp. vii–viii. 159 Raymond Boudon, La Place du désordre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), p. 21; Tocqueville for Today (Oxford: Bardwell, 2006). 160 Alexis de Tocqueville quoted in Georges Lefebvre, Réflexions sur l’histoire (Paris: Maspero, 1978), p. 135. 161 Ibid., p. 136. 162 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Souvenirs”. In Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 84. 163 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 121–123. 164 Gabriel Hanotaux, “De l’histoire et des historiens”. Revue des Deux Mondes, sept. 1913), p. 321. 165 Last letter of Charles Seignobos to Ferdinand Lot, Revue historique (1953), pp. 3–4. 166 Charles-Victor Langlois, “Les Études historiques au XIXe siècle”, p. 228.

Part II

Henri Berr and Historical Synthesis

3

Henri Berr, the Theoretician of Historical Knowledge

Both in his own writings and in the collaborative projects he organized, Henri Berr (1863–1954), a philosopher and lycée teacher, played an important role in the progress of historical science in France at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet, it was through philosophy that Henri Berr arrived at history. His philosophical training, which he acquired in particular from Émile Boutroux, explains his interest in the epistemological questions of his time and his broad views on the future of humanity. History, which he considered “the science of all sciences”, must embrace all past facts: particular facts as well as general facts, ideas as well as material facts. Eager to expand the field of history to an almost limitless degree, Berr enlisted the collaboration of eminent intellectuals with whom he planned to explore those aspects of the human past that traditional history had overlooked. Encouraged by the recent emergence of new social sciences, in particular sociology, Berr aspired to open up history and make it a more ecumenical discipline. As much by his method as by the problems he chose to address, Berr stands apart from the historians of his time. He envisioned history from a dual point of view, one that was both philosophical and positivist.1 As a philosopher, he looked to history to show the meaning of human life, and his writings often have moral connotations; as a scientist, he sought to establish the facts and to identify relationships between them. This dialogue of philosophy and science was in fact the cornerstone of all his thinking. And in this regard, he had many models to imitate, most of them from 19th-century France.2 Henri Berr’s style, which at times recalls the elegance of Sainte-Beuve, and his constant concern for systematization, reminiscent of the finest efforts of Taine and Cournot, make it difficult to classify him within the framework of any particular discipline. Henri Berr cannot be regarded, then, as a strict positivist. When he appeared on the philosophical scene at the end of the 19th century, he presented himself, in the footsteps of Émile Boutroux and Henri Bergson, as a critic of the scientific process. In his doctoral thesis on “the future of philosophy”, L’Avenir de la philosophie, Berr insists on the possibility of

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constructing a science of human evolution, one that will not be confined to necessity but will be open to the accidental and to individual facts. At first glance, there is nothing new in this attempt. But when Berr transposes this philosophical principle to historical studies, his approach becomes more original. Reacting against the scientific historiography of his time, Berr maintains that the precondition for scientific history is not that the historian should hide anonymously behind his documents but, on the contrary, that he should reveal himself in broad daylight, that he interact with his subject matter, and that he pose questions about the past in light of contemporary concerns. In this way, Berr thought, history would emerge once and for all from its metaphysical phase and would become, as Auguste Comte hoped, a useful science that could lay the foundations for a new moral organization. This general science of human evolution, which Henri Berr called “historical synthesis”, had to be built with the materials of the social sciences. What he proposed to the scientific community of the time was a multidisciplinary vision, organized around the temporal dimension. And that community responded favorably, duly collaborating in the ambitious projects that Berr was continually launching. These remarks set the tone for the second part of this book, which pursues two complementary intentions. On the one hand, we shall try to understand the theoretical sources and the guiding themes in Henri Berr’s work, and on the other hand, we shall stress his role as an organizer and instigator, by citing two of his most important collaborative projects, which he founded and directed: the Revue de synthèse historique and the Évolution de l’Humanité.

Constructing Synthesis Henri Berr never evolved very far in his thinking: from his youthful writings through to the works of his maturity, he consistently meditated on the need for and the importance of a general science of human evolution. Yet it is clear that, in order to understand his thinking correctly, we must examine the works of his youth and show how his initial ideas were articulated. Twin Influences: Fustel de Coulanges and Émile Boutroux The influences that contributed to Berr’s thinking are too numerous to be discussed systematically. We shall confine ourselves here to the direct influences exerted by two of his teachers: Fustel de Coulanges and Émile Boutroux. Like many young intellectuals of his generation, including Camille Jullian and Émile Durkheim, Henri Berr was heavily influenced by Fustel de Coulanges.3 Under his tutelage, Berr was introduced to a new concept of history, a new way of questioning the past. Fustel never speaks of events or famous men. He discusses beliefs, manners, institutions, he seeks to understand the human soul in its entirety: he asks how men of the past thought,

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and he is also interested in the processes involved in the formation and the disintegration of societies. Understood in this way, history goes well beyond the narrow conception of certain historians: it becomes, as we have seen, “the science of human societies”. Fustel de Coulanges’s influence was not limited to methodological considerations, although these were fundamental. He instructed the young Henri Berr in the virtues of a concrete and useful historical science that could illuminate human activity: “History”, he says in his lecture course, “is not just a pastime”.4 Therein lies a valuable lesson in method, and Berr himself admitted his intellectual debt to Fustel de Coulanges. In the first issues of the Revue de synthèse historique, Berr enthusiastically reproduced some previously unpublished writings of Fustel de Coulanges, with the tacit goal of lending a certain legitimacy to the new journal. The author of La Cité antique would no doubt have been “sympathetic” to the program of our Revue, he wrote.5 The influence of Émile Boutroux (1945–1921) made itself felt in another way, and it was even more profound. It was Boutroux who was Henri Berr’s thesis advisor at the end of the 1890s. As a good historian of philosophy, he suggested that Berr study the history of philosophical thought, analyze a wide variety of doctrines and compare them with each other. Boutroux insisted that a detour through the history of ideas was essential if a philosopher were not to become prisoner to his own thinking. But Boutroux was not only a historian of ideas, he was also an epistemologist and a respected theoretician. At the end of the 19th century he was undoubtedly one of the best-known and most influential French philosophers, on a par with Jules Lachelier and Charles Renouvier. The courses that Boutroux gave had a large audience and his books were read and mulled over by the French intelligentsia. This recognition was due in large part to his thesis, De la contingence des lois de la nature (1874), which was widely acclaimed. In that work, while calling into question certain principles of the scientific process, Boutroux tried to highlight the initiative of the mind in the constitution of science. Natural laws, he said, should not be seen as givens, imposed from outside, but rather as creations of the mind. And he concluded that necessity is nothing other than “the translation, into logical language as abstract as possible, of the action that the ideal exerts on things”.6 In a similar vein, Boutroux argues that there is no opposition between the individual and the general, between the contingent and the necessary. On the contrary, they are complementary to each other. Thus, the individual participates fully in the intellectual process and therefore cannot be excluded from it. In Science et religion, Boutroux muses: “In science, the individual seeks to systematize things from an impersonal point of view. How can science, which is the work of the individual, prohibit him from trying to systematize things as well from the viewpoint of the individual himself?”7 To assemble everything, to exclude nothing, this is the essential task of philosophy as Boutroux sees it. In an article he published in the very first

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issue of the Revue de synthèse historique, Boutroux takes the theoretical principles of philosophical synthesis and transposes them into historical synthesis. He suggests that history must be both analytical and synthetic. The important facts, he writes, “are our guides for determining the minor ones. For is it not a current maxim that, in order to understand persons or events, we must place them in their own time and their own setting? And does that not mean that we can know the detail only from the whole, and that we can understand the whole only in the multitude of details? [. . .] History cannot do without what is called (improperly) synthesis, together with analysis”. Like any other science, he insists, history is first of all an operation of the mind upon things: it is the “appropriation of historic documents by the human intelligence, just as the reduction of physical phenomena into mathematical formulae is the appropriation of matter”.8 This definition of the science of history is fully consistent with the one that Berr sought to promote. Indeed, it is no accident that Boutroux contributed to the very first issue of this journal (although his signature would not appear there again). The presence of Boutroux, even if his article was brief and not very original, gave a certain credibility to Berr’s project. The Gestation of a Project In committing himself to the path that Émile Boutroux had blazed, Henri Berr considered that his cherished synthesis would have to be built around a renewed historical science that associated the march of ideas with the material conditions of existence. He would treat history not only as the science of the past but also as the science of the present and of the future. Of course, Henri Berr was not the first to champion a general science of human evolution. At the turn of the century, this ambition sparked much scholarly debate, and a considerable number of works were published on the subject. The intellectual atmosphere of the time encouraged Henri Berr to delve into problems concerning the theory of history. One of his first writings appeared in 1890 in an obscure journal, the Nouvelle revue, in which he reflects upon “the science of history, statistical method, and the question of great men”. At first glance, this article is but a simple recounting in which our young author sets out to analyze five works of historical theory in an impartial manner. The reality is quite different: Berr uses this pulpit to defend his own ideas. The very first lines indicate the direction that the article will take: “It would seem that a new science is about to be born, one that has been long awaited, often promised, but always deferred; of all the sciences, the last to appear but the first in importance, and one that builds upon most of the others and surpasses them, for its subject matter lies in the most complex of phenomena: those that constitute the evolution of humanity”. This “new science” is doubly important: it allows man to clarify both “the mystery of his origins and that of his future”. We can already appreciate

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the immense scope that historical knowledge will have to embrace in Berr’s thinking. Like Émile Boutroux, Berr does not attempt to set the different currents of thought against each other, but rather seeks to bring them together. He never questions the importance and the interest of the works he analyzes; he raises no objection to the often sterile efforts of his forerunners. He analyzes, he discusses, he notes objections, he rounds out the thinking of the authors with numerous personal reflections, and he frequently stresses that history as a discipline is a work in progress: “By declaring that such a science will be born, we risk drawing smirks, both from those who thought it constituted long ago and from those who deem the venture impossible. However, we can safely deny that it already exists: surely it would not be difficult to show that the philosophy of history has most often amounted to nothing more than adventurous metaphysics, a systematization improvised by minds preoccupied with final causes”. One might be tempted to read in this passage the death certificate of metaphysics and of the philosophy of history. But Henri Berr was in no way condemning the metaphysical phase, which he saw as part of a process of continuity. Human thought progresses, he insists, and tends ceaselessly toward a higher level of perfection. There is no doubt that, on this point, the young Berr was heavily influenced by Auguste Comte and the positivist school. Hence the inevitable question: has history entered the positivist phase? “Did not the fanciful reconstructions of the past also herald a lasting monument, just as alchemy or astrology helped pave the way for the sciences that supplanted them? If we had to adopt the three phases of Auguste Comte—and they do contain, as does any system, a parcel of truth—the ‘new science’ that Vico anticipated would finally arrive at the positivist period. The first attempts had failed because, as soon as the idea that there is order in history glimmered in people’s minds, they wanted to take the pliable material of a little-known past and bend it to the speculations of a rash philosophy”.9 Consequently, the “new science” would be achieved only when philosophy was reconciled with scholarship. But that is not all, and here we come to the core of Berr’s analysis: the “new science” will have to be constructed from the most diverse interpretations of historical developments, and will have to indicate the limits of reductionist tenets. As to historical statistics, which Louis Bourdeau claimed could “explain everything”, Berr remains skeptical: “Is it true”, he asks, “that everything can be reduced to quantitative documents?” And what are we to make of mental life: can it be explained quantitatively? Under the pretext of discovering general laws, Berr complains, statistics denies the role of the singular event and the great man: “To base all of history on statistics is to deny the exception, the genius”.10 On the contrary, the “new science” cannot be limited to collecting heterogeneous facts. A great many historians, Berr notes, view the stuff of history as a tapestry of one-off events and deeds.

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Between these two extreme and apparently irreconcilable positions, the goal of historical science must be to identify “the principal agents of history”. The famous individual, the king, the sovereign, the politician—can such be considered as the principal agents of historical change? In the face of this key question, Berr adopts a stance that evokes perfectly that of the philosophers of the 19th century, such as Cournot and Taine. He insists on the reciprocal interaction between the individual and his setting: “The king has only the power that his subjects grant him, and his will is effective only if everyone shares it”. The famous individual, although his prestige and his authority may depend on the masses, is not thereby stripped of all autonomy: “Let us, for the sake of argument, eliminate Napoleon III or Bismarck and have Gambetta or Frederick III live longer: do you think nothing would be changed?”11 By all evidence, Berr replies, the answer is no. The great movements that shape the destiny of peoples result both from necessity and from individual initiative. Here we have an attempted explanation of historical causality, as well as the outline of a theory of historical knowledge. The famous individual can be explained in part by his setting, but he stands out from it, he tends to surpass it, and his action sometimes leads the masses to follow his will. In other words, the setting serves as a condition to his work, but it is not the efficient cause; the individual’s role is more important.12 “Wish as it might, the crowd cannot create an artist: the artist, on the other hand, can sometimes emerge outside and in spite of the setting. If all artists have something in common, this creative gift that is their privilege and that sets them apart from other men, they also have a character that distinguishes them among themselves”.13 What Henri Berr is proposing here is clearly an individualistic thesis. All progress can be explained by “the qualities of an individual”: “The growth of human powers can be attributed to certain minds, not providential but privileged, which the general need can stimulate but which are indeed necessary to satisfy a general need and which, almost always impatient of their setting, move on ahead of their contemporaries”.14 In fact, “it is a deliberate process of individualization that is the condition for a complete history”. What we find are “acts, works, inventions, ideas that are like the eternal and glorious imprint of individual variation”.15 Clearly, Berr is distancing himself from the kind of scientific positivism that was in vogue at the time. Thus, he takes strong exception to Bourdeau’s philosophy of history, where individual variations and initiatives are bound up in the workings of an implacable necessity. How can we reconcile the defense of the philosophy of history, on one hand, and this outright attack against it, on the other? It is around this paradox that Berr constructs his historical synthesis. Striving for the Unity of Life and Science In 1894, Henri Berr published his first work, Vie et science, to which he added a subtitle describing it as an exchange of letters between “an old

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Strasbourg philosopher and a Parisian student”. We must not be misled by this curious tag: the book is not a collection of correspondence but rather a philosophical novel with autobiographical overtones. Its structure is quite unique—the hero, and in reality the only protagonist, is Henri Berr, lurking behind two fictitious figures engaging in a philosophical dialogue. The student puts many questions, baring his soul to the philosopher; the philosopher responds with a mix of wisdom and nostalgia. Through these personalities, Berr reveals his torment: he is worried about the fragmentation of knowledge, about academic specialization. In fact, Berr often departs from the tone of the novel to make it more of a manifesto—a manifesto for synthesis. Without exaggerating the importance of this book, we may say that Vie et science is to Berr what the Avenir de la science was to Ernest Renan: a youthful essay, strident in tone, lively, lucid, often moving, in which he discusses the role of science in contemporary societies. This work of the young Henri Berr is a perfect reflection of the quandary in which philosophical thinking found itself in France at the end of the 19th century. Philosophy was suffering a severe identity crisis. Félix Ravaisson had foreseen it as early as 1867 in his Rapport;16 at the turn of the century, Émile Boutroux was alarmed at it.17 All came to the same conclusion: philosophy was being marginalized by the emergence of a host of positive sciences. Philosophy was no longer the master science, the total science that had formerly been entrusted with the governance of all knowledge. As was readily apparent in academic circles, the spirit of specialization had triumphed. Ambitious philosophical syntheses were consigned to obsolescence. Like many intellectuals of his day, Berr was profoundly disturbed by this situation. If knowledge was in crisis, it was because man himself was in crisis. If science had divorced itself from philosophy, it was because man was no longer thinking globally. Or worse yet, he was “no longer thinking”. That is the conclusion that Berr reached in this fine passage: “At the present time, there are people who do not think at all; there are people who think only to condemn thought; there are people who think outside science and there are those who think against science. And lastly, there are people who practice science without thinking. Science is not playing the role that it should; it is being used for inventions rather than to demonstrate the value of principles and truths. It does not illuminate the mind; it does not speak to the heart. It does not triumph, it does not reign. And that is because, if you look at it closely, it is analytic and not synthetic”.18 Science must restore its close links with philosophy. Without a philosophical foundation, science is incomplete: “Science, in expanding its empire, has propagated the habit of admitting only the positive, of looking no further than phenomena and their laws, of explaining or pretending to explain everything by causes that are of the same order as the effects”.19 Scientific positivism, lamented Berr, had contributed greatly to the ruination of philosophy: “This entire century has suffered from a surfeit of scientific analysis: knowledge, in its current form, produces in the mind a

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feeling of being rent asunder; it harms, whereas it could heal [. . .] It is well to be leery of positive syntheses that are false, inept and incomplete, and which make things worse through the inevitable disappointments”.20 How was the unity of thought to be restored? Henri Berr answers this question along the same lines as Auguste Comte: we must first erect a new moral code and then rethink our institutions. The crisis of thought could be laid to the crisis of moral values. Moral unity among people had broken down, and chaos had set in. Was there a cure? This question occupies Henri Berr in a little essay that asks, “can we restore the moral unity of France?” It is no accident that this work appeared in 1901, at a time when the public conscience was deeply troubled; the Dreyfus affair had been tearing at the French soul for several years. Berr raises the alarm: “Yes, this is a dangerous moment. As in the time when Fichte was striving, through his inspiring addresses [Reden an die Deutsche Nation], to rally the Germans to unity, it is the natural ambition of every observant and thoughtful Frenchman to restore the unity of today’s France, now so shattered and incoherent, and thus prepare the way for human unity”.21 Education was contributing to this malaise. At the secondary school [lycée] level, as in the university, teaching was becoming ever more specialized; the various branches of knowledge were straying in opposite directions, and the disciplines were ignorant of each other. The humanities, in particular, were hemmed in by the walls erected between disciplines. Looking back on his years as a student, Henri Berr writes: “All this immense field of research concerning man was in my eyes a dark and impenetrable jungle; philology with its subdivisions, history with its auxiliary sciences, an endless variety of subject matters, whether of centuries, of peoples, of languages, of facts or of works—where were the relationships, what was the purpose of all that study?”22 Berr is worried, tormented. Nevertheless, he allows himself an optimistic thought: “The time for synthesis has come [. . .] the concern for synthesis must penetrate analysis—that way, not only will everyone’s work be more effective, not only will everyone collaborate more closely, but every little detail of research will reflect this joy we derive from the view of the whole”.23 This passage from Vie et science indeed summarizes Berr’s work. The word “synthesis”, the key word, appears here for the first time. For the moment, he is speaking only of general synthesis, in its philosophical sense; it does not yet bear the “historical” epithet. In this youthful work, we search in vain for a systematic definition of synthesis; Berr certainly promotes it in many places, but he does not define it. In fact, Vie et science has no scientific pretensions. The work is apparently intended as a collection of personal reflections, but it reveals the embryo of Berr’s scientific design. The History of Thought or the Quest for Unity From 1894 to 1899, Henri Berr’s name is absent from philosophical and literary journals. Nor did he write any books during this time. In fact, he

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devoted those five years to writing his doctoral thesis. The idea of historical synthesis was taking shape in his mind, and he arrived at the conclusion that synthesis must be articulated around the historical time span. The title of his main thesis reveals this: L’Avenir de la philosophie, esquisse d’une synthèse des connaissances fondée sur l’histoire—it promises an “outline of a history-based synthesis of knowledge”. And his secondary thesis (written according to custom in Latin) deals, appropriately enough, with the philosophical work of Gassendi (1592–1665), who, in Berr’s eyes, was one of the first thinkers to have considered the possibility of a general science of history. Henri Berr, Student of Gassendi Berr maintained a steady interest in the work of Gassendi. This enthusiasm for a thinker who was overshadowed in his own time by the Cartesian school might at first raise some questions. Why should one study an obscure philosopher from the 17th century? What interest could his ideas hold for the late 19th century? It was important, Henri Berr insisted, to demonstrate the importance of Gassendi’s thinking in the history of ideas and especially to highlight its current interest. For to a large extent, as we shall see, the questions that concerned Gassendi at the beginning of the 17th century were the same ones that haunted Berr at the end of 19th. Among the many subjects in which Gassendi took an interest—philosophy, astronomy, physics—Berr focused only on philosophy. But in fact, the philosophy of Gassendi was constructed so broadly that it embraced virtually all the sciences of his time. He was the protagonist of a universal science which he called “Syntagma”. This key word already reveals the reasons why Berr attempted to raise Gassendi to the ranks of great thinkers. “I have no hesitation in asserting that the history of the 17th century will never be completely understood until we have thoroughly investigated the works and the thinking of Gassendi and have identified the influence of his writings, his ideas and his example on his contemporaries and his successors”.24 Gassendi represented an abrupt departure from the accepted ideas of his time: “For my part”, writes Berr, “I am convinced, and I become more convinced every day, that Gassendi provides an excellent focal point for considering everything that in the 17th century was opposed to the dominant principles”.25 The “principles” that Gassendi opposed were those of specialization. In the 17th century, a host of philosophical doctrines appeared and jostled with each other. “Historians have long observed that religious conflicts, the rebirth of ancient letters, the development of science, the expansion both of the world and of thinking had the result of overwhelming minds under the weight of knowledge and confusing them through the diversity of systems”.26 How could the systems be unified? How could dialogue be encouraged among the new branches of knowledge?

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Gassendi was certain that unity was possible only through history; he had “a broad premonition of historical studies”.27 What interested Gassendi, it seems, was not the history of events and of great men, but the history of the progress of knowledge and of the human mind: “History is assuredly the light of life, for not only does it lift times past from their obscurity and dispel the confusion but it also, through countless examples, instructs our mind and enables it to understand, based on the past, what we must expect for the future, what we must posit as the purpose of life, where this universal comedy is taking us, and why nothing will ever be new or surprising”.28 So reminiscent are these lines of the intellectual context of the late 19th century that they could well have been written by Berr. It is no exaggeration to say that, as this passage shows, Gassendi was trying to discern the “laws” of history, although he did not use that term. With Gassendi, the field of history is open to new horizons: it is no longer confined to the past, it now extends to the present and to the future. As we shall see, Berr’s concept of history was no different. Is Gassendi, then, the father of historical synthesis? There is a striking similarity of views between Gassendi and Berr. Indeed, it has been quite rightly said that Gassendi and Berr were “two strong spirits reaching out their hands to each other across the centuries”.29 Their respective times were marked by profound upheavals and intense social ferment. Gassendi was witness to the Reformation, to doctrinal conflicts and to the expansion of the Western world; Berr lived through the Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus affair and two world wars. And yet, even though separated by three centuries, they both set for themselves the dual objectives of establishing a principle for making sense of the changes under way and of reorganizing the knowledge of their day. The Progress of Philosophical Thought and the Introduction of Synthesis The history of ideas was a constant field of exploration for Berr. He looked to it for the materials with which to develop his synthesis. His interest in the work of Gassendi is a serious indication of this, and his doctoral thesis on the future of philosophy is even more persuasive. That work is ambitious, to say the least, in the problems it addresses. Berr seeks to show, through the history of thought since the 16th century, that scientific deduction is at all times based on philosophical foundations. Dismayed at the compartmentalization of knowledge, Berr adopts a mission: to insert the philosophical spirit everywhere, even into the domains claimed by the positive sciences as their preserve. How is synthesis to be established? There is one principle that commands Berr’s approach and the entire construct of his thesis: synthesis is to be found not in material reality but in the being, the subject. In other words, the subject is the principle of unity: it is the only certainty, the only truth. According to Berr, the entire evolution of modern philosophy revolves around this idea. It is legitimate, then, to believe that philosophy evolves,

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that it is not an eternal re-beginning and that, despite appearances, systems of thought are closely interrelated. “Philosophy progresses, that is the most important fact”, he declares; “it progresses in the same way as science, with which it has moreover been closely linked throughout its history”.30 More precisely, science is the instrument of the progress of thought; it is a method that seeks to resolve philosophical problems. But all “truth” will be obtained through “positive knowledge”. According to Henri Berr, positive knowledge embraces both psychological and scientific knowledge. Let us take psychological knowledge first. We are dealing here with psychology not as Théodule Ribot conceived it, but as established by Maine de Biran—i.e., introspective psychology. The subject of that psychology is the self, the “I” [le moi]. The I, Berr tells us, is the point of departure for all knowledge: “The philosopher who reflects upon the word I must, it seems, develop in this way the inductive and fundamental knowledge that is deposited and condensed in that syllable: therein is a reality and it sees itself as such. Consciousness, reality, unity—that is what the word I implies. That is what thinking discovers in it, if it considers it honestly”. But the word becomes fully intelligible only when it is compared to external reality, the “non-I”. It is by contrasting these two opposites that we appreciate their respective singularity. “The essential I recognizes itself only in the adventitious I [. . .] that must mean that the I knows itself only through the non-I, that I and non-I are given simultaneously in the consciousness and are perceived simultaneously in thought”.31 It is the task of psychology to establish a dialectical relationship between the I and the non-I. “Psychology discovers in the consciousness the reality of the I and the non-I: it defines the I as a sentient and consequently a unifying unit; it poses the non-I without defining it. But the non-I is conceivable only in relation to the I. Science is based on a necessary hypothesis, which it proves little by little; it is an application, at first spontaneous, of the I to the non-I, an extension of psychology”.32 Scientific knowledge relies, then, on an abstract form of psychology: the object “can be known only if it to some degree resembles the subject”. Science is nothing other than “a spontaneous application of psychology to the non-I”.33 In fact, there is in science an “undeniable and inevitable anthropomorphism”. Berr admits the principle that science can only be general, but he hastens to add this qualification, which brings us back to the Cartesian cogito: “For the general to exist”, he says, “there must be uniformities, resemblances; and resemblance is not attached to things, it is attributed to them by the mind which recognizes the similarities; it results from the manner in which the unity of the I is affected by the object”.34 Scientific knowledge, then, is the joint work of things and of thought. In fact, any science, from mathematics to history, expresses “the essence of the I”. “The being that is, the being that is made, and the relationships between the being that is and the being that is made—there you have the triple object of synthetic research”.35

