JEREMY D. POPKIN

Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier

Browsing in a bookstore in 1991, at the start of a sabbatical year in Europe, I came across a volume entitled Essais d'ego-histoire, a collection of autobiographical essays by several leading contemporary French historians.¹ Perhaps because my sabbatical was providing me with a chance to ponder the direction of my own career, this discovery piqued my curiosity. Informally, we academic historians spend a great deal of time reliving high and low points of our professional lives and speculating about the connection between work and personal experiences in the lives of our colleagues, but I had not previously encountered a contemporary historical scholar's personal memoir. To be sure, I knew of the existence of Edward Gibbon's Memoirs, and I had once read The Education of Henry Adams. But those two texts belong to another age. Their authors were independent men of letters, rather than modern professionals employed, as most of us are, in large bureaucratic institutions. Their autobiographies have long been part of the canon of literary classics, their status so lofty that it deters imitation rather than encouraging it. What had inspired these contemporary historians to write about their lives? Did their memoirs have any broader implications for the understanding of the past, or for the understanding of the art of autobiography itself? 1

     It did not take me long to discover that the appearance of Essais d'ego-histoire was not an isolated phenomenon. By the mid-1990s, new examples of autobiographical writing by historians were appearing faster than I could read them. I also learned, however, that these texts enjoy a dubious status in our profession. Such publications are rarely reviewed in scholarly journals, for example. In some ways, this dismissive attitude is curious. Autobiography obviously bears a strong resemblance to history: both are reconstructions of past events, usually in the form of a chronological narrative. The similarities between autobiography and history run deeper than this, however. Not only do autobiographers and historians both claim to give factually accurate reconstructions of the past, they also share the retrospective double vision that comes from knowing what the actors in the past thought they were doing and what actually happened as a result of their actions. Like historians, autobiographers implicitly or explicitly suggest causal connections, underline discrepancies between intentions and results, and point out ironies that are only recognizable with the benefit of hindsight. 2

     Another important feature published autobiographies share with works of history is that authors of both have made a deliberate decision to share their stories with readers they do not know. Historians doing research on others' lives often lump autobiographies together with other forms of personal writing, such as letters and diaries, but in fact these genres are quite different. Not only do letters and diaries lack the element of retrospection, but their authors need not be constrained by many concerns that necessarily preoccupy autobiographers. When they decide to write for publication, authors have to decide where the boundary between public and private should be; like historians, they must make conscious decisions on what to include and what to omit. They also know that they are inviting readers to challenge their veracity, even on highly personal matters: to publish one's life story is to make it public property and to invite scrutiny and criticism, just as when one publishes a monograph. And even the humblest historian-autobiographers know they are creating texts that will be compared with the "existing literature in the field," the acknowledged masterpieces of the autobiographical genre: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, The Education of Henry Adams, Elie Wiesel's Night. They must face questions of style and structure, just as they do in writing history. 3

     It is precisely because history and autobiography are so closely related that historians who decide to cross the line from one to the other find themselves uneasy about what they are doing. Autobiography may sometimes seem like history, but any autobiographer obviously has what Dominick LaCapra calls emotionally charged "transferential relations" with his or her own life story,² relations that make it impossible to maintain the pretense that an autobiography can achieve scholarly objectivity. Historians have long recognized this fact when using other people's autobiographies as historical sources. Standard manuals for students caution them against reliance on these "least convincing of all personal records,"³ and the critical treatment we routinely mete out to the autobiographical literature we use as source material ought to be enough to deter any historical scholar from risking such a project. René Rémond, one of the contributors to Essais d'ego-histoire, has well summarized the epistemological reasons why most modern historical scholars find autobiographical writing difficult. The historian's whole training, rather than making the writing of personal history seem natural, raises barriers to it. 4

A long tradition has taught [historians] to be on their guard against subjectivity, their own as much as others'. They know from experience the precariousness of recollection, the unreliability of first-person testimony. Their professional training has taught them that everyone has an unconscious tendency to introduce a factitious coherence into the path of his life. They have no reason to believe that they are better armed against these distortions. They have no reason to think that they have any better chance to avoid the tricks of memory that they have learned to spy out in others.⁴

     Implicit in Rémond's remarks is the fear that an autobiographical project may destabilize the professional historian's hard-won authority as a reconstructor of the past. If the trained historical scholar is at risk of introducing a "factitious coherence" into his or her personal history, is he or she not at equal risk of having done so in recounting collective history? If an autobiography shows a close connection between the scholar's personal passions and his or her academic work, it risks functioning as a subversive "supplement" to its author's historical scholarship, suggesting that some essential element was left out or concealed in the original scholarly project. French historian Annie Kriegel's revelation of her passionate involvement with and subsequent painful break from the French Communist Party, the subject of her later historical scholarship, inevitably raises questions about her ability to describe objectively a phenomenon in which she had such a strong personal investment.⁵ Joel Williamson's recent attempt to relate his changing understanding of race and gender issues in southern history to his personal experience, on the other hand, has led some critics to charge that a historian with such a background should not have been so obtuse about the significance of an activity like lynching.⁶ 5

     The fear of exposing personal involvements that could undermine the authority of their scholarship is not the only obstacle deterring most historians from writing about themselves. They are often acutely conscious that their own stories complicate or contradict the generalizations they and their colleagues have painstakingly elaborated, the "grand narratives" in which the discipline has encoded collective experience. In his memoir of the Holocaust, Saul Friedländer asks, "Can experience as personal, as contradictory as mine rouse an echo here? Isn't the way out for me to attach myself to the necessary order, the inescapable simplification forced upon one by the passage of time and one's vision of history, to adopt the gaze of the historian?"⁷ English social historian Carolyn Steedman sees the "usefulness" of her account of her own childhood "in the challenge it may offer to much of our conventional understanding of childhood, working-class childhood, and little-girlhood."⁸ The historian who uses his or her own case to question the possibility of generalization about collective experience, however, undermines one of the fundamental bases of our discipline. 6

     Autobiographies are also a challenge to history because they privilege a temporal framework based on the individual author's lifespan, whereas historical narrative takes place in collective time. The time of individual experience in autobiography is both arbitrary and concrete, determined by the accident of the narrator's birth: it is unrelated to the larger watersheds of shared experience. The emphasis on personal time in historians' autobiographies sometimes seems to subvert the meanings assigned to events in historical narratives. The often critical reactions to Paul Fussell's Doing Battle, with its insistence that the damage done to the author's body and psyche during World War II overshadows any broader significance of the conflict, demonstrate the tension such clashes of perspective can cause.⁹ 7

     In addition to these methodological concerns, historian-autobiographers face the possibility that their texts will come back to embarrass them in personal ways. The reviewer who greeted Gabriel Jackson's Historian's Quest by asking, "Who cares about the confessional outpourings of an academic historian whose horizon is bounded by grants-in-aid, tenure anxieties, and scholarly articles?"¹⁰ raised a question that doubtless haunts most of those who might contemplate such a project. Philippe Lejeune, the leading contemporary French critic of autobiographical literature, has remarked, apropos of intellectual autobiography in general, "I am often confused by the naïveté and the simplicity of mind that takes hold of people who are nevertheless intellectually gifted, and who have acquired a reputation in literary, psychological, or philosophical areas, when they take it into their heads to talk about their own life. Not only does critical sense vanish, and they no longer estimate very well what might interest other people . . . but it especially surprises me that they themselves might be interested in what they are relating."¹¹ If the historian's recollections are not dismissed as trivial, they are likely to be found awkward. Do we really want to know at what age and under what conditions certain distinguished scholars had their first sexual experiences, details related in a surprising number of these texts? 8

