History as a Kind of Writing: Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography 022642796X, 9780226427966

Table of contents :
Contents
A Note about Translations and Documentation
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: French History and Its Manuals
Chapter 1. Dispositions
Chapter 2. Situations
Chapter 3. Figures
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

History as a Kind of Writing

History as a Kind of Writing Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography

Philippe Carrard

The University of Chicago Press c h i c a g o & l o n d o n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America Translated and expanded from the original French edition published as Le passé mis en texte: Poétique de l’historiographie française contemporaine © 2013 by Armand Colin, Paris 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42796-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42801-7 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226428017.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carrard, Philippe, author. Title: History as a kind of writing : textual strategies in contemporary French historiography / Philippe Carrard. Other titles: Passé mis en texte. English Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | “Translated and expanded from the original French edition published as Le passé mis en texte: Poétique de l’historiographie française contemporaine” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016025837 | ISBN 9780226427966 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226428017 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Historiography—France. | History—Methodology. | Literature and history—France. | History—Philosophy. Classification: LCC DC36.9 .C37913 2017 | DDC 907.2/044—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025837 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/niso Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

A Note about Translations and Documentation vii Acknowledgments ix Preface xi

Introduction: French History and Its Manuals

1

C h a p t e r 1 Dispositions 15 Squabbles about Narrative Linear Narratives Writing the Event Synchronic Cross Sections Stage Narratives Theory of a Practice

15 20 24 31 44 51 C h a p t e r 2 Situations 55

Enunciations Perspectives The Discourse of the Absentee Readerships

56 71 86 101

C h a p t e r 3 Figures 117 Attestations References Computations Uncertainties Wordplay and Figures of Speech

117 127 135 149 167

Conclusion

186

Notes 197 References 203 Index 233

A Note about Translations and Documentation

Some of the works I have selected exist in published English translations. These translations, however, have often “edited” the French text to conform to the standards of Anglo-American scholarly writing. In the process they have toned down or erased some textual features I want to focus on. For the sake of homogeneity, I have therefore used the French editions throughout and have provided my own translations. I have included in parentheses a translation with the first mention of every title when it does not involve obvious English cognates. This translated title is in italics if it comes from a published English edition, in roman type if the translation is mine. I am using parenthetical documentation by author and date of publication referring to a reference list.

Acknowledgments

First of all I must thank the institutions that have enabled me to complete this project: Dartmouth College and the University of Lausanne (UNIL, Switzerland), specifically the Baker-Berry and Dorigny libraries, whose cooperation greatly aided my research. At Dartmouth I am particularly thankful to the Comparative Literature Program, which provided me with a home, and to the Humanities Resource Center, whose staff solved several computer problems. At the UNIL, I am grateful to the librarians who gave me faculty privileges, allowing me to borrow all the recent books in French historiography that were necessary to my project. On this side of the Atlantic, I am especially indebted to Hans Kellner, Dominick LaCapra, Allan Megill, and Gerald Prince, who have supported my work throughout the years, granting me the benefit of their knowledge in such areas as historiography, literary theory, and the philosophy of history. I must also thank the International Society for the Study of Narrative, whose conferences year after year gave me the opportunity to test my views on conventions of writing in nonfiction, particularly in historiography. Overseas, I am notably beholden to Bruno Auerbach, Laurent Avezou, Patrick Boucheron, Raphaëlle Branche, Christophe Charle, Quentin Deluermoz, François Hartog, Dominique Kalifa, Bertrand Muller, Antoine Prost, and Peter Schoettler, who gave me extensive information about the debates that now occupy the French historical community, told me about their own research, and helped with the constitution of my corpus. In Switzerland, I owe special thanks to my friends Mondher Kilani and Marianne Kilani-Schoch, who never failed to inquire about the state of my writing, as well as to my

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sisters Marie-Claude Dupraz and Christine Carrard and my brother-in-law Alfred Dupraz, who went along with my not so flexible schedule in the most accommodating manner. The University of Chicago Press has encouraged the project from the start. I wish to acknowledge my editor Douglas Mitchell and his assistant Kyle A. Wagner, for their accessibility and the quality of their professional advice; the two anonymous readers whose detailed reports saved me from a number of errors and helped me clarify several important points; and Alice M. Bennett for her meticulous copyediting. Once again, this book could not have been written without the complicity and support of my first and most demanding reader, Irene Kacandes. Many passages in the text retain the trace of her familiarity with linguistics, narrative theory, and discourse analysis, and most pages bear the imprint of her editorial assistance. Her emotional support was also most valuable during the rough moments that are part of any scholarly project.

Preface

Like most academic enterprises, this project originates in the perception of a void and the somewhat presumptuous assumption that there are ways of filling it. In studies conducted since the 1970s, historiographic works have at times been regarded as textual constructs and dissected with the tools of literary theory. Yet studies such as Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), Linda Orr’s Jules Michelet (1976), Lionel Gossman’s Between History and Literature (1981), and Stephen Bann’s The Clothing of Clio (1984) have mainly focused on historical production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; with a few exceptions, notably Axel Rüth’s Erzählte Geschichte (Narrated history) (2005) and chapters in Sande Cohen’s Historical Culture (1986), Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et récit (Time and Narrative) (1983), and Jacques Rancière’s Les mots de l’histoire (The Names of History) (1992), they have not troubled with contemporary research. Conversely, overviews of that research have hardly touched on issues of writing. In the French domain in particular, such surveys as Peter Burke’s The French Historical Revolution (1990), Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen’s French Historians: 1900–2000 (2010), Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, and Patrick Garcia’s Les courants historiques en France: XIXe–XXe siècles (Historical trends in France: 19th-20th centuries) (2007), Lutz Raphael’s Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre (The heirs of Bloch and Febvre) (1994), and Jean-François Sirinelli, Pascal Gauchy, and Claude Gauvard’s Les historiens français à l’oeuvre: 1995–2010 (French historians at work: 1995–2010) (2010), have mostly reviewed the topics that French historians are now investigating, together with problems of method and epis-

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temology. They have not, however, considered processes of textualization, have done so in passing, or have dismissed such an exercise as irrelevant. The table of contents of Historiographies (2010) edited by Delacroix, Dosse, Garcia, and Offenstadt is in this respect most revealing. Of the 120 entries of this encyclopedia, only two, “The writing of history” and “Narrative,” bear on what Ricoeur (2000, 169) calls the “representative stage” of the historical operation, that is, the stage when researchers write up the materials they have gathered.1 My purpose is to pick up where these two groups of studies leave off. More precisely, it is to continue the examination of history as a textual practice, while focusing on contemporary French historiography. By “historiography,” I mean here the “set of works produced by historians at a specific time” (Offenstadt 2011, 5), and by “contemporary” not the “period that extends from 1789 to today” (Noiriel 1999, 7) but more informally the “current period,” the one that started in 1945. Since I aim to provide an overview of the writing practices that have prevailed during this time, the corpus I plan to analyze is largely ecumenical. It includes studies produced by historians who belong to the Annales school and its continuation in the New History. But it also admits texts that testify to the reaction against the supposed hegemony of the Annales, beginning with instances of what Philippe Poirrier (2009) has identified as the “renewal of economic history,” the “rehabilitation of political history,” the “rise of cultural history,” and the “history of the present time.” The works I have selected should both represent these recent trends and illustrate features of writing. Some of them (e.g., Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou [1975], Braudel’s L’identité de la France [1986], Rousso’s Le syndrome de Vichy [1990]) are familiar and have been dissected by critics many times over, while others are less well known and have not drawn the same attention. I have included younger historians and especially historiennes (e.g., Christine Bard, Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Quentin Deluermoz, Antoine Lilti) whom specialists regard as having made significant contributions but whose research is less known in English-speaking countries because little of it has been translated. For the sake of coherence, I have restricted my sample to works written by professional historians, or at least by historians who conform to the rules of scholarly research and discourse. Although the texts that make up this sample have enough common features to be treated as a whole, I do not make “contemporary French historiography” into a stable and unified entity. Since no system functions without jolts, I also point to the conflicts, paradoxes, and inconsistencies that are part of the works I am considering. Literary theory distinguishes between criticism (the interpretation of indi-

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vidual texts) and poetics (the study of the rules, codes, and conventions that operate in a given set of texts). My purpose is to undertake a poetics, aimed in this instance at describing the discursive conventions that shape the texts in my corpus. I am all too aware that this kind of endeavor has been attacked over the past thirty years: in France by historians (e.g., Noiriel 2005, 116) who insist that their colleagues should worry about their “trade,” not about “writing”; in English-speaking countries by scholars who hold that the attention paid to processes of textualization in academic disciplines is dangerous (e.g., Palmer, Descent into Discourse [1990]) and even deadly (e.g., Windschuttle, The Killing of History [1994]). These charges seem unfounded. Obviously, “writing” is an essential component of the historian’s “trade,” and it can be productive to look closely at this step in the historiographic endeavor. To do so, moreover, does not imply ignoring the properly historical and political dimensions of the texts under consideration. To take just one example: from Roger Chartier (1998) to Marcel Gauchet (1988, 1999), several scholars have emphasized that one of the main changes in French historiography since the 1980s has been a reassessment of the role of the actors—a role that had remained largely unexamined at a time when historical research was mostly concerned with large social and economic phenomena. Poetics provides the means of describing how this reassessment was achieved, by posing certain questions: In this study, are events recounted from the actors’ perspective or from the historian’s? Do these actors have their own voice? And if they are quoted, how are their words recorded and made part of the text? The apparatus of poetics makes it possible to answer these questions, which certainly do not fall under the ahistorical formalism that Palmer and Windschuttle condemn. Indeed, such questions directly concern a specific moment, the reinstatement of agents and their textual staging in French historiography. Let me stress: a specific moment. The status of history as a branch of knowledge is nothing permanent and may itself be the object of historical inquiry. As for the relations between “history” and “literature,” as Lionel Gossman (1990), Claude Calame (2012), and others have argued, these have constantly changed from the ancient Greeks to the present day. I will look here at the current state of the dichotomy, which poses an opposition between “factual” and “fictional” discourses (Genette 1991; Lemon 1995), that is, between a discourse that reports “true” events and a discourse in which those events have been invented. This distinction remains central in Western culture. Heated controversies followed the revelation that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1996), a text offered as a testimony about the Holocaust, was actually a hoax, and simi-

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lar debates—to which I will return later—have been prompted by “historical novels” staging real characters, such as Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (The Messenger) (2009) and Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) (2006). Like all binaries, the distinction factual versus fictional may of course be questioned and deconstructed. Hayden White, in Metahistory, shows that the plots in some classics of European historiography in the nineteenth century have literary equivalents—those identified by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). But we can also confirm the legitimacy of the demarcation by using criteria that are not only epistemological but textual, that is, by moving the conversation onto the turf of the very postmodern theorists who deny any difference between fiction and history. To begin with the most obvious markers, almost all the works in my corpus are explicitly designated as “historical” by what poeticians (Genette 1987) call their “paratexts,” more precisely their “peritext”: their titles, their subtitles, the text on their back covers, and especially the series in which they are published. Indeed, such series as L’univers historique, Bibliothèque des histoires, Points histoire, and L’épreuve de l’histoire immediately situate the books on whose jackets they appear on the map of discourses, establishing a reading contract and programming a specific reception. Admittedly, readers can always “read as,” for example, can construe a book published under the label “history” as a piece of fiction; White does precisely this when he finds that Michelet’s Histoire de la Révolution française (1939) has the structure of a romance. To “read as,” however, is not synonymous with to “take for.” While readers are free to treat Histoire de la Révolution française as a novel, they cannot take it for a novel: in the case of Michelet’s work, its publication in Folio histoire and similar scholarly series has assigned a genre to the book, and in so doing has supplied precise instructions about the way it should be received. Insofar as they account for the mediation of language and posit that historiographic texts are constructed, the procedures I use might be associated with the “linguistic turn.” Yet viewing history “as a kind of writing,” as Richard Rorty (1982) viewed philosophy “as a kind of writing” in an essay on Derrida, does not imply what Dominick LaCapra (2009, 193) calls “literal pantextualism,” that is, the assumption that “everything is text” and that historiography has no referential dimension. While historians do not find, ready made in the archives, the form they are about to give to their text, they do assume that documents point to empirical facts. The “truth claim” (Ricoeur 1983, 135) that follows from this assumption must be taken seriously. For one thing, it plays an important role in the area of formal choices; it involves conventions of writing, conventions that differ from those in fictional works and

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that shape the reception of the text. It goes without saying, moreover, that if historiography can be examined in its textuality, this approach can in turn be considered in its historicity.2 Although I do not have the competence to undertake it myself, I would welcome an inquiry that would account for the current interest in writing history, situate this interest in its intellectual context, and make it part of a plot.3 My study unfolds in three stages. After an introduction that deals with manuals, chapter 1 takes up problems of macrotextual organization, asking whether historiographic texts always have a narrative form and, if not, what their structures might be. Chapter 2 bears on enunciation and perspective, that is, on the identity, role, and position of the speaker in historiographic texts, as well as on the kind of readers those texts are targeting. Chapter 3 treats questions of rhetoric and stylistics, with their political and epistemological implications; it considers the strategies historians employ to warrant the veracity of their accounts, to point to those accounts’ limits, and to make the past more accessible to readers. A conclusion returns to the distinction between factual and fictional discourses, reviewing a few texts published in the 2000s in which French historians question the difference between the genres, play at their borderline, and attempt to shake up what they perceive as the overly rigid protocols of writing in force in their profession. History as a Kind of Writing revisits, based on a much enlarged corpus, some of the themes I developed in Poetics of the New History. As its title indicates, the latter work was restricted to the analysis of the production of a school that, seen from a distance, was not as hegemonic as both its foes and its supporters claimed and that must now share the stage with recent trends (rehabilitation of political history, etc.) analyzed by Poirrier and others. My aim, however, is not to decide on the debates this evolution has sparked: Has the New History, as Dosse (1987) puts it, really “gone to pieces”? Have its members taken the “critical turn” they had theorized in a 1988 issue of the journal Annales? Is scholarly history threatened by “memory,” understood as the demand for recognition coming from the numerous groups that now reclaim an “identity”? And has history broken out of the “crisis” that Noiriel had described in 1996 and reaffirmed in 2005? These questions have been exhaustively addressed in the anthologies mentioned above as well as in the thematic issues that periodicals such as Le Débat have devoted to the quandaries of history. I will therefore not return to these problems—or, rather, I will do so only when they can be reformulated through an analysis of the discursive strategies at work in the texts under consideration. What I will be asking is to what extent the “crises,” the “turns,” and the “paradigm shifts” that history

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has supposedly undergone since the 1980s have come with parallel revisions in the area of writing, and what effects, if any, those revisions might have had on the politics and epistemology of the discipline. The scholarly apparatus I draw on is heterogeneous. It includes, besides the anthologies mentioned above, studies by theorists of literature (e.g., Barthes, Cohn, Genette, Phelan, Prince), philosophers of history (e.g., Ankersmit, Certeau, Danto, Ricoeur, Tucker), linguists (e.g., Benveniste, Ducrot, Lakoff, Sperber, Wilson), and historians who have reflected on their trade’s textual practices (e.g., Berkhofer, Chartier, Hexter, Jablonka, Noiriel, Prost). Intent on avoiding circularity, however, I will at times question this apparatus. I will thus ask, among other things, to what extent the corpus selected makes it necessary to revisit current views of historiography, beginning with the idea that historiographic texts always have a narrative structure, that they constitute the (admittedly unattainable) pole of objectivity, and that they are consistently monologic. In this respect, from its own corner, my book aims to participate in the conversation about the current state of the human sciences, at a time when the status of those sciences is being questioned by the different “posts” (postmodernism, poststructuralism, postfeminism, etc.) that have occupied the intellectual scene since the end of the twentieth century.

Introduction

French History and Its Manuals

Before looking at the ways contemporary French historians write up their materials, it might be useful to go over the instructions they have received during their apprenticeship. Concretely, it might be productive to examine the manuals available to them at the beginning of their careers, setting the rules for conducting and then textualizing their research in the form of articles, books, or other types of writing. Admittedly, historians who have secured a place in the profession do not (or no longer) need to strictly follow the guidelines they had to abide by when they were working on their dissertations; they may even flout them, as some members of the corporation seem to enjoy doing. It remains that didactic works are worth investigating. Indeed, their presence does not point only to the students’ assumed lack of technical competence, which should be remedied as early as possible. More deeply, it tells about an ingrained disciplinary inquietude: anxious to mark out their territory, historians feel they must inform prospective colleagues about the conventions of research and writing they will have to obey. In this regard manuals do more than provide directions; they inscribe the way the historical community perceives itself, as well as the image of its exigencies that it intends to bestow on the next generation. I will thus begin by reviewing some of the pedagogical handbooks that have been available to the French historical community, going from a classic of the late nineteenth century to a few texts published in the early 2000s.

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Introduction

The Method and Its Discourse The constitution in nineteenth-century France of a body of professional historians, the birth of a “scientific” history, and the promotion of that history to the rank of academic discipline have been well documented in studies such as William Keylor’s (1975), Pierre-Olivier Carbonell’s (1976), and Pim den Boer’s (1998). The historical “school” that emerged at the time was long called positivist, a label still found in the encyclopedia La Nouvelle Histoire (1978), edited by Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel, and in the Dictionnaire des sciences historiques (1986), edited by André Burguière. That school has now been renamed methodist, with scholars such as Patrick Garcia (2007) and Philippe Poirrier (2009) arguing that its members’ main concern had been to establish a “method” and suggesting that “positivism” be reserved for the theory developed by Auguste Comte and represented in history by Louis Bourdeau’s Histoire et historiens: Essai critique sur l’histoire considérée comme une science positive (1888). Garcia and Poirrier also stress that while over the past half century French history has explored new domains and identified new sources, it has largely remained committed to the research model that the methodists had elaborated. Adopting the trademark “method school,” I will briefly examine that model as it is exposed in the book that is still regarded as the school’s main pedagogical statement: Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s 1898 Introduction aux études historiques. After outlining the points that deal with research procedures, I will look more closely at the section—largely ignored in the studies that treat the method school—that is of prime interest for my purpose: the few pages that Langlois and Seignobos devote to “exposition,” that is, to the problems historians have to solve in textualizing their data. In their preface, Langlois and Seignobos (1992, 24) present the Introduction as a “summary sketch” designed for first-year Sorbonne students and professional historians eager to reflect on their trade, as well as for a general audience.1 The book, in fact, is more ambitious, as it synthesizes theoretical statements and practical directions given during the last part of the nineteenth century, by and large since the founding in 1876 of the journal Revue Historique. Its goal is to make history into a true science, distinct both from philosophical speculations about the course of mankind and from literary accounts of the past such as those of Thierry and Michelet. Divided into three parts, the Introduction describes the successive steps historians must follow to attain “scientific truth” (1992, 18). Part 1 lists the types of “prior knowledge” necessary in undertaking any

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historical investigation. Apprentice researchers must first familiarize themselves with the different ways of gathering documents: of consulting lists and inventories (“heuristics”). They must also learn the fundamentals of the “auxiliary sciences,” beginning with epigraphy, paleography, philology, and archaeology. This technical apprenticeship will replace the study of literary and philosophical models that in the past was regarded as indispensable. Part 2 enumerates the “analytical operations” historians must perform upon the documents they have identified. The first of these operations is “external criticism.” While processing their data, historians must (re)establish the original text (criticism of restoration); determine where, when, and by whom the text was written (criticism of origin); and classify this text according to a preset system, whether alphabetical, chronological, or some other. They will then move on to the “internal criticism” of the document (“hermeneutics”), an approach that consists of two stages: a “positive” interpretation of what the author meant followed by a “negative” interpretation of the author’s statements and an analysis of the circumstances in which the document was produced. Checking the validity of the documents, and then comparing them with one another, will allow scholars to establish the “individual facts” in which their inquiry will be grounded. Part 3 describes the “synthetic operations” that lead from criticism of the sources to writing of the text. The individual facts identified during the “analysis” stage must first be grouped. Langlois and Seignobos propose classifying facts in six categories based on their nature: material conditions, intellectual habits, material customs, economic customs, social institutions, and public institutions. Because the purpose of history is to study change, the central question in any investigation will be, Given the specific fact X, what is the evolution of that fact? While tracing this evolution, historians must at times resort to “constructive reasoning” (207) in order to link pieces together or to replace missing pieces. Furthermore, given the impossibility of communicating a “complete knowledge” (215), they must occasionally elaborate “general formulas” (216) whose function is to account for repeated facts. (Note that Langlois and Seignobos, as if anticipating the criticism the Annales would submit them to, admit that history is at least in part a “construction,” and that its task is to account for repeated facts as well as for individual ones.) It is in chapter 5 of part 3, titled “Exposition,” that Langlois and Seignobos take up textualization.2 Looking for a “really rational type of exposition” (239), they first analyze and evaluate the forms historical works have taken over the centuries. Distinguishing five moments in this evolution, they tell a success story that is typical of the scientific optimism of the Third Republic,

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an optimism found in other texts written at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Gabriel Monod’s 1876 editorial in the first issue of the Revue Historique, emphatically celebrating the “advances” of the discipline under the title “Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVIe siècle.” In antiquity, according to the plot designed in the Introduction, history was conceived as a narrative of memorable events and a collection of “good” examples of preparing for civic life. Its framework was the life of great men and the development of a community. It was basically a literary genre, and the authors were hardly concerned with evidence. In the Renaissance, historians imitated the ancients, but they also started, influenced by the scholars of the Middle Ages, to include a documentary apparatus in their texts. In the eighteenth century the philosophers regarded history as the study of both events and customs, and they sought to trace the evolution not just of political entities, but also of the arts, the sciences, and industry. During that same period, German scholars invented the “manual,” a book in which the facts are presented in a “scientific,” “objective and simple” fashion (242). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, romanticism brought about a relapse into “literary” history and its preoccupation with “effects” (242): the use of local color, the emotional narration of events, and the vain attempt to resurrect the totality of the past. Yet these reactionary tendencies were soon overcome, and scholars in the second part of the century were able to elaborate the truly “scientific forms” (244) that would make history into a legitimate academic discipline. Langlois and Seignobos recommend two of these forms, as they recommend a parallel division of labor. Historians at the beginning of their careers should undertake “monographs”—studies bearing on “a specific point,” such as “a part of the life or the life of an individual,” “an event or a set of events within close dates,” and so on (245). Monographs obey three basic rules: any fact originating in a document must come with a reference to that document and an assessment of its value; chronological order must be strictly followed; and the title must be explicit, to aid in library classification and bibliographical research. Langlois and Seignobos downplay a fourth rule—that monographs should exhaust their subject—because they do not consider this principle as important as the first three. According to them, it is legitimate to do “provisional work with the available evidence” as long as readers are informed “of the documents on which the work is based” (246). Relying on the research done by their younger colleagues, experienced historians will take on “general works,” whether “manuals” (collections of known facts methodically arranged) or “general histories” (narratives of events that

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have shaped the fate of nations) (247–50). These general works are submitted to the same exigencies as monographs: they must refer to the sources in which they are grounded and include a scholarly apparatus. Because of their size, they also must be divided into independent sections, the most common division being “state” and “period.” Finally, since no one scholar can handle so much material, general works will usually be collective undertakings, with specialists in charge of each section. Langlois and Seignobos emphasize that manuals and general histories target different audiences: manuals, “people in the trade”; general works, the “public” (250). Yet they see “no theoretical reason” why the two types of studies should not be written “in the same spirit” (250). They want the largest number of readers to have access to the best kind of scholarship, an ideal that of course agrees with the goals of the Third Republic in the area of education. The description of the basic forms that historical research may take comes in the Introduction, with specific instructions about writing itself. In the domain “organization of the data,” Langlois and Seignobos recommend observing chronological order. Indeed, such order is the most natural, the most logical, the one “in which we are sure that the facts occurred” (246). Moving away from it so as to produce tension and suspense testifies to “literary ambitions” (243), to a drive to attract readers by emulating novelistic strategies—a quest the authors condemn most emphatically. While the Introduction does not further theorize the concept of “chronological narrative,” advocating this mode of textual arrangement clearly has epistemological implications. Explaining a fact, for Langlois and Seignobos, involves linking that fact with preceding facts, describing a sequence in which facts follow one another in a necessary manner. In other words, for historians “to explain” does not mean to look for “deep,” “general” causes, as François Simiand (1903) and the sociologists will later argue in their debate with the methodists. According to Seignobos (1934, 37, first published in 1907 in response to Simiand), history does not have “laws,” and it requires a “specific explanation for each specific case.” At the level of enunciation, the Introduction assigns to historians the fundamental duty of being “objective.” True, scholars cannot eliminate the subjectivity inherent in selecting the evidence and arranging the data—a point Seignobos will often return to in his exchanges with sociologists. But they must refrain from taking sides and expressly communicating personal opinions: what literary theory calls author’s “intrusions” or “interventions.” Langlois and Seignobos (246–47) are especially scornful of younger historians who seek to “crown” their monographs with conclusions that are “subjective,

6

Introduction

ambitious, and vague” when they should merely have assessed “what they had achieved and what remained to be done.” Yet Langlois and Seignobos also scold the experienced historians who, in general works, feel compelled to add “personal, patriotic, moral, or metaphysical considerations” (252). Such encroachments, they insist, constitute illegitimate attempts to influence the audience, and they can only significantly lower the scientific level of the work. Finally, the Introduction proposes a stylistics—a set of rules bearing on word choices and levels of diction. That stylistics advocates what AngloAmerican composition teachers call the “plain style”: a language “unadorned with figures, unmoved by emotions, unclouded by images, and universalistic in its conceptual or mathematical mode,” as Dominick LaCapra (1985, 42) defines it with obvious irony. Promoting “sobriety” (246), Langlois and Seignobos condemn “rhetoric” (248) and “literary ornaments” (249), which they deem incompatible with the rigor of scientific writing. The tropes of figurative language are of course among the accused, because they produce a deformed view of what the world “is really like.” Langlois and Seignobos are especially hostile to “organic metaphors”: the figure in which an abstract entity is compared to a living being, as in “the life of words,” “the death of dogmas,” or “the growth of myths” (233). They consider these connections illegitimate in that inanimate objects cannot be described in terms of animate ones in a discourse whose goal is to account for the “real.” Seignobos (1934, 8, first published in 1920) will similarly object to the way sociologists treat groups (e.g., the proletariat), institutions (e.g., the monarchy), and systems (e.g., capitalism) as having lives of their own, and even to their use of the expression “social structure.” The term structure, he maintains, belongs to the vocabulary of anatomy and zoology, and it becomes metaphorical—thus inappropriate—when used to designate not real bodies, but social facts that are “external to the individual human being.” Simiand (1903, 9), in a previous discussion of those same issues, had spoken of “nominalist jokes,” claiming that scholars are entitled to draw on “abstraction” if they want their discipline to become a “science.” These skirmishes mark the beginning of a debate that is far from over: historians and sociologists are still discussing the nature of their respective fields; the makeup of a “structure” (actual entity or trope?) was questioned again in the 1960s, and metaphors—as we will see in chapter 3—are far from disappearing from historiographic discourse. Langlois and Seignobos (252), for that matter, conclude the chapter they devote to “exposition” by stating that historians “must always write well and never wear Sunday clothes,” an assertion that cannot escape the notice of both deconstructionists and poeticians. Indeed, this advice is given in the very language it proscribes, contributing a

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prime example of a statement that “deconstructs itself ” while showing—on a more modest scale—how difficult it is to avoid figurative language in scholarly discourse. The criticisms that members of the Annales have leveled at “positivist history” are well known and do not have to be rehearsed here. On the theoretical level, Febvre (1992, 7, first published in 1933) has blamed the methodists for viewing facts as “found” and not as “invented” with the help of “hypotheses and conjectures”; Chartier (1978, 461) has charged them with reducing historical documents to “written texts,” thus excluding from “history” much valuable evidence; and Dumoulin (1986, 536) has taken them to task for their “epistemological naivety,” specifically, for adopting an “inductive approach, grounded in absolute empiricism.” Commentators (e.g., Bourdé and Martin 1983, 150–68; Garcia 2007, 170–72) have also emphasized that the methodists’ practice did not always agree with their theory, especially in matters of objectivity. Focusing on the Histoire de France edited by Ernest Lavisse from 1911 to 1922, they have had no trouble demonstrating that this collective endeavor was laden with ideology: the contributors posited the existence of “France” as a nation-state dating back to Gaul, constructed a teleological narrative leading to the Revolution, and unabashedly celebrated republicanism as the best political regime. Similarly, scrutinizing school manuals written according to the same principles as Lavisse’s Histoire de France, specialists in discourse analysis (e.g., Maingueneau 1979) have easily exposed the value system such manuals put forth, beginning with their nationalism, racism, and sexism. The procedures of research implemented by the method school have aged more gracefully than its politics. Whatever trend contemporary French historians might belong to, they all acknowledge their debt to the model of investigation codified at the end of the nineteenth century by Langlois, Seignobos, and their followers. Le Goff (1978a, 213), for example, writes that while the Annalistes have extended the “range” of what may count as document, for the assessment of their material they still depend on the “technical acquisitions” of the method school. An unlikely admirer, Michel de Certeau (1975, 75) sees in the Introduction “the great book of a moment in historiography,” adding that it “surprisingly” can still be read “with interest” and is “admirable in its precision.” As for Noiriel (1998, 31–64), in a long rehabilitation of the “event history” (histoire événementielle) rejected by the Annales, he shows that the “scientific” (36) study of the French Revolution had been possible only when scholars such as Aulard and Mathiez, freeing themselves from the “witnesses’ testimony” (36), had based their investigation on the analysis of documents. Foreign philosophers of history have also taken part in this post-

8

Introduction

humous reinstatement. Aviezer Tucker (2004, 4), for instance, has argued that while Langlois and Seignobos “assumed an outdated philosophy of science that was inductive and empiricist,” this lack “should not obscure the fact that they described correctly how historians obtain knowledge.” In other words, according to Tucker, “if we broaden Langlois and Seignobos’s concept of evidence to include nondocumentary and material evidence, their analysis of historiographic practice as distinct from their philosophic self-consciousness is still correct.” Tucker adds that such confusion is frequent, with historians rationalizing “what they perceive as their own practice,” or adopting “what they perceive as the prevailing epistemic paradigm as a model,” without always being aware of the discrepancies between the two.

The Method’s Legacies Recognizing what they owe to the method school, have French historians supplemented and bettered the model proposed in the Introduction? Have they produced a manual comparable to Langlois and Seignobos’s that introduces apprentice historians to updated methods of research while providing them with some advice about writing? The answer seems to be no. The pedagogical information available to beginners is scattered over several textbooks, and none seems to have acquired the institutional authority that Langlois and Seignobos enjoyed. Before briefly reviewing these manuals, I must point out that the model offered in the Introduction, together with the very format of the work, has perpetuated itself for several years. Paul Harsin’s Comment on écrit l’histoire (How we write history) (1933), for example, faithfully follows the outline that Langlois and Seignobos used. The only difference lies in Harsin’s dropping the chapter titled “Exposition,” an exclusion that strangely belies the promise implied in the book’s title. Louis Halphen’s Introduction à l’histoire (1946) observes the model with similar respect, and it restores the section on writing. As Langlois and Seignobos did, Halphen enjoins historians to order the facts in a chronological narrative, which for him reflects “the movement of history itself ” (50). Equally concerned about correspondence to the “real” in matters of language, he also warns against anachronisms, in which he sees the “futile attempt to bring the facts under consideration closer to the readers” by resorting to such terms as “trade unionism,” “clericalism,” “meeting,” and “lockout” (58). (Here Halphen is an early participant in the polemics about “franglais,” which I will return to in chapter 3.) Both in its epistemology and in its stylistics, Halphen’s book thereby testifies to the continuation of the

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methodist model well into the 1940s. It should therefore come as no surprise that Febvre (1992, 114, first published in 1947, took this new Introduction to task in his review, denouncing it as representative of “a form of history that is not ours,” that is, of a research model that “we Annalistes” have now made obsolete. As for Marc Bloch’s Apologie pour l’histoire, ou Le métier d’historien (The Historian’s Craft), written in the early 1940s, it marks, as Noiriel (2005, 104) has argued, the “completion of the paradigm of ‘normal history’ ” rather than the “starting point of a ‘new history.’ ” Most of the treatise, for Noiriel, consists of presenting a “historical method” that is close to the model offered in the Introduction, Bloch’s major contribution residing in his emphasis on the role of the question that determines the selection of the evidence, hence of the facts that will ground the inquiry. Bloch (1993, 228), however, does not dwell on the ways those facts should be written up, only stressing that every “science” has its own “expressive means” and that a great “subtlety of language” is needed to treat the “human phenomena” that history as a discipline must deal with. While neither the Annales school nor the New History has produced a manual that could fill the Introduction’s role, this does not mean that textbooks written for graduate students and beginning historians have disappeared. They in fact have multiplied, falling into two main categories: general presentations that trace the history of the discipline, survey its current trends, or both, and practical guides that direct apprentices to the correct ways of doing research and then of textualizing their data. The first category includes manuals such as Françoise Hildesheimer’s Introduction à l’historiographie (1994), Jean-Maurice Bizière and Pierre Vayssière’s Histoire et historiens (1995), Jean Leduc, Violette Marcos-Alvarez, and Jacqueline Le Pellec’s Construire l’histoire (1998), Philippe Tétard’s Petite histoire des historiens (1998), François Cadiou et al.’s Comment se fait l’histoire (How history is written) (2005), Marie-Paule Caire-Jabinet’s Introduction à l’historiographie (2008), Philippe Poirrier’s Introduction à l’historiographie (2009), Antoine Prost’s Douze leçons sur l’histoire (2010), François Dosse’s L’histoire (2010b), and Nicolas Offenstadt’s L’historiographie (2011). These books assign variable importance to writing, ignoring the issue entirely or devoting only a few pages to it (Bizière and Vayssière, 237–38; Tétard, 86–87; Offenstadt, 55–58, 109–10). Only Prost and Leduc commit whole sections to problems of textualization (chapters 11 and 12 in Douze leçons sur l’histoire, part 4 in Construire l’histoire), reviewing such topics as textual arrangement, point of view, and insertion of references. I will return later to Leduc’s and especially to Prost’s contributions.

