History Is a Contemporary Literature : Manifesto for the Social Sciences 2017028414, 2017031020, 9781501710766, 9781501710773, 9781501709876

Table of contents :
History Is a Contemporary Literature
Contents
The New Frontier: Preface to the Cornell Edition
Introduction
Part I. The Great Divide
1. Historians, Orators, and Writers
2. The Novel, Father of History?
3. History as Science and “Literary Germs”
4. The Return of the Literary Repressed
Part II. The Historical Way of Reasoning
5. What Is History?
6. Writers of History-as-Science
7. Approaches to Veridiction
8. Fictions of Method
Part III. Literature and the Social Sciences
9. From Nonfiction to Literature-as-Truth
10. History, a Literature under Constraint?
11. The Research Text
12. On Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century
Index

Citation preview

History Is a Contemporary Literature

History Is a Contemporary Literature

Manifesto for the Social Sciences

Ivan Jablonka Translated by

Nathan J. Bracher

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Originally published under the title L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste pour les sciences sociales, by Ivan Jablonka. © Éditions du Seuil, 2014. Collection La Librairie du XXe siècle, sous la direction de Maurice Olender. Preface to the Cornell University Press edition, © Éditions du Seuil, 2017 This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français. Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut français. Funding for the translation was provided in part by a Hemingway Grant from the Book Department of the French Embassy in the United States. Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jablonka, Ivan, 1973– author. | Bracher, Nathan, 1953– translator. | Translation of: Jablonka, Ivan, 1973– Histoire est une littérature contemporaine. Title: History is a contemporary literature : manifesto for the social sciences / Ivan Jablonka ; translated by Nathan J. Bracher. Other titles: Histoire est une littérature contemporaine. English Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028414 (print) | LCCN 2017031020 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501710766 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501710773 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501709876 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences—Authorship. | Historiography. Classification: LCC H61 (ebook) | LCC H61 .J2713 2018 (print) | DDC 907.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028414 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Contents

The New Frontier: Preface to the Cornell Edition Introduction

vii 1

Part I. The Great Divide 1. Historians, Orators, and Writers

15

2. The Novel, Father of History?

35

3. History as Science and “Literary Germs”

55

4. The Return of the Literary Repressed

80

Part II. The Historical Way of Reasoning 5. What Is History?

97

6. Writers of History-as-Science

115

7. Approaches to Veridiction

132

8. Fictions of Method

155

vi

Contents

Part III. Literature and the Social Sciences 9. From Nonfiction to Literature-as-Truth

183

10. History, a Literature under Constraint?

211

11. The Research Text

236

12. On Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century

256

Index

269

The New Frontier Preface to the Cornell Edition

To reconcile research with creation, invent new forms for embodying knowledge, and take on the challenge of a creative history: for me, these propositions are one and the same thing. This book aims to highlight under what conditions they are possible in the realm of the social sciences. I do not claim to decree norms; I am speaking in terms of opportunities. The continued professionalization of disciplines from the nineteenth century on has led to progress on the level of method but regression in the areas of form, emotion, and pleasure. History—to speak just of my own discipline—has not learned much from the modern novel, journalism, photography, cinema, or the graphic novel, and this lack of interest is not unrelated to the closure that is now threatening the social sciences, with the increasing hyperspecialization of scholars, fascination with the “impact factor,” and the belief that an article published in an academic journal is more “scientific” than a documentary or museum exhibit. One might object that a researcher is a highly trained specialist who needs colleagues and students as readers, not laypersons. The problem is

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that ignoring matters of form and disregarding writing are obstacles to the very enterprise of knowledge. For without writing, knowledge is incomplete, an orphan from its form. All the great leaps forward in epistemology— Herodotus, Cicero, Bayle, Michelet, Nietzsche, Foucault—were also literary revolutions. That is what leads me to say that, instead of weakening the method of the social sciences, literature strengthens it. How do we proceed so that research does not simply amount to citation and commentary but to creation? How do we bring imagination and audacity together with scholarship? It would be a mistake to return to seventeenth-century belles lettres, and an illusion to transform history into a grand nineteenth-century novel. Hanging on to the existing hyperspecialization would simply mean following the path of least resistance. It is possible to get beyond both literature without method and method without literature, in order to practice literature within a method, a form designed for knowledge, a research text, with research inextricably tied to the facts, to the sources attesting to those facts, and to the form in which they are conveyed. The idea of reconciling social science research with literary creation can lend itself to a certain number of misunderstandings. If, for example, we define history simplistically by the “facts” and literature by the “fiction,” then the two domains may well be incompatible. If we judge history to be a serious pursuit while deeming literature to be dilettantism, we have to consider the former as our profession while relegating the latter to weekend hobbies. But if we consider history to be an investigation, and historians investigators driven by a problem, we can then draw the literary consequences of our method: using the “I” to situate one’s approach and perspective, telling the story of the investigation as well as its “results,” going back and forth between the past and the present to which we belong, using emotion as a tool for a better understanding, placing the cursor at the right spot between distance and empathy, choosing the right words, and allowing for the languages that the investigator usually does not share with the people (living or dead) that he or she encounters. These new rules are operators of textuality, that is to say, both cognitive and literary tools that, all while increasing the rigor and the selfreflexive character of the investigation, drive the researcher to write, in other words, to create. The point of intersection between history and literature is situated here. More than an academic discipline, history is

The New Frontier

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a voyage in time and space, an investigation based on a way of reasoning; without being limited to the realm of fiction, literature engages language, with a narrative construction, a singular voice, an emotion, an atmosphere, a rhythm, an escape to another world, as well as a canon fashioned by institutions. Happily, these two definitions overlap: history is a contemporary literature. The way of reasoning, which enables the production and transmission of knowledge, is the living heart of writing, the pulse of the text. That is how we can create new forms: social sciences for the twenty-first century. Since it was first published in 2014, I have presented my book at several European, North American, and South American universities, where it was then discussed. The debate over writing the social sciences and the cross-fertilization of disciplines has been particularly rich in the United States. I am not unaware of the fact that a large number of researchers, intellectuals, and epistemologists on American campuses and throughout the world have already reflected on a wide swath of the issues that I am focusing on so insistently. I pay them homage. However, while their thought has enriched my work, it has also allowed me to understand what distinguishes my work from theirs. It was in Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (1984) that Paul Veyne set forth the notion that “history is a true novel.” That striking formula recalls a crucial point: the historian tells a story; history is a narrative. But why the novel? I am not sure that one could do something new with Zola or Steinbeck. Or else one has to be capable, in the manner of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, of breaking with the conventions handed down from the nineteenth century (realism, a linear narrative, a hierarchy of heroes and secondary characters, a chain of actions proceeding by cause and effect, and so forth). But we do not have to limit literature to the novel. Poetry, theater, the essay, autobiography, testimony, feature newspaper and magazine stories, and creative nonfiction belong to literature, not to the genre of the novel. In The Writing of History (1988), Michel de Certeau recalled that, contrary to what the partisans of scientism have repeatedly claimed, history is written. But the title of his book suggests that it is the vocation of all historians to write, which is far from what they do. Quite often, they put into practice not writing but a technique: a set of archival sources, a patchwork of citations, and footnotes, all arranged according to a structure laid

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out with an introduction, chapters, and a conclusion. At that point, the historian produces not a text but a non-text, a specialist’s dissertation, in a purely instrumental form, inert, dead to language, continually denying its own literary character: in other words, a cardboard box stuffed with facts, excerpts, and a few concepts. When will we open creative writing workshops for historians and sociologists? Throughout the entire twentieth century, anthropologists such as Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, and Geertz accepted writing in the fullest sense of the word, and Michel Leiris was both an ethnologist and a writer. In Writing Culture (1986), James Clifford and George Marcus reflected on “poetics” and “the making of ethnographic texts.” With others, they criticized the rhetoric of ethnologists, their naïve realism, stylistic effects, discourse of authority, and their ethnocentric and colonialist biases. We can only applaud this critical enterprise. Unfortunately, Writing Culture fixes its gaze on only one horizon: the renewal of ethnology. James Clifford became the “ethnographers’ ethnographer,” but he could have become the ethnographer of historians or sociologists, or the historian and the sociologist of ethnographers. Historians also carry out fieldwork, “on-site investigations,” because, in their temporal and geographical journeys, they interview witnesses, they question people, they collect evidence. We can approach the past as sociologists, the present as historians or anthropologists. There is always something subversive in pluridisciplinarity, because it perturbs habits, upsets routines, and decenters perspectives. As I have pointed out, historical writing is often confined to a technique. With the ethnologists, the opposite is true: criticizing the “apparatus of writing” risks resulting in unbridled, ragged creations, fictionalized autobiography, performances, egotistical reveries, or poetry of the self. In the end, literature has killed the social sciences. Telling the story of one’s investigation, saying “I” in a self-reflexive manner, and finding the right word instead of perpetuating a jargon constitute both a scholarly and literary act. On this point as on others, the contributions of gender studies have been crucial. In the introduction to Feminism and Methodology (1987), Sandra Harding argues that the researcher’s situation in terms of gender, race, class, educational background, values, and social power should be made explicit. “Neutrality” is never neutral: it often takes the masculine for the universal. It looks down at the world from lofty heights, that position of superiority and exteriority

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typical of traditional historiography, in which the invisible voice of the historian blends indistinguishably with that of the Past. I think on the contrary that taking account of the researcher, and in particular of her ties to the objects of her study, is part of the research. The “I” places the researcher back among the other mortals that he is studying. That makes it possible to avoid scientism looking down from on high, relativist skepticism, and the supposed epistemological privilege of the oppressed class. “Situated knowledge” recuses the methodological sexism that, for males, consists of studying great men, great deeds, landmark dates, and institutions, and for females, the social relations of the sexes and the place that women occupy in societies favoring men. The way in which we look at human activities, including intellectual pursuits, is deeply gendered: the arid gravitas of science is supposedly “masculine,” while literature, sensitive, introspective, and psychological, is supposedly “feminine.” That is one reason why so many university professors refuse to “fall” into literature: Would men lose their imperium if they consented to give birth to texts? As we see, accepting the literary aspects of the social sciences is a way of refusing “malestream history.” It is not possible to embody a method in a text, an investigation in a narrative, without paying attention to language. In this sense, my book dialogues with the linguistic turn, informed by intellectuals such as Rorty, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and, closer to history, Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. This current of thought, which is so rich that we might speak of “linguistic turns” in the plural, pursued several agendas throughout the 1970s and 1980s: the discursive form of all experience, the role of rhetoric and imagination among scholars (the nineteenth-century historians in Hayden White’s Metahistory); the “languages of class” (the English working class in Gareth Stedman Jones’s work); the analysis of literary texts in relation to the context of their production (Musset and Baudelaire in Richard Terdiman’s Present Past); the wider agendas of structuralism, New Historicism, and the philosophy of language. All of these fundamental debates have enriched the reflection of historians. There is a bone of contention, however: that of asserting there to be no difference between history and fiction. To the extent that the linguistic turn consists of studying language in all its forms or of recalling that writing is a creative force belonging to the process of knowledge, you can count me in. Historians should not mistrust writing, for writing is

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not the problem but the solution. And I do think that devising “fictions of method” (from hypotheses and counterfactual scenarios to abstract concepts) may be conducive to a better understanding of the world. If, however, the linguistic turn becomes a machine for war against the social sciences, on the pretext that “everything is fiction” or that “there is no escape from the empire of signs,” I cannot get on board. Contrary to the way poeticians would have it, the historical text communicates with what is outside the text, not only material evidence (ruins, coins, skeletal remains) but also the reality to which this evidence testifies. The difference between one of Flaubert’s novels and a book by Darnton resides less in the literary quality of the former than in the latter’s capacity for veridiction. That is why it is not possible to completely deconstruct the social sciences. In the postface to his seminal article “Rethinking Chartism” (1983), Gareth Stedman Jones concluded, opposing Saussure to Derrida, “The historian cannot dispense with an implicit referentiality.” Would there be one linguistic turn “for historians” and another “for literary specialists”? The real dividing line is in fact the desire for truth that is driving us. Truth is not slippery. Words and archives do not have an infinite number of meanings. The notion of objectivity may well lend itself to criticism; it nevertheless retains its value. Instead of throwing the “noble dream” away, I prefer to make it less naïve, less biased, more self-reflexive. The reason why postcolonial, gender, queer, women’s and men’s studies are so important is not that they should allow each group to formulate its own “truth,” according to its own needs and vision of things, but rather that they provide tools for better grasping the world. History as a science will always prevail over identity discourses. I say so as a Jew and a feminist. My position therefore consists not of lowering the requirements for social sciences but on the contrary raising them, by making investigations more transparent, procedures more honest, research more audacious, and words better adjusted, which as a result enriches critical debate. By switching from discourse to text, we can proceed so that writing produces a net gain in epistemology: not by a proliferation of flashy words and metaphors, but by inventing new forms. Within the rules that constitute the method, we are free. And no one should apologize for exercising their liberty. A process of creation, a vibrant reflexivity, a refusal of methodological sexism, an independence of tone and style, a sensitivity to language, a respect for the reader, an uninhibited use of photography, video,

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the graphic novel, and digital resources: that is what the future of scholarship in the social sciences could be. On the map of writing, there are two continents: novels made of fiction and the nondescript texts of academia, both originating in the nineteenth century. We can live happily on both of these continents—I myself have published a novel and produced a number of scholarly books and articles— but we can also consider this terrain to be heavily cultivated, even a bit crowded, and it is possible to venture out into the unsettled parts of the world. Dipesh Chakrabarty put forth the idea of “provincializing Europe.” I propose, for my part, to get out of the nineteenth century. It is my way of dreaming of a world devoid of borders, title deeds, barbed wired fences, and walls. There is a third continent opening up before us, that of the creative social sciences—a pluridisciplinary investigation, a hybridization, a research text, a truth literature, a quite enjoyable intellectual adventure. Two of my books, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had (2016) and Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes (Laetitia or the End of Men, 2016), stem from just such an exploration. Their reception leads me to think that I have not gone completely astray. And should I get lost along the way, well . . . at least I shall have perished exploring the New Frontier. In the meantime, I am pleased to submit this book for the consideration of my English-speaking colleagues and readers. My warmest thanks go to my translator, Nathan Bracher, and to Mahinder Kingra, editor in chief of Cornell University Press, as well as to the anonymous referees who were willing to read my book and who, with their judicious remarks, inspired this preface.

History Is a Contemporary Literature

Introduction

Can we imagine texts that would be both history and literature? The challenge makes sense only if it spawns new forms. Literature can be something other than a Trojan horse for history, and vice versa. My idea is the following. The writing of history is not merely a technique involving an outline, citations, and footnotes: it represents a choice. The researcher has the opportunity to write. By the same token, an opportunity for knowledge is available to the writer: literature has a historical, sociological, and anthropological potential. Because at the end of the nineteenth century, history and sociology broke away from the realm of belles lettres, the debate over writing the social sciences is usually defined by two postulates: that the social sciences have no literary interest, and that a writer does not produce knowledge. We supposedly have to choose between a history that is “scientific” to the detriment of writing, and a history that is “literary” to the detriment of truth. This alternative is a trap.

2

Introduction

To begin with, the social sciences can be literary. History is not a fiction, sociology is not a novel, anthropology is not exoticism, and all three must meet methodological requirements. Within this framework, nothing prevents the researcher from writing. While shunning erudite pronouncements tossed off in some nondescript document, the researcher can compose a text that embodies a way of reasoning and creates a specific form for the purposes of a demonstration. To reconcile the social sciences with literary creation represents an effort to write in a more precise, free, original, honest, and reflexive way, not loosening the requirements of scientific research but on the contrary making them more rigorous. If writing is an indispensable component of history and the social sciences, it is less for reasons of aesthetics than for reasons of method. Writing is not simply a vehicle for delivering “the results,” nor is it just the wrapper used to quickly package research once it has been finished: writing is the very body of the research as the inquiry itself is carried out. In addition to the intellectual pleasure and epistemological capacity of writing, there is its civic dimension. The works of the social sciences must be discussed among specialists, but it is essential that they also be read, enjoyed, and critiqued among a wider audience. The use of writing to make the social sciences more attractive can be a way to counteract the distaste for them in universities, bookstores, and mass media. I moreover wish to show the ways in which literature is suited to accounting for reality. Just as the researcher can provide a demonstration by means of a palpable textual form, so the writer can compose a text to implement a historical, sociological, or anthropological line of reasoning. Literature is not necessarily the realm of fiction. It adapts and sometimes anticipates modes of inquiry in the social sciences. Writers who want to convey the reality of the world become in their own way researchers. Because they produce knowledge about the real world, past and present, and because they are capable not only of representing it (according to the old notion of mimesis) but also of explaining it, the social sciences are already present in literature in the form of travel logs, memoirs, autobiographies, correspondences, testimonies, diaries, life stories, and news reports. In all of these texts, someone is observing, giving a deposition, consigning, examining, transmitting, recounting their childhood, describing those who are absent, retracing some individual’s itinerary, giving an account of some experience, going through a country at war or a region

Introduction

3

in crisis, or investigating some accident, violent crime, or professional milieu. All of this literature displays historical, sociological, and anthropological ways of thinking, along with tools for making our lives intelligible: in other words, it reveals a way of understanding the present and the past. Literature can take us far away on its wings; it can also help decipher the world. This book thus attempts to answer the following questions: • How can we renew the writing of history and the social sciences? • Can we define a “literature of reality,” a writing of the world?

These two questions converge toward a third, more experimental interrogation: Can we conceive of texts that would be both works of literature and studies in social science? People have reflected on the way to write history for as long as history has existed. Two and a half centuries ago, Voltaire observed that since “so much has been said on the matter, it is necessary here to say very little.”1 But not so many thinkers have tried to figure out to what extent the social sciences can contribute to literature and what literature has been doing to the social sciences. One of the reasons is that the latter are relatively young. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, history and sociology have formed a “third culture,” between letters and the so-called exact sciences. Two world wars and mass crimes have also altered the stakes: since 1945, history, testimony, and literature no longer have the same meaning. This book deals with a literature permeated with the world, history as a social science, and research as method and creation, an epistemology in writing. History is more literary than it cares to be; literature is more of a history that it believes. Each is malleable, rich in extraordinary potentialities. Initiatives have been flourishing everywhere for a few years now, in journals and in books, on the Internet and within universities. One can sense an immense appetite on the part of researchers, writers, and journalists, and a huge expectation on the part of readers.

1. Voltaire, “Histoire,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot, vol. 8 (Neuchâtel: Faulche, 1765), 220–25.

4

Introduction

That does not amount to saying that everything is in everything. There are the social sciences, and there is literature: the dividing line between them exists. If, as Philip Roth has said, the writer, “is not responsible to anyone,”2 researchers are at the very least responsible for the accuracy of what they state. I would simply like to carry out a reflection on genres, in order to see whether the dividing line might not be turned into a frontier for pioneers, exploring a new avenue instead of laying down the law: “we can” instead of “we have to.” I would like to suggest a possibility, to indicate a path that we might walk down from time to time.

Writing History Speaking of “writing history” in the fullest sense of the term (writing as literary form, history as social science) requires that we look into the ties between literature and history. Now these notions are in some ways so multivalent, fluctuating, and recent that bringing them together inevitably produces misunderstandings. First mistake: the supposition that literature and history would be obviously akin. Is not the historical novel proof? Actually, that literary genre adheres to an epico-memorial conception that goes all the way back to antiquity: history, says Cicero, deals with “important facts worthy to be remembered.”3 History with a capital H supposedly constitutes what is important in the past: a spectacle in which great men produce great events, a fresco in which wars, revolutions, intrigues, marriages, and epidemics overwhelm individual and collective destinies. Certain novelists supposedly latch on to that “great History,” resuscitating Cleopatra, the gladiators, the Mayflower, Lincoln, D-day, and the conquest of space. But history is less a content than a manner of proceeding, an effort to understand, an analysis of the evidence. If Memoirs from Beyond the Grave by Chateaubriand and If This Is a Man by Primo Levi are more “historical” than cloak-and-dagger novels, it is not because they speak of Napoleon or Auschwitz, but because they produce a historical line of reasoning.

2. Quoted on the television program Les carnets de route de François Busnel, France 5, November 17, 2011. 3. Cicero, On Oratory 2.15, 63.

Introduction

5

Regardless of the subject, we might identify history and literature on the basis of their narrative vocation: both tell a story, arrange events, weave a plot, and depict characters in action. History thus blends into a vast corpus of literature in the form of a “true novel.”4 But is history necessarily a story with twists and turns? And can literature be summed up in the novel? Just as history is not a fascinating narrative full of kings and commanders in chief, smoke and blood, the novel is not the alpha and omega of literature. If, with a still more restrictive notion of literature, we pretend to believe that literature consists of pleasantly turned, wellbalanced sentences, history can be transformed as if by magic: a “fine style” would suffice to make literature. In the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers such as Hayden White, Paul Veyne, Michel de Certeau, Richard Brown, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Rancière, and Philippe Carrard established that there was a “writing of history” and even a “poetics of history” (or sociology). But the fact that researchers tell a story or cite evidence does not settle the question of their work of creation. The literary character of a text is something other than its discursive nature. It is obvious that there is a technical writing of history (the handling of the past, the organization of documentary material, and the apparatus of erudition), but not all researchers choose to write; far from it. On that score, in fact, the social sciences are far from having undergone the same revolutions as the twentieth-century novel. If they accept going from discourse to the text, historians set their eyes on a new horizon: no longer “historical writing” but simply writing. Which means creation. Reflecting on the writing of history thus requires that we avoid these false encounters with “great History,” the “true novel,” “fine style,” and “scholarly technique.” It is not because it excites, tells a story, or configures a speech that history is literature. The second mistake is symmetrical to the first: history is supposedly an anti-literature. To attain the status of science, history tore itself away from belles lettres, and sociology has been constructed over against novelists who claimed to be sociologists. Associated with amateurism, pretentiousness, and lack of method, literary work comes indeed to jeopardize the

4. Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 10.

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Introduction

work of the researcher. Moreover, the idea of literature nowadays connotes fiction, but history is not fiction. If such were the case, it would lose its reason for being, which is to hang on to “that old-fashioned thing, ‘reality,’ ‘what actually happened.’ ”5 It would produce not knowledge but a more or less convincing “version” of the facts. In the 1970s and 1980s, the most radical proponents of the linguistic turn and postmodernism attempted to dispute the cognitive scope of history by assimilating it to literature (understood as both fiction and rhetoric). As soon as one tries to oppose literature and history, the issues have already been decided. On one side, we have writing as entertainment, and on the other, we have history, which means serious work. This dichotomy explains the ambiguous relationship that numerous researchers have with literature. They use it in the context of their work, they privately delight in it, but they do not write it; that would be betraying their principles. The only universally accepted “writing” stays within the prescribed bounds: introduction, chapters, footnotes, with a few figures of style. Researchers in the social sciences are right to be wary of belles lettres and fiction, but by constantly insisting that their work has nothing to do with literary pursuits, they risk weakening their research. With its capacity for figuring and problematizing, the novel profoundly influenced history in the nineteenth century. When banishing writing from research on the pretext that it only concerns literati, one consigns entire chapters of historiographical thought to oblivion, since from Herodotus to Polybius, Cicero to Valla, Bayle to Gibbon, Michelet to Renan, each and every epistemological advance consisted also of a literary innovation. That is why we risk paying a very heavy price for disregarding the work of writing. Reflecting on the writing of history thus involves refusing anathema. It is not because history is a method, social science, or professionalized discipline that there is nothing literary about it. Is the writing of history something that goes without saying, or does it represent a peril? Is history always literature? Or can history never be literature? The only way of escaping from this fruitless opposition is to see to it that literary pursuits signal not the abandonment of “serious”

5. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Lettre,” in Michel de Certeau, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1987), 71–74.

Introduction

7

research, nor a well-earned rest after the “real” work has been completed, but rather an epistemological gain. The point is not to embellish the text but to lay out and deepen the method. Thanks to writing, research can obtain heightened self-awareness, increased honesty, greater rigor, a more clearly understandable protocol, an in-depth discussion of the evidence, and a more open invitation to engage in critical debate. To want to write the social sciences is not to rehabilitate History with a capital H, or to sink to the level of dime store sociography, or to sing the praises of flowery language. By reconciling methods of research and forms of writing, we can implement a method within writing, and thereby renew the fundamental elements of history and the social sciences. It is not a matter of burying history under mounds of fiction and rhetoric but of recasting it in a new form, reinvigorating its narrative construction, its language, its rhythm, its atmosphere, its inner voice, through an investigation-text whose form espouses its effort to say things that are true. Literary creation is the other name for the scientific ambition of history. Researchers have every interest in writing in a more sensitive, free, and precise manner. In this respect, accuracy, liberty, and sensitivity are of a piece with cognitive scope, as is the case when we say that a mathematical demonstration is “elegant.” Chronologies and annals do not produce knowledge, and the idea that the facts supposedly speak for themselves is the stuff of magical thinking. On the contrary, history produces knowledge because it is literary, because it is carried out by means of a text, because it recounts, reveals, uncovers, unearths, explains, contradicts, and proves; in other words, because it writes what is true. Writing is therefore not the researchers’ scourge but the form they give their demonstration. Writing entails no deterioration or loss of truth; it is the very condition of truth. It is up to each researcher to forge his or her own writing method. Renewing writing in the social sciences thus consists not of abolishing all rules but of freely giving oneself new rules.

Literature of the Real World The rhinoceroses drawn on the walls of the Chauvet Cave about 32,000 years ago, the forests and wrath depicted in the Gilgamesh cycle more than a thousand years before Homer, show that mimesis is as ancient as art. At

8

Introduction

the time of the Renaissance, thanks to painters such as Masaccio, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, and Raphael, perspective and expressivity refined the representation of the world. The novel in its various forms offers another type of realism: twelfth-century chivalrous romances, seventeenthcentury adventure or psychological novels, and nineteenth-century social novels are all capable of depicting the real world, describing persons and places, staging actions, and entering into the human soul. Like painters with drawing and color, writers try to make words correspond with things. No one doubts that these are constructions designed to produce certain effects. No one imagines that words give direct access to “reality,” as if they had the power to both designate and then disappear the moment they have done so. But the ambition to know that drives all science rests on the certitude that a text can establish an adequation with the real world. As Tarski recalled in the 1930s, a theory is true if and only if it corresponds with the facts. In the philosophy of language, the “axiom of identification” postulates that the listener is capable of recognizing an object on the basis of a statement. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists are highly aware of the gap between their sentences and reality, of the difficulty in finding the right words, and of the incommunicability of certain experiences. None of them are naïve enough to want to render “objective” reality or the facts “the way they are,” but none can accept the idea that their words could be disconnected from things. Research is not compatible with the idea that we are supposedly locked inside the Library, tossed from one word to another, from one signification to the next, condemned to mourn (or enjoy) our break with the world. As defective as it may be, our language is prehensile: in spite of everything, a text can account for what is exterior to the text. Words are both our problem and our solution. That is why we maintain the “courage to write,”6 by writing stories, having recourse to images, inventing tropes, and mobilizing symbols. Why would the conviction of scientists and researchers in the social sciences have no repercussions on literature? The entire problem is knowing

6. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 122–23.

Introduction

9

how the world penetrates into a text. By means of realism? Verisimilitude? That would be easy to dispute. In the Platonic tradition and continuing up to Barthes, literature is a copy of a copy, a masquerade. For their part, the German Romantics conceived of the Novel as a universe unto itself, a solipsism governed by its own laws that enact its own literary character or the writer’s genius. Is that all? After the Second World War, when the New Novel was announcing the end of traditional realism, writers such as Primo Levi, Varlam Shalamov, Georges Perec, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion proposed another solution for apprehending the world: that of deciphering our lives, understanding what has happened, and making writing a means of knowledge and of giving order to the world. From that need arose a profoundly historical and sociological literature fueled by the will to understand. Explaining by means of a text is a way of going above and beyond mimesis. We now turn to reformulating the question of literature’s relation to the real world, not to address the oft-rehashed question of representation or verisimilitude, but to determine how we can convey truth in and by a text. In order to theorize a “literature of the real world,” we must begin not with realism but with the social sciences as they conduct an investigation. It is by a way of reasoning that a text achieves adequation with the world. Literary creation and the work of the social sciences are compatible because reasoning is already embedded in the heart of literature. Texts do think; they are able to lead an investigation about the world, past and present, and about themselves. That is what we see, for example, in life stories, memoirs, testimonies, and some works of journalism. This reversal of perspective makes it possible to dismiss the old saw about literature being “cut off from the world,” as well as the cliché about the social sciences having a cold heart, incapable of invention, void of all aesthetic ambition. For the social sciences themselves resort to certain fictions that, controlled and substantiated, constitute indispensable components of demonstration. Inspired by the letter and spirit of the social sciences, literature of the real world is thus not required to define itself as nonfiction. It does not just report facts, as a walker picks up rocks along the road; it explains them, by means of tools of intelligibility. The knowledge that it produces transcends the simple “factual” narrative. Its understanding encompasses mimesis and brings it to completion.

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The Research Text This book proposes another manner of writing social sciences and conceiving literature of reality, but it does not itself espouse a particularly new form. Why this contradiction? Because it is the heir and double of another book, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had (2016), which retraces the trajectory of a couple of Polish communist Jews, Matès and Idesa Jablonka, from their shtetl to Auschwitz. That experiment in familial biography directly inspired the present volume, which is its theoretical substructure. Toward the middle of the first decade of this twenty-first century, I defended my doctoral thesis (devoted to children taken in by social welfare institutions) while at the same time publishing a novel, Âme soeur (Soul Sister), which tells the story of a wayward young man wandering between northern France and Morocco after the death of his sister. My thesis was defended at the Sorbonne, my novel published under a pseudonym. That twofold attempt at writing “pure” history and “pure” literature was a bit artificial, even though both books recount the plight of children in mourning, abandoned and deceived. Judging that it was unthinkable to reconcile social science and literary creation, and even less conceivable to make such a claim publicly, I experienced a painful dilemma: “If I become a historian, writing will have to be limited to a hobby; if I become a writer, history will be nothing more than a mercenary occupation.” It took several years, several attempts, and several encounters for me to make up my mind to resort to an illicit hybrid, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, whose form, between history and literature, social science and creation, is undecidable. I had finally arrived at what I wanted to do. A research text and, now, its methodological explication: the one is not produced without the other. But the present instruction manual also carries something of a manifesto. In it, I will say “I,” because I am laying out my conviction and my practice; I will say “we,” because we are a community—maybe a generation—of researchers, writers, journalists, and publishers united by a reflection on the social sciences, the forms of research, the writing of the real world, and the necessity of reinventing ourselves. Granted, our reflection does not pop up out of nowhere. It is rooted in the experiments of our forebears and the successes of our predecessors, who, each in their own way, wrote history or recounted the world.

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It is therefore up to us to explore the potentialities of the social sciences and literature when they agree to meet. Such a project refuses all norms and therefore all recipes suggesting that one would only have to mix together some ingredients, with history providing the “facts” or “concepts” and literature taking care of the “writing” or “aesthetic sensibility.” This parody of fertilization still exalts conventional definitions. Literature is supposedly linked to life, the individual, psychology, the inner or deeply personal realm, and the complexity of feelings, while the social sciences are associated with serious subjects, major events, social groups, and institutions. Let us reject the idea that literature is produced only by “writers” and studied only by “literary specialists,” while history is supposedly of concern only for “historians.” Let us not be taken in by theatrical domestic spats rehearsed by old couples, with science pitted against narrative, reason against imagination, professionalism against pleasure, content against form, the collective against the individual. Boundaries are necessary. History is not (and never will be) fiction, fable, rant, or counterfeit. The landmark distinction between poetry and history was made by Aristotle in chapter 9 of the Poetics. But the division between what could happen and what did indeed take place does not condemn researchers to be orphans of poiesis: their archival, methodological, conceptual, narrative, and lexical inventions all constitute acts of creation in the true sense of the term. By combining their production of knowledge with aesthetics and poetics, they create original works. The problem is therefore not “to determine whether or not historians write literature, but what kind of literature they produce.”7 The same can be said of writers: the problem is not to determine whether they deal with reality, but whether they give themselves the means to understand it. The important thing is not to be ashamed. What is at stake is collective experimentation. Let us imagine a social science that captivates, a history that is moving because it demonstrates, and demonstrates because it is a work of writing, an investigation in which human lives are revealed, a hybrid form that we can call a research text or creative history, a literature capable of conveying truth about the world.

7. Jacques Rancière, Les noms de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil / Librairie du XXIe Siècle, 1992), 203. Available in English as The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

Part I

The Great Divide

1

Historians, Orators, and Writers

Everybody knows that history is not literature. But since when is that the conventional wisdom on the subject? It would be an anachronism to try to study the divergence between history and literature prior to the nineteenth century, since they did not exist as distinctly separate concepts; or at least they took on meanings very different from the ones we give them today. However, it would be erroneous to conclude that their divorce dates only from Romanticism or the revolution of methodical history, as if “history” and “literature” had become independent of each other from the very moment they emerged. In order to avoid such misinterpretations, we need to retrace the genealogy of these two concepts as genres and as institutions within an economy of intellectual production, while at the same time paying attention to the interrelationship existing between them even before their meaning was set in our vocabulary. From its very beginnings, history was intimately tied to literature (understood as poetry, rhetoric, or belles lettres), before separating off to emerge as a science in the nineteenth century. Even in

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antiquity, however, critical debate led to a distinction between history and its “literary” fringes: the separation of history and literature in fact began twenty-five centuries ago.

History as Tragedy Herodotus has had a paradoxical posterity. As the historian of the GrecoPersian wars, Salamis, Marathon, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Scythians, and the Babylonians, he is both celebrated as “the father of history” and derided for his naïveté. Written in the fifth century BCE, his Histories (literally “inquiries” in the original Greek) seek rationally to know the causes of events (and those of the war between the Greeks and the barbarians in particular), while at the same time fulfilling the archaic function of memory: “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory.”1 These famous beginning lines lead us back into a world in which, as those who hold the truth, the gods make it flash in oracles and shimmer in dreams, and where the prophetic priestess of Apollo knows the future of humans and can even number the grains of sand on the seashore. As does Homer in The Iliad and Hesiod in his Theogony, Herodotus celebrates both the power of the gods and the great deeds of men, whose memory he passes on to future generations. (A later tradition will moreover name the books of The Histories after the nine daughters of Mnemosyne, the Muses.) Was he the first modern historian or the last epic poet of the oral tradition? For his detractors, the “poetic” side of Herodotus stems also from his spinning of yarns and trafficking in stories. Aristotle, Diodorus of Sicily, and Strabo all consider The Histories to be a collection of idle gossip. Plutarch lampoons the cleverness of Herodotus. What motivates this “writer for hire,” this “lover of myth,” this “fabulist”? The desire to entertain.

1. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0126 (accessed April 23, 2016).

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Herodotus allegedly sacrificed the truth to the pleasure of his audience. His aim is not to provide a truthful account, but rather to offer a delightful style and an enchanting story. That is why it is even “easier to believe in the fictions of Hesiod and Homer.”2 At the beginning of The History of the Peloponnesian War in about 430 BCE, Thucydides lays out his method in opposition to Homer and Herodotus. The former can be trusted only with great caution, because “as the poet he was,” he decorated and embellished everything. The latter starred in the Olympic Games with pompously staged lines for a moment’s pleasure. Hence the articulation of Thucydides’s own epistemological ambition, which is to leave the applause to the crowd-pleasers: “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest.”3 One cannot obtain any definitive knowledge with rousing speeches: truth requires a historiography of austerity. Three centuries later, another historian, Polybius, distances himself from other poet-historians, the tragics, whom he reproaches for their errors, their lack of rigor, and above all, their taste for pathos. In recounting the capture of Mantinea, Phylarchus paints one “scene of horror” after another: the vanquished are led off to be slaves, while women, with their hair undone and breasts bared, cling to one another desperately.4 Phylarchus makes the mistake of indulging in an emotional history that does not provide anything to explain the causes of events, motives for deeds, or human intentions. By criticizing Phylarchus’s intensely moving or cruel scenes, Polybius is responding to Aristotle, who had asserted the superiority of poetry over history. In order to establish his own value in contradistinction to the poets, Polybius sets intelligibility over against pleasure: “I did not aim so much at giving pleasure to my readers, as at profiting

2. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, ed. H. L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1924, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc= Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0198%3Abook%3D11%3Achapter%3D6%3Asection %3D3 (accessed April 23, 2016). 3. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, http:// classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html (accessed April 24, 2016). See François Hartog, Évidence de l’histoire: Ce que voient les historiens (Paris: EHESS, 2005), chap. 4. 4. Polybius, Histories 2.56, “The Credibility of Phylarchus,” http://data.perseus.org/ citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0543.tlg001.perseus-eng1:2.56 (accessed April 24, 2016).

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those who apply to such studies.”5 Tragedy, spectacle, and oddity are for poets; historians deal with rock-solid truth. The “myths” of Herodotus and the “tragedies” of Phylarchus tend toward poetry. Be it epic or tragic, poetry arranges muthoï (stories, tales told) in view of creating the greatest effect on the spectator. What is this sort of history worth? Aristotle has already given the answer: it is inferior to poetry. But a theatrical history is also bad history. It is less concerned with truth than with the sensational; it would rather charm or horrify than teach. Whether they be historians according to poets or poets according to historians, “tragedians” (or “mythologists”) are condemned to write second-rate poetry and second-rate history. From the dark legend of Herodotus and the quarrel of the tragics emerges an ideal: history as the truth, without entertainment, standing over against its opposite, history as poetry and theatrics, full of alluring lies. In this way, Thucydides and Polybius make an epistemology coincide with an aesthetic: history can never be delightful or moving; it can only aim for the bare truth. However, that does not keep them from producing “tragedies” of their own. Thucydides does not spare us the spectacle either of victims buried alive in a wall in Corcyra, or of Athenians drinking from a river reddened with their own blood. Polybius’s talent for making the action come alive is intrinsically tragic, since by making it seem “as if you were there,” he evokes pathos. For his part, Livy has no qualms about impressing the reader with his narrative of the death of Lucretia or that of Virginia, or by his depiction of Rome at the mercy of the Gauls: the cries of the enemies were drowned out “by the weeping of women and children, the hissing of flames and the din of houses collapsing.”6 As Cicero writes in his letter to Lucceius, the tragic arouses an emotion that is delicious and ambiguous (cathartic, says Aristotle). Transformed into a fabula full of perils, twists, and turns, the history of his consulate

5. Polybius, Histories 9.2, “Why Focus on Actions,” http://data.perseus.org/citations/ urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0543.tlg001.perseus-eng1:9.2 (accessed April 24, 2016). 6. Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, bks. 1–5, ed. Rev. Canon Roberts, http:// data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011 (accessed April 24, 2016). On the subject of these debates, see Adriana Zangara, Voir l’histoire: Théories anciennes du récit historique (IIe siècle avant J.C.–IIe siècle après J.-C.) (Paris: EHESS / Vrin, 2007), 56ff.

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leads the reader through all states of admiration, expectation, joy, sadness, hope, and fear. There is doubtless a difference between gratuitous dramatic effects and an instructive episode, but the main thing here is the rule that historians make and then immediately break: no staged production, no emotion, no show. This conception, which prefigures history as science, carries with it a mistrust of language, the shimmering, self-serving word so enamored of its own power that it winds up substituting itself for the world.

History as Eloquence The first chroniclers display an economy of means that reaches the degree zero of the narrative: biblical genealogies, lists of memorable things having occurred each year in Egypt, names of kings engraved on the steles of the acropolis at Susa, lists of the winners of the Olympic Games, public memories recorded by the great pontiff in Rome, and ephemerides. The Roman chroniclers, from Cato to Fabius Pictor, hardly do any better. In the dialogue On the Orator and the treatise On the Laws (written between 55 and 52 BC), Cicero deplores the poverty of such a radically event-based history that contents itself with recording names, places, and deeds. Unlike Greece, Rome does not yet have any historians. For in Cicero’s estimation, the historian knows how to decorate his narrative: as an exornator and not just a narrator, he is distinguished by the quality of his writing, his rich style, and his ability to switch registers. That is why history is a magnificent undertaking for an orator.7 Such a history as eloquence highlights the real, framing great deeds and events in beautiful language. That is precisely what marks the historian’s inferiority. As a pure storyteller, he does not lay out any argument, prove anything, or refute anybody; he merely displays his talent by reporting “what happened.” In contrast to the nobility of rhetoric in

7. See Jacques Gaillard, “La notion cicéronnienne d’historia ornata,” in Colloque histoire et historiographie, dir. Raymond Chevallier (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980), 37–45; and Eugen Cizek, “La poétique cicéronienne de l’histoire,” Bulletin de l’association Guillaume Budé 1 (1988): 16–25.

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the forum and the courtroom, this historia ornata does not take part in any effort to persuade. The maxim presenting history as the “oratory art par excellence” should not obscure the fact that, for Cicero himself, the historian is inferior to orators, the politicians and lawyers brilliantly representing the deliberative and judiciary genres. The historian orchestrates an eloquence for show; politicians and lawyers deploy their eloquence for combat. Purely decorative, history’s eloquence has nothing of the agonistic eloquence active in the political arena. After Lucretia’s suicide, Brutus arouses the people’s anger with virulent words “such as occur to a man in the very presence of an outrage, but are far from easy for an historian to reproduce.”8 History can place itself in service to the nobility of rhetoric by providing examples, precedents, and anecdotes that can make judges reflect and impress the crowd. For Cicero and Quintilian, it is useful for the orator to know the chronology of events, the history of Rome, and that of the great kings. The history considered to be the “teacher of life” (maîtresse de vie, from the Latin magistra vitae) by Polybius, Livy, Suetonius, and Plutarch is full of examples to imitate and lessons to apply fruitfully. History is profitable for orators, politicians, lawyers, and young men launching a career in the public arena. It is also the bittersweet refuge of those who have withdrawn from public life, such as Sallust, who, after the death of Caesar, meditates on the virtues of Scipio, the wild ambition of Jugurtha, and moral decadence. In addition to being useful for clashes in the public forum, history is also a substitute for confrontations in the public forum. Ciceronianism, the art of fine speech, this “rhetoric” in the modern sense (as opposed to the rhetoric of politics and the courtroom theorized by Aristotle and Cicero himself), illustrates both the glamour and the infirmity of history: glamorous because it is beautiful, but infirm because it is only beautiful. Since it remains subordinate to true rhetoric and delivers “truth” only in the form of moral lessons, it merely provides the pleasure of language, and not of knowledge or combat. Demoted to the status of a sub-rhetoric and a sub-politics, history serves as an outlet for the frustrated ambitions of the one who narrates it. History, says Quintilian, aims

8. Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, bks. 1–5. See Hartog, Évidence de l’histoire, chap. 2; and Zangara, Voir l’histoire, 91ff.

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solely “to record events for the benefit of posterity and to win glory for its author.”9 Once he conceives of his discourse as a repertory of admirable deeds heightened by well-ordered action (dispositio) and the finest expression (elocutio), the historian becomes a stylist. He slips quietly toward sophistry, where the important thing is not what is true but what is effective, if not beautiful. Classical antiquity associates the virtues and vices of style with historians. In this respect, Cicero becomes an apostle of a “flowing and ample” style, mellow, even, rich, and full of grace. Thanks to his reading of Herodotus, his discourse acquires greater color, just as a person tans from walking in the sun. Thucydides, however, with his arid style and obscure ideas, is of no use to the orator.10 It is Sallust, the adversary of Cicero in politics and historiography, who prolongs the Thucydidean tradition fed by Attic style: purity of language, concision, gravitas, and absence of ornament. Such sobriety of writing, which one also finds with Caesar in the same era, is part of a history as intelligence that seeks first of all to understand, as opposed to an impassioned history intended to excite the audience. Does a rigorous style correspond to rigorous reasoning? The opposition between historia nuda and historia ornata reappears in Christian historiography. At the beginning of the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea distinguishes the concise brevity of annals and chronicles from the more eloquent histories and heroic tales. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, historians profess their intention to write in a simple, accessible style, patterned after the “humble sermon” that Saint Augustine recommends for priests. Despite such promises, they offer discourses in fine Latin or rhyming prose, such as the flowery rhetoric of the Kunstprosa to those in power.11 In 1369 Froissart abandons verse for prose, but his Chronicles give him the possibility of “chronicling and storytelling throughout the subject.”12

9. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.31, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit: phi1002.phi00110.perseus-eng1:1.31 (accessed April 25, 2016). 10. Cicero, On the Orator 2.13–14, and The Orator 9.30–32. 11. Michel Redde, “Rhétorique et histoire chez Thucydide et Salluste,” in Chevallier, Colloque histoire et historiographie, 11–17. 12. Jean Froissart, Les chroniques, in Collection des chroniques nationales françaises 10, ed. J. A. Buchon (Paris: Verdière, 1825), 417.

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History as eloquence, the second “literary” form of history for classical antiquity after history as tragedy, is both highly sought after and criticized. Why should the scholar need to write well? One is interesting because what one says is true, not because one writes beautiful sentences; alliteration and hyperbaton are of no use to those who want to report what happened. Should narration therefore be confined to the bare minimum, for fear that figures of rhetoric might taint the facts? The “naked truth” would risk falling back down to the level of the annalist’s empty cataloguing. Regardless of whether they favor Attic concision or emulate Cicero’s exornator rerum, historians face a dilemma. If they say “too much,” their words no longer correspond to reality and betray the truth. If they say “too little,” they provide nothing more than a list of facts, or even a list of names. How then to captivate the reader without embellishing the story? The reason why historians in ancient and medieval times are so concerned with the question of writing is that it has epistemological ramifications.

History as Panegyric In the category of rhetoric for show, Cicero includes history, praises, speeches patterned after Isocrates’s Panegyricus, and everything that the Greeks designate under the name of epideictics, “lectures” devoted to lauding or condemning. The first to associate history with oratory are indeed Isocrates and his pupils in the fourth century before our era. They are the ones who invent the “panegyric,” praise for a people (the Greeks in Panegyricus) or a man (Philip of Macedonia in Theopompus’s work). With praise, historians return to the archaic function of poets as dispensers of memory; and the “truth” that they dispense, aletheia, is indeed the negation of oblivion, lethe. Historians perpetuate the glory of kings as much as they bestow it. Such privilege immeasurably heightens their role, making them indispensable to all who aspire to immortality. Cicero admits his “inconceivably ardent desire” for Lucceius to cover Cicero’s own consulate with praise.13 The poet Archias will also be able to help

13. Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares (in English), http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/ citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Cic.%20Fam.%205.12 (accessed April 27, 2016).

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Lucceius ensure “that all mention of our name will not cease at the same time with our lives, but that our fame will endure to all posterity.”14 In the imperial era, official ideology stifles oratorical genius, as Tacitus laments in his Dialogue on Oratory. For imperial ideology, history is a mere instrument: Livy serves the power of Augustus by singing the praises of eternal Rome, and Pliny the Younger celebrates the emperor in his Panegyric in Praise of Trajan. As is the case with tragedy and eloquence, praise arouses suspicion: Did the deed deserve to be handed down to posterity? Do historians not lavish praise too abundantly on the powerful, as Herodotus does with Themistocles, and Plutarch with the legislators and conquerors? Several historiographers on the contrary make impartiality one of the key components of their ethics. They do not so much condemn praise, which is a natural part of epideictics, as they deplore praise that is indulgent, undeserved, unjustified, and illegitimate, and which turns historians into propagandists. The latter are no less blameworthy when they darken the record as accusers. Polybius lashes out at historians’ biased perspectives on Philip of Macedonia: “I however hold that an historian ought neither to blame or praise kings untruly, as has often been done.”15 In The Way to Write History, written in Greek in AD 165, Lucian of Samosata judges there to be a “wall” between history and panegyrics. Maintaining their incorruptibility and their liberty to take various positions, historians must have no friends, no king, and no homeland other than the truth. If some flatterer claims that Alexander could kill several elephants by throwing a single javelin, his book will be tossed in the river.16 Under their diverse guises, epic or tragic poetry, eloquence and epideictics all correspond to what we call “literature”: they share the same concern with form, same aesthetic purpose, same pleasure principle, and

14. Cicero, For Archias, ed. C. D. Yonge, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit: phi0474.phi016.perseus-eng1:11.29 (accessed April 27, 2016). See Laurent Pernot, La rhétorique dans l’antiquité (Paris: LGF/Livre de Poche, 2000), 236–37. 15. Polybius, Histories, 8.10, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0543. tlg001.perseus-eng1:8.10 (accessed April 27, 2016). 16. Lucian of Samosata, The Way to Write History, 7–12. https://archive.org/stream/ luciankilb06luciuoft/luciankilb06luciuoft_djvu.txt (accessed August 14, 2017).

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same esteem for talent.17 From its very beginnings in classical antiquity, however, history has always defined itself by distancing itself from its “literary” forms. History as tragedy impresses by means of staged scenes and dramatic effects. History as eloquence dwells on style and morals. History as panegyrics distills the passions of the historian. These forms are linked and at times confused with one another. Isocrates and his disciples practice oratory, history, and panegyrics. Lucian considers it to be a “grave error” to mix history, poetry, myth, praise, hyperbole, and flattery. It is nevertheless worthwhile to distinguish among these three “literary” forms, because, beginning with Thucydides and Polybius, each of them has been used to separate history from what it is not. Any historians caught in the act of romancing, adding to or embellishing the story, declaiming, puffing themselves up, idealizing, caricaturing, or condemning, would no longer have their place among historians. There are three remedies for such excesses and deviations: history without emotion, history without ornament, history without partisanship. In the nineteenth century, they will come together in history as science. The tendency to “lay it on thick” with tragedy, to “spruce up” the narrative with eloquence, and to “take sides” with panegyrics are literary habits that pose a threat to history. But—and this is a point of utmost importance—they are not alien to history; it is not possible to eliminate them like something foreign. They remain within the historical text as trace magnetisms, because historians must indeed interest their readers, because it is not enough merely to rattle off the facts, and because historians are always linked to the objects of their studies. Too much literature, and history dies; not enough literature, and we no longer have anything. As long as history is a narrative conceived by an individual, and not a random listing of dates, it will be literary. That is why historians believing to be above literature can so easily be caught in the act of writing their own literary text. One is always someone else’s “poet.” These “literary” forms that were denounced from classical antiquity on are therefore not pathologies threatening individual historians but rather

17. See Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique,” Communications, no. 16 (1970): 172–223. On epideixis as “literary performance,” see Zangara, Voir l’histoire, 135.

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a risk to take and a high road to follow. Literature, a necessity and a danger, lives at the heart of history.

Against Courtly History History is never a distinct genre for the French neoclassicists of the seventeenth century. Inherited from Renaissance humanism’s desire for allencompassing knowledge, the term “Lettres” designates the entire set of learned fields, including history, philosophy, grammar, law, morals, theology, geometry, physics, and astronomy. All of Europe’s learned scholars exchange correspondence within the “Republic of Letters.” Within its movable boundaries, the stable nucleus of this abstract community includes grammar, eloquence, history, and poetry. “One has to be a poet in order to be a historian,” declares Le Moyne at the beginning of De l’histoire, insisting that history must be written “with spirit.”18 The Renaissance made a similar connection: in 1482, Bartolomeo della Fonte, a professor of poetry and rhetoric in Florence, began his yearly course with an opening speech on history. Such a cohabitation within the belles lettres revived the debates of antiquity. What sort of truth can be achieved by a history that is declamatory, poetic, subservient to political power, and invaded by its “literary forms”? In the sixteenth century, Ciceronianism enjoyed immense favor with men of state and the Church, lawyers in the Parliament, and moralists, to whom it provided the model for effective speech, capable of acting in the polis. Certain humanists, however (such as Jean Sleidan, historian of the Reformation and translator of Froissart and Commynes into Latin), launched polemical attacks against Ciceronianism. Ancients such as Cicero and Livy, and moderns such as the hagiographers of the Golden Legend in the thirteenth century, were poet-historians who understood the truth by means of their fables, praises, and reprimands.19 A generation later, the

18. Pierre Le Moyne, De l’histoire (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1670), 1. 19. Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et res literaria de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 42ff.

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jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin theorizes historia nuda, “sober, simple, direct,” and heir of Caesar’s Commentaries, revered for their terse style and their status as a witness to events. Historians used fine, pompous speech and engaged in flattery. With the rise of absolutism, official historiographers were accused of subjecting history to the interests of the king. Some of them, such as Scipion Dupleix or the Jesuits of the seventeenth century, were truly erudite scholars; others, following the example of Chastelain, historiographer for the court of Burgundy in the 1460s, did not hesitate to “speak the truth” against the follies of their master. Nevertheless, in this system of royal patronage, history becomes a means of “recording the splendor of the king’s undertakings and the detail of his miracles,” in the words of Chapelain, counselor to Colbert in the 1660s. The title of historiographer is envied, but also attacked in the name of integrity, because poetry for bribery degrades the very idea of history. Referring to Racine and Boileau, appointed to be Louis XIV’s historiographers in 1677, Mme. de Sévigné writes to BussyRabutin that the king deserves to have “other historians than poets.” Bussy-Rabutin replies that “these people discredit the truth even when they happen to tell it.”20 Three forms of history are developed in reaction to the historiographers’ subservience: memoirs, sermons, and erudition. When historiographers erect monuments in honor of princes, memorialists set the facts straight because they have been witnesses on the battlefield, in embassies, or in the king’s court. In writing their memoirs, Martin du Bellay (1569), Blaise de Montluc (1592), Michel de Castelnau (1621), Bassompierre (1665), and Retz (1677) have the ambition of “telling it like it is,” showing along the way how much they have contributed to the prince’s victories. History likes harangues, praises, lavish dress, and stylistic ornaments; memoirs practice unassuming diction, simple writing, and a “cleanliness free of both cosmetics and grime.”21

20. The quotations from the correspondence are taken from Raymond Picard, La carrière de Jean Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 318–20; Chapelain’s words are found on 79. Mme. de Sévigné’s original text can be found in her Lettres, vol. 5 (Paris: J. J. Blaise, 1820), 317. 21. Le Moyne quoted in Béatrice Guion, “Une narration continue de choses vraies, grandes, et publiques”: L’histoire selon le père Le Moyne,” Oeuvres et Critiques 25, no. 2 (2010): 91–102. See also Marc Fumaroli, “Les mémoires, ou l’historiographie royale en procès,” in La diplomatie de l’esprit: De Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 217–46.

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From his lofty pulpit, Bossuet disclosed another “truth” to the powerful in the king’s court: their nothingness. Glory belongs neither to the conquerors nor to those who serve them, but to the Creator. It is He who bestows favor or humbles, conveying His power to kings or withdrawing it. The inscriptions, the columns, the catafalques, the Condés’ glory, and the vainglory of the Ciceros of the world are the “empty marks of that which is no longer.”22 The man of the Church is less the Sun King’s courtier than the agent of God. Bayle is the one who, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), distinguishes history the most clearly from eloquence and panegyrics. The orator’s bombast is ill suited for history, which requires simplicity and gravitas. Independence from sovereigns counts among the “rules of the art of history.” The seventeenth-century jurisconsult and historian Capriata, specialist on Italy and Venice, prides himself on having maintained a balance between France and Spain. Though he may be quite attached to the household of Marguerite de Valois, he is right to divulge her failings: as a “public minister of the truth,” he contributes to “establishing the certainty of these facts.” The liberty of historians suffers neither endorsements nor rewards from the powerful. Historians must abandon the partisan spirit as well as slander. When asked where they are from, historians answer: “I am neither French, nor German, nor English, nor Spanish, nor anything of the sort. I am an inhabitant of the world . . . in service to the truth, who is my only queen.”23 Within the system of belles lettres, poetry and eloquence are the twin enemies of history.

Birth of the Writer and Literature Since history belongs to belles lettres, it will be part of “literature.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the term designates the knowledge of letters, in other words, the entire realm of secular knowledge, including mathematics. As the belles lettres are being constituted, “literature”

22. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, “Oraison funèbre de Louis de Bourbon, prince de Conde” (1687), in Oeuvres choisies (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1941), 520. 23. Pierre Bayle, “Usson,” in Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Rotterdam, 1715), 848–54, note F.

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becomes the erudite knowledge procured from frequenting the great texts, including the ancients, orators, poets, and historians: such is the definition given by Richelet’s dictionary in 1680. The two terms are so contiguous that “literature” is at first synonymous and then competitive with “belles lettres.” The treatise written by Abbé Batteux, Cours de belles-lettres, ou Principes de la littérature (1753), is republished a few years later under the sole title Principes de la littérature. In it Batteux defines the major literary genres (apology, epic, lyrical poetry, eloquence, history) as well as the rules of their composition, citing Homer, Virgil, Racine, and La Fontaine as examples. Hence a second shift: “literature” comes to define the corpus of texts themselves. The term refers less to a degree of learning than to a heritage of works. The important thing is not to learn the practice of rhetoric or to frequent the ancients and their fine Latin language in view of imitating them; it is rather to appreciate the works of the mind. This evolution is visible in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1765): literature is defined as the “knowledge of tasteful works, a veneer of history, poetry, eloquence, and criticism,” while “fine literature” designates “a choice passage from Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Bossuet, Racine, Pascal.”24 What is worthy of belonging in this canon? The works of “geniuses,” says Voltaire. This answer points to another lexical revolution: the birth of the writer. As early as the seventeenth century, the academies, salons, patrons, copyright, press, and language codification trace the social parameters within which writers and people of letters circulate.25 While the word “writer” takes on a laudatory character (since to write consists of producing a work with aesthetic ambitions), the expression “people of letters” becomes synonymous with ridiculous pedants, or “Jack of all letters,” as Tallemant des Réaux mockingly puts it. Be they historians, letter writers, fabulists, poets, or novelists, writers create pleasure for the public; they are people of high society and people in high society. The man of

24. Voltaire, “Littérature,” from Dictionnaire philosophique (1765), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 37 (Paris: Crapelet, 1819), 136–39. See Philippe Caron, Des “Belles Lettres” à la “Littérature”: Une archéologie des signes du savoir profane en langue française (1680–1760) (Paris: Société pour l’Information Grammaticale, 1992). 25. Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985), chap. 9.

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letters, however, knows Greek, philosophy, and algebra; he quotes and comments on others, similar to the “learned man,” who, according to La Bruyère, is a humble man holed up in his study, and who has meditated, searched, compared, and contrasted his entire life. When the man of letters triumphs in the Age of Enlightenment, he is designated a “great writer” involved in the political debates of the time. Voltaire has only scorn for antiquarians and scholars. It is at the end of the eighteenth century that the “writer” meets “literature”: writers create fine original works destined to be part of the canon. They draw from their ingenuity a universe where dwell heroes endowed with life, such as Rousseau’s Julie and Saint-Preux, and Goethe’s Werther. Celebrated and adulated by his readers, Rousseau saves his rough drafts and tells the story of his own life, contrary to Cervantes or Shakespeare, whose lives remain obscure but whose names are less those of an individual than of a certain brand of writing. They too become “writers” retroactively: one engenders Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Dulcinea, and the other, refusing to imitate the ancients, explores the human soul with all the power of his genius. Toward 1800, when Mme. de Staël publishes De la littérature, the Schlegel brothers and their friends among the Jena Romantics make literature into an absolute, a pure poiesis.26 Whereas for Abbé Batteux genius consisted of laying out a form and then drawing material from reality to fill it, the Romantics make writers into demiurges with no models other than themselves. “Literature” has become one of the highest spiritual values, and the “writer” is its priest.27 At the time, literature spanned all genres. Within three decades, Rousseau wrote a treatise on music, a discourse on the origins of inequality, an epistolary novel, an essay on pedagogy, a political treatise, and an autobiography. Voltaire has the same breadth. Around 1770, within a few months, the Scott James Beattie published his poem The Minstrel, whose torments prefigured Byron and Romanticism, and an Essay on the Nature

26. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand (Paris: Seuil, 1978); and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La naissance de la littérature: La théorie esthétique du romantisme allemand (Paris: Presses de l’ENS, 1983). 27. See Paul Bénichou, Le sacre de l’écrivain, 1750–1830: Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la France moderne (Paris: José Corti, 1973).

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and Immutability of Truth, intended to refute Hume. The German Romantics not only want to bring together within the novel all genres, including poetry, rhetoric, and prose, but also aim to fuse poetry with prose, literary creation, and criticism. For her part, Mme. de Staël takes into consideration “under the name literature, poetry, eloquence, history, and philosophy,” while at the same time taking care to distinguish between “philosophical writings and works of imagination.”28 The advent of literature and the writer thus does not upset the system of belles lettres. Within one century, however, its center of gravity moves toward the novel. In his Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant le XVIe siècle (Illustrious Men Who Published in France in the Sixteenth Century), Charles Perrault included “distinguished men of letters, philosophers, historians, orators, and poets.” Among the tragedians and men of erudition skilled “in the knowledge of belles lettres,” we find only one novelist, Honoré d’Urfé. According to period dictionaries, a novel was at the time a fable recounting adventures in love or chivalry: L’Astrée, but also Cléopâtre (1646), Le Grand Cyrus (1649), and Faramond (1661). With the exception of Pierre-Daniel Huet and a few others, the novel is not held in great esteem: with implausible plots, it offers the spectacle of all sorts of excess, and corrupts with its frivolity. History, by contrast, is a “teacher of life.” Thanks to history, the princess Henriette d’Angleterre loses her taste for novels: “Taking care to shape her understanding in reference to what is real, she despised these cold and dangerous fictions.”29 A century later, writers invent superreal worlds in the form of novels or “assembled” correspondences such as Clarissa (1748), La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Les liaisons dangereuses (1782), and Delphine (1802). Now, because of their evocative power and their instructive insights, these fictions enter into competition with history. For Mme. de Staël, novels provide an “intimate knowledge of every impulse of the human heart”—love, ambition, pride, and greed. They depict characters with such force and detail and paint such a complete picture of human passions that, by projecting themselves into it, readers acquire sensitivity to the moral lessons that

28. Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800; Paris: GF Flammarion, 1991), 90, 66. 29. Bossuet, “Oraison funèbre d’Henriette d’Angleterre” (1670), in Oeuvres choisies, 237.