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How should synthetic research be conducted? Berr’s conclusion on this score is strikingly reminiscent of Gassendi. “Scientific research”, he declares, cannot be pursued effectively except through history. “What I plan to focus on is history in its proper sense, on mankind as it has evolved. Of all subjects of study, none is of equal value: this history, in reality, is something incomplete through which the rest tends to complete itself; through this history, speculation and activity are joined in science: speculation rules activity, and the rule of activity reacts upon speculation”.36 Of course, if history is to be synthetic, it must be rethought: this means that its methodological principles will have to be completely overhauled. Scholarly history is futile, it serves only “to charm” and “to amuse”, while the philosophy of history is a wild fantasy: “it has done violence to the past by bending it to its concepts”.37 Navigating between these twin reefs, Henri Berr charts a course reminiscent of Paul Lacombe: history, he insists, must maintain close relations with psychology. Or better yet, it must become a multiple psychology: ontological psychology, social psychology, biographical psychology. The assemblage of these psychologies constitutes the very object of historical synthesis. The development of a general science of human evolution to which Henri Berr aspired (influenced as he was by the Neo-Kantianism of the late 19th century38) inevitably called into question the legitimacy of sociology. Following Auguste Comte, sociology had also sought to unify knowledge, but Berr believed it had failed. And that, he says, is because its methodological intentions are completely defective: it defines the social as an autonomous reality that dominates the individual. In Berr’s eyes, this determinism is unacceptable. “The elements that constitute society are conscious, thinking beings, and they are increasingly conscious and thinking: they think of themselves and they think of society, and they think of themselves more and more as elements of society. The constraint that society exerts over them, this they accept, they wish it; and then they make it gradually fade away; they recognize that this constraint emanates from their unconscious will, that it responds to the ultimate law of their being. In short, the individual, as a thinking being, and society develop in parallel—or rather, reciprocally. The progress of society allows the progress of the individual, and vice versa”. For Berr, society, far from being a reality in its own right, is, on the contrary, the “conscious” work of individuals. It results from individual thinking, which is at once the cause and the condition of social life. “Society is the being in which psychological thinking comes into flower: it is essentially plastic and it molds and organizes itself to fit the progress of this thinking which, in reflection, reaches beyond the individual and the social being to the very substance of being”.39 Can we detect in these assertions the opening salvos of a debate with Durkheim? We can at least see the first hints of real divergences, and we will find them again under other formulations in the years to follow. We shall return to this point, but we must here and now pre-empt any misunderstanding. Berr’s intention, in the assertions just quoted, is not to

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show that sociology is a fantasy, but rather to define it, to specify its scope— in short, to indicate the role that it should play in constituting historical synthesis. What is original about Berr’s thesis? To what extent does his thinking about the evolution of philosophy serve to justify the development of a general science of history? This thesis must not be taken as a fully matured framework of thinking. Too many questions are still vaguely phrased; the approach is too tortuous. Much of the work is devoted to an overly exhaustive account of the history of thought from Descartes to the end of the 19th century. Three centuries of Western intellectual history are thus condensed in cursory fashion. Hundreds of authors are quoted, and a host of doctrines and systems are cited. How are we to interpret the intent of this dissertation? the jury wondered. Émile Boutroux offered this critique: “M. Berr has read a great deal; he has read too much, and as an inevitable consequence he has read too many secondhand works. In philosophy one has to read the same text a hundred times; reading too much prevents one from reading well”. Alfred Espinas was even more severe: “I cannot really make out the dominant idea of your sketch of the history of philosophy; it is a useful textbook of the history of philosophy, but it is not an integral part of an original work”.40 These are perfectly legitimate objections. But, in defense of Henri Berr, we must note that it is not in the field of philosophy or the philosophy of history that his thesis claims to be original, but rather in the field of scientific history that was then flourishing. How does the genesis of philosophy serve his plan? Simply put, Berr is seeking to transpose into history the idea of the unifying and rational subject that we find, in many different forms, throughout the history of modern philosophical thought.41

Historical Synthesis and Sociology The Avenir de la philosophie is essentially a program for arriving at synthesis. That being the case, we can only marvel at its convolutions. In the first years of the 20th century, Henri Berr devoted much of his thinking to the rigorous and practical development of the idea of synthesis. He modified his language: he no longer spoke of synthesis without adding the qualifier “historical”. At the same time, sociology was gradually gaining legitimacy on both the methodological and the institutional fronts. The Durkheimians were sure of the intellectual importance of their discipline. They not only defined it as the “corpus” of the social sciences, but they also insisted that the object of their study was irreducible. How did Henri Berr react to a discipline whose ultimate ambition it was to govern human knowledge? He began by calling into question the very basis of the methodological principle that treated society as an independent reality, distinct from the individuals that comprise it. In the same vein, he stressed the eclectic nature of sociological science. “There are too many

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sociologies for sociology to be considered as constituted”, he writes.42 Its methodology is haphazard and riddled with gaps, and this proves once again that sociology has not yet achieved the status of a science. “It is unarguably a weakness of sociological studies that there are so many ‘introductions’ to sociology where the science is defined in various ways; there are so many ‘general’, ‘pure’, ‘abstract’ sociologies, so many textbooks where the facts are systematized in entirely different ways”.43 Émile Durkheim and his collaborators were probably the unnamed targets of this attack.44 According to Henri Berr, Durkheim and his “group of good workers” were inspired by a common concern to constitute sociology scientifically by giving it methodological rules. Berr was nonetheless in disagreement with the Durkheimians’ reading of history: they “tend to give history a purely sociological interpretation”, he complained. “Whatever reality societies may represent, however legitimate ‘society’ may be as an abstraction, and however important this factor may be in historical explanation, it is unacceptable, in reaction against individualistic history, to pose a priori the social being as an irreducible given, as the primordial source of all human facts”. Berr refused to believe that the individual would bow in servile obedience to the coercive force of collective life. He went even further: in some stimulating lines (which, we might add, smack somewhat of the utilitarian tradition), he maintains that any form of human association is the conscious work of individuals. If there is such a thing as society, he says, it is because individuals manifest the desire to live together. “It has not been proven, and it is highly unlikely, that society was constituted from the outset: we must not attribute to it a reality that predates and is superior to that of individuals—of what could that initial reality have consisted?” What is produced in society is not, then, “produced exclusively by society”.45 The quarrel between Berr and the Durkheimian school relates essentially to the origins of social life. It is true that Berr admits, with Durkheim, that collective life is external to individuals and that it can exercise constraint, but this externality and this constraint, he insists, exist only when society is firmly constituted: in other words, at the time it is endowed with institutions. “Society was not constituted all at once. We cannot say that before there was any true social organization, men were hostile or closed to something that did not exist. It could only be the social instinct of individuals, through a logical evolution, that gave birth to that social organization, and then went on to develop it because of the benefits it offered”.46 Berr finds it difficult to accept that there could be a collective consciousness distinct from the subjects that constitute it. “If society is to act upon individuals, individuals—as social beings—must first have created society. The effect reacts upon the agent”. Following this dialectical process, the individual is both cause and effect of social life. “What seems obvious is that society and the individual, from the mental viewpoint, are at once in opposition, virtual or real, and intimately related. Durkheim and his followers are wrong, then, not to recognize this complex interplay of constant action and reaction, not

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to distinguish, in their studies on the genesis of thought, what is individual— in the sense of human or logical—from what is social; not to recognize that the action of society is limited to affirming, freeing and developing rational logic, which it could never create. It is the individual who creates it”.47 There would seem, then, to be considerable disagreement between Henri Berr and Durkheim. Célestin Bouglé, who was an avid reader of the Revue de synthèse historique, maintains that Berr’s comments concerning Durkheim and the Année sociologique are “less severe than they appear at first glance”.48 The fact remains, however, that we have here two methodological orientations that are diametrically opposed. In a context where vast encyclopedic syntheses were being rendered obsolete by the specialization of disciplines, Berr seemed doomed to failure. At the crossroads of “eventsbased” history, the old philosophies of history and the budding sociology, he would face great difficulty in having his ideas triumph at the institutional level.49

The History Chair at the Collège de France: Moving on From Failure Although he was not a historian either by training or by profession, Henri Berr worked ceaselessly to advance the science of history. This sometimes placed him in awkward situations. Indeed, various historians greeted his works with indifference, regarding them as pertaining to sociology or seeing in them a return to the philosophy of history. It might strike us as surprising, then, that Henri Berr applied for a position to teach general history at the Collège de France in 1903, the very year in which the exchanges between historians and sociologists reached a fever pitch.50 Although he was not yet 40 when he submitted his candidacy, Henri Berr already had a fairly full intellectual career behind him. As professor of rhetoric at the Lycée Henri IV, he had many publications to his credit: dozens of articles and essays and three books. Most importantly, he had founded the Revue de synthèse historique which, he proudly said, had already done much to enrich “French science”. But Berr was not content to promote his project: he used it at the same time to attack the philosophers, the historians and the sociologists. None of this improved his chances. In the eyes of many historians, Berr’s historical synthesis had no place in the teaching of general history. His approach was considered much too philosophical. Among others who held that opinion was a prestigious candidate for the same chair, the historian Gabriel Monod.51 Speaking on behalf of the history community, he remarked to Berr personally that there were “already enough chairs of philosophy”. We can understand the sharpness of Berr’s response: “M. Monod is in error when he writes me that there are enough chairs of philosophy at the Collège de France. I could reply to him that there are enough chairs of pure history, as well as of philosophy proper”.52

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Monod’s opinion was no doubt shared by many others, and Berr’s candidacy was not accepted. Ironically, it was Monod, founder of the Revue historique, who was awarded the chair. Monad had a clear advantage over Berr on all counts. He enjoyed academic prestige, while Berr was a lycée teacher. Moreover, the Revue historique had a large following among historians, something that was obviously not the case for the Revue de synthèse historique, which was of interest primarily to sociologists and philosophers. This setback did not deter Henri Berr from his belief in the virtues of historical synthesis. In the years to come, he would defend his ideas with the same fervor and would seek out platforms for promoting them. Thus, it was that in 1912—at the very time when François Simiand was aspiring to the chair in labor history53—he again applied for a second time to the Collège de France, supported this time by Henri Bergson and Joseph Bédier.54 But once again, the Collège the France showed itself unreceptive to synthesis. Berr was considered an outsider by the French historians of his time.55 As one author put it, “this was surely a victory for the conservative academics of the Collège de France, the guardians of the relationships between disciplines”.56 Henri Berr’s eclecticism, it seems, made him a poor catch. And there were many who doubted that Berr, whose philosophical training surely made him suspect, could offer an original contribution to any particular field of history. Gabriel Monod’s appointment to the chair in general history came as a kind of confirmation of “the domination of academic and analytical historiography”.57 In 1913, in an article that reveals the disappointment engendered by his recent setbacks, Henri Berr reminds readers of the Revue de synthèse historique about the dangers of hyper-specialization: “Many pragmatic academics and historians are still skeptical about the efficacy of our research, which strikes them as a philosophical luxury and not as the very framework of history in its definitive constitution”.58

Notes 1 Henri Berr, La Montée de l’esprit. Bilan d’une vie et d’une œuvre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1955). 2 Cristina Chimisso writes that Berr’s history “as a science, is neither a metaphysics, which is general by a priori, no erudition, which is mere a collection of facts that does not attain general knowledge”, Writing the History of the Mind: Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 92. 3 See William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 4 Fustel de Coulanges, “Une leçon d’ouverture et quelques fragments inédits”, Revue de synthèse historique (2, 1901), p. 243. 5 Henri Berr, Foreword. In Fustel de Coulanges, “Une leçon d’ouverture et quelques fragments inédits”, p. 242. 6 Émile Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1913), p. 169. 7 Émile Boutroux, Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1913), p. 358.

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8 Émile Boutroux, “Histoire et synthèse”, Revue de synthèse (1, 1900), p. 12. 9 Henri Berr, “Essais sur la science de l’histoire. La Méthode statistique et la question des grands hommes”, Nouvelle revue (64, 1890), pp. 516–518. 10 Ibid., p. 525. 11 Ibid., pp. 726–727. 12 Henri Berr, “L’Histoire des romans de M. A. Daudet. Contributions à l’étude de la formation d’œuvre d’art”, Revue bleue (25, 1888), pp. 242–247. 13 Henri Berr, “Essais sur la science de l’histoire”, pp. 731–732. 14 Ibid., p. 735. 15 Ibid., p. 741. 16 Félix Ravaisson, La Philosophie en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1983). 17 Émile Boutroux, “La Philosophie en France depuis 1867”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale(1908), pp. 683–716. 18 Henri Berr, Vie et science. Lettres d’un vieux philosophe strasbourgeois à un jeune étudiant parisien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1894), p. 5. 19 Henri Berr, Peut-on refaire l’unité morale de la France? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1901), p. 52. 20 Henri Berr, Vie et science, pp. 182–185. 21 Henri Berr, Peut-on refaire l’unité morale de la France?, p. 6. 22 Henri Berr, Vie et science, p. 97. 23 Ibid., p. 174. 24 Henri Berr, Du Scepticisme de Gassendi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960), p. 13. 25 Ibid., p. 16. 26 Ibid., p. 27. 27 Henri Berr, “Gassendi, historien des sciences”. In Rapports et comptes rendus du deuxième congrès international de philosophie (Genève, 1904), p. 856. 28 Gassendi quoted in Henri Berr, Du Scepticisme de Gassendi, p. 85. 29 Ducham Nedelkovitch, “Gassendi et Henri Berr”, Revue de synthèse (85, 1964), p. 110. 30 Henri Berr, L’Avenir de la philosophie. Esquisse d’une synthèse des connaissances fondée sur l’histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1899), p. 300. 31 Ibid., pp. 305–308. 32 Ibid., p. 444. 33 Ibid., pp. 319–320. 34 Ibid., p. 321. 35 Ibid., p. 445. 36 Ibid., p. 416. 37 Ibid., p. 418. 38 Martin Siegel, Science and the Historical Imagination in French Historiographical Thoyght, 1866–1914 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis: Columbia University, 1965), p. 186; J. Benrubi, Les sources et courants de la philosophie contemporaine en France (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1933). 39 Ibid., pp. 427–428. 40 Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (7, 1899), p. 16. 41 This is clearly illustrated by Gabriel Monod. See his review of L’Avenir de la philosophie. In La Revue historique (70), p. 99. 42 Henri Berr, La Synthèse en histoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1953), p. 119. 43 Ibid., p. 118. 44 Christophe Prochasson, “Histoire et sociologie: Henri Berr et les durkheimiens (1900–1914)”. In Agnès Biard, Dominique Bourel, Éric Brian (eds.), Henri Berr et la culture du XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel/Centre international de synthèse, 1997), pp. 61–79. 45 Henri Berr, La Synthèse en histoire, p. 127. 46 Ibid., p. 165.

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47 Ibid., p. 193. 48 Célestin Bouglé, “Histoire et sociologie”, Annales sociologiques (Fasc. 1, 1934), p. 177; Jacques Faublée, “Henri Berr et L’Année sociologique”, Revue de synthèse (85, 1964), pp. 68–74. 49 In 1932, Henri Berr, with Lucien Febvre, showed the distinction between history and sociology. “What is the distinction between the work of the sociologist and that of historian? The one exerts himself by concentrated work of comparison to detach specific necessities, to characterize and classify social types, to create their statics and their dynamics. The other utilizes the data furnished by sociology the better to understand and clarify the role of the social element in history; he knows, however, that besides the necessary [. . .] and besides the contingent he will strike facts, logic, ideas; and he therefore avoids sacrificing to one of these three orders the other two. He thus, for example, aschews the adoption of a purely sociological interpretation of history, in which the social being is considered as an irreducible item of data, as the primordial source of all human facts. This is an act of prudence, which at one reserves and introduces a very great question, that of the role in the history of the individual—that ‘intermediary between chance and necessity’—and of his position at the various stages of evolution in relation to society” (Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre, “History”. In Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (1932), p. 365. 50 Madeleine Rebérioux, “Le débat de 1903: historiens et sociologues”. In CharlesOlivier Carbonell and Georges Livet (eds.), Au Berceau des Annales, le milieu strasbourgeois (Toulouse: Presses de l’Institut d’Études Politiques de Toulouse, 1983), pp. 219–230; Alice Gérard, “À l’origine du combat des Annales: positivisme historique et système universitaire”. In Charles-Olivier Carbonell and Georges Livet (eds.), Au Berceau des Annales (Toulouse: Presses de l’Institut d’études politiques, 1983), pp. 79–88. 51 Gabriel Monod, “La Chaire d’histoire au Collège de France”, Revue bleue (4, 1905), 5–43. 52 Henri Berr quoted in Martin Siegel, “Henri Berr et la Revue de synthèse historique”. In Charles-Olivier Carbonell and Georges Livet (eds.), Au Berceau des Annales (Toulouse, 1983), p. 229. 53 See François Simiand, Histoire du travail au Collège de France. Leçon d’ouverture (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932). 54 On the issue of academic chairs in the beginnings of the 20th century, see Terry N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). 55 Robert C. Rhodes, The Evolution in French Historical Thought: Durkheim’s Sociologism as a Major Factor in the Transition from Historicism (unpublished Ph.D. thesis: University of California, Los Angeles, 1974), p. 198. 56 Martin Siegel, “Henri Berr et la Revue de synthèse historique”, p. 211. 57 Giuliani Gemelli, “Communauté intellectuelle et stratégies institutionnelles”, Revue de synthèse (2, 1987), p. 230. 58 Henri Berr, “Nouvelle série”, Revue de synthèse (27, 1913), p. 2.

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Henri Berr, the Organizer and Promoter of Synthesis

History is synthesis. It links the accidental to the necessary and the logical; it brings the sciences together and indicates the principles of unity. But unifying knowledge also means uniting the specialists who come from various fields. In his first book, Vie et science, Henri Berr deplores the isolation to which the members of the scientific community have consigned themselves. “Synthesis is not yet organized. A few rare minds are attempting it, but there is no common accord in support of it”.1 How, then, and by what means was the unity of knowledge to be constructed? Henri Berr’s approach was driven by a keen concern for organization. In 1900, he founded the Revue de synthèse historique, and the issues at stake were clearly defined: the idea was, through “cooperative arrangements”, to specify the role that history should play in the family of the social sciences.2 It is not surprising that many of the works published in the first years of the Revue dealt with questions of method, theory and epistemology.3 In the wake of the First World War, Berr attempted to test the validity of his theoretical thinking on the field of history itself. The Évolution de l’Humanité, which he founded in 1919, responded to this concern to construct a fully concrete history.4

Objectives of the Revue de Synthèse Historique Synthesis presupposes unity. In the very first lines of his dissertation, Henri Berr recalls this point: “Synthesis must absorb all the energies, it must revive the ancient spirit of adventure. To launch ourselves on the conquest of the great unknown, to test the hypothesis of unity; to achieve the ultimate goals of being: is this not an exciting adventure?”5 These words have the overtones of a program. In writing the conclusion to his thesis, Berr was no doubt thinking of founding a journal in which history would be called upon to “test the hypothesis of unity”. It was in this vein that the Revue de synthèse historique was launched. From the outset, the young Berr was attracted by the historical ferment bubbling on the other side of the Rhine.6 There, history was being practiced in a way that sought to link the march of events to the meandering

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development of ideas. “In tracing our program”, he wrote a few years later, “we had our eyes set on Germany”.7 The contents of the first edition of the Revue de synthèse historique did not conceal this: it included a monograph by A. Bossert8 and an article by the eminent German historian Karl Lamprecht.9 The Revue de synthèse historique, which in this regard is difficult to compare with the French historical journals of the time, set out to take stock of scientific life and to encourage the sciences to specify their object in relation to synthesis. Such an intent is curiously similar to the avowed purpose of the Année sociologique. There is no doubt, moreover, that the Revue was greatly inspired by the Durkheimian project, although it was not the mouthpiece of any school or doctrine. One section of the journal, in fact entitled the L’Année sociologique, under the editorship of Edmond Goblot, summarizes and analyzes the works of the Durkheimian group. In the first years of its existence, the Revue de synthèse historique’s articles dealt primarily with the theory of history, philosophy of history and the history of ideas.10 “There may be many theoretical studies at the outset: needless to say, this is a vein that will quickly become exhausted. And do not be alarmed at the word ‘theory’: as used here, it is certainly not a call for those vague, overly general considerations uttered by thinkers who have no practical experience of history”.11 By 1913, Henri Berr senses that he has succeeded in his mission: “The theory of history is a necessity, and at the time when the Revue was founded it was too neglected, at least in France [. . .] Our essential concern has been to promote the theory of history, to elucidate the principles and to prepare the framework for an explanatory science, as far removed from pure analysis or from narration as it is from a priori philosophy”.12 From a theoretical viewpoint, the program of the Revue de synthèse historique sought merely to reinforce the historical psychology that Henri Berr was constantly promoting in his own works: “To arrive through history at psychology is absolutely necessary, but it is an infinitely delicate task. This Revue, in sponsoring works of this kind, does not attempt to conceal the difficulties: it does not seek to encourage the fantasies that have nothing to do with science. It hopes to lead the solid academic sciences to a synthesis, not only by bringing them together but also by deepening them and unifying them; it hopes, then, to elicit essays on historical psychology”.13 This historical psychology must examine man from multiple aspects: “The comparative study of societies must lead us to social psychology, to a knowledge of the basic needs that institutions respond to, and their shifting manifestations. The study of historical series must lead to the psychology of great men of action and thought, of ethnic individualities, of critical points in history. And it is a task of psychology, an important and delicate one, to shed light on the role played in history by the intellectual element”.14

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The Dialogue Between Historical Synthesis and Sociology The Revue de synthèse historique sought, then, to move beyond sociology while drawing inspiration from it. As Henri Berr saw it, sociology, far from being the master science that it claimed to be, was in fact merely an introductory course to historical synthesis.15 But it had nevertheless a fundamental role in laying the groundwork for a general science of history, and accordingly the Revue de synthèse historique reserved a good deal of space from the outset for recent works of sociology. “Positive sociology will play a prominent part in this journal”, Henri Berr stressed.16 Sociologists, and in particular those recruited to the Durkheim school, were invited to help with the task of opening up the historical discipline, and to define their viewpoint with respect to synthesis. A great many Durkheimians responded favorably to this invitation. Indeed, during the first five or six years of its existence, the Revue was literally inundated with sociological works. This collaboration by the sociologists with the Revue raised a number of eyebrows. Hubert Bourgin maintained that “with his historical synthesis, Henri Berr has founded a kind of preparatory school for sociology, following in the path of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl”.17 And Fernand Braudel complained that “the Revue de synthèse has been too attentive to sociology”.18 Despite his fruitful collaboration with the Durkheimian group, Henri Berr remained skeptical of a purely sociological interpretation of historical evolution.19 “However legitimate and important sociology may be, can it really plumb the depths of history? We do not believe so. But whatever our convictions, we must recognize that we have a problem here. Sociology is the study of what is social in history—but is history all social? The role of individuals, the role of great historical personages, which comparative sociology simply dismisses as unimportant—is that role really so negligible?”20 This was the question that two collaborators of the Revue de synthèse historique, A.D. Xénopol and Paul Mantoux, set out to answer. A.D. Xénopol A Romanian scholar with a doctorate from Berlin and the author of a history of Romania, Alexandru Dimitrie Xénopol (1847–1920) devoted much of his work to wrestling with the problems of historical theory. From the outset, he was a prolific contributor to the Revue de synthèse historique, and his byline was rarely absent from the issues of the Revue in the first years of the century. One of Xénopol’s primary objectives was to specify the role of history in the hierarchy of knowledge. His concept of science, his ideas and his language often recall the scientific positivism of the mid-19th century. Science, he wrote, “is not a creation of our mind, as are religion, the arts or the forms

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of government. It is the reflection in the understanding, the projection of the reason of things into human reason”. Hence the universal value of scientific knowledge: “Science is unique and cannot be shaded according to the different minds in which it manifests itself [. . .] Truth is unique and it knows no country”.21 For Xénopol, the sciences must be classed according to the orders of the phenomena that we observe in nature. Nature contains phenomena of two orders: those of “repetition” and those of “succession”.22 “Repetition” deals with similarities, with stability, while on the contrary, “succession” relates to the singular and the variable. But there is another difference: the fundamental characteristic of repetitive facts is that, contrary to successive facts, they can be foreseen and predicted. Thus, Xénopol argues that repetitive facts are “general as to time”, while “successive facts are always specific as to time”. Must science, then, confine itself only to the general, as the old axiom would have it? Not at all, replies Xénopol, for nature comprises both repetitive and successive facts, and we can conceive of history as a scientific discipline because it “constitutes one of the two universal modes for conceiving the world”.23 History is considered here as a perfect example of a science of the individual, the unique. “The principal element of the history of the formation of the universe”, says Xénopol, “consists in the changes that appear only once in the ocean of time, to cast their shadow and never to return”.24 Historical facts are unique: they never repeat themselves, but rather, they change over time. History, Xénopol tells us, must be “considered as a development and not as an eternal repetition of the same phenomena”.25 The task of history is to link and coordinate individual facts among themselves in order to discern laws. It is theoretically possible, then, to arrive at a scientific explanation based on individual or successive facts. This concept of history, which insists on the prime causality of individual facts, placed Xénopol in direct opposition to the theoretical stances of the newly minted sociology. In contrast to history, which he understands as a science of succession, Xénopol defines sociology as a science of “repetition”. Sociology, he says, is interested first and foremost in permanent and stable facts (institutions, beliefs, manners etc.), while history focuses on individual and variable facts (wars, treaties, events). More precisely, the role of history is to “localize” and to “individualize human actions”.26 As he saw it, sociology misunderstood the scientific importance of the individual person or fact: this was a serious error in his view, for the individual and the accidental are an important part of any scientific object. Social facts, despite their apparent irreducibility, are themselves the result of individual causes, and they are individualized in many ways, in particular by time and by space. In short, the social fact “happens only once in the course of the ages and never occurs again in an identical way”.27 As long as sociology fails to recognize the role and the importance of the individual in the intellectual process, its method will remain defective. “In this struggle between