10

Introduction

The second category, practical guides to writing, comprises such works as Roland Mousnier and Denis Huisman’s L’art de la dissertation historique (The art of the historical essay) (1965), Bernadette Plot’s Écrire une thèse ou un mémoire en sciences humaines (How to write a dissertation or a master’s thesis in the human sciences) (1986), Pierre Saly et al.’s La dissertation en histoire (The essay in history) (1994), Débuter dans la recherche historique (Historical research for beginners) (1986, 1990, 1996), a manual published by the Sorbonne that had several successive editions, and Vincent Milliot and Olivier Wieviorka’s Méthode pour le commentaire et la dissertation historique (Method for historical commentaries and essays) (2011). Guy Thuillier’s and Jean Tulard’s Le métier d’historien (The historian’s craft) (1991), La méthode en histoire (1986), and La morale de l’historien (1995) must be placed in the same category. Indeed, the authors do not just treat the subject announced in the title. They also set norms, defining the rules that according to them should be operative in any piece of historiographic writing. In the area of textual organization, these manuals distinguish—French terminology being different from the Anglo-American—between the dissertation (essay), the mémoire (master’s thesis), and the thèse (dissertation). According to Mousnier and Huisman (1965, 75), most subjects taken up in dissertations can be treated following the scheme “thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” which they suggest renaming “explanation-discussion-evaluation.” Milliot and Wieviorka (2011, 103–5) also say that essays “obligatorily” include three parts, which they call—not being overly concerned with originality—“introduction,” “development,” and “conclusion.” Plot (1986, 163–221), focusing on mémoire and thèse, devotes a long chapter to problems of “construction,” but she is less interested in ways of arranging the material than in textual coherence: how to launch the work, advance it, and chart it in such a way that readers can always process the text as conveniently as possible. The most extensive analysis of organization of the data is found in Saly and Scott’s chapter “Choisir et bâtir un plan” (To select and build an outline). Outlines, according to them, may be “chronological,” “thematic,” or “dialectic,” depending on whether the author wants to trace an evolution, analyze the different aspects of a conjuncture, or expose contradictions.3 Whatever category they may belong to, these outlines preferably should include three parts, for this structure is the most “flexible,” the best suited to account for the “richness and complexity of the past” (1994, 72). Thus Saly and Scott remain within the safe ternary framework. Their model is nevertheless the most productive, since the distinction between chronological, thematic, and dialectic arrangements makes it possible to pose—however indirectly—one of the central questions that contemporary

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historiography is facing: Does the historian’s main task consist of recounting? Of describing? Of analyzing? And are these activities incompatible? Such questions, of course, concern not just beginning scholars but the whole historical community, as attested by the current debates about the structure (necessarily narrative?) of historiographic texts. I will return to these issues in chapter 1. Manuals are most restrictive in the area of enunciation. True, some of them (e.g., Valéry 1990, 208–9) admit that “historical narrative” is a “pseudoobjective genre that has been vigorously denounced by linguists” and enjoin students to familiarize themselves as early as they can with “what Barthes and Benveniste were thinking about our traditions of writing.” When they supply concrete instructions, however, manuals dispense with Barthes and Benveniste, proceeding as if it were possible to eliminate all traces of the enunciation and of the subject who underlies it. Both Mousnier and Huisman (1965, 81) and Saly et al. (1994, 100) invoke Blaise Pascal’s celebrated “le moi est haïssable” (the use of the first person is despicable) to tell apprentice scholars that employing the first person would be presumptuous: history aims at “objective knowledge” and distrusts “arbitrariness and subjectivity” (Saly et al. 1994, 100), and its practitioners should be advised not to “impose their personality” on the materials they are handling (Mousnier and Huisman, 1965, 80). Plot offers an analysis that is both more detailed and less simplistic. Devoting a whole chapter to “personal discourse in writing,” she seeks to locate the “threshold of tolerance to subjectivity” in scholarly texts (1986, 251). “Expressive traces of subjectivity,” according to her, are acceptable where authors introduce their project or assess their data (252), but they should not be “polemical” or “ironic” utterances (257). Indeed, such utterances are no longer situated on the “true/false” axis of “honest” search for knowledge; they fall along the “good/bad” axis, and their authors commit the “cardinal sin”—for scholars in the human sciences—of “investing themselves ideologically” in the topic they are investigating (257). Manuals are just as strict on the subject of diction. Providing little positive advice, they call above all for “clarity” (Mousnier and Huisman 1965, 20; Thuillier and Tulard 1995, 23), with which they associate such qualities as “precision,” “elegance,” and “simplicity” (Le Goff 1986, 11). But what, exactly, is “clarity”? Most often, manuals define it by what it is not. Drawing up a long list of negative imperatives, Thuillier and Tulard (1986, 103) indict the eagerness to produce “effects,” more particularly, “the words ending in –ion,” “the adjectives used as nouns,” and—turning as Langlois and Seignobos did to the very device they denounce—the “fake diamonds” of literary style. They also

12

Introduction

(1995, 24–25) take on “the jargon borrowed from the human sciences (sociology, political science),” as well as “the abstract style modeled after Foucault, Althusser, and Poulantzas”; “not everybody,” they insist, “can imitate Foucault,” and historians should abstain from using a vocabulary that infringes on their profession’s “duty to clarity.” In a predictable manner, manuals also condemn anachronisms as “the worst epistemological mistake” (Saly et al. 1994, 92), and they strongly denounce figurative language. Plot again is the most nuanced in her analysis, as she distinguishes between “metaphor” and “simile.” Metaphor, she explains (1986, 20), substitutes the vehicle for the tenor, making “the link to the real” “ambiguous”; it must thus be eliminated from a type of communication that strives to describe the world as transparently as possible. Simile, on the other hand, presents “explicitly” both tenor and vehicle, and scholars may profitably use it to introduce a thesis or clarify a point. Plot (1994, 40) gives as an example of “perfect match” Saussure’s comparison of a linguistic system to a chess game, a felicitous simile in which she sees one of the reasons for the later “fortune” of Saussure’s theories. Taken as a whole, therefore, current manuals of initiation to historical research do not mark a significant advance over Langlois and Seignobos’s Introduction in the area of writing advice. This resistance to change is especially noticeable in the sections they devote to enunciation and diction. Indeed, their authors seem not to be aware of today’s vulgate in linguistics and epistemology, or they deem it pointless to make space for those subjects in guides targeted at beginning scholars. It is surprising, in this respect, to see academics of the stature of Mousnier (Sorbonne), Thuillier (Collège de France), and Le Goff (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) recommend the adoption of words that “fit the real” without accounting for the difference between signified and referent; assume that historians can easily neutralize their subjectivity; take it for granted that figurative language can readily be eliminated from learned discourse; proscribe “jargon” without asking when, and to what extent, scholars may draw on specialized language; and indict anachronism without seeking to determine how historians are supposed to articulate the relation between the present (that they live in) and the past (that they have endeavored to investigate). Plot, as well as Saly and Scott, is conscious of these problems of writing and their epistemological implications, and both pose them lucidly. But they back off from drawing the obvious conclusions: that apprentice scholars in the humanities and the social sciences need instructions that better account for current knowledge in the areas of language, cognition, and epistemology. Indeed, Plot, Saly, and Scott eventually retreat to the safe ground of the doxa (“eliminate the first person,”

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“be wary of figurative language”), thus prolonging the existence of rules they must know cannot be followed. Though history in France is no longer the fashionable discipline it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Annales metamorphosed into the thriving New History, it nevertheless has remained a most active field in the early 2000s. Publishers have continued bringing out historical studies in such series as Bibliothèque des histoires (Gallimard), L’univers historique (Le Seuil), Essais historiques (Tallandier), Histoires (Presses Universitaires de France) and Cursus-histoire (Armand Colin), some of them—as the statistics provided in chapter 3 will show—reaching if not best seller status, at least very acceptable sales figures. Young scholars have also sought to carry out the program formulated in the mid-1970s in the three volumes of Faire de l’histoire, taking up—to use the titles of these volumes—“new problems,” “new approaches,” and “new objects.” Yet the image of the discipline that emerges from the manuals I have surveyed is surprisingly dull, and its practitioners hardly seem more inspiring. Indeed, the “historians of the manuals” need have neither talent nor creativity. Their qualities are rather on the order of laborious industriousness, as attested by the list Frédéric Ogé (1986) drew up in his “practical advice or students”: “patience” (in establishing bibliographies, looking for documents, checking hypotheses), “humility” (in using earlier research, borrowing from other disciplines, presenting conclusions), and “rigor” (in referring to archives, organizing notes, selecting appendixes). In short, as the titles of some of Thuillier and Tulard’s books proclaim (Le métier d’historien, La morale de l’historien), history is a craft augmented by a code of ethics. As for “impartiality,” “honesty,” and “caution” (Thuillier and Tulard 1995), these attributes eventually separate historians from “literary people,” a distinction that authors of current manuals are as eager to establish as Langlois and Seignobos were in the late nineteenth century. Once they have obtained a position in the academy and have started to publish, do historians still abide by the rules textbooks have set for beginners? In the specific area of writing, do they strive to compose narratives that dutifully follow chronological order? Are they careful to avoid the first person, sign of an unwelcome subjectivity? And do they eschew anachronisms as well as abstain from figurative language? While established historians may no longer read manuals, they nevertheless have to solve problems of textual organization, enunciation, and diction every time they write up their data. Furthermore, book reviews and programmatic articles show that such problems are still discussed in the historical community, testifying to the permanence of norms in scholarly writing. I will examine the ways historians implic-

14 Introduction

itly situate themselves with respect to those norms. By looking closely at the texts they have produced, I will seek to work out—to borrow a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu—the “theory of their practice.” Yet I won’t assume, as deconstructionist critics did at some point, that such practice necessarily belies the principles in which it is supposed to be grounded. My only assumption is that it might be productive to examine how historians reconcile the exigencies coming from manuals and programmatic statements with the practical demands of writing—how they negotiate the relations between proscription and execution. I therefore will return at times to the guides I have just mentioned, probing not just whether the instructions they provide are followed, but— perhaps more fundamentally—whether they can be observed to begin with.

chapter 1

Dispositions

The first questions about writing I want to ask of contemporary French historiography pertain to “disposition,” in the sense this term enjoyed in ancient rhetoric. Since historiographic texts are composed of different units, according to what principles are these units organized? How are they connected with each other? Specifically, are these connections always temporal? Before taking on the texts themselves, I will briefly review the theoretical statements that historians, philosophers, and theorists have made on this subject, whether in essays, lectures, or programmatic articles.

S q ua b b l e s a b o u t N a r r at i v e The issue of textual arrangement in historiographic texts has often been reduced to their membership in the narrative genre, and for some time it was formulated in normative terms. Taking for granted that historians do use narrative, participants in the debate have asked whether that form was suited for serious scientific discourse, leading to the “squabbles” surveyed by François Hartog (2005a), from whom I borrow the title of this section. In Englishspeaking countries, discussions first opposed supporters and critics of narrative within the framework of analytical philosophy and philosophy of science. Assuming that historians necessarily rely on narrative, philosophers such as Carl Hempel (1942, 1962) and Karl Popper (1957) argued that history, measured by the standards of physics, is an imperfect science, which at best can offer “explanation sketches” (Hempel 1962, 15). True scientific knowledge, they held, is provided by laws that “cover” the phenomena to be described,

16

Chapter One

making it possible to predict the way they would unfold in the future. History for them is devoid of this faculty, because explanation sketches—while providing some form of clarification—do not allow for predictions. Starting in the 1960s and still within the analytical tradition, philosophers like William Dray, Morton White, Arthur Danto, and Louis Mink attacked the concept of “the unity of science”: the idea that the only correct model of explanation is the covering law, and that history therefore cannot be regarded as a truly scientific discipline. Other models, according to them, produce perfectly admissible explanations, narrative supplying, for the type of understanding needed in history, a well-suited “cognitive instrument” (Mink 1987, 182, first published in 1978). The function of that instrument, they argued, is to place an action on a temporal continuum, relating it to previous actions as well as to future scenarios, and so rendering possible an account of how certain events occurred when the covering law model would not. While these philosophers acknowledged that history does not have laws comparable to those of physics, they also maintained that it is not bereft of regularities, since it frequently relies on “lawlike statements.” Michael Scriven (1959, 458), for instance, defended the thesis that perfectly valid historical explanations are based on “truisms”: statements that say “nothing new but something true,” like “power corrupts,” “proportional representation tends to give minorities excessive influence,” and “other things being equal, a greater number of troops is an advantage in a battle” (465). These generalizations, Scriven specified, obviously do not always apply, and they frequently come with an adverb that modalizes them, like “doubtless,” “probably,” and “habitually.” Addressing the same issue, philosopher of science Avezier Tucker (2004, 160) has called statements of this type “middle-range theories,” that is, theories that are “not universal” and may have “exceptions,” sometimes “many exceptions.” Debates about the existence and role of laws in historiography are no longer current in English-speaking countries. Discussions concerning the nature and function of narrative in the historical discipline have of course continued, conspicuously in journals such as History and Theory, Past and Present, and Rethinking History. Yet those discussions have taken place within the framework of what has been called narrativism: the assumption that historians, when they organize their data, inescapably give them a narrative structure. Thus a self-professed postmodern theorist like Alun Munslow has written a book revealingly titled Narrative and History (2007). From page 1 of his introduction, he states that his objective is to analyze the “rules,” “procedures,” and “compositional techniques” historians employ when they “turn the ‘past’ into that narrative about it we choose to call history.” Similarly, historians

Dispositions

17

Elizabeth Clark (2004), Robert Berkhofer (1995), and Herman Paul (2015) reduce historiographic writing to a narrative when they give the chapters of the studies they devote to textual arrangement the titles “Narrative and History,” “Narrative and Historicization,” and “The Aesthetic Relation: Historical Narratives.” Theorists who still dispute the value of narrative as a mode of knowledge no longer pit that mode against the laws of physics; their objections bear on the coherence of historiographic narratives, a coherence they hold to be repressive. This position is represented in the United States by Sande Cohen, in the United Kingdom by Keith Jenkins. In History Out of Joint and other essays, Cohen (2006, 246–47) has excoriated what he holds to be the artificial homogeneity of historiographic narratives. Such narratives, according to him, render “continuity out of discontinuity,” thus concealing the “cognitive dissonance” between the different moments of the past as well as between the past and the present. Extending Cohen’s argument, Jenkins (2009, 283) has added that the arbitrary order historians impose on their data has ideological implications: by legitimizing “strong, contentious, present interests,” that order obliterates injustice and prevents any kind of social change. While in English-speaking countries controversies about the relation between narrative and history mostly involved philosophers and theorists, in France they first implicated trade historians. Starting in the 1930s, scholars who were to become members of the Annales school attacked what they condescendingly called “narrative history” (histoire récit) and “event history” (histoire événementielle): studies published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by historians who mainly focused on the political, military, and diplomatic past of nation-states. Lucien Febvre derided this type of research in his reviews. Fernand Braudel dismissed it in the preface to his study of the Mediterranean. And François Furet (1982, 76, first published in 1975) celebrated what he deemed to be the definitive shift from a history made of “narrations” and “compilations” to a history “scientifically conducted,” whose purpose was to “pose problems” and “formulate hypotheses.” Furet did not indicate which textual form(s) “problem history” was supposed to take, and he did not seem to notice the irony inherent in presenting his thesis as a narrative—in this instance, as a success story in which the “good” way of doing things had eventually triumphed over the “bad” one. From the 1930s to the 1980s, the antinarrativist position of the Annales dominated the discussions by French historians of the relations between their discipline and storytelling. Besides Febvre, Braudel, and Furet, other members of the Annales such as Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie also condemned narrative, either in accounts of their intellectual journey (e.g.,

18

Chapter One

Le Goff 1987), or in reviews of books that did not conform to the Annales’ standards (e.g., Le Roy Ladurie 1983). Obviously not all French historians belonged to the Annales school or to that school’s successor in the 1970s, New History (Nouvelle Histoire). But if they wrote studies that still fell under the heading of narrative or event history, they did not theorize their position. A notable exception, in 1971, was Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire: Essai d’épistémologie (Writing History: Essay in Epistemology). Using provocative language, Veyne (1971, 10, 13) had the boldness to state that history is “nothing but a true novel,” “nothing but a truthful story.” Relying on German, British, and American philosophers and sociologists, he also argued that in history explanations are provided not by laws, but by the comprehensive plots that historians devise when they textualize their data. Veyne’s intervention was so unexpected that the editors of the journal Annales had to farm out the reviews of Comment on écrit l’histoire to scholars more attuned to issues of writing and epistemology: in this instance Raymond Aron (1971) and Michel de Certeau (1972). Aron, for that matter, was to give in 1972 at the Collège de France a course in which he introduced Anglo-American analytical philosophy of history, but neither this course nor Veyne’s book had much resonance at the time. Tellingly, the encyclopedia La Nouvelle Histoire, published in 1978, had no entry for “narrative,” and entries like the one devoted to “event” (written by Jacques Revel, one of the editors) only restated the Annales’ party line. Things in France hardly changed before the early 1980s and the publication of Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et récit (Time and Narrative). Ricoeur’s theses have been exhaustively discussed, notably by Dominick LaCapra (1985) and Hayden White (2010), and this is not the place to rehearse them. For my purpose, the most important issue concerns what Ricoeur (1983, 133) calls the “fundamentally narrative character of history”: that even “the study the most remote from narrative form continues to be related to narrative understanding by way of a derivation, which can be reconstructed step by step, degree by degree, using the appropriate method.” Applying this “method” to productions of the Annales school that were meant to be non- and even antinarrative, Ricoeur argues that such studies as Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Le Goff ’s Pour un autre Moyen-Âge, and Duby’s Les trois ordres, ou L’imaginaire du féodalisme (Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined ), in fact fall under storytelling. Of course, these works do not constitute a return to the “kings and battle” history that the Annales had indicted. But the Mediterranean and even abstract entities like feudalism can be regarded as “quasi characters,” playing different roles in “quasi plots.” For Ricoeur (1983, 303), Braudel relies on one of these quasi

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plots, specifically on the narrative topos of “decline,” to tell the story of the Mediterranean’s “withdrawal from major history” and the sea’s “slow deterioration” as an important place of exchange. Although French historians had not been convinced by Veyne’s conception of history as a “true novel,” in contrast they have adopted Ricoeur’s views with surprising unanimity. Roger Chartier, for example, long associated with the New History, has now become a major spokesperson for narrativism. In the entry “Récit et histoire” (Narrative and history) that he wrote for the Dictionnaire des sciences humaines (2006, 969–70), he speaks of the “unanimous opinion that holds history as a narrative,” of the “acknowledgment that history is narrative,” and of the “membership, long ignored, of history in the category ‘narrative.’ ” Unanimous opinion, acknowledgment, membership: these terms show that for Chartier the problem is solved—that history, whatever its practitioners might have contended at a certain point, inescapably belongs to storytelling. François Hartog (2005a, 173), who, like Chartier, adopts Ricoeur’s theses, has argued that from antiquity to the contemporary period, history, however it is configured, has always relied on narrative: it has consistently “recounted the doings of men, told not the same story, but stories of diverse types.” When the Annalistes rejected event history, Hartog concludes, they did not abandon “narrative” altogether; they dismissed “a specific form of narrative” but invented new ones, the Braudelian model constituting in this respect an innovation not just at the level of content, but at that of emplotment. Discussing the rehabilitation of storytelling in the entry that a postAnnales encyclopedia, Historiographies, now devotes to the genre, François Dosse (2010c, 871) argues along the same lines. He confidently asserts that historians, even when they are no longer concerned with “recounting political, military, or diplomatic events,” always “emplot” the data they have gathered. Narrative, in this respect, constitutes the “indispensable mediation” that links “historical work” with one of the basic human “experiences,” the unfolding of time. Ricoeur’s take on the necessarily narrative character of historical endeavors has hardly been questioned. One of the few (and timid) challenges was issued by Bernard Lepetit in an essay in his Carnet de croquis (Handbook of sketches). Discussing studies that fall under microhistory, like Giovanni Levi’s Le pouvoir au village (Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist), Simona Cerutti’s La ville et les métiers (Town and trades), and his own Les villes dans la France moderne (The Pre-industrial Urban System: France, 1740– 1840), Lepetit (1999, 85–86) writes: “None of these works juxtaposes temporal cross sections to account for processes. But none of them is structured as

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a chronicle, either: their goal is to provide neither an exhaustive description nor a linear narrative. It is not the succession of episodes but that of analytical viewpoints and modes of observation (choice of ‘local’ interpretation grids, selection of sources, ways of processing the evidence) that shapes the development—I was about to say the plot.” Showing that he has read Ricoeur, Lepetit here poses a crucial question: whether “development,” in historiographic studies, is necessarily synonymous with “plot”; in brief, whether such studies, to count as historiographic, must take the form of a story and organize their data on the model of narrative. Before addressing this question, it is indispensable to define what is meant by “narrative”—something the texts I have just analyzed often fail to do. As the German historian Johannes Süssmann (2002, 86) has stressed in the entry he devotes to Erzählung in the Lexicon Geschichtswissenschaft, on points like this one, literary theory can contribute to the analysis of historiographic discourse. Narratology in particular can offer clarifications, since one of its aims is to characterize narrative by distinguishing it from other modes of textual organization. Turning to narrative theorists, I will here, with Gerald Prince (2012, 25), define narrative as “the logically consistent representation of a least two asynchronous events, or a state and an event, that do not presuppose or imply each other”; and with James Phelan (2007, 203), as “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened.” Whether they treat narrative as an object or as a transaction, these definitions say basically the same thing: to count as a narrative, a text must include at least two units located on a temporal axis, even if the first may remain implicit. Thus the minitext “France was a monarchy” is not a narrative, because it does not involve the representation of an event; but the subsequent minitext “France’s monarchy fell on August 10, 1792” is, because it represents a change with respect to a state and could be parsed into “there was a monarchy in France” and “that monarchy fell on August 10, 1792. If we use Prince’s and Phelan’s definitions to ask whether contemporary French historians rely on narrative, we cannot help noting that a large part of their production does not fall under storytelling. Some of the works they have published develop a plot, but others do not, resulting in three main categories of textual disposition.

L i n e a r N a r r at i v e s Furet’s 1975 pronouncement about the disappearance of a narrative history focused on political, military, and diplomatic events was clearly premature.

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Gérard Noiriel (1998, 31–64) has shown that this type of history had flourished in spite of the Annales’ hegemonic ambitions, producing several important works. Noiriel singles out the multivolume Histoire des relations internationales edited in the 1950s by Pierre Renouvin, as well as René Rémond’s Les États-Unis devant l’opinion publique française, 1815–1852, published in 1962. These studies, according to Noiriel, show the continuing production of “event history,” a term of discredit that Noiriel borrows from the Annales only to use it in a positive way: the “event,” whether it takes the form of a sudden political turn or arises from the actions of Renouvin’s “deep forces,” is a historical entity that deserves study. For that matter it has been studied, provided we consider all the historiographic writing in France in the twentieth century and not just the part the Annales deemed worthy of interest when they granted themselves the right to sort the wheat from the chaff. From a formalist perspective, the event history that Noiriel rehabilitates attests to the durability of another genre: chronological narrative as it was practiced, for example, by Ernest Lavisse and his team in the Histoire de la France published from 1911 to 1922. This type of narrative may be defined as “linear,” since it proceeds from sequence to sequence on a temporal axis, the order of events in the discourse agreeing by and large with the order of events in the past as documents have made it possible to reconstruct it. Several multivolume “histories of . . .” are organized according to this pattern, for example, the Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine launched in 1972, published by Le Seuil in the series Points histoire. Major contributions to political and diplomatic history, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s La décadence (1979) and L’abîme (The abyss) (1983) constitute other typical instances of linear narrative. Of the fifteen chapters in La décadence, seven include a date that establishes the order in which the events unfolded, from “June-December 1932” (“Edouard Herriot’s Return”) to “22 August-3 September 1939” (“Toward the Inescapable”). Some chapters have section titles that also include a date, “The Year of Munich” (chapter 11) thus proceeding from “The Crisis of March 1938” to “The False Crisis of May 1938” and finally to “The Great Crisis and Munich (23–30 September).” Whether at the level of the period regarded as a whole (the 1930s) or at specific moments (the Munich Conference), Duroselle’s study is thus marked out by a system of chronological landmarks that helps readers follow the story, in this case, to keep their bearings in the highly detailed account of the events the historian provides. Works dealing with political, military, and diplomatic events are not the only ones that fall under the heading of linear narrative. As an empty form, this kind of narrative may accommodate the most diverse content, beginning

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with cultural occurrences. Jean-François Sirinelli’s Intellectuels et passions françaises, for example, treats not “politics” in Duroselle’s sense but “political culture,” namely, “participation in the life of the city” (Sirinelli 1996, 17–18). The activities Sirinelli studies are those of a small group, and they take two main forms: the “petition” and the “manifesto.” Like Duroselle, Sirinelli proceeds chronologically from period to period, in this instance from the “curtain raiser” of the Dreyfus Affair to the campaigns sparked off by the Liberation, the 1956 revolt in Hungary, the Vietnam war, the Algerian war, and the supposed “silence” of the intellectuals during the 1980s. Within each temporal unit, Sirinelli then proceeds from case to case. He thus treats the Algerian war as a “war of writing” (guerre de l’écrit) (366), a war he covers without concealing that he had been obliged to make choices because so many proclamations were made during this period on subjects such as torture and the right to disobedience. Linear narrative is also the preferred mode of textual organization in one of the genres the Annales had most severely stigmatized: biography. This genre, which had remained popular with the general public, gained a new legitimacy with what Christian Delacroix (2007b, 491) calls the “return to favor” of the individual in scholarly history in the late 1970s. There are in fact many ways of organizing the study of a life, and linear narrative is only one of them. This mode is used by specialists in political history like Jean-Paul Brunet and Serge Berstein, whose biographies of Doriot, Herriot, and Blum follow strict chronological order. Berstein’s Edouard Herriot, ou La République en personne (1985) and his Léon Blum (2006) both include three parts that correspond to the main phases of the politician’s career. Within each part, duly dated chapters and sections enable readers to follow that career from year to year, month to month, and even day to day in moments of crisis. Political history, however, is not the only field to have experienced the rebirth of biography in its traditional form. Intellectual history has seen a similar return as professional historians have retraced the itinerary of philosophers, novelists, and even other historians. The author of an essay on biography as a “wager” (Le pari biographique) (2005), Dosse has published comprehensive studies of major French intellectual figures such as Pierre Nora, Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose shared journey is recounted in a “dual biography” (biographie croisée). Dosse, like Berstein, divides the careers of these intellectuals into phases, with “event” referring in his biographies to a new publication or to the move from one institution to another rather than to adhesion to a party, victory in an election, or membership in a government.1

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The persistence in French historiography of a type of narrative that the Annales had regarded as obsolete calls for a few remarks. One must first note that the only stories that report events in the exact order of their occurrence are those made up by narratologists who want to illustrate the genre “chronological narrative.” While it is impossible to arrange data in strictly chronological order at the microlevel of the paragraph—it would involve never using the past perfect tense—it is equally difficult to do so at the macrolevel of the whole text. Duroselle, as we have seen, recounts in linear fashion the events that marked France’s “decadence” in the 1930s. But he stops at times for descriptive pauses, needed to account for such things as the state of the French economy, security, and diplomacy (chapters 6–9). Dosse is faced with a different problem. Because Deleuze and Guattari did not always work together, he must begin (chapters 1–8) by recounting what he calls the “parallel lives” of the two men before moving on to their common undertakings. Thus he must report one after the other events that in fact occurred during the same time frame, if not literally at the same time. Taken as a whole, Dosse’s book, like Duroselle’s, nevertheless remains organized according to the conventions of linear narrative—a narrative in which events are related as closely as possible in the order of occurrence, to the extent that the historian has been able to reconstruct that order from the evidence. One must stress, moreover, that if linear narratives report events in the order of their occurrence, they do not constitute mere chronicles. Ever since E. M. Forster in 1927, Anglo-American poetics has distinguished between “story” and “plot,” that is, between narratives in which events are simply juxtaposed (“the king died and then the queen died”) and narratives in which events succeed each other in accordance with some causality principle (“the king died and then the queen died of grief ”). Revisited from this perspective, linear narratives such as La décadence and Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari clearly fall under “plot,” in the sense Ricoeur (1983, 11) has given to this term: a “synthesis of heterogeneous elements” that combines “goals, causes, and accidents” in the “temporal unity of a total and complete action.” In this respect, titles such as La décadence are already telling, because they point to a change in the initial situation, more precisely, to a move from good to bad whose specific aspects (e.g., political instability) will be examined during the course of the narrative. Similarly, the subtitle of Brunet’s biography of Jacques Doriot, Du communisme au fascisme, traces a political and intellectual journey, providing readers with a script whose points of departure and arrival are given from the outset. Let us note, finally, that looking more closely at the category “plot” can

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help clarify the distinction between fictional and factual narratives. Hayden White, among others, has argued that the two modes cannot be distinguished, because they both “emplot” their materials in the same way, along the lines of comedy, tragedy, romance, or satire. Whether or not we share White’s views about the similarity of fiction and historiography, his application of the term emplotment to both discourses is clearly inaccurate. Using the dichotomy between “to plot” and “to emplot,” literary theorist Dorrit Cohn (1999) has shown that only historiographic texts are “emplotted” properly speaking. Indeed, historians work with a database from which they select the data that will serve their research, data that they then “emplot” and that they frequently refer to in order to guarantee the validity of their endeavor. Fictional texts, on the other hand, can only be “plotted.” Their authors invent the stories they tell, and even when they rely on sources, the sources do not have to become part of the text itself. For Cohn (1999, 109–31), in other words, “emplotment” is specific to historiography. It is one of the areas in which “historical narrative adds something to the discursive virtualities of fiction,” showing that factual discourse cannot be described—as it often is—in terms of what it is missing with respect to fictional narrative used as an implicit point of reference.

Writing the Event Whether they treat France or an individual, the narratives I have discussed so far all bear on series of events. Yet one of the main characteristics of current French historiography lies in the interest it shows for the event; that is, not for a string of occurrences, but for one particular occurrence whose unfolding, reception, and memory the historian aims to examine. Dosse (2010b) has devoted a whole book to this rebirth, and “event,” still scorned in 1978 in the encyclopedia La Nouvelle Histoire, is now defined more positively in anthologies and dictionaries such as Historiographies (2010), Les mots de l’historien (2009), and Dictionnaire de l’historien (2015). The launching of the series Les journées qui ont fait la France (a successor to the more restricted Trente journées qui ont fait la France) testifies to this recovery, as does the publication of a reader such as 1515 et les grandes dates de l’histoire de France (2005a), edited by a scholar as little concerned with political and military history as Alain Corbin. From a formal perspective, one must first emphasize that there is no necessary relation between “event” and “narrative.” “Narrative,” as we have seen, is an empty form that may be filled with diverse contents, cultural and economic as well as political and military. In like fashion, “event” is what might be

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called an “empty content”: a content that may be represented under different forms, from narrative to description to quantitative analysis. Annales historians like Braudel (1966, 13–14) had confused form and content when they attacked “narrative history” and “event history” as if the two were synonyms, and Lawrence Stone’s often-quoted article “The Revival of Narrative” (1979) had fed the same misunderstanding. Observing that French historians in the 1970s had moved away from large regional studies to focus on, among other things, “single events,” he linked this shift to a change in the textual domain: their interest in events had “inevitably” led scholars to use narrative, the only mode suited for relating single occurrences like a battle or a coup d’état. That studying an event does not “necessarily” involve relying on narrative is illustrated by one of the books Stone uses to support his thesis: Georges Duby’s Le dimanche de Bouvines (The Legend of Bouvines) (1973). Indeed, viewed as a whole, Duby’s text does not meet the minimal conditions that could make it into a narrative: the units it comprises are ordered not temporally but rather analytically, constituting an interesting kind of collage. The first part (“The Event”) consists of stage directions given by the historian, then the testimony of the main witness, the chronicler Guillaume le Breton; the narrative is thus less Duby’s than his source’s, and it takes up only fifty of the book’s three hundred pages. The second part (“Commentary”) alternates between a report of what happened at Bouvines on July 12, 1214, and a description of attitudes at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Duby accounts for the peace, the battle, and the victory as single developments, but he also treats peace, battle, and victory as aspects of medieval culture, asking questions such as “What was the nature of war” in the thirteenth century? and “What did it mean then to win a battle?” It is the third part (“Legends”) that comes closest to a linear narrative, though not of the battle. Duby tells the story of the memory of the event, showing, among other things, how the enemy France defeated would change depending on the political circumstances: how it was England, then Germany, then, in some conciliatory “European” versions, the Count of Boulogne alone. As for the last part (“Documents”), it brings together all kinds of materials related to the battle, from chroniclers’ accounts to Jules Michelet’s brief report in his Histoire de France to excerpts of R. F. Longhaye’s Bouvines, a trilogy “in verse with choir” that apparently has not found a place in the musical canon. Steering away from treating events in narrative form, however, is not reserved for historians operating under the umbrella of the Annales and its legacy. A scholar of the Old Regime who is portrayed in manuals (e.g., Bizière and Vayssière 1995, 208) as being “outside the Annales,” Roland Mousnier

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does not chart his L’assassinat d’Henri IV as a linear narrative. Initially published like Le dimanche de Bouvines in the series Trente journées qui ont fait la France and then reissued in Les journées qui ont fait la France, Mousnier’s book includes three parts and an appendix. The first part is about the “event,” but the assassination itself is reported in 6 pages and the execution of the king’s murderer in 3, the rest of this brief (40 pages) first part being devoted to the causes of the regicide. The second part, by far the most developed (190 pages), treats the concept of “tyrant,” addressing the questions of knowing exactly what a tyrant is, whether it is permissible to kill him, and what role Jesuits played in the debates about tyranny. The third part examines the consequences of the regicide for the nature of the regime, and appendixes furnish documents such as the papal bull that excommunicated Henri IV. Considered as a whole, Mousnier’s work, like Duby’s, thus cannot be viewed as a narrative, because the units that make it up are not arranged on a temporal axis but are organized analytically. In other words, Mousnier does not emplot the materials he has gathered; he studies them from different angles, showing—even though it was obviously not his intention—that the “event history” he defends in his prologue (2008, 9) is in fact closer to the “problem history” advocated by his opponents in the academic community than it is to narrative history. Whether their authors are situated outside the Annales, in their orbit, or in one of the “new” cultural, political, and economic histories that anthologies have identified (e.g., Poirrier 2009, 60–81), most studies from the 1970s devoted to the event fall under Duby’s and Mousnier’s analytical model. Le Roy Ladurie’s Le Carnaval de Romans, for example, which Stone holds, like Le dimanche de Bouvines, as representative of the “revival” of storytelling, has only one narrative component: chapters 5 to 9, which recount the skirmishes between upper and lower classes that took place in Romans during the carnivals of 1579 and 1580. But chapters 1 to 4 describe the setting and the circumstances, stressing the social and economic aspects of Dauphiné in the late sixteenth century. As for chapters 10 to 14, they interpret the incidents in light of a theoretical apparatus borrowed from various disciplines and theories, such as anthropology, Marxism, semiology, and psychoanalysis. Le Roy Ladurie’s book, therefore, like Duby’s and Mousnier’s, cannot be regarded as a narrative; it is basically a case study, proceeding from issue to issue rather than from moment to moment. The same could be said about other works focused on a single event, for instance, Raphaëlle Branche’s L’embuscade de Palestro: Algérie 1956 (The ambush in Palestro: Algeria 1956} (2010a). As its subtitle indicates, this book does not deal with one of the days “that made France” but rather addresses an

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early episode in the Algerian war: the ambush that the Army of National Liberation laid for a French army unit in Kabilia’s mountains on May 18, 1956, an ambush that left only one survivor among the twenty-three members of that unit. As Duby and Mousnier do, Branche reports briefly what is known about the ambush, then goes on to analyze the significance of this incident with respect to the conflict as a whole. Her goal, as she states it (2010a, 9), is to identify “other histories” that might be present “under the surface of the event,” to give readers, through this “high-angle shot at a small and local occurrence . . . a keener understanding of what happened in Algeria during the one hundred years that separate the arrival of the colons from their hurried departure” (11). In brief, Branche does not intend to tell a story, however interesting that story might be. She wants not to recount the event but to discuss it, in a text whose structure will therefore be not a plot that unfolds in time, but an analysis that progresses from point to point in a thematic frame. From Corbin’s Le village des cannibales (1990) to Olivier Chaline’s La bataille de la Montagne blanche (1999), several studies focused on one event have a structure similar to that of the works I have just examined: they are concerned less with recounting that event than with using it to scrutinize certain aspects of the period during which it occurred. Although this type of textual arrangement is the most frequently employed in current French historiography, two alternative models also need to be considered. The first model consists of spotlighting not one but a series of events and having them briefly discussed by specialists of the period. Edited by Alain Corbin, 1515 et les grandes dates de l’histoire de France revisits the events that the textbook L’histoire de France à l’école, used in primary schools in the 1920s to 1930s, held to be worth studying and remembering. Made up of seventy-four entries, this work covers occurrences regarded as important at the time, from the founding of Marseille in 600 BC to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Each entry first reproduces the image and the “story to tell” as they appear in L’histoire de France à l’école, then adds a reading of the event made in light of recent research. Starting from a dusty manual and an obsolete conception of the event, this book offers a quasi-postmodern history made up of discrete moments that have in common only the presumption of their significance—a presumption the “revisionist” authors of the anthology frequently question. True, the history that 1515 et les grandes dates de l’histoire de France proposes is linear and devoted to a single subject: France. But the episodes that compose it, unlike those in most national histories, are not emplotted, as the coauthors seek neither to reconstruct France’s supposed “destiny” nor even to link the entry they must write to the preceding or subsequent entries.

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The second alternative to the Duby-Mousnier model consists of providing an exhaustive account of one event that is regarded as worth investigating, and whose detailed study is made possible by a large supply of documentary evidence. In Charonne 8 février 1962 (2006), Alain Dewerpe dissects with extreme thoroughness the demonstration that thousands of Parisians led toward the end of the Algerian war, protesting the activities of the terrorist, pro“French Algeria” Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a demonstration during which nine people were killed by the police. The first part of Dewerpe’s book deals with the demonstration itself, the second with its immediate aftermath, and the third with the lack of legal follow-up to the crimes committed by the police and with the public memory of the event. Though this summary outline does not do justice to a book that is 669 pages long (plus 197 pages of notes), it should suffice to show how Charonne differs from Le dimanche de Bouvines and L’embuscade de Palestro in the way it treats the event. To begin with, Dewerpe organizes his data on a temporal axis, turning to a double plot that goes from the crime to its lack of punishment and from the memorable event to the event that is almost forgotten. Further, he does not mine his findings to make the demonstration of February 8 into the prototype of the many demonstrations the Algerian war had brought about. His generalizations take the form of what Bernard Lepetit (1999, 90), in his reflections on “scales in history,” calls the move “from the singular object to the concept.” In this instance the “move” leads Dewerpe from a most meticulous examination of the evidence to the coining of abstractions that account for the idea of “responsibility in the highest places,” such as “state violence” (2006, 86), “state lie” (393), “state censorship” (588), and even “state massacre” (21). To “think by case,” for Dewerpe (19), enables scholars to devise useful concepts—concepts that originate in the detailed investigation of the “case” but then allow accounting for “very general phenomena” that exceed the case itself. Penser par cas (To think by case], for that matter, is the title of an anthology published one year before Charonne, in which contributors show how productive it might be, as editors Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel put it in their introduction (2005), to “think from singularities [raisonner à partir de singularités].” While the studies centered on one event do not have to be organized along narrative lines, those dealing with one individual’s life do not, or do not only, have to recount the story of that life either. In this respect Le Goff ’s Saint Louis plays for the genre “biography” the same role Duby’s Le dimanche de Bouvines plays for the genre “event history”: it aims at what Le Goff (1996a, 24) calls “total history,” that is, at a history that both relates the deeds of a major personage and poses problems: in this instance those of monarchy in

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the Middle Ages. The book is divided into three parts. The first part constitutes the biography properly speaking, the second investigates contemporary documents about the king, and the third describes the figure of the “kingsaint” that Saint Louis supposedly embodied. Le Goff ’s book traces the life of a prominent individual, but it also discusses the issue of evidence in research bearing on the Middle Ages and draws on the biography of the king to offer an anthropological description of monarchy in the thirteenth century. Though substantial (279 pages), the text’s narrative component tends to fade behind the analytical component (570 pages), and the work taken as a whole cannot be viewed as a narrative because the units it comprises are not disposed on a temporal axis. The trend toward eliminating all narrative elements from the study of a personality is radicalized in Olivier Dumoulin’s Marc Bloch. Published in the series Références/Facettes of the Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, the book plays the game proposed by that series, which consists of breaking with biographies that “recount historical characters according to a linear trajectory, always looking for coherence” (Dumoulin 2000, 2). The first part of the book is made up of portraits of Bloch coming from contemporaries like Febvre, from Bloch himself, and from scholars writing after the historian’s death. Just as disjointed, the second part offers a reinterpretation of Bloch’s “epistemology” as well as of his “scholarly and civic behavior,” based on some “symptoms” originating in his “language” (187): for instance, his predilection for the “originality” (191) of the works he reads and the documents he consults, or his choice of the trio “soldier, Frenchman, historian” to introduce himself to readers. If Dumoulin rejects the convention of linear narrative associated with biography, he also refuses to turn his book into a hagiography. Opposing the posthumous sanctification of Bloch, he does not hesitate to bring to light aspects of the historian’s personality that for him have not been sufficiently addressed, beginning with his careerism. The historians’ interest in the event and their parallel interest in the individual do not date, as Stone would have it, from the late 1970s. In 1972, for example, the journal Communications devoted a whole issue to l’événement, in which scholars coming from different disciplines tackled issues then related to structuralism, beginning with the relations between “system” and “event.” Commenting on these essays, editor Edgar Morin (1972, 3) pointed out that one of their common features was to identify two types of events and, correspondingly, two types of connections between event and system: the “nonreproducible event,” which modifies the system by bringing about a disturbance that leads to a reorganization, and the “reproducible event,” which is

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an element in a system whose mechanisms it reveals without altering them. Modern science, according to Morin, was now trying to integrate the nonreproducible events, that is, to account for breakdowns and discontinuities. Le Roy Ladurie (1972, 83) argued along the same lines in his contribution to that same issue of Communications, arguing that the New History, after focusing for years on repeated events, was now ready to deal with singular, nonreproducible occurrences. He saw an early realization of this trend in Paul Bois’s Paysans de l’ouest (Peasants from western France) (1960), where the major characteristics of the culture of western France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traced back to a decisive moment: the Revolution and the trauma it caused in that region. The pattern Le Roy Ladurie identified in 1972 has never really materialized. Deciding whether an event should be viewed as reproducible or nonreproducible is a matter of perspective: depending on the vantage point, the same event can be counted as an element in a system or as a disturbance leading to that system’s restructuring. French historians have generally chosen to make the events they treat members of the first category. True, they do not deny that these events might be unusual and even disturbing. The battle of Bouvines took place—against the religious interdictions in force at the time—on a Sunday, and Duby acknowledges that it can be regarded as one of the first manifestations of “France” as a nation. Similarly, Branche does not dispute that the ambush in Palestro might have functioned as a foundational event, since it made France aware of the war and then became a symbol of it. Still, Duby and Branche choose to consider these events “reproducible,” that is, to hold them as representative rather than as system changing. Le Goff ’s Saint Louis displays similar choices in the area of biography. Without questioning the importance of Saint Louis as a historical figure, Le Goff chiefly looks at the king’s reign as a component in a system: monarchy in the France of the Middle Ages. Dumoulin’s Marc Bloch falls under a different logic. The point of his book is no longer to ask whether the central figure is unique or exemplary, but to question the assumption of homogeneity that underlies that very distinction as well as biography as a discursive genre. The stake here is no longer, as it was for Le Goff, to adjust biography to the Annales’ standards, but to practice it while taking into account the critiques it has undergone: for instance, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1994, 81–82) rejection of the “presuppositions” according to which a life forms a “coherent and positioned whole” that unfolds “like a story, in a chronological order that is also a logical order, from its beginning . . . to its end, which is also a goal, an achievement (telos).” Bloch, for Dumoulin, is therefore neither a unique individual whose profes-

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sional journey could be traced as Berstein traces Blum’s and Herriot’s, nor a prototypical character who stands for “historian in the twentieth century,” as Saint Louis stands for “monarch in the Middle Ages.” Dumoulin, as well as the authors who have published in the series Références/Facettes, denies that an individual could illustrate either model in a consistent manner. This leads them, in order to depict the person they are studying, to adopt the scattered, nonnarrative type of organization I have analyzed above.