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they convey. Such depth is not found in history, which offers the “great scene of public events” without touching human lives. In history, moral lessons are found only “en masse,” in reference to peoples and nations.30 History thus provides but a truncated image of the world, indifferent to common experience. The fiction of novels, however, based on verisimilitude and identification, becomes the truth of literature. Its themes are the impulses of the heart, interior life, psychological events, the aspirations of the individual in the face of social constraints, and the suffering of the exceptional individual. The real history as “teacher of life” is the novel. Blanckenburg in Germany, Clara Reeve in Great Britain, and Mme. de Staël in France will be its theorists from the 1770s through the 1790s. Within the realm of “literature,” all genres do not enjoy the same status. Whereas history formerly occupied a crucial position within belles lettres, its status has now been made precarious not only by the novel’s rise to power but also by the very ambition of literature in the Romantic vein. As Schelling puts it in 1796, “There is no more philosophy and there is no more history; poetry alone will outlive all the other arts and sciences.”31 As a veritable ontology of aesthetics, literature makes Saying coincide with Being. History, however, has nothing of a literary absolute: its vocation is precisely to account for what is outside the text.

History or the “Third Culture” Whereas the humanists placed astronomy, mathematics, and poetry within Letters, the fields of knowledge become more and more subject to norms, and structured by the opposition between “science” and “letters” (in the limited sense of belles lettres) in the eighteenth century. Founded by Colbert in the 1660s, the Académie des Sciences takes charge of physics and mathematics, while the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres studies history, numismatics, seals, charts, and ancient texts, devoting hundreds of papers to these subjects throughout the eighteenth century.

30. Mme. de Staël, Essai sur les fictions (1795; London: Colburn, 1813), 37–41. 31. Quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L’absolu littéraire, 54.

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As the sciences and letters are gradually separated from each other, certain characteristic strengths and weaknesses get attributed to them. Whoever studies science becomes the friend of truth but risks experiencing various forms of fatigue, discouragement, and danger while making his or her way up a steep path; the belles lettres are a flower garden where the mind indulges in delightful banter and verbal virtuosity. This war between disciplines is fed by the notion articulated by Fontenelle as early as 1702, suggesting that the “exact” sciences better fulfilled the needs of society, since they led to progress in navigation, surgery, agriculture, and mechanics. The utility of science is worth more than the pleasure of letters. A certain abbot demurred, recalling “how much the sciences owe to the belles lettres,” while another tried to establish “the utility of the belles lettres” and “the drawbacks of the apparently increasing tendency to favor exclusively mathematics and physics.”32 Nevertheless, science is decked out with every virtue in the Age of Enlightenment. Now, history cannot fail to be attracted by science: like science, it has the ambition to give a truthful account of reality and to produce socially useful knowledge. The scholars’ wariness of history as art, puffed up with rhymes, flattery, and antiquated rhetorical figures, leads them to abandon the system of belles lettres. In antiquity, Thucydides mistrusted efforts to please; at the end of the seventeenth century, Bayle was bothered by the proximity of eloquence and panegyrics to history. Was history still in its rightful place within literature at the time when the novel began its irresistible rise to the top? In the 1760s and 1770s, Abbé Batteux relegates history to the end of his manual on literature, between the genres of oratory and epistolary writing. The historian, states Batteux, must avoid strong language, elegant phrases, and brilliant ideas, because they convey passions and pride. “His entire duty is to show things the way they are.”33 The less one produces literature, the more one will tell the truth. History thus finds itself in an uncomfortable situation: rump literature if it remains in the system of belles lettres, but with no legitimacy among the exact sciences. It has several possibilities for gaining greater authority.

32. Philippe Caron, Des “Belles Lettres” à la “Littérature,” 281ff. 33. Abbé Batteux, Principes de la littérature, 5th ed., vol. 4 (Paris: Saillant et Nyon, 1774), 332–33.

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The first solution consists of showcasing the auxiliary “sciences” of epigraphy, numismatics, and sigillography. Such is the path blazed by Louis Jobert with his Science des médailles (1692). But the antiquarian history in which the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres excels has little in common with the spirit of Enlightenment. Did not Voltaire, while preparing The Age of Louis XIV, qualify the details of history as “vermin that kill great works”?34 One can also challenge the hierarchy of knowledge that placed letters below the sciences. In the 1740s and 1750s, several men of erudition asserted that the sciences owed much to the belles lettres, with their critical thinking and penchant for precision. For the young British Francophile Edward Gibbon, letters are useful to society if they can reason, and history partakes of the spirit of philosophy because it is “the science of causes and effects.” Be it a system, a means of interrelating, or of linear sequencing, history can explain human deeds all while remaining within the domain of literature.35 One last perspective is that of the “human sciences.” Originating around 1770 among the physiocrats and sensualists, these sciences set out to study individuals in their physical and moral dimensions in order to define an art of governing that would be based on the best institutions and would work for social well-being. In his report of 1792 on the organization of public schooling, Condorcet distinguishes among several types of knowledge: “letters” (including fine arts and erudition) and “moral and political sciences” are charged with studying human sentiments and principles of natural justice from which laws are derived. Can history, which concerns human beings and institutions, transfer from one field of knowledge to another? When it was founded in 1795, the Institut de France comprised three fields: the physical sciences and mathematics, the moral and political sciences, and literature and fine arts. Led by the circle of Ideologues, the second field was, among other things, and at the initiative of Daunou,

34. Voltaire to l’abbé Dubos, October 30, 1738, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 43, Correspondance générale, bk. 2 (Paris: Armand-Aubrée, 1830), 83. 35. Edward Gibbon, Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (London: Becket, 1762), 65. (Written originally in French; English translation available at http://name.umdl.umich.edu/004849596 .0001.000 [accessed May 1, 2016].

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concerned with historical research. That same year, Volney delivered his Leçons d’histoire at the École Normale Supérieure, an elite school created during the French Revolution in 1794: while refusing to call it a science, he undertook a reflection on the epistemology and deontology of history so that it might become more solid, less dogmatic, and capable of shedding light on the science of government. Between letters and the sciences, history was beginning to embody a “third culture.”36 In 1803, Napoleon reorganized the Institut de France by eliminating the moral and political sciences, deemed too subversive: the historians had to join the new field of “ancient history and literature.” With the decline of human sciences under Napoleon’s Consulate, letters and the sciences once again found themselves facing off against each other. “Scientists” and “writers” confronted each other within an ever more politicized arena. By setting the century of Louis XIV, the golden age of belles lettres, over against the Enlightenment, enamored with scientific materialism, the champions of letters were taking on counterrevolutionary overtones. Louis de Bonald described the face-off of the two camps in 1819: on one side were the “natural and exact sciences,” supported by “auxiliary troops” such as statistics and archaeology, while among the “frivolous letters” on the other side, tragedy, the epic, and history were allied with the novel and vaudeville.37 In this “war between letters and the sciences,” human sciences were getting flattened. Totally lacking any scientific ambition, cut off from archaeology, statistics, and the study of antiquity, history risked being no more than a pleasurable pastime.

36. On the subject of this division, see Charles Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); and Wolf Lepenies, Les trois cultures: Entre science et littérature, l’avènement de la sociologie (Paris: MSH, 1990). 37. Louis de Bonald, “Sur la guerre des sciences et des lettres,” in Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques, vol. 2 (Paris: Le Clère, 1819), 305–10. See also Jean-Luc Chappey, “De la science de l’homme aux sciences humaines enjeux politiques d’une configuration de savoir (1770–1808),” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, no. 15 (2006): 43–68.

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The Novel, Father of History?

When two of Shakespeare’s former actors, Condell and Heminges, publish his works for the first time in 1623, they divide the plays into three sets: the comedies, the histories, and the tragedies. The oddity of this classification is glaringly obvious. Among the histories are found only the plays dealing with English history, arranged in the chronological order of reigning monarchs: John, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III, Henry VIII. The plays featuring classical antiquity (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra), and Macbeth, named after an eleventh-century Scottish king, are placed with the “tragedies.” Conversely, certain “historical” plays (such as Richard III) are clearly tragic.1 The 1623 folio in fact expresses a conception of history, understood as a political narrative punctuated by the succession of Christian and English

1. Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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kings. This way of seeing things contrasts sharply with the Chronicles of Holinshed, a sixteenth-century historian who was the bard’s source for Macbeth and King Lear. If Shakespeare’s dramatic works (or “literature”) had an influence on historians, it was as much due to his representation of political crises and his depiction of cruel, ambitious, or mad rulers as to the construction of a “recent” national history of interplay between dynasties and the people of England. It was for similar reasons that the novel shaped history in the nineteenth century.

Chateaubriand and History as Epic From his Essay on Revolutions (1797) until his Vie de Rancé (1844), and including his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Chateaubriand wrote history: his family’s history and his own, the history of the ancien régime and of the new France, of the Revolution and of Napoleon. To the extent that this history spans “the epic of my times,” Chateaubriand was at the same time a historian, a poet, and an orator, as was Bossuet, whom he cites. But the “historian of lofty figures” does not see himself as a scholar or man of letters. He mocks the “antiquarians” under Louis XIV (when the king had a Roman temple razed in order to build a chateau), for example, as well as the sophistry of Adolphe Thiers, that “brilliant historian.”2 In the new terminology, Chateaubriand is situated alongside other “writers.” As the Muses’ darling child, he awaits inspiration at his worktable, next to his turtledoves. The popularity of Atala along with the declarations of love from his female readers flatter his “author’s vanity.” He admires Milton’s Paradise Lost, Ossian’s poetry, Werther, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Studies of Nature. According to Chateaubriand, the world of letters is quite hierarchical. At its summit we find the “mother geniuses,” Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, who “gave birth to all the others and nursed them.” (Chateaubriand is fond of recalling that he is himself the soul of the Romantic generation.)

2. François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 2 vols. (1847; Paris: Garnier/Livre de Poche, 1998), 1:401. 758; 2:104, 394.

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Next come authors, epigones, “a family of Renés writing poetry and prose,” and finally scholars and learned copyists, in descending order of prestige. From Homer to Byron, Chateaubriand composed a library of writers, seminal geniuses who invent their own worlds, but “literature” still designated the entire array of letters (poetry, theatrical works, the novel, history, and essays). So it was that, at the outset of the nineteenth century, the generation of writers like Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Staël, Bonald, and Chateaubriand brought about a “change in literature” and gave rise to the “new literature.”3 The system of belles lettres still involved various types of writing, but was increasingly dominated by texts with aesthetic ambitions, those offering a level of glory superior or at least equal to that of statesmen (hence the constant intersection of Chateaubriand’s itinerary with that of Napoleon in the Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. It is within this intellectual context that Chateaubriand conceives of The Martyrs (1809). Combining history, epic, poetry, and narrative in recounting the unhappy love of a Christian officer of the Roman army for a Homerian priestess, the work is a sort of historical propaganda novel: the Christian supernatural is superior to pagan mythology. Such a project by no means excludes erudition. We know that Chateaubriand painstakingly researched his subject, visiting the major sites of ancient Greek and Christian history, and consulting with his learned friends, including a professor of Greek literature at the Sorbonne. He cites his sources in the preface, acknowledging that he has taken certain liberties: he made Diocletian look somewhat better than he really was; he situated the plot in Rome (and not in Nicomedia, the emperor’s usual abode); and he accelerated “the time a bit” in order to bring together the great men of the Church in one single book. Why did this epic full of implausibility and anachronisms generate enthusiasm among the young liberal historians? Could it be that The Martyrs was a proto-history, a method trying to find its way, clumsily propped up by claims to impartiality, pedantic topographical details, and bibliographical “authorities”? It was instead the imaginative creativity

3. Ibid., 2:48, 69, 76.

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and inspired style of The Martyrs that, even though it was a work of fiction, suddenly revealed a new way to write history. Its description of the Franks is chock-full of fanciful details taken from Tacitus and Sidonius Apollinarius: sweaty warriors cloaked in bearskins, eyes rolling in blood, and death canticles. They have such evocative power and display such a potent sense of dramatization that the narrative finally becomes not just plausible but alive. The work produces the “resurrection” of the past, in the same way that Michelet will a few decades later. Around the year 1810, when the public is becoming acquainted with The Martyrs, historians are splintered into three groups. First, “writers” like Chateaubriand follow in the steps of Voltaire and Gibbon: they write history on the basis of their literary talent. Second, erudite scholars are represented at the Institut de France (the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is reestablished in 1816) and in the German universities in the process of professionalization. Third, “historiographers” such as Anquetil, successor to Mézeray and the abbot Velly: like them, he authored an abridged Histoire de France as a secondary school textbook. For the latter group, with their pompous style, their conventional formulas, their fairy tales about “Clovis, founder of the French monarchy,” Augustin Thierry has nothing but contempt. They would speak of “royal favor” and “gallantry” in the court of the Frankish kings, when in reality they were crude Germanic looters struggling against the power of Rome! Having become the leader of the new school of history under the July Monarchy (1830–1848), Augustin Thierry relates that reading The Martyrs in secondary school at Blois dazzled his imagination and led him to choose history as his vocation.4 The anecdote is doubtless a tribute to the author who was from then on to be the patriarch of French letters, but it is nevertheless indicative of the powerful intellectual impact that Chateaubriand made on historians born in the 1790s. His epic was more accurate than history according to Anquetil and Velly, which rather resembled a children’s story or a page out of Artamène or the Grand Cyrus (a lesserknown novel of some thirteen thousand pages by Mme. de Scudéry). Fiction had become less fictitious than history.

4. Augustin Thierry, preface to Récits des temps mérovingiens (1840), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Lévy Frères, 1868), 10.

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Scott and the Historical Novel Having enjoyed tremendous success, the novels of Walter Scott are translated in France two years after the publication of Waverley in 1814 and lead to a historiographical revolution. In a way, Scott is less of a historian than Chateaubriand: he is neither a witness to his own time nor the historian of revolutions, and his eleven-volume biography of Napoleon is deeply apologetic. He depicts a highly idealized past, with sandy moors, forests, cairns, manors, knights, minstrels, tournaments, and bagpipes. If Walter Scott is nevertheless something of a historian, it is not only because he situates Ivanhoe (1819) in the England of the twelfth century and devotes Quentin Durward (1823) to one of Louis XI’s archers. It is also because he relies on a rich and varied documentation to set the background for the plot. As he explains to his admirers, it is moreover because he adapts the techniques used by the medieval chroniclers Froissart and Commynes in France: topographies, tableaux, descriptions, portraits, scenes, actions, dialogues, and details. This “vivification of history”5 makes readers feel that the men of the past, though now dead and temporally distant, were, like them, human beings endowed with life and filled with passions. Within a few years, historical narration found itself totally reinvented. Scott’s novels inspire Barante’s Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne (1824), Augustin Thierry’s History of the Conquest of England (1825), and even Eugène Sue’s Histoire de la marine française (1834). In Barante, we see duels, tournaments, banquets, and weddings, as if the dukes were our contemporaries whose lives unfold before our eyes. In the mid-1820s, one critic observed that “history in the true sense of the word has followed the path cleared by the Scottish novelist. . . . Until then, modern history had been little more than a bare-boned skeleton; Walter Scott, Barante, and Thierry restored to it its muscles, flesh, and colors!”6 In the 1830s, Pushkin pens not only poetry but also a scholarly study of the Pugachev Rebellion and a historical love novel, The Captain’s Daughter, inspired by

5. Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library (1894; Grosse Pointe, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1968), 220. 6. J.-J. V., “De la réalité en littérature,” Le Mercure du XIXe Siècle 11 (1825): 502–9.

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that rebellion, all while hanging out in libraries and archives in order to prepare a history of Peter the Great. Scott made things up, of course, in contrast to the historians. But the important lesson for the latter group was to observe that Scott’s romances made the erudition of former masters of history suddenly appear phony: Scott’s imaginary narratives carried more truth than history itself. By bringing people to life, indicating their relations, and revealing the complexity of interests and sentiments, his mode of narration lifted history out of the wearisome litany of royal successions. Augustin Thierry wrote as early as 1820 that Ivanhoe brought the Norman Conquest back to life, while historians shrouded it in the abstract commonplaces of power, government, and succession. Fictional characters such as the aged Lord Cedric of Rotherwood, his ward Rowena, Rebecca the beautiful Jewess, and the knight himself enliven “the real and truly historical theater in which the fable of Ivanhoe is set.”7 What is real and true in this fable is the human warmth and intelligence of the past, which scholarly erudition is incapable of rendering. But the impact of Chateaubriand and Scott was not just “literary.” The contribution of their works cannot be summed up in the notions of “resurrection of the past” and “local color.” What the liberal historians renewed through their reading of these novels was not just their art of writing; it was also their method.

The Objects of Historical Interest In his sixth Lettre sur l’histoire de France (Letter on French History), Augustin Thierry notes that Scott’s novels have stirred up curiosity about the Middle Ages, previously decried as barbaric, and for certain specific episodes of the era such as the Norman Conquest, the conflict between the king of France and the Duke of Burgundy, and so on. On a more general level, the Waverley novels display a new interest in the common people, represented by certain characters (such as the swineherd Gurth, Wamba the buffoon, and the drum major), in the depiction of everyday

7. Augustin Thierry, Le Censeur Européen, May 27, 1820, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Lévy Frères, 1867), 442.

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life (including mores, occupations, clothing, and poverty), and by a political principle (that history is governed by the silent activity of the masses). It is a matter of “rendering justice to all people.”8 The common people come onto the stage. We will find them again later in Michelet’s work and in Jean Jaurès’s Socialist History of the French Revolution. The arrival of the anonymous masses democratizes history.

The Problems The paradigm of conquest and domination is one of the key elements of Augustin Thierry’s historiography. His history is structured by a millennial conflict between subjects and masters, with the “vanquished” (the Gallo-Romans, Saxons, serfs, and Third Estate) bending under the yoke of the “conquerors” (the Franks, Normans, lords, and nobility). As he himself was born into a petty bourgeois family, Thierry strives to restore to the commoners their rightful glory: the Third Estate did not suddenly spring up out of the ground in 1789, but rather had experienced a long ascent through the Roman municipal regime and the autonomy granted to the free towns in the Middle Ages. To a certain extent, this analytical framework finds its source in Ivanhoe. Thierry constantly recalls his interest in the Norman conquest of England and the subjugation of the indigenous Saxons: “This great deed . . . had struck my imagination as an unsolved problem full of mysteries.”9 Scott’s novels thus contributed to opening up the problematics of history: Thierry and Guizot’s “race struggle” was to inspire Marx’s concept of “class struggle.”

The Field of Investigation In his first Letter, published in 1820, Thierry recalls the necessity of writing a “history of France.” The new school saluted by Chateaubriand in his Études historiques (1831) has been cemented by a common goal: laying “the foundations of our national history.” Now, just as the poems of

8. Walter Scott, Waverley (Paris: Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2003), 287. See Louis Maigron, Le roman historique à l’époque romantique: Essai sur l’influence de Walter Scott (Paris: Hachette, 1898), 86–95. 9. Augustin Thierry, Dix ans d’études historiques (1834), in Oeuvres complètes, 3:337.

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Ossian are supposed to reflect the Celtic soul, as Herder makes himself the voice of German culture, and as Manzoni’s The Betrothed follows a humble Italian couple in seventeenth-century Lombardy, Scott celebrates the generosity of the Scots and the spirit of independence of the Saxons. These national novels correspond to a conviction deeply rooted in the minds of historians that something decisive had happened in France between 1789 and 1815. The fact that they themselves had lived through this ordeal as epic heroes made them historian-witnesses, and their competence was enhanced by the experience they could call upon. The “modern personality, so much broader and more powerful,” which Michelet points to in his preface of 1869, is the one born from the Revolution: historians had experienced history before writing it. Therein lies the difference between the Benedictines of the seventeenth century, cloistered in their library, and the Chateaubriands, Thierrys, and Guizots. From the storming of the Bastille until the battle of Waterloo, events had taught them “to see the reality of facts beneath the letter of the chronicles. The historians found the nation, the nation supports the historians, as we see in a entire series of examples: Daunou is named to the Collège de France, then put in charge of the Archives in 1830; the inspection of historical monuments is instituted in 1830, followed by the agrégation (a highly demanding competitive examination conferring the most prestigious qualification for a secondary school teacher) in history in 1831 and the Société de l’Histoire de France in 1833; huge collections of archives are undertaken in 1835, and the École des Chartes reopens in 1836. The heroic saga of the nation gives birth to an embryonic community of scholars, equipped with a unified program of research. The nation becomes the legitimate frame of reference for history, and for a long time.

The Demonstration Behind each one of Scott’s characters there is an epoch, a nation, a social class, or a struggle tying the individual to the collective. To the extent that he is emblematic, the individual transcends his specificity—and his fictitious status—and serves as a type, an example, or a symbol. This is the system of representation that historians will borrow from the novel. In his Récits des temps mérovingiens (Narratives from the Merovingian Era, 1840), Thierry gathers “the most characteristic facts” and foregrounds

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“four figures who are emblematic of their time”: Frédégonde, the rudimentary barbarian; Chilpéric, the slightly civilized barbarian; Mummolus, the civilized man who became a barbarian; and Grégoire de Tours, the nostalgic man of civilization.10 In epistemological terms, the function of individuals and their deeds as signifiers will outlive Thierry’s historical claims, which will be refuted toward the end of the nineteenth century. (The Norman Conquests faded away rapidly, and the development of liberties was not the revenge of the vanquished.) In sum, the methodological revolution brought about by the novel is carried out in four areas: the objects of historical interest, in other words, the themes chosen by historians; the problems or questions that historians pose; the field of investigation, or the frame of reference proposed; and the demonstration, with the arguments deployed. The novel does not account for all of the historiographical developments of the 1820s and 1830s. To an even greater extent, the French Revolution determined a new relationship not only to that period which had suddenly become the “ancien régime” but also to the past, its heritage, and its memory in general. The work of Augustin Thierry is that of a historian: he delves into the huge collections of the Benedictines; pays tribute to Sismondi, Guizot, and Barante, who initiated a “veritable revolution in their way of writing French history”; and his reflection on the Third Estate is a continuation of the debates of the eighteenth century opposing Boulainvilliers, Saint-Simon, Mably, and Sieyès. It was still the case, however, that the war song of the “forty thousand barbarians” in The Martyrs, like the duels in Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, served only a narrative purpose. If the fictions of the epic poet Chateaubriand and the novelist Scott contained more truth than the narratives (or rather the quasi-fictions) of the historian Anquetil, it was because they brought the past to life through their characters, emotions, and atmosphere. It was also because, by isolating actions and formulating problems, they provided their readers with tools for making the past intelligible. Asking a question, selecting facts, telling a story, and making the reader understand are all “literary” means through which history will gradually acquire the

10. Augustin Thierry, preface to the Récits des temps mérovingiens, 7. See Marcel Gauchet, “Les lettres sur l’histoire de France d’Augustin Thierry,” in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Nora, in La nation, bk. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 247–316.

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status of science. At the heart of literature, the epic and the novel accompany history along the way to its increasingly scientific nature. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a group of writer-historians inspired a generation of historian-writers in the areas of narration and thematics as well as in methodology and the use of archives. However, Scott’s success in setting the trend for historical novels led to competition with history. Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1830), Han d’Islande (1823), and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831); Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826), Balzac’s Les Chouans (1829); and Mérimée’s Chronique du temps de Charles IX, not to mention the novels of Alexandre Dumas, constitute a literature perfectly contemporaneous with the first works of Barante, Thierry, Guizot, and Michelet. The rediscovery of Shakespeare encouraged the Romantics’ penchant for history: it is not only events that appear in the limelight but also their driving forces and unseemly aspects hidden behind the scenes. By having scenes alternate between the noble and the base, and by showing the thatched hut at the foot of the palace, and the slave present at the victory, the theater offered a sweeping panorama of a “complete humanity.”11 In his preface to Cromwell, Hugo entrusts literature with a new mission: that of painting an all-encompassing tableau of life, from buffoonery to sacrifice, and from the grotesque to the sublime. Drama speaks the reality of the world because it leaves nothing out. Right where neo-Shakespearean drama intersected with “a Walter Scott–like history of France,”12 Vigny’s Cinq-Mars told the story of the conspiracy plotted by Cinq-Mars in the seventeenth century to bring down Richelieu’s tyranny and reinstate the rights of the nobility. The theory of truth that emerges in that novel bases itself on history, all the better to surpass that history. Vigny distinguishes between “the TRUTH of art and what is TRUE in fact.” The former fulfills the latter: art enhances the event in order to endow it with the moral signification that it must retain in the eyes of posterity. Artists need history just as the sculptor needs marble. They have to know “all that is true about every century,” but if they had to limit themselves to this game of solitaire, art would be nothing more than an intensification of life, a duplication of “sad, disenchanting

11. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 2:664. 12. Honoré de Balzac, preface to La peau de chagrin (Paris: Gosselin, 1831), 29.

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reality.” The writer has to relinquish the positivist mode, instead elevating facts to a superior level of truth, all while witnesses protest and scholars dig into their documents and leaf through their books.13 Vigny sublimates the reality to which historians confine themselves. By choosing the force of beauty over the raw, teeming facts, the spirit of the time rather than the profusion of details, depth in place of the routine of precision, he rediscovers the capacity for idealization that was found in the Ciceronian history as eloquence. But it is not so easy to swear off the idolatry of little factual details. In contrast to Scott, Vigny places historical characters at the forefront of his drama, which requires him to painstakingly gather documentary evidence. Does not this concern for authenticity risk trapping the post-Scottian writer in the minutiae of erudition? When, in Cinq-Mars, Richelieu reads a page of his memoirs to Father Joseph, Vigny inserts a footnote referring to the Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France (Collection of Memoirs on French History). Beginning with the second edition (June 1826), he feels the need to correct his errors and indicate his sources: the cardinal’s attire is described in the Mémoires manuscrits de Pontis, available at the library of the Arsenal; one of Cinq-Mars’s handwritten letters containing his last will and testament has been conserved at the Royal Library of Paris. Vigny, who feared debasing his art to the level of reality, ends up binding himself to anecdotal facts. The writer was not as free as he had hoped, and ideal beauty becomes secondary to the reality. He was still imitating the master. In the “Magnum Opus” edition of his novels, Walter Scott added almost eight hundred footnotes of all sizes. He explains why in the general preface of 1829: mentioning his sources will provide his readers with another source of pleasure, just as the “internal machinery” of a watch stimulates a child’s curiosity. Will the growing prestige of history drive novelists to provide evidence of their professionalism? When, in 1843, and with respect to Les Burgraves, Hugo is accused of trafficking in the legend of the ritual murders committed by Jews in the thirteenth century, he reminds the director of the Jewish Archives that the

13. Alfred de Vigny, “Réflexions sur la vérité dans l’art” (1827), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1993), 5–11.

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dramatic poet is a historian and “has no more the right to remake history than to re-create humanity.”14 It is not the independence of the poet that is making its voice heard here; it is the historian’s scruples. The accusation of being in error or untruthful is so damning that the novelist, even though sovereign in his own universe, finds it unbearable: his liberty was not so great as to brush aside questions about his veracity simply for the sake of fiction. It is also the case that historians reacted to the success of the novel by pulling it over onto their turf. The German historian Ranke, who admired Scott but was shocked by his treatment of Charles the Bold and Louis XI in Quentin Durward, promised himself that he would never “poeticize.”15 Referring to the same novel, Guizot judged that the burgomaster of Liège was represented as “a true bourgeois of comedy, fat, spineless, inexperienced, totally lacking audacity,” whereas in fact the bourgeois of the time always wore a coat of mail, with spear in hand.16 Similar criticisms are voiced against Cinq-Mars. Writing in Le Spectateur in 1826, SainteBeuve denounced the liberties that Vigny was taking with his characters, overloading their conduct and their personality to the liking of his imagination. Speaking at the Académie Française twenty years later, the Count Molé reproached Vigny for having gravely compromised “the truth, and therefore the morality of history.” The accusation was also leveled at the passages of Stello devoted to the captivity of André Chénier during the Reign of Terror.17 Once novelists are interested in history, they do not have the right to abuse the truth: fiction is judged by the measure of reality.

The Historian as Creator The doctrine of “the truth of art” brings about an initial conflict between historians and novelists: Do the latter honor or flout the truth? This

14. Quoted by Pascal Melka, Victor Hugo, un combat pour les opprimés (Paris: La Compagnie Littéraire, 2008), 166–67. 15. Quoted by Cicely Wedgwood, The Sense of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 10–11. 16. François Guizot, Cours d’histoire moderne: Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (1828; Brussels: Hauman, 1838), 215. 17. Louis-Mathieu Molé, Réponse au discours de M. le comte Alfred de Vigny (1837; Paris: Firmin Didot, 1846), 325.

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question masks a second conflict over literary creation. For Vigny, the “chrysalis of facts” can soar to lofty heights only on the wings of imagination and genius. Failing that, history is condemned to trudge along in the dust of details. In other words, the poet creates, not the historian. Against this neo-Aristotelian profession of faith, which excludes history from “literature” (in the Romantics’ sense of the term), historians will declare that they too can be creators. Not that they invent fictitious beings, but that by personifying groups of people and naming forces, they give rise to new characters. For Michelet, it will be France, the People, the Witch, Woman; for Ranke, the Spirit of the Time, Ideas, the Invisible Powers such as the State and the Church; for Bancroft, America, Progress, Providence; and for Carlyle, the Hero and, in his French Revolution (1837), the Sun, the Guillotine, the Faubourg SaintAntoine, and even the Revolution itself, which, “like an angel of death, hangs over France.”18 These historians are demiurges because they invent characters that exist. Michelet adds another set of people: the dead. The archivist-poet is the legislator of this “admirable necropolis” into which he has gone down to work. “Easy does it, messieurs, let us proceed by order, please.”19 He brings back to life those who are deceased, murdered, or swallowed up by the passing of time. Shedding tears for them, he explains to them their own enigma, and this responsibility makes the historian a Prometheus, whose fire awakens the frozen voices that have fallen silent. Historians create by transmitting their energy to people of centuries past. This gift of life is another name for literary creation. Carlyle’s French Revolution is a reconstitution or a reenactment during which he calls up the protagonists with a resounding “you”: he then penetrates into their hearts and minds, varying his point of view and leading the reader from the Assemblies to the towers of Notre-Dame. We can measure the importance of Carlyle’s work by comparing his text with one of his sources, the Histoire de France depuis la fin du règne de Louis XVI jusqu’à l’année 1825 (French History from the End of the Reign of Louis XVI to 1825), published by Abbé Montgaillard. On February 28, 1791, the

18. Carlyle’s French Revolution, ed. Ruth Scurr (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 169. 19. Jules Michelet, “Éclaircissement,” in Histoire de France, bk. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1833), 701–2.

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sans-culottes from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine attack the keep of the castle of Vincennes (because rumor had it that the royalists were stocking arms there), while the aristocrats rush into the Tuileries to protect the king. The national guard, commanded by Lafayette, puts down both of these seditious movements. Carlyle’s use of personification, symbolism, exhortation, dramatic shortcuts, spectator involvement, formulae, and metaphors contrasts with Abbé Montgaillard’s linear narrative. Ranke has recourse to the same techniques to point out young François I’s bravery during the campaign of Milan in 1515: “Who does not know that, in the night that interrupted the battle, he rested completely armed on the barrel of a cannon, having laid down only his helmet; that he slaked his thirst, like the others, with

TABLE 1 Montgaillard’s Histoire de France (1827)

Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837)a

The rumor

“It was rumored for some time in Paris that arms and munitions of all kinds were being transported to the keep of the Vincennes castle at night.”

“A Tuileries, sold to Austria and Coblentz, should have no subterranean passage. Out of which might not Coblentz or Austria issue, some morning; and, with cannon of long range, bethunder a patriotic SaintAntoine into smoulder and ruin!”

The faubourg

“A huge crowd starts making its way out of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to go demolish the keep.”

“Saint-Antoine turns out, as it has now often done; and . . . moves eastward to that eye-sorrow of Vincennes.”

The royalists

“Most of these individuals were dressed in black with their hair drawn back, and carried with them pistols and daggers.”

“And you, ye Friends of Royalty, snatch your poniards of improved structure, made to order; your sword-canes, secret arms, and tickets of entry.”

Lafayette

“After having repelled the proletarians at Vincennes, he came to the royal residence to disperse those who regularly frequented the king’s court.”

“Such sight meets Lafayette, in the dusk of the evening, as he returns, successful with difficulty at Vincennes: Sans-culotte Scylla hardly weathered, here is Aristocrat Charybdis gurgling under his lee!”

a

Carlyle’s words are cited from the online edition of his French Revolution, bk. 2.3, “The Tuileries,” http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/french-revolution/ (accessed May 6, 2016).

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water from the ditches full of bloody mud; that he returned to battle at daybreak, with renewed courage, and achieved victory?”20 This history is thoroughly heroic. It sweeps everyone up in the epic: the king, daggered knights, the faubourg, and the historian-playwright, along with the reader, trembling with excitement. Such grandiose compositions doubtless have something thrilling about them. In the 1830s and 1840s, Michelet’s History of France, Bancroft’s History of the United States, and Macaulay’s History of England are the songs of nations that engender themselves and regenerate, a fusion of faces in which the universal is embodied. It is not only because it exalts the nation, liberty, and human progress that this epic is irresistible; it is also that the logos brings to life under our very eyes a fresco in which, as they clash, tyrants and peoples play out the destiny of humanity. In the first part of the nineteenth century, Grimm, Michelet, Macaulay, and Ranke were reaching a welleducated public outside the circle of specialists, as do nowadays historians of totalitarianism and World War II such as Antony Beevor, Ian Kershaw, and Timothy Snyder. “In this book was my life, it has passed over into the book,” writes Michelet in the preface that sums up his great work. The historian’s art is deeply personal, which does not mean it is arbitrary. It is the historian as a man and as a creator who throws himself into the battle, giving his life to revive the dead. That is also what makes Romantic historians writers, driven by their sensibility, finding in themselves the coherence of their works. As Barthes has shown, Michelet’s work is unified by his ravenous assimilation of the dead, fertility rites, voyeuristic eroticism, the power of women, animal portraits, and fascination with blood—black, putrefied, confined blood, or rich, plethoric, impetuous blood. For Ranke, history is literature: it mobilizes the driving spirit of a language, and the aesthetic sensibility, courage, and sincerity of the writer, along with the writer’s ability to re-create from collected evidence.21 We are not very far from the Schlegel brothers.

20. Leopold von Ranke, Histoire de France, principalement pendant le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle (Paris: Klincksiek, 1854), 93. 21. Rudoif Vierhaus, “Historiography between Science and Art,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. Georg Iggers and James Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 61–69.

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What is all too easy to forget is that Romantic history had a scholarly ambition. Trained in philology at the University of Leipzig, Ranke returns to original documents, cites his sources, and sets up a rich critical apparatus. His readers admire the impartiality with which the Protestant historian, full of the “sovereign calm of knowledge that does not want to sacrifice the truth to prejudice and fanaticism,” approaches the history of the papacy.22 For his part, Michelet is in charge of the historical section of the National Archives in Paris. As a man of great erudition who devours archives and discovers previously unknown documents, he utilizes a wide variety of sources in his History of France and in his History of the French Revolution, as he had in his earlier work History of the Roman Republic (1831): soils, landscapes, inscriptions, medallions, manuscripts, rare printed documents, legislative texts, trial records, and lists of grievances. The history that Michelet writes is already scholarly: it combines the “little erudite detail,” “a thousand documents of all kinds,” a national frame of reference, problematization, verification of chronicles, examination of breaking-off points, openness to other kinds of knowledge, and the intellectual curiosity that leads him to take into consideration economics, language, works of art, sensibilities, imaginary realisms, diseases, food, and even clothing. Of course, Michelet gets it wrong from time to time, as when he speaks of the fear of the year 1000, which was in fact a myth. What is not wrong, however, is wanting to understand the beliefs (what we would have called “mentalities” forty years ago) of a serf plowing his field, of a captive held in a castle tower, or a monk haunted by damnation. Armed with his capacity for analysis, Michelet even reminds us that “the historical method is often the opposite of a truly literary art.”23 That is why he is less a poet than a writer of historical scholarship.

Balzac and the Moral Sciences Did competition with the novel drive history toward that “third culture” consisting of the reemerging human sciences? Having become minister 22. Alexandre de Saint-Chéron, Introduction to Léopold Ranke, Histoire de la papauté pendant les XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Debécourt, 1838), xxiii. 23. Jules Michelet, “Préface de 1869,” in Histoire de France, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1871), xxx.

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of public instruction in 1832, Guizot reestablished the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in order to give them what they had “always lacked, a truly scholarly character.” The Academy discussed major problems of the time such as endemic poverty, abandoned children, and prisons, and invited historians for that very purpose. Michelet presided over the 1837 history contest devoted to the abolition of slavery. As a veteran of the Age of the Ideologues, Daunou was an ex officio member of the Academy. His career illustrates nonetheless the perennial character of the belles lettres: as a member and later permanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, he had contributed to the Histoire littéraire de la France and to the Histoire littéraire d’Italie under the Restoration, before becoming the mastermind of the Cours d’études historiques under the July Monarchy. As a poet, orator, archivist, and admirer of Boileau and the Greek historians who despised Romanticism, Daunou embodied a history that fully partook of literature.24 But just as the novel influenced history, so it came to have a bearing on moral and political sciences as well. The upheavals of the Revolution gave rise to an anxiety: post-1789 society seemed to have become inscrutable. Inasmuch as they elucidate the social realm, the novels of the 1830s and 1840s belong to the same hermeneutical system as the “paintings of mores,” “physiologies,” and other “investigations” (often mandated by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques): they offered a sort of pre-sociology capable of deciphering contemporary social life, probing society’s wounds, and understanding the effects of freedom. Beyond national and ideological differences, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, Honoré-Antoine Frégier’s Des classes dangereuses, Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris, Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour, all published between 1837 and 1850, confirm that the sharp rise of newspapers was intertwined with the uncontested reign of the novel and the beginnings of the social sciences. In each case, these works aim to acquire knowledge about the common people of the lower classes in London or Paris, from their life in the streets to their miserable dwellings in the slums.

24. Benjamin Guérard, “Notice sur M. Daunou,” Bibliothèque de l’École de chartes 3 (1842): 209–57.

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Dual offspring of the Scottian revolution, the realist novel and national history entered into competition with each other in several areas: the aim for truth, the ability to make sense of human society past and present, the emergence of the common people, and the regeneration of the past. On several occasions, and in the preface to La peau de chagrin in particular, Balzac claimed that the novelist divined the truth by means of “a sort of second sight,” inventing a true account “by analogy.” In fact, he had recourse to a form of demonstration: characterization according to social types. By concentrating certain characteristic traits within one character, he developed a “generic model,” in other words, a social fiction having the capacity to render intelligible (the thirty-year-old woman, the spinster, the provincial bachelor, and so on).25 This epistemology of the emblematic made it possible to understand the faceless, teeming masses of the common people. We find it everywhere, in both Augustin Thierry and Michelet, but also in Mayhew’s portraits (of the fruit and vegetable vendor, the little girl selling flowers, and the young prostitute), and also in Les Français peints par eux-memes (SelfPortraits of the French), a series of brochures presenting a “social type.” (Balzac inaugurated the series with the portrayal of the grocer.) In the Vauquer boardinghouse, one of the famous settings of Old Goriot (1835) by Balzac, the urban habitat, furniture, clothing, and boarders all combine to create both the moral atmosphere and the sociological explanation. The characters carry with them a history—their birth, personal qualities, financial assets, and profession—that situates them within both Balzac’s narration and French society. For Henry James, who admires him, Balzac is as much a creator as “a Benedictine of reality,” an insatiable investigator, driven implacably by the urge to record in writing and explain.26 Situated halfway between the national epic and the moral and political sciences, Balzac’s Human Comedy succeeds better than history at making postrevolutionary society intelligible.

25. Jérôme David, “‘Une réalité à mi-hauteur’: Exemplarités littéraires et généralisations savantes au XIXe siècle,” Annales HSS, no. 2 (March–April 2010): 263–90. 26. Henry James, “Honoré de Balzac” (1902), in Theory of Fiction: Henry James, ed. James Miller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 79–80. See Judith Lyon-Caen, La lecture et la vie: Les usages du roman au temps de Balzac (Paris: Tallandier, 2006).

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Hence Balzac’s incessant claims: he considers himself to be “more a historian than a novelist,” and more aware of the significance of mores than scholars uniquely “concerned with facts and dates.”27 In Philosophical Studies (1834), he also asserts his superiority over “black-robed historians who think themselves to be great for having recorded facts.” He pursues his polemical sorties against history in the foreword to The Human Comedy (1842). By paying attention to mores, which change according to social milieus and time periods, the novelist writes a contemporary, democratic history, whereas the historian, entrenched in his “dry, tedious nomenclatures,” touches only the surface of societies. Balzac does for nineteenth-century France what had not been possible for Rome, Egypt, Persia, or India: probing, recording, explaining, and establishing the meaning of things and human actions. Not only do writers accomplish a task more difficult than that of the historian, but also, at the end of the day, their novels are more authentic, more convincing, and more true. When Balzac famously praises novelists’ ability to “compete with the official record of births and deaths” (“faire concurrence à l’état civil”) by creating such characters as Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Robinson Crusoe, Werther, and Ivanhoe, he aims to humble the historian, whose ambition can be summed up as “putting in order roughly the same set of facts for every nation.” Balzac lays claim to the boasts of Vigny: novelists are better historians than historians themselves, for novelists are creators, but historians are not. In the twentieth century, a demographer will give a tip of the hat to Balzac’s “history lesson”: The Human Comedy set the agenda for both history and sociology, leading, for example, to the biology of social evolution (aging, generations, stages of life) and the study of social class (hierarchy, contacts, places, practices).28 Not content with being a genius as a writer, Balzac, contends Chevalier, was first among historians. In the 1830s and 1840s, historians themselves made the very same dual claims, insisting

27. Honoré de Balzac, preface to Fragments des études de moeurs au XIXe siècle, vol. 1, La femme supérieure (Paris: Werdet, 1838), liii, and Béatrix ou les amours forcés (Brussels: Méline, 1839), 6. 28. Louis Chevalier, “La comédie humaine: Document d’histoire?” Revue historique 232 (July–September 1964): 27–48.

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that they were creators in their own right while at the same time enjoying a monopoly on factual reality. Like Ranke and Michelet, Augustin Thierry had the ambition of combining drama with accuracy, narratives with questions, and learning with epic in view of “producing works of art and science at the same time.”29 In the Romantic period, history as science lives in osmosis with its literary milieu, a miracle that will also lead to its demise. At the end of the nineteenth century, university academics will declare it to be too narrative, too lyrical, too partisan, in a nutshell, too “literary,” casting Michelet off into the pathos of history as tragedy, Daunou into the decorum of history as eloquence, and Thierry into the excesses of history as panegyric. At the outset of the 1860s, Sainte-Beuve traced out a new dividing line between historians and poets. Among the latter was Vigny, who viewed reality “through a crystal prism,” and also Michelet, who practiced “semi-occult sciences,”30 two states of delirium stemming from their misunderstanding of sources.

29. Thierry, preface to Dix ans d’études historiques, 347. 30. Sainte-Beuve, Panorama de la littérature française de Marguerite de Navarre aux frères Goncourt (Paris: LGF/Livre de Poche, 2004), 1199, 1213.

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The term “realism” served as the name of the pavilion where Courbet exhibited his paintings in 1855, as the title of a journal edited by Duranty, and as a collection of Champfleury’s articles published in 1857. The term can also be used to characterize a good number of novels written in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is indeed not hard to point out what they have in common: a desire to depict reality without expurgating or idealizing any part of it, an interest in the common people and the matters of everyday life, and an evocation of the major issues of the time. Defined in this way, however, realism is not fundamentally new. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, painters such as Caravaggio and the Le Nain brothers did not hesitate to represent the common people in towns and in the country. Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Saint-Simon’s Mémoires (written in part during the 1720s and 1730s), and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) all provide a description of the world, with its miseries and vices. During the 1830s and 1840s, Balzac depicts the harshness of society, just as Eugène Sue takes interest in the plight of the lower classes.

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In the wider conception of things, the realist tradition finds its source in the Gospels, where the word of God touches the existence of artisans, fishermen, the disabled, and prostitutes.1 Since the Renaissance, most artistic revolutions had been carried out in the name of truth. But classicism and Romanticism were not based on the authority of scholars or scientists. The realist novel of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s strove on the contrary to achieve a discourse of truth based on science, whose foundation was laid out by Claude Bernard in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine in 1865. The realist project arose from the intersection of literature, methodical investigation, and biology: what set it apart was not the faithful representation of the world (or the unvarnished spectacle of human misery) so much as it was the determination to elaborate a science of the factual world. It was exactly on that point in common that Naturalism and methodical history begin to cross paths in the 1870s.

The Naturalist Method Realist writers were striving to theorize an art that could achieve a factual account of the world by means of science. Already in the 1850s, Flaubert predicted that “literature will increasingly take on the appearance of science,”2 and the Goncourt brothers explained in their preface to Germinie Lacerteux (1864) that in this “true novel,” they had carried out their “scientific duty.”3 In his foreword to The Human Comedy, Balzac cites Buffon, Cuvier, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire as his models before making a few quick references to Petronius and the medieval epic. With such patrons, realism is as much a literary form combining fiction and narration as an intelligence of the factual world, “a method of thinking, seeing, reflecting, studying, experimenting, and a need to analyze in order to know,” in the

1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), chaps. 2 and 3. 2. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, April 6, 1853, in Correspondance, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1980), 298. 3. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Préface,” in Germinie Lacerteux (Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie., Éditeurs, 1889), 7, https://beq.ebooksgratuits.com/vents/Goncourt-Germinie.pdf (accessed May 11, 2016).

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words of someone close to Zola who was a regular at the literary gatherings of Médan (soirées de Médan) in the 1870s.4 That is why the ability to fictionalize never overshadowed the need for documentation: realist novelists never started from zero, but became on-site investigators, journalists, archivists, travelers, and ethnologists in order to gather their material. Balzac collected information about the Vendée region for The Chouans and recalls his frustrations as a printer for Lost Illusions. Hugo inserted long commentaries about Paris, urchins, slang, English Channel reefs, lords of England, the Convention, and Waterloo into his novels. After having visited Tunisia in 1858, Flaubert decided that the manuscript of Salammbô had to be “completely redone.”5 American novelists would also prove to be big investigators. The Jungle (1906) was inspired by Upton Sinclair’s experience in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Before writing The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Steinbeck met with Okies and roamed through migrant camps in California. As a former journalist, Zola went beyond such methods of investigation. Each of his novels occasioned a lengthy preparation that consisted of collecting documents and information, making visits, meeting people, and letting the various atmospheres sink in. Zola read the works of the major mental specialists of his time, sometimes making notecards: that is what made it possible for him to describe the effects of delirium tremens and various professional pathologies so precisely. He visits Les Halles (a covered market in Paris) and the Théâtre des Variétés, ambles through department stores, goes down into a mine, attends labor union meetings, enters into miners’ homes and pubs, travels up and down the fertile plains around Paris, and retraces the route of the army at Sedan, near the German border. In Germinal (1885), there is an entire ethnology of the daily life of miners, including work schedules, nutritional habits, family and love rituals, celebrations, entertainment, lacrosse, pin pool, and birdsong contests for finches, all of which Zola observed or had described to him. The dossier of material prepared for the novel reveals a great

4. The words of Paul Alexis are quoted by Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Charpentier, 1891), 188ff. 5. Flaubert’s words are quoted by Clémentine Gutron, “Salammbô: Une leçon d’archéologie par Flaubert,” in Terrains d’écrivains: Littérature et ethnographie, ed. Alban Bensa and François Pouillon (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2012), 35–66.

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variety of sources: press clippings, entries from the Larousse dictionary, book reviews dealing with extraction techniques and the miners’ hygiene, a blueprint for a miner’s lodgings, notes about the Anzin Company, and a mining lexicon. The entire book testifies to this “sense of the real world.”6 Armed with that documentation, Zola proceeded to conduct a supposedly scientific experiment. He placed his characters in a given milieu under certain conditions and, by deducing the plot, tested the validity of his beginning hypothesis. Human organisms and temperaments are modified under the pressure of circumstances; the novel is the laboratory report on this experiment: “The outcome is knowledge of humanity, scientific knowledge.”7 In that sense, the writer was not making anything up. He did case studies and solved problems, driven by scientific curiosity and the love of truth. The novel had a cognitive purpose despite its fictional character. There is no need to go into detail about the illusions of such scientism. Naturalism’s trial began with Naturalism itself, charged with ugliness, obscenity, simplistic reasoning, arbitrary elements, and fatalism. The fact of the matter is that Zola’s “hypotheses” were based on firmly fixed beliefs, supposing that individuals were prisoners of their heredity, that modernity produced high-strung, greedy men easily susceptible to moral monstrosities. The entire cycle of the Rougon-Macquart is driven by the idea that the Second Empire aggravated the disorders occasioned by the Revolution, thus arousing ambitions, unleashing appetites, exacerbating urges for sex and sensual pleasure, and thus contributing to the scuffle of democratic society, in which individuals charge forward and fall, exhausted from having lived too fast and loose. Zola thus was in possession of his truth before having written a single line. His novels develop a postulate or illustrate a diagnosis much more that they “demonstrate” anything whatsoever, in spite of the fact that Zola gathered an enormous amount of information. It was one thing for realist writers to believe they were doing science; it was quite another, however, for them to share the same values as doctors, physicists, and biologists. “Letters” were becoming increasingly

6. Emile Zola, “Le sens du réel” (1878), in Colette Becker, Zola, le Saut Dans les Étoiles (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002), 270–73; Carnets d’enquêtes: Une ethnographie inédite de la France (Paris: Plon/Terre humaine, 1986). 7. Émile Zola, Le roman expérimental (1880), in Le roman naturaliste, 90.

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influenced by the “sciences.” In the second half of the nineteenth century, both the novel and history, those two forms of literature as method, were subsumed under scientism.

The Advent of History as Science History must adopt a “strictly scientific point of view,” announced Gabriel Monod in the opening essay of the first issue of the Revue Historique.8 After first appearing on the scene in Germany as early as the 1830s, an intellectual revolution was leading history to be considered as a “positive science,” and it was taking place in Europe and North America during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This revolution was marked by the creation of journals (such as the Revue Historique in 1876), associations (such as the American Historical Association in 1884), and institutions (such as the École Française de Rome in 1875), as well as by the development of a method (like those advanced by edited volumes such as Methods of Teaching History in 1883 and Introduction to the Study of History by Langlois and Seignobos in 1898). The science of history that triumphed at the end of the century reposed on three pillars: the ideal of objectivity, documentary sources, and the professional milieu. Historians were the ones who studied facts. That definition aimed to break not only with the postrevolutionary controversies and the notion of history as teacher of life, but also with the philosophy of History that sought to establish laws that would be valid for the past as well as for the future. That is why the new historians were not “positivists” according to the definition of Auguste Comte: they were not attempting to establish the meaning of History or the different ages through which humanity was moving. Rather, they were “methodical,” scholars whose work was based on a scientific approach. Historians did not engage in polemics, offer advice, or speculate; they were content with establishing “what actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen), as Ranke supposedly put it. This watchword, which

8. Gabriel Monod, “Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVIe siècle,” Revue Historique 1 (January–June 1876): 5–38.

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might be termed a Rankean norm, held up the German idealist as a model of scientific principle and founding father of the discipline, and that is how he was venerated by American historians, from Herbert Adams in the 1880s to George Adams at the outset of the twentieth century. Objective history, free from passions and preconceived ideas, was vulgarizing the empiricism of Bacon and John Stuart Mill, with cautious inductive reasoning based on observation, the refusal of hasty generalizations and metaphysical theories, the importance of taxonomy, and the determined effort to “let the facts speak for themselves” in order to produce a definitive history.9 In order to do that, historians base their work on the sources, original material consisting of archives, vestiges, inscriptions, and coins, authenticated thanks to the so-called auxiliary sciences of numismatics, paleography, epigraphy, and diplomacy. For Seignobos, documents are traces that can lead historians back to the facts that have now disappeared. In this area, American and French historians followed the example of the German scholars Niebuhr, Böckh, Ranke, Harnack, Gervinus, Mommsen, and Waitz, and drew their inspiration from their great collections of learning such as Monumenta Germaniae and Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum. The institutionalization of history, with a unified professional milieu, scholarly publications, and ties to the university, provided another motive for admiration, and a large number of American and French historians traveled to study in German universities: Monod as early as 1867, Emerton and Herbert Adams in 1876, Seignobos in 1879, and Camille Julian in 1882. History was leaving the amateur’s study and entering into the age of Wissenschaft (science). From that time on, historians were university professors, and university education was organized around seminars, structured curricula, and diplomas.10 German erudition and the institutionalization of history in France had already transformed the practice of history in the first half of the

9. See Georg Iggers, “The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought,” History and Theory 2, no. 1 (1962): 17–40; and, more broadly, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream. The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chaps. 1–3. 10. See Charles-Olivier Carbonell, Histoire et historiens: Une mutation idéologique des historiens français, 1865–1885 (Toulouse: Privat, 1976); and, more broadly, Christophe Charle and Jacques Verger, Histoire des universités (Paris: PUF, 2012), chaps. 5 and 6.

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nineteenth century; it was in the final decades of the century, however, that it truly acquired its prestige. In antiquity it had been a minor genre, a second-rate poetry, second-rate rhetoric, and second-rate philosophy. Torn between the arts, theology, and law in the Middle Ages, it had occupied a secondary rank at the university. As for the historiographers of the seventeenth-century classical age, they had been relegated to the status of courtiers. For the first time, history, having become a profession, a method, and a discourse of truth, was no longer dominated. It had definitively acquired its dignity by becoming a science.

The Objective Mode The epistemological convergence of realist literature and history as science, with their common imperatives of documented research, recorded facts, methodological intent, and search for the truth, results in a sort of confusion, as was the case at the time of Balzac. For the Goncourt brothers, “the present-day novel is made from documents, told or enhanced directly from life, just as history is made from written documents.”11 Zola, whose Rougon-Macquart cycle was devoted to the “natural and social history” of one family under the Second Empire, went even further: “I am writing history.”12 Conversely, speaking at an international conference of historians in 1900, President Henri Houssaye observed that the novel was made from “human documents,” clipboard notes, and direct observations,” before concluding that “the novelist follows about the same procedure as the historian.”13 One group was studying the past, the other the present; only the object of their study differed. The scientism that was inspiring novelists and historians created a common narrative mode, a source from which they both drew their techniques. The masters of the 1860s, Fustel de Coulanges, Renan, and

11. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, vol. 1 (Paris: Robert Laffont/Bouquins, 2004), 1112 (October 24, 1864). 12. Émile Zola, “Premier plan remis à Lacroix,” in Les Rougon-Macquart, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1967), 1757. 13. Annales internationales d’histoire: Congrès de Paris, 1900 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1901), 7.

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Taine, were historian-writers who prepared the way for this convergence and prefigured the methodical revolution. This objective mode has four dimensions.

The Detachment of the Scholar As admirers of Benedictine scholarship, the advocates of history as science held up the ideal of objectivity and serenity. No favoritism, no hatred, no grudges: since the past was clearly separated from the present, historians could study it from the requisite distance. Detached, preserved from every passion, they knew to step back and enjoy “this charm of perfect impartiality that is the chastity of history.”14 Such an attitude could be found in Flaubert, who wanted to treat the human soul with the same neutrality, the same capacity for indifference as the entomologist beholding an anthill. For his part, Taine avowed to Flaubert in 1877 his admiration for the “calm” and the “perpetual absence” that the master of prose displayed in Three Tales by cutting the umbilical cord linking a work to its author: “‘Herodias’ is the Judea thirty years after Jesus Christ, the real Judea. . . . You were quite right to say to me that at present history and the novel can no longer be distinguished from each other.” This principle of impassivity made Flaubert the inspirer, or at least the precursor, for historians at the end of the century.15

The Expulsion of the “I” Beginning in the 1850s, and with the works of Claude Bernard, science entered into a form of objectivity that consisted of securing observation from the human subject who was making it.16 Human mediation became a disruption, a deformation, a risk of error. The observer was to be dispensed with; the narrator was to be expelled from the text. With Flaubert, the

14. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Questions contemporaines (1893; Paris: Hachette, 1919), 26. 15. Marianne Bonwit, Gustave Flaubert et le principe d’impassibilité (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950); Bruna Donatelli, “Taine lecteur de Flaubert: Quand l’histoire rencontre la littérature,” Romantisme, no. 111 (2001): 75–87. 16. See Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Objectivité (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2012), chaps. 3 and 4.

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rule of nonintervention is equivalent to this principle: the novelist did not have the right to give his opinion; “he must, in his creation, imitate God in His creation, that is to say, to create and be silent.”17 For Zola, it was not the writer who spoke but the facts and laws of heredity. Fustel de Coulanges (and the majority of historians following him) shared this moral of abstention, eliminating everything that could be tainted with subjectivity, thus maintaining control of oneself in order not to inflict one’s own individuality on the reader: “The best historian of antiquity will be the one who has given no heed to himself, his personal ideas, and the ideas of his time, in order to study antiquity.”18 There is in this self-effacement an abnegation, a sacrificial modesty that can also be found in the monk Mabillon and in the “heroes of science” according to Renan, resigned to be nothing but anonymous monographers. This virtue mattered as much as truth: the self in history is loathsome because it is narcissistic, but also because it is non-scientific. Just as chemistry and astronomy are impersonal, so the extinction of the self guaranteed the historians’ objectivity. It certified axiological neutrality, that Wertfreiheit which Max Weber would recommend at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Universal Point of View The distance that the novelist and the historian maintain from the object observed is a way of achieving a panoramic view of the action. Looking down from on high is the point of view of God, making it possible to see everything at once. This general outlook is one of the trademarks of realism. Historians, however, have been familiar with it ever since Polybius invented sunopsis, synoptic narration making it possible to take in everything at a glance. It is possible, says Lucian of Samosata, to view the Roman camp from above, and then, an instant later, the Persian camp. Like Zeus or the adventurous protagonist of Icaromenippus, historians are those who fly “above the clouds.” Is this an exterior or an omniscient point of view? Unlike novelists, historians are not able to penetrate into the innermost depths of the soul. Like novelists, however, they

17. Gustave Flaubert to Amélie Bosquet, August 20, 1866, in Correspondance, 3:517. 18. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, “Comment il faut lire les auteurs anciens,” in Extraits des historiens français du XIXe siècle, ed. Camille Jullian (Paris: Hachette, 1908), 659ff.

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always know more than their characters, if only because they know what happens next. Zero focalization (to use Gérard Genette’s terminology), in which the narrator is both absent and omnipresent, was to be the privileged mode of narration for methodical history. In the end, the “point of view with no point of view” of scientific history is a “point of view of a quasi-divine spectator rapidly skimming over things from on high,”19 and amounts to the everywhere-and-nowhere status of Flaubert’s narrator.

The Dream of Transparency In order to accredit the idea that they have direct access to reality, novelists often have recourse to the metaphor of the window. “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,” wrote Henry James in the 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady: whether windows or holes in the wall, these openings look out over the “human stage.”20 In Zola, open architectural structures such as a window, greenhouse, or glass cabinet form one immense “house of glass” that can conceal nothing from the observer’s gaze. Such crystal-clear realism entails a perfectly clear plot with the same amount of light shed on all the characters, a logical composition, and a vocabulary accessible to all. For as Maupassant put it, novelists who flee “mere reality,” pointing to dubious facts or writing with preciosity, make “rain [fall] on clean windows.”21 The methodical historians are not unaware that history is an indirect knowledge from traces, but their narration borrows from the trope of hypotyposis, which, as Quintilian defines it, “puts the thing under our eyes.” Such realism provides direct access to the “facts” by placing them in full view. We are there on-site: the past is replayed before us, as if the words and narration were self-effacing. The objective mode exploited by both realist literature and methodical history was justified by scientism. Beyond the narrative technique, we can discern a veritable habitus of objectivity: discretion, self-confidence, and

19. Pierre Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité: Cours du Collège de France, 2000–2001 (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2001), 222. 20. Henry James, “Preface to The Portrait of a Lady,” in The Portable Henry James, ed. John Auchard (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 473. 21. Guy de Maupassant, “Le roman” (1887), in Pierre et Jean (Paris: Ollendorff, 1888), 35. See Philippe Hamon, “Zola, romancier de la transparence,” Europe, no. 468–69 (April– May 1968): 385–91.