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sociology and history”, Xénopol concludes, “it is the latter that will emerge victorious, for truth is on its side”.28 Paul Mantoux The economic historian Paul Mantoux (1877–1956) can certainly not be called a traditional historian. His contribution to the debate that raged between history and sociology at the beginning of the century is still quoted. In the 1903 issue of the Revue de synthèse historique, Mantoux penned one of his rare articles, “Histoire et sociologie”, in which he took issue with François Simiand and insisted on the possibility of a science of the individual. Despite the severe tone of the article, the young Paul Mantoux, author of La Révolution industrielle au XVIIIe siècle, in fact hoped to forge an alliance between history and sociology. But the best way to do this, he maintained, was first to appreciate the specificity of the two disciplines. The distinction between history and sociology that Paul Mantoux offers can be reduced to this simple expression: history is a narrative discipline, and as such it cannot be considered a science on a par with chemistry or physics, whereas sociology, in seeking to discover stable and permanent causal relationships, is indeed a science. As to the similarities between the two disciplines, Mantoux observes (as did Charles Seignobos) that both use the same “mode of knowledge”, one that is indirect. Because of this, sociology is as far removed as history from the type of observation that we find in the natural sciences: “Not only the majority of past facts but also the immense majority of present facts are impossible to observe directly”.29 Such a statement does not take us very far. In effect, Mantoux’s contribution lies in the definition of a possible meeting point between history and sociology, which he illustrates through the contrasts and the similarities between the two disciplines. Historical material offers some valuable lessons to the emerging sociology, seeking to distance itself from metaphysical interpretations: “The sociologist is constantly obliged to turn to history for the terms of his reasoning, and he implicitly assumes that what he borrows from history will be sound and appropriate”.30 How can sociology forge links with a discipline that gives pride of place to narration, to events and to individuals? No one has demonstrated, Mantoux maintains, that the individual “is not and can never be a cause, in the scientific sense of the word; one would have to be certain that, in eliminating the individual, one is not dispensing with something essential”.31 The individual, then, can act as an efficient cause: as Mantoux and Lacombe both stress, the individual can be the origin of the institutional and of the general. Paul Mantoux is proposing here a thesis that reflects the essential conclusions of social psychology. He describes collective life as the result of the multiplication of psychological elements. In this way, Mantoux takes issue with the Durkheimian concept of causality: “It is possible—and even

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probable—that social phenomena have no cause, in the scientific meaning of that word, except other social phenomena. But this is only an assumption, one that we must accept provisionally and under benefit of inventory. Moreover, along with the idea of cause we have another one—that of necessary condition”. In chemistry, “the cause of a chemical phenomenon can be found only by comparing certain bodies; but there are conditions of heat that are essential to producing the phenomenon. Because heat belongs to the realm of physics, are we therefore to condemn thermo chemistry? The development of a city is a social phenomenon; we may assign it whatever social cause we wish, but it is subject to geographic conditions that we cannot overlook”.32 It is legitimate, then, to believe that any phenomenon, natural or social, comprises both necessities and contingencies. If the role of the sociologist is to demonstrate the necessary element of a social phenomenon, it is up to the historian to identify the contingent element. It is precisely in this division of duties that history and sociology become complementary disciplines. As will be appreciated from the foregoing analyses, Paul Mantoux adopts a methodological posture quite similar to that of Henri Berr. Standing halfway between Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde, Mantoux interprets social life as the product of constraint and imitation. This is nicely illustrated by his example of language: “A language is perfectly distinct from those who speak it: it is a thing. Language imposes itself on individuals. Language is imitated: it is and it remains at all times the product of imitation”.33

A Historical Encyclopedia: The Évolution de l’Humanité The second round of collective work orchestrated by Henri Berr began in 1920, when he launched a vast historical encyclopedia, entitled L’Évolution de l’Humanité, which he proposed as a “mirror of world civilization”.34 At first glance, this was hardly an original undertaking: it was a frequent practice at that time to enlist various authors to put together a universal history. The approach was often the same: the collaborators, for the most part historians by training and profession, shared out the tasks according to their field of specialization. As a rule, each author would cover a particular area: each work would open and close with a date and an event. Henri Berr departed sharply from this tradition, however: he recruited his collaborators from among the elite of social science practitioners, and not all of them were historians. Then too, the material addressed by the Évolution de l’Humanité was immense in scope, extending from prehistory to the modern day, and it covered fields as new and diverse as the history of art and literature, the history of science and the history of ideas and mentalities. Each of the works was independent and dealt with a particular problem. The collaborators were highly diversified both in their training and in their theoretical approaches: “We are

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quite happy to count among our different collaborators a variety of tendencies and of guiding hypotheses, with the result that the Évolution de l’Humanité truly represents an experiment, as promised, in which various explanatory factors are tested and their explanatory power measured”.35 As editor, Berr wrote and signed a lengthy preface to each of the works, setting out and discussing the author’s thesis and recalling the principles of synthesis. The Ambitions of the Évolution de l’Humanité As we have seen, in its early years the Revue de synthèse historique consisted primarily of theoretical works. The design of the Évolution de l’Humanité was different, although it was fully complementary. It was no longer a matter of discussing theory, but rather, as Henri Berr promised, to put into practice the principles of historical synthesis, and to verify their validity in the face of the facts: “The theory of history which was developed in the Revue, and which we have described in our Synthèse en histoire, must be put into application [. . .] hence, the Évolution de l’Humanité, a work of collective synthesis, emanating from the Revue and intended to test its theoretical outcomes”.36 History thereby departs from pure speculation. In 1913, Berr was already speaking of his theoretical concerns as things of the past: “We now believe that there is something else to pursue beyond theory, or timid attempts to apply theory in narrow articles”.37 The idea is simple and harks back to the deepest aspirations of positivism: history must become a useful and concrete science. The events of 1914–1918 would only reinforce this belief, which was already deeply rooted in Henri Berr’s mind. In the wake of the war, he wrote, “what history must do is direct itself clearly towards resolving the problems that affect life, the life of peoples and the life of individuals, material life and the life of the mind”.38 It is difficult to say just when Henri Berr conceived the idea of preparing a universal history. Some passages from his work might suggest that this project was in gestation from the earliest years of his youth. What we know with certainty, however, is that Berr was taking serious steps in this direction as early as 1910 (recruiting collaborators, making contact with potential publishers, etc.). From 1912 on, the plan of the Évolution de l’Humanité was sketched out, and the following year Berr announced his project to readers of the Revue de synthèse historique.39 The first volume was planned for 1914, but Berr’s enthusiasm was squelched by the war. The Évolution de l’Humanité would not appear for another six years. In 1920, a book by Edmond Perrier, dealing with “the earth before history” (La terre avant l’histoire), was published as the first installment of the collection; this was eventually followed by around a hundred further papers, more than 50 of them with prefaces by Henri Berr. In the general introduction to the collection, Henri Berr cites two essential factors that he believes are highly favorable to the writing of a universal history: the development of historical studies, aided by a multitude of new

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social sciences, on one hand, and the globally prevalent conditions affecting people’s lives. The Évolution de l’Humanité was indeed a child of its time. Berr, who had witnessed the horrors of the First World War, was quick to remind his readers of the necessity, the urgency of a rebirth of historical studies in order to meet the needs of a constantly evolving society. And he considered that this rebirth depended on pursuing paths of research often overlooked by the historical community, such as the history of mentalities, the history of religions, the history of civilizations or the history of sciences. Such an undertaking would demand, once again, the collaboration of specialists from all the social sciences. The Évolution de l’Humanité and Sociology If, as Lucien Febvre suggested, the Revue de synthèse historique was “the Trojan horse of sociologists”,40 the community of sociologists, and more particularly the Durkheimian group, continued to collaborate enthusiastically with the Évolution de l’Humanité. Marcel Mauss was, in fact, their spokesman: “Some of us are and will be collaborating on this new project (the Évolution de l’Humanité), and we follow its success and applaud it with great enthusiasm”.41 What were the services that sociology was expected to render? How did it define its role in producing the Évolution de l’Humanité? Sociology, when it is aware and rigorous, considers societies as societies only. The task of the sociologist, according to Henri Berr, “is to study social organization, but from a comparative viewpoint. In order better to define the essential functions of society as they translate into institutions, to specify more clearly the relationship of those functions with the social structure and their reciprocal interplay, it isolates the social element of history. It is an aspect of historical synthesis, but it is only one aspect. Historical synthesis puts this element, social necessities or laws, in contact with other elements of history that pure sociologists tend to overlook or even to deny”.42 In the early 1920s, then, the place of sociology had not changed in Berr’s mind. “We must not imagine that the social element provides the key to history”, he reminds us.43 For Henri Berr, the “key to history” lies in logic. For it is the logical factor, he writes, “which gives to evolution its real continuity, its internal law. It is in relation to that factor, it is in the measure to which they serve or contradict it that contingencies derive their real value [. . .] [the logical factor] alone produces something new, only it is creative”.44 In fact, says Berr, echoing Cournot, collective life has its source in the mental structure of individuals: “Society, let us say it again, does not think; it is the individual who thinks: thus he can be more than a social agent; he can be a social initiator, an inventor. Mental logic and social logic have the same profound source, and it is here that they meet. Born of the successes of action, thought works in the individual to serve action, to enhance social life”.45

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Henri Berr’s prefaces are rife with similar passages: often, to highlight the limits of the Durkheimian method, he insists on the reciprocal action of contingency, of necessity and of logic, while opposing any organization of historical material as a function of chronology and of the great conventional dividing lines in history. This concept of history finds perhaps no better representation than in Lucien Febvre’s Rabelais: “No one should be surprised”, writes Berr in reference to this work, “if, in a book intended to study the evolution of mankind, we have admitted that one man can be the ‘center’ of an entire volume. This work seeks to be explanatory: now, explanation involves a study of the role of the individual either as interpreter of his time or as initiator of the future. And here it is exactly a matter of knowing to what extent the individual reflects his century, to what extent he was able to surpass or move beyond it”.46 The great achievement of Lucien Febvre, Berr says in relation to another work, is that he perfectly understood the creative role of the individual: “Considered action, creative intelligence, demonstrated determination in grappling with the obscure powers of the milieu, and struggling to apply them as best he can to their needs, which give birth to States, he (Febvre) knows very well that all this is the domain of individuals”.47 In these ideas we can discern the theory of history that was already apparent in the works of Henri Berr’s youth. For him, the origins of social organization can be explained only by the amalgamation of a multitude of individual and rational choices. The individual associates with his peers, not through a contract, “but with the awareness of the benefits of mutual help, in terms of expanding their lives”. In other words, society “does not precede individuals: it is made by them, thanks to appropriate states of consciousness. It is linked to the progress of the psyche: like it, it tends to expand life”.48 This passage illustrates the difference, noted initially, between the problems addressed respectively by Berr and by Durkheim. As Berr sees it, solidarity of the mechanical kind, characterized by the social constraint, cannot be considered as the first stage of human evolution. And Berr reminds us forcefully in his preface to the book by the Durkheimian Louis Gernet, “in the initial psyche, man’s emotions in the face of nature were complex: perhaps fear was the dominant one, but he recognized and trusted what was good in things. This trust, as it became stronger, led in turn to a desire for union, for identification with the good and protective being”.49 We cannot speak, then, of coercion at this stage of human evolution, for the bonds between individuals are still too embryonic. But, according to Berr, this period was short-lived. Little by little, a kind of symbiosis emerged between individuals, which Berr calls the “mass” or “crowd state” [état de foule]. And it is in this “crowd state” that social institutions develop. Society and individuals are then caught up in a relentless dialectical movement. In the preface to Des clans aux empires, of which one of the co-authors was Georges Davy, a guardian of Durkheimian orthodoxy, Berr mentions this explicitly: “We must be most emphatic on this point, that society is tied to the psyche. Society benefits from its progress, and it contributes to that progress. Even while absorbing individuals, it develops individuality”.50

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When did the second phase of humanity begin? Henri Berr provides no dates, of course, but he considers that mankind’s first period ended when the social constraint made its appearance—in other words, when collective life imposed its coercive power upon individuals. “We imagine our origins, then, as something moving and progressive, where the individual and society create each other—up to the point where the society that is taking shape and the individual who is developing come into conflict, real or virtual. It is then that the social being, in order fully to realize its own nature, exerts the maximum coercion”.51 The social constraint becomes so strong that not only do institutions “restrict all individual activities, but the psyche itself becomes institutionalized”. Individuals become homogenous, and individual initiatives tend to be suppressed. “Creative spontaneity, from which social organization was born, has been suffocated over time by that same organization, and the creative spirit is broken by the socialization of thought [. . .] In order for progress to continue, in order for representations and then for concepts to be molded on beings and on things, there must be a plasticity which the pseudo-primitive has lost”.52 For Berr, progress does not follow a straight line, as Durkheim suggests it does. The third phase of human evolution, characterized not by spontaneity but rather by liberty, begins when “the role of the individual is expanding steadily and at the same time society has become more lively and more plastic, without necessarily compromising its vitality”.53 The general hypothesis underlying this law of the three states or phases is, in reality, merely a continuation of the dialogue with Durkheimian sociology. “We are pleased to note”, says Berr, “that in this concept the essentials of Durkheimian sociology are retained and assimilated”. Berr is, however, quick to add a nuance that immediately takes the form of a methodological critique: “This rigid society, which exerts sovereign pressure on the individual, which shapes the individual entirely, right to his most intimate being, we accept it—but not as the first fact of history: if it appeared ready made, it would be inexplicable, and it would be impossible to understand how it could have produced something that is in contradiction or indeed in conflict with its very nature”.54 In short, the point of contention between Berr and Durkheim lies in the quest for the origins of social life.

Notes 1 Henri Berr, Vie et science. Lettres d’un vieux philosophe strasbourgeois à un jeune étudiant parisien (Paris: Armand Cloin, 1894), pp. 5–6. 2 On the beginnings of the Revue de synthèse historique, see this well-informed article: Martin Fugler, “Fondateurs et collaborateurs, les débuts de la Revue de synthèse historique”. In Agnès Biard, Dominique Bourel, and Éric Brian (eds.), Henri Berr et la culture du XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel/Centre international de synthèse, 1997), pp. 173–188. 3 Enrico Castelli Gattinara, Les Inquiétudes de la raison. Épistémologie et histoire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Vrin/École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998).

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4 Suzanne Delorme, “Henri Berr”, Osiris (10, 1952), pp. 5–6. 5 Henri Berr, L’Avenir de la philosophie. Esquisse d’une synthèse des connaissances fondée sur l’histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1899), pp. 510–511. 6 At the end of his life, Berr declared that his “intellectual roots” lay in the French thought. “Henri Berr par lui-même”, Revue de synthèse (85, 1964), p. 4. 7 Henri Berr, “Les études historiques et la guerre”, Revue de synthèse historique (29, 1919), p. 7; Le Germanisme contre l’esprit français. Essai de psychologie historique (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1919). On Berr and Germany, see Peter Schöttler, “Henri Berr et l’Allemagne”. In Agnès Biard, Dominique Bourel, and Éric Brian (eds.), Henri Berr et la culture du XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel/ Centre international de synthèse, 1997), pp. 189–203. 8 A. Bossert, “Portraits d’historiens: Niebhur, Ranke, Sybel, Mommsen”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1900), pp. 137–157. 9 Karl Lamprecht, “La Méthode historique en Allemagne”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1900), pp. 21–27. 10 Henri Berr, “Le Problème des idées dans la synthèse historique, à propos d’ouvrages récents”, Revue de synthèse historique (8, 1904), pp. 129–149; “Une nouvelle philosophie de l’histoire, l’orgueil humain de M. Zyromski”, Revue de synthèse historique (9, 1904), pp. 46–52. 11 Henri Berr, “Sur notre programme”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1900), p. 1. 12 Henri Berr, “Nouvelle série”, Revue de synthèse historique (27, 1913), p. 1. 13 Henri Berr, “Sur notre programme”, p. 2. 14 Ibid., p. 6. Henri Berr, “Au bout de dix ans”, Revue de synthèse historique (21, 1910), pp. 1–13; “Au bout de trente ans”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1930), pp. 3–8; “La Synthèse des connaissances et l’histoire”, Revue de synthèse (26, 1950), pp. 217–238. 15 Henri Berr, “Les Travaux de l’Institut international de sociologie”, Revue de synthèse historique (7, 1903). 16 Henri Berr, “Sur notre programme”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1900), p. 4. 17 Hubert Bourgin, De Jaurès à Léon Blum. L’École Normale et la politique (Paris: Fayard, 1938), p. 232. 18 Fernand Braudel, “Hommage à Henri Berr pour le centenaire de sa naissance”, Revue de synthèse (85, 1964), p. 24. See Jérôme Lamy and Arnaud Saint-Martin, “La frontière comme enjeu: les Annales et la sociologie”, Revue de synthèse (131, 2010), pp. 99–127. 19 See Henri Berr, “Les Rapports de l’histoire et des sciences sociales d’après M. Seignobos”, Revue de synthèse historique (4, 1902), pp. 293–302; “Les Rapports de la société et de l’individu d’après M. Draghicesco”, Revue de synthèse historique (12, 1906), pp. 197–204. 20 Henri Berr, “Sur notre programme”, pp. 4–5. See also Henri Berr and Louis Halphen, “Histoire traditionnelle et synthèse historique”, Revue de synthèse historique (23, 1911), pp. 121–130. 21 A. D. Xénopol, “La Classification des sciences et l’histoire”, Revue de synthèse historique (2, 1901), pp. 265–266. 22 A. D. Xénopol, La théorie de l’histoire (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908), p. 23. 23 Ibid., p. 276. 24 A. D. Xénopol, “Caractère de l’histoire”, Revue philosophique (57, 1904), pp. 43–44. 25 A. D. Xénopol, “Race et milieu”, Revue de synthèse historique (1, 1900), p. 255. 26 A. D. Xénopol, “Les sciences naturelles et l’histoire”, Revue philosophique (50, 1900), p. 383. 27 A. D. Xénopol, “La Causalité dans la succession”, Revue de synthèse historique (9, 1904), p. 13.

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28 A. D. Xénopol, “Sociologie et histoire, à propos d’un ouvrage de M. Cesare Rivera”, Revue de synthèse historique (12, 1906), p. 72. 29 Paul Mantoux, “Histoire et sociologie”, Revue de synthèse (8, 1903), p. 124. 30 Ibid., p. 127. 31 Ibid., p. 130. 32 Ibid., pp. 136–137. 33 Ibid., p. 138. 34 Louis-Philippe May, “Nécrologie. Henri Berr (1864–1954)”, Revue historique (213–214, 1955), p. 202. 35 Henri Berr, “Préface”. In Marcel Granet (ed.), La Pensée chinoise (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1934), p. xvi. 36 Henri Berr, “Au bout de trente ans”, p. 55. 37 Henri Berr, “Nouvelle série”, pp. 1–2. 38 Henri Berr, “Les Études historiques et la guerre”, Revue de synthèse historique, 29, 1919, p. 27. 39 Henri Berr. “Nouvelle série”, p. 2. 40 Martin Siegel, “Henri Berr et la Revue de synthèse historique”. In CharlesOlivier Carbonell and Georges Livet (eds.), Au Berceau des Annales, le milieu strasbourgeois (Toulouse: Presses de l’Institut d’Études Politiques de Toulouse, 1983), p. 206. 41 Mauss, Marcel, Review: “Henri Berr et ses collaborateurs”, L’Année sociologique 1924–1925 (1, 1925), p. 288. 42 Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1934), pp. 7–8. 43 Henri Berr, “Préface”. In Lucien Febvre (ed.), La Terre et l’évolution humaine (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1922), p. xvii. 44 Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle, p. 10. 45 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 46 Henri Berr, “Préface”. In Lucien Febvre (ed.), Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1947), p. ix. 47 Henri Berr, “Préface”. In Lucien Febvre (ed.), La Terre et l’évolution humaine (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1922), p. xxv. 48 Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle, p. 108. 49 Henri Berr, “Préface”. In Louis Gernet, Le Génie grec dans la religion (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1932), p. xxxix. 50 Henri Berr, “Préface”. In Georges Davy and Alexandre Moret (eds.), Des Clans aux empires. L’organisation sociale chez les primitives et dans l’Orient ancien (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1923), p. xvi. 51 Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle, p. 111. 52 Ibid., pp. 112–114. 53 Ibid., p. 117. 54 Ibid., pp. 118–119. See George Steinmetz, G, “Field Theory and Interdisciplinary: History and Sociology in Germany and France in the Twenthieth Century”, Comparative Studies and Studies in Society, (59, 2017), pp. 477–514.

Part III

The Durkheimian School and History

5

The Durkheimian School and History

How did Durkheim and his fellow sociologists react to the ascendant discipline of “scientific history”? Lacking the weapons to wage a pitched battle on the institutional front, the newborn sociology seized upon methodological arguments to counter the historians of the day. The challenge was a daunting one, for in France at the close of the 19th century, history was widely revered as pre-eminent among the social sciences.1 From the 1880s on, problems relating to the definition of historical method sparked ongoing debates and mobilized a large portion of the French intelligentsia. Divergent interpretations faced off against each other. Not only did historical discourse undergo profound changes, but this mutation of historical science awakened interest in the social sciences as a whole. Philosophers became historians, literary critics turned into historians of literature, and the sociologists constructed their theories from historical materials. Durkheim and his followers, grouped around the Année sociologique, shared fully in the vast heritage of historical thought. From the beginning, the effort to trace historical origins and developments brought a new depth to sociological research, which was eager to move beyond simple “journalistic” recording.2 We might say, in fact, that Durkheim and his disciples were attempting to apply a precise method, one that was experimental and comparative, to the concrete facts of history. At first glance, that assertion might seem paradoxical, given the many issues on which the Durkheimians diverged from the historians. We must point out immediately that it was not the notion of history as positive knowledge that the Durkheimians were contesting, but rather the individualistic determinism of certain historians. Most of the Durkheimians seem to have recognized the importance of history, and indeed they made it one of sociology’s principal “auxiliary sciences”. Marcel Mauss frequently argued in favor of close collaboration between sociology and historical science. “A better historical description of the relationships of civilization between various societies will necessarily have an impact on our studies from many viewpoints”, he writes.3 And he adds, “the history of religions is an essential tool, as it provides the materials to back up the facts and guarantee their accuracy”.4 In short, he concludes

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in an article written with Paul Fauconnet, the sociologist must “take fully on board the procedures of historical criticism”.5 In the same vein, Henri Hubert adds: “True sociological analysis has everything to gain from original historical research of the kind that will shed light on the furtive indicators of social facts”.6 This idea that history was essentially useful for sociological explanation was taken up by many other collaborators. Dominique Parodi asserted in the pages of the Année sociologique that history is “preparatory work prior to the constitution of the science of human actions”.7 Gaston Richard strikes a similar note, saying that “sociology receives its materials from history”;8 thus, he says, “it is to historical science that we must look for real genetic sociology”.9 And in his sociological study La Responsabilité, Paul Fauconnet declares, “we have sought to satisfy the legitimate demands of historical criticism”.10 History exposes the facts, sociology unites them through general relationships. “To show the unity of historical ‘factors’”, writes Paul Lapie, “is to do sociology a service similar to that rendered to psychology when it was shown that the three faculties of the soul are not separate personae, but poorly delimited classes of facts”.11 Yet if the Durkheimians were unanimously agreed on the importance of history in the development of a positive sociology, they found it hard to concur with the prevailing methodological principles used in the historical discipline. In fact, practitioners of the two disciplines were constantly engaged in methodological disputes. In addressing such a problem, one had, of course, to begin with Durkheim’s work. What remained then was to choose the most fertile and the newest ideas concerning history from among those put forth by members of the French school of sociology. It seems best to confine ourselves to those Durkheimians who focused their attention on contemporary Western societies. Works on ethnology or the history of religion, of which as we know the Durkheimian school produced a great many, have been systematically left aside. It goes without saying, however, that the frontier between historical science and ethnology has often been difficult to trace, since at that time the barriers between the disciplines were less apparent than they are today. Thus, we shall look only at those Durkheimians who contributed to the first series of the Année sociologique (1898–1913). There is a very simple reason for this decision: it was in the first years of this journal’s existence that the problem of history was debated most intensely. The budding sociology was at that time inclined to define itself in relation to the science of history, which was much better established and recognized in academic circles. The names of Célestin Bouglé, François Simiand and Maurice Halbwachs spring to mind immediately. Not only did they participate in the debates on historical method, but they also placed history at the center of their own research. The first used the materials of history to prepare a theory of egalitarianism; the second turned to history for a positive explanation of

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economic developments; and the last consulted historical materials in order to construct a sociology of the collective memory.