Synchronic Cross Sections If linear narrative has not disappeared from contemporary French historiography, contrary to what was for a time the Annales’ wish, it nevertheless must compete today with several other models of textual organization. These models can be distributed into four main categories. Anthropological Descriptions Manuals such as La Nouvelle Histoire, Dictionnaire des sciences historiques, and Les mots de l’historien usually define “historical anthropology” in terms of content as the study of “human groups in the past,” whether small communities (Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou), specific estates (Odile Arnold’s Le corps et l’âme [Body and soul], an examination of nuns’ lives in the nineteenth century), or whole social classes (Goubert’s La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle [French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century]). Yet these manuals do not ask how the works that fall under the label historical anthropology are organized, and thus they fail to note that most are not narratives but descriptions: if they proceed, like all texts, from point A to point Z, the successive stations are not temporal but spatial or thematic. In other words, to return to Phelan’s definition of narrative, they do not “tell someone that something happened”; they depict “what things were like” for a specific group during a specific period. Linguists Charlotte Linde and William Labov (1975), in their analysis of the way tenants describe their apartments in New York City, distinguish between the “map” and the “tour.” To draw a map, tenants would explain, “Next to the living room there is the bedroom.” To chart a tour, they would say, “To go to the bedroom, you cross the living room and then make a right.” Linde and Labov seek to account for the operations of ordinary spoken language. Still, their distinction matches one often made in poetics, notably by Philippe Hamon (1981, 186–87), between descriptions that are not focalized with

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precision and remain static (e.g., the family boardinghouse in Balzac’s Le père Goriot) and those that are focalized through a character whose line of vision they follow in approximate manner (Rouen in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary). The informants in Linde and Labov’s study favor the tour over the map, and novelists rely on both models depending on their needs or their membership in a particular literary school. In the human sciences, however, the rule is to use the map, seemingly because it looks more scientific, less dependent on the researcher as a subject with biases and prejudices. Anthropologists, for example, rarely report their observations in the order they made them while exploring an exotic territory. As Mondher Kilani (1995, 76) has shown, they write up their materials in accordance with a grid that has become standardized, at least in monographs: they go “from the periphery to the center, from the visual to the less visual, from the objective to the subjective, from the material conditions of a culture to its expressions of meaning.” Historians proceed along similar lines when they study a group, although— since this group can no longer be observed directly—they rely on documents they have studied rather than on information gathered in the field. Thus Le Roy Ladurie’s celebrated Montaillou is organized not on the model of narrative, as critics like Stone (1979) and even Chartier (1998, 246) think, but on that of classic anthropological studies like Edward Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1968; originally published in 1940). To be sure, the outlines of the two works are not exactly the same, and Le Roy Ladurie’s conceptual apparatus is that of a researcher in the late twentieth century. Whereas Evans-Pritchard divides his book into six chapters of roughly even length, Le Roy Ladurie groups his twenty-eight chapters into two asymmetrical sections, which he labels “Ecology” (in the literal meaning that is also EvansPritchard’s) and “Archaeology” (in the metaphorical meaning of an inquiry that peels off the successive layers of a culture). Still, the order in which domains are taken up is about the same in both studies: “Ecology,” in Montaillou, covers relations to the environment, work, and modes of livelihood (as do chapters 1–2 in The Nuer), while “Archaeology” deals with gestures, marriage, sex life, and beliefs (as do chapters 3–6 in Evans-Pritchard). Another example of historical anthropology organized as a “map” is Michel Vovelle’s De la cave au grenier (From the cellar to the attic) (1980). Looking at people in Provence in the eighteenth century, Vovelle goes metaphorically from the cellar to the attic. That is, he examines successively those people’s relations to the environment, social life, culture, and behaviors. As Le Roy Ladurie does, Vovelle thus moves from the outside to the inside. Only the evidence and the

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methods he uses are different, since he does not rely on a single document as Le Roy Ladurie does but draws on several sources and employs quantitative procedures to account for how the inhabitants of Provence “thought” at the time about subjects such as food, family, and death. Though not used as frequently as maps, tours are not absent from contemporary French historiography. Here one must account for an well-known precedent: the “tableau” that opens book 3 in Michelet’s Histoire de France (1833-67), which he draws by taking fellow travelers with him on a journey through the country, first climbing one of the eastern mountains to take an overview, then moving from north to west to south to observe different regions, and finally ending the trip at the country’s “true center”: Paris and its surroundings.2 The first chapter in Pierre Goubert’s La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle constitutes an interesting variation on Michelet’s “tableau.” Like his predecessor, Goubert (1982, 19) begins with an aerial view of France, which he updates by placing a “rural historian” and his companions in an aircraft that can go up and down, providing both crane shots and close-ups. Goubert’s path is also Michelet’s, except that it ends not in Paris but in the south, a destination that conforms with the Annales’ agenda, here with the decision to move the spotlight away from the capital to the rural provinces that constituted most of France’s territory at the time. After their initial flight, Goubert and his fellow travelers take a few more trips to “go see,” for instance, “extended families” (104), farmers “with large properties” (153), and “ménagers,” the wealthy bourgeois who own land but do not work on it (160). These journeys, however, are not frequent enough to make the text into a tour. The overall design of Goubert’s account remains that of an anthropological description going from the outside to the inside, following the familiar route “environment-housing-family-food-work-political life.” Unlike Le Roy Ladurie and Vovelle, however, Goubert does move from the “cellar” to the “attic,” from the examination of material life to that of ways of thinking. Scorning the concern that some of his colleagues in the 1970s were showing for “attitudes” and “mentalities,” he argues that the evidence available does not allow for reconstructing how peasants in the seventeenth century “felt” about subjects such as death, festivals, and premarital sex. Parish registers, according to him, provide statistical information about “naked and dirty death” (1982, 311), but they do not tell whether locating the cemetery in the middle of the village should be interpreted as a sign of “human warmth” or of “indifference” (313): those are “customs we no longer understand” and about which “the disarmed historian must remain silent” (313). Goubert ends his book with this barb, probably directed at fellow historians who were

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investigating death at the time, beginning of course with Ariès (1975, 1977) and Vovelle (1973). But the remark is emblematic of the polemics that in the 1970s opposed the Annalistes (e.g., Goubert, Braudel), for whom inquiries should remain restricted to ecology, demography, and economics, to those (e.g., Duby, Le Goff, Vovelle, Le Roy Ladurie) who deemed it legitimate to investigate the mental attitudes that underlay past behaviors. Tableaux Borrowed from Antoine Prost (2010, 41), “tableau” designates a comprehensive account of the social, economic, and political structures of a specific area during a specific period. Tableaux are close to anthropological descriptions because they are synchronic, but they do not dispose their data from the periphery to the center as Le Roy Ladurie and Vovelle do in their studies of Montaillou and Provence. The Annales school produced several tableaux in the 1960s, following two models that differ both in their scope and in the way they organize their materials. The first one is the Braudelian model. The theory of the three time spans that Braudel expounded in the preface to La Méditerranée received an immediate application: the book is divided into three parts, devoted to the very long term (“The Role of the Environment”), the long term (“Collective Destinies and General Trends”), and finally to the short term (“Events, Politics, and People”). Yet these successive approaches concern the same period: the sixteenth century, which Braudel proposes to rebaptize “the time of Philippe II.” Taken as a whole, therefore, La Méditerranée is not a narrative, even though Ricoeur (1983, 300), as we have seen, contends that the work includes a “virtual quasi-plot,” that of the Mediterranean’s decline as an actor on the world’s economic stage. Ricoeur, for that matter, acknowledges in the same passage that Braudel “proceeds analytically” and that the “quasi-plot” he has identified is an underlying one. Braudel’s project of undertaking a long-term history on a global scale has hardly been pursued by other historians, and his ternary model of textual organization has hardly been adopted either. The lengthy dissertations in social and economic history undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s, often under the direction of Ernest Labrousse, are focused on the more confined space of the province or the region, and they generally include two main parts rather than three.3 The first part is devoted to analysis of the “structures,” of the elements that remain constant throughout the period the historian has elected to investigate; the second examines the “conjunctures,” the variables that characterize

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that same period. Using the vocabulary of poetics, one could define this new model as including a description, which accounts for the structures, and then a series of parallel narratives, which account for the conjunctures. Goubert’s Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (1982) offers a scrupulous illustration of this type of disposition, being divided into two parts titled precisely “structures” and “conjunctures.” The first one depicts the main features of the area: the setting, the demography, the rural culture of the Beauvaisis, and the urban culture of Beauvais. As for the second part, it tells stories whose actors are not people but rather Ricoeur’s “quasi-characters”: prices, incomes, salaries, and industrial production, whose “movements” and “fluctuations” constitute what literary theorists (e.g., Cohn 1999, 96) call simultaneous narrative.” Le Roy Ladurie’s Les paysans de Languedoc is more complex, including not two but five parts and devoting some space to Braudel’s “very long time.” Still, the basic design of the work is the binary model: part 1 describes the structures of Languedoc (climate, resources, demography), while parts 2–4 treat conjunctures, in this instance the social struggles and the economic changes the province underwent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This second subdivision also reports events that occurred in Braudel’s “short time,” beginning with the uprising in Romans to which Le Roy Ladurie would later devote a whole book. The ternary and binary models of the tableau were generally abandoned in the 1970s and 1980s, together with the comprehensive studies bearing on the demography, economy, and social structures of a specific area like Beauvais or Languedoc. The tableau, however, has not completely disappeared from French historiography. Its format seems to suit some new endeavors, in particular the works that, while questioning Western chronologies and geographic divisions, seek to do a “global” or “connected” history (Bertrand 2010). An anthology edited by Patrick Boucheron, Histoire du monde au XVe siècle, is thus divided into four parts. The first one, “The Territories of the World,” draws the political map of the period, decentering Europe in order to take stock of the regimes that were in place in Central and Southeast Asia, Africa, China, India, Japan, and pre-Columbian America. The second, “The Time of the Worlds,” offers a “chronicle” of the fifteenth century, listing events in the West from the great religious schism to the crowning of Charles V, Tumu’s defeat in China, and the death of the Sultan Mehmed II. The third, “The Writings of the World,” describes the “library” of the fifteenth century, whether the Mexican codices burned by Itzalcoatl, Afanasij Nikitine’s Voyage au-delà des trois mers (Travel beyond the three seas), or Christopher Columbus’s Diary. As for the fourth, “The Turns of the World,” it takes up the “workshops”

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of the fifteenth century, such subjects as the revolution of linguistic cultures, court society, and Roman universalism. Boucheron’s anthology thus constitutes a synchronic overview of the “world” at a specific time, an overview that includes “structures” and “conjunctures,” even though the order of their presentation is no longer the one found in the works of Ernest Labrousse’s students. As for the fact that Boucheron’s survey is global rather than regional and covers parts of the world often neglected in French historiography, it pertains to the constitution of this particular tableau, that is, to the choice of its components, not to its textual organization.4 Analyses “Tableau” provides an appropriate metaphor for the way data are arranged in studies bearing on entities such as “the Mediterranean,” “the Beauvaisis,” and “the world” considered at a specific moment in history. That same term, however, is unsuitable when those entities are abstract, or at least no longer have a spatial component. For such cases I use “analysis” in the etymological sense: a “carving up” of the diverse elements that make up a whole, a separation that is conceptual, and not temporal as it is in a narrative, or spatial as it is in a tableau. Analysis is frequently used in contemporary French historiography, even in domains that are generally associated with narrative, like military history and political history. A specialist in World War I, Annette Becker shows in Les oubliés de la Grande Guerre (The forgotten ones of the Great War) (2003 [1998]) that a study of this period does not necessarily involve a review of military operations or the use of narrative. Divided into three parts, Becker’s book deals first with the hardships of civilians and prisoners, then with the interventions of organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and finally with the limits and failures of humanitarian work. As this outline attests, Becker does not dispose the facts she has selected according to the order of their occurrence. She treats them by category, going, for instance, from the civilians to the soldiers when she takes up the subject of hardship but from the soldiers to the civilians when she examines the measures taken by the Red Cross. Becker therefore does not draw a tableau; singling out the entity “the forgotten ones of World War I,” she identifies the different groups that make it up, then endeavors to describe them in their specificity. Gérard Noiriel proceeds the same way in a book of political history, Les origines républicaines de Vichy (1999). Turning to Bloch’s “regressive method,” he starts with a review of the discriminatory measures Vichy took in 1940 and 1941, then goes back to the discussions about “nationality” that took

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place under the Third Republic, to the “files” that same republic had constituted, and finally to the debates about “race,” “ethnicity,” and “national character” that had divided scholars and legal experts well before the “statutes on the Jews” were elaborated. Put back-to-back, however, the questions Noiriel addresses do not constitute a narrative that would move backward in linear fashion as some experimental novels and films do. The book’s structure remains an analysis, in which units are connected not temporally, but topically. Used in political and military history, analysis is also frequently employed in cultural history, that is, to provide a basic definition of this fast-expanding field in the study of both upper-class and lower-class practices and representations. From Le miasme et la jonquille (The Foul and the Fragrant) (1986) to L’harmonie des plaisirs (The harmony of pleasures) (2008), Alain Corbin’s work on “sensitiveness” is typical of the way cultural historians organize their materials along thematic lines, marking out a period, selecting a topic, and distinguishing diverse aspects of it. L’harmonie des plaisirs, for example, deals with treatises about “ways of coming to orgasm” published from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, before the invention of “sexuality.” Corbin divides these texts into three categories, depending on whether they were written by physicians, theologians, or pornographers. Sylvie Lindeperg disposes her data in similar fashion in Clio de 5 à 7 (2000), her study of the newsreels shown in French movie theaters immediately after World War II. In the first part of her work, she examines the role of the press groups that produced these newsreels, as well as the way the “Liberation” event was depicted. In the second part she treats successively the way General de Gaulle’s various appearances were staged, the return of the people who had been deported, and the trials of the “Epuration”—the “cleansing” of the politicians, journalists, and soldiers who had collaborated with the Germans. Though decidedly distinct in their subjects and the evidence they draw on, these two studies have in common tackling issues of representation in a way that is nonnarrative. Indeed, they do not arrange their data on a diachronic axis but make them into elements of a whole whose structure they set out to describe. Next to the tableau, analysis is also one of the preferred modes of organization in “global” and “connected” histories. Centered not on a period but on a social, economic, and demographic phenomenon, Olivier PétréGrenouilleau’s Les traites négrières: Essai d’histoire globale (The slave trade: An essay in global history) (2004) treats the slave trade as a topic whose different aspects must be broken down. True, in the first part of his book PétréGrenouilleau describes the “growth and evolution” of the trade, then in the second part he takes up the “process of abolition.” Yet the arrangement of the

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data in these two parts is comparative rather than narrative, the historian distinguishing between “Western” and “Eastern” ways of acquiring slaves, then between different “models” of abolition. Devoted to the demographic and economic aspects of the trade, the third part similarly eliminates narrative in favor of a thematic approach that considers the “profitability” of the trade and then its role in the history of Africa and the Muslim world. Romain Bertrand’s L’histoire à parts égales (History in equal shares) (2011), the study not of a worldwide phenomenon but of an encounter between European and Javanese cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, also falls under the heading of analysis. As its title indicates, Bertrand’s work does not, or does not only, trace a specific aspect of European expansion. Seeking to account for the nature of the “connections” that got established at the time between the newcomers and native cultures, Bertrand handles “in equal shares” Western archives and vernacular documents. He alternates points of view, asking, among other things, how “connected” cultures weighed merchandise, what money they used to buy products, how they evaluated distances and located countries, the nature of their commercial ethics, whether their encounter had a religious character, and what conception they had of the state. Insofar as he attempts to do a “symmetrical” history, Bertrand also “crosses” value judgments, showing how the Javanese elite, in love with decorum, looked at the Europeans they had met not as explorers worthy of admiration, but as illmannered merchants. Finally, analysis is often used in microhistories, histories whose scale is not the world but a small community and a few individuals. A work often given as an example of an investigation conducted “at ground level,” Paul-André Rosental’s Les sentiers invisibles (The invisible paths) (1999) is characterized both by its use of various scales and by the way it is organized according to the logic of an argument. Striving to reassess on one hand the assumption of an “immemorial entrenchment of the countryside” and on the other the thesis of a “massive rural exodus” in the nineteenth century, Rosental organizes his demonstration in three parts. First he contrasts the “territory” with the “residence,” describing a “local mobility” that differed from sedentary living as well as from far-off migration. Within the spatial frame of the territory, he then defines a “migratory project,” by which he means the opportunity to move that members of a rural community may have had at some point. Finally, he appraises the ways those diverse projects were actualized: how some “family dynamics” triggered the migrations and the itineraries those migrations took at the time. Thus Rosental does not arrange his data in a temporal sequence. The descriptions he supplies of the “territory,” the “migratory project,” and

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the “migratory models” are synchronic, since they refer not to changes in France’s rural society in the nineteenth century, but to some of its lasting features, as a specialist in historical demography was able to reconstruct them based on several samples. Metahistories Next to anthropological descriptions, tableaux, and analyses, contemporary French historiography admits a fourth category of nonnarrative texts: metahistories. Under “metahistories,” I count the studies that seek neither to explore new subjects nor to revisit subjects that have already been treated, but to discuss earlier works. Several historiographic studies include a metahistorical component: of the eighteen chapters in Goubert’s La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle, seven begin with a “wrong” description, which Goubert disqualifies before continuing with the “correct” account. Yet these polemical passages constitute enclaves whose function is to contribute factual data, in this case new information that will replace the information Goubert considers unsound. The studies I call “metahistories,” on the other hand, are entirely devoted to discussions not of the facts properly speaking, but of their interpretations. Their purpose is either to comment on these existing interpretations or to propose new ones, often combining these aims. Among the numerous works devoted to the French Revolution of 1789, François Furet’s Penser la Révolution française (Interpreting the French Revolution) (1978) stands out as an archetype of metahistory. A specialist of the period, Furet had already dealt with it in La Révolution française (1973), written with Denis Richet, and he was to return to it in the volume La Révolution (1988) of the Histoire de France published by Hachette on the occasion of the Bicentennial. However, whereas these two works take the form of a linear narrative, Penser la Révolution française is an essay that focuses on problems of conceptualization. Part 1 offers a diagnosis: the French Revolution is “over,” by which Furet means it can no longer be taken as a radical break or an absolute beginning. It must be problematized and reconceptualized; that is, theories must be found to situate the event in the long term, account for its heterogeneity (there are an urban revolution and a rural revolution), and explain its singularity (with respect, for instance, to England’s “evolution”). Reviewing some of the existing theories in part 2, Furet proceeds in two steps. First he rejects what he calls the “revolutionary catechism”: the Marxist version of the Revolution as class struggle and bourgeois takeover (Mazauric, Soboul), a version he finds too schematic and reductionist. He then goes on

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to praise the versions of Tocqueville (the Revolution as a continuation of the centralizing tendencies of the monarchy) and Cochin (Jacobinism as the conversion of intellectual power into political power), because they make it possible to “think” the two main aspects of the period: the place of the Revolution in the long time span and the drift toward extremism during the Jacobin episode. The way Furet arranges his data is thus not chronological (he begins with the most recent studies) but rhetorical: as in Goubert, the “wrong” versions must be disposed of before the “correct” ones can be introduced and commented on. That Marxist theories should be the ones occupying the “to be refuted” slot is not irrelevant. It points to the difficult relations between the Annales and Marxism as well as to the personal trajectory of several historians who, like Furet and Le Roy Ladurie, once belonged to the Communist Party but left it to endorse centrist and even rightist positions. The issue of the relations between scholars’ political itinerary and their scientific production is certainly important, and I will return to it when examining the way ideological positions are inscribed not at the macrotextual level of the organization of the argument, but at the microtextual level of enunciation and perspective. As Furet discusses not the Revolution itself but its interpretations, Pierre Laborie, in Le chagrin et le venin (The sorrow and the venom) (2011), does not investigate the Occupation properly speaking (he did so in L’opinion française sous Vichy [1990] and Les Français des années troubles [The Frenchmen of the years of trouble] [2001]) but addresses cultural productions that deal with the period. By referring in his title to Ophüls and Harris’s documentary film Le chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), Laborie designates his first target. Indeed, he holds this film responsible for what he calls—turning to more puns—the “ready to think” and the “memorially correct” (11) about the Occupation, especially for the idea that 80 percent of the population had remained indifferent, with 10 percent joining the Resistance and 10 percent becoming collaborators. These figures, according to Laborie, do not account for the diversity of regional situations or for the great number of microevents that shaped people’s attitudes from day to day. Next to Le chagrin et la pitié, Laborie also discusses some of the best-known theses about the Occupation, notably Henry Rousso’s (1990), Robert Paxton’s (1972), and Philippe Burrin’s (1993). Challenging Rousso’s periodization, he argues that at the time of the “consensus” supposedly imposed by Charles de Gaulle, right-wing magazines, novelists opposed to Sartre’s call for engagement, and former collaborators offered an alternative view of Vichy that did not agree with that of de Gaulle and his government. Similarly, debating Paxton, he maintains that the theories of the American historian apply to “state collaboration,” but not to

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the whole nation: the French who did not actively resist were not necessarily Vichy’s supporters. The concepts of “accommodation” and “wait and see” used by Burrin, finally, seem too broad to Laborie: while some Frenchmen were opportunists, others, following orders coming from the Free French government in London, were sincerely waiting for D-Day to take action. As this brief outline shows, Laborie here does not tell a story: he organizes his text according to the logic of an argument, discarding the “wrong” views before introducing the views he thinks better account for the complexity of the Occupation, specifically for the diversity of the acts of both collaboration and resistance that took place during this period. The works in which historians take up problems of epistemology may also be counted as belonging to the category of metahistories. True, these works are very few. While historians have frequently treated issues of methodology, it is certainly premature to claim, as Noiriel (2005, 127) does, that starting in the 1970s they have taken an “epistemological turn.” When they have debated the cognitive status of their discipline, they have mostly done so with two objectives: first, to defend—against Hayden White—the idea that history is different from fiction and can offer verifiable knowledge, then to support—against some of the advocates of the linguistic turn—the thesis that representations have a referent and do not constitute an autonomous world. Yet these interventions have mostly taken the form of articles in journals or texts written for anthologies. Furet, Sirinelli, Prost, Chartier, Ozouf, Corbin, and Boucheron have contributed to the issues the journal Le Débat has devoted to such subjects as “Inquiétudes et certitudes de l’histoire” (1999) and “Histoire et littérature” (2011), and Jacques Revel has written the chapter “Les sciences historiques” in Épistémologies des sciences sociales, edited in 2001 by Jean-Michel Berthelot. While historians have sometimes published collections of essays and articles (e.g., Pomian 1999; Chartier 1998, 2009; Lepetit 1999; Hartog 2003, 2005), nevertheless they have not written whole studies that would explore the nature of their discipline, leaving this task to philosophers like Aron, Ricoeur, and Rancière. Besides Henri-Irénée Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Historical knowledge) (1975 [1954]), Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire (1971) et Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? (Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? ) (1983) are among the few comprehensive studies that French historians have devoted to problems of epistemology. I pointed earlier to the originality of the theses Veyne puts forth in Comment on écrit l’histoire, specifically, to the provocative definition of history (“nothing but a true story”) advanced at a time when the Annales’ antinarrativist position was hardly questioned. Published

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twelve years later, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? constitutes an equally significant addition to the theory of history. Veyne probes various aspects of the Greeks’ system of beliefs, such as the social distribution of those beliefs, the meaning attributed to myths by historians and philosophers, and the use of myths by people in power. His point, however, is not to establish whether the Greeks “really” believed in their myths, since, he snaps, anybody “with the slightest historical education” knows they did (138). By reconstructing the Greeks’ “truth program,” Veyne shows how “discussions about facts” are always held within sets of assumptions that determine what can count as true at a specific time and place. For epistemology, therefore, the importance of Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? lies in the fact that Veyne does not answer yes or no to the question he asks but historicizes and theorizes it. This historicizing, however, does not take the form of a narrative. Even though Veyne (118, 130, and passim) refers several times to his “plot,” he actually organizes his data along topical lines, not temporal ones. His use of “plot,” then, is probably polemical and self-conscious, a continuation of the challenge issued to the Annales in Comment on écrit l’histoire. Synchronic Cross Sections and Narrative Recuperation While the texts I have labeled synchronic cross sections do not take the form of a narrative, this does not mean they are devoid of a narrative dimension. Rosental, for example, illustrates his analysis of migrations with brief stories that trace the spatial and professional journeys of people who are explicitly named, if only by pseudonyms. Similarly, Becker reports several anecdotes about the deportations, the situation in prisoner of war camps, the bombing of hospitals, and other topics related to the fate of the “forgotten” of World War I. In both Rosental’s and Becker’s work, however, these narratives remain subordinated to the analysis that frames them. They mostly serve as examples, pointing to events that are not unique but representative, in this instance, of what typically happened during the period the historian is considering. Similarly, the actors in these narratives are often given names because they constitute “cases of,” not because their identity is in itself worth investigating. Synchronic cross sections also have a narrative dimension in that they could be extended upstream as well as downstream. All the studies I have discussed are carefully situated in time, and their authors frequently characterize the period they are considering in terms of what it modified from the preceding period and what changes the following period would bring. As Prost (2010, 254) has argued, historians can assay the “specificity” of the moment

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they are investigating only with regard to other moments, using explicit or implicit comparisons of a temporal nature. To better explain, in L’harmonie des plaisirs, the singularity of theories about sexual pleasure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Corbin frequently contrasts them with theories elaborated in the late nineteenth century by sexologists such as Albert Moll, Friedrich Otto Westphal, and Richard von Kraftt-Ebbing. Similarly, Le Roy Ladurie (1975, 467, 574) at times evokes what remains today of Montaillou’s “folklore,” whether it is the “priest’s magical function” or the “praise of poverty,” relying either on the inquiries he himself conducted in the village in 1974 or on other scholars’ work, like Pierre Bourdieu’s study on marriage rules in Béarn. One could thus imagine that Corbin’s and Le Roy Ladurie’s inquiries have sequels, as one could imagine that Goubert’s tableau of Beauvais and Vovelle’s of Provence might well be extended to account for “what things were like” later in these areas. One could also, in the field of cultural history, envisage that Lindeperg’s study of newsreels at the time of the Liberation might be complemented by a study of those same newsreels under the Fourth Republic—up to the moment when the task of delivering this type of report was taken over by television. Finally, synchronic cross sections may include “quasi plots” similar to the one that Ricoeur (1983, 303) sees as underlying Braudel’s La Méditerranée. Revisited from Ricoeur’s perspective, several of the texts I have characterized as nonnarrative might indeed be viewed as including a virtual plot, a plot that proceeds, following Propp’s model of storytelling (1968) as modified by Greimas and Landowski (1979, 12), from an “initial state of lack” to the “elimination of that lack” performed by a “subject” endowed with special powers. Taken as a narrative, Becker’s study of the Great War would move from a “state of hardship” to a “reduction (if not elimination) of that hardship,” organizations such as the Red Cross playing the part of the “subject” that performs the change. Similarly, Pétré-Grenouilleau’s (2004) work on the slave trade would trace a journey from a state of cruelty and injustice to the modification of that state, in this instance, to the abolition of slavery through a long series of campaigns and interventions. In that they are situated in time, even metahistories could eventually be regarded as involving a narrative dimension. Penser la Révolution française could thus be made into the story of the interpretations of the event Furet considers most significant. To do that, it would suffice to restore the chronological order of the versions of the Revolution the historian analyzes (Tocqueville-Cochin-Soboul-Mazauric), then to review the text on this rebuilt temporal axis, as competent readers do with works of fiction in which the textual and the chronological orders do not coincide. The same operation

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could be performed on Le chagrin et le venin, as the interpretations of the Occupation that Laborie discusses by moving synchronically from topic to topic could be reordered according to their chronology. As for Les Grecs ontils cru à leurs mythes?, it could be regarded as describing one stage in a more comprehensive study that would examine the different “truth programs” that have preceded and followed those of the Greeks. Are all historiographic texts susceptible to this kind of narrative recuperation? Can they all be either continued or taken as including a virtual, underlying plot? The answer probably resides less in the texts themselves than in readers’ assumptions about the nature of narrative. If we follow Greimas and Landowski (1979, 12), all texts fall under narrative in their “deep structure,” since they remap an itinerary that goes from a “before” to an “after,” even when this itinerary is cognitive and leads from “lack of knowledge” to “knowledge.” For a literary theorist like Thomas Pavel (1986, 5), on the other hand, Greimas and Landowski’s thesis is too “powerful”: in emptying the concept of narrative of any significance as an analytical tool, it generates so many narratives that it becomes “trivial.” From the perspective of poetics, and without endorsing Pavel’s judgment, it is certainly more productive to distinguish the texts that situate their data in time (as do Montaillou, Les sentiers invisibles, and Penser la Révolution française), from the ones that organize those data on a temporal axis (as do La décadence, Intellectuels et passions françaises, and Léon Blum). Only the texts in the second category fall under “narrative,” at least for the poeticians (e.g., Genette, Prince, Phelan) who give an intentionally narrow definition to the term and do not assume, as Greimas and Landowski do, that all texts are in fact narratives in their deep structure.

S ta g e N a r r a t i v e s Cross sections, as we have seen that Prost argues, may often be conceived as parts of plots, since they explicitly or implicitly refer to a preceding or subsequent state of the period they treat, with which they could combine to form a complete story. In fact, several classics of contemporary French historiography are made up of precisely such combinations: they slice time up into a certain number of phases, which they successively characterize and piece together to make up a narrative. This narrative is constituted not of events, however, but of situations or stages. I therefore propose to call this type of textual disposition “stage narrative.” Just like cross section, stage narrative is suited for most domains of historical research. It is one of the preferred modes in cultural history, where

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it serves to show how practices and representations have changed over time spans of diverse lengths. Philippe Ariès’s L’homme devant la mort (The Hour of Our Death) (1977) is a plausible prototype of this kind of narrative for the long time span. The book unfolds in five stages, with each describing a moment in the evolution of attitudes toward death: the “tame death” of antiquity and the High Middle Ages, accepted as a step in a collective destiny; the “death of the self ” of the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, conceived as the completion of an individual biography; the “remote and imminent death” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, felt as savage and threatening; the “death of the other” of the nineteenth century, seen as the loss of a beloved one in a family-oriented culture; and the “invisible death” of the late twentieth century, regarded as a repulsive episode that must be concealed and sanitized. In the related area of the history of the body, health, and hygiene, Georges Vigarello’s studies likewise unfold as a series of phases. Le propre et le sale (Concepts of Cleanliness) (1985), for example, distinguishes four moments in the development of techniques of hygiene and the corresponding mental images of water: the “festive water” of the Middle Ages, linked to play and erotic pleasure; the “disquieting water” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which penetrates and weakens; the “strengthening water” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, held as a source of energy; and the “protective water” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose regular use prevents filth and infection. Vigarello turns to a slightly different periodization in Les métamorphoses du gras (Metamorphoses of the Fat) (2010), where he depicts five successive moments corresponding to changing attitudes toward weight: the “medieval glutton,” the “modern fathead,” “the Enlightenment and sensitivity,” the “bourgeois belly,” and “on the way to martyrdom,” the title of this last section probably referring to Henri Béraud’s Le martyre de l’obèse, an elegiac description of overweight people after what Vigarello calls “the revolution of the thin.” While stage narrative is appropriate for cultural history understood as the account of practices and attitudes whose meanings largely elude the members of the group under consideration, it also suits political and intellectual history, that is, the examination of what Marcel Gauchet (1999, 134) calls “the self-conscious part of the actors’ behavior, the ideas they form about this behavior, and the translations of them that they supply.” Illustrating Gauchet’s program, Pierre Rosanvallon’s trilogy Le sacre du citoyen (The coronation of the citizen), Le peuple introuvable (The people nowhere to be found), and La démocratie inachevée (The uncompleted democracy) dissects the theories that, from the Revolution to the present time, have sought to define more

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precisely concepts such as “citizenship,” “equality,” and “democracy,” as well as the controversies those concepts have brought about and the ways they have been applied. Le sacre du citoyen, for example, is organized into three parts, leading from the “revolutionary moment” (1789–92) to the “repertory of experiments” (1793–1848) to the “time of consolidation” (1848 to today). Adopting a two-step periodization (1789–1871, 1871 to today), Le peuple introuvable and La démocratie inachevée lead respectively from “difficult representation” to “balanced democracy” and from “democracy’s edges” to “average democracy.” Rosanvallon’s divisions are of course more complex, but it would be irrelevant to examine them in detail. From the perspective of the text’s overall disposition, it suffices to observe that Rosanvallon organizes his material by distinguishing a few major phases in the theorizing and then the establishing in France of “democracy,” even though the latter is still “uncompleted.” A recent domain that stage narrative has provided with a convenient model of textual arrangement is the history of memory. By “memory,” I mean with Philippe Joutard (2010, 783) the “remembrance of events lived by oneself, one’s ancestors, or people in one’s group”; and by “history of memory,” I mean the “study of the evolution of the different social practices . . . whose purpose is to represent the past and maintain its recollection, either within a specific group or within society as a whole.” I am borrowing this definition from Henry Rousso (1990, 11), whose Le syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours supplies both a representative example of history of memory and an illustration of the way stage narrative may be used in this area of research. Studying the “expressions” of collective memory (18), Rousso traces the evolution of the memory of Vichy over four phases: the “uncompleted mourning” (1944– 54, the aftermath of the civil war and the “purge” of the collaborators); the “repression” (1954–71, Vichy’s marginalization and the imposition of the myth of a “unanimously resisting France”); the “broken mirror” (1971–74, the collapse of the myth and the return of the repressed); and the “obsession” (1974 to today, the awakening of Jewish memory and the increasingly exclusive focus on the reminiscence of the Occupation). Bearing on a similar topic, Laurent Douzou’s La Résistance française: Une histoire périlleuse (2005) researches not the Resistance itself but, as its second subtitle (Essai d’historiographie) indicates, the works that have been dedicated to it. Douzou divides his study into six parts: a “history that cares about its history” (1940–44); a “history that is precociously, actively, and officially under construction” (1944–59); “witnesses [who] speak up and start writing” (1944–74); “Clio at work” (1944– 78); “a challenged and renewed historiography” (1978–2002); and “the end of

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heroes?,” this last chapter showing how the renewal described in the preceding chapter coincides with an erosion of the memory of the Resistance. The originality of Douzou’s narrative resides in its decoupling the time of historiographic research from the time of memory, a decoupling that is important from an epistemological standpoint. Indeed, it allows the study to escape a criticism often leveled at cultural history but that could also be leveled at stage narrative: that of considering the periods under consideration to be homogeneous, more precisely, as Chartier (2000a, 84) has it, of “locking in an artificial coherence the plurality of the systems of belief and modes of reasoning that in fact coincide within the same culture, the same community, the same individual.”5 Stage narrative, finally, is a model frequently used in women’s history, where it depicts the roles women have played and the activities they have carried out in the successive states of a given society, as well as that society’s stand toward them. Yvonne Knibielher and Catherine Fouquet’s Histoire des mères du Moyen-Âge à nos jours (1982) thus distributes attitudes toward motherhood into three main phases: the “time of silence” (Middle Ages to eighteenth century), when motherhood was seldom written about; the “time of exaltation” (eighteenth to late nineteenth century), when it was celebrated; and the “time of questions” (late nineteenth century to today), when several of its aspects (e.g., maternal instinct, freedom of choice) have become subjects of debate. Christine Bard’s Une histoire politique du pantalon (A political history of trousers) (2010) marks the shift from women’s history to gender history, that is, in Delacroix’s (2007b, 613) definition, to a study of the “relations between the sexes that articulates practices and representations and raises the issue of power.” Starting from men’s adoption of trousers in the years that followed the Revolution, Bard distinguishes four steps in this garment’s “politics,” that is, in the legal and aesthetic conflicts related to knowing who can wear what, and when: the “trousers’ utopia” in the nineteenth century, after a decree from 1800 prohibited women from dressing like men; the relaxing of this measure and the “reform of clothing” around 1900; the “resistible ascension” of trousers from 1914 to 1960; and the “recognition of women’s trousers” in the 1960s. Like Douzou’s, the originality of Bard’s work lies in the fact that she does not take her categories to be stable and unified: in the nineteenth century, strong personalities like George Sand and Rosa Bonheur defied the interdiction; in the 1900s, Colette and the multiple sports champion Violette Morris went even further than permitted by the relaxing of the rules; and in the 1970s, the political milieu still had trouble admitting women’s trousers.