     Since the dangers facing historian-autobiographers are so clear, what impulses have moved scholars who can hardly be suspected of having wanted to undermine the historical discipline, such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in France and John King Fairbank in the United States, to engage in such an activity? It is true that our popular culture is one of self-advertisement, but most commercially published confessional works have been inspired by marketing considerations, whereas there have not yet been any bidding wars among publishers for the rights to a historian's memoir. Vanity is no doubt as common among historians as among any other group, but few of these texts are self-satisfied celebrations of their authors' accomplishments. Surely the most powerful impetus promoting published autobiographical writing among historians is a sea change in the practices of our discipline itself, one that has involved both a new definition of the proper domain of history and a new judgment about the persuasiveness of arguments based on individual experience versus those derived from generalization. This change can be seen most clearly in the development of social history over the past thirty years, as it has shifted from an emphasis on the public manifestations of collective life to various forms of microhistory, the history of everyday life—is it an accident that four of the five principal editors of that series (Paul Veyne, Georges Duby, Philippe Ariès, and Michelle Perrot) have published personal memoirs?¹² —and the "history of memory," all of which have provided new justifications for historians who undertake autobiographical projects. 9

     Thirty years ago, social history usually implied the study of anonymous masses, often reduced to statistics, but more recently it has been dominated by case studies, often built around first-person narratives left behind by obscure individuals in the past, such as the eighteenth-century French glass-fitter Jacques Ménétra.¹³ Practitioners of microhistory, such as Jonathan Spence, have shown that apparently trivial events, such as the death of an utterly unknown Chinese woman of the seventeenth century, can provide important insights into historical processes.¹⁴ Fascinating as such studies of single lives often are, however, they often leave historians frustrated: the evidence is never complete and conclusive enough to answer all our questions about life in the past. Autobiography written by a professionally trained scholar holds out the lure of fully realizing the promise of microhistory. Historians' autobiographies seem to promise us case studies written by experts who know the broader context surrounding their subjects' life stories and who know all the right questions to ask. In an era in which generalizations about the collective experience of any group have come under suspicion, autobiography sometimes seems like the only genre with a convincing claim to credibility. 10

     In the light of these developments, historian-autobiographers need not be inhibited any longer by the fear that what they lived through was too inconsequential to be worth sharing with others. The challenge for historian-autobiographers now is to demonstrate the interconnections between their micro-historical experiences and some theme of broader significance; the possibilities are limited only by the narrator's skill and historical imagination, not by the objective dimensions of the event itself. The death of Jill Ker Conway's father during a drought in remote New South Wales was not of obvious importance except to his family, but his daughter uses it to illustrate the consequences of the importation of European agriculture to a climate unsuited to it.¹⁵ Martin Duberman justifies his narration of his love affairs and his unhappy experiences with a succession of therapists on the grounds that they illustrate how repressive mechanisms against homosexuals operated in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁶ 11

     The current historiographical climate is thus particularly propitious for autobiographical enterprises. This is not because historians have embraced the more radical forms of postmodernism, however. At the same time as historians have been finding increased interest in the record of individual experience, contemporary literary theorists have been determinedly engaged in what one of them has called a "Long March of autobiography and its critics away from facts, history, and the referential function of language."¹⁷ Recent critical contributions to this literature bear titles such as Fictions in Autobiography and Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography, and frequently conclude that autobiographers, like novelists, "communicate vital truths through falsifications,"¹⁸ which is not something historians would be likely to want said about their own autobiographies. Historians who have turned to autobiography have been happily oblivious to this scholarship, and their writings make it clear that they do not accept the claim that all writing about the self is necessarily fictional. 12

Regardless of the theoretical issues involved, contemporary historians have now produced a large and rapidly growing body of memoirs and autobiography, even though many of them assert that what they have written should not be given such labels. To be sure, not every comment historians publish about themselves deserves to be called autobiography. In the United States, it is increasingly common for scholars to make at least some brief comment on their relationship to the subject of their research. This trend is a significant development in its own right, but these self-reflexive comments are not the same thing as autobiography. Indeed, proponents of self-reflexive scholarship in which the emphasis is on the author's relationship to his or her research have argued that "few autobiographies are truly reflexive" because what they say about the author's self tends to be "merely narcissistic or accidentally revealing."¹⁹ The texts discussed here are ones in which the author's own life is the principal subject, because these are the texts in which the parallels between autobiography and history appear most clearly. I have included a number of writings that seem to fit in this category but whose authors have disclaimed any intention of writing an autobiography; these assertions are more often evidence of historians' discomfort with the genre than accurate descriptions of what they have written. This analysis is also deliberately limited to published texts. These are doubtless outnumbered by unpublished memoirs, diaries, letters, and other personal papers, which can be intensely revealing for the study of their authors' lives and the development of the discipline, as Peter Novick has demonstrated in his history of the American historical profession.²⁰ As I have already suggested, however, these informal and usually unpublished texts do not have the same relationship to historical writing as published ones. 13

     The loosening of inhibitions against historians' autobiographies in the past few decades has been most evident in France and the United States. Important examples of the genre have been published by historical scholars elsewhere, including England, Israel, and Italy, but they have been significantly less numerous than those published in these two countries.²¹ And there are countries with well-developed historical professions, notably Germany, where such texts remain rare. France and the United States are two countries where debates about traditional notions of historical objectivity have been especially intense in recent decades, a fact that may help explain why their historical communities have been more receptive to autobiographical texts than others, but there are also specific reasons for the development of the genre in these two different historical communities. Furthermore, the differences between the historians' autobiographies published in the two countries reveal how deeply affected their authors are by their surrounding cultures. 14

     In France, strategically located members of the historical profession have deliberately promoted autobiographical publications. Pierre Nora, best known in the United States as the editor of the seven-volume collection Les lieux de mémoire, has been the key figure in this development.²² At the same time that he was defining the "history of memory" exemplified in that work, Nora also persuaded several of his French colleagues to contribute to the collective volume of historians' memoirs I encountered in 1991, for which he invented a label—ego-histoire—that has been successful enough to enter the everyday French vocabulary. Essais d'ego-histoire, which appeared in 1987, was not the first modern autobiographical publication by a French historian. Philippe Ariès' Un historien du dimanche had attracted considerable attention when it appeared in 1980, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published a memoir in 1982.²³ But Nora's initiative converted such enterprises from individual initiatives into a collective movement. 15

     Furthermore, Nora provided the genre with an intellectual justification. In his view, having historians examine their own personal history was a way to make the profession come to terms with the "shaking of the classic foundations of historical objectivity," which, Nora claimed, required historians to abandon the tradition that had taught them to "let their work speak for them, to hide their personality behind their erudition . . . , to flee from themselves into another era, to express themselves only through others."²⁴ In the introduction to the first volume of Les lieux de mémoire, Nora argued that the shift to a history of memory that abandoned the notion of an objectively knowable past also required historians to adopt a new self-conception: "A new personage emerges from the upsurge of history conceived as memory, one ready, unlike his predecessors, to acknowledge the close, intimate, personal liaison he maintains with his subject. Even more, to proclaim it, to meditate on it, to make it, not the obstacle, but the means of his understanding."²⁵ If the historian's personal experience was essential to understanding his or her work, then it was logical to encourage historians to explicate the course of their own lives. Essais d'ego-histoire was thus the natural complement to Les lieux de mémoire, and ego-histoire, according to its promoter, "a new genre, for a new age of historical consciousness."²⁶ The Nora volume gave a cachet of legitimacy to historians' memoirs in France, stimulating longer and more revealing individual publications both by several of his own contributors and by other prominent scholars, many of whom referred explicitly to the Nora volume in justifying their projects.²⁷ A good part of the French profession's elite has now joined the movement, producing a sort of collective self-portrait, a body of texts that refer extensively to one another, justifying Alain Besançon's decision to entitle his memoir Une génération.²⁸ For the cohort of historians contemporary with Nora's contributors, publication of a memoir has in fact become a way of consecrating this elite status. 16