History as an Auxiliary Science: Émile Durkheim Durkheim’s work has been examined from various angles—political, religious, economic—but little analysis has been devoted to the key role that history played in his thinking.12 In fact, that role, decisive though it was, often seems to be misunderstood. Some authors have even suggested that Durkheim’s sociology was a-historic. Charles Andler was one of the first to propose this idea. In 1896, in an article published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Andler argues that sociology (and he is thinking of Durkheim) is incapable of offering a satisfactory and rational explanation for democracy because it ignores history: sociologists pursue their discipline “without psychology and without history” and, he concludes, “contemporary sociology in truth professes not to consult history”.13 That claim evoked a sharp reply from Célestin Bouglé.14 It is true, Bouglé observed, that Durkheim feared the encroachments of introspective psychology, but he had no objection to history on that score. Can the historical edifice be reduced to nothing more than an aggregation of singular and heterogeneous facts? Or on the contrary, is it quite irreducible, composed solely of necessities? What is the function of history? Is it the task of history to explain the evolution of humanity by establishing laws? Or should it simply give us an account of the facts? All these questions, which were widely debated by the historical community in the second half of the 19th century, were of keen interest to the newly founded sociology. In fact, we may say that Durkheim’s sociology stands somewhere between the strict empiricism of some historians and the broad, speculative visions of the philosophy of history. Sociology and the Particular Sciences: The Quest for the Unity of Knowledge The need for organization and unity, both moral and methodological, dominates all of Durkheim’s writings. Durkheimian sociology claims to be the science of society as such: it considers the “social” as a whole, distinct from its parts. Sociological science forms a unit that is at once distinct from and superior to the “special” or “particular” sciences, which it nevertheless needs in order to define itself. Durkheim points this out in the very first issue of the Année sociologique: “What the sociologists are urgently in need of, we believe, is to be regularly informed of the investigations being performed in the special sciences: history of law, customs, religion, moral statistics, economics and so on, for this is where the materials are to be found with which sociology must be constructed”.15

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It is true that sociology is constructed on the basis of these sciences, but in regrouping them it modifies them fundamentally, making them complementary to each other. Sociology thus becomes the “corpus” of the social sciences. “Since general sociology can only be a synthesis of these particular sciences, since it can only consist of a comparison of their most general results, it is impossible for it to grow except to the extent to which they themselves have progressed. It is therefore especially necessary to apply oneself to their organization”.16 To constitute the sciences, in Durkheim’s mind, means at the same time to initiate them to a common scientific method. If Durkheim had stopped there, his work would have been unremarkable, and there would be serious doubt about the utility of sociology. It is especially important, he thinks, that sociology should demonstrate how, in all the orders of phenomena—religious, economic, historic, demographic, morphological—society imposes itself on the individuals who comprise it. It is in this way that sociology can assemble the different sciences and make them aware of their interdependence. Indeed, to arrive at a scientific explanation of social facts, Durkheim maintains that the facts dealt with by the various positive sciences must be “tied in with a specific social milieu, with a definite type of society, and it is in the characteristics that make up this type that we must look for the determining causes of the phenomenon under consideration”.17 Thus, sociology begins where the work of the particular sciences leaves off. At the moment when these sciences have compiled a mass of raw facts, sociology moves in to derive from them explanatory laws. According to Durkheim, the fact that sociology gathers the most varied social facts and compares them among themselves makes it superior to the other social sciences. If what is “social” is a whole cannot be broken down into its parts, the same holds, in a sense, for sociological knowledge. Now, the problem is that most social sciences tend to isolate the parts of the social whole, thereby losing the comprehensive vision that scientific investigation demands. If we carve up the social object, Durkheim maintains, we will necessarily obtain only a partial understanding of that object. In The Division of Labor, Durkheim goes on to lament: “It is long since philosophy reigned as the science unique; it has been broken into a multitude of special disciplines each of which has its object, method and thought”.18 Can philosophy still guarantee the unity of knowledge? Nothing could be less certain. “What government is to society in its totality philosophy ought to be to the sciences. Since the diversity of science tends to disrupt the unity of science, a new science must be set up to re-establish it. Since detailed studies make us lose sight of the whole vista of human knowledge, we must institute a particular system of researches to retrieve it and set it off”.19 For “philosophy is like the collective conscience of science and, here as elsewhere, the role of the collective conscience diminishes as the work is divided up”. Consequently, the sciences offer “the spectacle of an aggregate of disjointed parts which do not concur. If they form a whole without unity, this is not because they do not have a sentiment of their likenesses; it is because

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they are not organized”. And, “if the division of labor does not produce solidarity”,20 Durkheim concludes, “it is because the relations of the organs are not regulated, because they are in a state of anomy”.21 It is up to sociology to put an end to this limbo in which knowledge finds itself. “We can expect”, Durkheim writes, “that sociology will determine a new and more methodical redistribution of the phenomena that are the concern of those different studies, and this is not the least of the services that our discipline is destined to render”.22 What, then, is the role that history should play in constituting the sociological corpus? The Importance and the Role of History When we look at Émile Durkheim’s work as a whole, it is clear that it draws in particular upon three auxiliary sciences: statistics,23 ethnography and history.24 While the function of moral statistics and of ethnography is well known, that of history is less so. However, there is no doubt that in Durkheim’s mind, history plays just as important a role as the other two sciences. To be persuaded on this point, one simply has to read the preface to the Année sociologique. After a brief discussion of the program of his journal and the status of sociology, Durkheim demonstrates his desire to forge alliances with neighboring sciences, and in particular with the science of history. “Our enterprise [. . .] can help bring closer to sociology certain special sciences that now hold themselves aloof, to our mutual detriment”. And he adds, “it is especially history that we have in mind when speaking in that vein. Even today, historians who take an interest in the investigations of sociologists and feel that such matters concern them are rare. The over-generalized nature and the inadequate documentation of our theories cause them to be regarded as negligible; they are credited with having little more than a certain philosophical importance. And yet, history can be a science only insofar as it explains, and it can only explain when making comparisons”.25 It is striking to note that in this program, no science other than history is discussed or even mentioned, not even the ethnography that would occupy such a prominent position in all the editions of the Année sociologique. This is all the more surprising because at the time, history was seen as the great rival of sociology. Not only did that rivalry between the two disciplines make itself keenly felt at the institutional level, but their respective methods were poles apart. Yet, as Durkheim saw it, this did not preclude the possibility of productive dialogue. “To my knowledge”, he wrote, “there is no sociology worthy of the name that does not have a historical character”.26 Furthermore, “not only can sociology not do without history, but it needs historians who are at the same time sociologists [. . .] To create historians who know how to view historical phenomena as sociologists, or sociologists with a full grasp of historical technique—such is the goal that must be pursued on both sides”.27

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This plea for unity raises a question. Are history and sociology destined to be rolled into a common discipline? On several occasions, Durkheim mentions the inevitable merger of the two disciplines: the historical and social sciences, he says, “are close relatives”;28 they do not live in “separate, airtight compartments”,29 they “tend to blend with each other”.30 Finally, in a collective work, Durkheim predicts that the relations between sociology and history “are destined to become ever closer, and one day there will be no difference, save for nuances, between the historical and the sociological mindsets”.31 Despite this appeal to common ground between history and sociology, however, Durkheim refuses to accord history equal status with that of sociology. His reason for this is simple: history is incapable of generalizing. Durkheim had been profoundly convinced of this since 1888: “Generally speaking”, he writes, “I have always found that there was a kind of contradiction inherent in making history into a science but not asking future historians to undergo any scientific training [. . .] I am very aware that the historian is not a generalizer; his very special role is not to find laws but to give each era, each people its own individuality and its particular physiognomy. He dwells in the particular, and he should remain there”.32 The sociologist, by contrast, refuses to confine himself to the restrictions of space or place; he seeks instead “verifiable laws in different societies”.33 This dichotomy is striking: the domain of sociology embraces everything that is general and comparative, while everything that is particular and contingent belongs to history. “There is in history something of the general and permanent, which can be expressed in laws; but there is also an element of the variable and the contingent, which is unforeseeable. The origin of these contingencies is the individual in all of his forms: individuality of the person, individuality of the group, geographical individuality, etc. The domain of necessity is the very domain of sociology”.34 In light of this clear declaration of methodological imperialism, then, what is the function of history? It serves as a research instrument, replies Durkheim: “History, in the usual sense of the word, is to sociology what Latin grammar or Greek grammar or French grammar, taken and treated separately, are to the new science that has taken the name of comparative grammar”.35 He adds, “in a word, history plays a role in the order of social realities analogous to that of the microscope in the order of physical realities”.36 And that role is to gather the facts from which sociological theory will emerge. In the preface to the second edition of the Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim arrives at a precise and circumscribed definition of sociology, one that he would never abandon: “One may term an institution all the beliefs and modes of behavior instituted by the collectivity; sociology can then be defined as the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning”.37 And in one of his last essays on method in 1909, he insists on the need for a historical approach: “The institution under consideration is constituted

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progressively, bit by bit; the parts that comprise it are born one after the other, and they are added more or less slowly to each other; all we need do, then, is to follow the development over time, i.e. in history, in order to see the various elements that produce it, naturally dissociated”.38 From these definitions, in which the quests for diachronic and synchronic causes intersect, we can detect Durkheim’s intention to distance himself from psychological reductionism or “psychologisme”. The social or institutional fact must be explained not by compiling individual manifestations but by making it emerge from the facts gleaned from historical materials. “The determining cause of a social fact”, Durkheim writes, “must be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness”.39 The present is by itself nothing: it is no more than “an extrapolation of the past”.40 “It is a grave mistake to think that in order to understand man it is sufficient to study him in his most modern and developed forms. We can only understand him by analyzing him; and we can only analyze him through the medium of history”.41 “In order to understand a practice or an institution, a legal or moral rule, we must go back as close as possible to its first origins; for between what it is and what it has been there is a close interdependence”.42 “To know what these conceptions which we have not made ourselves are really made of, it does not suffice to interrogate our own consciousness; we must look outside of ourselves, it is history that we must observe, there is a whole science which must be formed, a complex science which can advance by slowly and by collective labor”.43 These pithy observations, taken from Durkheim’s writings across many years, are clearly intended to justify the historical method, but they also condemn the individual or particular aspect in all its forms. Durkheim’s Campaign Against Traditional History In his various writings, Durkheim was constantly contrasting his views with those of the historians of his time. There are numerous articles and essays in which he openly challenges the method used by the historical discipline. In 1903, writing in the Année sociologique, he takes issue with the thesis of the Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, according to which it is the duty of scientific history to analyze the particular. “Generally [. . .] when one makes a science of history, one assigns as its object not the details of particular events but the institutions, the customs and beliefs—in a word, the collective things—whose constancy and regularity one opposes to the contingency and the extreme fluidity of individual facts”.44 Salvemini, then, is sowing ambiguity. History, understood scientifically, cannot give pride of place to the individual, and Durkheim stresses this point to Henry Berr: “We have acknowledged that historical personages have been factors in history. But besides the fact that we believe their influence has been greatly exaggerated, we have shown that they themselves have their [causes] and these are, in part, social ones”.45 Here the historical discipline is confronted with

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a dilemma: either it confines itself to examining the individual fact, in which case it is merely a literary genre, or else it rises “beyond the individual” and becomes a science. In the latter case, scientific history loses its reason for existence and is completely submerged in “dynamic sociology”.46 Here we have an obvious manifestation of the sociological imperialism often attributed to Durkheim, which claims for itself exclusivity in the scientific study of social evolution.47 We can now readily understand the thrust and the scope of the criticism that Durkheim directs at A. D. Xénopol. This theoretician of history, in his book Les Principes fondamentaux de l’histoire, distinguishes the laws of succession from the laws of repetition and arrives at the conclusion that the first are the field of the historian, while the second are, by right, that of the sociologist. Durkheim rebuts this approach vehemently for, as he sees it, it would limit sociology to the study of static laws and would make the field of dynamic laws the exclusive preserve of history.48 Such a distinction, Durkheim maintains, has absolutely no justification. Applying the model of Auguste Comte,49 sociology, he insists, must embrace both the static element and the dynamic element.50 If sociology were confined to dealing with static laws, it would be but an incomplete and partial science. Severe as they are, these objections seem mild in comparison to those that Durkheim levels at Seignobos during the same period. The tone changes, the attacks become more trenchant. It will be recalled that Seignobos was the most important historian at this time. His fame and his prestige made him an easy target. And indeed, in the early years of the new century, a number of Durkheimians, including Dominique Parodi, François Simiand and Hubert Bourgin, set out to debunk his methodological approach. It was in the Année sociologique, in 1902, that Durkheim took issue for the first time with Charles Seignobos. He was moved to this intervention by the recent publication of Seignobos’s book, La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales. The title itself was suspect. Responding in the name of the historical community to recent manifestations of methodological imperialism on the part of the new sociology, Seignobos asserts the supremacy of history over all the social sciences. He presents history as a model of scientific rigor and analysis. The document, he maintains, guarantees the scientific nature of history, for it exposes the facts in their raw state without any interference. And in a similar vein, Seignobos calls upon the social sciences to accept the authority of the document in their quest for objectivity. Durkheim is not at all of this view: science, he is at pains to note, cannot confine itself to empirical observation. Facts without theory have no explanatory value: “Science is not just an inventory of facts; it organizes them and systematizes them”.51 Durkheim concludes that Seignobos’s concern for neutrality, combined with his implicit fear that history would slide back into metaphysics, brings him to an impasse. In fact, the divergences between the two authors are deeper yet. Charles Seignobos refuses to recognize the other social sciences; he considers history

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to be “the only social science possible today”. Consequently, he objects to the notions and the concepts found in those sciences; the notion of collective representation strikes him as particularly obscure and untenable. In fact, Seignobos denies any legitimacy to sociology. It is merely “a word invented by philosophers”,52 he writes, in a manner curiously reminiscent of Fustel de Coulanges.53 Stung by this sharp attack, Durkheim responds directly to Seignobos in the Année sociologique: “While there is no doubt that social life is made exclusively of representations, it by no means follows that an objective science cannot be constructed from them. The representations of an individual are phenomena that are equally internal, and yet contemporary psychology treats them objectively. Why should it be any different with collective representations?”54 When he faced off against Charles Seignobos a few years later in a debate at the Société française de philosophie, the response that Durkheim received to this question was scarcely satisfactory. The subject of the debate had to do with explanation in history and in sociology. Although Durkheim and Seignobos held center stage during the debate, it is interesting to note that Marc Bloch, Paul Lacombe, Célestin Bouglé and the philosopher André Lalande also participated, if more discreetly. In principle, this event promised to be a grand debate between history and sociology, since both disciplines had fielded representatives: on one side was Durkheim, accompanied by Bouglé, defending the principles of the nascent sociology, and on the other side were Charles Seignobos, Marc Bloch and Paul Lacombe as spokesmen for the tribe of historians. But that grand debate never materialized: the whole group turned against Seignobos.55 They do not argued that sociology and history have a distinct domain. Isolated, peppered with questions, Seignobos was visibly ill at ease. His interventions were brief but to the point. Seignobos argues that to explain a fact, we must relate it to other facts, and this linking of the particular to the particular can be done only through documents. That approach, Durkheim retorts, offers only the appearance of objectivity. History thus understood retains only the visible, often superficial part of phenomena. A truly scientific explanation must look for the general cause that gave rise to the fact. “All those who concern themselves with studying the past know very well, however, that the immediately visible reasons, the most apparent causes are often the least important. We must delve much further into reality in order to understand it”.56 And if we are to understand, we must compare. To sum up, Durkheim refused to see history and sociology in contrasted categories. He argued that sociology and history have distinct domain.57 The Limitations of the Philosophy of History The approach taken by philosophers of history is the opposite of that used by historians. Dismissive of the facts, they are intent on indicating the direction in which humanity is taking itself. They speak of humanity or of society, but

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rarely of particular societies. Very early on, Durkheim took issue with vast metaphysical and philosophical constructions that had no empirical underpinnings. Sociology, in his initial conception, should go beyond the stage of a priori views and philosophical systems to arrive at a rational and scientific explanation of society. This was the grand plan of Auguste Comte. But, according to Durkheim, Comte carried his program only part way—the law of the three stages has nothing to do with causality in the scientific sense of that term. Durkheim’s reading of Comte is a fabric of praise and criticism. As early as his Latin thesis on Montesquieu, Durkheim subscribed fully to the twopart division of the sociological subject matter between social dynamics and social statics, as we find it in Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. Durkheim writes, “Social existence is determined by conditions of two types. One consists of the present circumstances, such as topography or size of population. The other pertains to the historical past. Just as a child would be different if he had had other parents, so the nature of a society depends upon the form of the societies preceding it”.58 Any explanation of social phenomena must then be rooted both in the actual structure of a society and in its history. That is to say, sociology must combine synchronic analysis with diachronic analysis. The Comtean law of the three stages places the emphasis on the historical aspect of human societies, and is “essentially dynamic”.59 In fact, it tends to misunderstand the structural conditions of social life. More serious yet, Durkheim observes, Comte is not interested in particular societies, but in “human society in general”. He proposes a linear evolutionism that relies on “a single people-subject”.60 In short, the founding father of positivism “reasons as if humanity formed a single unit, as if the human species, in its totality, were one and the same society that always develops in the same sense, following a straight-line progression”.61 However, Durkheim objects, “society does not exist”,62 it is an abstraction: “it is the tribes, the nations, the particular states that are the only true historical realities with which science can and must concern itself”. Like individuals, societies are unique: “the child represents the continuity of its parents, not in their mature years or their old age, but in their own childhood”.63 Comte, then, is being arbitrary when he concludes that humanity has passed from the theological stage through the metaphysical stage to the positive stage. The law of the three stages, Durkheim concludes, is “a summary review of the past history of the human race”.64 In methodological terms, Durkheim considers this approach highly defective. It leads Auguste Comte, consciously or not, to reduce social life to a mere epiphenomenon of mental manifestations. In Comte’s view, says Durkheim, progress depends on an exclusively mental factor, namely “the tendency that compels man to develop his nature more and more”. From this perspective, psychology will “always have the last word”, and sociology is nothing but “a corollary of psychology”.65 Durkheim’s accusation is unequivocal: Comte has a mistaken conception both of social reality and of sociological research.66

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Where does Durkheim stand with respect to his contemporaries’ interpretations of human evolution? He is as impatient with any retreat into strict empiricism as he is suspicious of metaphysical flights of fancy. In the Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim maintains that what sociology must constitute is a juncture of the “extreme realism” of historians and the “nominalism” of philosophers. For the historians, he writes, societies each constitute an individual type, “heterogeneous and not comparable with one another. Each people has its own characteristics, its special constitution, its law, its morality and its economic organization, appropriate only to itself, and any generalization is almost impossible. For the philosopher, on the other hand, all these special groupings, which are called tribes, cities and nations, are only contingent and provisional aggregates without any individual reality. Only humanity is real, and it is from the general attributes of human nature that all social evolution derives. Consequently, for the historians, history is only a sequence of events which are linked together but do not repeat themselves; for the philosophers, the same events have value and interest only as an illustration of the general laws which are inscribed in the constitution of man and which hold sway over the course of historical development [. . .] It would therefore seem that social reality can only be the subject matter of an abstract and vague philosophy or of purely descriptive monographs”.67 What is Durkheim telling us, in essence? That the domination of narrative history is over, that the philosophy of history is obsolete and, above all, that a new era is beginning: that of a truly scientific discipline of social facts, careful to combine diachronic and synchronic analysis, in which empirical facts and theory are jointly articulated. A new avenue of research was opening up, and it called for cooperation.

A Heterodox Durkheimian: Célestin Bouglé Although Célestin Bouglé (1870–1940) was one of the most important and influential members of the group constituted around the Année sociologique, he cannot be considered an orthodox disciple of Durkheim in the vein of Marcel Mauss or Henri Hubert, for example.68 But he did share their enthusiasm for a sociology that was at once positive and historical. He drew his inspiration from a wide variety of sources, ranging from Antoine Augustin Cournot69 to Gabriel Tarde,70 and including the works of German social science. Bouglé thus had imposing intellectual credentials when he joined Durkheim. Bouglé’s work is eclectic and, at first glance, perhaps somewhat incongruous.71 His writings, generally presented in the form of short essays and articles, do not try to plumb the depths of the subject but rather to raise questions, to open paths of research and to spark debate within the intellectual community.72 Bouglé was always attentive to the latest developments in the social sciences, and at an early age, he was fascinated by the novelty of the methods

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being applied in Germany. There he discovered a social science that was inspired not by the model of biological science but rather by the procedures of experimental psychology. Through his collaboration with Durkheim, Bouglé acquired the principles of a positive and objective method: he became aware of the problematic advance of individualism and of the replacement of old social structures. How could a sociology that was attentive to the lessons of psychology be reconciled with Durkheimian holism? That was the problem that Bouglé set out to resolve. An Initial Influence: The German Social Sciences Following the debacle of 1870, Germany came to hold great fascination for French intellectuals.73 They might detest it, they might admire it, but they spoke of it incessantly. Taine and Renan were distressed: they felt betrayed by their intellectual mentor, the homeland of Hegel. While German chauvinism might draw censure, however, there was unanimous praise and admiration for German science. In the 1880s, a trip to Germany was seen as de rigueur for French graduate students. The young Célestin Bouglé crossed the Rhine in 1893 with the idea of initiating himself to new methods and original currents of thought. There he attended the lectures of the most eminent social scientists of the time. Bouglé returned from this trip greatly impressed, and ready to write his first book, Les sciences sociales en Allemagne, in which he examined the work of four scholars “concerned with the construction of different social sciences”: Lazarus and the comparative psychology of peoples or nations [Völkerpsychologie], Simmel and moral science [Geisteswissenschaft], Wagner and political economy and von Jhering and the philosophy of law.74 What did young Bouglé glean from the German social sciences? First of all, he observed a ceaseless effort to reconcile the speculative and the concrete. Historically, this movement evolved into four distinct phases, beginning in the 18th century. The first phase, essentially speculative, corresponded to the “heroic age of German philosophy”. From Kant to Hegel, from Fichte to Schelling, German philosophy was steeped in speculation and a priori ideas. There was no room for facts—ideas crowded them out. The second phase was quite the reverse: facts came to the fore, and writers sought to be objective and impersonal. With Leopold von Ranke and his disciples, the idea of a universal science was eclipsed: “They will indulge themselves in the concrete, as they once did with the abstract [. . .] they will strive to distinguish, as the speculative philosophers sought to assimilate”. According to Bouglé, the third phase was dominated by a reaction against empiricism: “The mind felt itself oppressed by the multiplicity of facts that the historians were throwing at it. [Scholars] wanted to restore unity to that multiplicity and, after drawing distinctions, assimilate it anew”. Henceforth, one would look for laws, and to do that, one would rely on the model of the natural sciences. “It is thus that Schäffle or Lilienfeld, in constituting the

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science of the structure and life of society, would compare society systematically to an organism”. This naturalism was hotly contested by Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey, and it was with them, Bouglé tells us, that the fourth phase began; henceforth, social facts would no longer be related to biological phenomena, but rather to psychological ones. German thinking thereby took a decisive step, in Bouglé’s eyes: “no longer will the facts be ignored or ideas mistrusted, but one will try to unite facts and ideas to constitute true social sciences”.75 Lazarus, Simmel, Jhering and Wagner shared a common concern to found a science at the junction of the speculative and the concrete, of theory and empiricism, where psychology and history are intimately linked. Those are important names. Through the course of these thinkers’ intellectual development, the young Bouglé, who was then writing his thesis, looked for methodological pointers in order to develop his own method. Bouglé delved feverishly into the works of German thinkers, striving to lay the foundations of a historical psychology. Social scientists in Germany, he notes, admit the great importance of historical subject matter, but they are not content with narration and description: they try to theorize history. They look for the underlying causes, often difficult to grasp, that are lurking behind the facts. And they are almost unanimous in maintaining that the causes of historical events are psychological: “Wars or institutions are always born of and sustained by feelings and ideas, which are their very soul and which conceal their causes; and the only laws that can appear to us under the infinite rippling of historical evidence will be the laws of sentiments and ideas”. Between history and psychology, then, there is an imperative division of duties: “Social life will be described by history and explained by psychology”.76 Psychology, which is “the soul of the social sciences”,77 must therefore propose a new reading of the past. Bouglé is not thinking here of an introspective psychology, of a search for the soul, but rather, a social psychology or a psychology of peoples from which laws can be derived that will “shine light on the history of peoples, the biography of humanity, as the laws of individual psychology illuminate the biography of individuals”.78 “The psychology needed for constructing the social sciences is not some kind of disembodied psychology, some speculation about the abstract mind, independent of all physical conditions and all social relationships”.79 In the same vein, he lauds the German writers for having laid bare the shortcomings of individual introspection: “To take the individual as he appears from internal observation and to study the manner and the shape of his mind without reference to the society that offers or imposes upon him both that manner and that shape, is a scientific artifice by which we must not be deceived”.80 It is important, then, to establish universal laws of collective life: “When we say, backed by psychological science, that a given historic transformation must necessarily have occurred, we understand not only that it in fact occurred in this way, whenever analogous conditions prevailed, but that, by virtue of universal psychological laws, the

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public mind had to react the way it did”.81 History will therefore look to psychology for these laws.82 “Psychology”, Bouglé concludes, “will serve as the rational science for the history of humanity, just as physics and chemistry serve for biology, or as mechanics serves for physics and chemistry”.83 That sentence summarizes the key lesson to be learned from the method of the German social sciences: sociology must rely both on historical induction and on psychological intuition. The Role of Historical Method The idea of a renewed historical science that would serve as a point of departure for sociological synthesis, or that would at least be an indispensable aid to such synthesis, is central to Célestin Bouglé’s thinking.84 In a 1904 article in the Année sociologique, he invites the sociology community to come to terms with distance over time. “Sociology must not forget that it needs the help of history, not only because history establishes the particular facts that sociology will have to work with, but because, if sociology does not want the laws it formulates to be sheer speculation, devoid of any temporal and spatial rationale, if it wants to seek the laws specific to a given species or a given social milieu, it must not neglect the mobility, the transformations, and indeed the historical characters of that setting or that milieu”.85 There we have it: no history, no sociology. Or rather: no historical facts, no sociological theory. In his last book, Qu’est-ce que la sociologie?, Bouglé again recalls the importance of the historical perspective: “sociological induction demands lengthy historical research”.86 It would be useful in this regard, Bouglé thought, to encourage dialogue between history and sociology. In 1899, when methodological disputes were legion, Bouglé expressed the wish for “ever closer” relations between the two disciplines.87 More than three decades later, he could at last take comfort in the growing dialogue between them: “We are given to hope that the regrettable antagonism of the past between history and sociology in France will give way to ever more fruitful collaboration”.88 We may note that Bouglé, in his own writings, made many efforts to reconcile the sociologists with the historians—the “ironic enemies of sociology”.89 An avid reader of the Revue de synthèse historique, he took advantage of his editorship of the general sociology section of the Année sociologique to follow, closely and enthusiastically, the recent developments in historical science, and he confessed in particular a sincere admiration for the work of Henri Berr. Célestin Bouglé was not given to polemics in the debate between history and sociology. Moreover, he remained relatively discreet in the face of the constant methodological disputes between historians and sociologists in the first decade of the 20th century. It is true that he took part with Durkheim, Charles Seignobos and others in the famous debate of 1908 at the Société française de philosophie, but he played only a secondary role there, and his interventions, often fairly general, sought merely to affirm Durkheim’s

