Book Review

Methods/Theory

In a chapter of the Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (1753) on France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Voltaire announced that his goal as a historian would ideally be "to make known what human society was like at that time, what family life was like, what technical skills were cultivated, rather than recount once again the tale of so many disasters and wars ... that are the usual sorry subject matter of history." Although he himself did not or could not truly carry out this project, it was taken up again and expanded after the French Revolution created broad public interest in the history of the everyday life of everyday people. Ann Rigney's stimulating book is a study of the practical problems and theoretical issues raised by the effort—inseparable from the rise of modern democracy and still gathering momentum in our own time—to represent this elusive past, open up ever new areas of human experience to the historian, and "give a voice to history's silences," as Jules Michelet was to put it in 1842.

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The everyday past Voltaire claimed he wanted to represent is elusive, Rigney explains, not only because the recorded evidence is sparse and may have to be supplemented by speculation and invention but because the eventless, infinitely varied, and boundless world of everyday life does not lend itself to narrative exposition in the manner of political history. All histories, Rigney rightly maintains, are imperfect in the sense that, unlike literary fictions, they are not closed and complete but permanently subject to question and revision as new knowledge is discovered and new perspectives opened up. Cultural history—the history of the elusive past—is shown to be specially imperfect, however, because of the special difficulties encountered by historians trying to represent a past that always extends beyond their grasp and because the forms and methods devised or borrowed to meet those difficulties—with varying degrees of success—always involve compromises.

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