     Unlike the French ego-historiens, American historian-autobiographers have usually been unaware of each other's publications, and they do not refer to any common theoretical framework. Nor does publication of a memoir in this country represent or confer special status in the profession. Such motives are less necessary in the United States, where writing about oneself has long been what one critic calls a "characteristically American activity,"²⁹ and where academic autobiography is currently a fashion that cuts across disciplines, in contrast to France, where historians seem markedly more prone to it than their colleagues. American historians' memoirs are more diverse than the French. Some members of the discipline's elite, such as John King Fairbank, William L. Langer, H. Stuart Hughes, Henry May, C. Vann Woodward, and Michael Kammen, have written about themselves, in texts that approximate the French ego-histoires.³⁰ A second category consists of memoirs of immigrant scholars, such as Jill Ker Conway, Hans Schmitt, Raul Hilberg, Peter Kenez, and Peter Gay, usually focusing on their childhood experiences outside the United States and sometimes on their integration into American life. Many of the texts in this group are by writers who escaped the Nazis.³¹ The memoirs of self-proclaimed radical historians, such as the contributors to the collective volume Visions of History, put out by the Radical Historians' Organization in 1984, Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, and James W. Silver, Running Scared: Silver in Mississippi, form a third group, often more concerned with their authors' political activities than with their lives as historians.³² Finally, there is a group of texts that is still small but no doubt destined to grow in the years ahead: the memoirs of historians who identify themselves in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender. This group includes short essays by several African-American historians, some Jewish scholars, and Martin Duberman's Cures.³³ The distinctions between these categories are not rigid, however. For instance, the radical historians interviewed in Visions of History include several, such as Natalie Zemon Davis and David Montgomery, who have held senior positions at the country's most elite universities. Furthermore, there are certain texts, such as those of Gabriel Jackson and Lucy Dawidowicz, that do not fit into any of these categories.³⁴ 17

     The autobiographical texts considered here take many different forms. Some are traditional examples of the genre: leisurely retrospectives in which the authors have given themselves room to consider all aspects of their lives, from the time of their birth to the time of writing, in books that are truly their authors' own, devoted solely to their personal stories. Other authors have chosen to describe only one phase of their lives, most frequently childhood and youth, but in some cases an episode seen as possessing a historical significance absent in the rest of the author's career, as in Louis Harlan's All at Sea: Coming of Age in World War II, or Lucy Dawidowicz's account of the year she spent in Lithuania just prior to the Holocaust and its impact on her life when she returned to the United States.³⁵ Along with these texts, whose shape appears to have been chosen largely at the author's discretion,³⁶ there are others in which authors have agreed to describe their own lives under pre-set conditions, often as one essay in a collaborative volume. Rather than appearing to be forcing their stories on readers, contributors to such volumes can leave the responsibility for the project to an editor or interviewer, who often also sets limits on the subjects to be discussed and thus relieves them from having to decide for themselves how self-revelatory to be. Numerous historians' memoirs have taken the form of published interviews, a procedure in which the interviewee at least appears to surrender much of the autonomy that the author of an autobiography traditionally enjoys; the interview form usually militates against discussion of intimate personal experiences. So does the format of the American Council of Learned Society's series "A Life of Learning," to which several distinguished historians have contributed. These texts, originally delivered as public lectures, often tell much of interest about their authors' background, education, and political engagements, but it is not surprising that they omit many of the personal details that one finds in other kinds of autobiographical publication. 18

Regardless of how they came into existence, most of these texts give indications of having been carefully thought out and of having considerable significance for their authors. Most of these authors suggest that the decision to become autobiographers represents a conscious break with their existing professional identity. In some cases, particularly for elderly authors, the break is virtually definitive: the autobiographical project represents a farewell to active involvement in the discipline, if not to life altogether. After recounting the celebration of his retirement in his autobiography, John King Fairbank observed, "I was moving on from Chinese studies by Fairbank to Fairbank studies tout court, as in this present volume. Retirement had its opportunities." He also included in his memoir a circular letter that he had sent to friends describing the serious heart attack he had suffered a few years previously, an unmistakable intimation of mortality.³⁷ Even if the writer is young and healthy enough to anticipate doing other work, an autobiography is a venture into new areas that may end up changing the direction of its author's energies. Martin Duberman used his autobiography to proclaim a radical break with his earlier condemnation of confessional writing. "It's perhaps ironic—and may yet bring fitting retribution down on my head—that here I am, twenty-five years later, writing a comparably explicit, personal book and doing so in the absolute conviction, which I could never have entertained back then, that we all must tell our secrets, must come out of our 'shameful' closets if a more humane, genuinely diverse culture is ever to emerge," he announced.³⁸ A surprising number of historian-autobiographers have become recidivists, with the English historian of France Richard Cobb probably holding the record for volumes drawn from his personal memories.³⁹ Jill Ker Conway, after completing two volumes of autobiography, has joined the ranks of commentators on the genre with her recent volume, When Memory Speaks.⁴⁰ 19

     Although some historian-autobiographers clearly enjoy changing genres, most profess to find writing autobiography an uncomfortable experience or else claim that what they are writing does not really belong in that category. Peter Gay claims that writing about himself "proved the least exhilarating assignment I have ever given myself or received from others." Like many of these authors, he rejects the label of autobiography for his work, because, he claims, "this memoir of enduring a hell in the making necessarily has a melancholy tone that, taken by itself, distorts my personal history."⁴¹ His attitude is similar to that of C. Eric Lincoln, who uses his memories to show how young African Americans in the segregated South learned the boundaries of their condition but emphasizes that he has recorded only "selected experiences," which are "not the sum of my life."⁴² Gay's and Lincoln's protests express a notion that "true" autobiography should emphasize the author's individual autonomy rather than the weight of historical circumstances in determining the course of his or her life. 20

     This desire to maintain a safe distance from conventional autobiography is also evident in Nora's definition of ego-histoire. In France, Rousseau's Confessions, with its radical exposure of its author's innermost secrets, stands at the origins of the modern tradition of personal writing, serving as a model that few respectable academics want to imitate. To overcome his collaborators' inhibitions, Nora explicitly forbade them to follow in Rousseau's footsteps: "No falsely literary autobiography, or unnecessarily intimate confessions, no abstract profession of principles, no attempt at amateur psychoanalysis."⁴³ Furthermore, by collecting several such essays and printing them side by side in a single volume, Nora turned them into something analogous to the serial data on which historians from the Annales school, prominently represented among his contributors, had learned to rely. The interest of these narratives, Nora insisted, would come more from the collective portrait they would offer than from the idiosyncracies of the individual stories told. 21

     Having nevertheless decided to write about themselves, historian-autobiographers face questions about style, documentation, and narrative structure. Usually, the writing of an autobiography involves imagining a new kind of audience, one more diverse than the community of fellow historical specialists and students academic historians usually write for, and inventing a new authorial voice to address it. For some, the experience is liberating: "For a scholar it is a marvelous release to be able to write sentence after sentence, and page after page, without stopping for footnotes," Hans Schmitt writes, echoing W. K. Hancock's remark, "I am letting myself ramble and finding it a pleasure, because rambling is an indulgence I have never before permitted myself in writing a book."⁴⁴ But this freedom to write in a non-academic style comes at the price of abandoning scholarly conventions about documentation, a departure that causes some authors evident anxiety. To overcome this, they cite letters and diaries, describe consultations with relatives and old friends undertaken to confirm their personal memories, and even recount pilgrimages undertaken to childhood homes and sites of important life episodes. The French historian Annie Kriegel went to the extreme of footnoting her 800-page memoir with references to the cartons of her personal papers, labeled and arranged in different series in imitation of the government documents in the French national archives. The need for credibility is also behind the candor that these authors strive for, which often leads them to describe episodes, particularly sexual ones, that they would undoubtedly not normally share with others. 22