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Alice Saunier-Séïté, the first woman minister to wear this garment, raised Jacques Chirac’s wrath, the president making it known to the “rebel” that she degraded “the function and the image of France” (Bard 2010a, 364). Although stage narratives differ widely in their topics, they also have several features in common. For one thing, they faithfully observe chronology, at least in presenting the main phases. If we designate textual order with A, B, C . . . Z and chronological order with 1, 2, 3 . . . n, the basic model of stage narrative comes in the form A1, B2, C3 . . . Zn. For all its simplicity, this model is no more “normal” or “natural” than the patterns outsideinside and structures-conjunctures that govern anthropological descriptions and tableaux. Its conventional nature is especially obvious in studies whose last stage is “today,” since such studies clearly invert the order of the historian’s investigation. Ariès analyzes this phenomenon lucidly in his preface to Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen-Âge à nos jours (1975). Acknowledging that his inquiry was triggered by some observations of current attitudes toward death, he explains that he moved backward until he hit a “cultural border” (15). Ariès’s text, however, does not follow these “backward” motions. It begins with an analysis of the “border period” of antiquity and ends with an account of recent views of death, restoring chronological order, as do most of the stage narratives I have considered. Aside from raising the issue of the relations between textual and chronological progressions, stage narratives also have in common posing several problems that are of interest to both poetics and epistemology. Dividing time into phases, to begin with, is subject to rhetorical exigencies of size and proportion. Data, however numerous and diverse, must fit into a number of categories that is neither too high nor too low for prevailing discursive standards. Too low: there is no such thing as a one-stage narrative, although, as we have seen, tableaux and anthropological descriptions may be regarded as forming one phase in a virtual plot. Too high: the nine-stage narrative that Laurent Avezou proposes in Raconter la France (To recount France) (2008), a study of histories of France from “the invention of Gaul” to the current “collision of memories,” probably constitutes a ceiling from a rhetorical standpoint. Aware of the unusual character of this segmentation, Avezou explains why he refused to “reduce these nine sequences to three” (9). Such a simplification, he argues, would have been convenient, since it would have offered “the illusory comfort of the three-part development.” But one of the book’s purposes was to move away from accepted periodizations, a move that allowed Avezou to make up divisions that were not chronologically homogeneous, including at times “temporal exchanges.” Joan of Arc, for example, appears not in the

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section on the fifteenth century but in those devoted to the two periods that were especially concerned with this personage—the seventeenth century and the Third Republic. Most of Avezou’s colleagues, however, have no scruples about organizing their narratives in three or four stages, a formula that seems to satisfy the sometimes conflicting demands of completeness and readability. It would be pointless to assign a specific meaning to this type of disposition, using, for example, one of the many “numbers keys.” Yet one might ask whether division into three or four parts, in addition to bringing the “illusory comfort” denounced by Avezou, also has ideological implications. In his extended review of La Méditerranée, Jack Hexter (1979, 137) has contended that Braudel’s ternary partition of time might be the “residue” of a “mentalité once Christian,” and this point is important for contemporary history in general and women’s history in particular. Deconstructionist critics have sometimes argued that the theses expounded in a text and the rhetoric used to convey them are necessarily in conflict, the latter eroding the former to an extent that it is precisely criticism’s task to determine. Without endorsing deconstructionist assumptions, it would certainly be useful to establish whether the number three is always as inexorably linked with patriarchal order as it is in Christian and feudal doctrines. If it is, one could then wonder about the ideological status of works such as Knibielher and Fouquet’s Histoire des mères, which show the negative effects those doctrines had at some point on a part of society, while themselves relying on ternary models to organize their data. Similar issues arise when we consider the periodizations involved in stage narratives. Most often, historians adopt well-acknowledged temporal divisions: the century, to be sure, but also such preset compartments as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and romanticism, compartments that turn up in several multivolume “histories of . . . ,” like Histoire de la France rurale, Histoire de la vie privée, Histoire du corps, and Histoire de la virilité. The same remark applies to the Histoire des femmes en Occident edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, whose contributors supply new, thoughtprovoking information but then distribute it into categories whose legitimacy they do not seem to question. True, specialists in women’s history are keenly aware of the problems involved in periodization, for instance, of the possibility of separate masculine and feminine chronologies. Knibielher (1984, 53) addresses this issue directly in her essay “Chronologie et histoire des femmes” (Chronology and women’s history) (1984), stressing that throughout Western history women have been “late” when it comes to emancipation, “early” when it comes to repression. While this distinction is occasionally taken up in Histoire des mères and Histoire des femmes en Occident, the analyses conducted

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in those studies lead neither to new periodizations nor to the identification of phases that would be different from those in “men’s history.” The ideological consequences of this respect for established temporal divisions are far from obvious. Yet it is certainly fair to ask, as Joan Wallach Scott (1988, 19) does, whether the adoption of “received historical categories” has implications for women’s and gender history; specifically, whether to speak, say, of a “Renaissance” places women’s time under men’s time (Was there a Renaissance for women?), and whether it is possible to draw women’s chronologies that do something more than differ from men’s chronologies taken implicitly as points of reference.6 So far I have used poetics to install and then further describe the category “stage narrative,” but stage narrative can also contribute to poetics. For one thing it enables poeticians to answer a question often asked in narrative theory: Must a story necessarily include events, or can it be made of successive situations? Testifying to these hesitations, Prince (1982, 4) first defined narrative as the “representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence,” then (2003, 58) called it the “representation of one or several real or imaginary events,” and most recently (2012, 24–25)—the definition I have adopted—described it as the “logically consistent representation of at least two asynchronous events, or of a state and an event, that do not presuppose or imply each other.”7 Offering an implicit rejoinder to this problem in narrative theory, such works as Le propre et le sale, Le sacre du citoyen, and Histoire politique du pantalon show that texts made up of situations (or “states”) may in fact be regarded as narratives. Indeed, the relations they establish between the successive situations they describe are temporal, not spatial or thematic. As for the relations between situations and events, stage narratives show that changes do not necessarily originate in single, easily identifiable events. They may also arise from sets of events, grouped in such categories as “trend,” “slowdown,” “takeoff,” and “disappearance.” One consequence of this grouping is that stage narratives often lack “narrativity” (Prince 2003, 65) and what Monika Fludernik (2013, 133) calls “experientiality”: they do not offer intense conflicts, sudden turns, or unexpected endings, and they rarely evoke the real-life experiences of individual human beings. But they still must be regarded as narratives, since they include what narratologists hold to be the most distinctive feature of the genre: the modification, on a temporal axis, of a state A into a state Z. Stage narratives make another contribution to poetics in that they sharpen the distinction between fictional and historiographic discourses. Just as the two genres differ at the paratextual and emplotment levels, they also stand

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apart at the macrotextual level of “disposition.” Whereas fictional texts are closed, historiographic texts, as we have seen Prost argue, are open and may in most cases be continued. Of course fictional narratives may be continued too: Genette (1982) provides in Palimpsestes several examples of sequels authors have written for their own works (e.g., Dumas’s Vingt ans après) or for someone else’s works (e.g., Virgil’s Aeneid ). Yet these continuations originate only in their authors’ imaginations; they do not exist because the characters staged in these texts have lived a life independent of the authors’ or because the world has evolved. The epistemological status of historiographic discourse is clearly different, since any change in the world may require a parallel change in the text itself. This situation is especially obvious in the stage narratives whose last stage is “today.” In the preface to the new edition of La gangrène et l’oubli (Gangrene and forgetfulness) (1998), Benjamin Stora acknowledges that the last part of his book: “1982–1991: Imaginary Revenges,” should be supplemented because of changes that occurred between 1991 and 1998, especially because of the internal conflicts that took place in Algeria during this period and the increase in scholarly works about the war. It would be conceivable, therefore, that Stora add a chapter to the next edition of La gangrène et l’oubli, as it would be conceivable that Rousso, in a new edition of Le syndrome de Vichy, add to his analyses a stage that accounts for France’s current concern with the period of the Occupation.8

Theory of a Practice As the preceding inventory should attest, the textual models that contemporary French historians prefer are tableau, analysis, and stage narrative. Since two of these models are nonnarrative, we cannot but observe that in this respect the historians’ practice does not agree with their theories, at least in the organization of the data. When the Annales were prevailing, this contradiction resided in the fact that people in power, such as Braudel and Furet, condemned narrative while at times resorting to it. Today’s historians display the same inconsistency, but the pattern is inverted. Endorsing Ricoeur’s views, they tend to claim that all historiographic texts fall under narrative, whereas they themselves hardly turn to storytelling in their studies. This discrepancy between theory and practice is particularly noticeable in the works of historians who, like Chartier and Hartog, have actively participated in the “squabbles” I described earlier. Chartier’s Les origines culturelles de la Révolution française (2000b), for example, does not trace the itinerary that would lead from specific cultural facts to the explosion of 1789. Orga-

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nized as an analysis, the book examines on a thematic axis the “conditions” that made the Revolution possible, even though those conditions do not fully explain the “emergence” or the “dynamics” of the event (2000b, 291). The studies Chartier has devoted to reading are arranged in the same way. Admittedly, he states in the prologue to Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime (1987, 7) that the book has become progressively more “coherent,” each new study “making it necessary to better define the concepts used earlier, to rethink what had wrongly been regarded as final, to launch new research.” Chartier, however, accounts here for his intellectual journey but not for the structure of Lectures et lecteurs, whose successive chapters do not develop a plot, even a virtual one. The only book by Chartier that includes a narrative component is Cardenio entre Cervantès et Shakespeare: Histoire d’une pièce perdue (Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play) (2011). Indeed, Chartier here tells a story: that of the disappearance and then reissue of a play first staged at the British court in the winter of 1612–13, inspired by a few episodes in Don Quixote that Shakespeare might have written, at least in part. Chartier recounts the performances that took place in England, Spain, and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then moves quickly to the “Cardenio fever” that swept through England and the United States in the 2000s, leading to several “reconstructions” of the play of 1613. Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire: Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (2001a) plays the same role in Hartog’s production as Cardenio entre Cervantès et Shakespeare plays in Chartier’s. An intellectual biography of Fustel, the first part of this book is in fact the only text in which Hartog tells a story, that of Fustel’s career (the second part offers a selection of Fustel’s writings). The other books by Hartog that are not collections of articles—Le miroir d’Hérodote (2001b) and Mémoire d’Ulysse—must be viewed as analyses. Le miroir d’Hérodote first considers the way “the other,” namely the Scythians, are represented in the Histories, then looks closely at the textual strategies the historian uses in his descriptions. Made up of seven chapters, Mémoire d’Ulysse inventories the narratives the Greeks have written about their travels, the historian’s aims being the same as in Le miroir d’Hérodote. The point, for Hartog (1996, 21) is consistently to “provide a meaning” to the journeys the Greeks had taken, to explore the ways the “border men” whose treks he reports assign a place to the “other,” “even when they speak [Greek] on their behalf.” Similar remarks can be made about Veyne, who, as we have seen, had dared to write in Comment on écrit l’histoire (1971, 16) that history was “nothing but a truthful story.” Anticipating Ricoeur, he had also stressed the importance of

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the plot, which he defined as a “very human and hardly scientific mixture of material causes, goals, and accidents” (46). Veyne’s properly historiographic works, however, are at odds with his epistemological essays, since they do not deploy any plot. Le pain et le cirque (Bread and Circuses) (1976), for example, follows the model of the analysis. Veyne discusses evergetism—the donations the ruling classes made to the community—a gesture that played an important part in the classical period. He identifies different types of evergetism in Greece and Rome, though without tracing the route from one type to the other; the structure of Le pain et le cirque is a taxonomy. Similarly, Veyne does not, in L’élégie érotique romaine (2003), remap the evolution of this poetic form; he describes its stylistic features and investigates its social origins. As for Sénèque: Une introduction (2007), it is not a biography that would cover the career of this politician, writer, and philosopher. Veyne gives some brief biographical information in a prologue and an epilogue, but most of the book is devoted to Seneca as a stoic, accounting for philosophical positions that do not have a narrative component. Rather than speaking of a biography, one should speak here of a portrait, a “flat,” synchronic description of a character, not of the story of that character’s life. To blame Chartier, Hartog, and Veyne for the occasional discrepancies between their theory and their practice is of course inappropriate. To begin with, these contradictions could be identified only by using a specific definition of “narrative,” a definition that is formalist and comes from narratologists like Prince and Phelan. Chartier and Hartog do not propose any definition of this term, and Veyne’s definition of plot as a “mixture of material causes, goals, and accidents” refers to content, not to formal features. How, then, could these historians state that historiographic discourse always falls under storytelling? Taking “narrative” for granted, do they think it would be useless to specify the term’s meaning? And in this case, what implicit definitions do they employ when they claim that histories inescapably belong to storytelling? At least two explanations may account for this incongruity. The first is that Chartier, Hartog, and Veyne buy into Ricoeur’s thesis that histories, even when they do not explicitly take the form of narratives, nevertheless are part of an underlying plot. On this point they would join with Prost’s view of tableaux as installments in a virtual narrative, a view that, as I argued earlier, can be extended to other synchronic cross sections. But Chartier, Hartog, and Veyne, together with several of their French colleagues, would also join with the British and American theorists who hold that histories always come as stories; for instance with Hayden White (2010, 118), for whom Jacob Burck-

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hardt’s The Civilization of Renaissance in Italy, obviously a tableau, is in fact a narrative, although one that is “all middle.” Another way of making sense of classifying all historiography as “storytelling” is to see in this assignment a consequence of the “narrative turn.” As Martin Kreiswirth (2000, 2005) has shown in the articles he has devoted to this trend, one of the consequences of narrative’s “migration” from literary criticism and the humanities to the social and even the theoretical sciences has been a widening of the term’s definition. Commenting on this phenomenon, Prince (2012, 23) has pointed out that “narrative” may now be substituted for such words as explanation, argumentation, hypothesis, ideology, and message. Kreiswirth and Prince weigh the impact of the narrative turn in English-speaking countries, but a similar development has taken place in France. Some of the contributions to a seminar held in the late 1990s at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, whose proceedings were published as Le modèle et le récit (Grenier, Grignon, and Menger 2001), show that the semantic extension of the term in France has been even more radical. Some of the contributors, beginning with the archaeologist and epistemologist Jean-Claude Gardin (407–8), argue that in the human and the social sciences “narrative” now refers to texts or parts of texts that use “natural language and natural logic.” “Narrative,” then, would not contrast with anthropological description and analysis, as I suggested earlier; it would depart from “model,” that is, from texts or parts of texts that rely on “mathematical language and formal logic.” Although the French historians who now endorse narrativism do not mention this seminar, they may implicitly agree with the all-embracing definition of narrative as “any text or part of a text using natural language and natural logic” that was offered there. This definition is indeed broad, and one might ask whether it is too inclusive. More specifically, one might ask, as we have seen that Pavel does, whether it would be more productive to maintain the distinction between the mythos and the logos, that is, between texts that tell a story and texts that develop a topic or argue a point. The two modes, of course, are in fact often (always?) combined, as titles such as La décadence and Histoire politique du pantalon make plain. Furthermore, as Allan Megill (2007, 97) has shown, historians’ task is not just to find a suitable arrangement for the data they have gathered and to describe “what was the case”; it is also to explain “why it was the case” and to “interpret” that past from a certain perspective and for a certain audience. It is to the close examination of these additional tasks that I will devote my next chapter.

chapter 2

Situations

Danto, Ricoeur, White, and most of the theorists and philosophers who have engaged in historiographic discourse have generally restricted their analysis to the macrostructures. More precisely, as seen in the preceding chapter, they have asked to what extent historiography necessarily falls under narrative, and how studies that claim to no longer belong to this mode must be dealt with. They have not, on the other hand, considered the microstructures of historiography, or what might be called its pragmatics: the way historians write their texts according to rhetorical and stylistic conventions, in specific circumstances, and for a certain type of reader. In the few cases when they have taken up these questions—for instance, to describe the textual differences between historiography and fiction (e.g., Pihlainen 2002, 2006)—they have done so without providing examples, by conversing with other theorists and philosophers rather than by probing the conventions at work in studies written by trade historians. In brief, as J. Hillis Miller (1987, 1105) puts it in his review of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, they have eschewed “reading,” if by “reading” one means “a confrontation of the linguistic complexities of the texts discussed.” The matters I want to investigate in this chapter and the following one touch precisely on some of these “complexities.” Considering the discursive situation and its components, I first distinguish, as is usually done in poetics, between “voice” and “perspective,” that is, between determining “who is speaking” and determining “from what perspective it is spoken.” Because the texts in my corpus include a large number of quotations, I then ask who is quoted and what techniques are used to represent voices that are not the historian’s. Finally, assuming that scholars are no different from most authors

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and want to be read, I take up the question of the addressee and seek to identify the audience(s) contemporary French historians are seeking to reach. Yet my working hypothesis remains the same: “textualizing” is a major stage in the historiographic endeavor, and its different aspects must be investigated with great care. Attempting to enter into what Rancière (1992, 24) calls the “historian’s workshop,” I thus keep proceeding “bottom up,” from an examination of writing practices—however trivial they might appear—to an analysis of the implications such practices may have for the politics, the ideology, and the epistemology of the texts in which historians put them to work.

E n u n c i at i o n s According to Ricoeur (2000, 206), the basic speech act a witness performs is “I was there, believe me, and if you don’t believe me, ask someone else.” Ricoeur does not define the historian’s basic speech act, but it could take the form: “I’ve done research, believe me, and if you don’t believe me, go check my sources.” These two initial statements differ in that historians “were not there” and in most cases did not participate in the events they report or discuss, but rather reconstruct them based on documents. These differences at the level of the initial speech act entail corresponding differences at the level of enunciation. Whereas witnesses, because they “were there,” are bound to anchor their narratives in an “I,” today’s historians must ban signs of their subjectivity. For that matter, as we have seen, most manuals of historiography (e.g., Plot 1994, 252) direct beginners not to make judgments and to limit “personal interventions” to the presentation of their project and brief assessments of their evidence. Contemporary French historians have hardly discussed issues of enunciation, or they at least have not discussed them with as much vehemence as they have argued issues related to the use of narrative in their endeavors. When they have taken up the topic of their presence in the texts they write, their statements have generally tended to reinforce a noncritical view of objectivity. Braudel (1986, 1:9–10), for example, states in his introduction to L’identité de la France that although he “loves” his country, he will keep his feelings “carefully out of the way.” Indeed, historians must “purge themselves” of the “passions” originating in their “social position,” “experience,” “infatuations,” and the “multiple insinuations of their time,” a feat Braudel deems himself “able to accomplish quite decently.” Though placed in the opposite situation—they cannot “love” what they investigate—Loez, Pétré-Grenouilleau, and Dewerpe nevertheless forbid themselves to condone or disapprove of

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the events they report: Loez (2010, 539) intends to “keep in the distance and submit to criticism” the representations of the mutinies of the Great War; Pétré-Grenouilleau (2004, 13) means to “understand” the slave trade “without condemning it”; and Dewerpe (2006, 19), although he lost his mother at the Charonne demonstration, aims to produce through a detailed narrative “an effect of critical distance that will help account for an unreasonable event that has its own reasons.” In similar fashion, Ferro (1987, iii), who cannot be suspected of admiring the man whose biography he is writing, insists in the preface to his Pétain that historians must “preserve, clarify, analyze, and diagnose” but “never judge.” Ferro does not explain how one can “diagnose” without “judging,” that is, without leaving traces of one’s presence as subject of the “diagnostic.” Implicitly, he takes “objectivity” in the sense of “absence of bias,” not “independence with regard to a cognitive subject.” Yet it is that latter sense that must be considered when examining historiographic texts: not necessarily to expose an ideology their authors would be unaware of, but—at a more elementary level—to pose the question of those authors’ presence in the writings they have produced. Before entering the “historian’s workshop,” I must specify what theoretical assumptions my analyses are grounded in. According to the pragmatics I have adopted, every utterance—however neutral it might appear—is made by someone and directed to someone else, in circumstances that in most cases can be identified. Thus even a so-called scientific utterance such as “water boils at 212 degrees” involves a context of enunciation: it can be made only by someone familiar with the Fahrenheit system, and it answers an explicit or implicit question from someone who is unfamiliar with this system or does not know (or no longer knows) at what temperature water will boil. In other words, as Bruno Latour and Paolo Fabbri (1977, 90) have argued in an article on the rhetoric at work in a medical paper, utterances of the type “A is B” are convenient shortcuts that scientists use to summarize their findings. Debates and changes in the theoretical paradigm that characterizes science show that these utterances should be modalized, that is, presented in the form “X claims that A is B.” Similarly in the field of narrative poetics, Genette (1972, 252) has shown that there is no such thing as a story “in the third person.” Every story has a narrator, whether this narrator is telling his or her own story or someone else’s (homo- vs. heterodiegetic narrative), and whether or not the narrator is part of the storyworld represented (intra- vs. extradiegetic narrative). What may vary, of course, is the narrator’s degree of involvement. The range goes from what Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 90) calls “maximum covertness” to “maximum overtness,” since speakers can leave the utterance itself as the

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only sign of their presence or multiply the signs of their activities as subject of the enunciation. Depending on the choices historians have made in this area, I have distributed into five categories the marks of enunciation that can be identified in their discourse. The Utterance as Trace of the Enunciation Émile Benveniste (1966, 241), in an often-quoted article, defines “historical enunciation” (which of course for him is not restricted to historiography) as the mode in which “nobody is speaking” and “events seem to be telling themselves.” Yet one must note that Benveniste is being careful. He writes “seem to be telling themselves,” the modalizer “seem” indicating that the addressee’s impression is deceptive: no text is “telling itself,” even when it is situated in the regime of “history.” Genette (1966, 65–66) had no trouble demonstrating that the excerpt from Balzac that Benveniste uses as an example of this regime in fact contains several signs of enunciation, and the same observation can be made about most (all?) texts that “seem” to be functioning without an enunciator. Loez (2010, 10), for example, begins the study he devotes to the mutinies in the French army during World War I like this: “Have me shot, but I won’t go to the trenches, it amounts to the same thing anyway.” The soldier who launches into this speech as a challenge to his lieutenant is called Henri Kuhn. He is in civilian life a carpenter in Châlon-sur-Marnes, and he has been fighting for three years in the twentieth infantry regiment, with which he has just participated in the bloody Moronvilliers skirmishes, during the Chemin des Dames offensive. On this April 29, 1917, however, he enters into disobedience with two hundred of his comrades. While this beginning in medias res does not contain any explicit mark of enunciation in the form of a judgment or of a first-person pronoun, it nevertheless falls under the structure “X states that A is B.” Indeed, the utterances that compose it include implicit marks of the basic historian’s speech act as defined earlier: “I have done research (you can check my sources), and here are the results of my inquiry: on April 29, 1917, the soldier Henri Kuhn, etc.” As producer of his text, the historian is here endowed with formal and epistemological attributes that must be immediately specified. First, the historian is both heterodiegetic and extradiegetic, reporting what happened to someone else and not being part of the storyworld. Furthermore, unlike narrators in

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fiction, the historian is also the author of the study. When Balzac—to return to Benveniste’s (1966, 241) example—writes “After touring the gallery, the young man looked successively at the sky and at his watch,” the hetero- and extradiegetic “I” who conducts this description is not Balzac but the narrator in Gambarra. When Loez, on the other hand, states that Kuhn “in civilian life” “is a carpenter in Châlon-sur-Marne,” the implicit “I” that stands behind this statement is also the author’s: by promising that he has done research and inviting readers to verify that Kuhn really was a carpenter in Châlon-sur-Marne, Loez makes himself responsible for what his enunciator is stating. As Paul Hernadi (1975, 252) has argued, the possibility of a “play” between author and enunciator (in both senses of the word play) would severely interfere with historiographic communication, because readers would wonder whether the author “really” stands behind the enunciator. Obviously, several difficulties surround the concept of “author,” and the model adopted here posits neither a unified subject nor the “seriousness” of historiography, in the way John Searle (1979, 61) asserts that nonfiction texts are made up of “serious utterances.” Yet the analysis of the author-enunciator relations confirms the hypothesis of a distinction between fictional and historiographic discourses—a hypothesis already verified with regard to the paratext, the couple plot plus emplotment, and the possible continuation of stage narratives, for which I will provide further validation. The Academic “We” To compose a whole text while leaving utterances as the only marks of the enunciation is a tall order, and historians have several options when they need to designate themselves more explicitly as subjects of what they are stating. The first one consists of turning to the “academic we,” “nous,” a practice that is still frequent in French scholarly discourse and has several advocates. According to René Rémond (1986, 294), for example, using “we” has pedagogical, psychological, and epistemological advantages: associating readers with the inquiry, it also protects the “modesty” of the historian and implies that the research would have yielded the same results if conducted by any colleague who had “conformed to the principles of the method.” To say “we,” for Rémond, thus implies an “act of faith in the universality of historical truth” as well as the “conviction of being able to reach some level of objectivity.” Along different lines, Certeau (1975, 72) emphasizes that the mediation of “we” fulfills an important ideological function: it enables historians to “eliminate the alternative that would attribute history either to an individual (the author, the

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author’s personal philosophy, etc.) or to a global subject (time, society, etc.).” Turning to “we,” according to Certeau, allows the substitution of an institutional “place” from which the historian’s discourse can be “articulated” without being “reduced to it.” Though use of “we” is still widespread in contemporary French historiography, the pronoun is in fact more polysemic than Rémond and even Certeau think. When Quentin Deluermoz (2012, 74, 240), in his study of the enforcement of public order in Paris from 1854 to 1914, writes that negative stereotypes about the police, “as we have seen,” are deeply anchored or that policemen, “let us note,” can easily adjust to new standards, “we” clearly includes readers, whom the author invites to accompany him in the development of the analysis. Similarly, when Deluermoz speaks of the organization of “our archives” (24) or of an incident that “especially interests us” (145), “we” implicitly refers to the historians’ community that is (or could be) investigating the same subject. Yet not all occurrences of “we” in Policiers dans la ville fall so conveniently into Rémond’s and Certeau’s categories. In utterances such as “our study” (18), “our purpose” (152), “we do not know whether . . .” (69), “we mean by that . . .” (109), “we will only identify . . .” (184), and “as we have emphasized” (321), the first-person plural includes neither the readers nor the scientific community: verbs such as “to know,” “to mean,” and “to identify” refer to activities of research or consciousness that can only be the historian’s own. In other words, “we” here does not serve any pedagogical, epistemological, or even psychological function. While displaying “modesty” in utterances such as “we do not know whether,” Deluermoz actually calls attention to what he is seeking to conceal: that he is speaking in his own name, and that by substituting “we” for “I,” he merely follows the conventions of scholarly discourse. Deluermoz, for that matter, is remarkably consistent. I did not find a single occurrence of the first-person singular in the whole book, and Policiers dans la ville would provide a rich corpus for scholars eager to investigate, in a nonliterary text, what the literary theorist Gilles Philippe (2002) has identified in a literary corpus as the “formal apparatus of the erasure of enunciation.” The “On” of the Nonperson The second option available to historians eager to refer to their activities without resorting to “I” is a third-person pronoun, the indefinite “on” or “one.” “Nous” and “on,” however, do not have the same history in French scholarly discourse and are not exactly synonymous. Whereas “nous” is found in the texts of the method school of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-

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ries, at the time when historians were seeking to establish the “objectivity” of their inquiries, “on” is of more recent import, at least as a substitute for “I” in scientific studies. Its use peaked in the 1960s, with the coming of what might be called “structuralist enunciation”: the attempt to bring into the human sciences some aspects of the rhetoric of the theoretical and natural sciences, especially the practice of blotting out traces of the subject of enunciation by using verbs in the passive and pronominal forms (“the analysis that will be conducted”) or of impersonal expressions (“it will suffice,” “it should be noted”). This erasure figured briefly among the traits of literary theory when scholars such as Barthes (1966, 56) and Todorov (1968, 18) sought to implement what they called a “science of literature”: when Barthes (1984, 153, first published in 1967), for example, employed in his essay “Le discours de l’histoire” turns of phrase such as “one will observe here” and “one wants to offer a few reflections.” Scientific discourse, as conceived at the time, was indeed supposed to circulate without the mediation of an enunciator, and that is the model Barthes and other “structuralist” scholars were seeking to emulate, albeit without interrogating its exact workings as Latour and Fabbri (1977) would do later. Although most scholars who used impersonal enunciation in the 1960s later relaxed their approach to writing, “on” has not disappeared from academic discourse. Christophe Charle, for instance, frequently turns to it in La crise des sociétés impériales, mainly at the beginning and end of a chapter, when he wants to introduce a topic or bring one to a close. “On,” like “nous,” may then refer to the historian and the reader: “In these chapters . . . one will see” (2001, 30); “one has encountered similar themes in Germany” (99). Or it may refer to the historian and his research community: “One sees better in hindsight” (16); “One could even mention the place of the church” (27). Yet Charle also employs “on” as a substitute for “I” when he writes, “In this book, one will seek to combine” (14); “One will here call these societies ‘imperial’ ” (16); or “In the tableau one has just drawn” (119). “One” in these utterances designates only the historian, with whom neither readers nor scholars investigating the same subject could be associated when it comes to “combining,” “calling,” or “drawing a tableau.” Even if Deluermoz and Charle, for that matter, had used “we” and “one” only to refer to the historians’ community, their studies could not be viewed as belonging to the class of scientific reports in which the writer functions as a spokesperson for the group. Indeed, “we” and “one” in these reports must be analyzed as “I plus the other scientists in the laboratory” or, when the collaboration is explicitly acknowledged, as “I plus the scientists named as coauthors of the article” (Loffler-Laurian 1980).

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The situation is obviously different in historiography, because the collaborators included in phrases such as “one could even mention” remain virtual or are named only in the paratext, specifically in the notes or in the acknowledgments. Exceptions can be found in introductions and conclusions of collective works, when the scholars who have directed the endeavor designate themselves as “we.” This is the case in Historiographies, whose editors (2010, 20) refer to themselves in the first-person plural when they write in their introduction: “We chose three axes . . . to account for this plurality of orientations” and then cosign this text with their names: “Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, Nicolas Offenstadt” (22). The Researcher’s “I” In his review of Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire, Certeau (1972, 1325) noted that one of the most interesting phenomena in the historiography of the 1960s was the return of the historian’s “I” as researcher. He gave as examples the lengthy prefaces in Vilar’s La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne and Le Roy Ladurie’s Les paysans de Languedoc, stressing that such prefaces traced not just “the history of the topic under consideration” but also that of the “historian as subject.” Yet prefaces (introductions, forewords, etc.) are paratextual spaces in which scholars have long been allowed to speak in the first person (Bloch does it in his introduction to La société féodale), and the passages Certeau identifies exploit an existing convention rather than inaugurate a new one. That convention, by the way, allows historians to make comments in the first person in other parts of the paratext, for instance, in the notes, where they may use the first person to both refer to sources and assess their validity. Certeau does not tell whether he pursued his investigation beyond the prefaces of La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne and Les paysans de Languedoc, but an analysis of modes of enunciation in the latter work reveals other passages in which Le Roy Ladurie stages himself in the role of what Scholes and Kellogg (1966, 265) call a histor: an author-investigator who writes his study “on the basis of the evidence he has been able to gather.” In Les paysans de Languedoc, Le Roy Ladurie insists at times that he is working with documents, for example writing: “From a list, I extract the most significant episodes” (1966, 48) and “In notarial documents, I find three main categories of signature” (345). Similarly, he occasionally indicates how he has obtained the figures he relies on, modernizing the function of the histor to state: “I count” (245); “I take inventory” (376); and “If I convert into gold price or silver price the nominal prices of the grain market in Bézier, I obtain . . .” (514). In La

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sorcière de Jasmin, Le Roy Ladurie also makes it known that he has visited some of the places where the episodes of sorcery examined in the book supposedly occurred. Thus, announcing with pride that “from historian, I have become field investigator” (1983, 229), he provides such details of his expeditions as “In 1982, I visited the former farm of Mimalé, which now belongs to a family of local farmers” (37). True, these interventions of the histor are too infrequent to make Les paysans de Languedoc and La sorcière de Jasmin into genuine samples of texts in which a scholar describes both the results and the conduct of the investigation. But they nevertheless are noteworthy exceptions to the rule that restricts the use of “I” to the paratext while further attesting to the influence of some current tendencies in anthropological writing on historiographic discourse. The turn to the first person, rare in the 1950s and 1960s, has become more widespread since the coming of the New History in the 1970s and 1980s. It has put its stamp on studies as diverse as Vovelle’s Théodore Desorgues, ou La désorganisation, Flandrin’s Un temps pour embrasser (A time to embrace/ kiss), and even works initially designed as thèses d’état, such as Sohn’s Chrysalides and Hartog’s Le miroir d’Hérodote (The Mirror of Herodotus). Hartog’s work offers a catalog of the ways a historian can resort to the first person for a specific purpose. First, to chart the text using what Barthes (1984, 155) calls “discourse organizers”: “But the question I am asking from the outset” (2001b, 61); “I will stop here the story of the Salmoxis” (165); “I am returning now to the hypothesis of the double mirror” (484). Second, to justify his approach: “Therefore I won’t go into this procedure of mutual validation” (59); “Nevertheless, it remains that I spoke very little about the Medic Wars” (463); “I will thus deliberately remain at the level of the text” (474). Third, to interpret several points in Herodotus’s Histories: “I believe that silence in this passage points to an absence” (297); “I assume that the metaphor of insularity is here implicitly present” (319); “I see him [the histor in Herodotus] as a guarantor rather than as a referee” (25). These occurrences of “I” are too frequent to be accidental, and they have obvious epistemological implications. In the preceding utterances, they seem to indicate that the historian gives up doing “as if ”: as if he did not have to make choices; as if the text had written itself from documents; and as if those documents did not have to be deciphered by a researcher whose judgments involve subjectivity (“I believe”). Hartog, in sum, takes responsibility for the decisions he had to make, or at least for some of them. I must stress: some of them. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historian—following Munslow’s (2010, 102) call—could shift consistently “from objectivity to self-consciously responsible subjectivity”: a

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text that would at every turn resort to the explanatory and substantiating “I” would soon become unreadable, provided it could have been produced this way to begin with. A Partisan “I”? In the process of examining the demands made on the community of French historians, Christophe Prochasson asks in L’empire des émotions: Les historiens dans la mêlée (2008, 9) how that community deals with the “new emotional regime” to which it has been subjected since the 1970s; that is, with the requirement to intervene in the “melees” that have marked the period, from the quarrels about Vichy to the “memorial laws,” whether Jean-Claude Gayssot’s about Holocaust denial or Christiane Taubira’s about the slave trade. Because my corpus is restricted to scholarly historiography, I won’t discuss here works that fall under the genre polemics, such as Furet’s Le passé d’une illusion. I will focus on two studies whose particularly sensitive topics seem to lend themselves to an “emotional” treatment but whose authors—as we have seen—claim they wrote them with as much distance and dispassion as possible: Charonne 8 février 1962 and Les traites négrières. How do Dewerpe and Pétré-Grenouilleau deal with the acts of extreme brutality that they represent? Do they intervene to condemn them? And, if they do, what strategies are they pressing into service? Two schemes that denote subjective stances are at work in these texts. In Charonne, it is mostly by selecting certain terms that Dewerpe defines his position with respect to the events that took place at the Charonne subway station on February 8, 1962. His stand is already noticeable in the titles he gives to the three main parts of his book: “A State Massacre” (Dewerpe 2006, 21), “The Civic Scandal” (287), and “Emerging from the Murder” (427). These titles immediately place the analysis of the occurrences at Charonne within a most explicit interpretive framework, which is then confirmed by the frequent resort to such concepts as “state violence” (86), “state lie” (393), “state censorship” (588), and “police counterfeiting” (399). These phrases of course imply value judgments, as they assign responsibilities for the tragic events of February 8 and show Dewerpe’s indignation at the way “impunities” (467) eventually prevailed: no “murderer” was ever identified, the “crimes” were amnestied, and the French government was declared not accountable for the “harm” done to the victims and their families (468). Pétré-Grenouilleau, unlike Dewerpe, does not use titles to indicate from the start his position with regard to the practices he analyzes. His tone is

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generally neutral, an apparent aloofness that, together with his stress on the “internal” African slave trade, has earned him charges of racism and even of denial.1 While Pétré-Grenouilleau rarely meddles in his text and does not rely on a conceptual apparatus as value-laden as Dewerpe’s, he nevertheless reveals his stance through brief interventions. His judgments, then, most often take the form of ironic utterances or of adjectives that denote condemnation: some theologians, “in a nice try of casuistry,” claim it is legitimate to acquire slaves “in order to convert them” (2004, 89); the supporters of slavery use certain arguments “a posteriori, in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable” (79); in bad weather, life in the boats that transported the captives “became atrocious” (167); and the estimates about the breadth of the trade, at one time “excessive,” have been slowly “reduced to a lower order of magnitude, though still horrifying” (179). Pétré-Grenouilleau thus clearly indicts the system he investigates, as historians doubtless have to do in one way or another when they take up a topic such as slavery. Indeed, as Philippe Burrin (1993, 82) has argued in his discussion of the “historicizing” of Nazism, scholars who strive to provide “the most accurate and most qualified image of the past” also have a “requirement of respect” toward the victims.” In other words, they cannot proceed “as if they could make a purely scientific assessment, without experiencing the alternate demands of their ethics and of their trade.” Such “demands” are certainly at work in Pétré-Grenouilleau’s study, and the controversies his book has raised testify to the difficulties historians encounter when they seek to balance the sometimes conflicting exigencies of their “ethics” and their “trade.” From the standpoint of poetics, the tension between “cognitive” and “affective” histories that Prochasson (2008, 9) identifies is in fact more obvious in some studies that bear on subjects less sensitive today than the slave trade and the “state crimes” committed at the Charonne subway station. Interventions of the historian’s “emotional person,” as Barthes (1984, 58) calls it to contrast it with the “objective person,” are especially noticeable in some of the works Le Roy Ladurie devotes to events that are remote in time, such as the disturbances he describes in Le Carnaval de Romans. Indeed, here Le Roy Ladurie combines the most meticulous research with the most glaring breaks from the rules of scholarly nonpartisanship. Drawing a one-sided picture of the unrest, he (1978, 367) praises the performance of the lower classes, which leaves him “dazed” and “admiring.” Conversely, he assigns the responsibility for the trouble to the town’s bourgeoisie and aristocracy, which he designates as a “clique” (135) and even as a “mafia” (297). Le Roy Ladurie is especially hard on one of the ruling classes’ leaders, Judge Guérin, whom he views as

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their “evil genius,” a “character in a detective novel” (129), a “man capable of low blows” (274), a “Tartuffe” (153), and a “carnival Machiavelli” (277). The historian also comments unfavorably on Guérin’s testimony, a narrative that is one of the main sources for reconstructing the events. Thus he charges the judge with using “malicious exaggerations” (126) and with “forging” some of the statements he attributes to the lower classes; and he intersperses Guérin’s text with derogatory remarks and sics of disapproval. In this respect Le Roy Ladurie goes much beyond the “internal criticism of the document” that the theorists of the method school required historians to do. He seeks to discredit Guérin’s testimony, and he does it in a more “emotional” way than Dewerpe and Pétré-Grenouilleau do when they discuss sources whose credibility they find questionable. If we wanted to legitimize Le Roy Ladurie’s interventions, we could say that he—in the same way Hartog turns to the first person—ceases to do “as if ”: in this instance, as if historians had no opinions about the events they recount, or at any rate as if they had to keep these opinions to themselves. Le Roy Ladurie here makes no effort to contain what Ivan Jablonka, (2014 261, in his comments on the historian’s “stylistic challenges,” calls “the wrath of truth”; unwilling to “screen his feelings,” he flouts one of the basic tenets of contemporary historiography—its requirement of neutrality. Let me emphasize: contemporary historiography. Indeed, while Le Roy Ladurie’s interventions break current codes, they also mark a return to earlier practices, in particular to those of Michelet—certainly present here in the intertext—who could write without qualms that he loved his country, rejected the monarchy, and supported the Republic. Enunciation and Gender To conclude this overview of strategies of enunciation in current French historiography, one might ask whether selecting one option rather than another is related to gender. Michelle Perrot (1987, 291) certainly invites us to do so when, reflecting on the reasons that induced her to do history, she writes in her contribution to the Essais d’ego-histoire: “Molded by morality and guilt, my upbringing had prepared me to consent. It had instilled in me a sense of sacrifice that made me prone to withdrawal and acceptance rather than to refusal. Saying ‘I’ has always been difficult for me; in one sense, perhaps I have done history in order not to speak of myself, even not to think of myself.” According to Perrot, therefore, women who have received an upbringing similar to hers will find in history a profession that perfectly suits them; for they will have no trouble adjusting to the requirements of the trade, beginning with