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stance against Seignobos. When he drew a distinction between the work of the sociologist and that of the historian, he cited arguments similar to those of other Durkheimians. The moralists, like the sociologists, he wrote in 1905, “are not content to recount events, to dwell upon major or minor accidents, to highlight the initiatives and the revolutions that allowed this demand (the individualistic demand) to be formulated or imposed: more profoundly, they are trying to show that that demand has to do with the very organization of human groupings, that it corresponds to a stage of their evolution, that it expresses in its own way the needs that structural changes have determined”.90 The sociologist must look behind the facts to the pressure exerted by situations, institutions and settings. In his Essay on the System of the Caste, Bouglé argues that “what is of special interest to us is not what passes away but what is repeated; institutions survive the flow of events. From this point of view it is not impossible to note even now a certain number of intelligible relations between the dominant system of collective practices which maintain the cast system and religious beliefs, juridical conceptions or economic practices—relations which appear to be more than the product of coincidence”.91 We must not read into this passage an outright rejection of events and contingencies. But Bouglé insists that events are not in themselves scientific and that merely juxtaposing a series of miscellaneous events has no explanatory value. An event becomes meaningful only if it leaves its mark on an institution. And it is up to the sociologist to determine whether a particular event is the precursor of an institutional fact. This symbiosis of the particular and the general gives us a better idea of how Célestin Bouglé articulates the complementarity of history and sociology. The first, which is essentially empirical, describes and circumscribes a host of facts, while the second, essentially theoretical, explains them by relating them to general and permanent principles: “Through history, we re-live facts; through the social sciences, we explain them”.92 To explain is to search for laws. Sociology becomes, from this perspective, “an abstract science of history”.93 Can history be an explanatory science on a par with sociology? “Any explanation of the real must comprise one part history—a variable one— and one part science. Whether we are speaking of chemical, geological or social phenomena, if we are to understand them and not merely record them, we must state the particular circumstances, on one hand, and the general laws, on the other hand, of their production: it is from the collision of facts with laws that light bursts forth”.94 The distinction established here between history and science speaks for itself. History is not truly scientific, but its subject matter lends itself to scientific investigation. The extreme variability of historical facts must then be reduced to general principles. But this task, as Célestin Bouglé sees it, belongs not to the historian at all, but to the sociologist. How can we make theoretical sense of the individual fact or event? This is a tough question, Bouglé says, and the only satisfactory

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answer lies in the work of Antoine Cournot. “An event of any nature whatever is not really explanatory unless we can show in it the workings of certain laws. This amounts to observing that one particular factor does not explain another—any explanation presupposes belief in constant relationships, anticipates properties that are more or less permanent, and uses generalities”.95 Bouglé recommends a careful reading of Antoine Augustin Cournot in order to overcome the impasse that prevails between history and sociology. “We continue to hear so much debate over the value and the respective role of the individual and the universal in history, between ‘narrative historians’ and ‘sociologist historians’. Surely the too long-neglected methodology of Cournot offers a way to reconcile the two sides by clarifying the points that separate them”.96 Sociology and the Theory of Egalitarism Like Durkheim, Célestin Bouglé thinks primarily about the present. He considers that sociology is the answer to the anxieties and concerns of modern societies. If the problem of the relationships between the individual and society is at the core of Durkheim’s thesis on the division of labor, what interests Bouglé above all is the problem of the development of egalitarian ideas. It is true that, in his book on the social sciences in Germany, Bouglé had betrayed some reservations about the Durkheimian method (for example, in his call for the unity of psychology and sociology). But as Paul W. Vogt has shown, Bouglé was an eclectic, even ambivalent, thinker. Both in his doctoral thesis on egalitarian ideas (1898) and in his essays on the caste system (1908), Bouglé presents himself as a fairly orthodox disciple of Durkheim. In Les Idées égalitaires, as Maurice Halbwachs noted, there is a research program that follows “the precepts formulated in the Règles de La Méthode sociologique, namely that one must study social realities as things, one must observe them from without”.97 William Logue adds that the work of Bouglé “is a slightly mechanical application of the concepts developed by Durkheim in the Division of Labor in Society (1893) to the study of the origins and development of egalitarian ideas in Western society”.98 In Les Idées égalitaires, we read: “Our preferences, whether or not based on reason, no longer have any say in the matter: it is with a methodically disinterested mind that we must address the study of egalitarian ideas, as if they were rocks or vegetables of some kind. For us they are merely products that we must explain, and not judge”.99 That sounds like Taine! And Bouglé, faithful to 19th-century French positivism, proposes a conceptual system intended to embrace the evolution of egalitarianism in its entirety. The demonstration involves two steps. Célestin Bouglé seeks, first, to show that in order to find the cause of the emergence of egalitarianism we must look to the transformations in social organization resulting from morphological and physiological factors. He then demonstrates, using the

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method of concomitant variations, the correspondence between the phenomenon of egalitarianism and the forms of social organization. Relying on this theoretical framework, Bouglé considers that primitive societies, and in particular the Hindu society, will never provide fertile ground for the growth of egalitarianism, because nowhere else is occupational specialization so ingrained, organization so highly respected or mutual “repulsion” so great. Another obstacle is that these societies are scattered across immense territories. Hence, this conclusion: “What we can say to this point is that the portion of the earth where egalitarian ideas make themselves felt most clearly is also that portion where people are most numerous”. But, Bouglé hastens to add, “the immensity of the area covered by an empire is of little importance if, among the individuals that are its subjects, there are and can be but few relationships. The extension of societies is efficacious only through the interrelationships between their units. If population numbers are to influence social ideas, the many members of the same state must really interact with each other, and they must be concentrated, not scattered. Now this concentration is exactly what we find in modern nations: what distinguishes them is not so much their great volume as their great density”.100 In urban centers, then, we will find places that are quite favorable to the progress of egalitarian ideas. Yet these quantitative considerations, however important they may be, play only a secondary role in the argument, compared to the importance that Bouglé attaches to what he calls “the quality of social units”. One question concerns him greatly, and it dominates much of the work: is egalitarianism favored by the homogeneity of individuals or, on the contrary, by their heterogeneity? Alexis de Tocqueville and Gabriel Tarde thought that the progress of egalitarian ideas led to greater homogeneity; by contrast, Simmel, Spencer and Durkheim maintained that it depended on heterogeneity. Bouglé looks for a compromise between these two opposing interpretations. Thus, he argues that both homogeneity and heterogeneity both favor egalitarianism, but for fundamentally opposite reasons: “The most fertile soil for the sowing of egalitarian ideas is to be found in civilizations with the greatest number of individuals who resemble each other in some aspects while differing in others—where assimilation expands at the same time as differentiation grows—where heterogeneity coexists, in a sense, with homogeneity”.101 This parallel progression of homogeneity and heterogeneity, Bouglé thinks, is a phenomenon very specific to Western societies. Egalitarianism develops where individuals and different groups interact. The progressive condensation of ethnic groups means that the concept of “racial purity” is completely outmoded. For example: “In Germany, the Teutons have interbred with the Celts and the Slavs. England is an amalgam of Britons, Saxons, Normans, Danes. France is still more composite than all the others; the nation that was to formulate the rights of man is also, as we are often told, related to all races”.102 Although different at the origin, ethnic groups,

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upon meeting, merge and develop common beliefs and ideas, while nevertheless retaining their singularity. In short, everything becomes unified at the same time as everything becomes diversified. There is no doubt that Bouglé sees in this process an irreversible law of history. To this, we must juxtapose “social complexity” as a condition for the emergence of egalitarian ideas. Célestin Bouglé explains: “A society is highly complex if the individuals who comprise it, instead of belonging to one group only, can be part of a great number of groups at the same time”. Social complexity thus generates a multiplication of associations: “Labor unions or armies, clubs or churches, families or shareholder meetings, each of these groups, through its constitution, changes the sentiments and ideas of the individuals it embraces”.103 Consequently, “the individual is no longer locked up in any given society. He leaves one to enter another, or rather he is engaged, but only for a portion of himself, in all of them at once”.104 According to Bouglé, it is the fact that man is part of several particular societies that is the source of his liberty; for, and this is notably the case with primitive societies, “when an individual belongs to only one society, then he belongs to it entirely”.105 Whence and when came the idea of equality? Célestin Bouglé does not offer a date, but simply mentions a few milestones. He notes the tortuous path taken by the idea of equality in the history of human societies. It appears first, in embryonic state, in classical antiquity. The ancient city was favorable, at least in theory, to equality. It was then submerged by the feudalism of the Middle Ages, which isolated individuals within a hierarchy. It was reborn at the end of the Ancien régime, and has since made steady progress. What does Bouglé say about the French Revolution? Very little, except for a few passing comments on the declaration of the rights of man. To tell the truth, Bouglé shies away from events and individuals. What he wants is to reconstitute the slow gestation of the egalitarian movement. And he is quite convinced that the movement he observes is irreversible. From the teachings of the German social sciences, Bouglé discovered the role that history must play in the development of a positive sociology. He quickly became convinced that the subject matter of history is a “preparatory course” for any rigorous sociological analysis. The function of history was then firmly fixed in Bouglé’s mind: it must serve to combat metaphysical views and, especially, biological reductionism.106 Unlike Durkheim, it was the encroachments not of psychology but of biological science that Bouglé feared most. At first glance, Bouglé’s contributions to theory seem rather thin in comparison to those of Simiand or Halbwachs. If we go by the valuable article of Johan Heilbron, Bouglé was more of a teacher than a thoroughly original researcher.107 Hubert Bourgin describes him even more simply as a “popularizer” (un vulgarisateur).108 We might also add that Bouglé was a mediator of the first degree and that he launched many dialogues. He was the mediator between the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale and the Année

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sociologique, between sociology and philosophy, between sociology and the neighboring social sciences, between the French sociological tradition and the German sociological tradition. According to Maurice Halbwachs, Bouglé’s sociological contributions were crucial.109 That is why, all told, Célestin Bouglé stands as a valuable guide for anyone seeking to reconstitute the theoretical and methodological issues with which the fledgling sociology had to grapple.

The Polemist and the Social Scientist: François Simiand In moving from Bouglé to François Simiand (1873–1935), we detect a shift in style and in language. Simiand did not pay much attention to form: his writing style is turgid, and his indulgence in formulae and in lengthy methodological premises often obscures his train of thought. His work is not very accessible: “Simiand is completely unreadable”, Pierre Chaunu assures us.110 Yet despite these stylistic difficulties that try the reader’s patience, the intent of Simiand’s work stands forth clearly. In the main body of his writings, he was attempting to lay the basis for a positive economic science, inspired by Durkheimian holism. The path that François Simiand followed on his way to positive economics was fairly tortuous. He arrived at it through philosophy and sociology. His association with Durkheim left an indelible imprint on his thinking. For Simiand, economic facts were first and foremost social facts that impose themselves as constraints on individuals. Simiand’s work stands at the crossroads of history, economics, philosophy and sociology, and it was among historians that Simiand found his widest audience, particularly after 1930. This may seem paradoxical in light of the virulent attacks that Simiand launched against certain traditional historians at the beginning of the century, and even more so when we recall that he defined himself from the outset as a sociologist and an economist. In truth, he thought of himself as a sociologist who was practicing economics. Yet Simiand was virtually ignored by the sociologists of his time, a fate that persists today. His work is difficult to fathom, but that does not fully explain its eclipse. From a strictly sociological viewpoint, his method offered little that was new in comparison to Durkheim. But Simiand was indeed a pioneer in attempting to transpose the principles of sociological method to the analysis of economic history. Simiand’s work, in fact, offers us the best proof that history occupied a place of honor in Durkheimian sociology—and it does this in several ways. First, through its method. From the first to the last of his works, Simiand never proposed anything without solid references to historical materials. For him, historical materials were in a sense a substitute for the experimentation that is missing in the social sciences. History also allowed Simiand to sketch out a theory of economic evolution. He analyzed by turn the main

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types of economies that have succeeded each other in the West since classical antiquity. Of course, to present the different forms of economies that have left their mark on the history of modern societies is nothing new in itself—indeed, the “political economy” textbooks of the time offered many a synthesis of economic evolution. By contrast, to explain economics by looking not for individual causes but for the collective causes that lurk behind economic activity was a thoroughly new undertaking that aroused a lively interest both among scientific historians, who were eager to break with individualistic theses, and among sociologists. The backbone of Simiand’s theoretical plan can be found to a large extent in his writings on wages: there we find, for the first time, an interpretation of economic history as a function of time. The economy, Simiand argues, oscillates ceaselessly between two complementary movements: first comes phase A, characterized by an upswing, and then phase B, characterized by decline or stagnation. That fact, Simiand believes, makes it possible to explain recent economic developments and to show that the great crisis of 1929 was not the result of fortuitous causes but an inevitable outcome of the passage of time. A writer in the polemical style, Simiand devoted much of his work to discussing and criticizing theories that ran counter to positive economic science. At the beginning of his career, he clashed first with historians and then with economists. Simiand and the Historical Science of His Time Early in his life, even before he began to think of himself as an economist, Simiand was interested in the progress of historical studies in France. In his earliest works he attempts to specify the role, which he deems decisive, that history must play in constituting a positive and experimental sociology. But his methodological concept, inspired by Durkheim, set him in direct opposition to the historians of his time. The Process of Narrative History François Simiand had no sooner left the École Normale supérieure than his byline began to appear in the most important French scholarly journals of the end of the 19th century. He gained notice first as a collaborator with the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale,111 in the role of editor of its Année sociologique section, which until then had been in the hands of another Durkheimian, the philosopher Paul Lapie, and was intended to bring the principal works of sociology to the attention of the philosophical community.112 In his first issue, in 1897, Simiand provides summaries of the works of Worms, Giddings, Bernès and Durkheim. He also includes a critique of the Introduction aux études historiques published by Langlois and Seignobos. That Simiand should write essays on the recent works of Worms,

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Giddings, Bernès and Durkheim seems logical enough, for they were sociologists of universal reputation. But for him to take an interest in the work of Langlois and Seignobos, in the context of a section entitled the Année sociologique, may at first appear odd. In fact, however, there is a ready explanation—Simiand considered that sociology was impossible without the help of the neighboring social sciences. The term “sociology”, he says, “will be meaningful only on the condition that it is able to aggregate, organize and integrate under its umbrella all the efforts devoted to the scientific and positive study of the life of people in society, wherever they come from, and by whatever title they are known”.113 At this point, there is no doubt that Simiand has already espoused the principles of Durkheim’s sociological method. He is convinced that the field of sociology must embrace the entire range of the positive social sciences. It is from the vantage point of this principle that Simiand examines the work of Langlois and Seignobos. The summary he published sparked much controversy. What is striking in these authors’ book on method, he writes, “is a kind of distrust for the terms, the notions and the questions commonly posed in the methodology constructed by philosophers and sociologists”.114 He goes further: Langlois and Seignobos are attempting to constitute a historical science that cultivates the individual, the particular fact, in all its forms. “A special discipline may be needed here for gathering these individual and contingent facts [. . .] given their quantity and the difficulty in locating them; but it cannot be considered as the principal science itself”.115 Of course, it is history’s claim to scientific status that Simiand is here denying. This attack by the young representative of the Durkheimian school would not long lack for echoes. In La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (1901), Charles Seignobos asserted the methodological supremacy of history over the other social sciences and cast doubt on the very existence of social sciences apart from statistics (which includes demography), economics and the history of economic doctrines. A few months later, Henri Hauser in his book L’Enseignement des sciences sociales rallied behind Seignobos and took vigorous exception to the Durkheimian method, accusing it of being too abstract.116 François Simiand, insisting on his right of reply, issued that response in a famous essay of 1903, Méthode historique et science sociale d’après les ouvrages récents de M. Lacombe et de M. Seignobos, published in the recently launched Revue de synthèse historique. There, Paul Lacombe and Charles Seignobos, who hold diametrically opposing views of history, are in effect summoned to the witness box. Lacombe, who might be considered as a sociologist, assigns to scientific history the study of general and institutional facts, while the second promotes the individual and the particular fact. At first glance, as the subtitle of the article suggests, one might expect Simiand to confront these two antithetical perspectives and, as he put it himself, to “fix the essential points of the debate”117—but that is not the case. The article does not analyze Lacombe’s work (which was by no means

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“recent”, having been published a decade earlier), confining itself to a few words of praise and some passing references. Simiand instead focuses his fire on the book of Seignobos, and also, indirectly, on that of Henri Hauser. Each page constitutes a stiff lesson in method for historians. François Simiand asserts at the outset that most historians have a mistaken concept of science and that failing, he maintains, can be laid in part to the past record of the historical discipline. History has long defined itself as a literary genre or a narrative. To study history in a scientific framework is thus a relatively recent and still marginal concern among historians. The fact that historians are novices when it comes to discussing methodological questions (a point that Charles Péguy would make virulently) explains the lack of nuance in their statements and the absence of precision in the terms they use. Thus, for Charles Seignobos “the social fact is psychological in nature, and being psychological, it is subjective”.118 The first proposition is fair, Simiand tells us: the social fact is a relationship of man to the objects of the external world or a relationship of men among themselves with regard to those objects. Simiand does not quite deny that there may be objective psychological phenomena, but insists they can only be such when they depend on a social factor.119 The second proposition must then be inaccurate: contrary to what Seignobos maintains, the terms “psychological” and “subjective” cannot be treated as synonyms, as that would mean rejecting the possibility of “constituting a social science in the sense of the already existing positive sciences, all of which work in an objective domain and exist only on that condition”.120 The subjective and the objective must then be very carefully defined. The subjective is internal to the individual, it relates to his values, his tastes, his needs, his aptitudes: in short, it is everything that makes him unique among his fellows. On the contrary, the objective is by definition something external to the individual, such as a rule of law, a superstition, a dogma or a religion. What is objective is constraining: “The results of positive science are objective precisely because they arise in a manner independent of our own action and of our thoughtful spontaneity; the regularities that science reveals and expresses in the coexistence and the succession of phenomena impose themselves upon us, they are not of our making, and that is why they are of objective value”.121 An objective phenomenon is thus recognized by its sui generis nature; it is independent of individual wills: “The whole is something else, and it is more than the sum of its parts [. . .] The social element, which occupies such a great place in our psychological life, is for us a given that is independent of our individual spontaneity: it is reality, in the same sense that what we call in positive knowledge the material element is reality; it is object, as what we call the external world is object”.122 The concept of the social as an irreducible whole, which Simiand is vigorously defending here, is no different from that of Durkheim, not even in its nuances. This definition of the social object, of course, raised questions among certain members of the historical community. Examined in this

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light, the social becomes a pure abstraction; only the individual elements are concrete realities, Seignobos argues. Simiand sees in this reasoning “an old metaphysical illusion”. If we follow it to its logical conclusion, he notes with his customary irony, we will have to consider the individual as an abstraction, since he is essentially a composite of organs: “Is this organic individual nothing more than a joining of multiple organic elements, and is this socalled independent reality in fact independent only in our mind and through our abstraction, whether a common-sense abstraction or a scholarly abstraction? And do these cells, in turn, exist in themselves, separate from the elements that compose them, only through an operation of our mind, which is again an abstraction?” This simple example is intended merely to show that there is no solution to the conundrum posed by Seignobos. It tries to demonstrate the fallacy of maintaining that the social is an abstraction simply because it has the individual as its substrate. It is true, Simiand admits, that the social has the individual as its substrate, but what is important for all of science, as Durkheim showed, following Émile Boutroux, is not to deny its substrate but rather not to reduce things to that level: “The social phenomenon is an abstraction, but it is no more and no less an abstraction than the organic phenomenon, the chemical or physical phenomenon”.123 But science, François Simiand maintains, must look only for “first order” abstractions or “felicitous abstractions”, abstractions that, in short, will allow the researcher to establish regularities. To abstract is to theorize. The theorization of social facts presupposes the establishment of general facts that are linked to each other by relationships. Now, according to Simiand, historians start from “one or several previous facts chosen without a precise rule, by guesswork, by impression, by personal whim and, let us admit, at random”.124 Moreover, they often resort to finalism. “In fact, this tendency is quite dangerous. To explain the course of events by the motives of men [. . .] by direct introspection and immediate inference, is nothing more than to explain them by final causes, and this kind of explanation should be banished from positive social science just as it is from other positive sciences”.125 In this case, how can history become scientific? As we have seen, Charles Seignobos believed that the starting point of a scientific approach to history lay in the document. François Simiand finds both this solution and this perspective to be false: “The document, that intermediary between the investigating mind and the investigated fact, is far removed from scientific observation: it is done without any defined method and for purposes that are not scientific”.126 The scientific nature of history resides elsewhere: drawing upon Bacon’s metaphor, Simiand maintains, in some famous passages, that the historical discipline must, above all, do battle against “three idols” that prevent the historian from gaining access to what is real: the political idol, the individual idol and the chronological idol. These idols are the principal cause of a great many errors. They deform reality—by favoring individual facts, they give only an imperfect and confusing picture of human evolution.

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Scientific history must turn away from “unique facts in order to take up the facts that repeat themselves”.127 In short, history will have to be sociological, or it will not be scientific. The Notion of Causation in History Very early on, François Simiand proposed a causal explanation of social phenomena, taking as his model the natural sciences: “Here as in the other positive sciences, the cause of a phenomenon is, according to Mill’s formula, nothing other than the antecedent on which that phenomenon is invariably and unconditionally consequent. The causal link is established not between an agent and an act, nor between a force and an outcome, but between two phenomena of exactly the same order; it implies a stable relation, a regularity, and a law. In the positive sense of the word, there can be no cause except where there is a law, or at least a conceivable law. In this sense, we see immediately that the individual phenomenon, unique of its kind, has no cause, as it cannot be explained by a constant relationship with another phenomenon and, in a given case, the invariable antecedents cannot be established. If the study of human facts hopes to become a positive science, it must turn away from unique facts and take up facts that repeat themselves, that is to say it must discard the accidental to focus on the regular, eliminate the individual to study the social”. The concept of causality borrowed from Mill, which Simiand sets out here, stresses a relationship of invariable succession between facts. The prior invariable phenomenon is the cause, and the contingency is its effect. Now among historians, cause and effect are frequently confused. Thus, Simiand remarks, Charles Seignobos, in his Histoire politique de l’Europe contemporaire, concludes that the entire political evolution of Europe in the 19th century can be explained on the basis of just three great events: the revolutions of 1830 and of 1848 and the war of 1871. And that is not all: Seignobos argues that these events were the work of three “great men”: Charles X, Louis-Philippe and Bismarck. In this explanation, which is not an explanation at all as Simiand sees it, nothing flows from general causes because the author is content to establish relationships between individual facts. The true causes are thus completely overlooked, Simiand protests: “We notice the spark but we forget the explosive force of the powder [. . .] In the effects of these ‘accidents’, we note [. . .] facts of which the ‘accidental’ occurrence has very obviously been only the occasional cause, facts that bear no truly causal relationship to that cause: to indicate the occasional cause of a fact is by no means to explain it”.129 Of course, this complaint was aimed not only at Seignobos but at the entire community of historians, and François Simiand pursued his campaign against “narrative history” far beyond the pages of the Revue de synthèse historique. We find some echoes, for example, in the Notes critiques at the turn of the century, but the developments are too cursory to teach us much. In 1906, in a communication to the Société française de philosophie,

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Simiand compiles the essentials of his views on causality in history. There we find little new beyond the 1903 article, except perhaps that he praises the German theoretician Bernstein for having shown the possibility of developing causal relationships in the social sciences analogous to those that are established in the natural sciences. Then he comes back to the book of Seignobos, Histoire politique de l’Europe contemporaine. And after a final analysis, he poses this question: “Can we find true causes?”130 His answer is: no, not in the scientific meaning of the word. Simiand then abruptly offers a lesson in method. Rules are prescribed for historians: “Define in general terms the precise effect proposed for explanation”; “distinguish between cause and condition”; “always explain the immediate antecedent”; “try at all times to establish explanatory propositions for which the reciprocal is true”.131 These rules, short and pithy, are recalled again and again in Simiand’s reviews of historical works. The Principles of the Positive Method By 1907–1908, Simiand had delivered the bulk of his scientific message to the historical community. Henceforth, his main concern would be to construct a positive method for the science of economics, as illustrated in the many works he published on the subject in the Année sociologique.132 This method, we must specify, was developed to counter the leading tendencies in the political economy of the time;133 it was opposed to what Simiand called “finalistic economics” and “conceptual economics”. Inspired by Durkheim’s method, Simiand considered that economics must become experimental.134 However, and this comes out particularly in his last works, Simiand differed from Durkheim and many of the Durkheimians on one very specific aspect: he refused to explain advanced economic forms by reference to primitive or elementary forms. Critique of Traditional Political Economy In 1912, in La Méthode positive en science économique, his handbook on “methodological warfare” as Célestin Bouglé rightly dubbed it,135 François Simiand gives this definition of economics: “The objective of economic science is to understand and explain economic reality”.136 The key word, the dominant word here is “reality”, for it obviously implies a quest for objectivity. The economist must explain economic reality as it is, without judgment, without preconceptions, objectively, like things. For that reason, positive economic science must adopt the principles of the sociological method. “It is by that route”, Simiand declares, “that we can truly interpret the facts as they have occurred, as they unfold in actual reality”. In another work, Simiand attempts to apply this principle to the problem of wages. We must approach wages, he says, by establishing “a list of elements and factors to be examined that is as independent as possible of any preconceived idea and