     Most historian-autobiographers have followed conventional patterns in their stories, like the English historian Charles Petrie, who wrote, "There would appear to be no valid reason why I should not commence a book that is mainly about myself . . . in any different manner from that which I am in the habit of adopting when I write about others, and that is to say why I should not start at the beginning, and proceed with my narrative, as far as possible, chronologically."⁴⁵ Such a framework, beginning with parents or the author's birth, may seem unproblematic in the context of autobiographical literature, but it often represents a substantial departure for historians. The shift to autobiography requires emphasizing narrative over analysis and concrete detail over generalization. The autobiographer has to exercise talents more often associated with the writing of fiction than with the writing of modern academic history, such as the creation of convincing portraits of individuals and the (re)construction of believable dialogue. In place of the adults who occupy center stage in most works of history, the historian-autobiographer, at least in his or her early chapters, usually has a child for a protagonist, and the success of the project requires the ability to convey how the world looked from that perspective. H. Stuart Hughes evoking the terror he felt at age eight when he was taken to visit wax models of medieval prisoners in Mont-Saint-Michel or Peter Kenez describing his overwhelming, uncritical love for the Russian soldiers who liberated his family in Budapest when he was seven are good examples of what the genre requires.⁴⁶ 23

     Autobiography has long since freed itself from the limits of conventional chronological narrative, but few historian-autobiographers show any awareness of the more radical experiments, such as the French critic Roland Barthes's Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, with its alphabetically arranged mini-essays, which have enlarged the limits of the genre in the past few decades and even, in the view of some critics, rejuvenated a form of literature that was in danger of becoming stale and repetitive.⁴⁷ The historians' memoirs that do break from the usual pattern, such as Saul Friedländer's When Memory Comes, Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, and Luisa Passerini's Autobiography of a Generation, raise important questions, however, and it is not surprising that they have been among the few such texts to inspire serious critical commentary. All three fracture chronology, jumping forward and backward through their subjects' lives and thus rejecting the standard autobiographical portrayal of a coherent personality developing over time. All three also emphasize the creative power of memory, which does not simply record past experience but reshapes it into what Steedman calls "the stories we make for ourselves."⁴⁸ Steedman and Passerini, by intertwining their own stories with those of others—Steedman with a reconstructed biography of her mother, Passerini with oral histories of other Italian radicals of her generation—challenge the notion of the isolated, autonomous self; Passerini claims that "if I had not heard the life stories of the generation of '68, I would not have been able to write about myself; those stories have nourished mine, giving it the strength to get to its feet and to speak."⁴⁹ Friedländer, by emphasizing how the Holocaust imposed on him a completely new identity and initially left him unable to reconnect with his Jewish origins, undermines the notion of the unified and autonomous ego from another direction, dramatizing what one critic has called a "dispersed sense of self."⁵⁰ 24

Even the conventionally structured narratives that form the majority of historians' memoirs nevertheless challenge the normal professional boundary between the public and private. Given the evident discomfort many historian-autobiographers experience in writing about themselves, what is striking is the degree of intimate detail in many of these publications. Historians as diverse as H. Stuart Hughes, Luisa Passerini, William Langer, and Martin Duberman discuss in considerable detail their experiences in psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy, sometimes giving extended excerpts from sessions they found important. Annie Kriegel, Gabriel Jackson, Hughes, and Langer provide accounts of the break-ups of their first marriages, and Jill Ker Conway tries to convey the anguish of life with a beloved husband who suffered from manic-depression. In spite of the double justification that such personal experiences are the traditional stuff of autobiographies and that contemporary historical science finds social relevance in such private matters, these confessional texts have frequently been met with ridicule or outright hostility. One reviewer of Hughes's Gentleman Rebel complained that "this autobiography is all 'auto,' reporting only the memories of an intensely narcissistic author."⁵¹ The fact that any historian-autobiographers have chosen to leave themselves open to this kind of attack testifies to the importance that this kind of candor has for them. 25

     More than academic autobiographers from other disciplines, however, historians tend to put these private events in the context of the wars, political movements, and economic changes that were going on around them. This connection of individual experience to the framework of history that the discipline has produced through its collective efforts serves, among other things, to bolster the credibility of what these authors have to say about their personal lives and helps to explain why the question of factual accuracy, which preoccupies historians when they use autobiographies as sources, does not appear to be a major issue in the evaluation of historians' own memoirs. Historians are certainly not immune to error or distortion when they write about themselves, but they are most likely to make questionable statements about private relations, and the issues of whether autobiographers have been fair to ex-spouses or have unjustifiably exaggerated their concern for their students only interests a small group of readers who knew the author personally. In the end, autobiographies succeed or fail either because they give a convincing portrayal of now-vanished times and places or because they draw us into their author's thoughts and feelings. Their training gives historians the tools to do the former, and their success at the latter is not measurable by comparison with testimony provided by others. 26

     Although historians' memoirs are often more candid than one might expect about their authors' personal lives, they also have their characteristic zones of shadow. One topic that is often scanted in these publications is the actual work that professional historians perform. Teaching is hardly ever mentioned; historian-autobiographers seem to sense the danger of appearing vain and of appearing to speak for those voiceless subalterns who sat in their classrooms. Henry Adams wrote eloquently on the subject in his autobiography, but those who cite his famous assertion that "a teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops" rarely mention that it appears in a chapter entitled "Failure," in which he portrays himself as having accomplished nothing as an educator.⁵² Historian-autobiographers also usually say less about their personal scholarly accomplishments than do colleagues in many other disciplines. With a few exceptions, notably C. Vann Woodward and Georges Duby, who have deliberately chosen to limit themselves to this topic, these authors tend to make at best passing reference even to their major research projects and publications. Unlike many scientists' memoirs, historians' reminiscences are usually neither testimonials to their authors' special genius nor weapons in disputes about priority and credit. The image of the historical discipline implicit in these memoirs is one of a form of knowledge that develops without spectacular breakthroughs of the "double helix" variety to which an individual could lay claim. 27

     With a few exceptions, historians' memoirs also give a fairly bland portrait of colleagues and of faculty relations. In France, where the academic world is small and concentrated and the same major figures influenced the careers of so many ego-historiens, the brief comments in this collection of texts can add up to a sort of collective portrait. The almost unanimous praise for the unassuming Ernest Labrousse, dissertation director for many of the future autobiographers, contrasts sharply with the many critical comments about Fernand Braudel, who dominated the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales throughout most of their careers.⁵³ In the more dispersed academic culture of the United States, historian-autobiographers realize that their readers will not recognize the names of even their most distinguished colleagues or take much interest in their interactions with them. Some of these writers say enough to make it clear that they bear deep scars from professional fights, but the issues in these quarrels are difficult to explain to non-academic readers, and the authors who emphasize them tend to sound shrill or self-pitying.⁵⁴ 28

     The one episode in contemporary academic life that inspires relatively extensive commentary in the autobiographies of virtually every historian who lived through it, regardless of country, is the group of campus movements summed up by the date "1968." This was the one point in the lives of these authors when public and academic life intersected, and when they were confronted in their classrooms with challenges whose significance they can make clear to all their readers. Many of these authors were by then in positions of campus leadership, which gave them, as the Israeli historian Jacob Katz puts it, "the opportunity to experience at first hand the weight of responsibility and leadership so familiar in abstract terms."⁵⁵ Indeed, for a number of these authors, what Henry May calls the "learning and self-searching" forced on them in the 1960s had a clear connection with their later decision to write a memoir, even if the events of those years wound up occupying only a minor part of it.⁵⁶ Among the generation who were already professors, reactions to the 1960s movements ran the gamut from Annie Kriegel's violent hostility to what she saw as "an aggression, as brutal as a bolt of lightning, that annihiliated [the university]"⁵⁷ to the wary enthusiasm of those, such as Maurice Agulhon in France and Carl Schorske in the United States, who initially hoped that a new kind of pedagogy might emerge from temporary chaos. All seemed to realize that the student movements posed at least a potential danger to the very existence of the academic world in which they had invested their lives, however. George Mosse liked to think that he managed to express his sympathy for the students even while getting them to think more critically about the consequences of some of their actions.⁵⁸ H. Stuart Hughes, who had been active in the movement against the Vietnam War since the early 1960s, felt himself "outflanked" by radical students who "wanted the university, as an institution, to take a stand against the war" and who rejected Hughes's attempt to distinguish between his role as citizen and his role as professor.⁵⁹ On the other side of the generational divide, 1968 was the year that, in Luisa Passerini's opinion, formed the identity of her entire generation, "a worldwide phenomenon that changed and will change the course of our lives, within a process that is not yet completed and is thus difficult to grasp." The student movement's tie to "the everyday, to subjectivity, less separated from life," was also a tie to the values of autobiography.⁶⁰ 29