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the exigency of giving up their “emotional person.” Yet this forfeiture, which for Perrot has been “instilled” in the women of her generation, comes with a widespread stereotype that Arlette Farge (1984, 22) describes in her contribution to the anthology Une histoire des femmes est-elle possible? Asking whether women should aim at a “specific practice of feminine writing of history,” she argues that the issue is raised regardless of what women historians are actually doing. Even when they “do not claim for themselves a specific subjectivity in method and writing,” their work is often read “through this prism,” that is, through a critical look in search of marks of the “emotional person,” supposedly always present in the texts they have written. Are Perrot’s and Farge’s statements from the 1980s about the erasure of “I” and its alleged unavoidable occurrence in studies produced by women historians still topical in the twenty-first century? Proceeding in an empirical way, I will examine machineries of enunciation at work in three texts, beginning with a book whose subject seems to invite taking sides: Raphaëlle Branche’s La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962. Branche herself (2010, 41) has discussed the “writing choices” she made in her analyses of “colonial violence,” specifying that the point was neither to “clutter” the text with “emotional signifiers,” for instance, with adjectives such as terrible, impressive, and atrocious, nor to employ words that “sterilize . . . reduce violence to techniques, gestures to mechanisms.” Describing some of the methods used during the battle of Algiers, Branche (2001, 133) writes: Physical tortures occur according to a precise pace and in specific forms. Those inflicted at the Villa Sésini are always the same: application of electricity to the body and forced swallowing of water. These two basic tortures come with a few variations. The victim is either plunged into a basin or forced to swallow water through a funnel, a hood adding to the feeling of choking. As for electric torture, it varies according to the place where the electrodes are put and the strength of the current that is applied, but sex organs are systematically targeted. Deprived of any sign of the first person, Branche’s description takes us back to our first model of enunciation, in which the utterance is the only trace of an enunciator, in this instance, of the historian who communicates some of the data she has gathered during her inquiry. Yet Branche refrains from assessing those data: she does not add to terms such as “electric torture” phrases that would condemn the deeds of the army. For that matter, she does not need to: she and the readers she targets share an ethical code that rejects torture,

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whatever the cause it might be used for. Explicit indictments, moreover, are not absent from Branche’s text, but they are left to the actors—for example, to a woman who was tortured at the Villa Sésini, whose testimony Branche (2001, 133) quotes shortly after describing what was happening there: They covered my head with a hood and they made me go to the middle of the garden in a pavilion they had complacently named “confession chamber.”2 There, they took my clothes off. They bound my hands and my feet. They spewed offensive jokes, and they touched me in extremely embarrassing ways while a man had gone “to recharge the battery.” As a witness, the victim turns here to the very type of adverbs (“complacently”) and adjectives (“offensive,” “humiliating”) that the historian rejects because they constitute “emotional signifiers.” Branche, however, has most likely selected this text—originally a letter sent to the judge who was processing the case at the military court in Algiers—because it completes her own: attached to a description from which she wants to be as disengaged as possible, it both substantiates her statements and adds to them by providing the personal dimension she has carefully left out. Branche, when she goes over her discursive choices, does not refer to the issues of gender that history writing is raising. At most, her resort to such phrases as “l’historien-ne” and “le chercheur/la chercheuse” (2010b, 30, 37, 39) testifies to her desire to establish once and for all that “doing history” is not, or is no longer, a masculine privilege. Yet when she explains why she does not want to “clutter” her text with personal opinions, Branche traces this decision neither to her upbringing nor to a will to drain away the subjectivity allegedly inherent in “feminine writing.” In this respect the comments she makes about her own practices constitute an implicit intervention into the controversies about the place of women in the community of historians. Possibly considering that the issues of family environment and “feminine” nature raised by Perrot and Farge are no longer worth debating, Branche takes up only topics related to historians’ duties toward their profession or, more precisely, toward the actors and the readers: the actors, who must be treated with respect, and the readers, whose freedom must be maintained by not seeking to force upon them the “correct” interpretation of the facts. Trade women historians usually observe the same principles as Branche in the area of enunciation. Those who align themselves with feminism, in particular, clearly strive not to plead the cause of women in a way that could actually harm it. Thus the authors of the studies collected by Christine Bard in

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Un siècle d’antiféminisme (1999) seem to intentionally abstain from denouncing views they can only find nonsensical. They let some quotations speak for themselves, for example, adding no comment to the text in which the anarchist Victor Méric proclaims that feminists are “strange animals,” “hybrid individuals,” “amorphous beings,” and “a venomous species” (Rochefort 1999, 143). When they assess the text, they do it through adjectives devoid of any emotional charge: the French Academy has given an award to the Catholic novelist Théodore Joran’s Mensonges du féminisme (Lies of feminism), a book that is “rather mediocre” (Rochefort 1999, 136); a volume in a best-selling series, Berthe Bernage’s Brigitte aux champs (Brigitte in the fields) contains many “worn out clichés” (Cosnier 1999, 250); and French movies of the 1920s to 1930s are characterized by a “paranoid drift” as they stage males “destroyed” by the “destabilization of the postwar period” (Sellier 1999b, 286). The task of showing surprise or annoyance may also be left to punctuation, mainly to exclamation points and ellipsis dots: in Sacha Guitry’s film Quadrille, Guitry demonstrates to his partner that she is prey to all feminine vices, “beginning of course with adultery!” (Sellier 1999a, 209); in a movie of the same type, the husband forces his wife to use a stationary bike, even though “she visibly does not need to lose weight!” (Sellier 1999a, 213); and in both Nizan’s and Drieu La Rochelle’s novels, women “are housewives or victims, but kept away from active politics and heroism . . .” (Maugue 1999, 224). Punctuation marks, to be sure, do not enable the contributors to Un siècle d’antiféminisme to express strong opinions. But they nevertheless provide ways of intervening in that they make “affirmations of ” into “reactions to.” We can, as a test, replace exclamation points and ellipsis dots with periods and measure the difference. While these changes do not entirely erase traces of the enunciation, they do make them less noticeable, decreasing the force of the views the historian is seeking to convey. While they generally abide by the conventions of historiographic discourse in the area of enunciation, French women historians also play with them at times. Such is the case, in particular, in Arlette Farge’s Le goût de l’archive (The Allure of the Archives), a semiautobiographical text in which the author forbids herself not just to talk about her private life but to employ any form of the first person.3 Le goût de l’archive must doubtless be considered as a reflection on the article, mentioned earlier, in which Farge observes that historiographic studies written by women are always suspected of containing subjective elements, as well as on the subgenre of “career memoir,” in wide use since the publication of the Essais d’ego-histoire, edited in 1987 by Pierre Nora. Indeed, Farge does not retrace the steps of her professional

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journey. She focuses on her activities as a researcher, describing either the evidence she is working with (mostly judiciary documents) or her visits to libraries that she does not name, except for the Bibliothèque Nationale. To describe what she is doing without using the first person, she turns to the academic “we”: “A simple criminal affair has retained our attention” (1989, 74); to passive constructions: “What has been written above may, for some people, testify to a naïve and dated way of looking at archives” (69); to the “universalizing” masculine gender: “Our work as a historian [notre travail d’historien] is grounded on judiciary archives” (8); and, in a library scene, to a third person who might be the historian or another woman the historian is observing: “She has just arrived; she is asked for a card she does not have. She is told to return to the other room, where she will be given a one-day pass” (61). To be sure, the text on the jacket flaps of Le goût de l’archive tells us that the book is about “the trade of a historian who is inhabited by her passion for the archives.” By specifying that Farge speaks about herself, however, this peritext points to the very difference of the work. Indeed, the genres in which scholars talk of their own research, whether memoirs, diaries, or prefaces, not only allow use of the first person, they make it a norm. By excluding her “I” from a discursive mode in which it would be fully admissible, Farge meets a kind of challenge while responding to the charge of subjectivity that for her is often made about “feminine writing.” More precisely, in conforming to the rules of historiography in a text where they do not have to be followed, she makes a foregone conclusion obvious: any scholar, of whatever gender, can produce the kind of impersonal prose that the historical community requires for admission to its ranks.4 If we examine the ways contemporary French historians leave marks of their presence in the texts they produce, we can only observe that these interventions hardly involve engaging in the “melees” Prochasson describes. Their function is mainly to specify the role of the scholar as a histor looking for evidence, as a planner of discourse, and as a commentator on the documents gathered. Intrusions as frequent and one-sided as those of Le Roy Ladurie in Le Carnaval de Romans are exceptions that prove the rule, a rule that Branche nevertheless feels she needs to affirm once again in her essay on “colonial violence.” Branche’s neutrality requirement, however, concerns scholarly historiography, and it does not apply to the texts that historians, responding to various requests, may write about topics such as the memory of Vichy, the history of communism, and the privileges different categories of “victims” claim they are entitled to. Expressing personal opinions in these areas is mandatory, the historian, as an expert, being asked to tell where truth

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and justice are actually located. Are the demands made of the historian as a scholar incompatible with those made of the historian as a citizen? And has the competition of such demands, as Prochasson (2008, 209) laments, brought about a crisis of “confidence” to which historians have responded either by “withdrawing to their identity as researchers” or by letting “social pressure” make them answer any call for comments on the polemics of the day? Leaving these questions aside, I will only point out that research and citizenry are not mutually exclusive. When Vidal-Naquet, to take an obvious example, writes about the Algerian war, he—as Jablonka (2014, 157–58) emphasizes— both “defends values” and “follows the rules of his trade,” taking on state lies by collecting evidence and publishing books and articles. Yet the two roles are not easy to combine, especially in studies that bear on controversial subjects such as torture, police brutality, and the slave trade. Historians, then, have to make discursive choices that testify to what Prochasson (2008, 218) calls the “difficulties” of their “ethical position”: their efforts to understand human suffering by way of comparison will expose them to the charge of “relativism,” while their reluctance to show sympathy will be interpreted as “dryness of the heart.” Does their inability to resolve this double bind mean, as Prochasson believes, that historians have now become “pariahs”? Probably not. But the risk of being charged with “insensitivity” is real for scholars who aim at disinterestedness. In this respect, the text that Branche writes ten years after the publication of La torture et l’armée in order to justify some of her discursive choices may, among other things, be viewed as a defense against actual or virtual denunciation of what could be taken as her “dryness of the heart.”

Perspectives Poeticians usually distinguish between “voice” and “perspective,” that is, between the questions “Who is speaking?” and “Where is the center of perception and knowledge?” Having examined the first question, we must now turn to the second. More precisely, we must establish through what prisms, mediations, and points of view the data that historiographic texts convey are regulated and channeled to the readers. Classical narratology (Genette 1972, 206–11; Prince 1987, 31–32) admits three modes of what it calls “focalization”: “focalization zero,” in which events are recounted from a position that often cannot be exactly determined (Eliot’s Adam Bede); “internal focalization,” in which events are recounted from the perspective of one or several characters (James’s The Ambassadors, Joyce’s Ulysses); and “external focalization,” in which events are presented “from outside,” from the perspective of an

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observer who reports what characters do and say without having access to their consciousness (Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon). Genette’s ternary division has been questioned in postclassical narratology, represented in France by theorists such as Sylvie Patron and Alain Rabatel. Intent on going beyond “metaphorical definitions of point of view,” Rabatel (1998) puts forth a binary division between “narrator’s point of view” and “character’s point of view,” a division he grounds in the search not for a center of perception, but for the linguistic traces a specific perspective is leaving. The two approaches do not seem incompatible. Rabatel’s theory adds to Genette’s, as it assigns the task of identifying not just the “center of perception and knowledge,” but the discursive signs that ascribe such and such an utterance to the perception, the competence, or even the language of one of the narrative roles, whether the narrator or the character(s). Devised to account for the treatment of perspective in fictional discourse, these categories can be applied, or at least adapted, to factual discourse. They can certainly be used to analyze historiographic texts, even though the latter do not always fall under narrative. Whether historians tell a story, describe a situation, or analyze a problem, they must select a point of view: decide “from where” they want to speak, that is, how far from the object of their research and from what angle with respect to that object. The choices they make in this area are not just formal; they also have epistemological and ideological implications, in that they shape the knowledge communicated to readers and partake of the tacit or explicit value system that any text conveys, even when its author claims it does not have one. The mode that prevails in scholarly historiography is generally zero focalization: historians write from a perspective that is not that of the individuals or groups they depict, or of an observer who reports events without making any attempt at interpreting them. In contemporary French historiography, the use of this mode is especially noticeable in the genre of “global” or “total” history, as represented in different ways by Braudel and Pétré-Grenouilleau. Braudel’s author-enunciator is conspicuously omnipresent: he roams the whole French territory in L’identité de la France, the whole Mediterranean basin in La Méditerranée, and a large part of the earth in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme. He is also endowed with several types of competence: he is an ecologist, a geographer, a demographer, an economist, as he is a specialist in more traditional domains such as political and military history. PétréGrenouilleau is as ubiquitous and well qualified as Braudel. He too travels the world to describe Eastern, Western, and internal trade, and his inquiry admits the same expertise as Braudel’s in the domains of geography, demography,

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and economics. Chapters on abolitionism show that he has also studied political and intellectual history, in particular the movements that worked toward the abolition of slavery. Yet Braudel’s and Pétré-Grenouilleau’s expansive qualification is not the exact equivalent of narrators’ omniscience in works of fiction. Whereas the latter do not have to show evidence for what they are stating, historians must explain (or be able to explain if asked to do so) how they have obtained their data. This requirement accounts for the presence in their texts of a whole apparatus of notes and references, whose function I will examine in chapter 3. Taken at face value, the projects of “total” or “global” history conducted in zero focalization raise theoretical issues and pose serious problems of writing. Whatever the range of their overviews might be, the historians who have ambitions similar to Braudel’s and Pétré-Grenouilleau’s obviously cannot embrace everything, or describe all that they embrace. In his critique of the Annales, Hervé Couteau-Bégarie (1989, 170–92) has had no trouble drawing up a list of the areas that Braudel’s “total” history neglects, beginning with religion, the army, and international relations. Critics have also taken the debate to the Annalistes’ own turf. In a long analysis of La Méditerranée, Jack Hexter (1979, 133) has emphasized that the chapter on the economy offers abundant information about precious metals, currencies, commerce, and transportation, but only a few pages about agriculture, which at the time “was the life of at least four fifths of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean world.” Hexter adds that it would be “absurd” to blame Braudel for this omission, since scholars can never include in their texts all the materials they have accumulated while researching their subjects. Taking up the same question in the framework of analytical philosophy, Danto (1985, 148–49) offers an answer that has implications for writing. Positing an “ideal chronicler” who could carry out the “complete description” of an event E, namely, “list all that happened in E,” Danto asserts that the resulting “ideal chronicle” would be incomprehensible: since the chronicler had no criteria to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information, the description would be meaningless, or its meaning would be that it has none. In other words, for Danto what is “absurd” is not the possibility of a “complete” description, but the very idea that it could be achieved. Any “meaningful description,” he maintains, is the product of selecting the data that are relevant—both new and related to the subject under consideration. Taking for granted that contemporary French historians aim to offer meaningful descriptions and sort out their materials, I now want to probe how they perform these operations or, rather, “from where” they perform them.

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Place However extended the territories they travel and the domains they explore, historians necessarily speak from an institutional “place.” This place, according to Certeau (1975, 70–71), refers to a specific situation that is a “not said [non-dit]”: whereas the purpose of history is to study “relations to the social body,” historiographic discourse does not speak of its relations to the “body” of which it itself is part. For Certeau, therefore, “place” is a blind spot in the historiographic endeavor. Making a certain type of research “possible” because of “common situations and problems,” it makes others “impossible,” excluding them from discourse by exercising a certain type of “censorship.” Certeau does not give examples of that censorship, but one may think that the turn to large regional investigations in the 1950s and 1960s, and then the move away from this type of inquiry in the 1970s, is an outcome of the kind of expressed or implicit control that the historical institution can exercise over its members, for instance, over PhD students and young scholars seeking to publish their first research. Although the place Certeau analyzes is rarely theorized in historiographic studies, it is nevertheless inscribed in specific areas of the text. The question “Where is the historian speaking from?” is first answered in the paratext, more precisely in the editorial peritext. In the series Folio histoire, for example, the page that follows the title page tells about the author’s professional status: “André Loez is an ‘agrégé’ and a PhD in history; he teaches at the Lycée Georges Braque in Argenteuil and at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. He is a member and the webmaster of the Crid 14–18 (Collectif de recherche international et de débat sur la Guerre 1914–1918)” (Loez 2010, 7). In the series Points histoire, the blurbs on the back cover provide the same type of information: “Antoine Prost, professor emeritus at Université de Paris I, is a historian of twentieth-century French society in its different forms: social groups, institutions, mentalities. Among other studies, he has published with Le Seuil La Grande Guerre expliquée à mon petit-fils (2005)” (Prost 2010). These brief biographies do not just supply data about the authors. By pointing to the historians’ institutional bases, by specifying “where they speak from,” they confer an authority that readers are not necessarily aware of. In Prost’s case, it is enough to say that he was a professor at the Université de Paris I, a prestigious “place” if there ever was one. But in Loez’s case, a younger scholar who was still teaching at the lycée level when his book about mutinies during World War I was published, more details were needed. Thus the note specifies that Loez also has a position with the Institut d’Études Politiques and that

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he is the webmaster of a research group. That latter mention, showing that the historian has technological competence, confers extra authority. Today technology is part of a scholar’s “place,” and it is important to bring to the readers’ attention that historians speak “from” the technology, just as they speak “from” an institute or a university. Next to the editorial peritext, the authorial peritext—the peritext written by historians themselves—may also tell about the “place” of the investigation. Prefaces and introductions often perform this function, enabling historians to explain how they have conducted their inquiry, what audience they are targeting, and what texts they intend to converse with. Prost (2010, 10–11) emphasizes that the title Douze leçons sur l’histoire must be taken literally: the book is truly made up of lessons, given in this instance to “students in the first cycle,” that is, to a “specific audience.” These lessons, moreover, originate in “other people’s reflections,” namely, in the works of other scholars, whose quotations constitute “places” of conversation and exchange. Loez does not indicate in his introduction whether he first tried out his research on students, only telling about the previous investigations he is drawing on. The ninetyfour pages of notes at the end of the book have the same function: through numerous references to his sources and to other studies of World War I, Loez establishes that he is playing the game by the rules—that while his interpretation of the data might be debatable, the way he has conducted his inquiry conforms to the usages of the trade. Whether they are in the editorial paratext or the authorial peritext, these mentions of the researcher’s place also testify that the text has one of the desired qualities of historical scholarship: objectivity. Not, of course, in the sense that Lord Acton (quoted in Gottschalk 1969, 279) gave to that term: no historian today claims to be writing “at thirty degrees west longitude” in the middle of the Atlantic, in what Acton deemed a position of perfect neutrality (apparently without noticing its obvious Britishness). Similarly, no historian today hopes to describe past events “as they actually occurred,” independent of the subject who reconstructs them. Given that claims to, and calls for, “objectivity” are still frequently made in historiography, the term obviously must be redefined. With Allan Megill (2007, 113), one might say that “objectivity” now has both a “disciplinary” and a “procedural” sense: disciplinary, in that historians have a specific view of what may count as objective in their area of scholarship, and procedural in that they have devised methods that, if followed, will guarantee the “objectivity” of their endeavor. Descriptions therefore are “objective” not because they manage to reconstruct the past “in itself,” but because, having been made according to certain rules, they are

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regarded as such by the community of historians. In this respect references to the “place” of the historian provided in the paratext fulfill a specific function: they demonstrate that the authors of studies do indeed belong to the “discipline,” while the lists of their works attest that they know the “procedures,” since their output has been accepted and published. The remaining “subjectivity,” then, is not the individual’s but the group’s, as Paris I, the Institut d’Études Politiques, and the Crid doubtless have different views about what aspects of the past are worth investigating and what methods will best serve a specific research project. As for authors’ interventions, such as Le Roy Ladurie’s in Le Carnaval de Romans and the contributors’ to Un siècle d’antiféminisme, they are not incompatible with “objectivity” as defined by Megill. Indeed, they concern the interpretation of the data, not their identification by means of valid “procedures.” Time Asking “when” historians are speaking from, Danto (1985, 11) has argued that they are always doing so in light of their “here and now,” namely, in the context of “ulterior information” that allows them “to say things that witnesses and contemporaries could not have said.” In other words, for Danto, historians not only know “the whole story,” in the sense of “all the items that make up the text they have written”; they also know “the whole history,” in the sense of “all that happened between the end of that story and the moment of writing.” Historians’ position toward the past is thus constantly changing, a “place” that accounts, at least in part, for the fact that a large sector of the historiographic production consists of rewriting. Laborie, as we saw above, does not write Le chagrin et le venin because he has uncovered new evidence on the period of the Occupation. But forty years have elapsed since the release of the film Le chagrin et la pitié and the publication of studies such as Paxton’s Vichy France, a distance that enables the historian to revisit both these works and some of the judgments made in the late 1960s and early 1970s about the attitudes of the French during World War II. Explicitly written in light of current knowledge, studies such as Le chagrin et le venin raise the much discussed issue of “presentism.” In Régimes d’historicité, Hartog (2003, 28) defines this term as “the contemporary experience of a perpetual, evasive, and quasi-motionless present, which nevertheless seeks to produce for itself its own historical time.” “Everything happens,” Hartog adds, turning to metaphors, “as if there were no longer anything but the pres-

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ent, a kind of extended stretch of water set in motion by a continuous lapping.” I will be using a more specific meaning of “presentism”; it concerns not the relationship with time that a society is experiencing, but the mere observation that historians, whether intentionally or not, always write “from” the present—from a temporal position that is inescapably retrospective. As Danto (1985, 152) has shown, such apparently harmless sentences as “The Thirty Years’ War began in 1618” imply a backward-looking standpoint and are in this respect characteristic of historiography as a whole: even the “ideal chronicler,” who, in January 1619, would have drawn up the exhaustive list of all the events that unfolded in 1618, could not have stated that the conflict that had begun was the Thirty Years’ War. With the philosopher David Hull (1979), I will thus define “presentism” as the “now” in which historiographic inquiries are unavoidably grounded. Let me stress: unavoidably. However hard historians might try to “disregard their knowledge of what came next,” to “forget what distance allows them to see” (Rousso 2012, 230), they can never act “as if ”—in this instance, “as if ” they did not conduct their investigations from a retrospective viewpoint. Unlike their predecessors of the method school, who claimed to be writing from an extratemporal position while producing works as teleological as Lavisse’s Histoire de France, several contemporary French historians seem to think that, since they cannot escape from the present, they should make a place for it in their texts. In L’harmonie des plaisirs, for example, Corbin stages a “reader” and a “we” whose function is to provide a contemporary perspective on the phenomena he describes, as well as to point up the distance between “then” and “now”: in descriptions of the female body done by physicians in the eighteenth century, “the emphasis on contours strikes today’s reader” (2008, 27); focusing on orgasm, those physicians “hardly give any advice about what we, in the twenty-first century, call the preliminaries” (68); the model of the sperm’s path drawn in the eighteenth century was inaccurate, “but we now know that scientific errors, when they are shared, play as large a role as truths” (80). In a different area, Antoine de Baecque (2003, 9) stresses from the first sentence in his introduction to La cinéphilie that he belongs “to a generation in full rout, which discovered film when theaters were on the brink of closing,” and that “cinephilia,” in the early twenty-first century, can only refer “to a love and a practice that are irretrievably gone.” The diagnosis “irretrievably gone” shows that Baecque situates his analyses in his own present, a position he uses to better account for the specificity of the past. Admittedly, the historian here is not very remote from the moment he wants

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to reconstruct. Yet his turn to such phrases as the “peak” and “golden age” of cinephilia (18) involves retrospection, just as does Danto’s “the Thirty Years’ War began in 1618.” A movement must be close to its end for historians to speak of its “peak” and “golden age,” or more generally to identify its successive stages, as Baecque does in his study. Conversely, some historians ground their analyses in the present not to highlight the distance that separates it from the period they are investigating, but to point up the similarities between the two and establish connections that should help readers understand that the past is not as foreign as it first appears. This move is most obvious in Antoine Lilti’s Figures publiques, a study of the “invention of celebrity” in France, England, and the United States from 1750 to 1850.5 Describing how intellectuals, artists, and politicians became “celebrities” during this period, Lilti frequently uses comparisons with the contemporary world to develop his thesis, namely, that phenomena supposedly typical of today’s media-saturated society were already noticeable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lilti (2014, 7) begins his book by quoting Francis Ford Coppola’s comment about the film his daughter Sofia devoted to the queen of France: “Marie-Antoinette, it’s Lady Di,” and he sprinkles his study with similar connections: famous writers in the eighteenth century had their “fans,” a term that “obviously is anachronistic” (67). Able to transform his suffering into a work, Rousseau escaped the “tragic fate of so many stars after him, from Marilyn Monroe to Kurt Cobain” (219); heads of state like Napoleon and George Washington illustrate “what we call today, in general to denounce it, the peopleization of politics” (292); Liszt, Thalberg, and other virtuosos owed their success not just to their talent, but to “what was not yet called cultural marketing” (326); and after retiring, the popular British actress Sarah Siddons attempted a “comeback,” as “many stars of the stage, the movies, and sport will do later” in order to see whether they are still “alive and wanted” (59). In sum, Lilti argues, society at the time had a “star system” (10) and was already a “society of the spectacle” (40), a phrase the historian borrows from Guy Debord’s (1967) study to title his second chapter and earmark the communities he is describing. Of course Lilti is careful: he admits that the word fan is “anachronistic,” and formulas such as “what we call today” posit a resemblance, not an identity. Still, the many connections he and his fellow historians establish inscribe a readiness to draw on their familiarity with the present to explain the past. The temporal dependence of the scholars on their “here and now,” once experienced as a liability, is now fully acknowledged in the texts they are writing, where it becomes one of the most visible marks

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of their involvement in the reconstruction of the period they are seeking to describe. However careful historians might be, they nevertheless expose themselves to charges of anachronism when they turn to connections as provocative as those Lilti uses. The main problem, however, resides not in the way they occasionally draw on their “here and now” to better characterize earlier moments, but in their imposing current categories on past societies. In the 1960s, controversies opposed Marxist historians who analyzed the structure of the Old Regime in terms of “social classes” to specialists such as Mousnier, for whom that Regime had not classes but “orders,” a distinction that had to be maintained if the specificity of the period was to be accounted for.6 More flexible than Mousnier, several contemporary historians have pleaded for a self-conscious usage of anachronism, which they see as a heuristic tool that allows one to take a new look at the past without erasing its difference. In her article “Éloge de l’anachronisme en histoire” (In praise of anachronism in history), historian of antiquity Nicole Loraux (1993) has thus advocated for using the modern concept of “public opinion” to analyze Athenian democracy. Indeed, she considers it productive to approach the past with questions from the present, all the more so since that past can never be described “in itself ” and is accessible only through a set of mediations. Following Loraux’s example, Boucheron and Offenstadt (2011, 14) have proposed to examine the Middle Ages through the concept of “public space” theorized by Habermas. Adopting an “intentional and controlled” use of anachronism, they and the contributors to L’espace public au Moyen Âge have sought to identify “moments, virtualities, actualizations, and unfulfilled promises” of public space to avoid reducing medieval society to the “brutality of social domination.” In a more ludic fashion, Daniel Milo (1991, 39) has encouraged “gay” historians in Nietzsche’s legacy to “turn the handicap into a tool,” more precisely, to perform “methodical anachronism.” Since going from the present to the past is the “very definition of the discipline” (Milo ascribes this “definition” to Bloch and Ginzburg without providing a specific reference), systematically resorting to anachronism would only radicalize a practice that in fact is already the norm in most historiographic studies. Written before Loraux’s and Boucheron and Offenstadt’s interventions, Milo’s article deplores that models are “sorely lacking,” since the use of “class” by Marxists is both too obvious and not “gay” enough to meet the requirements of the “experimental” historiography Milo is advocating. I will return to the issue of anachronism in chapter 3 while examining the situation of “uncertainty” in which histori-

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ans find themselves when they want to account for the difference of the past without giving up on the conceptual apparatus that, in their view, they need in order to depict with accuracy the period they are researching. From the “Other’s” Point of View One of the aims of the Annales and the New History had been to call attention to social categories that their predecessors had supposedly neglected, such as of course peasants (Bloch 1939; Duby and Wallon 1975-76, but also servants (Martin-Fugier 1979), children (Ariès 1973), prisoners (Perrot 1980), and prostitutes (Corbin 1982). Narratologists (e.g., Prince 1987, 81) would say that historians made the story of these “forgotten ones” into something “tellable,” that is, worth investigating, recounting, and remembering. But they also would ask whether this shift in subject matter came with a corresponding shift in perspective, in this instance, whether historians had told the story of peasants and children from the standpoint of these groups. The clear-cut answer is that studying the other does not entail doing so from the other’s perspective, and that historians generally have not endowed the “forgotten” with the privilege of having a standpoint of their own. One of the most revealing examples of this phenomenon is Nathan Wachtel’s La vision des vaincus (The Vision of the Vanquished ), a study of the Spanish conquest as “seen” by the Peruvians, and one of the only works of the New History that deals with a non-European culture. Wachtel himself (1971, 22), in his introduction, claims that his goal is to reverse the eurocentrism usually attached to the study of the “conquest” and to examine how Native Americans have “experienced” their defeat, how they have “interpreted” it, and how it has “survived” in their collective memory. Wachtel admits that “we” (contemporary European scholars) “can never relive from within the feelings and thoughts of Montezuma or Atahulla.” Still, he maintains that, drawing on native evidence, “we can move our point of observation and transfer the tragic vision of the vanquished to the center of our concerns” (22). A close reading of the text, however, shows that Wachtel never “moves” the perspective to the Native Americans as Stendhal moves it to Fabrice in Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black), Flaubert to Emma in Madame Bovary, and Malraux to the combatants in L’espoir (Man’s Hope). True, he quotes documents that describe, for instance, Spanish ships as “mountains or big hills rolling from one side to the other without touching the coast” (42), or express the Native Americans’ surprise at the sight of the Spaniards’ beards, white skin, and “yellow” hair (43). But Wachtel never writes a sentence that would directly reflect

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the viewpoint of the “other,” such as “mountains or big hills were floating on the ocean.” The perspective remains the historian’s, as in the following passage: All Native Americans did not think that the Spaniards were gods, but they all, faced with their extraordinary appearance, asked the question: Gods or men? What is common to the different societies under consideration is the eruption of the unknown. All Aztec, Mayan, and Inca documents describe the strangeness of the Spaniards. The worldview of the Native Americans, at any rate, implied the possibility that white men were gods. This possibility meant everywhere doubt and anguish. But the answer to the question Gods or men? could be positive or negative, and it varied according to the specific circumstances of local history. (Wachtel 1971, 52) These few lines provide a good example of “zero focalization” in the sense of “plurimodality,” of “blending of perspectives.” Indeed, Wachtel does much more than paraphrase the documents he has gathered. Omnipresent in space, he can account for the reactions of different groups (Aztecs, Mayas, etc.) at different places. Moving in time, he can also describe the responses of the natives “then” (they were surprised by the Spaniards’ beards and skin color), and then resume his retrospective standpoint to state that the answer to “Gods or men?” varied according to circumstances. His “mental equipment” (52), moreover, is very different from the mind-set he is seeking to reconstruct: his analysis of the organization of the Inca state in terms of “reciprocity” and “redistribution” (115), as well as his study of the “acculturation” and “destructuration” of Inca society (134), are conducted using the conceptual apparatus of a historian-anthropologist of the 1970s. Wachtel therefore certainly presents “the vision of the vanquished.” But he does not do so “from” the vanquished’s standpoint, as his “view”—in Levi-Straussian terms—remains “afar” from that of the groups whose beliefs and value system he is striving to depict.7 Similar remarks could be made about other texts that aim to characterize an alien perspective, such as—the case is admittedly extreme—Eric Baratay’s Le point de vue animal. Explicitly situating himself in the legacy of Wachtel and the historians interested in the “defeated” and the “anonymous,” Baratay (2012, 65) states that his purpose is to “turn history around in order to do not a history of livestock farming but of cattle, not of transportation but of horses, not of bullfights but of bulls  .  .  . not of the ways animals are enrolled and

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used, but of what they experience, feel, and suffer.” As Wachtel thought he could picture the Native Americans’ “vision” by using the available evidence, Baratay deems it possible to enter the animals’ “experience” by observing how they respond to different stimuli. For instance, recounting, in the chapter he devotes to animals as “show toys,” the bullfight as “endured” by the bull, Baratay (2012, 231) writes: The bulls are more and more stressed when they must enter the toril, a dark corridor that isolates them, where they wait near the shouts and the smells of the carcasses that have been brought back. As soon as the doors open, they rush in order to go to a more reassuring light. Some stop immediately, sufficiently informed and surprised; others keep running in order to complete their discovery; they perceive the motions and the shouts of the audience, the presence of the men and the horses, their smells and the smell of blood, the stress pheromones of the preceding bulls, the lack of fellow creatures and of spots to take refuge or hide—all the things that scare gregarious herbivores in an unknown, too open space. Baratay sees some aspects of the bulls’ behavior as clear signs of what the animals “experience, feel, suffer” at a specific moment. When the bulls enter the arena, for example, that some of them stop denotes “surprise,” whereas others’ running points to a desire to “complete their discovery.” Baratay has no qualms about using the vocabulary of modern biology and psychology to interpret these signs, notably “stress,” “frustration,” “trauma,” and “pheromones,” just as Wachtel uses “acculturation,” terms that account with precision for phenomena the scholar observes in the “other” but that originate in his own conceptual apparatus. The standpoint thus remains Baratay’s, however sympathetic the historian may feel toward the “gregarious herbivores” whose struggles he wants to describe. For that matter, the title Le point de vue animal cannot really be taken literally. Baratay, or his publisher, resorts to this phrase for a strategic purpose, to flaunt the originality of the book with respect to the many studies devoted not to the “experience” of animals, but to their use or their representation. In this regard Baratay’s take on the animals’ perspective also contrasts with a position the historian does not discuss, though it is present in the intellectual intertext: that of philosopher Thomas Nagel, who, in his article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” argues that this question cannot be answered. Since we have no way of accessing the animal’s mind, we cannot know, among other things, whether bats think they are hanging “upside

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down” (as we perceive them), or whether for them that position is the “normal one.” Of course Baratay does not claim he can answer questions of this type. But his idea that certain signs let him piece together the “experience” of animals departs from Nagel’s agnosticism while at the same time rejoining the standard epistemological position of the historians’ community—the belief that the past can be accessed through the correct use of evidence. Polyphonies Whereas historians cannot consistently write up their data “from” the standpoint of the people they are investigating, they nevertheless are authorized, when documents are available, to represent that standpoint by adopting the language those people used or could have used. I have so far considered only the discursive situation in which historians hold concurrently the functions of what linguist Oswald Ducrot (1984, 43) calls the “speaker” and the “enunciator,” that is, the situation in which the author of the text is also responsible for it. Yet the two functions sometimes separate, as the author quotes an enunciator for whom the author does not stand. Geneviève Sellier (1999b, 285) obviously does so in this analysis of the “contradictions of French cinema in the 1950s,” her contribution to Un siècle d’antiféminisme: The postwar period breaks dramatically with the idealization of feminine figures that characterized the cinema of the Occupation. From Manèges to Manon, active women are dangerous. A pack of hussies desperately attempts to destroy men, whom they entrap with their beauty. This demonizing of women, however, is more the expression of male fears and humiliations accumulated since the defeat than a reaction to female desire for emancipation. In this passage Sellier clearly dissociates the roles of author and enunciator. On the one hand, she as author takes responsibility for the sentences that begin with “The postwar period begins dramatically” and “This demonizing, however, is more the expression . . .” Yet she also quotes an enunciator, whom she holds accountable for asserting that active women are “dangerous” and that “a pack of hussies” are intent on destroying men. Here Sellier introduces the conception of women that prevailed in many postwar films, but that conception is of course not hers. If we seek, as Rabatel does, to identify the linguistic signs that denote a point of view, the words “dangerous” and “hussies” inscribe a shift from the author’s perspective to the enunciator’s. Indeed, such

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terms cannot originate with a feminist historian who, speaking in her own name, would endorse them without reservations. Cultural historians frequently make use of these dissociations when they describe attitudes and practices that temporal distance makes all the more foreign and offensive. In his studies of the Middle Ages, Duby often accounts for what people “thought” and “felt” by adopting the standpoint of the contemporaries. Analyzing the position of the church toward material goods in Le temps des cathédrales (1976, 60), he writes: Chivalry, surrounded by hungry crowds, cheerfully squanders its wealth, but the church accumulates riches in fascinating heaps around its rites, which it wants more sumptuous than those of feudal celebrations. Is not God supposed to appear in the most dazzling glory, surrounded by this glow of light that the sculptor of Romanesque Apocalypses places around his body with a sheath in the shape of an almond? Doesn’t He deserve to possess a treasure more radiant than that of all the powerful of the earth? Clearly, the last two questions are not asked seriously by Duby, who as scholar would be uncertain of the answers. They have the value of assertions, but of assertions the historian does not endorse. Duby accounts here for the ideology that justifies the wealth of the church, and he does so by introducing an enunciator for whom God “must” appear in the most dazzling glory and “deserves” to own more goods than laymen. As Sellier does, Duby thus “quotes” views he objects to, views he is able to characterize using such evidence as paintings, theological treatises, and literary texts. These shifts in perspective abide by strict constraints. To begin with, the quoted standpoint is that of a group. In my corpus, at least, I have not found a single passage in which the author attempts to mention what an individual “could have thought, wanted, or felt,” as Natalie Zemon Davis (1989, 138) explains that she did in The Return of Martin Guerre. Formulated by Dorrit Cohn (1999, 16), the rule according to which “opening” characters’ minds is reserved for fiction still applies today, at least to scholarly historiography; an examination of historical studies written for a wider audience, especially “popular” biographies, would doubtless have yielded different results.8 Furthermore, the groups whose viewpoints are quoted belong in most cases to the upper classes, or at least to classes that have left traces in the archives; because documentation is lacking, historians rarely have the opportunity to represent the standpoint of the lower classes; at the most, they can scrutinize

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the discourse of the rulers to identify snippets of the discourse of the ruled, a strategy I will probe in the next section. The presence, in studies such as Sellier’s and Duby’s, of quotations the historian does not endorse makes it necessary to modify some received ideas about historiographic discourse. In the first place, those quotations show that historiography is not necessarily “monologic,” as Bakhtin and literary theorists in his legacy (e.g., Kristeva 1969) believe. Some historiographic accounts may very well be conducted in what Bakhtin (1981, 316) called the “characters’ zone,” in this instance, in a zone of culture that includes “words and expressions” that encroach on the author’s zone without being separated from it by quotation marks or prepositions (“for,” “according to”) that specify their origin. Such transfers make for a “dialogic” situation that, though certainly less rich than in Turgenev (to whom Bakhtin applies his theory of “zones”), must be understood for the text to be interpreted correctly. Specialists could play at identifying the origin of these quotations in the documents historians use without providing references (Who wrote that active women were “dangerous”? That the church “deserved” to accumulate riches?), as patient scholars have uncovered the origin of many unattributed quotations in texts such as Lautréamont’s prose poem Les chants de Maldoror (Sellier 1970) and Céline’s anti-Semitic manifesto Bagatelles pour un massacre (Kaplan 1987). The presence of “words and expressions” for which the historian cannot be held responsible also challenges the view of historiography as a “serious” discourse in Searle’s sense. If historians do not always “mean what they say,” does this infringement of the principle of the identity author-enunciator jeopardize the validity of the texts it occurs in? Some theorists think it does. Hernadi (1975, 252), for example, insists that such utterances as the celebrated beginning of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”) could not occur in historical discourse: it is not a “true statement,” and historians have committed themselves to making true statements exclusively. Yet passages such as the ones I have just quoted in Un siècle d’antiféminisme and Le temps des cathédrales show that Hernadi posits too fixed a boundary between the conventions of fiction and those of historiography. More precisely, they show that irony is not incompatible with historical discourse, provided the trope is not reduced to antiphrasis: that it is defined, with Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1978), as “mention” of another discourse, a discourse from which the author intends to establish distance, even though he/she does not mean the exact opposite (“good job” = “bad job”). When Duby, for example, asks whether God does not “deserve to possess a

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treasure more radiant than those of all the powerful of the earth,” he is not implying that a divinity is not entitled to some kind of material worship. He merely dissociates himself from the idea of necessary accumulation that the church was propagating at the time in order to justify its greed, an idea he obviously cannot share even though he must account for it. In this respect, Sellier’s and Duby’s turn to irony marks a return to earlier practices, notably to the protocols of eighteenth-century historiography. As Lionel Gossman (1990, 243) has shown, historians of the Enlightenment (e.g., Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbons) functioned as “unifying centers” in their texts, and they had no scruples about engaging the reader as “ironic spectator of the historical scene or tableau.” Representatives of the method school had sought to eliminate this trope, which for them denoted an unwise intrusion of the scholar into a text that is supposed to represent the “real” as transparently as possible. Hernadi, like several literary theorists, makes the historiography of the late nineteenth century into the archetype of “history” regarded as a homogeneous whole, in this instance, into a discourse from which any trace of enunciation had disappeared. He therefore makes historiographic discourse devoid of historicity, a fixed center in relation to which the literariness of fictional discourse can, so to speak, be measured.

