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

New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France

FRENCH HISTORIANS 1900–2000 Edited by

PHILIP DAILEADER and PHILIP WHALEN

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

FRENCH HISTORIANS 1900–2000

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

New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France

FRENCH HISTORIANS 1900–2000 Edited by

PHILIP DAILEADER and PHILIP WHALEN

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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

Contents

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction

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1 Maurice Agulhon (1926– ) Peter McPhee

1

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

11

3 Jacques Berque (1910–1995) James Whidden

23

4 Marc Bloch (1886–1944) Francine Michaud

38

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

62

6 Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) Willem Frijhoff

77

7 Roger Chartier (1945– ) Laura Mason

93

8 Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009) David Stewart

105

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

112

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10 Alain Corbin (1936– ) Peter McPhee

136

11 Jean Delumeau (1923– ) Thomas Worcester

144

12 Jacques Droz (1909–1998) Joseph Tendler

164

13 Georges Duby (1919–1996) Leah Shopkow

180

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

202

15 Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) Wallace Kirsop

218

16 Marc Ferro (1924– ) Kevin J. Callahan

239

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

252

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

271

19 Etienne Gilson (1884–1978) Philip Daileader

285

20 Jacques Godechot (1907–1989) Emmet Kennedy

306

21 Pierre Goubert (1915– ) James B. Collins

317

22 Elie Halévy (1870–1937) Philip Daileader

328

23 Paul Hazard (1878–1944) Leonore Loft

344

24 Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988) Mark Potter

360

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

371

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

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27 Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) Lawrence Harvard Davis

417

28 Albert Mathiez (1874–1932) James Friguglietti

428

29 Roland Mousnier (1907–1993) Sharon Kettering

437

30 Pierre Nora (1931– ) Richard C. Holbrook

444

31 Mona Ozouf (1931– ) Harvey Chisick

461

32 Michelle Perrot (1928– ) Denise Z. Davidson

475

33 Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) Walter Prevenier

486

34 René Rémond (1918–2007) Samuel Kalman

501

35 Daniel Roche (1935– ) Harvey Chisick

513

36 Gaston Roupnel (1871–1946) Philip Whalen

527

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

545

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

556

39 Henri Sée (1864–1936) Mark Potter

564

40 François Simiand (1873–1935) Philip Whalen

573

41 Albert Soboul (1914–1982) Peter McPhee

589

42 Michel Vovelle (1933– ) Peter McPhee

599

Notes on Contributors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction The Professionalization of the French Historical Profession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maurice Agulhon (1926– ) Peter McPhee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) Patrick H. Hutton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jacques Berque (1910–1995) James Whidden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Marc Bloch (1886–1944) Francine Michaud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) Eric R. Dursteler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) Willem Frijhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Roger Chartier (1945– ) Laura Mason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8

Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009) David Stewart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

Louis Chevalier (1911–2001) Barrie M. Ratcliffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10

Alain Corbin (1936– ) Peter McPhee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

Jean Delumeau (1923– ) Thomas Worcester

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jacques Droz (1909–1998) Joseph Tendler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Georges Duby (1919–1996) Leah Shopkow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bernard Faÿ (1893–1978) John L. Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) Wallace Kirsop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Marc Ferro (1924– ) Kevin J. Callahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Michel Foucault (1926–1984) James A. Winders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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François Furet (1927–1997) Marvin R. Cox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Etienne Gilson (1884–1978) Philip Daileader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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end. Although Gilson was in many ways a positivist, scientific historian, he nonetheless made it known that he regarded the rift between philosophy and theology that he saw as following from the condemnation of 1277 as regrettable, indeed tragic. Gilson’s vision of medieval philosophy has clarity and power – even today, it is not possible for scholars of medieval thought to ignore it. Nonetheless, some elements of Gilson’s vision have survived better than others, as Marcia Colish has well described in her Remapping Scholasticism published in 2000 (and, appropriately enough, as part of the Etienne Gilson series). Gilson’s insistence that Aquinas be viewed as both a theologian and a philosopher, and that scholars recognize the connections between his theological and philosophical studies, has been echoed in recent scholarship, and Gilson’s willingness to devote attention to medieval thinkers who were not Thomas Aquinas is likewise prominent in recent scholarship. The notion that medieval thought reached its highest point in the life and writings of Thomas Aquinas, however, is not one that most medieval scholars (even Catholic medieval scholars, I suspect) would espouse, and the condemnation of 1277, which looms so large in Gilson’s work, does not seem to have had the far-reaching effects that Gilson attribu