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self-control, associated with the legitimacy of the scholar and the scholar’s findings. Epistemological and moral stances thus determined choices in writing. The critics following Barthes have shown that what stems from the objective mode is “the reality effect,” as well as the measure of illusionism inherent in mimesis, the privilege and tour de force pulled off by the narrator-God.22 Thus didacticism, the ideal of transparent clarity, polish, seamless narration, principled impassivity, the ubiquitous absence of the enunciator, an absolute point of view, direct access to reality, and a tone of selfevidence came to be the indissociably cognitive and narrative structures of a history, and a story, that were told all by themselves. The reign of such “objectivity” ended up acquiring a mythological dimension. Like Zola describing the various specialized sections of the department store, Ernest Lavisse, first filling in for Fustel de Coulanges at the Sorbonne, then professor and director of the École Normale Supérieure, tells of the celebrations in the court of Louis XIV: There were exquisite refinements in the splendor of this rejoicing. . . . After a light meal accompanied by the mixed sounds of the fountains, the violins, and the oboes had been served in the grove of Le Marais, Lulli’s Alceste was performed in the Marble Courtyard all decorated with crated orange trees, chandeliers, pedestal tables, and golden vases. Streams of water flowed down from the fountain adorned with garlands; the splashing sounds were muffled by vases of flowers to prevent an excess of noise. One of the king’s fondest pleasures was to ride in a gondola followed by a vessel carrying Lulli and his players, right at or right after nightfall.23

Methodical history is not a theory of evidence. Rather than a demonstration, we find an exposition of facts or a chain of certitudes. The waters stream down from the fountain; Louis XIV and his court appear before us. We glide through a narrative without beginnings or rough spots. For the paradox of the objective mode is that, by virtue of a self-effacement

22. See Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov, eds., Littérature et réalité (Paris: Seuil, 1982), in particular Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel” (1968), 81–90, and Philippe Hamon, “Un discours contraint,” 119–81. 23. Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu’à la Révolution, bk. 7 (Paris: Hachette, 1905), 155–56.

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that lets reality “speak for itself,” it denies its own existence, flees, and conceals its presence and its attributes to the point of disappearing. It was positivism, wrote Baudelaire in reference to the Salon of 1859, that characterizes realist painting, devoted to things “such as they are.” Actually, the artistic equivalent of objective history is not Courbet’s painting but rather the painting of the Academy. The “pompous conventionalists” such as Cabanel, Gérôme, Bouguereau, Meissonier, Laurens, and Detaille, tied to the big public institutions, including the Academy, the École des Beaux-Arts, and the Salon, provided paintings of Venus and cavalry charges to the ruling bourgeoisie. As producers of official art passionately devoted to details displaying their technical virtuosity, they painted as learned artists. The smallest of details were rendered with accuracy and precision right down to coat buttons. Like the state historians of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, the painters of the Academy replayed the nation’s past on the stage of history. Their event-based history, in which kings and their éminences grises officiate, is a glossy history in which imitation has prevailed over intelligence. In the domain of art as in the field of history, there was the same monopoly of legitimacy, the same professionalism, the same concern for legibility, the same frontal, universal point of view, and the same “aesthetics of the finished product” that whisks away every impression and sketch, makes the artist disappear behind the work, and, by dint of distance and impersonality, removes the real from reality. It would take all of Manet’s genius not only to make such a manner of painting outmoded but also to overturn the Academy’s system.24 The university, however, did not have its own Manet.

Seers versus Mandarins In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the methodical university historians (Seignobos, Lavisse, Lanson, Durkheim) radicalized the narrative epistemology introduced by the first generation of advocates of scientism, to the point of making them into an ironclad law. The first generation

24. Pierre Bourdieu, Manet: Une révolution symbolique (Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’Agir, 2013).

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nevertheless followed a much more flexible form of history as science that was not unaware of its literary dimension. In his prefaces to the Essais de critique et d’histoire (Critical and Historical Essays, 1858), Taine advocated an experimental history in the manner of Claude Bernard, with analyses of facts, classifications, abstractions, and formulations in view of producing the equivalent of an “anatomy in human history.” That did not keep him from paying tribute to Lessing, Scott, Carlyle, Thierry, and Michelet, pioneers of modern historiography who strove, beyond the written text, to find the human being endowed with passions. In an article devoted to the “psychology of the Jacobin” (1881), he offered a psychological history particularly close to literature, since it was based on intuition, imagination, the capacity for introspection, the identification of the historian with his subject, and the technique of the interior monologue.25 For his part, the philologist Renan wrote his Life of Jesus (1863) after having traveled in Palestine, over the paths that the Nazarene had followed, beholding the horizons that he had contemplated. Along with introspection and psychology, imagination figured among the biographer’s tools: in order to make the souls of the past come alive, “a bit of divination and conjecture must be allowed.”26 Not only were these first-generation advocates of scientism still attuned to the belles lettres, with the artistry of the pen, their talent as men of letters, their refusal of specialization, their penchant for the essay, their scholarly travels, and their social prestige, but they were also perfectly aware that history belonged to literature. The generation of the methodical historians on the contrary rejected any kinship: the “pure science” that was history would risk getting contaminated. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, history breaks with literature. Or more exactly, it pulls itself away from the category of “literary” texts. This divorce had several causes. The first was a sort of rivalry intensified by the use of the objective mode. The battle of truth from the 1830s was continuing. Would history be a better social science than Naturalism? Who would articulate the most relevant language about reality? The novel

25. Patrizia Lombardo, “Hippolyte Taine between Art and Science,” Yale French Studies, no. 77 (1990): 117–33; and Nathalie Richard, Hippolyte Taine: Histoire, psychologie, littérature (Paris: Classiques Garnier 2013), 140 ff. and 245. 26. Ernest Renan, “Introduction,” in Vie de Jésus (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863), lv.

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was the form taken by social investigation and contemporary history at a time when, in contrast to Zola, professional historians were not interested in jobs, salaries, budgets, social hierarchy, lifestyles, birth, death, sickness, sex, love, or any of the topics that garnered the intense interest of the Annales School and the history of mentalities in the twentieth century. On that level, Naturalism proved to be a precursor, as were the novels of Scott in their time. While the common people of the lower classes interested writers from the 1830s on, and the Chicago School of sociology beginning in the 1920s, it was not until the work of Georges Lefebvre in the interwar period, and especially the “New History” of the 1970s, that historians had the idea of studying the humble, the anonymous, the silent ones, and the matters of everyday life. Institutional transformations constituted another reason for the break. When the university as well as the literary domain becomes autonomous, two figures become clearly visible: whereas “scientists” (savants) such as Claude Bernard, Louis Pasteur, or Ernest Lavisse are artisans of truth and national glory, notables covered with honors, “artists” such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, or Van Gogh, are pitted against bourgeois society and the misunderstanding of their contemporaries.27 Now these two dynamics entered into conflict. Poets led a bohemian lifestyle, flaunted their contempt for convention and their disgust with the humdrum of everyday life (and hence for Naturalism). The utilitarianism of science and the demand for documentation clashed with the artists’ thirst for freedom: seers versus mandarins, misunderstood geniuses versus institutions, immortal masterpieces versus ephemeral discoveries, Christ-like passion versus meticulous application, art for art’s sake versus the ideology of progress. As representatives of a profession, historians no longer recognized themselves to be artists, poets, or other “people of letters.” Provocations from the avant-garde got in the way of their quest for scientific respectability. The collective discipline of history was not compatible with soaring flights of the self and imagination’s escape from the real world. The moral stance of humility could not tolerate an author’s pretensions. When the dean of the college of liberal arts at the university in Bordeaux, Paul Stapfer, admitted at the beginning of his study Des réputations littéraires 27. See Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels,” 1880–1900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 24ff.

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(1893) that he had sought to ensure the glory of posterity, he made himself look ridiculous: he had forgotten that the professional critic and historian “have value and validity only through self-effacement.”28 Under Louis XIV, most men of letters circulated within the milieu of the academies or were funded by the state. In the nineteenth century, that was still the plight of university professors, but no longer the case for writers. History’s status was that of a fiefdom: it was dependent on the nation, the university, the profession, and the archives. Literature, by contrast, had emancipated itself. In such a highly polarized system, Zola occupied a central but ambiguous place. Should he mingle with the despised artists or with the learned scholars of the Republic? He should be closer to the circles of expertise, successful business, and the Légion d’Honneur; history and the sciences, however, no longer accept those who live by the pen. To grant historians a monopoly on the factual world, responsibility, science, and truth, while letting writers reign over literature, art, imagination, and subjectivity amounted to condemning the Naturalist project. A halfway compromise between the two poles became suspect, sure to end in failure. It was in this context that Sorbonne professor and future director of the École Normale Supérieure (in 1919, after Ernest Lavisse) Gustave Lanson invented a science of literature by applying the methods of erudition, philology, and history to texts. “Literary” critics Brunetière, Faguet, and Nisard were cast back into literature, in other words, into non-science. The stakes of this institutional clarification explain the virulence of Lanson’s attack on Zola in the article “La littérature et la science” (1892), whose vehemence greatly exceeded the usual limits for scholarly debate. For Lanson, the Naturalists were offering “the most exaggerated and degraded form of scientific literature”; like charlatans in provincial caféconcerts, they were giving a performance that was somewhere “between a silly song and [that of] learned swine.” Zola’s project was the nut that had to be cracked for science to be at last separated from art, and for objectivity to be freed from writing. Each would now stake out its own territory. The possible, the unknown, the undemonstrable, and the unreal were the stuff of literature; the objects of scientific study could never provide 28. Gustave Lanson, “L’immortalité littéraire” (1894), in Hommes et livres: Études morales et littéraires (1895; Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), 295–315.

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material for creating poetry, novels, or oratory. In order to maintain a sure footing and establish the basis for a science of literature, one had to be equipped with a method. Hence Lanson’s joyous proclamation “History, nowadays, has broken with literature.”29 Let literature lose all hope of articulating the truth; that is the role of science and its new recruits within the university: history, literary history, and sociology. Learned scholars do not produce literature; they can only read it and provide commentary. This farewell to creation was the price to pay for entering into the temple of knowledge and conquering professional autonomy within the system of specialized disciplines. History as science was from that point on set over against literature as art.

Two Millennia Forgotten The new boundary was thus drawn between scholar-scientists and writers. That line of demarcation, however, ran throughout history itself. The separation from literature, the novel, poetry, and the world of letters was coupled with a scorn for the historians, be they ancient or modern, who were themselves too “literary.” Their practice of history was both the opposite and the past of historical science: dramatization, anecdotes, quaint descriptions, local color, rhetoric, subjectivity, eclecticism, divinations, and contemporary passions. Within the discipline of history, “literary” became a term of disparagement. In 1855, Michelet was irritated when praised as a writer or poet, for that was the designation “with which up until now people sought to humiliate the historian.”30 Fustel de Coulanges was offended when people celebrated his “talent” as a writer and his “admirable Cité antique.”31 Kinship with science brought honor and recognition, while ties to literature were degrading.

29. Gustave Lanson, “La littérature et la science” (1892), ibid., 317–64. See Antoine Compagnon, La Troisième République des Lettres, de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 35–51. 30. Jules Michelet to Taine (1855), quoted by Roland Barthes, Michelet (1954; Paris: Seuil/Points, 1988), 76. 31. François Hartog, Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire: Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (Paris: Seuil/ Points Histoire, 2001), 156–57.

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For Monod, Langlois and Seignobos, history had been a literary genre up until the Romantics. It was only beginning in the 1860s that it entered into modernity by becoming a science. The methodical historians designated a few predecessors beginning with the Renaissance (Jesuits, Benedictines, German scholars): they exemplified those who had gropingly stumbled through the prehistoric phase of history, making their way up the steps leading to Science. The others, given over to the whims and fancies of their imagination, had been “writers of literary texts more than scholars.”32 Exit, then, Herodotus and the Greeks, Tacitus and the Latins, the medieval chroniclers, the memorialists of the seventeenth century, Guichardin, Bayle, Voltaire, the liberals, and the Romantics, all of these self-taught individuals so full of charm and passion. They were collateral victims of the methodical revolution, henceforth relegated to the status of “literary figures.” As for Voltaire, he was a philosopher; Gibbon, a writer of the Enlightenment; Michelet, a poet endowed with a mighty temperament. Even Monod, who kept Michelet’s personal papers and devoted a course to him at the Collège de France, regretted that his books were not mindful of “scientific precision, the method.”33 Michelet had the merit of having resuscitated the past, but he no longer appeared as a scholar and a man of erudition who devoured archives and invented concepts, at least not until Lucien Febvre blasted the “hapless fellows” of the generation of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s who had demoted him to the rank of “literary figure.”34 Thus it was that history as method diminished and misrepresented historians who thought differently: they became “talented writers,” artists essentially concerned with style, color, and life, driven by their enthusiasm. Whoever did not seek to uncover the facts was condemned to err amid the fog of imagination. The Rankean norm had effaced the complexity of Leopold von Ranke. The freedom to create enjoyed by people of letters was not able to survive the specialization of disciplines and the demands of career. In 1859,

32. Monod, “Du progrès des études historiques,” 29–30. 33. Gabriel Monod, Les maîtres de l’histoire: Renan, Taine, Michelet (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1894), 181. See Yann Potin, “Les fantômes de Gabriel Monod: Papiers et paroles de Jules Michelet, érudit et prophète,” Revue Historique, no. 664 (2012): 803–36. 34. Lucien Febvre, Michelet et la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 53.

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the death of Macaulay, saluted as “an almost universal genius, poet, orator, critic, historian, and biographer,”35 marked in that respect the end of an era, well before the deaths of Renan and Taine in the early 1890s. Rare were the historians who henceforth dared to practice a genre other than history. Henry Adams, an academic and the future president of the American Historical Association, published two novels, Democracy and Esther, in the 1880s, but without signing his name to them. The Frenchman Gaston Roupnel, enamored of the Burgundy vineyards, was both a novelist and a historian of rural areas, but he pursued a checkered career; Febvre was the only one refusing to see him as “a rather whimsical amateur.”36 Rarer still were scholars who tried to reconcile art and science in the same research project. Written in the first person with no bibliography, aiming to both instruct and move, the dream-promenades of Élisée Reclus were “both science and poetry.”37 However, despite his Universal Geography in nineteen volumes, he was disdained as an eccentric geographer who was more “literary” than “scientific.” It is true that this bourgeois Protestant had the audacity to say that he was an anarchist, a feminist, and a vegetarian. The literary vocation was perceived as proof that one was a dilettante lacking seriousness and having ludicrous pretensions. Historians could in no case be writers: their culture was henceforth that of a compilator or commentator. Such a nagging fear of writing and fear of the literary that might sully history revealed the force of the scientific paradigm. Two centuries after the letters and the sciences had gone their separate ways, history changed camps. It tore itself away from literature, poetry, the epic, eloquence, and the novel, which had contributed so much. In the manner of shame over origins, this repudiation dealt a fatal blow to the system of belles lettres. Hence the dilemma facing historians. If they wrote literature, they could reach the general public, but their pre-scientific or even antischolarly writing would close the doors of the university; if they wrote 35. Amédée Pichot, foreword to Thomas Babington Macaulay, Oeuvres diverses: Biographies, essais historiques, critiques et littéraires, 1st ser. (Paris: Hachette, 1860), ix. 36. Lucien Febvre, “Les morts de l’histoire vivante: Gaston Roupnel,” Annales ESC, no. 4 (1947): 479–81. 37. Élisée Reclus to his publisher (1880), quoted in Histoire d’une montagne (Gollion, Switzerland: Infolio, 2011), 18–19.

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history, they had the privilege of truth, but they had to submit to the rules of a professional circle. On the eve of the First World War, one young poet observed that there were two categories of historians: those of the university who, from Seignobos to Aulard, had founded scientific history, and those of the academy who were aiming for the French Academy by specializing in battle narratives and the portraits of kings.38 The break of the 1880s had repercussions in normative classifications. For the multivolume Larousse dictionary as well as for the Lagarde et Michard anthology, a well-known textbook in use in French high schools from the 1950s to the 1970s, literature included the historians of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Romanticism, up until Renan and Taine; after them, history is no longer a part of literature.

Birth of the Non-Text But the methodical historians did not escape from literature just because they denounced it. In the first place, as we have seen, they share a whole set of techniques with realist writers: the objective mode. Now the reality effects plunge the reader into a staged narration, a narrative spectacle that leads to the heart of “History.” Far from guaranteeing objectivity, crystalclear realism jeopardizes its status by making history into a narrative that goes without saying: it is a self-evidence in which the scholar’s self is all the more active in that it knows itself to be invisible. It is therefore not surprising that the methodical historians’ ill-tempered opposition to literature was of a piece with dramatized, partisan writing. In that manner, they practiced a history massively imbued with “literature.” The young Ernest Lavisse’s L’Invasion dans le département de l’Aisne (The [German] Invasion of the Aisne, 1872) is an epic closely resembling history as tragedy; with their illustrious men and moral lessons, the history textbooks of the French Republic belong to the genre of history as eloquence; the exacerbated nationalism found in Monod and Lavisse bring history as panegyric back to life.

38. Henri Franck, “Henri Houssaye,” in La danse devant l’arche (Paris: NRF, 1912), 219–22.

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First and foremost, the academic discipline of history elaborates a poetics of knowledge. The introduction, citations, footnotes, and bibliography constitute “literary procedures” by means of which history “screens itself from literature, giving itself a scientific status and signifying as much.”39 Such writing thus functions as an antidote: historians are historians (in other words, scientific) all the more so when they hunt down metaphors, rid themselves “of fake diamonds and artificial flowers,” and take care to “never spruce themselves up.”40 Like Pasteur, they destroy the “literary germs” lodged in introductions, transitions, and conclusions.41 Writing was a parasitical factor that had to be reduced to a minimum, since it was not possible to get rid of it completely. It was a tacky ornament, the hoopskirt of history, almost a shameful ailment. Since historians must nonetheless convey their findings through the use of words, textbooks and theoretical works did deal with the matter of writing, but always at the end, after everything else had been discussed. Langlois and Seignobos take up the question only in the last pages of their Introduction. Even for Monod, attuned to the question by his fervent admiration of Michelet, writing was what comes last. When one did history, it was first and foremost necessary to collect material, classify it, next assess facts and sources, then give an overall synthesis; at the very end came the “historical exposition,” in other words, the presentation of the results. That part, left to the historian’s “personal talent,” allowed a bothersome but inevitable distortion to enter in by adding an “individual and subjective element” to reality.42 Writing amounted to putting the finishing touches on scholarly work, an addition that simply had to be accepted. As the final polishing, it came under the purview of the historian’s “talent,” but was still governed by the rules of the profession that required a tight hold on things. Such restrictions in fact stemmed from a social division: the university’s power structure weighed heavily on the practice of writing. In 1913 Lavisse, an official figure of the French Republic covered with honors at

39. Jacques Rancière, Les noms de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil / Librairie du XXIe Siècle, 1992), 21. 40. Charles-Victor Langlois, Introduction aux études historiques (1898; Paris: Kimé, 1992), 252. 41. Charles-Victor Langlois, “L’histoire au XIXe siècle,” in Questions d’histoire et d’enseignement (Paris: Hachette, 1902), 229. 42. Gabriel Monod, “Histoire,” in De la méthode dans les sciences (Paris: Alcan, 1909), 36.

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age sixty-one, was the “boss” of French history. He exercised a veritable censorship over the contributors to the Histoire de France contemporaine [Contemporary French History] that he was editing for the Hachette publishing house. When correcting the proofs of Philippe Sagnac’s La Révolution, the first volume of the collection, he crossed out a number of lines, tempering an excess of verbal generosity, reigning in the surge of conviction, making his own liberal bourgeois views prevail, and foregrounding national consensus.43 No one censored Lavisse, however, when he vaunted Sully’s loyal service to Henry IV, and especially not when he glorified the French Republic in the eyes of elementary school children. In the academic world, writing reflected the division of powers. Those who made and violated the rules were at the pinnacle of glory. They let their writing flow in an ample, pleasurable style. They had the right to indicate their preferences, exalt France in the textbooks or essays that marked the apogee of their career. Their “I” found a rightful place in prefaces, autobiographies, and, before long, the “ego-histories” introduced by Pierre Nora at the end of the 1980s. For all the others, that is to say, the majority of scholars, writing is the clothing that one must indeed slip into to go out, among colleagues. Words are an ambiguous necessity: one cannot reasonably appear naked in public, but it would be unbecoming to call attention to oneself with a flashy outfit or to look as if one had put on one’s “Sunday best.” Writing must likewise be as discreet as possible, because it is the wrapping of something infinitely more valuable: “objective” reality. As Seignobos explained, “Eloquent phrases are not innocent ornaments: they conceal reality and they divert attention from objects and direct it to forms.”44 The exteriority of language is one of the principles of methodical history. Lanson stated that in literature, the “form” was more important than the “content.” The opposite is true in the sciences: the truth is preexistent and therefore superior to the form. Thus “if the truth can be grasped in itself, the form is but a bothersome garment: the truth is more beautiful in its nudity.”45 In order to be faithful to the “facts” and 43. Alice Girard, “Philippe Sagnac revu et corrigé par Ernest Lavisse: Un modèle de censure discrète,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 48, no. 4 (October–December 2001): 123–59. 44. Charles Seignobos, L’histoire dans l’enseignement secondaire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1906), 38–39. 45. Lanson, “La littérature et la science,” 346.

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reach that truth, it is necessary to adopt a sanitized, pasteurized style and to structure one’s text according to a preestablished, rigid outline: both measures protected against subjectivity. One must write, but as little as possible; use words, but without sound; an outline, but mechanical. Historians were to make their presence in the text as insignificant and bland as the color of a wall. The advent of the methodical historians was this slightly absurd moment when history believed it could purge itself of literature as if casting off something morbid. From this “emancipation,” it emerged mutilated, orphaned, and epistemologically impoverished. The codification of history as a science by a professional community constituted a revolution, but it came at a cost. The theory of style as a garment, affirming that writing was both utilitarian and inessential, invaded scholarly publications. The scorn for literature, preference for the “content,” praise for neutral, modest writing, and obsessive fear of the “flashy” all came together in the non-text whose function was to constantly swear off its own literary character. In leaving the system of belles lettres to join the camp of science, history abandoned the idea that it was also a form. There is therefore a link between the elaboration of the method and the triumph of the non-text, between the appetite for science and the repudiation of literature, as if the new dignity of history required a tabula rasa of the past. From then on, the non-text was a sign of the scientific. Being objective meant not writing. The methodical revolution would not keep some historians from creating their own distinctive works. Marc Bloch would write Strange Defeat, combining testimony, introspection, and an analysis of the collapse of France under the invasion of Nazi Germany in 1940. In the twentieth century, there would be Johan Huizinga, C. L. R. James, Michelle Perrot, Georges Duby, Simon Schama, and Saul Friedländer. In addition to their research, professional historians would write novels or autobiographies on the side. But there would not be many people to defend the idea that history, as a social science, can be a literary creation. The farewell to literature made it possible for history to conquer its intellectual and institutional autonomy. It also had a purgative effect. For historians gave over to novelists all that now embarrassed them: the involvement of the self, the challenges of investigation, the uncertainties of knowledge, the potentialities of form, emotion, language, rhythm, and

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the reader’s pleasure. Over the years, this more or less forced neutrality will turn into a tradition, professional drudgery, misunderstood modesty, self-censorship, and surly austerity. Mechanisms were already in place in the university to justify a total indifference to writing, the text, construction, pacing, language, and of course the reader, because such disdain is proof of a scientific orientation. Only one form of narration is permissible, and it denies its own existence: the objective mode. An entire set of unspoken rules lead historians (and their colleagues, literary historians and sociologists) to stifle their creativity, to blunt their words, to avoid producing a text, or rather to produce a non-text wrapped in nondescript writing.

The Social Sciences and “Life” Faced with the generation of Langlois and Lanson claiming that only history gave access to the truth of humanity, nascent sociology and the younger generation of literary writers reacted vigorously. In growing sharper, the conflict created a three-way enmity.

Sociology versus History Even though it described itself as “erudition” or “pure science,” history still maintained ties with the “third culture.” Monod entered into the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1897, and at the Collège de France he revived the spirit of the “chair of history and morals” previously occupied by Daunou and Michelet. But the sociology that Durkheim founded in the 1890s proved to be hard on history. Responding to Seignobos’s La méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (The Historical Method Applied to the Social Sciences), at the beginning of the twentieth century, Durkheim’s pupil François Simiand sharply challenged the scientific nature of the historians’ work. They remained outside of science, he charged, because they worshiped three “idols”: political and military facts, individuals and individual cases, and origins along with chronological rolls. The social sciences emphasized by contrast the study of institutions, regularities, and collective phenomena in view of establishing laws. The important thing, in a nutshell, was not to study for the hundredth

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time the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” but rather the state of agriculture and industry at the time of Turgot.46 The Durkheimians tossed history back into the domain of letters, in others words, into non-scientific fields: sociology despised history just as history despised literature.

Literature versus History and Sociology Letters were lighthearted and sweet; science was dry. In the twentieth century, this cliché leads to attacks on “modern science,” accused of draining life out of the world and disenchanting it, and of dissecting with a scalpel the beauties of nature and the shimmering of existence. First formulated by Catholic writers of the 1800s and leveled against the Encyclopedists, the same criticism was reiterated by Nietzsche in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874). During the belle époque, the claims advanced by the methodical historians and disciples of Durkheim irked conservative writers. As did Agathon, Paul Bourget, and Henry Bordeaux, Charles Péguy took the scholars of the new Sorbonne of the French Republic to task for their rationalism, critical mindset, and intellectualist jargon, which were destroying human sensibility and interior life. While Péguy was executing historians and their notecards along with “Langlois tel qu’on le parle” (Langlois as it is spoken) (1912) in Clio, Proust was constructing In Search of Lost Time in opposition to Sainte-Beuve and Lanson. Writers did not need the social sciences to tell the story of life or tell the truth about humanity. Speaking about Buddenbrooks (1901), Thomas Mann stated that he discovered all by himself “without reading anything, but direct intuition” the idea that capitalism stemmed from the Protestant ethic; only later did he recognize his idea in Weber and Sombart.47 In France, the enormously successful Paul Bourget wrote his novel Étape in the wake of Balzac and Le Play’s “sociology,” so full of “scientific truths,” such as the egalitarian fever originating in 1789, unbridled individualism, demise of the family mindset, and the widespread alienation from roots.

46. François Simiand, “Méthode historique et science sociale” (1903), reprinted in Annales ESC 15, no. 1 (1960): 83–119. 47. Mann’s words are cited by Wolf Lepenies, Les trois cultures: Entre science et littérature, l’avènement de la sociologie (Paris: MSH, 1990), 296.

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Sociology versus Literature From its very origins, sociology had to distinguish itself from literature, since, for centuries, literature had fostered an identical project, that of understanding society. In addition to that epistemological competition was the political split between the two. With its impressionistic, case-by-case approach, literature was rather “old France,” whereas sociology, born of the upheavals of the nineteenth century and of a scientific, secular, democratic bent, belonged to modernity. It was against this background that the struggle of Durkheim’s followers against Tarde and Bourget unfolded. As was the case for the “literary” historians and men of letters, the pseudo“sociologist” writers get excluded from the field of sociology. Sociology is no longer the work of amateurs. Literature interests sociology to the extent that it offers examples for theoretical development and types for analysis. In that manner, Faust, Werther, and Réné illustrate Le suicide (1897), while Saint-Simon is one of the main sources of information for Norbert Elias’s Court Society (1969). With the quarrel between the followers of Durkheim and the historians, the revolt of Péguy against the French Republican university, and the institutional recognition of sociology came the formation of a rigidly closed system in which everyone is a stranger to everyone else, as all define themselves in opposition to the others: sociology is not history, which is not literature, which is not sociology. Upon exiting the system of belles lettres, history joined with science in the 1880s and with the social sciences around 1930, with the Annales School. At the time when the university was excluding writing from its modernization of methodology, however, the novel was undergoing a revolution.

4

The Return of the Literary Repressed

The debate was over: historians do science and, if driven by some “personal talent” they persist in wanting to write, their work will lose in scientific value. It was a zero-sum game: the more history was literary, the less it was scientific, and vice versa. Speaking to his colleagues in the American Historical Association in 1931, Carl Becker did not hesitate to invoke the shades “of bards and story-tellers and minstrels,” who were historians’ ancestors, all the better to break with nineteenth-century scientism.1 In postwar France, the second generation of the Annales School, focused on statistics, collective forces, conjunctures, and the longue durée, joined in the criticism voiced by Durkheim’s disciples. The irony was that the Annales School historians were practicing a profoundly literary history. The works inspired by Ernest Labrousse, combining “economics” with

1. Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review 37, no. 2 (1931): 221–36.

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“the social” and “the mental,” were in fact following the same impulses as the dispositio of ancient rhetoric. In The Mediterranean (1949), Fernand Braudel offers a grandiose fresco, with a plot, action, staging, a heroine (the sea), and metaphors that describe it as a “Far West,” a “machine for collecting precious metals,” an “old queen” dethroned by the Atlantic, and a person who “had failed at her task of distributing goods.” To what extent do these images provide any evidence? What is the meaning of expressions such as “eternal history” and the “physics of history”?2 Here the historian’s literary character proves all the more difficult to admit in that its luster masks the weaknesses of his demonstration: history as poetry and history as rhetoric do indeed lead away from the social sciences. The impossibility of accepting his responsibility as a writer transformed Braudel, the best novelist of all the historians of the twentieth century, into an emblem of history as science. Langlois’s and Seignobos’s line of reasoning was therefore maintained by the Annales School: science and literature are mutually exclusive, and literature works against knowledge. If necessary, it is acceptable for the writer to be given a dispensation from obeying the method, if it’s a matter of enlivening the past and pleasing the reader. When they do that, historian-writers get the feeling they are committing a transgression, if not a crime against scientific integrity. It takes the courage of Georges Duby, whose history is composed of decors and scenes, events and introspections, life and passion, to be delighted that William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry (1984) reads “like a cloak-and-dagger novel.” He also felt, however, that he was taking a step backward: “I was clearly coming back to the narrative.”3 A few years later, after publishing his path-breaking and critically acclaimed Dead Certainties (1991), which does not hide its use of fiction to analyze two deaths in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Simon Schama acknowledged shyly that his book was “a work of the

2. Paul-André Rosental, “Métaphore et stratégie épistémologique: La Méditerranée de Fernand Braudel,” in Alter histoire: Essais d’histoire expérimentale, ed. Daniel Milo and Alain Boureau (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991), 109–26. 3. Georges Duby, L’histoire continue (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 192–93.

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imagination, not scholarship.”4 In the academic field, one often needs to apologize for straying from the straight and narrow.

The Narrativist “Scandal” In 1979, the British historian Lawrence Stone published “The Revival of Narrative” in Past and Present. Having run its course, the paradigm of quantitative ecology and demographics, whether embodied by Marxism, the Annales School, or cliometrics (new economic history) had been exhausted; historians were thus led to rediscover narration and their timeless role as storytellers, and also to delve into new areas of study: social outcasts, private life, mentalities, emotions, the family, love, sex, and death. The reign of history as science had thus been cut short by the return of the narrative and biography in the 1980s, as visible in the works of Georges Duby, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Robert Darnton. Such a conclusion, however, makes the mistake of taking seriously the denials made by historians from 1870 to 1970, as if, with all their methodical or quantitative postulates, they had for an instant stopped narrating history. At that point, we fall back into the dichotomy between science and literature, following the well-known pattern of the zero-sum game. “Science” had banished the “narrative”; the art of telling a story is given new expression, while statistical and demographic history declines; description replaces analysis; the postimpressionist artist breaks with the obsessive interest in structure. The problem is that Stone’s analysis has virtually nothing to say about the decades of reflection on the writing of history. The idea that history is a “narrative medium”5 was supported by thinkers such as Gallie, Danto, Kracauer, Certeau, and Veyne, joined by Ricoeur and Rancière in the 1980s and 1990s: they showed that the intelligence of the past has an express need for plot, staging, descriptions, portraits, and figures of

4. Quoted by Richard Bernstein, “A Historian Enters Fiction’s Shadowy Domain,” New York Times, May 15, 1991. 5. Siegfried Kracauer, L’histoire: Des avant-dernières choses (1969; Paris: Stock, 2006), 100.

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style. As Arthur Danto points out that in Analytical Philosophy of History (1965), an event can be explained only in the context of a story, in other words, by linking it to other events. This idea will be reiterated by Veyne in Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (1971) and by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative (1983). Historical knowledge stems from “narrative comprehension,” the ability we have to tell or follow a story. However, this “ultimately narrative character of history” is not to be confused with an effort to defend traditional history as narrative.6 In fact, history always has the same structure, regardless of whether it is written by Macaulay, Braudel, Ginzburg, or Zinn: “A series of events happened to such and such subject,” be it a miller, William of Orange, the United States, or the Mediterranean.7 Hence the conclusion, which sounds like a defiant challenge: Yes, history is written. Yes, to do history is to tell a story, a narrative of true events. Yes, there is a literary component of history, and the historian, this “poet of the detail,” performs a “literary staging.”8 All of this had been completely forgotten since 1870! Nowadays, narrativism has lost a bit of its iconoclastic character: its arguments seem obvious to everyone. The wearisome back-and-forth between science and literature has nevertheless softened the impact of the narrativist argument. For Paul Veyne, history’s profound narrativity is of a piece with its absence of method: if history is literary, then it is not scientific. Conversely, for Labrousse, history is articulated in terms of quantitative figures, series, cycles, and averages: history is scientific, not literary. Thus to assert that “history is written” is a way to start a controversy and make colleagues tone it down it little: “Be a bit more modest! You think you’re scientists, but you’re literary writers.” If one ever decided to submit this pseudo-dichotomy to the assessment of the liberal historians and Romantics such as Thierry, Carlyle, and Michelet, they would have responded by shrugging their shoulders.

6. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 1 (Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 1983), 165, 255ff. 7. Jacques Rancière, Les noms de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil / Librairie du XXIe Siècle, 1992), 9. 8. Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard/Folio histoire, 1975), 111, 119.

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What is not easy to do, however, is to assess the scope and intensity of literary choices implemented by historians. For if in the end it is indeed the case that all history is narrative, there can be no doubt that Renan and Duby opt for a more “literary” form of writing than did others.

The “Rhetorical Turn” The danger of the narrativist position is its indulgence toward skepticism. Veyne implies that there is no “fundamental difference” between history and fiction,9 and Ricoeur speaks of a “cross-reference” linking one to the other. Now, these books on historiography published in the 1970s and 1980s are contemporaneous with the linguistic turn, the current of thought holding that, since everything is language, history is but one discursive construction among others. Hayden White, one of the principal theorists of the linguistic turn and professor of comparative literature, articulates a provocative thesis in Metahistory (1973): history combines a language of tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) with three explicative modes, including emplotment (in the form of a novel, tragedy, comedy, or satire), argumentation (formist, mechanist, organicist, or contextualist), and ideological implications (anarchist, radical, conservative, or liberal). History is thus governed by aesthetic, logical, political, and in any case precognitive choices that form the matrix of discourse, the “metahistoric” substratum of the narrative. This approach, which foregrounds history’s narrative prefiguration, also reveals its rhetorical and poetic dimensions. Contrary to what the advocates of scientism believe, writing is not just the wrapping for historical “content”: writing rather constitutes the content. In making this argument, however, White performs a twofold shift. He not only reduces history to a purely literary object but also likens it to fiction on the basis of commonly shared forms. Not only do tropes and ideologies determine historians’ narrative “strategies,” but also history and fiction are of the

9. “Entretien avec Paul Veyne,” L’Homme, no. 175–76 (July–September 2005): 233–49.

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same nature. History, having become composition, artifice, “verbal fiction,” no longer has any cognitive function of its own.10 That is how the linguistic turn attempts to demolish history, by depriving it of all capacity for articulating a factual account of the world any more valid than that of fiction. Veyne, Certeau, and Ricoeur never go that far: that is the real difference between the narrativist position and relativist skepticism. The linguistic turn resulted from several currents of thought. The first is that of generalized doubt. The Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who was active around 300 BC, is considered one of the founders of skepticism, but it was Sextus Empiricus who, five centuries later, transformed Pyrrho’s teaching into a doctrine in Outlines of Pyrrhonism, stressing the contradictions among all schools of thought, the undecidable character of opinions, the necessity of suspending judgment, and omnipresent aporia. “Pyrronism” was rediscovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth century by Henri Estienne, who translated the Outlines of Pyrrhonism into French in 1562, by Saint-Réal in his Traité de l’usage de l’histoire (Treatise on the Use of History, 1671), and by La Mothe Le Vayer, author of Du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire (Of the Little Certitude That There Is in History, 1668). History is not capable of reaching any truth because truth is not of this world, and there is no criterion that could arbitrate among the different versions of the facts. Since it is incapable of certitude, history must be content to articulate what is likely and describe the passions of humanity. From there we can find a second tradition, pan-poetism, which drowns history in an ocean of “literary” texts. For Quintilian, history gives no demonstration. It tells a story, being a sort of prose poem free of metric constraints. The linguistic turn borrows first and foremost, however, from the Saussurian model or from a caricature thereof: language is a closed system of signs; since there is only text, words refer only to other words. History is thus condemned to remain a prisoner of language, that semiological machine that produces significations unrelated to reality or verbal constructions unconnected with anything outside the text.

10. Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1974), in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 191–210.

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That position converges with that of the poeticians. Under the pretext that the realist novelist and the methodical historian have recourse to the same reality effects, the poeticians conclude that all history makes use of the objective mode and is indistinguishable from fiction. In other words, since history happens to use the techniques of realism, it too is taken in by the “referential illusion.” The semioticians’ position managed to become the linguistic turn thanks to a 1967 article by Barthes: history pretends to believe that discourse has an exterior referent, but what history designates as being “real,” the res gestae, is nothing but a signifier lacking any signified. The referent enters into a direct relation with the signifier, and discourse “expresses” what is real. Hence Barthes’s conclusion: “The fact never has anything but a linguistic existence,”11 (the sentence that White will use an epigram for The Content of the Form twenty years later). Since every text is self-referential, the only difference between the novel and history stems from its rhetorical effects and from the authoritative arguments with which it appears. Hence the tie to the third tradition: the criticism of Power. In stating that history is an “ideological elaboration,” Barthes converges with postmodernism and its distrust of “grand narratives” designed to deceive the masses. History supposedly wants to make “us” believe in its legitimating epics that serve as a smokescreen for Western domination or social exploitation. (For his part, White will say that history moralizes.) Ideology, authority, norms, domination: history is “bourgeois.” To destroy it is to subvert what is real and to emancipate oneself from a reactionary past in order to enter freely into the future of all possibilities. The revolution, regardless of whether it comes from the extreme right or the extreme left, can only hate history, as did the Red Guards “profaning the relics” in the temple where Confucius was born.12 The critics of the 1970s present Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets and Genet’s pro-Nazi incitements as just so many “fictional” motifs. Maneuvering between nihilistic dandyism and skeptical paranoia, the linguistic turn was quickly perceived as a danger. From 1981 on, Arnaldo

11. Roland Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire” (1967), in Le bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 1984), 163–77. 12. Ibid., 176.

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Momigliano, his pupil Carlo Ginzburg, then Krzysztof Pomian and Roger Chartier, all historians, began to fight against it. They all pointed out that, having the mission of searching for what is true, historians ultimately submit to what is real, that their knowledge is verifiable, proven by texts, testimony, vestiges, coins, and also dating techniques.13 For White’s theory, influenced by the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s idealism, supplied arms to those who were claiming that the gas chambers were nothing but a “discourse.” Gentile’s last messages exchanged with historians moreover concerned the subject of the Holocaust.14 In the end, the linguistic turn has had an ambiguous effect. It forced historians to sharpen their methodological arguments, but in doing so they excluded writing, perceived as the Trojan horse for rhetoric and fiction. This was a wasted opportunity. Just when the narrativists were demonstrating that history is written and recounted, postmodern skepticism once again forced history to define itself over against literature. Thus it is that the old Aristotelian prohibition has been perpetuated along with the nineteenth-century taboo: history cannot possibly be poiesis; otherwise it would sink into non-science, poetry, relativism, or delirium. And thus it is that the cold war between the two superpowers, science and literature, seems to be going on forever. Nowadays the linguistic turn is dead, but it has left the smell of the debate to linger over its body: the belief that history cannot possibly be a literary genre without immediately forfeiting its standing. Reflection on the poetics of history has as a result been sullied. Those who want to write social science are suspected either of wanting to return to belles lettres without method, or of being the harbingers of pan-fictional relativism.

13. Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes” (1981), in Settimo contributo alla stona degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 49–59; Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise: L‘histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), chaps. 3 and 4. 14. See Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); and in particular Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” 82–96.

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The “Seductions” of Literature A certain number of researchers are working at the boundaries. There exists a historical sociology, economic sociology, historical anthropology, historical geography, and history as social science. Nevertheless, the disciplines are territorialized and are living by the prohibitions that they establish to mark off their territory. Each on his or her own turf. The field of the sociologist is, roughly speaking, that of present-day society. Historians study the past, and occasionally “present times.” They can take interest in writers and literary institutions, but they neither explain nor produce texts themselves. Those in the literary domain do not concern themselves directly with history. If they want to understand a work’s context, the little bit of “history” that interests them, they have to delve into a history book written by a colleague. Historians and literary scholars are often placed together in the same research unit. These “letters and human sciences” are set over against the “hard sciences,” as if the former were soft and the latter inhumane. As for writers, they do not do either hard or soft science. They invent, create, “write.” Sociology and history are wary of literature, for literature signifies fiction, futility, and fancy; creative writing flies away as fast as it can from the bridled monotony of research. This division is heavily gendered, following a tradition that associates poetry with alluring femininity and truth with stern masculinity. If the “voluptuous Muse” were allowed in the Republic, stated Plato, one would risk seeing reason replaced by the inferior elements of the soul, pleasures of the flesh, or the lamentations of weeping women. For Lucian of Samosata, history covers itself with ridicule by putting on the ornaments of poetry, like an athlete displaying the purple garments of courtesans. In the seventeenth century, “charm” was the attribute of belles lettres, and the novel was associated with women, sentiment, tears, sensitivity, and even with amorous ecstasy. This erotically hedonistic vision of things also encompasses history that is too “well written.” As SainteBeuve put it, Michelet gazed at everything, “right down to Clio’s breast.” Narrative history reveals the human and psychological dimension of events; literary texts injects movement, color, and flesh into the austerity of statistics. In conclusion, literature feminizes history: less gravitas, more charm; hardly rigorous, but so sensitive! Manly science contributes

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the concept, ladylike literature gives life: in history as elsewhere, there is a sexual division of labor. The same distribution of tasks is also found in sociology. For Bourdieu, modern literature (Flaubert, Proust, Woolf) has excellent intuition, but it remains opaque to itself until the sociologist comes to “unveil” the text, if need be breaking its “charm” (which is precisely what Bourdieu’s Rules of Art does). For the sociologist, a master of scientific rigor, the “literary” temptation of sociography becomes a danger: It will take a good deal of virtue not to give in to such advances and what they promise in the way of easy conquests. The frowning critics, guardians of the methodological Temple, are sometimes disturbed by such a state of affairs, but as they would be by a matter of personal vice. . . . The invitation to the Sabbath is nevertheless an appeal that echoes in the innermost heart of sociological interpretation, in the very dissatisfaction with one’s bitter task of producing knowledge, which is somewhat like a feeling of jealousy at having to gaze from afar upon the orgiastic yet fruitful wedding party of the -graphy and the -logy when they are at work within the charms of literature.15

This entire passage is structured by an opposition between literaturecorruption-pleasure and sociology-virtue-resentment. Sociologists do not indulge in pleasure, since they have chosen to say what is true. Rigor as opposed to orgy, scientific purity as opposed to the syphilis of literature. Male domination is also that of the sociologist over literature: he “unveils” it, but without “giving in” to it. Such a manner of structuring the scholarly imagination explains why the debate over the scientific (or literary) character is always full of ulterior motives. It is no longer a matter of making researchers hush up, but of imposing on them a morality of austerity. “You want to do science? Well then, give up the pleasures of literature.” Scholars comply, although at the same time keeping deep within something of a regret or a sentiment of frustration. They do not indulge in literature (of course), but they would really like to (a bit).

15. Jean-Claude Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique: Un espace non poppérien de l’argumentation (1991; Paris: Albin Michel, 2006), 355–56.

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To this condescension full of envy, writers respond with arguments about “higher truths.” This is the classical Aristotelian position: poetry deals with reality in general, while history remains prisoner of the particular. The rhapsodist writer has an instantaneous vision of the truth, while the historian is condemned to seek it out laboriously, without ever attaining it. The lightning flash of truth constitutes an aspect of the consecration of the writer, perceptible with Diderot, Chénier, and Hugo; and the Naturalists will attribute the same gift to themselves in a secularized form. In the face of competition from the sciences and history, writers have the possibility of turning to inner exploration, a realm in which the quest for the “truth” remains possible: the human heart, the innermost regions of the soul, sentiments, secret motivations, and nuances of personality. At the end of the eighteenth century, Rousseau wrote in his autobiography: “I may omit certain things in the facts, transpose other things, and make mistakes with dates; but I may not be mistaken about what I have felt, nor about what my sentiments made me do. . . . The real object of my confessions is to make known accurately my inner life in all the situations I have encountered.” Certainty and accuracy are beneficial not to the history of kings or of great civilizations but rather to the “history of my soul.”16 Still in force today, this division of the world guarantees fiction a realm of its own. The truth of the “outer world,” events, and great men is for history; the truth of the “inner world,” lived experience, and ordinary people is for the novelists. And so it is that novels, telling stories that everyone knows are not “true,” say they convey a “truer” knowledge than history: the rich subtlety of their psychological accounts leads readers to understand what they sense in their own lives. For Kundera, the novel reveals the uncertainty, contradictions, ambivalence, and relativity, or in other words the absence of any definitive truth, in human life. The suicide of Anna Karenina highlights the a-causal, imponderable element in human actions, while Kafka, speaking about the human condition, tells us “what no reflection from sociology or political science can say to us.”17

16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard/ Pleiade, 1959), 278. 17. Milan Kundera, L’art du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 17–18, 138–39.

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The truth of the novel, which is the absence of truth, makes it possible to resist the truth of the totalitarian state. The highly theatrical conflict between history and the novel has driven each side to identify itself much more with its social rather than its intellectual function. The popularity of such historical fictions as The Kindly Ones (2006) and The Messenger (2009), distant heirs of Robert Merle’s Death Is My Trade, has occasioned controversies whose cast of adversaries had been predesignated. As guardians of “historical truth,” historians corrected writers, who in return defended their right to say what they want on the basis of their “creative freedom.” After Claude Lanzmann had attacked The Messenger, author Yannick Haenel retorted, “As opposed to this courtroom of history from which Lanzmann is speaking, literature is an area of freedom in which the ‘truth’ does not exist.”18 Writers thus prevail on all fronts. Philosophizing on the Holocaust, providing a “true” story to the public, they are among those who deliver their vision of “History,” but without having to be accountable to the truth, since they are doing “literature” (understood as fiction). The writers’ freedom is associated with a refusal of all authority, including that of facts and documents: this is an extension of the autonomy gained by writers in the nineteenth century. This profession of faith also lets writers slip virtually unnoticed onto the terrain of politics, where they join the rebels of the linguistic turn: writers are those who contest the established order of history.

After the Divorce Writers write, historians do history. Since literature and history have established two distinct fields, it is possible to study their relationship. Vis-à-vis history, literature can be three things: a document, an object of study, or a source of inspiration. Literature, particularly the nineteenth-century novel, provides historians (as well as sociologists) information, examples, and illustrations. It

18. Yannick Haenel, “Le recours à la fiction n’est pas seulement un droit, il est nécessaire,” Le Monde, January 26, 2010.

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becomes a “source,” even if it must be corrected with indications of exaggeration or error. At the beginning of his History of English Literature, Taine writes that a work of literature is a “copy of the surrounding mores and the sign of a state of mind,” sort of a shell left by the human beings of yesteryear. From 1916 to 1936, Henri Bremond published a twelvevolume Literary History of Religious Thought in France. It was after history became a social science that literary works were more widely considered as historical documents. In order to reconstitute the “affectivity of the past,” Lucien Febvre set out to base his research on judiciary archives, works of art, and literary writings, which record various nuances of sensibility.19 In his grand study of the people of Paris in the nineteenth century, Louis Chevalier uses Balzac’s Human Comedy as a source, while posing the question of its veracity. It was out of the question to take novels at their word. In order to foreground the “surprising quality” of these novels, in other words, their consistency with what was revealed by the archives, Chevalier had recourse to demographics and statistics. Such an approach frees social history from its “subservience to literature”: it makes it possible not only to verify the uneven truths of literary texts but also to vie with literature itself by setting up “rival monuments” standing face-to-face with literary works.20 Historians have also sought to historicize the literary object by looking into the evolution of genres, corpuses, professional milieus, readers responses, publishing markets, and literary institutions. Outlined by Gustave Lanson and greeted with enthusiasm by Febvre, this research agenda did not truly become a reality before the beginning of the 1980s with the works of Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, and Pierre Bourdieu. Its focus is less on the text than on the book, which was the basis for social and economic as well as cultural history. Eager to do away with the old literary history in the manner of Raymond Picard, Barthes could only take pleasure in seeing the literary object taken in by sociology and

19. Lucien Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire,” in Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin/Agora, 1992), 221–38. 20. Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (1954; Paris: Hachette/Pluriel, 1984), 19–21.

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the Annales School: between history as social science and criticism of poetics, nothing remained.21 At the end of the day, literature is this muse that contributes sensitivity, emotion, intuition, and a sixth sense (so many “feminine” qualities) to history. It will thus be said that Proust “felt” the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the liberal bourgeoisie, the power of cultural strategies for distinction, the appearance of social hybrids such as Albertine, petty bourgeois, athletic, and homosexual all at once.22 Even if it is pre-scientific, this foreknowledge opens up new avenues of research for historians. Literature works something like an epistemological supplement. It sensitizes historians to things of which they have little or no knowledge: the role of random chance, the idea of contingency, and the private dimensions of great events. Literature is a cognitive toolbox from which one can borrow models of historicity or exemplars, categories of perceiving the real world, philosophies of time, and forms of interpreting the world (which becomes “Homeric,” “Dantesque,” “Balzacian,” or “Kafkaesque”).23 By reading, historians drink from a wellspring of subterranean inspiration. All of these works are innovative and stimulating, but they repose in a secret sorrow: history is no longer literature. Exiled from itself, history presents itself stridently as nonliterary, non-textual, and non-written. Mixed in with the “first culture” among letters in antiquity and the seventeenth century, fascinated by the “second culture” of science in the nineteenth century, history joins forces with the “third culture” of the social sciences around 1930, but with this belief that non-writing guarantees its scientific character. A literature without a method has given way to a method without literature. This abandonment is a form of self-hatred. For literature cannot be expelled from history; one can only make it insipid, dull, or insignificant.

21. Roland Barthes, “Histoire ou littérature?” in Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 145–67. On the subject of “the rehistoricization of history,” see the special number of Annales HSS, “Littérature et histoire,” ed. Christian Jouhaud, 49, no. 2 (March–April 1994). 22. See Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen, Proust sociologue: De la maison aristocratique au salon bourgeois (Paris: Descartes, 1997); and Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (Paris: Seuil, 1997). 23. See the special number of Annales HSS, “Savoirs de la littérature,” ed. Étienne Anheim and Antoine Lilti, 65, no. 2 (March–April 2010).

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This self-mutilation has four causes: the absence of method that characterized the belles lettres; the prestige of science, visibly useful and solid; the hegemony of the novel, having become quasi-synonymous with literature; and the menace of skepticism. History is not fiction: it is based on a method and aims to make true statements about the world. History is thus founded in its distrust of a certain conception of literature. Euphoric over its new status, however, history has repudiated itself. In order to get out of this trap, we must extricate history from its disciplinary framework (in which there are “historians,” “literary scholars,” and “writers,” with their competing fields of specialization) and must isolate that which intellectually founds history as a social science.

Part II

The Historical Way of Reasoning

5

What Is History?

Let us put ourselves in the place of the semiotician or advocate of the linguistic turn who, opening a history book, sees only an arrangement of words, a narration, a discourse. That perspective is right on one point: beyond their syntactical identity, fiction and history can be brought together within the paradigm of the narrative. “History is a novel that happened; the novel is history that could have happened,” observe the Goncourt brothers,1 a century before Paul Veyne was to qualify history as a “true novel.” These definitions are not unrelated to the nonfiction novels published by American journalists in the 1960s and 1970s. As is obvious to virtually everyone, however, telling a story is not equivalent to telling a true story. What then does history have in common with realist fiction, the historical novel, and “things seen”?

1. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, vol. 1 (Paris: Robert Laffont/Bouquins, 2004), 750 (November 24, 1861).

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Truth Effects The representation of reality in art is one of the great themes for reflection in the West. An “imitation of an imitation” according to Plato, an ordering of actions for Aristotle, the imitation of nature in the seventeenth century, and a “mirror going down the road” according to Stendhal, the representation of reality is therefore a technique before being a content (the common people of the lower classes, the things of everyday life, and so on). For Jakobson, realism has a need to motivate actions, thicken the narrative with metonymies or synecdoches, and to depict its characters through inessential traits.2 For Auerbach, realism is rather based on the serious tone, the coherent narrative, the device of hypotaxis miming the complexity of the real world, and the integration of characters into a known historical context.3 For example, Zola sometimes gives a double representation of his original model, which is present in the text in both its real and its fictional forms. The Anzin Company, on which he bases the Montsou Company, is explicitly named in the novel Germinal; Lantier reads the work of the Belgian doctor who had served as Zola’s model. The barometer above the piano in Flaubert and the little door in Charlotte Corday’s cell as depicted by Michelet are narrative luxuries, details with no purpose other than that of making reality “appear” in the book. That is the reality effect, according to Barthes’s analysis. Thus defined, however, the notion of realism ultimately disintegrates. As Jakobson points out, every current of art claims to be faithful to reality. Moreover, all literature is realist because it ultimately refers back to reality, to the experience of the reader, to objects or to feelings that are familiar to the reader. Don Quixote does not exist, but a donkey, a fulling mill, and Amadis de Gaule do actually exist. When, in describing a damned soul in hell, Dante states that “he held his severed head by his

2. Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 38–46, http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/LITS3304/2011-2012/ 05CJakobson,RealisminArt.pdf (accessed May 21, 2016). 3. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 487.

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hair, hanging from his hand like a lantern,” his description is both unrealistic and strikingly realist.4 The least credible of fables and the most abstruse of poems are realist: it is on the basis of such “realism” that we can picture the characters, understand what happens, and saturate ourselves with images. As Jakobson remarks, when all is said and done, the reader is the judge of realism: “realism” is what speaks to me and what corresponds to my habits. Details, verisimilitude, and motivations are realist once they satisfy our desire to believe. And it is this very act of believing that awakens pleasure. History not only tells a story, and not only represents actions, but also uses effects of presence that place it in direct contact with “reality” by abolishing all distance between the object and the reader, in a stunning operation of make-believe and make-see. On that score, history is fully realist. But such realism has no value if it does not contribute to our comprehension. The vocation of history is not to reflect the real world “as faithfully as possible” but to explain it. As Plato says in the Republic, imitators have no knowledge of what they imitate, and Barthes is right to recall that mimesis carries with it a measure of illusionism. Readers believe what they read, but knowledge fully intends to break with such belief. While realism was brought to its point of perfection in Zola’s work, his level of explanation, that of biological determinism, degeneracy, disorders caused by the French Revolution, and financial greed, is extremely low. The social sciences intend to go well beyond precisely that sort of doctrine. Realism does indeed exist in history, but at the end of the day, it proves to be neither necessary nor sufficient, nor does it constitute a relevant point of reflection. One powerful component of the novel consists of having characters make their way about against the backdrop of a known past, “History.” The tradition of illustrious men, symbolized by the Muse Clio, whose trumpet and laurels serve to celebrate (kleô), maintains the confusion between History as the narrative of memorable deeds and history as an intellectual undertaking: certain people, certain deeds, certain eras

4. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–1975), Canto XXVIII.

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are supposedly more important, more “historical” than others, and it presumably suffices to utter the name of Mme. de Pompadour or Bismarck to do history. Reworked in the nineteenth century by positivism and Hegelian idealism, this epic poetry conception transforms historians into philosophers or tutors, unless they become more prosaically their heroes’ heralds. Such History is the theater for the historical novel and historical painting: popes, emperors, kings, ministers, palace intrigues, assassinations, battles, treaties, penitence at Canossa, the victory at Lepanto, General Grant versus General Lee. This conception takes us from Albéric de Pisançon’s Roman d’Alexandre (Romance of Alexander) around 1120 to the best-seller Edge of Eternity published by Ken Follett in 2014, without forgetting the adventure stories written by Alexandre Dumas and Maurice Druon. But it has a weak spot: “If you put your historical figures at the forefront, they belong to history, so we are entitled to verify things and check your facts, since you give us this right.”5 Like Walter Scott, Stendhal, and Margaret Mitchell, we can render such inquiries harmless by projecting anonymous and fictitious deeds onto a “historical” screen, relegating princes to the background. The realist historical novel thus implements History effects, with contextual allusions, winks, “real” imports, Julien Sorel’s admiration for Napoleon, slavery in the Deep South, and so on. Joseph Roth activates History effects in his 1932 novel The Radetzky March. While it depicts Emperor Franz Joseph, the novel evokes first and foremost “private lives that blind, carefree History” allowed to fall by the wayside.6 However, it is not simply a matter of relating the tribulations experienced by a few unknown souls between 1859 and 1918: the extinction of the Trotta family metonymically parallels the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In other words, the fictitious events and family order reproduce in miniature the movement of “History.” How can the reader be made to sense this movement? On this point, the question of

5. Louis Maigron, Le roman historique à l’époque romantique: Essai sur l’influence de Walter Scott (Paris: Hachette, 1898), 42–43. 6. Joseph Roth in the Frankfurter Zeitung (1932), quoted in La Marche de Radetzky (Paris: Seuil/Points, 1995), ii.

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information is capital. Resorting to zero focalization, the narrator reveals incidentally what the characters do not know. Charles Joseph’s problem: “What he actually sought was a voluntary expiation. He would never have been able to express it himself, but we can say it for him.” The fate of Russian and Austrian officers: none of them knew that “over the glasses from which they were drinking, invisible death was already crossing its bony fingers.” Never does the narrator deliver the novel’s signification in the form of a message such as “Prefect Trotta was unaware that his lineage was condemned to disappear, just as was the empire.” In order, however, not to leave the reader in the dark (having no knowledge about the future, as is the case with the protagonists), Roth uses various techniques to divulge such information. Count Chojnicki and Dr. Skowronnek shock their friend Trotta when they insist that the empire is heading straight for disaster. Amid the confusion of late June 1914, Charles Joseph, who sees things as if “through a pure crystal,” assures the other officers that the crown prince has been assassinated in Sarajevo. Prefect Trotta finally understands that his world has collapsed and that “prophetic Chojnicki” was right. On June 28, 1914, a “supernatural” storm breaks out, in addition to which there is an invasion of crows that remain perched, “black, sinister fruit fallen from the sky.” These elements are History effects: Chojnicki announces the succession of events to the incredulous prefect, and Charles Joseph’s drunkenness leads him to guess the truth. The oracles (modeled after Cassandra) and the portents (such as lightning) that are found in Greek mythology and Herodotus solve one of the narratological problems of the novel, which consists of displaying knowledge of the future in characters who cannot have such knowledge. History is told from their point of view, with their fragmentary information and their human blindness. Our superiority over them, and the source of our pleasure, is that the narrator slips us information over their heads. In so doing, Roth manages both to respect verisimilitude and to bring the reader into the conniving circle of those privy to the future turn of events. These techniques are typical of the realist historical novel, in which “History” is embodied in the fictitious destiny of anonymous individuals or families, such as Évariste in Anatole France’s The Gods Will Have Blood, the two brothers in Roger Martin du Gard’s The Thibaults, and Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

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For historians, however, divulging information is never a problem. They know and tell everything, whereas novelists know everything but transmit knowledge bit by bit with hints and allusions. Historians stand back conspicuously from their narrative, while novelists stand incognito by their characters’ side. That is why the novel has need of harbingers or particularly lucid characters. When historians shed light on the experience of “people in the past,” they always have recourse to the harshly shining beacon of the present. With respect to the assassination of the crown prince on June 28, 1914, historians have no need to invent some supernatural storm as a portent of the coming catastrophe. They can be content to write that “no one or almost no one had believed that this regrettable accident could turn into a worldwide tragedy.”7 Of course the emperor, the defeat at Solferino, the Radetzky March, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the First World War, and all these other elements are real, and crossing fiction with History has something fascinating about it. This magic, which Naturalism also strives to master, is that of reality “entering” into a text and reaching us “as is.” Hence the power of the analecta: descriptions, allusions, reports, and factual details. Fiction derived from a real occurrence—a crime, for example—is something else altogether. The claim to have been “inspired by a true story” was used beginning in the nineteenth century, and still is commonly employed today in films as well as in literature, as if the fact that the story had been a lived experience made it more moving. But in addition to the fact that many narratives “inspired by a true story” have been arranged to be more dramatic, one little factual detail or an accumulations of “things seen” does not lead us to understand any more than would something fictitious. There are narratives and testimonies that hold no interest because they are flat, naïve, boring, or full of clichés, yesteryear’s drivel, family commonplaces, and other cream puffs. If Giovanni Levi’s micro-history and Clifford Geertz’s dense description have value, it is not because they offer a rich harvest of “factual” details about the life of an exorcist in the

7. Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Berstein, Victoire et frustrations, 1914–1929 (Paris: Seuil/Points Histoire, 1990), 20.