The Discourse of the Absentee Marcel Gauchet (1999, 141), in his examination of the “broadening of the historical object,” emphasized that a fundamental aspect of the “paradigm shift” he witnessed resided in the reassessment of the role of individuals and their capacity for action. Historiographic research, after “massively dispossessing actors and focusing on meanings that escaped them,” in the 1970s had again turned to reflections of the protagonists. A renewed political history, according to Gauchet, could now “take the actors’ thought seriously” while remaining mindful of the dimension of their undertakings that “still eluded them” (143). Without showing as much enthusiasm as Gauchet for the return of political history, the signatories of the 1989 Annales editorial “Tentons l’expérience” (Let’s attempt the experiment) had duly noted the same evolution. Stressing the concept of “scale of analysis,” they had emphasized that social history no longer concerned itself exclusively with “measuring social phenomena by drawing up tables and curves” (1989, 1319). Adopting a smaller scale, its practitioners were now seeking to account for the way actors “constantly redefine, according to what they want to do, the organization of the social” (1320). Retracing this evolution in Historiographies II, Delacroix (2010, 657–

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58) speaks of a “pragmatic turn” that involved such concepts as “agency,” “practices,” “negotiations,” strategies,” “competence,” and “appropriation.” Those concepts—Delacroix turns here to Gauchet’s vocabulary—allowed historians to take actors “seriously” while refusing both the “collective” as a form of imposition and the “pure and perfect” rationality as an aptitude with which individuals would be intrinsically endowed (660). Commenting on these discussions, Alun Munslow (2006, 24) has emphasized that neither the concept of “collective” nor that of “actor” has an observable existence. These are mere abstractions that historians have devised to account for “what, according to them, brought out change during a given period.” In other words, Munslow insists, the decision to take up a historical problem by collecting numbers or by examining the role of individuals does not, or does not only, originate in the available evidence. More basically, that decision derives from the questions the historian is asking, questions that are themselves determined by assumptions of a theoretical and ideological nature. Leaving aside issues related to these assumptions and taking for granted that actors have indeed returned to scholarly historiography, I will now look at the textual aspects of this rehabilitation. Specifically, I will ask whether actors are quoted, and if so, how. While rules of writing and documentation keep historians from reporting what groups have experienced from those groups’ perspective, do those same rules allow them to quote individuals? Under what conditions? And, provided those conditions are met, what procedures do historians employ when they insert the other’s discourse into their own? The way texts answer these questions depends both on the period scholars are investigating and on the social membership of the individual(s) they want to stage. Quoting the actors raises no major difficulty when the inquiry bears on personalities whose statements are likely to be recorded. On the first text page of Marc Ferro’s Pétain (1987, 7), readers learn that the marshal declared on May 17, 1940, “The war must be regarded as lost.” Pétain made this statement to his aide-de-camp, Commandant Bonhomme, who wrote it down in his diary while preserving the form of “reported speech” (Genette 1972, 190), that is, the literal quotation of what someone actually said. Quotations of this type were of course among the preferred materials of the method school, since its representatives concerned themselves mostly with high-ranking members of the state and the military. More recently, historians aligning themselves with the “linguistic turn” have also made extensive use of quotations, albeit while seeking to widen the scope of what may count as document. In La langue politique de la Révolution française, for instance, Jacques Guilhaumou (1989, 200) includes numerous occurrences of “reported speech,” quoting from

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tracts, leaflets, newspaper articles, and statements made from different platforms to analyze what he calls “the multiplicity of linguistic initiatives in the succession of revolutionary events.” A similar remark can be made about other studies, for example, Kalifa’s L’encre et le sang (Ink and blood) (1995) and Baecque’s Le corps de l’histoire (History’s body) (1993), which, even though their authors do not claim to be part of the linguistic turn as explicitly as Guilhaumou does, are based on discourses that they frequently quote and dissect as such. Reporting the actors’ speech, however, is certainly more problematic when that speech originates in individuals whose linguistic activities, unlike those of the Revolution’s “spokespersons” that Guilhaumou focuses on, have not been viewed as worth recording and remembering. Asking how historians deal with this situation, specifically what kind of evidence they rely on and how they embed the “other’s” speech in their text, I have distributed quotations from Certeau’s (1973) “absentees from history” into three categories. Popular Voices The issue of reporting the speech of the underprivileged was hardly raised when the Annales and then the New History dealt mainly with demography and economics. The large social histories of the 1960s explored peasant and urban societies based on tax rolls, price lists, and parish registers, and they did not ask whether these records contained traces of the actors’ discourse. Recovering the “other’s” voice became a concern in the 1970s, when some historians added the study of “mentalities” to the analysis of demographic and economic structures. Yet several specialists in social history refused to go this route, doubting it was possible to describe the mental universe of the underprivileged, more particularly by drawing on evidence that originated in the underprivileged themselves. Most emblematic of this agnosticism, Goubert’s La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle (The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century) does not include a single quotation from the group whose activities Goubert is investigating. Most examples of peasant discourse, according to Goubert (1982, 219), come from judicial archives, but they concern so few cases that no historian has the right “to declare them representative.” Goubert, for that matter, devotes only three pages (225–28) to the judicial system, and he does not cite any report or decision. The few quotations he includes are period expressions like “baux à cheptel ” (54), “cagots” (196), and “capitation” (252), that is, phrases that supply information about the language of the time but do not offer samples of peasant discourse. The main alternative, for historians who do not share Goubert’s misgivings,

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is exploiting the discourse of the dominant classes—more precisely, scanning that discourse to identify passages that include words coming from the absentee. Historians who have more trust in judicial archives than Goubert does have made large use of this type of evidence. Le Roy Ladurie draws widely on it in Montaillou to depict the life of a village community, and I will return shortly to the specific way he presses it into service. Yet the historian who most frequently turns to this type of material is Arlette Farge, who from La vie fragile (Fragile Lives) (1986) to Dire et mal dire (Subversive Words) (1992) to Essai pour une histoire des voix au dix-huitième siècle (An essay for the study of voices in the eighteenth century) (2009), has tirelessly pored over police records in order to reconstruct, through what they say about themselves, the everyday life of Paris’s popular classes. Theorizing her endeavor in Les lieux pour l’histoire (Places for history), Farge (1997, 71) contends that working with this kind of evidence enables her “to recover the speech of the most underprivileged, of those who could not write, and whose traces of the words they uttered are found in handwritten police records containing transcripts, investigations, hearings, testimonies, confrontations, etc.” Such traces, Farge claims, provide a “social observatory,” opening into a “possible decrypting of the ways of thinking, imagining, and seeing of the popular classes, as well as of the forms of sociability, civil attitudes, and political behavior” that characterize those classes. Drawing on police records, Farge frequently quotes the words of “those who could not write” in the many studies she has devoted to the everyday life of the underprivileged in the eighteenth century. Quotations are especially numerous in Vivre dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (To live on the streets in Paris in the eighteenth century) (1979a) because of this book’s membership in the Archives series, in which the author’s text is always interspersed with numerous documents. While these quotations shed considerable light on the Parisian lower classes, a close reading shows that they still do not generally originate in those classes. Largely illiterate, the actors Farge quotes have not themselves produced the documents that quote them: they have spoken to someone who has transcribed their statements, and who often has forced them to speak. These individuals are also mostly quoted in indirect speech, through verbs that refer to the situation of enunciation, such as “state,” “testify,” and “complain”: Françoise Chandelier, a woman who is of age, a salesgirl, living in Paris, rue Jean Beau 5, charges Martin and his wife, stating that yesterday night she met Martin who told her it’s a good thing you’re coming

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back, damned bitch, damned whore, because I was going to close the door, adding that she was always with soldiers, then he attacked her and manhandled her with all possible violence, holding her mouth to keep neighbors from hearing the noise she was making, that this bloody scene would have lasted for a long time if two women had not come to her aid, women who had a lot of trouble making him let her go (Y 9831). (Farge 1979a, 146) In his review of the English-language version of Farge’s La vie fragile, David Garrioch (1995, 724) ascribes to the historian the supposedly typically French taste for “explication de texte,” in this instance, the propensity to “squeeze” every document to “extract all drops of meaning.” From a strictly linguistic perspective, however, one can only notice that Farge here does not practice “explication” as systematically as Garrioch thinks she does, nor does she “extract” from the document all the “drops” that could serve her analysis. For one thing, she does not specify whether the strange syntax of this report, beginning with the bold juxtaposition of direct and indirect speeches (“stating that she met Martin who told her it’s a good thing . . .”) is traceable to a certain state of French in the eighteenth century, to the limited education of the police officer, or to a deliberate effort on the part of that officer to faithfully reproduce “what was actually said.” Furthermore, Farge does not mention that direct and indirect speeches both follow the introductory phrase “stating that”: both types are submitted to the mediation of the scribe who records Françoise’s statement. Dominant discourse, in other words, screens popular discourse, and it should come as no surprise that the brief excerpts of direct speech quoted here are insults, such as “damned bitch” and “damned whore”: those are the utterances the police are likely to single out as evidence of the “crime” that was committed. True, Farge (1997, 71) is aware that “words in police archives are extremely biased, do not reflect the real, and at times play hide and seek with the truth.” But she maintains that historians who are familiar with sources of this type can “distinguish between plausibility and lie” and can work among these transcripts without believing they are facing “a reality they could just copy.” It remains that Farge’s almost exclusive reliance on judicial archives can only lead her to depict the underprivileged in a way that underscores the foulness of their language and the brutality of their behavior. The issue, of course, is to know whether this description agrees with the self-image of the popular classes or whether it is only conveyed through its repressive apparatus, the view of them that the ruling classes had at the time.9 In addition to judicial records, historians eager to quote the absentee have

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also scrutinized the personal writings of members of the upper classes to uncover passages that quote members of the lower classes. Specialists in social history who study domestic service seem especially attached to this practice, to the extent that such works as Anne Martin-Fugier’s La place des bonnes (1979) and Geneviève Fraisse’s Femmes toutes mains (1979) (both studies of female servants) could be read as anthologies of the diaries and correspondences of writers such as Flaubert, Renard, and the Goncourts. Commenting on her sources, Martin-Fugier (1979, 37) states that because servants were “mute” during the period she studies (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), she had to turn to “literature,” “from fiction to private diaries,” to document her inquiry. When she wants, for example, to account for the experience of a housemaid who has just arrived from the countryside, MartinFugier (15) quotes from Jules Renard’s diary of November 5, 1905: “Mariette, our servant, who hasn’t seen Paris yet, finds everything superb. She says: ‘Here are the papers, Sir . . . A letter for you, Sir.’ When she is sent for groceries, she says: ‘Goodbye, my Lady [Au revoir, Madame].’ ” Then, to show that servant’s emancipation and change of attitude, Martin-Fugier (16) quotes the entry of June 9, 1908: “Mariette is taking a turn for the worse [se gâte]. She said to girls, who repeated it: ‘I have a lover. He is so proper that he doesn’t want to give his last name. His first name is Henri. He works on cars. On Sundays, he takes me for boat rides on the Seine.’ ” Here Martin-Fugier exploits Renard’s diary in order to “let the underprivileged speak,” and the quotations she uncovers contribute in useful ways to the history of servants at the turn of the century. Yet those quotations also raise several problems that the historian does not address in her analyses. The first concerns what introductions to historical research call the “internal criticism of the document,” and it coincides with a basic question that poeticians (and linguists) ask about quotations of direct speech in personal texts: Are those quotations supposed to be literal, and if so, how have they been recorded? In this instance Martin-Fugier does not comment on the way Renard has jotted down the words he attributes to his servant, specifically, on his turn to the convention of total recall. Although Renard doubtless writes his diary a few hours after encountering Mariette, he reproduces her words as if he had taken them down in shorthand. That is, he does not add phrases that would indicate the transcription is approximate, such as “Mariette said something like  .  .  .” or “to the best of my memory, Mariette said.  .  .  .” Yet, to reproduce the words uttered during a conversation is an arduous task. Whether the people who spoke belong to the upper or the lower classes, the literal transcription of what they said can be of interest only to linguists, sociologists,

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or anthropologists; transcribed spoken speech must be entirely rewritten for inclusion in a book targeted at a wider audience. Philippe Lejeune has demonstrated the need for these changes in Je est un autre (I is someone other) (1980), showing, based on a comparison between the published text and the tapes that were used to establish it, that works as dissimilar as Mémé Santerre (the “autobiography” of a seamstress written “with” the journalist Serge Grafteaux) and Michel Contat’s Sartre par lui-même (the transcript of the sound track of the film by the same title) were the outcomes of a painstaking process of editing and rewriting.10 Unlike Lejeune, we have no way of confronting two texts, in this instance, Renard’s diary and Mariette’s actual words. Given the writing conventions at work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can only speculate that Renard modified what his servant said to make her speak what Renée Balibar (1974, 106) calls “national French”: the kind of basic, grammatically correct but simplistic language that primary school children had to learn after public education became free and mandatory in the early 1880s. Upper-class novelists, as Balibar (226) demonstrates, frequently placed “primary school sentences” in the mouths of lower-class characters, and it is probable that Renard turned to this code when he made his servant make short, correct, but syntactically underdeveloped statements. Women’s Words Each of the five volumes of Histoire des femmes en Occident (A History of Women in the West) (Duby and Perrot 1991) ends with a section titled “Paroles de femmes” (Women’s voices), an inclusion that points both to the goals of writing women’s history and to the difficulties of doing it. On one hand, historians strive to reconstruct the “experiences” of women in the past, and quoting what women said is an important aspect of this undertaking. On the other hand, however, as the presence of a section “Women’s Voices” makes immediately evident, this objective may be questionable. Are there historiographic studies that end with texts grouped under the heading “Men’s Voices”? Probably not: that male individuals have expressed themselves is regarded as “normal,” and the part of a study that contains their “words” need not display any reference to gender in its title. The inclusion of an annex “Women’s Voices” thus indicates a major challenge, which editors Duby and Perrot (1991, 8) identify in the introduction to the first volume. Women, they warn, have often left “tenuous traces” of their presence, and those traces originate less in women themselves than in “the look of the men who govern the city, construct its memory, and manage its archives.” Duby and Perrot add that documents

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are especially scarce in the area of “women’s voices.” Indeed, public archives for a long time did not record what women said, and letters, diaries, and other personal writings frequently got lost or were destroyed because they were viewed as insignificant. This very lack, however, may be a goad for historians. As Corbin (1998b, 190) provocatively states in his answer to the question of knowing whether it is possible to do a history “without women,” any history is indeed conceivable “from the moment one has expressed an eagerness to find out, because sources can always be discovered or invented.” Corbin does not take up the issue of “voice” specifically, but the program he outlines has long been that of specialists in women’s history intent on “finding” or “inventing,” archives that provide materials coming from women themselves. In order to offer an alternative to male sources, these specialists have first turned to the writings of the group some feminist scholars ironically call “women worthies”: the women who in some way have distinguished themselves, and whose “words” have for this reason been preserved in the public record. These women are generally members of the intellectual elite, which for a long time meant members of the nobility or of religious orders, and some were both. Representatives of these groups wrote a great deal, and the texts they produced can be used to question the numerous statements men made about women, beginning with the issue of a “feminine nature.” Studies of birth and maternity written by feminist researchers, for example, do not draw only on the countless treatises that priests, physicians, and philosophers have published on these topics. They also include excerpts from the personal writings produced by upper-class women—from letters, diaries, and autobiographies in which these women describe their experiences as mothers. In Entrer dans la vie, Jacques Gélis, Mireille Laget, and Marie-France Morel (1978, 110), for instance, quote from a letter by Madame Roland, an influential supporter of the 1789 Revolution: Your baby looks at me while I’m writing, she raises her eyebrows the way you do, and she already has lines across her forehead. I’m almost no longer in pain when I breastfeed her and, what I would never have believed, I feel an increase in the pleasure to do it. I always take her to me with a shudder of delight, when I see her eagerness and her healthy look: it’s a feast for both of us. Madame Roland writes here to her husband, and she seems to be speaking in her own name. Admittedly, the feelings of “pleasure” and “delight” that she claims to be experiencing are not exclusively her own: they testify to

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the “discovery of maternal love” and “exaltation of maternity” that according to Knibielher and Fouquet (1982, 135) appeared in the eighteenth century, though only in the upper classes. Yet Madame Roland seems to be fully at ease with the new attitudes, since she does not refer to the ideas of “sin” and “suffering” that at the time were often attached to maternity in the discourse of priests and physicians. Anxious not to confine women to their bodily existence and the private sphere, historians have also used the writings of upper-class women to show how representatives of these groups could intervene in political and ideological debates. Historians of feminism have thus seized every opportunity to quote texts in which women give their opinions on the most diverse subjects, from art to education to civil rights. In the section they devote to the role of women in avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century, Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe (1977, 587–88) quote the provocative and misogynist statement made by Filippo Marinetti in his Manifeste du futurisme: “We want to glorify war—the only hygiene in the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas that kill, the contempt of women. . . . We want to tear down museums, libraries, fight moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice.” Yet Albistur and Armogathe stress that a woman member of the group, Valentine de Saint-Point, published her own Manifeste de la femme futuriste in which she pleaded the cause of androgyny: “It is absurd to divide mankind into women and men. It is only composed of femininity and masculinity. Any superman . . . is only the prodigious expression of a race and a time because he is composed of both femininity and masculinity, that is, because he is a fully complete being.” Interesting because of its content, this text that strangely mixes protofascism and queer theory is also noteworthy because of its context of enunciation. Unlike Madame Roland’s letter, it is indeed a public statement; even though it was addressed to a small audience, it no longer belongs to the private sphere. Whatever its effects might have been (Albistur and Armogathe do not say whether some futurists were converted to Saint-Point’s theses), the Manifeste de la femme futuriste is a case of feminine intervention into the intellectual debates of the time, a woman seeking to modify, at least in some regards, the beliefs of the mostly male group she had elected to join. While specialists in women’s history can easily support their analyses with statements made by members of the social and intellectual elite, they have more trouble identifying documents in which women from the lower classes speak both directly and on subjects of public interest. Women who belong

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to these classes are rarely quoted, and what they say is likely to concern domestic matters and relationships with their employers rather than societal issues. Still, “finding” and “inventing” sources, some historians have managed to uncover texts written by women of modest origins and by women most impatient to participate in public affairs. Michèle Riot-Sarcey, for example, irritated at Pierre Rosanvallon’s exclusive use of masculine discourse in his account of the debates about “democracy” in the nineteenth century, has argued that women joined in these debates and that the texts they published are easily accessible. Riot-Sarcey focuses more specifically on three women, two of them from a working-class background: the linen maid Jeanne Deroin and the seamstress Désirée Gay. Intent on showing that these women were capable of writing, Rio-Sarcey repeatedly quotes them. The chapter “Année 1830, le temps des possibles,” for example, includes eighty-six quotations for seventyseven pages of text—counting only the quotations that are typographically set apart by a shift to the next line and a change of font. These quotations frequently originate in the abundant correspondence that Deroin and Gay held with leaders of the revolutionary movement like Barthélemy Enfantin or, on such subjects as Saint-Simonism, with newspapers like Le Globe: Saint-Simonism has awakened in my soul the sweet dreams of peace and universal brotherhood that I regarded as utopian, that I rejected as the effects of an exhilarated imagination. I have a strong sympathy for the principle of the Doctrine: the abolition of birth privileges, the emancipation of women, the improvement of the moral, physical, and intellectual condition of the most numerous and poorest class are the object of all my wishes and have instilled in me the most fervent enthusiasm. Reason, however, tells me to control it; I still have doubts, I feel the need for a more intimate conviction, I want my conscience to be more specifically enlightened about the details of the political organization. (Riot-Sacey 1994, 51) Jeanne Deroin writes to Le Globe when she is about to take the examination to become a schoolteacher, and her vocabulary, her syntax, and her spelling attest that her occupation as a linen maid has not kept her from teaching herself the linguistic tools seemingly reserved for the ruling class. Yet Riot-Sarcey also quotes clumsier letters in which women, in this case Elisabeth Celnart, express their faith in Saint-Simonism without mastering spelling and syntax as well as Deroin does:

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Il aitait écrit que ce serait Saint-Simon qui finirait l’oeuvre si bien commencée et que vous ses apôtres vous raméneriez la paix, et le bonheur dans la clase la plus pauvre et la plus nombreuse. Pourquoi les riches n’ont-ils pas un coeur comme vous mais à force de perséverance vous leur communiqueré cette chaleur qui vous anime et qui fera le bonhuer général. Et moi ussi je jue la faiblesse de ne pas croire au bonheure que vous nous prometier mais mon fils un grand admirateur de votre doctrine a force de douceur m’a désidé à suivre votre enseignement. Il me semble maintenant que je si manquoi, il m’arriverait quelque malheur. (53) [It was written that it would be Saint-Simon who would complete the work so well begun and that you, his apostles, you would bring back peace and happiness to the most numerous and poorest class. Why don’t the rich have a heart like you, but by dint of perseverance you will instill in them the warmth that animates you and will create general happiness. Me too I have the weakness of not believing in the happiness that you promised, but my son is a great admirer of your doctrine and by dint of kindness he has convinced me to follow your teaching. It now seems to me that if I failed, some accident would happen to me.] By reproducing this letter without normalizing it, Riot-Sarcey has certainly taken the risk of making her source into an uneducated person who wants to express herself but does not have the proficiency to do so. The historian justifies her decision in a note (259n59), arguing that she has respected Celnart’s spelling and syntax “in order to best render the mode of expression of those who state, in their own way, within the limits of the education they have received, their will to take part in the large social upheavals that they observe and experience.” One might add that although Celnart’s grammar is not consistent with nineteenth-century norms, it does not fall under the “national French” of Renard’s servant. Celnart attempts to write complex sentences, even though her linguistic competence does not enable her to correctly formulate what she intends to communicate: her support of Saint-Simonism in the hope that it will bring “general happiness.” Unmediated Testimonies? In Le corps et l’âme, her study of convent life in the nineteenth century, Odile Arnold draws heavily on the letters and biographies written by the few sisters who were educated. In so doing, as Micheline Dumont (1985, 154) pointed

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out in her review, Arnold bypasses the many nuns who were still illiterate and have not left traces of their experience. But how do you quote the illiterate? How do you include the testimony of those who have not been invited to testify? In brief, how do you cite the people who cannot write and whose words, because they were not viewed as worth remembering, have not been preserved in the archives? The difficulties historians encounter in seeking to answer these questions explain Le Roy Ladurie’s enthusiasm on discovering the minutes of the hearings held by the Inquisition in the early fourteenth century in a village in southern France. At last, he exults in his prologue to Montaillou (1975, 9), we have a document in which someone, in this instance the inquisitor Jacques Fournier, has “granted a voice to villagers, even to a whole village.” As a result, historians have a source that provides what had been missing for so long: the “direct view,” the “unmediated testimony that peasants give about themselves.” Indeed, Fournier’s register does not just tell about the alleged heresy of the people of Montaillou. It also contains “a kind of detailed and factual information that cannot be found in charters and even in notarial archives” (10), information that allows Le Roy Ladurie, as we saw in chapter 1, to draw on the model of anthropology an exhaustive description of everyday life in a peasant community. Montaillou has been the subject of numerous discussions among medievalists, and my purpose is not to intervene in these debates. For poeticians who want to know whether, and how, the words of the absentee are reported, the interest of Le Roy Ladurie’s study resides in the large number of quotations. Those are frequently provided in direct speech, their literality being established through two typographical devices: italics and occasionally a shift to the next line. Many pages in Montaillou display this alternation of author’s discourse and italicized quotations, giving the work a distinctive look: In a rural environment, the daughters’ attitude toward their mothers is one of deference. This behavior is justified, among other things, by the material favors that the latter continue to do for the former, even when they are grown and married. One day, recounts Guillemette Clergue, who is now in the power of a violent husband, I needed to borrow combs for carding hemp, and I went to my father’s house for this purpose. As I was at the door of this house, I found my brother who was taking the manure out of the house. I then asked my brother: —Where is my lady mother? —What do you want from her? he replied.

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—I want combs, I said. —Our mother is not here, my brother said. She went to get water. She won’t be back for a long time. I refused to believe my brother, and I tried to get into the house. Then my brother put his arm in front of the door and kept me from going in. (Le Roy Ladurie 1975, 289) This passage shows how the inquisitor’s register can be useful to historians concerned with reconstructing the everyday life of a rural community in the Middle Ages. To begin with, unlike the police officers whose reports Farge quotes in Vivre dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, the notaries of the Inquisition consistently transcribed the statements of the villagers in direct speech. Furthermore, the need to determine individual degrees of guilt with precision obliged these scribes to attribute every statement explicitly. Similar in this respect to the postmodern anthropologists who treat their informants as “coauthors” (Clifford 1986, 17), they clearly identified the villagers they were interrogating: readers always know exactly who is saying what, to whom, and in what circumstances. As a result of this meticulousness, the register is a most valuable document: for example, the preceding excerpt supplies concrete information about forms of address (the brother says vous to his sister, even though he treats her brutally), ways of designating the mother (the adult daughter calls her mother “my lady” [Madame]), women’s tasks (the mother is in charge of getting the water), and even the width of the doors (the brother can bar access to the house by extending his arm). While the Inquisition’s register certainly provides worthwhile data, the way Le Roy Ladurie exploits the many instances of absentee discourse it contains raises several difficulties. The first concerns the situation in which the absentee was requested to speak. In his introduction the historian specifies that although Fournier was not particularly ruthless, he was a strict enforcer of church orthodoxies; as a result of the hearings, several villagers were jailed, excommunicated, or expropriated, and five were executed. Le Roy Ladurie, however, hardly refers to the circumstances in which the exchanges he reports took place; most are presented like the dialogue between Guillemette Clergue and her brother, as though they had been recorded on the spot, not reported to an inquisitor in the setting of a courtroom. Decontextualized, quotations in Montaillou thus lose their membership in what Carlo Ginzburg (1989, xxi) calls the “archives of repression,” and this loss is significant. Indeed, without presuming that the villagers systematically lied, one might ask whether the particular position in which they found themselves did not shape their

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answers. In other words, one might ask whether the “factual information” the register contains is as reliable as Le Roy Ladurie deems it to be, when it is grounded in statements produced by people whose fate was—literally speaking—at stake.11 The second issue that quotations in Montaillou raise is philological. Le Roy Ladurie indicates in his introduction that he is relying on the text of the register published in 1965 by Jean Duvernois, and that he is providing his own translation from the original Latin into French. In a note (18n3) he also explains that the Latin text is itself a translation: the hearings were held in vernacular Occitan; the minutes were translated into Latin, then translated back into Occitan to be submitted to the defendants, and finally were translated a last time into Latin. Natalie Davis (1979, 68–69), in her review of Montaillou, regrets the absence of a reflection on these successive transfers, especially on the implications of shifting from a mother tongue in which the villagers could express themselves comfortably to a clerks’ language that is obviously more distanced. Other critics, on comparing Le Roy Ladurie’s translation with the Latin original, claim to have discovered several misreadings and misinterpretations. If Bernard Clergue, as Leonard Boyle (1979, 455-56) argues after consulting the Latin text, buried his mother not “under” but “next to” (juxta) the altar of the Virgin, then Le Roy Ladurie’s (494–96) thesis about the chthonian aspects of the Marian cult in Montaillou embarrassingly falls apart. Lacking the qualifications to intervene in these controversies, I will merely point out that comments such as Davis’s and Boyle’s have the merit of showing that the many instances of reported speech in Montaillou are not literal transcriptions of what the villagers told the inquisitor. Offered as unmediated, these absentees’ statements had actually been mediated several times, a fact their typographic presentation tends to obfuscate. These remarks on the exact status of the italicized text in Montaillou bring us to a last question, which is both linguistic and epistemological. The villagers, as Davis (1979, 69–71) submits, valued oral communication and were probably accomplished storytellers. Yet linguists and anthropologists, as we have seen in the case of the servant speech that Renard quotes in his diary, have demonstrated that oral discourse of any kind (except prepared statements) cannot be published as transcribed except for the information of specialists. Even though the villagers doubtless used a formal language to talk to the inquisitor, it is certain that their statements were not just translated, but also arranged for clarity and readability. This editing is especially noticeable in the passages that include such conversations as the one between Guillemette and her brother. Indeed, the way these exchanges are presented rests on the

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convention that the people of Montaillou had total recall, and that the notaries wrote down every word as it was actually pronounced during the hearings. What we know about memory and the transcription of oral discourse suggests that the villagers could not remember their past conversations verbatim, and that the notaries of the Inquisition did not just translate these testimonies but rewrote them. Yet there is no way of measuring the gap between the actual hearings and their transpositions since, unlike Lejeune in his examination of such works as Mémé Santerre and Sartre par lui-même, we do not have a tape providing the urtext with which Le Roy Ladurie’s quotations from the villagers’ discourse could be confronted. The italicized text is given in Montaillou as an urtext, a status it clearly does not have. While literary theory provides the tools for assessing the validity of the schemes historians employ to quote the absentee, it must in turn be revisited in light of these schemes. For one thing, histories that extensively quote the underprivileged show that poetics must develop its pragmatic component if it is to fully account for the conventions at work in studies that rely on sources such as police reports, personal writings, and ecclesiastical archives. Indeed, to ask “Who is speaking?” is no longer sufficient to describe the specific situations of enunciation found in documents of this kind. Poeticians, as I have attempted to do, must in these cases turn to linguistics, for instance, to Ducrot’s concept of “polyphony” and his distinction between author and enunciator. Yet they could also make use of the work of the sociologists who, challenging speech act theory, maintain that the latter is not sufficiently concerned with issues of “power.” Evidently, to state that “the session is open” is not enough for this session to begin. The sentence has a performative value only if the person who utters it holds what Bourdieu (1982, 68) calls “symbolic capital,” that is, enjoys a “recognition” that allows enforcing what is stated. The texts in which the underprivileged are quoted certainly inscribe relations of power, raising such issues as determining who has the authority to ask questions, then to decide which statements must be preserved, and how. Admittedly, variables such as “power” (“race,” “class,” “gender,” etc.) are not easy to integrate into literary theory if it is to retain one of the most desirable attributes of theory— simplicity. But as Prince (1995, 77) has suggested in a discussion of the role of “context” in narrative analysis, those variables could be included under the heading “distance.” Or they could be examined in the framework not of poetics but of criticism, that is, of the studies that interpret individual texts with the help of theory, albeit without seeking to make contributions of a theoretical nature. Of course it is not crucial to determine once and for all when poetics must ask questions such as Who has the power of writing down what

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someone else is saying? But it is useful to pose questions of this type when considering them leads to a more exhaustive account of textual processes, in this instance, of the deployment of quotations into historiographic studies, where their occurrence is submitted to strict rules of validation.

Readerships Every academic discipline must at some point ask itself what audience(s) it addresses its productions to. This issue is particularly pressing in history, since our culture is highly concerned with its past and consumes large numbers of texts classified as “historical.” To examine these texts’ “readership” requires making a basic distinction: between the flesh and blood individual who buys a book or consults it in a library and the persona whose profile must be reconstructed from the text itself. This dichotomy agrees by and large with Rabinowitz’s (1987, 20–21) distinction between “actual” and “authorial” audiences and Prince’s (1987, 79) between “concrete” and “implied” readers. Of course, separating these categories poses the problem of their relation to one another. That is, one might ask whether the actual audience reads the text as the author intended it to be read—whether it is endowed with the same skills as the implied audience. I will return to this issue later, when I analyze the makeup of the “general public” for whom many historical studies now are supposedly written. Actual Audience Empirical studies in cognitive psychology (Fayol 1985; Herman 2003) have examined how people read “in actuality,” for instance, how they process narrative information and how far they are capable of retrieving that information to summarize or retell what they have read. Scholars have also drawn on the methods of anthropology to study how members of a certain group read a certain type of text: for example, (Radway 1984) examined how women “read the romance” in a small town in the Midwest. To my knowledge, however, no study has looked into the way French audiences “really read” historiographic works, whether popular biographies, scholarly books aimed at fellow researchers, or academic studies that became best sellers, such as Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. In that last case, how did nonspecialized readers react when they realized that the book they had bought based on enthusiastic reviews in mass-market magazines was in fact a learned study? Did they keep reading? And if they gave up, what specific aspects of the book caused them to do so?

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Because documented answers to these questions are lacking, that is, because the way historiographic works are actually read has not been investigated, we must content ourselves with numbers—in this instance, with the figures on print runs that publishing houses are willing to communicate. Making sense of these statistics comes more under the jurisdiction of sociology and economics than that of poetics. From the standpoint of narrative analysis, we can only observe that the specialists who have looked at print runs have traced their evolution in the form of a two-stage story. Going roughly from 1960 to 1975, the first stage is marked by a wealth of important studies in the social and human sciences, as well as by a significant increase of print runs in these areas. Trade publishers such as Gallimard and Le Seuil then launch scholarly series, beginning with Bibliothèque des histoires, Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, and L’univers historique. These series target le grand public cultivé, that is, an audience whose size has increased because of the growth in the number of university graduates eager to take up not just works of fiction, but also books written by theorists such as Barthes, Bourdieu, Lacan, and Foucault. Helped by their supposed “return to narrative,” historians strive to reach these “smart but not specialized readers” (Stone 1979a, 15): readers “anxious to learn what questions, methods, and data of a new type have revealed” but less inclined to decipher “incomprehensible statistical tables,” “purely theoretical developments,” and the “jargon-loaded prose” that according to Stone characterized the Annales’ production during 1950–60. The golden period for publishing in the human and social sciences comes to an end in the 1980s. A “crisis” then begins, together with what Bruno Auerbach (2006, 75) ironically calls the publishers’ “lamentation discourse” about the decrease in sales and readership. This discourse is exemplified by Pierre Nora’s interventions in Le Débat in 1982 and in Le Monde in 1997. In his 1982 article, Nora (17) emphatically announces the end of “the thirty glorious years of intellectual publishing,” a takeoff on “les trente glorieuses,” the years (1950– 80) that saw the steady improvement of the French economy. The people most responsible for this decline, Nora insists, are the academics themselves, who more and more are locked into “the logic of their disciplinary specialization,” and the students, who only work toward their examinations, neglecting the “disinterested knowledge” provided by books that are not directly connected to procuring a degree. Nora’s diagnosis(ix) is even more pessimistic in 1997. Disciplines that had made “the fortune of the human sciences,” such as ethnology, linguistics, sociology, and literary criticism, are now “sacrificed.” True, there is the “emergence” of new, potentially high-growth domains such as “communication, life science, and cognitive philosophy.” The overall pic-

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ture remains bleak, however, because of the “photoplundering” practiced by students, the excessive space the media grant to the “mandatory review” of a few works, and the always more pronounced specialization of “universitybased scholars.” More fundamentally, according to Nora, what is damaged is the “culture of reading.” A “general swing” has taken people away from the human sciences, leading to a “narrowing of curiosity.” Victims of an “internal downfall,” readers no longer aim to understand the “primitives of ethnology” or the “other in oneself ” that “psychoanalysis uncovers” but merely want “to go home.”12 Alternatives to Nora’s script of “progress and decline” have been offered by sociologists who have looked closely at numbers. Analyzing a report written by Sophie Barluet for the Centre National du Livre, Auerbach (2006, 82) has emphasized that statistics must bear on homogeneous data: depending on whether the category “history” includes the neighboring categories “memoirs, testimonies, documents,” it will appear stable or in free fall. Furthermore, according to Auerbach (2006, 79), if print runs and sales by title have been decreasing in the human sciences, the total number of publications and sales in this area “has never been as high as today.” The number of published dissertations in particular has been steadily increasing, going from 14.3 percent of all dissertations written in 1974 to 21 percent in 1999 (83). In brief, as Auerbach sums it up (87), the crisis is not a real one: publishers are darkening the picture in order to have new regulations put in place, specifically, to obtain rights to photocopies and library loans. Similarly, Auerbach exonerates students from the charge of reading in a “utilitarian” manner. Nora’s “disinterested reading,” he maintains, is hardly practiced in scientific inquiries, since both leading researchers and first-year students resort to “partial consultations” and “documentary reading” to achieve their purposes.13 Finally, Auerbach (91) defends the “fragmentation” of academic studies in the human and social sciences, which he sees as partaking of the “logic of any scientific development.” At most, he concedes that such an extreme specialization conflicts with the “cultural, political, and social” functions those sciences claim for themselves. Scholars in these domains do not seem ready to separate their activities, for instance, as some of their colleagues in the “hard” sciences do, to write articles for their fellow researchers and books for a wider audience. My purpose is not to decide between these versions of the “crisis” of publishing in the human and social sciences, a task for which I have no qualifications. I will thus restrict myself to quoting a few numbers for print runs as communicated by two of the publishers I have approached, Gallimard and Le Seuil. Submitted to the statistical requirements of the social sciences, these

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numbers doubtless have limited value, since they refer neither to the total number of books published by Gallimard and Le Seuil under the label history nor to a sample selected according to standard practices. Yet it seemed relevant to use them because they bear on several of the studies I am considering and make it possible to test, admittedly on a limited basis, the thesis according to which history captured a wide audience in the 1970s, then dramatically lost its popularity. Without thinking of drawing up a prize list, I have ordered the selected books according to copies printed: the first number refers to the print run in a series such as Bibliothèque des histoires or L’univers historique; the second applies to a paperback edition; the third gives the total. For comparison, I have included numbers for some works (Genette, Foucault, Ricoeur, etc.) published by Gallimard and Le Seuil that do not fall under “history” but that I use in my study. In summer 2012, the statistics provided by both publishers allowed me to establish the rankings shown in tables 1 and 2. These numbers clearly show that even though in the past thirty years the human and social sciences have not produced best sellers comparable to Montaillou and Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things), the “crisis” experienced in these areas since the 1980s is not as severe as publishers claim. Originally a dissertation, Branche’s La torture pendant la guerre d’Algérie had a run of 8,500 copies; Rosanvallon’s highly theoretical La société des égaux, of 30,000; and Pétré-Grenouilleau’s specialized but controversial Les traites négrières, of 19,300. Whatever methodological limits an investigation based on a limited sample might have, the conclusions that can be drawn from the figures provided by Gallimard and Le Seuil are very similar to those Auerbach reached at the end of a rigorous statistical analysis: it is excessive to speak of a “crisis” in the human and social sciences, since—even though print runs are no longer those of the 1970s—the number of publications has markedly increased. We should speak rather of the emergence of what Emmanuel Lemieux (2003), in his survey of the French cultural scene in the early 2000s, calls “new networks of intellectual powers.” Whether in the human or the social sciences, the disappearance of such “great tutelary figures” (2003, 252) as Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, and Bourdieu has left an opening for a certain number of scholars whose works are regarded as worthy of interest, but whose status is not (yet?) that of “tutelary figure.” Although I do not have statistics to bolster my argument, it seems that conclusions of the same type can be drawn about the presence of historians in the media. In studies hostile to the Annales, Dosse (1987) and Couteau-Bégarie (1989) contended that one of the reasons for the hegemony of that school resided in the ubiquity of its representatives in the press and other means of