This literature's varied comments on the significance of the 1960s shows that historians' autobiographies make their greatest contribution, not to an internal history of the discipline but to an understanding of "what it means to be living in history," as the literary critic Paul John Eakin puts it: what it means to be an individual reflecting on his or her own personal experience while simultaneously being aware—as he or she may not have been at the time—of the larger historical currents that the discipline has subsequently charted.⁶¹ Indeed, another student of autobiography has suggested that this is the special contribution historians turned autobiographers can offer: "Don't some people manage somehow to acquire a consciousness of history? Don't they become aware—more aware than others, at any rate—of the ways in which they have been determined . . . ?"⁶² It would be gratifying to conclude that historians' training means that their autobiographies always contain insights beyond those normally found in such texts, but it is by no means certain this is the case. An examination of how contemporary American and French historians have dealt with two major themes, the experience of living amid the large-scale crises that have shaped so much of twentieth-century life, and the classic autobiographical theme of sin and redemption, shows that historians' autobiographies complicate the issues they deal with as much as they clarify them. 30

     When contemporary historians recall their experience of war, they are wittingly or unwittingly echoing Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams. Gibbon drew positive lessons from his service in the militia during the Seven Years' War. It had been "an active scene which bears no affinity to any other period of my studious and social life," and he reported that the "experience forced me to feel the characters of our leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office and the operation of our civil and military system."⁶³ Adams also learned from his service as secretary in the American embassy in London during the Civil War, but the lesson was a negative one: subsequent revelations showed that the young diplomat had completely misunderstood the situation he found himself in, and he concluded that witnessing events firsthand taught nothing at all. "One's diplomatic education was a long mistake."⁶⁴ Contemporary scholars' memoirs show a range of reactions to the experience of war, but they lean toward Adams's sense of irony and frustration more than to Gibbon's pragmatic optimism. 31

     The generation of scholars who published end-of-career memoirs after 1980 was made up of men and women born during or shortly after World War I and who experienced its sequel as adolescents or young adults. Regardless of what kind of history they subsequently wrote, when they look back, these future historians recognize that the Great War shaped both their lives and their sense of what history was. As a child, Jacques Le Goff recalls, "I lived in a world where . . . the memory of the war obsessed everyone," and Raoul Girardet speaks for all his French contemporaries when he writes that "the time of my childhood was when the monuments to the fallen were still new."⁶⁵ Henry May also grew up on war stories: "To children the Great War and all wars seemed part of the past—terrible but romantic. Sometimes we wondered whether anything as exciting would ever happen again."⁶⁶ From childhood on, these memoirists were aware that this event separated their lives from a dimly understood era before 1914 when everything had been different. For this generation, a sense of the possibility of sudden and radical historical change was almost unavoidable; so was a recognition that they would have to reconstruct the past truly to understand themselves and their own time. 32

     This generation were young adults and thus necessarily participant-observers when World War II broke out. Not surprisingly, it looms large in their narratives. Curiously, however, this collection of historians' memoirs includes few accounts of battlefield experiences. Paul Fussell's Doing Battle is the only one of these texts that narrates a personal trauma of an intensity comparable to that which so many of these writers imagine as having characterized World War I.⁶⁷ Most of Fussell's contemporaries, both American and French, instead tell stories that emphasize the discrepancy between the immensity of the issues at stake and their relatively trivial or sometimes absurd experiences; only the group of future historians who were caught up in the Holocaust because of their Jewishness truly experienced the event's full measure of brutality. Future French historians such as Philippe Ariès, Raoul Girardet, Pierre Goubert, and René Rémond were in the army during the defeat of 1940, but none remembers it with the burning anger and frustration that characterizes that first-person philippic by a historian from an older generation, Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat. In some cases, personal experience was totally at odds with the obvious collective meaning of what was happening. René Rémond, a young officer candidate, recalls enjoying the taste of adult responsibility his post provided, in spite of the circumstances; he left it in 1941 "with a certain amount of regret."⁶⁸ The future French historians who lived through the war as civilians often continued their studies almost without disruption. Pierre Chaunu recounts his annoyance at being chased out of the Bibliothèque Nationale in August 1944 by librarians trying to safeguard the books during the liberation of Paris.⁶⁹ Alfred Grosser, a German-born Jew who faced the threat of having his French citizenship revoked, managed to pass the exam for a teaching certificate in June of 1943. "In the middle of the war? In defeated France? Under the Vichy regime which had enacted the statut des juifs? Looking back, it still astonishes me," he writes.⁷⁰ 33

     American historian-memoirist contemporaries of these French ego-historiens were more likely to have performed extended military service, but they, too, remember their experiences in terms that separate it sharply from the collective result it achieved. Louis Harlan, a naval officer whose ship was part of the D-Day flotilla, suggests that serving in the military was likely to provide very little insight into the macro-historical processes at work. "Our engrossment in our own little corner of the global war, and our very limited engagement with the enemy, had left me woefully ignorant of the strategy and geopolitics of the war. The folks back home actually had a clearer view than we on the scene," he writes.⁷¹ Perhaps the most striking confrontations between individual experience and the shaping of collective history are those recounted by the several American historians who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war and have subsequently written memoirs about it. Unlike Harlan, these men found themselves thrust into positions where they could try to use their historical knowledge to make history as well as occupying a vantage point offering an unparalleled view of how it was made. A disproportionate number of American historian-autobiographers come from this remarkable group: William Langer, John King Fairbank, H. Stuart Hughes, and Carl Schorske. 34

     The OSS historian-autobiographers did, in general, have "good" wars. Unlike Fussell, none were wounded; none even suffered the long stretches of boredom that characterize the war memories of many of their contemporaries, such as May and Harlan. All were able to resume their studies or academic careers afterward, usually in better positions than those they had left. All remember their OSS experience as intellectually stimulating, "a second graduate school," as Schorske puts it,⁷² and enormously important for their future understanding of their academic subject fields. Looking back, however, what they remember is not a sense of having been able to understand or influence what was happening around them, but quite the opposite. Hughes ended up thoroughly disillusioned. He had been unable to diminish official U.S. hostility to Charles de Gaulle, who he had recognized as the true representative of French patriotism, and he was equally unsuccessful in encouraging the unity of French democratic forces he thought essential to protect that country's future. In retrospect, his wartime experience "had been . . . an extended education that had ended in weariness and dread," and the OSS activities mostly a "futile waste."⁷³ By the end of the war, Fairbank realized that he and other Americans who had hoped to help promote a genuine liberal democracy in China had failed. The forces opposing such an outcome were too powerful, and the bases for an American-style political system did not exist.⁷⁴ In the McCarthy era that followed the war, both Hughes and Fairbank, as well as a number of the other future historian-autobiographers, suffered the additional absurdity of being accused of Communist sympathies by politicians who had none of the firsthand experience of having seen history in the making that they did. 35

     The portrayal these historians' memoirs give of the experience of "living in history" is thus a thoroughly disabused one. Historical training and the special opportunity of working for the OSS were insufficient to allow these intelligent young men to exert any real influence on events, or even to grasp the direction in which they were actually going. In hindsight, it is possible for memoirists like Hughes and Fairbank to see what aspects of the situations in France, China, and Washington they did not understand and to give some account of why history worked out as it did. Hindsight also shows them, however, that even they, from what should have been their privileged observation points, were whirled about by forces they did not comprehend and could not control. At a fundamental level, these memoirs thus raise a serious question about the way in which historians describe the behavior of historical actors in the past. These historically trained autobiographers suggest that the human condition is to be overwhelmed by circumstances and to arrive at results entirely different from those intended. If these are first-person examples of "history from the bottom up," they more often portray ineffectuality and incomprehension than the empowering sense of agency microhistorians usually attribute to their subjects. 36