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Italian Piedmont, a cockfight in Bali, or a raid on sheep, but because they reveal structures of meaning.8 In this case, density means intelligibility, or the opposite of a thousandpage biography whose claim to be exhaustive takes the place of method. When one wants to make people understand the past or even just relate “what happened,” one has to construct a narrative, order the facts according to their importance, and put aside insignificant details. A journalist will thus make no mention of the flies that flew across the courtroom or the persons who sneezed, except if it has a connection to the case at hand.9 This double criterion of intelligibility and relevance shows that, in composing a story, the argument that something is a fact does not justify its inclusion. There is an abyss separating the little factual detail, presented as such, and the production of knowledge. A lot of things are true: the fact that De Gaulle was in favor of armored units, that he went to Algiers in 1943, and that he published a comical skit at the age of sixteen, just as it is true that the Greeks were philosophers, the Romans builders. But how, among all these things, to separate out the hackneyed aphorism and the uninformative anecdote from the researcher’s topic? Let us imagine that a drone filmed the battle of Kursk in 1943, or that it had been possible to install a video surveillance camera in Jefferson’s bedroom. Would these “real,” even “historical” images lead us to understand something? The real world gives us brute facts in their in-significance, whereas what is true results from an intellectual process: as a component of knowledge, it contributes to intelligibility. The social sciences often have to adopt an anti-phenomenological approach capable of standing apart from or even repudiating lived experience, in order to return with greater strength. That is the difference between a testimony and its analysis, the source and its critique, phenomenological description and the enunciation of truth.

8. Giovanni Levi, Le pouvoir au village: Histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); and Clifford Geertz, “La description dense,” Enquête: Anthropologie, Histoire, Sociologie, no. 6 (1998): 73–105. 9. Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 131.

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From Mimesis to Gnosis History is of course a text, but it sets itself apart from three forms that do not offer a satisfactory response to the question of truth by and in a text, namely, imitation, memory, raw material, in other words—to put it in narratological terms—the reality effect, the History effect, and the lived experience effect. Certainly, historians occasionally resort to the use of such effects, but we must not confuse what is essential with what is an accessory: history is interested less in “the real world” than in what is true, less in “History” than in human beings, and less in “things seen” than in evidence. This passage from representation to knowledge is effected by a line of reasoning. The historical way of reasoning consists of trying to understand, and in particular, therefore, giving oneself the means to do so. What interest is there in stating that my grandmother was condemned to five years in prison or that the United States won the Cold War if I do not explain why I make such statements, how I know it, on the basis of what evidence, in what context, for what purpose? Cut off from a line of reasoning and a demonstration, facts are not worth much; they are at best real. “Hitler was a little landscape painter,” states one character in Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses. He is right, but it is not so easy to explain why he is profoundly wrong and how, starting from something real, he constructed something phony. Sure, we sense that his declaration is tendentious, but the unvarnished reality is that such a bogus assertion is simply mindless. For if we want to begin to understand something about Hitler, we have to admit that, although he was doubtless a (would-be) painter, but also and above all a soldier during the Great War, head of the Nazi Party, German chancellor, military strategist, and criminal, he cannot be reduced to or even associated with the artistic profession; after that, we can ask how he came to power, how he applied his agenda, and so on. Identifying Napoleon with his victories or reducing slavery to its abolition would result in the same sort of abusively misleading statement. Focusing on one item in a picture to the detriment of all others is a form of deception. One sole piece of reality, isolated from a line of reasoning, is not in a relationship with what is true. It is not acceptable as long as it has not been examined, proved, understood, explained, linked up, compared, and critiqued: only then does it become knowledge, “definitively

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accepted,” according to Thucydides’s formula. And then it can be said, if desired, that the facts are established. That is why the historical way of reasoning is at the heart of history. This assertion, which might appear to be a truism, has considerable bearing. Not only does it make it possible to distinguish between the intellectual activity, on the one hand, and the profession, diploma, and institutionalized field, on the other, but also it leads us to relativize what history designates as the very object of its study: history’s value resides not in such-and-such an era, figure, phenomenon, or result, but in the quality of the questions posed by the researcher. Inasmuch as it is a way of reasoning, history implements universal undertakings: seeking, understanding, explaining, and demonstrating. It belongs to everyone, and every human is apt for it. Ancient Greece thought that the truth was the privilege of certain figures, poets, soothsayers, kings, “masters of truth.”10 In the nineteenth century, the university claimed to seize the monopoly on knowledge for itself. This oligarchical closing off of the field gave rise to a history in which the techniques prevailed over the problems. In 1931, Carl Becker defended on the contrary the idea that each person can be his or her own historian: when rummaging through one’s papers, checking something out, or explaining some incident, “Everyman” does history, at least on a practical level.11 Scientific activity, explains Collingwood in The Idea of History, begins when a detective seeks to determine “who killed John Doe,” or when a mechanic explains why a car won’t start. History thus partakes of a natural use of reason. People can apply it to their own lives, to the lives of their close family, to the lives of the deceased, or, what amounts to the same thing, the lives of people they have never known, because those in question are already dead or else live beyond the immediate neighborhood. A writer, journalist, muckraker, detective, judge, museum conservator, curator, documentarist, citizen, or grandson takes part in the democracy of history if they accept the implementation

10. Marcel Detienne, Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (1967; Paris: Livre de Poche, 2006). 11. Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review 37, no. 2 (1931): 221–36.

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of a line of reasoning. We shall later see the modes of thinking involved. For the time being, let us observe that, as an antidote to widespread skepticism, the use of a line of reasoning is the activity by which history is defined. It is only the presence of such reasoning that turns a chronicle, a “faithful and accurate” description, a testimony, and even a historical novel into a work of history.

Understanding What Humans Do Even if we leave aside History and other things “worthy of memory,” history can be defined in several ways. It can be defined as “the mirror of human life” (La Popelinière), “a narration of true, great, public matters” (Le Moyne), “what has happen among humans” (Leibniz), “the narrative of facts held to be true” (Voltaire), the “past reality” (Beard), “human affairs that are over” (Hempel), “the past, to the extent that we know it” (Galbraith), the “science of human societies” (Fustel de Coulanges), the science “of human beings, in time” (Bloch), or the “science of the past, science of the present” (Febvre). Conversely, we can recall what history is not: a fable, an indictment, a glorification, or a complaint. I would like to propose another definition: doing history as a social science is to try to understand what humans do. This broad and by nature transdisciplinary definition has several implications.

A Method for Understanding Our knowledge is varied, our sources of information innumerable, and the temptation to believe that we have understood everything right away is great. “Trying to understand” supposes in fact that we adopt certain intellectual and moral frameworks in which the way of reasoning will occupy a prominent place. Its method is based on the idea that it is not easy to understand, that knowledge is not an immediately, unconditionally, or definitively acquired item, but is rather the fruit of a reflection that one attains by posing the right questions and doing one’s utmost to answer them. The demonstration is what establishes the connection between understanding and knowledge. Founded on arguments and evidence, research therefore consists of doing everything possible to try to understand what humans in fact do.

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A procedure more than a content. History is an intellectual activity defined by a way of proceeding, not by any subject and even less by some “noble” subject. A poor, illiterate clog maker belongs to history as much as does Napoleon: “Everything is historical, therefore History does not exist.”12 Since history is first of all a way of reasoning, it can take all sorts of forms: films, exhibits, graphic novels, myths, epics, novels, and in the case of eighteenth-century India, epic texts in Sanskrit, ka¯vya (court poetry) or pura¯na (“ancients” that recount the myths of post-Vedic India).13 Scholarship written in the objective mode, with footnotes and learned digressions, is consequently just one form of history among others. All this literature is tremendously rich, even if all forms are not equivalent. A capabilist ethic. We must not hide from the fact that, even defined as a science, history rests on moral premises. Historians take for objects of study a plural, undulating humanity, human beings in their infinite diversity, and not “man” in the masculine singular, nor the laws of “History,” nor the work of Providence. Humans are masters of their destiny. Even in the Middle Ages, historians speak less of what has happened than of what has been done, brought about by human action, which is reflected in the Latin terms actus, facta, res gestae. To seek to understand “what humans do” rather than “what happens to them” is a way of adhering to the capabilist principle of Karl Popper, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum: humans are born free and equal, endowed with reason, capable of being something and doing something, which must not lead us to deny the determinisms that weigh on them. Wanting to “explain” slavery by an inherent inferiority of blacks or the Holocaust by the unassimilable character of Jews is to partake not of history but of racism or anti-Semitism. History is human, therefore humanist. Humans in time. From the universal perspective of Polybius to the “representation of everything” according to La Popelinière, from Voltaire’s panorama of civilization to “life in its entirety” resurrected by Michelet, from Alain Corbin’s new territories to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s

12. Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire, suivi de Foucault révolutionne l’histoire (Paris: Seuil / Points Histoire, 1978. The quoted words are the title to chap. 2, 21. 13. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures du temps: Écrire l’histoire en Inde (Paris: Seuil/La Librairie du XXIe Siècle, 2004).

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connected history, history sets no limit for itself other than that of humanity. History is of course interested in objects, animals, trees, diseases, and climate, but only to the degree that they affect human life. Since historians profess their desire to understand the “thousand and one ways of being human,”14 there is no reason for them to designate the invention of writing some three thousand years BCE as their point of departure. History necessarily encompasses prehistory, even if it remains to be determined when what we call humankind first appeared: was it with the appearance of the genus Homo more than 2 million years ago, the creation of tools, bipedalism freeing up the hands, burial of the dead, development of symbolic thought along with the use of pigments and ornaments, the first manifestations of art, the emergence of anatomically modern humans, or the neolithic revolution? It is also the case that paleontologists and historians construct their line of reasoning on the same basis: traces from the past. It is absurd to make writing the pivotal point: that focuses in sharply on a mere technique to the detriment of an extremely long continuity. It leads us to deny 98 percent of human history and 100 percent of history in regions where the oral tradition is prevalent.15 History up to now. We are used to saying that historians study the past. Such an association is not false, but it runs the risk of putting up a barrier between “them,” trapped in their bygone times, and “us,” we moderns, masters of the present. Now, another truism is that historians study the past by means of what remains of it, according to the traces that exist here and now. The questions they pose are those of their own time, their own country, their own lives. Faulkner’s assertion that the “past is never dead; it’s not even past” has a heuristic value;16 this past studied by historians still pulses in their present, in our present, in the form of words, institutions, works, topographies, buildings, and customs, such that our

14. Romain Bertrand, L’Histoire à parts égales: Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident, XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 12. 15. Jean Guilaine, Archéologie, science humaine: Entretiens avec Anne Lehoërff (Arles: Actes Sud/Errance, 2011), 22, 150. 16. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), act 1, scene 3.

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present is constituted into different strata of the past added on to one another, sedimented in multiple concretions, like Westminster Abbey, in which Chateaubriand sees the “monolithic temple of petrified centuries.” The French historian Marc Bloch puts it another way: “The past commands the present. For in order to explain virtually every trait of the rural physiognomy of France today, one has to deal with causes rooted in the dawn of time.”17 There is absolutely no presentism in these words. We are the point of departure and the destination of history, but also the object of its studies: as human beings in time, swept away by its tumultuous rivers, we will soon pass away and be “men and women of the past.” In doing history, we look into our own historicity. We project ourselves in a constantly moving reflection, in which the present, linked back up with the past that draws it back in, is just one stopping place before other vanishing points. The human beings whom we study were, like us, “people of the present,” modern people. That is why a historian seeks to understand what humans do, not what they did yesteryear and in bygone times. History is not first of all an academic discipline but rather a set of intellectual ways of proceeding that aim to understand what humans truly do. It follows that history (as a way of reasoning) is present in activities that have nothing “historical” about them: reporting, journalism, judicial investigations, travel accounts, and life stories. The field of history far surpasses History. That is very good news.

Causal Explanation and Understanding What is required for history to become a science? From Plato to Comte to Toynbee, numerous thinkers have attempted to uncover “laws of History” that would reveal humanity’s ultimate destination: emancipation, servitude, decadence, or progress over the ages, through stages and cycles. In the nineteenth century, the scientific history advocated

17. Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (Oslo: Institut pour l’Étude Comparative des Civilisations, 1931), 250.

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by the methodical historians was hostile to any and all philosophy of History, but certain historians were hoping by means of experiments to lay bare laws analogous to those governing nature. For these positivists in the strict sense of the term, the discovery of laws would give history its noble pedigree and transform the historian into a “new Darwin.”18 The followers of Durkheim shared this nomological conception, but they excluded history: only sociology was capable of establishing laws (or at least regularities), that is to say, capable of proposing a scientific explanation. For his part, Hempel placed history and the natural sciences on the same level: they subsumed an event under laws, “hypotheses in a universal form” validated by experience.19 By deducing the event from these laws, one explained it. Hempel does not provide any example to support his theory, except for the explosion of a car radiator during a nighttime freeze. But even if we could list the entire set of elements setting off the French Revolution (dissemination of Enlightenment thinking, a new book culture, constitution of a public sphere, de-Christianization, rise of the bourgeoisie, decadence of the monarchy, fiscal pressures, poor harvests, and high food prices), it would not follow that bringing these “determining conditions” together would set off a revolution every time. No model can ever capture human diversity, complexity, and freedom. Or else the degree of generalization gets so high that, in the guise of a law, one gets a kind of maxim. “Explaining” the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 would thus consist of saying that “every tyrant seeks to get rid of those who threaten his power” or that “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword.” Moreover, even if laws of History could be formulated, they would not suffice to confer upon history the status of a science; it was precisely against Platonic, Hegelian, and Marxist historicism that Popper defined the logic of scientific discovery. The covering law model, as William Dray puts it, is more interesting if we consider the cause-and-effect relations that it establishes. The value

18. Henry Adams, “The Tendency of History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1894): 17–23. 19. Carl Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” Journal of Philosophy 39, no. 2 (January 15, 1942): 35–48.

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of a historical narrative is obviously based in part on its ability to explain. Referring to the war between Rome and Carthage, Polybius made a landmark assertion when he emphasized the importance of distinguishing “between a first overt act and a cause or pretext” and observed that “a cause is the first in a series of events of which such an overt act is the last,” therefore resolving to “look for ‘causes’ in the motives which suggested such action and the policy which dictated it.”20 At the end of the sixteenth century, during the Religious Wars, La Popelinière wrote that the good historian seeks out the causes “without which no one acts,” in other words, the motives that drive men in their private life (ambition, hatred, friendship, vengeance) as in civil society (sedition, tyranny, famines, epidemics).21 The search for causes, however, aims less to make generalizations than to explain the event in its most inner singularity: Stalin wanted to eliminate a rival and political opponent, Stalin was jealous of a hero of the Revolution who overshadowed him, the NKVD planned the operation for a long time, and Mercader had managed to slip into Trotsky’s entourage. The historian’s role is to present and to establish a hierarchy of causes, and that constitutes a task as intricate as that of a lace maker. The fact remains that the causal explanation is not the alpha and omega of historians’ work. It represents only one aspect, if we assume that it makes any sense. For in the end, does the Holocaust have “causes”? Counter to what the positivists say, the hermeneutical tradition affirms that history is a science, but not like the others: it is a “science of the mind” that seeks to understand human beings, whereas the “sciences of nature” explain molecules and galaxies. Following Dilthey, Weber, and Marrou, we can say that history is not an experimental science in search of laws, but instead an interpretative science in search of meaning.22 Deep in its understanding, history is based on the common humanity of researchers and the people they study: it therefore

20. Polybius 3.6, http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0543.tlg001.perseus-eng1 (accessed May 24, 2016). 21. Henri Lancelot-Voisin de la Popelinière, L’histoire des histoires, avec L’idée de l’histoire accomplie, vol. 2 (1599; Paris: Fayard, 1989), 94–95. 22. See Geertz, “La description dense.”

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seeks to shed light on people’s intentionality and the meaning they give to their actions. With respect to sciences of the mind, Hempel replies that the method of comprehension (empathy, for example) is a heuristic device, not an explanation. For his part, Popper criticizes hermeneutical separatism by recalling that physicists also seek to “understand” the universe, since they are part of it. On a broader scale, the humanities and the sciences share the same epistemology, which consists of solving problems.23 Indeed, it is hard to see how understanding can be opposed to explanation. In order to understand the experience of the soldiers during the Great War, we can make use of the empathy of Verstehen (even though it is difficult to situate oneself in such extreme physical and psychological conditions). We can also attempt to explain how, caught up in a network of constraints involving patriotism, the culture of war, the code of honor, the duty to obey, the feeling of having no choice, and the threat of being brought before a military tribunal, men underwent and accepted such an ordeal.

Putting the World in Order History can therefore be a science on a number of different levels: it provides causal explanations, it describes the world objectively, and it produces understanding. The question whether history is or is not a science, however, has lost its force nowadays. The debate has for too long been distorted by considerations of prestige: to be “elevated to the rank” of science, or to be “only” literature. In the end, the only thing that matters is for history to make its statements explicit and valid, that is to say, for history to demonstrate its validity by following a method and a mode of reasoning. That is how it can be a social science, in a way that reconciles Seignobos with Simiand.

23. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 301–3.

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The phenomena that historians study can be understood by means of a descriptive explanation incorporating rather disparate modes of intelligibility: intentions, motives, causes, circumstances, interactions, and random chance. The narration then produces the “synthesis of the heterogeneous.”24 To narrate an event is to give an explanation of it that is inextricable from its understanding: the narration answers the questions of how and why so as to make it possible for the intellect to appropriate the event. A narrative is therefore in itself an explanation. Conversely, a long-drawn-out, convoluted, topsy-turvy explanation that is all over the map is not a narrative. Narration is not a straightjacket or necessary evil for history; on the contrary, narration constitutes one of history’s most powerful epistemological resources. Trying to understand what humans do. In ancient Greece, history arose at the same time as rational thought: Thales observed the movement of the stars, Anaximander represented the universe, Hecataeus of Miletus engages in the cartography of the earth, and Herodotus travels over its surface to acquire knowledge about its people, their customs, and their deeds. Faithful to the Ionian tradition, he gives a symmetrical representation of the world inhabited by humans: in the north lay cold Scythia, hot Libya to the south, while the Danube and the Nile, supposedly flowing from east to west, form parallel lines on either side of the Mediterranean.25 In the mid-sixteenth century, jurist Jean Bodin turned to history because it allowed him to discover the order beneath the apparent chaos, and the universal behind the contingencies. The axes on which the facts can be configured (chronology, geography, climate, number) are the structures of intelligibility of reality.26 As a social science, an instrument of understanding and explanation, and a discourse on the method, history makes the lives of the deceased more intelligible to us in our own existences full of sound and fury, so that

24. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. I (Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 1983), 339. See also Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, chap. 7. 25. François Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (1980; Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 2001), 72. 26. Claude-Gilbert Dubois, La conception de l’histoire en France au XVIe siècle (1560–1610) (Paris: Nizet 1977), 94ff.

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the world will be less confusing, and reality less murky. Like Robinson Crusoe on his island, researchers in the social sciences give themselves the mission of digging, naming, inventorying, and deciphering the world that they have inherited. Starting from traces, they attempt to understand the organization of facts, the coherence of a culture, and the mechanisms of society. They expose the syntax of the world.

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Writers of History-as-Science

From Plato to Descartes and Simiand, and on to Barthes, an entire tradition sets history over against truth: history is a non-knowledge, a pure empiricism, and a cabinet of curiosities. It could not possibly be a science because it has no method and deals only with the particular. Consequently, truth must be sought elsewhere, in philosophy, mathematics, sociology, literature, and so on. At the end of the nineteenth century, the methodical revolution breaks with that routine of denigration. That break must not be considered the birth certificate of history-as-science, however: it represents instead the end result of a thousand-year thought process. For history has always laid down rules for itself. In Greek, truth is designated negatively: aletheia (absence of forgetting) or atrekeia (absence of lying). Once truth is no longer issued by some magical or religious authority, but instead demonstrated by the reasoning of a person face-to-face with his or her peers,

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truth acquires a different status.1 There is therefore a positivity to truth, which consists of seeking it out with arguments, thanks to techniques, and by means of evidence. This is historical reasoning, which originated in an era when history was commonly regarded to be a literature.

Herodotus’s Reasoning The dark legend of Herodotus sketches us the portrait of a homo fabulator, lying or credulous, quite inferior to Thucydides, except for the style. That there are in Herodotus errors, naïvetés, “explanations” based on divinities or fortune is obvious. But such a vision of the man does not render justice to the historiographical depth of the “father of history,” whose reliability is attested by recent archaeological discoveries, and who remains our main source for the Greco-Persian Wars. Histories is obsessed with the collision of the Greeks with the barbarians. Within that general problematic, the peoples who are victims of the Persians are described systematically, with their traditions, mores, gods, and habitat. Customs imply a past, and Herodotus also makes himself the historian of Egypt, Arabia, and Scythia. For his part, Thucydides will privilege the contemporary political and military history. What deserves our consideration in Herodotus’s work are his ways of reasoning. The Histories (literally “inquiry” or “investigations” in the original Greek) are based on the observation of a traveling witness and on the information gathered over the course of his journeys into Asia Minor, Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, and Greece in the 440s and 430s BCE. Since Herodotus relates his travels and mentions his encounters, he is led to indicate the origin of his information: “I saw” (opsis), “I heard” (akoe), “I inquired” (punthanomai), and “I investigated” (historeo). Elsewhere, he acknowledges his limits: “How numerous the Scythians are, I was not able to learn exactly, and the accounts that I heard did not tally, some saying that they are very numerous, and some that they are few.”2

1. Marcel Detienne, Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (1967; Paris: Livre de Poche, 2006). 2. Herodotus, Histories 4.81, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg 001.perseus-eng1:4.81.1 (accessed May 26, 2016).

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While Herodotus is capable of using his best judgment, he can on occasion also relay uncritically certain opinions he has heard. Juxtaposing the Persian version of the abduction of Io with that of the Phoenicians, his opening gives a vivid illustration of that aspect of the Histories. What has been interpreted as a sign of amateurism or proof of tolerance can also be read as methodological caution. The expression of doubt avows the absence of certainty and thus constitutes a sort of critical self-inspection. What do the statues of nude women in the palace of Mykerinos represent? “Except for what I was told, I cannot tell who these are.”3 There is nothing rudimentary about the history practiced by Herodotus. His questions could be included in a contemporary agenda: Persian imperialism since the reign of Cyrus, the “clash of civilizations” between the Greeks and the barbarians, the fight of liberty against tyranny, and the role of Ionian city-states in the conflict. In order to respond to those questions, Herodotus makes use of several types of reasoning.4 The first and the most fragile is by analogy. In a lake situated on the island of Cyrauis, near the coast of Libya, young girls harvest specks of gold using feathers dipped in pitch. “Therefore” what is said about the island of Cyrauis may be true. Likeness is evidence. The second manner of reasoning is by verisimilitude. Unable to verify the information provided to him, Herodotus is obliged to estimate its veracity, to weigh it, so to speak, on the basis of its coherence, logic, or probability. That is how he rejects affirmations that bees have invaded the regions beyond Istros (“implausible”), that a tyrant having available a large number of mercenaries was defeated by a handful of exiled men (“inadmissible”), or that the Nile originated from the melting of snows (“simply false”). Referring to the freed slave Salmoxis, who spent three years in an underground hiding place before reappearing in plain sight, supposedly resuscitated, Herodotus remains doubtful: “I neither disbelieve nor entirely believe the tale.”5 With the case of a complex event, the criterion of plausibility makes it possible to differentiate among several explanations.

3. Ibid., 2.130. 4. See Catherine Darbo-Peschanski, Le discours du particulier: Essai sur l’enquête hérodotéenne (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 127ff. 5. Herodotus, Histories 4:96, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg 001.perseus-eng1:4.96.1 (accessed May 26, 2016).

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When there exists no certainty, the historian opens the full range of possibilities and formulates a hypothesis, a third form of reasoning. Was Aristedomos, having survived the battle of Thermopylae, excused from fighting because of his inflamed eye, or was he charged with carrying a message out of the camp? The historian assesses the different versions available, then retains the one that satisfies the requirements of logic, verisimilitude, and the known facts. Ephialtes is the one who showed the Persians the trail leading to Thermopylae, and the tradition incriminating another man is unfounded. Indeed, Ephialtes fled and had a bounty put on his head.6 Finally, Herodotus implements “semiological” lines of reasoning based on signs and clues. Ephialtes behaves like a culprit; the Nile is full of silt, since it can be found in the water offshore; the Egyptians know nothing of Poseidon and the Dioscuri, and therefore they did not borrow their gods from the Greeks. This type of reasoning calls to mind the “evidential paradigm,” which, according to Carlo Ginzburg, apprehends a given reality based on details, peripheral facts, underestimated traits, and imperceptible traces.7 All of these methodological choices have consequences for the composition of the work. Herodotus indicates his sources while questioning, citing, discussing, and exposing the underlying components of his investigation: visits, observations, interlocutors, impressions, doubts, and surprises. He is not self-effacing, like Thucydides, before a history that speaks for itself, but assumes his status as investigator. Not content simply to describe, he exposes his difficulties. He doubtless gets it wrong, but he constantly reflects on his sources and on his right to affirm one thing rather than another. His “I believe,” “from my perspective,” and “as far as I am concerned” are not sufficient to establish any pre-scientific status for his inquiry, but do prove his scruples as a researcher, in other words, at the end of the day, his scholarly character. Herodotus speaks under certain conditions.

The Rhetoric of Aristotle and Cicero Carlo Ginzburg has shown that the book in which Aristotle speaks the most about history (as we understand the term) is not his Poetics but

6. Ibid., 7.213–14, 229–30. 7. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 96–125.

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his Rhetoric.8 The Poetics contains the famous passage opposing poetry to history, but it is in Rhetoric that Aristotle lays out his theory of proof, laying the foundation for the agonistic rhetoric that is again found in Cicero’s probare. Like the orator of antiquity, historians prove. They also have recourse to rhetoric in order to demonstrate, attest, or refute; within the framework of their line of reasoning, they also make use of material as well as verbal evidence, reliable clues (tekmerion) or signs (semeion). In this regard, it is striking that Barthes, with his intimate knowledge of ancient rhetoric, did not sense that history could be something other than a discourse heightened with reality effects. The barrier that separates history as narrative (disparaged in the Poetics) from historia as inquiry (based on clues and evidence) is in any case the very same as that which is decisive for the art of oratory: whereas the epideictic poet only shows, the lawyer provides a demonstration. Aristotle nevertheless does not hold historia as inquiry in higher esteem, deeming it nothing more than merely useful for enriching the politician’s experience in finances, military security, and legislation. However, Aristotle’s demonstrative rhetoric, so far removed from the “slick” rhetoric in the modern sense, serves indirectly as the basis for history as science. In 1440 the philologist Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that “Constantine’s donation” (with which the emperor supposedly gave part of his possessions to the pope) was the work of a mid-eighth-century forger acting in the interest of Pope Stephen II, who was seeking to solidify his temporal power. Valla’s Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine points out, in the first place, that the donation was not plausible, and second, that the text contained linguistic anachronisms, contradictions, and errors. Valla was in that respect the disciple of Aristotelian rhetoric, which he learned through his enthusiasm for Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory.9

8. Carlo Ginzburg, “Aristotle and History, Once More,” in History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 38–53. See also Adriana Zangara, Voir l’histoire: Théories anciennes du récit historique (IIe siècle avant J.C.–IIe siècle après J.-C.) (Paris: EHESS/Vrin, 2007), 112–16. 9. Carlo Ginzburg, “Lorenzo Valla on the ‘Donation of Constantine,’ ” in History, Rhetoric, and Proof, 54–70.

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Cicero’s historiographical contribution must be considered in light of this rhetoric. When Cicero requests that Lucceius heap praises on his consulate, he knows that he is violating the rules of history. What are they? Make no false statements; tell the entire truth; avoid the suspicion of favoritism or hatred. To these three rules, Cicero adds a fourth: tell the facts while pointing out their causes.10 We thus get a definition of history, founded on four pillars: the refusal of false statements, the courage to tell the truth, concern for remaining impartial, and the search to understand why and how. Cicero’s history does have a great need for eloquence, but it is less for ornamentation than for articulating a factual account of reality. The Revue historique in which Monod publishes his manifesto in 1876 will moreover use Cicero’s rules as its motto. Of course, Cicero is not a historian. But as a lawyer, he conducted several investigations. In 70 BCE, city-states in Sicily called upon him to expose the dealings of their former governor (propraetor) Verres, suspected of graft and extortion. Cicero examined Verres’s finances in Rome, since the law authorized it there. He found exports from Sicily, ledgers, archives of the publicans who farmed out taxes, and unpaid custom duties. On-site, in Sicily, Cicero spoke to farm workers and inquired within the assembly in Syracuse. The senators brought him secret registers in which the thefts suffered by the city were recorded. The “first oration against Verres” that Cicero pronounced in August 70 was enough to crush the defense; the vehement accusations of the “second oration” (concerning the illegalities committed during Verres’s governorship, the thefts of artworks, and the cruelties) were nevertheless published.11 The element of propaganda in Cicero’s eloquence does not prevent him from recognizing the rules of history. What is more, his judicial practice, based on historia as investigation, provides the foundation of a historical mode of reasoning, making use of archives, testimony, clues, evidence introduced within the framework of a demonstration, the establishment of the facts, and a search for the truth. The tradition linking together Aristotle, Cicero, Valla, Bayle, Mabillon, Momigliano, Vidal-Naquet, and Ginzburg is that of demonstrative rhetoric.

10. Cicero, On the Orator 2.15.62–63. 11. Pierre Grimal, Cicéron (Paris: Fayard, 1986), chap. 6.

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History as Science in the Sixteenth Century The awareness of a historical way of thinking developed through a process of secularization which began in the sixth century BCE with the advent of reasoned argumentation over against the word of oracles. This process was interrupted in the Middle Ages: to go beyond the mere chronicle of events would have been presumptuous, as an attempt to explain divine will.12 At the time of the Renaissance, history was based on free examination and a critical approach which implied a certain emancipation from the Church. Lorenzo Valla rose up against tradition; Henri Estienne made fun of the numerous miracles related in The Golden Legend. The Wars of Religion would drive La Popelinière and de Thou to fight against intolerance. History is the domain of human reason, not of dogma or revealed truths. Historians do not receive the truth all ready-made from on high, they seek it out by means of method. Independent from all authorities, historians are their own authority (which does not prevent them from working collectively). This break with the divine, distrust of beliefs, refusal of the supernatural, in a nutshell, this attempt to understand what humans do, links the humaniores litterae (human letters) of the humanists to the secular history of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. Banishing miracles became a “principle of historical criticism.”13 Where to find certitude here below on earth, if not in the archives, manuscripts, and antiquities? This return to the sources—ad fontes, as the humanist would say—gave rise to critical erudition, practiced by philologists such as Valla and Budé, and by jurists such as Bodin, Cujas, Pasquier, and de Thou, the envied owner of a library containing several thousand volumes, who in 1604 authored a history of contemporary Europe. The passion for original sources influenced the economy of the text. The “rhetoric of citations” typical of the humanism practiced by French magistratehistorians testifies to the importance they gave to documented evidence, lessons from manuscripts, and written testimony.14 As Étienne Pasquier,

12. Bernard Guenée, “Histoires, annales, chroniques: Essai sur les genres historiques au Moyen Âge,” Annales ESC 28, no. 4 (1973): 997–1016. 13. Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus (Paris: Lévy, 1863), lii. 14. Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et res literaria de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 489ff, 686ff.

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author of Les recherches de la France (Research on France, 1560), explains, historians must not affirm anything “without proving it.” At the heart of sixteenth-century philology and juridical thought was the demand for method. The method defined by Bodin in his Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (Method for the Easy Knowledge of History, 1566) was to serve as a model for numerous historians, who, like La Popelinière, would draw from it the idea of a “mathematics of history” based on problems, causal series, points of origin, and developments.15 History is not a metaphysics in which all sorts of speculation are permitted; history studies human deeds through certain material that has been deliberately collected. This requirement of “observation” heralds the method of Bacon’s Novum Organum Scientiarum (“New Instrument of Science,” 1620): just as nature is known by means of experiments, so the past is known thanks to documents. Even though the sixteenth century’s history-as-problem has nothing of an empiricism, La Popelinière and Bacon, who also wrote a History of the Reign of King Henry VII, converge on several points: their distrust of tradition, appeal to experience, self-transcendence, and the concern for objectivity.16 This scientific aspiration justifies the austerity of historia nuda. For Bodin and La Popelinière, the historian’s writing must distinguish itself not by its rhetorical ornaments but rather by its clarity of expression; the value of such texts resided not in their beauty but in their accuracy. The ideal of an “accomplished history” thus arose in the sixteenth century: this was no longer the history handed down by the ancients but an autonomous history-as-science, based on the secularization of research, questioning of original sources, a rational method, and sobriety of style. Beyond its own specific fields of investigation (Roman coins for Budé, the continuity of France for Pasquier), history’s object is the search for truth, which La Popelinière defines as “the historian’s principal and most-needed contribution.”17

15. Philippe Desan, Penser l’histoire à la Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1993), chap. 5. 16. F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580–1640 (London: Routledge, 1962); and G. Wylie Sypher, “Similarities between the Scientific and the Historical Revolutions at the End of the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 3 (July–September 1965): 353–68. 17. Henri Lancelot-Voisin de La Popelinière, L’histoire des histoires, avec L’idée de l’histoire accomplie, vol. 2 (1599; Paris: Fayard, 1989), 258.

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With their subordination to authority, errors, and partiality, the seventeenth-century historiographers sponsored by the monarchy represented the antithesis of “accomplished history,” whose values are better defended by the memorialists. The convergence of history with memory was favored by the fact that contemporary history could be written by eyewitness protagonists such as Guichardin, de Thou, and before them Polybius, Xenophon, Caesar, and Commynes. Beginning in the 1550s, the memorialists, who were aristocrats whose nobility was that of the sword (the oldest and most prestigious), foregrounded the rectitude and experience that made them apt to be good judges of the affairs that they related, as opposed to the historiographers, servile, inexperienced courtiers, obliged to work as subordinates. Writing in his Mémoires of the Thionville debacle of 1639, Abbé Arnauld intends to reestablish the truth that the historiographers have been covering up. Bussy-Rabutin holds that the memorialists were “disinterested and friends of the truth.”18 Saint-Simon is the one who defends most energetically his status as trustworthy witness-historian who redeems the tainted truth and is better for having “himself handled the things that he has written.”19 Marshal de Villars usurped the glory of his masters, Mme. de Maintenon maneuvered “with such great skill”20 that posterity will refuse to believe it, the Duke of Orléans did not poison the Dauphin and his family, and the Roi Soleil was “a rather great king.”21 In this personal combat against mystification, the historian is aided by his own memories, as well as by witnesses: Marshal de Lorges, “the truest man who ever was,”22 and the officers who participated in Marshal de Villars’s campaigns. Of course, Saint-Simon did not particularly distinguish himself by his impartiality. He wielded a blind hatred of the king’s bastards, their former governess and protectress Mme. de Maintenon, and all the “monsters” of the court. He fixated obsessively on quarrels over rank and etiquette.

18. Emmanuèle Lesne, La poétique des mémoires (1650–1685) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996), 42–49. 19. Louis de Rouvroy duc de Saint-Simon, Louis XIV et sa cour (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 2005), 526. 20. Louis de Rouvroy duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires de Saint-Simon, vol. 7: 1715 (Paris: Carrefour du Net, 2014), 409. 21. Ibid., 333. 22. Ibid., 406.

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A duke to the core, he was excessively vain, often superficial, and at times errant. But his Mémoires are filled with the historical way of reasoning forged by the sixteenth century: making use of authentic testimony, weeding out lies, speaking from experience, exposing the “driving forces of events,”23 stating only what was “dictated by the naked truth, good or bad,”24 and preventing posterity from letting itself be misled by the masks of the present.

The Spirit of the 1690s The authority of the Church, the glory of the king, the radical doubt of Descartes, the Pyrrhonism of La Mothe Le Vayer are the main threats that history had to face in the seventeenth century. For it if turned into obsequious flattery, a pastime, a fanciful tale, or gossip, it would lose all interest. Ways of fending off such attacks were developed in the last few decades of the century. “By history, I mean everything that has already been invented and is contained in books. But by science, I mean the ability to solve all problems,” wrote Descartes in 1640.25 Science is an activity of the mind, whereas history is an already finished narrative, moreover full of errors and doubts. Whoever seeks the truth must begin by rejecting the uncertain: that is why the philosopher abandoned history to the learned scholars. Leibniz refused this scheme of things. Mathematics and history are not of the same nature, but history can attain certitude once it has established its method. What method? Leibniz starts to develops his historiographical reflection in 1687, on a long trip he made through the German and Italian states, researching the origins of the house of Brunswick. In order to lift history above the fables, one can carry out a critique of documents and testimonies; to revive the past, one can study what remains of it in the present; to augment our certainties, one can have recourse to geology, archaeology, linguistics, philology, and genealogy; to measure what is plausible, one can avail oneself of mathematical probabilities; instead

23. Louis de Rouvroy duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires de Saint-Simon, vol. 6: 1712–1714 (Paris: Carrefour du Net, 2014), 278. 24. Saint-Simon, Mémoires de Saint-Simon, vol. 7: 1715, 329. 25. René Descartes to Hogelande, February 8, 1640. Descartes’s words are quoted by Yvon Belaval, Leibniz critique de Descartes (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 91.

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of rejecting opinions, one can compare them critically to one another. In sum, history can become a science if it is based on hypotheses, lines of reasoning, and demonstrations. In a report for the Duke of Brunswick (1692), Leibniz wrote, “This accuracy that the truly learned men require nowadays has spread even into history, which appears to be the least receptive.” History has several parts, but “the soul of everything is the truth,” which is reached by means of “good evidence.”26 To purge errors from history, to rely on documents, to advance nothing without evidence, and to aim for certitude as in all science is, with few exceptions, the agenda of Pierre Bayle. Bayle was an erudite Cartesian Calvinist, having taken refuge in Holland. Publishing his News from the Republic of Letters in 1684, he avails himself of doubt not to delegitimize history but to make it unassailable. Having first thought of putting together a “collection of falsehoods” present in other works, he published his Historical and Critical Dictionary in 1697. It was a biographical dictionary in which the errors of his predecessor, Moréri, were systematically corrected. The page layout of this Dictionary reveals the meticulous nature of Bayle’s work on sources. As Bayle indicates in his preface, the entries are divided into two parts. One is purely biographical, offering “a succinct narrative of the facts”; the other is composed of notes, consisting of a long commentary, a “blend of evidence and discussion.” In each of these parts, the source of information as well as references to the citations are indicated by notes. Bayle thus creates four levels of text: the biographical narratives, strictly speaking; his critical footnotes (A, B, C, and so on) in small print, which are long commentaries constituting the second part of the entry; the scholarly notes for the biographies, placed in the top margins (a, b, c, and so on); and the scholarly notes for the commentaries, placed in the bottom margins. To summarize, we have the biographical narratives, the critical commentaries in notes, the notes to the biographies, and the notes to the notes. By means of this system, every affirmation is proven, referenced, placed into perspective, and critiqued. By the tremendous scope of its erudition, the levels of reading that it makes possible, the complexity of its narration, and its labyrinthine

26. Louis Davilé, “Le développement de la méthode historique de Leibniz,” Revue de Synthèse Historique 23, no. 69 (December 1911): 257–68.

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organization, Bayle’s Dictionary is a masterpiece of literature. Now, it is precisely through its literary choices that history becomes a science. Narration corresponds to requirements in the areas of verification, certification, and delivering proof. It is because he tells a story that Bayle proves, and because he proves that he tells a story. He creates out of his concern for being rigorous. The critical and scholarly notes constitute a revolution of method as well as a revolution in literature. That is why the Dictionary is so decisive: following Herodotus, Cicero, and Valla, he exemplifies an epistemology in a text. Bayle’s writing is neither an ornament nor a work of rhetoric: it is in itself a way of historical reasoning. The invention of a literary technique for presenting factual truth made it possible for Bayle to rectify, in the historians’ favor, the scales that had been tilting in favor of the memorialists: an erudite scholar trained in the method is much more qualified than a contemporary witness, even if the witness has firsthand information. Thanks to its critical apparatus, history becomes a model of science. Thanks to its system of specific references, history makes it possible to suppress errors and prejudices. By way of history, Bayle’s Dictionary retraces the lives of great figures who have lived since antiquity. Now, in order to know the past of these men without restricting oneself to what is memorable or contemporaneous, it is necessary to study the entire set of traces that they have left behind. Mabillon, a Benedictine monk in Saint-Maur, lays the foundation of the critique of documents in De Re Diplomatica in 1681. Diplomatics becomes a science capable of authenticating, dating, and determining the origin of a document. In his works on the saints of his order toward the end of the 1660s, as in his Lettre sur le culte des saints inconnus (Letter on the Worship of Unknown Saints), published in 1698, Mabillon advocates accuracy and critical thinking in the area of religious history, and that arouses fierce enmities. He defined the “rules of history” in order to defend his work. The historians’ primary virtue is “the love and search for the truth.” In order to attain it, they must put forward only “what is supported by antiquity itself.”27 The only valid authority is the original.

27. Mabillon, Brèves réflexions sur quelques règles de l’histoire (Paris: POL, 1990), 44, 105, 129.

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According to Furetière, the antiquities include the “medals, statues, and other monuments of the ancients that remain for us.”28 Materiality and authenticity, methodically examined, lend the weight of certitude. Jacob Spon records archaeological testimonies in his Voyage de Grèce et du Levant (Travels in Greece and the Middle East, 1678); Spanheim lays the foundation of modern numismatics in the 1660s and 1670s; Le Clerc’s Ars Critica (1697) proposes a method for studying documents, inscriptions, currencies, and statues. This intense use of antiquities strengthens the work of historians, particularly with Mézeray and Father Daniel’s Histoire de France (1685).29 These advances will not be forgotten by the liberal, Romantic, and methodical historians of the nineteenth century. The struggle of the memorialists, antiquarians, Leibniz, Mabillon, and Bayle consisted of caring passionately about the truth in the century of Louis XIV and fighting against intolerance and absolutism. For Bayle, the footnote was a triple refuge: against Descartes’s scorn, Louis XIV’s oppression, and Catholic orthodoxy.30 History became a school of resistance by setting new rules for itself, thus trading constraints for the freedom of knowledge and the intellectual independence benefiting all mankind. This portrait of the historian as a Stoic with no homeland or passion reveals a sociology of truth in the seventeenth century: Racine and Boileau are bourgeois courtiers, whereas the great memorialist nobles live outside the favor of the monarchy, and the erudite “citizens” of the Republic of Letters escape the powerful attraction of Versailles by studying in their monasteries or exploring libraries. From that time on, history has been intent not just on understanding but also on proving, in order to correct errors, purge tradition, and expose imposture. Born from the spirit of the 1690s, history became a combat.

28. Antoine Furetière, “Antiquités,” in Dictionnaire universel, 1 (La Haye: Husson, Johnson et al.), 1727. 29. Arnaldo Momigliano, “L’histoire ancienne et l’antiquaire” (1950), in Problèmes d’historiographie ancienne et moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 244–93; Marc Fumaroli, “Historiographie et épistémologie à l’époque classique,” in Certitudes et incertitudes de l’histoire, ed. Gilbert Gadoffre (Paris: PUF, 1987), 87–104. 30. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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The Wrath of Truth The historical way of reasoning does not serve only to understand the past; it also helps to act in the present. It makes it possible to rehabilitate the Protestant Calas, wrongly accused of murdering his son. In order to demonstrate the cruelty of the slave trade in the 1780s, Thomas Clarkson traveled all around England in search of evidence, conversed with sailors, collected handcuffs and instruments of torture used on the ships, and helped disseminate the autobiography of a former slave. It is easy to make fun of Chateaubriand: he describes lands he has never seen and dreams he is Napoleon’s equal. But book 16 of his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave is one of the first attempts to understand the execution of the Duke of Enghien in the moat of the Château de Vincennes in 1804. In order to establish the truth, Chateaubriand lays out an argument based on the documents available to him: the interrogation of the young duke before the military commission, memoirs published by the protagonists of the event, and the exhumation report (revealing that the victim’s jaw had been shattered by bullets). Immediately following his analysis of this “murder,” Chateaubriand quotes from the article that he published in Le Mercure de France in 1807: When in the silence of abjection, the only sounds that can be heard are the chains of slaves and the voice of the collaborator, when everything trembles before the tyrant, when it is as dangerous to curry his favour as to merit his disgrace, the historian appears, charged with the vengeance of the peoples. Nero prospered in vain, for Tacitus was already born during the Empire; he grew unknown beside the mortal remains of Germanicus, and already Providence, true to her character, had given to an unknown child the glory of the master of the world.31

The writer-historian is an opponent for the simple reason that he tells the truth.

31. This English translation of Chateaubriand’s original article is available at http://www. napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/napoleonic-pages-mercure-de-france-4juillet-1807-chateaubriand-wrote-it-is-in-vain-that-nero-prospers/ (accessed May 28, 2016).

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At the end of the nineteenth century, historians such as Charles Seignobos, Henri Hauser, Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre take a stand in favor of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer falsely accused of treason in the context of the infamous Dreyfus affair which rocked France at the turn of the century, revealing the country’s deep divisions and virulent strains of anti-Semitism. They make their commitment as citizens, socialists, or partisans of the Republic, but also as people who possess a certain professional competence. For historians are professionals of evidence. Gabriel Monod examines the facsimile of the handwritten note and gives a deposition before the criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation (Cour de Cassation) in 1899; four students from the École des Chartes are called to witness by the defense in the Zola trial. Their commitment was “quasi-deontological.”32 In the second half of the twentieth century, the historical way of reasoning is employed in numerous struggles. As an orphan of the Holocaust, a hidden child, and a student of Marrou involved in the fight against torture during the war in Algeria (1954–1962), Pierre Vidal-Naquet defended the idea that the historian has a role to play in the polis. If historians are “witnesses for truth,” it is not just because they defend certain values; it is also because they follow the rules of their trade. Vidal-Naquet draws a parallel between the Dreyfus affair and the Audin affair, involving a French mathematician and member of the Algerian Communist Party arrested by French paratroopers and “disappeared” in 1957. In one camp was found the forgery, the complicity of the military high command, and the state lie; in the opposing camp, “a ‘lobby’ in service of the truth,” seeking out witnesses, gathering evidence, publishing articles and books. Here again, it is important to emphasize that the researcher and the activist were one and the same person. It was thus possible to fight against the war in Algeria in one’s capacity as a historian: “Establishing the facts, constituting coherent sets, reestablishing or trying to reestablish the truth as opposed to the official lies did not require me to change professions.” And Vidal-Naquet goes on to quote the passage in which the one who protested against Napoleon appears, “charged with

32. Olivier Dumoulin, “Les historiens,” in L’affaire Dreyfus, ed. Michel Drouin (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 389–96.

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the vengeance of the peoples.”33 Such was the portrait of Vidal-Naquet in the likeness of Chateaubriand, and the portrait of Chateaubriand in the likeness of Tacitus. The historian Carlo Ginzburg, who wrote a book to demonstrate the innocence of the leftist activist Adriano Sofri, also wrote the preface to Valla. The force that drives the historian is the same that led Valla to struggle against the papacy, La Popelinière against intolerance, Mabillon against obscurantism, Bayle against oppression, Saint-Simon against impostors, Chateaubriand against despotism, Thierry against the historiographers, Voltaire and Jaurès against judicial error, and Vidal-Naquet against state secrets and Holocaust denial. It is the wrath of truth in all of it forms: restlessness, the frenzy for knowledge, the urgency of speaking out, and the “passion for history,” in other words, the opposite of the state of intellectual quietude (ataraxia) sought by Pyrrho and the Skeptics. It is the wrath that drove the French journalist Albert Londres to tell of the penal colonies, insane asylums, wars, exploitation of Africans, and the solitude of the Jews. It is the wrath that gripped Primo Levi as a young deportee crossing Germany in 1945: “We felt an urgent need to settle our accounts, to ask, explain, and comment, like chess players at the end of a game. Did ‘they’ know about Auschwitz, about the silent daily massacre, a step away from their doors? . . . If they did not, they ought, as a sacred duty, to listen, to learn everything, immediately from us, from me.”34 Primo Levi was not shut up in some library; he had just left the camp. He felt the need to understand what had taken place, what happened, what happens to us, what humans have done, what we are doing. There, as Levi says, lies his “sacred duty.” History is an activism for the truth. It is always conducted in a hostile environment, against an enemy called error, deception, denial, lies, secrets, oblivion, and indifference. What is true here, however, does not partake of some cry of distress or rage, wisdom from time immemorial, mathematical equation, or information received in its immediacy from the media. It is a tributary to a way of reasoning that historians and non-historians, travelers, monks, jurists, lawyers, collectors, and journalists all contributed to inventing.

33. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Face à la raison d’État: Un historien dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1989), 45. 34. Primo Levi, The Truce: A Survivor’s Journey Home from Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Wolf (London: Bodley Head, 1965), 204.

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In the nineteenth century, the methodical historians succeed in making this heritage bear fruit, but in doing so they tear it away from its roots: writing and the commitment of the self. Here we reach the utmost limit of anti-literary scientism. Under the guise of objectivity, it failed to recognize the epistemological capacity of the “I of research.”35 In the name of being scientific, it disregarded the demonstrative and cognitive power that there is in literature, be it travel narrative, investigation, plea, epic, memoir, or novel. History-as-science was invented by writers who staked their lives on it. That was in the era of belles lettres.

35. Paul Ricoeur, Histoire et vérité (Paris: Seuil/Essais, 1955), 32–39.

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Contrary to prophets who decree it, researchers pursue truth by a way of reasoning, the guiding principle for a project of understanding and explanation. This mode of reasoning is common to all the social sciences and includes several procedures that I will differentiate here for the sake of my general argument: distanciation, which makes it possible to pose a problem; the investigation, through which sources are gathered; comparison, which dissipates the illusion of the unique; the formulation-destruction of hypotheses, based on evidence. To put it another way, history as social science is a critical rationalism consisting of answering the questions that one has put to oneself.

Distance How do researchers step back from the object of their analysis to put it in perspective? Temporal distance facilitates the task. Certain sentences,

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observes Danto, can be uttered only by a contemporary: to state that “the Thirty Years’ War begins in 1618” implies knowing not only the outcome of the war but also its scope. To describe something in light of future information is indeed a historical way of proceeding. But what about what one is presently experiencing, “immediate” history or on-the-spot sociology? One solution consists of moving physically away from the event. Intent on writing the history of the Roman people, Sallust keeps his distance from public life after the death of Caesar. On June 18, 1815, the day of the battle of Waterloo, Chateaubriand was at Ghent, fifty kilometers away, alone under a tree, which allowed him to ponder the consequences of this “new Agincourt.” However, neither temporal distance, nor the quietude of leisure, nor the posture of the witness can take the place of stepping back from one’s own situation. Kracauer dismisses Ranke’s objectivism as well as Dilthey’s hermeneutics when he points out that in approaching events, the historian is like Proust seeing his grandmother again, first involved in the action and thus blind, then in turn a detached observer in hat and traveling cloak.1 That is why, between involvement and disengagement, there are fruitful heuristic positions: the perpetual traveler, like Herodotus; the exiled, like Thucydides, Polybius, and Machiavelli; the deliberate outcast, the stateless, the turncoat, Simmel’s stranger or outsider, at once close and distant, indifferent and a participant; Park and Stonequist’s “marginal man,” who remains at the edge not only because society rejects him but also because he has chosen to straddle two worlds. This displacement, half in, half out, is a key notion in German sociology and in the Chicago School, and has its equivalent in the tradition of Durkheim: the “break with reality,” the necessity of freeing oneself from common sense, preconceptions, spontaneous theory, ordinary language, familiar relations, and things that seem to be self-evident.2 To the degree that Barthes’s Mythologies strives to denaturalize the objects of everyday

1. Siegfried Kracauer, L’histoire: Des avant-dernières choses (1969; Paris: Stock, 2006), 145. 2. See Pierre Bourdieu et al., Le métier de sociologue: Préalables épistémologiques (1968; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005).

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life in the 1950s, stuck in what seems to be obvious and what goes without saying, it partakes of social science. Finally, we can also step back and put the sources in perspective: there are false documents just as there are poor witnesses. From Mabillon to Langlois and Seignobos, every discourse on the method of history takes on this critical function. But how to avoid slipping from caution into mad paranoia, which consists of stating that September 11 was staged by the American secret services or that Descartes is a myth totally made up by the French Jesuits? When we have before us a document or a testimony, we must ask ourselves not whether the person wanted to deceive us, but whether he understood what he was talking about, and with what degree of accuracy and lucidity. Because historical knowledge is mediated, states Marrou, it supposes a relation of trust, which does not mean credulity.3 Shunning naïveté as much as hypercriticism, researchers must then adopt an attitude of vigilant trust that Herodotus summed up in his own particular way: “As for myself, although it is my business to set down that which is told me, to believe it is none of my business at all. This I ask the reader to hold true for the whole of my history.”4 It is up to researchers to make explicit the reasons they have to validate, doubt, or refuse. They are charged with treating their sources as they treat themselves, distant from their person, social status, identity, and motivations. Stepping back to put things into perspective epistemologically makes it possible not so much to define a problem—one always has a problem—as to define it in a relevant way. Contrary to what empiricists say, the scientist does not proceed from the particular to the general, the detail to the whole, the observation to the theory. It is the problem that impels the scientist toward the world. An entire epistemological tradition from Koyré to Popper recalls that the fundamental scientific act is the formulation of a problem. And through experimentation, each resolution of a problem makes new problems appear.

3. Henri-Irénée Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Paris: Seuil, 1954), 132ff. 4. Herodotus, Histories 7.152.3, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016. tlg001.perseus-eng1:7.152.3 (accessed May 29, 2016).

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The social sciences do not proceed any differently. From Herodotus on, all historians have pursued a problem that is often found caught up in their own lives: war, the advent of the new, conquest, revolution, or genocide. But one has to wait until the twentieth century for history to present itself explicitly as a problem-solving activity. Collingwood would state the point, and the Annales School, goaded on by criticisms from the followers of Durkheim, would recall that historians always start out, in their heads, with “a precise intention, a problem to solve, a working hypothesis to verify.”5 This postulate has two important consequences: all sciences think in the same manner, and history cannot define itself as the knowledge of the past. We have no “past” in itself, no “facts” to discover. There are only problems, that is to say, questions formulated about the traces of the past—objects, documents, witnesses—that have survived in the present. The historical problem is the question that one asks oneself, the paradoxical, counterintuitive question, the expression of what amazes, resists, prods, and excites. It is the fruitful enigma, the intuition, the “little idea” on which one ruminates, the obstinacy of the researcher, her anguish, his ingenuity, his speck of madness, her will to challenge all the rest. “Did Saint Louis really exist?” asks Le Goff mischievously, before proceeding to deconstruct the myth of the most Christian king.6 The question sets the line of reasoning into motion, directs the investigation of the documents, outlines the framework within which the research is going to work. Hence the feeling of perplexity in response to projects of a universal history. In the end, research in the social sciences implies two complementary attitudes: an attitude of maintaining a certain distance from the object of one’s research, which means stepping back (mentally, at least) in order to observe from a certain temporal and sociological position, and an attitude of focalization, in which one chooses to shut oneself inside the relevant context delimited by the question.

5. Lucien Febvre, “Examen de conscience d’une histoire et d’un historien” (1933), in Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin/Agora, 1992), 3–17. 6. Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 887.

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Investigating The researcher is not a soothsayer who “knows” by some inner science. The social sciences are carried out on the basis of sources, and history in particular has need of documents. Just like the historians of the Romantic era, the methodical historians know that history is a field of indirect knowledge that seeks to understand the past through the intermediary of traces. These sources, which we can designate under the generic term “archives,” are of a diverse nature. There are archaeological archives (skeletal remains, coins, jewels, monuments, buildings, inscriptions), underwater archives (shipwrecks, amphorae, stone blocks), material archives (roads, street furniture, household furnishings, artistic objects, articles of everyday life), written archives (manuscripts, printed material, newspapers, posters, banners), visual or audiovisual archives (images, photos, videos, film), and digital archives (Internet). All around us, however, there are people and things, landscapes and books that do not evoke any thought or reaction in us. That is because nobody is a witness and nothing is a source until the researcher has decided to make them so by posing a question. As soon as there is a question, all is endowed with the gift of speech: “A document is any source of information from which the mind of the historian is capable of drawing something that can contribute to the knowledge of the human past.”7 One has to have a certain technical or psychological flair to access archives, but that must not obscure the fact that archives are everywhere. Researchers can “invent” sources, that is to say, they can question new objects in hopes that these objects will answer the researchers’ question: fences, motors, recipes for cooking, sonatas, “lunar eclipses and horse collars,”8 my neighbor, your Facebook account, and even dreams, used to understand the impact of the Nazi dictatorship on people’s minds.9

7. Marrou, De la connaissance historique, 77. 8. Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), 428. Also quoted by Antoine Prost, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Seuil/Folio Histoire, 1996), 82. 9. Charlotte Beradt, Rêver sous le Troisième Reich (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2002).

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It is crucial not to put on blinders when gathering sources. Otherwise, one neglects those believed to be uninteresting, too spotty, or taken from minor, secondary protagonists. By viewing all documents available to him, whether they be of Dutch, Portuguese, Malaysian, or Javanese origin, as equally worthy of his attention in the writing of his Histoire à parts égales (History in Equal Shares, 2011), Romain Bertrand rejects from the very outset the implicit hierarchies that are the basis of our ethnocentrism. In order to understand the first interactions between the Dutch and the Javanese at the end of the sixteenth century, one has to knock down the “paper walls of the European archive.”10 When is the collection of sources over? Never, unless one has decided to stop. How are sources gathered? By means of an inquiry. The inquiry is the investigation by which researchers put their documentation together. It is based on three procedures that can be combined: excavations, encounters, and experiences. Excavations consist of seeking out conclusive archives in the earth, on the surface of the earth, under the sea, in special depositories, or in libraries: skeletal remains, vestiges, papers, and so on. The excavation is in itself a line of reasoning, for archaeologists and historians never open a tomb or carton at random. They have to have felt the need to do so, figured out that the artifact or article existed, and managed to locate it beforehand. It is not easy to discover what is being hidden by a state, a local or regional government entity, a business, or a family. It takes effort to find documents describing living conditions for slaves on a seventeenth-century slave ship or detailing the suffering of abandoned children in the nineteenth century, or to lay one’s hand on diaries to which girls confided themselves in the twentieth century. The same is true in paleontology. Searching for ancient hominids, Michel Brunet chose to set out to the west of the Rift Valley, in Chad and Libya, counter to the prevalent notion that humans first appeared in East Africa. During the various excavations conducted according to satellite images or core samples taken from petroleum drilling, he bored

10. Romain Bertrand, L’Histoire à Parts Égales (Paris: Seuil, 2011).

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into various zones, looking for geological strata at least 3 million years old. In 1995 he made a major discovery: the mandible from the oldest known Australopithecus, dubbed Abel. Was this a stroke of luck? There is “no random chance in our profession, but rather a rational, wellthought-out way of proceeding, during which the clues that have been gathered make it possible to establish new deductions and set out in new directions.”11 Encounters enable researchers to confront living human beings, by means of discussions or participatory observations. Developed by sociologists from Chicago, themselves heirs to the great social investigations conducted in the nineteenth century from Frédéric Le Play to Charles Booth, fieldwork leads researchers to go meet people, speak with them on-site, and live among them. In order to develop an anthropology of poverty in Mexico in the 1950s, Oscar Lewis spent several hundred hours with five families, eating at their table, listening to a number of them speak about their problems, and dancing with them. Every encounter has some destabilizing element. It displaces the gaze, makes one change viewpoints. It also makes it possible to gather new archives, administrative or private, written or oral. As Malinowski points out in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), modern societies enjoy institutions whose function is to conserve documentary materials, whereas an indigenous society, in the Trobriand Islands, for example, has nothing of that sort. For the ethnologist, the solution consists of conducting one’s own observations and putting together testimonies about all sorts of life’s imponderables: ceremonies, exchanges, cuisine, grooming, conversations, quarrels, and jokes. Experiences consist of reliving, to the extent possible, what others, living or dead, have experienced. To the extent that they study their fellow human beings, researchers share with them a certain number of feelings, emotions, and memories. Because they have themselves lived, desired, loved, traveled, suffered, learned, and shared, they possess their own “interior archives,” to which they refer in order to understand intuitively

11. Michel Brunet, D’Abel à Tournai: Nomade, chercheur d’os (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 60–61, 124–25.