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T a b l e 1 . Print runs for Gallimard Print run in series like Bibliothèque des histoires Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou Foucault, Les mots et les choses Duby, Le temps des cathédrales Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines Furet, Penser la Révolution française Le Goff, Saint Louis Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les traites négrières Ozouf, Varennes Farge, Vivre dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle Wachtel, La vision des vaincus Mousnier, L’assassinat d’Henry IV Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol.1 Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 2 Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 3 Dewerpe, Charonne 8 février 1962 Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident Delacroix et al., Les courants historiques en France Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises Loez, 14-18: Le refus de la guerre Nora, Essais d’ego-histoire Chartier, Cardenio entre Cervantès et Shakespeare

159,039 119,864 93,045 31,098 13,500 66,130 36,252 30,750 18,275 19,396 22,443 12,000 9,789 18,179 10,164 7,390 15,606 12,591 1,171 5,000 9,519

Print run for paperback edition 72,424 100,429 57,539 57,362 19,335 15,300 24,362 18,257 7,214 15,332 17,331 8,300 14,267 10,209

13,314 6,235 9,313

8,522

231,463 220,282 93,045 88,637 70,862 66,130 55,887 46,050 42,637 37,653 29,657 27,332 27,120 26,479 24,321 17,599 15,606 12,591 1,171 13,314 11,235 9,519 9,313 8,522

7,227 6,324 5,325 3,245

Total

7,227 6,324 5,325 3,245

communication. The Annalistes, according to these critics, had access to the daily newspapers and magazines that in France hold intellectual power (Le Monde, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur), where they ritually celebrated each other’s works. Dosse and Couteau-Bégarie also stressed the role of the radio, where Le Goff coproduced Les Lundis de l’Histoire, and of television, above all Apostrophes, where historians such as Ariès, Duby, Chaunu, and Le

T a b l e 2 . Print runs for Le Seuil Print run in series like L’univers historique Ariès, L’homme devant la mort Genette, Figures III Azéma, De Munich à la Libération Vigarello, Le propre et le sale Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire Bourdé and Martin, Les écoles historiques Prost, Douze leçons sur l’histoire Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 1 Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes ? Rosanvallon, La société des égaux Le Roy Ladurie, L’argent, l’amour et la mort en pays d’Oc Vigarello, Le sain et le malsain Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Révolution française Veyne, Le pain et le cirque Farge, Le goût de l’archive Genette, Seuils Pastoureau, Noir Farge, La vie fragile Le Roy Ladurie, La sorcière de Jasmin Hartog, Régimes d’historicité Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle Bologne, Histoire de la conquête amoureuse Drévillon, Batailles Leduc, Les historiens et le temps Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire Bard, Une histoire politique du pantalon Vigarello, Les métamorphoses du gras Laget, Naissances Muchembled, Une histoire de la violence Douzou, La Résistance française Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime Poirrier, Les enjeux de l’histoire culturelle Flandrin, Un temps pour embrasser Agulhon, La République au village Hartog, Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire Perrot, Jeunesse de la grève Valensi, Fables de la mémoire

33,800 111,500

Print run for paperback edition

108,500 69,500 72,500 74,200 61,800 22,800 33,000 30,000

112,400 111,500 108,500 87,700 82,700 74,200 61,800 47,100 46,000 41,100 30,000 23,000

5,000 6,000

15,500 13,500

20,500 19,500

7,000 7,500 9,500 18,500 8,000 12,800 7,000 4,000 5,000 4,800

12,300 11,500 9,200

19,300 19,000 18,700 18,500 13,200 12,800 11,000 10,000 9,500 8,300 8,200 7,800 7,500 7,500 7,300 7,000 7,000 7,000

14,000 10,000

24,300 13,000 11,100 30,000 23,000

4,000 7,500 7,500 7,300 7,000

78,600

Total

5,200 4,000 6,000 4,500 3,500 8,200 3,800

7,000 7,000 6,300 6,200 5,500 5,000 5,000 4,600

6,300 6,200 5,500 5,000 5,000 4,600 (continued)

Situations Print run in series like L’univers historique Vovelle, Théodore Desorgues, ou La désorganisation Farge, Le cours ordinaire des choses dans la cité du XVIIIe siècle Rioux and Sirinelli, Pour une histoire culturelle Charle, La crise des sociétés impériales Farge, Des lieux pour l’histoire Charle, La république des universitaires Charle, Paris fin de siècle

Print run for paperback edition

107

Total

4,600

4,600

4,200

4,200

4,000 4,000 4,000 3,500 3,000

4,000 4,000 4,000 3,500 3,000

Roy Ladurie were invited to discuss their recent books. The two critics’ diagnosis must undoubtedly be qualified. In his memoir Apostrophes host Bernard Pivot mentions only two works by Annales historians among the “One hundred books launched by his show”: Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and Aries’s L’homme devant la mort. As for the reviews that Annalistes such as Revel, Ozouf, Chartier, and Burguière supposedly wrote about each other in Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur, they did not make their own books into best sellers in the nonfiction category. Still writing in the media, those historians must now share the stage with newcomers such as Raphaëlle Branche, Jean-Yves Grenier, Antoine de Baecque, and Dominique Kalifa. As for television, no cultural program has succeeded in replacing Apostrophes. Historians may appear on such shows as La Fabrique de l’Histoire or Ce Soir ou Jamais, but their appearance there will not promote their books the way Pivot’s program did. New media have also contributed to the scattering of reviews and opportunities to introduce recently published work. The fame of a scholarly study, today, no longer exclusively depends on Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur; it also hinges on blogs and Internet sites that inform about new publications and offer critical judgments, such as nonfiction.fr, fabula.org, clionautes.org, and hostobiblio.com. Inscribed Readers While the tools of poetics do not really lead to drawing up profiles of historiography’s “real readers,” they are perfectly suited for describing the figures

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of “inscribed readers.” Indeed, all books are written, produced, and marketed for a specific audience, and the signs pointing to that audience usually are clearly visible in the books themselves. I will distinguish three types of inscribed readers, taking for granted that there are certainly more than three and that a book does not necessarily inscribe a homogeneous reader. This distinction will be grounded in an examination of both the text and the paratext, that is, of the marks “around” the text that immediately inform about the nature of that text and program the way it should be received. The first group is the peer group, namely, in Bourdieu’s terminology (quoted by Noiriel 2005, 202), the “professionals” for whom “other professionals” earmark their works. In this area the prototypes of books written for this restricted audience are the long dissertations published in their complete version by academic publishers such as Mouton, Les Publications de la Sorbonne, and the Services d’Éditions et de Vente de l’Éducation Nationale (SEVPEN). Appearing on the spine or front cover or at least on one of the first pages of the book, the names of these publishers immediately designate an academic audience that the title of the work will further limit. It is likely that only historians, or even only specialists in the period or the topic announced in the title, will have read in their entirety the extensive tableaux I examined in chapter 2, such as Goubert’s Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (SEVPEN) and Le Roy Ladurie’s Les paysans de Languedoc (Mouton). Yet the same remark could be made about recent dissertations, for example, Anne-Marie Sohn’s Chrysalides: Femmes dans la vie privée (1996), whose residence in “Les publications de la Sorbonne” inscribes specialized readers, and not all readers interested in women’s history. Adding to the name of the publisher, in these cases such factors as the length and the price of the book shape a certain type of reception: rather than an individual purchase followed by a careful reading, we can expect consultations in university libraries and the kind of selective reading that Nora condemns but that in fact is a major aspect of any scholarly reading, whether practiced by apprentices or by Bourdieu’s “professionals.” The second reader group inscribed in the paratext is the educated audience: the people who were trained at the university, are connected to it, or have learned to read according to its rules. Offered by important trade publishers, the series Bibliothèque des histoires and L’univers historique for which I have provided sales figures are obviously aimed at that audience. Prominently displayed on the front cover, at Gallimard the name of the series comes with additional information. Written by the series editor, Pierre Nora, the blurbs on the back covers tell us that “new questions” as well as “the enlargement

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of historical consciousness to the whole world” have required the creation of this series next to the already well-established Bibliothèque des sciences humaines. This “editorial peritext” (Genette 1987, 20) plays an important role of incitement: adding to the symbolic capital attached to the label Gallimard, it promises prospective readers that by acquiring a book published in this series, they will remain aware of the most advanced research. One could ask, at the most, whether that same peritext is not also intimidating, since it tells nonspecialists that the book they are looking at or skimming through is actually reserved for a specific audience, of which they are not members. Professional and educated readerships are also inscribed in another area of the paratext—the reference notes. These notes will be more extensively discussed in chapter 3. For now I will just say that they stage competent readers: readers who, retracing the author’s research journey, could go check for themselves the validity of the evidence the historian has provided. Thus, to take an example from Sohn’s Chrysalides (1996, 1:89n130), a study in which every piece of information is thoroughly documented, a scholar of women’s history and court records could go to the Archives of the Seine Department, specifically to cote D2 U8 132, to determine whether a Parisian carpenter, on June 28, 1882, really told his wife that she was “a slacker who thought only of her clothes and spent money like snow in the sun.” How frequently such verification actually takes place is not at issue here. My point is merely that reference notes, since they make checking possible, allow and even invite the scholarly reading of the studies that include them. Obviously, that certain books appear in certain series does not mean they will be read (or at least bought) by the audience they inscribe. Montaillou—to return to this text once again—was initially published in the Bibliothèques des histoires, and it is in this series that it sold more than 150,000 copies. Yet its paratext, which incorporates hundreds of notes and a twelve-page bibliography, is not particularly reader-friendly. Neither is the text itself, which, as we saw in chapter 2, is organized as a six-hundred-page anthropological description offering no overall plot that would sustain readers’ interest. For the publisher and journalist Maurice de Montrémy (1996, 26), the book is “unreadable for nonspecialists” because of the “proliferation of details” and the “abuse of scholarly demonstrations”; “unexplainable from a commercial standpoint,” its success seems due to the subject’s being “new” and the approach “original.” Gallimard, according to the cultural critics Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman (1985, 129–30), had for that matter not predicted the fortunes of the book; the initial print run was 6,000 copies—slightly above the 4,500 copies that Nora says was the average run in the human sciences

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in the 1970s. Such a success—“success” being defined here as actual buyers far exceeding inscribed readers—nevertheless remains unusual in the human sciences. The closest equivalent would be Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, whose total runs in 1966 reached almost 120,000 copies. But Montrémy’s diagnosis of Montaillou is even more applicable to Foucault’s book; its success is commercially “inexplicable” because of the philosophical nature of the text and the discursive strategies at work. Foucault, indeed, does not just treat a difficult subject; he also conducts his discussions according to argumentative logics that are not those of a work aimed at nonspecialists. The third group of readers inscribed in the books that fall under the label history is the general audience (le grand public). The signs of that audience can already be found in the editorial peritext, beginning with the series titles. While labels such as Bibliothèque des histoires and L’univers historique point to a general desire for knowledge, Les journées qui ont fait la France and La vie quotidienne—to take two conspicuous examples—appeal to more concrete concerns: the steady interest in events and the curiosity about everyday life, whether of ordinary people or of a specific group, from Greek gods to artists during the Occupation. Covers, as Gallimard editor Eric Vigne (2008, 44) stresses in Le livre et l’éditeur (The book and the publisher), also reflect the tastes of different audiences, in that they follow “the codes that come with the genres of the books.” With their red and light brown letters on a white background, the covers of the Bibliothèque des histoires works are restrained in a way that agrees with the scientific nature of the books published under this label. Conversely, with their red and blue letters on a white background, the covers of Les journées qui ont fait la France confirm the francocentrism inherent in the name of the series and inscribe readers whose interests are narrower than those of the Bibliothèque des histoires. Adding to these immediately visible signs, prefaces and blurbs on the back cover may also state that a text is suited for a general audience. Thus the blurbs on the back cover of La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle tell readers that Goubert has both the credentials to undertake a scholarly study (he is a “professor at the Sorbonne”) and the ability to make his research accessible (his Louis XIV et vingt millions de Français has “reached a broad readership”). Goubert himself, in his preface, states that he wanted to write a book that was “simple,” a book that his “grandchildren” and his “nonspecialist friends” could read “without irritation or boredom.” Goubert and his publisher seem here to want to have it both ways, but the appeal to readers eager to learn from experts who also can make their works accessible is found in many editorial peritexts. It is frequently encountered

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in the epitexts—the paratexts outside the book—for instance, in the catalogs that publishers now post on the Internet. Perrin and Tallandier—two publishing houses that have extensive history divisions—state on their sites that their books have a high scientific value without being reserved for specialists: “A Perrin biography is a warrant for serious information and reading pleasure,” while Tallandier historical studies are designed both for the “connoisseur” and for a “general audience.” At both publishers, the peritext confirms the program that the epitext has stated. At Perrin, the front cover of De Gaulle et Roosevelt: Le duel au sommet includes a photograph of the two men talking to each other while the back cover lists the author’s qualifications: François Kersaudy “has taught at Oxford” and is currently “a professor at Paris I Panthéon/Sorbonne.” Tallandier turns to similar strategies: the front cover of Les fêtes du maréchal: Propagande festive et imaginaire dans la France de Vichy (Celebrating the marshal: Festive propaganda and imaginary in Vichy France] showcases the photograph of a parade in Pétain’s honor, while the back cover accredits the author: a “PhD in history” Rémi Dalisson is “assistant professor at the IUFM in Rouen.” In both cases the publisher targets the same readers: members of a general audience that must be attracted to the book by an iconographic document, then convinced of its quality by the enumeration of the author’s titles and institutional positions. Yet Perrin and Tallandier also want to appeal to the educated and even professional audiences. The paratext, in this instance the notes, bibliographies, and indexes, is there to show specialists that the book has been written according to the rules of the historical profession and that the knowledge it transmits is thus entirely legitimate. The features of the text proper that inscribe a specific readership are more difficult to identify. The easiest signs to spot are those of Umberto Eco’s (1979, 19) “reader’s encyclopedia”: the expertise a text lends to its audience, especially in the area it covers. Goubert, who follows the conventions of the series for which he writes La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle, posits readers endowed with a limited encyclopedia. He thus defines terms that have disappeared, such as dévoiement (a type of diarrhea [1982, 78]) and fripe (a combination of butter and grease [122]); explains technical expressions such as atteinte exogène (external attack [75]) and écart intergénésique (time between births [75]); and flags words that have changed meaning in modern French, such as hardes (from “peasant clothing” to “bad clothing” [63]) and émotions (from “revolt” to “feelings” [273]). It would be pointless to comb Goubert’s book to uncover inconsistencies—cases when the profile of the inscribed audience is suddenly modified. Goubert has enough doubts about his readers’ competence to specify that sémetière is an older spelling

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for cimetière (cemetery) (200). He assumes, however, that they know Adam de Craponne was an engineer who built canals in southern France in the sixteenth century and that they understand such terms of the Old Regime’s legal system as mainmorte (the lord’s rights over the properties of his vassal [259]) and champart (the lord’s right over part of the crops of his tenants [270]). Furthermore, as implied in several polemical references, he expects his nonspecialized audience to be aware of Le Roy Ladurie’s work on carnivals (295), Duby’s on war in the Middle Ages (292), and Ariès’s on death (292); he takes these studies to task without naming their titles or their authors, thus positing readers who know about the debates within the Annales about “mentalities” and the kind of evidence that can support their analysis. Similar problems of readership are found in more recent works intended for a general audience, for example, in the anthology 1515 et les grandes dates de l’histoire de France edited by Corbin (2005b). This book, already discussed in chapter 2 in the section on the writing of events, revisits a school manual published in the 1920s with the goal of “commenting,” with the help of “the latest research,” on the dates the authors of that manual had selected as particularly meaningful. Because they are writing for nonspecialists, the scholars on Corbin’s team are led to clarify some expressions they assume this audience might not grasp. Discussing the battle of Bouvines, Jean-Claude Schmitt (2005, 89) explains that combat had the ritual meaning of an ordalie, that is, of a “judgment coming from God”; reflecting on another battle (at Agdanel), Patrick Boucheron (2005, 168) stipulates that the name roi sans dol given to its winner, Louis XII, signifies “without ruse or malice”; and retracing the antecedent of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Robert Sauzet (2005, 245) emphasizes that Louis XIV, in the 1660s, had already banned the relapses—the “converts to Catholicism who had returned to Protestantism.” A few notes define specific terms and identify specific characters, explaining for instance that the loi salique was “a law of the Franks that excluded women from inheriting ‘free’ land” (Corbin 2005a, 109) and that Jean Domat was a “seventeenth-century legal expert, a Jansenist, and a friend of Pascal” (271). As with Goubert’s study, other terms and proper names that are probably unknown to the readers that 1515 posits come without any clarification. For Maurice Sartre (2005, 11), readers of the book are aware that the famous cratère de Vix is a bronze vase found in Vix, a town in Burgundy; for Michel Sot (2005, 17), they have learned in the lycée that the table claudienne de Lyon is a plaque found in Lyon bearing the inscription of a speech given by the emperor Claudius; and for Michel Winock (2005, 395), they must recognize the name Morny, “mastermind” of Napoléon III’s coup d’état, as that of the

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emperor’s “half brother.” That the book has thirty contributors also accounts for certain inconsistencies, which it would be petty to list. I will mention only that Maurice Sartre (2005, 11) speaks of the “oppidum de Constantine à Lançon” without defining the Latin term or italicizing it, whereas Pierre Cabanes (2005, 15) stipulates that a part of Gaul’s population at the time of the Roman invasion in 58 BC lived in “fortified oppida,” which were “administrative centers, defensive sites, and refuges for area peasants.” In brief, as Yves Jeanneret (1994, 170) suggests in his analysis of scientific popularizations, these texts always posit some kind of shared knowledge, but the “linguistic capital” that the popularizer lends to this audience may vary from text to text, depending on the topic and the author’s awareness of matters of knowledge transmission. At any rate, assessments about what to gloss and what not to gloss are judgment calls by the authors; unlike notes referring to documents (which I will discuss in chapter 3), they do not fall under the rules of historical discourse as formulated in manuals. Another way of identifying the readerships inscribed in contemporary French historiography is to examine how some extensive studies, initially published by Mouton or SEVPEN, were modified when they were reissued in series intended for a wider audience. Two main procedures, dividing and digesting, have been used to make these works more accessible. Maurice Agulhon (1987, 39), as he himself recounts, could not in 1969 find a publisher for his 1,500-page dissertation on the department of Var; he had to break it up into three volumes: La république au village (1970), La vie sociale en Provence au lendemain de la Révolution (1970), and Une ville ouvrière au temps du socialisme utopique: Toulon de 1815 à 1851) (A working-class city at the time of utopian socialism: Toulon from 1815 to 1851 [1977]). Claude Langlois (1995, 119) reports that Christian Delporte had a similar experience when he wanted to publish his dissertation, Dessinateurs de presse et dessin politique en France des années 1920 à la Libération (Press cartoonists and political cartoons in France from the 1920s to the Liberation). Éditions du CNRS, although an academic press, decided to bring out only the “most salable” part of the work, the section about Vichy, under the title Les crayons de la propagande: Dessinateurs et dessins politiques sous l’Occupation (1993). Some of the lengthy dissertations of the 1960s had already been shortened in similar ways at the time of their reissue: Beauvais et le Beauvaisis had lost its second part; Les paysans de Languedoc, two parts out of five; and Perrot’s Les ouvriers en grève, one volume out of two. Publishers had also modified some titles to make them sound less academic: Les ouvriers en grève (Workers on strike) had been changed to Jeunesse de la grève (The youth of workers’ strike),14 and Beauvais et le Beau-

114 Chapter Two

vaisis: Contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France au XVIIe siècle became Cent mille provinciaux au XVIIe siècle, a catchier, more concrete title possibly patterned after Goubert’s preceding book, Louis XIV et vingt millions de Français. The profile of the “general audience” that results from these changes is not unexpected: its members prefer short books to long ones when it comes to nonfiction; they are not interested in evidence, especially graphs and statistics; and they practice linear, horizontal reading because they are not used to going from the body of the text to the bottom of the page or the back of the book to consult the notes, as scholarly studies ask them to do. It goes without saying that this portrait is grossly simplified, since responses inscribed in texts do not necessarily coincide with readers’ actual responses. In this instance members of the “general audience” may feel cheated if they learn that the text they read is not complete, and they may prefer to discover their lacks by themselves rather than being told about them through editorial decisions. Some cuts, moreover, may deprive those readers of useful help. The paperback edition of Les paysans de Languedoc eliminates the book’s illustrations, taking away information that would be useful for visualizing what Le Roy Ladurie (1966, 1:256, 259) means by such phrases as “ancient swing plough,” “terrace culture,” and “old fragmentary housing.” The distinction between professional, educated, and general audiences thus is doubtless too sharp, and it raises several of the theoretical problems that come with any binary or ternary opposition. To begin with, it is difficult to describe the general audience in a way that is not negative: it is the audience that “does not have” (in Eco’s vocabulary, a rich “encyclopedia”), or that “does not know” (how to use notes, to consult an appendix). By the same token, the professional and educated audiences are the ones that practice a “better” reading, a reading that is deeper and more thorough (understood: than that of the general audience). Furthermore, the assumption of a radical divide between readerships does not account for the possible crossing from one category to the other. That is, it fails to explain how inexperienced readers can improve, in this instance—as Pavel (1986, 126) has argued about the acquisition of the codes of literary discourse—how they can learn the rules of professional and educated reading and even play with pleasure the games such reading invites them to play. Yet such crossings do take place, for example, in the universities’ evening divisions, and it would be valuable for education specialists to study closely how they occur. “Professional” and “educated” audiences, moreover, are not homogeneous categories, and the encyclopedias of their members do often vary. In

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his analysis of history’s “crisis,” Noiriel (2005, 11) claims that “historiansepistemologists influenced by Karl Marx and Raymond Aron believed they could ‘revolutionize’ history by imposing on their colleagues a language and reference system that were incomprehensible to most of them.” Developing this argument throughout his book, and taking on more particularly Marrou, Certeau, and Veyne, Noiriel (131–32) writes about the author of Comment on écrit l’histoire: Veyne’s indifference toward problems of knowledge communication is illustrated by the energy he deploys to break from the traditions of the discipline. Whereas Bloch, by “translating” into normal historical language what he borrows from neighboring disciplines, always seeks to make his statements “agree” with those of his predecessors, Veyne operates in an exactly reverse fashion. Flaunting his membership in the profession (he frequently says “we historians”), he nevertheless expresses himself in a language totally incomprehensible to ordinary historians. He takes pleasure in quoting from philosophers his colleagues have never read, and who in most cases only restate what historians (notably Bloch and Seignobos) had already stated long ago. Here Noiriel posits the existence of “ordinary” historians who use “normal” language and to whom philosophical language is “incomprehensible.” For him it is sufficient to learn about history’s epistemological problems by reading what these “ordinary” scholars have written; turning to philosophy is useless, all the more so since philosophical texts often discuss subjects that historians have already explored. Yet Noiriel, while disagreeing with Veyne and other “historians-epistemologists,” does not banish them from the profession. He merely regards them as “extraordinary,” as he regards their language as “abnormal.” In doing so he acknowledges that the historical community does not possess a common encyclopedia and that its members at times have trouble reading each other’s works. It must be stressed, finally, that while the category “professional historians” is heterogeneous, historians’ reading habits also vary greatly. One might ask, for example, when its members do a complete scholarly reading, that is, when they proceed from the notes to the archives to verify their colleagues’ evidence. Only specialists who have to write a review or are particularly interested in the subject will go to the trouble of checking a study’s documentary apparatus, and they will generally do so selectively. Critics who, like Boyle, have questioned the quality of the translations in Montaillou have certainly

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not scrutinized all the translations, and they do not indicate how they picked their samples. More generally, scholars are prone to practice a reading that is no different from that of those students whose habits Nora indicts: they skim the text, looking for information that may satisfy their curiosity or be useful to their own research; but they rarely “read” it in the sense of “proceeding from the beginning to the end in linear fashion.” The more scholarly the work, one could say without indulging in paradox, the more extensive its documentary apparatus, the less likely it will be perused from one sentence to the next. Who has read Beauvais et le Beauvaisis, Les paysans de Languedoc, or Les ouvriers en grève not just in their scholarly versions, but in a scholarly way? Who has read these texts in their entirety, verifying all the references and all the numbers in the statistical tables? The answer can only be nobody, since no researchers would assign themselves such a Borgesian task and no institution would provide funds to undertake it. In fact, I have asked this question only to describe what a scholarly reading would be like if its requirements were fulfilled to the letter. But they are not, because reading in a scholarly way means, among other things, establishing whether some part of the documentary apparatus must be verified by going to the dictionary, to the library, or to the archives. In brief, the function of that apparatus in historiography is not, or is not only, to invite readers to undertake lengthy procedures of verification. It is also to attest to the authors’ seriousness and to show that they have played the research game by the rules. Displaying the evidence, in other words, is part of a rhetoric whose various aspects we must now review.

chapter 3

Figures

Whether they are writing for a professional, educated, or general readership, historians seek to make their accounts of the past both reliable and engaging. Confronting as I did in the preceding chapter what Miller (1987, 1105) calls the “linguistic complexities of the texts discussed,” I begin by examining how French scholars now stage their evidence. Specifically, I look at the ways they textualize the different materials they have drawn on, whether to reconstruct a period, recount events, or analyze a problem.

A t t e s ta t i o n s Since history became an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, manuals and theoretical studies have emphasized the importance of archival research. From the first sentence in Introduction aux études historiques, Langlois and Seignobos (1992, 29) state: “History is made with documents.” That formula is found almost word for word in Comment on écrit l’histoire, with Veyne (1971, 15) declaring from the start, “In its essence, history is knowledge by documents.” Showing that the epistemological regime of his discipline has hardly changed since the end of the nineteenth century, Veyne goes on to make the same points as his predecessors: historians rarely have the opportunity to observe the events they report; even when they have had this opportunity, their testimony must be supported by other sources; unlike scientists, they cannot duplicate their findings through laboratory experiments; and they must work not on the past “itself ” but on its traces, whether they find them already cataloged in official archives or “invent” them by broadening

118 Chapter Three

the range of what might count as a document. Carlo Ginzburg (1989, 96) has named this regime the “evidential paradigm,” arguing that historians, just like detectives, must conduct their inquiries using the signs actors have left behind, whether those signs are “intentional” or “unintentional.” History’s dependence on “clues” is important from an epistemological standpoint. First, it makes history into a discipline that relies on a “correspondence” theory of truth (Walsh 1968, 74): a “true statement,” in history, is a statement that “corresponds” to the available evidence. Let me stress: to the available evidence. The “true” statement corresponds not to the real “in itself,” but to traces of the real as the historian has been able to reconstruct them. In other words, this statement refers not to an absolute truth, but to Veyne’s (1983, 114) “truth program” and Foucault’s (1980b, 133) “truth regime”: a fact can count as true only if it has been established according to the discovery procedures the historical community regards as legitimate. Because “truth” is a highly loaded, “essentially contested” concept (Gallie 1964), some historians interested in the epistemology of their discipline (e.g., Petitjean 2007, 191) now prefer “validity”: a concept that “makes it possible not to return to the naive view of truth as correspondence of what is said with what is, independent of the theory that renders a fact ‘acceptable.’ ” The way historians interpret the evidence, however, is also subject to a “coherence” theory of truth. While documents establish that commando units of the National Liberation Front attacked various targets within the Algerian territory during the night of October 31-November 1, 1954, historians disagree on when the Algerian war “actually began.” For Yves Courrière (1990, 1:24), “everything began in spring 1954,” specifically in March 1954 in Paris, when the future minister of independent Algeria, Ali Mahsas, met with other militants, seeking to persuade them to move to “direct action” (29). For Guy Pervillé, on the other hand, the conflict began significantly before 1954. Historians, Pervillé explains (2002, 11), must ask “what France had done in Algeria since 1830 [date of the taking of Algiers], what were the grounds, the goals, and the results of her actions,” as well as “how Algerian nationalism had developed, what external and internal factors had produced it.” Different assumptions about what constitutes a “beginning” thus cause the same events to be interpreted differently, with Courrière and Pervillé both finding arguments to make “coherent” the story they recount and the thesis they advance. The philosophers (e.g., Ankersmit 1994; Mink 1987; Tucker 2004) who have debated the relation between “correspondence” and “coherence” theories of truth in historiography generally agree that only individual statements can be verified. That is, to return to the preceding example, the statement

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“commandos of the National Liberation Front attacked various targets within the Algerian territory during the night of October 31-November 1, 1954” can be substantiated in the archives and thus regarded as “true” or “valid.” But a statement such as “the attack of October 31-November 1 marked the beginning of the Algerian war” cannot, because it pertains to the domain of “emplotment,” and emplotments are not susceptible to being checked the way individual statements are. The problem, of course, is to determine whether historians are at liberty to organize their data as they please—to practice what Keith Jenkins (2003, 42) calls a “semantic free for all.” Jenkins’s and other theorists’ invitation to an “interpretative laissez-faire” has brought about lengthy debates, with conservative historians such as Gertrude Himmelfarb (1997, 158) charging their “postmodern” colleagues with “neglecting the facts” and sacrificing history’s “reality principle” to the “pleasure principle.” Keeping out of these controversies, poeticians will only observe that calls like Jenkins’s have had little impact on contemporary French historiography. True, as we have seen while reviewing metahistories, French historians continue to discuss subjects such as the Revolution and the Vichy period. But these discussions have not displayed the semantic free-for-all that Jenkins advocates. Their range has been restricted to deciding, among other things, whether the Revolution had been long or short and whether Vichy’s politics toward Nazi Germany amounted to a “state collaboration.” Furet, Vovelle, Rousso, Laborie, and the historians who have debated these topics have therefore not shown themselves “free to make of the past what we will,” as Jenkins (42) wishes they would. They have remained within the interpretive framework of the historical community for which, as Jenkins (42) deplores, there is “something in the past” that constrains one’s “semantic freedom.” While the function that historians lend to documents has basically remained the same since the nineteenth century, the nature of the materials they draw on has been significantly modified. In the 1930s, one of the first epistemological (and polemical) gestures of the Annales had been to demand that historians turn to sources more diverse than those their predecessors used. Febvre (1965, 13), in his 1933 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, had insisted that history should draw not just on official archives but on “all texts” and also should stop relying “exclusively on texts” and draw on nonwritten sources. Returning to these issues at the end of the 1970s, Le Goff (1978a, 213) stated that one of the achievements of the “new history” had been precisely to extend the “field of historical documents”: “statistics, price curves, photographs, films, or, for a more distanced past, fossilized pollen, tools, and ex-votos” could now function as evidence, providing researchers with data

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“of the first order.” These changes, Le Goff maintained, had brought about a true “documentary revolution,” even though the “critical operations” that historians of the method school had developed to process and evaluate documents remained useful and necessary tools. The distinction between written and nonwritten sources is relevant for poetics, because the two types of evidence require different types of textualization. Accordingly, I will treat them separately before considering what they have in common. Written Evidence To precisely the extent that they are “written,” documents in this category can be “quoted” in the literal meaning of the term. In this respect there is hardly any difference between the treaties, telegrams, and instructions that occupy a large place in Lavisse’s Histoire de France and the “new” sources in which contemporary historians have grounded their research, such as Farge’s police records and Le Roy Ladurie’s transcripts from Inquisition hearings. Both types of documents can be quoted directly, quoted indirectly, or narrativized, as language (French at least) does not seem to admit more ways of representing oral or written speech. Several examples of these modes of discourse were given in chapter 2, and it would be pointless to provide new ones, since techniques for inserting the other’s speech into the historian’s discourse remain the same from text to text. It will suffice to note that contemporary historians, far from excluding written documents, still use them as one of their preferred sources. Several established scholars, for that matter, have contributed to the series Archives and Découvertes, which revisit one of Langlois’s (1908, iii) favorite projects: to publish books made up of “original documents,” with the historian limited to “presenting” and “commenting on” those documents after “purifying them of all material errors.” Written for a general audience (and admitting a rich iconography next to written documents), works in these series include such valuable studies as Duby’s L’an mil, Certeau’s La possession de Loudun, Farge’s Vivre dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Foucault’s Moi, Pierre Rivière . . . , and Rousso’s Les années noires. Historians who want to insert quotations from written documents can use two typographic conventions. They can place the quotation within a paragraph, with quotation marks signaling that the historian’s discourse is about to shift to someone else’s. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau turns to this mode in L’enfant de l’ennemi (The enemy’s child) (1995), his investigation of rapes that German soldiers committed in occupied territories during World War I. As Anglo-American specialists in cultural studies do, Audoin-Rouzeau draws

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on all kinds of sources to describe “war culture.” Besides testimonies from raped women, he quotes newspaper articles, court transcripts, reports from government committees, soldiers’ letters, medical studies, and fictional texts. These quotations are separated from the historian’s speech by an introductory formula such as “he said” and placed in quotation marks, as in this description of what Audoin-Rouzeau (1995, 55) calls a “protected rape”: Here is another incident, which occurred in Coulommiers on September 6, 1914. About 9:30 at night, a German came to the house of a couple whose wife was twenty-nine years old. The soldier pulled the husband away and then, the victim said, “he threw himself on me, grabbed me by the shoulder and between the legs. . . . My attacker then threw me brutally on the kitchen floor, put one of his hands on my mouth, while my husband, in the next room, was terrorized and tried to calm my two crying children. The German, after performing this assault on my person  .  .  . joined five of his comrades, who had remained downstairs.” It is nowhere said that these other men intervened, but they protected the rapist and their presence kept the husband from trying to protect his wife. The second way of marking the transfer from the historian’s discourse to a quotation consists of granting the quotation a separate paragraph: a “block quotation.” This typographical convention is mostly at work in intellectual and political histories, when it is important to render accurately what people said or wrote. Michèle Riot-Sarcey, for example, inserts no fewer than 299 block quotations in her 274-page La démocratie à l’épreuve des femmes (Democracy to the test of women), including this statement from the activist Désirée Véret in the November 4, 1832, issue of L’Apostolat des Femmes, the newspaper of the Saint-Simonian proletarian women (Riot-Sarcey 1994, 84): “From now on, [Désirée Véret] gives priority to women’s freedom, which for her conditions all others. . . . “Union and truth” is her motto: For me, all social questions depend on women’s freedom: it will solve them all. All my efforts are aiming at this goal; it is the banner of the new women, to which I will bring all that I will do for our emancipation; the cause of women is universal, and not only Saint-Simonian. Whether the quotation is placed within the historian’s discourse or separated from it has consequences for the look of the page. The notion of “look”

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may seem inappropriate in the analysis of scholarly studies, but it is relevant because a text’s external appearance is among the factors that program its reception. In the preceding excerpts, the numerous quotation marks, brackets, and parentheses scattered across the pages of L’enfant de l’ennemi show that Audoin-Rouzeau is eager to cite the people who had something to say about the rapes committed by German soldiers but that none of these statements deserved to be typographically detached from the rest of the text. Conversely, that Riot-Sarcey frequently sets the other’s discourse apart from her own points to the worth she assigns to it. Because the writings of the women whose activities she is describing have been taken into consideration neither by their contemporaries nor by historians of democracy—Riot-Sarcey’s target here is mainly Rosanvallon—to quote them frequently and at length affirms the need to make a “place” for them, in the most literal sense. Written sources may also be provided in an appendix, especially when they are abundant or when historians believe they must reproduce all of a lengthy document. Possibly mindful of the reviews that blamed him for decontextualizing the quotations from the Inquisition’s register in Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie includes in La sorcière de Jasmin the whole text of the documents on which he grounds his inquiry: Jacques Jasmin’s Françouneto, the bilingual (French and Occitan) narrative of a case of sorcery in the province of Gascogne, and Abbey Jean-Baptiste Fabre’s Histoire de Jean-l’ont-pris, an Occitan novel that Le Roy Ladurie replicates with a translation by a specialist, Philippe Gardy. Similarly, Rosanvallon devotes 175 of the 377 pages of La monarchie impossible to the reproduction, in two appendixes, of the documents he discusses: the charters of 1814 and 1830 and the many texts that elaboration of those charters produced. Le Roy Ladurie and Rosanvallon are thus covered by a kind of comprehensive casualty insurance. For readers of Françouneto and La monarchie impossible, unlike readers of Montaillou, can return to the complete text of the documents the historians have used, and even to the urtext of Françouneto, since Le Roy Ladurie goes so far as to reproduce a facsimile of the original edition. Iconographic Evidence While French historians have remained attached to written documents, they have also—following in this regard the Annales’ agenda—made frequent use of nonwritten sources. Faced with those sources, which cannot be literally quoted, historians have exercised two options: they have included them as iconographic reproductions, generally photographs, and they have trans-

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coded them, describing them in language. Braudel does both in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalism (XVe-XVIIIe siècle) (Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century). Thus, to take just one example (1979, 1:174–75) among many in this richly illustrated book, on the left page he shows a photograph of a seventeenth-century fork and on the opposite page he describes that fork and analyzes how in the sixteenth century people stopped eating with their fingers and turned to silverware. In any book, the inclusion of an iconographic component depends as much on the exigencies of marketing and the nature of the series that book will be published in as on the documents the historian has used. The three volumes of Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme include 403 illustrations for 1,748 pages, about one illustration for every 4.4 pages. Yet Braudel was not always a celebrated scholar whose name guaranteed that his works would sell. In 1949 he had to publish the first edition of La Méditerranée at his own expense, and it came minus the graphs and iconography that constitute an essential dimension of that study (both were restored in the 1966 Armand Colin edition). Such prestigious series as Gallimard’s Bibliothèque des histoires and Le Seuil’s L’univers historique are parsimonious in their use of images; at Gallimard their inclusion seems to be reserved for the Bibliothèque illustrée des histoires, launched in 1983. Published in that series, Michel Vovelle’s La mort et l’Occident: De 1300 à nos jours comes with a generous iconography, whereas Philippe Ariès’s L’homme devant la mort (The Hour of Our Death), issued in L’univers historique, admits no iconography and certainly suffers from its absence. To again take a single example: in order to analyze the idea of death inscribed in ex-votos, Ariès (1977, 281) must resort to a twenty-line description in which he specifies that “the oldest of these paintings are divided into two zones: on the left, the donor on his knees, on the right, a celestial scene representing the apparition of the saint intercessor in the clouds.” A third zone, added later, described “the miracle, the danger from which the donor has escaped.” However detailed and precise this analysis might be, a plate would certainly have helped readers visualize the object the historian is depicting in words. Yet the only image in L’homme devant la mort, the reproduction of a painting, is on the front cover, as are the only images offered in Charle’s La république des universitaires, Bologne’s Histoire de la conquête amoureuse, Baratay’s Le point de vue animal, and most of the books published in the series L’univers historique. As their lack in such books as Ariès’s L’homme devant la mort makes obvious, iconographic documents are most valuable when they “illustrate” the written text, in both meanings of this verb: “to produce visual equiva-

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lents” and “to supply appropriate examples.” They clearly play these roles in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, as they do in the numerous “histories of . . .” published in the 1980s: Histoire des femmes en Occident, Histoire de la vie privée, Histoire du corps, Histoire de la virilité, and Nora’s multivolume Les lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory). Yet images are also useful in studies whose limited subject seems to require an iconography. Christine Bard’s Une histoire politique du pantalon, for example, admits many illustrations, most appropriate in this work because of the changing shapes of the garment whose evolution the historian is tracing. In her analysis of sports fashion in the late nineteenth century, Bard (2010a, 203–4) can thus “illustrate” how women were discriminated against by showing a magazine drawing of a woman dressed in pants standing next to a bicycle. Commenting on this image, Bard emphasizes that the pants are baggy, since women, while eventually allowed to take part in sports, had to exercise in outfits that were “much less comfortable and rational than those of men” (202). Bard adds that the woman cyclist’s voluminous pants evoke the zouave pants worn by some North African troops in the French army, and that the expression “zouave pants” did not have “very positive connotations” toward the end of the century. Women thus saw their athletic activities devalued, in that the outfits they had to wear evoked “the whole imaginary of the harem.” Frequently employed as illustrations, images may in turn themselves become the main object of the inquiry. Maurice Agulhon’s Marianne, as shown by its subtitle Les visages de la République, bears strictly on representations— those of the woman whom the Revolution made into the allegory of the people’s power. Published in the series Découvertes Gallimard, Agulhon’s book includes numerous images of Marianne as represented in different media: paintings, drawings, sculptures, medals, coins, or magazine covers and such. Each image comes with a commentary that traces its origin and describes its distinctive features. As for speeches, poems, and press articles about Marianne, they are consigned to an appendix, showing that here written documents serve the iconography, not the other way around as is usual in historiographic studies. Bearing on a narrower corpus, Christian Delporte’s Les crayons de la propagande examines the cartoons published in the French press during the time of the German occupation. Tracking the development of cartoons from 1940 to 1945, Delporte distinguishes their uses in the occupied and nonoccupied zones and inventories their various targets. Numerous and large, the plates identify the cartoonist, indicate what newspaper or album the drawing was published in, and specify the date of its publication. The cartoon on the book’s cover, showing Stalin as a boxer with a bruised face be-

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ing coached in his corner by Churchill, is thus reproduced again on page 96 with additional information: the cartoonist was Charlet, and the drawing had appeared in the collaborationist magazine La Gerbe in October 1941, a time when the USSR, in the fourth month of the German invasion, was “groggy” as a boxer might be and did not at this point receive any material help from the Allies. It goes without saying that the rich iconography of Marianne and Les crayons de la propaganda gives these studies a “look” very different from that of Ariès’s L’homme devant la mort. This look, in turn, inscribes the possibility of a cursory reading, since both works can be skimmed before (instead of ?) being read properly speaking. Historiographic studies—let me insist on this point once again—are not necessarily read the way purists such as Nora would like them to be read. They can merely be browsed as readers, in such works as Marianne and Les crayons de la propaganda, move from one image to the next, either searching for specific information or looking the text over before deciding whether to read it from beginning to end. From Documentation to Rhetoric Whether documents are written or iconographic, they fulfill two main functions. First, they contribute data. The testimonies Audoin-Rouzeau quotes in L’enfant de l’ennemi inform readers about the wrongs that civilian populations underwent during World War I, and the cartoons reproduced in Les crayons de la propaganda show that Paris’s collaborationist press was both anticommunist and anglophobic. Quoting or reproducing documents, however, also partakes of rhetoric. It establishes that the historian’s text is indeed referential, since it is grounded in traces that can be cited or represented. In method school works like Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France (1922, 10:52), quoting from such documents as Germany’s declaration of war on France attested that a certain event “actually occurred,” in this instance that Germany, in order to declare war, “actually alleged” that French armies had violated Belgium’s neutrality. In the descriptions and analyses that constitute most of current French historiographic production, the role of documents has changed. It is now to confirm that people and things “really were” as the historians say they were: for instance, that part of the French press was “really” anglophobic during the Occupation, and that women in the 1890s “really” wore baggy pants for biking. Documents, in other words, now refer to social and cultural practices and not only to political, diplomatic, and military events. But they still function as warrants, telling readers that historians have done their homework and are authorized to make such and such a statement about the past.