     Just as they grapple with the historical problem of the individual confronted with the collective force of events, so historian-memoirists bring their special perspective to vital issues in the construction of autobiography, such as the question of the causes and consequences of ideological commitment. Whether it is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie describing his involvement with the French Communist Party or Martin Duberman tracing his development into a gay activist, this issue dominates many of these texts. On this issue, there does seem to be a clear difference between the experiences of future historian-autobiographers in the two societies that have given rise to the largest numbers of these memoirs, France and the United States. Ideological involvements provide much of the drama in the French memoirs: French authors feel themselves defined in good part by the commitments they made and renounced. American historian-autobiographers give the impression of having been much less torn by their beliefs; compared to their French contemporaries, hardly any attach the same sense of sinfulness to any of their earlier faiths. 37

     The most striking examples of the French version of this story are the memoirs of historians who were members of the Communist Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Looking back, French ex-Communist historians such as Alain Besançon and Le Roy Ladurie are unsparing both with themselves and their former movement, even though the worst outrages they were personally involved in usually concerned the treatment of fellow French party members suspected of ideological deviations. "At some level, one realizes that we played a part in the worst the century produced, in a vast enterprise of evil," Besançon writes.⁷⁵ The ways in which these memoirists explain their attraction to Communism tend to be complex and to suggest both the over-determination of such decisions and the element of uncertainty that remains in any such analysis. There were public reasons—the prestige the party gained from its role in the wartime resistance, the sense that Communism was history's winning side—and private ones. For Le Roy Ladurie, joining the party was a way of rebelling against his father, who had been a minister under Philippe Pétain, and of asserting his individual identity;⁷⁶ for Maurice Agulhon, party activity compensated for a certain emotional immaturity. "I broke the records for discipline, devotion and obsessive scrupulosity, sacrificing my private life," Agulhon writes, "less . . . from a spirit of true sacrifice than out of a deep incapacity to take on a private life."⁷⁷ Only the Jewish Annie Kriegel, who entered the party during the Occupation as a way of fighting back against Nazism, finds her decision essentially unproblematic, seeing it as both "unavoidable and, at the time, honorable."⁷⁸ She is also the only writer in this group who conveys any sense of familiarity with the social injustices that drove so many French workers to support the party. To the other memoirists, the problem of explaining their motives remains a puzzle, which one of them considers characteristic of historical explanation in general: "history always offers mystery alongside explanation, and often it is born out of the explanation itself."⁷⁹ 38

     In the tradition of Augustine's Confessions, these ex-Communist historians also wrestle with an issue that is less common in historical writing than in autobiography: the question of how they freed themselves from the grip of error. The faith that redeemed them, they claim, was history, which plays a larger role in their personal narratives than in those of most other historian-autobiographers. Events such as the death of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" of 1956 helped precipitate their detachment from the party, but it was their growing attachment to historical professionalism and their consequent sensitivity to the ways in which the party distorted the past that gave them a new basis for understanding the world. Le Roy Ladurie writes of his shock when he realized that a disgraced French Communist leader had been removed from a historical photograph in a party publication: "formed by university training, he knew what such tampering implied."⁸⁰ Kriegel began the research that culminated in her massive dissertation on the origins of French Communism just at the time when she was beginning to loosen her ties with the party. Her autobiography makes clear both the intense personal meaning the topic had for her and the way in which the painstaking procedures of historical research, which she evokes in loving detail, provided her with a new ground for certainty that replaced her previous ideological commitment.⁸¹ 39

     Historical research was especially suited to play this role for these ex-Communists because it enabled them to defeat the party on its own ground. Communist ideology insisted that the evidence of history justified the party's claims; disproving the Communist version of history struck at the heart of that ideology's appeal. Marxism also taught that labor was the source of all human accomplishment, and historical research was nothing if not work: as the massive monographs on which their professional careers rest demonstrate, Kriegel and Le Roy Ladurie remained Stakhanovites even when they became ex-Communists. Finally, the Marxist tradition taught its adepts to place historical evidence in a theoretical framework. Here, the ex-Communists join hands with the French historian-autobiographers, such as Philippe Ariès and Raoul Girardet, who had been members of the right-wing Action Française. Girardet regrets some of his earlier political decisions, particularly his acceptance without protest of Vichy's anti-Semitic measures, but he considers that his devotion to Charles Maurras's movement had its intellectual benefits: "At least it taught [me] to apply a certain logic to political matters."⁸² 40

     Is it paradoxical that these ex-Communist historians, for whom objectively verifiable historical truth served as the antidote to ideology, should be among those who have now turned to the inherently subjective genre of autobiography? By themselves exposing the intense link between their Communist experience and their subsequent investment in history, they invite the question of whether history, too, is an ideological system that attracts individuals with a strong need for a set of beliefs that makes sense of the world. All of these writers make it clear that their autobiographies are not merely exercises in self-exploration, they are explicitly meant to be partisan acts in a continuing campaign against Communism and totalitarianism. If there is a resolution to this paradox, it lies in the fact that these texts achieve their purpose by claiming to translate to the individual level the demand for honesty and willingness to look unpleasant facts in the face that these authors claim to have found in history itself. By making the public self-criticism that the Communist movement, especially in its French avatar, so consistently refused to undertake, Kriegel, Le Roy Ladurie, and Besançon give force to the moral lesson they want their life stories to teach. 41

     By putting the classic autobiographical theme of sin and redemption in the specific historical context of Fourth Republic France, these authors show that autobiography can be faithful to the details of modern life while still linking itself to the great themes of its own tradition. These narratives have an emotional intensity that is often lacking in the stories American historians tell about their own commitments. This is not because American historians had no interest in political causes; indeed, the large number of self-proclaimed radicals among American historian-memoirists means that the ideologically committed are, if anything, over-represented in this literature. Nor is it because the political activities of American historian-autobiographers were unimportant. John Hope Franklin's and C. Vann Woodward's participation in preparing the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's briefs for the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school-desegregation case and James Silver's and Howard Zinn's roles in the southern civil rights movements of the 1960s demonstrate the contrary. American historian-memoirists remember their ideological commitments differently than their French colleagues do because they rarely see them as occasions for self-criticism. Even when they later changed their views, as in the case of the historians who were pacifists in the 1930s but eventually supported American entry into World War II, these writers do not see their earlier ideas as a problem requiring analysis or moral judgment. The French historian-autobiographers often convey a sense of having learned a painful lesson on historical responsibility from their ideological adventures. Their American counterparts seem, by contrast, largely unscathed by their equivalent experiences and unconcerned about any possible tension between them and the essential values of academic life. 42

     Ironically, one reason for this difference in tone is that American historian-autobiographers, much more than their French contemporaries, suffered for their commitments. Any sense of guilt they might have harbored for sins of political misjudgment is overshadowed by what they see as the unjustified treatment they themselves endured. At a time when a number of their French contemporaries were participating actively in a Communist Party without suffering any career repercussions—"perhaps even the contrary," according to Alain Besançon⁸³ —H. Stuart Hughes, John King Fairbank, and Gabriel Jackson faced groundless accusations of Communist sympathies. Natalie Zemon Davis's passport was confiscated because of her husband's association with the Communist Party. In the 1960s, long after the fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy, political activism still carried risks. Howard Zinn was fired from his job at Spelman College because of his civil-rights activism, and state legislators drove James Silver out of Mississippi. In the same period, French historians François Bluche and Raoul Girardet report being arrested on suspicion of involvement in assassination plots against de Gaulle without any consequences to their careers. 43