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the lives of others.12 Similarly, our mirror neurons link the recognition of emotions in others to the reality of experiencing them ourselves. There is also an intellectual experience of a vicarious nature: rare are the researchers who have been interned or tortured, but a large number of them can roughly imagine what such things mean. This co-affective capacity that Monod, Dilthey, Ricoeur, Marrou, and Corbin (to name just the historians) identify as an essential component of knowledge stems from an identificatory predisposition. It involves a capacity for listening and receptivity on an equal footing, and the acceptance of a resemblance that can include empathy, even if the interlocutor may be a psychopath. Richard Holmes radicalizes this approach by means of “footstepping”: the biographer follows the person step by step in order to retrace his life, taking a balloon ride like the scientists of the eighteenth century, crossing the Cévennes on the tracks of Stevenson, and living with his hero in an imaginary cohabitation.13 The thematics of experience are thus not limited to states of mind. The ethnoarchaeology of Ian Hodder and Pierre Pétrequin consists of observing present-day “primitive” societies in Africa, New Guinea, and the far North, in order to better understand prehistoric societies that have now disappeared. Certain archaeologists reproduce ancestral practices in order to appropriate them, fabricating a Neolithic oven, an alloy, or a weapon. But to what extent is it possible for researchers to put themselves in someone else’s shoes? When does the heuristic “footstepping” stop and a problematic fascination start? From this point of view, we can bring together two ethnographic experiences that prompted a debate within and beyond the social sciences, Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day (2008) and Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (2014). The question raised here is not the allegedly “fictionalized,” “romanticized,” or “dramatized” parts of their work, but the distance that an urban ethnographer has to maintain vis-à-vis his or her object of study. Thanks to more than five years of full on-site immersion spent

12. Alain Corbin, “Ne rien refuser d’entendre,” Vacarme, no. 35 (Spring 2006), http:// www.vacarme.org/article492.html (accessed August 16, 2017). 13. Richard Holme, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Viking, 1985).

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sharing the activities and routines of crack dealers or fugitives in segregated ghettos (the South Side in Chicago for the first book, West Philadelphia for the second one), Venkatesh and Goffman were able not only to document daily life in poor areas and housing projects, but also to explain how destitution, racism, police repression, and “new penology” reshape African American youth and citizenship today. While these books have been widely hailed for their rich ethnography, several reviewers raised concerns about the proximity between Venkatesh and “J.T.,” the gang leader, or Goffman’s inaccuracies and lack of reliability, not to mention her volunteering to drive a man seeking to avenge one of his friends who had been killed—which constitutes a felony. Others mocked the naïveté or voyeurism of would-be academics, an Indian American sociologist from a quiet Californian suburb and a welleducated young white woman, both thrilled by their adventurous stay in the ghettos. Here we may reach the limits of personal involvement in an ethnographical survey. Do “rogue sociologists,” to use Venkatesh’s own term, distinguish themselves by violating the ethical standards of their profession or by achieving a sociological feat, as heirs to the great classics of the Chicago School? Regardless of their flaws, those books fearlessly escaped the walls of academia in order to provide an insightful account of American urban society from within, through intensive fieldwork and participatory observation. Their experiment can be deemed worthwhile. An investigation in the social sciences thus includes three dimensions, each one involving a type of reasoning: finding the traces of human beings, establishing contacts, and putting oneself in their place. In each case it involves trying to understand what humans do. As imperfect as it may be, this tripartite scheme of things makes it possible to grasp the unity of the social sciences. Naturally, paleontology and history have recourse more readily to excavations, while sociology and ethnology proceed by means of encounters. In the end, however, all research can take on these three forms. That is how historians stir up oral archives in order to enrich their corpus, and sociologists and anthropologists consult written archives in order to attain temporal depth, while, out of obligation or curiosity, other researchers travel. In all of these cases, the explicative capacity of the research is improved. What better case for what we call “pluridisciplinarity”!

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Comparing Herodotus is the one who invented the model of the investigation. Twentyfive centuries removed from our times, the historian-ethnologist-reporter teaches us that the social sciences can be an adventure, a quest in which one fully engages oneself. Searching, traveling, paying the price, inquiring, historei: the etymology of the term reminds us that history is done by going to see for oneself, collecting, reconstituting bit by bit, step by step, over the course of an intellectual as well as a physical journey. The book matures; so does the historian. Polybius expresses this requirement in his polemical attack on Timaeus and Ephorus, whom he accuses of being armchair historians. For Polybius, history obeys three imperatives: drawing information from books, gathering the opinions of the witnesses, and being present at the events that pace the life of states. Beginning in the fifteenth century, numerous researcher-travelers rediscover Herodotus: Lorenzo Valla, who translated him into Latin; Henri Estienne, author of an Apologie pour Hérodote (In Defense of Herodotus) in 1566, after the world had become wildly larger; Volney, whose Chronologie d’Hérodote (Chronology of Herodotus) heralds trips to Egypt and Syria in the 1780s; and Kapus´ cin´ski, a major Polish journalist whose activities lead him to undertake countless Travels with Herodotus (2004). Others carry on the tradition more discreetly, with a mix of readings, testimonies, travels, and firsthand observations. Setting out to retrace the steps of Jesus in the middle of the nineteenth century, Renan walks down “the streets where he played as a child,” admiring the horizon Jesus beheld: Carmel, Thabor, the Jordan River valley, the Gulf of Haifa, elements for a “fifth Gospel.” In order for the inquiry to be complete, however, it must go beyond the subject that it set for itself: that is the comparatist aspect, in other words, the capacity to meet face-to-face challenges. Comparing things takes them out of the particular case and abandons the religion of the unique. If it is true that there is no science but of the general (that is Aristotle’s criticism of history), and if historians tend to idolize the individual (which is Simiand’s criticism), the monograph is much worse than a shortcoming of curiosity: it is the very negation of the social sciences. For on the contrary, the social sciences strive to fit the individual into the structures of the given time, the milieus to which the individual belongs or which the

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individual passes through, the determinisms that enclose the individual, and from which the individual sometimes manages to escape, the individual’s field of possibilities. Facts exist and lives are intelligible only when linked to others, immersed in the current of their time. Otherwise, they remain isolated and lose all signification; they shrivel up and harden into anecdotes; they die unique, petrified in the realm of neither-true-nor-false. In The Great Divergence (2000), Kenneth Pomeranz compares the economic growth and the development of energy-intensive industries and of trade in northwest Europe and China since 1750. In Renaissances: The One or the Many? (2010), Jack Goody contrasts the different renaissances that emerged in Europe, Islam, India, and China. This appetite for comparison—historical consciousness, in a way—is already manifest in the investigative phase. Documentation needs to be wider than the subject targeted; or rather, the actual subject consists of bringing together several subtopics that one has been comparing. Hence the necessity of opening up to other periods, other countries, other archives, coming and going between past and present, circulating throughout the world in order to be capable of telling the whole story. There is no good atomistic biography sequestering the chosen one in a golden cage. There is no social science riveted to one point in time or space. There are only eras and experiences that telescope together, contexts that intermingle, categories under construction, rival institutions, and individuals fashioned by collective forces. The discourse of “self-sufficiency” and “exceptionalism” is the stuff of propaganda or wishful thinking; a nation always thrives “among nations,” as Thomas Bender showed in the case of the United States. In place of the Unique, there are groups, series, generations, classes, movements, interactions, influences, norms, figures, examples, and counterexamples. That is what takes us from Guillaume le Maréchal to knights of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; from the fantasies of a miller from the Friuli region to the dynamics of so-called popular culture; from SaintSimon’s “ducal mania” to the problem of ranks and hierarchies in the court of Versailles; from this little village in the Quercy region to the modernization of the French economy after 1945; from a transfer of children on Réunion Island to the social engineering practiced by the great European powers in the twentieth century; from my late grandmother to the trajectory of communist Jews under the heat of Stalinism and Nazism;

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from biography to history-as-problem; from the monad to the structure; from solipsism to the social sciences.14 Comparison-generalization confers interest on any and every subject. If bedroom secrets, great crime, the man in the iron mask, and the technical specifications of the Panzers leave me indifferent, it is not because they are fundamentally uninteresting, but rather because they are treated like fossils in a curio cabinet, without the faintest hint of any line of reasoning. History is less an object than a method.

Weighing the Evidence We are now getting to the essential heart of historical reasoning: providing evidence. In the eloquence of antiquity, there are several types of evidence. Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory distinguish “technical,” discursive evidence invented by the orator from “extratechnical,” nondiscursive, institutionalized evidence gathered in the form of testimony, confessions, and documents. The essential, irrefutable clue (tekmerion) is one of the first types of evidence: “If a woman has milk, then she has given birth.” Traces of blood on a fugitive’s shirt, however, lead only to a presumption of guilt. Enthymemes are syllogisms in which one of the premises remains unspoken because it is assumed to be taken for granted. In saying that Handel composed his Te Deum to commemorate the victory at Dettingen in 1743, one makes no mention of the meaning of a Te Deum: The battle of Dettingen is a victory. (A Te Deum celebrates a successful event.) Therefore Handel composes a Te Deum.

14. I am alluding in this paragraph to Georges Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: Fayard, 1984); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Saint-Simon ou le système de la cour (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979); as well as to two of my own books, Enfants en exil: Transfert de pupilles réunionnais en métropole, 1963–1982 (Paris: Seuil, 2007), and History of the Grandparents I Never Had (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).

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Certain links in the chain of reasoning are therefore unmentioned, since they are deemed to be self-evident (a form of “evidence” that must of course be questioned). As rigorous as they may be, the social sciences often have recourse to enthymemes. Resorting systematically to epicheirema, the syllogism in which each premise is given with the evidence, would be tedious. “Extra-technical,” physical, material, documentary evidence has something direct about it. It is part of natural, almost intuitive reasoning: factual reality backs up the notions being advanced. Deeds to property, letters of nobility, identity papers, and diplomas make it possible to prove something: a possession, status, dignity, identity, or qualification. Like Herodotus and Thucydides before him, Polybius relies on the authority of sources. Hannibal’s brother thus received 11,850 Africans and 21 elephants, as indicated by “a bronze tablet on which Hannibal himself had made out these lists during the time he was in Italy.”15 For Voltaire, the historian attains the truth by means of “incontestable documents”: a collection of astronomical observations made in Babylon, a chronicle of Athens engraved on the Arundel marbles, and medieval charters and diplomas.16 Evidence highlights the difference not only between history and fiction but also between a scholarly text and all others. It is at the heart of Bayle’s practice, which is “to advance nothing without proof.”17 This reflex is the foundation of history, and has made it possible to hold off the assault of the linguistic turn in the 1980s. By making the text communicate with what is outside and beyond the text, material objects, documents cited, and verifiable references all function as the text’s very guarantee. The ability to verify is also the ability to dispute. The existence

15. Polybius, Histories 3.33, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Poly bius/3*.html (accessed May 31, 2016). 16. Voltaire, “Histoire,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot, vol. 8 (Neuchâtel: Faulche, 1765). 17. Pierre Bayle, “Épicure,” in Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Rotterdam: Bohm, 1720), 1077, note E.

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of evidence therefore prevents us from confusing “the truth [with its] typographical dimension.”18 Yet the Aristotelian distinction between technical and extra-technical evidence risks becoming artificial if we forget that a thing becomes a source only within and by means of a line of reasoning: it is rhetoric that raises the document to the dignity of veridiction. Argumentation transforms the archives gathered over the course of the investigation into evidence (into “documentary evidence,” as Ricoeur puts it). In fact, there are no sources in and of themselves; there are only things that we draw in and transform into evidence by the way we look at them. Conversely, anything can serve as evidence, provided we have the intention of demonstrating something with it. Everything is thus a matter of choice: ruins can corroborate the assertions of an archaeologist, but they can also charm a poet, inspire an artist, or recall to the sage the brevity of our existence and the fragility of civilizations. Ruins as a curiosity, antiquity as decor, quotations as maxims, and images from a video surveillance camera prove nothing in themselves: only the investigator’s questions transform things into instruments of veridiction. In the end, trying to understand human deeds consists of mobilizing evidence in order to answer the questions that one has posed. The best way to transcend the dichotomy between technical and extratechnical evidence is to recall that a fact is proven more effectively when attested by several sources. The more evidence a demonstration carries, the more complex, well argued, and grounded it is. By comparing two elements of an archive, a text with a testimony or several testimonies, a text dating from a certain era with an archaeological vestige from the same era, cross-checking makes it possible to strengthen the certainty. Several passages from Herodotus have thus been corroborated by archaeological discoveries, including the construction techniques for the wall protecting Babylon, Scythian funeral rites, and the tsunami that hit Potidaea in 479 BCE. In order to cross-check his sources, Commynes thus refers back to the archbishop of Vienna, doctor to the Duke of Burgundy when the latter succumbed to nervous prostration following the disaster at Grandson in 1476: “And on this subject, Monsignor de Vienna, you know more

18. Jorge Louis Borges, “Deux livres,” in Enquêtes (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1967), 169.

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than I do, since you helped him to think during this illness and trimmed the beard that he was allowing to grow.”19 The quantitative method offers another type of evidence. Great is the temptation to believe that a statistic would be more “scientific” than an article from the archive or a logical argument. As Seignobos writes: “The special impression produced by figures is particularly important in the social sciences. Figures have a mathematical aspect giving the illusion of a scientific fact. . . . One refers to the ‘raw numbers’ in common parlance, in about the same way as to the ‘naked truth,’ which implies that figures are the perfect form of truth.”20 To avoid this illusion, the healthiest attitude is to consider figures as one type of evidence among others, a form of reasoning, a way of putting data to use in view of a demonstration. Even then, these data have to be accurate. Precisely because he seeks to measure the variations of prices and incomes in eighteenth-century France, Ernest Labrousse shares his doubts about an index constituted from connected series and “perhaps partly inaccurate.”21 In order to escape this conflict between stylistic elegance and flashy statistics, we can admit that there is a narrativity of the quantitative, with ways of representing, sets of scales, articulation of problems, and a dialectic between the sophistication of calculating and the instantaneous nature of the result (given in the form of a percentage, for example). Just as a table full of figures tells a story, so a graph gives a figurative representation, explains, and maps out. That is why the quantitative harmoniously espouses the qualitative, as in Face à la persécution (Facing Persecution, 2010) by Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc, in which statistical tables alternate with testimonies with microhistorical analyses as all the components work together, allowing us to understand the attitude of the 991 Jews of the city of Lens under the Occupation in northern France. It is moreover obvious that the bases of

19. Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965), 129. 20. Charles Seignobos, La méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (Paris: Alcan, 1901), 34–35. 21. Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2 (1933; Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 1989), 315.

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the data have often been drawn from a heterogeneous set of materials, including archives, conversations, and on-site observations. The figures are “traces among others.”22

Refuting Researchers prove with the help of sources they have gathered, aggregated, and cross-checked. Against that logic, it could be objected that consulting a huge number of archives does not suffice to establish a fact. According to Popper, however, science functions not in a positive manner, by accumulating evidence, but according to a negative approach, by conjectures and refutations. Instead of proceeding according to Bacon’s empiricism, one can adopt what Popper described as a “deductive method of testing”: a hypothesis implies a certain number of consequences that can be either verified or invalidated.23 If the hypothesis stands up to the tests of documents, archives, archaeology, and testimony, it is by default acceptable: we can say that it “holds.” Conversely, a hypothesis will be eliminated if it is contradicted by what we know from other sources. One can gather together thousands of records, rulings, and testimonies tending to prove, inductively, that the children taken in by the social services of the French Republic are “without a family”: as orphans abandoned by or taken away from their parents, they are transferred to a distant location that is kept secret, and where no one has the right to visit them except for the inspector. But if one advanced that apparent conclusion in the form of a working hypothesis, it would be easily refuted: not only are siblings not separated from one another, but there are also a certain number of children, including wards of the state, who manage to write their parents or join up with them again after running away, not to mention those who get legally returned to their families. At that point, a

22. Claire Lemercier and Claire Zalc, “Le sens de la mesure: Nouveaux usages de la quantification,” in À quoi pensent les historiens? Faire de l’histoire au XXIe siècle, ed. Christophe Granger (Paris: Autrement, 2013), 135–48. 23. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; London: Routledge, 2002), 7.

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new question arises that one must try to answer: How can such relations be maintained?24 When I sought to establish the circumstances of my grandparents’ arrest in 1943, I had to formulate three hypotheses and then proceed to critique each one in turn: • If they were arrested by the city police from their arrondissement in Paris in reprisal for an attack by the Resistance a few days before, how could I explain the fact that not all the Jewish inhabitants of the apartment building were rounded up? • If they were arrested as Jews or communists, how could I explain the fact that the Brigades Spéciales had not been mobilized? • If they were taken subsequent to the arrest of a neighbor by the RG (Renseignements Généraux, roughly analogous to the FBI), how could I explain the presence of the city police that day?

There were other possible explanations. After 1942, Jews arrested by the RG were taken to the local police station. It can also be thought that this operation led by the RG necessitated the intervention of the local police because of my grandfather’s “rebellion.” I accept this hypothesis until it is invalidated by previously unknown testimony or other records. In paleontology, the negative method plays a decisive role. In this anonymous history, documentation is extremely tenuous and fragmentary. The formulation of hypotheses and “paleoscenarios” is for that very reason fundamental and highly structured by bibliography, excavations, other sciences, dendrochronology, archaeobotany, anthracology, and palynology. In order to explain the presence of perforated seashells in the Blombos Cave of South Africa, in strata dated from about 75,000 years ago, researchers proceeded by the process of elimination. The seashells did not get there naturally or accidentally, no more than they were brought there to serve alimentary needs. Neither can such perforations be observed on present-day specimens. The holes do resemble, however, those made by piercing seashells with a pointed bone. Conclusion: they were used

24. Ivan Jablonka, Ni père ni mère: Histoire des enfants de l’Assistance publique, 1874–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), chap. 1.

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as beads, even well before the appearance of such bodily ornaments in Europe.25 Historians formulate hypotheses within the framework of a given problem and a given context. They next seek to invalidate them by means of vestiges, objects, writings, and testimony, making possible an “arbitration by the facts.”26 They maintain the hypothesis that they do not manage to refute, the hypothesis that stands up to the available documentation. At that point there emerges a conjectural model, a rational scenario, a coherent proposition supported by the sources, in other words, a tentative answer to the given question. Before becoming one of the bases of the archaeological paradigm and the “deductive method of testing,” such refutation was part of agonistic rhetoric. In book 5 of the Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian gives advice for critiquing written or oral testimony, refuting the adversary’s argument, attacking a particular point, and rejecting what is contradictory, absurd, or incredible. In the domain of the social sciences as in that of the physical sciences, it is up to the community to verify, discuss, and contest. But it is important for this process to begin earlier, over the course of the research itself. Historians can orchestrate their own refutations, calling into question the results they submit to the reader. Within the same line of reasoning, they propose a history and a counter-history. Impartiality, said Bayle, requires one to have a double: one must impose a “rigor against oneself” by “summoning oneself to appear before a stiff cross-examination that makes one explain unremittingly anything and everything they care to ask.”27 A counter-epistemology begins to take form, in which researchers struggle against themselves, telling their story and critiquing it at the same time, raising problems, subjecting themselves to objections, rocking their own position. They are the ones who devise the tests having the potential

25. Francesco d’Errico, “Nassarius Kraussianus Shell Beads from Blombos Cave: Evidence for Symbolic Behaviour in the Middle Stone Age,” Journal of Human Evolution, no. 48 (2005): 3–24. 26. Jean-Claude Gardin, Une archéologie théorique (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 214. 27. Pierre Bayle to his brother Joseph, January 30, 1675, http://bayle-correspondance. univ-st-etienne.fr/ (accessed August 16, 2017).

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to demolish their arguments. They make for a proliferation of hypotheses, and then proceed to eliminate the greatest number by having recourse to documentary materials. As Popper wrote, “The discovery of instances which confirm a theory means very little if we have not tried, and failed, to discover refutations. For if we are uncritical we shall always find what we want.”28 In the end, documents are both a source of positive information and a way of closing doors. We prove by gathering clues and crosschecking our sources, but also by eliminating other hypotheses. Since they are familiar with inductive reasoning and the use of examples, the social sciences also have something of a Popperian space. Not because they would aim to establish universal laws, of course: their statements have a most limited range, without a general nature, nor any predictive capacity. Idiosyncratic and non-reproducible, their tests possess nothing of an experiment carried out in a laboratory and repeatable at will. However, in posing a problem, historians are led to formulate hypotheses, which they subject to a procedure for eliminating error. The criterion of non-refutation applies just as well to physics as it does to the social sciences: a scenario is valid until proven otherwise. That is what ensures the open, provisory nature of history. History is knowledge on trial, the opposite of the word of authority with which it is often identified. Guided by their methods and their intuition, historians feel their way about cautiously, hesitate, doubt, and display their doubts: “It is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.”29

Stating the Truth We end up with a paradox: how to reconcile the provisory, imperfect nature of every statement and the feeling of certainty to which history leads. On the one hand, we have the defects of terminology, the fragmentary

28. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1957; London: Routledge, 2002), 123–24. 29. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 281.

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nature of documentation, the difficulty of establishing positive proof, and the avowal of impotence by Ranke, for whom only God knows the history of the world. On the other hand, we have the fact “established once and for all,” the refusal to consider history as a mere probabilism, the serene confidence of the same Ranke. History, wrote Bayle, attains “a degree of more indubitable certainty” than mathematics. For the object of mathematics does not exist outside our mind, whereas Caesar and Pompey existed independently of our own person and of all persons present and future. There can be no objection to this “factual truth”: Caesar defeated Pompey.30 Did Caesar defeat Pompey? Were Jesus and his mother Jews by birth? Did an epidemic of the plague ravage Europe in the mid-fourteenth century? Did Lincoln abolish slavery in the United States? Did the gas chambers exist? Did passenger planes crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001? We can go on and on forever about the formulation of such questions, but a world in which it would not be possible to answer “yes” to each one of them would be not be a revolutionary world, open to the “freedom of speech,” but a totalitarian world, or a world in a state of collapse, already devoid of meaning. There are things that are known definitively and unconditionally. As Bayle said, irreversible facts, obtuse reality, and the outcome of events exist outside ourselves. But is that the object of history? We know definitively that Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800 and that Rousseau’s first name was Jean-Jacques. None of that constitutes a research agenda. Indeed, no historian is “working” on the question. It is therefore important to differentiate between a fact (which does not necessarily imply its comprehension) and research. This distinction reveals an invisible dividing line: What is it necessary to prove? In a history book, certain affirmations are not demonstrated but instead taken for granted: the general context, major dates, famous figures. A common cultural store of knowledge is also presumed to be

30. Pierre Bayle, “Dissertation” (1692), in Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3rd ed., vol. 4 (Rotterdam: Bohm, 1720), 2983–84.

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established. In any book published in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a large number of notions can forgo explanation: the Founding Fathers, the Far West, the NYPD, or Hollywood. What is it, then, that makes it possible for history to rightfully give the feeling of certitude? It is not because history supposedly produces absolute knowledge. On the contrary, it is because history strives, with reasoned arguments, to answer the questions that it asks. As Xenopol put it at the end of the nineteenth century, history is not made up of truths of an individual nature, but that does not prevent it from being a science, for science is a system of (singular or general) proven truths.31 Between the non-questions (“Did George Washington exist?”) and questions devoid of interest (“What is the name of the first soldier wounded at the battle of Gettysburg?”), there exists a domain of relevance in which history can be developed. Doing the social sciences thus consists not of rehashing the obvious, nor of revealing laws, but of producing statements of truth in the form of rigorously tested, in other words non-refuted, conjectures. That is the difference between a pseudo-question (“Did the gas chambers really exist?”) and a research agenda (“What was the size of the industrial killing center at Belzec and how was it set up?”). Doing the social sciences therefore consists not of finding the Truth but of making true statements by constructing a line of reasoning, giving the evidence, and formulating statements endowed with a maximum of solidity and explicative relevance. With respect to a famous series of photos, it is more accurate to say “Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin pose for photographers at the Yalta Conference in February 1945” rather than “Three old men are seated on chairs.” We can also propose a more elaborate caption: “At the time when the Soviet army is victorious on all fronts, the Big Three are meeting to finish ‘destroying German militarism and Nazism,’ prepare the Allied occupation of Germany, and lay the foundation for a new world, during one of the last inter-Allied conferences before the beginning of the Cold War.” To try to understand what humans do is to expand statements of truth, and therefore the complexity of the

31. Alexandru-Dimitrie Xenopol, Les principes fondamentaux de l’histoire (Paris: Leroux, 1899), 32.

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demonstration and the quality of the narrative, and therefore the epistemological risk that we are taking. Between the facts “established once and for all” and what we undertake to find, there extends a front that is the very place of research, a space in which we ask ourselves questions, progress, and test hypotheses, not in the hope of discovering factual nuggets lying dormant at the bottom of a river, but with the implacable determination to understand. We seek all the more feverishly in knowing that we will never reach our goal. But it matters little that the horizon keeps on receding into the distance: the important thing is to advance the front of research. To understand what humans truly do, to understand what has truly happened, we do history in order to respond to the great events of our lives. For Herodotus and Thucydides, it was the “world wars” of the fifth century BCE; for Polybius, the advent of Rome; for Chateaubriand, the collapse of the ancien régime; for Guizot and Michelet, the French Revolution; for François Furet, the popularity of communism; for Saul Friedländer, the destruction of European Judaism. The death of a father in the trenches, the murder of parents during the Second World War constitute a foundational traumatism for Chaunu, Vidal-Naquet, Momigliano, and Klarsfeld, an event that shook their entire world. “Our conception of history has a bloody origin,” states Carlo Ginzburg, the son of an antiFascist militant who died in a Nazi prison.32 The vital, visceral question that we ask ourselves, and which is not possible not to ask ourselves, explains the obsession with accuracy and inflexibility in research. It is the question that feeds the fury of Lorenzo Valla, the “passion for history” of Augustin Thierry, and the sacred fire of all the others. The important thing here is not the self in its Romantic omnipotence but rather the effort undertaken in order to master, filter, and appease the self, and the area of constraints and freedom through which the self journeys. We search in ourselves, we search with ourselves, in all directions, and then we restrain ourselves inflexibly. The investigation, everything that we learn thanks to excavations, encounters, experiences,

32. Carlo Ginzburg, Un seul témoin (Paris: Bayard/Vacarme, 2007), 94.

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readings, archives, and testimony, serves as our guardrail. The investigation is the antidote for vanity, a systematic mindset, aimless wandering, delirium, and the notion that anything goes. We might think that we are guided by documentation indicating to us what is true and revealing “what happened.” But that inductive reasoning can be completed by a hypothetical-deductive (or, rather, hypothetical-destructive) model in which, as prehistorian Jean Guilaine puts it, excavation is “the test of truth” for all speculation.33 What tames researchers’ emotions and contains the proliferation of their hypotheses are the sources. History is what channels their passion. History, then, is the absolute freedom of a self within the absolute limits fixed by documentation. We can say anything, imagine anything, believe anything as long as the investigation and the entire body of available knowledge does not intervene to contradict us. If history is a struggle against error, lies, oblivion, and silence, it is also a struggle against oneself.

33. Jean Guilaine, Archéologie, science humaine: Entretiens avec Anne Lehoërff (Arles: Actes Sud/Errance, 2011), 53.

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Fictions of Method

Fictional objects are extraordinarily varied: legends, fairy tales, novels, films, games, and so on. For Plato as well as for the theorists of the seventeenth century, the term “fiction” connotes a lie, an imposture, or a dissimulation of the truth. Nowadays, fiction is associated with imagination and fun, the fun of projecting oneself into “another world,” a universe populated with beings and places that do not exist. Oliver Twist, Scarlett O’Hara, Sherlock Holmes never lived; in 1910, no student named Quentin Compson was sexually attracted to his sister and committed suicide. Fiction is not what is true, since it does not exist, but neither is it what is false, since it carries no intention of deceiving.

The Status of Fiction There are at least two ways to consider the “objects” of fiction. The first, which can be termed intransitive, posits fiction in a non-relation with the

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real world. This a-referentiality stems from the fact that the text is enclosed in itself, autotelic, the sole producer of its meaning. Not only does fiction refer back only to itself, but also the novelist “has the Midas touch which turns all fiction . . . to fictional truth”;1 this process of fictional metabolization voids all referentiality. The only reality of fiction is itself: fiction creates its own world by means of all sorts of transformations and manipulations. Fiction is therefore neither true nor false; it is other. There is no elucidation or enlightening to be expected from fiction. As Barthes wrote, in a text, “everything is to be untangled, but there is nothing to decipher.”2 Over the course of two centuries, intransitive reading associates the Romantics of Jena with the Parnassians, the post-Saussureans from Barthes to Riffaterre, as well as with certain authors of the Nouveau Roman. There are several criticisms that can be leveled at such a manner of thinking. Generations of readers past and present have seen the world (including society) through Mme. de Lafayette, Dickens, Balzac, Eugène Sue, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harper Lee, and Franzen. In their own time, the fictions of Tartuffe, The Jungle, and Lolita provoked a scandal, showing things that were unbearable to their contemporaries: pious hypocrites, the hell of slaughterhouses, and pedophilia. In communist Czechoslovakia, relates Kundera, people found that their lives resembled Kafka’s novels. Are those collective hallucinations, a sort of “Werther effect” propagated across millions of people who took the works quite literally? Let us suppose that in ten thousand years humans go off to live on another planet, taking with them only a few novels. For lack of anything better, would the historians of the terrean era be right to refer to these texts? The society of the eighteenth century would be known through Manon Lescaut, industrial America through Philip Roth. Surely we jest? This is nevertheless what historians do today when they seek out in Homer the structures of Greek aristocratic society of the tenth or ninth centuries BCE. Conversely, Barthes chose to read Michelet and Fourier as if their works

1. Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (London: Routledge, 1982), 263. 2. Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” (1968), in Le bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 1984), 66.

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aimed not to understand the past or transform the real world but simply to achieve “the bliss of writing.”3 Alas, in listening to “transport of the message, not the message,” we do violence to the text.4 We now come to the second conception, a transitive one in which fiction refers in one way or another back to the world. A text reflects, figures, transposes, explains, distorts the real world: it paints “from life.” This theory of reflection is the classical way of thinking from Aristotle to the Marxist critics, and makes fiction into a representation: a mirror, painting, photo, or “semiconductor” material.5 As a mimesis of the real world, fiction tells us something about society (social groups, social structures, and relations between classes, production, and gender), about social situations, mobilities, mentalities, and, finally, about the spirit of the times in a given era. Certain characters acquire the status of quasi-symbols: Rastignac embodies unscrupulous ambition in the nineteenth century, Kurtz the aberrations and excesses of colonization. Many things are real in The Human Comedy, the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and In Search of Lost Time: such-and-such a place and event, but also persons of private means, Haussmanization, railroads, and the life of high society in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Hence the question of sources and influences: Did Fould and Rothschild serve as models for the character Nucingen, who, as they are, was a tremendously wealthy banker and a Jew? What woman in Tolstoy’s entourage threw herself under a train? While reflecting the world, fiction also reflects the writer’s psychology, culture, convictions, combats, obsessions, and position in society or in the literary realm. The mulatto woman at the beginning of Germinie Lacerteux and the black man Neb in The Mysterious Island reveal not only the common lot of servants in the nineteenth century but also the racist prejudices of the Goncourt brothers and Jules Verne. It has been remarked that Balzac’s novels were describing not so much the people of Paris as the experience of Balzac himself. If there are many people from the region of Tours among the Parisians in The Human Comedy,

3. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 14. 4. Ibid., 1046. 5. Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction (1991; Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 2004), 226.

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for example, it is because they are indeed numerous among Parisians, but also and above all because Balzac knew well the Loire Valley area.6 The novelist thus appears as a sort of alchemist transforming material (the society of his time, his own experience) into fiction. However, the transitive reading raises a difficulty: What does fiction teach us about the world? We can distinguish among three types of fiction according to their relation with reality: the incredible, the verisimilar, and the “superior truths.” The incredible takes us into the realm of the mythical, the fabulous, the fantastic, the supernatural. One of the first storytellers of the impossible, Lucian of Samosata, speaks of having encountered vine-women, sailed on a sea of milk, and lived in a whale’s belly containing forests and villages: “Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others—which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist.”7 In the article “Fiction” in the Encyclopédie published in the mid-eighteenth century, Marmontel distinguishes among the various fictions outside of perfect representations, including those that are exaggerated (with a giant), monstrous (with a centaur), and fantastic (with a man’s head in the middle of a flower). The verisimilar is what one can believe in. The “quasi-truth” mentioned by Asclepiades of Myrlea in the second century BCE, the argumentum of classical rhetoric, the novel according to Nicolas Bricaire or to Clara Reeve, and the realism of the nineteenth century trace the boundaries of the possible. The dichotomy between the credible and the incredible can also be found in science fiction: the novels of Jules Verne play with the “probable future” (a submarine, films with sound), while those of H. G. Wells stage the impossible (an invisible man, a traveler coming back from the future).8

6. Louis Chevalier, “La comédie humaine: Document d’histoire?” Revue historique 232 (July–September 1964): 27–48. 7. Lucian of Samosata, A True Story (New York: G. B. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 253, http:// www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/true/tru01.htm (accessed) June 2, 2016). 8. Jorge Luis Borges, “Le premier Wells,” in Enquêtes (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1967), 122–26.

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Since verisimilitude is geared to public norms, it evolves continually. In the seventeenth century, it respects conformity and propriety, which is why El Cid and La princesse de Clèves were criticized for their lack of verisimilitude. Hence the perennial temptation to correct the past, to polish the narrative so that it might become a model to identify with: the plot will be “improved” until it shows things as they should be, in conformity with the spectator’s expectation.9 This technique was to be adapted by Maupassant: in his preface to Pierre et Jean (1888), he advises writers to “correct events to the benefit of verisimilitude and to the detriment of truth,” so as to obtain a view “more convincing than reality itself.”10 The “higher truths” are conveyed by “highly true” fiction, more real that the real world, which jolts readers, making them cry out, “Yes, that’s exactly it!” Certain novels are so powerful that they carry the reality effect to an unequaled intensity. They give rise to larger-than-life characters who inhabit our own lives as if we had actually encountered them. The relation between the referent and fiction is reversed, with fiction finally becoming a world: people visit the home of Madame Butterfly in Nagasaki, the tomb of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, and the roads of Don Quixote in Spain.11 Literature, then, reveals what was not known: unknown destinies, unnoticed suffering, the little everyday humiliations, but also the cracks and contradictions. Whereas nineteenth-century historiography and certain novelists such as Horatio Alger championed the “Manifest Destiny” of the United States, the violence that bursts forth from the works of writers such as Burroughs, Russell Banks, and Ellroy shows the flip side of the American dream.

9. See Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” in Figures II (Paris: Seuil/Essais, 1969), 71–99; and John Lyons, “La triple imperfection de l’histoire,” Dix-Septième Siècle, no. 246 (2010): 27–42. 10. Guy de Maupassant, “Le roman,” preface to Pierre et Jean, vol. 356, version 1.01 Bibliothèque électronique du Québec, Collection À tous les vents, 16, https://beq.ebook sgratuits.com/vents/Maupassant_Pierre_et_Jean.pdf (accessed June 3, 2016). 11. Jean Jamin, “Fictions haut régime: Du théâtre vécu au mythe romanesque,” L’Homme, no. 175–76 (July–September 2005): 165–201.

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Fiction as Revelation This tripartite scheme of things is unsatisfying on at least one point: stemming from the theory of reflection, it places fiction in a specular, umbilical relation with a reality considered to be a given. The novelist supposedly comes to draw on a preexistent referential stock, and then supposedly transforms his “raw material.” On that basis, any novel can teach us something about anything and everything: the human condition, love, pleasure, happiness, madness, historicity, boredom, death, nothingness. The facilities of literature-as-a-mirror respond to the closure of intransitive literature. Art as imitation and semiological adventure: How can we find our way out of these two dead ends? There is another link between reality and fiction that does not partake of mimesis. A work of fiction can occasion a sort of instantaneous understanding, providing readers the key they need to decode the real world. Such fiction-revelation takes on several forms: epic, myth, poetry, allegory, and symbol. In the mid-eighteenth century, Abbé Charles Batteux sets history (the faithful narrative of natural deeds) over against the epic (the poetic narrative of supernatural deeds). Less than a century later, the epic is rehabilitated by the Romantics in The Martyrs, the Odes, and The Legend of the Ages. Because poets “see” history through ecstatic flashes, their poems are “historical reality condensed or divined.”12 Similarly, myths disseminate truth in ages-old legends, primordial narratives, and dreams transmitted by the “prophets of the past,” as both Schlegels and Barbey d’Aurevilly put it. Before being struck by the “July thunderbolt,” Michelet drew his conception of “what is poetically true” from Vico: Homer and the Latins were the first historians of nations, producing “fictions that were in singular harmony with the realities.”13 In his Life of Jesus, the rationalist Renan does not disdain the naïve, legendary, and fully expressive Gospel narrative, whose approximations are “true by a higher truth.” Myth liberates the soul of history, freeing the vital energy accumulated within.

12. Victor Hugo, La légende des siècles (1859; Paris: Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1950), 5. 13. Jules Michelet, Principes de la philosophie de l’histoire, traduits de la “Scienza nuova” de J. B. Vico (Paris: Renouard, 1827), xxiv, 272.

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Beyond the epic as a poetic genre, poetry is not far away. At times, only poetry is capable of conveying experiences that have no words, such as intense pain or suffering, cruelty, atrocity, and mourning. We can understand why numerous witnesses have chosen poetry to represent the death of masses of people, in the manner of Lyudmila Titova, the Kiev musician who accompanied a neighboring Jewish woman to the ravine in September 1941: “You see, you see, there falls a bloody snow, / It falls, and everything turns purple.”14 Babi Yar and Treblinka can be expressed with poetry. Allegory disguises truth under the outer appearance of fiction. Fables are not as puerile as they seem: that is the reason why Plato does not banish Aesop from his republic, and also why, in his famous prologue to Gargantua, Rabelais warns readers that they must go beyond the literal meaning, as a dog cracks open a bone in order to suck out the “substantific marrow.” In the seventeenth century, fiction partakes fully of philosophical, scientific, and astronomical reflection. Kepler’s Dream (1609) makes use of a trip to the moon to defend the theories of Copernicus.15 In his dedication to the king, La Fontaine asserts that fables are more edifying than history: even better than the death of Crassus among the Parthians, the fable of the fox and the goat (having descended to the bottom of a well) shows that “in all things, one must consider the end.”16 A large number of novels have recourse to fiction, science fiction, allegory, and parables to carry out a historical reflection. Such is the case with the “plague narratives” from Defoe to Manzoni, and from Albert Camus to Philip Roth. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is a fiction; although strongly inspired from narratives of the time, it constitutes one of our best testimonies about the epidemics that raged from London to Marseille between 1660 and 1720. In The Betrothed (1840), Manzoni bases his depiction of the Milan plague of 1630 on sources. He pursues his work as a historian in the parallel volume History of the Column of

14. Cited in Annie Epelboin and Assia Kovriguina, La littérature des ravins: Écrire la Shoah en URSS (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2013), 176. 15. See Frédérique Aït-Touati, “Penser le ciel à l’âge classique: Fiction, hypothèse et astronomie de Kepler à Huygens,” Annales HSS, no. 2 (March–April 2010): 325–44. 16. Jean de La Fontaine, “Le Renard et le Bouc,” Les Fables 3.5, http://www.lafontaine. net/lesFables/afficheFable.php?id=48 (accessed August 17, 2017).

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Infamy, devoted to the “bums” accused of spreading the epidemic in order to make people flee so as to rob them.17 The Plague, a chronicle of events that “took place in 194–,” and Nemesis, which depicts a polio epidemic in the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic (in Newark) in 1944, can be read as reflections on resistance to the Nazi evil. Allegory can therefore express the truth by transposing it. The same could be said about the “Holocaust novels” published around 1960. They were fictions inspired by personal experience or historical documentation: L’arche ensevelie (The Shrouded Ark) by Édouard Axelrad, The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart, Blood from the Sky by Piotr Rawicz, and Bags of Sand by Anna Langfus. Finally, symbolization consists of conceiving of a character, behavior, or situation in an abstract manner and attributing that conception to an individual who will embody it, according to an inductive technique found in the seventeenth-century writings of Molière and the moralists. Harpagon or the miser, Georges Dandin or the newly rich upstart (in Molière’s plays), René or world-weariness (in the eponymous book by Chateaubriand), Pinneberg or the proletarized employee (in Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada): there is a long list of character types who do not exist, even though they embody a well-attested social reality. This technique of exemplification is also used by historians. Are Herodotus’s Artabane and Thucydides’s Pericles supposedly, like Rastignac, concept characters whose invented words nevertheless express an authentic political, military, or social position? We can decide the matter only if we situate these characters within a line of reasoning. In Balzac’s work, fiction is not just mimesis, a description, a slice of life, and an outlook on the world. Fiction also supplies tools for understanding an era, the configuration of a family, and the functioning of a society. Be it myth or symbol, fiction participates in the intelligence of phenomena that are quite real; it is the historical way of reasoning, however, that is ultimately in charge. How can we tear fiction away from mimesis in order to incorporate it into the process of knowledge? At this point, we must recall the great discovery made by Augustin Thierry: a good novel contains more truth than

17. Christian Jouhaud, Dinah Ribard, and Nicolas Schapira, Histoire, littérature, témoignage: Écrire les malheurs du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), chap. 4.

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a bad history book. How can we explain this strange power? By observing that the way of reasoning is more important than the representation of actions. The problem prevails over the narrative. Balzac’s Old Goriot leads us to understand the society of the nineteenth century not because it depicts that world with realism or verisimilitude, but because Balzac poses questions about it by projecting the reader into the hierarchy of fortunes, the logic of private, unearned, guaranteed income, and the violence of relations between social classes. The functioning of Stalin’s totalitarianism is explained from within by works of fiction such as Darkness at Noon (as well as by Kafka, if we can believe Kundera) and by works of science fiction such as 1984. This observation prompts us to consider fiction in a different light, not as a representation (even if it should be stunningly realistic) but rather as a cognitive operation. Fiction is no longer a replica, the double of some “given” called the real world or History, but a tool helping to construct knowledge about the world. Instead of thinking, as is the case in the theory of reflection, that the novel takes in and reworks facts that were already there, we can suppose that certain fictions take part in a mode of reasoning capable of establishing the facts.

Defamiliarization To assert that certain fictions are part of a historical mode of reasoning does not amount to drift into pan-fictionalism, as do the most radical proponents of the linguistic turn and postmodernism. Nor does it consist of subverting history, as does Wolfgang Hildesheimer in writing a parody of a learned biography about a fictitious person, Sir Marbot. The vocation of certain novels is to undermine the very possibility of truth: if facts do not exist, if there are only interpretations, and if history is nothing but the victor’s propaganda, then fiction is the only reality. Fiction makes it possible “to stand up to history,”18 that is to say, denounce the smug arrogance of meta-narratives, Western superiority, might makes right, the march of progress, and so on.

18. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (New York: Vintage/Random, 1989), 238.

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Whoever eliminates the boundary between reality and fiction, or truth and fabulation, destroys the social sciences. Nevertheless, historians have need of a certain type of fiction. I shall call such fictions (in the plural, following the usage of the seventeenth century) fictions of method. They can be defined as fictions that are acknowledged, publicized, claimed as such, within a line of reasoning. They cannot be reduced to imagination. From Seignobos to Pomian, without forgetting Carl Becker and Collingwood, all historians have recalled to what degree imagination is necessary for the researcher: it serves to find sources, construct theories, and display empathy by putting the researcher in the place of others. “The unrelieved tension of learning and imagination is the mainspring of the work of the historian,” writes Peter Brown.19 When they constitute a line of reasoning, fictions of method are at the same time more fictional, conceptual, and indispensable than imagination. They differ from novelistic fiction on three points: first, fictions of method are presented as such, which is to say that they call attention to their own fictionality; second, they stray from the real world only in order to return with greater force; and third, they are neither whimsical nor arbitrary but are rather commanded by the line of reasoning.20 Fictions of method can be grouped together into four functional families: estrangements, plausibilities, conceptualizations, and narrative devices. As I previously mentioned, defining a problem requires one to step back and put the real world in perspective. But this is by no means an easy task: How can we approach with a critical eye what we know by heart? In order to fight against our habits, we can engage in a process of defamiliarization, which consists of deliberately taking ourselves out of our own element to conceptualize a world now strange or a past now odd. Before being brought back into favor by the Russian formalists in the 1920s, estrangement was practiced by satirists such as Voltaire, through the ingenuous gaze of the Huron or Candide, and poets such as Wordsworth,

19. Peter Brown, “Learning and Imagination,” in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 19–20. 20. On the opposition between referential and whimsical fiction, see Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Quelles vérités pour quelles fictions?” L’Homme, no. 175–76 (July–September 2005): 19–36.

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who strove “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural.”21 In history, estrangement is an attitude made of refusal and marvel. Refusal means no longer agreeing, so as to consider evidence that has nothing self-evident about it, to understand that one no longer understands, and, at times, to force oneself to undo one’s understanding (décomprendre). With marvel, the world is re-enchanted, taking on the strange unfamiliarity it had when we were children. Startled admiration is one of the virtues of Herodotus. Upon his discovery of the labyrinth in Egypt, the gathering of aromatic herbs in Arabia, the fertility of the lands of Babylon, and the ability of Scythian horses to withstand cold, Herodotus is filled with enthusiasm: the commonplace is transformed into thômasta, in other words, into extraordinarily curious things.22 This capacity for marveling, which has resulted in the historian-traveler’s being seen as naïve, is nevertheless praised by Estienne in his Apologie pour Hérodote (In Defense of Herodotus) in the mid-sixteenth century: the “ancient marvels” testify as much to the diversity of mores as to our difficulty in escaping our usual ways. History-as-juvenescence reposes on a fiction of method, the epistemological surprise consisting of no longer seeing what everybody else sees. Augustin Thierry spells the names of the Franks in the Teutonic fashion (Merowig instead of Mérovée, Hilperik instead of Chilpéric, Chlodowig instead of Clovis), producing for the reader an “impression of strangeness” aiming to recall that these kings did not speak French. At the beginning of Les religions de la préhistoire (Prehistoric Religions, 1964), Leroi-Gourhan imagines an extraterrestrial entering a church: he would see a donkey, an ox, lambs, and a man nailed to a post without perceiving the mystic depth of these concepts. Lascaux is no different for us. In Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History, Karl Jacoby uses a striking process of defamiliarization when he suggests,

21. The quoted words are those of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographica Literaria (1817), chap. 14, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm (accessed June 4, 2016). See also Carlo Ginzburg, “Making It Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” in Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1–23. 22. See François Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (1980; Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 2001), 364.

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about nineteenth-century Arizona, referring to “borderlands” instead of “frontier” and “the North” (of Mexico) rather than “the West” (of the United States). This estrangement is a way to counter the teleology of Manifest Destiny, so that the deeds of the Native Americans, the different tribes, and the Mexican settlers are all taken into account in the history of this region. Though decisive for the quality of this way of reasoning, these techniques are not specific to history as an academic discipline. In 1961, Daniel Spoerri, whose father was sent before a firing squad by the Nazis, describes with the utmost minutiae his office worktable strewn with slices of bread, crumbs, an eggcup, a bottle of wine, a jar of Nescafé, a glass jug, a box of matches, some screws, and a rubber band: the random chance and disorder of the everyday are thus subjected to a completely offbeat topographical reading.23 Georges Perec uses a most effective instrument of defamiliarization when he posits that “the world is not as it is.” In order to restore its rightful value to what has ceased to astonish us, Perec stations himself at a table outside a café at the intersection of the Rue du Bac and the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris on May 15, 1973, at seven o’clock in the evening, waiting “until the place should become improbable, until, for a very brief instant, getting the impression of being in a foreign city.” Stripped of its self-evident character, caught up in a “place in space” through which buses roll and under which sewer lines run, the street becomes an experiment in itself.24 Such experiments are the basis of an anthropology of the “infra-ordinary” pursued by historians like Michel de Certeau, Alf Lüdke, and Kristin Ross (in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies).

Plausibility In the Poetics, the opposition between poetry and history corresponds to the opposition between the verisimilar and the actual. By bringing the

23. Daniel Spoerri, Topographie anecdotée du hasard (1961; Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1990). 24. Georges Perec, “Pour une littérature réaliste,” in L. G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 52, and Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 70–74.

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notion of the possible into the picture, Aristotle enriches Plato’s dualism, which was based on the binary true-false paradigm. However, this third element benefits only poetry, even though the historians, Herodotus as well as Thucydides, often have recourse to it in the form of pithanos (the believable) or eikos (the verisimilar). History can be perfectly well written in the conditional. Nevertheless, there is a difference between the verisimilar in poetry, tragedy, and novels and the verisimilar in history. Poetic verisimilitude involves the playful or aesthetic adhesion of the reader: Coleridge calls it “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,” which is symmetrical to Wordsworth’s estrangement.25 This is a question of what it is possible to believe. For history, the verisimilar concerns that which is not only possible but admissible and satisfying with regard to the entire body of knowledge. There are several degrees of verisimilitude in history: the plausible is a possibility more solid that the others, or in other words, the hypothesis that has best withstood the test of evidence. This is the type of reasoning that Cicero develops in For Milo in 52 BCE, his defense of Milo, accused of having killed his rival Clodius. Cicero pleads legitimate self-defense. Contrary to habit, Clodius was going down the Appian Road on horseback without his wife, accompanied by well-trained slaves: therefore, everything indicates that he waited in ambush for Milo. As Quintilian points out after commenting on this passage, a lawyer’s arguments can be taken not only from known facts but also from suppositions and fictional facts (kath’hypothesin).26 In order to prove that the “donation of Constantine” was a falsehood, Valla not only exposes the linguistic anachronisms it contains but also shows that it was not plausible, since the emperor’s son would never have let himself be deprived of wealth. Nor is it credible that from the fourth to the eighth century, no one had mentioned an event as important as the donation of the Western Empire to the pope. In his 1942 article on the “general laws” of history, Hempel himself admits that there are probability hypotheses: if a boy catches the measles

25. Coleridge, Biographica Literaria, chap. 14. 26. Quintilian, The Institutes of Oratory 5.10.50, and 95–96.

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after remaining for two weeks near his brother sick with the measles, we can accept the idea that his brother passed it on to him. The historical way of reasoning constantly avails itself of the fiction of method called plausibility, especially to elucidate situations about which the sources are silent or fragmentary. Assassinations are a classic example. Ötzi, a man from the Chalcolithic Age (more or less 4,500 years BCE), was found frozen on the slopes of the Alps. X-rays revealed that he had an arrow point in his back. How did Ötzi die? In Dead Certainties (1991), Simon Schama investigates the murder of George Parkman in the middle of the nineteenth century, in connection with another ambiguous death, that of General Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759: the two events, remotely linked, are dissected through conjectures, alternative narrations, invented dialogues, and “unwarranted speculations.” In “Cherry Brandy,” Chalamov imagines the last thoughts of the poet Mandelstam, who was dying of hunger in the gulag. To put it in Aristotelian terms, historians articulate not only what happened but also what may have happened and what probably happened. Plausibility therefore structures an area of evaluation in which, on a sliding scale, the probable prevails over the possible, which is more acceptable than the doubtful, which in turn is superior to the implausible. Plausibility enters fully into the logic of the counterargument, which consists less of delivering proof than of demolishing competing hypotheses. But the verisimilar, even if sturdily supported by the most universal common sense, can in no way constitute proof. It only provides a scenario that is quite possible, a hypothesis not simply molded after reality but dependent on reality, and guided by the sources available to us. In other words, plausibility is a reasonably supported, visible, yet humble fiction.

Concepts and Theories Because they aim to grasp the real world and to conceptualize it beyond the phenomenological givens, fictions of method are real fictions. They go far beyond the domain of the social sciences. Roman law, for example, contains numerous fictions: some posit the existence of an unreal fact (adoptive parents pretending that their adopted child is their own naturally born offspring), or else they deny what really exists (the will of a

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person who died in captivity is validated, even though captivity deprived that person of the capacity to make a will).27 In French law of the ancien régime, civil death consisted of depriving an individual of his rights, “just as if the person were dead.” The procedure targeted those in religious orders up until 1790 and convicted criminals until 1854. In a social science way of reasoning, a certain number of elements (postulate, concepts, causal explanations) are fictions of method. Such is the case with the epistemological “as if,” Hobbes’s reconstitution of the state of nature, Rousseau’s depiction of a humanity without property, Kant’s assimilation of the moral being to a universal legislator, an economist’s postulate of a situation of pure, perfect competition, Durkheim’s treatment of social facts “as [if they were] things,” Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” and Weber’s effort to see how everyone would have acted “in the case of a rationality ideal in its finality.” The ideal type is a construction that, by its own abstract nature, becomes unreal, foreign to reality, precisely to have the capacity to measure its distance from reality.28 The two metahistorical categories proposed by Koselleck, the “field of experience” and the “horizon of expectation,” are the actualization of the past and the future brought about by the historian for the sake of the historian’s contemporaries.29 Metaphor establishes an analogy between otherwise unrelated elements. Evoking, as Proust does, the layers of “mental soil” or the bliss of “wandering about amid one of Racine’s tragedies” makes it possible to enclose “within the necessary loops of a fine style” two different things, in the first case, psychology and geology, and in the second, walking about and reading.30 The metaphor makes it possible to remove these realities from the contingencies of time. As a paradigm, however, it also has a cognitive dimension. To speak of the “social drama of work,” as does Hughes, or of the “rules of the game” as does Bourdieu, comparing, as does Schumpeter, social classes to a bus with people getting on and off, or comparing society

27. Yan Thomas, “Fictio legis: L’empire de la fiction romaine et ses limites médiévales,” Droits: Revue Française de Théorie Juridique, no. 21 (1995): 17–63. 28. Max Weber, Économie et société, vol. 1 (1925; Paris: Plon/Pocket, 1995), 51. 29. Reinhart Koselleck, Le futur passé: Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques (1979; Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1990), chap. 5. 30. Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), 40.

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to a sky structured by constellations, as does Mendras, amounts to using images as concepts that convey a theory. A good metaphor, like a translation, gives immediate understanding. In his 1903 article, Simiand brushes aside, as just so many “nominalist jokes,” warnings recalling that the government, the Church, the family, and the textile industry are “abstractions”: exactly like the physicist, the sociologist has the right and the duty to implement abstractions. The fact remains that these invisible entities are fictions of method. To speak of the “white collars,” for example is a double heuristic fiction, since it transposes an abstract sociological concept (office employees) into a synecdoche. Similarly, the metaphor “bloodlands,” forged by Timothy Snyder, refers to territories having, among several historical links, that of getting crushed by the successive reigns of terror of Stalinism and Nazism between the beginning of the 1930s and the end of the Second World War. The social sciences likewise make use of falsehoods in order to zero in more sharply on the truth. The practice involves taking into consideration something that one knows well either is false or did not happen. As Max Weber shows in his Essays in Economic Sociology, unreal causal relations serve to identify the real ones: “What would have happened if . . . ?” Compared and contrasted with what actually took place, the alternative imaginary construction indicates the mainsprings of reality. In his biography of Mozart, Norbert Elias explains that if he had spent his entire childhood in Salzburg (instead of traveling in Europe as a whiz kid), he would have been stuck in the traditional language of his time. This logic was not foreign to the rhetoric of antiquity. In order to convince members of the jury that Milo was not wrong to kill Clodius, Cicero momentarily resuscitates him. If Clodius had lived, he would have seized control of the praetura, imposed silence on the consuls and senators, and usurped power: public liberty would have been snuffed out and the republic reduced to nothing. The unreal has a retroactive impact on reality: Clodius deserved to be killed as a public enemy. Such a way of reasoning can very often occasion ritual exercises: alternative history. Counterfactual history is a serious form of amusement, an absurdity used as a form of reasoning, a hypothesis that does not need to be tested, since it has been conjured up as a fiction. Let us suppose that the Allies did not manage to break the Nazis’ secret codes, that Pius XII condemned the genocide in progress, that Lincoln did not abolish slavery, and

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that the Chinese discovered the New World. Pontius Pilate spares Jesus: Jesus lives many more years, attracts thousands of disciples, dies near the age of one hundred, is discreetly buried, his preaching is subject to many interpretations, and Christianity flourishes in synagogues as a variation of Judaism. Beyond the humor, there is a penetrating reflection on the role of the crucifixion in Christianity.31 Here again, this way of thinking is not specific to professional historians. Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962) describes the world “as it might have been” after the Axis powers have won the Second World War in 1947; a secretly circulated book has the audacity to imagine a world in which the Allies won the war. A well-controlled anachronism conveys a reality for today’s readers. We can rightfully speak of a “Roman proletariat” in reference to the revolt of the Gracchi in the first century BCE, even if Marx was not yet born; the Bayeux Tapestry is a marvelous “comic strip” dating from the eleventh century; the Jews and the Spanish Muslims are victims of an “ethnic cleansing” between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries; Rousseau had thousands of “fans” throughout Europe after publishing The New Heloise. These deliberate errors convey an effort to make explicit, by which historians try to “express themselves correctly with incorrect words.”32 All of these tools are fictions of method in the original sense of fictio, that is to say, intellectual fabrications capable of deviating from the precise facts in order to think the facts.

Narrative Techniques As a professor of literature and founder of “reader response theory” at the University of Konstanz, Hans Robert Jauss lists three fictions that are constitutive of historical narration: vectorial unfolding of the action from the beginning to the end; homogenization of the narrative, unifying disparate

31. All these examples are taken from Robert Cowley, ed., More What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (London: Macmillan, 2002). See Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou, “Explorer le champ des possibles: Approches contrefactuelles et futurs non advenus en histoire,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, no. 59 (2012): 70–95. 32. Antoine Prost, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 280. See Nicole Loraux, “Éloge de l’anachronisme en histoire,” Le Genre Humain, no. 27 (1993): 23–39.

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elements while eliminating gaps as well as superfluous details; and the objectivization of a past that tells its own story by itself.33 The objective mode, based on the expulsion of the “I,” the synoptical point of view, and the dream of transparency, is a fiction of method: indeed, nobody is ignorant of the fact that the historian is the one speaking, writing, and enunciating in an act of presence so overwhelming that he prefers to make himself invisible. Letting us see “as if we were there,” hypotyposis is a particularly successful verbal animation. The use of the present tense (or presentification), thanks to which the past replays itself in a representation here and now, constitutes another fiction of method. One of the most fruitful techniques is narration by symbol, which consists of encapsulating a phenomenon, an era, or an event within some individual or object judged to be representative. Such a concentration of the line of reasoning results in a more vivid narrative while at the same time activating an identification reflex in the reader. From an epistemological viewpoint, narration by symbol makes it possible to ward off the lenifying effect of abstraction, which is so feared in dealing with slavery, World Wars I and II, and the Holocaust. Narration by symbol provides the point of departure for Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship (2007). In order to recount and explain a global crime that enslaved 14 million Africans over the course of three centuries, Rediker makes use of a double focalization on the object (the slave ship) and on the individuals who were agents and victims of the slave trade (slaves, sailors, captains, merchants, planters, and political men). This narrative commitment results in a personalization of history that makes the narration more dynamic. In a related area, Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat (2008) tells the story of globalization in the eighteenth century through the circulation of objects that are visible in Vermeer’s paintings: a felt hat, a bowl of fruit, and tobacco. To reduce slavery to the dimensions of a ship or globalization to those of a hat is to resort to a fiction of method. Every line of reasoning follows one or more narrative schemata. Hayden White brought to light those privileged in the nineteenth century: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. The emplotment of history supposes

33. Hans Robert Jauss, “L’usage de la fiction en histoire,” Le Débat, no. 54 (March– April 1989): 89–113.

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a story, and the story appeals to the imagination of the author as well as to that of the reader. At the Pergamon Museum of Berlin, the Ishtar Gate and the procession of lions are much smaller than they actually were in Babylon: it therefore requires a work of re-creation to restore them to their true dimensions. A sentence such as “Hitler invaded Poland” constitutes not only a metaphor and a shortcut but also a historiographical choice. Saying nothing of the role of the generals, soldiers, and German population, it foregrounds the decision of the Führer, thus concentrating both barbarity and celebrity in his person. Lenglet had already observed in the eighteenth century that the “supposed heroes” Skanderbeg, Charles V, and Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, only served to claim for them the carnage created by “five or six well-placed canons.”34 In some cases, the line of reasoning follows narrative paths that “do not exist.” Ever since Lucian of Samosata had the dead speak (an idea taken up again by Fontenelle at the end of the seventeenth century), historians have not hesitated to make use of fictional or posthumous dialogues. In his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Chateaubriand summons the emperor before his judges: On being asked his name and forenames? — He replied that his name was Napoleon Bonaparte. On being asked where he has resided since he left France? — He replied: at the Pyramids, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and St Helena.35

In Pensons ailleurs (Let’s Think Elsewhere), Nicole Lapierre invents encounters that could have taken place between Simmel, W. E. B Du Bois, and Gandhi at the Universal Race Congress in 1911, and between Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias in London in 1938. The most complex aspects of The Silences of Hammerstein are discussed in the “posthumous conversations” that author Hans Magnus Enzenberger imagines having

34. Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresnoy, De l’usage des romans, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: De Poilras, 1734), 43. 35. René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, bk. 16, chap. 8, sec. 1, trans. A. S. Kline, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Chateaubriand/Chateaubriand MemoirsBookXVI.htm#anchor_Toc127706677 (accessed June 6, 2016).