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of any conscious or unconscious theory”.137 For “a theory of positive science is constituted by the causal explanation, in the form of a law, of a phenomenon or a category of phenomena; it is not the ideal determination of a certain hypothetical system of relationships between elements conceived by the mind”.138 François Simiand’s intent was to take sociology, economic history and social history and transpose them into the study of economics. In this plan, he was setting himself squarely against the classical political economy method, with its emphasis on a rational homo œconomicus looking out for his own interests. Working in isolation, on the fringes of the community of economists, Simiand battled ceaselessly against those economic systems that defined themselves in contrast to positive economic sociology.139 From the very first works he published in the Année sociologique, François Simiand took issue with finalistic or applied economics, the basic objective of which, he said, was to identify concrete solutions in order to remedy the problems facing modern economies. History is rife, he argued, with examples to show that, whenever people saw their interests or aspirations at stake, they attempted to apply solutions “to achieve desired or conceived ends” before ever studying and acquiring a “pure and simple understanding of reality itself”. Thus, “not only did the healer precede the physician, but the physician himself preceded, and to a large extent still precedes, the physiologist; and even now, when physiology and scientific medicine have been constituted and authorized, we still have healers”.140 This method, far from being scientific, does not establish any relationships of cause and effect. Finalistic economics is concerned above all with trying to change the course of the events it studies. This concern is clear in the treatment that some economists give to economic crises: “The ills occasioned by crises impinge upon minds from the outset so strongly that the strictly scientific viewpoint is typically lost or neglected immediately. The study of the phenomenon or of its causes at once takes on the character of applied scientific research, and not of science as such; it is constantly concerned with finding remedies, before or in any case during observation of the case”.141 It is not that Simiand wants in this youthful text to deny positive economics the right to offer solutions to contemporary economic problems, but he wants this to be done at the last stage, after the evil has been first rigorously diagnosed and explained. Otherwise, he insists, we are not explaining, we are constructing “an economic ideal”.142 The conceptual economic method is just as defective: “By conceptual economics, we mean that manner of treating the object of economic science according to which we study and analyze that object using ideas that the economist has constructed or accepted in his mind, and where we account for what is happening or what could happen through the ideological formulation of relationships and explanations that appear to the mind as acceptable and satisfactory”.143 Proponents of this type of explanation often invoke the mechanism of supply and demand as a factor explaining

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economic life. But this theory must be rejected, according to Simiand, for it serves only to explain the change in a price, and not the process by which that price was formed.144 “The essence of an economic explanation using supply and demand is that, assuming a free market and things or services offered for sale on that market, the relative economic values for those things or services will be determined in inverse relationship to the physical quantities that are, respectively, offered and demanded in trade”. Simiand maintains that in a positive study of wages, this principle cannot be applied: “Since at all times there are the unemployed, and hence the supply of labor exceeds the demand for it, how is it that wages are not steadily falling?”145 Clearly, in the two examples cited, it is “reality” that escapes the economist. Finalistic economics merely proposes an economic ideal, and conceptual economics is a purely ideological construct. In the early 1930s, François Simiand is still a trenchant debater, always eager to do battle over method. Now he is debunking economic science as he had discredited history at the beginning of the century, but this time his reasons are diametrically opposed. While he had reproached historians for stringing out a series of facts without any thought to theory, he now upbraids economists for stringing out theories without any empirical foundation. In all his work, Simiand promotes dialogue between facts and theory. In an article in the Année sociologique of 1904, Simiand had written: “To combine a concern for theory with investigation of the facts is surely the essential principle of a truly positive scholarship”.146 In 1932, in the introduction to his important study of wages, he returns to the charge: “This essay argues both against theories without facts [. . .] and against studies of facts without theories”.147 As Simiand sees it, we must avoid the twin pitfalls of retreating into empiricism and engaging in purely theoretical speculation. And those traps can only be avoided if economics becomes an experimental science. The Problem of “The Search for Origins” In science, the invariable prior phenomenon serves as cause. In this sense, Simiand maintains, looking for the cause of a phenomenon does not mean that we have to go all the way back to its embryonic state. The study of primitive societies occupies a prominent place in the works of the Durkheimian school.148 It is by studying the simplest, most elementary phenomena, they believed, that we come to understand more complex phenomena. In 1903, in a youthful essay, Simiand had subscribed to this methodological approach wholeheartedly: “It would be very important for the establishment of a positive economic science and for a better understanding of complex economies, of advanced developments and of obscure holdovers, if the economy of primitive societies were better known and scientifically analyzed”.149 Nowhere in Simiand’s later works do we find a statement of this nature. What happened was that, little by little, he changed

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his ideas about the usefulness of “looking for origins”. Indeed, 30 years later, in Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, he reaches a quite different, in fact diametrically opposed, conclusion to the one he offered in the pages of the Année sociologique at the beginning of the century. This time, he no longer sees the need to explain the complex by the elementary, at least when it comes to economic phenomena: “In studying a phenomenon or a set of phenomena that have developed historically or organically, we are more likely to arrive at accessible and reliable explanations if we examine the fully formed state rather than the nascent one, the adult state rather than the embryonic one”.150 In asserting this, Simiand is arguing that we cannot go directly to the origins, because the object is always, consciously or not, considered in some phase of its development. “It is quite hopeless to try to begin a study at the original embryonic state: we can only understand a beginning, an infancy, if we have first appreciated the full development or the adult state, and if we were to pursue this precept, we could show that science has never proceeded in any other way”.151 In fact, Simiand says, to look for origins is to place great store by contingency. For, he explains, there is no causal filiation that can prove beyond doubt that a fact, considered in its primitive state, is the source of a given institution. We cannot explain social phenomena, then, by tracing their successive states. In Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie dealing with wages, money and social evolution, Simiand goes further: he urges sociologists to leave aside “the superstition of the study of origins”.152 He calls instead for seeking the immediate, or the least “substitutable”, antecedent of a phenomenon: “In any study, whether of a category of phenomena, or a group of phenomena, or a single phenomenon, we are more likely to arrive readily and quickly at conclusive results if, within the proposed field, we begin by studying the clearest, the simplest part”. What does he mean by that? As Simiand sees things, it is difficult, if not impossible, when looking at primitive societies, to distinguish an economic fact itself from certain categories of facts (technical, material or other). In primitive societies, “economic life [. . .] has no separate existence, it is permeated by religious and ethnic elements and beliefs, by extra-economic practices, that are intimately bound up with it”. Simiand thus arrives at the conclusion that, since the autonomy of the economic sphere is relatively recent in human evolution, the modern economy must be analyzed in its own right (without any reference to the primitive world), for nowhere else “does economic life appear more autonomous, more detached from all other elements, more independent of everything else in social life”.153 In this way, Simiand takes issue with the comparative method. Since the economic sphere is specific, he argues, we must avoid comparing it to other kinds of phenomena, and religious phenomena in particular. Does this mean that the comparative method is obsolete from a scientific viewpoint? If the comparative method has allowed sociology to free itself from individualistic explanation, Simiand believes—curiously, at first glance—that its task is fulfilled. In fact, he thinks that the comparative method can be applied only imperfectly to the

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study of economic facts. “In our economic affairs, especially [. . .] we can demonstrate that comparative study is only a second-best”.154 We might be surprised to hear this critique of the comparative method coming from a Durkheimian, but there is an explanation: in effect, if we follow Simiand’s reasoning to its end, the comparative method, by gathering facts from different societies, serves merely to confirm coexistence, and it does not fulfill the essential condition of a science. It is better, then, to examine the movement of a fact—in other words, to explain the fact as it develops (se produisant). Neither the comparative method nor the search for origins, then, can make economics into a science. An Experimental Method We have dwelt at length on Simiand’s idea that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the social sciences.155 By the 1920s, Simiand was arguing that economic science must adopt the principles of the experimental method, the power of which had been proven in the natural sciences: biology, chemistry, physics. However, there would be some problems associated with applying the experimental method to the social sciences. In the natural sciences, in observing the facts (often in a laboratory), the experimenter is working directly with his object, which means that he is able to conduct multiple experiments. He can also reproduce phenomena before his eyes. Obviously, however, the social sciences do not enjoy this methodological advantage. The problem in developing a positive economic science, Simiand thinks, is to recreate the conditions that will allow the type of experimentation used in the natural sciences. To this end, history and statistics have valuable contributions to make. THE FUNCTION OF HISTORY AND STATISTICS

Generally speaking, economists work with facts that are known to them only indirectly. In fact, the method of positive economic science is necessarily historical. “This means that positive economic study is condemned to rely essentially on documents, on facts that have been recorded or reported, seldom with any scientific purpose and never by scholars (or their representatives) seeking only the truth”.156 Consequently, the economist, like the historian, must undertake a critical examination of sources to determine whether they are consistent with reality. Simiand calls this operation “the critique of accuracy”, and it involves both an external critique and an internal critique. The external critique consists of verifying the origin, the authenticity and the circumstances of publication of a document, while the internal critique has to do with understanding the meaning of the document in regard to its author and the context in which it was written.

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Like Durkheim, Simiand was convinced that the historical method is of great heuristic value. “Positive economic research can benefit much from the practices tested and validated by history” in terms of discovering “through documents the facts that escape experimentation in the laboratory”.157 History in itself is not experimental in the meaning given that word by Claude Bernard. It is merely a science of observation; it confines itself to identifying a body of facts in their raw state. Experimentation requires the scholar to compare the facts, to question them and to verify them against each other. The historical method cannot go beyond the observation stage. It is here that statistics comes into play. “Economic history, as we see it, has to be complemented by economic statistics, and vice versa. And this doubly desirable link can only be made effective and useful if it does not rely on economic empiricism but becomes systematic research conducted according to the needs and aspirations of a true positive science in this area”.158 In Statistique et expérience, Simiand states the usefulness of statistics very clearly: it serves “to allow the human mind to make a relatively simple representation of complex groupings of facts, to appreciate the value of those simplified representations, to study and recognize whether they are interrelated, and on what basis, and to what degree those relations are established”.159 In fact, the sociologist or the economist proceeds no differently from the botanist who breaks down a phenomenon into its component parts and examines the action of each factor on each part. “When we study the characteristics of a species or a breed, what are we doing? We are trying to identify the traits that clearly characterize all the individuals of that species or that breed, even if they are not all necessarily to be found in any one individual”.160 The fact that statistics seeks to establish averages is, according to Simiand, additional proof of its experimental nature. Not only does statistics organize the facts, it also offers an objective analytical technique. In this respect, it is a perfect complement of historical analysis.161 Thus, history and statistics bear the same relationship to each other as do observation and experimentation. A Theory of Economic Progress At the beginning of the 1930s, economic history was in great vogue in France. The works of Henri Hausser and Ernest Labrousse paved the way to this new field of history. Clearly, the context of the day did much to encourage this enthusiasm for the study of economic problems. “Economic history responds to falling world prices by undertaking a thorough examination of price swings; it responds to the crisis of 1929 by examining the general issue of crises and fluctuations”, says Pierre Chaunu.162 Was economic history born of the problems linked to the 1929 crash? In fact, it emerged much earlier, although the crisis did much to develop it. We can already see in

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Simiand’s work, from the end of the 19th century, the first indicators of a long-term economic history. The Sociological Foundations of Economic Evolution In the 1930s, François Simiand’s theory of economic progress finally took on its definitive form. Simiand sketched a theory of economic progress that, on many points, diverged radically from that of his contemporary economists. He identified two broad alternating and contrasting phases in economic evolution: a phase of progress, which he called phase A, and a phase of depression or stagnation, which he called phase B. In order to understand the key linkages in Simiand’s theory of economic progress we must first take as our guide his three-volume Cours d’économie politique (1929–1932). Of all Simiand’s works, this is the one that had the greatest influence on the historical community. It can in fact be regarded as a fine example of economic and social history. In it, Simiand addresses economics both as a historian and as a sociologist. As a historian, he consults sources, reviews historiography, traces developments. As a sociologist, he relates economic facts to general principles and proposes a positive interpretation of economic evolution. Like all of Simiand’s work, much of this course of political economy is devoted to a review of the literature. Economists, Simiand remarks, generally distinguish three types of economies, corresponding to specific moments in history: 1, the closed economy; 2, the simple exchange economy; and 3, the complex exchange economy. In its general principle, Simiand is prepared to accept this conventional classification and he uses it in his own works, albeit with some amendments. At the outset, he identifies two problems: 1, can we consider these economic types as closed units, isolated from each other? and 2, does this classification follow an irreversible historical order? In both cases, Simiand responds in the negative: “Rarely do we find a completely closed economy, and the first two types are often linked, at least to some degree”. More specifically, he proposes: “Let us juxtapose upon this tripartite classification a grouping that links type I and type II-A (simple barter) in what we shall call the barter economy, and another grouping that links type II-B (simple monetary exchange) and type III (complex exchange economy) in what we shall call the monetary or credit economy”.163 Simiand clearly does not deny the legitimacy of a theory of economic progress, but as he sees it the complexity and the progressive diversity of the economy does not follow a straight line. Economic evolution, he insists, is composed jointly of forward and backward movements. There is, then, no “unique and irreversible succession”. This vision of economic progress, consisting of alternating movements, was in full gestation in Simiand’s earliest works. Thus, he writes in the Année sociologique of 1899, “we must not believe that the subsequent form will totally eliminate the previous form. The various successive modes appear and coexist before our eyes”.164

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According to Robert Marjolin, Simiand’s grand plan is to distill sociological laws from economic evolution.165 As a good Durkheimian, he explains the economy through social forms. Thus, the closed economy, which we find at various moments in history, flows directly from a segmented social structure where the members are intimately bound to each other. In this type of society, as Durkheim had shown, the collective consciousness is strong, and the law is repressive. “Very generally”, Simiand notes, “what dominates life in primitive society is a set of prescriptions that, we might say, apply to its entire life and all its activities. Collective life, which is considerable [. . .] is made up of positive rules and of negative rules or taboos”.166 Thus, in primitive society, there is little division of labor, exchange is rare, and money is nonexistent. This weak economic organization, in Simiand’s view, is largely attributable to a rudimentary social life. The simple exchange economy is the result of more complex social relations. The civilization of the high Middle Ages offers a good example of the simple exchange economy. While in some respects it was archaic, it nevertheless contained certain characteristics that heralded the modern economy. Initially, trade was confined to the village or the manor, but little by little products began to make their way in from beyond. It was the mobility of traders that drove the expansion of economic frontiers. In the villages, there was a division of tasks among individuals. While the majority remained on the land, some turned increasingly to trade. The mass arrival of new products from the New World opened up a host of new activities. The city became a market place. Gradually—and this is important—trading came to be conducted in money. The division of labor, however, remained elementary, and trading was still confined within the city walls.167 The complex exchange economy—or the capitalist economy—appeared in the 16th century, and it owed its existence, Simiand insists, not to political events, such as religious reformations, but rather to rising prices.168 Far from depressing commerce, rising prices boosted it. “What does it matter to the merchant if prices go up, if he is able, on his first sale, to turn a profit (even higher than expected) on something that he bought at a lower price and can sell at a higher price, and then on a second sale, even though he has to pay more for something, he can sell it at an even higher price?”169 The terms of trade were changing, thanks in large part to the sharp increase in the volume of precious metals, sparked by new overseas discoveries. Personal fortunes multiplied, and money became the symbol of wealth. How, then, can we explain rising prices? Simiand maintains that they are a direct result of the accumulation of monetary means: “What made the general environment favorable to economic development in the 19th and 20th centuries was not the constitution of the economic system itself, nor economic freedom, nor technical transformations, nor capitalism, nor socialism—it was the discovery and exploitation of gold mines in California, and then in the Transvaal and the Klondike”.170 Simiand’s demonstration, as Raymond Aron has pointed out, may seem ambiguous at first glance.171 Must we, in

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this case, reduce monetary fluctuations to chance and contingency? Simiand foresaw this objection, and he responded with a sociological argument: “We simply need to integrate the accident of gold mine discoveries into a more general formulation of social monetarism”.172 Evolution and the Functioning of the Economy In the 1930s especially, Simiand was urging economists to look beyond cyclical phenomena and to think about the process of continuity. To those who were rushing to offer solutions to economic imbalances, he insisted that this was the best way to understand the great economic crisis of 1929. In 1932, Simiand wrote an essay, Les Fluctuations économiques à longue période et la crise mondiale, that clearly bore the marks of his time. In it, he offered a long-term perspective on the great economic depression afflicting Western economies. He was certain that history could offer a means for understanding the phases of growth and stagnation in economic activity. To be sure, he was not looking to history for moral lessons or for solutions to the crisis: that would merely demonstrate an attachment to finalism, something he had vigorously denounced throughout his career. His presentation is based on two hypotheses: the first is that “long-term economic fluctuations have been an important, even central feature of modern and contemporary economic development, since the end of the 18th century and very probably since the 16th century; the second is that the current world crisis is not merely a turning point between the expansionary and recessionary phases of those shorter cycles that last for perhaps a decade or less, with which we are familiar, but is in fact a turning point between two phases of one of those long-term fluctuations that run for decades or for half a century”.173 This analytical framework gives no place to the particular cyclical stage of an economic crisis, nor to individualistic determination. Each crisis, Simiand tells us, has its own causes and effects, but it is not these particular issues that are of interest to science; it is the general traits that we find in every period of economic crisis. History helps to make it clear that a crisis, however unique it may appear, is not a spontaneous event but one that has been in preparation for a long time. In this way, Simiand outlines a law of economic development. That law starts with the general movement of prices and monetary fluctuations and is characterized by two alternating phases, A and B, which Simiand had already explained in his work on wages. Phase A indicates an upward price movement and is positive; phase B represents a downward movement or stagnation and is therefore negative. Simiand finds that these phases, stretching out over a cycle of several decades, have come in relentless succession since the 16th century. Generally speaking, the upswings occurred (in reverse order) in the periods from the end of the 19th century to the Great War, from the middle of the 19th century to the years 1875–1880,

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from before 1789 until 1810–1815 and, finally, from the 16th century to the middle of the 17th. The B phases, for their part, filled the gaps between the periods mentioned. Since the beginning of the modern era, however, Western economies have been in constant fluctuation, although with a rising trend. François Simiand asks if the crisis of the 1930s might mean the end of an A-phase period: “Are we at a turning point in a long-term economic fluctuation?” “Can we see in these years an indication of a move from phase A to phase B?”174 As a good economic historian, Simiand recognizes several signs from past years that foreshadowed the crisis. The causes of the crisis are to be sought, he says, not in the preceding months, but all the way back to the last quarter of the 19th century, in the years 1875–1880 and 1895 to 1900, when there was a detectable downward shift in the long-term movement. This alternating pattern, which here is irreversible, is not specific to the economic world: nature is subject to analogous laws. “Plant growth occurs in alternating phases, not only in temperate climes but even in climates where the temperature varies less. In the animal kingdom, many functions that are essential to life reveal alternations (the circulation of the blood, respiration, periods of sleep and wakefulness, etc.). All these orders of facts seem to show that where there is life there is a succession of expansions and of stoppages or compressions, an alternation of contrary phases”.175 Following this line of reasoning, then, it would be wrong to consider crises as pathological symptoms. The crisis is simply a temporary malaise. Yet economists, Simiand complains, regard economic crises as pathologies: rather than analyze the true causes, they insist on looking for cures. Now before we look for remedies, for solutions, we must first “learn to understand properly”.176 To understand is to grasp the laws governing the historical development of a phenomenon. An economic crisis, even if it seems unique and fortuitous, can only be explained by situating it within a longterm pattern. Thus, to analyze the crisis of the 1930s, we must first consult the past. “If it is true that the world economy has today entered phase B of a long-term fluctuation, then we must expect it to play itself out in the manner characteristic of previous B phases”.177 That is to say, we must expect strikes, conflicts and social unrest of various kinds. Can we speed the crisis to its conclusion? That question was frequently posed, but it was of no interest to Simiand. As he saw it, the primary task of science is to explain; it is not necessarily to provide solutions to the phenomena it studies. “We have not found a panacea for the present situation, for the simple reason that it does not exist”.178 We must “make the best of this necessary evil”.179 If there is no panacea, it is because the alternation of phases A and B is an ineluctable pattern of history. “We have no reason to call phase A either more or less pathological than phase B, or [to apply that epithet to] the transition from one to the other. Each part of this process is just as regular, just as normal as the other”.180 In short, Simiand concludes, the combination of these two phases is the key

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characteristic of economic progress—phases A and B are like “successive reaches of a waterway”.181 It is easy to understand why economists never regarded Simiand as one of their own. His profound aversion to homo œconomicus, his holistic method, his concept of system, all served to distance him from conventional political economy. In fact, his contribution to economics is still considered meager. Nor in sociology were his methodological developments very illuminating, compared to those of Durkheim. Simiand’s work, for obvious reasons, resonates essentially within the community of historians.182 Like Durkheim, whose methodological imperialism he fully espoused, François Simiand considered that sociological research must be preceded by detailed historical analysis, and when he turned (with contempt) to the work of historians of the early 20th century, it was first of all to lay the basis of a new historical science that could collaborate in developing the newborn sociology. In his late-career works on price movements and wages, Simiand pointed a path forward for historians anxious to renew their discipline. He himself designed the architecture of a historical sociology that comprised at once an analysis of human action and a long-term vision of historical development.

A Theory of Collective Memory: Maurice Halbwachs Like his friend and mentor François Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs (1877– 1945) attached great importance to questions of method. When he joined the Durkheimian group in 1905, he was already intrigued by quantitative techniques. But in the development of his thought, history did not hold as important a place as it did with Simiand or with Bouglé, or even with Durkheim. For Halbwachs, history was but one auxiliary science among others. In fact, many of his works contain scarcely any reference to history. We may say that his analysis of the working class—and of social classes in general—is essentially static. In the introduction to La Classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie, he writes, “the working class, we believe, resembles more closely a mechanical and inert mass than a living and supple organism”. Consequently, “it is first and foremost in the present, and not in history, that we must study the working class, for of all portions of society it is the one that feels the least influence and impetus from its past”.183 In fact, there is nothing unusual about the methodological perspective of this piece, and this rejection of history in favor of synchronic analysis appears frequently in Halbwachs’s works. Thus, his writings on social morphology or on suicide do not make any particular reference to history. It is true that Maurice Halbwachs was often critical of historical science and some of its representatives, but, like Simiand, it was only with eventsbased or narrative history that he did battle. Halbwachs took a lively interest in the new history that was developing at the beginning of the 1930s under the leadership of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, with whom he maintained

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close and happy relations, and he was from the outset a member of the editorial board of the Annales. The hallmark and the dominant feature of Halbwachs’s varied work, although he came to this concern relatively late, is surely his sociology of the memory, inspired both by Émile Durkheim and by Henri Bergson. To remember is a collective affair, for it is through the collective memory that individual memories acquire their deeper meaning. However, memory is not history. Halbwachs contrasts the two: history, the science of history, merely recounts sequences of events and ruptures; collective memory insists on continuity. The Sociology of Memory Maurice Halbwachs was concerned with the sociology of memory as early as the 1920s.184 Man has a memory. He represents to himself the image of things or events seemingly past. He finds in them similarities with events that he remembers or that he knows about from others. Knowledge of the past guides him in his actions, in his decisions. The primary function of memory is to reach into the confused mass of experience and draw from it certain events that will then be sheltered from the passage of time. And this function, Halbwachs tells us, responds not only to individual but also to collective needs.185 For Maurice Halbwachs, in fact, memory is a collective representation in the full meaning of that term.186 For it contributes, just as does religion for example, to forging the bonds of solidarity between individuals. Thus, the individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group. “We can remember only on condition of retrieving the position of past events that interest us from the frameworks of collective memory. A recollection is the richer when it reappears at the junction of a greater number of these frameworks, which in effect intersect each other and overlap in part. Forgetting is explained by the disappearance of these frameworks or of a part on them, either because our attention is no longer able to focus on them or because it is focused somewhere else [. . .] But forgetting, or the deformation of certain recollections, is also explained by the fact that these frameworks change from one period to another”.187 As a loyal Durkheimian, Halbwachs maintains that it is the collective memory that gives meaning to the many individual memories: “To call up his own past, a man often needs to appeal to the memories of others. He looks to points of reference that exist beyond him, and that are fixed by society. What is more, it is impossible for the individual memory to function without these instruments, which are words and ideas that the individual has not invented, but has borrowed from his milieu”.188 In other words, collective memory and the individual memory are mutually dependent. The collective memory is external, true, but the individual gradually internalizes it over the course of his life. When he recalls a

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memory, the individual is often led to wonder whether he really experienced some fact or whether it was told to him. And this is so because at each moment, society possesses the necessary means to reproduce memories. But the collective memory is not innate to the individual consciousness: the individual acquires it little by little. It is the links that he forges with his social environment that allow him to appropriate it. “As soon as a child moves beyond the purely sensual phase of life, as soon as it is interested in the meaning of the images and pictures it perceives, we may say that it thinks in common with others, and that its thinking is divided between the stream of quite personal impressions and diverse currents of collective thought”.189 Memory is reconstituted, in large part, with the help of society. “What survives is not ready-made images, stored away in some subterranean gallery of our thought—rather, we find in society all the indications needed to reconstruct those parts of our past that we recall only partially or indistinctly, or that we believe completely gone from our memory”.190 Thus it is that society’s memory—other people’s memory—reinforces and completes the individual memory. The events that a nation has lived through, and that have had the effect of modifying its institutions or traditions, belong to the individual, even if he has not experienced them himself. “Through one portion of my personality I am part of the group, so that nothing that happens there, as long as I am a member of it, and indeed nothing that has concerned and transformed it before I joined it, is completely foreign to me”.191 In other words, history as we have experienced it is bound up with history in general. The link between the individual memory and the collective memory is guaranteed by a multitude of recollections that we might call intermediary. The individual belongs to several groups at once, and each of those groups fashions its own memory, in greater or lesser depth. In the end, each social class has its own memory. But the smaller the group, the stronger will be the individual’s sense of belonging, and consequently, it will be easier for individuals “to remember in common”.192 In his unfinished book, La Mémoire collective, Halbwachs distinguishes two kinds of memories: one is internal, personal, autobiographical; the other is external, social, historical. And he shows at the outset that the collective or social memory is broader and denser than the individual memory. “The first (the personal memory) will draw from the second (the collective memory), for after all the history of our own life is part of general history. But the second will naturally be much more extensive than the first”. Halbwachs goes on to specify: “If it is understood that we know our personal memory only from within, and the collective memory from without, there will in fact be a sharp contrast between the two. I remember Reims because I lived there for a whole year. I also remember that Joan of Arc was in Reims and that Charles VII was crowned there, because I have heard it said or I have read it. Joan of Arc has been so often presented in the theater, in the cinema and so on, that I have no problem imagining her in Reims. At