     When American historian-autobiographers grapple with the problem of evil in their lives, they usually write about pervasive social attitudes they may have shared, particularly anti-Semitism and prejudice toward blacks, rather than about explicit political choices they made. Anti-Semitism often seems to stand out in their recollections as the strongest instance of moral evil that they had to confront on a personal basis, in part because it pervaded academic life during their student years to such an extent that even John Hope Franklin writes that "the most traumatic social experience I had [at Harvard] was not racist but anti-Semitic."⁸⁴ Unlike joining the Communist Party, sharing the prejudices of one's era was not an individual decision and overcoming them not the result of a dramatic conversion. For the American historian-memoirists who highlight the issue, the reference to anti-Semitism serves to show the evolution of American attitudes in general and to underline the difference between past and present, rather than to reveal something special about their own characters. The gradual evolution in attitudes implied in the harsh judgment these writers now make on the past rarely required the kind of conscious, intellectual reflection or the same acceptance of personal responsibility that led French scholars out of the Communist Party. Nor did a commitment to historical research play the same redemptory role in their lives as it did for their French contemporaries. 44

Historian-autobiographers' recollections of their wartime experiences and their reflections on personal commitments and their consequences show that these texts do offer genuine insights, both for historians and for students of autobiography. On both sides of the Atlantic, the ways these historically trained witnesses recall the era of the world wars challenge standard historical reconstructions and the clichés of popular culture. Their first-person accounts carry a degree of conviction missing in many other memoirs of the period because their training makes them aware of the larger historical context in which their own stories unfolded. At the same time, these publications also expand our understanding of how historians' sensitivity to the impact of events develops out of the circumstances of their own lives. Similarly, when they describe changes in their personal commitments and values, historian-autobiographers at times succeed in enriching a type of narrative that dates back to Augustine with a complex understanding of how external circumstances combine with personal motives. They also show how the practices of historical scholarship themselves can sometimes provide the necessary perspective to liberate its practitioners from ideology or prejudice. Furthermore, the contrast between typical French and American historians' memoirs illuminates significant differences between the two cultures. 45

     Viewed as a whole, the corpus of contemporary historians' autobiographies is thus neither trivial in content nor an embarrassment to the profession, as its sterner critics have charged. It is true that none of these texts seems destined to take its place beside the works of Gibbon or Henry Adams. Contemporary authors' concern to make their stories into case studies and to define as precisely as possible where their experiences parallel or diverge from those of larger groups militates against their achieving the monumental individuality of those two classics. By being more careful historians, today's historian-autobiographers are perhaps inevitably less successful autobiographers. These earnest and well-documented life histories are also something less than the historiographical breakthrough that Pierre Nora, the French protagonist of the ego-histoire as a new genre, has called for. Historians' autobiographies do sometimes suggest new ways of viewing familiar historical questions, but historians who read them are apt to react to their most interesting passages, not by calling for more autobiography but by asking for more history: comparison of these first-person accounts with other available documentation. This is an outcome most of the recent historian-autobiographers would probably embrace. Few of them have set out to challenge the accepted canons of historical scholarship; more often, they testify to the importance that the relative certainty provided by that scholarship has had for them. 46

     The relative caution of today's historian-autobiographers does not mean that their enterprises raise no fundamental questions for our discipline, however. Historians' autobiographies are still autobiographies, and autobiographies, as the theoretical debates on the subject among literary scholars have shown, are texts whose truth claims are inherently contestable. Ultimately, the theoreticians of autobiography themselves are forced to admit that their conviction that it can transmit truth rests on an act of faith. They fall back on paradoxical formulations such as Philippe Lejeune's: "In spite of the fact that autobiography is impossible, this in no way prevents it from existing."⁸⁵ 47

     The fact that only a small minority of professional historians is ever likely to publish such texts is no safeguard: the mere awareness that such a project is possible is sufficient to make it an issue for all historians. Are we then obligated to accept the equation between history, autobiography, and fiction that literary theorist James Olney, among others, has proposed?⁸⁶ I would argue instead for a more nuanced conclusion. Historians' autobiographies do remind us that history is written by human beings, all of whom have their own unique personal histories and their own individual reasons for finding meaning in the history they write. But history, for all its similarities to autobiography, has its own specificity. Even when, as in Luisa Passerini's case, autobiography and history are deliberately intermingled in a single text, history aspires to comprehend the experience of the Other, not merely that of the self. Olney's claim that "we go to history, as to philosophy to autobiography and poetry, to learn more not about other people and the past but about ourselves and the present"⁸⁷ is simply not accurate. The aspiration to know what other people are like and what they have experienced is itself important, even if it can never be completely realized. Historians' autobiographies demonstrate the value of this attempt to go beyond personal experience in the ways in which they incorporate the historical "big picture" into their reconstruction of their authors' lives, and thus give these self-portraits a richness of context often absent in the autobiographical genre. Occupying a liminal position on the frontier between autobiography, with its connections to literature, and history, with its aspirations to confirmable certainty, historians' autobiographies are uniquely suited, not to show that these genres are really one and the same but that they each can be enriched by an awareness of what the other has to offer. They also demonstrate that history can and should contest the literary theorists' bid to annex autobiography to the realm of fiction. Even as we learn from other disciplines, we have a right to insist that ours, too, has insights to offer from which others can benefit. 48

Jeremy D. Popkin is a professor of history and the chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. He has published a number of books on French history and the history of the press, including The Right-Wing Press in France, 1792–1800 (1980), News and Politics in the Age of Revolution (1989), Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (1990), A History of Modern France (1994), and A Short History of the French Revolution (2d edn., 1998), and recently co-edited The "Mémoires secrets" and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France (1998). Popkin has published articles on autobiography in French Historical Studies and A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and is currently working on a book on historians and autobiography.