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had with the protagonist, a German general who opposed Hitler, and his next of kin. The use of fiction in historical or sociological narrative has the effect of dramatizing. Thus Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft retraces “the life of the same woman over a period of three hundred years,” and Michael Young’s Rise of the Meritocracy is written in the form of a science-fiction essay in which the narrator, who lives in 2034, looks back retrospectively on the education that was provided in Great Britain between 1870 and 2033. Faced with a lack of material traces, archaeology uses the novel for pedagogical purposes. In Abbé Barthélemy’s Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece (1788), Adrien Arcelin’s Chasseurs de rennes à Solutré (Reindeer Hunters at Solutré, 1872), and Jean Guilaine’s Pourquoi j’ai construit une maison carrée (Why I Built a Square House, 2006), the characters have been invented, but the historical circumstances (those of classical Greece, the Solutrean era, and the Neolithic period, respectively), as well as the questions they raise, are quite genuine. Beginning with the late twentieth century, the prehistoric novel has been gradually replaced by graphic novels and docu-fiction. Fiction can also be offbeat or jubilant. In Les conférences de Morterolles (“The Morterolles Lectures), Alain Corbin slips into the shoes of a rural elementary school teacher of the latter part of the nineteenth century in order to tell farmers about the victory at Valmy, the conquest of Madagascar, the effects of frost, and the benefits of work. In his photographic novel Reconstitution, Philippe Artières walks the streets of Rome in a cassock and then collapses onto the pavement, as had his Jesuit great-uncle, who was murdered in 1925. History becomes a game without ceasing to be serious. For the questions posed by Artières are fundamental: situated between living history and near-documentary, the historical reconstitution with actors materializes the difference from what took place while at the same time revealing our close connections to the event in which we are so involved. We act out history and play with history in order to prevent history from playing with us.

Activating Fiction The preceding survey teaches us that certain fictions have a cognitive potential as a more or less free “reconfiguration” of reality, and not a mere

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mimetic function. They prove to be indispensable for the production of knowledge, and they serve to pose questions, formulate hypotheses, implement concepts, and transmit knowledge in order to understand what it is that humans in truth do. These fictions of method have not been understood either by literary theory or by history based on scientism. For literary theory there is nothing but fiction, a surrounding world unrelated to reality: truth is but a word. For history based on scientism, there are but facts: truth is to be gathered like a rock. Hence the following division of the world: on the one hand, literature and the reign of “fiction,” and on the other, history, the realm of the “factual.” The mistake of those who exclude fiction from history is to consider fiction to be a meta-reality and history to be a content, a sack filled with “facts.” Now, history is above all a way of thinking, an intellectual adventure that has need of imagination with its archives, originality with its concepts, audacity in its explanations, and a capacity for invention in its narratives. If we want to understand the actions of human beings, we have to implement a way of reasoning, in other words, have recourse to fictions of method, controlled and explicit fictions for which there is no need to deliberately suspend our doubt. Since they are both activated and neutralized by the historical way of reasoning, such fictions are components of demonstration that participate in the production of knowledge. History is in no way fabled; it does, however, have need of certain fictions, thanks to which it can indeed proclaim itself to be scientific. Fictionalization is in no way a threat but an opportunity—provided it has been tamed, subjected to the aim/goal of the researcher, transformed into a cognitive (and literary) tool. Used in the novel as in the social sciences, fiction is not the ultimate criterion that enables us to distinguish between literature and history; it is not the gauge of any literary quality, no more than history should be by nature hostile to fiction. How then to separate novelistic fiction from fictions of method? The difference resides in the use we make of them. There are not fictions “for literature” and others “for the social sciences”: there are fictions used to a greater or lesser degree to seek out what is true. In his article on the “psychology of the Jacobin” in 1881, Taine invents a character who condenses traits specific to his group. The “Jacobin” indulges in an interior monologue, a collage of formulae and quotations

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that Taine drew from various texts of the period. This invented discourse makes it possible for the reader to follow the Jacobin’s thought “live.”36 As creatures of a novelistic universe, Rastignac and Nucingen are ideal types in Max Weber’s sense. They are obviously fictional people, but we can also consider them to be abstractions, borderline cases given in their conceptual purity, in other words, fictions of method fit to conceptualize the society of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, ambition, greed, and so on. If there is any truth in The Human Comedy, it is not because it is so realistic or because it delivers some moral or psychological “truth.” Rather it is because the work poses questions and forges tools that equip the line of reasoning. We can thus say that Balzac helps understand what humans do. Fiction is therefore not in itself true or false. It is not in a relationship with the real world if it believes itself to be self-sufficient. It is in an unfulfilled relationship with the real world if it is content with representing reality or if integrates bits of “knowledge” into the text, for example, by recopying dictionary entries, medical theories, or taxonomies, as do sometimes the works of Zola and Verne. Nor does it suffice for fiction to provide an overview of the human soul, a discourse on society, a more or less original philosophy of History (such as the partial view of a witness like Fabrice at Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, or the expectation and the restarting of History in Julien Gracq’s novels). Yet fiction can enter into a relationship with the real world if it participates in the production of intelligence as an operator of knowledge in the form of a problem (as in Scott and Balzac), a defamiliarization (as in Sterne and Borges), a hypothesis (as in Dostoyevsky and Wells), an ideal type (such as a Madame Bovary or a Kafkaesque world), or a narrative construction (as in Woolf, Dos Passos, and Faulkner). Insisting that there is ultimately no signified, that every text is “writable” (scriptible), that literature is nothing but polysemy, ambiguity, semantic dispersion, and that fiction is everywhere, we risk forgetting that many novels are fictions of method, in other words, problematizations

36. Nathalie Richard, Hippolyte Taine: Histoire, psychologie, littérature (Paris: Classiques Garnier 2013), 248–50.

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of history, social questioning, and political anguish: Robinson Crusoe on the Westernization of the world, Ourika on relations of gender and race, Dickens on the industrial revolution, Balzac and Zola on democratic society, Faulkner on racial and social domination, Arthur Koestler and Vassili Grossman on totalitarianism. None of that takes anything away from the value, force, and depth of “literary” fiction, nor from the place it occupies in our lives. But if it wants to have an element of truth, it cannot live in autarky, as a miniature world in which we would be deliciously enclosed. As for fiction-as-mirror, it only reflects appearances. In order to learn something about the real world, we must on the contrary step back and distance ourselves from it by using fictions of method. When placed at the center of a line of historical reasoning, fleshed out in application to a specific problem, and implemented within the framework of an investigation, the fictionalization of the world becomes a productive deviation, a means of keeping one’s distance in order to understand. If fictions of method contribute to widening the scope of truth statements, we can say reciprocally that history is a form of literature that, by means of a method, activates fiction in order to produce knowledge. There is therefore a dimension of arbitration, a strategy of fiction. Its activation consists of breaking it down into fictions of method, by a sort of fission producing elements of the demonstration. Non-activated fiction poses the question of mimesis, realism, and the verisimilar, but never that of truth; truth is the privilege and fragility of the historical mode of reasoning. The opposition between fiction and reality can therefore be replaced with a different opposition: on the one hand, the fiction that is assertive, playful, and pleasurable in its inertia, and on the other, the fiction of method that works as a hypothesis, concept, expression of a problem, a link in a chain of reasoning, and form of narration. Realist fiction can be conceived as a succession of hypotheses without evidence, while fiction activated by a line of reasoning is a series of hypotheses subjected to the test of evidence. In the social sciences, fiction never reigns: it is subjected to rules, subordinated to ends other than itself. The only ruler for a learned scholar, wrote Bayle in the seventeenth century, is the truth. Nowadays, we would say that fiction is one of the tools that serve to seek out and construct what is true.

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It is often said that in Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood there are two alternating narratives: the “fiction” consisting of the encounter with the mysterious Otto Apfelstahl, the shipwreck of the vessel Sylvandre, the system of rules on the island of W, and the memories of childhood structured by “History,” with the parents’ disappearance and the refuge at Villard-de-Lans. But as Perec specifies in the title and again in the book, the dystopia of W, a society monstrously obsessed with sports, is a “history/ story of my childhood” which he wrote at the age of thirteen. Once he was an adult, he rediscovered it and published it in a series of installments in La Quinzaine Littéraire. This information transforms the status of the long imaginary structure of W. It is no longer a fiction but a record of the self, a document devoted to elucidating a question by means of other documents, in particular the text dealing with his parents’ life and death, which dates from his youth and which is reproduced as is, with notes that rectify errors. Conversely, the “real” part of the book is populated with fictions: as a child, Perec invents an accident with ice skates, draws a ship whose sails do not stay attached to the mast, imagines himself next to his mother, clearing the table on which “there would be a waxed, blue checkered cloth.”37 Since the entire book is based on childhood memories, it is no longer possible to set “fiction” over against “History.” The slightest fiction is inscribed into a line of reasoning that activates it, such that W can be read as an investigation into the records (the records of the self), based on a problem, documents, and hypotheses. In this sense, W is a book of history. The adventure narrative is not about the trip to an isle in Tierra del Fuego, but a quest following the tracks of the disappeared persons and their child, which is exactly the purpose of the “Truth Office” in charge of the shipwrecked (the sommersi, as Primo Levi put it). The one who tries to explain his itinerary, fit himself into a filiation, and bring together a corpus of autobiographical records dreams of history. His “dreamlike action” consists of gathering and stringing together, treasure hunt and melody, “temporality grabbed at the roots of emotion.”38

37. Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 95. 38. Maurice Olender, Matériau du rêve (Abbaye d’Ardenne: IMEC, 2010), 30.

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We can attempt to explain the Holocaust by anti-Semitism, by “vital space,” total war, the invasion of the USSR, the covetous desire for Jews’ property, or the necessity of eliminating useless hungry mouths. A different approach consists of taking on the stupefying, incomprehensible nature of the crime and rendering it radically alien to anything familiar. Claude Lanzmann has shown that the intelligence of the event and the desire to create both stem from the refusal to represent, an obstinacy in not understanding, and an impossibility of seeing presented as “lucidity itself.” Not one single archival image is present in Shoah. The film shows rivers, roads, train stations, and farms as they exist today; Lanzmann has us listen to testimony and proceeds with artificial reconstitutions, such as those involving the work of a hairdresser and the maneuvers of a train engineer. How can fiction produce knowledge? Such staging is in fact nothing other than a fiction of method, targeting both the trivial narrative of the past and the obscene fiction of televised series. “Shoah is a fiction of the real world.”39 Clearly, the aim of these fictions is neither an escape from the world, nor the pleasure of the text, nor the “feeling of reality,” but the truth. Should we then define history as a arrangement of nonfictional fictions whose purpose is to make the real world break out into the open? If such is the case, it is not certain that history is always in its rightful place among “factual” narratives.

39. Claude Lanzmann, “Le lieu et la parole” (1985) and “Hier ist kein warum” (1988), in Au sujet de “Shoah,” le film de Claude Lanzmann, ed. Michel Deguy (Paris: Belin, 1990), 407–25, 385–86.

Part III

Literature and the Social Sciences

9

From Nonfiction to Literature-as-Truth

It is one thing to assert that all history is narration, and quite another to make a way of reasoning operative in a text. To write history: the project is not new. By going all the way back to agonistic rhetoric, we can show that history (as a way of reasoning) and literature (as a text) have the same origins. In the perspective of belles lettres, all history can be regarded as literature, in the form of history-as-tragedy, history-as-eloquence, or history-as-panegyric. At the end of the nineteenth century, history tore itself away from this system, since the academic world assimilated literature to fabulation, partiality, dilettantism, even a malady. Once it was based on a method and institutionalized as an academic discipline, history took it upon itself to practice the professional non-text (le non-texte professionnel). Thankfully, that was not enough to turn away those who devoted great care and creativity to their writing, and it seems to me that certain history books of the twentieth century belong purely and simply to literature. When, in the 1970s, postmodernism tried

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to theorize the literary character of history, however, it was done to the detriment of history’s cognitive capacity. It was a lamentable power play. Ever since, we have felt a bit ill at ease. Before the last three decades of the nineteenth century, historians did not have such numerous scruples with respect to literature. Herodotus, Gibbon, and Michelet were clearly writers. Should they be promoted as models? The problem is that, even if they contributed to founding the historical way of reasoning, their method was not always reliable, nor assured, nor clear, nor were their conclusions always correct. Conversely, historians such as Monod and Seignobos were not the old fogies they were alleged to have been. They had rigor, independence, and a true intellectual curiosity. They knew they were entrusted with the legacy of their predecessors, and they took an interest in institutions and social groups.1 “We must believe only in what is demonstrated,” wrote Fustel de Coulanges.2 Who would claim the contrary? We are their heirs: let us not be ungrateful. To put it succinctly, the methodical revolution took place. Disciplines have been established, history is nowadays a social science, and that is all for the better. A reflection on the writing of history could therefore not be carried out in the past, by reviving “Walter-Scotted” history, relying on Balzac’s “sociology,” or hoping for the eternal return, “the return of the narrative,” “return of the event,” or “return of biography.” What is really at stake is the invention of new literary forms thanks to the social sciences and for the social sciences, without regressing to belles lettres nor letting ourselves be dissolved in the linguistic turn’s vat of acid. Instead of attempting to return to an era in which history was not an academic discipline, or giving up on all rules, I am trying to give a new orientation to the rules that now exist. Rather than seeking to reconcile the history-literature duo, which has constantly been in the process of divorcing for centuries, I favor the encounter of method and text. First and foremost, I pose the question: What writing for what knowledge? What text for what history?

1. See Antoine Prost, “Charles Seignobos revisité,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire, no. 43 (July–September 1994): 100–118. 2. Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1893), 407.

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The Zone of Extraterritoriality History is not fiction, sociology is not a novel, and all discourses are not equally valid. There is a point, however, where literature and the social sciences intersect, an area of interpenetration in which what is specific to each remains undecidable, and in which it is good for things to be that way: a sort of library in which every book does not have its pre-designated place on the shelves. The homeland for these books is the “neutral territory” in James Fenimore Cooper’s sense of the term: a poorly defined area, a noman’s-land in flux, escaping the belligerents’ control, a space over which no authority manages to exert its power. Not all writers have several lives, as did Michel Leiris, poet and ethnologist, and Jean Duvignaud, a theater artist and sociologist.3 Books themselves are what has a blurred identity, as is the case with Austerlitz by Sebald, who rejected the term “novel,” defining the work instead as “a book in prose of an undefined nature.”4 These works aim not so much to make history more literary or to mix “documents” with “fiction” as to write the real world, with the cognitive operations that supposes. They have no other identity than that of a mongrel by which literature becomes a tool for the explanation and comprehension of the world, a text charged with a line of reasoning. What follows here is an attempt to classify a few of the works defying classification. Self-inventory is a reflexive text, in the form of a testimony or autobiography aiming to elucidate an itinerary, to report an experience, to shed light on a very personal relationship, or to get out of oneself. I will cite, without any particular order, Michel Leiris’s Manhood, Romain Gary’s Promise at Dawn, Arthur Koestler’s Scum of the Earth, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, the entire work of Annie Ernaux, Georges Perec’s Ellis Island and Je me souviens (I Remember, inspired by Joe Brainard’s work), Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, and Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion. Numerous researchers have written about their own trajectory: Nels Anderson

3. See Pierre Lassave, Sciences sociales et littérature: Concurrence, complémentarité, interférences (Paris: PUF, 2002). 4. Interview with W. G. Sebald, “Ich fürchte das Melodramatische,” Der Spiegel, March 12, 2001.

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in The American Hobo, Richard Hoggart in 33 Newport Street, Didier Éribon in Returning to Reims, Oliver Sacks in On the Move. Navigating between sociology and self-analysis, these texts manage to create spaces in which the authors present themselves, seek themselves out, and engender their own selves. Social radiography is a tentative approach or an account of an on-site investigation, most often in milieus of great precarity. By showing what no one sees, making audible voices no one listens to, it gives dignity to the poor, the lowly, and all those deemed null and void by society. Such is the mission taken on as early as the 1890s by Jacob Riis in the Lower East Side of New York (How the Other Half Lives) and Isaac-Levy Peretz in the Jewish villages in eastern Europe (Stories and Pictures), followed in the twentieth century by Jack London in the East End of London (The People of the Abyss), George Orwell in the same area and with English miners (Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier), James Agee with the Alabama sharecroppers (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), and Joseph Kessel in the “human garbage can” of the Bowery alcoholics. To this literature we can add the anthropologies of everyday life which, from Siegried Kracauer to Norman Mailer and Roland Barthes to Joan Didion, latch on to our familiar places and objects: umbrellas, typewriters, the streets of Berlin, boxing or wrestling matches, steak and fries, the use of drugs, California suburbs. There comes a time when the words would like to yield to the mute objectivity of photos, the pure materiality of things: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron.”5 The book of the world is a hymn in praise of venturing out, leading the life of a nomad, leaving one’s familiar surroundings to experience foreign lands and make new discoveries. It brings together the masterpieces of journalism, either war correspondence or travel narratives: not only the reports by Joseph Kessel, Albert Londres, and Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, but

5. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939; Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1960), 13, http://www.unisa.edu.au/global/eass/hri/let%20us%20now%20 praise%20fammen.pdf (accessed June 7, 2016).

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also John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, on the Bolsheviks’ taking power, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon on the Yugoslavia of the 1930s, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah on the territory of the Naples mafia, as well as circumterrestrial anthropologies such as Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World, on the Silk Road from Belgrade to the Khyber Pass, Albert Londres’s The Wandering Jew Has Arrived, a trip around the world of Judaism, and William Vollmann’s Poor People, a worldwide tour of poverty from Kenya to China and from Russia to Thailand. This literature of travel logs leads us to encounter others and to come into contact with their culture, their way of life, their beauty, and their suffering. By effacing our usual guide marks, it forces us to forget ourselves. It goes far. The exploration of the human soul is carried out with books that dive in, startle us, and force us to look at what we find repugnant. By basing their work on judicial archives, interrogations or press articles, writers become the clinicians of social disorders and ailments, chroniclers of atrocity. In La Séquestrée de Poitiers (The Sequestered Woman of Poitiers), André Gide makes us share the long ordeal of a fifty-two-year-old woman locked up by her mother, living on a bed covered with excrement and rotten food. Claude Lanzmann and Marcel Jouhandeau sketch the portrait of the parish priest of Uruffe, who ripped open the womb of his pregnant young mistress before baptizing and then stabbing the fetus. Every great scandal has had its writer–court reporter, as in the case of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère. Similarly, Michel Foucault went to seek out, in the depths of the nineteenth century, the crime of the farmer declaring I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother.6 With such works, common criminal cases and genocide form the two opposite ends of the same chain. Gitta Sereny questions the deed of an eleven-year-old murderess before interviewing the commandant of the Treblinka camp in his prison cell. Jean Hatzeld holds up the machete of

6. Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Riviére, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

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the Rwandan killers like a broken mirror. Crime fascinates because it is the hidden face of our societies. Madness, chaos, and savagery await their hour, tucked away in our countrysides and living rooms; they explode at the heart of life’s tranquil course, ravaging certitudes, destroying everything. This literature of terror that delves into the darkest depths of the human soul ends up troubling the social order: crime’s holiness, Genet would say. The reparation of the past is the work of memory-backed justice. This literature, which tells of the destruction of humans by other humans, originates at the end of the nineteenth century with Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead and Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, both devoted to the Russian penal system. The literature of memory dates its tragic upsurge, however, from the First World War. Nonprofessional writers such as Hallé, Cazin, Pézart, Delvert, whose texts have been exhumed and analyzed by Jean Norton Cru in his Témoins (Witnesses, 1929), recounted the trenches, the moral and physical sufferings in the industrial massacre. The World War II victim-chroniclers and the diary-archivists of the ghettos, then Primo Levi in Auschwitz Report and If This Is a Man, David Rousset in The Days of Our Death, Robert Antelme in The Human Race, Charlotte Delbo in her trilogy Auschwitz and After, Shalamov in Kolyma Tales, and Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago are determined to bear witness, and they survived in order to tell their story. Their documentary prose gave rise to a literature of accuracy and sobriety, texts-as-evidence that stubbornly insist on telling things as they were. Their barren writing corresponds to the nakedness of human beings at the mercy of totalitarianism: their depositions are narratives without “the slightest bit of literary invention.”7 Orphans such as Perec and Grumberg, children of the postwar period such as Patrick Modiano, Daniel Mendelsohn in The Lost, and Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes, set out on a quest for people who disappeared without leaving any traces. With these books written in a hostile environment, we can associate investigations whose purpose is to let the truth burst out into the open,

7. Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi-Yar: Roman-document (1970; Paris: Robert Laffont, 2011), 30; in English, Babi-Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, trans. David Floyd (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).

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such as in Les preuves (The Evidence) by Jaurès, at the time of the Dreyfus affair and in Facing the Chair by Dos Passos, in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, as well as in the testimonial narratives given in memory of persons torn from their loved ones, such as Other Lives Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrère.

Postrealism Let us group this corpus of texts together under a provisory banner: literature of the real world. It is indissociable from the twentieth century (even if one finds accounts of travel during the time of the great discoveries and in the memoirs of the Wars of Religion). It is the imprint that the century has left on literature. The conditions making such literature possible include not only industrial society, urbanization, dire poverty, exile, war, totalitarianism, and mass murder, but also the new ways of apprehending the world through psychoanalysis, the press, photography, the cinema, the automobile, and the airplane. We might say that it reflects a democratization of the literary realm, if social exclusion and crime have some relation with democracy. In the era of the masses, it is the language of individuals protesting against being summoned by the state, reduced to servitude, and having to face the annihilation of others and of themselves. Obviously this literature is also heir to the realist novel. Like Zola, Dreiser, and Sinclair, it has the firm intention to express the world, the entire world, that is to say, without concealing any of it. Yet—and this is a fundamental point—it refuses recourse to fiction as well as to psychological recipes. We can therefore approach these texts from the angle of postrealism, an attitude toward the real world that we can discern in three twentieth-century forms of literature: objectivism, testimony, and the nonfiction novel. The artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, which originated at the outset of the 1920s in Weimar Germany, defined objectivity as the unrelenting description of the real world: pleasures of the modern city, daily life of workers, deformed bodies, and the horrors of war. In a broader sense, we can qualify the factographic literature appearing at this time in Europe, the USSR, and the United States as being objectivist. Be it in the form of a report, interview, biography, document, or poetry,

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it intends to maintain a direct operative relationship with reality by concentrating attention on “the material, the real fact, the information,” as Shklovsky put it. Within the LEF, an avant-garde Soviet journal created in 1923, Mayakovsky and his friends Brik, Tretyakov, and Shklovsky theorized a “literature of fact,” as opposed to the literature of novels, perceived as a bourgeois, artificial, and outdated form. Brik summarized their agenda along three lines: eliminating obsolete narrative schemata, gathering together the largest possible quantity of real facts, and perfecting a method for linking facts and details by means of a plot. Instead of inventing fictions, the “factovists” (faktoviki) embraced the centrality of the object, which resulted from a process of production and was endowed with material properties: stoves, clothing, advertising posters, and so on.8 A few years later in the United States, an “objectivist” current brought together young poets like Reznikoff, Oppen, Rakosi, and Zukofsky. Zukofsky, influenced by the poet Ezra Pound and the historian Henry Adams, published a manifesto titled “Sincerity and Objectification” in the review Poetry in 1931. He wrote that poetry makes us hear “things the way they exist.” Poets are sincere when they flee neither the conditions of materiality nor the vigor of the word, when they speak (like Reznikoff) of the shoemaker sitting at his sewing machine, of fish cooking, of shabby clothing, of passersby in the street, and when they speak of “factory smokestacks,” “stacks of bricks and plaster,” and “a beam . . . amid the garbage.” The following year, Zukofsky edited an objectivist anthology. Working within the framework of his Index of American Design project during the New Deal, he took a passionate interest in the decorative arts and material culture. In one way or another, objectivist literature was determined to take up the challenges of the young twentieth century: urban and industrial modernity, the advent of the masses, inequalities, and the construction of socialism. The survivor witnesses who wrote after the Second World War certainly did not share either in this didactic approach or in revolutionary poetics. But the experience of the camps was at the origin of

8. Leonid Heller, “Le mirage du vrai: Remarques sur la littérature factographique en Russie,” Communications, no. 71 (2001): 143–77.

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a “factographic” ethic, whose principles included the demand for truth, scrupulousness, sobriety, and the mistrust of fiction. Shalamov is a good representative of that tendency. As a worker having become a journalist and a former member of the Trotskyist group, he approached the “factual literature” of a writer like Tretyakov and, in the gulag, was in close contact with Mandelstam, who sneered at the “psychological belles lettres.” The “new prose” created by Shalamov in the 1960s was not characterized only by the properties of its style, which was laconic, simple, and contained; the prose was also the act of the one who overcame death, like Pluto coming back up from the underworld. What ensures the “truth of the real world” is not fiction, description, characters, and psychology as in Tolstoy; it is the memory-document, pure presence, authenticity, and “lived experience in prose.” By abolishing the boundaries between narrative, autobiography, report, and document, Shalamov is able both to condemn the Russian school of realism and to proclaim himself the “ultimate citadel of realism.”9 Shalamov’s profession of faith illustrates the transition from the literature of facts to testimonial literature (aiming to bear witness or made from the testimony of witnesses), whose objective is less to celebrate the object than to understand the real world. His praise of specialists (those who speak “only of what they know or what they have seen”) echoes strangely the memorialist historians of the seventeenth century. At the same time in France, Georges Perec, a young writer tempted by communism, became the champion of “realist literature.” The journal he was thinking of beginning with several friends was titled La Ligne Générale (The General Line) in tribute to the filmmaker Eisenstein, who was moreover close to LEF. The journal aimed to explore the complexity of the world. For this young writer, realism consisted of revealing things, deciphering society, and grasping the workings of the present time. It followed that literature and culture could only be committed, that is to say, “inserted into the world, hooked onto reality,”10 which distances them

9. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (London: Penguin, 1994), and Tout ou rien (Paris: Verdier, 1993). 10. Georges Perec, “Le Nouveau Roman et le refus du réel” and “Pour une littérature réaliste,” in L.G.: Une Aventure des Années Soixante (1992): 25–45 and 47–66.

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from both Sartre’s excessively political militancy and the New Novel’s disdain for the “little factual detail.” At the outset of the 1960s, Perec had not yet written about his parents’ disappearance, but he was still influenced by the truth literature of Robert Antelme, “this man who recounts and who interrogates . . . who extracts from events their secrets, who refuses to accept silence about these matters.”11 That is a fine definition of the historical way of reasoning. Perec’s postrealism surpasses nineteenthcentury realism by making literature into an operation for putting the world in order, an obstinately lucid investigation. Perec’s first book would be Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which many critics would read as a sociological essay in the guise of a novel. The Holocaust inspired Reznikoff, founder with Zukofsky of the “objectivist” current, one of his most important books. Holocaust (1975) is completely composed of verbatim testimony from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. The poet selected excerpts, organized them into chapters (“Deportation,” “Ghettos,” “Massacres,” “Children”), and set them on the page, indenting each new line, making them appear versified. The emotion stems from the naked horror of the testimony, but also, following the objectivist aesthetic, from the words themselves in their original purity. One has to “name, name, keep on naming” in order for a rhythm and the chorus of the tragedy to rise up.12 Ten years earlier, Reznikoff had published Testimony, a gigantic montage of American court records from the end of the nineteenth century. This rough simplicity gave the impression of having been taken directly from the most unrefined reality, testifying to people’s distress, even their murder. Like the narratives of Primo Levi and Shalamov and Perec’s memories, Reznikoff’s poetry is not without ties to history. In certain respects, it follows the tradition of archaic royal annals which also appear as a succession of true verses. Similar to the survivor’s testimony, it adopts an attitude of self-effacing humility vis-à-vis the dead, those who did not return. Whereas the survivors say “I” while yet refusing to put themselves in the limelight, however, Reznikoff remains absent because he is an outsider

11. Ibid., 87–114. 12. Charles Reznikoff, “Nommer, nommer, toujours nommer,” in Holocaust (Paris: Prétexte Éditeur, 2007), 151.

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to the tragedy. By reporting as is the words spoken before the judges, while at the same time refusing to comment or put them in perspective, Reznikoff ventures a radical experiment: that of the self-sufficient record. From a literary vantage point he succeeds, but from an epistemological perspective, it is an illusion. The interesting thing is that this objectivism reconnects with the narrative abstinence of nineteenth-century scientism. Remaining invisible, the poet lets the facts “speak for themselves,” as in the objective mode. Objectivism raises the curtain on the life and death of others. While thinking that the poet can provide direct access to the real world, however, he implements reality effects: the fascination for life “as is” dodges all critical reflection about the production of sources and the construction of knowledge. That is why Reznikoff’s work must be read for what it is: a poem, not an open window on the past. The manner in which this literature refuses fiction (often conflated with the nineteenth-century novel) is ambiguous. On the one hand, these writers, universal witnesses in a universal court, come to testify at the witness stand. When they do not tell of their own experience, they carry the word of others, nothing more. This testimonial model, which refuses invention and shuns all narcissism, exhibits something of a counter-literature. On the other hand, however, the writer pursues the ambition of the great masters whose fictions claim to be faithful to the real world. Tolstoy, whom Shalamov cites as a foil, transposed his experience as a soldier in The Sebastopol Sketches (1855). Zola did nothing more than give his reports the form of a novel. Objectivism and document literature do not in fact announce the “death of the novel” but rather the metempsychosis of realism, and Perec, who was so harsh with the New Novel, was to be one of the most innovative novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. We find the same ambivalence in a third form of postrealism: the nonfiction novel.

Nonfictional Literature The first nonfiction novel was Operation Massacre (1957) by the Argentine journalist Rodolfo Walsh, who investigated the suppression of a putsch during which several civilians had been clandestinely executed. In the 1960s, a few American writers give the genre its noble pedigree: the

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nonfiction novel magnifies a true story by means of novelistic techniques, including plot, descriptions, characters, dialogues, points of view, and suspense. The inventor was Truman Capote with In Cold Blood (1965), which told the story of a quadruple homicide in Kansas. The basic fabric of the novel is real, but several dialogues have been invented, the ties between the author and the two criminals have been erased, the presence of Harper Lee has been “forgotten,” and so on. In The Executioner’s Song (1979), Norman Mailer retraces the criminal itinerary of Gary Gilmore right up to his execution in Utah. As he specifies in his afterword, his book is based on conversations, documents, court records, “and other original material.” In order for the narrative to be “as accurate as possible,” Mailer adopts a historical way of reasoning: corroborating the facts by cross-checking the sources, choosing among contradictory testimonies, and inscribing events in a precise chronology. However, he acknowledges having taken a few liberties in quoting newspapers and witnesses. Generally speaking, the nonfiction novel is only “globally” true. Is nonfiction the mirror image of history, which at the beginning of the 1970s Paul Veyne defined as a “true novel”? In associating fiction with lying, as do Plato and the Puritans, the British writer B. S. Johnson spares the form of the novel, considered as a sort of recipient: “Within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel.”13 The project of New Journalism is fairly close to that position. In its investigative reports, it espouses the great mythologies of the sixties: bands of motorcyclists in Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, drugs in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the Black Panthers along with their rich supporters in Radical Chic. Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night is subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History. It describes what happens within and without a march on the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. This “self-reporting” in the third person, at times spruced up, at other times faithful to the events and to the author’s memory, has the intention of transforming itself into “history” by means of press articles and eyewitness accounts. It actually amounts to a counter-history,

13. B. S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 14.

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capable of cutting through the “forest of inaccuracy” that the media have put up around the demonstration, or even an over-history, with the novelist’s instinct filling in for the lack of information when events seem too violent or confined to the world of the psyche. In the introduction to The New Journalism (1973), Tom Wolfe lists the techniques he has borrowed from the novel: telling the story through scenes; making use of dialogues instead of quoting indirect speech; presenting events from a particular point of view; recording the details that characterize the protagonists, their way of life, and social status. The operative procedures are taken from both naturalism and reporting: conduct voluminous documentary research, establish contacts with the milieus involved, get a firm sense of the social climates, and expose the structures that organize society. Fascinated with his idol Zola, Tom Wolfe sees himself as a court registrar and observer, “convinced that, if you spend one month in any corner of the United States, you will come back with an excellent story.”14 The New Journalism can be termed a post-Zola project all the more in that it ended up turning into a novel. The Bonfire of the Vanities, which describes the euphoria of money in the New York of the 1980s, echoes Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Zola’s Money; Bloody Miami deals with immigrants in an increasingly criminalized metropolis. The nonfiction novel and the New Journalism converged in a genre enjoying a prominent place in the United States: creative nonfiction (as opposed to the “plain” nonfiction of traditional journalism and the humanities). Taught at universities, promoted by journals, it has met with a certain success since the 1990s. One of its theorists has defined it as an “art of the fact” featuring four distinct traits: a subject taken from the real world, not from the mind of the writer; exhaustive research supported with verifiable references, not a string of impressions; a story rich in detail, and not a simple report; and fine writing in the form of a skillfully elaborated prose narrative, not the commonplace language of the nonfiction texts.15 Taking into consideration the fact that creative nonfiction involves

14. Wolfe’s words are quoted by Florence Noiville, “Le siècle de Tom Wolfe,” Le Monde des Livres, April 12, 2013. 15. Barbara Lounsberry, “The Realtors,” in The Art of the Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), xi ff.

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living persons, another theorist has developed a deontological checklist: be faithful to one’s recollection, do not lie, do not try to sense what others are thinking, do not hurt people’s feelings, and have those concerned read the text before publishing it.16 “Literature of the real world,” “true novel,” “nonfiction novel,” “New Journalism,” “creative nonfiction”: we find ourselves dealing with labels whose precise differences we are hard put to explain. In order to avoid jumbling everything together, we must start over from square one by posing three simple questions. Is there something specific to fiction? What is nonfiction? Why is a text literary?

On Fiction Several researchers have wondered whether a fictional narrative had any intrinsic properties, or in other words, whether there were indices of fictionality. Clearly, a fiction is signaled by extra-textual elements: a subtitle, book cover, publishing house, series, back cover, and what is called the paratext. As for the text itself, four arguments suggest that a fiction can be recognized “from the inside.”17 • Fiction makes massive use of dialogues, scenes, descriptions, and spatiotemporal deictics associated with the past. • Fiction does not refer to a verifiable documentation nor to referential data. The historian, on the contrary, makes great use of footnotes. • The indirect free style engenders “unpronounceable” sentences that never fail to signal the fictional narrative. “Yes, certainly! He would remember that,” “My God, what was going to become of her?” Since no one in the world can know what someone is thinking, intrusions into the consciousness of others is characteristic of fiction.

16. Lee Gutkind, “The Creative Nonfiction Police?” in In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005), xix–xxxiv. 17. See Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (London: Routledge, 1982); and especially Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

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• The novel houses narrative voices independent of the author’s. The disjunction between author and narrator(s) entails a greater liberty of interpretation: even though Flaubert asserts that “Madame Bovary is me,” Madame Bovary does not “say” what Flaubert “thinks.”

Let us examine in turn each one of these markers of fictionality. The first two are the most fragile. As the nonfiction novel shows, reporters or biographers can very well take their narrative devices from the novel, implementing dialogues, descriptions, chronotopic elements, and the past tense. Historians can use flashback or prolepsis, shuffle the chronological order, slow down or accelerate the narrative. Conversely, numerous novelists base their works on verifiable documentation: not only Walter Scott, Émile Zola, and Robert Merle, but also William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner and Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian. In the paperback edition of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell corrected the errors that had been pointed out to him. The third argument dealing with the indirect free style ignores the fact that historians do not hesitate to enter into the minds of protagonists. Taine delivers the interior monologue of the “Jacobin” while explicitly referring to Flaubert’s techniques. In reference to Philip II, Braudel writes: “He is not a man of great ideas. . . . I do not believe that the word Mediterranean ever drifted through his mind with the meaning we attach to it.”18 Georges Duby writes: “Count Maréchal can’t take it any longer. The load is now overwhelming him. . . . He felt it coming, and for a time, he had without saying anything been getting ready for his last adventure.”19 Are we going to say that one must distinguish the indirect free style used by novelists and the “given as true,” from the indirect free style used by historians, deemed “conjectural”? In reality, the historian’s use of the technique is a fiction of method. The final criterion having to do with the voices present in the text is the most interesting. While fiction follows a “disjunctive model,” the nonfictional

18. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, vol. 2 (1949; Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), 514. 19. Georges Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 7–8.

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narrative of history or biography posits the equation “author = narrator,” in other words, the name visible on the book’s cover. We can nevertheless hold that there are several narrative voices in history as well, including the alternation between the narrative and the learned commentary in the notes, the interplay of evidence and counter-evidence, the historian summoned before the “stern examiners” (as Bayle puts it), and the differing interpretations within a historiographic controversy. Historians can therefore lend a voice to several narrators who are not themselves. It is therefore not certain that from a syntactic, semantic, or narratological point of view there is anything “specific to fiction.” In any case, these strong reservations require us to remain cautious, even pragmatic. With respect to fictionality, moreover, some have spoken of “indices” and not proofs.

On Being Factual We must of course pose the symmetrically opposite question: Is there something specific to nonfiction? Everyone tends to answer in the affirmative, identifying nonfiction with the factual, the real, the referential. That is the way that, all while adopting a gradualist attitude linking the various forms of fiction and nonfiction, Gérard Genette sets the “fictional narrative” over against the “factual narrative,” with the latter encompassing history, biography, diaries, press articles, and police reports. The reflection of the language philosopher John Searle is structured by the same opposition: in normal conversation, speakers are accountable for the veracity of their statements, whereas in fiction, discourse is overtly feigned, with no intention of deceiving. Fiction is a simulation of serious assertions. Its status is therefore that of a “parasite” in relation to that of nonfiction.20 Creative nonfiction, literary theory, and the philosophy of language all have in common their formal acceptance of the notion that the “factual

20. John Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 58–75; and John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

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narrative” is such by virtue of being referential, as opposed to fiction, which is not. It is supposedly not possible to get out of this scheme of things without falling into panfictionalism. Such a manner of structuring the question, however, has the singular weakness of throwing together indiscriminately all “factual” discourses and setting them over against fiction. Now, among the texts that refer “seriously” to the real world, is there no difference between a press article and a history book, or between The Savvy Backpacker’s Guide to Europe on a Budget and Braudel’s The Mediterranean? We cannot distinguish one from the other on the basis of facts: they all contain some. As can be seen, the notion of “factual narrative” leads to ignoring the question, which is nevertheless fundamental, of the epistemological status of the text and, precisely, the way in which it manages to establish the facts. The social sciences are factual in that they state things that are true, but they do not speak of the “facts” in the same way that we speak of the weather. Let us come back to that pseudo-definition of Hitler as a “little landscape painter.” That presents a true fact and therefore a “factual” micro-narrative; it is nevertheless false. It is surprising that literary theorists have so seldom sought to distinguish among the different “factual” narratives that, they say, constitute the opposite of fiction. Within the huge category of prose nonfiction, Genette singles out a “literature of diction,” including history, eloquence, the essay, and autobiography, which supposedly establish their imposing presence by means of their formal characteristics.21 That reflection, however, bears on the way in which texts are read and appreciated, “made literary,” as it were, as if the difference between Michelet and Reader’s Digest played itself out first of all on the aesthetic level and not on the capacity to produce knowledge. Hence this factual conception, tinged with scientism: in order to express things that are true, all one supposedly has to do is to go out into the street and gather up a bunch of facts (or, as Tom Wolfe puts it, to spend a month “in any little part of the United States”). Such is also the illusion of a certain naturalism, more in the manner of the Goncourts than

21. Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction (1991; Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 2004), 105–10.

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of Zola: novels supposedly connect with the real world all the more when they deal with dire poverty, filth, alcohol, and sex. This winds up being the theory of reflection, according to which literature claims to be “a mirror going down a road.” To avoid making nonfiction into a collection of odds and ends, we must bring in the criteria of the problem, the investigation, the demonstration, the evidence, and knowledge, which together constitute the historical way of reasoning. Numerous “factual” narratives (for example, nonfictional novels and autobiographies) repose on a pact with the reader and the writer’s promise. In Cold Blood thus presents itself as a “truthful narrative” based on documents and conversations. However, in addition to the fact that Capote has forged or suppressed a good number of things, Balzac also swears that “all is true” in Old Goriot. A book in the social sciences never announces that it is going to tell the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth. If it dispenses with such promises, it is because it holds itself to a duty to give immediate justification: citing its sources, seeking an explanation, critiquing a hypothesis, producing the evidence, presenting an argument. The researcher asks the reader not to willfully suspend disbelief but rather to systematically refuse to be credulous. Such is the “believing with difficulty” that Volney referred to when speaking to the young students at the École Normale Supérieure at the end of the eighteenth century. The notion of the referent carries little weight here. Just like nonfiction, the novel has referential correspondents, such as Kutuzov in War and Peace, the Gold Rush in Jack London’s novellas, or St. Paul, Minnesota, in Franzen’s Freedom. Fiction and the factual are therefore not distinguished from each other by the “referential level of analysis.”22 The notion of evidence, however, does differentiate between the two. An archival document and a testimony do not have the same function as the word “Mississippi” from the pen of Mark Twain, even though they all exist in reality. It is the line of reasoning that, at the very interior of nonfiction, makes it possible to distinguish between the purely informative factual narrative and the text with a cognitive purpose.

22. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 114.

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Thanks to questions, sources, and evidence, the social sciences produce knowledge about the real world instead of merely evoking it. They give the reader not only the intellectual but also the physical possibility of going out of the text to verify what is asserted. They accept the need to fit their object within a larger whole: that is what we call comparison or generalization. Instead of adhering to the belief in the unique fact, they seek out resemblances that will make it possible to define a succession, a series, a family, or a group in other times and in different configurations. The life of my grandmother has no interest if we do not manage to inscribe it in a history broader than her own story. It is all well and good that fiction and the factual can refer back to the real world (or to bits of the real world); they do not compare, they do not prove, and they refuse to demonstrate anything: truth is not their problem. In place of the fiction-factual duo, we can therefore substitute a tripartite division including three types of narratives: fiction, the factual, and investigation. Fiction is an imaginary narrative whose characters, settings, and action do not exist. Whether it be realistic, of fanciful fabrication, or supertrue (survraie), the fiction is implicit, acted out “as if it were true”; in exchange and for a moment, the reader agrees to play along. The pleasure of fiction—this bliss of immersing ourselves within—supposes that, even in a transitive relation with the real world, it is closed in on itself, and self-sufficient. The factual is an informative narrative: annals, chronicle, genealogy, biographical sketch, necrology, account or report, manual, dispatch, weather bulletin, blog, ship log, travel guide, dictionary entry, museum notice, or even creative nonfiction in its most common formula, “real facts + storytelling.” The approach is phenomenological: the fact is obtained and transmitted, like a coin passing from hand to hand. Of course, no narrative is purely descriptive: the most neutral factography, even a train schedule, is always explanatory at a minimum level. The factual narrative, however, does not pursue what is true because it poses no question. The investigation is a narrative driven by a line of reasoning, a cognitive activity. The “fact” is not what is revealed but what is sought out, by formulating a problem, cross-checking sources, inventing fictions of method, and insisting on understanding. This category of texts encompasses the social sciences and an entire extraterritorial zone: inventories of

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the self, social radiographies, books of the world, plunges into the human abyss, and reparations of the past. There are, then, several types of description: fictional realism, the realm of mimesis; the factual account, reporting on what is visible; and the explanatory investigation, “dense” in Geertz’s sense. Let there be no misunderstanding about the meaning of this tripartite division. It in no way means that the social sciences are supposed to be superior to the novel or journalism. On the contrary, it underscores the fact that, as far as understanding the real world past or present, individual or collective, is concerned, the most enlightening text is the one that contains the most reasoning. That is why it is better to read a good novel than a bad history book, or a captivating travel narrative than an insipid sociological account. As “literary” as it may be, Jack London’s autobiography The Road is an anthropology of the world of hobos. It is difficult to group the social sciences together with “factual narratives,” seeing that they incorporate fictions of method into their lines of reasoning: on that level, they do not belong to nonfiction. Borrowing Searle’s vocabulary, we could define fictions of method as serious, explicit, and openly avowed simulations in which the speaker makes a binding commitment to truth. Fictions of method stray from the facts in order to return to them with greater force, as opposed to the “factual” narrative that believes it must stick close to reality as a token of fidelity. Fictions of method draw on the cognitive imagination of the researcher, whereas creative nonfiction claims to respect the facts. The paradigm of the investigation makes it possible to avoid postmodern nihilo-dandyism, while at the same time escaping the illusions of mimesis and the cult of the informative, the film of appearances. The investigation stands apart from both the fictional and the factual because the last two produce plenitude. For its part, history encloses emptiness. If I were to give an image of what history is, I would evoke a well—not because the truth would spring out of it magically, but because a well is a hole in the middle of the courtyard, a gap where something has once existed. We should not fill this void; we should not fall into it, either. But we can sit quietly next to it, in order to identify what we know, what we cannot know, what we can cling to, what we miss, what is lacking. To gather evidence about the past is to realize what has vanished, the worlds that have gone under. This is why we should not feel uncomfortable in

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contact with the gentle absence that lives in the archives: it is constitutive of history. Or, to use another metaphor for defining history, I would summon up the image of Ellis Island today. Why Ellis Island? Because this place, full of old papers, of abandoned suitcases, of orphaned furniture, of family photos yellowed by time, of vanished memories, is a series of empty rooms through which millions of human beings passed. The sound of their voices, cries, tears has become extinct, but the rooms are still echoing with their passage. And now we come onto the scene. History listens to silence, ponders a disappearance, seeks out what is lacking, tracks this hollow space that splits our lives open like the “nonColorado canyon.”23 It would be useless to fill it in with big scoops of dirt, with fiction, the grave around which the researcher is walking. We can, however, decorate it with flowers; we can care for an absence. Just as the pigment in a prehistoric cave outlines the silhouette of a hand that has disappeared forever, as ruins point to a domestic space now devoured by brush, sources construct a parapet of certitude around the emptiness. History is an investigation into the traces of those who have been swallowed up, forgotten: my grandparents; an illiterate nineteenth-century clog maker in Alain Corbin’s Life of an Unknown; stocking makers, croppers, weavers, artisans, shoemakers, all the “obsolete,” “utopians,” and “losers” of the English working class in E. P. Thompson’s masterpiece; an obscure woman in southern France, leader of a strike in the belle époque, in Michelle Perrot’s Mélancolie ouvrière (Worker Melancholy). The “melancholy” here is that of the researcher, who does not enjoy the privilege of encountering anything but silhouettes or embracing anything but shadows. “Is a history of women possible?” queried Michelle Perrot at a colloquium in 1984, for that very reason. The investigation makes it possible to circumscribe the gaps in our knowledge with substantiated hypotheses. It gives a precise formulation of the enigma. It is even more scientific when it is open to its own shortcomings, and to uncertainty, doubt, our ignorance, and to everything denied by the saturated narratives in the objective mode. With gravitas,

23. Georges Perec, La disparition (Paris: Gallimard/L’Imaginaire, 1969), 128; in English, A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair (Boston: Verba Mundi, 2005).

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historians manage to establish a few facts; they know neither the assurance of fiction, nor the optimism of the factual. In the historiography of emptiness, writing rims a gaping chasm.

On the Literary The confusion maintained by literary theory around the “factual narrative,” into which the essay and the journal, the life story and history-asproblem, the travel guide and ethnology are relegated pell-mell, can be explained by aesthetic reasons: the dichotomy between fiction and the factual supposedly corresponds to the distinction between literature and non-literature. At best, prose “diction” includes a few great works distinguished by their formal qualities and the opinion of readers. At worst, the factual partakes of the “universal reporting” mentioned by Mallarmé. It is the dumping ground where nonfiction non-literature is thrown. What for lack of anything better we name “literature of the real world” constitutes an often despised genre. Overly imbued with the everyday, it seems to belong with conversation, the utilitarian, the futile. Whereas fiction is “constitutively literary,” states Gérard Genette, the factual is only conditionally literary, for nothing guarantees that there might be an aesthetic intention. Hence criticism’s neo-Aristotelian assertion: literature is supposedly creation, capacity for invention, limitless imagination, whereas “factual” history is supposedly only an account, a ground-level experience, an observation of what took place. There nevertheless exist several telling definitions of nonfiction literature. In Russian, the otcherk genre includes the essay, testimony, diaries, memoirs, travel notes, portraits of society, reporting, and other prose writings “without plot.” In Japanese, the term nikki (literally “daily notes”) refers to official journals, minutes, autobiographies, and diaries, whose common existence has been attested since the tenth century. Is it possible to theorize this literature? Do we have to speak of “documentary narrations” or of “literary recordings”?24 In a general way, it is possible to

24. Lionel Ruffel, “Un réalisme contemporain: Les narrations documentaires,” Littérature, no. 166 (2012): 13–25; and Marie-Jeanne Zenetti, “Factographies: Pratiques et réception des formes de l’enregistrement littéraire à l’époque contemporaine” (PhD diss., Université Paris VIII, 2011).

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identify, next to fiction, a “poetics of effective genres,” whose specificity is to belong to the ordinary order of language. Memoirs, essays, autobiographies, commentaries, newspapers, and speeches hold a precise function within institutional and social frameworks, while at the same time maintaining a “relationship [with the world] of designation, consignment, or direct explanation.”25 The idea that there exists positively a literature of the real makes its possible to oppose the vulgate of conventional wisdom that the essential criterion of the literary would be the fictional, even the novelistic, with other productions condemned to beg a bit for recognition. We must nevertheless not fall into the reverse extreme and believe, with Searle, that fiction is an epiphenomenon, a “parasite” on serious discourse. It is important to recall, however, that the fictitious-factual dichotomy, which drifts gently toward the literary-nonliterary dichotomy, depreciates wide swaths of literature and discourages countless experiments. Moreover, instead of talking about fiction and nonfiction, we could for fun invert the distribution of the negative and thus set “non-referential” (or “irreal”) literature over against “referential” literature. On what basis can writings about the real be qualified as literary? We end up wondering about the notion of “literature,” this term haloed with all the glories, and whose modern meaning was set. Define literature? The idea has something embarrassing, even ridiculous about it. It is nevertheless necessary to face the challenge, since certain productions (the social sciences among them) have been excluded from literature. The only acceptable definition is that literature is several things at the same time. Literature is form. The literary text is one that manifests an aesthetic quality, an intention of beauty, without being limited to mere communication. As early as the time of Furetière, a writer has been someone who “writes,” but the term designates more particularly a “master in the art of writing.” Narrative construction, lexical invention, and the work of language stir up an emotion and nourish, as Barthes says, a “pleasure of the text.” Genette pursues this analysis when he writes that literature, “the art of language,” produces an “aesthetic satisfaction.”26

25. Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Écrire ses mémoires au XXe siècle: Déclin et renouveau (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 321–24. 26. Genette, Fiction et diction, 91, 105.

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Literature is imagination. Since Aristotle, there has been an organic link between poetics and muthoï, between literary creation and the aptitude for inventing stories. Poets are not the ones who write in verse but those who make up fictions (the idea was to be taken up again by Furetière in the article “Poet”). Every writer is a bard, a Scheherazade, a Tristram Shandy, a Jacques the Fatalist, a Tevye the milkman, that is to say, a spinner of yarns, a talker, a juggler, a narrative machine, or the horseman who leaps from one apartment to another (in Life, a User’s Manual by Perec). Literature is polysemy. A work does not deliver a “message” any more than the social sciences can be reduced to the delivery of a “result.” Literature authorizes several interpretations and occasions a thousand different readings: its specificity is that it never lets itself be wrapped up in a box. Genet’s work does not allow a univocal analysis, such as the distress of the abandoned child, fulfillment of the little country boy in the animal and vegetal realms, the spirit of rebellion of a homosexual delinquent, the wanderings of a vagabond, or the fascination of a loser for crime and Nazism. The work is all that at once, and much more still. Literature is singularity. A literary text is the irruption onto the scene of a self that, by its own vision, upsets the order of things. It lets us hear a voice like no other, words unbound by any norm, outside our world, unheard of. We instantly recognize a page from Proust, the atmosphere of Kafka, a poem by Baudelaire. Borrowed from the Russian formalists, this conception takes into account the dynamism of literary works, in other words, the strength of their impact, but it also incorporates the notion of literature as an original act of speech, a universally singular voice that belongs to each as they are all, as Rancière puts it, “literary animals.” Literature is literature. This tautology constitutes a quite profound definition: it recalls that “Literature” composed of great writers and masterpieces does not exist, any more than does “History” with its heroes and events worthy of memory. On the contrary, literature is a set of texts that have been canonized, brought together by a tradition, recognized by a culture, and made familiar by a program of teaching. We qualify as literary any text that an author, a publishing house, a nation, an era, and group of readers has considered to be such. It is therefore less important to define literature than to discern the processes of the institutionalization and ratification by which texts are gradually torn away from their times, their field of production, and even their author, to become classics, regulars

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in an Olympian salon where Shakespeare chats with Hugo. There is no literature without this process of institutionalization, without the authorities that judge and social institutions that legitimate, therefore without the conflicts after which a text is considered to be literary, or not.27

Literature and the Search for What Is True Since these avenues of approach offer not so much diametrically opposed directions to follow as they do a number of perspectives, we can espouse them all together: the term “literary” applies to any text considered to be such and which, by means of a form, produces an emotion. As open to criticism as it may be, this definition offers two advantages: that of simplicity, which makes it possible to apply it easily, and that of plasticity, which makes it compatible with the social sciences. The belief that literature and the social sciences are alien to each other is based on several misunderstandings. Even if we accept the idea that language has two functions, one utilitarian and another aesthetic, why would the social sciences necessarily stem from the utilitarian? That would mean that we considered as belonging to history or sociology only academic writings that implement non-writing in non-texts. The formula that would make the “form” more important than “the content” in literature is perfectly suitable for history, which has the right to speak of everything, once it follows a certain method. The historical way of reasoning has never been an impediment to writing, constructing a narration, carrying out work on language, nor even of having an aesthetic intention. A schematically Aristotelian approach leads to the constant rehashing of the notion that the writer invents and creates, as opposed to the historian, reduced to saying “what happened.” But Aristotle himself defines poiesis as a personal labor of composition, the effort by which a creator carries out the “assembly of completed actions.” Ricoeur naturally

27. See Christophe Charle, “Situation du champ littéraire,” Littérature, no. 44 (December 1981): 8–20; and Antoine Compagnon, Le démon de la théorie: Littérature et sens commun (Paris: Seuil/Points, 2001), 48ff.

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emphasizes that very passage: emplotment is common to the novel and to history. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists construct stories. They most often arrange those stories that have been recounted to them, through something in the archives, a conversation, or a myth. The jubilation felt by the novelist has its parallel: “the allure of the archives,” the emotive fascination that the historian experiences and seeks to transmit.28 But there is more. Historians “invent” facts to the extent that they seek out, establish, select, and order them, put them into a hierarchy, and link them together in chains of explanation. Naïve is the scientism believing that, for historians, journalists, or memorialists, the material is given in advance and that it suffices to go pick it up in the real world. As we have observed, the fictions of method are what makes it possible to proceed from the factual to knowledge. Conversely, fiction is no guarantee of any literary quality (and pulp fiction is there as a reminder). We must therefore declare a radical divorce of literature from fictionality. The present-day domination of the novel among literary genres is a de facto reality that should not have any consequence of a theoretical or normative nature. History, then, lets the original speech act resound on two levels, first because it lets us hear the voice of the voiceless, and second, because it is driven by the wrath of truth, capable of transforming a personal obsession into something socially useful. The literary quality of history also stems from historians’ idiosyncrasies, their visions of the world, and the coherence of their universes. It is therefore possible to build a bridge between the social sciences and literature without regressing back either into the system of belles lettres or into postmodern skepticism. History is a possibility of literary experimentation. It is not only a question of the “plot” as with White, nor of “writing” as with Certeau, of “narrative” as with Ricoeur: in the end, those terms encompass all forms of history, even the most unimaginative. It is first and foremost a matter of producing a text that is fully a work of literature and fully a work of the social sciences, a text that provides evidence in and by a narrative; a work of history that is literature because it demonstrates, not because it “fleshes out,” or breathes “life” into, or creates “atmosphere”; a search in which

28. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

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a problem is explored in depth, not a set of results tossed into non-writing like fish into a pond; in a nutshell, a literature that follows the rules of a method. It would be neither fiction in a text, nor facts in a non-text, but the activation of fictions within a line of reasoning that a text materializes and deploys. Writing the social sciences therefore does not consist of “litterarizing” history, or “embellishing” sentences. History does not go “toward literature” by adopting an elegant style. History is immediately literature when it is a search, journey, investigation, or discovery and disclosure of truth. History is literature when it is nothing other than itself; it ceases to be literature when it allows itself to be taken over by flashy effects, reality effects, or effects of presence, History effects, or lived experience effects. The fact that the social sciences can be literary without renouncing their principles leads us to pay renewed attention to this literature said to be “about the real world.” Instead of conceiving it in the form of a factual narrative, factography, or referential mimesis, we can define it as a text in which and by which we seek to express things that are true. It is an embodiment of a way of historical reasoning, and that is exactly what unites numerous “effective genres” ranging from autobiography to major news reporting, and including witness documents as well. This literature is a historia, an investigation about humans, in other words about oneself and about others, living or dead, in view of understanding what they do: truth-literature or creative history, in which a research project has need of freedom, inventiveness, and originality in order to exist. Writings of the real world can therefore be defined as a literature imbued with a line of reasoning, in the sense that I have given the term. The rich potential of the social sciences, their view, and their plasticity have repercussions for literature itself. Since the historical way of reasoning is alive and vibrant in countless “literary” texts, we have to add to the criteria of form, imagination, polysemy, singularity, and institutionalization that of its procedural realization: literature can also be the narrative of a quest, the anxiety of a problem, the qualification of suffering, the determination to understand what humans in truth do. The literary text is a journey to the center of absence, the energy driving people to seek answers to their questions, sparing no effort to say what is true about the world, fighting against indifference and amnesia, beliefs, and lies, but also people struggling against themselves, the lack of clarity and precision,

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and the notion of what “goes without saying.” This driving passion is the DNA of a large family of writers, journalists, explorers, poets, historians, anthropologists, survivors, vagabonds, sociologists, and investigators. We can see just how illusory the superiority that poetry believes itself to have over “universal reporting” turns out to be. Language is redeemed when it carries a search: the investigation itself obliges us to write, that is, to work on language, elaborate a narration, construct a text, and throw off habits. Social science writing shines through in a text when the text is devoted to a historical way of reasoning. Such writing illuminates a literature defined not by its ambition for realism but by its desire for truth. That is the second literary revolution of the twentieth century, following that of the modern novel. That is what wars and crimes did to literature, and to the social sciences. To the previously mentioned definitions, we shall therefore add another: literature is research.

10

History, a Literature under Constraint?

I like the rule that corrects emotion. —Braque

If, as is often said, novelists enjoy every power in their creation, historians submit themselves not only to reality but also to rules. From that state of affairs, two questions result: Does the existence of constraints prevent historians from writing? To what degree of originality can they take their research, questioning, sources, vocabulary, tone, and narration? That amounts to raising questions about the ars historica, which reconciles an epistemology with an aesthetic.

Liberating Rules The demand for absolute liberty has driven writers’ discourse ever since the nineteenth century. In his foreword to The Human Comedy, Balzac proclaims himself to be “freer” than the historian. One hundred thirty years later, Robbe-Grillet wrote that “what makes the strength of the

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novelist, is precisely the fact that the novelist invents, inventing in complete liberty, with no model.”1 This bliss of no longer being bound to anything is consonant with the romantic libertarian myth of poets with no masters other than their own genius, emancipated from all conventions and determinisms; hence this vision of literature as a solitary aspiration, a drive that bursts through frames, norms, and conventions. Such is the text-nihilo. From Aristotle to Boileau, the tradition of “poetic art” strove on the contrary to codify the techniques (from technè, “art”) at the poet’s disposal. It is clear that all writers work within a matrix that already exists prior to their creative intention: vocabulary, syntax, metrics, rhymes, the three unities of classical theater, the subdivisions (body, mind, soul) of socialite portraiture in the seventeenth century, and verisimilitude in the realist novel. This is the theme of “dancing with one’s chains,” so appreciated by Nietzsche and French classicism. These rules can of course be loosened, dodged, or subverted. Certain writers chose to impose more or less arbitrary constraints on themselves. Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner have their characters return from one novel to the next. Several of Raymond Roussel’s readers have been fascinated by the brilliant fantasy, unbridled fictional and verbal creativity produced by the rules he sets for himself, as he explains in How I Wrote Certain of My Books.2 For Michel Leiris, willingly subjecting himself to a “complicated and difficult rule” brings about a “lifting of censorship” that cannot be reached with automatic writing.3 This game is much more profound than it appears, and would be put into practice by the entire Oulipo group (from the Ouvroir de Litérature Potentielle, or “Workroom for Potential Literature” formed in the 1960s with the goal of renewing literature through strictures of form and playful experiments). In attacking the myth of inspiration, Raymond Queneau turns the traditional position on its head: the impulse that people believe they receive from the Muse, the unconscious, or random chance is a false liberty. Indeed, “the classic author who writes his tragedy while observing a certain number of

1. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963), 30. 2. Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books (New York: Exact Change, 1995). 3. Michel Leiris, Roussel l’ingénu (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1987), 39.