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the same time, I know very well that I could never have witnessed the event itself, and so I am limited here to the words that I have read or heard, the signs that have been reproduced over time, which are all that comes down to me from that past”.193 To speak of the collective memory is also to speak of oneself, and Halbwachs constantly situates his own memory within the grand collective whole. Memory and History If Maurice Halbwachs gives such primacy to memory, it is mainly because it has an invaluable social function: it serves to establish the bonds between generations. “A child has the vague feeling that, upon entering the house of its grandfather, upon arriving in his neighborhood or in the city where he lives, it has penetrated into a different region, which however is not foreign to the child because it coincides too well with the image and the lifestyle of the oldest members of the child’s family”.194 Contrary to historical science, which is interested only in heterogeneous events, the memory is a “living history”. Thus, Halbwachs adds this essential nuance: “History is not all the past, but nor is it all that remains of the past. Or, if you will, in addition to a written history there is a living history that is perpetuated or renewed over time and where we can retrieve a great number of these old currents that only seem to have disappeared”.195 It is tradition, rather than history books, that keeps history alive. The difference between the collective memory and history, then, is clear. “History is surely the gathering of facts that have occupied the greatest space in the memory of men. But past events, as read in books, as taught and learned in school, are selected, compared and classified, according to necessities or rules that do not impose themselves on the circles of men who have long safeguarded the living heritage. In general, history begins only where tradition leaves off, at which time the social memory is either extinguished or breaks down. As long as a memory survives, it is useless to set it down in writing, or even to fix it purely and simply”. Despite their apparent antithesis, memory and history are in fact complementary: history takes over from memory when the latter fades. History, then, has a central role to play: it allows us to preserve our collective memories against the ravages of time, it provides intergenerational linkages. “Of course, one of the objects of history may be precisely to build a bridge back to the past and to restore this interrupted continuity”.196 But is history up to this task? Rarely. And that is why Halbwachs considers that the collective memory differs from history in at least two respects: “It is a steady current of thought, a continuity about which there is nothing artificial, since it retains from the past only that which is still alive or capable of living in the consciousness of the group that entertains it. By definition, it does not go beyond the bounds of the group”.197 In this sense, history is much broader than collective memory: “History”, Halbwachs writes, “divides the

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sequence of centuries into periods, as we might distribute the plot of a tragedy among several acts. But whereas in a play, from one act to the next, it is the same action that is pursued, with the same players, who remain to the end consistent in their character, and whose feelings and passions progress with uninterrupted momentum, in history we have the impression that, from one period to the next, everything—the interests at stake, the direction of minds, ways of understanding men and events, traditions and outlooks for the future—everything starts anew, and if the same groups seem to reappear, it is because the external divisions, which result from places, from names and also from the general nature of societies, survive”.198 Thus, history divides and contrasts periods against each other in a radical manner, and this contrasting, as we know, generally focuses on the event. But, Halbwachs maintains, that is a great source of error: “It is possible that on the day after an event that has shaken or in part destroyed or reshaped the structure of a society, another period begins. But we perceive that only later, when a new society, in fact, will have drawn from itself new resources and will have set for itself new goals”.199 In fact, even when there seems to be a rupture, it is never complete; the collective memory does not start again from scratch but pursues its path, despite the obstacles it encounters. There are of course several collective memories, Halbwachs tells us, just as there are several histories. However, in collective memories a unique phenomenon occurs: it is not the differences that stand out, but rather the resemblances, the similarities. “The group, when it comes to envision its past, senses clearly that it has remained the same and it becomes aware of its identity over time. History [. . .] tends to discard those intervals where nothing seems to happen, or where life simply repeats itself, perhaps in slightly different forms but without any essential alteration, without any rupture or upheaval. But the group, which lives first and foremost for itself, seeks to perpetuate the sentiments and the images that form the substance of its thought”. According to Halbwachs, the collective memory stresses continuity: “it is a portrait of things permanent”, while history consists primarily of changes—“history is a portrait of changes”.200 To perceive the changes, history must embrace long periods of time, while the collective memory rarely extends beyond the human lifespan—it covers one or two generations at most: “Perhaps we have come to a point of view that is not and cannot be that of the historians. We criticize them for lumping together in time national and local histories each of which represents a distinct line of evolution. However, if we succeed in presenting to ourselves a synchronic picture where all events, wherever they occur, are brought together, it is surely because we detach them from the settings of their own time, that is to say we abstract them from the real time to which they belonged. There is a current opinion that history, on the contrary, focuses perhaps too exclusively on the chronological succession of facts”.201 In short, history does not see the slow mutations; it “overlooks those intervals in which nothing seems to happen”, it sees only ruptures and

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changes. “History is necessarily a summary, a précis, and that is why it takes evolutions that extend over entire periods and compresses and concentrates them into a few moments; it is in this sense that it extracts changes from the course of time”.202 In posing the problem of memory as a collective reality, Maurice Halbwachs was remaining faithful to Durkheimian thinking, but, it seems, the influence of Henri Bergson led him down a metaphysical path. Halbwachs, the positivist who was once so careful to offer empirical proofs and who had promoted the statistical method in the social sciences, now gives himself over to the most rampant speculation. He takes up residence in the space that has been circumscribed by a metaphysical psychology. Maurice Halbwachs’s thinking about the collective memory often drives him into the last redoubts of sociological reductionism. The collective memory has its own being, distinct from individual memories. To remember is to awaken the social influences concealed in the immediate consciousness. But that is not all. Halbwachs intends in this way to move beyond traditional history. “He hopes to retrieve what he calls a ‘living history’, that produced by obscure collusions of consciences and which, in our modern societies, form what we are tempted to call traditions”.203 Of course, this “living history” will be brought forth and explained not by historical science but by sociology. Maurice Halbwachs, then, drew a radical distinction between history and sociology. In attendance at Raymond Aron’s defense of his thesis, Halbwachs vigorously asserted the methodological supremacy of sociology over history. He addressed Aron in the following terms: “On many occasions you speak of the microscopic and the macroscopic level, in order to designate, I think, the historical and the sociological, but you seem to attribute greater value to the first than to the second. And yet for all that, sociology is superior to history”.204 This statement is by itself a succinct summation of the Durkheimian stance vis-à-vis history.

Notes 1 Antoine Prost, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Galimmard, 1996), pp. 189–211. 2 Philippe Besnard, “L’Impérialisme sociologique face à l’histoire”. In Historiens et sociologues (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1986), pp. 27–35. 3 Marcel Mauss, “Divisions et proportions de la sociologie” (1927). In Œuvres, 3 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), p. 182. 4 Marcel Mauss, Review: Teil, L’Année sociologique 1897–1898 (2, 1899), p. 188. 5 Marcel Mauss and Paul Fauconnet, “La sociologie: objet et méthode”. In Marcel Mauss (ed.), Essais de sociologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), p. 34. 6 Henri Hubert, “Introduction”. In P.-D. Chantepie de La Saussaye (ed.), Manuel d’histoire des religions (Paris: Armand Colin, 1921), p. xiii. 7 Dominique Parodi, Review: Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, L’Année sociologique, 1897–1898 (2, 1899), p. 144.

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8 Gaston Richard, “Les Obscurités de la notion sociologique de l’histoire. Sociologie et axiologie”, Revue philosophique (26, 1906), p. 646. 9 Gaston Richard, “La Sociologie ethnographique et l’histoire”, Revue philosophique (40, 1905), p. 506. 10 Paul Fauconnet, La Responsabilité. Étude de sociologie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922), p. 17. 11 Paul Lapie, Review: Labriola, L’Année sociologique, 1896–1897 (1, 1898), p. 274. 12 See Robert N. Bellah, “Durkheim and History”, American Sociological Review (24, 1959), pp. 447–461; Célestin Bouglé, “Sociologie, psychologie et histoire”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (4, 1896), pp. 363–371; Philippe Steiner, “La Méthode sociologique et l’histoire”. In Massimo Borlandi and Laurent Mucchielli (eds.), La sociologie et sa méthode. Les Règles de Durkheim un siècle après (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), pp. 165–184; Edward A. Tiryakian, For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 63–66. 13 Charles Andler, “Sociologie et démocratie”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (4, 1896), p. 255. 14 Célestin Bouglé, “Sociologie et démocratie”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (4, 1896), pp. 118–122. 15 Émile Durkheim, “Preface to L’Année Sociologique” (1898). In Contributions to L’Année Sociologique, trans. John French et al. (New York: The Free Press, 1980), p. 47. 16 Ibid., p. 49. 17 Émile Durkheim, “Preface to L’Année Sociologique” (1898), p. 52. 18 Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 40. 19 Ibid., p. 359. 20 Ibid., p. 368. 21 Ibid. 22 Émile Durkheim, “Preface to L’Année Sociologique” (1899). In Contributions to L’Année Sociologique (New York: The Free Press), p. 54. 23 Durkheim uses the term “moral statistics” (statistique morale), meaning numerical data used to indicate social pathology. 24 Philippe Besnard, “L’Impérialisme sociologique face à l’histoire”, p. 29. 25 Émile Durkheim, “Preface to L’Année Sociologique” (1898), p. 48. 26 Émile Durkheim, “Débat sur l’explication en histoire et en sociologie” (1908). In Textes, 1 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), p. 199. 27 Émile Durkheim, “Preface to L’Année Sociologique” 1896–1897 (1, 1898), p. 48. 28 Émile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France, trans. Peter Collins (London: Hentley, and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1997), p. 331. 29 Émile Durkheim, “Remarques sur l’évolution du droit criminel en grèce” (1904). In Textes, 1 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), p. 242. 30 Émile Durkheim, “Preface to L’Année Sociologique” (1898), p. 48. 31 Émile Durkheim, “Sociologie et sciences sociales” (1909). In La Science sociale et l’action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987), p. 157. 32 Émile Durkheim, “Cours de science sociale. Leçon d’ouverture” (1888). In La science sociale et l’action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987), p. 107. 33 Émile Durkheim, “Sociologie et sciences sociales” (1909), p. 155. 34 Émile Durkheim, Review: Henri Berr. In Contributions to L’Année Sociologique (New York: The Free Press, 1980), p. 27.

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35 Émile Durkheim, “Sociologie et sciences sociales” (1909), pp. 156–157. 36 Ibid., p. 154. 37 Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: The Free Press, 1980), p. 45. 38 Émile Durkheim, “Sociologie et sciences sociales” (1909), p. 154. 39 Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, p. 134. 40 Émile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, p. 15. 41 Ibid., pp. 335–336. 42 Émile Durkheim, “La Prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines”, L’Année sociologique 1896–1897 (1, 1898), p. 1. 43 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen, 1964), p. 20. 44 Émile Durkheim, Review: Salvemini, Croce, Sorel. In Contributions to L’Année Sociologique 1901–1902 (1903), p. 70. 45 Émile Durkheim, Review: Henri Berr. In Contributions to L’Année Sociologique 1911–1912 (1913), p. 89. 46 Émile Durkheim, Review: Salvemini, Croce, Sorel, p. 71. 47 See Philippe Besnard, “L’Impérialisme sociologique face à l’histoire”, pp. 27–35. 48 Émile Durkheim, Review: Xénopol. In Contributions to L’Année Sociologique 1904–1905 (1906), pp. 73–74. 49 See Johan Heilbron, French Sociology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 50 Émile Durkheim, “Sociologie et sciences sociales” (1909), pp. 146–147. 51 Émile Durkheim, Review: Charles Seignobos, L’Année sociologique 1900–1901 (5, 1902), p. 124. 52 Charles Seignobos, La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901), p. 7. 53 On the influence of Fustel de Coulanges, see Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 58–65; François Héran, “L’Institution démotivée. De Fustel de Coulanges à Durkheim et au-delà”, Revue française de sociologie (28, 1987), pp. 67–98; “De La Cité antique à la sociologie des institutions”, Revue de synthèse (3–4, 1989), pp. 363–390. 54 Émile Durkheim, Review: Charles Seignobos, p. 127. 55 See Dominique Parodi, Review: Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, “Introduction aux études historiques”, L’Année sociologique 1897–1898 (2, 1899), pp. 142–145; Hubert Bourgin, Review: Charles Seignobos, “La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (3, 1901–1902), pp. 661–666. 56 Émile Durkheim, “Débat sur l’explication en histoire et en sociologie” (1908), p. 203. 57 Philippe Besnard, “L’Impérialisme sociologique face à l’histoire”. In Historiens et sociologues aujourd’hui, journées d’études annuelles de la société française de sociologie (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1984), pp. 27–35. 58 Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 59. 59 Georges Davy, “L’Explication historique et le recours à l’histoire d’après Comte, Mill et Durkheim”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (58, 1949), pp. 330–362. 60 Mike Gane, “Durkheim contre Comte dans les Règles”. In Charles-Henry Cuin (ed.), Durkheim d’un siècle à l’autre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 34–35. 61 Émile Durkheim, “La Sociologie en France au XIXe siècle” (1900), p. 119. 62 Émile Durkheim, “Cours de science sociale. Leçon d’ouverture”, p. 88.

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67 68

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70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

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Émile Durkheim, “La Sociologie en France au XIX siècle” (1900), p. 119. Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, p. 140. Ibid., p. 127. See Johan Heilbron, “Ce que Durkheim doit à Comte”. In Philippe Besnard, Massimo Borlandi, and Paul Vogt (eds.), Division du travail et lien social (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), p. 63; Félix Pécault, “Auguste Comte et Émile Durkheim”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (28, 1921), pp. 639–655. Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, pp. 108–109. W. Paul Vogt, “Durkheimian Sociology versus Philosophical Rationalism: The Case of Célestin Bouglé”. In Philippe Besnard (ed.), The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press & Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1983), pp. 231–247. Célestin Bouglé published extensively on the work of Cournot. See “L’Opinion de Cournot sur la crise universitaire”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (7, 1899), pp. 352–364; “Les Rapports de l’histoire et de la science sociale d’après Cournot”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (6, 1905), pp. 349–376. See also his Latin thesis: Quid e Cournot disciplinâ ad scientias “sociologicas” promovendas sumere liceat (Carnuti, 1899). Célestin Bouglé, “Gabriel Tarde un sociologue individualiste”, Revue de Paris (May–June 1905), pp. 294–316. Raymond Aron, Mémoires, cinquante ans de réflexions politiques (Paris: Julliard, 1983), 83. See Alain Policar, Célestin Bouglé, justice et solidarité (Paris: Michalon, 2009). Laurent Mucchilli, “La guerre n’a pas eu lieu: les sociologues français et l’Allemagne (1870–1940)”, Espace-Temps (53–54, 1993), pp. 7–18. Bouglé owed an important debt to French socialists such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon. See Célestin Bouglé, Proudhon (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930); Socialismes français: du “socialisme utopique” à la “démocratie industrielle” (Paris: Armand Colin, 1946). But he was critical of the Marxist class struggle. See Célestin Bouglé, “Marxisme et sociologie”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (16, 1908), pp. 723–724; Joshua M. Humphreys, “Durkheimian Sociology and 20th-Century Politics: The Case of Célestin Bouglé”, Journal of Human Sciences (12, 1999). Célestin Bouglé, Les Sciences sociales en Allemagne. Les Méthodes actuelles (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896), pp. 4–7. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 36. See Célestin Bouglé, Review: A.-D. Xénopol, H. Berr, F. Simiand, B. Croce, “Discussions sur les rapports de l’histoire avec les sciences naturelles et les sciences sociales”, L’Année sociologique 1902–1903 (7, 1904), pp. 148–151. Célestin Bouglé, Review: Paul Mantoux, L’Année sociologique 1903–1904 (8, 1905), p. 163. Célestin Bouglé, Qu’est-ce que la sociologie? (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1939), pp. 1–2. Célestin Bouglé, Review: Karl Lamprecht, L’Année sociologique 1897–1898 (2, 1899), p. 142.

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88 Célestin Bouglé, Bilan de la sociologie française contemporaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1935), p. 94. 89 Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1899), p. 15. 90 Célestin Bouglé, “Individualisme et sociologie”, Revue bleue (4, 1905), p. 587. 91 Célestin Bouglé, Essays on the Caste System, trans. D. F. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 6. 92 Célestin Bouglé, Review: Alphone Darlu, L’Année sociologique 1897–1898 (2, 1899), p. 145. 93 Célestin Bouglé, Les Idées égalitaires (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1899), p. 87. 94 Célestin Bouglé, Qu’est-ce que la sociologie?, p. 47. 95 Célestin Bouglé, “Les Rapports de l’histoire et de la science sociale d’après Cournot”, p. 375. 96 Ibid., p. 349. 97 Maurice Halbwachs, “Célestin Bouglé sociologue”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 48, 1942, p. 31. 98 William Logue, “Sociologie et politique: le libéralisme de Célestin Bouglé”, Revue française de sociologie (20, 1979), p. 146. 99 Célestin Bouglé, Les Idées égalitaires (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1899, p. 15. 100 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 101 Ibid., pp. 148–149. 102 Ibid., pp. 152–153. 103 Ibid., p. 169. 104 Célestin Bouglé, “L’Entrecroisement des groupes”, Revue bleue (6, 1906), p. 596. 105 Célestin Bouglé, Les Idées égalitaires, p. 194. 106 Célestin Bouglé, La Démocratie devant la science. Études critiques sur l’hérédité, sur la concurrence et la différenciation (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904). 107 Johan Heilbron, “Les Métamorphoses du durkheimisme, 1920–1940”, Revue française de sociologie (26, 1985), pp. 203–239. 108 Hubert Bourgin, De Jaurès à Léon Blum. L’École Normale et la politique (Paris: Fayard, 1938). 109 Maurice Halbwachs, “Célestin Bouglé sociologue”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (48, 1941), p. 25. 110 Pierre Chanu and François Dosse, L’Instant éclaté (Paris: Aubier, 1994), p. 139. 111 In this journal, François Simiand published two important notes on the works of sociologists and social scientists. See François Simiand, “L’Année sociologique 1897”, Revue de métaphysique et de morale (6, 1898), pp. 608–653; “L’Année sociologique 1898”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (7, 1899), pp. 606–609. 112 Philippe Besnard, “Le Groupe durkheimien et le combat épistémologique pour la sociologie”. In Historiens et sociologues aujourd’hui (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1986), pp. 25–29; Gérard Noiriel, “L’Éthique de la discussion. À propos de deux conferences sur l’histoire (1903–1906)”, pp. 79–93; “L’Épistémologie durkheimienne, l’ancienne et la nouvelle histoire”, pp. 111–123. In Lucien Gillard and Michel Rosier (eds.), François Simiand (1873–1935). SociologieHistoire-Économie (Amsterdam: Les Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1996); Massimo Borlandi, “Durkheim, les durkheimiens et la sociologie générale: De la première section de L’Année à la reconstruction d’une problématique perdue”, L’Année sociologique (48, 1998), pp. 27–65. 113 François Simiand, “L’Année sociologique française”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (6, 1898), p. 608. 114 Ibid., p. 639. 115 Ibid., pp. 640–641. 116 Henri Hauser, L’Enseignement des sciences sociales. État actuel de cet enseignement dans les pays du monde (Paris: Maresq, 1903). See François Simiand on Henri Hauser’s book (1903). In Marina Cédronio (ed.), Méthode historique

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117 118 119

120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

129 130 131 132

133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

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et sciences sociales (Amsterdam: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1987), pp. 177–178. François Simiand, “Méthode historique et science sociale”, Revue de synthèse historique (6, 1903), p. 3. Ibid., p. 3. Simiand had earlier explained this point. “Psychological elements are related only indirectly to individual psychology; they belong to a group psychology, to a social psychology. The phenomena of social psychology escape individual introspection; they must be treated objectively”. (François Simiand, “Déduction et observation psychologique en économie sociale”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (7, 1899), p. 461. François Simiand, “Méthode historique et science sociale”, Revue de synthèse historique (6, 1903), p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 17. Célestin Bouglé, “La Méthodologie de François Simiand et la sociologie”, Annales sociologique (121, 1936), p. 10; Marina Cedronio, “Le statut de l’histoire”. In Lucien Gillard and Michel Rosier (eds.), François Simiand (1873–1935). Sociologie-Histoire-Économie (Amsterdam: Les Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1996), pp. 103–109. François Simiand, “Méthode historique et science sociale”, pp. 17–19. François Simiand, “La Causalité en histoire” (1906). In Marina Cédronio (ed.), Méthode historique et sciences sociales (Amsterdam: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1987), p. 227. Ibid., pp. 229–235. Philippe Steiner, “La Sociologie économique dans l’Année sociologique (1897– 1913)”. In Lucien Gillard and Michel Rosier (eds.), François Simiand (1873– 1935). Sociologie-Histoire-Économie (Amsterdam: Les Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1996), pp. 31–41. Basile V. Damalas, L’œuvre scientifique de François Simiand (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1947). See François Simiand, Statistique et expérience, remarques de méthode (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1922). Célestin Bouglé, “La Méthodologie de François Simiand et la sociologie”, p. 12. François Simiand, La Méthode positive en science économique (Paris: Félex Alcan, 1912), p. 179. François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 1 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932), pp. 102–103. Ibid., p. 183. François Simiand, “Déduction et observation psychologique en économie sociale. Remarques de méthode”, pp. 446–462. François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 2, p. 532. François Simiand, “Systèmes économiques”, L’Année sociologique 1902–1903 (7, 1904), p. 580. François Simiand, La Méthode positive en science économique, p. 180. François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 2, p. 541. François Simiand, Le Salaire des ouvriers des mines de charbon en France (Paris: Cornély, 1907), p. 58.

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145 François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 2, p. 543. 146 François Simiand, “Systèmes économique”, L’Année sociologique 1902–1903 (7, 1904), p. 580. 147 François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 1, p. x. 148 W. Paul Vogt, “The Uses of Studying Primitives: A Note on the Durkheimians, 1890–1940”, History and Theory (15, 1976), pp. 33–44. 149 François Simiand, Review: Thonnar, L’Année sociologique 1901–1902 (6, 1903), pp. 483–484. 150 François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 2, p. 578. 151 François Simiand, Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement general des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1932), p. 6. 152 François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 2, p. 579. 153 Ibid., pp. 582–583. 154 Ibid., p. 587. 155 Maurice Halbwachs welcomed this: “We have nothing to regret or to envy in other disciplines, if it is true as it seems to us that [. . .] Mr. Simiand offers the proof that it is now possible to raise the study of man and the social sciences to the very level that the natural sciences have already reached”. (Maurice Halbwachs, “Une théorie expérimentale du salaire”, Revue philosophique (114, 1932), p. 363. 156 François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 1, p. 38. 157 Ibid., 2, pp. 567–568. 158 Ibid., p. 572. See Valade, Bernard, Introduction aux sciences sociales (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), pp. 315–316. 159 François Simiand, Statistique et experience (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1922), p. 7. 160 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 161 That is why, Bouglé observes, Simiand “wanted to be a historian as well as a statistician: to grasp the phases of a development over a fairly long span of time, to show the rhythm of events, to determine the general ups and downs [. . .] In his eyes, that is the best way to establish, in a quasi-experimental manner, the relations of causality”. (Célestin Bouglé, “La Méthodologie de François Simiand”, p. 21. See Marina Novella Borghetti, “L’Histoire à l’épreuve de l’expérience statistique: l’histoire économique et le tournant des années 1930”, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines (6/1, 2002), pp. 15–38. 162 Pierre Chaunu, L’Historien dans tous ses états (Paris: Perrin, 1984), p. 120. 163 François Simiand, Cours d’économie politique 1930–1931 (Paris: DomatMontchrestien, 1932), pp. 38–39. 164 See François Simiand, Review: Bücher, L’Année sociologique (2, 1897–1898), 1899, p. 444. 165 Robert Marjolin, “François Simiand’s Theory of Economic Progress”, Review of Economic Studies (5, 1937–1938), pp. 159–171. 166 François Simiand, Cours d’économie politique 1930–1931, p. 82. 167 Ibid., p. 115. 168 See Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, “L’Héritage de Simiand: prix, profit et termes d’échange au XXe siècle”, Revue historique (243, 1970), pp. 77–103. 169 François Simiand, Cours d’économie politique 1930–1931, p. 138. 170 François Simiand, Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 1, p. xiv. 171 Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp. 268–280. 172 François Simiand, Letter to Gaëtan Pirou, Revue d’économie politique (50, 1936), p. 224. On Simiand’s social monetarism, see Cours d’économie politique 1929–1930 (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1931); Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, 2 Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932), pp. 480–503; “La monnaie réalité sociale”, Annales sociologiques (1936), pp. 1–86; Jean-Jacques Gislain

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173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186

187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204

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and Philippe Steiner, La sociologie économique, 1890–1920 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995), p. 91; Michel Rosier, “Le Monétarisme social”. In Lucien Gillard and Michel Rosier (eds.), François Simiand (1873–1935). Sociologie-Histoire-Économie (Amsterdam: Les Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1996), pp. 215–226. François Simiand, Les Fluctuations économiques à longue période et la crise mondiale (Paris: Félix Alcan. 1932), pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 63. François Simiand, Cours d’économie politique 1929–1930, p. 704. Ibid., p. 5. François Simiand, Les Fluctuations économiques à longue période et la crise mondiale, p. 114. Ibid., p. 126. François Simiand, Cours d’économie politique 1929–1930, p. 701. François Simiand, Les Fluctuations économiques à longue période et la crise mondial, p. 126. François Simiand, Cours d’économie politique 1929–1930, p. 716. Marc Bloch, “Le Salaire et les fluctuations à longue période”, Revue historique (173, 1932), pp. 1–21; Lucien Febvre, “Histoire, économie et statistique”, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (2, 1930), pp. 581–590. Maurice Halbwachs, La Classe ouvrière et le niveau de vie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912), p. xvii. Michel Amiot, “Le Système de pensée de Maurice Halbwachs”, Revue de synthèse (62, 1991), pp. 265–288. Fernand Dumont, Foreword: Maurice Halbwachs, La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en terre sainte (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971), pp. vii–viii. “A representation”, Halbwachs writes, “is only social when it is in the individual because of the group in which he is submerged, and which imposes it on him”. (Maurice Halbwachs, La Classe ouvrirère et le niveau de vie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1913), p. 119). Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited and trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 172. Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), p. 36. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., pp. 37–38. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., pp. 68–69. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., pp. 77–78. Ibid., pp. 101–102. Ibid., p. 103. Fernand Dumont, Foreword: Maurice Halbwachs, p. viii. Maurice Halbwachs quoted. In John Craig, “Maurice Halbwachs à Strasbourg”, Revue française de sociologie (20, 1979), p. 283.