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The rhetorical function of quoting from the evidence is especially noticeable for photographic documents. Indeed, photographs do not just “illustrate” a text in the two senses I have given to this term. They also, as Barthes (1980, 120) has argued, validate the existence of their referent: the object that appears in a photograph is “necessarily real,” since “there would be no photograph without it.” Photographs, in short, make it impossible to deny that “the thing was there,” and their being mechanically recorded imposes both the idea that the past exists and the idea that its existence is independent of a cognitive subject. While photographs create a powerful reality effect, they also raise several issues of reliability and exactness. Studies bearing on the iconography of World War II, in particular, have shown that images can easily be touched up and even falsified, and their occasional transfer to a digital support makes their authentication even more difficult: the layout of the pixels depends on an operator, who can easily transform “a German soldier’s uniform into a French soldier’s uniform” without making this change detectable (Duprat 2007, 13). Those studies have also demonstrated that the information about people, places, and dates provided in the captions that come with the images must be viewed critically. Clément Chéroux (2001, 15), in his examination of the use of Holocaust iconography, gives as an example the issue of the communist newspaper L’Humanité of April 24, 1945, which offers on its front page an article about Birkenau, “together with a photograph of Bergen-Belsen titled ‘Ohrdruf.’ ” This type of inaccuracy, according to Chéroux, characterizes a large part of the camps’ iconography, which admits a high number of “symbolic images” that document less the reality of a specific camp than a very generic “atrocities story.” More basically, specialists such as Chéroux contend that in the context of a war (but the observation certainly applies to other circumstances) it is crucial to determine not just where and when the photograph was taken, but also by whom. The picture may come from a soldier who had a camera, from a war correspondent, or from a propaganda service, and its origin is highly relevant. The identity and professional competence of the photographer, as well as membership in a certain group, may determine whether the image will be saved, for what purpose it will be used, and what its caption will say or conceal. Henry Rousso’s Les années noires: Vivre sous l’Occupation (The dark years: Everyday life during the Occupation), published like Agulhon’s Marianne in the series Découvertes Gallimard, testifies both to the rhetorical force of photographs and to the problems they may pose. Some pictures effectively confirm that events unfolded as the historian affirms they did, for instance, that Pétain did indeed shake Hitler’s hand at Montoire (Rousso 1992, 44), that ho-

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tels in Vichy were actually transformed into ministries (31), and that Jews had to wear yellow stars in the occupied zone (95). Other photographs, however, link a generic image to a caption that is very specific. Readers are then invited to trust the text, for example, to accept that the photographs on pages  34, 61, and 84 really show “Alsatians” seeking asylum “in Bellac, in the department of Haute-Vienne,” a young girl rummaging through a garbage can “at les Halles,” and a member of the Resistance executed by hanging “in Rostrenen, in Brittany, in June 1944.” Conversely, highly suggestive photographs sometimes come with no description or a most imprecise one: the four pictures on pages 24–25 give an idea of the massive “exodus” of June 1940, but no information is given about the place and the exact date when they were taken; the caption that follows the image on page 82 mentions “a German patrol in action” but without saying where and when that “action” was perpetrated (it could be anywhere in occupied territory); and the text that comes with the picture of a railway sabotage on page 111 states that operations of this type were frequent “as D-Day was nearing” but does not tell where that specific operation was carried out. Finally, the “Table des illustrations” and “Crédits photographiques” supplied in an appendix (186–91) do not always provide the information needed for a full understanding of the image. Thus, to return to two photographs discusses earlier, it would be relevant to know by whom and for what purpose the pictures of the hanging in Rostrenen and the railway sabotage were taken in spring 1944: By the Resistance, to keep proof of both the crimes committed by the Germans and the operations it was able to carry out? By Nazi propaganda, to show that activities directed against the occupying forces would be mercilessly punished? Or even by Vichy, to demonstrate that the first victims of sabotage were French infrastructure, already bombed by the Allies? These data were perhaps not available, and providing them with other “missing” information might have extended Les années noires beyond the two hundred pages to which books published in the series Découvertes are apparently limited. I have pointed to the incompleteness of some of the captions in Rousso’s study only to show, from the perspective of both rhetoric and epistemology, what kind of questions could be asked of documents that are supposed to refer to the past in the most transparent, most unmediated fashion.

References Whatever the nature of the evidence they are drawing on, historians must satisfy another requirement of their discipline: the demand that they provide,

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normally in a note, some information about that evidence, whether about its origin, its reliability, or where it can be consulted. In this respect contemporary French historians have remained most faithful to the principles that Langlois and Seignobos codified in the late nineteenth century. In his work on the historian’s “trade,” Bloch (1974, 81–82, written in 1940–41) called for his colleagues to make only statements that “could be verified” and to supply the means for performing such verifications. He saw in this exigency a “universal rule of probity” for which the “forces of reason” had to fight at a time “poisoned by myths and dogmas.” More recently, Prost (2010, 57), in one of his “lessons on history,” has emphasized that using notes is still a “common rule in the profession.” Because they do want to be “taken at their word,” historians give readers “the means of verifying what they assert,” as Seignobos and Bloch—whom Prost quotes while making them into the advocates of the same cause—instructed them to do. Following the classification that Jack Hexter (1971, 227–30) proposes in his essay on the “microrhetoric of history,” I will distinguish two categories of notes. Notes to the Record Historians may first make use of notes to refer to the “record” (Hexter 1971, 228), that is, to tell about the sources they have drawn on to support what they are asserting. Notes of this type, as Veyne (1983, 22–27) has shown in a brief sketch of their history, have not always been part of historiographic texts, and their presentation obeys rules that are neither eternal nor universal. In contemporary historiography, their presence seems to depend on the potential market described in chapter 2. Studies designed for a general audience, such as Goubert’s La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle and the 1515 et les grandes dates de l’histoire de France edited by Corbin, do not include this type of note. They sometimes point to a source in the text itself, as when Goubert (1982, 106) states that “like Paul Meyer, the editor of this text, I think . . . ,” and Jean Tricard (2005, 112) mentions that “In a very recent book, Jean-Marie Moeglin proposes . . .” The reading contract implies here that the historian could provide the necessary references to his source, but that the nature of the endeavor does not require it. This contract, in other words, invites readers to assume that authors have done their homework, even though traces of their activities are not immediately visible in the form of footnotes or endnotes.1 In contrast, most of the studies that trade historians earmark for the professional and educated audiences follow most scrupulously the basic rule

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formulated by Langlois and Seignobos (1992, 245): “Every historical fact coming from documents must be accompanied by a reference to those documents and an evaluation of their value.” Because they abide by that rule, many scholarly historical studies provide examples of what Certeau (1975, 11) calls the “split structure” of historiographic discourse: a discourse made up of an “upper text” where historians offer descriptions and analyses and a “lower text” where they refer to their sources, resulting in “split pages.” Whether they originate in Université de Paris I or the Institut des Sciences Politiques, some of the doctorats d’état that French students had to write according to tyrannical though unspoken requirements about number of pages and time of research contribute impressive instances of this type of layout. Jean-Jacques Becker’s 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre includes 3,257 notes for 581 pages of text, an average of 5.6 notes a page, and Becker (1977, 15) thanks Pierre Renouvin in his preface for “guiding his research during thirteen years.” Yet Becker’s figures are exceeded by Anne-Marie Sohn’s, whose Chrysalides: Femmes dans la vie privée (XIXe-XXe siècles) admits 6,216 notes for 989 pages of text, an average of 6.28 notes a page (Sohn does not specify how long it took her to complete her dissertation, only thanking Maurice Agulhon for “consenting to direct a project that was atypical with respect to his own interests”). Other works illustrate the model of the “split study,” where notes are placed not at the bottom of the page but at the end of the book. Alain Dewerpe’s Charonne, for example, includes 197 pages of notes for 654 pages of text, almost one page out of three. That rate is even higher in Jean-Louis Flandrin’s Un temps pour embrasser: 88 pages of notes for 161 pages of text, or one page out of two. Flandrin’s work, for that matter, shows that cultural history does not lag behind social and economic histories in documentation, even though it draws its data from different sources: Flandrin uses ecclesiastical manuals and theological treatises rather than state archives, price lists, and police records, but his habits for referring to sources (often Latin texts that he quotes in the original) are as fastidious as Becker’s, Sohn’s, and Dewerpe’s. Similar in this respect to the sources they direct readers to, references notes have two main functions. First, they provide relevant information about the materials the historian has drawn on and, occasionally, the value assigned to them. Becker (1977, 107) documents his analysis of the hesitations of the Socialist Party in July 1914 with the help of four notes referring to the National Archives, and Sohn (1996, 2:3) supports her description of the abuses undergone by drunkards’ wives with seven notes pointing to letters and police records. Readers therefore could in theory reconstruct the historians’ intellectual and even physical journeys, since they could travel from one archive

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depository to the next to consult the original documents. They could also, if these documents have been digitized and made accessible online, view them on their computers and assess the way the historians have used them. Yet readers, as I argued in chapter 2, rarely go to the trouble of reconstructing the historian’s whole journey, and it is too early to tell whether the progressive digitizing of the archives will significantly increase debates about the interpretation of documents, at least among professionals.2 At this stage, whether they are or are not members of the historical community, readers usually settle for “taking note that there are notes.” The documentation has for them a rhetorical as well as a referential function: its presence attests that historians are playing the game by the rules, in this case, that they have worked from sources or at least know about them. Attestations of “knowing about” are especially important regarding previous research. One might ask, for example, whether Braudel (1966, 1:23) has read the twelve works on the Mediterranean basin that he itemizes in the long first note to chapter 1 of La Méditerranée. The function of this “pile,” as Steve Nimis (1984, 119) calls it in an article about the role of documentation in studies about the literature of antiquity, is chiefly to show that an author is aware of the available scholarship on the subject under investigation. Drawing up this kind of list, however, implies neither exhaustiveness nor even further use. Ahead of the “pile” mentioned above, Braudel writes: “For more recent geological explanations, see for instance . . . ,” and he does not return in chapter 1 of La Méditerranée to any of the twelve studies he has mentioned in his initial note. Still, listing the research they “know about” is important for historians from both a cognitive and a rhetorical standpoint. Showing that they are aware of previous scholarship helps to prevent questions colleagues might ask (Why isn’t X’s book on subject Z mentioned somewhere?) and in this respect contributes to the smooth functioning of scholarly communication. However thoroughly historians strive to document all the facts they report, they clearly cannot do so consistently. As Anthony Grafton (1999, 16) has emphasized in his book on footnotes, it is “problematic” to assume that “authors can, as manuals for dissertation writers say they should, exhaustively cite the evidence for every assertion in their texts”: no historian can ever “exhaust the range of sources” relevant to the topic under investigation, “much less quote all of them in a note.” Furthermore, according to Grafton, scholars do not just select their “materials”; they also “rearrange” them, “interpret” them, and “omit” those that do not meet their own “standard for relevance.” Grafton’s diagnosis certainly applies to the documentation that comes with Becker’s, Sohn’s, Dewerpe’s, and Flandrin’s works. Dewerpe’s abundant sources, for

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example, are not “exhaustive,” as is plain in this excerpt, where the historian (2006, 170–71) examines how responsibilities for the massacre at the Charonne subway station could be assigned: It is revealing that the identity of the authors of the massacre, even though it was known, has for a long time been debated. Indeed, the identification of the units engaged on Boulevard Voltaire and responsible for the massacre immediately became a major political stake in the controversy, and it has remained so. According to France Nouvelle, “We can still ask the question. M. Frey, M. Papon, M. Debré, the president of the Republic are not dispensed from answering: Which killer units did the government call up on February 8 in the evening?”5 To specify the administrative identity of the unit that attacked the demonstrators amounts to making it responsible for the massacre, hence to putting a name on both the culprits and the persons who were in charge of them. In note 5 on page 727, Dewerpe provides the reference for the quotation in this excerpt: an article in the issue of the magazine France Nouvelle of March 21–27, 1962. That reference, however, is highly selective: Dewerpe cites one sentence from the article, and he does not list in a note (a “pile”) other texts that would validate his assertion that the identity of the people responsible for the massacre “even though it was known, has for a long time been debated.” Dewerpe thus makes Grafton’s point: in reproducing a few lines from a magazine article and “omitting” other sources, he “rearranges” his documentation. Yet that he does not specify the criteria for that “rearrangement” is not at issue here. Historians are not expected to always describe their “standard for relevance” when they select a source, since such descriptions would soon make the text unreadable. Indeed, competent readers have at least an implicit knowledge of what Grafton has theorized: historians can neither “exhaust” the range of their sources nor “quote all of them” in a “pile,” however large that pile might be. Notes to Residual Matters Conscientiously referencing data in their studies’ “lower text,” contemporary French historians also turn at times to the notes that Hexter (1971, 229) calls “residual”: the ones that do not bear on the sources but qualify some assertion, suggest further research, or comment on previous scholarship. Following Bloch’s and Febvre’s early invitation to cross disciplinary lines, several

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French historians have turned to residual notes to converse with specialists in other social and human sciences. Corbin, for instance, uses many of the 1,266 notes in his study of smells, Le miasme et la jonquille (The Foul and the Fragrant), to dialogue not just with fellow historians (Agulhon, Ariès, Delumeau, Mandrou, etc.), but with specialists in such fields as psychology (Ellis, Freud), sociology (Bourdieu, Goffmann), philosophy (Bachelard, Foucault, Sartre), and even literary theory (Barthes, Richard, Starobinski). One of the several notes Corbin (1986, 277) devotes to Bachelard thus reads: 25. For Gaston Bachelard (La terre et les rêveries de la volonté, Paris, 1948, pp. 129 sq.), the attention lent to muddy materials conceals an ambivalence; it expresses the implicit desire to wallow, and psychoanalysts have prolifically discoursed upon this regression toward dirty materials. In this regard, studying the possible utilization of rubbish (cf. infra, p. 134 sq.) would only be a screen, allowing scientists to express their drives. Parent-Duchâtelet’s research on lifestyle, Chevreul’s analyses, and Chaptal’s calls for using the mud would manifest this unconscious desire. At the same time, however, the study of mud is a look toward the future, haunted by the possible growing of germs. Even more, it seems to me that it testifies to an obsession with loss and to the will to prevent it. This note adds to Corbin’s upper-text examination of mud as a “factor of stench,” documenting the statement that the “fastidiousness of the analyses” in the many works about smells written in the nineteenth century would “delight Gaston Bachelard” (28). Yet Corbin also uses the reference to Bachelard to turn to psychoanalysis, offering a few hypotheses about the “drives” and “unconscious desire” that could have motivated the scientists who studied the subject of “rubbish.” Corbin, however, does not elaborate on these hypotheses. Playing the game of the residual note, he puts them forth to show in what direction psychoanalysis could take his inquiry, that is, merely to add an excursus to the argument he develops in the upper text. Residual notes are especially numerous in metahistories, that is, in studies whose purpose is to discuss other studies or, more generally, issues related to history as a discipline. Thus most notes in Noiriel’s Sur la “crise” de l’histoire are of the residual type, the historian exploiting the lower text to reinforce his argument, point to his disagreement with other scholars, and specify what he intends to do or not do. To support his thesis that standpoints on the supposed crisis of history are overdetermined by the institutional position of

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those who express them, Noiriel (2005, 404n2) briefly summarizes an article by Joan Wallach Scott: It is for example the case of J. W. Scott, “History in Crisis? The Others’ Side of the Story,” American Historical Review, 1989, 1, p. 680–692, who observes that the arguments about the “crisis” are mostly developed by those whose hegemonic positions are shaken by the appearance of new research trends. Conversely, it is to account for the discrepancy between Ginzburg’s definition of “paradigm” and his own that Noiriel (2005, 412–13n3) refers to his colleague’s well-known piece on the “evidential paradigm”: In a study that has played an important role in the diffusion of this concept among historians, Ginzburg writes explicitly: “I am using this term in the sense that Thomas S. Kuhn has proposed.” In actuality, however, it is the linguistic definition that he adopts. For that matter, he acknowledges that he has “disregarded the clarifications and distinctions made later by that same author.” Yet the specifications Kuhn provides in the afterword of the second edition of his work are essential, because they emphasize the importance he lends to sociological factors in his definition of the scientific “paradigm.” Cf. C. Ginzburg, “Traces: Racines d’un paradigme indiciaire,” in C. Ginzburg, Mythes, emblèmes, traces. Morphologie et histoire. Flammarion, 1989, p. 286 (1re éd. 1986). Finally, in the following excerpt it is to clarify his objectives and to specify that he won’t discuss issues related to his definition of the historian as a “professional” that Noiriel (2005, 439n4) refers to studies that have debated such issues: I do not take up here the problems posed by the use of the term “professionalization” for intellectual activities that are not officially regulated; cf. on this subject (for sociology), H.S. Becker “The Nature of a Profession,” in H.S. Becker (ed.), Sociological Work, Methods and Substance, Chicago, Aldine, 1970. Like reference notes, residual notes both inform readers and fulfill a rhetorical function. By considering articles by Scott, Ginzburg, and Becker, Noi-

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riel broadens and enhances his own analyses while pointing to their specificity with regard to those of other scholars. But he also shows that he is “aware of ”—in this instance, aware of the works of foreign historians that have been frequently discussed in France since the 1980s. Noiriel therefore preempts questions that educated readers might have asked, such as “What do you have to say about Ginzburg’s definition of ‘paradigm’ and Scott’s thesis concerning the relation between epistemological theories and institutional positions?” While Noiriel, by answering these implicit questions, shows that he is “aware of,” his placing his discussions of Scott, Ginzburg, and Becker in the lower text nevertheless constitutes a judgment, specifically, a relegation. In other words, this placement illustrates Hexter’s (1971, 230) “maximum impact rule” about residual notes: “Place in footnotes evidence and information which, if inserted in the text, diminishes the impact on the reader of what you, as an historian, aim to convey to him [sic].” Thus, to assign the discussion of certain works to the lower text has a double implication: it shows that those works deserve to be signaled, but also that their contribution to the subject the historian is investigating is not sufficient to be examined in the text itself. Let me underscore: the subject the historian is investigating. Noiriel does not always place Scott’s analyses in notes; he devotes several pages (176–81) to examining Scott’s use of the concept of “gender,” arguing that even though such a concept is useful, it is pointless to ground it, as Scott does, in an “epistemological theory” that warrants its legitimacy. That contemporary French historians make extensive use of notes in their texts shows that they have generally remained faithful to what LaCapra (1985, 18) calls the “documentary model”: a model in which the task of research is to “fill up the gaps in the record” and “throw new light on a phenomenon” based on “ ‘hard’ facts derived from the critical sifting of sources.” I have dwelled on the textual aspects of this model because they are among the factors that immediately shape both the production and the reception of historiographic works. Indeed, as Krzysztof Pomian (1999, 33) has argued, that such works are “split” as a result of documentary requirements constitutes an immediate “mark of historicity”; it is one of the first signs of their being “serious” (Searle 1979) or “factual” (Genette 1991), that is, not fictional. True, notes can be found in works of imagination. Linda Hutcheon’s (2004) postmodern “historiographic metafictions,” as well as the texts that include what Nathalie Piégay-Gros (2009) calls an “imaginary scholarship,” frequently admit notes as part of their imitation academic apparatus. Yet these notes are never numerous enough to confer the appearance of a learned study on the book they occur in, and the generic status of that book, in most cases, is at any

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rate determined from the start by the paratextual information on its cover and title page. If Leonard Boyle (1979, 457), in his review of Montaillou, can claim that Le Roy Ladurie has the “makings of a fine novelist” (though not, Boyle regrets, those of a “careful” scholar), it is because he has initially followed the decoding instructions provided in the paratext and approached the book as a piece of historiographic research. Thus Boyle can regard Montaillou as “bad” history only because he correctly views it as belonging to the category “history.” True, nothing prevents us from “reading as,” in this instance, from reading Montaillou “as” a novel. But we are not free to “take for,” that is, to take Montaillou “for” a novel by pretending that the work is devoid of reading instructions. At some point we must accept that the book we look at or skim through proposes a transaction: a transaction we can of course refuse, though we cannot deny that it was offered to us.

C o m p u ta t i o n s Having extended the range of what can be viewed as evidence, contemporary French historians have also processed that evidence in novel ways. They have turned to procedures that were not part of the method school’s toolbox, beginning with counting. The story of the way the Annalistes and their successors have relied on numbers has been told several times, notably by Michel Margairaz (2010, 295–306), Maria Novella Borghetti (2010, 412–19), and François Dosse (2007, 296-391). It will thus suffice to sketch it out as it unfolds in three main steps. Starting in the 1960s, the Annalistes treated “new” archives such as parish registers and price lists using quantitative methods derived from sociology and economics. Since these documents had little relevance when considered individually, the Annalistes grouped them in sets or, rather, in series. Hence the label “serial history” given to this approach, which Chartier (1978, 508) defined in the encyclopedia La Nouvelle Histoire as “any historical approach that constructs statistical series based on homogeneous data, repeated over the long term.” Chartier added that serial history marked a shift from an endeavor “in which numbers were used in an isolated and anecdotal way” to another “in which they became basic tools, allowing us to measure both the major trends and the short fluctuations in a development.” With high expectations, Chartier (1978, 509) concluded by assuring readers that this approach constituted “one of the major advances of French historiography in the past half-century,” in that it made it possible not just to analyze “economies and populations” but to gain “a better understanding of the mental equipment, texts, images, and cultural practices of ancient societies.”

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Widely deployed in the lengthy dissertations in social and economic history of the 1960s and 1970s, quantitative methods fell out of favor in the 1980s with the “paradigm shift” diagnosed by Gauchet (1988, 166): the shift from the “anonymity of the large numbers” and the “weight of the long time span” to the “reevaluation of the role of individual actors and their capacity for strategic planning.” In 1987 Chartier had already if not disowned the profession of faith expressed in La Nouvelle Histoire, at least formulated several reservations about the use of numbers. In his book on reading (1987, 12), he argued that while figures allow us “to measure the quantity and distribution of the materials under consideration” (leaflets, treatises, arts of dying, etc.), they posit “too simple a correspondence between social levels and cultural horizons” and miss “the essential, namely, the way groups and individuals appropriate the forms they share with others.” Ginzburg’s (2010, 380) critique was even more radical. Asserting that “to choose what is repeated” could only lead to “paying a heavy price in terms of knowledge,” Ginzburg added that whether on the chronological level (histories of antiquity and the Middle Ages), the thematic level (intellectual and political histories), or the level of agency (examination of the role of the actors), quantitative methods are lacking. Focused on what is homogeneous and repeatable, unable to account for the “anomalies” (381) necessarily present in the sources, they can only contribute “very general analyses” that for Ginzburg were of limited interest. The reliance on numbers in French historiography seems to have entered a third phase in the early twenty-first century. In his contribution to the anthology Passés recomposés, responding to the question whether “quantitative history is still necessary,” the economic historian Jean-Yves Grenier (1995, 176) argues that turning to numbers is certainly “relevant” and “legitimate.” Indeed, it enables historians both “to pose questions that could be posed only in terms of figures” and “to provide specific answers (often in the form of hypothesis falsifications) to questions that originate in large historical problems” (177). In short, according to Grenier, quantitative approaches do not just supply “new tools for interpreting actual data,” they also contribute “models of reflection,” thus “renewing the intellectual formulations of issues” and offering “ways toward their conceptualization” (180). Claire Lemercier and Claire Zalc argue along the same lines in their manual Méthodes quantitatives pour l’historien. While history, they concede (2008, 3), is “not an exact science,” “to count, compare, classify, and model remain useful means of gauging our degree of doubt or certainty, making our hypotheses explicit, or assessing the weight of a phenomenon.” Lemercier and Zalc emphasize that quantitative

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methods have “many unexpected applications in political and cultural history as well as in social and economic history,” on the scale of “individuals and small groups as well as on that of classes and nations” (4). Yet they also insist that deploying quantitative methods requires an apprenticeship; students must learn the techniques that will enable them, with the help of software especially designed for these tasks, to process the data and then display them in the form of tables and graphs. Lemercier and Zalc (3) point on this subject to the “paradox” that today’s history students are still receiving a basically “literary” training and have little taste for counting, whereas computer science now supplies “the means for crunching numbers scholars could only dream of in the 1970s,” at a time when a large part of the historical community believed in numerical figures but did not have the tools to use them in the most productive way. The purpose of poetics is not to assess the merits of quantification in historical research. Accordingly, I will limit my inquiry to describing the ways historians insert quantitative data into their texts, as well as the rhetorical effects such insertions may produce. I will distinguish three primary modes for displaying figures. Raw Numbers and Percentages Depending on the nature of the project and the evidence available, historians have inserted numbers in the text itself to supplement their descriptions or ground their analyses. Braudel, for example, strews almost every page in L’identité de la France with figures related to the most diverse subjects: the money parents in Savoy had to pay to have their children speak French (1986, 1:101); the size of parishes in Brittany (1:118); the population of FrancheComté (1:179); the consumption of wine in Laval (1:210); the traffic on the Rhone River (1:246); the food supply in Metz (1:311); and so on. To take a specific example, Braudel (1986 1:224) draws on intendants’ reports made in 1787–89 to answer the question, Was France an urbanized country at the end of the Ancien Régime? Here are the rankings for the first twelve [cities in the Kingdom]: (1) Paris, 524,186 (the number is probably underestimated); (2) Lyon, 138,684; (3) Bordeaux, 82,602; (4) Marseille, 76,222; (5) Nantes, 64,994; (6) Rouen, 64,992; (7) Lille, 62,818; (8) Toulouse, 55,069; (9) Nîmes, 48,360; (10) Metz, 46,332; (11) Versailles, 44,200; (12) Strasbourg,

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41,502.  .  .  . Readers will have noticed the performance of Bordeaux, then at the peak of its prosperity, which outranks Marseille. But that is only a detail. Braudel then turns to proportions to make his assessment that France was not an urbanized country at the time, especially compared with other countries: If we relate this chart to the total population of France (possibly 20 million people), the urban equipment of the country appears mediocre compared with that of England and Holland. Paris makes up between one-fiftieth and one-sixtieth of the total. Together, the first twelve cities include 1,249,890 people, that is, one twenty-third of the French population. Today Paris and the surrounding area make up by and large one-fifth of the population of our country. (224) Another advocate for quantitative methods, Michel Vovelle, had drawn on statistics to study not social and economic problems, as Braudel did, but “mentalities,” in this instance attitudes toward death (1973) and festivals (1976) in the Provence of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He returned to counting in 2009, in a work on the Revolution in Marseille. Basing his analyses on the census taken by the troops sent to this city in 1793 to repress an uprising, Vovelle (2009, 58) includes in his text various types of numerical data. In the following excerpt, he turns to percentages to examine the civil status and the origin of the women employed in the textile trade: Among the 1,370 “active women” tallied in the census, 8% (128) are married, 63% (874) single, and 24% (318) are widows. The proportions are about the same for the hosiers (respectively, 53%, 12%, and 33% for 80 cases), the spinners (64%, 4%, 33% for 138), the seamstresses (67%, 4%, 26% for 534), and the tailors (58%, 15%, 26%). A survey also shows a higher proportion of workers of local origin (38% from Marseille and 12% from the surrounding area), France furnishing the rest and foreign countries 2%. Descriptions and analyses grounded in numbers, however, are not found only in the works of the historians who expressly support quantification, like Braudel and Vovelle. The many scholars who now align themselves with cultural history also resort to numerical data at times, whether to make a demon-

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stration more convincing or to flesh out the tableau they are drawing. Robert Muchembled (2011, 79–80), for instance, frequently includes numbers in his studies of pleasure, violence, or, as in the following passage, career development at a time—the eighteenth century—when offices in France’s judicial and political systems were for sale: An ambitious young man, Sartine begins his career as a counsel at the Châtelet for 10,000 livres.3 Three years later he is offered the prestigious job of lieutenant in charge of criminal affairs. Single, barely twenty-five years old, he does not have the means of spending 250,000 livres. When he becomes general lieutenant of the police in 1759, after marrying a distant relative, the daughter of a secretary of the king, who brings a dowry of more than 100,000 livres, his personal fortune is over 240,000 livres. . . . In 1759 Sartine must nevertheless borrow the entirety of the 150,000 livres necessary to buy the additional charge of police chief. At the end of that same year, he must relinquish his position of lieutenant in charge of criminal affairs in order to immediately invest the 100,000 he has recuperated in the purchase of a fixed, lifelong appointment in the king’s justice system [maître de requêtes de l’hôtel]. This title constitutes a prestigious springboard for a still brighter career, crowned by the purchase, for half a million livres, of the State Secretariat of the Marine in 1774. In Braudel’s work, as in Vovelle’s and Muchembled’s, numbers of course provide information. For readers interested in these subjects, it is relevant to learn how many people lived in France’s main cities toward the end of the Ancien Régime, whether “active women” in Marseille were married or single around 1793, and how the career of an enterprising individual could develop in the mid-eighteenth century. Numbers, however, can also produce what might be called a boomerang effect. Raising expectations, they generate questions that texts do not always answer satisfactorily. Braudel, in the excerpt quoted above, states that France was not urbanized in the eighteenth century, “especially when compared with England and Holland.” Yet he does not provide figures for those two countries, whereas he has just supplied detailed statistics about French cities and indicated the proportion of city dwellers out of the total population of France. Failing to establish a standard (What proportion of city dwellers makes a country “urbanized”?), he thus does not abide by one of the most basic rhetorical and arguably epistemological exigencies that come with quantification. Readers of such passages are invited to take Braudel at his

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word, an invitation they would surely accept had the argument been founded in the trust lent to the scholar and not in precise statistical figures. Historians who make use of quantification, moreover, are not above turning at times to what Gallie (1964, 80) calls the “dummy variable”: an expression that denotes a quantity but that is neither precise nor defined in relation to other quantities. L’identité de la France contains many such expressions. For instance, Braudel (1986, 1:60) writes (my emphasis) that cattle raising in the high mountains “was often abandoned,” that the cavalry based in Metz needed “large quantities” of hay (178), and that the development of the city of Besançon in the eighteenth century is traceable to the more general “economic growth” and “increase in wealth” that was taking place at the time. Braudel, then, again falls short of ascertaining the exact scope of the phenomena he is describing, since only a genuine value assigned to the variable could indicate how often is often and how large is large. It is certainly difficult, in historiography, to back up every statement involving quantities with specific figures, and to do so in a way that satisfies the requirements of statistical science. One of the merits of L’identité de la France is its showing how a respected scholar, known for his skillful use of numbers, seeks to negotiate between the sometimes conflicting exigencies of quantification and readability, not always successfully from the standpoint of rhetoric or epistemology.4 Tables When numbers are more profuse and complex than those I have just cited, historians have often arranged them in tables. This type of display was almost obligatory in the extensive studies in social and economic history of the 1960s and 1970s. Michelle Perrot (1987, 277–78), in her contribution to Essais d’ego-histoire, recounts how Ernest Labrousse, when she came talk to him about the subject of her dissertation, turned her away from feminism and redirected her to labor history, specifically to strikes in the late nineteenth century. She was forced to learn techniques she did not know at the time: to construct “exhaustive series” grounded in archives and then to compare those series with “conjunctures and prices.” Perrot states that she complied with Labrousse’s demands, but she does not mention the book that resulted from her efforts: Les ouvriers en grève (Workers on strike), a two-volume, 900page dissertation that included 31 maps and tables bearing on such subjects as the evolution of strikes, their frequency, the complaints that had caused them, and the sentences given to striking workers. Corbin (1995, 41) tells a similar story. Instructed by Labrousse to apply quantitative methods not to

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social problems but to a region, Corbin discovered that the inhabitants of the area he was supposed to investigate, Limousin at the end of the nineteenth century, were not “statistically minded.” Corbin does not explain how he still was able to produce a two-volume, 1,167-page dissertation that included no fewer than 34 tables and 105 maps, related both to the socioeconomic structures of Limousin and to the population’s “attitudes” toward such domains as the church and politics. Obligatory in the large regional histories of the 1960s and 1970s, statistical tables have not disappeared from French historiography despite the critiques that quantitative methods have undergone since the 1980s. Specialists in social and economic history, in particular, have continued using this form to display the numbers that ground their analyses. Michel Margairaz’s twovolume, 1,456-page L’état, les finances et l’économie: Histoire d’une conversion, 1932–1952, includes 20 tables longer than one page, 18 figures, and 18 graphs as well as numerous tables of less than one page. Shorter than Margairaz’s study, Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie’s Être veuve sous l’Ancien Régime (To be a widow under the Old Regime], a 415-page work in the social history of gender, is no less loaded with numerical data. Stating that she wants “to measure and to understand,” Beauvalet-Boutouyrie (2001, 14) inserts in her book 35 tables and 22 figures, which she summarizes in the last pages (404–6) in the form of eight “synthetic tables.” The same way of presenting quantitative information is found in sociocultural history. Christophe Charle, for example, includes 45 tables in La république des universitaires (1994), 18 in Paris fin de siècle (1998), and 12 in Discordance des temps (2011), showing that while he has progressively reduced his reliance on numbers, he has not renounced it (Paris fin de siècle also has 4 maps, and Discordance des temps includes 5 figures). Tables are also found in microhistories, notably in Face à la persécution, the study Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc devote to the fate of the 991 Jews of the city of Lens during World War II. Combining quantitative analysis and case studies, Mariot and Zalc insert 36 tables, 5 maps, and 3 graphs, going from “moments of departure” (2010, 86) to “naturalizations after the war” (227), through “dates of arrival in Switzerland” (105). Zalc, as we have seen, is the author with Lemercier of Méthodes quantitatives pour l’historien, and she and Mariot make use of the methods advocated in this manual, such as the chisquared test, whose application they explain before table 9 (50). The function of tables, of course, is to cross-reference data, to visually show the connections between two or several aspects of a specific phenomenon. Beauvalet-Boutouyrie (2001, 165), based on a regional sample (Vernon, a town in Normandy, and the surrounding parishes), demonstrates in a nine-

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line, three-column table that while three out of four women widowed before the age of thirty were able to remarry, the marriage market was much less favorable for women over forty (see table 3). Similarly, Charle (2011, 102) illustrates his thesis of the “time discrepancy,” in this case of a “conflict” in early nineteenth-century Paris between “modernity and inherited archaisms,” with an seven-row, four-column table attesting that the mortality rate during this period was much higher in the capital than in the rest of France (see table 4). In both examples, tables help transmit the data. By quantifying some aspects of death, historians certainly make it easier to understand the phenomena they investigate. But such understanding becomes more difficult when the tables are more elaborate than the ones I have selected. Predicaments of this kind arise in several economic histories that illustrate their analyses with a T a b l e 3 . Rate of second marriages Frequency of remarriages 1700–1749

Age of widowhood