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rules that he knows is freer that the poet who writes what pops into his mind, and who is the slave of other rules of which he is unaware.”4 Perec is one of the big beneficiaries of that liberty. He elaborates techniques, imposes a rigorous set of requirements, slips into systems of constraints, ranging from the lipogram based on e in A Void to the polygraphy of the knight in Life: A User’s Manual. He thus stimulates narrative and verbal imagination in the manner of “fiction pumps”: one gives oneself rules in order to be “totally free.”5 This neoclassical praise of constraints, with which Italo Calvino also identifies, makes it possible to reconsider the pseudo-opposition between the liberty of demiurges and rebels and sterile bourgeois rules. The true alternative distinguishes between a solitude believing to be its own master and an autonomy aware of its laws, that is, between a liberty made of ignorance and an intentional liberty. Whether they wish to or not, all writers impose rules on themselves. David Lodge acknowledges the fact honestly: “The golden rule of fictional prose is that there are no rules—except the ones that each writer sets for himself or herself.”6 Bringing these constraints to light partakes of an art of liberty. The fact that rules do not impede creation but on the contrary prod it on proves that historians’ method will never prevent them from being writers as well. The notion of laws in history goes back all the way back to antiquity. I have already mentioned the four rules of Cicero. In How to Write History, Lucian of Samosata demands respect for the truth, impartiality, goodwill toward one and all, placing facts into a hierarchy according to their importance. At the end of the seventeenth century, the “rules of history” that Mabillon prescribed for himself echo the rules of his own order of Saint Benedict: they recall that history requires a certain asceticism, a form of humility and obedience. Now, of course the writer’s “laws” are not equivalent to those of the historian, if for no other reason than that some laws aim to unleash fictionality, while others always lead back toward the real world. We have on the one hand a technique for exciting

4. Raymond Queneau, “Qu’est-ce que l’art?” (1938), in Le voyage en Grèce (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 94. 5. Georges Perec, Entretiens et conférences, vol. 1 (Nantes: Joseph K., 2003), 208, 228, 243–46. 6. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 94.

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the imagination, a jubilation in inventing, the genesis of a work that is a world unto itself, and on the other hand, the sources, the instruments of the historical way of reasoning, a deontological requirement, and an aim for truth. We can nevertheless establish a parallel among these different rules. All are freely accepted, chosen within the framework of an intellectual activity. The work of creation is conducted thanks to and within these rules. They are sources of liberty with respect to the world: either writers want to escape from the world through fiction, or they seek to understand the world through a way of reasoning. They exist to be followed, but also to be transgressed from time to time. In the work of Lucretius, Jarry, and Perec, the clinamen is the “little mistake” that sets the entire system in motion, the deviation that upsets the norm. In Life: A User’s Manual, there are only ninety-nine chapters even though the apartment building constitutes a ten-by-ten square: the cellar at the bottom left is not described. The “reason” why is that a little girl nibbled off the corner of her square cookie: such is the pirouette showing that writers are never prisoners of their system of constraints. Similarly, it happens that history transforms its own rules: that is the historiographical revolution. Braudel studies “the Mediterranean at the time of Philip II” instead of Philip II’s Mediterranean political strategy. Alain Corbin raises smells, sounds, riverbanks, laundry, orgasms, the shade of trees, and the weather to the dignity of history. A geographer and a biologist, Jared Diamond is able to encompass thousands of years in telling the history of entire civilizations (Vikings, Maya, isolated Pacific islands), analyzing how soil problems, energy shortages, overhunting, overpopulation led to the final collapse. Micro-history, as well as world history and connected history, changed the rules. Fictions of method have something akin to the clinamen, an unusual offset, or an epistemological fancy that sets the line of reasoning in motion: estrangement, disorders, uchronias, anachronisms, and so on. It is up to historians to each choose their own limits.

Wealth of Styles Style could be the second constraint to hinder the researcher’s creativity. A first glance, impartiality would seem to dictate a total neutrality of tone,

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a sort of colorless quality. Such an injunction, however, is the legacy of the era of scientism, which moreover did not obey it. (One only has to read Ernest Lavisse’s history-as-panegyric to confirm as much.) Antiquity was familiar with a great variety of styles. Quintilian distinguishes the “gentle and limpid” charm of Herodotus from the pithy density of Thucydides, the slightly abrupt brevitas of Sallust, and the suavitas or “creamy abundance” of Livy. Schools were already clashing with one another in great controversies at the time of Cicero. Atticism, characteristic of Lysias, Xenophon, and Thucydides, consists of a pure, distinct style, simple to the point of being stripped down to the bare essential. Imported from Asia Minor, Asianism makes use of studied, refined, flowery, or brilliant expressions in order to light up the audience. Such is the influence that the neo-Atticists believe they detect in Cicero’s oratory when they criticize his expressions, redundancies, rhythms, and dramatic effects. With On the Orator, Cicero retorts that rhetorical flashes and abundance are also part of the Atticists’ style from Lysias to Demosthenes. Near to the school of Rhodes, Cicero should more likely be situated halfway between Attic gravity and Asianist pathos. Generations of historians, orators, and philosophers have wondered what style is most suitable for history. History-as-tragedy, history-aseloquence, and history-as-panegyric have supplied a response, each in its own way. It seems nevertheless that, beginning with Thucydides, history as a rational undertaking has more readily recognized itself in the Attic style. For Lucian, who wrote six centuries after the Peloponnesian War, historians must be neither obscure nor jumbled. Their order is shown by their clarity. Their narratives are a “limpid mirror, clear and precise,” in which each event is in its place, and everything is designated by its name. Historians call “a fig a fig” and “a vase a vase.”7 In the sixteenth century, the rise of history-as-science was accompanied by the rediscovery of the “naked style.” The truth needs to be stripped down and grave: no lofty speeches. In L’idée de l’histoire accomplie (The Idea of the Perfect History, 1599), written three decades after Bodin, La Popelinière praises the simple style, clear expression, and density of speech,

7. Lucian of Samosata, The Way to Write History, https://archive.org/stream/luciankilb06 luciuoft/luciankilb06luciuoft_djvu.txt, 41, 51 (accessed August 17, 2017).

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qualities that he admires in Thucydides, Xenophon, Cato, and Sallust. With this ethic of purity and austerity, modernized under the auspices of Calvinism, the historian is comparable to the best currency: “In less material, more value.”8 A century later, Bayle supports the convergence of a scientific approach with a sobriety of style: disdaining a pompous style full of rhetorical figures, he praises, contrary to Theopompus, “this grave simplicity that suits the historical character.” In his quarrel with Adorno in 1969, Popper recalls that the scientist (and even the intellectual) must speak a “simple and clear” language, not a barrage of intimidatingly grandiloquent gibberish, since “brilliant opacity” is the refuge of the trivial, if not the erroneous.9 That is the reproach that Searle will bring against Derrida in the 1970s. To the extent that they engage in the social sciences, which are open to critical discussion, historians do not have the right to use obscure, verbose, hazy, equivocal language, as in the mantic divination of archaic Greece. For fear of being pulled toward the ambiguous or the flashy, nineteenthcentury university history made itself the champion of the non-style. This cure has turned out to be as destructive as it is useless. For with its reality and presence effects recreating events “as if you were there,” the objective mode promotes a much more theatrical narration, even verging on pathos, than that of Thucydides. Moreover, as soon as it is outside of scholarly publications, academism easily makes accommodations with a style that is pleasant, full of elegance and grace. But even the historia nuda is intrinsically literary, just as simplicity, precision, and limpidity are literary. “That their style must be clear and concise, and the punctuation of the ordinary kind, would not necessarily militate against their being regarded as literature.”10 Clarity and sobriety are indissociably writing choices and epistemological stances: rigor, distanciation, refusal of the spectacular, suspicion with respect to pomposity and pity. That is very precisely the choice made by the deportee writers who returned from the camps.

8. Henri Lancelot-Voisin de la Popelinière, L’histoire des histoires, avec L’idée de l’histoire accomplie, vol. 2 (1599; Paris: Fayard, 1989), 107–8. See Claude-Gilbert Dubois, La conception de l’histoire en France au XVIe siècle (1560–1610) (Paris: Nizet 1977), 124ff. 9. Karl Popper, “Reason or Revolution?” European Journal of Sociology 11, no. 2 (November 1970): 252–62. 10. Joseph Conrad, “Outside Literature,” in Last Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30.

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Primo Levi is doubtless the most Attic among them. His model is not the poet of malediction but the chemist who writes up his weekly report. The composition of If This Is a Man follows several principles: “An extreme clarity and the least possible clutter: to be compact, condensed. . . . I have for a model of writing the factory ‘report’ that one makes at the end of the week. Clear, essential, understandable for everyone.”11 Levi approaches the crucial question of description indirectly, in speaking of a star. Because the superlatives of horror impinge upon the reader’s intelligence, one must have “the courage to eliminate all the adjectives that tend to arouse amazement.”12 As a creator of a perfectly suited language who is always seeking the right expression, Primo Levi narrates with the greatest economy of means. His sense of concision, his pithy formulations with no frills, ability to go right to the essential, art of putting things in a nutshell, and abrupt endings constitute a stunning brevitas. After having described his highly colorful, comic, and crazy roommates in The Truce, Levi sketches the portrait of a “tiny little Sicilian mason,” reserved, very clean, obsessed with bedbugs, and ridiculous with the swatter that he fashioned in order to kill them. Everyone makes fun of him, but they all envy him: “Among all of us, D’Agata was the only one whose enemy was concrete, present, tangible, susceptible to being combated, hit, and crushed against a wall.”13 This analytical literature has nothing of the factual narrative nor anything in the objective mode: it takes the “matter-of-fact” style to an unequaled degree of relevance and lucidity. It converges with the position of numerous historians, for whom the Holocaust must be narrated in the most “literal” way possible, since aestheticization, sensationalism, and romance are morally and epistemologically unacceptable. History-as-science, however, does not mean impassivity. While deconstructing the imposture of the “donation of Constantine,” Lorenzo Valla takes the counterfeiter to task: “Villain! Crook! . . . Do the Caesars speak that way?” The eighteenth century was of the opinion that sages never

11. Primo Levi, “L’écrivain non-écrivain” (1976), in L’asymétrie et la vie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004), 181–87. 12. Primo Levi, “Une étoile tranquille,” in Lilith et autres nouvelles (Paris: Liana Levi/ Livre de Poche, 1989), 87–88. 13. Primo Levi, La trêve (Paris: Grasset/ Livre de Poche, 1966), 120.

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speak without a bit of fire and accepted the idea that “one must not narrate things coldly,” even in history.14 Exaltation and indignation were therefore not incompatible with research. In a comparable manner, Levi never adopts a coldly clinical style. On the contrary, he shakes with passion, anger, shame, and suffering, and at other times exudes irony. Not insensitivity but restraint; not the absence of feeling but a discreet sense of modesty. The great challenge of style for the historian is to contain the wrath of truth. Unleashed, that wrath bursts out in Romantic fury. Stifled, it transforms research into erudition, mechanical professionalism. The sacred fire of desiring to know (libido sciendi) must neither consume nor be consumed but rather be kept alive beneath the ashes. Historians struggle against themselves, seeking to filter their sentiments and temper their impatience, love, and compassion. We can therefore define history as a grieving hymn to life, and historical writing as a muted Romanticism, a pared-down lyricism. The fact that history is an epistemology in a way of writing makes it possible to bypass the frozen oppositions of Atticism versus Asianism, laconism versus verbal abundance, intelligence versus sensitivity. While emotion has its place in the social sciences, it arises from sobriety, concision, and obstinacy in research, not from hyperbole or lamentations. Emotion comes from the effort to contain emotion. It is the touchstone of an investigation that is moving forward and of a language that sounds right. In all, we can list at least six forms that are compatible with research in the social sciences. The non-style. One falls into this style when one forgets or refuses to pose the question of writing. If science is placed in opposition to literature, putting research “into words” (as if putting it “into a box”) becomes a chore, a necessary evil. The important thing is to communicate a result in any way you can; you put it in words similar to the way in which you put on clothing. The non-style also signals the scholar’s boredom. In 1881, Seignobos himself was surprised that the German professor piled heaps of detail on his students, ignoring “perspective and life.”15

14. Bernard Lamy, La rhétorique ou l’art de parler (Paris: Poiron, 1741), 117. 15. Charles Seignobos, “L’enseignement de l’histoire dans les universités allemandes,” Revue Internationale de l’Enseignement 1 (1881): 563–601.

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The pleasant style. This is the style close to the temperate style ( genus medium) that Cicero recommends for the historian: flowing naturally, expressing itself with quietude, and consistent (as opposed to the orator’s tense, lively discourse). Speaking of a gently flowing river, Quintilian will take up the same metaphor. The “pure and firm, savory and full” style accepted by the methodical historians of the nineteenth century is a variant of the pleasant style.16 Allowing itself to indulge in a few flourishes, displaying a certain pomposity, it is the heir to history-as-eloquence and the embodiment of the academic “fine style,” conceived for dressing up what you have to say. Surrounded by such conventional grace, you become eminently presentable. The Romantic style. This style emanates from the genius of the historianas-writer, letting the voice of the conquerors resound, the din of the canons thunder, the cry of the people ring out, as the wind of “History” blows. Be they Alexander, the Mediterranean, the Revolution, or America, bringing heroes back to life arouses enthusiasm and gives goose bumps. Vehement, overwhelmingly powerful, “sublime” as Cicero put it, this style nowadays inspires numerous narratives and documentaries for the general public. The ironic style. This style allows one to take an offbeat, Nietzschean perspective, dodging the trap of “History” used by the victors to justify themselves. The way in which it disputes what is obvious, the distance from all things that it manages to maintain, and its acute self-consciousness are very near to the scientific spirit. Its irreverence and refusal to be taken in give it a slight touch of subversion. The ironic style is the linchpin of Hayden White’s tropological theory, and also the preferred style for “antiestablishment” history and sociology of the years between 1965 and 1975. American schools thus did not bring about any liberation, but rather served to reinforce the inegalitarian racist order by subjecting the children of the unfavored classes to “social control.” The supposed progressivism of the school turned out to be only a masquerade.17

16. Charles-Victor Langlois, Charles Seignobos: Introduction aux études historiques (1898; Paris: Kimé, 1992), 252. 17. See Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

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The Attic style. With its sobriety, clarity, and rational character, the Attic style links Thucydides, Caesar, the Church fathers, Bodin, du Vair, La Popelinière, Bayle, Taine, the deportee-writer, and the researcher of the democratic era. It aims for perfect formulation and quasi-geometrical concision. Radiating the discreet elegance of a beauty without pretension or artifice, to the point of embodying “the simultaneously moral, intellectual, and aesthetic asceticism of truth,”18 it seems to have everything to recommend it for history-as-science, but also for a report on an investigation, meeting records, testimony, and judicial documents. Its indissociably literary and epistemological qualities make it possible to attain what Perec, in his article on Robert Antelme, calls the “truth of literature.” The restrained style. This style is passion entrusted to the discipline of rigor. It is the lyricism that expresses itself through scruples. Incorruptible, but shaking with silent rage, candid amazement, or a nameless revolt. Expressing the world accurately is its manner of weeping: that is how it disavows Attic austerity, tames Romantic ardor, and shuns ironic sneers. At times, it allows its emotions to burst forth in broad daylight: piercing the rock compressing it, it shoots out and takes other paths, like an underground torrent having momentarily come to the surface. Its language lets itself give in: yielding to itself, it espouses other tones, other narrative levels, and other registers. There is at that point a sort of clinamen: that of accepting, when need be, to subvert one’s own rule. Is the restrained style a hyperstyle, containing all the others? For Aristotle, discourse must be neither flat nor pompous but clear and appropriate, “suitable.” The ideal orator, says Cicero, must know how to master and vary all styles, according to the circumstances: this is speaking in a fitting and adequate manner (apte dicere), which precludes speaking of a gutter in a sublime style and of the Roman people in a simple style. Transposed over to the social sciences, this conception must not lead to a literary relativism consisting of saying that the style must be adapted to the subject being treated, with the “form” and the “content” working together. However, it is possible to combine styles. In The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E. P. Thompson combines his impressive erudition and his pathbreaking line of reasoning 18. Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et res literaria de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 689.

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(the English working class has constructed its own consciousness “from below,” through an active process) with a humanist respect for all those children, women, and men who lived, worked, suffered, starved, hoped, prayed, and died. His gathering of hundreds of archives, newspapers, registers, reports, booklets, pamphlets, and songs, performs a chorale. Thompson’s famous introduction, where the “I,” the “we,” and the “they” are intertwined, aims not only to make the English artisans and workers live again in their astonishing diversity, but also to make us understand how valid their aspirations were, even if they failed in the end, and to counteract “the enormous condescension of posterity.” All of them contributed to growing the “liberty tree,” defined as an individual agency as well as a collective resistance. This epic of an entire people, from the 1790s to the 1830s, from the smallest village to Sheffield and London, is also a vanitas: they lived, they passed away, and so will we. That is why the book is at the same time a scholarly landmark, a memorial made out of paper, a tribute, and a literary work. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but among these six styles, only the last three are capable of making historical reasoning live in a text, that is to say, to avoid choosing between a method without literature (the non-style and the pleasant styles) and a literature without method (the Romantic style). With the ironic, Attic, and restrained styles, however, and not with the puffed-up “literary” style of history-as-tragedy or history-as-eloquence, we can renew the writing of the social sciences.

Grandeur and Misery of the Footnote Any and every reader will notice that a book in the social sciences comes with footnotes. Originating in the Republic of Letters in the seventeenth century, raised to an art form by Gibbon in the eighteenth century, and adopted by the German university system in the nineteenth century, the footnote has become the entry ticket into the temple of science.19 It has the ability to lead out of the text, not only on the level of the narrative but

19. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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also above all epistemologically, by providing the bibliographical or archival reference that will confirm what is being stated: historians are not their own sources, and what they invoke to substantiate their statements is verifiable. This system of proofs is more than a support: it is the architecture of historical reasoning. But the footnote has other functions: pedagogical (“Here are some additional points, for you are perhaps not familiar with this debate”), deontological (“I am citing this book because someone else had the idea before me or else formulated it better than I have”), critical (“It is possible to dispute what I advance; here moreover is a counterexample”), and, one must confess, charismatic (“You see how learned I am, how many cartons of archives I consulted”). The fact remains that the footnote cannot be considered the alpha and omega of the social sciences. In the first place, the note taken by itself proves nothing: it is only a reference to something else, and it becomes meaningful only when placed back within a line of reasoning. Moreover, numerous works of erudition have footnotes: glosses in the Hebraic and Christian Bibles, commentaries of Roman grammarians on Virgil, the Jewish Gemara framing the Mishna, themselves surrounded by the texts of Rashi. The footnote also belongs to the universe of fiction, and as early as the seventeenth century, “infrapaginal seditions” burst out in the texts: ironic statements, self-commentaries, denials, pseudo-editorial remarks, narrative bifurcations, aesthetic experiences, sets of deceptive appearances, and parodies of a critical apparatus.20 Most important, the footnote arouses wariness, and on occasion disgust, even among historians. Considering footnotes to be emblems of German philology from the first part of the nineteenth century, Niebuhr and Ranke were tempted to write a linear history with no notes, free of all pedantry. In his 1868 preface to his History of the French Revolution, Michelet warns that he quotes rarely, since references have the drawback of “interrupting the narrative or the thread of ideas.” In 1927, Kantorowicz published his Frederick II without any critical apparatus, neither for citations nor for a bibliography, nor for the learned discussion. Singled out for harsh criticism by his colleagues, he published a few years later an Ergänzungsband, a supplement composed entirely of footnotes and erudite 20. Andréas Pfersmann, Séditions infrapaginales: Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVIIe–XXIe siècles) (Geneva: Droz, 2011).

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commentaries. Marc Bloch, who had been highly critical when the book was initially published, gives it his stamp of approval: with its “copious and clearly presented references,” Frederick II had become “a valuable instrument of study.”21 However, certain books by Marc Bloch (Feudal Society, for example) are themselves parsimonious with their notes. How can we explain such bother over a typographical sign that is supposed to offer a guarantee of scientific integrity? Numerous writerhistorians are reluctant to constantly interrupt the narrative, deface their text with stitches, and bloat their book with excrescences. Speaking of the notes found at the end of his Cromwell, Hugo gives a clarification: “This is the work of a poet, not the fruit of scholarly labor. After we have displayed the decoration of the theater to the spectators, why drag them behind the curtain and show them the crews and the pulleys? Does the work’s poetic merit gain much of anything by this testimonial evidence of history? . . . In works of the imagination, there exist no supporting documents.”22 Despite their reluctance, Scott, Chateaubriand, and Hugo end up indicating their sources in subsequent editions. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the footnote became indispensable for anyone who wanted to do history or have the appearance of doing history. We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: certain writers play with the footnote; certain historians reject it. The real dividing line runs between the acceptance or rejection of its capacity for veridiction, making it possible to escape the confines of fiction or even of the text. As Bernard Pingaud explains, the presence of notes is acceptable in a “work providing information or reflection” but is objectionable in a novel: they break its continuity, and open it up. Now, “the closure of the literary text is the first sign by which we recognize its ‘literary’ character.”23 More broadly, the note damages one of the fondest myths of writers: their autonomy. Notes get in the way of the dream of the creative geniuses that have engendered themselves, and found inspiration all by themselves with the aid of no one, drawing an entire universe out of their imagination.

21. Quoted by Peter Schöttler, “L’érudition . . . et après? Les historiens allemands avant et après 1945,” Genèses, no. 5 (1991): 172–85. 22. Victor Hugo, “Note sur ces notes,” Cromwell, in Oeuvres complètes: Drames, vol. 2 (Paris: Renduel, 1836), 410. 23. Pingaud’s words are quoted by Pfersmann, Séditions infrapaginales, 18–19.

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We observe such a refusal of notes in several works, both fiction and nonfiction, that are based on outside documentation. In the best of cases, the references are found at the back of the book, in the form of acknowledgments. Otherwise, they are simply omitted in an occultation showing that the writer does not want to owe anything to anyone (except to prestigious predecessors). Acknowledging a debt would constitute a fall, transforming the Dichter into a scholar, perhaps a copyist. And so it is that in A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch (1976), Danilo Kiš “borrows” from books and history texts without mentioning anything. He draws his inspiration for the subject of his stories from Karlo Stajner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, but grants him only a laconic dedication at the beginning of a chapter.24 Patrick Modiano’s masterpiece Dora Bruder (1997), an investigation into an adolescent girl deported to Auschwitz, is largely based on the research in Paris and New York conducted at Modiano’s request by the historian and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, including the girl’s declaration for the census of Jews taken in 1940, police files, her parents’ arrest, the young girl’s internment in the Tourelles camp, her attempts to run away, the identification of a witness who experienced the Catholic boarding school on the Boulevard de Picpus, and photos. Yet not only is there no mention of Klarsfeld’s contribution in the book, Modiano even attributes to himself the findings made by Klarsfeld. Hence Klarsfeld’s expression of surprise when the book was published: “As you narrate it, the investigation belongs more to the novel than to reality, since you eliminate me.” Klarsfeld wonders whether this elimination is indicative “of too great a presence on my part in this research, or whether this is a literary device allowing the author to be the only demiurge.”25 The term “dishonesty” is inadequate here: all literature is a rewriting of other texts, involving deliberate or unconscious borrowing, homages, vampirism, and fictionalization. Even a historian’s citations compose a “layered text.”26 We can say, however, that Kiš and Modiano chose to

24. See Alexandre Prstojevic, “Un certain goût de l’archive (sur l’obsession documentaire de Danilo Kiš), www.fabula.org. 25. Klarsfeld’s words are quoted by Maryline Heck and Raphaëlle Guidée, eds., Patrick Modiano (Paris: L’Herne, 2012), 186. 26. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 111.

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dispense with the requirement consisting of citing one’s sources. But what rule can literature accept in this respect? Some will reply that creation does not tolerate any constraint or morality, especially not the obligation to make acknowledgments, and that notes degrade the text by making visible what Hugo called “the crews and the pulleys.” Nevertheless, the act of respecting the ethics of the note elevates the social sciences, including on a literary level. For “the servitude of citing”27 gives rise to a new freedom: an enrichment of the argumentation, the possibility of a critical debate, the communication of the text with what remains at the exterior, the refusal of authorial narcissism, and the emancipation of the reader from beliefs and approximations. The fact remains, however, that the criticisms leveled at the footnote are completely valid. Erudition has hardened the footnote into a sort of technical toolshed, and it is understandable for readers to prefer staying in the more livable area, the text. A number of works in the social sciences moreover push the notes all the way to the end, out of view. How can we avoid the blurred vision now hampering numerous works, torn between narrative and factual details, story and gloss? Either we consider it most important and reintegrate it honorably into the narration, or else we deem it to be but the receptacle of a surplus of erudition and eliminate it.

Evidence without Footnotes If we want to restore the footnote to its full dignity, it is possible to turn it into a literary object by disseminating the narrative across several levels linked to the text: references, reflective commentaries, status of the issue, and learned discussions. That is the stroke of genius of Bayle’s Dictionary, whose labyrinthine page layouts are not the reflection of an aesthete’s fancy but an intellectual and narrative necessity. We are dealing with a creation, not a routine. In his history of the Roman Empire, Gibbon uses notes to reveal the literal sense of terms, underscore an ambiguity, slip in a sarcastic

27. Pierre Bayle, preface to the first edition (1696), Dictionnaire historique et critique, vol. 16 (Paris: Desoer, 1820), 6.

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commentary, and involve the reader in a friendly conversation. The note makes the narrative more complex by creating multiple narrative voices. About Constantina, the new emperor’s wife (in the middle of the fourth century), Gibbon writes: “Although she had renounced the virtues of her sex, she retained their vanity. She was seen accepting a pearl necklace as the sufficient price for the murder of an innocent man.” The explanation is found in a footnote: the victim was Clematius of Alexandria, whose mother-in-law, offering the imperatrice the necklace, had a bounty placed on his head. Gibbon indicates his source at the end: book 14 of Ammianus Marcellinus’s History of Rome.28 We have here three narrative voices: the general proposition, the example justifying inductive reasoning, and the reference. The footnote shatters the illusion of immediacy (of history unfolding before our eyes) and authority (attributing to the historian a wealth of acquired knowledge). The footnote enters to disrupt the objective mode. Other uses can be more audacious: in The Outline of History (1920), H. G. Wells invites collaborators to complete, clarify with more detail, or even invalidate his statements with notes. He thus gets a lively book, a sort of conversation among several people. Marc Bloch saluted this “lesson in method.” Readers understand that they have in front of their eyes not the fruit of some revelation but rather the result of “collective thinking seeking its way.”29 In the works of Bayle, Gibbon, and Wells, the note is taken up as a literary form, and none of its potentialities, including irony, mise en abyme, reader involvement, echoing narrative voices, is neglected. Conversely, we could purely and simply get rid of the note as a rhetorical form and exterior sign of scholarship, all while keeping its inestimable conceptual function. In the eighteenth century as in the beginning of our twenty-first century, certain historians complete their narrative with a learned commentary: “Remarks and Evidence” in Mably’s Observations

28. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5 (New York: American Book Exchange, 1880), 192. 29. Marc Bloch, “Une nouvelle histoire universelle: H. G. Wells historien,” in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance (Paris: Gallimard/Quarto, 2006), 319–34.

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sur l’histoire de France (Observations on French History, 1765), “Evidence and Illustrations” in Robertson’s History of the Reign of Emperor Charles V (1769), and “Considerations” and “Substantiating Documents” in Augustin Thierry’s Historical Essays and Narratives of the Merovingian Era (1840). Readers immerse themselves in the narrative before engaging in a more specialized historiographical discussion, if they wish. We could also limit the use of the note by integrating the indispensable information into the text. Kiš and Modiano could have honored their debts with a sentence slipped into the text here and there. Instead of separating narrative and evidence by means of the note, we could bring them together by requiring narration to take on all of the veridiction function. In this book I have chosen to make use of footnotes only to identify quotations or the origin of an idea. The collage technique makes it possible to replace the excerpt or citation by the document itself, reproduced with the indication of its origin. In the twentieth century, certain writers take advantage of this technique in view of a certain realism: an account of a court session in the Zola trial in Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois (1913); posters, speeches, press articles, and other “news” in Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. (1938). In the wake of cubism, Dada, and expressionism, artists such as Braque, Picasso, Grosz, Heartfield, and Max Ernst fashioned collages using press clippings, photos, and objects from everyday life. Following the example of Georges Rodenbach in Bruges-la-morte (The Dead City of Bruges, 1892), some novelists insert illustrations and photos in their works. Best known for this technique is W. G. Sebald. Instead of relegating the technical information to the back of the book, historians can develop an Internet site where they make accessible the evidence that they have unearthed and on which they have based their findings. Conceived by three French historians, the site www.affairedreyfus. com provides free public access to the essential documentation linked to the Dreyfus affair: the “secret dossier” fabricated by French counterespionage to serve as damning evidence against Dreyfus; the complete record of the different trials, the investigations and deliberations of France’s highest appeals court (the Cour de Cassation), and Alfred Dreyfus’s memoir, for a total of some ten thousand pages available for searches in text mode; all sorts of books linked to the affair; and hundreds of images, including in

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particular a gallery of the protagonists’ portraits. With its infinite number of possibilities, various levels of reading, thumbnails, and active Web links opening onto cascades of documents, printed materials, photos, and films, the Internet is nowadays the instrument for a neo-Baylian history. Beyond the storage capacity as such, big data makes it possible to ally narrative arborescences with democratic research. The social sciences could take inspiration from these experiments, not to augment the realist illusion, but to incorporate into the text itself their manner of weighing the evidence. We would obtain other ways of telling the story, debating, and referring to things outside the text. Here are a few examples. The archive-narrative presents a source, a corpus, an encounter, a conversation, or a “treasure”: slave narratives, Pierre Rivière’s memoir, Genet’s public welfare dossier, life stories gathered by a sociologist. Like tea leaves plunged into a teapot, the archive infuses. It becomes the subject of the book. That is what Timothy Gilfoyle does in A Pickpocket’s Tale (2006), the story of a petty delinquent in New York, born in the middle of the nineteenth century to a Chinese father and an Irish mother. Gilfoyle’s book is largely based on the pickpocket’s memoirs, written at the end of his life: they let us discover the milieus of crime and punishment in the New York underworld in the years following the Civil War. We follow the hero through streets of ill repute, reformatories, opium dens, and gambling dens before he redeems his behavior by working for the Society for the Prevention of Crime. The fragments of history designate a collection of archives, an anthology of excerpts, or a scrapbook made of newspapers and souvenirs, all brought together to compose a narrative. This arrangement of raw materials tells a story while at the same time revealing the researcher’s daily reality and the emotion produced in contact with the traces. It radicalizes the recomposition undertaken by the “layered text.” Such is the principle operative in Alexander Kluge’s Stalingrad (1964), an arrangement of newspapers, radiograms, directives, excerpts from military regulations, and organizational charts, through all of which the famous battle is diffracted. An oral history spanning several centuries, Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004) lets us hear “rebel voices” from the discovery of the New World in 1492 to the protests against the “war on terror” in the 2000s, including resistance to slavery, exploitation, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and homophobia.

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In facsimile, “visual history” incorporates drawings, engravings, elements from the archive, and photos of places and persons. Here it is the image that tells the story. This form could make it possible to tighten the links between history and photography, which Kracauer finds comparable to each other to the extent that they have “their counterpart in reality”: as a fragment both present and incomplete, regretting the absence of what happened, each serves as a medium for the real world. In both cases, it is a matter of finding the right balance between a tendency toward realism (reproduction, fidelity to reality, copy) and a tendency toward the primacy of the form (artistic creativity, composition, imagination).30 The dialogue presents the correspondence, exchanges, and debates between researchers within the framework of an investigation. In Thinking Together (2013), the sociologist Howard Becker and his colleague Robert Faulkner publish the e-mails, full of ideas, intuitions, projects, and jokes, that they exchanged while preparing a book on jazz musicians. There is something Socratic about these dialogues: probing hesitantly using trial-and-error, arguments and counterarguments, they journey together toward what is true. That can lead to face-to-face encounters, exercises with four or six hands, texts-as-excursions through which one constructs an object of knowledge. The documentary work combines texts, photos, drawings, maps, sound recordings, videos, and film excerpts. Many historians nowadays photograph archives and, after having downloaded them onto their computers, consult them in digital form, amid greater tranquillity than is often available in an archival repository. Similarly, sociologists record testimony, and ethnologists film ceremonies. Over the Internet, one no longer needs notes to cite one’s sources: a URL allows users to open a PDF, read an article online, view a video, listen to a program or a piece of music, or take a class. One can zoom in on a record, click on a photo. Digital humanities are giving rise to hypertexts that both represent and explain the real world. This total work will doubtless be the form that the social sciences will take in the twenty-first century, thus modernizing the humanists’ cult of the originals, ad fontes.

30. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 60–76.

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Modernizing the Social Sciences As far as its literary character is concerned, history-as-social-science has fallen a bit behind. Doubtless it knows that documents are “traces,” that all research is “constructed,” and that all things “pluridisciplinary” are highly valued. But writing is often perceived as an inessential step, a purely technical phase, or an epistemologically costly fantasy in the historiographical undertaking. For its part, the novel has been “modern” ever since Tristram Shandy (we could go all the way back to the Satyricon, whose citations and parodies warn readers that they must not let themselves be taken in by the trappings of fiction). The novel has widely opened up to the anonymous, to people-like-you-and-me, to non-events, to life accidents, and to unknown suffering. It has above all learned to change tones and points of view, handle irony, shatter the reality effect, experiment, deconstruct linearity, and not proceed “as a muleteer drives on his mule, straight forward, for instance, from Rome all the way to Loreto, without ever once turning his head.”31 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, history was revitalized by fresh ideas from Scott and Chateaubriand. A century later, it missed the revolution of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Céline. Nevertheless, it is possible to account for the emergence of a worker’s expression around 1830 in “a type of narrative similar to that of Virginia Woolf, in which there are voices that little by little interweave with one another.”32 The anthropological investigations of Oscar Lewis borrow both from theater (the casting is indicated at the beginning of the chapter, with each person’s family relationships and age) and from Kurosawa’s technique in Rashomon (describing the same event through the eyes of different witnesses, in order to produce an “autobiography with several faces”).33

31. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1900), 40. 32. Jacques Rancière, “Histoire des mots, mots de l’histoire” (1994), in Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués: Entretiens (Paris: Amsterdam, 2009), 76. 33. Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 2011), xv–xx.

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Why has history not been shaken up either by the cinema or by the modern novel, as in the era of the Waverly novels? Perhaps it is due to a complex with respect to literature. History-as-science scorns literature all while remaining jealous. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the social sciences entered into modernity by their method, not by their writing. Let us recall that the first number of Annales in 1929 was roughly contemporaneous with The Trial (1925), The Sound and the Fury (1929), The Man without Qualities (1930), and Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Having missed this rendezvous, history has not completely broken with its nineteenth-century certitudes such as the objective mode, the nonstyle, and so on. It is therefore useful to think through the modernization of the social sciences, which would consist of fitting their writing to the effort of understanding, explanation, and veridiction that constitutes their reason for being. Such an ambition could not be at all prescriptive, only prospective. We know what we want to avoid: the non-text, a sanitized style, learned jargon, solemnity in the introduction and conclusion, a tedious presentation of structure and content, burdensome learned footnotes, mechanical organization that determines the layout of the various components regardless of the subject, the claim to write an exhaustive biography, pseudo-neutrality of the researcher, and “crystal-clear” realism. Yet we have no scripted sermons to deliver from any pulpit, and that is all for the better, since all writer-historians forge their own style. Let us be content with a few statements about literary techniques, narrative construction, and the pleasure of reading. One thing is certain: research is deployed in narration and not against it. The social sciences can borrow everything they like from the novel, tragedy, poetry, and muthos, thus contradicting chapter 9 of Aristotle’s Poetics. No technique can be alien to them: not only emplotment and arrangement of action, but also expectations, effects of suspense (as in the cliffhangers that leave the hero dangling from a precipice), of surprise (paradoxon), reversal (peripeteia), climax, contrasts, dialogues, interplay of points of view, lists, irony, involvement with the reader, defamiliarization, interior monologues, decentered underground voices, intertextuality, studies on focalization, framing, and scenography. All of this “art of fiction,” to borrow David Lodge’s expression, can be utilized by writers in general and historians in particular.

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Time, which is our subject matter, deserves particular attention. Starting in medias res, ending abruptly, discontinuity, flashback, foreshadowing, going back and forth, varying tempo, acceleration, slowing down, liveliness of rhythm: here again, all is possible according to the necessity of the demonstration. The important thing is to belie Abbé Batteux, who thought that the historical narrative followed the “order of time,” so that “all should proceed directly and without detour.”34 We perhaps arrive at the best rhetoric by breaking up rhetoric, that is by endlessly variable narrative modes: lived experience effect, art of the chronicle, digressive break, portrait gallery, or documentary hypotyposis. Narrative construction (“composition,” as they used to say in the nineteenth century) is the structure on which everything reposes, the order behind the disorder; it is reasoning transformed into narrative. One common theme runs through all nine books of Herodotus’s Histories: the fatal opposition between the Greeks and the barbarians. The writing of Herodotus does perhaps flow like a river, with the tranquillity of Cicero’s fluens, but the course of his narration—the flow of the water, the narrative stream—is swollen by torrents, wellsprings, and storms. Like the Ionian storytellers, Herodotus incorporates scenes, speeches, descriptions, conversations, and anecdotes. No detour is gratuitous, however: conquered by Cambyses, Egypt belongs to the Persian Empire, and it is therefore useful to take interest in the Nile, the pyramids, and embalming. Unexpected events admirably suspend battles at their acme: Hippias loses a tooth in the sand while landing in Attica, and the braying of a donkey protects the army of Darius in Scythia. These digressions not only serve to entertain the reader; they also enrich a unified problematic. This genial art of narration is what will cause grief to Thucydides and, long after him, to the methodical historians of the nineteenth century. (Greek society did not yet have the “taste for the naked truth.”)35 Narrative construction of course depends on the line of reasoning that it implements. Universal history in the manner of Polybius makes it fly up to lofty heights. In The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), Simon Schama sews together images and texts, whereas Saul Friedländer

34. Charles Batteux, Principes de la littérature, vol. 2 (Paris: Saillant et Nyon, 1774), 329. 35. Amédée Hauvette, Hérodote (Paris: Hachette, 1894), 505.

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orchestrates a chant with the voices of the witnesses in The Years of Extermination (2007). A comparative approach makes it necessary to see double or triple, and all research that brings the past of an object of study into contact with the present of a question causes one to zigzag a bit. There are books in the form of cathedrals, puzzles, steles, geometries, and roads going up a hillside. All have a deep unity, as with Cézanne’s paintings, in which each point has “knowledge of all the others.”36 It is not always the characters who act, nor is it always actions that make things happen. As with the dark areas in Rembrandt’s paintings and the solid patches of color in one of Manet’s portraits, absence can tell a story. There is an intelligence of doubt, a vibration of silence, an integrity of the fragment, and a fullness of the vacuum. And the narrative gives way to something other than itself: an atmosphere. Creation in the social sciences might take the form of an experimentation with form. This is a matter of developing new fictions of method. For example, telling a story in a regressive way, not by beginning with the most distant point in the past, but by moving farther and farther away from the present moment; following a character with a shoulder-mounted camera, while respecting the possibilities and future paths open to that person; introducing a narrative with several beginnings, but without giving it any ending (or vice versa); comparing and contrasting various slices of life; writing the history of an incoherence; associating verbatim conversations, citations-as-images, and documents-as-videos. The format of the texts might be reduced, like a newspaper article or a short story, so as to make them more striking. For a longer narrative, the editing might be that of a televised series, and the rhythm that of a thriller. Elsewhere, the historian might use the future perfect, which integrates the fact that events are done and over together with our act of looking back on them. Modiano has just such a particular affection for the future past: “The future past is the tense for revisiting the past and for the impossibility of reparation. It is a tense that contains different layers, different depths.”37 Or the mere future tense, enunciated from the past. Or the present, both for the past and for today.

36. Rainer Maria Rilke quoted by Françoise Cachin et al., Cézanne, Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (Paris: RMN, 1995), 172. 37. Conversation with Patrick Modiano, Madame Figaro, November 9–10, 2012.

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The condemnation of pleasure, including taste, interest, and aesthetic emotion, for the sake of truth once again goes all the way back to Thucydides, who was put off by “theatrical charlatanry.” Beginning with the age of the Enlightenment, deduction was attached to the sciences and what was deduced, to the realm of letters. From the moment in the nineteenth century when history was defined as an academic discipline organized around university courses and closed seminars in Germany, France, and the United States, historians start to write for their peers within a highly specialized circle. One really had to be full of oneself to want to reach other people besides one’s colleagues! “The reader” became suspect, if not taboo. The closed circles of academia justified the researcher in producing only articles for journals, or else books that would be read in order to fulfill professional obligations. It is possible for the social sciences to rehabilitate readers’ pleasure, and not only their intellectual benefit but their interest, curiosity, passion, and “first-degree” reading at the age of twelve, which does not impede but, on the contrary, encourages more sophisticated approaches. Did not Rabelais say as much? It is possible to imagine a story that one would simply like to read, because it would be new and captivating, but also because it would combine sobriety with obstinacy, because its effort to decipher things would be so moving, and because its quest would touch on something universal. That is doubtless what books that “read like a novel” succeed in doing, and, as is evident, that does not entail resorting to the pathos of history-as-tragedy, nor to the reality effect that fleshes things out. The idea of social sciences procuring pleasure may seem provocative, but in the Republic of Letters and up until the middle of the nineteenth century, the proposition was rather commonplace. The division that Bayle produced in his Dictionary, namely, a historical narrative and a long commentary, aimed precisely to “better capture the public’s taste.” The scholar also planned passages that were a bit playful in order to compensate for the dictionary’s dry character and to “entertain the readers.”38 Bayle’s Dictionary combined the utmost rigor with concern for the reader. Like the Encyclopédie a half century later, Bayle’s intellectual and narrative revolution was predicated on commercial success, therefore on the 38. Pierre Bayle, preface to the first edition (1696), Dictionnaire historique et critique, 2, and “Dissertation” (1692), 2979.

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readers’ enjoyment. Writing Racine and Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, Stendhal recalls that the history of France before Barante was “too boring to read.” After having devoured Chateaubriand’s The Martyrs as a middle-schooler, Augustin Thierry refused to write “a book of pure scholarship, instructive for those who seek, off-putting for the mass of readers.”39 In France, Renan’s Life of Jesus was one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, the invention of new objects of historical study provide a pleasure not offered by middle school lessons learned by heart. Give pleasure, but also indulge in it. We are happy to do research because we investigate and discover, but also because we intensely exercise our liberty. Because we choose the place where our mind is going to live for several years. That is why we must not hesitate to embrace a subject that concerns us personally, to undertake research motivated by a personal event or a quest for identity: admiration, love, desire, childhood memory, feelings of indebtedness, but also of abandonment, suicide, loss, exile, the affront of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, or social domination. Researcher, do not fear your wounds. Write the book of your life, the one that will help you understand who you are. The rest will follow: rigor, honesty, excitation, rhythm. In the 1860s, a great writer named Zola gave himself the following precepts: “Have passion. Keep in my books one same, strong inspiration which, rising up from the first page, carries the reader all the way to the end. Maintain my restless energy.”40 These three imperatives could serve as a researcher’s motto. A new constraint? Of course. Like life in society, the social sciences are a mixture of rights and responsibilities; and the responsibilities are there only to increase the liberty of all.

39. Augustin Thierry, preface to the Récits des temps mérovingiens (1840), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Lévy Frères, 1868), 5. 40. Émile Zola, “Notes générales sur la nature de l’oeuvre,” in Les Rougon-Macquart, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1967), 1742.

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My purpose here is not to teach the method that all must follow to conduct their reasoning in good order, but only to show how I have endeavored to conduct my own. —Descartes, Discourse on the Method

In this chapter, I would like to lay out the subtext of my History of the Grandparents I Never Had.1 The book represents a literary and epistemological experiment that consisted of recounting the method. The point was not to renew the writing of the social sciences by combining the nineteenth century’s revolution of history with the twentieth century’s revolution of the novel. It was instead to produce a work of social science in a form partaking of investigation, testimony, biography, autobiography, narrative, and literature all at once: the book does history by implementing a line of reasoning, and performs literary creation in making the text live.

1. I entered briefly into the subject in “Écrire l’histoire de ses proches,” Le Genre Humain (September 2012): 35–59, as well as in Nouvelles perspectives sur la Shoah (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), coedited with Annette Wieviorka, and L’enfant-Shoah (Paris: PUF, 2014).

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This hybridization makes it possible not only to represent human actions but also to understand them through a line of reasoning that, deployed in a text, produces an emotion.

The Situation of the Researcher In order to realize the historical narrative’s potential for literary creation, we have to run counter to the “objective mode,”2 which neither the invention of the modern novel nor the advent of problem-based history in the twentieth century has managed to eliminate. The objective mode denies the subjectivity of the narrator by concealing it within the absence of an omnipresence. Postulating that objectivity involves sacrificing the self, the objective mode tries to get rid of everything that is not “exterior” reality. Since that is impossible, it substitutes the point-of-view-withouta-point-of-view of the narrator-God in place of the researcher’s point of view. This manner of proceeding would not be of great consequence if it were not accompanied by self-denial. As Popper explains, the proponents of scientism who elude the point-of-view issue nevertheless adopt a certain point of view unknowingly, and their ignorance of the fact invalidates their claims to objectivity, since it is impossible to cast a critical eye on one’s work when one remains in the dark about one’s own point of view.3 Hence scientism’s hypocrisy: banning value judgments never prevented anyone from instilling values. Added to this narrative and epistemological weakness is a defect of a political nature. Smoothly polished history has the same flaws as authoritative discourse: its glossy surface hides from the reader the complexity of operations performed by the historian, and footnotes are a poor remedy for this lack of transparency. Research is

2. As defined in chapter 3, the “objective mode” is based on the detachment of the scholar, the extinction of the self, the universal point of view, and the illusion of crystal-clear transparency. It characterizes both the academic historical narrative and the realistic social novel from the last third of the nineteenth century on. 3. Karl Popper, Misère de l’historicisme, trans. Hervé Rousseau (Paris: Plon, 1956), 190–91; in English, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

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presented as a finished product and as a completely settled result, instead of as a process. In a nutshell, the objective mode is no longer compatible with the demands of the social sciences. If the proponents of scientism fear the “I” so much, it is because they see only one type of subjectivity, that of Pascal’s loathsome self: a deeply personal, shameless, complacent, self-centered, highly partial self of historical panegyrics or indictments. We indeed find such a narrative voice here and there, for example, when Gibbon deals with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity: “The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age.”4 What is really wrong with Kantorowicz’s Frederick II, apart from the absence of scholarly apparatus? That it is heavy-handedly hagiographic and proto-Nazi? After all, the historian is also an individual, and, toward the end of the 1920s, Kantorowicz had the right to work on the figure of an emperor because he was hoping for the coming of another “great man.” What is unacceptable from a methodological point of view is that he was incapable of taking the slightest critical distance from his sources and his convictions. By neglecting to discuss these elements openly, he quietly let his personal outlook coincide with historical knowledge. Therein lies the dishonesty: the historian’s ego underhandedly commands the narrative. Numerous historians have nevertheless acknowledged that their self was engaged in their research. Augustin Thierry defends the third estate out of “filial piety.” In his 1869 preface to the History of France, Michelet endorses the historian’s involvement with history: “Even in the most accurate and seemingly perfectly resemblant of portraits, the artist puts a little of himself in the painting.”5 That is an admission that historians are present in their history just as narrators are in their texts, homodiegetically. In the 1930s, Charles Beard criticized the neo-Rankean myth of objectivity, “that noble dream,” by recalling that all historians are influenced by their upbringing, their beliefs, their experiences, and the

4. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, http://www.ccel.org/g/ gibbon/decline/volume1/chap39.htm. 5. Jules Michelet, “Préface de 1869,” in Histoire de France, vol. 1 (Paris: Le Vasseur, 1935), viii.

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interests of their class, sex, or race. Ranke, for example, embodies reactionary Prussian conservatism.6 One might think that this admission is mere affectation, Romantic whim, or an activist’s provocation. Actually, it has a considerable bearing on the matter. It reveals a second subjectivity, unknown to the proponents of scientism: that of the situated researcher. This subjectivity consists not of opening up about one’s personal life or giving one’s opinion, but of knowing the vantage point from which one is speaking. In sociology, for example, it consists of indicating the sociologist’s point of view to the extent that it emanates from a sociologist, constitutes an instrument of documentation and analysis, and calls for self-awareness on the part of the researcher.7 All researchers are thus situated, but it is not sufficient simply to recall the fact. They must assume responsibility for their situated selves, their roots in time and space, gender, kinship, race, social category, interests, philosophy, values, and their position in the academic field. In other words, they must calculate the distance separating their own anchorage point from the object of their study. The connection between the scholar and his or her object of study is part of the scientific activity. This effort to situate oneself helps researchers avoid being taken in by their own prejudices, or being the hostage of their own interests, or becoming their own puppet. The more they analyze their position, the less blind they are to their own biases. More effectively than empathy or Verstehen, clearly situating the narrative self makes it possible for us to be delivered from ourselves. Objectivity in history thus has nothing to do with the extinction of the self, neutrality (or rather neutralization), or the hidden yet omniscient narrator. It reposes instead on describing the narrator’s position, prior to individually and collectively critiquing the narrator’s hypotheses. The problem is not that one has baggage; it is rather that of failing to declare it. Three avatars of the self participate in the epistemological process: the self as witness, the research self, and the counter-self.

6. Charles Beard, “That Noble Dream,” American Historical Review 41, no. 1 (October 1935): 74–87. 7. Richard Harvey Brown, Clefs pour une poétique de la sociologie (Arles: Actes Sud, 1989), 85; in English, A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

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The self as witness. Researchers are in direct contact with the objects of their study, if only because the operations of their inquiry—searching, encountering, experimenting—are carried out in the present. We are history’s contemporaries. In some instances, scholars have even been directly involved in the events that they recount. Such is the case of the memorialists from the Cardinal de Retz to Claude Lanzmann. That is also true for several historians in ancient Greece and Rome, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Sallust. Since he is present as both historian and protagonist in his own narrative, Polybius casually explains that it is necessary “to put a bit of variety in the terms used to speak of myself,” as the constant repetition of his name would ultimately be wearisome or even annoying.8 The situation of ethnologists, sociologists, and reporters is comparable: the fact that they observe as participants makes them less timid than historians. The traveling anthropologist will recommend displaying his “personal coefficient in broad daylight,” thus augmenting the value of his testimony.9 The researcher’s motto could be “a witness among human beings.” It is the very title that Joseph Kessel, one of the twentieth century’s greatest journalists, chose as the title for a republication of his articles. The research self. The entire hermeneutical tradition from Dilthey to Ricoeur stresses the personal involvement of researchers, since they in fact belong to the world that they describe. Interpretation, comprehension, the experience of alterity, sympathy for others, empathy, and the feeling of indignation are the driving forces of knowledge. The fact that events happen to be distant, as if frozen and irreversible, changes nothing: historians cannot escape their own historicity. As Carl Becker put it in the 1930s, we write history not about what is intrinsically important but about what touches or strikes us and defies our understanding. Since “history is inseparable from the historian,”10 it is futile to oppose objectivity and subjectivity: rather, the former consists of the critical, in-depth examination of the latter.

8. Polybe, Histoire (Paris: Gallimard/Quarto, 2003), xxxvi, 12; in English, Polybius, The Histories, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/home.html. 9. Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, in Miroir de l’Afrique (Paris: Gallimard/Quarto, 1995), 395. 10. Henri-Irénée Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Paris: Seuil, 1954), 51.

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The counter-self. “Neutrality” is neither possible nor desirable: values, whichever they may be, constitute the foundation of researchers’ humanity. It is therefore preferable to bring them into broad daylight, or in other words struggle against oneself, against one’s trade secrets, against one’s preferences, against the narcissistic presumption of deeming oneself “normal.” This step can prove to be rather uncomfortable, particularly if one is a former communist working on communism or the grandson of deportees writing about the Holocaust. For researchers who claim to tell the truth about others, such introspection makes their take on the subject less indelicate and more objective. By revealing their method, they demythify their own person and desacralize their discourse. To Karl Mannheim, who thinks that the intellectual must be emancipated from traditions to be able to have an unencumbered view of the world, Popper replies that objectivity resides not in the impartiality of scholars (such as that “anthropologist coming down from Sirius”) but in the public, antagonistic nature of science.11 In fact, this selfexamination and disclosure begin much earlier, when researchers agree to consider their own involvement in the process of knowledge. By divulging the biographical, familial, academic, social, and political position from which they speak (before laying out the itinerary of their investigation), they formulate the conditions of their own critique: it is because a discourse carries a point of view that it can be subjected to criticism and thus become scientific. Situating the researchers is a prerequisite to testing their hypotheses. This critique of absolutism in science carries a benefit for literary creation: rooting the author in history, social milieus, and cultural contexts contradicts the myth of the self-made “foundling” who does not have to answer to anyone and who has borrowed only from Dante or Shakespeare. It can therefore be said that, in the social sciences, objectivity resides collectively in critical debate, and individually in the analysis of one’s own situation. Just as the refusal of the self characterizes scientism, so

11. Karl Popper, “Raison ou revolution?” in Theodor Adorno, Karl Popper et al., De Vienne à Francfort: La querelle allemande des sciences sociales (Brussels: Complexe, 1979), 237–47; in English, Theodor Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976).

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the self-examination of the researcher, the objectivation of those who objectivate (to use Bourdieu’s language), belongs to the method of the social sciences. The adoption of “a point of view on one’s own point of view” makes it possible to break with all that is left unsaid in the objective mode.12 It is a shame that Bourdieu did not apply this “agenda for a reflexive cognitive anthropology” either in his article on the single men in the Béarn area nor in his studies of Kabyle ethnology, and scarcely in his book on Homo academicus, where the sociologist’s own personal experience—his “indigenous knowledge”—was absolutely decisive. The analysis of the self within the framework of a reflexive exercise clearly does not bear the stamp of relativism. On the contrary, such an analysis makes knowledge more objective. The activation of all of these selves is an integral part of the method in the social sciences, and in the form of an autobiographical socio-analysis, that activation can intersect with literary creation.

The “I” of Method The researchers’ self guides and enriches their work, but that does not necessarily appear in narration in the form of an “I.” The distinction between the self and “I” is capital. Acknowledging the role of subjectivity theoretically in a work on epistemology, a book of interviews, or a belated autobiography is one thing; assuming responsibility for that subjectivity in a scholarly work is quite another. The “research self” is a capacity for understanding inherited from the hermeneutical tradition, but the pronoun “I,” by injecting that epistemology into the heart of narration, incites the researcher to write a text. The pronoun “I” is the taboo which makes one go from the objective mode over to the reflexive mode, from crystal-clear realism to the narrative of inquiry, from academic impersonality to the research log, and to critical autobiography. In Herodotus, the first-person singular is fully part of his way of reasoning, and therefore of his narration. Beyond the reference to the

12. Pierre Bourdieu, “L’objectivation participante,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no. 105 (December 2003): 43–58.

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traveler-inquirer as an individual, the “I” has several functions: it attests to the physical presence of the witness (the one who goes to Thebes, who describes a monument, who has seen only a painting of the phoenix), it constitutes a link in the chain of reasoning (hypothesis, argument for verisimilitude, comparison of different versions, avowal of impotence), and it expresses the author’s judgment (of Xerxes’s foolish pride, Cyrus’s wisdom, and so forth). We find similar narrative functions to varying degrees among the memorialists of the classical era, as well as in certain works of the twentieth century. C. L. R. James’s childhood, professional life, racial awareness, and political engagement were so marked by his personal experience as both a cricket player and a sports reporter that his book Beyond a Boundary (1963), devoted to cricket in Caribbean societies, takes on a certain autobiographical character. Georges Duby also writes as a witness. In The Legend of Bouvines, he relates having “known farmers who still trembled a bit when bad weather forced them to harvest a crop on Sunday.”13 This “I” expresses an epistemological modesty aimed less at decreeing the truth than at suggesting the probable: “This is my way of alerting my reader.”14 As ancient as its usage may be, we might consider the “I” as a frontier, a wide horizon for the social sciences. Its three functions intertwine with the narrative’s progression. In the first place, the “I” of method indicates a situation. This positioning “I” serves to acknowledge filiations, roots, itineraries, belongings, motivations, tastes, preferences, and value systems. If we accept the idea that history is inseparable from the historian, or that tropes structure the historian’s vision, we must see to it that the text sheds light on the particular and close ties with what one has chosen to study. Conducted on-site, this self-analysis allows writer-researchers to carry out a procedure they frequently follow when studying others: they put themselves in context. Second, the “I” of method deploys a line of reasoning. This investigative “I” makes it possible to describe a search or an archaeological dig

13. The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); originally published as Le dimanche de Bouvines (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 14. Georges Duby, L’histoire continue (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 81; in English, History Continues, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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(as do Schliemann, Leroi-Gourhan, and Michel Brunet), an encounter (as do Malinowski and the Chicago School sociologists), as well as an experiment (as does a medical team when describing its protocol). It serves to lay out historical reasoning: it argues the pros and cons, weighs the various factors present, advances and invalidates hypotheses, explains, justifies, contests the narrator-researcher’s own ideas, finds counterexamples, questions the narrator-researcher’s method, and, finally, firmly and conscientiously decides the matter after having made one’s case. Such an explanation provides a sort of instruction manual or source code, and thus paves the way for critical discussion. That is the reason why the narrative “I” is used so frequently in the most rigorous sciences, those “hard sciences” said to be so objective—physics, biology, medicine, and mathematical economics: I measure, I utilize, I believe, I search, I find, I do not find, I show, I observe, I compare.15 Finally, the narrative “I” testifies to a path that the researcher has followed. This is the “I” of emotion. Researchers are not robots, algorithms designed by Google, but individuals who have invested a part of their lives in a body of research. It would be surprising if, over the course of their research, they felt nothing, were surprised at nothing, and learned nothing. Why would they not speak of these infra-discoveries on which the final “result” is based? There is no egocentrism here, simply an observation: the process of gaining knowledge often has the side effect of shaking our certitudes. This involvement of the researchers (which one might call “the government of knowledge”) shows that they are as much the rulers of their investigation as its very object, its substance. The positioning “I,” the investigative “I,” and the emotional “I” constitute the three forms of the “I” of method. This threefold “I” is characteristic of a narrator who is both distanciated and homodiegetic, and constitutes one of the footbridges linking the social sciences to literature. It belongs to the essay, the press or media report, the investigation, the witness’s narrative, and the travel log, but not to the realistic novel, which conceals it in order to augment the reality effect, nor to the classic autobiography, which 15. Two examples among thousands of others: Michelangelo von Dassow et al., “Surprisingly Simple Mechanical Behavior of a Complex Embryonic Tissue,” PLOS ONE 5, no. 12 (December 2010) http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015359, and Alwyn Young, “Inequality, the Urban-Rural Gap and Migration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 4 (2013): 1727–85.

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is self-centered. Writer-researchers say “I” to break out of themselves and to speak of others more objectively, whereas novelists speak of others without objectivity and autobiographers speak of themselves subjectively. The “I” of method is a combination of forces, groups, constraints, and tendencies. It humbles our subjectivity, and it reminds us that we are “ourselves” not only by being free and unique, but also by encountering processes that are beyond our control within ourselves: not “I–me” but “I–we” inasmuch as I am constructed, fashioned by other things than myself at the intersection of clusters called institutions, social classes, values, and educational principles. The acquired capacity to step back and look critically at myself assigns me a little spot on the tableau, a starting point from where I can set out. Far from the pompous, hollow royal “we,” this “I” therefore communicates easily with the “we” of the team or the group formed to carry out a project. Consequently, the “I” of method can be implemented regardless of the subject under study. There is absolutely no need to be working on one’s own city, political party, or family in order to benefit from its epistemological virtues. For the “I” of method is not only a way of reasoning and a form, but also a line of reasoning within a form. More than the footnote, the “I” of method makes it possible to crack open the objective mode that sweeps the unified whole of the research process under the rug, while providing only a slick, glossy result. By means of framed stories, the “I” of method reminds us that a situated individual set out on an investigation, searched, saw, and felt. This is no longer History with a capital H that is speaking; it is the researcher. The statements enunciated finally have an enunciator. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s use of “I” in A World on the Wane reconciles the scientific with literary creation.16 What is literary in this narrative is not the description of a sunset or the ambition to write a novel that, as the author himself admits, risked turning out to be a “very bad version of Conrad.” The literary in this book consists of the traveling anthropologist’s implementation of a new form to unhinge the familiar and tame the foreign. It would be impossible to be some all-seeing narrator descending from the clouds. On the contrary, Lévi-Strauss systematically avails himself of an “I” of method.