Conclusion

While it is true that, from its beginnings, sociology has taken the turf of the other social sciences as its building site, we may say, following that metaphor, that the discipline of scientific history has done the same and that, more particularly, it has risen on the foundations of sociology itself. These frequent encroachments of sociology on history and of historical science on sociology have been the cause of much debate and of ongoing disputes between practitioners of the two disciplines. Georges Gurvitch has pointed out that confrontations between historical science and sociology were inevitable, for “both were master sciences serving as guides to all the others”.1 What, then, has been the outcome of the past century’s dialogue between history and sociology? What are the principal ramifications? It would seem that the intellectual landscape of the historical discipline has been changed more than that of sociology. The sociological holism of Durkheim and the historical synthesis of Henri Berr have left deep marks on the face of historical science. In challenging the individualistic determinism of certain historians, in shaking off the yoke of metaphysics, they forced history’s way into the family of the social sciences and humanities, although this process had begun in the last third of the 19th century. From the beginning of the 20th century, the historian gradually ceased to be an isolated scholar, poring patiently over documents, classifying them and seeking constantly to perfect his methods of inquiry. Henceforth, the historian’s field would be defined by that of the social sciences. With the founding of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale in 1929, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in effect signed the birth certificate of this new, multidisciplinary history. But in reality, this “new history”2 was not so new—it had been taking shape since the mid-19th century. Thus, the initiative of Bloch and Febvre must be seen as part of a long and continuing process.3 The new history, as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre conceived it, would have to enlist the collaborarion of all those who were devoted to “the study of contemporary societies and economies”.4 Not having a clearly defined theoretical program,5 the Annales cultivated mistrust of narrative and “battlefield history” [histoire-bataille].

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In founding the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, moreover, Bloch and Febvre were promoting a history that was no longer content to be an introductory course or a method for sociology, but claimed to be a total science of man, as Henri Berr was hopeful enough to call it in the first years of the century. A combination of factors worked in favor of their ambitions. The Durkheimian school was disintegrating: its founder was dead, and many of its promising collaborators had been lost in the Great War. As to Berr’s historical synthesis, it was never able to bring the historical community around fully to its philosophical vision of the human future. Thus, as André Burguière remarks, “the terrain was vacant, and the Annales moved in”.6 History became thereupon the federating force behind the social sciences. “There is no economic or social history”, declares Lucien Febvre in his Combats pour l’histoire, “there is simply history, in its unity”.7 To a large extent, this all-embracing concept of history was built on the model of Henri Berr’s “historical synthesis” and on that of Durkheim’s sociology. What we must do now is place in perspective these twin influences on the new history. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Revue de synthèse historique, founded by the philosopher Henri Berr, was patiently setting out the milestones for the new history.8 From the outset, Berr’s intention was simple: to move beyond narrative and events-based history and to foster dialogue with the social sciences. The invitation was issued, and all were asked to contribute their particular skills to opening up history into an ecumenical science. Fernand Braudel had no doubt that Berr was among those most responsible for the new, multidisciplinary orientation that history was acquiring: “This quest for a non-narrative history imposed itself irresistibly upon contact with the other social sciences—a contact that was inevitable and that, in France, took place after 1900 thanks to Henri Berr’s marvelous Revue de synthèse historique, which when we read it in retrospect is so exciting”.9 In Braudel’s eyes, the collective work of Berr was of interest not only from the viewpoint of the history of ideas. In 1964, in a tribute to Berr, Braudel stresses the importance of that work in the development of the social sciences, and also demonstrates its continued currency: “Henri Berr was the first to launch the enterprises by which we still live today and the formulas that we go on repeating [. . .] The Revue de synthèse still carries just as much weight in French thinking as does Durkheim’s Année sociologique, the Annales de géographie founded in 1891, or Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine—as much, and perhaps more”.10 Recalling the years of his youth, Lucien Febvre adds: “We were young historians back then in 1900, at the École Normale, somewhat adrift, bored with our studies—and then along came the Revue de synthèse historique!”11 From 1900 until World War I, Henri Berr’s influence was at its zenith. Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch became valued collaborators for Berr, and their first writings appeared in his Revue de snthèse historique. Febvre’s pieces, inspired by Vidal de la Blache, dealt with the Franche Comté and

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those of Bloch with the Île de France. Their contribution to the Évolution de l’Humanité was just as important: Lucien Febvre published there his pieces on Luther and on Rabelais, and Marc Bloch his essay on feudal society. Upon founding the Annales in 1929, Febvre and Bloch waged the same battle as Henri Berr against the mindset of specialization. Between the social sciences, they remarked, “the walls are so high that they often block the view [. . .] it is against these formidable schisms that we intend to take arms”.12 In his Combats pour l’histoire, Lucien Febvre again recalls that the goal is “constantly to negotiate new alliances between neighboring or distant disciplines; to beam the light from several heterogeneous sciences on the same subject: this is a primordial task, and of all those tasks that impose themselves on a history impatient with its confines and its partitions, surely the most pressing and also the most fertile”.13 Henri Berr, of course, was not unfamiliar with this definition of the role of history.14 History is never written once for all. It is the science of change. In the wake of the Second World War, Lucien Febvre felt the need to adjust the program of the Annales in light of the recent cataclysms. The journal changed its name to Annales, Économies, Societés, Civilisations. “The Annales are changing because everything around them is changing: people, things, in a word, the world”.15 With this concept of history, Leopold von Ranke’s16 famous dictum—that we must study the facts “as they really happened”—is rendered completely sterile, and the maxim of Charles Seignobos—“history is conducted with texts”—becomes suspect. Yet in this stance, Febvre was championing, not a subjective, partisan history, but a history that poses problems to the past “in light of mankind’s present needs”. Such a declaration serves to distance Febvre from scientific positivism. And there is no doubt that on this point, Henri Berr served him as a valuable guide. In all his writings, as we have seen, Berr promoted a science of history that was always a “work in progress”, one that was defined and renewed in a world in constant motion. For Berr, history was above all the science of life. To link science and life, to understand the human drama, was his chief concern, as we can appreciate in the title of his first book, Vie et science. Lucien Febvre viewed history no differently: “History is the science of man, let us never forget it. It is the science of perpetual change in human societies, of their perpetual and necessary readjustment to new conditions of material, political, moral, religious and intellectual existence. The science of that accord that is negotiated, of that harmony that emerges perpetually and spontaneously, in all ages, between the diverse and synchronic conditions of human existence: material conditions, technical conditions, and spiritual conditions. It is in this way that history rediscovers life. It is in this way that it ceases to be a slave driver [maîtresse de la servitude], and to pursue this dream—deadly in all senses of the word—of imposing on living beings the law supposedly dictated by the dead of yesteryear”.17 For his part, Marc Bloch, in his Apologie pour l’histoire, challenges the historian to “understand the past on the basis of the present” and “to understand the present

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in light of the past”.18 The past and the present illuminate on each other in a profound dialectical relationship: once again, Henri Berr’s lesson has been thoroughly taken on board. Just as decisive was the influence of Durkheimian sociology on the new history. Lucien Febvre recalls that fact to readers of the Annales in this colorful passage: “When at the age of 20, with mixed feelings of admiration and rebelliousness, we read the Année sociologique, one of the novelties that caught our attention was surely this perpetual effort to revise and adapt the classification frameworks which, volume by volume, were softening and shifting, and always for reasons which Durkheim’s followers would explain, discuss and put into clear formulas. A fine lesson in method, and one that they offered not only to their avowed followers: they had other disciples, whether they knew it or not, even among those who were put off by the intransigence of some of their assertions; for in those distant times they [the Durkheimians] were young, like us, and they were not always concerned to couch their claims with due modesty”.19 And in the Combats pour l’histoire, Lucien Febvre goes further: “The advocates of the Durkheimian School did not send history up in smoke. They took it over as its owners. Everything in the domain of the historical sciences that seemed to them susceptible of rational analysis they claimed as their own. History was the residue—nothing more than a simple chronological account of superficial, and usually random, events. In short, a story”.20 It is nonetheless true that the work of Durkheim and his disciples remained a model of scientific rigor in the eyes of Febvre and Bloch. “Durkheim has taught us to analyze in greater depth, to grasp problems more closely, to be less facile in our thinking”,21 writes Bloch. In a sense, the Annales could be regarded as the spiritual daughter of the Année sociologique. Explaining the objectives of his journal, Marc Bloch writes to Marcel Mauss: “What we want is not just a nice little scholarly journal, in the petty-minded sense of the word; we intend it to be serious, that goes without saying, free of all journalistic taints, with a very wide field (embracing) all of the past (including the primitive past), and all of the present, and taking the words ‘economic and social’ in their broadest meaning [. . .] We must tell you that we are counting on your collaboration, whenever you have the time, in the form of articles, notes and reviews, and lastly we want your permission to put your name on the list of contributors [. . .] We will do our best to ensure that the Annales will be of some service to these ‘human’ studies, for which the Année sociologique has already done so much”.22 Marcel Mauss (and Maurice Halbwachs) responded favorably to the invitation of Bloch and Febvre, and he sat on the editorial board of the Annales until the year of his death in 1945. There is no doubt, however, that the most important contribution of the Durkheimians to the Annales project came from François Simiand, although he never wrote or contributed anything directly to the journal. We will recall the acerbic attacks that the young Simiand leveled against the historians

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and their “tribe of idols”. He wanted historians to revamp their method, to revise their object of study. Of course, as Philippe Besnard notes, Simiand “had little chance of diplomatic success”23 on this score. And the author was himself aware of this, as his ideas were aimed essentially at the next generation of historians. At the end of his famous article in the 1903 Revue de synthèse historique, Simiand declares: “Yet I believe that in the very work of current historians, in the carefully studied choice and arrangement of their works, in their clear concern to renew their work by drawing on the progress achieved in neighboring disciplines, we can already see signs that they are gradually replacing their traditional practice with a new, positive, objective study of the human phenomenon capable of scientific explanation, and they are directing the core of their efforts to the conscious development of a social science. I hope that the new generation will see these trends through to conclusion”.24 As we know, the historians of the “new generation” gave a warm welcome to François Simiand’s demands. The editors of the Annales provided eloquent testimony to this fact when, in celebrating the journal’s 50th anniversary, they published Simiand’s text. They added a revealing editorial note: this text “is well known among all those who learned their trade before 1939. We publish it now for the benefit of young historians, to allow them to measure the road traveled over half a century, and to understand more thoroughly this dialogue of history and the social sciences, which is still the goal and the very raison d’être of our journal”.25 This is surely a strange fate for an author who had raised the hackles of historians at the beginning of the century; half a century later, Simiand’s article was in effect being hailed as a methodological manifesto for the new history. Marc Bloch was surely entitled to declare, in wonderment after reading Le Salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie, that Simiand was now part of the “heritage” of historians.26 François Simiand’s intellectual legacy is something of a paradox.27 Neglected by economists, forgotten by sociologists, Simiand’s main contribution was to the development of economic history. We are also aware of the intellectual debt that Ernest Labrousse owed to Simiand.28 Following in Simiand’s footsteps, he too became interested in long-term economic fluctuations over the course of history. “Economic life”, Labrousse writes, “in all its fields—prices, production, trade, income, consumption—is nothing but a succession of imbalances, alternating between upswings and downswings, between expansion and contraction, between [periods of] prosperity and recession, usually classified according to their duration”.29 François Simiand might have penned these words, and it was indeed he who paved the way to this concept of the economy as a sequence of alternating phases. Pierre Chaunu regarded Simiand as one of the forefathers of serial history.30 “All historians have been speaking the language of François Simiand for 50 years now”, he wrote in 1984.31 We could not ask for a better illustration of the impact that Simiand had on the renewal of historical science in France.

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Yet despite their discipline’s close relationship to sociology, theory was not front and center among the concerns of historians. Hence their mistrust of philosophy, from which they struggled to free themselves. What history had to do, above all, was to define its method. For historians, methodology boiled down to digging through archives and establishing the chronological order in which events unfolded. By contrast, sociologists, inspired by the model of the natural sciences, were from the beginning determined to find laws. This explains—at least in part—why they did not share the historians’ attachment to the temporal dimension. The laws they were discovering emboldened them, and they did not typically confine their study to the life of a single society over time. They wandered freely across the ages, drawing comparisons between different societies that did not always have the same cultural points of reference. Debate was complicated by a host of apparently irreconcilable contradictions. Scholars were obliged, then, to specify the place and the role of theory and of empiricism, of necessity and of chance, of the institutional and of the individual fact. Historians had never had to grapple with such questions, which were for the most part left to philosophers. The thorniest question, however, and the one that forced historians into a debate for which they often seemed ill-prepared, was this: could history be scientific? Denials came from two sides—first from the metaphysicians, and then from the champions of a subjective, personal history, personified by Jules Michelet. At the end of the 19th century, sociologists—and in particular Durkheim and his followers—insisted on raising questions, not only those that the historians thought settled, but some new ones as well. What was the relevance of long-term history? What were the preconditions for a historical psychology? How did memory and history differ from each other? The entire 19th century, and the early part of the 20th as well, was the scene of an ongoing effort to adapt history to a new intellectual landscape. It is well to remember this in making connections between the many authors and currents of thought that this book has tried to bring to life. Comte, Cournot, Renan and Taine were theorists of knowledge, first and foremost. The speed and the nature of the changes to which they were witness induced them to think about history and about the need to create a social science. They were pioneers, and they opened up many paths for research. We do not know whether Fustel de Coulanges read Comte or Cournot, but there is no doubt that he was imbued with the scientific spirit that marked his century. He was the first truly professional historian, eager to find a scientific method for his discipline, and he was also the first member of his intellectual community to discuss the challenges posed by the emergence of sociology. As we have seen, he was skeptical of the utility of that science, and yet his Cité antique remains an emblematic example of applied historical sociology. Louis Bourdeau was a fairly orthodox disciple of Auguste Comte, from whom he absorbed inspiration in his attacks on history and historians. Paul Lacombe drew upon Cournot and Taine to propose a synthesis between the individual

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and the institutional, thus paving the way for the work of Henri Berr. As to Charles Seignobos, the sworn enemy of sociology, he rejected philosophy and metaphysics in all their forms, and proposed a method that ended up exaggerating the importance of events and particular facts—indeed he was a prime illustration of the difficulties in sustaining dialogue between historians and sociologists. It is undeniable that history underwent profound transformations at the hands of these authors, beginning in the second half of the 19th century. The historical discipline, now so keen to define itself as a science, was torn between competing forms of positivism that were often in open contradiction to each other. By the end of the century, the walls between the disciplines, as we know them today, were beginning to rise. Dialogue became more strained, the exchanges more barbed. The historian, already well established institutionally, suddenly felt threatened by the pretensions of the upstart sociology. Sociologists, we must say, took a haughty view—they regarded history as a discipline without theoretical ambitions, incapable of going beyond mere description. Taking cognizance of these disputes at the dawn of the 20th century, Henri Berr dreamed of restoring unity to the family of the social sciences. But to the new generation of historians Berr, an admirer of Cournot’s work, seemed a figure from the past, and this view was forcibly driven home to him by Lucien Febvre. His ideas held less and less attraction for the Durkheimians, who were now focused mainly on their own pursuits. Synthesis had been rendered obsolete by the advance of the social sciences that were rapidly asserting themselves. And so began the era of specialization, which, within a few decades, would lead to the fragmentation of the social sciences.

Notes 1 Georges Gurvitch, Dialectique et sociologie (Paris: Flammarion, 1962), p. 299. 2 Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, Le Phénomène nouvelle histoire, stratégie et idéologie des nouveaux historiens (Paris: Économica, 1983). 3 Laurent Mucchielli, “Aux origines de la nouvelle histoire: l’évolution intellectuelle et la formation du champ des sciences sociales (1880–1930)”, Revue de synthèse (1, 1995), pp. 55–99. 4 Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, “Introduction”, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (1, 1929), p. 1. 5 See Fernand Dumont, L’Anthropologie en l’absence de l’homme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981), p. 323; Guillaume Blanc, “Une pratique sans questionnement”, Hypothèses 2011 (15/1, 2012), pp. 15–25. 6 André Burguière quoted. In François Dosse, L’Histoire en miettes (Paris: La Découverte, 1987), p. 39. 7 Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), p. 20. 8 Fernand Braudel considered Henri Berr as one of the founders of the Annales School—with Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. See Fernand Braudel, “Personal Testimony”, Journal of Modern History (44, 1972), pp. 448–467.

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Index

Amiot, Michel 147 Andler, Charles 103, 141 Arnélia, Lucien 27 Aron, Raymond 132, 140, 143, 146 Aurell, Jaume 8 Bellah, Robert N. 141 Bergson, Henri 25, 28 Bernard, Claude 130 Bernès, Marcel 120–1 Berr, Henri 2, 5–8, 18–9, 28, 32, 39, 47–52, 63–4, 67–98, 107, 114, 114, 141–3, 149–52, 155–6 Besnard, Philippe 140–4, 153, 156 Blanc, Guillaume 155 Bloch, Marc 45, 109, 135, 147, 149–53, 155–6 Borghetti, Marina Novella 146 Borlandi, Massimo 141, 143–4 Bosser, A. 88, 97 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 24 Boudon, Raymond 61, 159 Bouglé, Célestin 8, 18–9, 83, 86, 102–03, 109, 11–19, 125, 135, 141, 143–6 Bourdé, Guy 4–5, 8–9 Bourdeau, Louis 4–7, 31–2, 40–7, 63–4, 73–4, 154 Bourgin, Hubert 89, 97, 108, 118, 142, 144 Boutroux, Émile 22, 69–73, 75, 81, 84–5, 123 Braudel, Fernand 147, 149–52, 155–6 Bréhier, Émile 25, 29 Burguière, André 150, 155 Burkhardt, Jacob 2, 8 Carbonnel, Charles-Olivier 5, 8, 34, 62, 86, 98

Castelli Gattinara, Enrico 96 Charle, Christophe 156 Charlton, D.G. 9 Chaunu, Pierre, 119, 130, 146, 153, 156 Chimisso, Cristina 84 Clark, Terry N. 86 Cointet, Jean-Paul 24, 29 Collingwood, R.G. 8 Comte, Auguste 1, 4–6, 13–20, 24–7, 31–2, 41–4, 47–8, 51, 61, 70, 73, 76, 80, 108, 110, 142–3, 154 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 25 Cournot, Antoine Augustin 6, 13, 16–19, 24–9, 32, 48, 69, 74, 94, 111, 116, 143–4, 154–5 Coutau-Bégarie, Hervé 155 Craig, John 147 Croce, Benedetto 59, 66 Damalas, Basile V. 145 Darwin, Charles 16 Davy, Georges 95, 98, 142 Day, John 156 Debeir, Jean-Claude 156 Delorme, Suzanne 4 Descartes, René 24, 81 De Smedt, Charles 54, 65 Dholquois, Guy 29 Digeon, Claude 23, 29, 65 Dosse, François 144, 155 Du Fresne de Beaucourt, Gaston 4, 8 Durkheim, Émile 2, 7–8, 20, 32, 39, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62–3, 66, 70, 80, 82–4, 86, 89, 92, 95–6, 101–12, 114, 116–23, 125, 132, 135, 141–4, 149–50, 152, 152 Ehrard, Jean 8 Essertier, Daniel 64

176

Index

Faublée, Jacques 86 Fauconnet, Paul 102, 140–1 Fawtier, Robert 65 Febvre, Lucien 5, 8, 18, 28, 45, 86, 94–5, 98, 135, 147, 149–52, 155–6 Fénelon 24 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 76, 112 Fournier, Marcel 156 Fugler, Martin 96 Fustel de Coulanges 2–3, 5–6, 8, 31–40, 47, 53, 55, 58, 62–3 Gassendi, Pierre 77, 79–80, 85 Gemelli, Giuliana 86 Gérard, Alice 86 Gernet, Louis 95, 98 Giddings 120–1 Gillard, Lucien 144–5, 147, 156 Goblot, Edmond 88 Gore, Keith 29 Granet, Marcel 98 Guiraud, Paul 34, 62, 79 Guiraud, Victor 23, 29 Gurvitch, Georges 149, 155–6 Halbwachs, Maurice 88, 102, 116, 118–19, 135–44, 146–7, 152 Halphen, Louis 97 Hanotaux, Gabriel 39, 59, 61, 63, 66 Hauser, Henri 121–2, 144 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 25, 112 Heilbron, Johan 118, 142–4 Héran, François 62–3, 142 Herder, Johann Gottfried 47 Hours, Joseph 66 Hubert, Henri 102, 111, 140 Humphreys, Joshua 143 Iggers, Georg 8 Jehring von, Rudolf 112–13 Jullian, Camille 2, 4–5, 8, 34, 38, 53–4, 62–3, 65, 79 Keylor, Robert R. 65, 84 Labrousse, Ernest 130, 153, 156 Lacombe, Paul 4–7, 19, 22, 29, 32, 47–52, 64–5, 80–1, 109, 121, 154 Lalande, André 109 Lamprecht. Karl 88, 97, 143 Lamy, Jérôme 97

Langlois, Charles-Victor 3, 5, 8, 31–2, 52–4, 56, 58–9, 61–2, 65–6, 120–1, 140, 142 Lapie, Paul 102, 120, 141 Laplace, Pierre-Simon de 16 La Bruyère, Jean de 24 Lavisse, Ernest 4–5, 9, 53–4 Lazarus, Moritz 112–13 Lefebvre, Georges 39, 63, 66 Leibniz 16–7 Le Van-Lemesle, Lucette 156 Lepenies, Wolf 28 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 14, 26, 89 Lévy-Leboyer, Maurice 146 Liard, Louis 9 Logue, William 116, 144 Lombardo, Patrizia 28 Lukes, Steven 142 Mantoux, Paul 89, 91–2, 98, 143 Marjolin, Robert 132, 146 Marrou, Henri-Irénée 5, 9 Martin, Hervé 4–5, 8–9 Mauss, Marcel 94, 98, 101, 111, 140, 152, 156 May, Louis-Philippe 98 Michelet, Jules 2–3, 13, 18, 33, 60, 154 Monod, Gabriel 3–5, 8, 23, 29, 34–5, 39–40 Moreau, Pierre 8, 60, 66 Morel, Charles 39, 63 Mucchelli, Laurent 141, 155 Nedelkovitch, Ducham 85 Noiriel, Gérard 9, 144 Nordmann, Jean-Thomas 29 Noronha-DiVianna, Isabel 65 Palmade, Guy 8 Parodi, Dominique 102, 108, 140, 142 Pascal, Blaise 24 Paumen, Jean 27 Pécault, Félix 143 Pellissier, Georges 34, 62 Perrier, Edmond 93 Petit, Annie 29 Petitier, Paule 8 Pickering, Mary 27 Pierenne, Henri 58, 66 Pirou, Gaëtan 146 Poisson, Siméon Denis 16 Policar, Alain 143 Prévost-Paradol, Lucien-Anatole 22 Prost, Antoine 65, 140

Index Ravaisson, Félix 75, 85 Rebérioux, Madeleine 86 Renan, Ernest 4, 6, 13, 19–26, 28–9, 31, 75, 112, 154 Rhodes, Robert C. 86 Ribot, Théodule 59, 66, 79 Richard, Gaston 102, 141 Richard, Nathalie 28 Rosca, D.D. 29 Rosier, Michel 144–5, 147, 156 Ruyer, Raymond 27 Saint-Martin, Arnaud 97 Saint-Sernin, Bertrand 27 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de 9, 19, 143 Salvemini, Gaetano 107 Schöffler, Peter 64, 97 Sée, Henri 28 Seignobos, Charles 3–7, 32, 47, 50, 52–9, 61, 64–6, 91, 97, 108–09, 114–5, 120–5, 140, 142, 151, 155 Seys, Pascale 28 Siegel, Martin 38, 86, 98 Simmel, Georg 112–13, 117

177

Simiand, François 2, 6, 8, 84, 86, 91, 102, 108, 118–35, 143–7, 152–3, 156 Spencer, Herbert 117 Spinoza 25 Steiner, Philippe 141, 145, 147 Steinmetz, George 98 Taine, Hippolyte 4, 6, 13, 21–6, 28–9, 31, 39, 48, 50, 69, 74, 112, 116, 154 Tarde, Gabriel 18, 28, 32, 50–2, 92, 111, 117, 143 Tiryakian, Edward A. 141 Tocqueville, Alexis de 35, 60–1, 66, 117 Tourneur-Aumont J.M. 36, 39, 62–3 Valade, Bernard 146 Van Deth, Jean-Pierre 28 Vico, Giambattista 47, 73 Vogt, Paul W. 116, 143, 146 Walch, Jean 59, 66 Worms, René 120 Xénopol, A.-D. 64, 89–91, 97–8, 108, 142–3