Notes

I would like to thank the eight anonymous readers for the AHR and the audiences at the 1997 American Historical Association, the European University Institute, the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, and the history departments at Vanderbilt University and Mills College for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. I am also grateful to several of the authors whose works are discussed here for their responses to my questions, particularly Henry May, Gabriel Jackson, Hans Schmitt, Peter Kenez, and the late George Mosse. Thanks also to Paul John Eakin and Philippe Lejeune for encouraging a historian's venture into terrain more often explored by members of their discipline.
¹ Pierre Nora, introduction to Nora, ed., Essais d'ego-histoire (Paris, 1987), 5–7. The contributors were Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, and René Rémond.
² Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 45.
³ G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (New York, 1967), 67.
⁴ Rémond, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 294.
⁵ Annie Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre (Paris, 1991).
⁶ Joel Williamson, "Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian," Journal of American History 83 (1997): 1221–53, followed by the comments of seven reviewers.
⁷ Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes, Helen R. Lane, trans. (New York, 1980), 144.
⁸ Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London, 1986), 7.
⁹ Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston, 1996).
¹⁰ Cecil Eby, Book World, October 19, 1969, cited in Book Review Digest (1969): 650.
¹¹ Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, Katherine Leary, trans. (Minneapolis, Minn., 1989), 235.
¹² Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., A History of Private Life, 5 vols., Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1987–92).
¹³ Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, Daniel Roche, ed., Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (New York, 1986).
¹⁴ Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York, 1978).
¹⁵ Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain (New York, 1990), 82.
¹⁶ Martin Duberman, Cures (New York, 1991), 37, 67, 122.
¹⁷ Albert E. Stone, "Modern American Autobiography: Texts and Transactions," in American Autobiography: Texts and Transactions, Paul John Eakin, ed. (Madison, Wis., 1991), 108. Other important contributions to recent theorizing about the genre are Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-facement," Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919–30; Lejeune, On Autobiography; James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, N.J., 1972); Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, 1985); Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton, 1992); and Susanna Egan, Patterns of Experience in Autobiography (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984).
¹⁸ Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 310.
¹⁹ Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby, "Introduction," in A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, Jay Ruby, ed. (Philadelphia, 1982), 5–6.
²⁰ Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
²¹ For England, see the previously cited work of Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, and the long series of volumes of personal reminiscences published by Richard Cobb; from Israel, Jacob Katz, With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian, Ann Brenner and Zipora Brody, trans. (Hanover, N.H., 1995); from Italy, Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, Lisa Erdberg, trans. (Hanover, 1996).
²² Paris, 1984–92. About a third of this massive work has now been translated into English under the title of Realms of Memory, Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. (New York, 1996–98).
²³ Philippe Ariès, Un historien du dimanche (Paris, 1980); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier P.C.-P.S.U. 1945–1963 (Paris, 1982).
²⁴ Pierre Nora, introduction to Essais d'ego-histoire, 5.
²⁵ Pierre Nora, "Entre mémoire et histoire," in Les lieux de mémoire: 1. La république, xxxiii.
²⁶ Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 5.
²⁷ Raoul Girardet, Singulièrement libre (Paris, 1990); other subsequent memoirs by Nora's contributors include Georges Duby, History Continues, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Chicago, 1994); and Jacques Le Goff, Une vie pour l'histoire (Paris, 1996).
²⁸ Alain Besançon, Une génération (Paris, 1987). For a more detailed overview and listing of these French publications, see Jeremy D. Popkin, "Ego-histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers," French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 1139–67.
²⁹ Albert E. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts (Philadelphia, 1982), 2.
³⁰ John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York, 1982); William L. Langer, Up from the Ranks (n.p., 1975); H. Stuart Hughes, Gentleman Rebel: The Memoirs of H. Stuart Hughes (New York, 1990); C. Vann Woodward, Looking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, La., 1986); Henry F. May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley, Calif., 1987); and Michael Kammen, "Michael Kammen," in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Shelly Andrews, ed., vol. 23 (1996), 133–63. One could also include in this category shorter texts such as the contributions of Carl Schorske (1987), John Hope Franklin (1988), and Natalie Zemon Davis (1997) to the ACLS "A Life of Learning" series.
³¹ Conway, Road from Coorain; Jill Ker Conway, True North (New York, 1994); Hans Schmitt, Lucky Victim (Baton Rouge, La., 1989); Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago, 1996); Peter Kenez, Varieties of Fear: Growing Up Jewish under Nazism and Communism (Washington, D.C., 1995); Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 1998).
³² Henry Abelove, et al., eds., Visions of History (New York, 1984); Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Boston, 1994); James W. Silver, Running Scared: Silver in Mississippi (Jackson, Miss., 1984).
³³ For African-American historians, in addition to John Hope Franklin's essay (see n. 30), see C. Eric Lincoln, Coming through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America (Durham, N.C., 1996); Vincent Harding, in Abelove, Visions of History; Darlene Clark Hine and David Levering Lewis, in the collective volume Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History, Paul A. Cimbala and Robert F. Himmelberg, eds. (Bloomington, Ind., 1996). Several American Jewish historians are represented in People of the Book: Thirty Jewish Scholars Reflect on their Jewish Identity, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. (Madison, Wis., 1996).
³⁴ Gabriel Jackson, Historian's Quest (New York, 1969); Lucy Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York, 1989).
³⁵ Louis R. Harlan, All at Sea: Coming of Age in World War II (Urbana, Ill., 1996); Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time.
³⁶ This is, of course, not necessarily the case. Few autobiographers are either reckless enough or privileged enough to publish their texts without submitting them to some kind of editorial process. Gabriel Jackson has been kind enough to share with me the text of several chapters omitted from the English-language version of his memoir, Historian's Quest, at the insistence of his editor, but later included in the Spanish edition of his book. The American editor wanted Jackson's book to focus on a historian's personal encounter with the reality of the foreign culture he was studying; as a result, the book omitted, among other things, a chapter describing the impact of McCarthyism on Jackson's career.
³⁷ Fairbank, Chinabound, 450, 451–54.
³⁸ Duberman, Cures, 80.
³⁹ A bibliography circulated at a memorial session in Cobb's honor in 1997 listed eight volumes of autobiographical material written after his well-known essay, "A Second Identity," was published in 1969.
⁴⁰ Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks (New York, 1998).
⁴¹ Gay, My German Question, 207, x.
⁴² Lincoln, Coming through the Fire, 7.
⁴³ Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 7.
⁴⁴ Schmitt, Lucky Victim, 242; W. K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London, 1954), 41.
⁴⁵ Charles Petrie, A Historian Looks at His World (London, 1972), 3.
⁴⁶ Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 20; Kenez, Varieties of Fear, 36.
⁴⁷ Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires; Rousseau to Perec (Oxford, 1993), 327.
⁴⁸ Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 5.
⁴⁹ Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, 124.
⁵⁰ John Burt Foster, "Cultural Multiplicity in Two Modern Autobiographies: Friedländer's When Memory Comes and Dinesen's Out of Africa," Southern Humanities Review 29 (1995): 210.
⁵¹ Choice, March 1991, cited in Book Review Digest (1991): 207.
⁵² Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Ernest Samuels, ed. (1918; rpt. edn., Boston, 1973), 300.
⁵³ On Labrousse, see Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 304–05, 616–18; Michelle Perrot, "L'air du temps," in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 276–77; Pierre Goubert, Un parcours d'historien (Paris, 1996), 135–42; on Braudel, Goubert, 159–66; Le Goff, Une vie pour l'histoire, 49–50, 161–63, 180n; Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier, 223, 227.
⁵⁴ Examples are Raul Hilberg's complaints about the reception of his work and about rivals in the field (Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 127, 142–46), even though some of his remarks about the discipline's disdain for Holocaust scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s contain more than a kernel of truth, and H. Stuart Hughes's denunciation of his second wife's rejection for tenure at Harvard (Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 296–98).
⁵⁵ Katz, With My Own Eyes, 164.
⁵⁶ May, Coming to Terms, 308.
⁵⁷ Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 706.
⁵⁸ George Mosse, "Ich bleibe Emigrant": Gespräche mit George L. Mosse, Irene Runge and Uwe Stelbrink, eds. (Berlin, 1991), 62. Mosse was working on an English-language autobiography before his death in January 1999.
⁵⁹ Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 284–85.
⁶⁰ Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, 60, 96.
⁶¹ Eakin, Touching the World, 145.
⁶² Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London, 1993), 186. Freeman is referring specifically to Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain.
⁶³ Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, Georges A. Bonnard, ed. (New York, 1966), 107, 117.
⁶⁴ Adams, Education, 162.
⁶⁵ Le Goff, Une vie pour l'histoire, 7; Girardet, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 139.
⁶⁶ May, Coming to Terms, 12.
⁶⁷ See also Charles P. Roland, "A Citizen-Soldier Remembers World War II," in Military Leadership and Command: The John Biggs Cincinnati Lectures, 1987 (Lexington, Va., 1987), 101–18. Roland's talk, originally given as a faculty seminar in my own department at the University of Kentucky, was one of the first stimuli to my interest in this subject.
⁶⁸ Rémond, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 297.
⁶⁹ Chaunu, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 74.
⁷⁰ Alfred Grosser, Une vie de français (Paris, 1997), 32.
⁷¹ Harlan, All at Sea, 122.
⁷² Carl E. Schorske, A Life of Learning: Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, April 23, 1987 (Washington, D.C., 1987), 8.
⁷³ Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 146, 179, 184.
⁷⁴ Fairbank, Chinabound, 312.
⁷⁵ Besançon, Une génération, 325.
⁷⁶ Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier, 36–37.
⁷⁷ Agulhon, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 24.
⁷⁸ Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 195.
⁷⁹ Besançon, Une génération, 315.
⁸⁰ Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier, 164.
⁸¹ Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 616–17, 621, 676–77.
⁸² Girardet, Singulièrement libre, 34, 43. Alexsey Stakhanov was a Soviet "model worker" in the 1930s, celebrated for overfulfilling his work assignments.
⁸³ Besançon, Une génération, 325.
⁸⁴ John Hope Franklin, A Life of Learning: Charles Homer Haskins Lecture (New York, 1988), 8.
⁸⁵ Philippe Lejeune, "The Autobiographical Pact (bis)," in Lejeune, On Autobiography, 131–32.
⁸⁶ Olney, Metaphors of Self, 36.
⁸⁷ Olney, Metaphors of Self, 36–37.

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