16. Originally published in French in 1955 under the title Tristes tropiques.

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He identifies himself as the product of a particular history: the legacy of Judaism, his memories of the Provence region, his love of the mountains, his distinguished achievement in studying philosophy, the experience of boredom at the Sorbonne, and the appeal of the Brazilian savannas. He relates how he went about preparing his research project, making purchases from Parisian wholesalers, choosing his men and mules in Cuiabá, learning the language of the Nambikwara, making himself the first to get up and the last to go to bed. Beyond the apparent differences, he describes the kinship of cultural systems and the fraternity of the “wild.” He expresses his feelings, including not just his enthusiasm, surprise, lust, weariness, boredom, and doubts, but even the least avowable: “What are we doing here? With what expectation? To what end? What exactly is an ethnographic investigation?”17 He even gives us a hint of the melancholy that overcomes him in facing the fact that these people are condemned to extinction as opposites and victims of our “modernity.” The anthropologist supposedly has to immunize himself against details, adventurous anecdotes, and insignificant occurrences. “The truths that we go seek out so far away are only valuable once we have removed them from this gangue,” states Lévi-Strauss ironically in the introduction.18 His admirable book flatly contradicts that assertion: without its gangue and the life of the gold panner, gold would be only a common metal. Thirty years later, the writer wonders whether there is not a greater truth in A World on the Wane than in his scholarly books, because, as does a fisheye lens, A World on the Wane “reintegrated the observer into the object of his observation,” with all the resulting distortions.19

Recounting the Investigation Using the narrative “I” is an epistemological liberty before becoming a choice in writing. Over history as a finished product, we will, for scientific reasons, prefer truth as a process: in other words, the rational, explicable,

17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 450. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Interview with Claude-Lévi Strauss on the television program Apostrophes, broadcast by Antenne 2 on May 4, 1984.

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amendable means of achieving an objective. The question, the investigation, the research, and the demonstration mark out the cognitive path to be followed. By the same token, a fact without the evidence or line of reasoning behind it would be of little interest, as “true” as it might be. Those who are wary of history as a finished product, a sort of Athena springing fully armed out of the head of Zeus, will open up their workshop to everyone. Without delving into the secrets of the bedroom, hidden trapdoors, and other goings-on behind the scenes of history, we can show the workings of the book itself. Thus invited to cross over to the other side of the fence, the reader can discover a research project as it is being carried out, with the researcher eager to lay out its reasons, postulates, definitions, and associations of ideas, intent on distinguishing clearly among the various logical and archival operations being implemented, displaying its arguments, bodies of evidence, arrangements, gaps, successes, and shortcomings. It is useful for the reader to understand how history makes it possible to understand: that means understanding to the second power. For the researcher, it is gratifying to show how knowledge is made. It is important to show that history is made in a workshop, but also outside, just as the impressionists painted under the wide-open sky. It is a pleasure to welcome non-specialists in as friends, instead of confining them to the role of passive admirers. These alter egos could have done the same thing that I did, if they had ever had the time and the desire to do so. By writing history as the story of our groping in the dark, we become what we are: people writing in order to deliver statements of truth, not authorities decreeing what is true. This principle of the coproduction of knowledge exerts an obvious influence on the construction of the narrative. Before we let visitors enter the apartment, it is good to have them climb up the scaffolding. Just as there are ceilings with visible beams, there are narratives with visible evidence, a sort of half-timbered history which consists of showing how the entire edifice holds up. Research is delivered all together—structure, building, trim—with the phases of its development and the rich complexity of its origins, realization, and incompletion, because research is inseparable not only from the intellectual paths that it follows but also from the difficulties that it raises and continues to raise. Like historians and sociologists, anthropologists can provide a detailed account of their observations, unlike those researchers who prefer to “deliver their readymade

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conclusions without revealing to us anything about their origins.”20 The narrative of the investigation conveys the texture of the research. The canvas lets us make out the sketch, the cluster of colors, and the movement of the brush. This is how the rupture with “aesthetics of the finished product,” which is the mark of academicism in the social sciences as well as in painting, can be consummated. The objective mode is ultimately paradoxical. Chosen by scientific history, it produces a narrative saturated with reality effects by pushing the body of evidence and other critical elements out of sight and warehousing them in somewhat repulsive footnotes. In order to better respect the requirements of the social sciences, we could move the narration’s center of gravity and devote one part of the narrative to the research itself, in other words, to recounting how one has gone about reasoning, investigating, doubting, and proving. The core of the book would no longer be the historical narrative but the narrative of historical reasoning, the report on the intellectual activity without which history would be only a shallow surface narrative. We have everything to gain from such a change. An investigation has the miraculous property of adopting the method of the social sciences while at the same time arousing the interest of the reader: from 1914 to 1918, Malinowski sojourns on an archipelago off the eastern coast of New Guinea, where several thousand partners exchange armbands and seashell necklaces having no useful function; Nuto Revelli investigates “the lost soldier from Marburg,” tracking down the solitary German, neither a hero nor an executioner but a fairly nice guy who lived in the San Rocco barracks, rode a horse every morning, and conversed with children before being killed by partisans in the summer of 1944. In the Upper Paleolithic caverns, Leroi-Gourhan leads us to discover the abstract drawings that accompany large animal paintings: points, lines, grooves, grids, and meanderings. After a bit of cross-checking, he realizes they have a constant, regular character. At Las Monedas in Spain there appears

20. Bronislaw Malinowski, Les Argonautes du Pacifique occidental (Paris: Gallimard/ “Tel,” 1989), 58–60; in English, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, Studies in Economics and Political Science 65 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922); republished in 1984 by Waveland Press.

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“the most amazing ‘scribbling’ of the entire Paleolithic period”: circles and little bars, similar to the incoherent yet meaningful figures that some people trace on a piece of paper when talking on the telephone.21 This “panel of unfinished contours,” this “discouraging residue of scribbles,” is in fact what all researchers must deal with. Leroi-Gourhan thus tells us the story of these mysterious traces, the enigma that they pose, and his efforts to decipher them. In other words, he shares his struggle to understand. This is another allegory of the cave. In order to accomplish and transcend mimesis, the social science text can take the form of a double helix, composed of a narrative that represents and explains the facts (as the narrativists say) and of a narrative of the investigation that has made it possible to establish these facts: it is the story of an object of research and, indissociably, the story of the individual in a certain situation having set out to investigate it. As a form, the research text thus consists of bringing the past, the demonstration, and the investigation together in the same text. The real hero is not a great man, nor an event, nor the historian, but a line of reasoning. Eventually the footnotes, those shamefully hidden scars, can be eliminated: once reintegrated into the narration, they will become the very substance of the narrative. This reincorporation has something of a profession of faith: historical reasoning is our core activity.

Transparency and Finitude Opening up the researcher’s workroom and constructing a line of reasoning whose framework is apparent are metaphors of visibility closely related to the ideal of transparency. This no longer involves the rather illusory “glass house” of naturalism nor totalitarian “transparency” entailing the absence of privacy and forced self-criticism. Crystal-clear realism and the crushing of individualism have the same consequences: they kill critical debate. True transparency is the democratic manner of deciding or handling issues with integrity and in compliance with publicly known procedures.

21. André Leroi-Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967).

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A line of reasoning is therefore transparent when it is analytical, in other words, fully explicit and endorsed, and when it is based on clear definitions, hypotheses, deductions, examples, and counterexamples. The more visible this reasoning is, the more aware everybody will be of its nuts-and-bolts operations, patterns of organization, fault lines, and limits. This effort not to leave anything hidden has nothing to do with exhibitionism: it is a call for discussion, the friendly rivalry that is the foundation of science. It might be feared that transparency could sterilize the text: actually, it serves to prevent the text from being a non-text. The demand for accountability, the expression of doubt, the admission of incompletion deflates the “positive” character of discourse that is full of itself and offers nothing but its own self-satisfaction. This self-imposed rigor prevents researchers from delivering univocal “results,” and their anxieties confer on the text its narrative depth. Such self-searching has something stoic about it. Every history book should be mindful of Montaigne’s Essays: “Reader, this is a book written in good faith.” Several writers have revealed themselves openly to the reader, with their own limitations thus embodied in their work: Montaigne, Saint Augustine, and Sallust from the depths of his withdrawal from public life. In Poor People, William Vollmann makes a point of recalling that, unlike Jack London and George Orwell, he never experienced poverty, and therefore has no firsthand knowledge of what he is talking about. At the beginning of Tombstone, devoted to the 36 million Chinese, including the author’s own father, who fell victim to famine between 1958 and 1961, Yang Jisheng has the courage to confess that, as someone in charge of propaganda for the Communist Youth, he sang the praises of the Great Leap Forward until the very end: “My sorrow at the death of my father did not weaken my confidence in the Party.”22 The opposite of such transparency is the furtive manner of Robert Jauss, who theorizes the use of fiction in history without asking himself to what extent such a de-realization concerns him personally as a former volunteer and Waffen-SS. As Stierle, his postwar successor at the German university in Konstanz, puts it, “the watchword of self-effacement before

22. Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012).

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scientific objectivity was most often masking another silence: his silence in the face of horror.”23 The remedy for this inauthenticity is for researchers to search their own souls before heading out to investigate others. After all, just who can rightfully claim to tell the truth about human beings? Investigators interrogate and critique witnesses, but, asks Volney, are they themselves free of their faults, their negligence, and their prejudices? “Are they not human like the others?”24 Subjecting oneself to thoroughgoing objective scrutiny, inspecting one’s own historical baggage, and swearing off all superiority are all part of the method of social sciences. Once we ourselves have taken our place alongside others on the world’s playing field, we can meet them in our role as sociologists, observe them as anthropologists, and study them as historians. Charles Péguy used to make fun of historians who refused to “join the ranks” of history as doctors refusing either to be patients or to die. We historians are also historical beings. Research in the social sciences helps the living to live. It makes intelligible their past, their itinerary, and the world in which they dwell. It makes it possible for people not only to journey to distant times and faraway places but also to reappropriate their own experience, to take back words stripped away from them by trauma such as abandonment, solitude, exile, destitution, discrimination, racism, war, and death. Historians are humans who come to the aid of their fellow human beings. They are all the more human in that they try to understand what other human beings, those living in a certain time that they study from the vantage point of humans in their own time, are doing. History is that by which we link ourselves to others, to our children as well as to our ancestors. It is the question we carry within ourselves, which, in the winter of our lives, we will regret not having posed. It is a self-interested tribute that the living pay to the deceased on behalf of the living, before they themselves pass away. A poignant melancholy dwells in Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). “When the world was five centuries younger,” the shape

23. Cited by Maurice Olender, “Le silence d’une génération,” in Race sans histoire (Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 2009), 249–91. 24. C.-F. Volney, Leçons d’histoire prononcées à l’École normale (1795; Paris: Baudoin, 1826), 21.

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of events stood out more markedly. There was less to soften the blows of adversity; people enjoyed wealth more avidly. These ready emotions must be remembered if we intend to imagine “the harsh taste and violent colors that life had in that era.”25 Huizinga’s expressions, “life in that era,” “there was at the time,” and “more than nowadays” show that the sense of a bygone time creates no discontinuity. On the contrary, Huizinga has us go back and forth between past and present, them and us, in a selfreflection that makes us even more aware of all that is now strange to us among our fellow human beings who came before us.

The Reflexive Mode To summarize, I lay out the four principles of the reflexive mode, which has the merit of integrating methodological innovation into narration itself. The involvement of the researcher. Even if the passing of time has distanced them from the focus of their project, researchers are tied to the object of their work by thousands of invisible threads. Their epistemology benefits from a self that responds to Pascal’s demands: an anti-Narcissus made up of the self as witness, the research self, and the counter-self. The “I” of method. By integrating the researcher’s subjectivity into narration, the “I” makes its account more objective: it sheds light on the vantage point of the narrator, the circumstances of the investigation, and the ins and outs of the narrator’s reasoning, along with its doubts and certainties. The “I” of method is both humble and lucid, and belongs to the scientific protocol. A point of view on the point of view. Because the narrator is situated, the researcher struggles with reality, be it in archival holdings or in an inner city, deep within a tomb, or amid the dunes of the Sahara, looking for clues. Aware of this specific situation, refusing to look down on the world from on high, capable of the sort of self-searching called teshuva in Hebrew, the researcher produces statements of truth subject to refutation.

25. Johan Huizinga, L’automne du Moyen Âge (1919; Paris: Payot, 2002), 25, 33; in English, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1999).

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Democratic transparency. This is reasoning in its greatest honesty. It becomes analytical when it is made explicit, when it is based on clear definitions, postulates, hypotheses, deductions, examples, and evidence. Researchers have no need to put themselves on display; they must only say what they are doing and show how they do it. Armed with these principles, the reflexive mode can break with the narrative of realistic novelists and academic scholars. It transcends the sterile opposition between “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” “science” and “literature.” It favors honesty over neutrality, disquietude over certitudes, emptiness over smug satisfaction, and explicit accounts over innate knowledge. Objective narrators know everything and dispense information to their liking; reflexive narrators know nothing and construct a line of reasoning. The objective mode implements method at the expense of literary creation, and literary creation at the expense of method, in the form of tragic history, eloquent history, and panegyric history; the reflexive mode turns itself into literary creation to provide a better account of the researcher’s scientific activity. It insists on being both form and research. The reflexive mode makes it possible to live history, for lack of making the dead come back to life. Does that mean that we should relinquish all neutrality? Of course not. Impartiality remains one of the highest values in the social sciences. But choices, interests, arguments are often related to the very person of the researcher, and it would be easy to point out how a so-called “objective” scholar may be taken in by fascination with his object of study or field of investigation, driven by voyeurism or ulterior motives, subject to questionable feelings, ingenuousness, gender biases, and so on. Instead of loudly professing one’s “neutrality” in terms of some unearthly detachment from the past or the present (all while writing from a ubiquitous perspective), it would be healthier, as the first step of critical debate, to develop an epistemology of self-awareness: in other words, a humble honesty that recognizes one’s own premises, doubts, successes, failures, and finitude. The triangular relationship between the researcher, academia, and the object of study, be it a housing project in an American city today or Athenian democracy in the fifth century BC, results in an insider-outsider perspective that is fruitful from a cognitive and literary point of view. This profession of faith may be disturbing. Insisting loudly that one is lucid, presenting some ongoing research project, and incessantly mentioning

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the “ifs, ands, and buts” are no guarantee of rigor. In other words, how do we prevent the reflexive mode from offering the spectacle of putting the self on display? Do not those who skewer the reality effect, the History effect, the lived experience effect, and stylistic effects also avail themselves of “honesty effects”? The only effect that researchers can claim is the distanciation effect, Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the device made of humor, irony, warning, disillusion, and complicity. In the theater, the V-Effekt incites the spectator to gaze upon the stage with an “investigative and critical eye”: bright lighting, visible sources of light, offbeat acting, with actors buttonholing the audience. With all its magic removed, the theater no longer creates any “hypnotic field.” Brecht explicitly establishes a parallel between the distanciation effect and the scientific gaze. Each constitutes a “technique of systematic suspicion” with regard to all that seems to be self-evident: between themselves and the present, actors must put “the same distance that historians put between themselves and the events and behaviors of the past.”26 The refusal of any and all mystique does not prevent us from fully experiencing theater: the emotions are simply of a different nature. Numerous artists and writers have been influenced by Brecht’s theory, his rejection of passive adhesion, and his determination to awaken the reader and stimulate critical reflection. In 1969, the year when A Void came out, Perec declared: “I was raised in the school of Brecht: I believe in distance and frigidity of style.”27 From investigation to irony, the social sciences have every instrument necessary for shattering the illusion of History and of experiencing events “as if you were there.” The research text does not pander to the need to believe. By using cognitive and literary techniques, it precludes that exquisite passivity of allowing oneself to be taken in by the voice that recounts the Past like a fireside storyteller. Satisfaction comes not with believing but in refusing to believe: satisfaction is in the pleasure of opening one’s eyes and the feeling of having understood—somewhat.

26. Bertolt Brecht, “Nouvelle technique d’art dramatique” (1935–1941), Écrits sur le théâtre (Paris: L’Arche, 1963), 330–37; in English, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964). 27. Georges Perec, Entretiens et conférences, vol. 1 (Nantes: Joseph K., 2003), 106.

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It is on these terms that dramatic narration taking the form of famous or anonymous protagonists can become acceptable again. The identification that it occasions is simultaneously canceled out by the distanciation effect: it is a way of stirring up the readers’ interest without ever imprisoning them in tragic history. There is a proviso: the writer-historian has every right to utilize effects of presence and other reality effects, as long as they are undercut by an actual research project that is narrated as a living, reflexive process—a sort of R-Effekt of the social sciences. That is precisely the definition of a fiction of method. Like every writer, researchers have the right to be magicians on occasion, but they must reveal the tricks of their trade.

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I do not know what cinema is, that is why I continue to make films. —Kurosawa

A reflection on the writing of social sciences allows us to look into the form of research, but also to see the question of the relations between literature and the real world in a new light. By refusing to identify literature with the novel and the social sciences with the academic non-text, by choosing to embody a way of reasoning in a text, we arrive at another manner of doing the social sciences and another way of conceiving literature.

The Investigation or Post-Disciplinarity Nowadays, history and sociology are legitimate enough, sufficiently established in the university and in public life, to be able to be open again to literature, whereas a century and a half ago, in order to establish themselves, they had believed it necessary to “purge” themselves of it (without managing to do so, obviously). In the nineteenth century, the advent of

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the method corresponded to a quite understandable institutional strategy, but also a deeply gendered division of labor. The arduous labor of truth was for science; the sweet pleasures of life were for literature. The advocates of scientism, exclusively male at the time, broke with literature as an ascetic forbids himself to look at women. The contributions of the various professionalized disciplines since then are undeniable, but that institutionalization has come with a cost that must not be concealed. The words “creativity,” “pleasure,” and “readers” are less and less in use in the academic world. Does “specialization” mean ignorance of what other scholars do? Bringing together within the same research agenda specialists defined by their attachment to a specific discipline is productive, but recalling that pluridisciplinarity is an invitation to work on the frontier, switch tools, shake up habits, and let different approaches combine and intermingle within one and the same text is crucial. I have used the terms “social sciences” and “historical way of reasoning” to talk about history, paleontology, sociology, and anthropology. I have done my utmost to show that the historical way of reasoning in general and history in particular did not have an organic link with “History,” that they were not limited to the study of the past, and that they made it possible to understand contemporary societies, anonymous people, and non-events. These terminological choices are not the sign of any imprecision (though I might have spoken of “human sciences”), nor any imperialism whatsoever of history. They are designed solely for bringing to light what indeed unites all of these intellectual activities. The paradigm of investigation makes it possible to create a federation of social sciences and narratives that nowadays partake of literature. All of these forms are capable of deploying a line of reasoning in a text. That does not mean that Toni Morrison is equal to Marcus Rediker, or Bourdieu to Faulkner. It means only that literature is good for the social sciences and that the social sciences are good for literature. Here is what a post-disciplinarity descended from the methodical revolution might look like: the reconciliation within a text of different experiments with knowledge and writing; the practice of history not as a history that would make itself “literary” as one would dress up in a feathered outfit (or like an ascetic who finally allows himself to look at women), but a history that is all the more sensitive and vibrant in that it is an investigation, a way of reasoning, a method, and a social science; a text in which a

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struggle takes place—a struggle against errors, indifference, banality, and oblivion—with all the tools needed for this enterprise: traces and encounters, hypotheses and travels, the “I” of method and fictions of method, all of which carry out a cognitive and a literary function in the text. When I say a more literary history, I mean a history more rigorous, transparent, reflexive, and honest with itself. For history is all the more scientific to the extent that it is literary. If the historical narrative continues until now, if history has no particular relation with History, if the social sciences occasion an investigation, if the historian travels and meets witnesses, it is only natural that the text should be opened up for new experiments. With all the tools that are theirs, historians can delve into current events, contemporary phenomena, social problems, milieus, and territories. And there is no reason why they should deprive themselves of the contribution of visual and audiovisual arts. By entering into post-disciplinarity, the social sciences can gain access to modernity—a modernity without postmodernism, a rigor without academicism, a literature that would not be reinvested with all the powers of fiction. None of the instruments utilized by the social sciences serve to grab power. They are only means leading to an end: the production of knowledge. The novel and poetry have been the crucibles of literary modernity. Today, the social sciences could be like all that escapist literature which, by having recourse to evidence, has managed to escape from itself. The social sciences are gaining this liberty thanks to the rules that they very knowingly set for themselves. Among these rules is the one that authorizes their transgression—at times. Contrary to what is proclaimed by the conventional romantico-libertarian wisdom, it is possible to be liberated by following a method. That makes it possible to replace the realist history of the nineteenth century with a history that is modern on a literary level, blending together narrative voices, bordering the gaping emptiness, divulging codes, and so visibly respecting the rules that it ends up subverting them. The social sciences are a school of liberty, and without renouncing their vocation, researchers can be writers. May they not only realize it at the very end of their career, when the time has come to indulge in “hobbies” such as writing their memoirs or recounting their life to their grandchildren by the fireplace!

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Upon returning from their fieldwork, certain anthropologists of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Alfred Métaux, Michel Leiris, and Claude LéviStrauss, each published a literary work, an autobiography or journal, intended as a personal counterpart to their scholarly publications.1 Not everybody has had such audacity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the anthropologist Paul Rivet was on a mission in Ecuador. Deeply moved by the Indians’ distress, filled with a sentiment of revolt in the face of the legacy of confusion and damage created by the Spanish conquest, he wrote some poems, a text on the causes of that tragedy, and a description of a little town in the north where dire poverty was prevalent. He was never to publish them. Why? Because for Rivet, literature was incompatible with a scientific ambition and scholarly reputation. Fleeing emotion, swallowing his anger, neglecting to tell of his activities as a doctor practicing among the Indians, he preferred to opt for the “scientifically correct,” erudition and the academic network. For the early years of French ethnology on the path to institutionalization, poetry and travel literature were a “detestable school.”2 Rivet had a brilliant career (he went on to found the Musée de l’Homme and the resistance network of the same name). But what was the cost of this professional trajectory in terms of self-censorship, self-denial, and auto-mutilation? How many Paul Rivets are there today in universities all over the world? Between the institution and literature, they have chosen the former. Yet it is possible to have both, because literature is the new, exalting form that the social sciences can take today. I am not saying it is necessary, superior, or obligatory; I am saying it is possible. Research in the social sciences is also a research project about its own forms. This research serves to shake up genres, instill doubts, move the lines, and upset what was all nice and orderly. The real pluridisciplinarity is praise for the hybrid, an unstable form, an undefined text that can be at the same time investigation, testimony, document, observation, travel narrative, a history of the lost and of the spiritual offspring that we are. Within the framework of certain rules, let us forget what we have learned to do.

1. Vincent Debaene, Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 2. Christine Laurière, “‘Détestables écoles d’ethnographie’: Litérature interdite, poésie censurée,” L’Homme, no. 200 (October 2011): 19–41.

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Toward a Neo-Ciceronian Approach Beyond the diversity of initiatives and the abundance of experiments, can we come to an agreement on two or three major principles? What tradition shall we draw from? Just as Herodotus was scorned by Thucydides, as literature worried history-as-science, the Ciceronian approach serves as a foil, and it would indeed be that if it were limited to history-aseloquence or history-as-panegyric. We all know that the purpose of history is not to celebrate the powerful, nor to provide practical recipes for conducting one’s life. Fortunately, there is an enormous space between these outdated forms and the boredom of academicism. It is said that history is instructive for citizenship. Historians can also act as citizens. As researchers, they have participated in the struggles for truth that highlighted the twentieth century. In that role, they are the followers of the Ciceronian orator, whose speech, with its powerful efficacy, makes it possible to do battle in the courtroom and in the public arena. Like the rhetoric of Aristotle and Cicero, history is agonistic: it serves to fight against indifference, amnesia, lies, and falsehoods. Like the orator, the researcher has public responsibilities. To assume them, there is absolutely no need to be a card-carrying member of some ideological group or to skip from one television studio to another: to produce and disseminate knowledge is already to commit oneself actively as a citizen. For that, however, one has to agree to speak in public. Hence the necessity of reflecting on the type of “eloquence” suited to the social sciences. The Ciceronian orator knows how to move the judge and the audience. On what level should historians move their readers? Do they not focus their research solely on producing rational activity? It nevertheless remains true that research can be moving. It is not necessarily so by virtue of its content, but it is by virtue of its form, when that form is actively taken on, and the investigation recounted, with its triumphs and its failures. For it is then that we are engaged in work concerning ourselves, our liberty, and our finitude, in a nutshell, our history. And history is also our story. In the manner of the eloquence of antiquity, the social sciences might give themselves three missions: proving, pleasing, moving. In any research, the line of reasoning is always first. Grounded in the evidence, it is the fundamental element of the text, on which all the others

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depend. For Cicero, probare takes place by means of persuasion, that is, by the power of the word. In the twenty-first century, a historian seeks not to convince but rather to demonstrate. For Cicero, the supreme talent consists of moving deeply: that is the “triumph” of the orator. Historians have but one sole triumph: understanding what they were seeking to understand, that is to say, confronting a question in a conclusive manner. Writing a text involves taking the interest of the reader into account. Researchers can succeed in this area by asking themselves a very simple question: “Who will want to read me apart from those who, as colleagues and students, have the obligation to do so?” Winning over (conciliare) the general public does not mean outwitting people either by attracting them with sensationalism or seeking to impress them with the paratext and the critical apparatus. It is rather through the pleasure of reading, the excitement of the investigation, originality of the subject, love of learning, and aesthetic emotion, that we can win readers over. Just as the orator puts “fire in the judge’s heart,”3 so historians communicate their sacred fire to the reader. This flame is not transmitted directly by the pathos of what is moving, but accessorily, by the intransigence of accuracy, the effort of veridiction, and the humility of the traveling investigator. The restrained style can sometimes be imbued with the researcher’s contained enthusiasm or sorrow. That is how the “sublime” (to use Cicero’s language) springs up from sobriety. Emotion is the despair of truth. Proving, pleasing, moving. These three watchwords make it possible to substitute history-as-literature for a history “spruced up” in a “literary” manner. Probare immunizes against the tendency toward panegyric that disqualifies numerous biographies (“He was a visionary, a giant, a rebel, a martyr”). Instead of praises, the will to understand. By way of tribute, the mere truth that we owe the deceased, the sobriety of a eulogy recapitulating their life. Grounded in the pleasure of the text, the conciliare is a remedy for history-as-eloquence, which captivates the reader by means of exterior additives: the system of schools, prestige of scholarship, professional duty. Finally, the ruses of history-as-tragedy and storytelling can be replaced by the emotion emanating from the research itself.

3. Cicero, On the Orator 2.45.188.

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A Counter-Literature The novel reigns over literature nowadays. That is a fact that we could neither dispute nor regret. But there exists another literature, with no welldefined name, an effective literature whose nature is to latch on to the real world. These texts, lamented as being prosaic or even trivial, make up a literature of intelligibility. They bear the imprint of a historical way of reasoning. There also is the writing of the social sciences. To demonstrate the literary character of the social sciences amounts to founding a literature of the real, characterized above all by its relation with the world. This literature is defined not by its object (the “facts”) nor by what it lacks (“nonfiction”), but by its desire to understand, its potential to explain. In other words, if literature of the real world does exist, it is more cognitive than realist. Hence the theory of literature-asunmasking (dévoilement): instead of imitating reality or inventing stories, literature can attempt to express what is true about the world, past and present. All of these undervalued texts are a gold mine. If fiction is a text with no conditions, literature-as-social-science can be defined as a text under certain conditions, conscious of the rules that shape and liberate it. These very conditions greatly amplify the powers of the text. This is a literature that shatters all reality effects, knows what it is made of, spends its time refuting itself, getting out of itself, proliferating, denying and renouncing itself; a literature made of documents, citations, excerpts, bits, traces; a literature in pieces, a sort of counter-literature that does not seek to be part of the action and that nevertheless is, because it is a research project. Research in the past, research in the real world, research about oneself: this literature benefits from the reflexivity of the social sciences and from their extraordinary capacity for experimentation. Thus emerge hybrid forms, texts-as-research, autobiography-as-itinerary, investigation into the vanished worlds, sociohistorical reporting, audiovisual writing, documentary theater. These literary forms are also forms of history, sociology, and anthropology. They offer a solution to the double challenge of renewing the writing of the social sciences and proposing a writing of the world. Genette is right: in our time, the novel is the “constitutive” literature. But it is precisely because fiction has such a privilege, because it is the

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firstborn, the favorite, the institutionalized, that it is worthwhile to follow another road, the one that leads to the frontier, in the no-man’s-land, on the margins of the misfits. Let us play at de-fictionalizing fiction, at activating it by means of a method, a critical engagement, an R-Effekt. In order to do history and literature differently, perhaps we must turn our backs on history and literature. In order to write, perhaps we must no longer be writers but rather chemists, journalists, priests, doctors, explorers, lawyers, researchers, or just an anonymous Web surfer. Just as Mr. Everyman is his own historian, we are all capable of understanding our lives. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the writer is a sort of copyist, a public employee, a court clerk, or an editor of printed matter. In our time, the writer can still be a “non-writer writer,” as Primo Levi puts it, someone who plies a trade, writes reports, meets people, transmits information, communicates an experience. Happy are the prophets, the soothsayers, the poet-clairvoyants, the writer-shamans! If we are not one of these chosen ones, we still have the possibility of being investigators, activists, surveyors, a witness, a scribe, a “scribbler” as Perec puts it, a researcher on the tracks of what he has lost, or looking for worlds that have sunk into oblivion, or people who have been forgotten. There we have what the twentieth century has done with the social sciences and literature; there is the viaticum with which we are departing for the new century. The text of the modern writer does not divulge “the message of the Author-God” but is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”4 A good way to bury the Author definitively is to engage in the social sciences, to cite one’s sources, join in a collective project, and subject oneself to the criticism of others. A good way to make people read the social sciences is to write them. The democratization of knowledge undoes the “coronation of the writer.” It opens up for the throng the inner sanctums of the happy few and the seminars of the specialists.

4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146.

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The Time is Ripe In this book, I have spoken of the meeting of the social sciences and literature. It would take another book to speak of the visual arts and cinema.5 But the idea is there: not only to dare to engage in new experiments, but also to project onto a thousand different media the tools of intelligibility that our predecessors have forged and that we highly value. In the last decades of the twentieth century, scholars such as Georges Duby in France and Simon Schama in the United Kingdom have told the history of their country on TV for millions of their fellow citizens. The time will come when it will no longer seem flaky to embody the historical way of reasoning in a photo exhibit, a graphic novel, a video game, or a play. On that level, the Internet is our most faithful ally. If writers, journalists, cartoonists, and photographers invent new forms for narrating society and understanding the real world, we must not forget that the social sciences are essentially practiced at colleges and universities. “Academic” is a loaded term, expressing at the same time the noble character of research, the ugly aspects of internal professional conflicts, and the loneliness that scholars may experience in libraries or archival repositories. “Historian” is one of the most beautiful professions on earth, but there is no need to take this word as a synonym for scholar, dean of students, or institutional crocodile. Let us take a pleasurable look at a different future. Writing workshops in the social sciences as in letters; fieldwork, outdoor internships, and training sessions led by teams of experienced supervisors; theses and qualifying exams that include a share of creative writing, not to be stylish, but because that is one face of the social sciences; the transformation of separate humanities departments into post-disciplinary centers, that is, into places for experimentation and exchange, linked with schools of art, cinema, and journalism; research texts published in journals, by publishing houses, on the Internet, and intended for the public.

5. For the graphic novel, see Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon s, 1991); and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell (Marietta, Ga.: Eddie Campbell Comics, 1999). For the cinema, see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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Just as there exists a “young” literature, there is a “young” history and a “young” sociology. They are the fruit of researchers who identify with the project of the social sciences, this crucible in which separate disciplines become alloys. New combinations with theater, live productions, photography, video, and graphic arts are on the horizon. While this generational effect is most heartening, the context is anything but: it is incumbent on us to create new intellectual objects in response to the closure that is impacting universities as well as publishing houses. It is up to us to attract students, readers, and new public followings. It is up to us to reinvent our profession.

The Spirit of Resistance The social sciences are a public service. They help understand where we come from and what we are. They show a society its past, its manner of functioning, its plurality, complexity, and outcomes. They let free speech be heard, and that is why, like the footnote, they have “tragic” origins. The profession is dangerous because it is interested in the truth, and all the more so under tyranny, as Vidal-Naquet recalls, citing Chateaubriand, who cites Tacitus. Nevertheless, it is not certain that political or religious oppression is the danger nowadays. The social sciences have to resist something less visible and more insidious: the order of things, blind consent, the display of the obvious, and also words devoid of meaning, empty rhetoric, scripted language, the background noise of the media, the lies that take form in slogans, and discourses that refer to sincerity and truth only in order to speak the opposite. In the nineteenth century, the novel enabled its readers to decipher the social world and to understand the upheavals that were affecting them. It was the first to apprehend the democratization of society, the challenge of equality, and the advent of industrial capitalism and of urban civilization. Two centuries later, fiction no longer suffices to understand a world now once again opaque to itself. Today, we have need of the social sciences to comprehend our lives, challenge the tyranny of communication and advertising, remedy all that tends to make social experiences invisible, and fight against indifference. The freedom of knowledge (which is distinct from freedom of speech) counteracts the production of ignorance, which

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is a conscious activity in many corporations and governments around the world. That is why it is so important that the social sciences be present in public life, lending themselves to being fully integrated into society, accessible to the public that funds and demands them, embodied in a text whose words once again take on their meaning. The social sciences must, then, be as rigorous and literary as possible. When words no longer mean anything, the real world is removed from itself. Once the social sciences agree to inhabit language by producing statements of truth in and by means of a text, they will once again become public, democratic, republican, antidespotic speech, in other words, a literature in the sense that Mme. de Staël gave the term. But how can we be transgressive nowadays when we have the right to do and believe anything? Investigation bears truth, which is to say it questions and protests. To explain why a society is driven by white males or politics by “angry white men,” to show what a financial adviser is hiding behind the secrecy of the bank, to scrutinize overextensive “national security” secrets, reveal what industry is putting in cigarettes, a food product, or a drug is already an act of resistance. The true rebel today is the one who deciphers reality with the courage and probity (Redlichkeit) that Nietzsche identifies in the scholar. It is the parrhesiast, that “unbearable questioner” who buttonholes people.6 It is Foucault’s pyrotechnician, who makes the old world explode from within rather than burning down its temples. It is the professor of liberty, who teaches in so many schools and colleges all around the world. To be subversive is to try to understand what humans in truth do, explaining how constraints, models, beliefs, stereotypes, inequalities, crises, and hatreds are perpetuated; it is to put a bit of intelligibility into our lives. The courage of truth is the audacity of speech and the liberty of creation, but also the will to pull free from one’s habits; it is an effort to shun academicism by modifying the existing rules. Thus can we succeed in unsettling. Along with journalists and magistrates, researchers are among the few who have the possibility of speaking the truth publicly. They have for

6. Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 18.

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capital their method and their conscience, producing not private wealth but public good—and common good. In espousing that mission, they no longer expose themselves directly to imprisonment or exile. They risk above all going unheeded, shrouded in indifference, locked up in their unreadable discourse. In order to better engage in their democratic apostolate, the social sciences have the possibility of writing. Researchers can make themselves heard as writers; and writers can express truth as researchers. Reality is a new idea.

Index

Abel (hominid), 138 Adams, George, 60 Adams, Henry, 72, 190 Adams, Herbert, 60 Agathon (pseud. of Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde), 78 Agee, James, 186 Alexander the Great, 23 Alger, Horatio, 159 Anaximander, 113 Anderson, Nels, 185–86 Anquetil, Louis-Pierre, 38, 43 Antelme, Robert, 188, 192 Arcelin, Adrien, 174 Aristedomos, 118 Aristotle, 98, 157, 220; on evidence, 145, 168; on history, 16–18, 87, 90, 119, 120; Poetics, 11, 166–67, 206, 207, 212, 231; Rhetoric, 118–19, 143, 260 Arnauld, Antoine, abbé, 123

Artières, Philippe, 174 Asclepiades of Myrlea, 158 Audin, Maurice, 129 Auerbach, Erich, 98 Augustine of Hippo (saint), 21, 250 Augustus, 23 Aurevilly, Barbey d’, 160 Axelrad, Édouard, 162 Bacon, Francis, 60, 122, 147 Balzac, Honoré de, 50–55, 156, 162, 177, 184, 211–12; Les Chouans, 44, 57; The Human Comedy, 52, 53, 56, 92, 157–58, 176; Old Goriot, 52, 163, 200; La peau de chagrin, 52; Philosophical Studies, 53 Bancroft, George, 47, 49 Banks, Russell, 159 Barante, Prosper de, 39, 43, 44, 235 Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques, abbé, 174

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Barthes, Roland, 9, 156–57, 186; on Annales School, 92–93; on death of the author, 263; on historiography, 86, 115, 119; on Michelet, 49; Mythologies, 133–34; Pleasure of the Text, 205; on “reality effect,” 65, 98 Bassompierre, François de, 26 Batteux, Charles, abbé, 28, 29, 32, 160, 232 Baudelaire, Charles, 66, 68, 206 Bayle, Pierre, 27, 32, 71, 151, 228; Dictionnaire historique et critique, 125–26, 225, 234–35; footnotes of, 225, 226; on historiography, 120, 127, 144, 151, 198; News from the Republic of Letters, 125; as political activist, 130; writing style of, 216, 220 Beard, Charles, 106, 238–39 Beattie, Scott James, 29–30 Becker, Carl, 80, 105, 164, 240 Becker, Howard, 229 Beevor, Antony, 49 Bender, Thomas, 142 Bernard, Claude, 56, 62, 67, 68 Bertrand, Romain, 137 Blanckenburg, Christian Friedrich von, 31 Bloch, Marc, 76, 106, 109, 223, 226 Böckh, August, 60 Bodin, Jean, 26, 113, 121, 122, 220 Boileau, Nicolas, 26, 127, 212 Bonald, Louis de, 34, 37 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 34, 100, 104; Chateaubriand on, 37, 128, 133, 173; Scott on, 39 Booth, Charles, 138 Bordeaux, Henry, 78 Borges, Jorge Luis, 176 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 27, 36 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 43 Bourdieu, Pierre, 89, 92, 169–70, 242, 257 Bourget, Paul, 78, 79 Bouvier, Nicolas, 187

Brainard, Joe, 185 Braque, Georges, 211, 227 Braudel, Fernand, 81, 83, 197, 199, 214 Bremond, Henri, 92 Bricaire, Nicolas, 158 Brik, Ossip, 190 Brook, Timothy, 172 Brown, Peter, 164 Brown, Richard, 5 Brunet, Michel, 137–38, 244 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 69 Budé, Guillaume, 121, 122 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 56 Burroughs, William, 159 Bussy-Rabutin, Roger de, 26, 123 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 29–30 Caesar, Julius, 20–21, 26, 123, 133, 151, 220 Calas, Jean, 128 Calvino, Italo, 213 Camus, Albert, 162 Capote, Truman, 187, 194, 200 Caravagio, Michelangelo Merisi, 55 Carlyle, Thomas, 47–48, 67, 83 Carrard, Philippe, 5 Carrère, Emmanuel, 187, 189 Castelnau, Michel de, 26 Cato, Angelo (archbishop of Vienna), 145–46 Cato, Marcus Porcius, 19, 216 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (pseud. of LouisFerdinand Destouches), 86, 230, 231 Certeau, Michel de, ix, 5, 82–83, 85, 166, 208 Cervantes, Miguel de, 29, 98 Cézanne, Paul, 233 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, xiii Chalamov, Varlam, 168 Champfleury (pseudo. of Jules Husson), 55 Chapelain, Jean, 26 Charlemagne, 151 Charles V of France, 173

Index Chartier, Roger, 86, 92 Chastelain, Georges, 26 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 36–44, 109, 130, 230, 265; Études historiques, 41–42; footnotes of, 223; The Martyrs, 37–38, 43, 235; Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 4, 36, 37, 128, 173; Napoleon and, 37, 128, 133, 173; René, 162; Thierry and, 38, 235 Chaunu, Pierre, 153 Chekhov, Anton, 188 Chénier, André, 46, 90 Chevalier, Louis, 53–54, 92 Churchill, Winston, 152 Cicero, 4, 22, 119, 126, 213, 220; For Milo, 167, 170; on historiography, 120, 219, 260, 261; On the Laws, 19; On the Orator, 19–21, 215; on tragedy, 18–19 Clarkson, Thomas, 128 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 26, 31 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 167 Collingwood, Robin George, 105, 135, 164 Commynes, Philippe de, 25, 39, 123, 145–46 Comte, Auguste, 59, 109–10 Condé, Louis de Bourbon, prince de, 27, 128, 173 Condell, Henry, 35 Conrad, Joseph, 157, 245 Constant, Benjamin, 37 Constantina, Byzantine empress, 226 Cooper, James Fenimore, 185 Corbin, Alain, 107–8, 139, 174, 203, 214 Courbet, Gustave, 55, 66 Cru, Jean Norton, 188 Cujas, Jacques, 121 Cuvier, Georges, 56 Daniel, Gabriel, 127 Dante Alighieri, 98–99, 241 Danto, Arthur, 82–83, 133 Darnton, Robert, xii, 92

271

Darton, Robert, 82 Daunou, Pierre, 33–34, 42, 51, 54 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 82 de Gaulle, Charles, 103 de Thou, Jacques-Auguste, 121, 123 de Waal, Edmund, 188 Defoe, Daniel, 55, 114, 161, 177 Delbo, Charlotte, 188 Demosthenes, 215 Derrida, Jacques, 216 Descartes, René, 115, 124, 127, 134, 236 Diamond, Jared, 214 Dick, Philip K., 171 Dickens, Charles, 51, 156, 177 Diderot, Denis, 90 Didion, Joan, 9, 186 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 111, 133, 139, 240 Diocletian, 37 Diodorus of Sicily, 16 Dos Passos, John, 176, 189, 227, 230 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 176, 188 Dray, William, 110–11 Dreiser, Theodore, 189 Dreyfus, Alfred, 129, 189, 227–28 Druon, Maurice, 100 du Bellay, Martin, 26 Du Bois, W. E. B., 173 Duby, Georges, 76, 81–82, 84, 197, 243, 264 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 44, 100 Dupleix, Scipion, 26 Duranty, Louis-Edmond, 55 Duras, Claire de, 177 Durkheim, Émile, 66, 77, 79, 133, 135, 169 Duvignaud, Jean, 185 Eisenstein, Sergey, 191 Elias, Norbert, 79, 170, 173 Ellroy, James, 159 Engel, Friedrich, 51 Enghien, Louis-Antoine de BourbonCondé, duc d’, 27, 128, 173 Enzenberger, Hans Magnus, 173–74 Ephialtes, 118

272

Index

Éribon, Didier, 186 Ernaux, Annie, 185 Estienne, Henri, 85, 121, 141, 165 Eusebius of Caesarea, 21 Faguet, Émile, 69 Fallada, Hans, 162 Faulkner, Robert, 229 Faulkner, William, 108, 176, 177, 212, 230–31, 257 Febvre, Lucien, 71, 72, 92 Fielding, Henry, 55 Flaubert, Gustave, xii, 56, 62–64, 197; Madame Bovary, 176; Salammbô, 57 Follett, Ken, 100 Fonte, Bartolomeo della, 25 Foucault, Michel, 187, 266 Fourier, Charles, 156–57 France, Anatole, 101 François I, 48–49 Franz Joseph of Austria, 100 Franzen, Jonathan, 156, 200 Frégier, Honoré-Antoine, 51 Friedländer, Saul, 76, 153, 232–33 Froissart, Jean, 21, 25, 39 Furet, François, 153 Furetière, Antoine, 127, 205 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 61–63, 65, 70, 184 Galbraith, Vivian Hunter, 106 Gallie, Walter Bryce, 82–83 Gandhi, Mahandas Karamchand, 173 Gard, Martin du, 101, 227 Gary, Romain, 185 Geertz, Clifford, x, 102–3, 202 Genet, Jean, 86, 188, 206, 228 Genette, Gérard, 64, 198, 199, 204, 205, 262–63 Gentile, Giovanni, 87 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Étienne, 56 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 60 Gibbon, Edward, 33, 238; footnotes of, 221, 225–26; writing style of, 38, 71, 184

Gide, André, 187 Gilfoyle, Timothy, 228 Ginzburg, Carlo, 83, 87, 118–20, 130, 153 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 29 Goffman, Alice, 139–40 Goncourt brothers, 56, 61, 97, 157, 199–200 Goody, Jack, 142 Gracq, Julien, 176 Grass, Günter, 185 Grégoire de Tours, 43 Grimm brothers, 49 Grossman, Vassili, 176, 177 Grosz, George, 227 Grumberg, Jean-Claude, 188 Guichardin, François, 71, 123 Guilaine, Jean, 154, 174 Guillaume le Maréchal, 142–43, 197 Guizot, François, 41, 43, 44, 46, 51 Haenel, Yannick, 91 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 143 Hannibal, Barca, 144 Harding, Sandra, x–xi Harnack, Adolf von, 60 Hatzeld, Jean, 187–88 Hauser, Henri, 129 Heartfield, John, 227 Hecataeus of Miletus, 113 Hegel, G. W. F., 110 Heminges, John, 35 Hempel, Carl, 106, 110, 112, 167–68 Henri IV, 75 Henriette d’Angleterre, 30 Herder, Johan Gottfried von, 42 Herodotus, 23, 71, 101, 113, 133; Bayle and, 126; Cicero on, 21; Estienne on, 141, 165; Histories, 16–18, 116–18, 134, 232; method of, 184, 242–43; rediscovery of, 141; on thômasta, 165; Thucydides and, 116, 118, 162, 167, 260; writing style of, 215, 232 Hesiod, 16, 17 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 163

Index Hitler, Adolf, 104, 170, 173, 199 Hobbes, Thomas, 169 Hodder, Ian, 139 Hoggart, Richard, 186 Holinshed, Raphael, 36 Holmes, Richard, 139 Homer, 16, 17, 28, 156, 160 Houssaye, Henri, 61 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 30 Hughes, Everett, 169 Hugo, Victor, 44–46, 57, 90, 223, 225 Huizinga, Johan, 76, 251 Hume, David, 30 Isocrates, 22, 24 Jablonka, Ivan, 227; Âme soeur, 10; A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, xiii, 10, 203, 236–37, 241; Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes, xiii Jacoby, Karl, 165–66 Jakobson, Roman, 98, 99 James, C. L. R., 76, 243 James, Henry, 52, 64 Jarry, Alfred, 214 Jaurès, Jean, 41, 130, 189 Jauss, Hans Robert, 171–72 Jauss, Robert, 250 Jesus, 62, 141, 151, 171; Renan’s biography of, 67, 160, 235 Johnson, B. S., 194 Jouhandeau, Marcel, 187 Joyce, James, 230 Julian, Camille, 60 Kafka, Franz, 90, 156, 163, 176, 231 Kant, Immanuel, 169 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 222–23, 238 Kapuscinski, Ryszard, 141, 186 Kepler, Johannes, 161 Kershaw, Ian, 49 Kessel, Joseph, 186, 240 Kis, Danilo, 224–25, 227 Klarsfeld, Serge, 153, 224 Kluge, Alexander, 228

273

Knausgård, Karl Ove, 185 Koestler, Arthur, 163, 176, 177, 185 Koselleck, Reinhart, 169 Kracauer, Siegfied, 82–83, 133, 186, 229 Kundera, Milan, 90, 156 Kurosawa, Akira, 230 La Bruyère, Jean de, 29 La Fontaine, Jean de, 28, 161 La Mothe Le Vayer, François de, 85, 124 La Popelinière, Henri Lancelot-Voisin de, 106–8, 122, 220; L’idée de l’histoire accomplie, 215–16; on Wars of Religion, 111, 121, 130 Labrousse, Ernest, 80–81, 83, 146 Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier, marquis de, 48 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de, 156, 159 Lagarde, André, 73 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, 101 Langfus, Anna, 162 Langlois, Charles-Victor, 59; on historiography, 71, 134; Seignobos and, 74, 81 Lanson, Gustave, 59, 60, 69–70, 78, 92 Lanzmann, Claude, 91, 179, 187, 240 Lapierre, Nicole, 173 Lavisse, Ernest, 66, 68, 69, 73–75, 215 Le Clerc, Jean, 127 Le Goff, Jacques, 135 Le Moyne, Pierre, 24, 106 Le Nain brothers, 55 Le Play, Frédéric, 78, 138 Lee, Harper, 156, 194 Lefebvre, Georges, 68, 129 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 106, 124–25, 127 Leiris, Michel, 185, 212, 259 Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Nicolas, 173 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 165, 244, 248–49 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 67 Levi, Giovanni, 102 Levi, Primo, 9, 130, 178, 188, 263; If This Is a Man, 4; The Truce, 217

274

Index

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, x, 245–46, 259 Lewis, Oscar, 138, 230 Littell, Jonathan, 197 Livy (Titus Livius), 18, 20, 23, 215 Lodge, David, 213, 231 London, Jack, 186, 200, 202, 250 Londres, Albert, 130, 186, 187 Lorges, Guy Aldonce de Durfort, maréchal de, 123 Louis IX (saint), 135 Louis XIV, 26–27, 34, 36; absolutism of, 127; men of letters and, 69; Saint-Simon on, 123–24; Zola on, 65 Lucceius, 22–23, 120 Lucian of Samosata, 23–24, 63–64, 88, 173, 213, 215 Lucretius, 214 Lüdke, Alf, 166 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 65 Lysias, 215 Mabillon, Jean, 63, 130; on historiography, 120, 126, 127, 134, 213 Mably, Gabriel de, abbé, 43, 226–27 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 49, 72, 83 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 133 Mailer, Norman, 9, 186, 187, 194–95 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de, 123 Malinowski, Bronislaw, x, 138, 244, 248 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 204 Mandelstam, Ossip, 168, 191 Manet, Édouard, 66, 233 Mann, Thomas, 78 Mannheim, Karl, 173, 241 Manzoni, Alessandro, 42, 161–62 Marais, Marin, 65 Mariot, Nicolas, 146–47 Marmontel, Jean-François, 158 Marrou, Henri-Irénée, 111, 129, 134, 139 Martin du Gard, Roger, 101, 227 Marx, Karl, 41, 82, 110, 171 Mathiez, Albert, 129

Maupassant, Guy de, 64, 159 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 190 Mayhew, Henry, 51, 52 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 188 Mendras, Henri, 170 Mercader, Ramón, 111 Mérimée, Prosper, 44 Merle, Robert, 91, 197 Métaux, Alfred, 259 Mézeray, François Eudes de, 38 Michard, Laurent, 73 Michelet, Jules, 44, 47, 51, 107–8; Barthes on, 49; Chateaubriand and, 38; common people in, 41, 52; footnotes of, 222; History of France, 49, 238; on “modern personality,” 42; Monod and, 74; at National Archives, 50; “realism” of, 98; Sainte-Beuve on, 54, 88; Satanism and Witchcraft, 174; Taine on, 67; Vico and, 160; writing style of, 70, 71, 184 Mitchell, Margaret, 100 Modiano, Patrick, 188, 224–25, 227 Molé, Louis-Mathieu, 46 Molière, 156, 162 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 86–87, 153 Mommsen, Theodor, 60 Monod, Gabriel, 59, 60, 139, 184; on Cicero, 120; at Collège de France, 77; on Dreyfus affair, 129; on history as science, 71; Michelet and, 74; nationalism of, 73 Montaigne, Michel de, 250 Montgaillard, Guillaume-Honoré Rocques de, abbé, 47–48 Montluc, Blaise de, 26 Moréri, Louis, 125 Morrison, Toni, 257 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 170 Musil, Robert, 230, 231 Nabokov, Vladimir, 156 Napoleon I. See Bonaparte, Napoleon Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 60, 222 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 78, 212, 219, 266

Index Nisard, Désiré, 69 Nora, Pierre, 75 Orwell, George, 163, 186, 187, 250 Ossian (pseud. of James Macpherson), 36, 41 “Ötzi” (Alpine mummy), 168 Pascal, Blaise, 238, 252 Pasquier, Étienne, 121–22 Pasteur, Louis, 68, 74 Péguy, Charles, 78, 79, 251 Perec, Georges, 9, 166, 188, 220, 254, 263; Ellis Island, 185; Life, a User’s Manual, 206, 213, 214; on New Novel, 191–93; A Void, 203, 213; W, or the Memory of Childhood, 178 Peretz, Isaac-Leby, 186 Perrault, Charles, 30 Perrot, Michelle, 76, 203 Pétrequin, Pierre, 139 Petronius, 230 Philip II of Spain, 197, 214 Philip of Macedonia, 22, 23 Phylarchus, 17–18 Picard, Raymond, 92 Picasso, Pablo, 227 Pictor, Fabius, 19 Pingaud, Bernard, 223 Pisançon, Albéric de, 100 Plato, 98, 109–10; on Aesop’s fables, 161; on fiction, 155, 194; on history, 115; The Republic, 99 Pliny the Younger, 23 Plutarch, 20, 23 Polybius, 17–18, 20, 23, 24, 107–8, 232; on authoritative sources, 144; exile of, 133; eyewitness accounts in, 123, 240; method of, 141; on Punic Wars, 111; synoptic narration of, 63 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 142 Pomian, Krzysztof, 86, 164 Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de, 100 Pompey, 151

275

Popper, Karl, 110, 112, 147, 150, 216; on objectivity, 237, 241 Pound, Ezra, 190 Proust, Marcel, 78, 93, 157, 169, 206, 230 Puskin, Aleksandr, 39–40 Pyrrho, 85, 130 Queneau, Raymond, 212 Quintilian, 20–21, 64, 85, 167; Institutes of Oratory, 119, 143, 149; on style, 215, 219 Rabelais, François, 161, 234 Racine, Jean, 26, 28, 127, 169 Rancière, Jacques, 5, 82–83 Ranke, Leopold von, 47–50, 59–60, 71, 133, 151, 222, 239 Rawicz, Piotr, 162 Rawls, John, 169 Reclus, Élisée, 72 Rediker, Marcus, 172, 257 Reed, John, 187 Reeve, Clara, 31, 158 Rembrandt, 233 Renan, Ernest, 61–62, 63, 73, 84, 141; Life of Jesus, 67, 160, 235 Retz, Jean-François-Paul de Gondi, cardinal de, 26, 240 Revelli, Nuto, 248 Reznikoff, Charles, 190, 192–93 Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal de, 44, 45 Ricoeur, Paul, 5, 82–83, 85, 139, 207–8; on documentary evidence, 145; hermeneutics of, 240 Riffaterre, Michael, 156 Riis, Jacob, 186 River, Paul, 259 Rivière, Pierre, 228 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 211–12 Robertson, William, 227 Rodenbach, Georges, 227 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 152 Ross, Kristin, 166 Roth, Joseph, 100–101

276

Index

Roth, Philip, 4, 156, 162 Roupnel, Gaston, 72 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 29, 90, 151, 169, 171 Roussel, Raymond, 212 Rousset, David, 188 Sacks, Oliver, 186 Sagnac, Philippe, 75 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 46, 54, 78, 88 Saint-Réal, César Vichard de, 85 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de, 43, 55, 79, 123–24, 130, 142 Sallust, 20, 21, 133, 215, 216, 250 Salmoxis, 117 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 192 Saviano, Roberto, 187 Schama, Simon, 76, 232, 264; Dead Certainties, 81–82, 168 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 31 Schlegel brothers, 29, 49, 160 Schliemann, Heinrich, 244 Schumpeter, Joseph, 169–70 Schwarz-Bart, André, 162 Scott, Walter, 39–46, 52, 100, 176; Chateaubriand and, 39, 40, 43–44; footnotes of, 45, 223; historiography of, 184, 197, 230; Ivanhoe, 39, 40, 43; Quentin Durward, 39, 46; Rob Roy, 43; Taine on, 67; Vigny and, 45; Waverley novels of, 39, 231 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 38 Searle, John, 198, 202, 205, 216 Sebald, Winfried Georg, 185, 227 Seignobos, Charles, 146, 164, 184, 218; on Dreyfus affair, 129; on historiography, 59, 60, 66, 71, 134; Langlois and, 74, 81; on literary tropes, 75; La méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales, 77 Sereny, Gitta, 187 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, 26 Sextus Empiricus, 85

Shakespeare, William, 29, 35–36, 44, 241 Shalamov, Varlam, 9, 188, 191 Shklovsky, 190 Sidonius Apollinarius (saint), 38 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, abbé, 43 Simiand, François, 77, 115, 170 Simmel, Georg, 133, 173 Sinclair, Upton, 57, 156, 189 Sismondi, Jean de, 43 Skanderbeg (pseud. of Georges Kastrioti), 173 Sleidan, Jean, 25 Snyder, Timothy, 49, 170 Sofri, Adriano, 130 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, 188 Sombart, Werner, 78 Spanheim, Ezechiel, 127 Spoerri, Daniel, 166 Spon, Jacob, 127 Staël, Germaine de, 29–31, 37 Stajner, Karlo, 224 Stalin, Joseph, 111, 142, 152, 163, 170 Stapfer, Paul, 68–69 Stedman Jones, Gareth, xii Steinbeck, John, 57–58 Stendhal (pseud. of Henri Beyle), 98, 100, 176, 235 Stephen II (pope), 119 Sterne, Laurence, 176, 230 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 139 Stierle, Karlheinz, 250–51 Stone, Lawrence, 82 Stonequist, Everett, 133 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 156 Strabo, 16 Styron, William, 197 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 107–8 Sue, Eugène, 39, 51, 55, 156 Suetonius, 20 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de, 75 Tacitus, 23, 38, 71, 128, 130, 265 Taine, Hippolyte, 62, 73, 220; Essais de critique et d’histoire, 67; History of English Literature, 92; on Jacobins, 175–76, 197

Index Talese, Gay, 9 Tallemant des Réaux, Gédéon, 28 Tarde, Gabriel, 79 Terdiman, Richard, xi Thackeray, William Makepeace, 195 Thales of Miletus, 113 Themistocles, 23 Theopompus, 22, 216 Thierry, Augustin, 44, 153, 162–63, 227, 238; Chateaubriand and, 38, 235; on historiography, 40, 41, 52, 54, 130; History of the Conquest of England, 39; Récits des temps mérovingiens, 42–43, 165; Taine on, 67 Thiers, Adolphe, 36 Thompson, E. P., 203, 220–21 Thompson, Hunter, 194 Thucydides, 18, 32, 105, 133; Cicero on, 21; Herodotus and, 116, 118, 162, 167, 260; The History of the Peloponnesian War, 17; writing style of, 215, 216, 220 Titova, Lyudmila, 161 Tolstoy, Lev, 90, 157, 193, 200 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 101 Toynbee, Arnold, 109–10 Tretyakov, Sergey, 190, 191 Trotsky, Leon, 110, 111, 191 Truffaut, François, 104 Turgot, Jacques, 78 Twain, Mark, 200 Urfé, Honoré d’, 30 Valla, Lorenzo, 120, 126, 130, 153; on “donation of Constantine,” 119, 167, 217–18; on Herodotus, 141; as philologist, 121 Valois, Marguerite de, 27 Van Gogh, Vincent, 68 Velly, Paul-François, abbé, 38 Venkatesh, Sudhir, 139–40 Verlaine, Paul, 68 Vermeer, Jan, 172 Verne, Jules, 157, 158, 176 Verres, Caius Licinius, 120

277

Veyne, Paul, ix, 5, 82–83, 85, 194 Vico, Giambattista, 160 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 120, 129–30, 153, 265 Vigny, Alfred de, 44–47, 53, 54 Virgil, 28, 222 Vollmann, William, 187, 250 Volney, Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, comte de, 34, 141, 200, 251 Voltaire (pseud. of François-Marie Arouet), 3, 29, 33, 106–8, 130, 144; Candide, 164; Philosophical Dictionary, 28; writing style of, 38, 71 Waitz, Georg, 60 Walsh, Rodolfo, 193 Weber, Max, 63, 78, 111, 169, 170, 176 Wells, H. G., 158, 176, 226 West, Rebecca, 187 White, Hayden, 5, 86, 87, 172–73, 208, 219 Wolfe, Tom, 194, 195, 199 Woolf, Virginia, 176, 230 Wordsworth, William, 164–65, 167 Wright, Richard, 185 Xenophon, 123, 215, 216 Xenopol, Alexandru-Dimitrie, 152 Yang Jisheng, 250 Young, Michael, 174 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 197 Zalc, Claire, 146–47 Zinn, Howard, 83, 228 Zola, Émile, 64, 68, 93, 176, 235; Balzac and, 177; Germinal, 57–58, 98; Goncourt brothers and, 199–200; Lanson on, 69–70; realism of, 99, 189, 197; recurrent characters in, 212; Les Rougon-Macquart, 58, 61, 157; teaching career of, 65; trial of, 227; Wolfe and, 195 Zukofsky, Louis, 190, 192